DE SIR ALFRED MUNNINGS pra, rws Mendham 1878 – 1959 Dedham
Portrait of Miss Millicent Baron on Magpie
decorated by Syrie Maugham and my grandfather shot pheasant with the Duke of Norfolk’, Millicent’s daughter Elizabeth Luard recounts in her memoirs.1 The brilliant scientist Miriam Rothschild, a contemporary of Millicent, commented: ‘The English Rothschilds were not like the Barons. We were a dull lot compared to them’.2 Munnings painted portraits of Millicent on Magpie and her younger sister Miss Betty Baron on Freckles (RA 1933) in the early summer of 1929. Munnings later joined the family at the villa in Biarritz which they had rented from Princesse Murat. Mornings were spent at La Chambre d’Amour, ‘a sort of Royal Enclosure where only millionaires, their wives and friends bathe, bask in the sun, drink cocktails, eat lobster salads’.3 In the evenings the dashing young Prince of Wales, the future Duke of Windsor, would come over to the villa to dance. ‘A beauty and a flirt, like all the Baron women’,4 Millicent Baron married Richard Longmore, son of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Longmore, at the beginning of the Second World War. ‘Both remarkably handsome and unusually courageous’,5 Wing Commander Longmore MBE, DSO, DFC was killed in action in 1943. Four years later she married Longmore’s Eton schoolfriend and fellow RAF officer David (later Sir David) Hildyard, who enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a diplomat, ably abetted by Millicent’s social flair.
1 2 3 4 5
My Life as a Wife, 2008, p.18. Ibid., p.20. The Second Burst, p.326. Miriam Rothschild quoted in My Life as a Wife, p.20. Ibid., p.174.
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