The
British press, in my opinion, have the best obituaries in the
language. They also have some of the most interesting characters
to write about. The following, found in the Daily Telegraph is
the obit of Clementine, Lady Beit. Lady Beit was born a Mitford
and a cousin of the celebrated sisters. Her husband
Sir Alfred Beit had one of the great private art collections
in Britain. It had been accumulated by Sir Alfred’s father,
a South African diamond millionaire at the turn of the 20th
century. It had a rocky road after its bequest and provided
enough wild and frightening adventure to make it into a movie,
which it was (and more than once). This obituary was published
in January of this year.
Marjorie
Fitzgibbon (b.1932) Lady Clementine Beit (née Mitford,
1915-2005).
Lady
Beit
Lady Beit, who has died aged 89, retired with her husband, Sir
Alfred Beit, Bt, to enjoy one of the finest private art collections
in private hands at an idyllic Irish country house, only to find
themselves the victims of a series of robberies.
In 1974 the Beits were listening to records in the library of Russborough
House, Co Wicklow, when three armed men and a woman forced their
way in. Refusing to answer questions, the robbers used tights to
tie up the couple and their servants. Sir Alfred was struck on
the head with a pistol butt; his wife was dragged down the stone
steps to the cellar. Meanwhile, Rose Dugdale, a radical civil rights
leader with a fake French accent and IRA sympathies, did a hurried
survey before selecting 19 works, including the only Vermeer in
private hands, a Rubens and a Goya; her accomplices then tore the
pictures down from the walls, raving about "exploiters" and "capitalist
pigs" before making a hurried getaway.
The insurers offered a £100,000 reward; the experts declared
that the thieves would be unable to sell their booty, anyway. The
criminals responded by issuing a demand for £500,000 and
for two IRA bombers to be removed from their London prison. After
a week the Irish police, who had ignored advice to look for Dugdale,
admitted that the trail had gone cold. Then a pair of alert Gardai
officers discovered a lone woman in a recently rented farmhouse
in Co Cork, and all the pictures were found wrapped up in a cupboard
and in a car.
The upper-middle-class Dugdale, who had earlier robbed her own
father, was sentenced to nine years after pleading "proudly
and incorruptibly guilty"; and she retained her place in the
public eye by marrying and having a baby in prison.
After the paintings returned to Russborough, ownership was transferred
to the specially-formed Alfred Beit Foundation, which opened the
house to the public, and the Beits moved into a wing. But this
did not prevent a second raid in 1986, when Martin Cahill, a well-known
Dublin criminal, took 17 paintings. The Beits were away at the
time and, heeding police advice, declined to discuss the incident.
But the robbery became the subject of a book and several films,
including John Boorman's The General (1998), in which Brendan
Gleeson played Cahill, known in Dublin as an ODC (ordinary decent criminal),
who was later murdered by the IRA. Twelve pictures, including Vermeer's
Lady Writing a Letter and Gainsborough's Madame Bacalli, were taken
in what the film treated as a comic scenario. It shows the gang
breaking in to set off the alarm, then retreating to drink tea
in the woods while police arrive to conclude it was a false alarm,
leaving the gang to help themselves.
By now some friends felt that the Beits had good reason to leave
Ireland. But Homan Potterton, director of the Irish National Gallery,
tactfully suggested that, in recognition of the government's generosity,
the planned handover to the nation of 17 of the finest paintings
should now take place. The gallery's north wing in Dublin was renamed
Beit, though it was some years before all the pictures were recovered.
A third robbery occurred in 2001. The now widowed Lady Beit was
sitting down to lunch when a 4x4 drove up Russborough's front steps
and through its closed doors; three men in balaclavas leaped out
to seize a Gainsborough and a Bernardo Belotto, which were soon
recovered. The following year there was yet another robbery, but
the five paintings, including two Rubenses, were soon recovered.
Clementine Mabell Kitty Mitford was born on October 22 1915, the
posthumous daughter of Major Bertram Mitford; she was also a granddaughter
of the 1st Lord Redesdale - the five celebrated Mitford sisters
were her cousins. Diana Mitford particularly admired Clementine's
blonde beauty, which her sister Nancy was to hymn in the 1950s
when she described Clementine as one of London's 10 most elegant
women.
Since Clementine's mother spent long periods in Africa after marrying
Captain Courteney Brocklehust, a game warden, Clementine and her
sister were frequently sent to stay with their cousins. She was
a contemporary of Unity Mitford at St Margaret's School, Bushey,
and also went to Berlin to learn German, where she met Hitler. She
was occasionally escorted by a handsome young stormtrooper, and
was asked by Unity to "waggle a flag" as "the
darling Führer" passed in the street.
But instead of being swept up by Nazism, Clementine returned home,
where she took a nursing course at St Thomas's. In 1939, she married
Sir Alfred Beit, 2nd Bt, a serious-minded Conservative MP with
liberal instincts and a lifelong dedication to the collection which
had been built up by his father, Sir Otto Beit, the South African
diamond millionaire.
Since her husband had large African interests, they set off on
honeymoon via Athens for Southern Rhodesia. On coming home the
young couple started to make substantial alterations to their recently
acquired house in Kensington Park Gardens, turning their rectangular
dining room into an oval in an attempt to perfect the setting for
the pictures.
After the declaration of war, Beit was commissioned into the RAF
and attached to the Joint War Cabinet Commitee in France. His wife
accompanied him, but when the British legation was withdrawn, she
had to make her own way home, taking the last boat out of Brest.
Back in England, they put the Kensington house on the market, but
it was bombed before they could sell.
While Beit was posted to Bomber Command at High Wycombe, his wife
worked in a factory making air reconnaissance cameras and joined
the Transport Workers' Union while helping her husband's agent
in his constituency.
After he was defeated in the 1945 general election, the Beits decided
to take a holiday in South Africa. Instead of returning home after
a month, however, the Afrikaans-speaking Beit toyed with the idea
of standing for the dominion's parliament, and they bought a modern
house in Cape Town with a fine view of Table Mountain; their Kensington
home was sold to become the Iraqi embassy. Later the couple moved
to Johannesburg to be closer to the Beit interests in Southern
Rhodesia, but they could find no house suitable for the pictures,
which were temporarily lent to the South African and Irish National
Galleries.
Click
to order
By 1952 Lady Beit, particularly, had grown exasperated with the
National Party's apartheid regime. When Sir Alfred saw an advertisement
in Country Life for Russborough House, a Palladian mansion 20 miles
outside Dublin (but half an hour's drive from the nearest police
station), he cabled a bid, which was accepted.
The couple moved in, with the entire collection at last under one
roof. Introducing a pre-war style of entertaining, they filled
the house with guests at Christmas and hired a plane to bring friends
to the Dublin Horse Show. They also lent pictures to the Wexford
Festival, of which Sir Alfred was president.
Beit was a fine shot and his wife hunted with the Killing Kildares
and took retired greyhounds for walks. The sound of Lady Beit reading
aloud to her husband from a chaise longue while mist engulfed the
house and the rain poured down became the stuff of local legend.
In 1993 the state, which had offered them such shaky protection,
expressed its appreciation by making them both honorary Irish citizens.
Lady Beit continued to live at Russborough after Sir Alfred's death
in 1994, reading Proust and Mann in their original languages. She
was in St Thomas's Hospital, looking forward to a party at Russborough
for her 90th birthday, when she died on August 17.
