John Betjeman (1906–84), popular poet, writer, broadcaster and advocate for Victorian architecture, knighted in 1969. He married Penelope Chetwode in 1933, but the two became estranged after her conversion to Catholicism in 1949. As a schoolboy at the King’s School, Canterbury, in the 1930s, PLF had heard Betjeman lecture long before they met. His daughter, Candida Lycett Green, was also a friend of PLF’s.
Lyndall Birch (b. 1931), later Lyndall Passerini-Hopkinson, daughter of the journalist Tom Hopkinson and the novelist Antonia White. She had married Lionel Birch, Hopkinson’s successor as editor of Picture Post (a man only five years younger than her father), but the marriage failed after only a few months. When she first met PLF, in 1958, she was working as a proofreader for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation in Rome.
(Cecil) Maurice Bowra (1898–1971), classical scholar and Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, knighted in 1951, renowned as a wit, often vicious. He was devoted to Joan but not so friendly towards PLF.
Marie-Blanche (‘Balasha’) Cantacuzène (1899–1976), a princess from one of the great dynasties of Eastern Europe. Her family owned a house in Bucharest and an estate in Romanian Moldavia, near the Bessarabian border. In 1924 she had married a Spanish diplomat, who abandoned her while serving as ambassador in Athens, where PLF met and fell in love with her in 1935.
(Charles) Bruce Chatwin (1940–89), travel writer, novelist and journalist. He had known PLF and Joan slightly since 1970, but he and PLF came to know each other well when he visited Kardamyli in the winter of 1984/5 and stayed for seven months. After his premature death at the age of only forty-eight, his ashes were buried at a chapel nearby, at his own request.
Cyril Vernon Connolly (1903–74), writer, critic and editor, briefly Joan’s lover. PLF referred to him satirically as ‘The Humanist’.
Alfred Duff Cooper (1890–1954), 1st Viscount Norwich, politician, diplomat, author, and British Ambassador to France, 1944–7.
Artemis Cooper (b. 1953), writer, daughter of John Julius Norwich and granddaughter of Duff and Diana Cooper, married to the military historian Antony Beevor (whose books include Crete: The Battle and the Resistance, 1991). Her biography of PLF, Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure, was published in 2012.
Diana Cooper (1892–1986), née Lady Diana Manners, famous beauty and London socialite, the youngest daughter, in theory, of the Duke of Rutland (in fact daughter of the Hon. Henry ‘Harry’ Cust). In 1919 she married the Conservative politician and writer Alfred Duff Cooper, who was appointed British Ambassador to France in 1944. Towards the end of his life he was made Viscount Norwich; she preferred to remain known as Lady Diana Cooper, claiming that Viscountess ‘Norwich’ sounded too much like ‘porridge’. She and PLF became friends in the early 1950s: in the words of PLF’s biographer, ‘Paddy and Diana each discovered that the other was the sort of person they liked best.’
Deborah (‘Debo’) Vivien Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1920–2014), née Mitford, the youngest of the six Mitford sisters, who married Andrew Robert Buxton Cavendish, later 11th Duke of Devonshire (1920–2004), in 1941. PLF had first seen her at a ball in 1940, though she had scarcely noticed him. In the post-war years they became close friends, and he was a frequent visitor to the Devonshire seats, Chatsworth in Derbyshire and Lismore Castle in Ireland. The correspondence between the Duchess and PLF over a period of more than half a century was published as In Tearing Haste, edited by Charlotte Mosley, in 2008.
Lawrence Durrell (1912–90), poet, novelist and man of letters. Though British, he lived most of his life abroad, in Corfu, Crete, Egypt and France. He came to know PLF while serving as a press attaché to the British embassies in Cairo and Alexandria.
Pamela Egremont see Pamela Wyndham-Quin
(Henry) Robin Romilly Fedden (1908–77), writer, diplomat and mountaineer. In the 1930s he served as a diplomat in Athens and taught English literature at Cairo University, and co-edited the literary journal Personal Landscape with Lawrence Durrell and Bernard Spencer. Henry Miller thought him effete. After the war, he worked for the National Trust.
