Lady Annabel Goldsmith
Lady Annabel Goldsmith was an English socialite, author, and political activist. She was the eponym of Annabel's, the exclusive Mayfair nightclub founded by her first husband, businessman Mark Birley. A prominent London society hostess during the 1960s and 1970s, she attracted media attention for her relationship with financier Sir James Goldsmith, which began during her marriage to Birley and later led to their own marriage. In her later years, she published memoirs and supported political and philanthropic causes.
Background and image
Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart was born on 11 June 1934 in London, the second of three children in an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family with roots in Ulster and County Durham. She was the younger daughter of Robin Vane-Tempest-Stewart, 8th Marquess of Londonderry, and Romaine Combe, whose father was Major Boyce Combe of Surrey.She became Lady Annabel as a young girl in February 1949, when her father became marquess on the death of his father, the controversial Ulster Unionist politician The 7th Marquess of Londonderry. Her mother died of cancer in 1951, but the illness was kept a secret by her parents. She later said, "Cancer was such a taboo then – Mummy didn't even tell her sisters." Subsequently, her father became a chronic alcoholic and died from liver failure at the age of 52 on 17 October 1955. "My father was a really wonderful man but after my mother died, we couldn't talk to him as we had done before. He couldn't face life without her and he turned into Jekyll and Hyde almost overnight", she explained.
She was named after her mother's favourite song, "Miss Annabel Lee", and grew up as a country child at her family's former estates of Mount Stewart, Wynyard Park, and Londonderry House. She was educated at Southover Manor School in Sussex and Cuffy's Tutorial College in Oxford. Awkward and shy in her youth, she was an avid reader, equestrian, and a Girl Guide for the Bullfinch Patrol. She transformed from an unconfident and self-described "skinny, gauche young girl" into a socialite during the 1950s and 1960s. Queen Elizabeth II attended her coming-out ball in 1952. As part of the London social circle, she was known for her sense of humour, down-to-earth personality, and love of children and dogs. She was never a drinker. She chain-smoked until the age of 40.
Personal life
Lady Annabel was the mother of Rupert, Robin, India Jane Birley and Jemima, Zac, and Ben Goldsmith. She had referred to herself as "an incredible mother, rather a good mistress, but not a very good wife". With six children and five miscarriages, her primary vocation was motherhood, which prompted her to say: "I'm not judgmental about women who work, but I was so besotted with my children I never wanted them out of my sight." She was also considered a mother figure by her nieces, Ladies Cosima and Sophia Vane-Tempest-Stewart, and Diana, Princess of Wales. As the wife and ex-wife of two unfaithful men, she explained her marriage philosophy to the Times in 1987: "I can never understand the wives who really mind, the wives who set such store by fidelity. How extraordinary, and how mad they are. Because, surely, if the man goes out and he comes back, it's not actually doing any harm."Annabel's and the Birleys
On 10 March 1954, at the age of 19, she married businessman Mark Birley at the Caxton Hall register office in London. Birley famously paid tribute to her by naming in her honour his nightclub, Annabel's, which opened on 4 June 1963 and was run by Birley for more than forty years. During the 1960s, Lady Annabel was a constant presence at Annabel's, known as one of the grandest nightclubs of the sixties and seventies, where she entertained guests ranging from Ted and Robert F. Kennedy to Frank Sinatra, Prince Charles, Richard Nixon, and Muhammad Ali. "I used to be there every night, even when I had three small children to take to school the next day. It was like a second home to me", she recalled.She raised her three children with Birley at Pelham Cottage. Her eldest son Rupert, who was born on 20 August 1955, studied at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1986, he disappeared off the coast of Togo in West Africa, where he was presumed drowned. "There really is nothing worse than losing a child – and there is something special about your first-born", she said, adding that, "Because I was so young when Rupert was born... we were more like good friends than mother and son." Her second son Robin is a businessman, whose face was disfigured as a child when he was mauled by a tigress at John Aspinall's private zoo. Having let him go near the pregnant tigress, Lady Annabel said, "It was my own fault. I was, am, angry with myself." Her first daughter India Jane, the granddaughter of society portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley, is an artist.
The Birleys separated in 1972 and later divorced in 1975 after the birth of her second child with James Goldsmith. "Our breakup was because of Mark's infidelities, not because I fell in love with Jimmy", she told Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth after Birley's death. Revealing that Birley had numerous other girlfriends from the beginning of their relationship, she added: "I think he was absolutely incapable of being faithful. He was a serial adulterer. Like a butterfly, he had to seduce every woman."
