Raged as some Greek fury would have raged

Lady Houston

Lady Houston was born Fanny Lucy Radmall in Lambeth, the ninth of ten children. She had little formal education but her physical beauty and personal charm gave her the opportunity to become a dancer and chorus girl on the London stage. At the age of 16, she briefly ran away to Paris with Frederick Gretton, who was twice her age and already married and whose family owned the Bass brewery company. He bequeathed £6,000 a year to her when he died in 1882.

She married Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Frances Brinckman the following year, but they divorced in 1895. She then married George Byron, the ninth Baron Byron, in 1901. Byron died in 1917 and that same year she was appointed Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire, for her support for a home for nurses who had served during the First World War.

Her last marriage was to Sir Robert Houston, a wealthy shipping magnate, in 1924. Sir Robert died in 1926, leaving his widow over £5 million.

She was, throughout her life, staunchly patriotic and she donated generously to a wide variety of causes, including the British Schneider Trophy team in 1931 and the Houston-Mount Everest Expedition of 1933, when both enterprises were endangered by government spending cuts. She was also an avowed Royalist and was so upset by the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936 that it is said she was consumed by a ‘passionate anger [and] raged as some Greek fury would have raged…’

She died, on her yacht, shortly after the King’s abdication. Reportedly, her last words were: ‘It is time for me to sleep and a damned long sleep it is going to be.’