18
THE “IT” GIRL
General Sir Bryan Mahon and Sir John Peniston Milbanke, Buffles’ father, shared much in common, although the two men probably never met. Both had distinguished military careers and were feted for their bravery in combat, particularly in the Boer War where Sir Bryan was awarded a Distinguished Service Order and Sir John a Victoria Cross.
And both served in the Dardanelles, although this was where their stories went separate ways. Milbanke was killed in action and Mahon, who didn’t agree with the tactics of his superiors, was transferred to run the Irish command and survived. He then married Sir John Milbanke’s widow.
Dame Amelia Crichton had married Baronet Milbanke at the end of 1900 and, in a happy but all-too-brief marriage, bore two children—John Jr and Ralph—before her husband was killed in action in 1915 during the pointless skirmishes of Gallipoli in the Great War.
Five years later she married 58-year-old Sir Bryan and moved to Ireland where he was a member of the Privy Council. They lived in a rambling house named Mullaboden in County Kildare, south-west of Dublin, which she had inherited from her father and where they occasionally hosted John and Ralph, or “Buffles” and “Toby” as they were known, now young men who found London more to their taste. The Dowager Lady Milbanke, as she preferred to be called, died in late 1927 and Sir Bryan followed three years later, his two stepsons by his bedside when he finally succumbed to a long illness on September 29, 1930.
Sir Bryan’s death marked something of a fillip for Sheila and Sir John. The shock and sadness of Loughie’s death the year before was now fading and the passing of Buffles’ parents proved a fortuitous windfall at a time when the Great Depression was beginning to bite. But instead of selling Mullaboden, the couple decided to add a country manor to their social life, as a place where they could host friends from London. It also offered a respite from the increasingly harried capital. Sheila entertained in the autumn, as the London Season was drawing to a close, and then later in winter. Cecil Beaton quipped in a piece he wrote for Vogue: “Sheila Milbanke has become a champion knitter and, with the help of pattern books, makes socks, sweaters and caps. She has developed a complete fireside manner.”
She also quickly became a local celebrity and was photographed with her two sons, now aged fourteen and thirteen, when in 1931 she decided to invest in the Irish racing industry, which was struggling in the gloom of the Depression. It was perhaps inevitable—given her family background in horses, and the lure and prestige of Ascot and Epsom in the English summer—that Sheila would eventually dabble in thoroughbred racehorses.
Annoyed that Buffles and Toby had secretly bought some racehorses, she went to the Dublin Horse Show and bought a yearling, chosen “chiefly because he nibbled the carnation in my buttonhole”, and placed it with the flamboyant Irish trainer Roderic More O’Ferrall, who had his stables next door to Mullaboden.
The modest 55-guinea investment was social more than serious, announced to the local media as a signal that she and her husband intended to spend much more time in Ireland now that Sir John had inherited Mullaboden. And she proved to have a keen eye for horse flesh when in the following year the gelding, now a strapping two year old named Dr Strabismus, won his first race at the odds of 50 to 1. He would go on to win three in a row, the prize money repaying tenfold his purchase price and the horse being declared the best two year old of the Irish racing year, with a promising career ahead.
The media coverage was enthusiastic and always seemed to describe the animal as “Lady Milbanke’s horse”, as if the ownership was an important aspect of his race form. The English racecourses beckoned and he was now entered into a lead-up event to the famous Grand National steeplechase. Dr Strabismus began as one of the favourites in the West Derby Stakes, immediately before the big race, and finished a creditable second. He then finished midfield in the Irish 2000 Guineas, which was enough to show he had promise, although it might take time for him to fulfil it.
But her dalliance with racing would be short-lived. After the gelding easily won a stakes event back in Ireland, Sheila chose to sell him on a winning note to an excited Indian businessman keen on taking him back to Bombay. The price of £1100 was the highest sum paid that season: “I invented my own racing colours and made quite a lot of money. I sold ‘The Doctor’ eventually and retired from the turf gracefully, I hope.”
