Quiet beginnings
Margaret Helen Anderson was born in London on 20 December 1863. Margaret’s birth certificate states that her parents are Helen Anderson and William Murray Anderson - however in fact, her natural parents were Helen Anderson and William McEwan, a successful brewer.
William Murray Anderson was in fact an employee at William McEwan’s Edinburgh brewery. To save Helen’s reputation, and provide the baby with legitimacy, it is believed that McEwan sent Helen and William Anderson to London to have the baby. As they had the same surname, no one would question whether they were actually man and wife when they registered Margaret’s birth.
In early spring 1864, William Anderson returned to Edinburgh, his job at the brewery and his complicit wife. Helen and Margaret followed a couple of months later.
William McEwan and Helen eventually married when Margaret was 21 and, although there were always rumours about Margaret's true parentage, McEwan was referred to as Margaret's step-father. By the time of their marriage, McEwan was a well-respected businessman and liberal MP, and the family lived in Mayfair.
Mrs Greville and Ronnie
Margaret married Captain Ronald ‘Ronnie’ Greville, heir to a baronetcy and a member of the Marlborough house set, the social circle around the future King Edward VII, in 1891.
It was a mutually beneficial match; through her ‘step-father’, Margaret brought money to the marriage.
‘...she had the sense to meet and marry a man who as a member of a good family who I think was not rich at all but quite poor, and I suppose with him as a background she was able to get into Society’ (People and Places by S.E.D. Fortescue)
