London Calling. London Walks connecting. This is London. This is London Walks. Streets ahead. Story time. History time.
And today, a London dinner party. A dinner party with a rather extraordinary guest list.
The King came to dinner. Six months later, he wasn’t king.
And the woman who invited him? Well, she went on inviting people to dinner for another fourteen years.
Come with me to Chelsea. To number 211 King’s Road. A handsome eighteenth-century house called Argyll House.
It’s June 11th, 1936.
And there’s a dinner party going on.
Quite a dinner party.
The hostess is a woman called Sibyl Colefax. Lady Colefax.
And just look at her guest list.
King Edward VIII. And Wallis Simpson. Yes, that Wallis Simpson. The woman for whom the king will give up his throne six months from now.
Winston Churchill is here. Duff Cooper. Kenneth Clark, the great art historian.
And that’s not all.
Artur Rubinstein, one of the greatest pianists in the world, sits down at the piano and plays three pieces by Chopin.
And Noël Coward sings.
A king. The woman he’ll marry. A future prime minister. One of the greatest pianists who ever lived. And Noël Coward.
All in one drawing room.
Good heavens.
What must the conversation have been like?
And who is this woman who can summon such a cast of characters?
Well, her name is Sibyl Colefax.
But she has a nickname.
The Coalbox.
And there, ladies and gentlemen, we have our London story for today.
Because Sibyl Colefax wasn’t just a society hostess.
She was a phenomenon. A force of nature. A one-woman social exchange. A woman who collected famous people the way other people collect stamps.
But that’s only half the story.
There’s a poignant other half.
Because the girl who became one of the most sought-after hostesses in London had had a lonely, rather unhappy childhood.
She was born in Wimbledon in December 1874. Spent much of her childhood in India, where her father worked in the Bengal civil service.
She felt neglected. Excluded. Unwanted.
When the family returned to England, she lived in what was politely called genteel poverty.
And Virginia Woolf herself, who would later become one of her acquaintances, had a wonderfully cruel description of that period of Sibyl’s life.
She was, said Woolf, “running after old ladies with their knitting”.
There’s a life in a sentence.
Trailing around after elderly ladies. Carrying their shawls, perhaps. Listening to their ailments. Keeping them company.
Not exactly a dazzling prospect for an intelligent, imaginative, ambitious young woman.
But Sibyl was learning.
Books. Painting. Music. Conversation.
She discovered that the world could be a wonderfully interesting place, provided you found the right people.
In Italy she met the great art connoisseur Bernard Berenson.
And gradually she began to assemble the thing that would make her famous.
An address book.
Not an ordinary address book.
An address book to die for.
In 1901 she married Arthur Colefax, a successful barrister who became an MP and was eventually knighted.
Kenneth Clark described Arthur as a large, rather ponderous man whom people who’d never been outside London considered the biggest bore in England.
Poor Arthur.
But he was tolerant and good-humoured, and he gave Sibyl the freedom to become Sibyl.
And what Sibyl became was one of the great hostesses of twentieth-century London.
Her great stage was Argyll House in Chelsea.
It’s still there. Number 211 King’s Road, at the corner of Oakley Street.
Built in 1723. Designed by the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni.
An extraordinarily handsome house.
And through its front door came an astonishing procession of people.
Virginia Woolf. T. S. Eliot. Aldous Huxley. Churchill. Fred Astaire. George Gershwin.
The clever. The celebrated. The talented. The powerful.
Sibyl’s particular genius was knowing whom to put in a room together.
And getting them to sparkle.
She didn’t have to be the cleverest person at the table.
She wanted the cleverest people at the table.
And she knew how to draw them out.
There’s an art to that. A very considerable art.
She could be kind. Loyal. Generous. Encouraging.
But she was also a formidable social climber.
Indeed, her appetite for famous people was so prodigious that a word was coined for it.
Colefaxismus.
Wonderful word.
It meant claiming an intimate acquaintance with celebrities. Hinting that you were in on great secrets. That you knew everybody. Had met everybody. Were on first-name terms with everybody.
