111050

The Honourable Charles Thomas Mills 1915

Half-length, slightly to the left, looking full face to the viewer, wearing a black jacket (silk handkerchief in breast pocket) and waistcoat with a black tie held by a pearl tie-pin, a gold watch-chain, his right hand holding the lapel of his jacket, against a dark background with a suggestion of drapery to the left

Oil [support and dimensions unknown]

Inscribed lower left: P.A. de László / 1915 June 8

Laib L7672 (396) / C17 (8A) Mr Mills

Sitters’ Book I, opp. f. 104: Charles Mills  June 8. 1915. / 2nd Lieut Scots Guards

Private Collection

This portrait was painted on 8 June 1915 and shows Lieutenant Mills in civilian clothes in a parliamentary pose rather than in service dress, unusual given that at the time most of de László’s commissions to paint young men leaving for the Front showed them in uniform. He painted some twenty-seven portraits of that type, which included:  Lieutenant General Sir Francis Lloyd [11991], brothers James and John McEwen [6407][6414] and Sir Philip Sassoon [6526].

Lucy de László mentioned the present portrait in her diary on 8 June: “P. is doing many officers going to the Front – Today he must finish Lady Hillingdon’s son, wh=[ich] he began yesterday.”^[1]

Charles Thomas Mills was born on 13 March 1887, the eldest son of the banker and M.P. for West Kent, Charles Mills, 3rd Baronet and 2nd Baron Hillingdon (1855-1919), and his wife the Honourable Alice Harbord (1857-1940), daughter of the 5th Lord Suffield. He was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford. On leaving Oxford in 1908 he became a partner in the family bank of Glyn, Mills, Currie and Co. of Lombard Street (founded 1793) and in 1910 was elected Conservative Member of Parliament for Uxbridge. At the age of 22 he earned himself the epithet “Baby of the House” as the youngest Member of Parliament.

He commissioned in 1908 as a captain in the West Kent (Queen’s Own) Yeomanry and was made a lieutenant in 1910. He was gazetted to the Scots Guards as a second lieutenant in May 1915. He was killed four months later at Hulluch during the battle of Loos on 6 October 1915 and has no known grave. Mills is one of 22 MPs who died fighting in the First World War and is commemorated on the Loos Memorial, part of the Parliamentary War Memorial in Westminster Hall.

LITERATURE:

László, Lucy de, 1915 diary, private collection

DLA019-0279, letter from the Dowager Lady Hillingdon to de László, 4 May 1932

CWS 2022