Adventuress

The Life and Loves of Lucy, Lady Houston

Teresa Crompton

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780750993289
• eBook ISBN:
  9780750994439
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

In the 1930s Lady Lucy Houston was one of the richest women in England and a household name, notorious for her virulent criticisms of the government. But politics had been far from her mind when, as young Fanny Radmall, she had set out to conquer the world. Armed with only looks and self-confidence, she exploited the wealth and status of successive lovers to push her way into high society. Brushing off scandal, she achieved public recognition as an ardent suffragette, war worker and philanthropist. Having won control of her third husband's vast fortune, she enjoyed the trappings of wealth – jewellery, couture, racehorses and a luxury yacht – but she wanted more. Seeking influence in national politics, Lady Houston financed the first flight over Mount Everest, backed secret military research, and facilitated the development of the Spitfire aircraft. Engaging with famous contemporaries such as Winston Churchill and Oswald Mosley, Lucy sought her own public voice and so purchased a newspaper. Seeking to expose the Prime Minister as a Soviet agent and promote Edward VIII as England's dictator, Lucy was loved as a patriot but loathed as a troublemaker. Adventuress draws upon hitherto unpublished archival material to reveal how Lucy Houston achieved her fame and fortune, and how she exploited them.

1

NO LADY

Fanny Lucy Radmall – called Poppy by her family and Lucy by everyone else – never scorned her origins. At the end of her days, as a super-rich woman with a title and a famous yacht, she would boast, ‘I’m a pure Cockney, my dear, born within sound of Bow Bells.’ The Cockney traits of optimism, determination, quick thinking and humour would characterise all that she did. Her upbringing in Victorian London would exert great influence upon her life. By the time of her birth in the 1850s, London, the capital of the British Empire, was developing rapidly and abounded with optimism and opportunity. For decades people had been flooding into the city from across Britain; the families of Lucy’s parents, Thomas and Maria, crafts- and tradespeople seeking to exploit the city’s markets, had been among them. Thomas Radmall, born in about 1816, was the son of a stonemason while Maria Clark, born in 1818, was the daughter of a brewer.

With a young population, London had a high birth rate and with it a high level of illegitimacy. By the time of their marriage in June 1840, Thomas and Maria already had two daughters, Margaret and Eliza. Maria was pregnant again when she married and bore another girl, Mary, six months after the wedding. The fact that Maria signed her marriage certificate with a cross indicates that she was illiterate. The lives of the Radmalls, with the frequent changes of occupation and location that indicated economic instability, were typical of the lower classes. They lived at various addresses south of the River Thames until about 1840 but then moved north into the City of London, the capital’s historic centre. There Thomas worked firstly as a warehouseman and then as a boxmaker, and later Maria would run a clothes shop from the family home in Shoe Lane in the parish of St Bride.

In April 1843 their first son, Thomas, known as Tom, was born, followed by another girl, Sophia, and then three boys, Alfred, Walter and Arthur. Mary and Alfred had died by the time that Lucy, Thomas and Maria’s penultimate child, was born on 8 April 1857 at 13 Lower Kennington Green in Lambeth. In 1861, when Lucy was aged 4, the Radmalls moved once more, for Thomas had risen to become a junior partner in the firm of J.T. Powell and Co., a wholesale woollen-drapers in Newgate Street. Thomas had charge of the warehouse, overseeing the dispatch of orders of cloth to retailers in better parts of London. The Radmalls lived on the premises, sharing the crowded rooms ‘above the shop’ with two company porters and two female servants. This would be Lucy’s home for seven years. In 1862, Maria’s last child, Florence, was born. She usurped Lucy’s position as baby of the family but was destined to spend her life in the shadow and under the patronage of her big sister.

Outside the family home the streets offered entertainment and drama. Newgate Street itself was a busy trading thoroughfare but had never been a salubrious address; it was described in a guidebook at this time as ‘little better than a lane’ in a ‘greasy’ neighbourhood, featuring an ‘odorous and insanitary’ meat market. Newgate Prison, a gloomy building with high walls, was one of the area’s attractions and, until 1868, hangings took place on gallows erected in the street. Either Lucy’s parents were happy to allow her the freedom to explore the City of London or they had little control over their strong-willed daughter. Newgate Street was near St Paul’s Cathedral and there, she would recount, almost as soon as she could run she played hide-and-seek among the tombstones in the churchyard: ‘My playmates were the bones of the City Fathers,’ she said. On another occasion she told a friend how she had once led a ‘band of little ragamuffins up and down Drury Lane’. In her 70s, out in her Rolls-Royce, she would direct her chauffeur through the maze of little streets that she had known as a child. She knew every inch of the City, she told a companion, for as a child she had ‘run wild through its streets like a street arab’ until she could not have got lost if she had wanted to. The City, she said, had been her home.

