The Sheila who shook up society
SHEILA: THE AUSTRALIAN INGENUE WHO BEWITCHED BRITISH SOCIETY
BY ROBERT WAINWRIGHT (Allen & Unwin £14.99)
By Jane Shilling for MailOnline
Published: 18:27, 13 February 2014 | Updated: 17:02, 19 February 2014
Toy boy: Sheila Milbanke weds second husband 'Buffles'
Edward VIII, the Mitford sisters, the legendary beauty Lady Diana Cooper... together with the novelist Evelyn Waugh, the photographer Cecil Beaton, the dramatist Noel Coward and society hostess Emerald Cunard – these are figures that epitomized the heady glamour of the decades between the two world wars.
Yet there is another name on that list, almost forgotten now, but which once sparkled as brightly as her most famous contemporaries'. Sheila Milbanke was an Australian beauty from Wollogorang, two days' ride south of Sydney who married, in succession, an earl, a baronet and a Russian prince, and became an intimate of Edward Prince of Wales – the future King Edward VIII – and of his brother, Bertie, the future George VI, with whom she had a close friendship before his marriage to Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
She was a darling of the gossip columns, where her fashion style and antics were scrutinized with the same breathless fascination as those of Cara Delevigne or Pippa Middleton today.
Yet Sheila's life of glittering hedonism was marked by deep sadness. She was divorced twice, and outlived two of her three husbands and one of her sons. As a young mother she effectively brought up her two boys as a single parent while her husband, Lord Loughborough, struggled with the hopeless addictions to alcohol and gambling that would eventually ruin him. And during the Second World War she, like other war wives and mothers, suffered the anguish of not knowing when, or if, she would see her son and husband again.
For a future society "It" girl, Sheila Chisholm had a surprisingly tomboyish upbringing. She was born in 1895, the daughter of Harry Chisholm, a well-off bloodstock agent and his wife, Margaret. Sheila had two elder brothers, Jack and Roy, and she grew up eager to outdo them in all their adventures. By the time she was nine they had taught her to ride any horse, swim, crack a stock whip and kill a snake.
Society beauty: Lady Sheila Milbanke,
painted by Cecil Beaton in 1930
But there was a more reflective side to Sheila's nature. She loved to read the novels of Thomas Hardy and the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and her imagination was so vivid that her mother warned her not to 'try to turn people into what you want them to be. It is better not to live in a world of dreams.' It was advice that Sheila would resolutely ignore.
In April, 1914, Sheila, then 18, and her mother boarded the steamship SS Mongolia to make the six-week voyage to London, where she was presented to the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace. The announcement of war on August 4 left Sheila and her mother in a quandary. Should they attempt the sea voyage back to Sydney, or remain in London. Eventually it was decided that they should travel to Cairo, where Sheila's older brother, Jack, was headed with the Australian Expeditionary Forces.
By the spring of 1915 Jack was back in Cairo, in hospital after being wounded in action. In the next bed lay 23-year-old Francis Edward Scudamore St Clair-Erskine, Lord Loughborough, known as Loughie to his friends. He was tall, handsome – and already a hopeless gambler, who had appeared in court accused of bouncing a cheque.
Loughie fell in love with Sheila, telling her, 'I know I am wild, but with your love I will be different. I could do great things.' Ignoring her mother's warnings, Sheila accepted his proposal, and they were married in Cairo on December 27, 1915.
Almost at once things began to go wrong. Returning to England in 1916, Sheila found herself neglected while Loughie spent the nights gambling so recklessly that his father, The Earl of Rosslyn (himself a rakish gambler) took out an advertisement in the Times warning that he would not be responsible for his son's debts.
Mixing with royalty: Sheila flanked by the princes, Bertie on the left, and Edward
An heir, Tony, was born in 1917, and a 'spare', Peter, a year later, and the marriage tottered on. But as a young married woman, Sheila had far more social freedom than a single girl, and she took full advantage of it. Waiting to be introduced to the Prince of Wales and his brother at a society ball, Sheila asked her neighbour, Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower, how to behave when she was introduced to the royal brothers.
'Curtsey to the ground, call them sir, and treat them like dirt,' Rosemary replied. It was a winning formula. Sheila danced several times with both princes, and before long a quartet had formed, dubbed the '4 Do's' by Prince Edward, with Bertie and Sheila sharing outings and 'stunts' with Prince Edward and his married mistress, Freda Dudley Ward.
Eventually King George V got wind of Bertie's affair, and the relationship cooled to a more decorous friendship. But by then Sheila was launched as a brilliant society figure. She and Loughie divorced so amicably that at her second wedding, in 1928, she carried a bouquet of lilies that he had sent her, and it was a terrible shock when he committed suicide a few months later.
Sheila's second husband was Sir John 'Buffles' Milbanke, a boxing baronet seven years her junior. She doesn't seem to have been a great picker of men. This time there was evidently a violent sexual attraction – what she called a 'strange sex antagonism', but it swiftly faded, leaving Sheila to pursue her social career amid a crowd of admirers.
By the beginning of the second world war, Buffles admitted that he was having an affair. That blow was followed by an even worse tragedy, when Sheila's younger son, Peter, who had trained as an RAF pilot, was killed in a flying accident in the first days of the war. His ashes were laid to rest in the Rosslyn family chapel in Scotland, made famous by Dan Brown's novel, the Da Vinci Code.
Sheila's courage in the face of her grief was exemplary. In an unpublished memoir she wrote that her mantra in difficult times was 'Head high, walk very tall'. and she described using an imaginary 'thought whisk' to remove negative feelings. Happily, in her later years she found fulfilment in running a successful travel business, Milbanke Travel, eventually sold to the Forte group, and in a third marriage to an old friend, Prince Dimitri Romanoff.
Family seat: Rosslyn Chapel where Sheila's son Peter is buried
She died in 1969, aged 74. Shortly before her death, a young relation visited her in hospital, and found the room filled with her old friends, all in fits of laughter: 'They were spitting cherry pips in the air like children. It was a party. They were celebrating her life.'
Sheila's biographer, Robert Wainwright, notes in an afterword the difficulty of writing the life of someone who moved in the orbit of so many famous people, but remained in many ways a peripheral figure. 'Her life had to be reconstructed, fragment by fragment,' he writes.
The result of his labours is a vivid portrait of a woman with no special talents, beside beauty and a great ability to have fun. Historians are generally more interested in seriousness than fun. But the charm of Wainwright's biography is that he makes us see what an engaging, admirable and sometimes heroic quality it is to be a life-enhancer like Sheila: beautiful, amusing and cheerful through good times and bad.