Back from Romania in 1921, Dorothy has lots of fun in Paris and southern France. In 1922, after a brief return trip to her father in New Jersey, she goes to England to try and get into Oxford; she passes her entrance exam, but decides not to go.
Paris, France
After that I was all alone till Paris, but I talked all afternoon with Jean Crissafelloni [Jean Chrissoveloni, well-known Romanian hotelier], and dined with him, and talked till 11.00 pm, so I certainly wasn’t either lonely or bored. We got to Paris about 10 a.m. on the 3rd of October. I went to the bank, and Lyman [Dorothy’s brother] took me to the Hotel Sylvia and gave me lunch. I also dined and played bridge with him and some others. His girl friend of the moment seemed to be Enid Alexander, American, and very pretty indeed. [Possibly Enid Alexander, born in 1891 in Iowa, who applied for a passport to visit France as a student in 1919, and again in April 1921. She was again living in Iowa in 1925, but I have no further record of her.]
I stayed in Paris till Oct.18th and saw lots of friends – Marguerite and Helene, Miss Crawhall, who may have stayed on in Paris, Billy Williams, whom I saw a good deal, Billy Sloane, whom I don’t remember – I think he was a friend of Lyman’s – Maisie Bideleux and her mother, Miss Fiske – I think that was Dorothy Fiske from Plainfield – Godfrey Miller, someone called Nichols. Then Miss Crawhall left and I saw her off.
Marguerite is probably Dorothy’s friend Marguerite Quersin, probably born in Brussels in 1897.
Helene has not previously been mentioned.
Miss Crawhall was the chaperone for Dorothy and her friends.
Billy Williams has not previously been mentioned. He appears in one of Dorothy’s photos from earlier in 1921.
Billy Sloane has not previously been mentioned. I was hoping that he would turn out to be the minor science fiction writer William Sloane, but the latter was born only in 1906, so is unlikely to have been unaccompanied in Paris in 1921.
Maisie Bideleux (real name Mary, later Mrs Philips) lived from 1903 to 2002; Dorothy knew her through her sister Vera.
The Bideleux’s mother was Swedish, born Anna Maria Skoglund (1874-1951); she married their father, Arnold Fatio Bideleux (1869-1953) in 1898.
I find a Dorothy Whitney Fisk (not Fiske) who lived 1888-1957 and was indeed born in Plainfield. She married William Nettleton Paine (1891-1956) in 1930.
It would be nice if the Godfrey Miller here could be the Australian / New Zealander artist of that name, but he does not seem to have visited Paris before 1929.
There is no other clue about the person called Nichols.
Lyman and I thought we’d like to share a flat and I did some flat hunting but without success. We went out dancing a lot, with various friends. Several of us went down to Vernon for the week-end. There was an eclipse of the moon on the Sunday. [16 October 1921.]
Zora had taken a villa on the Californie in Cannes called the Cambria. Dollie was with her; Harvey had died while I was in Roumania. While the estate was being settled Dollie wasn’t too well off, I think and Zora insisted on her being her – Zora’s – guest; usually they shared expenses. I have the impression that Zora wasn’t overjoyed at the idea of having me there for the winter, and indeed I don’t know why I did stay so long instead of going back to Paris, nor why the scheme for taking a flat with Lyman fell through. I could surely have found one if I’d gone on looking long enough.
Dorothy’s aunt Zora, formally Lily Wickersham, lived from 1870 to 1956; she gave Dorothy an allowance until her marriage. She is buried in the same grave as her mother, her sister, her brother-in-law and her niece Dorothy in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey; I tracked it down in September 2022, on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.
Dollie, born Blanche Lucy Rigg (1872-1946), married Frederick Harvey Erskine Sperling, known as Harvey (1868-1921) in 1906. She was two years younger than Zora. She does not seem to have had children.
Before Col and I had gone to Roumania Mlle. de Felice had had an exhibition of things done in her studio, both her own things and her pupils, and Col and I had each sold some batiks. Then someone told us that a book-binding firm wanted to buy papiers batiks for end-papers and covers of books, and we began making those. While I was at Cannes I did a lot of work on those and on other things. I had a small room which I called my den where I could work. I also sketched a bit, and we went for drives, and the two Sanders girls, Joan and Enid, came to see me or I went to see them, but it was a very quiet life after all the excitements of the winter in Paris and the summer in Roumania. We three, Dollie and Zora and I, sometimes went down into Cannes for tea. I usually went to Mass at Notre Dame des Pins, but at least once I went to the Russian church. Mrs. Gordon was in Cannes, and I made some papiers-batiks for her. She had done a lot of travelling and had some hair-raising adventures to tell. Mrs. Dudley-Scott was also in Cannes that winter, at one of the hotels.
