GEORGIE ZIADIE BECOMES LADY COLIN CAMPBELL and SOON LIVES TO REGRET IT : SHE BECOMES A CELEBRATED AUTHOR OF BOOKS ABOUT THE ROYALS and UPPER CLASS

These are my notes selected to further her story from her memoir, Daughter of Narcissus, the prime reference for his month's posts. 

As a young woman who was a fashion aficionado and designer and had lived in Jamaica growing up, Miami for fashion school, and New York, where she had sold some of her designs and earned income, Georgie Ziadie was expecting she would marry before the age of twenty-five.  After successful surgery to correct a birth defect that had caused her parents to raise her as a boy, she was swept away by suitors who were interested in marrying her.  However, she met Lord Colin Campbell because she was close friends with his sister.  There were hints that there was a "darker side" to members of his family but she met him and married him rapidly, only to soon learn that he was not interested in keeping up his side of the relationship and that included a reluctance or inability to earn income.  Although she had grown up witnessing and subjected to her parent's abuse, she failed to realize that she had married without knowing enough about the man.  He was alcoholic and using drugs - probably to self medicate mental illness.  He soon became physically violent, spewing hatred of all women. He bashed her face in.  After corrective surgery he said he would never hit her beautiful face again.  Instead he battered her body.  After one extreme beating even her father who believed in staying in marriage thought it was time she leave hers.

Like many persons who are subjected to Domestic Violence, a cycle of apology, retreat, and then another episode drove the new Lady Colin Campbell to reality. She wanted out of the marriage.  The divorce was fraught with abuse as well, and this involved his lawyer(s) and certain of his family, members of the British peerage. Perhaps she would like the world to know she had been born intersex and had surgery to corrected the birth defect?  Would everyone like to know how she peed?

She kept the name thinking it would only be a year or two before she remarried.  She had boyfriends but was wary and it was never meant to be.  After leaving the fashion world behind and participating in charity fund raising she turned to writing.  Eventually after writing several books, she earned enough income to consider adopting children.  From Russia she adopted two boys - not twins genetically but close in age - who she managed to raise without repeating the horrors that she grew up experiencing. 

Let me say that I found the book I have excerpted from riveting and have gained respect fort this woman. When I listen to her broadcasts via her YouTube station, I do so with new appreciation for her. She purchased Castle Goring and lives there as well as in London.

Below are some of many books she has written: 

Her latest about Meghan and Harry.

The book that made her famous as an author. With her earnings she realized she could afford to have her own family through adoption and became a single mother of two boys.

Lady Colin Campbell gains her information from others who know the inside stories of the royals and peerage and members of international high society.

This one was based on a real person, who so identified with the main character that law suits were threatened... Eventually Lady Colin Campbell prevailed.

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GEORGIE ZIADIE BECOMES A WOMAN AND BEGINS TO UNDERSTAND HER MENTALLY ILL PARENTS

Lady Colin Campbell takes the name she received upon her marriage, a brief marriage. As a young woman known as Georgie she had an ordeal to match her body with her female gender which would require surgery.  These are my notes selected to further her story from her memoir, Daughter of Narcissus, the prime reference for his month's posts. 

In May on 1968, Georgie had been cleared as psychologically well enough to consider surgery to correct her intersex condition and be a woman by gender. At the time there was intense pressure of young women to marry well before the age of twenty-five. Both of her parents were hostile towards her. In 1969 her narcissist mother denied that she had ever made the promise to her that she and her father would consent to surgery. Georgie however went to fashion school in Miami and had begun to sell some of the clothing she designed in New York. She needed $5000 for the surgery and attempted to earn it. But surprisingly she learned that her grandmother, Maisie, her mother's mother, had never known of her condition and, while visiting Jamaica, offered to pay for the surgery! She needed her vagina to be reconstructed and her clitoris reduced in size. Her parents offered to pay for it as suddenly and wanted her to forget her New York doctor and go to a Jamaican doctor instead. She had the surgery in New York with contributions from family and it turned out to be not as long a surgery as expected. Her mother bought herself jewelry with the money contributed in excess of the surgery costs rather than give it back to donors. Georgie had the surgery without family there but anorexia was another consideration and the doctors demanded that a parent come to New York. Her mother did, under duress, and then kept the medical paperwork needed to actually change her ID to female.  Eventually the redone birth certificate was done.

