The Edmondson Blog

(Probably the best obituary in the last ten years, published in the Daily Telegraph, 29th May 2002.)

The 4th Earl of Kimberley, who has died aged 78, achieved a measure of fame as the most-married man in the peerage; once known as "the brightest blade in Burke's", he worked his way through five wives in 25 years before settling down contentedly with a former masseuse he had met on a beach in Jamaica.

Johnny Kimberley was a jovial extrovert whose interests included shark fishing, UFOs and winter sports - for much of the 1950s he was a member of Britain's international bobsleigh team.

There was a serious side to him too: he played championship tiddlywinks, bred prize pigs, and as a Liberal spokesman in the Lords advised the electorate to vote Conservative, whereupon David (now Lord) Steel sacked him. Once on the Tory benches, he took a keen interest in defence and foreign policy, although not in social reform. "Queers," he declared, "have been the downfall of all the great empires."

However, it was his frequent trips to the altar, and those shortly thereafter to the divorce courts, that most naturally caught the eye of the public. His first marriage, in 1945, was to Diana, daughter of Sir Piers Legh, Master of the King's Household and a former equerry to Edward VIII; Kimberley had met her on a blind date at the Ritz.

The wedding took place at St George's Chapel, Windsor, and was attended by the Queen, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, and King George VI, who proposed the toast to the bride and her groom, then a Guards officer.

But Kimberley already knew that he had made a mistake. "I couldn't stop it," he said later, "because the King and Queen were there, and I was in my best uniform." Several years ago, in racy memoirs which were then unpublished, he wrote that on honeymoon he had more fun chasing mice around the bedroom than his new wife, and within a year the marriage was all but over.

"I gave the butler a note to give to her saying that it wasn't going to work out, and that since her mother was sailing for America that night why didn't she go too? That night I found a lovely girl and realised what I'd been missing not having a proper romp. After that, I never stopped."

By now Kimberley was a free-spending, hard-driving member of London's beau monde, taking weekends at Deauville, losing heavily at all-night chemmy sessions with John Aspinall, and bedding as many women as he could.

"Sex. I just couldn't think of anything else," he recalled later. He claimed among his conquests Eartha Kitt and Glynis Johns, and even tipped his hat at Princess Margaret, though she declined the honour. One night, he was caught naked by an irate husband in a hotel cupboard.

His second marriage, in 1949, was to Carmel Dunnett, one of the five daughters of Mickey Maguire, sometime welterweight champion of Australia. Kimberley was introduced to her by her elder sister (a daughter-in-law of Lord Beaverbrook), whose affections he had already enjoyed. They were married at St Moritz, and in 1951 she presented him with an heir, Lord Wodehouse.

"It went quite well for three years," the earl remembered. "Then I found out that she had been knocking off one of my chums. I wasn't all that upset, but it was the fact that one had been made a fool of." They were divorced in 1952. She was later murdered in Spain in 1992 by her third husband, Jeremy Lowndes, who then confessed the crime to Kimberley's son.

Number three was Cynthia Westendarp, a Suffolk farmer's wife whom the earl met at Newmarket. After she contracted polio, he invited her to recuperate at Kimberley, his seat near Wymondham, Norfolk, "and she never moved out". They were married in 1953, and divorced in 1961.

Three years before that, he had sold Kimberley, a Queen Anne brick mansion built on land held by his forebears for five centuries - "it was the easiest way to get rid of Cynthia. All I could think about was buying a new Aston Martin".

Next up was Maggie Simons, a 23-year old fashion model and the daughter of a cafe owner. She refused to sleep with him until he proposed marriage, which he did within a week. They were married in 1961 but "we both drank a fair amount and had fearful fights". Kimberley's fourth divorce came through in 1965. He was 39.

His fifth marriage, in 1970, was to Gillian Raw (nee Ireland-Smith), "and that was a disaster from the word go. She was a very successful girlfriend, but it didn't work as a wife". He had met Janey Consett, a soldier's daughter, in the Caribbean some years before, and now decided to "sugar off" with her instead. Once more divorced, he married her in 1982, and happily it proved to be sixth time lucky.

No other peer had ever had so many wives. Ready as he was with explanations as to the failure of his marriages, the simpler truth was that Kimberley was for much of his life a charming but egotistical, idle and rather weak man who craved attention and sought only pleasure. He was also, as he admitted in 1980 in a debate in the Lords, an alcoholic.

"Helping to liberate Brussels in 1944 was the beginning of my downfall," he wrote. After capturing an almost inexhaustible supply of Champagne, he kept a crate in his tank, regularly refreshing himself from it with a tin mug. "I spent much of the war tight and when it was over I couldn't stop."

By the 1970s, it had begun to affect his health, and he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. He later became vice-president of the World Council on Alcoholism and a member of the National Council on Alcoholism.

As it was, this did not prevent him in his later years from consuming a bottle of white wine each day, although, as he pointed out, this was an improvement on the years when he counted himself "insane". "After all," he reasoned, "no normal person would try to drive a car up the steps of the Grand Hotel in Brighton."

John Wodehouse was born on May 12 1924. His father, the 3rd Earl, was a well-known polo player and former MP who had won an MC on the Marne. His kinsman, P G Wodehouse, stood godfather to young Johnny.

Both of Johnny's parents had an eye for the opposite sex. His mother had already been twice married, and Johnny was her third child. He had a rather lonely childhood, spending large parts of his school holidays on his own with his nanny at Kimberley, which had been visited in 1578 by Elizabeth I.

The family traced their line back to an ancestor knighted by Henry I, and took their mottoes - "Strike Hard" and "Agincourt" - from those of a forebear who had fought with Henry V. They were prominent in Norfolk affairs from the 16th century, and in 1611 received a baronetcy.

In 1797, the Kimberleys were raised to the barony, and in 1866 the 3rd Lord Wodehouse, the Liberal politician and diarist, was created an earl. As Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Kimberley diamond field was named for him.

Johnny was sent to Eton, and first acquired "my taste for feminine flesh" from "an old dear I paid a couple of quid to while up in London". At 17, he inherited the titles when his father was killed in a German air raid. He then went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, but his studies were cut short when, at 19, he got drunk in a nightclub and "accidentally enlisted in the Grenadier Guards". He finished the war as a lieutenant.

In the 1950s, he ran a successful public relations business that had clients such as Gregory Peck, Robert Mitchum and "that bald bugger" (Yul Brynner); his tea-boy was the future gossip columnist Nigel Dempster. In these years, he acquired a reputation as a rackety motorist, and was frequently fined by the police. He also killed a pedestrian he claimed not to have seen crossing the road in Piccadilly.

After selling Kimberley, the earl moved to Jamaica, where he sold land to wealthy Americans. Later he concentrated on his duties in the Lords, leading a campaign in the late 1970s for repayment of money docked during the war from the pay of POWs to take account of local "camp currency".

From 1976, he was a member of the Lords' All Party Defence Study Group, and from 1992 until the expulsion of the hereditary peers in 1999 was its president. He was also president of the Falmouth Shark Angling Club. Latterly he had lived in Wiltshire.

In 2001, he eventually published a version of his memoirs as The Whim of the Wheel. He died on May 26.

Looking back on his life as a roue, Lord Kimberley admitted: "I'm not very proud of what I've done." He believed that his marriages had taught him "that you have to work very, very hard at them". "If you strive for perfection," he considered, "eventually you'll find it."

He is survived by his sixth wife and by the four sons of his marriages. He is succeeded in the titles by his eldest son, John Armine, Lord Wodehouse, a computer programmer.