Sheila Page 12

  Ever yours sincerely,

  Albert

  He missed one piece of news, perhaps because of a continuing longing he held for Sheila or simply because it was too personal. Albert had proposed a second time to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon who, yet again, rejected him because she regarded their relationship as a friendship rather than intimate. He would try once more in February, 1923. This time Elizabeth accepted and they were married on April 26.

  Two weeks later Sheila Loughborough arrived back in London with her husband and their two sons, Tony, who was about to turn six years old, and Peter, aged four, after a voyage that went via the Cape of Good Hope and the west coast of Africa rather than the Suez Canal and the Mediterranean. One of their maids had photographed husband and wife about to board the Nestor as it weighed anchor in Sydney, covered with streamers as they said goodbye to the party of well-wishers, including Chissie and Ag. Sheila looked pensive, the goodbyes difficult. Loughie was beaming.

  Sheila summed up their time in Australia succinctly and sadly: “We remained in Australia for nearly two and a half years and Loughie did not change at all.”

  On May 22 the new Duchess of York recorded in her diary how Prince Edward had come to dinner where they were staying at Windsor and suggested they drive to London for an evening of dancing at the Embassy Club: “So we dashed up to London in his car & joined Paul’s party there. Among Prince Paul’s guests were the Prince of Wales’ friend Freda Dudley Ward, Sheila Loughborough, Alice Astor, Prince Serge Obolensky and Lord Cranborne. Danced hard till 2.30. David sent us back in his car. Very tired & enjoyed it awfully.”

  Sheila also made mention of the evening in her memoir, but from a different perspective: “The Prince of Wales was with us and Freda, of course, also the Duke and Duchess of York. Prince Bertie, now the Duke of York, had married the little debutante we had seen in the doorway . . . three years before, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.”

  11

  AN EXTRAVAGANT PEER

  May 15, 1923

  Lord and Lady Loughborough, who have returned from a long visit to the latter’s parents in Australia, have taken Lady Cynthia Asquith’s house in Regents Park. Lady Loughborough is a remarkably pretty woman and when she first came to London created something of a sensation.

  The Daily Mirror was one of a number of media outlets that noted the return of the Loughboroughs as they swept back into London society, reinstated onto party and dance lists for the summer, nights at the theatre, weekends away in Scottish castles and holidaying among the social and political elite at Frinton-on-Sea.

  On the surface the marriage appeared solid—the two years away from the temptations of London a success—but the public welcome and acknowledgement hid their private despair. All was not well. Within months Loughie was gambling again—worse than ever before it seemed. Aimless, with no job or purpose, he was back in his old haunts, sitting night after night in the smoky haze of places like the 43 Club in Gerrard Street, Soho, where, once inside the doors, you might have been in a Chicago speakeasy with its tinny piano and dubious clientele.

  The 43 Club’s owner, the infamous Kate Meyrick, noticed and pitied him. She would later recall him as being young, handsome and yet fragile, often sitting with her staff as if he were part of the furniture, greeting guests and friends alike and brushing off the inevitable ribbing about his precarious financial position, which had been made public on numerous occasions: “He displayed many of the symptoms of a manic depressive, with wild swings of emotion,” she would write in her memoir, which was considered scandalous when published in 1933, a few weeks after her death. “But Lord Loughborough always seemed to remain in the gayest spirits no matter how unmercifully he was chaffed, taking everyone’s jokes with complete good humour.”

  Increasingly, Sheila was going her own way socially. London was completing its transformation from hesitant post-war celebrations into an era of economic and social prosperity. Life was changing on the gender front too: women were admitted to the bar for the first time in 1922 and one young woman, identified only as Miss Drummond, had created headlines as a successful marine engineer. Barbara Cartland, until then a newspaper gossip columnist, published her first novel, Jig-saw, a risqué society thriller that quickly became a bestseller; Agatha Christie was also beginning her career, although initially with somewhat less success. On a broader social front, parliament had also recognised equal rights for women in divorce cases, making it possible for wives to divorce their husbands for adultery.

