Sheila
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Sheila

The Australian ingenue who bewitched British society

Robert Wainwright

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eBook - ePub

Sheila

The Australian ingenue who bewitched British society

Robert Wainwright

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About This Book

Vivacious, confident and striking, young Australian Sheila Chisholm met her first husband, Lord Loughborough, in Egypt during the First World War. Arriving in London as a young married woman, she quickly conquered English society, and would spend the next half a century inside the palaces, mansions and clubs of the elite. Her clandestine affair with young Bertie, the future George VI, caused ruptures at Buckingham Palace, with King George offering his son the title Duke of York in exchange for never hearing of Sheila again.

She subsequently became Lady Milbanke, one of London's most admired fashion icons and society fundraisers and ended her days as Princess Dimitri of Russia, juggling her royal duties with a successful career as a travel agent. Throughout her remarkable life, Sheila won the hearts of men ranging from Rudolph Valentino and Vincent Astor to Prince Obolensky, and maintained longstanding friendships with Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward, Idina Sackville and Nancy Mitford.

A story unknown to most, Sheila is a spellbinding account of an utterly fascinating woman.

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Year
2017
ISBN
9781925575392
1
TO PROVE THAT A GIRL COULD DO IT
It was a farewell tea, or at least that’s the way the occasion would be described in the social pages of The Sydney Morning Herald. In hindsight though, this casual social event was probably more a beginning than an end. The young woman at the centre of attention was on her way to adult life—with all its possibilities and pitfalls.
On the afternoon of March 31, 1914, eighteen-year-old Miss Sheila Chisholm and a few dozen friends and family chatted over tea and sandwiches beneath the arches on the first-floor balcony of the grandest establishment in Sydney, the Hotel Australia. Out on the balcony, they chose to ignore the hotel’s interior splendour, with its soaring red marble Doric columns and mahogany staircase, so as to relish the autumn sunshine and the noise of the city and Castlereagh Street below.
Not far away, in the midst of the harbour jostle lay the steamship SS Mongolia, due to leave the following morning for a six-week voyage to London with a cargo of the best of Australia’s produce—wool, leather, fur, tin, copper and lead, as well as cases of refrigerated meat and meat extract, crates of apples and boxes of pearl shell. The ship would also carry a human cargo—up to 400 first- and second-class passengers plucked from the Australian capitals—as she made her way around the southern coast and then across the Indian Ocean toward Africa, the Suez Canal and on to Europe. Among those who paid £45 for passage, the equivalent of seven months’ wages for a working woman, were Sheila Chisholm and her mother, Margaret, who were travelling to Europe for at least six months—France, England, Germany and Italy—hence the farewell gathering.
Australia may have grasped a degree of political independence after its declaration of federation in 1901, but its upper echelons remained firmly attached to the matronly bosom of England; the wife and only daughter of prominent grazier and bloodstock agent, Mr Harry Chisholm, were joining the great annual migration of well-to-do families paying homage to the rituals of British society.
It was daunting and exciting, particularly for a young woman who had spent the best part of her life on a grazing property named “Wollogorang”, a local Aboriginal word meaning “Big Water” because the property bordered a large lagoon, which was a two-day ride south of Sydney and 60 kilometres from where Canberra would eventually rise.
Like her father and older brothers, John and Roy, Sheila had been born in the main bedroom of the two-storey stone homestead and reared in the practical, if privileged, colonial environment of working men. Her birth notice in The Sydney Morning Herald—sans the names of either the mother or daughter—had reflected a world that was spare, both in its comforts and attitude to women: “CHISHOLM—September 9, the wife of Harry Chisholm, Wollogorang, Breadalbane, a daughter.”
When the baby was finally named, she was christened Margaret Sheila MacKellar Chisholm, but from an early age she would go by her second name, taken from the heroine of a book that had inspired her mother, who eschewed her husband’s suggestions of naming her after one of two godmothers or Queen Victoria, as “the idea of the former is mercenary and the latter snobbish”.
Despite the challenges of a rural life, Sheila was brought up in what she later described as “an atmosphere of love and sympathy. I adored my mother and father.” Harry Chisholm was tall and prematurely silver-haired, with the firm-eyed gaze of a man who spent his days in the sun. In the months before his daughter was born in 1895, he had pursued his love of racehorses by establishing what would become Australia’s largest bloodstock agency. He was a hardened businessman but at home Sheila would recall a doting father who filled her head and heart with stories about heroic bushrangers like Captain Thunderbolt and quoted poems from Adam Lindsay Gordon. He couldn’t resist his young daughter, even her habit of referring to him by his nickname, “Chissie”, something his sons would never dream of doing.
Harry had known Margaret MacKellar since they were children and married the slim, fair beauty when she turned sixteen. “She was an extremely intelligent woman, twenty years ahead of her generation and a suffragette at heart,” Sheila would recall in her unpublished memoir, which she would begin penning in the late 1940s. “Had we lived in England, I can easily imagine her doing violent things and being under the influence of Mrs Pankhurst.”
The family homestead was an English retreat inside a spare colonial landscape of “brown rolling country, purple hills beyond and gentian-blue skies”. The main building was pale yellow washed stone with French doors opening onto trim lawns with English oaks and elms, and a wooden bridge leading to a pond surrounded by willow trees, all created seventy years earlier by her paternal grandfather, James Chisholm, son of a Scottish soldier who arrived in Australia with the Third Fleet in 1790. Her father had inherited Wollogorang after his older brother, Jack, had died when thrown from his horse. Jack Chisholm’s ghost is said to still haunt the homestead.
This was a wealthy household, with a main house containing dining room, drawing room and her mother’s sitting room downstairs and her parents’ private rooms upstairs. There were also two wings: one for Sheila, her brothers and guests, and the other for the household staff of five, including Sheila’s nanny, whom she called “Ninget”. Sheila would always remember the wallpaper in her bedroom, patterned with clusters of tiny roses “all seeming to have little faces. I constantly counted them as I lay in bed—an eccentricity I have to this day.”
Her childhood home was “beautifully run but old-fashioned and rather shabby”, always with masses of flowers arranged by her mother, who wore elaborate, clinging dresses known as tea-gowns in the evenings while her father and brothers wore dinner jackets, a formality that was rare among station owners.
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John, or “Jack” as he was known, and Roy were seven and four when their sister was born: “They had both prayed ardently for a baby sister and I became a toy to them. They alternately spoiled and teased and tormented me. I was rather a timid child, but I tried to be brave and to do all the things my brothers did because they were proud of me and said I was almost as good as any boy.

