Shane Leslie spent much of his literary life enhancing the reputations of notable Catholics and Maria Fitzherbert was a favourite subject. In his 1917 book The End of a Chapter, he had written of Maria: ‘Whatever influence in the prince’s life was good came from her. Whatever unhappiness entered hers came from him.’ In 1939 he published a life of Mrs Fitzherbert and a volume of her letters and papers, taking the same chivalrous approach. Maria was put-upon and saintly; the prince, later George iv, ‘the uttermost cad in Europe’. As with so many of Shane’s biographies, his subject never came alive. His books were all about him, his opinions, his scholarship, his didacticism. Anita found her father’s life of Maria disappointing and knew that she could do better. She never had a problem bringing a subject to life, although her characterization didn’t always adhere to the life that was actually lived. She knew how to introduce colour and atmosphere and, unlike Shane, wrote with warmth and sympathy. Her biographies slide pleasantly through your fingers.
In her lifetime, Maria Fitzherbert had been the subject of scabrous gossip and rude cartoons. One of these, by James Gillroy, called ‘The Royal Exhibition – or – A Peek at the Marriage Heads’ (May 1786), is of George and Maria, bare-bottomed, with their faces shown on their naked behinds. The twentieth century was more polite towards Maria, although she was still seen as an equivocal figure. Since she destroyed many of her papers and letters – ‘Your quest will lead from bonfire to bonfire’, Shane had warned Anita – it’s still not certain whether Maria’s ward, Minney Seymour or her ‘niece’, Maryanne Smythe, were, in fact, her daughters by the King. George certainly seemed to think that Minney was; he gave her a dowry of £20,000. Anita’s Maria had a good head for finance, owning three houses and a fashionable carriage. On their secret marriage in 1785 she had managed to procure an annuity of £6000 from George and, when, after their parting, he sometimes fell behind with the payments, he got a sharp reminder: ‘Permit me to receive henceforward the allowance you promised me twenty-eight years ago – an allowance which the times have not increased in value.’
Papers that survived Maria’s bonfires were snipped to pieces by Minney’s daughter, Lady Constance Leslie, ‘in a fit of devotion to Queen Victoria who hated the Fitzherbert story … Scissors have cut out what one most wishes to know’, Anita wrote in her book’s foreword. But enough documents remained to inspire her to write a biography of the complex woman who was at the centre of the glamorous world of Regency England. Here was a woman who was treated badly by the man she loved but managed to survive pretty well; a story familiar to her biographer. Although Anita’s style could be slushy: ‘Their eyes met for the first time – untroubled topaz and fevered grey’, she skilfully threaded in the love story of ‘a dangerously virtuous woman and a rather delightful rake’ with an account of what it was like to be a Catholic at the time of the Penal Laws, when English Catholics were ‘virtually outlaws in their own country, doomed to a life of secrecy and retirement’. Anita’s Maria isn’t just a devout innocent, neither is George just a contemptible cad. His failings are traced back to his cold, unresponsive parents, who allowed him to be ‘flogged unmercifully for faults in Latin grammar’.
Politics and passion are adroitly intermingled as Beau Brummel, the Duchess of Devonshire, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan make their appearances. Of a later book, Anita told her publisher that a biography is interesting for what it doesn’t say as much as for what it does. This is certainly true of Mrs Fitzherbert. Without spelling it out, Anita hints that Maria had a financial steeliness worthy of Ivana Trump and that her tiara, which found its way into a Leslie jewellery box, might have been extracted from a prince whose ‘royal rubbery mind’ wobbled under the persistent demands of a predatory woman who was all backbone.
Patsy Jellicoe, always an enthusiastic hostess, gave a party in London to celebrate the book’s publication on 11 April 1960. The guests included Sally and Gerald Grosvenor, to whom Mrs Fitzherbert was dedicated, and ‘lots of cousins from the counties’. There don’t seem to have been any literary journalists, or publicists or anyone who might have been involved in the book’s promotion among the guests. Anita’s diary entry for the following day is about taking Tarka to the dentist and the rest of the Easter holiday in London was spent on outings for her own children and those of her friends: the boats at Regent’s Park, Disney films, the Tower of London and Tarka’s first visit to the ballet: ‘He loved it.’
