+ Lady Rose McLaren (1919-2005)
Michael Rhodes
(Daily Telegraph Filed: 05/11/2005)
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
élan. 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.