“I was sensitive and imaginative with large, hazel eyes and a pale, heart-shaped face and short hair. I was allowed to go about in riding breeches except on Sundays when we all went to church. Then I had to wear a stiff muslin frock with a wide sash bow at the back. The parson and his tiresome wife usually had luncheon with us afterwards. I disliked her because she constantly remarked: ‘Little girls should be seen and not heard’. She never said anything disagreeable about the boys. I hated being a girl and used to pray that God would turn me into a boy overnight.”

The conflict of being a female in a male world and being expected to behave in a certain manner would be a constant struggle and a mark on her life, Sheila once making herself sick by drinking a bottle of Worcestershire sauce when challenged by her brothers “to prove them wrong and in defence of my sex”. She adored the wildness of her fourteenth-birthday present, a black mare named Mariana, which she rode with deliberate abandon and laughed when the grooms told her she would “break her bloody neck”.
These were important statements of independence, perhaps not so much intended for those around her but to satisfy herself, like the day she harnessed Mariana to a cart called a longshafter and, without telling anyone, drove to the nearby village of Breadalbane to collect the mail, only to be thrown and almost killed when her horse bolted after being confronted with a rare sight on country roads—a motor car: “It did not teach me a lesson,” she wrote. “Nothing ever does.”
Sheila loved the farm, separated from the main house by a dusty ribbon of road, but was caught between its mystery and its horror; delighted at the overnight arrival of baby pigs, goats and cows, and disgusted yet intrigued by the bloody slaughterhouse: “I occasionally sat on the fence and watched the pen man cut a sheep’s throat and then skin the poor animal.”
The shearing shed was the real attraction, with its rough workers like Jock, who had amputated his own foot with an axe rather than let the poison from a tiger snake kill him. The shed was no place for a girl, he told her, before allowing her a turn at being a tar boy, to dab and brush tar to seal nicks on sheep when the shears drew blood. “This made me feel most important, but I was always sorry for the sheep, their lives seemed to me to be hideous: they were eternally herded together in their thousands, driven for miles amidst clouds of dust in the burning sun, dogs snapping at their heels, kicked and cursed, then shorn and often badly cut. No wonder they looked so bewildered!”
The young girl sat enthralled on top of the 6-metre fence of the “round yard” to watch her brothers break horses. By the age of nine they had taught her to ride any horse, swim and crack a stock whip. She had killed her first snake and watched it be devoured on an anthill and once galloped for hours at dawn in a wild kangaroo hunt with her brothers and a pack of dogs. “It had taken months to persuade an apprehensive mother and indulgent father . . . that I was old enough and could ride well enough to go out with the boys. I had a strong will and I knew it. I was excited and secretly terrified . . . my heart beating so fast I could hardly breathe . . . but of course, I never admitted it.”
She kept a variety of pets, including a piglet and a lamb born on the same day, which she fed with a bottle and which followed her everywhere. When a pet died, she would arrange an elaborate funeral service. The body of the animal would be placed on a goat cart, which the gardener then led to a pet cemetery near the orchard. Sheila followed dressed in the robes of a nun: “The ceremony would always include Mummy and Ninget . . . and occasionally Jack and Roy if they felt in the mood. I would read a few words of the burial service and a cross with the animal’s name on it would mark the grave.”
Of all her animals it was the rabbits she collected that especially caught her heart; forbidden creatures she’d hide in the wine cellar when the government inspectors arrived every few months, trying to eradicate the introduced menace that was so out of control across Australia that if Sheila gazed off into the distance at dusk their sheer numbers made it look as if the hard brown land was moving.
As always though, there was a practical side to rural life: “Although my heart always ached for the rabbits, once they were dead it seemed different. Jack and Roy taught me to skin them expertly in 30 seconds. I was proud of the achievement.”
