A CUP OF TEA WITH ME

 

Is it tea into the boiling water or the boiling water into the tea?

SIR JOHN NOT QUITE A CHARACTER IN NETFLIX's THE CROWN

Just a note.  I was rewatching The Crown, which is an excellent series about the British Royal Family.  I know it cannot be "accurate" and must be considered fiction based on much of what is known about the Royal Family, but if you haven't seen it, well, try to. Excellent production values.  Historical content. Terrific acting. Truly an achievement for all involved.

In Season Two, Episode Four, which is about Princess Margaret's introduction to the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones through a Lady In Waiting, she is invited to a dinner party attended by "unconventional" people.  Margaret has had a tough love life thus far, being unable to marry her first true love because he was a divorced man. She is starting to go nutty and so, to help her get out of the house (the castle) she attends this dinner party.

She notes that the poet John Betjeman is at the party.  She says, "Is it true he has two wives?"  and Armstrong-Jones says, "Better he has three."

Ever since I saw that, I've been wondering - WHO WAS THE POSSIBLE THIRD WIFE OF POET SIR JOHN BETJEMAN?  If you know, please leave a comment!

SECRECY, PRIVACY, DISCRETION

SECRECY, PRIVACY, and DISCRETION : these are three words that almost seem extinct at times because of social networking. People are putting themselves out there inviting the world to know them, their relationships, everything. So it may surprise you to know that there are many people who still think their lives are nobody's business but their own. They don't invite commentary or speculation and tend not to respond to being outed. You won't find them revealing their personal life on the Internet. If they are famous due to their wealth or position they understand that there is curiosity about them but tend to have as friends, lovers, and family, others who agree to keep their privacy. It is for everyone's benefit because too much can be made of the smallest slip up.***

Such was the case with Lady Elizabeth Georgiana Alice Cavendish.  She refused to speak of her relationship with John Betjeman, who became famous as Poet Laurate and Sir John Betjeman. As a Lady In Waiting to Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth's sister, she was privileged to serve and never commented on the Princess's life, which was a rather dramatic life while the Princess was alive.

After Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowden, died in 2002 at the relatively young age of seventy-one, Lady Elizabeth asked permission of the Queen to speak to the press about Margaret. And then her commentary was simple and repeated by numerous news services. She said Margaret had been in a great deal of pain towards the end. Margaret, like her father who died of lung cancer, was a heavy smoker who had a lung removed years earlier and reportedly had been declining in health for the previous 20 years. It was as if Lady Elizabeth said what was apparent.

For all her access to the elite circles and nobility in Great Britain, Lady Elizabeth was barely photographed for the purposes of the media, and especially not with Sir John. Further, she refused to cooperate with those who wished to write a biography of him - not even his daughter.  According to Sebastian Shakespeare, the author of a Daily Mail UK article previously linked to, all her correspondence with the poet was given as she wanted it to The Chatsworth House Trust, this being a house she grew up in. According to The Telegraph. co.uk in an article that appeared in September of 2018, it was also her will that these letters remain private and not be given over for use until the year 2034!

C 2021 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

*** As a note, there are situations that we should NOT keep secret, such as when there is abuse taking place. Use your wisdom.

CATHERINE JAMES - BOB DYLAN - and the RECENT ACCUSATIONS AGAINST HIM

DAILY MAIL - CATHERINE JAMES / BOB DYLAN 2007 MEMOIR  link to the article

Taking a pause here to address the accusations that Bob Dylan had an inappropriate sexual relationship long ago.  If he did it was not with Catherine James.

I saw the article linked above in Daily Mail - a British publication that has an Online presence.  Although I included CATHERINE JAMES in my month about GROUPIES,  I felt that it was also not appropriate for the Daily Mail to link Catherine James in this article - to even bring her up - in order to float more speculation against BOB DYLAN, who is included here because of his long relationship with RUTH TRYANGIEL, to whom he was required to provide a financial settlement.

I read Catherine James' memoir years back before including her in that month's GROUPIES feature, and basically, she never said that Bob was anything but honorable. Catherine James had a hard life, beginning with a cruel narcissist mother, one she had to survive.  As many teenagers did, she headed for what excited her, the burgeoning rock and roll scene in what is now West Hollywood - the Sunset strip.

Her depiction of Bob Dylan was of him being kind, almost big brotherly, and driving her home - and home was an orphanage. James became a groupie and admits to having sexual relationships with a number of rock stars.  Bob wasn't one of them, even if she had him up on the pedestal.

