Lady Rose McLaren; Bohemian Londoner & florist
Hyfler/Rosner
November 05, 2005, Saturday
Obituary of Lady Rose McLaren Aristocrat who danced at
Sadlers Wells and twice broke off her engagement to a future
duke
LADY ROSE McLAREN, who has died aged 86, enjoyed a brief
career as a ballet dancer before becoming a well-known
figure in bohemian London from the mid-1950s; she also
established a successful business supplying flowers for
occasions such as the wedding of Princess Margaret.
She was born Rose Mary Primrose Paget, the fourth of five
daughters of the 6th Marquess of Anglesey, on July 21 1919
at the family's house on Arlington Street, behind the Ritz
Hotel in London. Her mother, Lady Marjorie Manners, was a
daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland; thus, Lady Diana Cooper
was Rose's aunt.
The Angleseys' elder daughters, Caroline and Elizabeth, were
to become famous beauties; their third daughter, Mary, was
brain-damaged, and Rose made herself responsible for her
sister's welfare until Mary's death in 1996.
In her early years Rose inhabited a world (captured in her
father's home movies) in which nursery tea was served by
white-gloved footmen at the family's houses, Beaudesert, in
Staffordshire, and Plas Newydd on Anglesey; often she would
be taken to other great family houses such as Belvoir and
Wilton. There was a brief experience of boarding school;
brief because, when her father visited her there for the
first time, he found her so unhappy that he removed her at
once. After that, her education was entrusted to
governesses, and she grew up a voracious reader,
particularly of history and biography.
In those days Plas Newydd played host to a lively artistic
group, chief among whom was Rex Whistler, who was in love
with Rose's elder sister Caroline and painted for the 6th
Marquess in 1936-37 an enormous "mural" (in fact, a 58-ft
wide painting on a single piece of canvas) for the dining
room of the house.
In 1934 Rose appeared, with other members of her family, in
a black-and-white silent film made by her father called The
Pink Shirts, which satirised the British Fascist movement.
But although she went on to have small roles in two
B-movies, her early ambition lay elsewhere. In her teens she
trained as a ballet dancer with Marie Rambert, and (under
the name Rose Bayly) made her debut at Sadlers Wells in Swan
Lake in 1937. Margot Fonteyn, Frederick Ashton, Robert
Helpmann and many other leading figures in the world of
dance were to become life-long friends.
Meanwhile, she was the object of much romantic interest (she
even enjoyed a flirtation with her father's valet). Her most
prominent and persistent suitor was the handsome Valerian
Wellesley, now the 8th Duke of Wellington, and it would have
been a resonant match, since the two families had close
historical connections: Rose's ancestor Henry William Paget,
the 2nd Earl of Uxbridge, had been created 1st Marquess of
Anglesey for his service at the Battle of Waterloo, in which
he commanded the British, Hanoverian and Belgian cavalry,
losing a leg in the process. But although Rose Paget twice
allowed herself to become engaged to Wellesley, she twice
broke it off.
Instead she married, in 1940, John McLaren, second son of
Lord Aberconway, the creator of the famous garden at Bodnant
in north Wales. McLaren was serving as a Mosquito pilot, and
in order to see more of him, Rose made use of her role as a
Land Girl to follow him from one RAF base to another,
finding work on farms nearby. He later became a fighter
pilot instructor, but died in 1953, leaving his wife with
two young daughters.
After her husband's death, Rose McLaren became a prominent
figure in the bohemian group based around Muriel Belcher's
Colony Room in Soho, making enduring friendships with exotic
figures such as Francis Bacon, Dan Farson and George Melly.
She took to driving glamorous cars and owned a series of
Aston Martins and an Alvis convertible, all of which she
drove with considerable lan. In later life she was proud of
her membership of the Institute of Advanced Motorists, whose
test she last took at the age of 80; it was a qualification
that did not, however, always reassure her passengers, who
tended to compete for seats in the back of her car.
In 1957 Rose McLaren started a successful flower business,
in partnership with her friend Pamela Forster. Known as
Flower Services, it was run from Rose McLaren's house at 24
Smith Street, Chelsea. Every morning she would go to the old
Covent Garden market (she found the porters' language
"really rather fierce - they make me feel 10 years younger")
to purchase supplies for her clients. Among her commissions
was Princess Margaret's wedding to Antony Armstrong-Jones in
1960, for which she provided 30,000 pink and red roses to
decorate The Mall. In the same year, working with Cecil
Beaton, she supplied 25,000 carnations to adorn the Royal
Opera House for a visit by President de Gaulle.
In 1975 Rose McLaren left London, retiring to her house on
the Bodnant estate and becoming involved in charities and
community affairs. She was county chairman of the Macmillan
Nurses, president of the Churchill Club of Conway and, for
many years, president of the Eglwysbach Show.
In north Wales she taught her two grandsons to play cricket
and backgammon, beating one of them at the latter in the
last few weeks of her life (when he accused her of cheating,
she maintained that she was palming pieces only because the
morphine she was prescribed made her absent-minded).
For many years she patiently endured the pain that may have
been caused by her early days as a dancer, and she overcame
three bouts of cancer, the first in 1965, before the fourth
killed her; she died on November 1.
Lady Rose McLaren was a strong character who expressed firm,
if not always logical, views. But she was always ready to
change her mind, and proved a loyal friend. She loved
handsome men, fast cars, skiing, cricket and her garden.
Although, in the years after her husband's death, she
received many offers, she never remarried. Her two daughters
survive her.
Bob Feigel
magnanimously proffered:
>THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
>
>November 05, 2005, Saturday
>
>Obituary of Lady Rose McLaren Aristocrat who danced at
>Sadlers Wells and twice broke off her engagement to a future
>duke
A great obit and, according to my wife, who met her in the
late-fifties, "A great lady."
"It's not that I'm afraid to die. I just don't want to be there when it happens." - Woody Allen
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Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
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