ETHEL HOWARD MCLAUGHLIN née Pawley (1875-1961), my grandmother, was a witty forceful woman with extraordinary social skills. When attending a finishing school near Ascot she was highly popular with the other girls even though she was the only one to eat at the headmistress's table and the only one to have her own lady's maid.

She is pictured wearing a beauty patch on her cheek. Its blackness was intended to emphasize the fairness of her skin.

Ethel was ashamed of her father's connection with commerce. She tried to hide them in the 1901 British Census by claiming to have been born in the USA, and in Burke's Landed Gentry she pretended that it was her father who came from New York.

Ethel was a Christian Scientist who knew that full understanding of the divine can overcome disease, destitution and death. However she retained a healthy respect for germs. When I was very young out walking with her she would instruct me "We are coming to some poor children: hold your breath until we have passed them."

After the Great War, Ethel began visiting Italy with her new husband Lt. John Tait, her two daughters and twenty cabin trunks.

As she boasted of having brought anxiety and suffering to a fine art, it was appropriate that her first choice was Hotel Angst. In the picture, her suite is outlined in green. Hotel Angst, now a ruin, was situated in Bordighera on the Riviera. It was named after its Swiss owner.

During one visit the Italian police arrested her on suspicion that she was a male spy in disguise, but, after watching how she smoked a cigarette, these close observers of women's behaviour let her go. Later a Thomas Cook courier would escort Ethel, her Italian maid, and the trunks as they flitted between Claridges, the Carlton or the Dorchester in London, and Rome's Grand Hotel, located just by the elegant shops of the Spanish Steps.

Photo courtesy of Grand Hotel Plaza

In old age Ethel took to powdering her hair, but her dark velvet cloaks remained immaculate because the unfortunate woman was almost immobilized by rheumatoid arthritis.

One day as she sat in the foyer of the Grand Hotel clutching her walking staff, a bobbysoxer stared at this imperious apparition and asked: "Are you a princess or somethun?"

After inspecting the brat through her lorgnette (a dirty look on the end of a stick) Ethel replied: "You may say that I am somethun..."

She most certainly was.

© 2006 G. Harry McLaughlin.
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