Col is Colette Blanc (1898-1973); daughter of a Swiss architect, Louis Blanc, who designed much of late nineteenth century Bucharest; her mother, born Irina Berendei, remarried after his death, and as Irina Procopiu was one of the ladies in waiting at the court of Queen Marie. Her mother had hosted Dorothy and other friends earlier in 1921.
Marguerite de Felice (1872-1933) was an artist originally from Sainte-Foy-la-Grande, in southwestern France. In her early career, she worked primarily in leather, producing many objets d’art as well as dollhouses for children. After leather became scarce during World War I, de Félice turned her talents to bookbinding, teaching it at the Ecole et Les Ateliers d’Art Décoratif beginning in 1920.
Enid Sanders (1900-1997) married Scottish clergyman William Skinner Wilson (1885-1942) in 1928; their son David Clive Wilson, Baron Wilson of Tillyorn (born 1935) was the second last governor of Hong Kong.
Joan Sanders (1901-1987) married Roland Hall Griffiith (1900-1981) in 1929.
Mrs Gordon could be anyone.
Mrs Dudley-Scott is probably Sybil Harding Peto (1875-1963), who married Henry Dudley Scott (1868-1943) in 1897. He had three brothers, but two of them just went by Scott and the other had died in 1902, and his widow had remarried.
Papa and Sally came on December 17th for Christmas. They felt the cold very much – I think there was central heating in the villa, but it wasn’t very efficient. There was also a fire in the drawing room and in another smaller sitting-room which they appropriated. They used to sit one on either side of the fire, wearing overcoats and scarves, when everyone else was in light summery clothes.
Much more on Dorothy’s father, Henry Deming Hibbard, and his second wife Sally here.
Vera Bideleux also came for Christmas, arriving on 23rd. We danced at least once at the Casino with Sheila Locke (W. J. Locke’s adopted daughter) and some men, one of whom, whose other name I forget, had the surname of Emmanuel. I can’t say I forgot his Christian name, as he was Jewish. The Emmanuels had a lovely house in Belgrave Square and I know I went to a dance there later on at least once. There were two brothers, I think, both up at Cambridge, and very intelligent, and also very nice. One day lots of people came to tea including a Baroness de Constant who wanted to see my work and ordered a good many things.
I actually remember meeting Vera Bideleux, Maisie’s sister, a couple of times when I was a child. Like Dorothy, she was born in 1899; she married Rowley James (1900-1938) in 1931 and died in 1983.
W.J. Locke (1863-1930) was a prolific author who has been forgotten today. He and his wife Aimee Maxwell Close (née Heath, 1879-1948) established a relationship with Sheila Baines (1905-1936) when she was in her late teens; when she legally changed her surname to Locke in 1923, her father committed suicide, leading to a public scandal.
I have been unable to identify the Emanuels who lived in Belgrave Square and had sons who were studying at Cambridge, though there are a number of notable Londoners with that name at around that time.
Baroness de Constant is presumably the former Daisy Sedgwick Berend, the American wife of Baron Paul de Constant, a French politician who had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1909. There is a striking portrait of her in the Sörmland Museum in Stockholm.
There are a number of photographs from the winter at Cannes, none of them terribly good quality unfortunately. Two young men, Georges Wechter and Henri d’Ursel, feature prominently in several of them, but are not mentioned in Dorothy’s memoirs.
“Georges Wechter” seems likely to be George Ernest Richard Harry Wächter (1899-1945), son of Richard Hermann George Francesco Wächter (1872-1956) and Marie Johanna Schiff (1877-1948). His relative Frank Gent has done some research on him here and here (in French).
Henri d’Ursel (1900-1974), later the eighth Duke d’Ursel, became a notable Belgian film director.


