Sheila

by Robert Wainwright

  It had been a marriage born of sadness in many ways. They had both been members of a pre-war fashionable set of English aristocrats and intellectuals who called themselves the Coterie. Its members included Raymond Asquith, son of the prime minister and a famed barrister; the dramatist, poet and novelist Maurice Baring; the war poet Patrick Shaw-Stewart; lawyer Edward Horner; socialite Nancy Cunard and her friend Iris Tree. War destroyed the group and took the lives of Horner, Shaw-Stewart and Asquith. Duff Cooper had been one of the few surviving men of the group.

  Duff, son of a GP, and Diana, daughter of the Duke of Rutland, were married in 1919 in a ceremony (which Sheila attended) which stopped the city and they had a son, John Julius, ten years later. But Duff would have at least five known affairs, including with the writer and American diplomat’s wife Susan Mary Alsop, by whom he had an illegitimate son.

  It is clear that he would gladly have added Sheila Milbanke to his list of conquests, although their friendship had got off to a rocky start in 1916 when she had first arrived in London. As she recounted in her memoir, at a dinner at the home of the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, given in her honour as an introduction to London society: “I sat between Geordie [the duke] and Duff Cooper. I had never met Duff before and he made me feel shy. I could not think of anything to say so I racked my brains and finally, for no reason, stupidly remarked: ‘I hate people with big heads, don’t you?’

  “He stared at me and said: ‘Mine is the largest in England.’

  “His head was big, which I had not noticed. He never spoke to me again that evening. He went back to France and Carroll Carstairs told me that one evening in a dugout Duff saw a full-page photograph of me in the Tatler. He looked at it, tore it out, tore it into small pieces and ate it, muttering as he munched: ‘I am eating one of the silliest girls I have ever met.’”

  Two decades later all was forgiven, and Duff Cooper felt the opposite about Sheila, and the once-silly girl was now a target of his illicit affections. Duff had begun the game a few months earlier, when he wrote to tell of his devotion and reveal that he had eaten a photograph of her years before. She wrote back:

  Darling Duff,

  Your “devotion” could never be a bore or an embarrassment. I am so fond of you. If you think it nonsense and midsummer madness perhaps you’d better laugh yourself out of it a tiny bit, but not enough to have quite “calm dull feelings of friendship as in the past”. I can’t bear to remember that when you ate my photograph years ago, it never even gave you indigestion!

  But her poem clearly suggested an interest on her part, or at least a delight in the attention, and during the next month there was a series of letters and notes back and forth as Duff Cooper attempted to woo her and she kept the hook baited. Ultimately she resisted the temptation. Even so, this literary dalliance was important enough for him to keep her notes and poems among his possessions. She would not return the compliment.

  In mid-December he offered to buy her a Christmas present and she replied:

  Darling Duff—thanks for your very sweet letter. I am very touched that you want to give me a Christmas present. I should love one (I’m funny that way!) but absolutely wouldn’t go and buy one myself. What I should like better than anything is any sort of little animal made of that pale pink stone (I think it’s quartz).

  Love and best wishes for everything beautiful in 1935.

  Sheila

  A few days later the gift arrived and she wrote again:

  Thank you darling Duff for my pink lady. I am crazy about her. She is too beautiful. I didn’t mean anything half so grand when I said a little pink animal! But I love her. I am in London for one day and then go to Apsley for 2 weeks. Violet has asked me to stay for the Belvoir Ball but I doubt that I shall be able to fix it. But may see you there.

  Love and best wishes for 1935.

  Sheila

  Later, another note from her, this time with a little more candour:

  Darling Duff,

  Dear froggie could only have come from you. Thank you so much but you mustn’t send me any more presents till next Xmas. I have been in bed with a vile cold. Don’t forget lunch here next Thursday, 21st.

  Love Sheila

  Her fifth note in this series was simply dated “Sunday”:

  Darling Duff,

  Thank you ever so much for the orchids. I can’t make up my mind if I would rather you loved me more and saw me less or loved me less and saw me more.

  Sheila

  On the second page there was another ditty, this time with a warning from the past:

  My darling Duff it’s very plain to see

  In every way you quite agree with me

  I’m all for pure love without even kisses

  For what one’s never had one never misses!

  Let’s take a warning from our old friend Serge

  And “beware of sex appeal and body urge”.

  Serge, of course, was Prince Obolensky, who had followed Sheila to Australia in 1920 and on the Port Said docks had declared his love. Even though she ultimately rejected Duff ’s advances, she was playing a dangerous game, just six years after marrying Sir John Milbanke. Was she unhappy, realising that it was a mistake to marry a younger man? Or was she just titillated by the attentions of an older man? There was no indication of the former, even though her husband was abroad for weeks at a time, travelling as an investment banker with a company called the British Foreign and Colonial Corporation.

