Mrs Greville’s Treasures

“I would rather be a beeress than a peeress.” Mrs Margaret Greville, society hostess par excellence, not only admitted but celebrated her humble beginnings. She was born in 1863, the illegitimate daughter of a cook at McEwan’s brewery in Edinburgh. The brewery owner, multimillionaire William McEwan, was Margaret’s rumoured true father, and he eventually married his mistress when Margaret was 21, making her the heiress to an astonishing fortune. McEwan, a ‘disruptor’ himself, famously refused a title, saying “I would rather be first in my own order than at the tail end of another”. He’d made his money himself; he needed no airs and graces to spend it. Like father, like daughter.

The society hostess Mrs Margaret Greville not only admitted but celebrated her humble beginnings

This attitude did not endear Margaret to the aristocracy and the reputation she has attracted down the decades has often not been kind. She has been decried as social-climbing, meddling and, worse, trivial. When writer to a “grappling hook onto society”. Sir Oswald Mosley, hardly a paragon of virtue himself, described her as a “blousy old barmaid”. Was she really that bad? The truth is, we can’t know.