REBELLIOUS BLUE BLOOD AND THE PLAYBOY MODEL
Lady Constance Lytton and her great-great-great niece Morwenna Lytton-Cobbold, 28.
LADY Constance was a suffragette of the most hard-core variety, with some truly blue blood flowing through her veins.
Lady Con, as her fellow ‘sisters’ dubbed her, was the daughter of the first Earl of Lytton and grew up in the splendour of a stately Tudor house, Knebworth in Hertfordshire.
Her rebellious streak seems to have started in 1892 when she was refused permission to marry a man from a ‘lower social order’. She spent years waiting in vain for her family to change their minds.
She ‘caught’ politics when she was nearly 40 and campaigned for prison reform, birth control and votes for women. She once threw a stone at a car, thinking Lloyd George was in it.
She was imprisoned four times and was force-fed through a tube while on hunger strike — a shockingly grim process that she described afterwards in print.
In Holloway, she used an alias, Jane Warton — an ‘ugly London seamstress’ (her words) — to avoid special treatment, and carved a ‘V’ for votes into her bleeding chest with a hairpin. She remained unmarried and died at the age of 54. With her weak heart — possibly as a result of spending so much time on hunger strike — she was seen as a martyr to the cause.
The same blue blood runs through Morwenna’s veins, and her family seat is still Knebworth —but that’s as far as similarities between the two women go.
Spotted in a feature for Teen Vogue in 2006, posing with a Mickey Mouse doll, the 5ft 10in winsome redhead has modelled for Burberry, Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen. She was also shot by Rankin for French Playboy in 2008 — she described having to feign an ‘orgasm face’ for the camera.
Latterly, she’s turned her hand to photography and working as a DJ. And like her great-greatgreat aunt, she remains unmarried. Possibly the only thing the less jolly Lady Con would have approved of!