The name Maud Russell creeps almost apologetically into a few 20th-century diaries such as those of her friend Violet Bonham Carter. Generally, she keeps her head below the parapet — not a bad place for a diarist, since it allows her to observe without being noticed.
She is certainly worth knowing about. The wife of a banker, Gilbert Russell, a scion of the great Whig family, whose cousin was Duke of Bedford, and daughter of Paul Nelke, a seriously rich stockbroker of German Jewish origin, she was from the mid-1930s chatelaine of Mottisfont Abbey, a beautiful 2,000-acre estate in Hampshire, now owned by the National Trust.
There, in her mid-forties, she surrounded herself with top-notch artists, writers, politicians and aristocrats. Having been associated with the ‘Coterie’, she was close to Duff and Lady Diana Cooper, whose son John Julius Norwich writes a foreword to this rich selection of her astute and entertaining diaries, which, as well as being elegantly produced, is edited with rare sensitivity by her granddaughter Emily Russell.
Intelligent and chic, Maud was an art connoisseur, who not only bought for her own collection, but sat for painters, including Matisse. Her early diary entries concentrate partly on her efforts to obtain visas for her many German relations and partly on her dealings with Rex Whistler, who she hired to decorate the entrance hall at Mottisfont in ‘modern Gothic’ style.
When war came, Mottisfont provided a luxurious retreat for friends. In return they provided informed gossip, such as details of the extraordinary snub Winston Churchill experienced in the French town of Tours in mid-1940. When Churchill’s son, Randolph, visited with his new American girlfriend, Pamela Digby, Maud snorted in unusually catty fashion, ‘She is pretty in a common way and supposed generally to be very silly.
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