Lady Lucy Houston DBE

Aviation Champion and Mother of the Spitfire

Miles Macnair

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473879386
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The life-story of Lady Lucy Houston DBE must surely be one of the most romantic and dramatic epics of the last one hundred and fifty years, yet nowadays she is a woman unknown. She was a renowned beauty with a sharp intelligence, and over the years she would exploit her charismatic charm, first as a teenager to entice a wealthy lover, and subsequently to lead three husbands to the altar.She was an ardent and productive campaigner for womens rights, conducting outstanding works of charity during the Great War, such as providing a convalescent home for nurses returning from the front line. In recognition of these endeavours, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1917. After the death of her third husband, a known misogynist, under mysterious circumstances, she was temporarily certified mad, but his Will was to make her the richest woman in England. During the rest of her eventful and eccentric lifetime, she spent her fortune on a vast number of charitable causes, whilst waging a feisty political campaign against weak British politicians of all parties. As a great admirer of how Mussolini had restored Italys patriotic self-esteem, she championed men like Winston Churchill as the future saviour of her own beloved country. But her greatest legacy arose from her steadfast support for the Royal Air Force, whose finances were being crippled. She funded the 1931 Schneider Trophy Race as well as the Houston-Mount Everest Expedition of 1933. This funding had a crucial bearing on the development of the Merlin engine and the Spitfire aircraft, essentially kick starting the chain of events that would ultimately end in allied victory during the Battle of Britain. She died before the cataclysmic war that she so accurately predicted however, her death being precipitated by an infatuation with Edward, Prince of Wales.In spite of her many eccentricities, the enchanting, infuriating, inspiring and endlessly controversial Lucy Houston deserves to be remembered as a very patriotic lady indeed.

Chapter 1

Beginning at the End

29 December 1936. Lucy had not left her bed for several days. She was in her eightieth year and although there was a bitter wind blowing across Hampstead Heath she had ordered her staff to keep all the windows in the house wide open. The tray of food that had been brought up to her was untouched – again. Lucy had decided that she no longer wished to live. The world outside that she had enlivened with her feisty glamour and vitality for seven decades was crumbling around her and she knew that her country, the England she loved and that she had fought so hard to defend against its own politicians, was heading for another catastrophic war. One of the richest and most generous-hearted women in the country had decided to starve herself to death.

As she slipped in and out of consciousness, one can imagine that past memories from her eventful life would have flitted through her mind. Her heart had been truly broken only once before, when the love of her life, the man she had lived with in Paris for ten years since she was 16, had died in her arms in 1883. What a glamorous, carefree time she and Frederick Gretton had shared together! Now, as her unseen neighbours prepared to celebrate the New Year, she was in mourning over another bereavement, not a mortal death but the end of a romantic illusion that collapsed when she heard a broadcast on the wireless a fortnight before. That was the day when her adored idol King Edward VIII announced his abdication and his intention to marry the American divorcée Wallis Simpson. How could he be so weak-willed? How could he have allowed himself to be bullied by the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury into renouncing the throne and deserting his country? He had even come to visit her in person recently. For Lucy, who saw patriotic duty as a moral priority above selfish indulgence, his abdication was the last straw.

Perhaps, above the noise of wind and the billowing curtains, she might have heard the sound of an aircraft flying overhead, even one powered by the revolutionary new Rolls-Royce ‘Merlin’ engine. She would have read about the first flight of the prototype ‘Spitfire’ fighter the previous March and she could enjoy a glow of satisfaction to think that neither would have been developed so quickly without her bold, impulsive initiative five years earlier. At last it seemed that the dunderheaded politicians she despised so much had heeded her prophetic warnings, men like Ramsay MacDonald, to her mind a secret communist lurking under the disguise of a so-called socialist, and Stanley Baldwin, an indecisive nonentity who was leading the Conservative party, where precisely? Thank goodness there were still some talented men who retained a patriotic vision of a Great Britain with its great Empire, men like Lord Lloyd and her hero Winston Churchill. Ah, dear Winston! – her mind doubtless wandered back to the day in 1927 when she had wheedled her way to a flirtatious encounter in his office at the Treasury.

The daylight had faded and soon the country would be swallowed up in the darkness of a winter night, in the same way that Lucy saw the whole British democratic process. She could recall another era, when she had been an ardent suffragist and a passionate advocate of votes for women. It was surely just reward for their hard work and sacrifices during the terrible Great War. She had seen not only wounded soldiers coming back from the front, but also the brave young nurses who had treated them in dressing stations behind the lines, and who had been traumatised by the experience.

