An English Socialite in Paris: The Letters of Lady Victoria Stanley

‘Fun like sunshine, mixed with sense like salt’ was how an anonymous correspondent in The Times described Lady Victoria Bullock following her untimely death in November 1927, at the age of only 35.   This description is borne out in the lively bundle of letters by Lady Victoria which were deposited at the Borthwick as part of the Hickleton Papers, the extensive archive of the Earls of Halifax, which include the papers of Lady Victoria’s eldest daughter, Ruth, wife of the 2nd Earl.

The 19 letters span 28 years of Lady Victoria’s life in all, with the majority dated between 1918 and the mid 1920s.  They provide a fascinating glimpse into the world of an aristocratic socialite in the years after the First World War, when continental Europe was once again accessible to those who could afford it and the Roaring Twenties brought new fashions, music and attitudes.  

Lady Victoria Stanley. Copyright: Daily Sketch, 1915.

The only daughter of Edward Stanley, son and heir of the 16th Earl of Derby, and Lady Alice Montagu, daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Manchester, Lady Victoria was born into the privileged world of British high society in the closing years of the reign of Victoria.  

One of the earliest letters in the bundle, written to her ‘darling sweet Mamma’ in March 1902, describes a quiet country childhood at the family’s Coworth Park and Knowsley estates with her brothers Edward and Oliver, riding her pony Kruger, playing in the gardens and practicing the piano.

Lady Victoria to her mother, the Countess of Derby, in 1902
Borthwick Institute, Hickleton Papers

Wedding of Lady Victoria Stanley and Neil Primrose.
Copyright: Daily Mail Historical Archive, 1915

In 1915, at the age of 22, she married Liberal MP Neil Primrose, son of the 5th Earl of Rosebery, in a ceremony attended by Queen Alexandra and three of the royal Princesses, as well as David Lloyd George and a young Winston Churchill.  Their daughter Ruth was born in April 1916, but the marriage was cut tragically short by Primrose’s death in active service during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign in November 1917.

Thus at the age of only 25 Lady Victoria found herself a wealthy widow and when her father, to whom she was extremely close, was appointed Ambassador to France the following year, she went with him, arriving in Paris in the closing months of the war and at the very thick of the political and diplomatic action.  She found the city to be ‘the most wonderful place in the world’ and her 1918 letters are full of famous names and crowded social engagements as the great and the good began arriving in Paris for the post-war negotiations.  Sir Henry Wilson, Lloyd George and Admiral Hope attended her ‘England luncheon-party’ in late 1918. Sir Henry, she wrote, was so ‘terribly bored’ with his fellow politicians, or ‘frocks’ as he called them, that he ‘lunches, dines and comes to tea’ whenever he can. She played lawn tennis with Sir Eric Drummond, later the first Secretary-General of the League of Nations, and the Duc d’Albe invited her to go to Spain after the war. ‘As I have already made plans to go to Monte Carlo,’ she wrote, ‘I don’t believe I shall ever get back to England!’

She bought Parisian clothes and persuaded her friend Bee to do the same, admitting to her mother that she had ‘led her into temptation in the way of clothes,’ and that she herself had entirely lost her head in this direction and ‘bought masses’ of the new fashionable shorter skirts and thin silk stockings.

Her father’s post as Ambassador came to an end in 1920 but the surviving letters show that Lady Victoria was all too happy to remain, at least for long periods of time, in France.  In June 1919 she had married again, this time to Malcolm Bullock, a Captain of the Scots Guard and later Conservative MP for Waterloo.  The letters Lady Victoria wrote to him over the next 4-5 years, addressed always to ‘My own darling’ and signed from ‘ever your very loving wife, Victoria,’ reveal plenty of the fun and the salt described by The Times.  Her observations to him are often acerbic and rather funny. Writing from Paris in 1921 she describes the Duke of Marlborough and his bride as being ‘very much the young engaged couple, who have decided not to dance with each other but make googly eyes across the room instead.’  

