Sheila

by Robert Wainwright

  Duff Cooper was among those who offered condolences, as he had been with Peter’s death eight years before. She replied to him on July 23, a short note that seemed to echo her sadness about their marriage: “Dearest Duff, Thank you for your wonderful letter. I am very sad and bewildered by the whole affair—I mean Life! and Death. Love Sheila”.

  She stayed at Brook House, comforted by dozens of condolence letters. She finally ventured out when another face from the past beckoned. Edward, the Duke of Windsor and his stern Duchess insisted that she stay with them at their villa in the south of France: “They had a charming villa called La Croe at Cap d’Antibes. It had large grounds and a swimming pool set near the sea. One could also bathe off the rocks. The view was beautiful.

  “I will never forget how charming they were to me. They seemed to be deeply in love with each other after 10 years. Their lives were made up of love and laughter, fun and sense, and they helped me a great deal. She is a perfectionist and a great character. She has lovely, strange eyes. I am devoted to them both.”

  Among the guests in nearby villas that summer was a Russian man she had known, on and off, since the early 1920s when she went to parties at Prince Felix Youssoupoff ’s flat in Kensington. She’d only had eyes for Serge Obolensky at the time, but Dimitri Romanoff, another of the exiled princes, had become a friend whom she’d seen occasionally over the intervening years. He was a kindred soul.

  Reality returned when she got back to London after the summer. Buffles, who had taken a senior management position with the famous engineering firm Vickers after the war, had written his will barely six months before the accident. The document, witnessed by his housekeeper Mrs Streeter and maid Miss Thorn, generated a degree of mystery. For a man who had a reputation for financial competence and had once entertained the dream of creating a national lottery, his estate was relatively modest—£9600, most of which he left to his stepson, the Earl of Rosslyn, and to his wife Sheila, with a token £100 for his butler.

  But there were also two payments to female friends, which would reveal the identity of the women he had been seeing. He bequeathed £500 to the Countess Marie Goethals, wife of the Belgian nobleman Rene Goethals, who lived with her husband in a castle outside Ghent where he was killed.

  More intriguingly, the sum of £100 was left to Princess Weikersheim who had fled Austria with her husband at the beginning of World War II and settled on a property in Surrey. The Milbankes and the Weikersheims most probably met when both couples attended two society functions in July 1939, but Sheila seems not to have remembered that occasion, if one of her later letters is any indication. Writing to Georgia Sitwell in 1941, she confided: “Was glad to get a glimpse of ‘the Princess’ at last and thought her very fascinating.”

  The mystery is further deepened by an unconnected document that would surface more than fifty years later, in a book about Soviet espionage. The authors of The Crown Jewels: The British Secrets Exposed by the KGB Archives published a series of raw, and at times unsourced, documents that gave an account of KGB attempts to infiltrate British society. One of these documents referred to the possibility of agents blackmailing high society figures:

  Another method is that of blackmailing wives. A Mrs Beaumont Neilson is the lover of a suspect called S De Trey. He encourages her to run heavily into debt. As her husband is vice-chairman of Vickers . . . De Trey blackmails Mrs Beaumont Neilson for information about Vickers and its associated firms. Mrs Beaumont Neilson is now living in the house of Buffles Milbanke, who was some months ago in charge of the aerial defences of Vickers. His girlfriend is Pupe Weikersheim, daughter of Count Windischgraetz.

  Like the princess—who had attended Sir John’s memorial service in London—Mrs Beaumont Neilson did exist. It seems that by then she was estranged from her businessman husband John, so her capacity to exert influence over him would have been minimal; she had lived for some years in a flat in Maida Vale, not far from the Milbankes.

  The death of Buffles would indirectly trigger another sad series of events over the next two years, culminating in an end to the title Baronet of Milbanke. At his death, the title had automatically passed to his younger brother, Ralph, known as Toby, who was a larger-than-life character in London’s social world and often rode his horse “Tiger” across the city to visit friends, leaving the horse tethered outside their houses. In 1939, for a bet, he had hit a golf ball from Tower Bridge to the steps of the famous White’s Club, where he was a member.

