4774

Study portrait

Lorna Peggy Vyvyan Harmsworth, later the Hon. Lady Neill Cooper-Key 1933

Head and shoulders slightly to the left, her head turned and looking to the right, wearing pale pink chiffon dress

Oil on board, 80.5 x 57.5 cm (31 ⅝ x 22 ⅝ in.)

Inscribed lower right: de László / 1933.I.

Laib L17687 (797) / C12 (5)

NPG Album 1933, f. 1

Sitters’ Book II, f. 74: Lorna Harmsworth Dec: 31st 1932

Private Collection

This portrait was one of seven commissioned by 1st Viscount Rothermere [4759] of members of his family. They included his son, the sitter’s father, Esmond Harmsworth [4772] and his wife Margaret [4770], their two other children Esmée [4776] and Vere [4782], as well as Rothermere’s sister Lady King [4792], his son’s wife, the Comtesse d’Estainville [4872], and his distant cousin Judith Wilson [7760]. The present portrait was painted, together with those of her brother and sister, in the artist’s studio at No. 3 Fitzjohn’s Avenue, Swiss Cottage, over the Christmas holidays in 1932, as requested by their father.^[1] 

Lorna Peggy Vyvyan Harmsworth was born on 24 October 1920 at Hemsted in Kent, the home of her grandfather, Lord Rothermere.^[2] She was the eldest daughter of Esmond Harmsworth, 2nd Viscount Rothermere, and his first wife Margaret Redhead. Her early education took place at home with a governess and then at Miss Spalding’s School in London. Later, she was a boarding pupil at Heathfield School in Ascot before being sent to Paris and then to Florence where she attended a bookbinding course.

Holidays were spent with alternate parents and included visits, with her father and siblings, to India in 1931 and America in 1938. While staying with her father in Monte Carlo in 1938, she learned to water-ski, taught by a friend of her father’s, Captain Darcy Rutherford. In due course she took part in water-ski displays on the sea near the old casino, as part of the evening cabaret during the summer months. She was also an excellent snow skier and after the war, co-founded the Meribel resort in Savoie with Patrick Lindsay, of the Irish Guards.

During the Second World War the sitter trained as a nurse and worked at the local cottage hospital near Mereworth in Kent, where she was living with her father at the time. Later she worked at the General Hospital in Maidstone caring for the troops who had been evacuated from Dunkirk. The Maidstone hospital received all injured soldiers and they underwent their primary treatment there before being sent home or on to other specialist hospitals. She was working as Nurse Harmsworth in relative anonymity until she took an afternoon off in 1940 to go to the races and watch her father’s filly Godiva win The Oaks^[3] and her photo appeared in the Daily Mail.

An accomplished sportswoman, she excelled at water-skiing and downhill, which she continued to do into her 80s. She was heavily involved in the creation of the Méribel ski resort in the French Alps.

On 11 January 1941 she married Major Edmund Neill Cooper-Key (1907-1981), who served as the conservative Member of Parliament for Hastings from 1945 until 1970 and was knighted in 1960. They had three sons, Adrian Astley Vere (born 1942), and Esmond Kevin Peter (born 1943), and twins Linden and Emma Charlotte (born 1958).  

The sitter was widowed in 1981 and divided her time between London and Monte Carlo, before her death in 2014, aged 93.        

LITERATURE:

• DLA019-0220, letter from de László to 1st Viscount Rothermere, 9 December 1932

KF  2013