Sheila Page 10
The prince and his retinue might have left Australia’s shores, but tongues had begun to wag and would do so for decades. Mollee and Roy Chisholm (who, according to his sister, had been unhappy about the prince dancing so often with his girlfriend) were engaged four months later and married the following year, settling first at Roy’s property “Khan Yunis” (named after one of the Anzac battles in Turkey during the Great War) at Braidwood in southern New South Wales and, a few years later, in Macleay Street, Potts Point, when Roy came to work for his father at the bloodstock agency.
But each time her name appeared in a newspaper, often because of her heightened profile, there would be the reminder that she had been “the favoured dancing partner of the prince”, the articles regurgitating details of Prince Edward’s private trips to Brooksby House, their walks along the beach and his passion for jam sandwiches. On the surface these appeared innocent reminders, perhaps out of admiration for a local girl who had struck up such a special friendship with a prince, but there was also the subtle implication of something more to the relationship.
In early October 1923 Roy and Mollee had a son. David Anthony Chisholm was named after the Prince of Wales, “David” being the last of the prince’s seven Christian names. It was a very personal statement of the friendship, confirmed a few days later with a snippet in The Sydney Morning Herald: “Mr Roy Chisholm announces that the Prince of Wales has consented to be godfather to his baby son, born on Wednesday. Mrs Chisholm will be remembered as Miss Mollee Little, a favourite dancing partner of the Prince of Wales during his visit to New South Wales.”
The fact that the birth occurred three years after Edward had left Australia would not prevent the gossips from insisting that David Chisholm, who would always be known by his middle name, Tony, was actually the illegitimate son of Mollee and the Prince of Wales, particularly as he had the softer features of the refined Edward rather than the robust darkness of Roy, whom Sheila reckoned looked like Rhett Butler. The ensuing controversy would remain undiminished more than eighty years later.
Harry “Chissie” Chisholm, Sheila’s beloved father, who established one of Australia’s earliest bloodstock agencies
Margaret “Ag” Chisholm, Sheila’s mother, who spent most of the Great War tending wounded Anzac and British soldiers convalescing in Egypt
Sheila, aged four, photographed in 1899 between her brothers Jack (left) aged eleven, and Roy, aged eight. The brothers would not get on, forcing her father to sell the family property, Wollogorang.
Roy Chisholm, whose childhood love affair with Mollee Little eventually ended in marriage
Mollee Little, Sheila’s best childhood friend and sometimes mistaken for her sister, was described by Sheila as “fascinating, with golden brown hair, a retrousse nose and the biggest blue eyes I have ever seen”.
Sheila, aged sixteen, at Wollogorang in 1912 as her family prepared to sell the property and move to Sydney.
Mollee (left) and Sheila dressed in their swimming costumes in the summer of 1914. Much of Sydney’s eastern suburbs was still semi-rural. The girls used to swim out past the men to be brave.
John “Jack” Chisholm, Sheila’s oldest brother, at camp in Cairo before heading to Gallipoli. He was the reason that Sheila and her mother diverted to Egypt instead of going home.
Sheila in Egypt in 1915, dressed to attend one of the rare social occasions, probably on the eve of the Gallipoli campaign
Sheila in her uniform as a volunteer nurse in Cairo during the Great War, alongside two trained colleagues
Freda Dudley Ward, Sheila’s best friend during her early years in London and the mistress of Edward Prince of Wales for fifteen years. Like Wallis Simpson after her, Freda would be a mature, steady influence on the dandy prince.
A rare moment of complete ease for the royal princes. The “4 Do’s” in 1919 sit on a fence, Prince Bertie smiling with his arm around Sheila, during a visit to Sheila’s Winchester home, Lankhills (seen in the background). From left: Edward, Freda, Bertie, Sheila and Edward’s equerry, Edward “Fruity” Metcalfe.
The heading on this photograph, published by The Sketch magazine in 1919, sums up the media response to Sheila’s arrival in London. Little did they know that she was having an affair with the second in line to the throne.
