Evan Morgan's Two Wives

 

LOIS STURT AND PRINCESS OLGA DOLGORUKY
EVAN MORGAN'S TWO WIVES : A SUCCESSFUL LAUNCH OF NEW TALK FROM WILLIAM CROSS AND MONTY DART
 

Evan Morgan’s Two Wives a new talk / presentation celebrating  Hon. Lois Sturt and Princess Olga Dolgoruky was given at a Newport WI Group on 7 July 2015.  William Cross and Monty Dart  Newport writers, researchers and historians  who have written several books about the Morgans of Tredegar House delivered a well received new piece on Evan Morgan's two wives.

 

Will and Monty  are authorities on the women in the Morgan family. They met on a Creative Writing Course in 2005 and published their first book “ A Beautiful Nuisance: The Life and Death of Hon. Gwyneth Ericka Morgan”  ( on Evan Morgan’s wayward sister)  in 2012. The  new presentation was put together to give those interested in the Morgan women something a little different from the many routine talks and presentations about the Morgan family.

The script is  built extensively to  supplement the information  given to visitors  when they go round Tredegar House.

Evan Frederic Morgan (1893-1949) was the 4th Lord Tredegar and the 2nd Viscount Tredegar. Despite being a homosexual he first married Hon. Lois Sturt in 1928; she became Viscountess Tredegar in 1934, but died in 1937. In 1939 Evan married Princess Olga Dolgorouky, Olga divorced Evan in 1943. Olga died in 1998.

HON LOIS STURT

Hon. Lois Ina Sturt ( 1900-1937)  was born in London. She was at her peak in the age of the flapper. A dazzling, single minded, one-off personality,  an accomplished actress and dancer, a clever painter who studied at the Slade School of Art and had her own art studio in Chelsea. She also became a successful race horse owner and breeder of Great Danes. Lois wanted to knock the stuffing out of convention and achieved this by engaging in mad-cap pranks and several long love affairs, generally with older, married men. She was for four years the lover of the much older Reggie Herbert, 15th Earl of Pembroke, and an intimate around the string of unapproved-of good-time girls chasing Prince George, the ill-fated Duke of Kent. She died suddenly in Budapest in 1937, a victim of long years of alcohol abuse and insane slimming treatments.

PRINCESS OLGA DOLGORUKY

Princess Olga Dolgorouky ( 1915-1998) was born in St Petersburg, Russia, a member of the Russian Imperial  family. She was among those saved when King George V sent the battleship HMS Marlborough to the Balkans to rescue what was left of the family of the Tsar after the Russian Revolution. Always treated well by her Royal British cousins, she lived with her father and other Russian exiles at Frogmore and in Paris. She first married and divorced a Polish aristocrat. Following the death of her father ( her mother died in Russia when she was small ) she was to be seen regularly in London in the company of ‘White Russians’, and frequented the various Russian tea rooms as well as the wider social scene. Olga was  photographed in The Tatler magazine and was a lover of  fun, High Society parties and dancing.  She met Evan Morgan and married him – but the marriage was never consummated and she divorced Evan in 1943. In the years that followed Olga  ( who received a settlement from the Tredegar Estate after Evan’s death) lived in London and finally became a part of a small  group of upper class British expatriates in Guernsey, CI, where she died in 1998, aged 83. When Tredegar House was bought by Newport Council in 1973, Olga ( who was a regular visitor to the House when it was a Catholic school and retained her title of Viscountess Tredegar) assisted the Curators David Beevers and David Freeman in the restoration of the House to its former glory.

About Will Cross and Monty Dart

William Cross, FSA Scot and Monty Dart are writers and researchers based in Newport, South Wales.  Will  is the author of five books on  the  Carnarvons of Highclere Castle ( the backdrop to TV’s Downton Abbey). He  has also published in his own right ( or with writing partner, Monty Dart ) five books on members of  the Morgan family of Tredegar House. Monty also writes about murder cases in South Wales. She is the author of “ Who Killed Dripping Lewis?” on an unsolved murder in Pontypool in 1939.   Will and. Monty are members of the Society of Authors and Will is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. 

All enquiries about books/ talks etc by e-mail please to williecross@virginmedia.com