1922
I have no records for 1922 and 1923 – at least I have a few, but very scanty. I think I stayed at Cannes till the spring and then went to Paris and Maisie [Bideleux] and I both stayed at the Hotel Studia in the Bd. St. Germain. [It still exists, 101 years later.] It was really a student’s hostel, and a lot of Scandinavian girls stayed there. One could have breakfast and a light supper – cocoa and a boiled egg and bread and butter, that sort of thing. But of course we were out quite a lot. I went on working with Mlle de Felice, and Maisie at her drawing and painting. Then Billie McKeever came to stay. She had quite a large room next to mine. She had been ill with colitis and was supposed to lead a very quiet life, but of course she found that dull.
One evening she had gone out to play golf and dine and didn’t come back till very late. I can’t remember if she came into my room, or if I woke when she passed to go to her own, but I was feeling quite cross with her. Then about two in the morning she woke me saying she was really ill. I rang her doctor – one of the very posh and very expensive – Paris doctors – and he flatly refused to come at that time of the night but said he’d come in the morning. I rang my own doctor, Dr. Robinson, American, and he did send a French doctor who lived near and who at least could tell me what to do – though he was terrified of infringing on the posh doctor’s practice.
He said to give her a hot foot-bath with mustard in it and put hot compresses on her chest, as there was great danger of pneumonia. The manageress of the hotel was a brick and got me hot water and then I went to work. I’d never done anything [like] that in my life and it’s a wonder Billie survived, but she did, and used to say I’d saved her life. The rest of that night seemed endless to me; I remember standing at the window watching the dawn come so slowly, just a faint lightening of the darkness. But at last it was full daylight and the posh doctor arrived. He found Billie not too bad and didn’t seem to believe that she had really been very ill in the night.
Anyway he said he would arrange for her to go to the American hospital and would send a nurse and an ambulance later; I forget what time, but I was lunching with Jack Nation and although Billie would have liked me to go with her I didn’t put him off. I wish now I had; I didn’t even like him particularly, and I loved Billie. Anyway she went there, and of course I went to see her. For some reason she didn’t like it – now, perhaps I’m getting this the wrong way round; I think I am. I think she first went to the posh doctor’s pet clinique and that she didn’t like that; anyway with the help of one of the nurses she went to another nursing-home, and then her mother came from Rome and took her to the American hospital; at least I think that’s the way it was. I remember her mother arriving and saying how clever she was as she’d brought sandwiches and so wouldn’t have to go away for lunch.
Marianne Goodhue “Billie” McKeever (1898-1934) married Edmund Steuart Davies in 1925; she was also one of the early lovers of the writer Mercedes da Acosta, who was probably the most visible lesbian in American culture in the early twentieth century. Their relationship had ended around 1921, so it’s possible that was part of the real reason that Billie wanted to be away from the USA.
Billie McKeever’s mother was born Julia Draper (1971-1932) and married Isaac Chauncey McKeever (1871-1932) in 1894. Their house at 160 East 65th St, where their three daughters grew up, is still standing.
Later her mother gave me a beautiful little baby-pillow with a cover all lace and embroidery, and I was terribly indignant at being given a present because of anything I’d done for Billie; Billie herself had a hard time pacifying me enough to thank her mother with some civility! I don’t know why it was but I had a feeling that Billie was neglected by her parents and I think I was quite wrong. I was very prickly in those days always leaping in with both feet if I thought anyone I was fond of wasn’t getting all the attention I felt they should have.
Jack Nation was really a friend of Bunnie’s; he was a colonel then, and later a general. I can’t remember much about him now. I think he was rather taken with Billie. She was so attractive; small, but very well made, with a lovely little heart-shaped face and dark red hair and big hazel eyes. She was my dearest friend.
John Nation, 1874-1946, was a British army officer and later, from 1931 to 1935, a Conservative MP.
Frances Belt “Bunnie” Wickersham (1862-1949), Dorothy’s mother’s sister, married Sir Robert Hadfield (1858-1940) in 1894; they had no children, but informally adopted Dorothy after her father remarried. She wrote at much greater length about them elsewhere.
