Girls and Boys
Lady Desborough's daughter Monica was best friends with Rosemary Leveson-Gower, the daughter of Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, whose famous portrait Sargent painted in 1904. At around that time, the young girls Monica and Rosemary were taking German classes together three times a week, and Rosemary was included in the many events Lady Desborough organized for her children, everything from fancy dress parties to a series of lectures on English literature. During the early years of the first world war Rosemary was frequently at the Desborough's homes -- Taplow on the eve of the declaration of war, and a long weekend gathering at Panshanger at the end of 1916 when she deeply impressed another house guest, Duff Cooper, who was smitten with her (Davenport-Hines, pp. 118 and 217).
Lady Rosemary married William Ward, Viscount Ednam, (subsequently 3rd Earl of Dudley) in 1919. In December of 1929 their son John Jeremy died when he was hit by a truck while riding his bike. He was seven years old. Eight months later the Viscountess, who was leading a fund-raising campaign for an extension to the Cripples Home at Stoke on Trent, was returning to England from France when the plane in which she was a passenger crashed in Kent, killing everyone on board. She was thirty-six.
Viscountess Ednam's death brought an emotional response from the local people. The Crippled Children's Home, opened by Edward Prince of Wales in 1931, was bounded by a memorial fence erected in her honor, composed of decorative panels of boys and girls rolling hoops, running, skipping and swimming. The fence survived the Government call for metalwork at the outbreak of the Second World War when fences and railings across the country were requisitioned. The memorial still remains today, although the original hospital structure has been demolished and replaced with nurses housing. [Source].
I understand a statue of a mother and child was also commissioned in honor of the Viscountess Ednam and is to be found in the Memory Garden at the Church of St. Michael's in Himley, Staffordshire, near Himley Hall, the country seat of the Earls of Dudley. I have not seen the memorial but hope it is still there. I have in my mind a sort of simple Art Deco Pieta. Something by Eric Gill perhaps. Beautiful but not too sentimental. You may be interested to know that the Duke and Duchess of Kent honeymooned at Himley Hall in 1934; Edward Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) spent his last weekend there before his abdication. After the Second World War the property was sold to the National Coal Board.
Also on that ill-fated flight with Lady Rosemary was Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 3rd Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, who had succeeded to the marquessate on the death of his elder brother Terence the 2nd Marquess on 7 February 1918. His eldest brother Archibald, Earl of Ava had already died in action in the Boer War in January 1900, while his other brother, Lord Basil Blackwood, had perished in an attack on German trenches in July 1917.
As for Lady Rosemary's best friend from childhood, Monica Grenfell survived her three brothers, Julian and Billy who died in the First World War and Ivo who perished in a car crash. She married Sir John Salmond and produced two children, Julian and Rosemary. The marriage was not a particulary happy one, however, from which Monica, who had struggled with her weight, retreated into food, living quietly in Sussex where "the great excitment of her life was provided by meringues." (Davenport-Hines, p. 300).
For some reason, however, perhaps because it is spring and Easter is here, and Easter is a time of such powerful contradictions, of death and rebirth, lamentation and rejoicing, exodus and eggs, blood and bunnies, I am drawn to thinking of these two friends, Rosemary and Monica, as they were when they were girls, the daughters of a duke and a baron and of two of the great Edwardian society hostesses, Ettie and Millie at the very end of an era. Young girls coming of age when the world was poised upon the precipice of war and death, but at the same time when life was still bright and heady and full of promise, as it always feels as though it is, at this time of year.
Also on that ill-fated flight with Lady Rosemary was Frederick Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 3rd Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, who had succeeded to the marquessate on the death of his elder brother Terence the 2nd Marquess on 7 February 1918. His eldest brother Archibald, Earl of Ava had already died in action in the Boer War in January 1900, while his other brother, Lord Basil Blackwood, had perished in an attack on German trenches in July 1917.
As for Lady Rosemary's best friend from childhood, Monica Grenfell survived her three brothers, Julian and Billy who died in the First World War and Ivo who perished in a car crash. She married Sir John Salmond and produced two children, Julian and Rosemary. The marriage was not a particulary happy one, however, from which Monica, who had struggled with her weight, retreated into food, living quietly in Sussex where "the great excitment of her life was provided by meringues." (Davenport-Hines, p. 300).
For some reason, however, perhaps because it is spring and Easter is here, and Easter is a time of such powerful contradictions, of death and rebirth, lamentation and rejoicing, exodus and eggs, blood and bunnies, I am drawn to thinking of these two friends, Rosemary and Monica, as they were when they were girls, the daughters of a duke and a baron and of two of the great Edwardian society hostesses, Ettie and Millie at the very end of an era. Young girls coming of age when the world was poised upon the precipice of war and death, but at the same time when life was still bright and heady and full of promise, as it always feels as though it is, at this time of year.
George,
Did you read Ana Seghers'"The Excursion of the Dead Girls"?
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Thank you for this recommendation. I did not know the work, but just read a brief synopsis and now I am intrigued. There are definite parallels to the story of Rosemary and Monica. Interesting.
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The fabulous Joyce Grenfell got her name by marrying a Reginald Pascoe Grenfell (born, sadly, in 1903). I wonder if there's any relation to Monica. The British aristocracy seems like such a small and incestuous group.
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