Alongside the roles of society wife, hostess, and mother to three young adult boys, in the 1920s and 1930s Dorothea expressed a sense of herself as a fashionable modern woman. Whilst her husband’s oil and banking interests saw him busy in the city during the week, Dorothea too was on the move. Her diaries are a record of travel across family homes, salons and dining rooms, theatres, village halls and charity hospitals as well as across towns and countries.
In the late 1920s we see her absorbed by the task of decorating and furnishing the family’s new residences. It was at the Bearsted’s Cap Ferrat villa where Dorothea seemed to exercise the greatest decorating influence and from which she derived the greatest pleasure:
Saturday 16 July 1927
‘Mons Seusal fetched me about 12 and we spent the morning at the villa deciding doors, windows etc. He lunched with us. Another 2 hours in the villa after which we all motored out to a small place where they make pottery … Bought some nice old jugs. Very cheap. Lovely day.’
Society journals also told a story of Dorothea, Lady Bearsted as a mature yet fashionable modern woman:
In August 1934 Tatler praised her youthful style with a picture of Lady Bearsted sporting tennis shorts outside the Bearsted’s Cap Ferrat villa:
‘In her dark blue shorts, Lady Bearsted looks very youthful to be the mother of a grown-up family. Her beautiful villa on Cap Ferrat is a Riviera show-place’.
Like many British women, the outbreak of war in September 1939 opened up new opportunities for Dorothea; she wasted no time and immediately volunteered to support the war effort where she saw it was most needed, in London.
She was tireless in her efforts for both the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association) and the WRVS (Women’s Royal Voluntary Service). This included personal donations, such as the mobile canteen she made to the YMCA. But Dorothea also showed that she was not afraid to roll up her sleeves and contribute cheer, food and drink to the victims of bombings at home and Allied soldiers, sailors and airman at home and abroad. We do not have any diary records for her during these years. How might her experiences of war work have altered her sense of who she was in this world at war?