‘Christabel was a liberated woman’
employ nearly 40 staff. She drove a car, a motorcycle and could also fly an aircraft.
The couple actually needed the money her dress enterprise brought in, as John was not wealthy by aristocratic standards.
He earned £275 a year from the Vickers aviation engineering company plus a £100 annual allowance from his father.
Combined, it was the equivalent of around £16,500 in today’s money.
Christabel drew a salary of £400 from her dress shop on Curzon Street, Mayfair.
The average annual pay of a labourer was £60 and a train driver £120.
When the Russells moved to a small house in Chelsea, John was mostly away on submarine duties, leaving Christabel to resume her extensive socialising.
A week before Christmas 1920, the couple shared a bed at Oakley House.
Normally, they had separate bedrooms but this time the priggish Lady Ampthill put them in the same chamber to keep up appearances. Later the following year, Christabel was astonished to discover she was five months pregnant.
John disclaimed paternity, insisting conception must have been at one of the flats and hotels where his wife had admitted spending nights with, in her husband’s words, “a string of detestable young men”.
He sued for divorce on grounds of adultery, naming two co-respondents and one unknown person. Yet Christabel claimed that while she had never had full intercourse with her husband, she had not had sex with any other man either.
She insisted she was a virgin and produced medical expert evidence that prior to the birth of Geoffrey in October 1921 her hymen was only partly perforated.
She also claimed on that pre-christmas night her husband had undertaken unspecified “Hunnish scenes” – and had tried unsuccessfully to rape her.
She revealed she had used his bathroom sponge to clean herself afterwards and later soaked herself in a bath recently vacated by her husband.
AS A RESULT, Christabel’s baby, Geoffrey, became known as the “Sponge Baby” or “The Baby in the Bath”. Newspaper headlines would focus on the “Virgin Birth”.
In the divorce case John charged that Christabel had “cavorted” across the Continent, writing home about “slim, silky Argentines” and “marcel-waved” Italians who courted her.
Christabel wrote to a female friend: “I have been so frightfully indiscreet all my life that he (John) has enough evidence to divorce me about once a week.” However, she insisted they had not slept with her and medical experts conceded her story of Geoffrey’s conception might be true.
A 10-month gestation was not unknown, and impregnation without penetration, though rare, was possible. Still, the jury in the second trial found her guilty of adultery with an unnamed man.
Yet despite the number of co-respondents cited, she won sizeable public support, largely as she presented herself as a doting mother to her infant son.
King George V was said to be appalled by the salacious newspaper coverage and in 1926 a law was brought in to restrict reporting of divorce cases.
Christabel lost on appeal but had the verdict overturned at the House of Lords, which ruled that no child born after a marriage could be declared illegitimate merely on the testimony of a parent. The implication was Christabel was no adulteress and her son Geoffrey was the legitimate heir to the Ampthill title and wealth.
Christabel’s biographer Bevis Hillier said the sensational news headlines made her Britain’s most famous woman in 1924.
She later designed costumes for several films and in 1941 created Elizabeth Jane Howard’s wedding trousseau using parachute silk because of wartime conditions.
She continued to have “boyfriends”, including a champion fencer, and in 1957 emigrated to County Meath, Ireland, where she became Master of the Ballymacad Hunt, before moving to a castle in County Galway.
SHE TOOK the young Anjelica Huston, five-year-old daughter of Hollywood director John, riding and hunting. Huston recalled: “She spoke in the slow, emphatic English of the Anglo upper class. The way she held herself was something from the 18th century. It led to the idea she was aloof but she wasn’t. She was sweet. She was very welcoming”.
When John, Lord Ampthill, died in 1973, he left the vexed question of who should succeed him. In 1950, during his third marriage, he had fathered a son, also John.
A House of Lords committee confirmed Geoffrey as lawful heir and the 4th Lord Ampthill. After a career as a theatrical impresario, he became Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords.
However, Christabel never lived to hear the judgment, as she had died of a stroke in Galway aged 80 a week earlier.
Shortly before her death she said she would pass “without one backward look that saddens or distresses me”.