"A CRUEL HISTORY"

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 124, 21 November 1935, Page 5

"A CRUEL HISTORY"

THE KENDAL FAMILY A remarkable story of the unhappy family life of the late Dame Madge Kendal was told to a representative of the "Daily Telegraph" by one of her daughters, Mrs. Ethel Muriel Leonard. "Not one of us children is a beneficiary under mother's will," said Mrs. Leonard. "We have not been left even a token of remembrance or a photograph. "I was living in Rumania and had a premonition that something was wrong at home. I came to England on Friday, September 13, but could not get in touch with my mother that night, and the next day I read of her death. I went at once to Chorley Wood, where she lay dead. There a friend said, 'Look upon your mother and try to forgive her.'" Mrs. Leonard, who is sixty, is now a governess teaching French and English. She was formerly a hotel manageress on the Continent for ten years. "My mother was a very wonderful woman, but she had a dominating temperament," she said. "All of us, three daughters and two sons, thought differently from her. The position became so unbearable that there was nothing for us to do but to leave home. "Our father died in 1917. He left a life intei'est in his fortune to our mother and his will provided that at her deatli the five children were each to have the interest on £SOOO. My brothers and sisters sold their interest in the will. I sold pai-t of mine to live, and I learn row that I may get £75 a year when matters are settled up. "It is a cruel family history. Ever since I could think for myself I have tried to effect a reconciliation with my mother. I wrote her dozens of letters, but only a few times did she even reply. Four years ago I wrote to her that I was in need. She sent me £2 a week for three months. Two children of my sister, Mrs. Shields, who lives in Cape Town. are in an actors' orphanage, an institution which benefits from the Kendal estate. Wc were all victims of my mother's temperament. For not seeing eye to eye with I her in all things we have been con- | demned to a life of poverty and want."