Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, Diana Souhami [the ebook reader TXT] 📗

of Ashford in Kent, Viscount Bury of Lancaster, Earl of Albemarle – a Normandy town – and left him 200,000 guilders in his will.

Harold Acton alluded to this sexual underpinning of the Keppel family status when George, seeing Acton’s mother reading a biography of Oscar Wilde, muttered, ‘A frightful bounder. It makes one puke to look at him.’

Fortunately Mrs Keppel had enough humour to spare. Did she ever remind him that he was descended from William III’s minion who was created Earl of Albemarle for his beaux yeux?

Subsequent Keppels served the Crown as aides-de-camp, ladies of the bedchamber, equerries, grooms-in-waiting. George’s grandfather was equerry-in-waiting to Queen Victoria on her wedding day. Arnold, George’s eldest brother, who inherited Quidenham and the family titles, was aide-de-camp to Bertie. Derek, the second brother, was equerry and deputy master of the household to Bertie’s son when he was Duke of York then George V.

Long before he met Alice, Bertie held the Keppel family in high esteem. His favourite Keppel, prior to her, was ‘dear little Sir Harry’, George’s great-uncle. He was Admiral Sir Henry Keppel, son of the 4th Earl of Albemarle, author in 1899 of A Sailor’s Life Under Four Sovereigns: His Personal Journal Edited by Himself. Five feet tall, with copper-coloured hair, in his early days he was ‘hard up for tin’ and had numerous creditors. Bertie and he went yachting at Cowes and to the races at Epsom and Ascot.

Bertie was a friend too of little Sir Harry’s nephew, Henry Frederick Stephenson, who was also in the navy. In 1886 he asked him to teach his own son George, Duke of York:

I feel that in entrusting my son to your care I cannot place him in safer hands, only don’t spoil him please! Let him be treated like any other officer in the Ship and I hope he will become one of your smartest and most efficient Lieutenants. He is sharp and quick and I think likes the Service, but he must be kept up to his work, as all young men of the present day are inclined to be lazy.

Bertie told Henry Frederick to make sure George neither ate too much meat nor smoked too many cigarettes. He made him his equerry, knighted him, corresponded with him about little Sir Harry – ‘The old Admiral went every day to Epsom with me this week,’ he wrote in May 1886, ‘and I fear lost his money. I hope mylady won’t pitch too much into him on her return home’ – and about yachts, horses, deer drives and the shooting of elks, stags, grouse, rabbits and anything that flew.

So there was a time-honoured bond between the Keppel family and the Crown, a tradition of service and reward, trust and familiarity. Which meant that when the newly married George and Alice moved to Wilton Crescent in Belgravia they were from the start ‘court cards’. Life’s principal domain was social. George was thought splendid in his upright military way, the perfect gentleman, and Alice had, as all averred, disarming blue eyes, charm, vivacity, humour, directness, confidence, ripe curves …

But the costs of smart society were huge: the hats, the furs, the jewels, the crystal, the china, the champagne. The Keppels dined in houses in Grosvenor Street, Stratford Place, Portman Square and graced the weekend parties of Lord and Lady Derby at Knowsley Hall, Prescot, Lancashire, or Lord and Lady Alington at Crichel Down, Wimborne. Even the hostess’s staff expected to be tipped. ‘From a really great house like Lord Derby’s the guests would come away at least fifty pounds the poorer,’ Rebecca West wrote in her book 1900. And hospitality must be reciprocated, menus compare, pearls equal and gowns surpass.

Mrs Keppel was ambitious and her nose for profit shrewd. She wanted more than George could give. ‘Throughout her life,’ her daughter Sonia wrote of her, ‘mama was irresistibly attractive to bank managers.’ The attraction worked both ways. Violet was born on 6 June 1894, three years into the marriage. By the time of her birth the Keppels had moved from Wilton Street to a larger eighteenth-century house at 30 Portman Square. Violet’s father was said to be William Beckett, senior partner in the family bank, Beckett & Company of Leeds, member of parliament for Whitby, owner of a large villa in Ravello and heir to the Grimthorpe title. Vita Sackville-West told Violet’s first biographer, Philippe Jullian, that William Beckett was probably Violet’s father. And William Beckett’s grandson said Violet ‘undoubtedly had the Beckett nose’.

Violet was never altogether clear whose nose she had. Beckett’s American wife died in 1891, the year of Alice’s marriage, leaving him with three small children. Perhaps Alice consoled him for his plight. ‘My mother,’ as Violet was to write, ‘not only had a gift of happiness, she excelled in making others happy.’ Daisy, Princess of Pless, in From My Private Diary, expressed shock at the candour with which women guests, at one of Mrs Keppel’s lunch parties, admitted to having had ‘several lovers’.

Mrs Keppel viewed adultery as sound business practice, a woman’s work. In 1914, on holiday in Spain with the young Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine as guests of Bertie’s erstwhile financial adviser Sir Ernest Cassel, she advised Clementine to further her husband’s political career by finding herself a rich and influential lover. She inferred it would be selfish to desist and offered to recruit one.

Her excellence in making others happy at times received uncharitable mention. Lady Curzon in September 1901 wrote to her husband the Viceroy of India:

Mrs Favourite Keppel is bringing forth another questionable offspring! Either Lord Stavordale’s or H. Sturt’s!! Lord Stavordale is going to be married off to Birdie Stewart as Mrs Keppel made a promise to Lady Ilchester to allow him to marry at the end of the summer! Jenny said people were seriously disgusted at the goings on of the King – his pursuit of the Keppel and daily visit there in his green brougham.

There is no record of Mrs Keppel bringing forth