Anita was the least self-conscious of writers. It’s as though she wrote books because that is what Leslies did and she didn’t suffer much over their composition. This may have been because she wrote biographies rather than novels. Michael Holroyd once remarked that ‘[b]iographers are like saints: they are always thinking of other people’. Anita didn’t have a literary agent or negotiate for higher advances. When her friend Virginia Crawley was given a £20,000 advance for a book on the Commando leader David Stirling, Anita was impressed but not envious because Virginia had ‘found it incredibly dreary to write’. She remained with the same publisher, Hutchinson, from 1948 (Train to Nowhere) until her death and looked upon her editors there, Harold Harris and Anthony Whittome, as dear friends with whom to enjoy sherry and gossip. To discuss advances would not have been ‘amusing’.
What she found increasingly pleasurable, from the 1960s onward, was to spend more time in England, visiting friends who owned well-maintained country houses and gardens, such as the one that was ‘all so English and beautifully kept-up with lawn tennis courts – so unlike the jungle-demesnes of Ireland with weedy hard courts deep in water’. Between these visits, she belatedly tried to improve her son’s education. In the autumn of 1961 a tutor came to Glaslough to coach Tarka for Eton – ‘huge bribes and presents but it all ended in tears over the Latin which he said had “suddenly got so difficult.”’ With a leaden heart, Anita delivered Tarka to a crammer, Mr Rolls, in Gloucestershire and then ‘drove the 4 hours back to Saighton Grange [the Grosvenors’ house] so unhappy at making the break with his utterly happy childhood’. Although she would probably have agreed with Nancy Mitford’s pronouncement on ‘The horror of not having been educated when young’, Anita, like her mother before her, could never see education as a priority and was concerned that schooling might get in the way of her children’s hunting. In the winter The Irish Field published a photograph of Anita, Tarka and Leonie at a meet of the Galway Blazers, and Tarka had ‘four good hunts before the frost turned the land to iron’. When the hunting ended, the search for a school began. In February 1962 Bill took Tarka to Scotland for an interview at Gordonstoun, which Prince Charles was about to attend. Suddenly the unfashionable school was oversubscribed. When Tarka told Bill that the interview and test were ‘all frightfully easy’, Anita wrote smugly in her diary: ‘Irish country life has certainly kept him natural and with the right values,’ and was delighted when the headmaster told Bill that Tarka
was so different at the interview from the others – had such a twinkle in his eye … so whatever the result one feels he has made his mark and one is grateful to the dear old village schoolmaster for giving him supreme self confidence without being cheeky. I feel sorry for the 55 little boys from non-twinkling boarding schools.
The mother abbess and the nuns of the Poor Clares convent in Galway prayed for Tarka’s success but to no avail. Tarka failed the test – ‘his math paper so very poor! Odd as its [sic] his best subject.’
Anita turned to Shane, who was well connected in educational circles, for help. He warned against his own old school, Eton, since he thought it turned out depraved boys – ‘This is why I did not send Jack or Des there’ – and suggested Stowe or Milton Abbey, implying that both schools had easier entry requirements. Anita understood his reservations about Eton when, disregarding Shane’s advice, she took Tarka for an interview at the school and found some of the older boys having tea at the nearby Cockpit restaurant ‘drinking tea out of a blonde’s slipper’. Anita now regretted that ‘the dear old village schoolmaster’ at Oranmore didn’t prepare his pupils for English public school entrance examinations, instead of letting them practise standing on their heads. A friend assured her: ‘You’ve taught your son more bringing him up in the west of Ireland than any school could,’ but she was upset when Tarka failed to get into Eton: ‘Tarka’s Eton attempt so bad in Latin and French that his housemaster advises not trying again in November.’ To her relief, Milton Abbey in Dorset, founded in the 1950s as a ‘forward looking school’, accepted Tarka. Anita’s final diary entry for 1962 is dated 23 August: ‘Wonderfully arranged houseparty [at Birr Castle] for Princess Margaret … She’s very pretty and exceedingly intelligent tho inclined to be difficult.’ Nancy Mitford, less inclined to deference towards the royal family, referred to the petite princess as ‘The Royal Pigmy’.
