Clementine, Lady Beit
Hyfler/Rosner
27 August 2005
Clementine Mabell Kitty Freeman-Mitford: born 22 October
1915; married 1939 Sir Alfred Beit Bt (died 1994); died
London 17 August 2005.
There are as many reasons for liking a work of art as there
are people to look at it. Even so, Clementine Beit's
fondness for Goya's Portrait of Doña Antonia de Zarate was
out of the ordinary. Gazing at the picture, Lady Beit would
say, "That painting means a great deal to me for two
reasons. Alfred was standing beneath it when he proposed to
me, and we were tied up under it during the Dugdale raid."
It was, in various ways, an extraordinary thing to say.
Alfred was Lady Beit's late husband, the second (and last)
baronet. His uncle, the first Alfred Beit, had made a vast
fortune through mining gold and diamonds in South Africa;
together with the Wernhers and Oppenheimers, the Beits were
the richest of the so-called Randlords, or goldbugs. The
elder Beit used his money to amass one of the world's great
private art collections, a treasure that included works by
Hals, Velázquez, Rubens and Gainsborough, as well as the
aforementioned Goya. Inheriting half of these pictures on
his father's death in 1930, the young Alfred Beit bought a
London mansion grand enough to house them - in Kensington
Palace Gardens, known as Millionaires' Row - in 1937. The
following year, after a short romance, he proposed to
Clementine Freeman-Mitford beneath Goya's Portrait of Doña
Antonia de Zarate: the painting under which the couple were
to be tied up by robbers 35 years later.
Clementine Mitford was, like the Goya, something of a catch.
The daughter of Major the Hon Clement Freeman-Mitford, she
was born five months after her father's death in action on
the Western Front in 1915. Her mother, a cousin of
Clementine Churchill, prayed for a son: had her own Clemmie
been a boy, she would have eventually succeeded her
grandfather as the second Lord Redesdale. As it was, the
title went to her father's younger brother, so that it was
Clementine's cousins - Nancy, Diana and the rest - who
became the famous Mitford Hons. Her own childhood was spent
as a (relatively) poor relation, a situation that was put
spectacularly to rights when, aged 23, she married the
36-year-old Conservative Member of Parliament for St Pancras
in 1939.
The Beits weren't merely the richest young couple in London,
they were also known as the handsomest. Two things blighted
their glittering lives, however. The first was the
revelation that they couldn't have children, the second the
loss of Sir Alfred's seat - and his job as Parliamentary
Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for the
Colonies - in the 1945 Labour landslide. Furious at what
they saw as the treachery of the British public and fearful
of Clement Attlee's plans to tax the rich, the Beits set off
for South Africa. Both were appalled by apartheid, however -
"We madly disagreed with it" was Lady Beit's Mitfordian
phrase - and hankered for London. The situation was made
more complex when, in 1947, Sir Alfred's mother died and
left him the rest of the family pictures. It was clear that
Kensington Palace Gardens would no longer do; and it was
while pondering what to do next that the Beits, paging
through Country Life, saw an ad for an Irish house called
Russborough and bought it by telegram in 1952.
Built in the 1740s, the Palladian Russborough was certainly
big enough for the couple's pictures: its 700ft façade was
the longest in Ireland. Its seclusion in the Wicklow
Mountains also appealed to the Beits' taste for privacy, a
reclusiveness that was to grow more pronounced as time went
by. Unfortunately, the mansion's isolation was also
attractive to art thieves, who realised that the nearest
Gardai station was half an hour's drive away and that the
frugal Beits would have skimped on security.
In 1974, an IRA gang led by a British heiress, Rose Dugdale,
broke into the mansion at night, pistol-whipping the couple
and leaving them bound and gagged under the fateful Goya.
Or, rather, under what remained of it: the Beits had to look
on as the raiders cut it and 18 other paintings out of their
frames with a screwdriver. All these were later found in a
cottage in Cork, and Dugdale was sent to jail. But 12 years
later, in 1986, Doña Antonia was stolen again, this time by
a notorious gangster called Martin Cahill who took other
pictures including Lady Writing a Letter - the only Vermeer
in private hands - and Gainsborough's lovely Madame
Baccelli, already stolen by Dugdale. In June 2001, seven
years after Sir Alfred's death, the Gainsborough suffered
its third theft, this time at the hands of a gang that drove
a Japanese 4x4 up Russborough's Palladian steps and through
its (closed) front door. The widowed Lady Beit, now 85 and
sitting down to lunch, was characteristically unruffled.
It was this, her implacable sang-froid, that made Clementine
Beit what she was. A less assured woman might have tried to
leave her mark on the Beit Collection and, in doing so,
ruined it: Lady Beit, favouring modern Irish painters such
as Jack Yeats and Derek Hill, kept her own modest
acquisitions to herself. A less tenacious woman would have
called it quits at Russborough after the first robbery,
never mind the third: Clementine Beit stayed on to the end.
And a more hot-headed woman might have railed at the Irish
government, theoretically responsible for the collection's
safety after Russborough's gift to the state in 1976.
Lady Beit did no such thing. As a result, the Beit
Collection - lacking only Madame Baccelli and a Bellotto
stolen in the final raid - will go to the people of Ireland,
with Russborough to house it.
Charles Darwent