Posted on 03/20/2002 5:10:34 PM PST by dighton
ELIZABETH BROOKE VIDMER, who has died aged 88, had a colourful upbringing as the daughter of Sir Charles Vyner Brooke, the last White Rajah of Sarawak. She later married Harry Roy, the popular 1930s band leader; as "Princess Pearl" she starred with him in two musical films.
Sarawak, in north-west Borneo, was one of the most exotic personal fiefdoms carved out in the age of European colonial expansion. In 1838, James Brooke (Elizabeth's great-great uncle) had spent his £30,000 inheritance on a 142 ft schooner and sailed for Borneo as a soldier of fortune. Landing at Sarawak, then a province of the sultanate of Brunei, he found a nation riven by head-hunting tribes and pirates. The Sultan of Brunei promised Brooke that if he restored order, Sarawak would be his.
This he did, and in 1841 Brooke was proclaimed the first White Rajah. In 1864 Britain recognised Sarawak as an independent territory. On the death of Rajah James in 1868 he was succeeded by his nephew Charles Johnson, who took the name of Brooke. Rajah Charles (a notable eccentric who, after losing an eye in a riding accident, replaced it with a false one destined for a stuffed albatross) consolidated the state and extended it into the interior. In 1888 Sarawak and Brunei became separate British protectorates, but the Brooke family kept control of Sarawak's domestic affairs. Charles Vyner Brooke, always known as Vyner, succeeded his father as Rajah in 1918.
Elizabeth Brooke had been born on September 2 1913 in London, the second of Vyner Brooke's three daughters. Elizabeth's mother Sylvia (nee Brett) was the daughter of the 2nd Viscount Esher and an accomplished painter and writer; her books, such as Queen of the Head Hunters and Sylvia of Sarawak, vividly evoke her life in the fiefdom.
Elizabeth and her sisters (Leonora and Valerie) grew up in a cultured milieu; their grandmother Ranee Margaret used to play the piano to them in the company of Edward Elgar and Joseph Conrad; J M Barrie (Leonora's godfather), D H Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, and Noel Coward (who called the Brooke sisters "The Chicks") were also regular visitors to their house in Portland Place. The girls were educated at home, in London and in Sarawak.
When Elizabeth first went to Sarawak she remembered turning from the sea into Sarawak river and seeing "the broad winding beauty of its pale brown water and the Malaysian men, out in their little boats, waving, cheering and singing to welcome us".
The Brookes's residence was the Astana, a white, thatched palace ("a fantastic medley of beauty and bad taste", according to one observer) in the capital Kuching. From the first Rajah Vyner showed himself shy of ceremony; in his first speech to his people he encouraged them to call on him to air their problems, and he declined to allow his daughters to be addressed as "princess", preferring the more personal datang (your ladyship).
A benevolent and popular ruler, Rajah Vyner was on the whole scrupulous not to stamp on local customs, but he drew the line at head hunting, then still practised by Dyak tribesmen. "At that time," Elizabeth would recall, "when a young Dyak came of age, the girls thought little of him until he had at least two or three heads to his credit. My father had to spend long hours with these men to teach them that severing an old woman's head as she worked in a rice field, just to please a girl, was not really a sign of honour."
Rajah Vyner himself found the local women hard to resist, and he had a string of mistresses, several of whom came to live with the family, to be looked on by the Brooke daughters as elder sisters. Ranee Sylvia, Elizabeth recalled, "liked most of Daddy's mistresses enormously. Some even became her greatest friends. And those she did not like, Daddy threw out. As I can recall, she only forced him to discard three - one who was a gold-digger, one who was a thundering bore and the other because she was a nymphomaniac."
To his daughters, Rajah Vyner was somewhat stiff, not prone to showing affection, but they did occasionally go with him on horseback and canoe to government outstations in the jungle, getting to know the Kayaks, Dyaks, Chinese, Malays and Indians who lived there.