In the wider sphere, lavish expenditure was being made on infrastructure and public buildings. For example, in the year of Lucy’s birth the South Kensington Museum (the predecessor of the Victoria and Albert Museum) opened its doors, and the following year the new Royal Opera House was inaugurated at Covent Garden. Communications advanced. In the late 1850s public post boxes appeared, Westminster Bridge was built in 1862, and the following year the world’s first underground railway opened, with a line between Paddington and Farringdon Street operated by steam locomotives pulling gas-lit wooden carriages. These developments were a grand display of the power of money.

In later life Lucy would be proud to be labelled ‘patriot’ but her patriotism would always belong to the England of her youth, when, with London the global centre of finance and commerce, Britain’s power and reach was extending ever further. In 1858 the British government took direct control of India to establish the British Raj, or Rule, and India became the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the Empire and a key source of British strength. Lucy’s upbringing in the imperial capital would shape the beliefs and feelings that became a key component of her patriotism in later life. Another strong influence in Lucy’s early life was the changing lives of women. Women were at this time gaining an increasing role in public life and Lucy was greatly influenced by stories of Florence Nightingale, then a national icon for her work in the care of soldiers wounded in the Crimean War of 1854–56. Lucy’s parents had named their youngest child after the great nurse, and Lucy’s admiration of Nightingale would contribute both to the development of her own feminist aspirations and to her later charitable support of hospitals and nurses’ welfare.

The regular income and more settled way of living that came with Thomas Radmall’s partnership in J.T. Powell and Co. provided a foundation from which the Radmall siblings could advance. As a group they possessed intelligence, ability and a culture of achievement that enabled them to make their own luck; in time each would rise considerably above the social and economic level of their parents. Significant moves into higher levels of society were made by Lucy’s brothers Arthur and Tom in the 1860s. In 1862, at the age of 12, Arthur was enrolled in the City of London School, an independent day school for boys from poorer backgrounds. Arthur did well to get in, for it had an excellent reputation and there was a long waiting list for scholarships. He was in the same class as Herbert Asquith, later British Prime Minister, and at the school’s annual prize-giving ceremony of 1864 he received a prize for arithmetic – no small achievement in a school known for the quality of its mathematics scholars. Arthur left school that December to become an apprentice accountant. Lucy, meanwhile, may have attended James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich village, which educated girls from less well-off backgrounds.

But it was Tom, the oldest boy, who was destined to rise the highest and fall the furthest. After leaving school he became one of the many young men who worked as clerks in the City of London, but as he laboured with ledgers and invoices Tom set his mind on greater things. Quick-witted, clever, capable and sociable, he was a person, a friend wrote of him later, who ‘could do and did everything well and without trouble’. Short and wiry, at the age of 18 Tom took up rowing, becoming a founder member of the Thames Rowing Club, which had been formed that year at Putney. Racing events were reported in the London newspapers and successful rowers became celebrities of the river; it was something to be associated with the rowing club. Tom’s move would allow the young Radmalls to mix with or succeed among social superiors. In time Tom’s brothers Arthur and Walter would join, and two of their sisters would marry club members. Tom became a leading member of the club and he and his rowing partner James Catty were so successful that, it was reported some years later, they became ‘all but worshipped names between Putney and Mortlake’. Both would serve as club captain.

In 1868, when Lucy was aged 11, Thomas Radmall’s partnership with J.T. Powell and Co. was dissolved and he set up in business as a picture-frame maker. At about this time the family seems to have broken up, for Lucy went to live with her sister Sophia in Earls Court; she was baptised at the church of St Matthias there in September 1869. In doctrine the church was ‘high’, veering towards Anglo-Catholicism, a religious line to which Lucy would adhere throughout her life. The baptismal record shows that she had already swapped her first names, and by this effected an early, if minor, change of identity. A photograph from about this time shows Lucy with small determined eyes protruding slightly from beneath bony, prominent, brows; the strong chin is inclined to be fleshy. There is no indication of her later famed beauty.

In the 1860s Tom Radmall had left clerical work to begin his own business as a wine merchant and restaurant owner, but in 1870 he went bankrupt. Nevertheless he got married that same year. Insecurity about their ages or social status would over the years lead various Radmall siblings to lie on official documents. On Tom’s marriage certificate, for example, he gave both his and his father’s profession as ‘Gentleman’. The term had traditionally been the preserve of the gentry and a right of birth, and the rising middle classes were anxious to have it applied to themselves, but even by the standards of the day Tom was stretching things too far. When, five weeks after Tom’s wedding, his sister Sophia married James Catty, her marriage certificate was strikingly different, for Thomas Radmall’s profession was more correctly given as ‘warehouseman’. A precocious ‘Lucy Fanny Radmall’ signed with a flourish of confidence beyond her 13 years; Lucy felt grown-up, for education was not compulsory and she had already left school.