She had to do something just for them. And what, she must have wondered, had that grim conflict been fought for anyway? A flawed Treaty and the setting up of the ineffectual League of Nations? To Lucy the League had never been more than just a toothless talking-shop, particularly after the United States had opted out and slunk back into isolationism. There had been one man who seemed to her to have at least some of the answers, a man of strong convictions who had a dream of combining centralised capitalism with social justice, at the same time stemming the tide of communism. Most important to Lucy was that this vision of national economic resurgence would be managed under a reconstituted monarchy. Benito Mussolini had seemed like the role-model of a politician for the third decade of the twentieth century. Now, however, he had gone a step too far with his invasion of Abyssinia, threatening to apply a pincer grip on Britain’s interests around the Suez Canal. Her one-time political hero had proved as untrustworthy as the rest of them, and if he now cosied up to that brute Adolf Hitler, Lucy did not want to live to see the outcome. How often had she warned of another catastrophic war, even worse than the last, with London in flames and terrified children running screaming through the streets?

The maid had come up to turn the lights on in the bedroom but had been dismissed. Lucy never knew any of their names nowadays and there seemed to be a different one every week. She was becoming delirious and knew that she must be close to death. Lying in the darkness her mind may have wandered back to her three weddings and the three men she had enticed to the altar. How different they had been from one another. Theodore Brinckman had been a true gentleman, and we could possibly have been so happy together if only I had been able to have children and he had not been unfaithful. And then there had been bankrupt, ‘red-nosed’ Lord Byron, great-nephew of the illustrious poet and scandalous roué. Ah, poor George, what a liability you were for all those sixteen years we were together. So different from Robert Houston! He had been a real man, once upon a time so handsome, with his black beard and penetrating dark eyes. By 1922 ‘Black Bob’ was in poor health and more cantankerous than ever; but he did have one cardinal virtue, and that was that he was rich – very, very rich indeed. Getting him to the altar, against the advice of his few friends and relations, had been a real challenge. At least I only had to put up with living with him as his nurse for fifteen months; his death had certainly set the tongues wagging.

A few last moments perhaps to reflect on all the other challenges she had faced, the myriads of people who had benefited from her charity, the political battles she had fought, her journalistic crusade, and the great patriotic adventures she had inspired and financed. And her own childhood, happy days in a loving family, when she had been allowed to run wild through the back streets of the city of London, streets that echoed to the clarion call of the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral …

Chapter 2

The Dancing Nymph and a Teenage Love Affair

It would be quite wrong to think that the girl christened as Fanny Lucy Radmall had been a street urchin, a child brought up in rags and poverty. She had been born as far back as 1857, on 8 April to be precise, though she kept her true age a closely guarded secret throughout her life. Her birth certificate states that she was born at number 13 Lower Kennington Green, in the district of Lambeth, South London. The road no longer exists but the area, on the edge of Camberwell, was of bourgeois respectability at the time. It seems to have been a very temporary address anyway.

Back in 1840 her father, Thomas Radmall, had married Maria Isabella Clark, who had her own career as a ‘wardrobe dealer’ – which meant clothes rather than furniture – while his profession throughout the 1840s and 50s was described as ‘warehouseman’. Their first four surviving children, three daughters and one son, had been born in Islington, but by 1861 the family address was 13 Newgate Street in the parish of Christchurch, close to St Paul’s Cathedral. Lucy’s father was now described as a woollen draper and it seems that he had moved his family to live ‘above the shop’, so that the premises could become store, counting-house and home all in one. Lucy was the seventh child, two more sons having been born in 1850 and 1852, and the last child, another daughter, Florence, would arrive in 1863 when their mother was 45. In 1871, Thomas Radmall was recorded as a ‘picture-frame maker’, employing a joiner and a spoke-shaver, living with his wife Maria at 21 Church Lane, in the parish of St Mary, Whitechapel. There is however no mention of any of the children at that address, though little Florence is noted as staying with one of her elder, married brothers, Thomas G. Radmall, a wine merchant in Croydon, and his wife. Lucy seems somehow to have evaded the census collectors completely.