The other aspect of this change was that the upper classes in Jamaica were stunned to see a beautiful twenty-one year old woman rather than a young man in their midst, fashionable and a model. Her mother decided to tell the story her way, starring herself and all her suffering, blaming her husband for delays, and exaggerating all that Georgie had been through as well. Georgie chose to be straight-forward when asked but did not want to become news. It was time to let a suitable husband from the island's elite find her. But her mother was jealous of the attention she was getting and her beauty and an incident occurred in which Gloria, her mother, stabbed Georgie's cheek with a lit cigarette. In response she began battering her mother. I was 1972 and her mother would die without ever apologizing.  No chance of closeness, Georgie was through with trying or believing it would ever get better.

Georgie slowly became more aware that her parents were mentally ill and suffered from personality disorders for which they would not seek help.  She came to understand they were a mismatched couple dedicated to preserving the marriage but that the terms and conditions of marriage for women of their class could be especially difficult.

She came to understand that as Narcissists they were incapable of true care and concern for their children. Eventually accepting what they were and were not allowed her to deal with them with the distance she needed to keep to further be abused by them.

But psychology and psychiatry was not then what they are today today.  Georgie Ziadie was expected to marry early and well before the age of twenty five. Her beauty and status as a person of the British Jamaica colony attracted many a like-minded suitor who was prepared to marry, but the man she did marry proved to be exactly like her parents - and worse. She had to come to terms with the effects her parents abuse had on her without the acknowledgment we have today of Domestic Violence.

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WHY MISTRESSES OF EQUAL STATUS THREATENED THE SOCIAL ORDER

Why had her mother, and women of aristocratic status - members of Jamaican society and of the British peerage, accept that men were possibly not capable of fidelity.  For that matter, why did men also accept that the woman they married would not be the only one for them?  Is sex really meaningless?

From Chapter 7 again, page 59

It always futile to judge people by the rules of another time, and the values of that age certainly seem breathtakingly hypocritical  and unreasonable from a contemporary viewpoint, until one examines what motivated them and realizes that their objective was preservation of the family unit and conservation of the social fabric. Divorce was still something to be avoided at all costs, not only because of the disruption to family and social life, but also because it usually undermined the financial foundation of a divorced couple. As few marriages were conducted across class and colour lines, choice was also restricted, and there seemed little merit in 'swapping a black dog for a monkey' , as Jamaicans used to say. Therefore a mistress like Miss Khouri (her relatives's mistress of equal status to the family), being wife material, was a living, breathing, throbbing threat to the social order, while a girlfriend like Mrs. Powell (her fatther's supposed mistress) was not.

Commentary: Lady Colin Powell states in her book that her father, Michael, often openly declared that he had never looked at another woman other than his wife, their mother, though many knew of his sexual adventures. However, she realized that he was also signaling to his wife, Gloria, that he was not contemplating actually divorcing.

Page 60

,,, Gloria's ascendancy over Michael was reinforced by the fact that he was more emotionally involved with her than she was with him...

GLORIA ZIADIE, LADY COLIN CAMPBELL'S MOTHER and HER EQUALS TOOK THEIR HUSBAND'S OTHER WOMEN IN STRIDE

In this memoir, Lady Colin Campbell recalls that her mother, Gloria, and father, Michael, were abusive to their children, her mother especially, which she credits to her mother's personality disorder, Narcissism. Her parent's were not happily married and her father was one to make sexual demands of the house servants and women who worked at his office as his natural right. But one woman emerged as his mistress, a woman from the office called Mrs. Powell who was thirty-some years younger than him.

In this passage from Chapter 7, she explains her mother's attitude about Mrs. Powell, who, in my opinion, might have been a relief to her mother, Gloria, considering that Michael, her husband, might have settled on one other woman.

