Sheila

by Robert Wainwright

  She called it “Waltzing Matilda”, subtitled “A Sketch”, and clearly wrote large sections and then put it aside—it seemed for several years—before starting again. There are errors, some simple mistakes in time and others recalling events that other records show didn’t happen. For example, she wrote about both brothers, Jack and Roy, being in Egypt at the same time during the Great War as well as a childhood friend named Lionel who died at Gallipoli, broken-hearted that she had chosen Loughie rather than him.

  Australian war records show that Roy only joined the army in January 1918, long after his sister had settled in London and had a baby boy and would soon be pregnant with another. Lionel, according to official records, never existed—perhaps it was a pseudonym.

  There is frankness at times, about some of the men who admired her and her choices and expectations, forever chasing the elusive emotion of love. On the other hand, there is an avoidance of some issues, particularly of her relationship with “Bertie” when it is clear from other sources and events that there was a close relationship which flirted with a love that was never allowed to flourish.

  Her marriage to Dimitri not only gave Sheila a husband with whom to see out her days but the daughter she never had—Dimitri’s daughter Nadejda, “who might have been my own”. She would also have a granddaughter when Tony married Athenais de Mortemart, a descendant of the famed mistress of Louis XIV of France, the Sun King. Tony and Athenais would have two children, Caroline born in 1956 and Peter, the current Earl of Rosslyn, who was born in 1958.

  In an entry written when her granddaughter was seven months old, Sheila pondered: “I wonder what her fate will be? Please God, save Lady Caroline.”

  Sheila’s last entry in her memoir is dated January 14, 1960 and begins: “Now this is the end of my story.” It tells of attending the wedding of Lady Pamela Mountbatten, daughter of friend and neighbour the Earl of Mountbatten, and the famous interior designer David Nightingale Hicks. The weather was terrible, with snow and ice which plunged their grand home, Broadlands, in Hampshire, into darkness: “The ceremony at Romsey Abbey was wonderful but the guests froze, except for the royal family who had installed huge electric heaters over their heads (most unfair!!) Luckily I was wearing snow boots. The special train was comfortable and we had an excellent luncheon. We were met by motor coaches and had good seats in the Abbey. The organisation was perfect. We had to keep jumping up as the Royals arrived. Headed by the Queen Mum looking sweet, Princess Margaret looking annoyed, the Duchess of Kent and Princess Alexandria both looking beautiful, footed by the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales, both looking older.

  “We arrived at Broadlands for the reception and the house was in pitch darkness. Dickie and Edwina were receiving guests in the dark except for a candelabra held in front of them by a butler. Dickie and Edwina were serene and charming, and smiling as if nothing had happened. We then pushed our way through a door into another room where we found a buffet lit by a few candles. We gratefully grabbed a glass of champagne.

  “Arrived in London at 8.30 after a nine-hour icy day. Dimitri—who could not or would not go—greeted me by saying ‘I told you so’—a typical husband’s remark! Now this is really the end of my tale (seem to have heard that before!!!) The End?”

  Her Highness Princess Dimitri lived for another nine years after the Mountbatten wedding but made no more entries in her memoir. She died on October 13, 1969, from a combination of heart failure and lung cancer, compounded by pneumonia, but this was barely noticed by media that had once doted on her. In death it seemed she had been forgotten. The International Herald Tribune published one of only two brief obituaries:

  She was Margaret Sheila MacKellar, daughter of Harry Chisholm, of Sydney. In 1915 she married Lord Loughborough, heir to the Earldom of Rosslyn, from whom she obtained a divorce in 1926 and who died in 1929. Their son is the sixth Earl of Rosslyn. In 1928 she married Sir John Milbanke, 11th baronet, who died in 1947. He was an amateur boxer. Between 1918 and 1939 she was a noted hostess and a frequent dance partner of the Duke of Windsor when he was the Prince of Wales. She bought a majority of shares in a Piccadilly travel agency. Her marriage to Prince Dimitri, whose maternal grandfather was Czar Alexander III, took place in 1954.

