Aussie reporter married a duke
Jill, duchess of Hamilton, journalist and author: b Sydney, January 30, 1940; m (1) Martin Page, (2) Edward Hulton, (3) Angus, 15th duke of Hamilton; 1s; d Oxford, UK, April 22, 2018, aged 78.
Jill, duchess of Hamilton, left her native Australia as a young reporter for the Murdoch press and ended up marrying Scotland’s premier duke; after her divorce, she distinguished herself as a writer and researcher.
Jillian Robertson was born in Sydney, and spent her youth in Townsville, Queensland. After school, she made her first trip to Britain. On her return to Sydney in 1961, she trained as a newspaper reporter under Donald Horne, then Australia’s leading journalist and later one of its great public intellectuals. Three years later, she was sent to report from London.
She was one of the group’s youngest foreign correspondents and later recalled the young Rupert Murdoch as a friendly man in a brown suit wandering between the desks of his journalists. Assignments took her to the United States, India, Russia, Tahiti, Vietnam and Afghanistan. Among the people she interviewed were Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton, Nancy Mitford and P G Wodehouse.
Her journalistic career was cut short by motherhood and marriage. Finding herself pregnant, she married the father of her child, a fellow journalist named Martin Page. Her only son, Jamie, was born in April 1968. The marriage was brief and unhappy, and after their divorce the couple never spoke to each other or saw each other again, communicating solely through lawyers.
Nevertheless, Jill was deeply annoyed some years later when the marriage was annulled by the Roman Catholic Church to enable Page, a convert to Catholicism, to marry again.
Her second marriage, to Edward Hulton, a scion of the newspaper dynasty who was several years her junior, brought with it a residence in the south of France, a flat in Monte Carlo as an address for tax purposes, and a seaplane in which they regularly toured the West Indies. But they were unsuited to each other, and divorce followed.
Her third and final husband was Angus, 15th duke of Hamilton. They married in 1988, and divorced in 1995. She was his second wife, and carried out her duties as chatelaine of Lennoxlove, his house, with great devotion and energy. Nevertheless, none of this hard work and commitment was quite enough to overcome the duke’s alcoholism and unhappiness.
After her third divorce, she swore she would never marry again. Based in a small but charming flat in Chelsea, given to her by the Hamilton estate, she threw herself into the business of making her living, drawing on her dynamic personality and her journalistic training.
In later years she came to dislike the awkward title of Jill, duchess of Hamilton, with which her last divorce had saddled her, and demanded that it be removed from her byline. On being asked the correct written form of address for a divorced duchess, she replied: ‘‘I have absolutely no bloody idea, and please don’t tell me.’’
She was frequently invited to parties, quite often by people she hardly knew. ‘‘There’s a list,’’ she once explained. ‘‘Once you are on it, you get invited to everything.’’
Her best book, Marengo, the Myth of Napoleon’s Horse (2000), uncovered some hitherto unknown facts about Napoleon’s favourite horse. First to Damascus (2002) dealt with her father’s wartime experiences in the Australian Light Horse in Egypt, Palestine and Syria. Later came God, Guns and Israel (2009), which ran to several editions.
She also wrote numerous volumes on gardening, including Scottish Plants for Scottish Gardens
(1996), English Plants for Your Garden (2000) and The Gardens of William Morris (1998).
In 1995 she organised an Australian War Memorial at Battersea Park in London, and a dawn service on Anzac Day. This eventually led to the memorial that now stands at Hyde Park Corner, which was built by the Australian government.
She was never sentimental. Cancer was diagnosed, and lying in bed in her small flat in Oxford, shortly before leaving for the hospice, she mischievously suggested to a friend that he try the powerful opiate medicine she had been given to ease her pain. ‘‘Let’s face it, darling, I’ll be gone before I can finish the bottle,’’ she said.
She planned to donate her body to science and to have no funeral. ‘‘Funerals,’’ she told one friend, ‘‘are a bore.’’
She is survived by her son. – Telegraph Group