The following, found in the Daily Telegraph is the obit of Clementine, Lady Beit. Lady
Beit was born a Mitford and a cousin of the celebrated sisters. Her husband Sir Alfred
Beit had one of the great private art collections in Britain. It had been accumulated by Sir
Alfred’s father, a South African diamond millionaire at the turn of the 20th century. It
had a rocky road after its bequest and provided enough wild and frightening adventure to
make it into a movie, which it was (and more than once). This obituary was published in
January of this year.
Lady Clementine Beit (née Mitford, 1915-2005).
Lady Beit
Lady Beit, who has died aged 89, retired with her husband, Sir Alfred Beit, Bt, to enjoy
one of the finest private art collections in private hands at an idyllic Irish country house,
only to find themselves the victims of a series of robberies.
In 1974 the Beits were listening to records in the library of Russborough House, Co
Wicklow, when three armed men and a woman forced their way in. Refusing to answer
questions, the robbers used tights to tie up the couple and their servants. Sir Alfred was
struck on the head with a pistol butt; his wife was dragged down the stone steps to the
cellar. Meanwhile, Rose Dugdale, a radical civil rights leader with a fake French accent
and IRA sympathies, did a hurried survey before selecting 19 works, including the only
Vermeer in private hands, a Rubens and a Goya; her accomplices then tore the pictures
down from the walls, raving about "exploiters" and "capitalist pigs" before making a
hurried getaway.
The insurers offered a £100,000 reward; the experts declared that the thieves would be
unable to sell their booty, anyway. The criminals responded by issuing a demand for
£500,000 and for two IRA bombers to be removed from their London prison. After a
week the Irish police, who had ignored advice to look for Dugdale, admitted that the trail
had gone cold. Then a pair of alert Gardai officers discovered a lone woman in a recently
rented farmhouse in Co Cork, and all the pictures were found wrapped up in a cupboard
and in a car.
The upper-middle-class Dugdale, who had earlier robbed her own father, was sentenced
to nine years after pleading "proudly and incorruptibly guilty"; and she retained her place
in the public eye by marrying and having a baby in prison.
After the paintings returned to Russborough, ownership was transferred to the speciallyformed Alfred Beit Foundation, which opened the house to the public, and the Beits
moved into a wing. But this did not prevent a second raid in 1986, when Martin Cahill, a
well-known Dublin criminal, took 17 paintings. The Beits were away at the time and,
heeding police advice, declined to discuss the incident. But the robbery became the
subject of a book and several films, including John Boorman's The General (1998), in
which Brendan Gleeson played Cahill, known in Dublin as an ODC (ordinary decent
criminal), who was later murdered by the IRA. Twelve pictures, including Vermeer's
Lady Writing a Letter and Gainsborough's Madame Bacalli, were taken in what the film
treated as a comic scenario. It shows the gang breaking in to set off the alarm, then
retreating to drink tea in the woods while police arrive to conclude it was a false alarm,
leaving the gang to help themselves.
By now some friends felt that the Beits had good reason to leave Ireland. But Homan
Potterton, director of the Irish National Gallery, tactfully suggested that, in recognition of
the government's generosity, the planned handover to the nation of 17 of the finest
paintings should now take place. The gallery's north wing in Dublin was renamed Beit,
though it was some years before all the pictures were recovered.
A third robbery occurred in 2001. The now widowed Lady Beit was sitting down to lunch
when a 4x4 drove up Russborough's front steps and through its closed doors; three men in
balaclavas leaped out to seize a Gainsborough and a Bernardo Belotto, which were soon
recovered. The following year there was yet another robbery, but the five paintings,
including two Rubenses, were soon recovered.
Clementine Mabell Kitty Mitford was born on October 22 1915, the posthumous
daughter of Major Bertram Mitford; she was also a granddaughter of the 1st Lord
Redesdale - the five celebrated Mitford sisters were her cousins. Diana Mitford
particularly admired Clementine's blonde beauty, which her sister Nancy was to hymn in
the 1950s when she described Clementine as one of London's 10 most elegant women.
Since Clementine's mother spent long periods in Africa after marrying Captain Courteney
Brocklehust, a game warden, Clementine and her sister were frequently sent to stay with
their cousins. She was a contemporary of Unity Mitford at St Margaret's School, Bushey,
and also went to Berlin to learn German, where she met Hitler. She was occasionally
escorted by a handsome young stormtrooper, and was asked by Unity to "waggle a flag"
as "the darling Führer" passed in the street.
But instead of being swept up by Nazism, Clementine returned home, where she took a
nursing course at St Thomas's. In 1939, she married Sir Alfred Beit, 2nd Bt, a seriousminded Conservative MP with liberal instincts and a lifelong dedication to the collection
which had been built up by his father, Sir Otto Beit, the South African diamond
millionaire.
Since her husband had large African interests, they set off on honeymoon via Athens for
Southern Rhodesia. On coming home the young couple started to make substantial
alterations to their recently acquired house in Kensington Park Gardens, turning their
rectangular dining room into an oval in an attempt to perfect the setting for the pictures.
After the declaration of war, Beit was commissioned into the RAF and attached to the
Joint War Cabinet Commitee in France. His wife accompanied him, but when the British
legation was withdrawn, she had to make her own way home, taking the last boat out of
Brest. Back in England, they put the Kensington house on the market, but it was bombed
before they could sell.
While Beit was posted to Bomber Command at High Wycombe, his wife worked in a
factory making air reconnaissance cameras and joined the Transport Workers' Union
while helping her husband's agent in his constituency.
After he was defeated in the 1945 general election, the Beits decided to take a holiday in
South Africa. Instead of returning home after a month, however, the Afrikaans-speaking
Beit toyed with the idea of standing for the dominion's parliament, and they bought a
modern house in Cape Town with a fine view of Table Mountain; their Kensington home
was sold to become the Iraqi embassy. Later the couple moved to Johannesburg to be
closer to the Beit interests in Southern Rhodesia, but they could find no house suitable for
the pictures, which were temporarily lent to the South African and Irish National
Galleries.
By 1952 Lady Beit, particularly, had grown exasperated with the National Party's
apartheid regime. When Sir Alfred saw an advertisement in Country Life for
Russborough House, a Palladian mansion 20 miles outside Dublin (but half an hour's
drive from the nearest police station), he cabled a bid, which was accepted.
The couple moved in, with the entire collection at last under one roof. Introducing a prewar style of entertaining, they filled the house with guests at Christmas and hired a plane
to bring friends to the Dublin Horse Show. They also lent pictures to the Wexford
Festival, of which Sir Alfred was president.
Beit was a fine shot and his wife hunted with the Killing Kildares and took retired
greyhounds for walks. The sound of Lady Beit reading aloud to her husband from a
chaise longue while mist engulfed the house and the rain poured down became the stuff
of local legend. In 1993 the state, which had offered them such shaky protection,
expressed its appreciation by making them both honorary Irish citizens.
Lady Beit continued to live at Russborough after Sir Alfred's death in 1994, reading
Proust and Mann in their original languages. She was in St Thomas's Hospital, looking
forward to a party at Russborough for her 90th birthday, when she died on August 17.