Latest news with #BerylMarkham
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Inside the British monarchy's history of mistresses - good enough for kings and princes to bed but not posh enough to marry, writes CHRISTOPHER WILSON
Kings and princes have had their mistresses since the dawn of time – women deemed desirable enough to share a royal pillow, but not posh enough to become a wife. Some, like King Charles II's bedfellow Nell Gwyn, ended up as duchesses, while others like William IV's Mrs Jordan ended their lives penniless and destitute. By its very nature being a royal squeeze is only a temporary assignment, not a job for life. And by the 20th century the British royal family reckoned it had devised a foolproof plan to get rid of their discarded lovelies. Put simply, it was to pay them to shut up and go away. Depending on the woman, this strategy was the gateway to fame and fortune – or the road to perdition. Take Beryl Markham, for instance, the flexible mistress who took two royal brothers – King Edward VIII and Harry, Duke of Gloucester – to bed. The tall, angular daughter of a horse-breeder, she was part of Kenya's Happy Valley set, and landed her royal double when the brothers came to Africa on tour in the 1920s. In one glorious season she alternated between both men before settling on the dimwitted, gullible Harry Gloucester who, back in England, set her up in a hotel outside the back gate of Buckingham Palace. Soon she was telling Harry that he was to be the father of her child, and the royal machine was set in motion – Harry, desperately in love, was separated from her and packed off on a tour of Japan. Beryl gave birth to a son, and Harry's mother Queen Mary arranged for Beryl to be summarily paid off and sent away. Harsh treatment? Not necessarily. Beryl not only secured a lifetime's pay-check from the Palace for her entanglement with Harry, she had the last laugh too. The child wasn't Harry's at all, and if he'd bothered to count the months from one to nine, he would have realised it couldn't be. But off the back of these strenouous bedtime activities, Beryl became rich and – later as a pioneer aviatrix – famous. Decidedly less fortunate was Kiki Preston, glamorous scion of the super-rich Vanderbilt family who lived in Paris and snared the oversexed George, Duke of Kent on his first visit to the city of love. Kiki was mad, bad and dangerous to know, introducing the Duke not only to her bed but to addictive substances such as cocaine and morphine. George became addicted to both the woman and her drugs. When he returned to London Kiki followed, but emissaries of the duke's father King George V knocked on her door and told her to go away. She did. Legend has it that Kiki took away not only royal money but the prince's child. For years it was whispered that 'Kiki had borne George a son', and then given the child away. But for once the rumour mill was wrong – a royal bastard was indeed born in 1926, but he wasn't George's child – or Kiki's. The father was, once again, the dimwit Harry, Duke of Gloucester and the mother Violet Evans, daughter of a Canadian coal magnate who came to London and, with her money and good looks, had been swept into the royal circle. In this case, responsibility for the child was shuffled off onto a fellow cavalry officer, Ian Karslake, who married Violet and took her to Switzerland where the baby was born before being given away to an adoption agency. The Karslake marriage soon foundered and, overcome with remorse at the loss of her only child, Violet committed suicide in 1951, gassing herself in her bedroom. By an eery and tragic coincidence, Kiki Preston had led the way by throwing herself off a New York hotel balcony five years earlier. But by far the most bizarre royal mistress tale comes from Marjory Haddon, an electrifying brunette who bedded a prince - then got paid just £5 to go away. Marjory was the wife of an Indian Army officer who was part of the royal entourage accompanying the future king Prince Albert Victor, known as Eddy, as he made a three-month tour of the Indian sub-continent in 1890. That the sex-mad prince had an affair with Marjory is beyond question – lawyers for the royal family later bought back the steamy love letters he'd sent her in a desperate attempt to damp down publicity over the affair. But for Marjory, that wasn't enough. She came to London – abandoning her husband and three other children – claiming that her newborn son Clarence was Prince Eddy's. He wasn't. But what followed was a mad, confused and dizzying tale worthy of a Hollywood movie. King George V received letters demanding money with menaces, as Clarence Guy Gordon Haddon said he wouldn't settle for less than the equivalent of £3,000 a year as the price of his silence Marjory ended up in a Paddington guest house with the probable father of her child, an officer in the Kings Own Scottish Borderers, before locking horns with royal officials and demanding money and recognition. But her royal lover Prince Eddy was already dead, whisked away at the age of 28 by influenza. Having negotiated the return of his letters, courtiers felt confident enough to order Marjory out of the country – buying her a one-way ticket back to India with just £5 spending money. It set the beautiful temptress off on a spiral path, changing her name from Marjory to Mary to Maria - and her husbands just as often. Her husband ended the marriage, whereupon she became entangled with a local doctor which ended up with a notorious divorce case back in 1898. Her slide down the social ladder had begun. She married another soldier – this time a non-commissioned officer in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment - and when that failed, a man called Gorbold who'd worked in the boot trade who took her to Australia. To ensnare him she'd chopped ten years off her age and lied about her parentage. But soon Gorbold died and she returned to London, where in 1912 – now an alcoholic and beset by mental problems – she was arrested outside Buckingham Palace with two loaded pistols in her possession. She said she wanted the royal family to buy two properties she owned. The one-time love of a future king had clearly lost all reason and was bundled away, never to be seen again. That wasn't the end of it. Marjory had convinced her son that he was a royal love-child. Born Gordon Guy Haddon, she'd added Clarence as a first name – Prince Eddy's title was Duke of Clarence and Avondale – and as Clarence Haddon he was to cause the royal family more woe when he published a book titled 'King George, My Uncle', laying claim to his royal bloodline. The madness which had infected his mother had passed to him, and after sending King George V letters demanding money with menaces, Haddon said he wouldn't settle for less than the equivalent of £3,000 a year as the price of his silence. 'Clarence' threatened to walk the streets of London wearing billboards naming the King as his uncle, and was followed by Special Branch police and finally arrested. Let off with a warning, he repeated the allegations and was jailed. He died, still believing the lies his mother had told him – that he was a royal love child – at the age of 52 in 1943.