Anita and Bill were in charge of Glaslough but spent little time there. In 1962 they went on holiday twice with Roger and Xandra Frewen, first a skiing trip and, in August, one to Venice. By then the Leslie-Kings had had enough of Glaslough. The three farms were too much for Bill to manage and Anita, with Tarka at school in England and Leonie about to follow suit, had begun to think about buying a flat in London. According to the memoir of her sister-in-law Agnes the first sign of Bill and Anita’s dream of leaving was
a curious letter from Anita asking Desmond to take over Glaslough altogether; asking only for Drumlargen in return …Of course Desmond did not turn down the offer nor did he have any feelings of apprehension about having to run such a large demesne without the necessary capital.
In his 2010 biography of Desmond, Desmond Leslie (1921–2001), Robert O’Byrne tells the story of the handover in more detail. Trying to keep the estate solvent took up Bill and Anita’s time and energy, although they were only jointly co-owners with Desmond and Agnes, who were not involved in the day-to-day management. When the Leslie-Kings offered to transfer the estate to Desmond, he dithered, so exasperating Anita and Bill that they then offered to buy him out completely for £20,000. More dithering. Desmond was doing well in London composing music for films. So was Agnes, her singing career given a spectacular publicity boost when Desmond, in front of eleven million viewers, landed a punch on the critic Bernard Levin during a live television broadcast of That Was the Week That Was for having given Agnes’s cabaret show a poor review, the amplification system having failed. In the autumn of 1963 agreement was reached: Desmond would run Glaslough, Bill and Anita would retain Drumlargan. Nothing about this was recorded in Anita’s diary during the previous spring and summer, when negotiations were getting increasingly frantic. Instead she wrote of her sorrow at the death, from cancer, of Pope John xxiii on 23 June: ‘There will never be anyone like him – I have lived in the time of a great saint.’ It upset her that the Pope’s last days were darkened by ‘the tyranny of modern medicine which with drugs draws out a dying and can only alleviate with the false effects of morphia’. She wasn’t alone in loving this man, who reached out beyond the Catholic Church to the whole human race and had been named Time magazine’s Man of the Year in 1962.
Three days after that June diary entry came another:
From the fascinating elation of Pope John’s death to the bathos of Profumo!!. One is wracked with laughter – so sordid – so silly – such an ass and the whole Tory party ludicrous with indignant explanations and trying to make it not matter – much!!
And then: ‘Poor Philip P was so easily embarrassed anyway. One really is so sorry for the family – but can’t stop giggling.’ I have been unable to trace any connection between Anita’s erstwhile fiancé and John Profumo, the disgraced Secretary of State for War, whose affair with Christine Keeler led to his resignation on 5 June, followed by that of the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, the following October.
The next diary entry isn’t until 1 September and is dramatic: ‘Made over Glaslough to brother Des … A creech owl drowned in the Fountain before I left – I hope this does not mean I have handed the place over to its doom.’ Anita’s uncle Seymour wrote her a farewell letter, thanking his niece for making it possible for his family to live in one wing of the castle – ‘our little hermitage! A sort of link between several epochs … I think both of you will be happier without this distant burden.’ In 1964 the Sir John Leslie Estate Company was wound up. Relieved of the distant burden, Anita began to look for a flat in London. Leonie was now a London schoolgirl, her previous lack of education revealed when she received minus ninety in her first test.