Even, on occasion, people who were dead.
Henry James, for example.
Sibyl was a world-class name-dropper.
And here’s one of my favourite examples.
An invitation she sent to the writer J. C. Squire.
“Do dine Tuesday. Just ourselves and Pirandello.”
Just ourselves.
And Pirandello.
Luigi Pirandello. The great Italian dramatist. The man who turned theatre upside down with Six Characters in Search of an Author. The future Nobel Prize winner.
As you do.
Imagine receiving that invitation.
I think I’d cancel whatever else I had on that evening.
And Sibyl’s energy was phenomenal.
While the rest of London was still asleep, she might write sixty postcards.
Sixty!
Then the telephone would start ringing.
Arrangements. Invitations. Introductions. Revisions to the seating plan.
And more invitations.
Her parlourmaid, Fielding, must have had nerves of steel.
There’s a wonderful story of Fielding announcing three guests in rapid succession.
“Mr Winston Churchill. Mr Max Beerbohm. Mr Yehudi Menuhin.”
Good grief.
Most people would be content to have any one of those three come to dinner once in a lifetime.
Sibyl had all three arriving together.
And what parties they were.
On one occasion George Gershwin found himself at the piano with Artur Rubinstein on one side and Cole Porter on the other.
Gershwin. Rubinstein. Cole Porter.
Three men on one piano stool.
Can you imagine?
And they got talking about where Gershwin found his musical inspiration.
His answer?
Wagner.
Yes, Wagner!
And the three of them began exploring the musical connections.
Later that night, Jan Masaryk, the Czechoslovak diplomat, sang Czech folk songs.
And at about three in the morning, dressed in white tie and tails, he suddenly stood on his head.
Right there in the drawing room.
Why?
Because, he explained, for the first time in months he’d been able to forget the terrifying prospects facing his country. The menace of Hitler. The gathering storm in Europe.
For a few precious hours, Sibyl Colefax had given him an escape from the world.
That’s rather moving, isn’t it?
And there’s a deeper point here.
These weren’t merely parties.
They were occasions. Encounters. Connections.
Something happened when Sibyl brought people together.
But not everybody was captivated.
Virginia Woolf certainly wasn’t.
Or not entirely.
Woolf was one of the great observers of human behaviour. She could dissect a personality with a few strokes of her pen.
And she had Sibyl very firmly in her sights.
She described her as “painted and emphatic”.
Broad-cheeked. A little coarse. Kindly. Glass-eyed.
An extraordinary combination.
But then Woolf produced a description that’s positively immortal.
She likened Sibyl to “a bunch of red cherries on a hard black straw hat”.
Oh, that’s good.
You can see her, can’t you?
The bright colours. The exuberance. The slightly vulgar display. And underneath it all, something hard and unyielding.
And Sibyl even made it into fiction.
Edith Wharton, the great American novelist, used her as the model for a character in The Gods Arrive.
And what did Wharton call this character?
Lady Plunder.
Lady Plunder!
Not Lady Benevolence. Not Lady Generosity.
Lady Plunder.
What a deliciously wicked literary revenge.
But then came the Wall Street Crash of 1929.
And suddenly Sibyl Colefax had a rather more pressing problem than the seating plan.
She’d lost an estimated £50,000 in American investments.
A fortune.
What to do?
Well, this is where the story takes an unexpected turn.
Because Sibyl had something else going for her besides her address book.
Taste.
She knew how to furnish a room. How to arrange furniture. How to make a house beautiful.
And she knew a great many people who owned very large houses.
Why not charge them for her expertise?
And so she did.
In 1933, approaching sixty, she established Sibyl Colefax Ltd.
A new career.
And in 1938 she joined forces with a brilliant young decorator named John Fowler.
Colefax and Fowler.
Now there’s a name that still means something in the world of English interior decoration.
Think about it.
A woman in her late fifties, much of her fortune gone, invents a new career for herself.
She takes what she knows, what she loves, and what she’s good at, and turns it into a business.
