Jean, Lady Hamilton, 1861–1941

Jean, Lady Hamilton’s diaries remained forgotten and hidden in the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College, London, for fifty years. The story begins with the young couples’ wedding, a dazzling bride, Jean Muir, marrying a star-struck Major Ian Hamilton. The daughter of the millionaire businessman Sir John Muir, Jean had all the money while Hamilton was penniless.

Having spent their early married years in India the Hamiltons returned and set up house in the prestigious Hyde Park area of London, also eventually buying Lullenden Manor, East Grinstead, that they purchased as a country home from Winston Churchill when he could no longer afford it.

Jean chronicled Ian’s long army career that culminated in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. The failure there ended her husband’s distinguished career and almost ended Churchill’s as he had to leave his job as First Lord of the Admiralty. From new evidence it is possible to judge how close the campaign came to succeeding and the failure seems greatly due to the absence of fresh troops not being supplied by Lord Kitchener to the peninsula.

Winston Churchill in particular was like family in the Hamiltons’ home, he used to go there and practice his speeches, and painted alongside Jean to whom he sold his first painting. Because the Churchill's were in genteel poverty, Clementine could not afford the £25 fee to enter a nursing home to give birth to her 4th child Marigold. Mary, the Lady Soames, Clementine’s daughter, supported Celia Lee in publishing the story. Marigold’s secret grave was uncovered in Kensal Green Council cemetery in 2001. The child’s life ended in tragedy just before her 3rd birthday when she died in the post-First World War Spanish influenza epidemic.

Unable to conceive, Jean adopted two children, Harry Knight, who had been abandoned on the doorstep of the creche of which she was President, and Phyllis Ursula James that she preferred to call Rosaleen and who was nicknamed Fodie in the family. Fodie's mother was unmarried and abandoned by her soldier lover during the First World War. Harry was killed in action in the Libyan desert during the Second World War. Fodie, having been sent to be educated at a private school was trapped in war-torn Europe and never returned home again.