Pages 58 - 59

Towards the end of her life, I discovered, while speaking to another member of our family whose husband had always had mistresses, Gloria's true attitude towards marital infidelity. 'She makes a fool of herself carrying on the way she does. As long as the wife's position isn't threatened, or he doesn't bring home unwelcome presents in the form of venereal diseases, it doesn't really matter what a man does. And men, let's face facts, will always be men.They can't help it. All men are unfaithful. A wife who even acknowledges that her husband is being unfaithful lowers herself in his eyes. If I had created a scene every time your father had another woman, I would have spent my life ripping my hair out. Where would that have got me?  I had far too much self respect for that."

'So you really didn't mind?"

"When you're young and impressionable, you mind those sort of things, but, as you get older and learn the ways of the world, you realize there is little point in letting things like that bother you. As long as it wasn't done under my nose and I could ignore it with grace, it wasn't an issue. Women today make far too much fuss about infidelity, but seem quite happy to tolerate things that my generation would have never done.'

'Like what?'

'Men who don't know, and don't want to know, how to take care of their wives. Whatever your father's faults, he always took good care of me. Man was made to protect women and your father was a real man, not one of those namby-pamby freeloaders whom one meets so often nowadays.  Believe me it is better to be a man's darling - even an old man's darling - than any man's slave. Whether or not they've been my slave or not is something else,' she laughed.

Commentary: Lady Colin Campbell goes on to say that the discussion exttended to what if the mistress was of the same status or class.  A relative of theirs had such a mistress and the entire family supported his wife in the matter, so it seems that the attitude that taking a mistress in stride for these British-Jamaican aristocrats, seeing them as Other, keeping them separate, had much to do with a man taking a lower status woman as a mistress.

What is your opinion on that?

 

WAS MRS. POWELL MICHEAL ZIADIE'S MISTRESS AT THE OFFICE? LADY COLIN CAMPBELL as GEORGIE MEETS MRS. POWELL, HER FATHER'S SUPPOSED MISTRESS

 

This passage is from Chapter 7 of her book. In it, Lady Colin Campbell, called Georgie here by me, revealing that her father was a sexual predator who had his way with the servants, also had liaisons with women employed at his office. Her mother had no control over that aspect of his life.  It strikes me that perhaps her father, Michael, was not only a a sexual predator but a sex addict. Learning that he might have had a mistress who he mostly saw at the office gives the possibility that he became more civilized. The excerpt begins with the office, her father and his brother, Solomon...

Excerpt page 58

.,,Doubtless the majority of their contacts were casual, but both also formed enduring relationships with members of their staff.  In their scheme of things it was perfectly alright to have a mistress who remained out of sight of their family and friends. There was apparently no problem and no conflict, so long as there was no overlap between the two worlds.

Commentary:  In 1979 Micheal was shot in a store. Two serious gun shots done, Mrs. Powell put herself between the gunman and Michael.  She called him "Mas Mike," as in Master Mike. Georgie told her brother that she thought Mrs. Powell had to be their father's mistress or she would not have risked her own life to shelter him. Her brother, Mickey, did not believe it, preferring to think of the woman as a loyal employee. Georgie thought not only was this employee her father's mistress but that the woman loved him. 

Excerpt page 58

The following year, Mickey and I were in Jamaica for Easter when I witnessed for myself the delicacy with which my parents avoided the true nature of his relationship with Mrs. Powell...

Commentary: At one point Georgie got to witness her father and Mrs. Campbell together, when they entered a hospital room together to visit a family member. She said the "ease" between the two was the tell-all.

Excerpt page 58

To say I was surprised by her presence would be an understatement. There seemed to be no good reason to justify her attendance - if he needed her emotional support, he should be doing without it until a more appropriate time - and I was somewhat offended on my mother's behalf that he was trotting his mistress out in a place where decorum precluded her admittance. This, after all, was a purely family occasion, and where interlopers of any kind were simply unacceptable. Of course, I was also intrigued to meet the woman who had saved my father's life, though I would have preferred to do so somewhere else than a hospital while my cousin was dying. 