  If Sheila looked beyond her marriage pall, life seemed wonderfully exciting. As much as she missed Australia, she knew that her future lay in London and mainland Europe. It was the centre of the world and she was happy back in its bosom. There were new cafes, fashions and dances. The theatre scene, always vibrant, was now a thriving jumble of music and dance and comedy; there were two evening sessions every night, in theatres stretching from Covent Garden to Stepney, Finsbury Park and south across the Thames. George Robey was at the peak of his comedic popularity and Gracie Fields was on the verge of singing stardom.

  There was opera at the Lyric and the Savoy, musical comedy at Daly’s and the Winter Garden and plays at the Apollo, Globe and Ambassador. At the bottom of St Martin’s Lane, the Coliseum was the city’s flagship variety theatre venue. Hundreds would line up each night outside it, perched on camp stools and wrapped in blankets as they waited for its ticket office to open. Hawkers would wander up and down the lines selling hot tea and sandwiches, and street musicians, singers and conjurers would entertain the crowd before passing around the hat.

  The wealthy “smart crowd” flocked to clubs like the Embassy in Old Bond Street and the Hotel Metropole on the fringe of Mayfair, happy to pay the cover charge of 1 guinea for men and 10 shillings for women to watch the revue Midnight Follies, dance the Shimmy and Heebie-Jeebie to the new jazz bands, and swill champagne and cocktails until 2 a.m.

  The spectacular Hippodrome Theatre, on the corner of Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square, built to host circus and aquatic shows at the end of the 19th century, had been revamped for music hall and variety theatre as audience demands changed. Charlie Chaplin had been one of the first performers there, but now it began to host American jazz as entertainers ventured across the Atlantic in great numbers, with the vaudeville industry in the United States starting to buckle under the onslaught of the movies.

  The foreigners had mixed success, just as many English acts struggled on Broadway. The four Marx Brothers had played to small audiences at the Coliseum but Sophie Tucker, “The Last of the Red Hot Mamas” as she became known, had wowed them at the Hippodrome and packed out the 5000-seat Rivoli theatre in Whitechapel.

  Brother-and-sister routine Fred and Adele Astaire were struggling to win audience support for their dance musical Stop Flirting. They’d had a short season at the Queen’s Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue and were about to close. But that all changed the night the Prince of Wales and a group of friends, including Sheila Loughborough, attended. Rave reviews followed and the Astaires went on to play over 400 performances.

  Lady Alexandra Curzon later recalled that particular evening:

  I was with the Prince of Wales, and we went to see Stop Flirting at the Queen’s Theatre. He sent his equerry “Fruity” Metcalfe, who would later become my husband, backstage between acts to say that the Prince of Wales and his party would like them to join us for dinner at the Riviera Club . . . The place was packed. Prince Edward, Prince Bertie, Prince Henry and Prince George; they were all there . . . Who were all his English friends? Well, I suppose they were all from our world, the circle in which we all moved—Edwina Mountbatten, Sheila Loughborough, Freda Dudley Ward. That was his age group, and that was the world that went to parties, and from nightclub to nightclub, and then away for weekends. One always went away from Friday to Monday to some delicious country house nearby.

  Sheila would recall her friendship with the famous siblings: “I had known the fascinating Adele for years. She and her brother, Fred
Astaire, had come into our lives in the early twenties. They came to all our parties.”

  Sheila often left a lasting impression on those she met, like the writer Frances Donaldson who, in her autobiography A Twentieth-Century Life, said she had been inspired by Sheila’s frankness at a dinner party in 1924:

  Today, the insensitivity, sometimes vulgarity, which often accompanies a sense of superiority is out of fashion, but on the night when I first dined with the Nortons I fell in love. Walking up the stairs after dinner, Jean [Norton] said to Sheila Loughborough: “This is the dress I bought in Paris. Do you like it?” and Sheila replied: “Well I would if it wasn’t for that tarty bit of ribbon round the neck.” No one I had ever met before would have given that answer. Asked the question, my mother or friends would have replied: “Yes, I think it’s lovely,” and given their real opinion to someone else. This speech had a dramatic effect on me, suggesting unimagined freedoms.

