Sheila Read online

  ROBERT WAINWRIGHT

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Robert Wainwright 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

  from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 131 8

  eISBN 978 1 74343 156 6

  Internal design by Lisa White

  Set in 12.5/18 pt Minion by Post Pre-press Group, Australia

  Image credits:

  (Margaret) Sheila MacKellar (née Chisholm), Lady Milbanke (1895–1969) by Cecil Beaton © National Portrait Gallery, London

  Lady Milbanke as Penthesilea, the Queen of the Amazons © Madame Yevonde Archive Lady Sheila Milbanke by Simon Elwes RA (1902–1975) © Peter Elwes

  All other images © The Earl of Rosslyn

  To my own Sheila, Paola,

  and in loving memory of my late father, Arthur

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: A PRINCESS RETURNS

  1. TO PROVE THAT A GIRL COULD DO IT

  2. I THOUGHT THIS MUST BE LOVE

  3. “HELLO, CALL ME HARRY”

  4. A SON AMID THE AIR RAIDS

  5. “CALL THEM SIR AND TREAT THEM LIKE DIRT”

  6. THE 4 DO’S

  7. A DUKEDOM FOR A SHEILA

  8. MOLLEE AND THE PRINCE

  9. NO MAN IS WORTH LEAVING ONE’S CHILDREN

  10. EVER YOURS SINCERELY, ALBERT

  11. AN EXTRAVAGANT PEER

  12. A STRANGE SEX ANTAGONISM

  13. PALM BEACH NIGHTS

  14. “WEDDING BELLS ARE ALL BUNK”

  15. LINDBERGH AND THE DERBY BALL

  16. AN INCOMPARABLE SHEILA

  17. A TEMPORARY UNSOUND MIND

  18. THE “IT” GIRL

  19. VIVID, GAY, UTTERLY CHARMING

  20. WHEN THE CAT’S AWAY

  21. YOU’D BETTER ASK MRS SIMPSON

  22. POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL

  23. TIME CHANGES MANY THINGS

  24. A JOURNEY HOME

  25. THE SHADOW OF WAR

  26. “I’M NOT CRYING; THERE’S RAIN IN MY EYES”

  27. SO COMPLETELY IN THE HANDS OF FATE

  28. A FEELING OF UNCERTAINTY

  29. A PRINCE OF RUSSIA

  30. SMELL THE WATTLE AND THE GUM

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  SELECTED READING

  PROLOGUE

  A PRINCESS RETURNS

  The lady graced, rather than sat on, the hotel couch; at ease, as one might have expected, in the luxury of her temporary surroundings. Her face, famed in her youth for its ethereal beauty, was still bright and eager, her make-up spare. Wide clear eyes creased faintly when she smiled, framed by thick, carefully styled silver hair that sat shoulder-length—longer than in her heyday, when she had helped make short, sharp hair fashionable. Pixyish, an admirer and frustrated suitor had once described her. That compliment still held true four decades after it had been given.

  But she had some other, special quality. Her interrogator, the women’s magazine journalist perched on a chair opposite, scrambled mentally for the phrase that might definitively encapsulate the woman before her. It was on the tip of her tongue, and yet somehow elusive. Prim or matronly did the lady a disservice, despite the cascading strings of pearls around her throat and the modest length of her skirt in this summer of 1967. Even graceful was too simplistic an assessment of a woman with an air that evoked much, much more. Then it came to her—regal. She had a bearing that could only have come from a life of stature.

  The lady’s name was Princess Dimitri Romanoff, but she was Russian only by name. As Sheila Chisholm she had been born and raised on a sheep and horse station on the Goulburn Plains in southern New South Wales, where she defied her parents and smoked at the age of twelve and rebelled against well-meaning but demanding governesses: “Mother told me she would never keep on a governess who was unkind to me so, whenever they actually tried to teach me something, I said they were being unkind. Governesses came and went like butterflies. I was a monster,” she confided to the journalist, with a half smile and only a hint of contrition.

  But this same wilful child would become as intimate with royalty as any Australian woman of her time. Born into a family that had helped settle and explore Australia and then craft the European settlement from the days of the early fleets, Sheila, as she would always call herself, left Australia as a teenager in 1914 just as political rumblings stirred fear of a war in Europe. She would return home just three times in the next fifty years—her first visit as the wife of a Scottish lord, her second as the wife of an English baronet, and now as the wife of a Russian prince. Through it all, she remained quintessentially an Australian country girl.

  “I married all my husbands for love,” she’d told a throng of media waiting at Sydney Airport when she had arrived a few days earlier. “I certainly didn’t care about titles, and none of them had any money.”

  In the forty-eight hours since arriving in Sydney the prince and princess had lain low, taking their time acclimatising to the twin demands of time and seasonal change. They had come from the twilight and damp cold of an English winter to the glazing, steamy heat of an Australian summer; the temperature had bubbled at over 102 degrees Fahrenheit (39 degrees Celsius) when they’d arrived at Sydney Airport and sat in a room with a broken air conditioner while three television stations took their turns interviewing the couple. One reporter, sensing their distress, had offered Prince Dimitri a glass of water. His reply—“No thank you; I never drink water”—delighted them; they interpreted it as the motto of a vodka man without knowing he had once made his living selling whiskey.

