The Duke who hid diamonds under his mistresses' pillows
In short: Hugh Grosvenor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster, was the ultimate Victorian aristocrat. A man of immense wealth, he owned 17 Rolls-Royces, a private train, and a 54-bedroom hall. Yet, behind his public stature lay a life of scandalous affairs, radical politics, and a notorious obsession with the right-wing fringe.
Known by the nickname 'Bendor,' the Duke was a figure of staggering privilege. His ancestral home, Eaton Hall, sat on 11,000 acres of Cheshire parkland and housed masterpieces by Goya, Rubens, and Rembrandt. His wealth was so vast that his death in 1953 triggered a record £18,000,000 in death duties, which took over a decade to settle. Despite this status, his personal life was marked by complexity; he was married four times and divorced three times, notably paying his first wife a settlement of £13,000—the largest in British legal history at the time. The Duke was also a man of extreme, often controversial, convictions. He was a 'hard core' pro-Nazi peer in the House of Lords during the 1930s, harboring antisemitic views and lobbying the government to abandon the defense of Poland.
His radicalism extended to his personal relationships; he maintained a ten-year affair with Coco Chanel, for whom he purchased a home in Mayfair and a villa on the French Riviera. He was famously described as a man who enjoyed hiding diamonds under the pillows of his mistresses. His military career was equally distinct. During World War I, he developed a prototype Rolls-Royce armoured car and led a daring 120-mile desert dash to rescue prisoners held by the Senussi. However, his later years were defined by his 'defeatist' stance on war and his involvement in 'Operation Modellhut'—an attempt to use his former mistress, Chanel, to broker a separate peace with Nazi Germany. He remains a study in the contradictions of the British aristocracy: a decorated war hero who simultaneously championed the ideology of the enemy.
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