Sheila

Sheila, King George VI’s Married Girlfriend

Margaret Sheila Mackellar Chisholm was born on September 9, 1895, in Woollahra, New South Wales, Australia. She came from a wealthy family of Scottish descent.

In 1914, Sheila travelled to England with her mother, and ended up not returning to Australia because of the War which started later that year. She and her mother did however manage to make a trip to Cairo, Egypt. It was during this time that she met her first husband, Francis Erskine, Lord Loughborough. They married in late 1915.

Prince Albert, or “Bertie” to family and friends, was the second son of King George V and Queen Mary. He was later King George VI from 1936 to 1952 and is the father the late Queen Elizabeth II.

At the end of 1918, around the close of the First World War, Sheila and Bertie met. Sheila was the best friend of Freda Dudley Ward, the also married mistress of Bertie’s elder brother David, the Prince of Wales.

The two couple’s called themselves "The Four Do’s", and would often go out together on double dates, et cetera.

Naturally, the brothers’ disciplinarian and monogamous father King George V was shocked and worried about the Princes’ open cavorting with married women, and was keen for them to stop this bachelor lifestyle, settle down and make heirs.

After a couple of years together, King George finally convinced Bertie to give Sheila up. He agreed to do so on the condition he was given a Dukedom. So, he was made Duke of York by his father on June 4, 1920.

We all know that a couple of years later, Bertie moved on and married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the daughter of the Earl of Strathmore, and had two daughters- Elizabeth and Margaret Rose.

Sheila then divorced Lord Loughborough, and went on to remarry twice, lastly to Prince Dmitri Alexandrovich of Russia, a nephew of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. She had two sons with her first husband.

She also had other relationships, including with actor Rudolph Valentino for the last six months of his life. This relationship was the basis for Evelyn Waugh’s novel “The Loved One”.

Sheila herself died in 1969 at the age of 74. She is buried at Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, with her first husband’s family.