Wednesday, December 4, 2013. Cold but not too; some Sun, some clouds, where the weather dulls everything in sight. It’s that time of the year.
This past week, the Telegraph of London ran an obituary of the 4th Earl of Dudley, known to many as just plain Billy Dudley, who died on November 16, a little less than two months from his 94th birthday, and exactly two years to the day of the death of his wife Maureen, Countess of Dudley.
![]() | ![]() | | Countess and Earl of Dudley. | ![]() |
The Dudleys were very popular on this side of the Atlantic. They visited New York fairly frequently, which is how I met them.
Billy was one of those British gents who always had a smile with his hello, and a twinkle in his eye that implied laughter was on the way. Maureen, as she was known to friends, was warm and friendly, and like her husband was glad to see friends. I always had the feeling they were glad to see me. The feeling was mutual. I mention this because we were really just acquaintances.
I think that it was probably true, however, because they were the kind of people who did like people and were glad to see them. Such personal generosity is not as commonplace as you might think it should be or would be with the Very Social animals who inhabit this world, and particularly the world where the Dudleys held some sway –in New York and London.
I hadn’t seen them in a few years. Maureen died of cancer two years ago at 78, and had been ill for at least a year before. Although I knew Billy only from the few times we had dinner together in New York, he was one of those people who always shared the pleasure of his company.
In reading the Telegraph obituary, and then re-reading the Telegraph’s obituary of Maureen, which was published at about this time two years ago, I got a much stronger sense of these two friendly people, and insight into them and their relationship. Firstly I knew very little about their past lives because it never came up. The prominence both experienced in their young adulthood was before my time.
![]() | ![]() | | William Humble David Ward, 4th Earl of Dudley, 1939. © National Portrait Gallery, London | ![]() | | The young actress Maureen Swanson. | ![]() |
Billy came from the aristocracy and sat in the House of Lords. He’d been married before to an Argentinian woman with whom he had a son who is his heir, and two daughters. He met Maureen when he was in his late 30s and his marriage was evidently already foundering, and she was in her mid-20s, a very successful film actress – on the brink of real stardom. This was in the late 1950s. Maureen was Show Business and Billy was heir to a wealthy earldom of long standing historically.
The Prince and the Showgirl, almost but not quite. He was a man of obvious stature in his community, and personality; and she was a beauty. And hot. According to the obituaries of both, their marriage had its rocky moments but it turned out to be an ideal for both personalities. Together they had five daughters and a son. So Billy was the father of nine.
I’m running Billy’s obituary first. You get some sense of the man from it. But then in the second – Maureen’s obit – you understand more clearly, not only the man but also their bond that was evident when you were in their company.
It is never surprising to learn after the fact that the marriage, any marriage, is not/was not as copasetic as it might appear in polite company. But with the Dudleys you definitely had the feeling that they liked each other, and understood each other – and were safe with each other in that goldfish bowl of a society that they belonged to because of his peerage and patrimony.
The following is from the Telegraph of London last week:
The 4th Earl of Dudley was a former ADC to Lord Wavell who married an actress and once satirised Princess Michael in verse
The 4th Earl of Dudley, who has died aged 93, was ADC to the Viceroy of India, Lord Wavell, for two years during the war, and in peacetime became an enthusiastic amateur actor and successful businessman.
William Humble David Ward, always known as Billy, was born on January 5 1920, the elder son of the 3rd Earl of Dudley, descendant of Humble Ward (the son of a London goldsmith), who was raised to the peerage as Baron Ward in the 17th century. Billy’s great-grandfather, the 11th Lord Ward, was created Viscount Ednam and Earl of Dudley in February 1860.
Billy’s mother was the former Lady Rosemary Leveson-Gower, only daughter of the 4th Duke of Sutherland. She died in the Meopham air disaster in 1930, a few months after the death of her younger son, run down on Chelsea Bridge. Eric Dudley had taken an earlier flight for business reasons and so survived.
Billy’s grandfather, the 2nd Earl, who died in 1932, was Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland and Governor-General of Australia. After the death of his first wife, Rachel (née Gurney), he married Gertrude Monckton— formerly Miss Gertie Millar, the Gaiety Girl.
![]() | ![]() | | Queen Mary. | ![]() | | Duke of Windsor. | ![]() |
There were close ties between the 3rd Earl, Billy’s father, and the Duke of Windsor, who when Prince of Wales, had courted Billy’s mother. Queen Mary had vetoed her as a Royal bride on the grounds of “bad blood” — there was a touch of madness in the Leveson-Gower line. The Prince stood sponsor for the infant Billy at his christening and later used to stay with the Dudleys at Himley Hall, near Dudley, and Great Westwood, King’s Langley.
On one occasion King Edward, as the Prince became in 1936, went to spend the weekend with Billy’s father. Some time later, the Earl and young Billy were favoured with a teatime visit by Queen Mary.
“I understand that my son was here recently,” Queen Mary said to Lord Dudley. He admitted that this was so. “And that so was Mrs Simpson.” Again Dudley concurred. “And Mr Simpson. And Mr Simpson’s lady friend.”