So much for the known facts about Lucy’s family background as a child growing up in London. Her parents seem to have been moderately prosperous, providing a happy environment for all their children, and the sons were certainly given good educations, two of them going on to professions in the City as commission agents in stockbroking firms. It seems likely that Lucy was the wild-child of the family, by her own admission much happier scampering round the backstreets of the city and playing hide-and-seek around the gravestones of St Pauls than taking lessons. She may have had a governess, but in later life she had a wholesome contempt for education. ‘Too much,’ she said, ‘addles the brains,’ adding that in her case it inhibited her sort of active, seeking mind – ‘the world was my university and humanity my perpetual mentor.’¹

Lucy was a very pretty girl, ‘a creature of tremendous vitality and utterly roguish charm, with tiny hands and feet, a wasp waist … and large impish eyes.’² There is just one surviving photograph of Lucy as a teenager, most discretely dressed and looking rather prim, with magnificent hair. [see PLATE B1] It is significant that this is a portrait from the studio of the society photographer Bassano.³ And it is Lucy’s dark, wide-apart eyes that captivate the viewer, along with her very pretty mouth. She herself claimed that she had become a ballet dancer, but Sir Arthur Pinero is quoted as saying that he had once encountered her as ‘a small part actress’.⁴ There is no doubt that by the age of 16 in 1873 she was on the stage of some theatre or music hall as a dancer or chorus girl, possibly in pantomime. The most famous impresario of such productions was Augustus Harris at the Drury Lane theatre, and Lucy claimed that she had been taken on by him when she turned up at his office with no introduction, no appointment, no influence and just refused to go away until he had offered her a job.⁵ In her later life, Lucy’s recollections were somewhat muddled concerning precise events and dates, and this particular story was probably a distortion of the facts because Harris did not return to England from France until 1877; and by this time Lucy had already made the same journey, but in reverse, four years earlier.

Precisely where Lucy performed is immaterial anyway; the important point is that this was the era when pretty young chorus girls played out a special role in the London entertainment scene. Young men – and some not so young – could ogle the tightly corseted girls through their opera glasses as they cavorted around the stage, exposing flashes of shapely legs and a hint of pert, well-rounded bosom. Young army officers and city gents, the ‘mashers’ in their top hats, white ties and tails, with a white scarf casually thrown over the shoulders, would tip the theatre staff to deliver notes to the dressing rooms during the intervals, and then throng around the stage door to whisk their pick of the evening out to supper in some intimate restaurant. It provided a liberating safety valve from the Victorian stuffiness under which such young men had been brought up.

Lucy may have only been enjoying such adulation for six weeks since she had been launched ‘on the boards’ when a particular admirer came into her life. Frederick Gretton was older than the typical ‘young blood’ and offered more than just dinner at a nearby restaurant; he took her to Paris. There they would live together for the next ten years as man and wife, losing themselves in a love affair of pure romantic indulgence. She was just 16 and he was 34, and what may have made the whole business more scandalous was that there were rumours that he might have already been secretly married. (This was speculated at the time, though there seems to be no record of any official wedding, but it may explain why Frederick never agreed to marry Lucy, the girl he was so obviously in love with.)

Frederick Gretton had been born in the spring of 1839, the second son of John Gretton, a partner in the brewery firm of Bass, Radcliffe & Gretton in Burton-on-Trent. In 1861 it was recorded that John Gretton employed 1,084 men and 83 boys in what was probably the largest brewery in England, if not the world. His eldest son, also called John, was then aged 24 and was in the business, while the 22-year-old Frederick was described as ‘Gentleman, Lieutenant in the 8th company of the Staffordshire Rifle Volunteers’. In his twenties, Frederick had taken quite a keen interest in the family business, particularly the more scientific aspects such as quality control, and he was made a partner in 1867 on the death of his father, with two shares that represented 12½ per cent of the issued capital.⁶ But in the long term the mashing of malt and the brewing of beer were not the life for Frederick, who got his intoxication from gambling on the ‘the sport of kings’ at Ascot, York and on Newmarket Heath. His father had left an estate of £80,000 and Frederick invested his share of the cash element in building up his own string of racehorses, including the famous stallion Isonomy. [see PLATE B3] Over the next fifteen years he would become one of the most famous owners in the country, respected for his judgement, admired for his flamboyant betting and no doubt secretly envied by many for his unconventional lifestyle. Probably leaving Lucy at their apartment in Paris, he would return to England for the main events of the flat racing season. Readers who are interested in Frederick Gretton’s contribution to this sport are referred to Appendix I.

