CLOUDS HILL DORSET

TE Lawrence rented this spartan cottage and furnished it to his personal taste (left) in 1923 when he was stationed in the Tank Corps at nearby Bovington Camp. ‘I’ve taken a little cottage (half ruinous), and water-tighted it,’ he wrote, having sold his gold Arabian dagger to pay for repairs. He later bought the cottage as a retreat where he entertained friends including Thomas Hardy (see above), who didn’t mind the lack of running water.

to keep up, terribly expensive… perhaps it is just as well,’ wrote Queen Elizabeth, stoically.

Cecil Beaton called Maggie, as she was known, ‘a greedy, snobbish old toad who watered her chops at the sight of royalty’, and Queen Elizabeth thought she was ‘amusingly unkind, so sharp, such fun, so naughty’.

Maggie was heiress to a beer fortune. ‘I’d rather be a beeress than a peeress,’ she gloated. When she bought Polesden Lacey in 1907 she employed the architects of The Ritz to indulge her taste for bling. One guest likened the gold saloon to an ‘extremely expensive bordello’. Royalty, politicians and celebs could enjoy lavish hospitality and discreet bed-hopping there.

Born in 1863, Maggie was the illegitimate daughter of a domestic servant and millionaire brewer William Mcewan, but the couple later married. Maggie then wed the Hon. Ronald Greville, part of the fast-living set who surrounded Edward VII and his mistress Alice Keppel – the socially ambitious couple were known as ‘The Grovels’.

When she died in 1942, Maggie left her fabulous jewellery collection to Queen Elizabeth. Today the whopping Greville diamond tiara is often worn by Alice Keppel’s great-granddaughter the Duchess of Cornwall, and the Greville emerald tiara was worn by Princess Eugenie on her wedding day.