Lady Victoria to her husband Malcolm Bullock, 1921
Borthwick Institute, Hickleton Papers

At another dinner she was made (as the only foreigner) to sit next to the King of Romania, who to her horror only wanted to talk about Bolshevism, meanwhile the Duchess de Guiche ‘evidently thought she should be next to him & sniffed round my place like a dog round a lamp post.’  On that occasion she seemed to rather admire her fellow guest Daisy Fellowes who managed to avoid having to stand all evening in the presence of royalty by immediately feigning a bad foot so she could retire to a chair in the corner and be left alone.  In a later letter, dated 1924, she wrote she was having ‘such a marvellous time that it is almost turning my head. I feel well dressed, I feel I am almost amusing, in fact all the things the Cadogans think they are & are not!’

Lady Victoria was evidently extremely popular, her letters chronicling a whirl of social engagements with numerous people, from lunches and dinners, to balls, plays, drives, dancing, golfing, horseriding and long evenings at the casino, sometimes until 4am.  ‘I am having a glorious time here & I feel quite mad,’ she told her husband in one letter of summer 1921, ‘I tremble to think what I shall be like with a mask on at the Bal de l’Opera on Saturday!’

Lady Victoria to her husband Malcolm Bullock, 1921
Borthwick Institute, Hickleton Papers

In a letter sent in April 1924 she sets out the numerous entertainments she has arranged for her husband’s imminent visit, including dinners out and trips to the theatre and the music hall.

Lady Victoria to her husband Malcolm Bullock, 1924
Borthwick Institute, Hickleton Papers

Her letters show that she continued to be a keen, though canny, shopper, writing to her husband that she had been ‘quite good about clothes,’ only buying an evening dress and skirt from Paton, an afternoon dress, two knitted skirts and some jerseys from the Russian ladies, which were ‘just like Chanel’s & quarter the price.’  In an unexpectedly modern anecdote, she also writes that she had her ‘nose done’ in January 1921, though it is not clear from the letter what exactly this entailed.  Rather startlingly, it involved her being given ‘a liberal application of cocaine’ to prevent her feeling anything during the procedure. ‘The doctor kept on warning me that I might feel faint or hysterical from the effects but I have a very odd constitution as I felt absolutely nothing!’ She concluded that the only remarkable thing it made her do was write some letters she had been avoiding.

Lady Victoria to her husband Malcolm Bullock, undated

Perhaps her most enduring interest however was horseracing.  This was perhaps hardly surprising given her ancestry.  The Epsom Derby was named for the 12th Earl of Derby and her father, the 17th Earl was a prominent owner-breeder, his horses winning the Epsom Derby, the Epsom Oaks, and the St Leger Stakes.  Lady Victoria’s 1902 letter to her mother references their horse Pellisson failing to win his race and the racing at Knowsley and even amidst the whirl of her new Paris life in 1918 she found time to ask her mother who she should back ‘for the Cambridgeshire’ and to wonder whether Cecily remembered to do her bets for her that week.  

Her 1920s letters are filled with further references to her own and her family’s horses chances at different races. Of the 1921 Prix de Diane she writes ‘It was rather a slap in the face to the French jockeys that the first three...yesterday were ridden respectively by Bullock, Donoghue & Childs. Maurice de Rothschild’s victory was received in stony silence.’ ‘I really think I must have seen thousands of horses,’ she writes in another undated letter from France, ‘I have been going around neighbouring stud farms in the mornings, then racing in the afternoon & yearling sales in the evening,’ adding that her expeditions had served to remind her just ‘how little I really know about horses.’  Only a year before she died she started a racing stable of her own in France with Major Dudley Gilroy.  

Lady Victoria to her husband Malcolm Bullock, undated [1920s]
Borthwick Institute, Hickleton Papers

Both of her daughters, Ruth Primrose and her child with Captain Bullock, Priscilla Victoria, shared their mother’s love of racing and would later become two of the first three women admitted by the Jockey Club in 1977. Priscilla’s grandchildren, Andrew and Clare Balding, are in turn well known today for their involvement with racing, as a trainer and an amateur jockey, journalist and television presenter respectively.  

Lady Victoria Bullock’s death in 1927 came as a devastating shock to her family.  Whilst hunting with the Quorn near Lowesby Hall, she struck her head on a low bridge and was thrown from her horse and found unconscious.  Her husband quickly arrived from London and her mother from Knowsley Park. An urgent message was sent to her father, who was on his way to Cannes, and he returned by aeroplane early the following morning, but to no avail.  Lady Victoria never regained consciousness and died at 3pm on the afternoon of the 26th November.  