  A more appropriate commentary on her life would be published as a passing reference fourteen years later. The obituary of her great friend Freda read in part:

  The Marquesa de Casa Maury who died in London yesterday aged 88 will be better known to future generations as Mrs Dudley Ward. She lived into the last quarter of the twentieth century but it was her life between the wars, which will give her a place in history. She was one of a group of exceptionally beautiful young married women—a group that included Mrs Richard Norton, Lady Milbanke and Lady Louis Mountbatten—who played a part in the liberation of the old aristocratic society and were to be seen in the restaurants and night clubs of London. Mrs Dudley Ward belonged to the generation, which bridged the gap between the manner of the old world and the new.

  But she did not die alone. A few days before her death, a young relative visited Sheila in her hospital ward. It was just after her seventy-fourth birthday, and the room was filled with people—ageing friends and compatriots from the early days all laughing and making merry: “They were spitting cherry pips in the air like children. It was a party; they were celebrating her life.”

  And what of Australia?

  The last few lines of her memoir discuss how Dimitri’s family had escaped from Russia in 1919: “None of them has ever returned to Russia,” she wrote, before adding as an afterthought: “Funnily enough, I always thought I would return to Australia—but quite different—although same thoughts of one’s country.”

  In 1967, when she arrived in Sydney on her last trip, a Herald reporter asked Sheila if she missed her homeland. She replied: “I’ve missed Australia very much. I dream about it, you know, and I can smell it, quite clearly, with the wattle and the gum trees.”

  Margaret Sheila MacKellar Chisholm was cremated and her ashes spread across the grounds of Rosslyn Chapel. The following year her son ordered a commemorative stained-glass window, which was placed in the chapel’s baptistery and dedicated to his mother. The window depicts the figure of St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, surrounded by birds, a lamb, squirrel and rabbit. “My mother loved animals all her life,” he explained.

  In the bottom left-hand corner is a kangaroo.

  Pilot Peter St Clair-Erskine was killed in a training accident on September 8, 1939, during the first few days of World War II. His mother struggled for years to come to terms with her youngest son’s death.

  Lady Sheila Milbanke as painted by Cecil Beaton in 1930, at the time he was compiling his ode to London’s most beautiful women, The Book of Beauty. © National Portrait Gallery, London

  A portrait of Lady Sheila Milbanke painted in the late 1930s by the celebrated British society painter and war artist Simon Elwes, RA (1902–1975). © Peter Elwes

  Sheila could look as glamorous as the movie star she once wanted to be, as can be seen from this 1935 photograph by Madam Yevonde, which depicts Sheila as Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons. © Madame Yevonde Archive

  Wartime Sheila, sans makeup and ballgowns, instead wearing the uniform of a volunteer. The six-year conflict had an enduring impact on her physically and psychologically.

  Tony Loughborough, by now the Earl of Rosslyn, with his stepfather Sir John “Buffles” Milbanke in 1945, after they had returned home from World War II. Although both were safe, the marriage of Sheila and Buffles was a casualty of the conflict.

  Sheila decided in 1948 to become a businesswoman and started a travel agency. She talked her way into opening a desk with two staff at the Fortnum & Mason department store in Piccadilly.

  Sheila and her third husband, Prince Dimitri Romanoff, on their wedding day in 1954. The ceremony at a registry office was a far cry from her wedding to Buffles.

  Sheila counted royal families from a
cross Europe in her social circles, including Aly Khan, son of the Aga Khan spiritual leader of Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims. Aly’s son, Karim, became the Aga Khan in 1957 at the age of twenty. He gave her this photograph two years later, signed to “Aunt Sheila”.

  Sheila, the grandmother, reads to young children in 1960.

  Sheila (second from right) was a frequent guest of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at their homes in France, including this visit in the 1960s. Edward and Sheila were close friends for half a century.

  Even aged in her late sixties Sheila, now Princess Dimitri, knew how to engage with a camera.

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  The journey to uncover the life story of Sheila began thanks to the eagle eye of my commissioning editor, Richard Walsh. Buried in William Shawcross’s 2009 official biography of the Queen Mother, Richard spied a few paragraphs describing the relationship between Prince Albert and “an unhappily married, beautiful Australian”—Lady Loughborough, nee Sheila Chisholm.

  Richard sent me an email in July 2011 quoting the intriguing snippet and adding that the detail had made him “salivate”, adding “I think there is a book somewhere in all this that is crying out to be written.” I too was hooked when I read the small entry on Margaret Sheila MacKellar Chisholm in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

  From there, however, the task became very difficult and the research path over the next year felt more like a treasure hunt than a biographical project. There was no one left alive who would have known Sheila in her heyday, so her life had to be reconstructed, fragment by fragment, after a meticulous trawl of international newspaper archives and online databases. My search took me to the National Archives, British Library and British Newspaper Archive in London, the Rosslyn Collection at the Scottish National Archives in Edinburgh, the Churchill Library in Cambridge, the New South Wales State Library in Sydney, the National Archives in Canberra and the Georgia Doble Sitwell collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. Permission was sought—and granted—to search the royal family’s archives held at Windsor.

  Hugo Vickers, the noted author and royal historian, kindly provided important references to Sheila from the diary of Sir Charles Hepburn Johnston, the former UK High Commissioner to Australia. I would also like to acknowledge the help I received from John Harris at the Royal Australian Historical Society and Roberta Carew, archivist at the Kambala girls’ school in Sydney.

  I found mentions of Sheila in the biographies and autobiographies of famous contemporaries, including King Edward VIII, Evelyn Waugh, Lord Beaverbrook and Lady Diana Cooper. She featured, again in passing, in books by more recent authors writing about the lives of friends such as Fred Astaire, Rudolph Valentino and Nöel Coward. All these snippets, along with mentions in hundreds of social columns and articles in newspapers and magazines—ranging from the Fleet Street dailies and magazines such as Vogue to smaller, regional UK newspapers—became important, if tiny, parts of a jigsaw puzzle that allowed me to get a sense of the human being behind the famous “It” girl—as well as her place in London society.

  During the early part of the 20th century, the lives and loves of the British aristocracy proved irresistible the world over. In the United States and India, local newspapers could not get enough of reports from “special correspondents” in London who filed social news via the wire services, while Australia lapped up any mention of the woman reported always as “formerly Sheila Chisholm of Sydney”.

  Most valuable too were the letters of Prince Edward to his married lover Freda Dudley Ward, not just because they provide a contemporary voice but because they were written without the kind of discretion and self-censorship that would normally dampen such correspondence. It is a great pity that he did not keep any of her replies.

  The Scottish archives also maintain an extensive collection of the Rosslyn family’s records, among them a small collection of personal files, all folded neatly and probably originally held in the top drawer of Sheila’s bedroom bureau. Here, the importance of the letters sent to her by Prince Bertie is very clear, as is the carefully conserved card from Rudolph Valentino. Here too it is sad to note that most of the letters between Bertie and Sheila were long ago destroyed, an act that his brother, Prince Edward, had reminded her to do so very frequently.

  Ultimately however, the most important and valuable resource in writing this book was her family’s decision to grant me access to her unpublished memoir. The document, poignantly titled ‘Waltzing Matilda’, was written when she was well into her sixth decade and is chronologically incomplete, missing (or discreetly skimming over) a number of important relationships and significant events in her life.

  I was given access to the memoir only after I had finished writing the first draft of this book. I am enormously grateful to the current Earl of Rosslyn and his family because it was so important to give a first-person voice to Sheila’s thoughts, joys and fears. I am also indebted to a friend, James La Terriere, who arranged the introduction to the Earl whom, by chance, he knew from their school days at Eton.

