A 1920 postcard featuring twin portrait photographs of future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Dorothy Macmillan as newlyweds, signed by both, an optimistic portrait of what would become a long, complicated, and deeply compromised marriage.
London: Bassano Ltd., 1920. Postcard. This double-signed 1920 souvenir postcard of newly wed Harold and Dorothy Macmillan heralds what would become a long, complicated, and deeply compromised marriage.
The postcard features side-by-side oval portrait photographs, signed, respectively “Harold Macmillan” and “Dorothy Macmillan” at the bottom of each portrait. Condition of the postcard is very good, complete and substantially clean, though with a light crease across the lower left corner, another light crease at the upper left edge, and mild soiling. The only print credit is “Bassano” discreetly blind stamped at the lower right corner below Dorothy’s portrait. This indicates printing by Bassano Ltd., one of the most prominent society portrait photography studios in London. Harold and Dorothy had a society wedding at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 21 April 1920. This postcard almost certainly dates from the time of their marriage or shortly thereafter. The studio-portrait style and Bassano printing of the item indicate that it was tied to the wedding.
Macmillan, along with Clement Attlee, was one of only two British prime ministers to be seriously wounded in battle. For Macmillan, it was actually twice, both times during the First World War, in his right hand, pelvis, and left thigh; the experience gave him “compassion, resilience, and perspective.” It also left him with “a limp handshake, a dragging gait, and sporadic pain.” None of this left him unable to successfully woo Lady Dorothy Evelyn Cavendish (1900–1966) “the third of five daughters and fourth among the seven children of the duke and duchess of Devonshire. She was the first woman to whom Macmillan had been seriously attracted, and was his only love. Said by some to be a shrewd judge of character, she sought, perhaps, a wider intellect than the aristocratic youths among whom she grew up provided. He wrote to her on the eve of their wedding: 'I shall always be your lover', and remained true to his word.” It would cost him.
Macmillan secured his first seat in Parliament in 1924 and early in his career partnered with Winston S. Churchill, who had recently returned to the Conservative Party after two decades as a Liberal. Macmillan would serve in Churchill’s wartime government and the cabinet of Churchill’s second and final premiership. Regrettably for Macmillan, Dorothy partnered with another Churchill ally, Robert Boothby, to whom she credited one of her children and with whom she had a long-running affair of some three and a half decades.
Husband and wife apparently came to an arrangement. “Dorothy was to be an impeccable and very effective political wife, Harold a celibate and unenquiring husband… Dorothy's affair with Boothby was well known among the social and political élite, but was, remarkably, never publicized until after her death.” Regrettably, it was very much known to Harold. “With the start of her liaison, and a recurrence of trouble from his war wounds, Macmillan suffered 'what in fact seemed to have been a full-scale nervous breakdown'. He was for several months in a sanatorium at Neu Wittelsbach, near Munich.”
None of this prevented Harold Macmillan from becoming Prime Minister, in which office he served from January 1957 to October 1963. Rather remarkably, as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan offered the man who so thoroughly cuckolded him a life peerage, and Boothby became Baron Boothby in 1958.
Reference: ODNB; NPG. Item #008909
Price: $250.00