The last two letters in the bundle were sent to Captain Bullock after her death. The first is a letter of condolence from fellow MP Winston Churchill, who sent his deepest sympathy to Bullock on the 10th December, ‘though well I know how useless words are, & how nothing but the passage of time mitigates gradually the pain & awful sense of deprivation.  You & Victoria were so suited to one another, so devoted to each other...that this separation & destruction of yr happiness seems doubly cruel.’  

Winston Churchill to Malcolm Bullock, December 1927

Borthwick Institute, Hickleton Papers

The second is from her father, written at the close of the year from France and accompanying ‘a photograph of our darling.’ ‘I can’t talk or write to you about her,’ the letter reads, ‘I am too great a coward, but I loved her - as no man has ever loved his daughter & with her has gone all joy from my life.’  Touchingly he adds that he wants Bullock to know that he will be to him ‘all that I tried to be to her’ and that he has in the earl ‘a friend to whom you can always turn & who would always try the best of his ability to help you.’ He ends by sending his son in law every good wish for 1928, knowing that ‘for you, as for me, no year in future can be a happy one - except the one in which I rejoin her.’

For her family and those who knew her, the words of the anonymous Times correspondent were all too true, ‘without her, the world was a duller and greyer place.’

The letters of Lady Victoria Bullock, nee Stanley, are part of the Hickleton Papers at the Borthwick Institute for Archives.

The World’s Largest Telescope

Anyone attending the Great Industrial Exhibition in London in 1862 could have been forgiven for passing by the sight of two circular blocks of glass, 26 inches in diameter and two inches thick, standing on their edges being displayed by Messrs Chance of Birmingham. Impressive though they were these optical glasses could easily be missed alongside the great machines - such as Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, cotton mills, maritime engines, and London and North Western’s passenger locomotive, Lady of the Lake - being displayed by the 28,000 exhibitors from 36 countries.

However, there was one visitor to the event who saw the opportunity to create a lasting legacy. Robert Stirling Newall of Gateshead, whose fortune was made from the manufacture of wire rope,  purchased the glasses for £500 pounds each. They were the largest in the world at the time, being nearly twice the diameter of the previous largest, and Newall’s intention was that they would be the foundation of a telescope that would exceed in size all that had gone before.

The project would thrust England, and York in particular, to the forefront of the optical arts, ‘as we were in Dolland’s time’ according to the journal Nature. Contemporary commentators believed the optical art had been stifled in England by an ill-advised duty on glass, and for many years England had been dependent on foreign built telescopes, mainly from France and Germany. At the time of the Great Industrial Exhibition the telescopes with the largest object glasses in England - at Greenwich, Oxford and Cambridge - were all of foreign make. Newall, however, opted to use T. Cooke and Sons of York for his grand project.

Cooke had been at the forefront of resurrecting the art of optical manufacture in England. Samuel Smiles in Men of Invention and Industry relates that Cooke made his first object glass from the base of a glass tumbler, and from this unlikely beginning set up T. Cooke & Sons in 1837. Based at No. 50 Stonegate, York, he specialised in making telescopes and other optical instruments, such as surveying equipment, microscopes, turret clocks and later steam engines (for an unsuccessful steam carriage or motor car). He gained a reputation for excellence, and in 1860 constructed a 5.25 inch telescope for HRH the Prince Consort that was erected at Osborne House, and also provided Sir Norman Lockyer a telescope for his Wimbledon Observatory in 1861. In 1862 he exhibited his creations at the Great Industrial Exhibition in London, bringing home two First Class Medals, one for the excellence of the object glasses and mountings of his telescopes, the other for the construction and finish of his turret clock, and it was here that he came into contact with Mr Newall.

Newall sought quotes from both Cooke and Thomas Grubb of Dublin, but Cooke was so eager for the contract that he bid too low and underestimated how long it would take to construct. The project took far longer than the year he had anticipated. Newall became increasingly frustrated throughout the endeavour, whereas Cooke frequently sought advances to cover his costs. The project nearly caused the demise of Cooke’s business which was still suffering financial difficulties as a result several years after the completion of the telescope; Sir Norman Lockyer writing in 1878 stated, ‘Cooke did not hesitate to risk thousands of pounds in one great experiment, the success of which will have a most important bearing upon the astronomy of the future’.