After signing Sophia’s wedding certificate Lucy all but disappears from the contemporary record for a decade. Many years later she would say that as a ‘poor girl’ she had worked for her living and gone on the stage as a ‘ballet dancer’, although others interpreted this as meaning ‘chorus girl’. But long after Lucy’s death a newspaper would report that she had been a showgirl who appeared at ‘bachelor dinner parties’, and on one occasion had emerged ‘high-kicking, from a huge pie’. Certainly, Lucy’s petite form and extrovert personality would have lent themselves to such employment, and the story would also explain how she first attracted the eye of the man who would change her life.

Frederick Gretton, a partner in the prosperous brewing firm of Bass, Ratcliff and Gretton, was fifteen years Lucy’s senior. Bombastic and alcoholic, he was also nouveau riche and indeed very wealthy. He was brought up in the brewing town of Burton-on-Trent, which owed its fame to the qualities of its spring water. In Tudor times water obtained from a ‘Holy Well’ dedicated to Modwen, a local female saint, had been found to be particularly suited to brewing; beer made with Burton water became clear without the need for further processing. Small breweries had sprung up and with industrialisation in manufacturing and transportation the beer trade expanded rapidly. As demand grew there were fortunes to be made and Frederick Gretton’s father John was one who took advantage of the boom.

John Gretton’s background had been lowly. Born in 1792 into a poor Staffordshire family, he had begun his working life as a carter. But when in his early 30s he started work as a brewer for the Bass company, his outstanding capabilities and business acumen ensured that he was soon appointed manager of the malting and brewing departments, and within a few years taken on as a partner. John Gretton inspired affection, respect and admiration, not only for his ability but also for his service to the town. For the following thirty years he would be one of the triumvirate who ran Bass, Ratcliff and Gretton. The company’s aggressive exporting across the British Empire meant that by the mid-1850s Bass ‘bitter’ was the world’s best-known beer and a symbol of Englishness, as a contemporary rhyme showed:

John Bull, indeed, would be defunct, or else look very queer,

If Bass and Co. should cease to brew their glorious bitter beer.

Frederick, born in 1839, was one of five children. During his childhood the family still lived in an unpretentious home in Bass’s premises on Burton-on-Trent’s High Street. He grew up amid great piles of stacked casks, breathing brewing-scented air, and to the sound of locomotives rumbling through the streets pulling trucks loaded with beer barrels. During Frederick’s teenage years the value of his father’s capital as partner rose dramatically. Money projected the young Grettons into a higher social class but, like Thomas and Maria Radmall, John Gretton and his wife were personally ill-equipped to prepare their children for sophisticated social environments. Frederick attended a small local school but left as a teenager to work in the brewery; he had no opportunity to acquire the polish that a public school and university education had given his financial peers. Contemporary news articles indicated unease and disorientation among the families in Burton-on-Trent as a new generation, the recipients of unearned wealth, arose out of the success of the town’s brewing industry. The young people, it was feared, would be unable to cope with the opportunities, perils and pressures that money would bring. As Frederick Gretton would show for one, as they entered higher levels of society and interacted with those who had been born into money, they would bear the stigma of being first-generation rich.

Frederick and his older brother John were expected to dedicate their lives to the service of the company in whose rapid expansion their revered father had played such a prominent role. Indeed, initially both seemed set to follow this path and John junior, being quiet, competent, hard-working and ambitious, seemed a worthy successor. Frederick, on the other hand, was boisterous and sociable, and in his youth participated keenly in the sporting life of the area, rowing and playing cricket for local teams, and leasing a large shooting estate. He and John also joined the local branch of the Volunteer Rifle movement and participated in drill and shooting practice, and it would be shooting that would eventually lead Frederick to Lucy.

In his mid-20s Frederick Gretton became manager of Bass’s thirty-two malt houses, supervising 200 employees. It was a responsible position, for upon his department the reputation of the company depended. The work of maintaining the supply of Bass beer in sufficient quantity and quality was no easy task. Pacing the hollow wooden floors of the tall brewery buildings Gretton oversaw the hops and malt, water and yeast as they progressed through the various processes of brewing. Sieving, crushing, mashing, blending, separating, boiling, straining, cooling and fermenting brought forth the end product, which was barrelled up and transported out of Burton by rail. The Bass company continued to grow so that within a few years its annual output reached 720,000 barrels, each containing 36 gallons of beer. This, a newspaper reported, was enough to provide more than half of the human race with a glass each.