  Toby also held a pilot’s licence and became a war hero like his father. In September 1940, while serving as a second lieutenant with the Royal Armoured Corps, he was awarded the Military Cross, “for gallant and distinguished services in action in connection with operations in the field”. He was wounded three times during World War II, serving in North Africa, and returned home shattered psychologically. In November 1949, two years after becoming the 12th Baronet of Milbanke, Ralph shot himself in the head, alone in the Mayfair apartment that had been left to him by his mother. He had no wife and no children, so the title died with him and remains unclaimed.

  The village of Bracknell lies deep in the forests of Berkshire where one of Henry VIII’s hunting lodges once stood and where he banished his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, until he organised an annulment of their marriage.

  In the nineteenth century, the playwright Oscar Wilde stayed and worked at a local estate and later named one of his most famous characters, Lady Augusta Bracknell from his play The Importance of Being Earnest, after the village. Lady Bracknell represented the hypocrisy of the Victorian age and in particular of those who married into the aristocracy from the lower classes and then adopted a pious position against those who might follow them up the social ladder.

  But, unlike Lady Bracknell’s attitude toward change, the village of Bracknell would prove a place of renewal. In the early 1950s it was identified as a “new town” by planning authorities, which wanted to relieve the housing crisis caused by the wartime bombings by building a series of satellite towns around London’s perimeter. Bracknell, which had a railway station, was among those chosen.

  Sheila would live in Brook House until the early 1950s. A guest book among the photo albums kept by the family shows a constant flow of visitors through the years until the house was compulsorily acquired as part of the “new town” vision, and the only modern signs of the property are two streets named Milbanke. Despite their largely separate lives, Buffles had also come to regard Brook House as his home and had sat in the study overlooking the grounds one day in mid-December 1946, writing his will, struggling to find a way to end his marital affairs and rekindle his marriage.

  Sheila was eventually drawn back to London where she bought a large apartment in Mayfair and resumed her pre-war life, if slightly quieter and attracting much less publicity. There would still be moments when she caught the attention of the media, such as the day she organised a brass band to welcome Vincent Astor ashore at Plymouth to the strains of “Rule Britannia”, and the occasional snippet noting that she was hosting the Duke and Duchess of Windsor for the summer at Biarritz or simply that she was leaving for a six-week holiday in Florida. But the heady days of public attention were largely over, not that it had ever mattered to a woman whose memoir would barely mention her personal fame. It was as if she was aware of those outside her windows, figuratively speaking, but rarely chose to peek outside.

  Despite this, Sheila remained at the head of the high-society social circuit, as Charles Hepburn Johnston’s diaries noted: “ . . . we found ourselves firmly embedded in the ‘Sheila-Wheeler set’ so called because it more or less revolved around Sheila Loughborough/Milbanke, London’s Australian-born fun-dictator of the twenties and thirties, still going strongly in the fifties.”

  Sir Charles would also meet Sheila in the United States and he described a dinner party at the home of Winston Guest, an international polo player, businessman and second-cousin to his namesake, Winston Churchill:

  Dinner two nights
ago at Winston Guest’s. Candles, flowers, champagne, frog’s legs, duck. I sat next to “Cee Zee” Guest, who is a sort of mixture between Susie Stirling and Pat Wilson. The newspaper millionaire W.R. Hearst junior arrived unexpectedly after dinner—rather awkward because his ex-wife was there, but Sheila made it all right because as soon as she saw him she called out “William Randolph!” and got him in a corner talking travel business.

  There would also be losses. Eileen Sutherland and Jeanie Norton had both died during the war and Laura Corrigan had followed in 1948. King George VI—her “Prince Bertie”—died on February 6, 1952 from lung cancer but she wrote only a few words in her memoir: “The premature death of King George VI early in 1952 made everyone very sad.”

