Dee Gordon - Bad Girls from History: Wicked or Misunderstood?

Bad Girls from History

This is for my husband, Raymond, who passed away in December 2015 but was similarly intrigued by women who survive in history as unconventional, fascinating, or just downright evil.

Wicked or Misunderstood?

Dee Gordon

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

Pen & Sword History

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street

Barnsley

South Yorkshire

S70 2AS

Copyright Dee Gordon 2017

ISBN 978 1 47386 282 1

eISBN 978 1 47386 284 5

Mobi ISBN 978 1 47386 283 8

The right of Dee Gordon to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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I t has been difficult to retain motivation during the illness and demise of my husband, so on this occasion my main thanks are directed at those friends who have kept me going in the absence of any family (my only son is autistic). So thanks to Donna and Steve Lowe, Denise Oanes, Laurel Padbury, Pat Stone, Debbi Campagna, Lisa Newman, Sandra Brown, Judith Williams, Kim Kimber, Peter Brown, Chris Sternshine, David Fox, Val Henderson and Diane Waterman. As for those assisting with research, this has mainly been staff at the British Library in London and at my local library in Southend on Sea especially Simon Wallace, who has since moved to Malta (and why not). Thanks also to everyone at Pen and Sword Books who have shown an interest and encouragement with regard to this project. Dependent on the feedback, there are enough women out there for a follow up!

Uncredited images are either in public domain, part of authors private collection, or sourced with relevant permissions via https://commons.wikimedia.org/ (If any credit has been misattributed or omitted, this will be corrected in any subsequent edition.)

Dee Gordon

www.deegordon-writer.com

and an occasional contributor to Facebook

B ad girls and wicked women always a source of fascination. Especially fascinating is the why. Sometimes it is easy to arrive at the why, the motive: women prostituting themselves for money, or killing a husband for the love of a new man; desperate women stealing to survive, literally, or women from comfortable backgrounds who sought adventure or romance; women who were hungry for power or who were led astray by temptation.

One of the most difficult things to do when putting this book together was to choose from the many women in history that would qualify, so the choice is mainly down to providing variety for the reader. The other difficulty was in choosing which chapter to put them in some killers could count as megalomaniacs, some courtesans as prostitutes, pirates as thieves, gangsters as killers, adulterers as exhibitionists. Certainly, a large percentage of the women featured earn their place in more than one chapter.

It has been difficult with the non-famous, mainly working class, individuals, to research their roots, assuming that such roots had an influence on their later lives and their reputations. And, if you are writing about 100 women rather than focusing on one, there are time constraints it is very easy to spend a week searching the British Library Archives in London and end up with one relevant paragraph, though this also has something to do with being side-tracked by a fascinating, irrelevant, story!

Note that some of the more obvious choices e.g. Myra Hindley are not included, mainly because they are just that; obvious. Enjoy the results of all this research and join in the authors love of and enthusiasm for the subject.

E ven before becoming the third wife of the 11th Duke of Argyll in 1951, this society beauty was fuelling the gossip columns. The daughter of a Scottish millionaire, partly educated in New York, it was said that she lost her virginity at the age of fifteen to the actor David Niven. What is more well documented is her voracious sexual appetite and penchant for men of all ages and from the entire social strata. She had been engaged to the 7th Earl of Warwick, romanced by a Prince (Aly Khan), by the bisexual George, Duke of Kent and by Lord Beaverbrooks son, Max Aitken; but it seems that there were also plenty of one night stands with whoever came her way! Her first marriage (19331947) was to Charles Sweeny, an American golfer, producing two children, and she had subsequent relationships with a Texas banker and the curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A woman of eclectic tastes.

Margaret, Duchess of Argyll. ( Allan Warren )

It was her taste for adultery and litigation that puts her into this book, however. When the Duke of Argyll sued for divorce in 1963, he introduced a list of eighty-eight men to the court, including government ministers and members of the royal family. The evidence was salacious enough to make all the national newspapers. There was her diary (apparently stolen by the duke) listing the physical attributes of her lovers, as if, according to the Daily Telegraph, she was running them at Newmarket. First and foremost, however, there were the Polaroid photographs of the Duchess, wearing only three strings of pearls, fellating a man whose head is not in the photographs, and who has therefore never been identified with certainty. Possibly the actor Douglas Fairbanks Junior? Or Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchills son in law? Perhaps even the Duke of Edinburgh? The general consensus favoured Douglas Fairbanks, but the (also controversial) Lady Colin Campbell, the Duchesss step-daughter-in-law, has gone on record as stating that the man was Pan Am executive Bill Lyons the Duchess herself never revealed the truth, even in her 1975 memoirs Forget Me Not .

The court case lasted eleven days, with the judge summing up the Duchess as a completely promiscuous woman wholly immoral. Not unexpectedly, the Duke was granted his divorce, following a judgment that ran to a near novel-length 40,000-plus words, one of the longest in history. The case itself probably cost the Duchess more than 200,000 but it didnt stop her suing, in the ensuing years, her daughter, her landlord, her bank, her stepmother, and her servants, usually for libel and usually unsuccessfully. The 1970s were full of lavish parties but she was forced, financially, to sell her house in Upper Grosvenor Street in 1978, and took up residence in Grosvenor House, from where she was finally evicted over unpaid rent in 1990, ending up in a nursing home in Pimlico.