TRANBY'S FIRST LINGUIST

Many of you will have heard of Muriel, the third daughter of Arthur and Mary Wilson of Tranby Croft, born in 1875. She was an accomplished amateur actress, mixed with royalty and other high society folk, and helped local and national charities. She was perhaps best known for turning down the proposal of marriage from a certain Winston Churchill. However, she was also a keen linguist. As Gertrude Attwood wrote in her book The Wilsons of Tranby Croft, ‘She spent much of her early life at Tranby Croft and received her education there at the hands of the governesses. When she was very young she had a little French nursemaid, Marie Deschamps, who was very young herself, but able to ensure that Muriel would speak French and English with equal fluency. Later, her governess was Florence Isabel Brown, who coped with the necessary French grammar, with English Literature, spoken and written English … Muriel was receptive to literature and languages, rather than to music at which her mother and elder sisters shone.’

She retained her love of languages all her life and used French to good effect in another of her passions, performing. In 1909 The Arbroath Herald reported that ‘Miss Wilson plays in French as successfully as she does in English and has often figured as a star performer in amateur theatricals at Chatsworth, and other famous houses.’

Her father Arthur built a beautiful villa at Cap Ferrat in the south of France which he called Villa Maryland, and Muriel and her mother were especially fond of spending much time on the Riviera following Arthur’s death in 1909. When not in France she was usually in London, enjoying the attention of a number of suitors and on occasion flirting, with the Portuguese Minister the Marquês de Soveral; ‘Si tu ne viens pas au bol vendredi soir, je ne te parle plus jamais, jamais, jamais!’ she once wrote.

During the First World War she became a VAD nurse and was described by the Daily Mirror in 1915 as a ‘beautiful war nurse’ who was ‘charming and versatile, a fine linguist, speaking French and Italian well’ and in another article in 1916 one of their journalists wrote that she ‘met Miss Muriel Wilson coming out of a book shop the other morning wearing one of the new long skirts. The book she carried was a volume of French poetry. She is one of the most accomplished French scholars in society, and to hear her recite in French is something of a revelation.’ She spent a period working for her sister Tottie who had established a hospital at her and her husband George Holford’s house, Dorchester House, in London, before moving to another hospital in France to help Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland. The Sheffield Telegraph in 1917 described her as ‘an accomplished linguist’ who knew Italian well because of ‘prolonged stays in Venice’ and wrote that she ‘speaks French as much like a Frenchwoman as is possible for a Briton.’ Muriel married an army officer who she met at Dorchester House but was soon widowed.

Muriel continued to divide her time between Charles Street in London and Maryland before returning to London around 1950 to spend the rest of her days at Cannon Hall. It is here she lived a quiet life in the company of her French companion and housekeeper, Mademoiselle Jeanne (Marie) Beliac. However, she became weary and suffered increasingly from "tiresome attacks of old age" as she put it. She eventually died on 19 October 1964 in the arms of Jeanne. She was the last of the Wilsons to have lived at Tranby Croft.