While inspecting a flat at 10 Westbourne Terrace, Anita had a strange psychic experience. The old lady showing her round burst into tears before a photograph of her son who had killed himself two days before Christmas after a quarrel with his wife. Anita wrote in her diary: ‘I felt him begging me to say he was sorry and not to cry and that the death anniversary must be a day of joy not grief.’ Anita conveyed this experience to the young man’s mother who had, it seemed, been longing for some stranger to come with a message. Anita wrote to the grieving woman from Ina’s flat in South Lodge, the same block where Marjorie had once owned a flat and where, coincidentally, the young man had spent his childhood:
I feel he was hanging around trying to send them a message and literally made the greedy little Jewish agent [to Anita, unpleasantly anti-Semitic even after the war, Jews were either ‘greedy’ or ‘clever’, by which she meant too clever by half] see this advert in The Times and send me hoping he could get me to write from South Lodge and give them a clue.
Anita, perhaps on account of these disturbing portents, didn’t buy the Westbourne Grove flat. Soon afterwards she learned that her cousin Diana Churchill, at the age of fifty-four and after several nervous breakdowns, had killed herself on 10 October. Diana had been divorced from her second husband, Duncan Sandys in 1960 and changed her name back to Churchill. Anita’s diary: ‘Am so flattened by these emotional shocks on top of emotional Glaslough decisions I feel like seeing nobody.’ But Christmas at Oranmore, hunting with two enthusiastic children, both ‘going like bombs’, restored her spirits although, on 18 January 1964, ‘children back to school worn out – ditto ponies – ditto me’. That winter she bought a flat at 10 Cleveland Square, near Hyde Park, which she chose because of the leafy street and traffic-free air. As for the rest of the city: ‘The noise and smell of London horrify me – and the people.’
To avoid having to pay uk income tax, Anita put the flat in Xandra Frewen’s name. By now, the Frewen marriage was skidding towards divorce. Xandra had fallen in love with another man but was still hanging about Brede Place, the Frewens’ marital home, which caused Roger great bitterness. Anita felt that if the Frewens couldn’t be reunited, Xandra should marry her lover ‘and make him give you a proper home elsewhere. Or if you are sick of him why not marry someone else?’ When Xandra pointed out that lack of money was at the root of her morally dubious position, Anita told her: ‘but my love all morality is based on economics!! The reason such a fuss is made about feminine chastity is because men do not want to bring up other men’s children.’
Xandra was beautiful; the head waiter at the Ritz mistook her for the French film star Anouk Aimée, and her adventuresome nature was a worry to Bill and Anita, who took on a parental role towards this reckless young woman. Anita advised Xandra, the mother of four small children, against sailing the Atlantic:
It just would be so awful if you got drowned my dear – you’re so precious to so many. Other people’s lives would be terribly spoiled without you … One can’t have EVERYTHING – not love and affection and freedom from love and affection … It may be a BORE to be precious but it’s not for ever!
There were sitting tenants in the Cleveland Square flat and they wanted to stay in it until November. A new friend of Anita’s solved the problem by giving the tenants £2000 to leave. This was Roy Miles, a successful London businessman, who had first met Anita at a party at Lough Cutra Castle in Galway, in 1961, the year that he had been featured in a bbc Radio programme, New Names Making News, in which ‘young people making their names in the literary, theatrical and business worlds talk about themselves and their work’. Roy had begun his business career by taking over the famous hair salon, Antoine, and its associated beauty products. But his real passion was art, and before long he sold the salon and opened his first art gallery in St James, Piccadilly. He became well known as much for his parties as for his paintings; The Daily Telegraph diarist called him ‘One of the country’s top fifteen self-publicists.’ Roy was captivated by Anita. In an interview in 2008, he told me:
I’ve never met anybody else in my life who could fascinate you with her conversation – who could thrill you. Anita educated me in the ways of high society. She had a way of saying, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ She was the greatest mentor of my life.
Anita invited Roy to dinner parties attended by duchesses, where dreadful food was served. Roy took Anita and Bill to dinner at the Connaught, where the food was much better.