Telegraph
28-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The biplane that changed Britain: how ‘the Moth' took off
When, now long ago, I told my grandmother that I had just read Beryl Markham's book West with the Night, she was delighted. 'Oh, Beryl Markham! The last time I saw her, she was in the arms of the Prince of Wales under the wings of your grandfather's Puss Moth.' Only years later, during the research for my book, Captain de Havilland's Moth, would I make the connection: the occasion would have been the London Aeroplane Club's summer party of 1930. Markham was at that time conducting simultaneous affairs with the future The Moth quickly became a favourite of the wealthy and leisured. But when Captain Geoffrey de Havilland designed it, his dream was to do for the aeroplane what Henry Ford had done for the car with his Model T – to make what had been a preserve of the few a realistic proposition for many. If he could come up with a package that combined light weight with simplicity, ease of operation, reasonable speed and range, as close to £500 as possible, he would be successful. In the end, a Moth cost £650, putting it just in range of the emerging professional classes, and cruised at around 75mph carrying two people and overnight bags for up to 300 miles before needing to refuel. It was the world's first genuinely practical aircraft for the private owner. The princes, though, found themselves among familiar company. The monarch-in-waiting had many Moth owners in his friendship group: Denys Finch Hatton, famous for organising the prince's two African safaris and latterly as Karen von Blixen's doomed lover in Out of Africa, was one. Then there was Freddie Guest MP, a cousin of Often during my research, I found the Moth's least expected pilots the most interesting: in particular, the women. Amy Johnson, the typist from Hull, famously flew her Moth to Australia in 1930. Johnnie, as she liked to be called, was representative of a group of pilots who stood outside the ranks of the uber-privileged and who were the first champions of private aviation. Then there was Lotfia Elnadi, a telephonist from Cairo who, in the same year, became the first African woman to gain her pilot's licence. Though her mother gave full support, her father was unconvinced that this was at all a good idea until she flew him over the pyramids. He was an immediate convert. Another remarkable female pilot was Sophie Heath, who grew up in tragic circumstances. Her father, a member of the Irish Protestant Ascendancy, bludgeoned his wife to death while she held the baby Sophie in her arms. Brought up by a pair of disapproving aunts, Sophie was outstanding both academically and as an athlete becoming, first, an agricultural scientist and then a founder member of the Women's Athletics Association. As a competitor at the London Women's Olympiad of 1924, she won the silver medal in long-jump. In 1926, she became the first person to attain a private pilot's licence on a Moth and, incidentally, also the first woman in England to make a parachute jump from an aircraft. Her first husband having died, she married Sir James Heath, a man almost 45 years older than she was. Thereafter, Sophie was a regular air-racing competitor until Sir James, tired of bankrolling a woman he claimed he never saw, put a stop to his wife's gallivanting by announcing publicly that he would no longer be paying her bills and would be divorcing her in favour of a woman even younger than she was. Sophie went on to befriend the American aviation pioneer, Amelia Earhart, and, later, to set up a business operating Moths in Ireland. It was ultimately unsuccessful but arguably she did just as much as Amy Johnson to advance the role of women in this country. There were some tragic stories too. Maurice Wilson hoped to be the first person to climb Everest. He would achieve this by crash-landing his Moth halfway up. The son of a Bradford mill owner, Wilson was a decorated survivor of the First World War who never succeeded in settling down following his traumatic experiences in the trenches. Buying a second-hand Moth in January 1933, his aim was to learn to fly and take it out to the Himalayas to reach the summit in time for his birthday in May. Despite the best efforts of the British authorities to thwart him, he made it as far as the foothills – crossing the Middle East without proper maps – before his aeroplane was finally impounded. Undaunted, he set off on foot, eventually dying of exposure at 23,000 feet. His body was discovered a year later – not, though, clad in the women's underwear that he was suspected of wearing, even if his latest biographer makes clear that Wilson was, beyond doubt, a transvestite. Wilson's lack of maps was familiar to all of those who undertook long-distance flights at that time. For her flight up the west coast of Africa, Lady Bailey used one that she had cut out of a cruise ship brochure. Aspy Engineer and his friend RN Chawla used a school atlas to get them from Cairo to Croydon. It is hardly surprising to learn that they landed 80 miles from Paris in bad weather on what was supposed to be the penultimate leg of their flight. Nor is it surprising that they should have landed in Norfolk instead of at Croydon on what was in fact their penultimate leg. What is astonishing, however, is that when he flew himself successfully back to Karachi to win the Aga Khan Trophy for being the first Indian national to fly solo between the two countries in under a month, Aspy Engineer was just 17. Truthfully, de Havilland's dream of flying for everyman was only fulfilled when he designed the Comet, the world's first jet airliner in the late 1940s. But the Moth was an important step along the way. What is clear is that, collectively, these exploits in the Moth showed that flying could actually be safe, and, at least potentially, open to all. In doing so, they sealed the reputation of Captain de Havilland's Moth as being one of the most successful, and certainly the most iconic, light aircraft of all time. by Alexander Norman (Abacus, £25) will be published on Feb 6