The general design was the same as Cooke’s equatorials  but the huge size necessitated special arrangements. The main issue was the crafting of the glass lenses. Special equipment had to be designed to handle the discs, and the lenses had to be floated in mercury to prevent them breaking under their own weight. Lockyer stated that it took 1560 hours to grind the discs to the required shape, the thickness being reduced by an inch in the process. The work took place at Cooke’s Buckingham Works, Duke’s Hall, in the Bishophill area of York, but the scale of the project required the final assembly take place in the open near the city wall; Employee Mr Graham recalled the telescope “…..was a big undertaking and it had to be erected on the moat, near the City walls about the place where Newton Terrace now stands.”. It was 1870, and the telescope had taken around six years to complete. Once assembled it was taken to Newall’s observatory at Ferndene, Gateshead, and it was not until 1871 that it was fully installed in the observatory.

The resulting instrument weighed 9 tons and was 32 feet in length. At a time when the largest lenses in Greenwich, Oxford, and Cambridge were 15. 5 inches, the largest in Russia at Pulkova were 15 inches, and the largest in the U.S. were 18.5 inches, the step forward in manufacturing techniques required to produce a telescope with 25 inch discs, weighing 144lb, was considerable. The telescope was nearly twice as powerful as the 18 inch Chicago instrument, having a 485 inch area compared to 268, and had a focal length of 29 feet. The diameter of the object end was 29 inches, the diameter of the tube centre 34 inches, the diameter of the eye end 22 inches, and the support pillar was 19 feet high.

The tube was cigar shaped and made of steel plates riveted together in 5 sections. Inside there were five other tubes of zinc increasing in diameter from eye end to object end. The wide end of each tube overlapped the narrow end of the next with an inch of space left around the end of each to aid ventilation and prevent currents of warm air interfering with the light. The ends were lighter than the centre to prevent them destabilising the telescope.

Fixed above and below the eye end of the tube were two finders, each of 4 inches aperture, 12.5 inches in area, to aid accessibility. An additional telescope with an object glass of 6.5 inches was fixed between the two finders to assist the observation of objects (such as comets) for which the main telescope was not suited.

The observatory housing the instrument was between 40 and 50 feet in diameter and packed with apparatus to allow the telescope to be easily maneuvered, the temperature always the same inside and out to prevent currents of air interfering with observations. However, the atmosphere in England was ‘not the best suited for such an instrument’ and as early as 1870 the journal Nature was reporting that Mr Newall intended to move the instrument after preliminary testing to a location more suited to astronomical observation. This was taken to mean that it would not remain in England ‘every increase in the size of the object-glass or mirror increases the perturbating effects of the atmosphere, so that the larger the telescope, the purer must be the air’. However this was not to be the case, and Mr Marth, known for his work with the Lassel Reflector at Malta, was given charge of the instrument in Ferndene.

Newall’s telescope drew widespread attention, the US government sent Commodore BF Sands of the US Naval Observatory with a deputation of astronomers to examine it and this resulted in a commission of a telescope that would be one inch larger. Austria ordered one the same size.
Cooke never got to see the result of his work as he died in October 1868, whilst Newall was only able to claim to be the owner of the world’s largest refracting telescope for a short period, being overshadowed by the 26 inch Washington Naval Observatory telescope in 1873. However, the telescope was of such exceptional quality that it was used for years to come. On Newall’s death in 1889 it was moved from Gateshead to Cambridge University Observatory and by 1925 it was in the charge of Prof James Newall, Mr Newall’s son, director of the Polar/Solar Physics Observatory, Cambridge. There it stayed until the 1950’s when it was donated to the Greek National Observatory, Mt Penteli, Athens, where it can still be found today having undergone a complete restoration in 2013.

T. Cooke and Sons continued to produce telescopes and exported all over the world, eventually merging with Troughton and Simms in 1922, and Vickers Instruments in 1963. The records of the company can be found at the Borthwick Institute for Archives as part of the Vickers Instruments archive. An online catalogue for the archives of Vickers, Cooke, and Troughton and Simms can be viewed on Borthcat.

Further information:
http://www.instrumentsoflight.com/newall.html 
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/218396

A full technical description of the telescope can be found in ‘Stargazing, past and present’, by Joseph Lockyer.

Graham Hughes,
Archives Assistant.