  It seemed strange to have written so little about a man who had meant so much but, given that she would have expected that others might one day read her memoir, it probably said more about her loyalty to his memory.

  Instead, Sheila wrote to the new queen, Elizabeth, to express her condolences. The two families had known each other through the 1930s and Tony had established a friendship with the young Princess Elizabeth, which would be retained over the years with polite correspondence and even an exchange of birthday cards through the 1970s.

  The Queen eventually replied to Sheila in April, in a black-lined envelope closed with the royal seal:

  Dear Lady Milbanke,

  Please forgive the long delay in answering your kind letter of sympathy at the death of my father, which touched me deeply. Owing to the endless number of letters I have received, it has taken me some time to answer them all. We have been greatly strengthened to know that the thoughts and prayers of so many people have been with us and sharing our sorrow. Thank you once again,

  Yours sincerely,

  Elizabeth R

  Four years later there would be further correspondence between them when Sheila decided to pass on some of the letters that had flashed back and forth between her and the princes Edward, Albert and George after the Great War. The Queen’s response was succinct: “It was very kind of you to send me those letters of my father’s and my uncles. They were most interesting and amusing.”

  Soon after, driven by the death of Bertie, Sheila gave up smoking, quoting King James I who in 1616 had described tobacco as a “black stinking fume”. She also rejoined the Women’s Voluntary Service, this time to help the plight of refugees of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising.

  Women may have won the vote and equal rights to divorce but even in the late 1940s society still regarded the home as the place for married women, particularly in upper-class society. Ever one for pushing boundaries, Lady Sheila Milbanke decided in 1948 to become a businesswoman and opened a travel agency.

  The seeds had been sown at the end of a trip to New York that year, during which she had been inspired by the attitudes of her American circle of friends that life had not ended, but was just beginning. She sailed back to London aboard the Queen Mary: “I stood alone on the deck and watched the fantastic skyline disappear into the rosy mist of dawn,” she wrote. “I wondered ‘Does life begin at fifty?’ It reminded me of the quote in the book Point of No Return, by John P Marquand, which said ‘50 is a period of life when time begins altering faces in all sorts of disagreeable and incongruous ways’. I whisked away that thought and wondered if dreams were better than facts.”

  She began the business soon after returning to London, initially buying shares in a small company owned by a friend, and then talking her way into opening a desk with two staff at the Fortnum & Mason department store in Piccadilly. What had begun as a search for a new purpose swiftly became a creative joy. Interviewed in 1951 she reminisced about her success and expansion: “We invented all sorts of enjoyable slogans. We started with a manager and one assistant. Now we have a counter and a window at Fortnum & Mason plus a large office . . . and employ a staff of 18. I am the chairman and the directors include the Duchess of Marlborough, Lord Ashcombe and Sir Anthony Weldon.”

  The business had given her a new lease on life, she told The Australian Women’s Weekly: “I have started a business career because I believe life begins at 50 and ends at 91. All the people of my age are happier if they have an interest in life, especially if they are widows; otherwise they become bores.”

  As she slowly disappeared from the social pages of the newspapers that had once doted on her beauty and fashion sense, Sheila parlayed her contact book—which contained names like Emerald and Nancy Cunard, whose family owned the famous shipping line—into a thriving business, outgrowing the department store and moving into its own offices, Milbanke House, in New Bond Street.

  Eventually Milbanke Travel was producing its own holiday magazine, with package tours north to Norway, east to Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, and south to the Costa del Sol, Tunis and Tangiers. The company offered services for everything—flights, cruise ships, hotel rooms, car hire, travellers’ cheques and even beach charges.