My curiosity got the better of my rectitude, however, and as Michael introduced Mrs. Powell to me, I eyed her up and down, assessing her with genuine interest. I noted that she was attractive, personable, a civil and civilized woman whose goodness of heart shone through her countenance. She was also a good thirty-something years younger than he was, Then she demonstrated how lucky my father was to have a mistress like her by greeting me with just the right amount of respect. She did not make the mistake of fawning, as so many other people did when meeting people like us. The she walked over to Gloria (Gloria is Georgie's mother - married to her father Michael) and, while ostensibly sympathizing with her for the horror of having seen her niece by marriage collapse in front of her, treated her with the reverence royalists reserve for regnant empresses. 'She has the tact and decorousness of a true courtier,' I thought, 'She's also sensible. She sees that the way to maintain her relationship with Daddy is to be respectful and non-threatening to Mymmy as possible. And she has natural dignity.'  I liked her immediately. 

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LADY COLIN CAMPBELL : HER FATHER and MEN OF HIS STATUS TOOK THE "LORD'S RIGHT" AS THEIR DUE

(Warning: Possibly explicit words here.)

This excerpt is from Chapter 7 of Lady Colin Campbell's book. I read it on Hoopla and my settings could change the page number/count.  In the book she calls her mother Gloria and her father Michael. This passage begins with her father's resistance to travel outside of Jamaica or with his wife.  But that changed and he began to do both when his wife insisted.  Sometimes her mother still traveled without her husband. She well positions her mother as a wife married to a husband who may have tolerated her - mutually. Was it that Michael wanted his wife to travel alone so he could womanize? 

Excerpt: Page 57

His risk aversion aside, two others aspects of Michael's personality would have made living with him a rough-ride for any woman. Like all men of his station and background, he saw nothing wrong with availing himself of the plenitude of available 'pum pum' - as Jamaicans called the female organ - which was always on offer. It is a fact of life that well off men will always be attracted to poorer girls, even if the men themselves are not sexually appealing - which Michael, according to just about every woman who knew him - was. It was also a fact of life that the wives of rich men know that there is a queue of hundreds, if not thousands, of girls who will happily jump into their shoes, if they should vacate the position of wife. The divorce laws in England and America have gone some way towards readdressing the balance in favour of the wife in the latter part of the twentieth century: but even so, the rule of thumb that moneyed men will always find it easy to replace a wife with another - or with a stream of girlfriends -still applies. It keeps wives on their toes and gives them a tolerance towards infidelity that the wives of poorer men rarely have.

Like most of his relations and friends, Michael never saw any reason to deny himself the pleasures of the flesh. To all of them, morality had nothing to do with sex. Indeed, Michael went further than many of his sexually-liberated peers and lived by the rule of droit de seigneur in a way that would be totally unacceptable in today's world. 'As soon as Mrs. Ziadie was out of the house,' our Butler Edward told Joyce, his last nurse, 'Mr. Ziadie would go to the servants quarters and demand to be let in by whichever maid had taken his fancy. He would never take no for an answer. They had to give him what he wanted. Once one of the girls said no and locked the door with a key. Mr. Ziadie kicked down the door."

Commentary:  Eventually Gloria refused to hire any female servants other than a laundress who was shared with another family member. She hired males, including gay males.  However lousy this situation of having a husband who was a sexual predator was for Gloria - or the elite woman of Jamaica in the 1950's and 1960's (for Georgia was born in 1949 and this is about her childhood) - this in it self would not be the origins of her personality disorder of Narcissism. 

Droit de seigneur means Lord's Rights in French. For many centuries the Lord of the Manor (or the royal men and that of the aristocracy) had the right to have sex with women under their rule. This was such an assumed right that it was not fought by law. In recent Me Too Movement days, it is often the boss, owner of he company, or someone powerful in an industry, that wishes to assume the "right." We call it sexual harassment or rape. The sex these men had with women of lower status to them did not imply romance or a willingness to marry women, even if the sex resulted in pregnancy and the man was unmarried.

