Belinda, Lady Montagu of Beaulieu, respected embroiderer and first wife of the vintage car-mad peer obituary

Belinda, Lady Montagu of Beaulieu, who has died aged 90, was the to start with wife of the flamboyant 3rd Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, founder of the Nationwide Motor Museum at his relatives seat in Hampshire.

In her own appropriate she turned a mentioned embroiderer, her commissions like presentation cushions for the late Queen and for King Charles when he was Prince of Wales, ecclesiastical perform for cathedrals and church buildings – and seven wall hangings recounting the story of Beaulieu Abbey.

Elizabeth Belinda Crossley was born on January 11 1932 on a farm on the Cadland estate at Fawley, Hampshire, to Captain John Crossley, a youthful son of the 1st Lord Somerleyton, the Liberal Unionist politician and former Paymaster-General Sir Savile Crossley, 2nd Bt, and Sybelle, née Drummond, a relation of the Earls of Perth.

From the age of 15 she researched at the Byam Shaw College of Artwork and went on to analyze mural portray at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. She started her occupation as a business artist, such as doing the job as an assistant to Alfred Wurmser, provider of captions and animated graphics to BBC Tv.

Belinda experienced recognised the dandyish younger Lord Montagu – who experienced inherited his title aged two – because childhood, when she would cycle and ride her pony close to the Beaulieu estate. When she married him in 1959 she experienced no illusions about what she was taking on.

Four a long time earlier, soon after a collection of brushes with the English prison justice system, adopted by a trial in the full glare of publicity, Montagu experienced been jailed for a calendar year for “consensual homosexual offences” with an RAF serviceman during a weekend bash at a beach hut on his estate.

The conviction experienced brought on the crack-up of his engagement to a former fiancée. But Belinda was designed of sterner stuff.

When she married Lord Montagu in a lavish ceremony at Beaulieu, Belinda was eager to emphasise her standard background: “I’ve not got a bean,” she confident an interviewer. “It’s been said I’ve bought cash, but choose it from me I’m a simple performing woman. I’ve even labored as a waitress in a cafe so you can inform I’m not the Society variety I’ve been painted.”

For 15 decades Girl Montagu was an energetic and well known chatelaine of Palace Dwelling, Beaulieu, jogging a staff of 30 and supporting with her husband’s motor museum, for which she built posters and shows. She also presided in early decades over the yearly Beaulieu Jazz Pageant (for which she painted an old merry-go-round used as a stage) until it was cancelled in 1961 next experiences of “nude bathing parties, fights with damaged bottles, drunken orgies and harmless bystanders beaten up”.

“One great advantage was that Belinda understood Beaulieu nicely, getting been introduced up there, and our households have been previous buddies,” Lord Montagu recalled in his 2000 memoir Wheels Inside Wheels. “She was for that reason capable to require herself in community functions devoid of problems. I was substantially aided by her cultivated preferences in redecorating the dwelling and she was enormously supportive in the early days of the museum.”

In March 1973 she arrived to the rescue of the teeny-bopper heart-throb David Cassidy, who, as is recorded on an information and facts board erected on the estate, stayed at Beaulieu for a handful of days “to escape the clamour of adoring fans”. She gave him a fishing lesson on the Beaulieu River and took him for a spin in 1 of her husband’s classic automobiles.

She and her spouse experienced a son and a daughter, but the marriage ended in 1974, and the exact 12 months Lord Beaulieu married his 2nd wife, Fiona Herbert, with whom he had one more son. But he and Belinda remained close, and when he printed his memoir he devoted it to both equally of his wives and to his a few little ones.

Belinda Montagu continued to enable the estate, coming up with and making souvenirs these types of as tea towels and mugs and dealing with a new lease of lifestyle as an embroiderer soon after enrolling at Southampton Faculty of Artwork for a Town and Guilds class.

As nicely as her wall hangings chronicling the tale of Beaulieu Abbey, now hanging in the abbey’s former refectory, her other commissions involved kneelers for the 1999 wedding ceremony of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones at St George’s Chapel, Windsor a big embroidered appliqué for the New Forest Association, of which she was patron, to mark the 900th anniversary of the forest’s creation kneelers for Salisbury Cathedral, and an altar frontal and kneelers for the chapel at Buckler’s Really hard, in the vicinity of Beaulieu, to mark the 1998 relationship of her daughter Mary to Rupert Scott.

She also collaborated on a project to teach embroidery abilities to local females in Bali, Indonesia.

In 2019 “The Art of Belinda, Woman Montagu – her tale in stitches”, an exhibition celebrating her portray, drawing and needlework, was opened in the former non-public wing of Palace Residence by her son Ralph, who had succeeded on his father’s demise in 2015 as the 4th Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.

He and her daughter Mary endure her.

Belinda, Woman Montagu of Beaulieu, born January 11 1932, died December 15 2022