Image above, foreground: https://londonpubsgroup.camra.org.uk/viewnode.php?id=150402. On the other corner of Hearne Road: Rose Cottage.
From Nancy Mitford (1985), by Selina Hastings:
“They were married on Monday, December 4, 1933, at St John’s, Smith Square. Peter (Rodd), having planned his stag-night for the Saturday before, appeared sober, upright and wonderfully handsome in his tail-coat. Nancy, in a dress of white chiffon with a train, wore a wreath of white gardenias securing a long veil, and carried a bouquet of gardenias and roses. Farve gave her away, and she was attended by eleven little pages in white satin Romney suits.
After the service there was a reception for over two hundred at Rutland Gate presided over by Muv in brown velvet and a feathered hat. Lady Rennell was in red. Among the guests were Hamish’s parents, Lord and Lady Rosslyn, with their daughter Mary, Hugh Smiley and his wife Nancy (Cecil Beaton’s sister), Mark Ogilvie-Grant and his mother, Middy and her mother, Helen Dashwood, Roy Harrod, Nina and her husband Studley Herbert, Robert Byron’s two sisters, Constantia Fenwick, and the Osbert Lancasters.
They went to Rome for the honeymoon, staying in the Rennells’ magnificent apartment in Palazzo Giulia. ‘Why do people say they don’t enjoy honeymoons?’ wrote Nancy to Unity, ‘I am adoring mine.’ To *Mark (Ogilvie-Grant) she sent a teasing postcard: ‘I am having a really dreadful time, dragging a badly sprained ankle round major & minor basilicas & suffering hideous indigestion from eating goats cheese. However I manage to keep my spirits up somehow.’
Peter and Nancy began their married life in a tiny house overlooking the Thames at Strand on the Green, just down river from Kew Bridge. Rose Cottage was like a little dolls’ house, with a walled garden back and front, a stone-flagged garden path, bow-windows, and a pink china pig and two parrots balanced on top of the porch.
With help from Mark, who was good at that sort of thing, Nancy made the interior elegant and pretty. Although she had almost no money she was clever at picking up bargains in the sale-room, and had bought among other things a big sofa for £2 and a carved mantelpiece for £1. Although small, the rooms were airy and light, made more so by the pale colours of the walls and carpets. In the sitting-room was a handsome, if shabby, Aubusson carpet and Nancy’s beloved desk, her bonheur-du-jour. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclopædia_Britannica/Bonheur_du_Jour Upstairs in the bedroom were the festooned curtains that throughout her life were such a distinctive mark of her Parisian taste; from this window Nancy could look over the garden, and on the other side of a quiet road, across to a tree-lined tow-path and the pleasant, wide expanse of the Thames.
Once or twice she caught sight of something not so pleasant, the sodden mass of a suicide’s corpse drifting on the tide: this, according to the story, was the cue for Nancy to telephone the old boatman whose job it was to fish it out, at ten shillings a time – a shilling more if he had to cross over to the far side of the river.
Nancy enjoyed her little house, she enjoyed being married – and the liberty marriage gave her. With Peter away all day at work, she had no one to please but herself. ‘I am awfully busy learning to be a rather wonderful old housewife,’ she wrote cheerfully to Mark. ‘My marriage, contracted to the amazement of all so late in life is providing me with a variety of interests, new but not distasteful, & besides, a feeling of shelter & security hitherto untasted by me.’ That her husband was the last person to be relied on to give either shelter or security was not yet apparent…”
* “first son of William Robert Ogilvie-Grant, who in 1882 became an Assistant at the Natural History Museum (officially known as British Museum (Natural History) until 1992). He studied ichthyology under Albert C. L. G. Günther, and in 1885 he was put in temporary charge of the Ornithological Section under Richard Bowdler Sharpe’s visit to India. He remained in that department, eventually becoming Curator of Birds from 1909 to 1918.” (Wikipedia)
Julia Upton 