  Sheila Loughborough not only attended the great balls and intimate dinners but hosted her own: “The Prince of Wales was there, the Duke and Duchess of York, Prince Henry and Prince George . . . and many of our fiends. [The jazz star] Aileen Stanley sang for us. My butler got drunk! He had elongated the dining room table and forgotten to put in the leaves. He then appeared with plates of eggs and bacon, which naturally fell through on the floor. All he said was: ‘There goes another one.’”

  Although her public persona was that of an independent and feisty woman, Sheila continued to be shackled to her marriage until January 1924 when, finally, she decided that she’d had enough. With the financial backing of the Rosslyn estate trustees, Sheila and the boys moved into a house at 19 Talbot Square while Loughie took a nearby apartment, but only after one last plea to Loughie for him to play an active role in the raising of his young family. Later discovered among her personal records was a letter sent, but apparently never received, which read in part:

  Darling,

  I know I’m wasting my time as your mind is made up that you are going to Trent to enjoy yourself and Tony, Peter and myself are going to be neglected again for your pleasure—why I write this is purely to say that if your attitude is going to be the same as it is now and was in the past, you had far better not come to Hyde Park Terrace but leave my Trustees and myself to bring up Tony and Peter in a school which does not believe in the mother neglecting her husband and children night after night and day after day as you have done to Tony, Peter and myself. As Tony said tonight, he’s forgotten what you look like and you can’t blame him when you go every afternoon either to have your face washed, watch football, nails manicured, golf at Trent, in fact anything except seeing our children.

  She had plenty of evidence, although much of it was as tragic as it was infuriating. Any number of friends could have told her of Loughie’s indiscretions—Diana Cooper and Helen Azalea “Poppy” Baring among them who were aware of an encounter between Loughie, his friend Noel Francis and a society actress named Lois Sturt. In mid-January Sheila had been out of London for a weekend and her husband had gone to stay with Noel, the pal with whom he had shot down the Selfridges balloons. Both had alcohol problems and the result was toxic, as Lady Cooper described in a letter to her husband Alfred Duff Cooper:

  Poor Loughie, who had just come out of an inebriates’ home, and Noel, who had been tee-totalling for months under a vow, celebrated the occasion by getting gloriously drunk together. They were joined by Lois Sturt and an orgy that would have made Nero and Caligula turn in their graves appears to have taken place.

  “The scandal”, as Lady Cooper referred to the incident, was the last straw for Sheila and news of the estrangement quickly swept Mayfair, echoed by coverage in the social pages over the following months, which mentioned her frequently, and always alone.

  For example:

  April 6, 1924

  The Prince of Wales and [his younger brother] Prince George and the gay young set which includes the pretty Australian countess of Loughborough . . . were all dancing indefatigably at the ball given at Sir Philip Sassoon’s house in Park Lane last week. Flowers were in almost pre-war luxuriance and the whole hall was ablaze with blue and mauve hyacinth.

  June 14, 1924

  Lady Cunard entertained a large party to dinner and a dance at the Ritz Hotel last night. The guests included the Duchess of Sutherland, Lady Betty Butler, the Earl and Countess of Carlisle, the Duchess of Rutland, Mr and Lady Diana Duff Cooper, Sir Frederick and Lady Ponsonby, the Viscount and Viscountess of Maidstone, Lady Loughborough, Lady Sarah Wilson, Sir John Milbanke and the Honourable Mrs Cochrane Baillie.

  July 15, 1924

  A cabaret ball in aid of the children’s country holiday fund has been arranged for Tuesday next at the Hotel Cecil. Among the organising committee is the Duchess of Westminster, Lady Louis Mountbatten, the Countess of Brecknock and Lady Loughborough. This fund provides a fortnight’s holiday for the poorest London children. They stay in the country or seaside cottages and learn often for the first time what country life means.

