Wyndham Hewitt

Picture a man, handsome, titled parents, King’s Scolar at Eton, racing driver, pioneer aviator, yacht-owner, homes in the South of France, Brittany and England, brilliant engineer, lover and (several wives, mostly famous models), bon viveur, accepted in Parisien society, cook, rather close relationship with royalty, and I am sure much else - my goodness, what a splendid person he must have been. But he wasn’t. And using a descriptive word of his times - a cad. And a very selfish one at that. 

Wyndham Hewitt was my uncle, my mother’s brother. Wyn, as he was known, had a famous anaesthetist father who helped to safv King Edward VII’s life just before his intented coronation, and was knighted for it. His mother was a beauty at court and those who now know the tastes of the king know what that might imply. In fact, stilll in the family is a magnificent brooch of blue enamel and many bordering diamonds, surrounding a royal cypher of diamonds. What might it have been for?

My first recollection of Wyn was a a child of perhaps four or five years. He had come to stay with us at our house in Silchester in the Hampshire countryside. That is where we first fell out, as I called him a pansy. A pansy to me was a flower, having, at the time, no idea at all that the word had a second meaning. 

We were to meet many times later, almost invariably when I was to be of use to him. These “uses” over the following years were generally to house-sit in one of his South of France places. In Cabris I had to feed the dogs and parrot, and pay the gardener and maid. This was fine for me as it was a chance to get away from my very small London Council rooms above the railway lines of Victoria station to have access to good food and wine and to swim in his pool in the sunshine.

I made a friend for life in the delightful form of a Yale Professor of History who had rented a villa nearby to write a book. Also nearby lived the mistress of a French scent baron with her six black poodles. The latter I met when painting a landscape, when each day she ran past my easel in heavy army boots while exercising herself and the dogs. 

I thought I had timed this particular stay beautifully as Wyn would return when arranged and then I could meet up with a fellow art school friend from England and drive to Italy. 

But the weather was unseasonable in Brittany where Wyn would usually spend the hot summer months. But it was cold in the North this time and he returned unexpectedly.

He learned that I had eaten not in his dark mid-Surrey heavely mahogonied dining room, but in the kitchen with the old and rather plain but perfectly pleasant maid. People of my standing did not eat in the kitchen with the cook. Also I had thrown stones for his bull terrier to retrieve - ruining the dog’s mouth. I drank local red wine which I collected in containers from Grasse, like the peasants, and made friends with the parrot that bit him but played swirling-arround games with me. I was told to leave. 

I was sad to part from dogs and parrot but had made two friends, both of whom invited me to stay - one of whom I did not want to distract from his writing and the other, soaked in perfume from Paris that was used mainly to keep ants at bay - without much success.

That was the last time that I went to Wyn’s house.

He died when still married to his 6th? wife, a Parisien model of note.

Wyn did have a daughter with whom he was estranged as he divorced her mother for having the  baby. She now lives, I believe, in Canada.

What happended to his wealth is uncertain as far as I  know. But he did keep gold bars for emergencies. These were somewhere hidden in the loft of his house in Cabris and were moved to a house he built in Mougins. There, we believe, they were actually built into the fabric of the house. They may still be there.

With the combination of French laws and lawyers, everything he owned went to his French wife who died shortly after he did.