Lucy, Lady Houston

Lucy, Lady Houston, DBE (8 April 1857 – 29 December 1936), born Fanny Lucy Radmall, was a British philanthropist, political activist, and suffragette. Beginning in 1933, she published Britain's Saturday Review, which was best known for its attacks on what the paper labelled the "unpatriotic" Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald. She has been acknowledged as an aviation pioneer, "the saviour of the Spitfire".

Fanny Lucy Radmall was the daughter of Thomas Radmall, a woollen warehouseman and draper, and Maria Isabella Clark. She was born at 13 Lower Kennington Green, Lambeth, the ninth child of ten children. As a young woman, she was a professional dancer, a chorus girl known as "Poppy". At the age of sixteen, she ran off to Paris with a wealthy man twice her age, Frederick Gretton, whose family owned the Bass Brewery. He was married at the time. Despite a tumultuous relationship, Gretton bequeathed Poppy £6,000 per year for life when he died in 1882.

On 3 September 1883, she married Lt.-Col. Sir Theodore Francis Brinckman, 3rd Baronet (1862–1937), the couple divorcing in 1895 after a long separation. She remarried in 1901, to George Frederick William Byron, 9th Baron Byron. During their marriage, she was an active suffragette. He died in 1917, the same year Lucy, then Baroness Byron, was appointed Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her support of a home for nurses who had served in the First World War.

Her third and final marriage was to Sir Robert Houston, 1st Baronet, Member of Parliament for West Toxteth, and a shipping magnate, on 12 December 1924. Houston is described in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "a hard, ruthless, unpleasant bachelor". They lived as tax exiles on the island of Jersey. When Sir Robert showed her his will, Lady Houston reportedly tore it up, telling him that £1,000,000 was insufficient. Sir Robert then suffered a series of mental disorders and reportedly employed a food taster to ensure that he was not being poisoned. Sir Robert died on his yacht Liberty, on 14 April 1926, leaving his widow roughly £5.5 million.

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