There’s something rather admirable about that.
But life was changing.
Her husband Arthur died suddenly in February 1936.
And that extraordinary dinner party we began with, the one with the king and Wallis Simpson, Rubinstein and Noël Coward?
That was her last great dinner at Argyll House.
The end of an era.
She left the house she loved.
Eventually she settled at number 19 Lord North Street, in Westminster.
And here’s where our London story takes another fascinating little turn.
Lord North Street.
Does it ring a bell?
Think Virginia Woolf.
Think Mrs Dalloway.
Because Clarissa Dalloway, one of the most famous fictional hostesses in English literature, lived in this very neighbourhood.
Woolf never gave us her exact address.
But one of the leading candidates is Barton Street, just around the corner.
And another possibility is the grand house at number 11 Lord North Street, associated with the Greville Howard family.
So there you have it.
Sibyl Colefax, the real-life hostess.
Clarissa Dalloway, the fictional hostess.
Living, at different times, in practically the same handful of Westminster streets.
And the woman who created Clarissa knew Sibyl.
It’s a small world.
Or perhaps that’s the wrong way of putting it.
It’s a very large world, London. But its stories have an extraordinary way of coming together.
And Sibyl was still entertaining.
Indeed, among the people who came to dinner at number 19 Lord North Street were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Now, remember where we began our story.
June 1936. Argyll House, Chelsea. King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson sitting down to dinner with Sibyl Colefax.
Well, the king had abdicated. He and Wallis had married. They were now the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
But there they were again. Sitting down to dinner with Sibyl Colefax. This time in Westminster.
The king had lost his crown.
Sibyl had lost her grand Chelsea house.
But neither had lost the other’s company.
And the dinner invitations kept going out.
Then came the Second World War.
Sibyl helped run a canteen in Belgrave Square.
And she continued entertaining, although wartime conditions called for a few adjustments.
At the Dorchester Hotel she organised regular dinners known as “ordinaries”.
And here’s the delicious part.
Her guests paid for their own dinners.
Yes!
The great hostess had discovered a way of entertaining without picking up the bill.
Colefaxismus with an eye to the bottom line.
And on she went.
Through the war. Through the austerity years. Through illness and operations and broken bones.
The parties continued.
One of her last, in February 1950, brought together Vivien Leigh, Terence Rattigan, Beverley Nichols and a glittering company of writers, artists and aristocrats.
The general election was taking place that week.
So there were no politicians.
For once, London’s political class was otherwise engaged.
Seven months later, on September 22nd, 1950, Sibyl Colefax died at number 19 Lord North Street.
She was seventy-five.
And here’s the detail I want to leave you with.
On the hall table of that Westminster house lay her visitors’ book.
It was open.
Open at the page recording her last dinner party.
There it was.
A lifetime of invitations. A lifetime of conversations. A lifetime of friendships and introductions and encounters.
All those extraordinary people.
The famous names.
The sparkling evenings.
The laughter.
The music.
The arguments.
The conversations that went on until three in the morning.
And now the visitors’ book lay open.
Waiting, almost, for someone else to sign it.
I find that enormously touching.
And it brings us back to those two London houses.
Argyll House, number 211 King’s Road, Chelsea.
And number 19 Lord North Street, Westminster.
Two real places. Two front doors.
Behind them, an extraordinary slice of London’s social and cultural history.
And I think there’s a lesson here.
London’s greatness isn’t just its architecture. Its monuments. Its museums. Its great institutions.
It’s the people.
And what happens when people meet.
When they talk. When they argue. When they listen. When they make one another laugh.
When someone brings them together.
Sibyl Colefax understood that better than almost anybody.
Remember that lonely little girl? The one who grew up running after old ladies with their knitting?
Well, she became a woman whose invitations people ran after.
Quite a journey.
And quite a London life.
Lady Colefax.
The Coalbox.
A woman who could get a king to come to dinner.
And who, when the king ceased to be a king, still knew what mattered.
It wasn’t the crown. It was the company.
See you tomorrow.