The Earl, now blushing hard, had to agree that it was true.
Queen Mary then insisted on being shown the sleeping arrangements. It soon became apparent that the bedrooms of the Prince of Wales and Wallis Simpson shared a connecting bathroom, as did those of Simpson and his girlfriend. “I see,” said the Queen stiffly. “Very convenient.”
Billy later remained friends with his godfather. He was amused at the possibility that the Duke of Windsor might have been his father, especially when evidence emerged that the Prince of Wales had been known to visit his mother privately after her marriage.
Billy Ward was brought up at Himley. The family then owned 30,000 acres in Staffordshire and Worcestershire, and some of the most valuable iron, steel and coal interests in the country. He won a scholarship to Eton and, aged 16, by then Lord Ednam, an exhibition to Christ Church, Oxford. A brilliant academic career was damaged when he suffered from meningitis and then his university education was interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War.
Having joined the Blues as a trooper, in 1941 Lord Ednam was commissioned lieutenant in the 10th Royal Hussars (PWO), his father’s old regiment. In 1942-43 he was ADC to the Viceroy of India, Lord Wavell, and in 1943-44 Adjutant, the 10th Hussars. He saw action in Italy, where he was wounded in September 1944.
In 1948 he joined the board of Round Oak Steelworks (founded as the Earl of Dudley’s Round Oak Works in 1897), of which his father was chairman; but the company was nationalised in the 1950s.
He was an enthusiastic amateur actor, at home in the company of actors and film stars. In 1954 he was a member of the amateur cast of “The Frog,” a play by Ian Hay and Edgar Wallace, staged in aid of charity at the Scala Theatre in London. He played PC Balder, and was said by William Douglas Home, writing in The Daily Telegraph, to have proved himself “an admirable comedian with an enviable sense of timing”.
Ednam succeeded to the earldom on the death of his father in 1969. For a time he was chairman of British Federal Welder and Machine Co, deputy chairman of Baggeridge Brick Co, and a director of Tribune Investment Trust. He was president of the Staffordshire Society from 1954.
Dudley sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative. From 1973 to 1975 he was a member of the Lords Select Committee on European Legislation. His special interest was economics.
![]() | ![]() | | Stephen Ward, at the center of the scandal who had previously dated Maureen Swanson. | ![]() |
Lord Dudley married first, in 1946 (dissolved 1961), Stella (“Baby”) Cárcano, the daughter of the Argentine Ambassador in London; they had twin daughters and a son, Viscount Ednam, who was born in 1947 and now succeeds to the earldom and other peerages. Lord Dudley then married the beautiful film star, Maureen Swanson (a one time girlfriend of Stephen Ward), in 1961, and they had a son and five daughters.
His marriage to Maureen was tempestuous and stimulating but there is no doubt that the pair were devoted to each other, a tribute to his limitless courtesy and old school good manners, and her undoubted zest and charm.
In the early 1980s Maureen formed a friendship with Princess Michael of Kent and in 1982 they travelled together to the United States, but the friendship later soured. On such occasions Lord Dudley was inspired to write poetry and he duly produced a piece of scurrilous doggerel about the Princess. Soon afterwards, at a dinner at Lord Weidenfeld’s in March 1983, attended by Princess Margaret, he was pressed to recite it. Presently Princess Michael got to hear about the poem and complained. A solicitor’s letter was sent. Lord Dudley apologised and all (more strictly speaking, most) copies of the poem were destroyed.
This was not his only sortie into verse.
Maureen Dudley sued Alastair Forbes for libel when he rehashed the same incident in a review of Anne Somerset’s“Ladies-in-Waiting” (1984). Forbes was all for defending himself and boasted that he would open his case with the phrase: “I am [re]minded of the fact that the first time I saw the present Countess of Dudley was when she working as Stephen Ward’s receptionist in Wimpole Mews, Wigmore Street.” The case was settled but Lord Dudley penned another ode which contained the line: “In the end it’s Forbes’s meanness – that will be more use to him than his p----.”
In contrast he frequently wrote beautiful sonnets to his wife. Until her death in 2011, he and Maureen entertained a wide circle of friends at their Kensington home. Last year he sold the house and moved to the country.
The 4th Earl of Dudley, born January 5 1920, died November 16 2013
The Telegraph obituary of Maureen, Countess of Dudley which ran on November 25, 2011, provides the signposts of the snobbish social system that surrounds the aristocracy in the UK. Some of the “scandals” that are referred to in this dispatch -- matters which brought down a government and scandalized certain members of the upper classes (the lower classes involved were not considered surprising of course) -- now seem mild, even harmless and mundane. The scandals were almost entirely about extra-marital sex.
From the Telegraph of London, November 25, 2011.
The Countess of Dudley, who has died aged 78, was, before her marriage to Viscount Ednam, heir to the earldom of Dudley, better known to cineastes as the actress and dancer Maureen Swanson. |
