DUGDALE, Cecilia, Lady (Cecilia Mary nee BLOUNT, 1931-2018)
Richard R
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The daughter of one baronet, Sir William Mount, 2nd Bt, she married another, Sir William Dugdale, 2nd Bt. She inherited her father’s Berkshire estate, but brought up her family at the Dugdale seat, Blyth Hall, Warwickshire. Bill Dugdale was chairman of Aston Villa and took the young David Cameron, a son of one of Cylla’s sisters, Mary Cameron, to matches at Villa Park.
When Bill Dugdale died in 2014, Cameron, then Prime Minister, ended questions promptly after an important speech to ensure he would not be late for Dugdale’s funeral.
“I’ve got to go to the funeral of a much-loved relative, a man who fought at Monte Cassino, landed on the beaches of Anzio, rode a horse in the Grand National and was chairman of the world’s greatest football club, Aston Villa,” Cameron said. “So I don’t want to dishonour him by being late.”
Bill Dugdale was awarded an MC in 1943 for leading his platoon up a Tunisian hillside under intense fire to knock out a German machine-gun post. His first wife, Lady Belinda Pleydell-Bouverie, daughter of the Earl of Radnor, died in 1961. Cylla Dugdale was an affectionate stepmother to the four young children of the first marriage, and an adoring mother to her own two children with Sir William.
An imposing 6 ft tall, Cylla Dugdale was a figure of considerable style and elegance, and an accomplished artist, with a gift for painting the flowers at Blyth Hall, a charming 17th-century house. Sir William and Lady Dugdale lived at Blyth while his oldest son, now Sir Matthew Dugdale, lives at another Dugdale house nearby, Merevale Hall. Cylla was an art collector, too; the walls of Blyth were covered with pictures.
She was also a skilled amateur pilot. After a particularly hair-raising flight back from Newmarket with Sir William at the controls – the hired plane had a faulty elevation control cable – she said she would never fly with him again in a hired aircraft. So she learnt to fly solo, later appearing, in the Birmingham Mail, taking off “to beat those traffic jams”.
Cecilia Mary Mount was born on January 15 1931, the eldest daughter of Sir William Mount and Elizabeth Nance Llewellyn. Bill Mount was one of the leading figures in Berkshire and a notable wartime soldier, largely responsible for founding the 61st Reconnaissance Regiment (Royal Armoured Corps) and for leading it in action until he was wounded on D-Day + 2.
The Mounts, David Cameron’s ancestors, were active in Conservative politics for more than a century. Cylla was brought up at Wasing Place, Berkshire, the Mount family seat. In his 2008 autobiography, Cold Cream, her first cousin, the writer Ferdinand Mount, describes Wasing as “4,000 acres of mixed arable and woodland between Newbury and Reading, including a fine pedimented Adam house with Victorian extensions and delightful Georgian Gothick outbuildings, not to mention a rich library derived from the family’s origins as stationers on Tower Hill.”
Wasing Place – once identified as the original of Rosings in Pride and Prejudice – was requisitioned during the Second World War as railway offices. The house, built in 1777 by John Mount, was burnt to a shell in 1945 in a blaze caused, it is thought, by a charwoman lighting fires with a taper and accidentally dropping burning wax into a waste paper basket.
Rebuilt on a smaller scale, the house became the Mount family home once more in 1956, when an announcement in The Daily Telegraph read: “Sir William and Lady Mount have returned to Wasing Place.” Cylla Dugdale inherited Wasing on the death of her father in 1993.
Bill Dugdale asked her to marry him in 1967 in the kitchen at Blyth. As he wrote in his autobiography, Settling the Bill (2011), “she was so surprised that she sat on the hotplate – which had the opposite effect to inflaming her ardour.”
Cylla Dugdale did much to support her husband, not least as Aston Villa chairman from 1975 to 1982, a period when he appointed Ron Saunders as manager and the club rose from the Third to the First Division. Sir William was also chairman of Severn Trent Water Authority (1974–83) and General Utilities (1988–99), and High Sheriff and Deputy Lieutenant of Warwickshire.
In recent months, Lady Dugdale returned to Wasing to live near her son, film-maker Joshua Dugdale, and her daughter Adelaide, a journalist. They survive her along with four stepchildren.
Cylla, Lady Dugdale, born January 15 1931, died December 4 2018
On Thursday, 6 December 2018 10:14:45 UTC, Richard R wrote: