Past President's Dinner at the Heronston Hotel

The Victorian Lady and the Playboy was the title of Lesley Dunlop's illustrated talk at the President's dinner on 5th June. The Victorian Lady was Mrs. Humphry Ward, an author whose books were amongst the most widely read of the time, who was a pioneer in the creation of play centres for able and disabled children in London, a founder of Somerville College, Oxford and whom former US President Theodore Roosevelt called upon to explain to the American people in a series of articles how the British were faring during World War I. After visiting the trenches in France, munitions factories and the Fleet, her response was a book, England's Effort, Letters to an American Friend, which was a huge success and was credited with encouraging America into the war. 

The Playboy was Victor Lownes, then head of Playboy Europe and the UK. The link between him and Mrs. Ward was the Georgian mansion called Stocks in Aldbury, Hertfordshire, in which they had both lived. 

When Lesley visited Stocks in the 1970s to do a recce for a film she was making about Mrs. Ward and Aldbury, she had read (in those pre-internet days) that it was a private girls' school. Little did she know when she arrived that Victor Lownes had bought the property a short while before. When he greeted her with an outstretched arm, Lesley spotted his Playboy Bunny cufflinks. Victor was most co-operative and interested in her film. Lesley recounted her memories of the Playboy Extraordinary: the title of his autobiography, in which Lesley is mentioned for bringing to Victor's attention the fact that his house in London's Connaught Square was where Mrs. Humphry Ward had died. He cited the fact as 'quite eerie'.