  Sheila knew the impact of change more than most. Her life had been shattered twice by world wars—her first marriage devastated, at least partly, by the impacts of the Great War on her psychologically-fragile husband and the life of one of her sons taken in battle during World War II.

  Traumatic upheaval had haunted her generation, as the man who now sat beside her could testify. As a young man Prince Dimitri had escaped the violence of the Bolshevik Revolution, which had claimed the life of his uncle, the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II. His family had been under house arrest for eight months before they were rescued and taken to London; he was one of only thirty-five of the famed Romanoffs who survived. In reply to a question from the magazine writer, he recalled: “We slept in our clothes, always hoping for escape. We were starved.” He had survived, rescued by the English King, George V, but, notwithstanding his grand title, he had spent most of his adult life working, including some years in the United States as a factory worker making refrigerator parts.

  His wife’s life had been the opposite: born in the obscurity of the Australian bush but, by a combination of fate and opportunity, finding her way to the centre of the world, in London. In her heyday the public had been fascinated by Sheila’s life, which had been reported on regularly over the years, not only by Fleet Street but by newspape
rs across the United States and the sub-continent. Back home, even the smallest regional papers had carried regular reports gleaned from the wire services, for readers eager to explore her success and wonder how a young woman from the plains outside Canberra had managed to spend half a century inside the palaces, mansions and clubs of the rich and powerful.

  Sheila’s story was deliciously evocative, as the reporter would observe in her feature article for The Australian Women’s Weekly: “When you talk to [her] the air seems to fill with the ghosts of a long-ago glittering world, with the sound of far-off trumpets, the swirl of beautiful Court dresses, the flash of light of ceremonial swords.”

  The newly federated Australian nation was still finding its feet when Sheila Chisholm left its shores with her mother Margaret—wife of the pastoralist, grazier and prominent racehorse breeder, Harry Chisholm—and headed for the social glamour of Europe: “Canberra didn’t exist when I left,” she reminisced; the national capital was still a political wilderness in the middle of nowhere, with barely a shovel hole. Its development would be further delayed when the Great War was declared a few months later, which meant she had not seen it until now.

  This trip home—for that’s the way she would always feel despite the infrequency of visits—was a sentimental pilgrimage of sorts. Her last, thirty years ago, had been to see her mother, who was then seriously ill; there had been little time for sightseeing. The onset of World War II a few years later would prevent her returning for her mother’s funeral. After that, there was little reason to make the arduous trip, which in those days meant hopping from continent to continent and cost the equivalent of two years of a working man’s wages.

  Now she wanted to reconnect with the place and the people she had left behind: “I want to see the Blue Mountains again—and a koala farm. I want to surf again, to see if I can surf without being knocked over.” It was no idle wish.

  There would also be time to visit friends in high places: “First, we go to Canberra to stay with the British High Commissioner, Sir Charles Johnston, and his wife Princess Nathalie, who is Dimitri’s cousin,” she explained matter-of-factly, unselfconsciously name-dropping, although strangely neglecting to mention that another cousin was Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth. “Then back to Sydney to do all those things I dream of. And I want to meet all my old friends again, and have Dimitri meet them.”

  What about change? They had seen so much in their lifetimes, the reporter suggested. Princess Dimitri nodded: “I was reared in a world of servants and chaperones. Today the young have no chaperones and almost no help, and they manage their lives magnificently. I’m not bothered by Beatles haircuts. Half the boys at Eton have long hair, and it horrifies their fathers. But what does it matter? Basically, they’re very much alive, and they just want to be different. They’re very tough.”

  She might have been speaking about her own resolute determination, after arriving in London half a century before as one of a handful of Australian-born women making their way in a society that demanded blood and position as an entry card. Somehow, her personality and beauty—in that order—would open doors and not only invite her into the most inner of sanctums but allow her to stay and become a leading figure in a society that might otherwise have ignored her.

  There would be great highs—the patronage of kings, movie stars, celebrated writers and even heroes. She would become a fashion icon, among the first to go hatless and adopt the daring hairstyles of the raging 1920s and 1930s; she would grace magazine advertisements for beauty products, pose for famous photographers and be pursued by the world’s richest and most eligible men.

  As the limelight of her youth faded, she would reinvent herself as a businesswoman and a celebrity travel agent: “I started it as just a counter in Fortnum & Mason’s with a staff of two,” she explained about her business. “I couldn’t even read a balance sheet, but somehow the thing snowballed. Now we employ two hundred in our London office and we have branches everywhere, even in Australia.

  “I was chairman of the company for a long time, though still unable to read those balance sheets! Now I mainly help with publicity. I can be very useful persuading our friends to use the agency, and, oh, yes, in persuading them to pay up. The rich don’t pay, you know. No, they don’t, Dimitri.”

