FATAL GRIEF.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 21, 26 January 1939, Page 6

FATAL GRIEF.

DEATH OF COUNTESS. MRS. MEYRICK'S DAUGHTER. «TOAST or MAYFAIR," (By Air Mall.) LONDON, January 1. Grief-stricken since the death of her husband nine months ago, the Countess of Kinnoull. eldest daughter of the late Mrs. Kate Mevrick. one-time queen of the May fa ir night club*, died in Brompton Hospital. Her two brothers and five sisters— with whom she lived after her husband's death—stood and knelt by the bedside. Pneumonia seized the countess a fortnight ago. Her health had already been capped by her grief, and she was taken to hospital. Even thoughts of her three-year-old son. the present earl, and of her two daughters, Lady Venetia and Lady June, did not seem to penetrate the melancholy which enwrapped the former toast of Mayfair from that day in March when her husband died. Thejr marriage—Mayfaii i 's most discussed romance for years—took place in 1028, when the famous "43 Club" and the name of Mrs. Mevrick were synonymous with the whirl of gaiety and pleasure which was the West End of London in the days before the depression. "Our Only Support." As Miss Mary Ethel Isobel Mevrick, the Countess of Kinnoull, then a vivacious beauty in her early twenties, was toasted and sought after by many of the wealthiest young men of Mayfair, and the night clubs which she helped her mother to run were nightly crowded with celebrities from all parts of the world. When Lady Kinnoull's first daughter born in 1929' Mrs. Mevrick was serying her sentence of 1j months' hard labour in Hollo way for her part in the Goddard bribery and conspiracy case. [ A son was. born in 1931, but died a few weeks later. In 193.j the present Earl Kinnoull was born. He was christened in the crypt of the House of Commons, a sherry party being held in one of the biggest committee rooms, with many members of Mayfair society a*; guests. Lady Kinnoull. with her sister, Lady de Clifford, declared after her mother's death that the night clubs with which Mrs. Kate Meyrick was associated would be carried on—"we shall have to; it is our only support." Later she opened a flower shop in Jermyn Street, and the earl was. often to be seen in Covent Garden at 5 a.jnpurchasing the day's supplieg. Work for Socialism. In December, 1930, Lord de Clifford was acquitted by his peers, after a sensational and spectacular trial by the House of Lords, of a manslaughter chaige arising out of a motor accident. In recent years the Earl and Countess Kinnoull had devoted themselves to social and political affairs. Lord Kinnoull, a Socialist whip in the House of Lords, became a borough councillor, while liis wife, as shy and retiring in politics as she had been gav and v i\ acinus in the night clubs of her voutli, devoted herself to her family and to supporting her husband at meetings and conferences. . '' ,e earldom, which carries with it six titles, is one of the oldest in the kingdom, being created in 1033.