Violet Needham

Violet Needham was born on 5 June 1876 at 9 John Street (now Chesterfield Hill), Mayfair, London, as Amy Violet Needham, the younger daughter, and child of Captain Charles Needham, 1st Life Guards, and his attractive (and rich) Dutch wife. The 1881 Census, taken when Violet was not yet five, shows the family in the house of her birth and living in considerable style, with a butler and footman, cook, kitchen-maid and housemaid, lady’s maid, nurse, and French nursery-maid – and we may guess at a stable establishment elsewhere.  

Charles Needham took part the next year in the Egyptian campaign, which culminated in the battle of Tel-el-Kabir, rose to command his regiment, and served as military attaché in Rome between 1895 and 1901. On his retirement, the family bought a country house and spent summers there with winters in London. It is all very much as we might have imagined Violet Needham’s background – privileged, leisurely, and cosmopolitan. But it is not the whole story.

To begin with, Charles Needham was both more and less than he seemed. Superficially we see an aristocratic, quick-tempered soldier (his nickname with his troops was ‘Blastofino’), remarkably cultured, speaking French and Italian, well-read in English literature with a beautiful voice. But he had spent his early years laboring under the dual handicaps of illegitimacy and an eccentric father, handicaps which might easily have warped his character.  

He was the result of a union that was not merely unlawful but was downright scandalous, for his father, Francis Jack Needham, 2nd Earl of Kilmorey, had run off with the young Priscilla Anne Hoste when he was already a grandfather, and she his ward. Charles Needham was two years younger than his half-nephew, the eventual 3rd Earl of Kilmorey (who was to become Violet’s godfather). Priscilla Hoste was one of the daughters of Admiral Sir William Hoste and his wife, Lady Harriet Walpole.  

Her father died when she was a small child, and her mother allegedly was careless of her relations with Lord Kilmorey. He had been born in 1787, been M.P. for Newry from 1819-26, succeeded his father in 1832 and was notorious for his eccentricity and a bad reputation. He bought or leased large houses in bewildering succession, built (and twice moved) his own mausoleum – now in Isleworth – is said to have dabbled in black magic and housed his wife and mistress in adjoining houses with an underground passage between them.  

All in all, he was the antithesis of 19th Century respectability. But to his credit, although his relationship with Priscilla Hoste was scandalous, it was not transitory. He set her up in her own establishment, acknowledged her son (born on 19 July 1844) as his, gave him his name, and after Priscilla’s early death from heart disease on 21 October 1854, had her buried in the mausoleum and commemorated as ‘Priscilla, the beloved of Francis Jack, Earl of Kilmorey.’ On his own death in 1880, he was buried beside her, beneath the bas-relief showing her lying dead on a couch, mourned over by himself and the ten-year-old Charles.

After Priscilla’s death, Kilmorey took Charles everywhere with him, going first to Rome on what must have seemed an interminable journey to a terrified little boy. For in Priscilla’s lifetime, Kilmorey had been jealous of her love for her son, wanting all her love for himself, and evidently, at this stage in their lives, he was a severe and frightening father. That Charles was to become the apple of his eye shows the depth of his passion for Priscilla, and eventually, he must have been able to show the boy affection.  

Yet nothing could remove the stigma of illegitimacy, and Charles’ youth on that account alone cannot have been easy. However, he soon overcame the hostility he encountered when he first joined the Life Guards – he attributed this to having friends already, but surely some of it must have been due to his own character – and became popular. Violet remembered her father with deep affection, and that he was a charmer is surely borne out by his marriage in 1874 to his Dutch heiress