1965 started with a royal visit to Oranmore Castle. The Countess of Rosse, Lord Snowdon’s mother, brought her son and his wife, Princess Margaret, to the castle, where they spent an hour clambering on the roof: ‘And I never thought hrh would admire the Red Turret (rather dripping!)’, Anita recorded. There was whiskey and gossip and an oyster feast and singing at nearby Clarenbridge. A few days later, an observer ‘watching Tony in his odd beatnik shooting outfit pulling out a fabulous cigarette case, said, “He’s not a gentleman of course but he will flaunt it.”’ Anita approved of the unusual royal consort,
such an alive attractive person – most congenial and such fun for her to be married to – one sees her face in repose is so soft and happy and a gleam in her eyes – after the taut miserable-looking little princess of a few years ago – Obviously he is a good lover and takes trouble with a highstrung temperamental attractive wife – who can’t carry on any old how with the press spying and being beastly.
On 10 January Anita recorded, ‘Bill left for Kenya – coughing.’ She wasn’t particularly worried, unlike Bill’s old friend Ruckers, who wrote to her that
the continual coughing and the night sweats (the latter are a bad sign) may well mean his lungs are affected … I am almost in entire agreement with his contempt for doctors and his faith in nature cures etc but there are occasions when doctors are essential and one is to be screened in case there is the least sign of T.B.
Ruckers intended to give Bill this advice ‘but please also add your weight to mine’. It is unlikely that Anita did this, or that Bill would have taken any advice offered; both the Leslie-Kings swore by ‘nature cures etc’.
Winston died on 24 January. ‘One can think of nothing else but the end of an epoch. All the war revives and runs through one’s veins.’ Shane was a chief mourner and Tarka, home from school, queued in the cold to witness the Lying in State. Anita wrote: ‘He will never forget the Great Hall and Marines on guard with tears pouring down their faces.’ Anita attended the funeral in St Paul’s and then, from the banks of the Thames, watched ‘the little flag-covered coffin leaving us for ever – One was seared by the day.’ Inevitably, at Glaslough, there were spooky goings-on. Seymour wrote to Anita: ‘Crashes and bangs in the loft overhead and all that week mysterious footsteps in West Wing staircase and Leonie’s famous finger-tip drumming, sounded like a typewriter tapping next door!’ When Jennie Churchill’s grave at Bladon, near Blenheim, was shown on television, ‘an awful big bang in our loft! And it’s upset Timmie [Seymour’s wife]. Twice we’ve heard together Leonie’s drumming fingertips … I predicted it would be so.’ Seymour’s letter concluded: ‘Des has flag (Eire) ½ mast! Top of castle. Floodlit. The only ½ mast flag!’
There was another significant death on Good Friday, 15 April, that of Paul Rodzianko. After a funeral officiated by his nephew, Father Rodzianko, and attended by representatives of several regiments and the Italian Cavalry School, he was cremated and his ashes spread over the garden of Brayfield Lodge in Buckinghamshire, the house he had shared with his wife Joan and where they had run a school for horsemanship. For Anita, all Paul’s sins were forgotten – his bullying, his refusal to give her a divorce. Instead:
What a character he was. I am glad I could write his book and give him some happiness – tho very little for our penniless garret life was such a strain. It was like being married to a bear – or to the North Wind! Such vitality courage and talent – Farewell Paul. May your best horses await you in the clouds.
It was as though she had momentarily forgotten that she’d spent much of her married life with Paul plotting to run away from him, or pleading for a divorce. By the 1980s she’d returned to a more truthful frame of mind, telling Harold Harris that she could not bear to write about Paul in her forthcoming memoir because of the unhappiness he had caused her. Among Paul’s glowing obituaries, one mentioned his marriage to Anita and a schoolfriend of Tarka’s brought it to his attention. Tarka was so surprised by this aspect of his mother’s past that he was given permission to ring home. Anita assured him that she was going to tell him about Paul ‘one day’. Leonie, aged fourteen, staying with Bill Cunningham and his family, heard about the obituary and was deeply shocked that her mother, who had brought up her children as Catholics, was a divorcée.