Frederick Gretton seemed set for a lifetime in brewing but as a minor celebrity in the town he was closely observed, and the pressure to live up to his father’s reputation was a burden. At the age of 27, and rich but restless, he began to cast off the constraints of Burton life and would increasingly become an embarrassment to Bass & Co. and to his family. He began to shift his focus to London, his initial visits to the capital probably made in connection with the Bass premises then under construction at St Pancras Station, but before long he joined the fringes of Victorian London’s ‘social season’, as enjoyed by the upper classes. Wanting to test his skills against a different class of shot he joined the newly formed Shepherd’s Bush Gun Club, essentially a betting venue based on pigeon-shooting events using live birds. The all-male membership was cosmopolitan and sophisticated, comprised mainly of aristocrats, military officers and members of prestigious London clubs. Gretton could join on the basis of his money but, despite that fact that he had more disposable income than many of his social superiors, with his wealth coming from manufacturing and trade he had no class. However, he was generous and sociable and those gun club members who would tolerate his company could introduce him to all that London had to offer. Many members were prominent in horse-racing circles and it was probably this connection that introduced Gretton to the lifestyle that would soon consume his interest.

After the death of his father in 1867, Gretton was made a partner in Bass & Co. and he and his brother each held a 12.5 per cent share of the company’s capital. With an increased income and freedom from his father’s expectations Gretton could live as he pleased, and he increasingly grew away from his brother’s steadying influence. While he occupied his father’s home, Bladon House, with his unmarried sisters, Frances and Clara, he sought excitement elsewhere and in 1868 took up horse racing and betting. In this way he used money that had originated with the Bass company for purposes that many in Burton thought selfish, reckless and immoral. In particular Michael Thomas Bass, the strait-laced but influential senior partner, disapproved strongly. Frederick Gretton, people told each other, was on the slippery slope to hell but, having found his life’s passion, he was not going to give it up for a few critics.

The ‘Turf’, as the world of horse racing was called, was then in its heyday and England’s most popular sport. The headquarters of the exclusive Jockey Club, the Turf’s governing body, in Newmarket, was its centre. Beginning to build a stable of racehorses, Gretton adopted ‘racing colours’ for the jockeys who would ride his horses, choosing the garish scheme of orange jacket with purple belt and cap, and gave himself over to horse racing almost entirely. Most owners were aristocrats, landowners or those such as Gretton who made their money from trade and industry. That the Prince of Wales and many in his circle were Turf enthusiasts greatly raised the prestige of the sport, and involvement offered enhanced social status. Gretton’s ownership of horses therefore allowed him to mix with members of the highest society at the many meetings that made up the annual racing calendar. He quickly made a name for himself when in October 1871 his bay colt, Sterling, had a sensational win at Newmarket. The horse became an instant equine celebrity, reported in the press as being ‘undeniably the best animal of his age in the world’. Gretton was delighted and when a few months later Sterling won again at Newmarket, he was so proud that he commissioned an equine portraitist to depict the horse in oils.

When in London, Gretton made his headquarters at the Bath Hotel, located in fashionable Piccadilly. As there is no photograph of Frederick Gretton he may have disliked his appearance and avoided the camera – perhaps because he took after his father. A photograph of John Gretton senior shows a dour visage that, by the standards of the day, belonged to a farmer rather than a gentleman. A magazine suggested that, for all his money, Frederick Gretton’s figure ‘never seemed in harmony with the landscape of Piccadilly’. Gretton, well aware that his lack of manners and polish created a barrier between him and those in higher social circles, surrounded himself instead with people with whom he felt comfortable. He held a kind of court at the Bath Hotel in which he was the centre of a group of cronies and hangers-on, some of them old friends from Burton. With money but no intellectual interests or acquirements, Gretton relied entirely on others for diversion and entertainment. But his desire for constant company, and in particular his generosity as a host, made him vulnerable to sycophants and parasites. Not only did his associates eat and drink at his expense – and at any event hosted by Gretton the drink was sure to flow freely – they also sought betting tips, with which he could be generous when he chose.

While Gretton’s wealth may have brought attention from middle- and upper-class women, he seemed comfortable only with working-class girls such as barmaids and chambermaids. Stories went around about Bath Hotel barmaids. One, for example, was that in 1872, when his horse Playfair was due to run in an important race, Gretton offered to put a sovereign on the horse for two of the girls. One asked for the coin ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Sources
• Preface
• 1 No Lady
• 2 Miss Grafton and Mrs Brinckman
• 3 Becoming Mrs Broadhead
• 4 Lady Byron
• 5 Identities
• 6 War Worker
• 7 A Real Man
• 8 Lady Houston
• 9 Six-Million Widow
• 10 Into the Jolly Old Limelight
• 11 Were I Prime Minister
• 12 Born to Strife
• 13 The Saturday Review
• 14 The Bludgeon, Not the Rapier
• 15 Rule Britannia and Damn the Details
• 16 Intrigue
• 17 Patriot No. 1
• 18 Hitleress
• 19 Legacy
• Notes
• Bibliography