  While Sheila seems to have had London in her thrall, Loughie had fallen further, if that was possible; a transient shifting between friends and hotels around London, running up accounts that would never be paid. But his credit eventually ran out and in June he was forced to apply for bankruptcy, revealing that his debts were now £18,000, the modern equivalent of A$1.5 million. Most of this was owed to Indian moneylenders, who had ignored all Lord Rosslyn’s appeals and continued to lend to his son.

  Far from protecting Loughie from temptation, the six months he’d spent on the sub-continent on the way to Australia three years earlier had merely given him unfettered access to money without oversight. In 1920, the morning after his father had allowed the trust to clear an £11,000 debt, the same bookmaker had simply ignored every paternal plea and offered him more money, a drip-feed of cash that was destroying him as he emulated his father and flung money around, wildly betting on cards and horseracing. Added to the £9000 debt he had racked up in 1916, it showed the depths of his descent.

  Inevitably, he was forced to make his appearance before the bankruptcy court, where his weaknesses were judged harshly. No account was taken of the greed and incompetence around him, perhaps because he was still blaming others, insisting that his title had been a “handicap” in seeking a career. This time his pleas fell on deaf ears. It was a case of gross extravagance, the bankruptcy registrar declared, refusing to discharge the bankruptcy for three years. More embarrassing was the wide public exposure as the courts examined his finances. The Times was among a number of papers which laid bare his useless life in an article under the heading “An Extravagant Peer. Wife Supporting Household”, which detailed how it had been Sheila’s money that had been keeping their home running.

  A few weeks after the court declaration the Earl of Rosslyn wrote to his son:

  My dear Loughborough,

  I know it is useless but I write you my last word before completely giving you up. We parted somewhere about September 15—you with the expressed anxiety to get back to your farm. Neither Cumber nor Slouch know where you are and believe you’re with me, and letters there are returned through the dead letter office.

  Surely you must realise you are ruining your last chance of salvation ie: peace and happiness with your wife and children. It is little use reciting the reasons for your separation by agreement—suffice it the terms were “Give up all drink and learn to manage affairs”.

  You have practically made no effort, and what effort can you expect your wife to make? You profess your love for your children. How can you imagine you will be allowed their guardianship under present conditions?

  As a man of the world I know all you are doing. Your whining to Tommy and then Denise, how sympathetic each of them is and how you love their advice, only to break completely away from it and go to the devil.

  How may I ask can you live in London hotels without borrowing . . . You should not leave the farm again till you can go to your wife and say �
�I am clean again both as regards women and drink”.

  Rosslyn

  The earl’s anger had not diminished four years later, when he published his autobiography, My Gamble with Life, which concentrated on his own fraught relationship with money. It included little about his personal life or the fallout from his disasters and there were only two brief references to his son, whom he called Loughborough.

  The first was a passing reference to his birth in 1892: “That year, besides squandering a terrible amount of money, I found time for some formal duties at home, and the Duke of Cambridge was staying with us at Dysart for his annual tour of garrison inspection, when a second child—a son this time—was born to us.”

  His memoir provided no subsequent sense of his fatherhood, let alone any love he had for the son he had rarely seen in childhood and influenced only through his own wayward actions. Nor was there any recognition that his own weakness and lack of interest might have contributed to his son’s difficulties.

  Instead, Rosslyn’s second reference to Loughie, as brief as it was amid his self-serving tale, was a reference to their estrangement: “I pass over the vagaries, to use a generous word, of my eldest son, Loughborough, in the hope that he will someday shed the dust with which he has so freely covered himself.”

  As she sought solace from her marital nightmare Sheila might have considered fleeing into the arms of Serge Obolensky, who was now working at a city brokerage, but it seemed their paths were destined never again to cross romantically.