'My Fair Lady' from Treorchy
She was Alice Wilshire, a coal miner’s daughter from the Rhondda Valley in South Wales, working as a housemaid at the Carlton Club in Pall Mall. He was Patrick Bowes Lyon, the son of the 13th Earl and Countess of Strathmore, and uncle of Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, who would later become Queen, one of the Carlton Club’s most stylish and influential young members, a Cambridge graduate, JP and barrister at the Inner Temple. As soon as he set eyes on her he fell madly in love.
In Patrick Bowes-Lyon's social position, marriage to a commoner would have been unheard of. So he sought the help of his good friend and fellow member of the Carlton Club, Captain Arthur Lister-Kaye, telling him about his love for Alice Wilshire, and his desire to marry her. It was agreed that, with the utmost secrecy, Lister-Kaye would take Alice to live with his wife and family in the Manor House in Stretton on Dunsmore, so that she could be schooled in the ways of the gentry. In 1890 Captain Arthur Lister-Kaye officially made Alice his ward and the following year, Alice was taken to a finishing school in Paris, where she learned the skills that all young ladies in high society were expected to know – from embroidery and painting, to music and, of course, French.
When she returned to Stretton in 1892, Alice was ready to take her place in society as his wife and on 9th August 1983, Alice Wilshire was Bowes Lyon’s beautiful bride at a glamorous, country wedding at All Saints Church, Stretton-on-Dunsmore. She had no fewer than nine bridesmaids, and none of the guests gave her background much thought in an era when such things really mattered. But then, none of them would have guessed that she was a coal miner’s daughter. The Chaplain of Glamis, the Strathmore seat, even performed the ceremony.
Thirty years later, she was in St. Margaret’s Westminster, for the wedding of her niece, Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, to the Duke of York, and she had become completely at home in the most elevated company. The Queen Mother apparently had a great affection for her “Aunt Alice”. However she was still a girl from the Valleys and regularly made the trip home to Wales, where her family loyally kept Alice’s true identity a secret, for fear that exposure would ruin her London life.
The marriage was a very happy one that lasted 53 years until her husband’s death in 1946. They were a handsome and popular couple, frequently involved in charity fund-raising, and had four children, the first, Gavin, born in 1895, Angus four years later, Jean in 1904 and finally Margaret Ann. Sadly Gavin was killed in action in 1917 and his brother Angus died in 1923. Only Margaret Ann had children of her own.
Alice died in 1953 at the age of 84, and is buried with her husband in the Bowes Lyon family grave in Kensal Green, North London. Her story remained a secret until after the deaths of all her children, when a Stretton resident, who had worked in the Manor House, revealed the story to the Stretton History Society who were writing a history of the village for the Millennium.