Sheila stands smoking a cigarette between the two princes and future kings of England.
Prince Serge Obolensky and Sheila pose as a couple during the voyage aboard the Malwa to Australia in 1920. They fell in love during the trip.
9
NO MAN IS WORTH LEAVING ONE’S CHILDREN
Mollee Little and Roy Chisholm might have been headed toward the altar but back in London, Sheila was desperately trying to find a way to hold her marriage together. Her dalliances with Prince Albert and Serge Obolensky aside, she was resisting reasons to leave her husband, for the sake of her children, now aged three and two.
In July 1920 Loughie had confessed again to gambling and running up debts with bookmakers and moneylenders but wouldn’t say how much he owed. Despite Sheila’s renewed pleas with her father-in-law, the earl had washed his hands of his son, suggesting that they leave England and start a new life in a country like Canada. The prospect seemed bleak: “I was in despair. We talked it over. I thought Australia a much more sensible idea. I felt my brothers would be a good influence. It might really help Loughie and also, I could escape from the temptation of my secret love for Serge.”
Loughie finally agreed to go with his wife and children to Australia, but only for a year as a trial. And he wanted to go ahead, by himself, to spend time in India while Sheila packed up the house. “He said I could easily cope with the boys as we were taking two nurses and my maid and he would join our ship in Bombay. I pleaded and begged him not to go before us but I could not explain why. I hardly dared admit even to myself that my feelings for Serge were growing stronger all the time.”
Loughie insisted and fled, leaving his family and his Whitehall desk job behind and heading to India for what would turn out to be a six-month shooting and social safari where he cut a notable figure—a rare aristocrat among the ranks of military officers and well-to-do commoners. His appearances at society fancy dress balls were reported widely, alongside descriptions of the new gaming tables of baccarat and roulette, which were beginning to appear in Calcutta. Instead of moving away from gambling, he was simply shifting to another location, beyond the gaze of his financiers.
Back in London his family described it as a business trip “visiting governors and officials” but the alibi fell through when a London bookmaking firm launched a lawsuit for non-payment of a £444 debt. Loughie did not deny that he owed the money but, when the trustees of the fund set up by his mother realised it was for gambling losses, they refused to pay up. Before he left for India, Loughie had pleaded with the bookmaker to be patient: “Apart from your firm I owe the ring roughly £1700,” he wrote at the time. “I am not in a position now to pay one penny. I am trying to get one man to take over the whole lot and let me pay him back in instalments as I intend to meet them in full.”
Loughie and the bookmaker had then met over lunch to discuss a scheme in which the troubled young peer would bring clients—some of his gambling friends—to do their betting with the firm. In exchange, he wanted “an interest” in the operation and more gambling credit. The bookie refused until he had cleared the initial debt, so Loughie wrote the cheque even though he knew it would bounce. The bookie, stupidly as it turned out, extended more credit and Loughie promptly lost another £200 in quick time.
It was then that the bookie decided to sue, but he would lose when it finally got to court, several months after Loughie’s departure. The debt was real and acknowledged but it was a gambling debt and, so, was illegal and invalid. The judge accepted the argument and threw out the case; it was the second time Loughie had escaped conviction because of a technicality.
Sheila sailed from London with the children a month before the case went to court and b
ecame public. Before leaving she said her goodbyes to Serge: “I at last admitted to myself that I was in love with Serge but eventually the moment came when I had to say goodbye to him forever, and we chose Freda’s house. After he had gone she sat up with me all the rest of the night, trying to comfort me. She saw me off the next morning from Tilbury Docks.”
It took a week to reach Marseilles, where a cable was waiting. It was from Serge: “Vickers has given me a job in Australia. Coming overland to join Malwa. Get me a cabin somehow.”
Sheila was in shock—“an Alice in Wonderland situation to say the least of it”. Ignoring her previous decision, she rushed off to find the ship’s purser. Every cabin was taken but there was a single bed, in a downstairs cabin with two priests, that was spare if the passenger who’d made the booking didn’t front by the time the ship sailed.