Occasionally Sheila would remove herself from the male world of the station and lie in the long grass of the orchard beneath the pear trees, where she would construct plays in her head, once convincing her brothers to dress up and put on a play she had written about a woman who ended up as a convent nun because of unrequited love.
Margaret Chisholm, encouraging her daughter’s creative spirit, gave her a bound copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning poetry for her fourteenth birthday, as well as a copy of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám and Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Her imagination soared: “I sometimes dreamed of flying to England and America in an airship, not unlike Arabian Nights and magic carpets.
“I suppose I was a queer mixture of romanticism and boyishness. I wrote these sentimental poems and stories, and yet was really happy with my horse and dogs and particular family pets. I liked to go out all day and help to round up the sheep and cattle, and I once swam my horse over a swollen river for a bet. I was quite unconscious of my looks.”
Jack and Roy would certainly not tolerate any notion that their sister was anything but a tomboy, washing her face under an old pump near the kitchen the day they detected she had a dash of powder on her nose and teasing her about having a 43-centimetre waistline. Sheila accepted it with good grace but was embarrassed when they found her secret book in which she wrote her poems and began tittering over a verse titled “Is It Love?”:
Is it love, this nameless longing?
This aching, lonely feeling,
that round my heart seems stealing,
and makes my pulse race.
Is it love that makes me want you?
Feel I cannot live without you,
is it love that makes me doubt you?
With your strange, elusive face.
Despite the isolation Sheila had several girl friends, relationships mostly made when the family rented a house in Sydney each year during the late summer. Mollee Little was her best chum, one of five children of the prominent pastoralist and businessman Charles Little, who had settled his family in a grand old mansion called Brooksby House, at the bottom of Ocean Avenue as the slope of Darling Point flattened out and slid into Sydney Harbour.
Mollee would come and stay at Wollogorang for holidays where they memorised Alice in Wonderland and read the poems of Baudelaire, talked about life and love and confided in each other: “We wondered what was just around the corner, beyond the lagoon—unknown, intangible, mysterious, exciting things—the places where you will never be, the lover you will never know. We didn’t really understand half the time what we were talking about. We decided that when we married, we must feel like the poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘A Woman’s Shortcomings’”:
Unless you can think, when the song is done,
No other is soft in the rhythm;
Unless you can feel, when left by One,
That all men else go with him;
Unless you can know, when unpraised by his breath,
That your beauty itself wants proving;
Unless you can swear “For life, for death!”—
Oh, fear to call it loving!
Sheila’s brother Roy was in love with Mollee, and Roy’s best friend, a boy called Lionel who would also come to stay at the property, was infatuated with Sheila. Although Mollee felt the same about Roy, Sheila couldn’t bring herself to declare romantic feelings for Lionel who pestered her about the future, promising to one day marry her and take her around the world in a “flying machine”. Despite her rebuttal of Lionel’s advances, they hung around with Roy and Mollee during holidays at Wollogorang as an “inseparable” foursome.
Sheila once tried to explain her feelings for a boy with whom she was quite happy to lie in the fields and wish on the evening star but knew she would never marry: “I suppose I loved Lionel in a childish way. I loved him as I loved my brothers only slightly differently which I couldn’t even explain to myself.”
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As Harry Chisholm’s business grew, so did the demands on his time in the city of Sydney, 200 kilometres to the north; here he made his way up the business and social ladders of colonial society, marking out his business territory in the heart of the CBD and creating his political base as a committeeman at the Australian Jockey Club.
Sheila had been educated at home for most of her formative years, making life as difficult as possible for the series of governesses who...

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