‘How many noughts are in a million?’

Robert Leigh-Pemberton on Lady Houston’s progress from chorus girl to socialistbashing newspaper magnate

TADVENTURESS by Teresa Crompton 320pp, The History Press, £20, ebook £3.99

he £6 million left by the shipping magnate Sir Robert Houston on his death in 1926 caused something of a scandal. The public were willing to overlook the fact that his wife of only 16 months and heir to his estate was a former chorus girl (known in her early life to perform at “bachelor dinner parties”, emerging “high kicking from a huge pie”), but what demonstrated, as The Times put it, no “sense of decency and patriotism” was the fact that, having been rushed to the island of Jersey at the first sign of illness, he had avoided some £3 million in death duties.

The criticism stung his widow, Lady Houston, who regarded herself as, above all things, a patriot. In an “act of grace”, she resolved to return her dues to the exchequer. By then in her sixties, she had lost none of her famous coquetry. Sweeping into the office of Winston Churchill, she pouted over her chequebook: “How many noughts are there in a million? I’ve never written a cheque this big before… Don’t you think you’d better come and guide my hand?” An uncharacteristically timid Churchill refused, but £1.5 million was handed over. “Now haven’t I been a good girl?” purred Houston. “Don’t you think I deserve a kiss?”

Despite Houston’s flamboyant munificence, Churchill denied her the kiss (she was given tea instead), and posterity has denied her much of the credit she is due. Now remembered only for her financing of the Schneider Trophy air race, which led, in part, to the development of the Spitfire, the more amusing aspects of Houston’s life have been neglected. Teresa Crompton’s lively biography does much to address this injustice.

The early life of the “famous millionaire harlot”, as the press called her, reads more like Evelyn Waugh comedy than dogged biography. Born Fanny Lucy Radmall in 1857, she spent her childhood in “greasy” Newgate, running “wild like a street arab”. There followed a spell, some time between the ages of 12 and 16, as the under-age mistress of the Bass brewing heir Frederick Gretton, vastly wealthy and known for his ability to consume “enough Scotch to wash a bus”; an elopement, in 1883, with a young baronet; a number of other lovers, including the celebrated author of a work entitled “Alone with the Hairy Ainu: or, 3,800 Miles on a Pack Saddle in Yezo and a Cruise to the Kurile Islands”; then marriage, in 1901, to the distinctly un-Byronic Lord Byron, a short, unassuming man, prone to chronic indigestion.

It was, however, with the vast inheritance from her third and final marriage, in 1924, to Robert Houston, and her subsequent purchase of the weekly paper The Saturday Review, that Houston came into her own as a thorn in the side of Britain’s “treacherous socialists”. With an outspokenness justified by a lifetime of charitable works, which ranged from a fund for “Gondolier-Soldiers’ Wives in Venice” to a “Patriotic Herring League”, Houston proved a formidable if eccentric foe. On one occasion, she rigged her yacht with vast lights spelling “TO HELL WITH RAMSAY MACDONALD”. As she had been granted the privilege of naval moorings in Portsmouth at the time, a destroyer had to be dispatched to tow her out of sight. When Anthony Eden unwisely summoned a laugh in the House of Commons by asking “Who is Lady Houston?”, the editor of The

Saturday Review fielded a call from his irate proprietor, who demanded to know whether, in his opinion, it would be libellous to call Eden a “nancy” in print.

Such ferocious opposition to the evils of socialism led Houston in a dangerous direction. She named her dog Benito, and only an unflattering article in the journal of the Union of Fascists prevented her from offering financial support to Oswald Mosley. A childlike infatuation with Edward VIII led to some surreal editorial in The Saturday Review, which called him “sincere, modest” and “devoted to duty”, and demanded he be installed as Britain’s own dictator.

Having pinned her hopes for the rescue of the country she loved on the young king, the news of Edward VIII’s abdication was too much for an already weakened Houston. She died in December 1936 in the bed where, covered with a Union Jack bedspread, she had spent her later years, attired in a pink silk nightgown and jewelled turban, receiving guests varying from vulnerable young RAF officers to Edward VIII himself, and from which she dispatched fearsome letters in mauve ink, filled with underlining and marvellous spelling errors. “Now is the cycological (sic) moment for you” she wrote to Churchill in 1935.

