Great eccentrics VI Lady Houston, D.B.E.

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32589, 24 April 1971, Page 13

Great eccentrics VI Lady Houston, D.B.E.

It is not often that a former small-time Cockney actress can sign cheques for £1,500,000, £lOO,OOO and many other huge sums; but Fanny Lucy Radmall was no ordinary woman. Her later life as Lady Houston, D.8.E., was certainly bizarre.

She was bom to a struggling London warehouseman in 1857 and went early on the stage as a cheeky, pretty entertainer. She was 26 when she ran away with 21-year-old Theodore Brinckman, the heir to a baronetcy, but divorced him after 12 years. At the age of 44 she married the ninth Lord Byron and lived happily with him until his death in 1917. But the big romance of her life came when she was a plumpish 60-plus, and a shipping magnate. Sir Robert Paterson Houston, fell in love with her. He found she had highly expensive tastes.

Once on the eve of her birthday he sent her an assortment of jewellery from which to choose a present. She sent them all back at once.

He protested by telephone: “But there was a pearl necklace there worth £l2OO. Any woman would have been proud to wear ft.” ‘You’d better find her and give it her then,” she sharply replied. “I'm not any woman!"

Inherited fortune

Then she went on casually to mention a necklace of black pearls she had seen priced at £lOO,OOO, artfully adding that would be much more than he could possibly afford.

No-one had ever told him there was anything he could not afford. He bought it at once. They married in 1924 and he died two years later. He had aimed to protect his fortune of more than £5,000,000 by going to live in Jersey. But Lady Houston, a superpatriot among super-patriots, returned to England and decided to pay the £1,500,000 death duties as a saving gesture to the nation. She did it in the most spectacular way: she sent the huge payment as a single cheque to Winston Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer. She spent— offered—-

money lavishly on national causes. The kind of sums that charities and funds would spend years painfully amassing she would offer on the spur of the moment. Thus in 1927 and 1929 the Royal Air Force had won the famous international Schnieder Trophy air race against all .opposition. But in 1930 depression hit the country and the Government announced that they could not put up the money to compete in the 1931 race—in which Britain might win the trophy outright Lady Houston was spluttering with anger at the parsimony. She at once wired No. 10 Downing Street saying she would be responsible for all the expenses incurred. The telephone call cost her £loo,ooo—but Britain won the race and was enabled in time to develop the aircraft which was the forerunner of the famous Spitfire.

Flight over Everest

Lady Houston was now established as a "character.” The old lady with her cloche hats and still coquettish "kiss curls” went everywhere with a handbag the size of a holdall crammed with £5OO in notes and coin. They called her the “fairy godmother” as she handed over the money to charities and deserving individuals.

In 1932 she rescued another British enterprise threatened by the deep national depression that was the far off age when wages were actually being reduced. The enterprise: an expedition to send an aircraft for the first time over Mount Everest

She financed the expedition generously and on April 3, 1933, British pilots flew over the summit of the world’s highest mountain for the first time in history.

Hitler had now come to power and Lucy Houston foresaw the need for rearmament. She therefore offered £200,000 to help provide an air defence for highly vulnerable London.

When the national Government turned it down, she was sure they were prompted by a fear that they would have -to offer her a higher formal honour if they accepted. She declared: "The deaths of the Dukes of Wellington and Marlborough have created an unexpected problem for filling the two vacancies in the Order of the Garter. As one would be of no use to me, I sug-

gest that I be given them both.”

Lady Houston disliked the ruling politicians. Right or Left. She decorated her yacht Liberty at night with illuminated denunciations of Ramsay MacDonald. She thought that Stanley Baldwin did not measure up to events; she fancied that, like all politicians, he was a peril to the traditional greatness of England. She would have exploded with wrath at Union Jack underwear and shopping bags—but she decorated her home, Bynon Cottage in Hampstead, London, strictly in red White and blue. In the mid-Thirties, needing ■ platform for her strident patriotism, she took over the failing “Saturday Review,” a weekly periodical once dedicated to Victorian Liberalism and numbering Bernard Shaw, Hardy and Max Beerbohm among its distinguished contributors. She had it printed in a bizarre mixture of red and blue type, her own effusions appearing with a proliferation of capitals. It sold for twopence. She had a particular "down” on Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary. After one of her attacks he asked in the House of Commons: "Who is Lady Houston?”

Attack on Eden

She snapped back in August, 1936, with a piece entitled "Who Is Mr Anthony Eden?” calling him a “nancyfled nonentity.” Typically she spluttered: “The sinister selfworshipping simpleton who—by getting round a silly old man—has wangled himself into a position for which he is totally unfitted—imagines himself a saviour and redeemer—BUT IN ATTEMPTING TO ROAR LIKE A LION —HE HAS ONLY SUCCEEDED IN BRAYING LIKE AN ASS. And Cowardly Conservatives are bowing down before this brazen image of brass ...” She championed the late King Edward VIII in the abdication crisis later that year. Indeed, she was inspired to poetry in her rumbustious pages. It was one of the last things she wrote before she died on December 29, 1936. Not long before her death she was told ft was time to sleep—and replied with characteristic spirit: ’Yes, it is time for me to sleep and a darned long sleep it's going to be.”