Elizabeth - known in the family as "Didi" - grew up self-assured yet prone to indefinite sulks if she did not get her way. She was, her mother wrote, "of constant interest to those about her. Even if she did not speak she subconsciously attracted. From out of her tangled black hair, her eyes loomed - they were like jungle pools, half green, half brown. Her skin was like ivory, and her lips a broad thread of scarlet. Her capacity for love was immeasurable. She had to have it, it was meat and drink to her."
Back in London, the sisters were presented at Court and introduced by their mother to "everyone in the interesting and artistic world". The English tabloid press dubbed them Princesses Gold (Leonora), Pearl (Elizabeth) and Baba (Valerie), and recorded with some relish their spirited behaviour and romantic adventures.
Elizabeth fell in love with a string of men, including George Metaxa, who sang for the first time in England at the Brookes's London house, and Jack Buchanan, the musical-comedy actor. Buchanan saw that Elizabeth might be suited for the stage, but lamented to her mother: "She doesn't seem to know what she wants. She doesn't seem to have any fixed ideas".
At this time, Elizabeth was in the habit of going out night after night, smoking and drinking, and, according to her mother, "creeping back in the early hours of the morning unhappy and profoundly bored". Sylvia Brooke persuaded Elizabeth to try for the stage, and she started at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, appearing in a number of amateur shows.
She became properly galvanised, however, only after marrying the "King of the Hot-Cha". Elizabeth Brooke had met Harry Roy in 1932 at a party in Mayfair, and three years later, while in Sarawak, she received his letter of proposal. They were married in 1935 at Caxton Hall in London and spent their honeymoon in Paris. All of a sudden she was declaring herself to be full of ambition, dismissing her earlier existence of cocktail parties as "wasting time".
The Roys were soon at work on Everything is Rhythm (1936), a jaunty musical filmed at Elstree in which he played a band leader, she a princess in a mythical kingdom. The next year they co-starred in Rhythm Racketeer, and appeared together on numerous occasions on stage. He composed the foxtrot Sarawakee in her honour.
During the Second World War, the Japanese captured Kuching on Christmas Day 1941. The Rajah and Ranee were exiled abroad. In 1946 they returned to a tremendous welcome but a devastated economy. Rajah Vyner decided that outside help was essential to the survival of the country, and that his position had become an anachronism.
On February 6 1946, Rajah Vyner announced to the people of Sarawak that George VI had agreed that the country should be ceded to the British Crown. The Rajah handed over Sarawak's accumulated reserves of £2.75 million on the understanding that £1 million be set aside for a trust fund for his family and certain other local functionaries. British rule lasted until 1963, when Sarawak became part of the Federation of Malaysia.
Sir Vyner Brooke, meanwhile, returned to England "a broken man", according to Elizabeth, and lived the rest of his life as a recluse. He died in 1963, Lady Brooke in 1971.
Elizabeth and Harry Roy's marriage was dissolved in 1947, having come under strain due to his constant absence during the war. In 1949, she married Colonel Richard Vidmer, of the US Air Force; they lived in Barbados and then Florida, playing golf and reminiscing occasionally about the old days.
She had not returned to Sarawak since her first marriage in 1935, preferring to remember it "as it was - like a wonderful dream".
Elizabeth Brooke Vidmer is survived by a son and daughter of her first marriage.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
A benevolent and popular ruler, Rajah Vyner was on the whole scrupulous not to stamp on local customs, but he drew the line at head hunting, then still practised by Dyak tribesmen. "At that time," Elizabeth would recall, "when a young Dyak came of age, the girls thought little of him until he had at least two or three heads to his credit. My father had to spend long hours with these men to teach them that severing an old woman's head as she worked in a rice field, just to please a girl, was not really a sign of honour."
To die for.
Gets me wondering, though. Will today's Brits generate such lovely obits? Limeys of the imperial age seem to have lived such amazingly interesting lives. Look at the royals and nobility of the present age. Will any ten of them be as interesting as Princess Elizabeth?
With the set of the Empire's bright sun
It's eccentrics shufflin' off one by one
We might as well get-set
That today's British jet-set
Will never be half as much fun.
Leni
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