Despite their divorce, the two remained best friends, talking to each other every day and holidaying together until Birley's death in August 2007. Birley said they were "the true loves of each other's lives".
Goldsmith affair and remarriage
In 1964, she embarked on a decade-long extramarital affair with Sir James Goldsmith, a member of the Goldsmith family. Though both she and Goldsmith, who was then married to his second wife Ginette Lery, believed that the affair would be a passing fling, it soon gained her notoriety in London's gossip columns as a modern mistress. She was eventually coaxed into having his children by their friend John Aspinall, who was also a former friend of Mark Birley who introduced her to Goldsmith.While still legally married to Birley, she gave birth to Jemima and Zac. Her last child Ben Goldsmith was born on 28 October 1980 at 46, after two consecutive miscarriages. The children were raised in Ormeley Lodge in Ham, London. The half-Jewish and half-Catholic Goldsmith was an occasional presence in their lives as he divided time between three families. In 1978, Goldsmith and Lady Annabel married solely to legitimise their children.
Goldsmith moved to New York with his new mistress Laure Boulay de la Meurthe, daughter of Alfred, Comte Boulay de la Meurthe, in 1981 and spent the last years of his life mostly in France and Mexico. He became known for quoting Sacha Guitry's words, "If you marry your mistress you create a job vacancy." Often wrongly credited with the quote, Goldsmith admitted, "I quoted him at dinner, and it was pinned on me. I don't mind.... I just don't want to claim what's not mine." In 1997, she and her youngest three children inherited a portion of Goldsmith's wealth, estimated varyingly at £1.6 and $1.7–$2.4 billion.
She resided in Ormeley Lodge, a Georgian mansion on the edge of Richmond Park, with two Grand Basset Griffon Vendéens, Daisy and Lily, and three Norfolk terriers, Barney, Boris and Bindy. In 2003, she remarked on her children's varied marital patterns by observing, "All my children with James marry young and breed, and my children with Mark do the opposite."
Later life and death
Lady Annabel had fourteen grandchildren. She spent part of each year at her organic farm in the hills above Benahavís and had a 1930s holiday home by the seaside in Bognor Regis, West Sussex. Asked about her regrets in life, in 2004, she confessed wishing that she had, instead of marrying twice, been "a one-man woman".Lady Annabel died on 18 October 2025, at the age of 91.
Activism and philanthropy
Lady Annabel was president of the Richmond Park branch of the Royal Society of St George, a patriotic outreach society aimed to motivate youth. She was a donor to and supporter of the Countryside Alliance, the environmental charity The Soil Association, and African Solutions to African Problems, which works to mitigate the impact of HIV/AIDS on orphans and vulnerable children in South Africa. As an animal lover, she was also one of the patrons of the Dogs Trust and a supporter of the Battersea Dogs & Cats Home, along with being vice-president of the British Show Pony Society.She had an early interest in journalism but declined a low-level position at the Daily Mail at age 19 to get married instead. She contributed opinion editorials to national newspapers The Sunday Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Telegraph, among others.
Inspired by Hungarian Premier Imre Nagy's radio address during the Hungarian Revolution, in November 1956, she and Birley volunteered with the Save the Children organisation in Vienna. She organised charitable donations and travelled daily to look after refugees who crossed the Austrian border into the frontier town of Andau. In May 1997, she campaigned with her second husband in Putney, the constituency unsuccessfully contested by Goldsmith for his Referendum Party. She continued to support her husband's ideas, like the single currency referendum, after his death as part of the Referendum Movement, which was headed by Paul Sykes and Lord McAlpine of West Green and of which she became honorary president.
In January 1999, she launched the Democracy Movement, of which she was president and her son Robin was chairman until 2004. Starting from 12 January 2001, the organisation launched a £500,000 advertising and leafleting campaign to expose the parliamentary votes of pro-Brussels candidates in 120 "target" seats before the May general elections. The Democracy Movement released two million pamphlets carrying gloom-ridden headlines about a European state and published full page local newspaper advertisements in the constituencies of 70 Labour MPs, 35 Liberal Democrats, six Conservatives and three Scottish National Party candidates. Describing the campaign as an effort "in memory of Jimmy", she said:
On 17 December 2007, she testified at the inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, where she denied the rumour that the princess was in love with and/or pregnant by Dodi Fayed. "She was in love with Hasnat Khan. I felt she was still on the rebound from Hasnat Khan... She might have been having a wonderful time with him, I'm sure, but I thought her remark that she needed marriage like a rash meant that she was not serious about it", Lady Annabel told the jury.