  Sheila had insisted that the Duchess of Marlborough join her on the board of directors “because women need representation nowadays”. Ultimately she removed herself from the day-to-day management and concentrated on her client list, where there was room for flair. In late 1952 she launched a project with her friend the Maharaja of Cooch Behar which offered twelve-day tours for paying guests hunting tigers from the backs of elephants.

  Such hunts had been traditional for over a century but, when India’s aristocrats began to feel the financial pinch, just as their English counterparts had done half a century before, they started to open up their lands to commercial enterprise. The hunting grounds of the maharaja’s estate lay in the province of Bengal in the north-east of India. The new project chiefly targeted moneyed Americans and offered five separate hunts in the season, between January and March; the trappings of luxury included a retinue of manservants and cocktails at sunset, surrounded by the sights and sounds of the Indian jungle that Kipling had known and popularised.

  Sheila launched the project in New York, during what had now become her annual pilgrimage to the United States. The New York Times lapped up the story; under the heading “Lady Milbanke and the Cooch Behar Tigers” it ran a long interview with her, in which she explained: “It all began at a dinner party last summer when the Maharaja mused with faint melancholy ‘How am I going to keep my elephants?’ You know, one is always anxious to earn some dollars these days. It’s a unique opportunity that has never been done before.”

  She likened these expeditions to the traditional hunts on grand English estates; when asked if she could guarantee a tiger, she replied: “There are an awful lot of leopards and panthers there, and I should say one would be awfully unlucky if he didn’t get a tiger.” And did she hunt? the reporter inquired: “I couldn’t shoot a fly,” Sheila winced gently.

  Years later, in May 1967, as her health began to wane, Sheila agreed to sell her share of Milbanke Travel to the British hotel and restaurant company Forte. By then it had grown into an operation with several entities, with eight branches across the country and a staff of 200. There were also operations in the United States and Australia, which made it one of the largest independent travel companies; during the previous year it had generated a turnover of £5 million and sold 40,000 holiday packages. Sheila Milbanke had left a unique mark on the business world, just as she had done on so many other worlds into which she had ventured.

  29

  A PRINCE OF RUSSIA

  The lasting memory Prince Dimitri Romanoff would have of landing in England in 1919 was not of his rescue from almost certain death at the hands of Bolshevik revolutionaries but, as he would later write, watching the “flow of tears” as his grandmother Maria, the Dowager Empress of Russia, hugged her sister Alexandra, the Queen Mother of England, on the docks of Portsmouth Harbour.

  Dimitri was seventeen years old when he and his family arrived in London aboard the HMS Nelson. He had been born in a thousand-room palace with the sound of cannons celebrating his birth; he’d been raised amid
the untold wealth and splendour of one of the world’s great dynasties. But his family had been displaced by revolution and terror and now they had to start a new life in exile. His surviving family members had lived under house arrest for two years, sleeping in their clothes with few possessions and little food as they waited to be either rescued by the Allies or delivered for slaughter into the hands of the revolutionaries. They were among the thirty-five direct relatives of the royal Romanoff family who would escape.

  It was only when German troops—their former and future enemy—freed them that he was told of the murder of his uncle, Tsar Nicholas II, and his family. The same fate would almost certainly have befallen them, given that his mother was the Tsar’s sister, Grand Duchess Xenia Alexandrovna, and his father was the Grand Duke Alexander Mikhailovich, head of the air force and navy and close advisor to the Tsar.

  After another nine months on the island of Malta, they were brought to London, where King George V and Queen Mary were waiting on the platform at Victoria Station to usher them into the bosom of Buckingham Palace. Such was the familial network of the European dynasties that the King of England was the first cousin of the Tsar of Russia and of the Kaiser of Germany.

  “We were driven straight to Buckingham Palace, where we were met on arrival by the Prince of Wales, who was standing at the entrance to the palace. He escorted us to our rooms. That first night in London did not seem so strange. The atmosphere of one palace is much like another and being in one in London with our English relatives helped obscure the reality of the situation,” Dimitri would recall many years later.