Sir John Milbanke’s boxing career had all but ended in 1930, when he had stepped into the ring with a London professional named Ernie Jarvis, the nation’s second-ranked flyweight. The Boxing Baronet had his hand broken, or “knocked up”. Henceforth, he would concentrate on his growing financial career outside the ring and he began dabbling in the world of gambling.
In October 1932 he and three partners announced their involvement in a Monte Carlo-based sweepstakes project, which promised 25 per cent of the take to British hospitals in the hope of winning government and public support. It was front-page news in the Daily Mirror on October 11, 1932, which trumpeted: “At long last a sweepstake is going to be run on the Continent from which British hospitals and charities will benefit.” The article included pictures of the esteemed businessmen who would front the scheme—Sir Charles Higham, Colonel Wilfred Egerton and Sir Walter Peacock with the much younger Sir John Milbanke as an inset.
The first £2 million sweep would be on the Grand National steeplechase and would raise £500,000 for hospitals. It was a grand plan, supported immediately by a combined hospitals board, but it would splutter and die when its Monte Carlo backers objected to English hospitals benefitting, instead of French facilities. Buffles backed off quickly, although he would always be known as the man who attempted to bring national sweepstakes to England.
In June 1933 the Milbankes caved in to the reality of the continuing economic malaise and reluctantly sold Mullaboden, its grounds and much of its stash of antiques, which had been built up over several generations. But with this sale came an opportunity: they poured the proceeds into a new project, a family home in St John’s Wood, a suburb in north London that had been among the first to abandon the traditional London terrace in favour of larger, semi-detached villas with large gardens.
For Sheila it was an attempt to marry the convenience of city living with space, inside and out, for children and dogs and, as usual, she set a trend. Their move from Belgravia was soon followed by others such as Lady Ravensdale, the novelist Dennis Wheatley and later by Freda Dudley Ward.
If Sheila Chisholm’s wartime entry into London society had been originally fuelled by the novelty of her being a young Australian, and her Roaring Twenties stardom had been nurtured by prominent family and friends, then the profile of Lady Sheila Milbanke in the 1930s was of her own making. As the musical taste turned from jazz to swing and fashion from elegance to glamour, it seemed there was little she could do or wear that didn’t make an impact.
From being tanned: “The bronzed complexions that are to be fashionable this summer have already appeared on some women. Lady Plunket is one of them. She is combining a brown skin with a rather high colour. Lady Milbanke is another who has adopted this fashion”; to having bare legs in public: “One of the smartest women at Cowes this year is the Australian beauty, Lady Sheila Milbanke. She goes about stockingless most of the day, and, like most of the smart younger set, sports a jaunty white beret in preference to other hats”. Even wearing a wig caused a stir:
Society is not likely to take up the silken wig as a new fashion, despite its alluring colour scheme possibilities. This at least appears to be the majority verdict upon the chance of Lady Milbanke who created a mild sensation by appearing at a West End dance club in a wig of golden coloured silk. Miss Tallulah Bankhead: “Women with naturally nice hair would not, I think, want to hide it, apart from fancy dress balls and the like. I should imagine that Lady Milbanke was indulging in a lark.”
(Sheila also recalled the incident: She had won the golden wig at a fancy dress and accepted a bet to wear it in public at
the Embassy Club: “I couldn’t resist doing so. News must have been scarce at the time because the Evening Standard came out with the front-page headline ‘Lady Milbanke goes blonde!’”)
The columnists were not just reporting her attendance at a restaurant or a dance but what she was wearing and how it fitted with trends—“long-drop earrings, which are so fashionable at the moment”, an all-green dining room in her home, and her hair in curls, “more fashionable now that an uncompromising shingle”.
