Washing one's mother's linen

Spectator, The, Oct 28, 2000 by Gilmour, David

Washing one's mother's linen

David Gilmour

THE VICEROY'S DAUGHTERS: THE LIVES OF THE CURZON SISTERS

by Anne de Courcy

Weidenfeld, L20, pp. 421

The lives of Lady Irene, Lady Cynthia and Lady Alexandra were connected by two powerful men. They were the daughters of Lord Curzon and they were among the lovers of Sir Oswald Mosley. Without these connections, nobody could want to read - or even write - this book.

George Curzon was a great viceroy, a successful foreign secretary and a passionate conservationist. But he was a lamentably bad father. He wanted his daughters to be delicate and submissive like their mother, who died young; instead, they were wilful and opinionated like him. He told them there were more serious things in life than knitting and reading novels. They agreed: fox-hunting, for example, dancing, going to parties, swarming around the Riviera, having love affairs and marrying the wrong men.

Curzon died when they were in their twenties, estranged from the elder two by disputes over money and on deteriorating terms with the youngest, who was not quite old enough to escape. Their stepmother (who also had intimate physical experience of Mosley) did not help these impulsive orphans. Stupid, selfish and vain, she spent most of their father's money and managed to secure most of their mother's jewellery.

The life of Cynthia ('Cimmie') has already been well told by her son Nicholas in a biography of his father. She made the mistake of marrying Mosley and paid for it with years of sarcasm, bullying and ostentatious philandering. On realising that Diana Mitford had finally captured her monstrous mate, she lost the will to live and died at the age of 34.

The lives of Irene and Alexandra ('Baba') were until now unchronicled and would have remained so had it not been for the bewildering decision of a son and a nephew to hand over their letters and diaries to a Daily Mail journalist who thrives on social gossip. Irene, whose intimacy with Mosley was limited to a drunken tumble after hunting, is the nicest and saddest figure in the book. Although several people proposed to her, she yearned for a married man who refused to leave his wife. For consolation she turned to drink, charitable work and looking after her sisters' children. In the summer holidays she took her nephews and nieces to the English seaside while Mosley and Baba cavorted (sometimes together) in the Mediterranean. She received little gratitude.

Almost the only other person who comes out well from this tawdry tale is Baba's husband, Major Metcalfe, known as 'Fruity' to everyone except the aged Queen Alexandra, who thought he was called 'Juicy'. Penniless, brave, amiable and rather dim, he realised from the beginning that he was the wrong person for the beautiful, imperious and much younger Baba. Intensely loyal himself, Fruity was repeatedly let down by the most important people in his life. Baba gave him three children and then neglected him for Mosley and a succession of other lovers, all of whom were richer, more intelligent and more sophisticated than her husband. His closest friend, the Duke of Windsor, callously exploited him. Despite years of service as companion and equerry, Fruity was abandoned in Paris in May 1940 when the ineffable former monarch fled to Biarritz. Like Irene, he was a kind and heavy-drinking loser.

The Viceroy's Daughters is a chronicle of gossip, scandal, sisterly bickering, political nastiness and the smart social gatherings that Anne de Courcy finds so extraordinarily exciting. The subtitle suggests that the author has written biographies of the Curzon sisters. She hasn't: she has written about them in the Twenties and Thirties when they were young, rich and naughty. The last 50 years of Baba's life are virtually ignored. We are told that `the main thrust of her life was her work for the Save the Children Fund, a commitment that lasted for more than 40 years'. But because the author doesn't find charities smart or sexy, she writes only half a page on the `main thrust' of her main character's life.

Anne de Courcy gushes breathlessly about the social round, the 'frenetic' Season, about wedding presents, menus, fancy-- dress parties and after-dinner games. Much of the book is Jennifer's Diary in hardback: entire paragraphs are consumed by lists - the guest lists at Cliveden weekends, the people dining at the Dorchester Hotel, the neighbours of the Windsors in the south of France. `The Dorch' exercises a peculiar fascination. We learn that inside it the Duchess of Westminster played bridge, that Roger Senhouse attended a dinner, that Sir George Clerk slept in the Turkish baths during air raids. But how could we possibly care? These characters do nothing in the book except belong (with a great many others) to these interminable lists.

Evidently an authority on the fashions of the period, the author details not only the livery of the Windsors' footmen in Antibes but also their Parisian costumes of `black suits with crimson, white and gold striped waistcoats with silver buttons, and gold-- collared scarlet waistcoats for large, formal dinners'. `Perfection reigned,' she purrs when describing that pointless couple's colour schemes for soap and towels.