A TRULY INTERESTING ARISTOCRAT
Anita Leslie came from a family filled with extraordinary relations, but few had a more colourful life than she did
IT SEEMS unlikely that anyone ever accused Anita Leslie’s family of being boring. But even by the standards of a particularly colourful background and lineage, her life was a pretty eventful affair. By any reckoning, her CV reads like something out of a blockbuster novel. Not only was she a decorated war hero and highly acclaimed biographer, she also had a very tempestuous love life.
Yet, if the truth be told, it all sounds rather dramatic for a woman who always seemed most at home in a sleepy backwater near the border. The story begins on the other side of the Atlantic, though, when Anita was born in New York City on November 21, 1914.
She was the first child born into a wealthy family that claimed Irish, English and American heritage. Her father Shane — a first cousin of Winston Churchill’s — had rejected his Anglo-Irish background to become both a Catholic and a supporter of the Home Rule movement. Meanwhile, her American mother Marjorie was the daughter of a senior diplomat who had served as governorgeneral of the Philippines and ambassador to Spain.
Anita was aged just five when the family sailed to Ireland on the White Star Line and took up residence at Castle Leslie, the 1,000-acre ancestral estate in Glaslough, Co Monaghan, that is now run as a luxury hotel. Though the castle itself wasn’t built until 1870, the land had been owned by the Leslies since 1665 when they bought it for £2,000.
At the time of her arrival here Anita had a younger brother Jack, who died last year at the age of 99. They were later joined by another sibling, Desmond, who was born in 1921. By any reckoning, there was something haphazard about Anita’s upbringing and education. Various accounts suggest that she had 14 different governesses during her childhood and attended at least seven schools.
She was sent in her early teens to the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Roehampton, south-west London, where her fellow pupils included future Gone With The Wind star Vivien Leigh.
It wasn’t an entirely happy experience and, in her 1981 memoir The Gilt and the Gingerbread, Anita admitted that she ‘began to wonder what sort of lunatic asylum I had fallen into’.
In a letter to her mother during that time, she observed of the conditions: ‘The food is foul and occasionally gives me violent indigestion but this week some mothers complained about it so that for a few days it was properly cooked.’
She also complained: ‘I don’t think three-
quarters of an hour a day out of doors is enough in summer... I may be able to stand another term but I should much rather be with you where I could swim and work hard by myself.’
There were more exciting times ahead, although not always in a good way. It was 1935 when Paul Rodzianko, a penniless Ukrainian aristocrat more than 30 years older than her, first visited Anita at the family estate.
The pair had earlier met at another country house where he was training racehorses.
Rodzianko had an impressive military CV and also guided the Irish showjumping team to their first-ever victory in the Aga Khan Cup. According to Telling Tales: The Fabulous Lives of
Anita Leslie, a new biography by Penny Perrick, the gifted Paul was ‘a horse whisperer before the term was invented’.
That didn’t necessarily make him suitable marriage material, though. Writing to her father in the early days of the romance, she remarked that Rodzianko was ‘delightful but so temperamental and Russian’ and ‘thinks he can’t live without me’. Anita added that an upcoming trip she was planning to take to America on her own will provide ‘a good chance for it [the relationship] to die out’.
Yet she nonetheless married her older lover in a registry office ceremony in London in April 1937, much to the disapproval of the wider Leslie clan. Even Anita herself admitted that her heart ‘turned to lead at the word “wife”’ during the wedding day formalities. Nor did relations improve as time went on.
Partly to escape her unhappy domestic set-up, Anita volunteered in 1940 to join the Allied effort in World War Two. She enlisted with the Mechanised Transport Corps, a female-only civilian organisation that provided drivers for British army officers, government officials and other functionaries.
It was on August 28 that she learned she had been chosen to train as an ambulance driver and, less than two months later, she sailed out of Glasgow docks on a liner headed for Pretoria in South Africa. Fellow passengers included 60 other women drivers and squadrons of the Free French Air Force on their way to liberate North African states from the fascist Vichy regime.