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THE ECCENTRIC and HIGHLY OPINIONATED LADY COLIN CAMPBELL (GEORGIE ZIADIE) : MISTRESSES WERE UNDERSTOOD A CERTAIN WAY

LADY COLIN CAMPBELL

(Georgia Arianna Ziadie)

Hello!

I know my followers are wondering why I'm featuring British-Jamaican aristocrat and BabyBoomer Lady Colin Campbell here at Mistress Manifesto.  I admit at first thought it's a stretch but hear me out. No, I do not think she has been a Mistress. Yes, I think she has some important things to say.  In fact I have arrived at respect for this eccentric and highly opinionated - and rational - woman. 

One of the purposes of this blog is to explore the real lives of past and recent Mistresses - Kept People - Courtesans - an Alternative Lifestyle that may no longer depend on women not being allowed to be educated or unable to financially support themselves another way. This lifestyle no longer depends on adultery for its definition. Nor is it always a heterosexual relationship. No, while we use the term Mantress with fragility, we also realize that men, both gay and straight are experiencing being Kept, even when gay marriage is legal. Sometimes a Mistress (or Mantress) of 2024 is supporting themselves but accepts "help" of some sort from her or his person rather than be the Classic Mistress who is entirely supported financially - sometimes very well - by  a man. We also know that a person who has become a Mistress can also be transgender.  

Lately, as it seems that Democrats and Republicans take opposite sides to the question of medical and psychiatric treatment of children who believe themselves to be born into the body of the wrong gender, we tend to think that this is a modern issue. Well, Georgie was born intersex and the decision was made to raise her as a boy which she was until the early 1960's. She felt she was a girl and the issue emerged again as she went through puberty.  

And her dad - her uncle - and other men like them - had a mistress.  And her mother knew it but accepted it.

I was following the Duke and Duchess of Sussex controversy and drama. I noticed that among those with strong opinions about them was Lady Colin Campbell, born George William Ziadie, eventually changed to Georgia Arianna Ziadie, and is called Georgie or Lady C.  She has a distinct way of speaking,  forthright, creative with words, detail oriented and thought provoking. It's fair to say that she does not think well of the Sussexes. Though I do sometimes listen to BBC as well as some of the more tabloidish publications and broadcasts on YouTube, Lady Colin Campbell is an especially fascinating character herself. She is not only considered one of many "royal experts" and the guest on various televised programs but runs her own YouTube station.  (The link to it is below.) She says that she gets her information from people she is connected to within the aristocracy. 

When I discovered that she was a book author noted for the book The Real Diana, a 1992 New York Times Best Seller List title, that was the first to reveal Diana's unhappy marriage, I searched my Hoopla subscription for her books. I discovered Daughter of Narcissus, a memoir that focused on her childhood as part of the British elite of the island of Jamaica, which has much to reveal about what race relations were there. Perhaps when it comes to the question of the British Royal Family being racist, she might know quite a bit about racism having been raised on an island where white people and people of color most often had employer-employee relationships.

Lady Colin Campbell's memoir proved to be a powerful, can't put it down read.  I cancelled plans to keep reading.

She was raised by abusive parents who were not challenged by other family members or those in their employ. She knew her father and his brother and men of their status were what we call today predators, sexual harassers, even rapists, outside the immediate family. Inside it, as she and her three siblings were being raised to adulthood, there was tremendous physical and psychological abuse. Her mother was what we would call today a Malignant Narcissus, lacking empathy, plotting, attention seeking, turning every story around so that they could be the star. Her father went into rages - beating servants - breaking doors down.  Both parents were excessively concerned with their public reputation.

As I will reveal in excerpting this book, the primary reference for this month's posts, Lady Colin Campbell's father likely had a mistress named Mrs. Powell, and, well, Lady Colin Campbell liked her. In fact, Lady Colin Campbell thought that the mistress, a much-younger-than-her father employee she calls Mrs. Powel, may have provided a respite from his marriage and a sense of actual civilization to the errant Michael Ziadie.

