Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
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by the magnificence of Dean Castle but astounded by what he perceived as the coldness of his hosts. He claims to have been greeted by Lord Howard de Walden dressed in a full suit of medieval armour, holding The Times with hands clad in iron gauntlets. In his account, an exaggeration of the anecdote told by Augustus John, his host wore different suits of armour all the time, even changing for dinner into an especially shiny one. His grotesquely amusing account presents the entire family frequently communing with ghosts.172
He was devastated to discover that, although her father was extremely rich, the bulk of his fortune would be inherited by Pip’s brother John. That Pip was merely to inherit an amount of money that assured her what he bitterly dismissed as ‘a mediocre comfort for life’ led José Luis to comment revealingly in his memoirs that this was ‘not at all part of my plans’. With a quite delicious lack of irony, he follows the bitter statement that ‘it’s one thing to marry a rich woman and quite another to marry the daughter of a rich family’ with the assertion that he did not marry Pip for money. Forgetting his earlier story of the shotgun marriage in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, he asserted that he married her out of snobbery – the hope of annoying his father with photographs of Chirk Castle, alongside which the Barón de Segur’s Palacio Falguera looked like a watchman’s hut.173 While at Dean Castle, according to José Luis, Lord Howard de Walden asked him point-blank if he had married Pip just for her money. He writes that, although fully aware that the dignified reply would have been to turn on his heel and leave the castle, ‘the Spanish gentleman was in no position to burn his boats and leave himself on the beach with his feet in the water like any old ship-wrecked man’. He admitted to his father-in-law that he had indeed married his daughter for her money but also because they were good friends and she constituted an opportunity for him to break free from his family and from the asphyxiating atmosphere of the Spanish aristocracy.174 Lord Howard de Walden was appalled by his son-in-law’s ready admission that he was a gold-digger. He altered his will to prevent Pip, now twenty-nine, getting access to her money before she was forty.175
José Luis claims that, during a ball given at Dean Castle, while Pip was asleep on a sofa elsewhere, he passed a night of passion with Lady Audrey Fairfax, the wife of Admiral Sir Rupert Fairfax. Pip’s sister Gaenor pointed out that there were no balls held in Dean Castle in 1946. After they left Scotland, the couple spent several weeks in London, staying at the Mandeville Hotel. While there, José Luis maintained the social life to which he was accustomed by accepting large sums of money from Pip. Given that this situation could not be sustained, that José Luis had no way of earning a living in Britain and that Pip’s health required a warm climate, he proposed that they emigrate to Argentina.176
Tommy Howard de Walden owned a small shipping line, the South America Saint Line. In consequence, his son, Pip’s brother John, was able to arrange a passage for Pip and José Luis to Argentina. He also arranged for there to be two medical men, Dr W. L. Roche and Dr W. D. Mulvey, and a nurse aboard. The ship, the SS Saint-Merriel, set sail from Liverpool for Buenos Aires via Las Palmas and Rio de Janeiro. Pip’s labour started before the ship had reached the Canary Islands. The medical staff turned out to be of little help, since one doctor was in fact a dental specialist and the other an ophthalmologist. The nurse, who bore a remarkable resemblance to the young Margaret Rutherford, managed to break her leg just before Pip went into labour. Her son John was born at sea on 22 June 1946. It was a difficult birth and Pip was in danger of losing her life. An attractive fellow passenger, a fashion designer called Esterre ‘Terry’ Erland, helped with the labour. When the ship reached Las Palmas, there was a christening at which Terry Erland became John’s godmother. His godfather was, thanks to Margot van Raalte and by the proxy of the ship’s captain, Don Juan de Borbón. When the ship reached Bahia in Brazil, while Pip lay still convalescing on board, José Luis claims that he went ashore and slept with Terry Erland. José Luis made no secret of this and, for Pip, suffering a degree of postnatal depression, the effect was devastating. Even if she had not done so in Portugal, before reaching Argentina, she realised that she had made a dreadful mistake and that Prince and Princess Orléans-Borbón had been right about José Luis. However, with her boundless optimism, she determined to make the best of the marriage.177
During the sea voyage to Argentina, José Luis met a retired Hungarian cavalry officer, Count Laszlo Graffy, who was planning to breed and train horses on the pampas. He persuaded Pip that they should become the Count’s partners in the enterprise. On reaching Argentina, at first their expenses were met by the agent of Lord Howard’s shipping line. They acquired a flat in Buenos Aires, were able to buy land on the pampas for their stables and riding school, install a prefabricated house and buy a car. They suffered considerable privation since Pip could gain no immediate access to either her own funds or the help of her family since money could not be sent out of England until she had established herself as a British resident abroad. She had very little money and José Luis had none, since his family were outraged by the manner of his marriage and had effectively cut him off.
Since José Luis was repelled by the thought of childcare and Pip could not cope with John’s crying, they left him with a series of nurses. Their own experience of parenting hardly prepared them for any other response. Moreover, their own relationship was in increasing difficulty.178 José Luis, in his memoirs, asserts that when he made love to her, he could not disguise his indifference. Nevertheless, she was soon pregnant again. They hardly spoke to each other. José Luis claimed that he abhorred his son (although photographic evidence suggests otherwise) and spent ever more time in Buenos Aires.179 Pip’s skill with horses contributed greatly to the initial success of the business at Los Cardales where she worked with Graffy and the various Hungarian and Polish cavalry officers employed at the stables. However, money was so tight that, in an effort to make ends meet, Pip went into partnership with Terry Erland to open a fashion-design business and dress shop under the name Susan Scott Designs.180
Tommy Howard de Walden died on 6 November 1946. Because he had not made prior arrangements, the amounts that he left to his daughters were severely diminished by death duties.181 Pip was to be left £50,000 – a considerable amount of money in 1946, about £1 million in 2001 terms – but it was tied up in the family estates. In any case, postwar austerity restrictions on capital movements prevented it being taken out of the country. Tommy did, moreover, leave Pip his studio in Cadogan Lane. Because, when the news arrived, Pip was suffering a difficult pregnancy and had been ordered by her gynaecologist to rest, José Luis went to London alone in the early summer of 1947 to wind up the estate. He stayed with Margot Howard de Walden at her house in Welbeck Street and soon established a warm friendship with a bisexual Austrian aristocrat called Count Boisy Rex. Boisy vaguely knew the family because his elder sister, Countess Marie Louise Rex, was married to the father-in-law of Pip’s cousin, Charmian Russell (née van Raalte). José Luis used the impoverished Boisy as a cicerone to the gastronomic, sartorial and erotic delights of postwar London. Needless to say, he did not stint himself. After the reading of Tommy Howard de Walden’s will, the cornucopia that was the studio in Cadogan Lane lay at the mercy of José Luis and Boisy. The house contained a wealth of modern art although some were fakes and the collection may not have included the Max Ernst, Braque, Otto Dix, Rothko and Jackson Pollock canvases, Hogarth and Picasso drawings and Rodin sculptures ‘remembered’ by José Luis. José Luis did not hesitate to move into the house with Count Rex nor, with his help, to sell off paintings in order to finance the rebuilding of his wardrobe. Given his vocation as a dandy, this proved to be a fabulously expensive endeavour.182
Since there was no detailed inventory of the contents of the Cadogan Lane house, there was little or no control over what José Luis was able to sell. He lived, as he put it,