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Mollie Ponsonby

Preserver of the memory of the military Ponsonbys at Haile Hall

Thursday 24 April 2003 00:00 BST
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Mary Robley: born 3 July 1901; married 1935 Maj-Gen Sir John Ponsonby (died 1952); died Kirksanton, Cumbria 18 April 2003.

Mollie Ponsonby was 101 when she died but, through her marriage, she had spanned three centuries. Her grandfather-in-law had fought at the Battle of Waterloo. She used to say that her husband had belonged to the age of port, whereas she belonged to the age of cocktails.

Mary (Mollie) Robley married Major-General Sir John Ponsonby, late Coldstream Guards, when he was Colonel of the Suffolk Regiment, in 1935. Her husband had been born in 1866; she was 34. Their marriage ended with his death in 1952, after which she continued to live in the ancient property of the Ponsonby family which he had bought back, Haile Hall. She recalled that he had proposed within three weeks of their meeting but that she had kept him waiting for five years, as she had to look after her widowed mother.

Her father, Thomas Robley, of nearby Beckermet, in west Cumbria, had died – catching a salmon – of a heart attack when she was one. She always wondered whether he had landed it.

Haile Hall, with its separate gatehouse, is dated by Pevsner to the late 16th century but it seems immemorial, despite the proximity of the nuclear power plant at Sellafield. It retains an aura of a former, remote England. This is partly because the house, in the care of its long-lived chatelaine, retained the flavour of the inter-war period. Its four-gabled façade was broken by a large, handsome Venetian window, which illuminated the library on the first floor. Inside, the passages were dark, the back premises ancient and unchanged.

It was a shrine to the Guards regiments in which not only her husband had served but also his father, Maj-Gen Sir Henry Ponsonby, a Colonel in the Grenadier Guards, then an equerry to the Prince Consort and, from 1870 to 1895, Private Secretary to Queen Victoria. Sir John's grandfather Maj-Gen Sir Frederic Ponsonby had commanded the 12th Light Dragoons in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo, where he was severely wounded. He was the second son of the third Earl of Bessborough (the Ponsonbys of Haile settled in Ireland in the 17th century.)

Mollie Ponsonby's regimental collection was of great interest to military historians, to whom she gave generous access. She continued to do things in a quiet, old-fashioned style until all the silver – including a replica of the Duke of Wellington's Peninsular War canteen – was stolen (to the great distress of her maids) and she could no longer entertain. She still worked in the garden at Haile into her nineties.

"I never thought I'd live so long," she said in 1996, recalling the abdication of King Edward VIII, next to which the problem of the divorce of the Prince and Princess of Wales seemed of minor importance.

Mollie Ponsonby's memory will be cherished because she was blessed with her husband's gallantry and sense of humour, a gaiety and indomitable spirit, which carried her, uncomplaining, through more than 50 years of widowhood.

Her generosity will be seen in her dispositions with regard to Haile Hall, its military collections and her husband's diaries of the First World War, which she has bequeathed to the Coldstream Guards.

Ian Lowe

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