Page 41 - Greystones Archaeological Historical Society

GREYSTONES ARCHAEOLOGICAL & HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL VOLUME 8

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depths, and enthusiastic and vigorous as a youth.’
In 1927 she returned to witness the first High Mass to be
celebrated in the cathedral since September 1914. From her
place under the pulpit, Lizzie heard the Cardinal as he preached
for half an hour ‘without pause or hesitancy.’ As vigorous as ever,
‘he seemed the youngest of the train of bishops supporting him’
– indeed, in the following year, he would make the news again
when he went up in an aeroplane over the city, afterwards
declaring his ‘great pleasure’ in being able to see his beloved
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cathedral and the archiepiscopal gardens from the air.
Although the work of the Restoration Fund was largely
complete by 1924, Lizzie maintained her commitment to Anglo-
French friendship at a time when wartime amity was already
beginning to be replaced by the mistrust and suspicion which
had traditionally marred relations between the two countries. In
1925 she became one of the founding members and secretary
of the Anglo-French Luncheon Club, which fostered contacts
between notable French visitors to London and their British
peers. ‘Thus’, as Lizzie put it, ‘a literary man meets writers, a
soldier finds himself amidst a bevy of field-marshals, a merchant
is swamped in a flood of British industrialists, an archaeologist
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buried in the dust of our excavators.’
Guests over the years included authors Paul Valery and
Andre Maurois, the composer Maurice Ravel, and military leader
and colonial administrator Marshal Lyautey, for whom Lizzie had
a particular admiration, and whose Letters from Tonquin she
translated into English. The Anglo-French Luncheon Committee,

18 The Times, 30 May 1930; Day in, day out, pp 204-205.
19 Day in, day out, p. 205; Nottingham Evening Post, 19 June 1928.
20 Day in, day out, p. 249. On her involvement with the Anglo-French Luncheon
Club, see contribution of V C O’Connor and Colonel H Worsley-Gough in ‘In
memoriam: Mrs Aubrey Le Blond’, pp 13-16.
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