An Iron Girl in a Velvet Glove by Triona Holden

Author:Triona Holden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The History Press

Joan painted a relatively modest picture of Norah but she was notorious for getting drunk on pink champagne and behaving badly. The press loved her because she was known to slap waiters and abuse club owners and fellow socialites.

There was a Pathé newsreel report in 1954 of Norah and Bernard entertaining thirty-three miners from Leeds on board Shemara as a thank-you for an invitation to their pit. The banquet was vast, with every imaginable kind of luxury food available. It must have shocked most of those who saw the footage, as the country was only just coming out of rationing. It must have stuck in the miners’ throats as they sipped the champagne, ate the fine foods and pretended to be having a ball. At one point a much ‘imbibed’ Norah was on the poop deck doing the ‘Sailor’s Hornpipe’ as the embarrassed miners clapped and tried not to seem too uncomfortable.

The Dockers came to a sad end. All their spendthrift ways led to Sir Bernard being forced out of his various companies, and gradually the many houses and treasures were sold as the money ran out. They fled to the tax haven of Jersey where Norah continued to be too vocal for her own good. It was reported that she said the inhabitants were ‘the most frightfully boring, dreadful people that had ever been born’. Not a good way to endear yourself to the locals.

Sir Bernard died in 1978. Norah was discovered dead in her bed in 1983 by a maid at the Great Western Royal Hotel in Paddington.

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