Her mother's personality disorder damaged everyone's lives. Her father was an older man with a personality disorder himself who allowed his wife to be treacherously abusive and was cooperatively and independently abusive himself. Lady Campbell was raised in a family in which she and her siblings were unfairly and cruelly punished by parents who gave one impression as members of high society and a drastically different one where matters were considered to be private. I suspect that as the girl Georgie, being raised as a boy, was already invested in getting to the truth of every situation. Since divorce was not generally considered an option, her parents settled into their dangerous domesticity. Lady Colin Campbell, while advantaged materially, is a survivor of much.

One review of this book from Goodreads was: "Daughter of Narcissus is a stunning analysis by the author of the serious personality disorder of narcissism through her own dysfunctional family, positioned at the heart of international society from the middle of the 20th century to present day. Dr Anna Brocklebank considers it one of the most significant and inspiring books ever written on the subject of narcissism and believes it should become a medical reference book as well as a popular best seller."

If you are the child of a parent or parents who were so mentally ill that they took it out on you, this book may be a must-read.  (And if you realize you are abusing your own children, or you're letting your partner or their parent do so, I beg you to have courage and get psychological treatment first for yourself.) 

Now, before we begin this month dedicated to her, I want to mention more fascinating things about Lady Colin Campbell.

Born in 1949, she is now in her 70's. Lord Colin Ivar Campbell, her now longtime ex-husband, was a son of the eleventh Duke of Argyll. Lord Colin Campbell has said he wishes she would stop using her name - which is unlikely. Well, she obtained it fairy, through marriage, even if their marriage was brief, and either way she was born into the aristocracy. They married after knowing each other only five days but it took months before they started divorce.  She had met him because she was great friends with his sister. He too was severely abusive, even bashing her face in requiring corrective surgery, and then focusing on her body. He was an alcoholic and addict and mentally ill. He took from her financially. He and his lawyers - his family - threatened to ruin her reputation and more thoroughly out her as having been born intersex.  Lady Campbell kept the name thinking she would remarry in a year or two, for she was quite a young woman when she divorced, but that never happened.  She had boyfriends but was hesitant because of all the abuse.  Fortyish with a best seller that earned money and some independent income, she decided what she lacked was her own family. She adopted two sons from Russia and raised them. (The boys are not biological twins as has been reported elsewhere,)

The story of her understanding of her birth defect and resulting gender issues and the horrors she went through with her parents and doctors is something anyone who is interested in today's issues of transgenderism needs to read. The decision that she be raised as a son had been made at her birth and until she reached puberty it seemed as if her siblings and other relatives in the know and the doctors were accepting of that decision but she was considered an effeminate boy. She was given hormones to masculinize her as well as shock treatments circa 1963. She felt that her mother in particular had set her up to be her lifelong companion rather than correct her gender so that she couldn't marry: She references instances in British Royal Family that may have been the same issue.  By 1967 she was threatening suicide if her parents did not allow her to correct her gender to female and was being promised treatment in the United States.

Trouble with teenage classmates lead her to skipping school and applying to Fashion Institute in New York before the age of 18, not only because she loved fashion but to escape. Her father wanted her to stay home as company to her mother. He warned her that no one would want to marry her siblings when they found out that their sister was a "freak." They were selfishly emotionally blackmailing her. 

Being a woman who did want to earn her own living, but also compelled by socio-economic and class considerations unique to her status at birth and sexism in general, she worked in fashion for a while, but turned to writing.  Now she is a commentator. 

Are you ready for the excerpts from her book that focus on the attitude towards mistresses - and the husbands who didn't consider sexuality outside of their inescapable marriages to be anything worth divorcing over? Not even the cruelty of a mother to her children?  Well, consider yourself a member of my unofficial womens study college class here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot!

Missy

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Here's the link to her YouTube Station! https://www.youtube.com/@LadyColinCampbellYouTube