Serge arrived by train: “I felt so bewildered that I didn’t know if I was pleased or sorry to see him,” Sheila later wrote.
Fate would dictate what happened next as they waited to see if the mystery passenger turned up to take his bed. He didn’t and the ship sailed with Serge Obolensky aboard.
On the evening of October 3, 1920, the Malwa arrived at Port Said in Egypt, the northern terminus of the Suez Canal, on its first London–Sydney run since being requisitioned as a troop ship during the Great War. There would be an overnight stop to take on coal before making the 190-kilometre run through the man-made canal, which linked Europe and Asia. It was a messy undertaking, the coal being carried in small baskets by a small army of workers dressed only in loincloths and covered in coal dust.
To avoid the dust invading the luxury interiors, the ship was sealed and its portholes locked. Many of the passengers—a mix of Australian businessmen, merchants, wool buyers and engineers, plus Indian civil servants and British army officers on their way to the sub-continent—chose to go ashore for the evening, returning late in the hope of avoiding the mess.
Sheila and Serge joined those going ashore, riding in an open carriage through the wide streets to a restaurant by the beach where they whiled away the hours beneath a full moon, brilliant against the black Egyptian night and the peace of the man-made sea. “The sense of the past and the mystery of the future,” Serge would later recall, “made the night memorable beyond any I have ever known.”
On their way back, Serge had his fortune read on the beach. The fortune teller made scratches in the sand and allowed the fine white grains to trickle through his fingers before declaring that Serge would be returning through Port Said within a year.
“It was very late when Sheila and I returned to the ship. We reached the gangway but then realised that the heat on board was going to be unbearable because all the portholes would be closed. So we decided to spend the night wandering through the city until daylight came and with it the time for the ship to sail. We watched the dawn come up upon the shimmering harbour and I realised I was in love. We watched the Oriental sunrise and then returned sadly to the ship.”
After she arrived in Sydney Sheila would get letters from friends asking if it was true that she and Serge had eloped. She denied it because it wasn’t true, but although unexpected and uncomfortable, his presence on board was not unwelcome. She even accepted his flimsy excuse that he had seen a business opportunity. He already worked for Vickers, which manufactured harvesting equipment, and Australia’s vast agricultural industry offered opportunities for machinery sales. It would also give him the chance of a clean break from his marriage, which was in name only as his wife continued to pursue her singing career across France.
He didn’t need to say the obvious: that he was besotted with Sheila and was chasing her across the world in the mad hope that she would see sense and leave Loughie. Divorce seemed out of the question for Sheila, driven by social expectations that wives should remain loyal to errant husbands if only for the sake of their children, although she freely admitted to herself that she was in love with another man: “We both knew we were in love, but not a word of love was spoken,” she would write. “The urgent clasp of hands told us what we knew. But I was married—so was he.”
On board ship they were treated as a couple and invited to the captain’s table, dancing and eating together while discussing the “thin film of white control over the Eastern abyss” and how the world was changing post-war. They posed together for photographs and slept on deck with other passengers, listening to the chatter of jackals in the dunes as the ship slipped silently along the canal. They marvelled at the red-sailed feluccas on Aden harbour and wandered the narrow streets of Jeddah, exploring bazaars and mosques.
Serge watched with delight, as a husband might watch his wife, when Sheila pranked fellow passengers by pinning a notice to the bulletin board announcing that the ship would heave-to at noon so passengers could bathe in the Red Sea—gentlemen to the starboard and ladies to the port. Bathing suits could be rented from pursers. This was all in character—an idiosyncratic Australian character—for a woman he found irresistible but who remained just beyond his reach because she loved her children and didn’t want to abandon their fragile father.
