WESTBURY, Rt Hon Dowager Baroness (Ursula Mary-Rose nee JAMES) 1924-2023
Richard R
She was d of Hon Robert JAMES 1873-1960 (s of 2nd Baron NORTHBOURNE 1846-1923, gt gs of 2nd Baron BAGOT 1773-1856, 2xgt gs of 3rd Earl of DARTMOUTH 1755-1810, 3xgt gs of 2nd Viscount ST JOHN 1695-1748, etc etc) and his 2nd w Lady Serena Mary Barbara LUMLEY 1901-2000 d of 10th Earl of SCARBROUGH 1857-1945 and as her 2nd h Lucy Cecilia 1860-1931 d of Cecil Mina Bolivar DUNN-GARDNER 1826-1903 scion of that gentry family of Chatteris House by his 26 April 1859 m (St George’s, Hanover Sq) to Emma RENISON 1832-1911. She m 1947 the 5th Baron WESTBURY 1922-2001 (3xgt gs of Sir Edward STRACEY 1st Bt 1741-1829, etc), and had 2 sons (incl the present 6th Baron b 1950) and a dau.
colinp
Ursula, Lady Westbury, St John Ambulance Superintendent-in-Chief and friend of Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret – obituary
She played with the future Queen when they were children, and dined with her on the night of her engagement to Prince Philip
Ursula, Lady Westbury, who has died aged 99, was the Superintendent-in-Chief of St John Ambulance who organised a party for more than 100,000 children in Hyde Park featuring a nine-mile-long sausage; a lifelong friend of both Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, she took on informal royal duties including representing Princess Margaret at memorial services and chaperoning the 23-year-old Prince Andrew on a trip to New York.
She was born Ursula Mary Rose James on May 6 1924 in the house of her grandfather, the Earl of Scarbrough, at 21 Park Lane. In the communal garden on the edge of Hyde Park, she befriended two girls, with whom she would play hopscotch under the ilex: they were Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, then living at 145 Piccadilly….
Ursula James’s mother, Lady Serena James, née Lumley, was the Earl of Scarbrough’s only child; had she been a boy, she would have inherited his estates. As it was, she inherited the Lumley Brick Company, which she passed on to Ursula.
Lady Serena had shocked her mother by marrying Robert James, son of the 2nd Lord Northbourne and a great horticulturalist. The Countess of Scarbrough’s objection was not that “Bobbie” James was a widower 28 years her daughter’s senior, but rather that Serena was “going to live in a little cottage by the road”.
In fact, Bobbie James’s house was the romantic 17th-century St Nicholas, built in the ruins of a medieval hospital on the edge of Richmond, in Yorkshire. Ursula spent the war years there, with six evacuees, in her father’s garden, filled with his own hybrid roses, notably the Mary Rose (named after her), and the Bobbie James rose, the enormously popular, fragrant, creamy-white rambler named in his honour.
Through her half-brother Arthur James – from her father’s first marriage to Lady Evelyn Wellesley, daughter of the 4th Duke of Wellington – Ursula had a foot in the racier world of the Bright Young Things, thanks to Arthur’s short-lived marriage to the fashionable Zita Jungman, one of the Jungman twins described by Cecil Beaton as “a pair of decadent 18th-century angels”.
Ursula James was doubly connected to the Wellesleys: in 1943, her aunt, Serena’s half-sister, the poet Dorothy Wellesley, became the Duchess of Wellington on her husband’s unexpected succession as the 7th Duke. The Duke lent Apsley House for the coming-out ball of Ursula’s younger sister, Fay, in July 1947; Princess Elizabeth dined with Ursula James beforehand at the Dorchester, but left the ball early, to announce at midnight her engagement to Prince Philip.
A few months later, Ursula James married Captain David Bethell, younger son of the Egyptologist Richard Bethell, who as Lord Carnarvon’s secretary had entered Tutankhamun’s tomb with Howard Carter in 1922. In 1929, Richard Bethell died mysteriously in his sleep; three months later, his father, the 3rd Baron Westbury, jumped seven floors to his death from the St James’s apartment where he kept the tomb artefacts.
David Bethell, seemingly untouched by “the pharaoh’s curse”, survived a lively war, winning an MC with the Scots Guards in Tunisia in 1943, when he escaped from hospital 40 miles behind the lines to return to the front, with shrapnel in his hand and chest. Handsome and moustached, with a look of Lord Lucan, by the time of their courtship he was equerry to the Duke of Gloucester….
Both Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret attended the Bethells’ subsequent wedding at St Martin-in-the-Fields. Fifty years later, Queen Elizabeth II would attend their golden wedding anniversary….
From 1951, the Bethells made their home at Knapton Hall, near Malton, and had two sons and a daughter. In 1961, on the death of his older brother, Richard succeeded as Baron Westbury; after a desultory period selling fertiliser, he discovered a flair for public relations, representing Moët & Chandon and London hotels including the Stafford, Dukes and the Ritz, where Princess Margaret lunched with them often. They also took the Queen, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret dancing at The Talk of the Town night club…..
In 1990 she stepped down as Superintendent-in-Chief [of St John Ambulance], and was appointed CBE and Dame Grand Cross. She was also, from 1984, President of the Women’s Electrical Association (being practical-minded, she availed herself of the wiring courses). She raised more than £10 million for various charities, and served for decades on the grants sub-committee of the Royal Variety Charity.
She remained dedicated to St John, visiting the St John’s Eye Hospital in Jerusalem well into her nineties; she thought nothing of driving herself from London to Minehead for a cup of tea with St John’s folk.
Lady Westbury had a phenomenal memory for names and faces, and was stoic, humorous, forthright and determined to do what was right (to the point of stubbornness). She created wonderful, sweet-smelling gardens, filled with camellias, hydrangeas, salvias and the Bobbie James rose, in Yorkshire and later in the communal garden of her Chelsea flat. She adored bridge, and lived to 99, in both respects taking after her mother. In her final year, Lady Westbury was not only still driving, but the proud recipient of her first speeding ticket.
Lord Westbury died in 2001. She is survived by two sons and a daughter.
Ursula, Lady Westbury, born May 6 1924, died November 25 2023