Agnes ‘Magouche’ (also known as Magouch) Fielding (1921–2013), née Magruder, then Gorky, Phillips and finally Fielding, was the daughter of an American admiral and widow of the Armenian-American artist, Arshile Gorky.
Alexander (‘Xan’) Wallace Fielding (1918–91), writer, translator, journalist and traveller; met PLF while serving behind enemy lines in Crete during the war, and they became close friends. Before his marriage to Magouche Phillips, he was married to Daphne (1904–97), née Vivian, ex-wife of the 6th Marquess of Bath.
Rudi Fischer (1927?–2016), editor and scholar, a naturalised Australian of Saxon Transylvanian origin who was living in Budapest and working as an editor for the New Hungarian Quarterly when he first made contact with PLF in 1978 to draw his attention to errors in A Time of Gifts. ‘My debt to Rudolf Fischer is beyond reckoning,’ PLF would write in Between the Woods and the Water. ‘His omniscient range of knowledge and an enthusiasm tempered with astringency have been a constant delight and stimulus during all the writing of this book; his vigilance has saved it from many errors, and I feel that the remaining ones may be precisely those when his advice was not followed.’
Ann Gerald Mary (‘Annie’) Fleming (1913–81), née Charteris, granddaughter of the 9th Earl of Wemyss. Her third husband was Ian Fleming, later the author of the James Bond novels. They lived at Goldeneye, a house in Jamaica, and Sevenhampton, in Wiltshire. A renowned society hostess, she had friends in politics and in the literary world, and became one of PLF’s closest friends and most regular correspondents.
Nikos (‘Niko’) Hadjikyriakos-Ghika (1906–94), artist and sculptor generally considered among the best modern Greek artists, from a wealthy Athens family. He and PLF became friends after the war, and in the early 1950s Ghika allowed PLF to stay for long periods at his house on Hydra. After this house was destroyed by fire, Ghika built a house on Corfu. He married first Antigone (‘Tiggie’), and then, in 1961, Barbara Warner.
Enrica (‘Ricki’) Huston (1929–69), née Soma, socialite, model and ballerina, born in New York of Italian-American parents. She became the fourth and much younger wife of the film director, screenwriter and actor John Huston (1906–87). She died in a car accident at the age of only thirty-nine.
Barbara Hutchinson see Barbara Warner
George Katsimbalis (1890–1978), poet and raconteur, a dominant figure in Greek literary life, immortalised in Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi (1941).
Patrick Kinross (John Patrick Douglas Balfour) (1904–76), 3rd Baron Kinross, historian and writer, specialising in Islamic history. He came to know PLF while serving as First Secretary at the British embassy in Cairo during the Second World War.
Elemér von Klobusiçky (1899–1986) was PLF’s host on his family estate in Transylvania in the summer of 1934. In Between the Woods and the Water, PLF concealed his identity under the pseudonym ‘István’. ‘I admired him very much,’ wrote PLF, ‘he was tremendous fun, and we became great friends.’ They had several adventures together, including a frolic with peasant girls who discovered the two young men swimming naked in a river. PLF especially liked the fact that ‘István’ had run away to join a hussar regiment during the First World War.
Lady Dorothy (‘Coote’) Lygon (1912–2001), fourth and youngest daughter of the 7th Earl Beauchamp, the doomed family on whom Evelyn Waugh is said to have modelled the Flytes (Lord Marchmain) in his novel Brideshead Revisited. She was a spinster until her unexpected and short-lived marriage to Robert Heber-Percy in 1985, two years before his death.
Sir Aymer Maxwell of Monreith (1911–87), baronet, elder brother of the writer Gavin Maxwell. He had inherited estates in southwest Scotland, but preferred sailing round the Greek islands to more conventional country pursuits. While PLF was waiting for the house at Kardamyli to be built, Sir Aymer let him use his own house in Euboea.
