Basic HTML Version
4
City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
collection. Guests could admire her Renoirs,
Utrillos, Constables and Gauguins. In 1957, a year
after she died, one painting, Gauguin’s “Still Life
with Apples,” sold at auction for nearly $300,000.
The flatware was bequeathed to the White House
where her close friend Mamie Eisenhower
converted a billiard room, probably without
consulting her husband, into the Vermeil Room
in 1958 to display the pieces. In the UK we usually
call flatware cutlery and Vermeil silver gilt.
Thus it was that when Queen Elizabeth II attended
a white-tie dinner at the White House in 2007 as
the guest of President Bush, she ate her Maryland
crab and chorizo pozole from flatware given to the
White House by Margaret Thompson Biddle of
Saint Hill Manor.
If you opt to book your group Christmas lunch
at Saint Hill Manor we are not promising Vermeil
flatware but lunch will be served in Maggie’s
Monkey Room painted by John “Johnny” Spencer
Churchill, bon viveur and doyen of the 1950s
Chelsea art scene. Every bit a Churchill
in 1929
he had accompanied his father, Uncle Winston
and Randolph on their celebrated trip to Canada
and the USA where William Randolph Hearst
introduced them to all the Hollywood greats –
except Garbo of course. Churchill was a muralist
whose work can also be seen at Chartwell,
Blenheim Palace and Simpsons of Piccadilly.
He also undertook some work for the wantonly
wonderful Maharini of Cooch Behar whose daughter
would later live at Saint Hill. Johnny Churchill spent
three months sketching monkeys at London Zoo
and three months painting at Saint Hill.
There are 145 monkeys and 20 different species:
"Much as I tried to prevent it happening,
the monkeys resemble human beings", he wrote
in his autobiography. Thomas Beecham is there and
a capuchin monkey painting under a tree portrays his
uncle Sir Winston. Johnny now lies in Bladon
Churchyard, not far from Uncle Winston and in sight
of Blenheim Palace.
The next owner was Mrs Elaine Laski, daughter of
Michael Marks and heiress to the Marks & Spencer
millions. She first married Norman, son of a cotton
merchant. Her brother-in-law Harold Laski, Marxist
professor of politics at the LSE, taught Ralph
Milliband, father of the man who is currently leader
of the Labour Party and, of course, father of the man
who currently isn’t!
When Norman Laski died Elaine married his cousin,
another textile industrialist Neville Blond, who was
the first Jewish man to be commissioned into the
Household Cavalry and they lived at Saint Hill Manor.
They were close friends of
Sir Archibald McIndoe,
the surgeon who treated more than 600 burned
airmen at the Queen Victoria Hospital in nearby
East Grinstead during WWII. These airmen formed
the world-famous Guinea Pig Club. The Blonds
opened their beautiful home to convalescing patients
and set up the Blond McIndoe Foundation, donating
both money and buildings. The Foundation (patron
the Princess Royal) is still based in the grounds of the
Queen Victoria Hospital and is instrumental in the
treatment of servicemen badly injured in Afghanistan.
Elaine Blond’s massive inheritance also funded the
start of the Royal Court Theatre. Neville’s son was
Anthony Blond the maverick publisher who funded
Private Eye and published everything from school text
books to
A History of Orgies
as well as works by 70
new authors including Simon Raven and Tom
Stoppard. He would have inherited a Monet from his
Saint Hill stepmother had they not fallen out just
before she died.