Several of Anita’s friends and associates died during the year: Dr Gillespie, the family doctor at Glaslough, who had delivered Leonie in Marjorie’s bed; Montague Porch, Jennie Churchill’s third husband, at the age of ninety-nine; Anita’s favourite teacher, Miss Lambert, ‘the only sensitive teacher of my miserable childhood’, and the amateur sailor Bobby Somerset, a close friend. ‘I am over 50 so from now on I suppose everyone who has been in my past will drop by the wayside,’ Anita recorded gloomily. At a party in July, she met the American former presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson for the first time. He told her that, at his very last meeting with Winston, he’d asked the old man on whom he had modelled his oratorical style and Winston had said that he had learnt all he knew, when he was nineteen, from another American politician: Bourke Cockran. Anita wrote in her diary:
Only I in all England – except Pa – knew that Jennie had a love affair with Bourke and gave Winston his introduction – Then Bourke married my mother’s sister! And left us all his money – And told his wife my aunt the tale! 24 hours after pouring this out for me Stevenson dropped dead in Grosvenor Street.
This was on 14 July; the following weekend, Anita wrote down the entire exchange and brought this record to Randolph Churchill at his house, Stour, in East Bergholt, Sussex, where Randolph was writing his father’s life. When the first volume was published in 1966, Anita ‘was horrified to find my own ill-written, hasty letter about Bourke inserted verbatim in this most eminent of biographies!’ There were more deaths in the second half of 1965: Barney Baruch, Aziz al-Masri, the Egyptian general whom she had known during the war, and Joe Dudgeon of the Irish Riding School. But Anita could write: ‘The year ends in great happiness for me personally with both children enjoying their schools and able at 16 and 14 to get the most out of hunting.’
She had been writing another book, once again recycling her father’s work. In 1932 Shane had published Studies in Sublime Failures, one of the failures being Moreton Frewen, his uncle by marriage and husband of the eldest Jerome sister, Clara. Moreton had had a varied career: cattle dealer in Wyoming, land speculator, financial advisor to the Nizam of Hyderabad, investor in strange products such as a noxious-smelling disinfectant called Electrozone and, briefly, from 1910 to 1911, an Irish Nationalist mp. None of his schemes brought him anything except financial loss, for which he acquired the nickname ‘Mortal Ruin’.
Anita’s biography of this chancer was published in 1966 and called Mr Frewen of England. A Victorian Adventurer. Anita treated her subject sympathetically, writing: ‘It has been said of Moreton that he had a first-class mind untroubled by second thoughts.’ Rudyard Kipling was harsher: ‘He [Moreton] lived in every sense, except what is called common sense, very richly and widely, to his extreme content.’
But not to his family’s content. Moreton bamboozled Clara and their children out of every inheritance, which he then lost, to the point where Clara’s household goods had to be auctioned. Her two sisters, Leonie and Jennie, who were hardly rich themselves, bought her favourite pieces and returned them to her. With his daughter Clare, Moreton went further: he not only forced her to hand over her inheritance but demanded that she seduce rich men on his behalf, which the strong-willed Clare refused to do. Moreton wrote to her disapprovingly: ‘You are a beautiful woman with a mental equipment which, rightly employed, might have helped me infinitely.’ He was incorrigible as he launched scheme after disastrous scheme: ‘I have got the ball at my feet once more, and this time I’ll keep it – you will see.’ A philanderer as well as a duplicitous crook, he boasted in his journal: ‘Every woman I have ever enjoyed has been completely paralysed by the vigour of my performance.’ An outcome which not every lover would relish.
