Hither and Yon

Although she was based in London, Elswyth frequently travelled through England, often with friends Dorothy and Percy Marmont, he was a well-known actor of the time.

She was especially fond of British cathedrals, Winchester (“comforting, dependable, eternal, grand”) being her favourite. She knew its “tombs and chantries by heart”. At Wells (pictured right), she purposely sat in the Swan’s upstairs lounge because “its windows looked on the cathedral green”. In Salisbury Cathedral she waited until she saw “sunset fade from the windows of its great West Front”, then left through Harnham Gate because it led to a lane of high brick walls “overhung by heavy mingling sprays of jasmine and pink roses, pale in the slow twilight”. In describing Exeter Cathedral in 1938, Elswyth lovingly described its minstrel gallery, 1390 window, 1480 bell, and the 700-year-old clock. The next summer, as war loomed, she visited Gloucester Cathedral which she hadn’t seen since 1930.

Given her close association with Disraeli, it’s not surprising that Elswyth would spend time at his haunts, like Bradenham Manor (where he and his father had lived) and Hughenden Manor, the Georgian house which Disraeli turned into an ultra-gothic fantasy of battlements and pediments. She tried to imagine Dizzy’s reaction to the new “mechanical gambling game” in High Wycombe’s Red Lion Hotel and recounted how the interior of Beaconsfield’s Saracen’s Head “had been ‘improved’ to distraction for the benefit of the film trade from the studios nearby”.