Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor (19 March 1879 - 19 July 1953), 2nd Duke of Westminster, known within the family as "Bendor" after his grandfather's Derby-winning racehorse Bend Or, was among the wealthiest men in Britain. His connection to Cartier passes through his long and turbulent relationship with Coco Chanel and through the commercial efforts of Cartier London to retain his patronage.
The Grosvenor fortune
The Grosvenor wealth rested on London ground, specifically the five hundred acres of meadow and pasture west of the City that had come to the family through the 1677 marriage of Sir Thomas Grosvenor to the twelve-year-old heiress Mary Davies. Those fields were developed in the 1720s into Mayfair and from the 1820s into Belgravia, becoming by Bendor's day the most valuable private estate in London. His principal country seat was Eaton Hall in Cheshire, a 54-bedroom house set in 11,000 acres, hung with paintings by Goya, Rubens, Raphael, Rembrandt, Hals, and Velázquez. He also kept a Tudor-style hunting château, the Woolsack, built in 1911 on Lake Aureilhan at Mimizan in the Landes, modelled on Rudyard Kipling's South African cottage of the same name. He owned two yachts, the schooner Flying Cloud (bought around 1921) and a converted destroyer named Cutty Sark crewed by 180, seventeen Rolls-Royce motor cars, and a private train between Eaton Hall and London.
Military service and marriages
Bendor served as ADC to Lord Milner in Cape Colony during the Second Boer War and, in the First World War, developed a Rolls-Royce armoured car prototype and led the March 1916 desert rescue of British prisoners from the Senussi at Bir Hakeim in the Western Desert, an exploit for which he received the Distinguished Service Order. He married four times: Constance "Shelagh" Cornwallis-West (1901-1919), Violet Mary Nelson (1920-1926), Loelia Ponsonby (1930-1947), and Anne Sullivan (1947 until his death). The first divorce, in December 1919, carried a settlement of £13,000 a year, the largest in English legal history to that date.
Chanel and Cartier
Bendor was introduced to Coco Chanel in Monte Carlo in 1923 by Vera Bate Lombardi, and their affair lasted a decade. He bought her a Mayfair house, entertained her aboard his yachts, and in 1927 gave her a parcel of land at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin where she built Villa La Pausa.
The most specific commission linking the Duke to Cartier was a vanity case made for Chanel, personalised with a simple C monogram in black and white enamel. The relationship between the Duke and Chanel was stormy, and some of the jewels he gave her met colourful fates. Jacques Cartier worked actively to maintain the Duke's custom through the 1930s, particularly after the Duke gave a tiara commission to a rival house in 1930. These Cartier stories are told in The Cartiers, chs. 6 and 8.
Later years and death
In the late 1930s Bendor drifted to the political far right, joining the Right Club and the Link in 1939; contemporary accounts, including Diana Cooper's diaries, record him "abusing the Jewish race" at the Savoy Grill on the eve of war. He died of coronary thrombosis at Loch More Lodge in Sutherland, Scotland, on 19 July 1953. His estate attracted death duties of around £17-18 million, a British record, which took the Inland Revenue eleven years to collect.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 6 ("Stones Paris: Early 1920s"), ch. 8 ("Diamonds and Depression: The 1930s"), and ch. 10 ("Cousins in Austerity, 1945-1956")
- Leslie Field, Bendor: The Golden Duke of Westminster (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1983)
- Wikipedia: Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster
- Wikipedia: Château Woolsack, Mimizan
- Grosvenor Group: Our history (Mayfair and Belgravia)
- Survey of London vol. 39: The Acquisition of the Estate (British History Online)
- thepeerage.com: Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor
