The girl who outshone the Queen
Lady Ursula d’Abo, who has died a few days short of her 101st birthday, became an overnight sensation after appearing on the balcony of Buckingham Palace following the coronation of George VI
AS THE crowds looked up to watch the Royal Family gather on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in 1937 in celebration of the coronation of King George VI, one member of the regal party outshone all others.
It was not Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother), nor the then young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret who caught the eye of the cheering onlookers and the world’s media but a spirited 20-year-old socialite and aristocrat by the name of Ursula Manners.
Her father, the ninth Duke of Rutland, was a close friend of the King and with her delicate tiara, dark hair and distinctive widow’s peak she became an overnight sensation across the globe – every inch the Pippa Middleton of her day.
In that moment her life changed for ever. There were campaigns to find her and one magazine published a poem in which each verse began with the line: “Who is that beautiful lady in waiting?”
It is a question that has now arisen again after it was announced that Lady Ursula D’Abo – as she was known after she married – died last week. It would have been her 101st birthday today.
Born Lady Ursula Isabel Manners on November 8, 1916, she was the eldest child of the Marquess of Granby – later 9th Duke of Rutland – and his wife Kathleen (“Kakoo”) Tennant, niece of Margot Asquith.
She enjoyed a magical childhood with her siblings at home within the turreted splendour of Belvoir Castle which sits atop a hill in the Leicestershire countryside where her grandfather, the then Duke of Rutland, would bring her “delicious pink sweets in bed” when he thought her nanny was not looking.
There she enjoyed a life of privilege which included a kitchen staff of 20, from the teenage boys who scrubbed the copper pans to the maids who rustled up homemade jams – details she revealed in her charming memoir of 2014, The Girl With The Widow’s Peak.
But she was fondest of the castle’s gardener with his whiskers and baggy trousers and of Mrs Anderson, the family’s Scottish cook, who would read Ursula’s tea leaves between domestic duties.
Schooled at home by a governess she described her education as consisting of “all the traditional home pursuits – cooking, sewing and running a large house”. Away from Belvoir, Ursula also had swimming, ballet and piano lessons in London and there were weekends spent playing in the sea at Bognor Regis with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret and their various nannies.
After attending finishing school in Paris her parents debuted her before 200 guests at a grand ball at Belvoir when she was 17, dressed in a white tulle couture gown by Worth of Paris.
To mark the occasion her father gave her a large, heart-shaped aquamarine brooch he had designed himself, featuring her name in diamonds.
Although she was aware that she was expected to find a husband within the peerage in the traditional way, this shy, giggly, unpretentious woman set the hearts of many a rich man racing. As she put it herself decades later: “I had the pick of the most fascinating young men in England.”
Before her fame artist Rex Whistler sent her letters strewn with amusing sketches and, after upstaging the Queen, the Maharajah of Jaipur whisked her away to his pink palace while Winston Churchill took a friendly shine to her and affectionately nicknamed her “the cygnet”.
She was a regular on the glittering social circuit of the upper classes, attending society balls, the Derby and the opening night of the opera at Covent Garden.
When Lady Ursula’s father died in 1940 her mother was left to cope with the vast demands of Belvoir and the worries of having three sons away at war.
IT WAS around this time that Ursula joined the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) in London, cleaning railway carriages and nursing with the Red Cross at St George’s Hospital before later overseeing 2,000 women making bullets in a factory in Grantham which was close to Belvoir.
In July 1943 Ursula eventually married handsome barrister Anthony Marreco, describing him as “brilliantly clever, conceited and sure of himself ”.
According to her memoirs her new husband left to serve in the Far East two days later and they had no communication again until 1946, by which time she considered him a stranger. They divorced in 1948 and three years later she married her second husband, financier and renowned ladies’ man Erland d’Abo, with whom she had sons Henry and Richard and daughter Louisa. They set up home in Cambridgeshire and became farmers.
Following his death from a sudden heart attack in 1970 aged 58, Lady Ursula then famously had a long-running love affair with American oil billionaire John Paul Getty, who was then the richest man in the world.
In her memoirs she declared: “I felt so lost and lonely [after being widowed] that I fell for this dear old man’s kindness and charm.”
He had numerous mistresses which she found hard to tolerate and declined his proposal of marriage but revealed: “We lived as though married for five years.”
Getty called her “little bear” and when she urged him to invest in North Sea oil he replied: “You’re the most expensive girlfriend I’ve ever had.”
When he died in 1976 he left her £85,000 – the equivalent of £550,000 today. Even after his death her life continued on its ever glamorous trajectory. She remained a regular at society dinners and events in London – albeit often alone – and continued to live in well-heeled Kensington Square until 1999. She celebrated her 90th birthday with a party at the Ritz in 2006.
Horse-racing also became her greatest hobby in old age, having bought her first racehorse in 1989 when she was 81. She also loved nothing more than a good flutter.
As she watched the runners parade before the Derby in 2011 she was so convinced that a horse called Pour Moi was going to win that she decided to put £50,000 on it at 10-1. “I desperately rang friends who had accounts with Ladbrokes but couldn’t get in touch with anyone in time,” she revealed in her memoirs.
“Pour Moi beat the favourite and the Queen’s horse Treasure Beach by a head.”
Far from kicking herself about missing out on scooping half a million pounds in winnings she claimed that she couldn’t have cared less about the cash. After all Lady Ursula had always been more interested in the romance of life and its myriad situations.
As one of her close friends, Sir Claude Hankes, put it following her death on November 2: “She was a grand lady of an ilk of positive, pragmatic common sense with an inquiring mind and a wicked sense of humour and a flirt until she died.”