Writing home to a friend from the ship, Anita observed: ‘Only I could invent this way of running away from a husband’. On November 7, as she neared her destination, she wrote again: ‘Never again am I going to live a dull domesticated existence — I’m just going to be naughtier and naughtier! He he.’
The months and years that followed saw Anita stationed in Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Italy. She also became editor of an English language newspaper, The Eastern Times, that aimed to boost the troops’ morale with stories about regattas and grouseshooting events. Not that every waking hour was devoted to work, though. Anita wrote about occasionally skiing by moonlight with a group of offduty submarine offices at various locations across Lebanon. On one evening, she dined with General Alexander and later slept in a luxury guest tent on the grounds of his villa. ‘The best day off in the whole war,’ she declared.
But Anita’s greatest contribution to the war effort was yet to come.
In 1944, she volunteered for the French army and landed at Marseilles in August of that year. Working as a frontline ambulance driver with the 1st French Armoured Division, she was involved in
“NEVER AGAIN AM I GOING TO LIVE A DULL DOMESTICATED EXISTENCE, I’M JUST GOING TO BE NAUGHTIER!”
ferrying injured troops as Alsace and the Vosges were liberated.
She later recalled arriving at a house that had been shelled and finding a dead boy there with his skull cracked open. ‘Nothing arouses anger like the sight of wounded children,’ she wrote.
Even now the official Castle Leslie website proudly note that she ‘truly distinguished herself by rescuing wounded French soldiers from behind enemy lines’.
It continues: ‘Perhaps her greatest moment was to liberate French prisoners from the terrible underground Nordhausen concentration camp, where they were systematically worked to death building V1 and V2 rockets for the bombardment of England.
‘At the end of the war, General de Gaulle awarded her two Croix de Guerre for her courage and she took part in Churchill’s victory parade in Berlin, where she also took advantage of the opportunity to hurriedly write letters home on the personalised stationery from Hitler’s office in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery.’
Despite her busy working routine during the war, however, Anita managed to find time for a very active love life. ‘I want to marry two men,’ she said at one point. Meanwhile, she described her affair with an Australian colonel as ‘the first time I’ve ever loved with my whole heart and mind without any doubt or hesitation’.
Another lover, a Royal Dragoons officer named Peter Wilson, wanted her to marry the Australian, but to have a child by him first. There were other gentleman callers as well, but it was Bill King — the only man to be in command of a British submarine on the first and last days of the war — who became her second husband.
The pair had first met while skiing in Lebanon in 1943 and were reunited when King arrived at Glaslough three years later.
They married in 1949 and spent an extended honeymoon sailing around the West Indies on a yacht called the Galway Blazer.
By the time of their engagement in December 1948, however, Anita was already pregnant by Wilson and gave birth to a son named Tarka.
She later had a daughter, Leonie, and raised both children in Oranmore Castle, the 12th century pile overlooking Galway Bay that she shared with her husband.
Meanwhile Anita’s writing career, which began in the pre-war years, continued right into the 1980s. Her books included two volumes of memoirs, biographies of Madame Tussaud and the French sculptor Auguste Rodin, as well as various volumes about royalty and the extended Churchill family.
After her death at the age of 70, Anita Leslie was buried at Glaslough. Her husband, who lived until the age of 102, was interred beside her.
According to Telling Tales there is a theory that her reckless and often erratic behaviour could have been caused by akcrasia, described by the author as ‘a mental condition that leads one to act against one’s better judgement’.
Or there could be a simpler explanation, especially given that Anita herself was keenly aware of her huge appetite for life and love. One frank remark in a letter to a friend sums it up. ‘I want to have several cakes and eat them too,’ she admitted.
Telling Tales: The Fabulous Lives of Anita Leslie by Penny Perrick is published by The Lilliput Press and available now, priced €20
“SHE TOOK THE OPPORTUNITY TO WRITE LETTERS HOME ON THE PERSONALISED STATIONERY FROM HITLER’S OFFICE”