Back to Lucy and her life in Paris, or rather to the frustration of our knowing very little about the years she spent with the man she often referred to as the ‘true love of my life’. In later years she would always treat his birthday as a very special occasion. ‘Mrs Gretton, as she became known, was a beautiful young coquette, with direct, impudent speech and a tiny waist, who became expert in Parisian fashions and manners. During their riotous partnership, Gretton gave her many gifts.’⁷ [see PLATE B2] Their unconventional relationship meant that socially they were ‘cut’ by the English aristocracy residing in the city, unlike their French friends for whom the idea of a rich ‘milord’ and his beautiful young mistress was quite normal and one to be applauded. Paris in the 1870s was coming to terms with a Third Republic after the military disaster of the Franco-Prussian War, which had culminated in the Battle of Sedan and the capture and exile of the Emperor Napoleon III. While the military suffered the legacy of disgrace, there was an explosion of artistic vitality, in music and theatre, in sculpture and particularly in painting. ‘The Impressionists’ had held their first exhibition in 1874 and artists’ studios and galleries became the prime places for the well-to-do of Paris to see and be seen.

It was in the studio of the painter Édouard Detaille, famous for his battle scenes, that Lucy was introduced to Edward Prince of Wales, the man known to his friends as ‘Bertie’ and later to be crowned as King Edward VII.⁸ ‘Bertie’ was a hugely popular figure in Paris, cheered by the crowds in public and applauded by audiences at the theatre when he appeared in his box arm in arm with his latest mistress. ‘From 1877, Bertie kept an apartment in a building on the Avenue de l’Opéra, an address he relished because it was the Right Bank’s epicenter of vice, then dubbed by one British aristocratic roué, Lord Hertford, as “the clitoris of Paris”.’ Lucy never joined the ranks of his intimates like the actress Sarah Bernhardt, but her meeting with ‘Bertie’ made a lasting impression on her and gave her a deep admiration and respect for the concept of a popular monarchy, one that through a combination of charm and diplomacy could exercise a power and authority beyond that of mere politicians. When, as we will see later, she attended his coronation in 1901, she was not just a mere member of the congregation, but had her own seat among the peers of the realm. Much later in her life she would lavish her devotion for the monarchy on another Prince of Wales, Bertie’s glamorous but wayward grandson Edward – with fatal consequences.

Nor was it only in the visual arts that these new expressions of originality were on show in Paris in the 1880s. The same skill and inventive energy was being put into couture dress-making, and into the kitchens of hotels, restaurants and private houses, where chefs were perfecting the classic cuisine for which the French would become famous the world over. Given Frederick Gretton’s wealth and flamboyance, he and Lucy probably dined out almost every night before going on to the opera or theatre. Lucy quickly became fluent in French and the glamorous couple would have been welcome guests at the tables of the Paris ‘haute-monde’, including the many Russian aristocrats who had made Paris their second home. Lucy’s biographer Warner Allen was himself a considerable gourmet and a noted expert on wines, but the chapter he wrote about the couple’s time in Paris was mere padding, largely given over to his own recollections of Parisian cuisine in the Edwardian era.⁹

It was in the studio of Édouard Detaille that Lucy struck up a lasting friendship with the dynamic Madame de Poles. This eccentric personality...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Beginning at the End
• Chapter 2: The Dancing Nymph and a Teenage Love Affair
• Chapter 3: The Toast of London and Mrs Brinckman
• Chapter 4: Lady Byron, a Suffragist from Hampstead
• Chapter 5: The Angel of Mercy
• Chapter 6: A Swing to the Right and Seducing the ‘Robber Baron’
• Chapter 7: Plots and Persecution
• Chapter 8: The Legacy of Versailles and the Fascination of Fascism
• Chapter 9: Winston Churchill and Lady Bountiful
• Chapter 10: A Whisper of Mortality
• Chapter 11: Wings Over the Water – the Schneider Trophy
• Chapter 12: The National Government, Squadrons of Planes for London and an Eccentric Clergyman
• Chapter 13: Oswald Mosley Rejected and Lucy Gets her New Man
• Chapter 14: Wings Over the Himalayas – the Houston-Mount Everest Expedition
• Chapter 15: The Saturday Review
• Chapter 16: Domestic Matters and More Racehorses
• Chapter 17: Lord Lloyd and the India Bill
• Chapter 18: ‘Our Champion Hoare’, the Abyssinian Crisis and the General Election of 1935
• Chapter 19: Patriotism, Charity and the Prince of Wales
• Chapter 20: King Edward VIII, the Engagement Ring and a Broken Heart
• Chapter 21: Epitaphs and What Happened Afterwards
• Appendix I: The Racehorses of Frederick Gretton
• Appendix II: Where Did Lucy’s Fortune Go?
• Appendix III: British General Elections 1920–37 and Changes of Prime Minister
• Appendix IV: The Value of Money
• Notes
• Bibliography