Ursula, Lady Westbury

Stalwart of St John Ambulance and childhood friend of Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret

URSULA, LADY WESTBURY, who has died aged 99, was the Superintendent-in-Chief of St John Ambulance who organised a party for more than 100,000 children in Hyde Park featuring a nine-mile-long sausage; a lifelong friend of both Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, she took on informal royal duties including representing Princess Margaret at memorial services and chaperoning the 23-year-old Prince Andrew on a trip to New York.

She was born Ursula Mary Rose James on May 6 1924 in the house of her grandfather, the Earl of Scarbrough, at 21 Park Lane. In the communal garden on the edge of Hyde Park, she befriended Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, then living at 145 Piccadilly, with whom she would play hopscotch under the ilex. The Earl, who had been Prior of St John Ambulance since 1923, arranged for Ursula and her friends to be taught artificial respiration.

Ursula’s mother, Lady Serena James, née Lumley, was the Earl of Scarbrough’s only child; had she been a boy she would have inherited his estates. As it was, she inherited the Lumley Brick Company, which she passed on to Ursula.

Lady Serena had shocked her mother by marrying Robert James, son of the 2nd Lord Northbourne and a great horticulturalist. The Countess of Scarbrough’s objection was not that “Bobbie” James was a widower 28 years her daughter’s senior, but rather that Serena was “going to live in a little cottage by the road”.

In fact, Bobbie James’s house was the romantic 17th-century St Nicholas, built in the ruins of a medieval hospital on the edge of Richmond, Yorkshire. Ursula spent the war years there, with six evacuees, and was educated at the Convent of the Assumption in Richmond, although she was not a

Roman Catholic. In 1944 she went to

London and taught children at the convent in Kensington Square.

Through her half-brother Arthur James – from her father’s first marriage to Lady Evelyn Wellesley, daughter of the 4th Duke of Wellington – Ursula had a foot in the racier world of the Bright Young Things, thanks to Arthur’s short-lived marriage to Zita Jungman, one of the Jungman twins described by Cecil Beaton as “a pair of decadent 18th-century angels”.

Ursula James was doubly connected to the Wellesleys: in 1943, her aunt, Serena’s half-sister, the poet Dorothy Wellesley, became the Duchess of Wellington on her husband’s unexpected succession as the 7th Duke. The Duke lent Apsley House for the coming-out ball of Ursula’s younger sister, Fay, in July 1947; Princess Elizabeth dined with Ursula beforehand at the Dorchester, but left the ball early to announce at midnight her engagement to Prince Philip.

A few months later, Ursula James married Captain David Bethell, younger son of the Egyptologist Richard Bethell, who as Lord Carnarvon’s secretary had entered Tutankhamun’s tomb with Howard Carter in 1922. In 1929 Richard Bethell died mysteriously in his sleep; three months later, his father, the 3rd Baron Westbury, jumped to his death from the St James’s apartment where he kept the tomb artefacts.

David Bethell, seemingly untouched by “the pharaoh’s curse”, survived a lively war, winning an MC with the Scots Guards in Tunisia in 1943. Handsome and moustachioed, with a look of Lord Lucan, by the time of their courtship he was equerry to the Duke of Gloucester.

For their first date, he asked Ursula James to the races. Nervous, she made herself a new outfit out of a curtain, and arrived (characteristically) a few minutes late, mortified to realise that Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip constituted the rest of their party, and she had held them all up.

Both princesses attended the Bethells’ subsequent wedding at St Martin-in-theFields. Fifty years later, Queen Elizabeth II would attend their golden wedding anniversary.

From 1951, the Bethells made their home at Knapton Hall, near Malton, and had two sons and a daughter. In 1961, on the death of his older brother, Richard succeeded as Baron Westbury; after a desultory period selling fertiliser, he discovered a flair for public relations, representing Moët & Chandon and London hotels including the Ritz, where Princess Margaret often lunched with them. They also took the Queen, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret dancing in The Talk of the Town.

On the surface, the Westburys shared no interests, he being a Master of Foxhounds, obsessed with horses and dogs, to which she was indifferent.

Their house was filled, to her irritation, with dogs of all breeds, most egregiously an Irish wolfhound called Lena. One Sunday, Lena ate the joint of meat from the kitchen table and was evicted in punishment; revenge was later taken when the dog slipped back indoors and urinated all over her mistress’s bed.

What the Westburys had in common, however, was ebullience, strength of character, a taste for lively debate and a fascination with people from all walks of life. The Queen and Princess Margaret were frequent guests – as were Margaret and Denis Thatcher, Penelope Keith, Jimmy Tarbuck, Elaine Paige, and Derek Nimmo, who published the anthology Memorable Dinners with the Westburys’ help.

Lady Westbury’s career with St John Ambulance began in 1954, as County Vice-President of the East Riding of Yorkshire. On one occasion, she was on St John’s business at the docks when a striking docker sauntered over and said: “Have a drink with me, love.” She told him she would love to, but sadly she was driving. He replied: “You’ve got a bloody chauffeur and a bloody Rolls-Royce.” She said: “I’ve got a bloody Mini, and if you don’t believe me, you can come with me.” The docker was most impressed.

Lady Westbury accepted the post of Superintendent-in-Chief in 1983, despite trepidation (Princess Margaret told her: “You’ve got to do it”). Her new staff “had stiff ideas how I was going to do it, and I was going to do it my way,” she recalled. She toured Commonwealth countries, and modernised the women volunteers’ uniforms. In 1987, to complement the Cadets (volunteers aged 10-17), she founded the Badgers, for children between five and 11.

That year, with the help of Major Michael Parker, impresario of the Royal Tournament, she threw The Great Party in Hyde Park to mark the centenary of St John Ambulance. Lord Vestey donated a sausage weighing five and a half tons, which 50 Boy Scouts cooked on a massive saucepan. Mother’s Pride donated 100,000 slices of bread. Lady Westbury won over the various police departments with chocolate biscuits.

It rained solidly the week before. But on the day itself the clouds parted, and the roads were so thronged with the 40,000 St John’s volunteers coming to the party that Queen Elizabeth II was made late.

Lord Westbury organised a cheque for £100,000, charmed out of American Express, to be dropped by parachute on to a pony, then presented to the Queen in the royal box.

When it was all over, the police telephoned Lady Westbury to report that nine children had stayed behind: “They’re having a bloody good time, and they don’t want to go home.”

In 1990, she stepped down as Superintendent-in-Chief, and was appointed CBE and Dame Grand Cross. She was also, from 1984, President of the Women’s Electrical Association.

She raised more than £10 million for various charities, and served for decades on the grants sub-committee of the Royal Variety Charity.

Lady Westbury had a phenomenal memory for names and faces, and was stoic, humorous, forthright and determined to do what was right. She created wonderful, sweet-smelling gardens in Yorkshire and later in the communal garden of her Chelsea flat. She adored bridge, and in her final year was not only still driving, but was the proud recipient of her first speeding ticket.

Lord Westbury died in 2001. She is survived by two sons and a daughter.

Ursula, Lady Westbury, born May 6 1924, died November 25 2023

She was ebullient, with a taste for lively debate