Kirsty Mcleod
Author, Telegraph columnist, gardener, traveller, aesthete, and a celebrated beauty of her generation
KIRSTY MCLEOD, who has died aged 72, was a historian and biographer, and a Daily Telegraph columnist with a passion for gardens. But earlier, in her days at Oxford, she was remembered by contemporaries as the cynosure of all eyes.
“The Zuleika Dobson of her day” – the intelligent beauty with sparkling blue eyes, Cupid’s bow lips and rosy cheeks, who would drive young men to distraction – is a label often borrowed from Max Beerbohm’s satirical novel of 1911. In 1968, when the BBC were making a documentary about Kenneth Tynan’s days at Oxford 20 years before, they invited Gyles Brandreth to be Tynan’s latter-day equivalent, and to find the Zuleika Dobson of his era, 1965-68.
Brandreth, president-elect of the Union, eagerly nominated eight lovely young things to be delivered in vintage cars in their evening gowns to an al fresco dining table by the river. Among the eight were Kirsty Mcleod, Michele Brown, and the victorious “Zuleika”, Lady Annunziata Asquith, whom the director declared must wear the winning sash. “Unaided,” Brandreth recorded in his diary, “I would certainly have picked either Michele or Kirsty.” Michele Brown became, in due course, Mrs Brandreth. And all remained lifelong friends.
The future Mrs Brandreth had already bonded with Miss Mcleod at first sight, as they waited to be interviewed at St Anne’s College: both sat reading a copy of Woman’s Own rather than swotting up on their subject, Modern History.
An early beau, who wrote the John Evelyn gossip column for the undergraduate paper Cherwell, recalled falling for Kirsty Mcleod at a party hosted by her admirer Kevin Pakenham; after kissing her goodbye outside his college he watched her skipping down the lane in a plum-coloured floppy hat, artlessly personifying the gaiety of the era and, in her ebullience and vivacity, “ideally suited to running through meadows”.
Kirsty Mcleod studied mostly unmodern history (the 10th century papacy, the Crusades), and played a Weasel in the Magdalen production of The Wind in the Willows. After Oxford she wrote for the Twiggy generation’s magazine, Honey, and worked for the publisher Collins. Billy Collins published her first book, The Wives of Downing Street – the spouses of PMS from Chatham to Lloyd George – in 1976.
Margaret Kirsty Mcleod was born on December 23 1947 in Colombo, Ceylon, the second of three children of Alexander Drummond Mcleod, a tea-planter, and Elizabeth Margaret Mcleod. Before the family returned home to Wadhurst in Kent she was sent to board at St Leonard’s School, St Andrews. “Eat up yurr porridge, Kerrsty Mclude!” became a refrain of her friend Michele.
In 1978 she married the journalist and novelist Christopher Hudson, who had been working for Faber. They were a symbiotically well-matched couple – both had got first-class degrees, and Hudson’s Cambridge thesis had been on Paradise represented by a garden – and each was intent on authorship. Kirsty would accompany him on research trips to America, Africa and Sri Lanka.
Her next book, A Passion for Friendship: Sibyl Colefax and her Circle (1991), reflected her taste in fabrics and furnishings. As a mistress of the domestic arts, she created a series of houses noted for their welcome and ease, featuring a soft palette of muted colours, plenty of Toile de Jouy, marbled papers, huge bowls of Japanese Imari porcelain. Later (1998) she wrote The Last Summer: May to September 1914, about those mythologised months “when time stood still, after which things were never as happy, or as carefree, or as golden again”. The myth came to stand for “a vanished world, a lost Eden, held fast by the sticky bonds of nostalgia”.
Since the Hudsons found themselves with two pairs of Aged Parents to care for – at Christmas there were four wheelchairs around their fireplace – they moved from London to the Kentish countryside. Little Dane at Biddenden, with tennis court (both were keen players), was a former pilgrims’ halt on the way to Canterbury, described by James Dawnay as “the house in World War II films that the Squadronleader comes back to, taking tea on the lawn before leading a daring air raid on Hamburg”.
In fact the house became the target for gangs of East End thieves in search of Kirsty Mcleod’s antique porcelain and pictures. She wrote graphically of the audacious ram-raids on neighbours and forays into her home. Under attack when alone on a dark winter evening, she unearthed a surge of adrenalin – and furiously confronted the thieves in their getaway car.
In the early 1990s, when her son Rowley was seven, Mcleod began writing a column for The Daily Telegraph at first called A Mother’s
View, concerned with anxieties about computer games, the rise of the Supermum (not yet a Tigermum), parental overprotectiveness destroying a childlike trust in the world and a chance to run wild – and the price of trainers. Her mailbag on subjects such as Francophilia, or mail-order kitsch, reflected her broad appeal to readers.
In 1998 she published Battle Royal, a sympathetic and much admired study of the fractured relationship between Edward VIII and his brother George VI.
But her magnum opus was The Best Gardens in Italy: A Traveller’s Guide (2013) featuring photographs by her friend Primrose Bell and with a preface by Robin Lane Fox, who found the whole enterprise “outstanding, a masterpiece of clarity, compression and accuracy”, putting to shame the earlier writings of Georgina Masson and Edith Wharton.
Kirsty Mcleod and Primrose Bell travelled “for five glorious springs and summers the length and breadth of Italy” in a small Fiat Panda. They met the owners and guardians of palazzi and villas in terracotta and tawny yellow with marble portals, symmetrical staircases, frescoed rooms, baroque sculpture, often set in olive groves, forests of ilex and oak, orchards of cypresses and yew, featuring clipped box enclosures, intricate geometrical parterres, visual caprices, hanging gardens, wild flower meadows with self-seeded poppies, banks of lavender and roses.
“Kirsty was a wonderful travelling companion, loved by everyone we met,” Primrose Bell recalled. Several gardens were cared for by third or fourthgeneration retainers “who spoke in very strong dialects which neither of us could understand. But of course both they and Kirsty knew the Latin names. So with not a word of a language in common they communicated perfectly, with gestures and Latin.”
The book’s launch party, packed with Italian grandees, was at the celebrated Florentine villa of Sir Harold Acton, La Pietra.
Her own gardens were not as formal as the Italian model, but her last home was close to the late Christopher Lloyd’s at Great Dixter, and she would recommend to friends such abundant plantings as the white-flowering Exochorda x macrantha, “The Bride”.
Her sunny smile and generous nature did not deter Kirsty Mcleod from making laughing comments on anyone with overweening pretensions – but her loyalty was steely and her compassion limitless. She was closely bound to the family of Aidan Crawley and Virginia Cowles, who had greatly influenced her taste in youth – and when the Crawley scholarship was set up at Harrow in memory of their sons Andrew and Randall Crawley, killed in an air crash in 1988, Kirsty Mcleod sat on the judging panel. While exploring their chosen country, winners must commit to learning a foreign language – Mandarin, Arabic, Japanese, Urdu.
She also chaired English Heritage’s Parks and Gardens advisory panel, and judged the Koestler awards for prisoners’ writing.
To accompany her to art galleries was to be infected by her enthusiasm and expertise. Her final trip abroad was to New York, where her son Rowley showed her the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights, and the Shakespeare Garden in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, featuring 80 plants mentioned in the Bard’s poems and plays, including her favourite lilies, which appear thrice in Venus and Adonis. She is survived by her husband and their son.
Kirsty Mcleod, born December 23 1947, died May 16 2020