  I would also like to mention two other family members. I am grateful to Sheila’s nephew Bruce Chisholm, Roy Chisholm’s son, who is now in his eighties, with whom I chatted on several occasions about memories of his aunt when he visited her in London during the 1950s—a gentle woman, as he recalled—and his memories of the night in 1934 that the family stables burned down at Randwick.

  The Australian family of Sheila has been shy of publicity because of the incessant stories of the years of Edward and Mollee, and the paternity of Bruce’s late brother, Tony. If it gives them any comfort, it is clear from my search of records, including numerous media stories of the day, that Tony was the son of Mollee and Roy Chisholm.

  The other relative I found was Penny Galitzine, granddaughter of Dimitri Romanoff, who kindly gave me access to her grandfather’s unpublished memoir. The yellowing document of 280 pages, carefully typed but clearly a first draft, with hand-written corrections and notations, lies at the bottom of a cardboard box stored in the roof of her home in a small town outside Eastbourne in southern England.

  The pages haven’t curled in the three decades since Dimitri’s death because of the weight of the photographs and negatives on top of them—unfiltered, mostly amateur images taken of the last few years of his life with his second wife, Sheila.

  Although the wealth and splendour of a European title has long disappeared, the Galitzine family’s pride in their aristocratic background remains strong. The house is filled with memories of another age—long-dead Russian relatives in their finery populate haunting black-and-white family portraits of families who fled or died in the revolution of 1917.

  Among them, on the lounge room wall, is a very different and striking portrait. It is clearly the face of Sheila, drawn in the 1930s, her hair cut sharply ending with shoulder-length ringlets, as had been vividly described by Cecil Beaton for Vanity Fair. There is a faraway look in her eyes—almost a sadness which might, romantically, be read as a wistfulness for her home on the other side of the world.

  There are signs in the house of her longing for Australia. Carefully mounted on the staircase wall are a series of sketches of Australian animals that once decorated Sheila’s home—a kangaroo, platypus and koala among them. And on a coffee table is the small, hallmarked silver boomerang given to Sheila by her mother in 1937 as a reminder to keep a promise and return to Australia with her grandchildren—a journey never made as war intervened.

  The boxes and plastic bags Penny has dragged from her roof space were unsorted, but very much treasured nonetheless. She is resolute that they should be kept, not discarded, but she is unsure as to exactly how they should be displayed. When the contents are tumbled out onto the kitchen table, the task of sorting through them looks enormous and problematic. The photographs, mostly undated and early Polaroid, communicate a sense of contentment—they are of an ageing couple still travelling and exploring old places and new, as the pace and
demands of life slow.

  The scenery behind them provides clues about where they were taken, mostly in Europe—summers in Italy, spring in the south of France, autumn in Monte Carlo. Almost always there is a lunch or dinner scene, to toast enduring friendships. Several contain familiar faces. There is the jazz singer Sophie Tucker, with whom Sheila socialised during the 1920s, and several taken with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at their home in southern France, his trademark lopsided smile unchanged despite years of social exile.

  There are also images from Sheila’s younger days among the pile: one is a mesmerising image of the young married woman soon after arriving in London in 1916; another is of her posing innocently in a tennis outfit, perhaps from as far back as her student days at Kambala. Others reveal the sense of fun of the couple: Sheila’s depicted as a white rabbit on a card titled “Time to Travel the Milbanke Way” and on another with her head glued to a kangaroo.

  Penny’s memories of Sheila are vivid but limited to the year her family spent in London in 1968 (she grew up in Canada) when she was fourteen years old and she and her two sisters, Marina and Alexandra, would visit on alternate Sunday afternoons. Sheila and Dimitri’s house in Wilton Street was a stone’s throw from Buckingham Palace and was set up for entertaining, even though they were now both into their seventies. There was a dumb waiter, which brought up from the kitchen in the basement food that was cooked and served by two live-in staff members, and a bar at the top of the first flight of stairs with a machine that frosted drinking glasses.