Footers

I had lunch at the Savile on Wednesday with a friend, as his guest, and two of his friends.

I need hardly say the wine flowed, the food was good (egg mayonnaise with crab, and seafood linguine for me) and the conversation was better. MB has raced through Chips’s diaries and is going to read them again. I thought this was overdoing it a bit. Today I think it likely I will do likewise, perhaps omitting the early years.

Dear reader, an expression borrowed from Laurence Sterne (Tristram Shandy), I’m obsessed by his most personal revelations that few would care to reveal, chronicled alongside social, royal and international affairs. I’m up to May 1938 when he is living at 5 Belgrave Square while Kelvedon Hall is being re-built. The only area of his life he is reticent about is his servants. He mentions Honor’s maid, his valet, a secretary, chauffeur, housemaids and footmen. There must have been a butler and a nursemaid for baby Paul; some personnel domestique – Chips likes to throw in a few foreign words to show he’s not a snobbish parvenu from Chicago, so I will do it too, to season this post.

The footnotes are remarkable; a veritable Almanach de Gotha. Some entries upstage Chips: “he was found drowned in his bath, and there was a theory a younger male lover had murdered him”. But I was disappointed in one insignificant footnote.

”Wednesday 5th January 1938

Richard Cavendish was secretly married on December 16th to one of the pretty Lloyd Thomas girls. I forgot to record this, although I knew (the family did not) a week ago. It was in the press tonight: the Cavendishes are furious. I am secretly pleased …

Footnote: Richard Edward Osborne Cavendish (1917-1972), son of Lord Richard and Lady Moira Cavendish, married in 1937 Pamela June Thomas (1918 – 2006), daughter of Hugh Lloyd Thomas.”

An unusually exiguous footnote that might have included at least two things.

“Hugh Lloyd Thomas, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary in the British Embassy in Paris and one of the world’s leading amateur jockeys, was killed today when his horse, Periwinkle II, fell after taking the last fence in the three-mile steeplechase here (Derby).” (New York Times, February 1938)

As so many of us do, Pam Cavendish had a mother, my grandfather’s sister, Aline, the owner of the Rolls requisitioned by TE Lawrence, see posts passim. She also bred Well To Do, winner of the 1972 Grand National.

“Duchess of Windsor at Paris Memorial service for Mr Lloyd Thomas. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the British Ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps, and all the members of the staff of the British embassy in Paris, attended a memorial service at the embassy church in Paris for the late Mr Hugh Lloyd Thomas, the British Minister in Paris, who was killed while riding in a steeplechase at Derby. Photo shows the Duke of Windsor leaving after the ceremony.”