England
I think I must have gone to London sometime that spring or early summer. François [de Buisseret] was up at Oxford and Bunnie took me to see him several times and he gave us luncheon in his rooms at Bailiol. I met a lot of his friends; I remember Count Marcati – whose sister Alexandra married Michael Arlen – and Laddie Sanford, whose sister Janie had roomed with me at Foxcroft, and Gertie Olmsted’s brother, Ted, and Ralph Hines, a rich American, and there were lots more I forget. I also met some of the girls who were there, but the only one I remember well was Cristina Casati. Anyway I thought I’d like to go to Oxford myself. Zora [Dorothy’s other aunt, Lily Wickersham] had promised that she would do anything I liked the next winter; it was a great sacrifice for her leaving Dollie so long, but she said she’d do it and of course I was thrilled. So it was arranged that if I could pass Responsions she would take a house at Oxford and I would be a Home Student. As I’d never done any English History and hadn’t looked at Latin since I left school I had to study quite hard. In addition to Responsions I had to pass an examination for the Home Student whatever-it-was, but that was much easier.
Count François William Marie Joseph Gerard de Buisseret (1899-1934) was a young Belgian aristocrat and diplomat who had been legally adopted by Dorothy’s aunt “Bunnie”, Lady Hadfield.
Count Leonardo Mercati (1901-1974) and his sister Atalanta (not Alexandra) Mercati (1903-1964) were children of Count Alexander Marcati, Chamberlain to the Greek royal court, and his American wife Harriet Wright.
Michael Arlen (1895-1956) was born Dikran Sarkis Kouyoumdjian and was a very well known writer. He married Atalanta Mercati in 1928. Their son Michael J. Arlen, born in 1930 and also a writer, is still alive.
Stephen “Laddie” Sanford (1898-1977) became a well-known polo player and horse breeder. His sister Sarah Jane Sanford (1900-1984) married Mario Pansa (1894-1946) in 1937.
Gertie Olmsted (1901-1973), later Gertrude Nauman, was the daughter of Marvin Olmsted, a Republican Congressman from 1897 to 1913, and became a well-known fund-raiser for the Republican Party in later life. Her brother Marlin Edgar Olmsted (1900-1931), presumably “Ted”, died young of heart failure, with no children.
Ralph Hines (1900-1950) was the son of a Chicago lumber millionaire. He married in 1947 and had no children.
Cristina Casati (1901-1953), daughter of famous art collector the Marchesa Luisa Casati (1881-1957), married artist and Labour politician Francis Hastings, earl of Huntingdon, in 1925, and then married Communist politician Wogan Phillips in 1944. She had two children by her first marriage.
America
I went to America that summer, crossing on the Majestic, then the largest ship afloat and very expensive, we thought – I paid £50 for my share of a two-berth 1st class cabin. I don’t remember anything about the other woman in the cabin; I just know there was one. Ralph Hines and Ted Olmsted and some others who were at Oxford with François were also on board; I remember playing bridge with them. There was dancing, too, and altogether I had quite a pleasant time.
The Bank of England’s inflation calculator tells me that £50 in 1922 prices is equivalent to £2,400 today. Ouch!
I stayed in Plainfield with the family and that was the year we went to Nantucket. I know that, because they sent on the Home Students examination papers to me there and I was told to get a teacher or professor or something to supervise me. I asked at the hotel desk and was told that our table-waitress was a qualified teacher! Like so many Americans she had taken that as a holiday job. She was very nice but did no supervision beyond asking me if I’d done the papers all by myself and signing the certificate that I had done so.
The Society of Home Students at Oxford, for women only, eventually became St Anne’s College. In the 1920s it did not have any centralised premises, and its students were dispersed throughout the city. Women had only just (in 1920) been granted the right to take degrees at Oxford. (It took women at Cambridge were not fully recognised until 1948.)
It’s interesting that Dorothy, now 23, decided to have a go at Oxford. Her father and his brother had attended MIT, but her brother had dropped out of Yale. Her two stepbrothers had graduated from Harvard and Princeton. Twenty-five years later, her son would go to Oxford, and ten years after that, her daughter turned down a place at Cambridge.
I studied a lot, but also we had some quite nice times, sailing and bathing and so on. John Barclay, the English tenor, was there with his wife Kitty, and I saw a good deal of them. Mary Charles, Sally’s cousin, was there with her two little girls, Mary de Puyster and Adrienne; I remember making paper dolls for them. That was the famous time when Sally refused to get up because Papa had got up too early; I remember I had a pale pink dress with white beads around the neck and the edge of the short sleeves; it sound ghastly but John Barclay admired it very much. There was a man there whose name I forget but who went riding with me and also took me for my only experience of surf-board riding; I enjoyed it but I doubt if I did it more than twice.
