#13877, Elizabeth Belinda (Lindy) CROSSLEY

Belinda began her career as a commercial artist, including working as an assistant to Alfred Wurmer, supplier of captions and animated graphics to BBC TV. She had known Lord Montague ? who inherited his title aged two ? since childhood, when she would cycle and ride her pony around the Beaulieu estate. When she married him in 1959, she had no illusions about what she was taking on. Four years previously Montague had been jailed for a year for ?consensual homosexual offences? with an RAF serviceman. The conviction had caused the break-up of his engagement to a previous fianc?e, but Belinda was made of sterner stuff.

When she married Lord Montague in a lavish ceremony at Beaulieu, Belinda was keen to emphasise her ordinary background. For 15 years Lady Montague was an energetic and popular chatelaine of Palace House, Beaulieu running a staff of 30 and helping with her husband?s motor museum for which she designed posters and displays. She also presided over the annual Beaulieu Jazz Festival until it was cancelled in 1961. She and Lord Beaulieu had a son and a daughter but the marriage ended in 1974.

They stayed close however, and she continued to help by designing and creating souvenirs. She experienced a new lease of life as an embroiderer after enrolling at Southampton College of Art for a City & Guilds course. As well as her wall hangings chronicling the story of Beaulieu Abbey, now hanging in the abbey?s former refectory, her other commissions included kneelers for the 1999 wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones and for Salisbury Cathedral as well as an altar frontal and kneelers for the chapel at Buckler?s Hard, to mark the 1998 marriage of her daughter Mary to Rupert Scott. Her son, Ralph succeeded his father who died in 2015 as the 4th Lord Montague of Beaulieu.

Some help from the Daily Telegraph, 26th December 2022 is acknowledged.