Loughie was waiting at the docks when the Malwa reached Bombay a week later for a one-night layover. Sheila had cabled ahead so he was expecting Serge and seemed unperturbed. His reunion with Sheila and the children appeared happy, if stilted. Serge watched on with mixed emotions. In Loughie he saw a man who was clearly a drunk and a gambler who was at times verbally abusive to his wife, but who struggled with post-war life and seemed resigned to failing, lacking the self-control or will to avoid self-destruction. It seemed only a question of whether he would take his family with him.
The Loughboroughs stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel and dined at the Royal Bombay Yacht Club; the colonial grandeur hid the awkwardness of the reunion, which resolved nothing. He had donated a gold cup—the Loughborough Cup—for a race meeting and, instead of joining his family for the onward voyage to Australia, wanted to stay and see who won. Sheila, saddened, took it to be yet another excuse. The following morning Loughie stood at the end of the pier, bareheaded in the blazing sun, watching the boat carrying his family until it was out of sight.
Sheila was subdued for the next few days, regret and worry etched across her face. But by the time they reached Ceylon, Loughie seemed to be forgotten as Serge and she explored the city in rickshaws. As they passed through tropical woodlands and rice paddies straddling mountains, they marvelled at the sight of elephants by the roadside and ancient temples engulfed by sweet-scented foliage.
They made their first Australian landfall in Perth, where the local media interviewed them as they stepped ashore together. It was breathlessly reported that Prince Obolensky was “more than ordinarily tall with a charming personality and thorough grip of the English language”. But it was Lady Loughborough, an Australian girl who had made good, who held most interest: “Her ladyship was formerly Miss Chisholm, daughter of Mr and Mrs Harry Chisholm of Sydney, and is journeying to visit her parents after seven years’ absence in England. During a short chat Lady Loughborough said that residence in England had been full of interest, particularly during the war period, but that she was more than delighted to come to Australia—as it was still her home”.
They steamed across the Bight, reaching Melbourne on November 1. The timing seemed almost magical and was certainly fortuitous; they were met there by Harry and Margaret Chisholm, who had travelled down from Sydney for the Melbourne Cup. The next day Serge and Sheila watched the wonder horse, Poitrel, carry an unprecedented 10 stone to win the Cup; they had backed the winner at 8 to 1. Australia appeared to be a land of sunshine, joy and millionaires.
The entrance to Sydney Harbour a few days later only confirmed Serge’s impression that he had arrived in a place of wonder and opportunity. He was seen by the media as an exotic—“a bona fide Russian prince,” boomed The Bulletin, “who discourses on the Bolshevik horror which robbed him of the family wealth and sent him out to look for work.”
Harry and Margaret, who had accompanied them on the Malwa, accepted his presence because (according to Freda Dudley Ward) Sheila had kept her latest marital woes and subsequent infidelity from her parents, so Prince Obolensky appeared to be a gallant escort rather than the insistent suitor he had actually become. Harry Chisholm, white-haired and ruddy-cheeked, even arranged introductions to businessmen for him and membership at the Union Club in Bligh Street, where he took up residence.
It was a new world, with many of the trappings of London but few of its formalities—an increasingly independent nation that was about to begin its own airline, admit women to parliament and thrash England 5–nil in the 1920–21 Ashes series: “People did what they wanted,” he later reflected. “They weren’t concerned with self-conscious European attitudes at all.”
There was also a frontier aspect to its way of doing business as Serge was about to find out, dragged from his bed at 6.30 one morning by a young associate and driven to Bondi Beach: “It was completely wild, that beach. The only structures were towers from which lookouts watched for sharks. But the beach was packed with people. Beyond the expanse of white sand, all of Sydney it seemed was riding in the early-morning surf. This was the way the business day began, with a swim in that tremendous surf before breakfast. It was also where I first learned to shoot the breakers.”
Sheila and the children settled back into the family home, now at Double Bay. But she and Serge continued to see each other. They attended society events, race meetings and parties; he was introduced to everyone as simply a close friend of hers who was exploring business leads in Australia. And, to give him his due, that’s exactly what he did.