mangles - pafg10.htm - Generated by Personal Ancestral File

Descendants of Mangles Progenitor 2015-288359

Eighth Generation

140. Hon Rodd Gloria Ellinor-59265 (Lilias Georgina Guthrie , Elenor Stirling , Ellen Mangles , James , Robert , William , Progenitor 2015 ) died in Oct 1975.

See http://www.angelfire.com/real/gotha/Part_h6.htm

Gloria married Elwes Simon Edmund Vincent Paul-119940 son of Elwes Senior-162980 and ENotknown Miss-162981 on 25 Nov 1926. Simon was born on 29 Jun 1902 in Hothorpe Hall, Northampton, England. He died on 6 Aug 1975 in Sussex, England.

See http://www.angelfire.com/real/gotha/Part_h6.htm from "Dictionary of National Biography" (1971-1980 supplement):

"ELWES, SIMON EDMUND VINCENT PAUL (1902-1975), portrait painter, was born 29 June 1902 at Hothorpe Hall, Northamptonshire, the sixth and youngest son (two daughters were born later) of Gervase Henry Elwes [q.v.], the singer,
a famous Gerontius, and his wife, Lady Winefride Mary Elizabeth, fourth daughter of Rudolph William Basil Feilding, eighth Earl of Denbigh. The boy went to Catholic schools--Lady Cross School, Seaford, and The Oratory, Edgbaston. In 1918, at the age of sixteen, he entered the Slade School, when Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer [qq.v.] taught there, and soldiers of the great war, such as Gilbert and (Sir) Stanley Spencer, A. R. Middletown Todd [qq.v.] and Allan Gwynne-Jones were taking up their studies again. Courteous, handsome, and a devout Catholic, Elwes might have come out of Brideshead.

"Elwes spent eight years in Paris after leaving the Slade, first at the Ecole de l'Ecluse and then at the Academie des Beaux Arts, and also he visited the galleries of Germany, Holland, and Italy. He came back to England in 1926 and next year showed a portrait at the Royal Academy of Lady Lettice Lygon. She was the first of his many noble sitters, who included the Duke and
Duchess of York (later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth), the Princess Royal, Prince George and Princess Marina, Queen Mary, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, Princess Margaret, and Queen Elizabeth II. His portraits hung in the summer exhibition of the Royal Academy every year. In 1929 he was created a Knight of Malta and in 1933 was elected a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters.

"He joined the Welsh Guards at the outbreak of World War II, to be transferred later to the 10th Royal Hussars in Egypt. After fighting in the battles of Benghazi, Mersa Matruh, and 'Knightsbridge,' he was made an official war artist. In Cairo he painted King Farouk and Queen Farida, in South Africa the King and Queen of the Hellenes as well as J. C. Smuts [q.v.], and in India the viceroy Wavell [q.v.], the Maharaja pf Patiala, Lord Louis Mountbatten (later Earl Mountbatten of Burma, q.v.), and Indian Army soldiers who had won the VC. The journeys, the heat, and the astonishing activity must all have helped to bring about the stroke he suffered when he came back to England after the Japanese surrender. He spent two years in hospital. He was never to use his right hand for painting again, but as soon as he could stand, he taught himself to paint with his left. Till then, his portraits owed much to Sir William Orpen [q.v.], not only the light reflected on the side of the face, the folds of the curtain radiating from the sitter's waist, the chair which brought the hands high up in the composition, but also the fluid and
continuous surface of paint.

"There is not much in the way of manual skill that a painter needs; but he wants to be able to control the direction of his brush. In default of that precision of movement, Elwes now broke his surface with separate touches, which, instead of weakening his pictures, gave them a new vivacity. He surmounted his disability enough to become president of the Guild of Catholic Artists, vice-president of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters from 1953, an associate of the Royal Academy in 1956, and a full RA in 1967.

"To read over a list of his sitters is like turning over the pages not only of _Who's_Who_ but of Debrett and the Almanach de Goth. No other painter since Philip de Lazlo [q.v.] such eminences, not even Frank Salisbury [q.v.]. Like de Lazlo and Salisbury, Elwes was sustained by a craft which ensured that his portraits went ahead as he intended; they owed their virtue to
their confidence. Elwes endowed his subjects with a good nature and a joy of life which, enhanced by brilliant colour, were the expression of his own character and appearance. He had none of the guilt which seems to afflict some portrait painters, either from talent unfulfilled or taxes unpaid.

{???} "Nothing could be stronger than the contrast at a council meeting of the Royal Academy between Elwes and the rest of its members, teachers to a man. Handsome, fresh of complexion, finely dressed, with a scarlet flower in his buttonhole, he enriched the proceedings with his smile, no less than with his air of being a visitor from a world more carefree and elegant than
the one in which deficits and disappointments were certain to be discussed. When he used the old ballroom in Burlington House to paint a portrait, a beautiful girl brought him his brushes and set up his paintbox, for that was his own exhilarating way of making light of his useless right arm and dragging leg. It was natural that he should have been at ease painting Cardinal
Hinsley [q.v.], richly robed in a red cassock, yet benign, and Sir Thomas Beecham [q.v.], in a white dressing gown, and mischievous. It is not to be wondered at that his paintings of roses, peonies, and lilies are not in the least like the hedgerow flowers of his contemporary Allan Gwynne-Jones, but blithe and sumptuous. His DNB notice of Frederick Lonsdale, the playwright, is equally light-hearted.

"In the last months of his life, he had to be pushed about in a chair, hardly able to speak, no longer spotless in his dress; but his face, thinner and paler, had a look of the greatest nobility--wistful, unearthly; not old. He could have been the embodiment of the dying Gerontius. He died 6 August 1975, in Sussex. "In 1926 Elwes married Gloria Elinor, daughter of James Rennell Rodd, first Baron Rennell [q.v.], diplomat and scholar. They had four sons, one of whom died in infancy, and one of whom, Dominic, died in the same year as his father. Elwes's wife died two months after Simon."

Simon and Gloria had the following children:

+ 162 M i Elwes (Bede Evelyn) Dominick-48347 was born on 17 Aug 1931. He died in 1975.

141. Baron2 Rennell Rodd Francis James Rennell-240794 (Lilias Georgina Guthrie , Elenor Stirling , Ellen Mangles , James , Robert , William , Progenitor 2015 ).

Francis married Smith Mary Constance Vivian-240793 daughter of Baron1 Bicester Smith Vivian Hugh-15546 and McDonnell Sybil Mary-42840 in 1928. Mary was born in 1901.