‘She had no neutral gear’: Lindy Dufferin remembered

In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The granddaughter of the Duke of Rutland and daughter of Loel Guinness, an MP, financier and Battle of Britain pilot, Lindy Dufferin had a gilded childhood. Her entries as a teen are like no other: ‘Randolph Churchill [Winston’s son] was staying the night here… It was most embarrassing because Randolph was very drunk…’ In October 1957, she was in Paris: ‘The Dutchess [sic] of Windsor came… I did a show of Rock & Roll. It was all great fun. Bon Soir!’

But, amid all the luxury, a note of seriousness enters – there was art, too.

That autumn, she went to stay with her mother in Coughton, Warwickshire. There the artist Paul Maze (1887-1979), an Anglo-French painter known as ‘the last of the post-impressionists’, came to stay.