  Of all Sheila’s close friends and even her English relatives, Diana Cooper would be one of the few who remained faithfully married to her first and only husband. She accepted Duff ’s philandering ways, explaining his many lovers to her son in this way: “They were the flowers, but I was the tree.” Sheila had already been unfaithful during her turbulent marriage with Loughborough; Freda Dudley Ward would marry twice and have a fifteen-year affair with the Prince of Wales; Poppy Thursby (formerly Poppy Baring) and Edwina Mountbatten both remained married, but were promiscuous, as were the Dukes of Sutherland and Westminster; Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, married three times and the Countess of Warwick (the wife of Lord Brooke) was known as the “Babbling Brooke” because she couldn’t keep quiet about her liaisons. And so the list went on.

  Her exchange with Duff Cooper would not be the only time that Sheila would resort to verse to explain a subtle sexual quandary. One Easter in the 1940s, alone at the Milbanke property Brook House in Berkshire, she wrote to a friend, Georgia Sitwell. At the end of the letter she added a ditty she had written about being the wife of a club member at London’s most famous gentleman’s club, White’s. It was entitled “To all ‘White’s Club Wives’ from and by one of them!”

  I’m just a little White’s Club Wife,

  my husband’s very kind

  I wait outside “the club” for hours

  I really don’t MUCH mind

  I watch the big St James’s clock

  to pass the time away

  but I know he’s talking business,

  and it isn’t every day!

  The policemen often grumble

  and say the cars “must scram”

  but when I tell my husband that

  he doesn’t give a damn.

  We seldom go to nightclubs

  he doesn’t like it much

  he still prefers his billiards

  with “old Baghdad” and such.

  He is often late for dinner

  and he says he’s met a bloke

  and he simply had to listen

  to a very funny joke.

  But we really mustn’t grumble

  for when the cat’s away

  it gives the “Little White’s Club Wives”

  a lot of time to play.

  White’s was among the most exclusive clubs in London, opened in 1693 by an Italian immigrant, Franco Bianco, to sell one of the rarest pleasures of the time—hot chocolate—and originally known as Mrs White’s Chocolate House. By the early 18th century it had been t
urned into a gentleman’s club and had become notorious for its gambling, criticised by the author Jonathon Swift as “the bane of half the English nobility”.

  It would continue to be both a pleasure and a problem for the idle rich as well as a place of legend, with members such as the dandy Beau Brummell, and exotic betting including the outcome of battles during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps the most famous was when Lord Alvanley bet £3000 with a friend named Pierrepoint as to which raindrop would first reach the bottom of a window pane.

  Loughie had been a member, courtesy of his father, as was Buffles, who had begun to tire of the endless round of balls and dinners, instead preferring the club and his male friends. It came to a head one night when they had dined in a private house along the prestigious Carlton House terrace before making their way to Buckingham Palace for a royal function: “All the men were in court dress or in uniform and the ladies wore tiaras and much finery. We arrived at the ball and as we were walking up the staircase Buffles turned to me and said: ‘The whole place stinks of mothballs. I am going to play billiards at White’s.’ And he did!”

  There were dents and scuff marks appearing on Buffles’ shining armour as the binding ingredient of their relationship—physical attraction—began to wear thin, although Sheila seemed willing to look past them, perhaps mindful of her continuing regret about the demise of Loughie.

  Buffles had lost a court dispute over payment of fees for stabling and managing his polo ponies and was also involved in an early morning scuffle outside a central London nightclub. Buffles and two others were arrested and charged with “making use of insulting words and behaviour”. They appeared at the Marlborough Police Court a few days later, where the arresting officer gave evidence that he’d noticed them outside the Cabaret Club in Noel Street just before 1 a.m.: “The men on the door refused them admission. They became abusive and refused to go away and I was obliged to take them into custody. They had been drinking.” The magistrate placed them on a six-month good behaviour bond.

  Then there was his gambling, although a moderate version of the tragic Loughie’s, observed at a new beachfront casino in Cannes, and which then appeared in the social pages of the Express:

  Everyone, it seems, was there. This implies, I need scarcely say, the presence of Sir John Milbanke who sat at the principal baccarat table, partly hidden by a wall of ten thousand franc plaques. Nor, in spite of all the trumpets blown by the syndicate holding the bank, did the wall crumble away. The alternative reputation of “Buffles”, the boxing baronet, is thus enhanced by his prowess as a baccarat bank-buster.

  But there were also times that Sheila was proud of her husband, recalling the night that forty couples stayed with the Duke and Duchess of Westminster during the running of the Grand National: “Winston Churchill was among them, as was his son Randolph who was about 18 and very beautiful. He was, however, also tiresome and argued with everyone. One evening he became so obnoxious that several of the elder men decided to de-bag him [pull down his trousers in public] and fling him in the lake to teach him a lesson and improve his character.”

  Then Buffles intervened, insisting that because his father had been a protector of Winston Churchill at high school he would do the same for his son. Sir Claude de Crespigny took up the challenge: “They chose my huge bedroom for the event. I had gone to bed and was half asleep when Buffles told me what was about to happen. They fought for some time, stripped to the waist with no boxing gloves. I can’t remember who the referee was. Anyhow, Buffles won, on points, so no one could touch Randolph.”