I have to say his. There is a difference between a 14 year old teenager being forced into an arranged marriage or anyone being forced into sex slavery,  or a 14 year old being molested by a step father or teacher, and the choice some young women made, though often this was unknown to their parent or parents, to be groupies.  The world had just started being a different place when contraception, significantly The Pill, became available, and part of what was Women's Liberation was sexual liberation.

CATHERINE JAMES : DANDELION : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW  appeared here at Mistress Manifesto in October 2016, which was the month I featured some of the best known Groupies.

CARNATIONS

Peter Charles Henderson - artist

United Kingdom

1799-1829

LADY ELIZABETH CAVENDISH AND HER SERVICE TO PRINCESS MARGARET

According to multiple obituaries in newspapers (and on the Internet) it may be that Lady Elizabeth Georgiana Alice Cavendish was the person to introduce Princess Margaret to her husband Antony Armstrong Jones, who was to be ennobled with the name First Lord Snowden. Snowden would divorce Princess Margaret when he got his Mistress pregnant!

At her funeral, to represent The Queen (Elizabeth II) Lady Sarah Chatto, Princess Margaret's daughter stood in. 

Lady Elizabeth was known for her zippered lips, but another of Princess Margaret's Ladies In Waiting, Anne Glenconner, eventually wrote a book about her times with the Princess who was known to have her "Royal Moments," was a hard partier, and whose marriage to the First Lord Snowden was chaotic.

Anne Glenconner was in an awful marriage herself. I have not read this book but.... Here's a great interview with Glenconner:  THE GUARDIAN : I'M NO SNOWFLAKE : INTERVIEW WITH ANNE GLENCONNER by Hadley Freeman

She mentions that she married a man of a slightly lower rank in the aristocracy.

EXCERPT: Glenconner's family has a long relationship with the royal family; her paternal grandmother was Edward VIII's mistress and her father was equerry to George VI.  Glenconner was Princess Margaret;s devoted lady-in-waiting for more than 30 years, and this is what spurred her into writing her book, as she was horrified by a recent biography about the princess, which she describes as "that horrible book, we won't mention the name of the somebody...

  

According to an October 5, 2018 article in RoyalCentraco.uk by Charlie Proctor, Lady Elizabeth was also a godmother to Princess Margaret's son, who is the current 2nd Lord Snowden. 

In a Daily Mail UK article dated June 29, 2007 entitled Very Contrary Princess - Why Did The Charming Margaret Turn Into The Most Unpopular Royal by Tim Heald, there is this:

EXCERPT:

Above all, she (Margaret) craved kitchen meals and intelligent small-talk. What she particularly loathed were occasions when a hostess would suddenly announce she had friends coming in for drinks or a meal; then the Princess would feel correctly that she was being exploited and "shown off."

"The people who knew her best were devoted to her," said Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire. "She was, I think, the most loyal person I have ever met and, of course, to me a wonderful friend."

"I know that no matter what I had done, she would have been there."

But even those who saw the Princess often acknowledged that she could be contrary and contradictory.

DAILY MAIL UK - MARGARET UNPOPULAR ROYAL

C 2021 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot  All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

Besides the linked to articles, reference for this post also came from Hello Magazine, an April 19, 2020 article called Why The Queens Ladies In Waiting Do Not Receive a Salary by Gemma Strong.

PURPLE ROSES

 

LADY ELIZABETH GEORGIANA ALICE CAVENDISH : NMNK MISTRESS OF POET LAUREATE JOHN BETJEMAN

 LADY ELIZABETH GEORGIANA ALICE CAVENDISH

1926-2018

One of the few public photos of Sir John Betjeman and his Mistress

Lady Elizabeth Cavendish

(pinterest)

I know how much my readers love to know about Modern Mistresses, especially more obscure women from the peerage in the British Isles. Perhaps if you're a member of this elite group you know all the inside information, but Lady Elizabeth Georgiana Alive Cavendish is not a famous woman (or an infamous one) and so I was surprised to know that her arrangement was remarked upon in multiple obituaries and being a Mistress didn't stop her from being acknowledged or rewarded for her accomplishments.