John Barclay (1892-1978) became better known as an actor in the 1930s; his last cinema part was in Soylent Green (1973). His first wife was Louisa Catherine Etheldreda Danell (1889-1986), presumably “Kitty” for short. They had two daughters but divorced in 1925. He married three more times.
Mary de Peyster Charles, nee Bailey (1880-1954) was the first cousin of Dorothy’s stepmother Sally. Her older daughter, also Mary de Peyster Charles (1912-1975) married Edward Clark (1907-1996) in 1931, aged 19, and then John Henry King. Her younger daughter, Adrienne Bruton Charles (1915-1946) married Charles Henry Classen (1912-2003) in 1937.
England
In the autumn I came back to England on a small ship whose name I don’t remember. I had booked through Cook’s – the reason I was going on that ship was because Papa knew someone who knew the purser, I think; We were told the ship was to sail at 3:00 p.m. and Papa took me in to the dock. As he always liked to be early we got there about 1:00, and rather to our surprise found the decks lined with passengers all looking rather annoyed. Papa wasn’t allowed to come on board and we were told the ship had meant to sail at noon; Apparently all the other passengers had got their tickets straight from the line and had been notified, but there was another couple who had got them through Cook’s, like me, and they hadn’t yet arrived, so we sailed without them. I heard later that they were given passage on another ship of the line. I was in a small double-berth cabin; when I went to it, it was full of flowers, fruit, candy etc. for me, and my stable-companion was very cross indeed. She, like some of the other passengers, seemed to think I had delayed the ship on purpose, and apparently didn’t believe that I hadn’t known of the sailing time being altered. The atmosphere was not cheerful and I went along to the purser to see if I could possibly change my cabin, and he gave me the one the couple who never turned up should have had! It was a lovely big cabin with its own bath. Unfortunately the purser himself got a bit amorous and I spent most of the trip avoiding him. I only remember one person I got to know at all well, and I forget her name; she was a nice youngish American, married, with a little boy, and she was also a Christian Science healer and I read some of Mrs. Eddy’s works to please her. I saw her several times later in London.
When I went to Oxford for Responsions Zora came too and we stayed at the Mitre. Up to that last minute I was studying, and I really didn’t expect to pass. The period of English history was the 19th century with all those complicated reform bills and factory acts and there were masses of dates to learn, and then also the British constitution was it Bagehot on the Constitution? I think so – that was what worried me most; I’d had a good grounding in Latin at Hartridge’s and I knew French well – I was going to read French. I had to do French, Latin, English History, and Mathematics. As I’d never done £ s d sums in my life, I reduced them all to pence, worked the sum, and then painfully put them back into £ s d again! – anyway I passed.
Responsions, also known as Little Go or Smalls, was the Oxford University entrance exam until 1960.
But by the time I knew I’d passed I was no longer so keen on going to Oxford. Viva Erskine had been in Egypt, where the 9th Lancers – in which Donald was a subaltern – was stationed, the winter and spring before, and was full of it, and Donald himself said to me: “You are a mug, what do you want to go to Oxford for when you can come to Egypt?” So I decided I’d like to go to Egypt too. One other thing that influenced me was that I had thought that I’d be able to hunt at Oxford, but I was told that for my first year, at any rate, I wouldn’t be able to. Also I hadn’t cared terribly for the few girls I’d met who were there, excepting always Cristina Casati whom I liked very much. She was Italian; her mother was the famous Marchesa Casati whom I’d sometimes seen in Paris, though I think I never met her. Cristina liked me too, in a patronizing way, calling me a little mouse. Anyway I saw Cristina at François’s parties and later on in London, but then I lost sight of her.
Viva Erskine is presumably Victoria Esmé Eskine (1897-1989), older sister of Donald Erskine (1899-1984). They were children of Montagu Erskine, 6th Baron Erskine of Restomel. Victoria married Air Commodore Harry Aitken Hewat in 1932, and does not seem to have had children. Donald married Christina Baxendale in 1927, and had four children. He inherited the title of Baron Erskine in 1957 from his father, and the title of Earl of Buchan from a distant cousin in 1960.
See above for Cristina Casati.
I have to say I don’t think much of Dorothy’s reasoning for not attending Oxford – not enough riding, and tourism in Egypt a more attractive alternative!