Adored friends

Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs.

Years ago the late ‘Brookie’ Warwick, 8th Earl, asked me to ghost his memoirs. In conversation he was full of amusing scandal, but the transcript of his dictated reminiscences was painfully discreet. I suggested they might be ‘sexed up’ — a new, comparatively innocent but still obviously vulgar expression — and he looked puzzled. ‘The first boy I met at Eton was my cousin Bingham,’ the transcript read, ‘who was very stupid and rather dirty, and came to a bad end.’ Bingham became Lord Lucan, so if there were more about his stupidity and dirtiness, along the lines of ‘I remember “Lucky” in Uganda, beneath a pile of oiled Nubians…’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you mean an exposé. I don’t think so.’

The 7th Earl of Lucan was a friend of Annabel Goldsmith’s, and of both her husbands. Here, complete and unexpurgated, is what she recalls of him in her latest book: ‘Rarely did I walk into the Clermont and not see Lucan sitting at a table playing back- gammon. Little did we anticipate the scandal with which he would be synonymous — to me he was simply part of the furniture.’ So no oiled Nubians.

No Invitation Required — a companion piece to Annabel: An Unconventional Life — records her sojourn at Pelham Cottage, in a garden down a lane in South Kensington, in the 1960s and 1970s. She was married to Mark Birley, who named his nightclub after her, and they had three children. At the club’s opening night she met Birley’s friend Jimmy Goldsmith, who became her lover, husband, and the father of another three children. Goldsmith acquired Ormeley Lodge, Ham, where Lady Annabel (née Vane-Tempest-Stewart, a daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry) installed the Pelham Cottage furniture in her bedroom, which is of a similar size.