The press, after their initial joy at finally discovering her real age (79, rather than the touted 65), promptly forgot Lady Houston (“plump, imperious... voluble”). Crompton deserves credit for her elegant resurrection. Adventuress may suffer from a lack of analysis – Houston’s fascist associations are glossed over, and some tantalising leads, such as the bundle of notes amounting to as much as £250,000, delivered in secret to Edward VIII on the eve of his abdication, amid whispers of a Right-wing coup, are left unexplored – but there is much to enjoy in this life of a “queer, obstinate old woman’.

Lights on her yacht spelt out: ‘TO HELL WITH RAMSAY MACDONALD’

When Audrey Withers took the helm at British Vogue in September 1940, London was under siege from the Luftwaffe, whose 57-day air assault on the capital that autumn left a third of the city in ruins and

32,000 dead. Once, twice, often three times in a day, to the roar of bomb blasts and the wail of air raid sirens, she and her small staff at 1 New Bond Street had to stumble down six flights of stairs to the building’s cellar, to continue production as best they could.

One learns, vividly, in Julie Summers’ magnificent new biography, how Withers took all this in her stride, keeping a small attaché case to hand, into which she could stuff anything vital for the next issue – proofs, copy, photographs, sandwiches (she was notoriously frugal) and a gas mask. “We look as if we are going on a peculiar picnic,” Withers wrote in a Vogue editorial, designed to show anxious readers how they, too, might find the courage to go on.

It is a measure of Withers’ mettle that not once in those war years did she fail to bring Vogue to the news stands. Each new issue, she said, was “a hurdle in a steeplechase… the difficulties pile up threateningly; one last spurt – and (so far) over she goes! No owner leading in his steaming horse feels prouder than we on the day when all the bookstalls are hung with the new Vogue.”

It’s now 60 years since Withers resigned (voluntarily, because she saw that the Sixties called for fresh blood), and 19 since she died at the age of 96. She was honoured in her lifetime – appointed OBE in 1954 for her role on the Council of Industrial Design, which delivered the Festival of Britain and the landmark Britain Can Make It exhibition at the V&A in 1946 (alongside the gloriously named Phyllis Panting) – but we have heard very little of her since.

Withers hovers at the edge of other, more extrovert lives: she has walk-on parts in the biographies of the photographers Lee Miller, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn and Norman Parkinson, all of whom she nurtured, along with the cookery writer Elizabeth David and the authors Simone de Beauvoir, Kingsley Amis and Bertrand Russell, who wrote regularly for her. Summers’ task, then, was to round those pre-existing snippets, along with acres of correspondence, into flesh, and she has done it superbly.

Here’s Withers pointing out to American Vogue's editor-in-chief, Edna Woolman Chase, that the recent American covers had been “specially unsuitable” for British readers in wartime: “for instance, your charming August 15th one, which we would have loved to have, had to be ruled out on account of that full dirndl skirt which looks quite impossible to people who must now think in the skimpy terms of coupons. Again… coiffure or accessories are over-elaborate for England’s present life, and we feel we must be most careful to avoid striking false notes.” A request from New York for a society titbit on the shooting practice going on behind the high walls at Buckingham Palace (apparently the Duchess of Kent was a crack shot with an automatic) was met with a terse “no” from Withers’ secretary, it having landed on her desk the morning after a German bomb had killed 68 people in Balham Underground station.

The book deals with the role of wartime Vogue – why fashion magazines were even permitted in a period of strict paper rationing. Summers points out that, between them, women’s magazines reached more than 90 per cent of the female population, making them excellent vehicles for governmentendorsed tips on rationing, savings, health, evacuation and education. When a woman

DRESSED FOR WAR

‘HIGH KICKING FROM A HUGE PIE’ Lady Houston in the 1880s, during her marriage to Theodore Francis Brinckman