According to numerous accounts, Lady Elizabeth grew up as friends with both Princess Elizabeth (The Queen Elizabeth II) and the Queen's sister, Princess Margaret. She became one of Princess Margaret's Ladies In Waiting from the late 1940's until Margaret's death in 2002 - a long assignment. (As we may have been informed by the series The Crown, Margaret lived an unconventional life and so I can guess that Lady Elizabeth was in the know about Margaret's wild times.) Sometimes we are shocked by just how unconventional Royals and the Peerage can be, perhaps because we think they are prim and proper people being English and in such high standing but maybe they just do as they do knowing theirs is an insular world.

According to The Times - UK, obituary, Lady Elizabeth was already waiting on Margaret at the age of twenty-five when in 1951 she went to a dinner party in London hosted by Lady Pamela Berry and there met John Betjeman, who was not yet Poet Laureate. She was gawky tall and shy, perhaps uncomfortable, and didn't speak to him at all that night and yet some connection must have been made, because that was the start of something. 

Betjeman, born in 1906, twenty years older than she, and married since 1933 to the Honorable Penelope Chetwode, had attended Oxford College but did not graduate. He was involved in World War II but perhaps in intelligence. The couple had a son and a daughter together, in 1937, Paul, and in 1942, Candida.

As if to explain why there was never a divorce, a Wiki on Betjeman, which was highly referenced, especially in regards to his literary accomplishments, states that Penelope "became a Catholic in 1948" I note just a couple years before this meeting. No divorce for Catholics but was that it? There are also major mentions that he was bisexual, at least in his imagination. So Interestingly one wonders why then so many of Lady Elizabeth's obit's have the words "Lover, Companion, and Carer." Despite such rumors he was a High Anglican and even a Church Warden for a while.

Since John Betjeman died in 1984, and they met in 1951, my math tells me that Elizabeth and John were in each other's lives for thirty-three years! The obituary in The Telegraph calls her "The Other Wife" acknowledging that Betjeman had a legal wife and a Mistress and she reportedly was at his bedside when he died. She was a devoted to him. According to a YouTube video from poster Dead Obituary, Betjeman's daughter Candida Lycett Green called Lady Elizabeth her father's "beloved other wife." Apparently he himself referred to Lady Elizabeth as his "London Wife."

Do you know what NMNK stands for?  It means Never Married No Kids. Why does it seem so rare for a Mistress to have never had a child? Well, the description fits Lady Elizabeth. She was satisfied to have this relationship with this man and endured in it and was there at his death bed.

Perhaps Lady Elizabeth grew up knowing about Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, an ancestor who allowed her husband another woman in their home where they lived together sharing a man for many years. (I'll post about the film made about that love triangle latter this month.)

According to multiple sources, Lady Elizabeth achieved some recognition for her service to Princess Margaret. In 1976 she was made a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order. My research reveals that this is an order of knighthood that Queen Victoria established in 1896 to recognize someone's personal service to the Queen or members of the Monarchy.  Twenty years later Lady Elizabeth became a Commander in the same Order. She was also a Justice of the Peace in the city of London and served in the juvenile and adult courts. It's my guess that the once shy young woman was not shy for long.

Just to further help you tie this noblewoman into other posts here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot, our Mistresses of the Month, Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, an older sister of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who I covered in March 2017 married into her family.

Elizabeth's brother Andrew became the 11th Duke of Devonshire and her brother William, Marquess of Hartington is the one who married Kick after a very long wait due to their religious differences. He was killed during World War II making her a young widow. If interested in reading about Kick, who after the death of her husband went back to England and became a Mistress anticipating marriage, go into that month's archives or search for her within the blog!

While an unpaid Lady In Waiting and never married, the discreet Lady Elizabeth refused to talk about her relationship, which was an Open Secret.  According to a September 18, 2018 article by Sebastian Shakespeare in Daily Mail UK entitled "Betjemen's Mistress Leaves 10 Million (pounds) To Adopted Nieces After Dying Age 92," John's wife Penelope found out about his "London Wife" in 1973 when she moved a few blocks away.

And according to that writer, all Lady Elizabeth's correspondence is held by Chatsworth House Trust, as Chatsworth House is where she grew up, and it will be held there sealed for many years hence. 

C 2021 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot All Rights Reserved

References for this months posts include the aforementioned as well as genealogy sites, wiki's, numerous articles in the British press - newspapers, YouTube videos, and some specifically mentioned references. One article that I had the damnest time trying to read because the teaser required a subscription was in the Telegraph.co.uk obituaries on September 18 2018. I can't link to it for you because you too will require a subscription to read it.  The Telegraph seemed to be quite interested in Lady Elizabeth.

 

Thanks for reading!