Jessica Mitford (1917–96), known as ‘Decca’, writer and civil rights activist, the second youngest of the six Mitford sisters. Her left-wing sympathies were in sharp contrast to those of her sister Diana, second wife of the Fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley. She lived in California, where she met and married the American lawyer and civil rights activist Robert Treuhaft.
Nancy Mitford (1904–73), novelist, biographer and journalist, eldest of the six Mitford sisters. After the war she lived in France. She had married Peter Rodd in 1933, but the marriage did not survive, and she formed a long-term liaison with the Free French officer, and later ambassador in Rome, Gaston Palewski.
Judith Venetia (‘Judy’) Montagu (1923–72), daughter of the politician Hon. Edwin Montagu and Venetia Stanley, the young woman with whom Asquith had become obsessed during the First World War. Judy was a close friend of Princess Margaret, but had given up her London life and moved to Rome after falling for the American photographer and art historian Milton Gendel (b. 1919), whom she eventually married in 1962. She and PLF had a brief love affair in the 1950s. He was staying in her Rome flat on the Isola Tiberina when he began his affair with Lyndall Birch.
W. Stanley ‘Billy’ Moss (1921–65), soldier, writer and traveller, PLF’s second-in-command in the operation to capture General Kreipe. He wrote an account of this operation, Ill Met by Moonlight (1950), which was made into a film (1957) by Powell and Pressburger. In Cairo during the war he met the Polish Countess Zofia (‘Sophie’) Tarnowska (1917–2009), whom he subsequently married.
John Arnaud Robin Grey (‘Jock’) Murray (1909–93), publisher, the sixth John Murray in the illustrious family firm, and a patient friend to and supporter of PLF.
John Julius Norwich (1929–2018), diplomat, writer and broadcaster, otherwise known as John Julius Cooper, 2nd Viscount Norwich, son of Duff and Lady Diana Cooper. Among his best-known works is a three-volume history of Byzantium; he credits PLF with having opened his eyes to this great civilisation, in the two weeks they were on board the Eros II together.
Mark Ogilvie-Grant (1905–69) was posted to Greece with the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War, but was taken prisoner in the Mani soon after landing. After the war he settled in Athens, where he worked for BP.
Janetta Parladé (1922–2018), née Woolley, a close friend of Joan’s, and of Frances and Ralph Partridge, much admired for her beauty and intelligence. Her lovers included Lucian Freud and the Duke of Devonshire. She was married to Humphrey Slater, Robert Kee and Derek Jackson, who left her for her half-sister, Angela Culme-Seymour. Eventually she would marry a Spanish aristocrat, the interior designer Jaime Parladé.
Frances Catherine Partridge (1900–2004), née Marshall, was married to Ralph Partridge (1894–1960), and lived at Ham Spray, where, before marrying Frances, Ralph had lived in a ménage à trois with Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington. Ralph and Frances were close friends of Joan’s and Janetta Parladé’s.
George Psychoundakis (1920–2006), Cretan resistance fighter, shepherd and author. PLF translated his war memoir into English and then helped to arrange its publication with John Murray under the title The Cretan Runner (1955). Later he translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into the Cretan dialect.
Peter Courtney Quennell (1905–93), writer and man of letters, knighted in 1993. He was editor of the Cornhill Magazine, and co-editor of History Today.
Joan Rayner, later Joan Leigh Fermor (1912–2003), née Eyres Monsell, photographer and muse, the second of three daughters of Bolton Meredith Eyres Monsell, MP, who became Conservative chief whip and then First Lord of the Admiralty, and was ennobled in 1935 as 1st Viscount Monsell. In 1939 she married the journalist and typographer John Rayner, but the marriage did not succeed, and they were living apart by the time she met PLF in Cairo towards the end of the war. She and Paddy formed a lifelong partnership, despite his affairs with other women. She was devoted to her brother Graham, who succeeded his father as 2nd Viscount on his father’s death in 1969. Joan’s mother, Caroline Eyres, had inherited Dumbleton Hall in Worcestershire, a mid-Victorian pile, said to have been considered as a refuge for the House of Lords during the war. This was sold after her death, and thereafter Joan and Graham shared the Mill House on the Dumbleton estate.