  Dimitri smiled quietly. He understood his wife’s subtle point. There was a perception in society that the powerful classes were, by definition, also the wealthy. But, as their own lives would show, the richness was in the experience.

  1

  TO PROVE THAT A GIRL COULD DO IT

  It was a farewell tea, or at least that’s the way the occasion would be described in the social pages of The Sydney Morning Herald. In hindsight though, this casual social event was probably more a beginning than an end. The young woman at the centre of attention was on her way to adult life—with all its possibilities and pitfalls.

  On the afternoon of March 31, 1914, eighteen-year-old Miss Sheila Chisholm and a few dozen friends and family chatted over tea and sandwiches beneath the arches on the first-floor balcony of the grandest establishment in Sydney, the Hotel Australia. Out on the balcony, they chose to ignore the hotel’s interior splendour, with its soaring red marble Doric columns and mahogany staircase, so as to relish the autumn sunshine and the noise of the city and Castlereagh Street below.

  Not far away, in the midst of the harbour jostle lay the steamship SS Mongolia, due to leave the following morning for a six-week voyage to London with a cargo of the best of Australia’s produce—wool, leather, fur, tin, copper and lead, as well as cases of refrigerated meat and meat extract, crates of apples and boxes of pearl shell. The ship would also carry a human cargo—up to 400 first- and second-class passengers plucked from the Australian capitals—as she made her way around the southern coast and then across the Indian Ocean toward Africa, the Suez Canal and on to Europe. Among those who paid £45 for passage, the equivalent of seven months’ wages for a working woman, were Sheila Chisholm and her mother, Margaret, who were travelling to Europe for at least six months—France, England, Germany and Italy—hence the farewell gathering.

  Australia may have grasped a degree of political independence after its declaration of federation in 1901, but its upper echelons remained firmly attached to the matronly bosom of England; the wife and only daughter of prominent grazier and bloodstock agent, Mr Harry Chisholm, were joining the great annual migration of well-to-do families paying homage to the rituals of British society.

  It was daunting and exciting, particularly for a young woman who had spent the best part of her life on a grazing property named “Wollogorang”, a local Aboriginal word meaning “Big Water” because the property bordered a large lagoon, which was a two-day ride south of Sydney and 60 kilometres from where Canberra would eventually rise.

  Like her father and older brothers, John and Roy, Sheila had been born in the main bedroom of the two-storey stone homestead and reared in the practical, if privileged, colonial environment of working men. Her birth notice in The Sydney Morning Herald—sans the names of either the mother or daughter—had reflected a world that was spare, both in its comforts and attitude to women: “CHISHOLM—September 9, the wife of Harry Chisholm, Wollogorang, Breadalbane, a daughter.”

  When the baby was finally named, she was christened Margaret Sheila MacKellar Chisholm, but from an early age she would go by her second name, taken from the heroine of a book that had inspired her mother, who eschewed her husband’s suggestions of naming her after one of two godmothers or Queen Victoria, as “the idea of the former is mercenary and the latter snobbish”.

  Despite the challenges of a rural life, Sheila was brought up in what she later described as “an atmosphere of love and sympathy. I adored my mother and father.” Harry Chisholm was tall and prematurely silver-haired, with the firm-eyed gaze of a man who spent his days in the sun. In the months before his daughter was born in 1895, he had pursued his love of racehorses by establishing what wou
ld become Australia’s largest bloodstock agency. He was a hardened businessman but at home Sheila would recall a doting father who filled her head and heart with stories about heroic bushrangers like Captain Thunderbolt and quoted poems from Adam Lindsay Gordon. He couldn’t resist his young daughter, even her habit of referring to him by his nickname, “Chissie”, something his sons would never dream of doing.

  Harry had known Margaret MacKellar since they were children and married the slim, fair beauty when she turned sixteen. “She was an extremely intelligent woman, twenty years ahead of her generation and a suffragette at heart,” Sheila would recall in her unpublished memoir, which she would begin penning in the late 1940s. “Had we lived in England, I can easily imagine her doing violent things and being under the influence of Mrs Pankhurst.”

  The family homestead was an English retreat inside a spare colonial landscape of “brown rolling country, purple hills beyond and gentian-blue skies”. The main building was pale yellow washed stone with French doors opening onto trim lawns with English oaks and elms, and a wooden bridge leading to a pond surrounded by willow trees, all created seventy years earlier by her paternal grandfather, James Chisholm, son of a Scottish soldier who arrived in Australia with the Third Fleet in 1790. Her father had inherited Wollogorang after his older brother, Jack, had died when thrown from his horse. Jack Chisholm’s ghost is said to still haunt the homestead.

  This was a wealthy household, with a main house containing dining room, drawing room and her mother’s sitting room downstairs and her parents’ private rooms upstairs. There were also two wings: one for Sheila, her brothers and guests, and the other for the household staff of five, including Sheila’s nanny, whom she called “Ninget”. Sheila would always remember the wallpaper in her bedroom, patterned with clusters of tiny roses “all seeming to have little faces. I constantly counted them as I lay in bed—an eccentricity I have to this day.”