Items from the collection of Lady Glenconner, who was Maid of Honour at Elizabeth II’s Coronation and lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, a friend from childhood, will be auctioned off at Bonhams New Bond Street on November 18.
Highlights include the Thomas Smith of Derby painting The Cullen Arabian held by a groom, before a landscape with classical ruins, which carries an estimate of £50,000–£70,000; Victor Pasmore’s The Painting Lesson (estimate £30,000–50,000); a 1954 nine-carat gold Cartier box, a present from Elizabeth II; and Lady Glenconner’s Sir Norman Hartnell wedding dress.
Lady Glenconner comments: ‘I have had such great pleasure living with these wonderful objects, each telling their own fascinating story.’
In 2023, Country Life interviewed Lady Glenconner about her time on Mustique or ‘the party island’ which her husband, Colin, purchased in 1958 for £45,000.
You can read some snippets from that article, below.
Mustique royalty: Lord and Lady Glenconner photographed by Slim Aarons in 1973.
(Image credit: Slim Aarons/Getty Images)
There is a certain serendipity to the timing of my conversation with Lady Glenconner. She is off to Mustique imminently. ‘I suspect this may be the last time I go,’ says the 91 year old, rather wistfully, of the tiny West Indian island she and her husband, Colin Tennant (later Lord Glenconner), brought to life over many decades, turning it, as Colin prophesied he would, into ‘a household name’.
‘The sound of having your very own desert island was wonderful, the reality was far less attractive,’ recalls Lady Glenconner of the scrubby island infested with mosquitoes and overrun with wild cows, where she was to spend months and years eating barely more than tinned beans and ‘sweating rather than sleeping at night’.
Her excitement about her forthcoming trip is palpable — she barely draws breath — so I ask her the five things she is most looking forward to when she gets there. ‘
Oh swimming, of course,’ she says, without missing a beat. A picnic and a swim at Macaroni Beach are nostalgic reminders of her days spent with Princess Margaret (to whom she was lady-in-waiting), perhaps Mustique’s most famous occupant among a roll call of celebrities and who ‘set the island on its way’. ‘I adore swimming in the lagoon, too,’ she adds. ‘Some people don’t like the weed there, but I love the way it strokes your body as you glide along.’
For Princess Margaret, Mustique offered a rare haven, where she could truly relax.
(Image credit: Slim Aarons/Getty Images)
We turn finally to her books and the writing career that has brought her such fame in her old age. ‘I wouldn’t have written my books at all if it hadn’t been for Colin’s ghastly will, which left me with nothing.’ I can feel the shudder on the end of the telephone line as she voices a fear of bumping into Kent Adonai, Lord Glenconner’s only beneficiary, when she travels through St Lucia. ‘I’ll be wearing a mask, just in case,’ she says firmly.
We discuss, in particular, her book ‘Murder on Mustique’, written partly because she had been inspired by a real, but little documented, murder on the island and partly to give an idea of what the island was really like. ‘How it smelled and how it sounded,’ she says, and I think of a passage in the book’s early pages
when she describes the ‘sweetness of decaying leaves, sea salt and paprika drifting from someone’s kitchen’. I can hear the ‘cicadas chirruping like a round of applause’ and I can imagine Lady Glenconner, back on Mustique, bursting with the same colour and energy as the island that has been so much part of her life.
‘Lady Glenconner, My Life in Objects’ can be viewed online until November 18.