George Humphrey Wolferstan (‘Dadie’) Rylands (1902–99), literary scholar and influential theatre director. Elected Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1927, he lived there for the rest of his life. Virginia Woolf, for whom he worked at the Hogarth Press, outlined some of his qualities in her diary: ‘His silver grey suits, pink shirts, with his powdered pink and white face, his nerves, his manners, his love of praise.’
Edward (‘Eddy’) Sackville-West (1901–65), 5th Baron Sackville, novelist and music critic. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1949.
Georgios Seferiades (‘George Seferis’) (1900–71), poet, career diplomat, and a major figure in Greek letters, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963. His close relations with PLF were strained by the tensions over Cyprus in the 1950s. Seferis served as Ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1962. He took a stand against the dictatorship of ‘the Colonels’ who took power in 1967, and by the time of his death he had become a popular hero in Greece for his resistance to the regime.
Philip Owen Arnould Sherrard (1922–95), author, translator, poet and philosopher, whose work includes important translations of modern Greek poets, and books on modern Greek literature and culture. He lived on the island of Euboea, near Sir Aymer Maxwell.
Sir Sacheverell (‘Sachie’) Reresby Sitwell, 6th Baronet (1897–1988), art critic and writer on architecture, one of the famous three Sitwell siblings. In 1925 he married Georgia Doble (d. 1980). PLF was taken up by them in the late 1930s. They lived at Weston Hall, a Jacobean house in Northamptonshire.
Amy, Lady Smart, painter, Lebanese wife of Sir Walter Smart. PLF had come to know them both in Cairo during the war. In the 1950s PLF was often a guest at Gadencourt, their house in Normandy.
Walter Smart (‘Smartie’) (1883–1962), diplomat, knighted in 1942.
Freya Stark (1893–1993), explorer and travel writer, had met PLF in Egypt during the war. She was awarded a CBE in 1953 and made a dame in 1972.
Michael Stewart (1911–94), diplomat, British Ambassador to Greece 1967–71, knighted in 1966. He and his wife (Katharine) Damaris (b. 1923; née du Boulay) became close friends of the Leigh Fermors, as did their daughter Olivia. PLF’s last years were eased considerably by Olivia, who shouldered all the administrative tasks in Paddy’s life that had been done by Joan in her lifetime.
Philip Toynbee (1916–81), writer and journalist, son of the historian Arnold Toynbee, an old friend of PLF’s and an exuberant drinker.
Iris Tree (1897–1968), poet, actress and muse, daughter of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree. As a young woman she had been sought-after as an artists’ model, being painted by Augustus John, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry; sculpted by Jacob Epstein; and photographed by Man Ray. She was first married to the New York artist Curtis Moffat; their son Ivan, a successful screenwriter, was also a friend of PLF’s. Her second marriage was to the actor and ex-officer of the Austrian cavalry, Count Friedrich von Lebedur-Wicheln. After their divorce they both appeared in the 1956 film, Moby Dick. She also appeared in a cameo in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
Guillaume Villeneuve (b. 1960), French translator, whose work includes translations of A Time of Gifts, Between the Woods and the Water and The Broken Road, under the collective title Dans la Nuit et le Vent, as well as of A Time to Keep Silence and Abducting a General. His translations include works by several of PLF’s friends, including James Lees-Milne, Steven Runciman and Osbert Lancaster.
Barbara Warner (1911–89), née Hutchinson, had been married to Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild, and Rex Warner before marrying Niko Ghika in 1961.
Rex Warner (1905–86), classicist, writer, poet and translator. As director of the British Institute in Athens, Warner had been PLF’s boss for a brief period after the war.
Janetta Woolley see Janetta Parladé
Pamela Wyndham-Quin, later Egremont (1925–2013), society beauty, wife of John Wyndham, 1st Baron Egremont (1920–72), and a long-standing friend of PLF’s.