Clothing houses began using her to show off their new fashions in newspaper photographs:
Lady Milbanke, who was formerly well known in Australian social circles as Sheila Chisholm, is wearing one of Jean Patou’s newest sports suits of brown wool, with a blouse of green, beige, and brown plaid tweed, matching scarf and brown felt beret . . . Lady Milbanke is wearing one of the newest Mary Stuart hats. She is just as lovely as ever. She once said that one of her beauty secrets was her capacity to sleep anywhere and at any time . . . Lady Milbanke’s becoming beige costume came from Paris Trades in London. She was among the popular young London hostesses at Le Touquet.
She had become one of the first so-called “It Girls”, the term coined initially by Rudyard Kipling in his 1904 short story, Mrs Bathurst, when he wrote: “It isn’t beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just ‘It’”, and later by another English novelist and script writer Elinor Glyn in her 1927 novel, It. Lady Glyn, who happened to be an acquaintance of Sheila’s, wrote as an introduction to the subsequent Hollywood movie of the same name: “With ‘It’ you win all men if you are a woman and all women if you are a man. ‘It’ can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.”
The term also echoed Cecil Beaton’s view on the changing nature of beauty, in that women required a personality, and not just genes, to be beautiful. Sheila Milbanke had it all—she was an increasingly significant woman in the world’s most important city. She was not just “Lady Milbanke, wife of . . .”, as many women were often described, being mere adjuncts to their husbands. She was Lady Milbanke the tireless charity queen or the stylish hostess or, quite often, the Australian—as if these were integral aspects of her character, and her beauty.
London society had been hit by a wave of American “dollar princesses” in the latter years of the 19th century, when dozens of young women made their way across the Atlantic in search of a husband and the heady social power of a title. European aristocracy, and particularly a British title, had become a “must have” that could not simply be bought; however, the cynical claimed that this was exactly what happened as an estimated 200 young women, mostly from self-made, moneyed families, found love. By 1899, prompted by the future King Edward VII’s frank admiration for their uninhibited vitality and self-confidence, society magazines had begun covering “Anglo-American beauties”. There was even a club called the Society of American Women.
There would be many who would leave their mark, like Jennie Jerome—the mother of Winston Churchill, who became one of the first “princesses” when she married the Duke of Marlborough in 1874—or Nancy Langhorne, who became Lady Astor in 1906 and in 1918 was the first woman to be elected to the British Parliament. But it was an uneasy acceptance, as the Duchess of Marlborough would write in her diaries:
In England, the American woman was looked upon as a strange and abnormal creature with habits and manner something between a red Indian and a Gaiety Girl.
Anything of an outlandish nature might be expected of her. If she talked, dressed and conducted herself as any well-bred woman would . . . she was usually saluted with the tactful remark; “I should never have thought you were an American”—which was intended as a compliment . . . Her dollars were her only recommendation.
Even though most American princesses were eventually accepted in society, they would continue to create ill-ease and to be dismissed by some as mere social climbers, particularly when Wallis Simpson appeared in 1934 and inveigled her way into the bed of the Prince of Wales, thus threatening the monarchy.
But Sheila was different. From the moment the newlywed Lady Loughborough arrived in London in early 1916 she wore her birthplace as a badge, often mentioned alongside the description of her latest frock, or her hat or fur coat. At the time, there were only a handful of Australian women who had married into high society; these included Lady Huntingdon, who was formerly Margaret Wilson, daughter of a Victorian MP; the Countess of Portarlington, born in Adelaide as Winnafreda Yuill; and Lady Lindsey, formerly Millicent Cox, daughter of a Sydney dentist.
Perhaps best known was the Countess of Darnley, who was formerly Florence Rose Morphy, a Melbourne nanny and music teacher who had tended the injured finger of the English cricket captain Ivo Bligh during the 1882 tour of Australia and won his heart. Bligh had been presented with a small terracotta urn by a group of Melbourne women after England’s victory in that Test series and the Countess of Darnley kept the urn on her mantelpiece until the death of her husband in 1927 when it was donated to the Marylebone Cricket Club, where it became cricket’s most famous symbol.
The Australian ranks had hardly swelled by the 1930s, although debutantes and their mothers continued to make their way to London for the Season each year, often making a beeline for Sheila who might offer an entrée. For example, in 1931 a group of young Australian women accompanied her to the Dublin Horse Show. For most it would be an introduction to society and no more, after which they would head back home in August, when the social rounds came to an end. But some would remain.
In 1938 The Australian Women’s Weekly would commission a feature on “Australians who shine in London” but the magazine could barely name more than half a dozen. “The amazingly youthful and beautiful” Sheila Milbanke was photographed at the Ritz; the gushing article lavished praise on the women who “have won a reputation as brilliant hostesses. There is a quality about their dinner parties, house parties and entertainments which sends fashionable London flocking to their doors.”
Sheila Chisholm’s powerful persona was best illustrated by a peerage survey, published in 1939, which attempted to rank the importance of titles. As the wife of the Earl of Rosslyn she would have been among the more senior women in London society, but as Lady Milbanke, wife of a baronet, her ranking was a lowly 27,130.
The seniority of her title didn’t seem to matter as she sat among the guests in Westminster Abbey to attend the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Kent, nor when she was nicknamed “Mascot” by the Earl of Derby because she was sitting next to him when his horse Hyperion won his own race, the Derby. Sheila was again in the royal box at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane to watch close friend Nöel Coward’s play Cavalcade—“I had known him in his infamous days. He is completely unspoiled, kind and generous,” she would later recall. She watched the love affair of Aly Khan, son of the Aga Khan, with Joan Guinness and became “Aunt Sheila” to their son, the current Aga Khan. She holidayed with Prince Paul of Yugoslavia and his wife Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark and stayed at Blenheim Palace “with the Marlboroughs”, as well as Leeds Castle, the former home of King Edward I, with Lord and Lady Braille. Christmas was usually spent at Himley Hall with Lord Dudley.
Her home in Talbot Square became a frequent venue for parties, usually featuring a performance by the latest West End star, and she often stayed at a house in Sunningdale, just outside London, where she sat with American songwriter Cole Porter while he composed some of his best-known songs: “It fascinated me to sit in the room while he played and sang as the words and music came into his head.”
The Derby Ball, created initially as a one-off event, had become not only an annual fixture on the social calendar but the city’s most significant charity event of the year. Lady Milbanke was its permanent chairwoman, enjoying the ear of Edward, the future King of England, and his brother George the Duke of Kent, whose wedding invitation at Westminster Abbey in 1934 she would keep as one of her prized possessions. She supported the events of other charity queens and
in return they flocked to hers, whether it was at Grosvenor House or the May Fair Hotel.
The high-profile guest appearances and one-off events at the ball continued to spur its ticket sales. In 1932, on the same page as The Irish Times congratulated Lady Milbanke for her foresight in buying Dr Strabismus and published a photograph of her horse being patted by jockey Tommy Burns after a convincing six-length victory, the newspaper welcomed to the UK the famed American pilot Amelia Earhart as the first woman to cross the Atlantic.
Just as had happened to Charles Lindbergh five years before, Ms Earhart was quickly drawn into the Milbanke circle and drafted to appear at the Derby Ball, due a few days before Dr Strabismus made his debut at Epsom. The ball that year was an enormous success, attended not only by the Prince of Wales but by a slew of entertainment celebrities, including Fred Astaire, who had recently returned to London. But Ms Earhart, “whose boyish curls and charming smile attracted a good deal of attention”, as the Daily Express described her, was the focus of the now traditional gushing media coverage.
The ball’s theme turned to cricket in 1933, when Sheila staged a “Grand Googly Competition” hosted by English great “Patsy”
Hendren, who was about to face the Australians in a home Ashes series after missing out on the infamous Bodyline Tests of 1932–33. And so it continued for the rest of the decade—the ball always supported by royalty and a clutch of show business celebrities, often from Hollywood like Gary Cooper in 1932, or Broadway and West End stars of the day.
Sheila Page 20