The aristocratic daughters of Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India

George 1st Earl Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925) lived at his great ancestral home Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire. In 1886 he was elected MP for Southport, and later Under Secretary for India (1891-2) and Foreign Affairs (1895-8). Then he became Lord Curzon, Vice­roy of India (1898-1905), one of the grandest and most self-confident imperial servants Britain ever had. Meanwhile, in all his travels, Curzon collected artefacts which are now displayed in Kedleston’s Eastern Museum.

 

Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire

Daughters Irene (1896-1966), Cynthia (1898-1933) and Alexandra (1905-95) were all born before the sad death of his fabulously rich American wife Mary Leiter in 1906. Lord Curzon then embarked on a long love affair with novelist El­inor Glyn, before dropping her to marry his rich, beautiful second wife in 1917. 

Anne de Courcy provided insight into girls’ public and private liv­es, based on their private letters and diaries. For ex­ample on­ce their mother died, the girls grew up in the shad­ow of their lov­ing father who nevertheless left them to a child­hood of neglect and nannies. De Courcy’s book, The Viceroy's Daughters (2002), told the story of the Curzon girls who grew up into the last flow­ering of the privileged world of the British haute monde. Irene's deb party in 1914 included sup­per for hundreds, tons of exotic flowers and illustrious aristocracy.

As his daughters reached adulthood, Curzon proved autocratic and unreasonable, particularly on the subject of the money their mother had left her daughters in her will, which dad wanted to use to finance his urgent need for house renovation.

This led each of the girls into revolt against their father. In­tensely musical and a pass­ionate foxhunter, Irene set up a house­hold of her own at Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire, which by the 1920s had become the hub of a glamorous hunting set whose second sport was late-night bed-hopping. So she was a keen hunter, bridge player, partygoer and drinker, and took a series of lovers that included pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Despite a series of proposals from ambitious suitors, including Nevile Hen­derson later the British ambassador to Hitler's Berlin, she remained single.

Cynthia married the ambitious Oswald Mosley in 1920, joining him in the Lab­our Party where she became a popular MP her­self. Cynthia was just 21 at marriage and she re­mained submissively loyal to him despite a] his constant woman­is­ing. And b] his alarming political opportun­ism, veering from young Conservative MP to Labour MP to founder of the British Union of Fascists. In the 1929 general election, Mrs Mosley won an amazing victory as a Lab­our candidate!! By 1932 Cynthia was enthusiastically ex­tolling the merits of Fascism. How bizarre! Was she so pathetically depend­ent on Mosley that she would have followed him anywhere? We’ll never know because she died in 1933, at 34, after appendicitis.

 

Cynthia Curzon married Oswald Mosley in 1920

Alexandra, the beautiful sister, married the Prince of Wales' friend Edward Fruity Metcalfe in 1925. By the time of Lord Curzon’s death in 1925, he had rebuffed his daughters, the most painful case being with Irene who was refused access to his deathbed. Yet in the 1920s and early 30s, the sisters remained at the centre of Brit­ain’s gli­tter­ing upper class.

In 1933 youngest sister Alexandra jumped into a long pas­s­ionate affair with her widower brother-law Mosley and a liais­on with Muss­ol­ini's amb­assador to London, Count Dino Grandi, while simultan­eously enjoying a romance with the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax.

The sisters saw British Fascism from behind the scenes, so they had an intimate view the arrival of Wallis Simpson and the early mar­r­ied life of the Wind­sors. The war found them based at the Dor­ch­es­t­er Hotel, spending their days nursing wounded soldiers, work­ing in canteens, lecturing and doing other war work.

Both sisters became increasingly enmeshed in Mosley's world, Alex­andra as his mistress, Irene as the child minder; and they became enthus­iastic supporters of his politics. Irene organised a Fascist ball and went to the Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg in 1936! And for a while, “Baba Blackshirt” worked as a go-between for Mosley and her other lover, Mussolini's amb­assador Dino Grandi.

Readers of this blog will know my harsh feelings about Oswald Mos­ley, Wallis Simpson, Edward Duke of Windsor, Nancy Astor and Lord Halifax. Anyone who doubts the awful links between them should read the story of the Duke of Windsor's 1937 trip to Germany.

As war threatened, the sisters retreated from the group. Alexandra's wartime admirers included Av­erill Harriman and Walter Monckton, the Bri­tish foreign sec­ret­ary Lord Halifax, with whom she began a pass­ion­ate relationship. Ir­ene, anxious about her alcoholism and her spinsterhood, began to be very annoyed with her younger sister, and vice versa. Gossipy yes, but irrit­ating during the real tragedies of WW2.

At the end of their fortunate and unfortunate lives, Irene and Alexandra somehow emerged as pillars of society. Irene made one of the first life peers in 1958 for her work with youth clubs, while Alexandra was recog­nised for her good work for the Save the Children Fund. 

Anne de Courcy's book, 2002.

De Courcy was a keen and experienced writer of upper-class Britain, and The Viceroy's Daughters was indeed a wond­er­fully revealing portrait of British upper-class life in the early C20th. And although I thought I knew everything about ar­istocratic Brit­ish Fascism, the Viceroy's Daughters provided new information about Os­wald Mosley, the Clived­en set, Lord Halifax, the Duke and Duch­ess of Windsor etc - new accounts of the bully­ing Cur­zon's career; of the actively nasty but mesmer­ising Mosley; and of the abdication of the unpleasant Edward VIII. The stories of these men frequently ov­ershadowed the slighter histories of the rich Curzon women.