Anita doesn’t mention that in spite of Moreton’s vigour, Clara’s admirer, King Milan of Serbia, may have been Clare’s father. Clare herself believed this to be the case. In a letter to Anita on 20 December 1954, Clare wrote: ‘Margaret [Clare’s daughter] looks so like him and we both so dislike Frewens.’ Although the exiled King Milan was devoted to both Clara and Clare and showered them with gifts, Anita was reluctant, as always, to reveal amorous goings-on within her family, a stance not easy to maintain since so many of its members were world-class adulterers. She sprinkled stardust over Moreton as she would do with later biographical subjects, Jennie Churchill and Winston’s son Randolph. Ralph Martin, a rival biographer, who will later reappear as Anita’s nemesis, preferred another biography of Mortal Ruin: ‘The prime source book on Moreton Frewen is The Splendid Pauper by Allen Andrews (1968). It is excellent. Anita Leslie has also written a biography of him … but as a member of the family she is not as objective.’ Anita found rascals irresistible, which is perhaps why she was so fond of the Edwardian age, with its randy and rapacious scoundrels and their sultry, adulterous mistresses. To have depicted Moreton as a monstrous cad might have unsettled her readers, who responded to her talent to amuse. Unpleasant aspects of her subjects’ lives were kept shadowy. Of her biography of Randolph Churchill, she told Harold Harris: ‘That book is full of things i don’t say.’ As for Moreton, she told Betsan Coats: ‘I didn’t harp on how dreadful Moreton was to his offspring.’
There aren’t many diary entries for 1966. One of the most interesting refers to a visit Anita made to Randolph Churchill at Stour.
Found him weak and doctor said he had cirrhosis of liver. His Vol I so good – warm and well balanced but he knows I think he cannot finish the other 4 vols … I had to realise he is dying – all because he lives on whisky and plum cake. My heart was aching all the time I tried to jot down notes in the archives for ‘Jennie’.
In spite of the state of his liver and his poor diet, Randolph survived until 7 June 1978 when, according to his doctor, he had ‘worn out every organ in his body at the same time’. He rallied after Anita’s visit and on 27 October 1966 was the guest of honour at a Foyles Literary Luncheon, at the Dorchester Hotel in London, to mark the publication of Winston S. Churchill Vol. I Youth 1874–1900 (1966). At the top table were Shane, Iris, Anita and Clemmie, now Baroness Spencer-Churchill, gbe. There had been much recent literary collaboration between Churchills and Leslies: Shane and Anita had helped Randolph, and Randolph had given Anita access to his family archive to help her in the writing of her next book, a biography of Randolph’s grandmother Jennie.
At Glaslough there were problems both financial and domestic. Desmond was in Dublin for much of the time with Helen Strong and their baby daughter Sammy. Anita wrote to Betsan:
Helen maddens everyone by calling herself Mrs Desmond Leslie while Agnes storms around Glaslough, is hateful to poor old Seymour and Timmie stuck in their wing and causes as much scandal and trouble as possible. The farm we worked at for 8 years is ruined and Desmond – who never pays bills – has a huge overdraft and is about to sell the garden as a hotel! I think they are as mad as hatters. Pa spent 3 months there last summer and said they were the most unhappy of his life – with Desmond and Agnes screaming at each other.
Seymour was having a bad time. In a letter of 21 November 1966 to Anita, he referred maliciously to Agnes as ‘cette horrible juive à côté de nous’, while Desmond’s ‘other wife’ was ‘La Belle Helene’. The war of the wives went on until 1969, when Desmond, despicably, contrived to banish Agnes and her children from Glaslough. Anita immediately took them in at Oranmore until Monaghan County Council found them a house close to Castle Leslie, where Helen and her two daughters had been installed. Sammy and Antonia, Agnes’s daughter, were classmates in the local school and became friends. When Antonia was invited to tea at the Castle, she found herself in the room which had once been hers, playing with her old toys. In any ordinary family this would have been regarded as a heart-breaking and scandalous episode but the Leslies had a talent for sliding a veneer of civilized behaviour over their natural ruthlessness, and cordial relations were soon restored between Desmond, past and present wives and all the children. Only Anita continued to find her brother’s conduct unforgivable.