  Even so, Sheila could not resist the attention of other men who continued to crowd around a woman nearing her fortieth birthday, such as the night in 1935 that a young aristocrat named Seymour Berry asked her to dance at the nightclub Ciro’s. He was “dark and attractive” and at twenty-six years old was almost fourteen years her junior: “I told him I had been trying unsuccessfully to force Buffles onto the dance floor all evening. ‘They must be mad,’ he replied. We danced for a long time.”

  Seymour would appear frequently over the next few years at functions and weekends, showering Sheila with gifts including a treasured Yorkshire terrier nicknamed the Vocal Muff and the Barking Chrysanthemum because of her high-pitched bark: “She was photographed several times for Vogue.”

  He was not alone. Sheila would be surrounded by would-be suitors on visits abroad with friends like Jeanie Norton: “There were trips to Paris—crazy evenings when Jeanie and I would get back to the Ritz about 5 a.m. and be seen to the lift by . . . various young men. They would buy dozens of red roses as we left Montmartre and scatter the petals on the floor to make a path for us to walk on. The night porter always enjoyed this—so did we.”

  The friendships were always coy or merely flirtatious and, insisted Sheila, not a threat to her marriage despite the shadow of doubt that had begun to encroach into a relationship dulled by the routine of marriage: “Buffles had a good job as a financial adviser. He was sweet and kind to me and a wonderful stepfather to Tony and Peter, who were now both at Eton, and adored him. Our lives were full but we hardly seemed to be alone together anymore.”

  21

  YOU’D BETTER ASK MRS SIMPSON

  The first week of April 1934 was promising for the bloodstock agency H. Chisholm and Co. The Saturday opening of Sydney’s autumn racing season had been a great success; the hopeful early signs of economic recovery from the Great Depression were reflected in the numbers through the Randwick turnstiles and the fashions were flaunted.

  Men wrapped up against the misty rain in camel hair coats and Donegal and Harris tweeds while the women ignored the weather conditions to show off their millinery, from velvet, wide-brimmed Mae West hats and tiny skull caps to creations inspired by the Dutch bonnet and Tudor cap, the curate’s hat, the pillbox and halo, the fez, Tyrolese, the mortarboard and even the military forage cap.

  Over the next six days, crowds flocked to the company’s yards, built conveniently next door to the racecourse, for three sales. In the first sale, hundreds of spectators and prospective buyers spilled out into nearby passageways as they eagerly snapped up the 104 promising young horses paraded.

  Then, three days later, the crowds returned when the Chisholm family’s partners, William Inglis & Son, with whom the family company had merged a few months earlier, were forced to seat buyers on the grass alongside the 138 horses up for sale. The final sale of the week—another 140 lots—started slowly as the rain came down but brightened with the weather in the afternoon, and by the evening all but a handful had been bought at the best prices in years.

  When Harry Chisholm died in 1927 neither of his two sons wanted to leave their own rural properties to run the operation—Jack was up north in Queensland running cattle, while Roy ran brood mares down south at Braidwood, near Goulburn, where he was a successful amateur rider and polo player. Instead, both brothers were content to have the family business managed by the managers who had been put in place by their father. But that had changed as times got tough in the Depression years and Roy had reluctantly agreed to move to the city permanently, selling the Braidwood property and buying a house in Macleay Street, Potts Point, just up the road from his mother, Margaret.

  But this settled family situation was about to change. On the evening of Friday April 6, Roy Chisholm was feeling tired but satisfied as the yards were being cleaned; the animals, penned for the night, would be picked up by their new owners the following day. But before he could go home, Roy had a meeting with his insurance agent to complete documentation for the policy, which had fallen due. His sons, Bruce and Tony, then aged seven and ten respectively, were at home with their mother and thus not privy to the conversation that followed, but it would become part of the sad family folklore in years to come. Bruce still remembered the night seven decades later: “I know that Dad had an argument with the insurance agent and sent him off, saying he would think about it over the weekend and re-insure on the Monday. But the who
le place burned to the ground on the Saturday and everyone lost their money.”

  Bruce Chisholm knew the Randwick yards well. The brothers had often spent time there helping out and watching the horses, some of whom were among the nation’s finest racehorses. One event that would always shine in his memory was the morning Roy Chisholm hoisted his then three-year-old son onto the back of the red wonder horse, Phar Lap, and led him slowly around the exercise ring. The champion had just finished eighth in the 1931 Melbourne Cup (after winning the 1930 race) and was being stabled ahead of a journey to the United States where he would win the world’s richest race before dying suddenly, creating a sporting legend.

  The champion thoroughbred Chatham, winner of eighteen major races, was one of 200 horses housed inside the yards and at the nearby stables opposite Centennial Park. When Roy Chisholm went home that night, he was unaware that he’d walked past a smouldering cigar butt, which lay hidden in the coir matting he’d installed in the ring to make it easier on the hooves of the horses. Investigators would blame one of the buyers as the likely culprit for flicking or dropping the cigar, which smouldered for hours before its heat took hold and created a small flame. Then, fanned by a rising breeze through the building, the fire had grown and swept toward the stables, where the horses, sensing the danger, began to rear and shriek.