The Dollar Princesses Who Revolutionised The British Country House

Send us a textThe American girl was a phenomenon, charming, sporty, better educated than her European counterpart. talk on a wide range of subjects.  Around sixty American girls became peeresses at the turn of the 20th century.  ‘We are the dollar princesses,’ ran a popular song.Crossing the Atlantic was no longer as perilous as it had been in earlier days.  Huge fortunate had been made during the expansion of the United States after the Civil War.  From the 1870s, aristocrats began to experience a decline in the income from their landed estates, due to a prolonged agricultural recession.  Heiresses offered an alternative income stream.  Thus, in the late 1870s, Sir Thomas George Fermor-Hesketh sailed into San Francisco Bay on his yacht The Lancashire Witch, fishing for pretty girls with ‘heaps of the needful’ to maintain his two country houses in England.  He landed Florence Emily Sharon, the daughter of the enormously rich, if notorious Senator Sharon, and they were married in 1880.  That marriage was not happy – nor was Consuelo Vanderbilt’s to the ither Duke of Marlborough.  But May Goelet had a delightful time with the Duke of Roxburghe, whose nickname was Bumble.  She liked shopping, he liked polo; their letters show that they were touchingly fond of each other.  Her fortune allowed Floors Castle in Roxburgheshire to be borught up to date with electricity, central heating and décor in the style of the Ritz.

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