Victoria-Josefa Sackville-West, Baroness Sackville
One of 7 illegitimate children of Lionel Edward Sackville-West, 2nd Baron Sackville, Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina Sackville-West (1862-1936) was the daughter of a Spanish dancer with the stage name ‘Pepita de Oliva’. She was a woman of contradictions: though she once gave £60, 000 to a man she met on a train, she also was known to cut up used postage stamps to form a fresh stamp with no postmarks to save money and once wrote a letter on a side of ham to avoid buying paper. Her favorite stationery was toilet paper pinched from the department store, Harrods.
Like Helena, Comtesse de Noailles, Victoria had strong views on fresh air and interior decoration. The windows and doors of her home at Knole, Kent, were always kept open, and she dined outdoors year-round. To fight off the inevitable sore throats she suffered, Victoria would tie a pair of Edward Lutyens’s old socks around her neck. One bedroom at Knole was wallpapered with postage stamps (those again), and the so-called Persian Room was decorated with objects exclusively from Turkey, despite the inherent geographical paradox. Preferring fake flowers to real, she often landscaped with porcelain flowers, which were immune to slugs.
Her only child was the prolific writer, Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), who was also a noted garden designer; one can only imagine what Victoria thought of her daughter’s insistence on using real flowers for the celebrated garden she created at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent. Vita was the product of her mother’s marriage to her first cousin, Lionel, which seems to have taken place primarily due to Victoria’s desire to keep ownership of Knole, though it flowered into a passionate match (for which we have her coded diaries as evidence). Unfortunately, the once-devoted Lionel’s infidelities forced Victoria to leave Knole for Brighton anyway.
Victoria was famous for her money-making schemes. Needing a new roof for her house in 1928, she founded the Roof of Friendship Fund, in which all of her friends were asked to pay for a tile commemorating their friendship with her. Incredibly, Lady Sackville’s natural charm and exuberance meant that many of her friends did actually make a contribution. Lady Sackville also raised money for others, and once tried unsuccessfully to eradicate the national debt through the Million Penny Fund, in which she asked famous people celebrating their birthdays to contribute a penny to commemorate each year of their life.