Ronald Tree

Arthur Ronald Lambert Field Tree (26 September 1897 – 14 July 1976) was a British Conservative Party politician, journalist and investor who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Harborough constituency in Leicestershire from 1933 to 1945. He later established the Sandy Lane resort in Barbados.

Biography

Tree's American-born father, Arthur Tree, was an English gentleman of leisure, self-identifying as a 'horse breeder and farmer' and son of Lambert Tree, a former U.S. minister to Russia. His mother, Ethel Field, was a daughter of Marshall Field, a co-founder of Marshall Field's department store in Chicago, Illinois. Born in Eastbourne, he was educated at Winchester College in England. Both sides of the family had great wealth and even though his parents divorced, Ronald and his father continued to enjoy a life of great luxury, not least Arthur's yacht The Adventuress.thumb

Two months after his parents divorced in 1901, Tree's mother married her lover, Capt. David Beatty, the future 1st Earl Beatty and First Sea Lord. His half-siblings were David Beatty, 2nd Earl Beatty, and the Hon Peter Beatty; he also had two full siblings, both of whom died in infancy. After the divorce, he remained with his father at Ashorne Hill House, Warwickshire, as the court had given Arthur custody of Ronald. There he was tutored by a convent girl from Cork in Ireland, his governess Kate Walsh, who was also Arthur's partner, the mother of six further half-siblings of Ronald; Dennis (1898–1969), Kathleen (1901–1975), Patrick (1905–1991), James, Gerald and Elizabeth Waring (1914–1991). Arthur and Kate were never married and while Ronald grew up with them at Ashorne Hill, he would have had little or no contact with a Catholic, half-Irish and illegitimate family after Arthur's death in 1914, when Ronald was already at the cusp of adulthood. Dennis, Kathleen and Patrick all had issue including notable architect, Michael Blower.

Tree edited Forum Magazine in New York from 1922, and in 1926 became involved in investment on the New York Stock Exchange, before the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Politics Tree returned to England with his wife, the former Nancy Keene Perkins (the widow of his cousin Henry Marshall Field) in 1927, where they had two sons, artist, Michael Lambert Tree and racehorse trainer, Jeremy Tree, and a daughter, who died at birth. At first the couple took a 10-year repairing lease on Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire (near Market Harborough) which Nancy redecorated with help from Mrs Guy Bethell of Elden Ltd.

In November 1933, Ronald was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Harborough in Leicestershire. In the same year, the couple bought Ditchley House and Park near Charlbury, Oxfordshire as their home, and it was the decoration of this house which earned Nancy the reputation of having "the finest taste of almost anyone in the world." She worked on it with Lady Colefax and the French decorator Stéphane Boudin of the Paris firm Jansen.

Tree was among a small group who saw the rising Nazi party in Germany as a threat to Britain, and using his home as its base he became friends with the group's leader, Winston Churchill. Churchill and his wife Clementine dined at Ditchley on numerous occasions from 1937.

In February 1938, after Anthony Eden resigned as foreign secretary from Neville Chamberlain over the conduct of foreign policy, Tree himself became a follower of Eden, known then as the "Glamour boys," a pejorative term used by the Conservative Party whips' office, headed by David Margesson.

World War II

On the outbreak of war, the security forces were concerned by the visibility of Churchill's country house Chartwell, its high topographical location and the fact it was south of London making it an easy target for German bombers returning from raids on the capital. The Prime Minister's official retreat of Chequers was also deemed vulnerable to attack. Churchill had use of the Paddock bunker in Neasden, but only used it on one occasion for a cabinet meeting, before returning to his Cabinet War Room bunker in Whitehall. However, this created additional difficulties on clear nights when a full moon was predicted (or as Churchill romantically termed it 'When the Moon is High') – so the authorities looked for an alternate site north of London. Tree offered Churchill use of Ditchley, which thanks to its tree coverage and no visible access road made it an ideal site with which Churchill was happy. Churchill first went to Ditchley in lieu of Chequers on 9 November 1940, accompanied by Clementine and his daughter Mary. By late 1942, security measures at Chequers had improved, notably including covering the road with turf. The last weekend Churchill attended Ditchley as his official residence was Tree's birthday on 26 September 1942. Churchill's last visit was for lunch in 1943. and twenty years older than Marietta, at the end of World War II, Tree and Peabody divorced their respective spouses, and then married on 26 July 1947; they had one child, Penelope (born 1949), who became a celebrated fashion model in the 1960s.

Marietta moved into Ditchley, but found herself bored with English country life. Tree and most of his friends were conservatives, and Democrat Marietta found herself isolated. Recognising his wife's unhappiness, and for the first time in his life short of money due to the taxation of Foreign Trust income enacted by the 1945 Labour Government, Tree sold Ditchley and agreed to return to New York with Marietta, her daughter Frances FitzGerald, their daughter, and his butler Collins. built just after the closure of War and one of the finest neo-Palladian mansions of the New World. In New York, he also lived for a time at the Ogden Codman House, a grand town house on the Upper East Side.

Books A History of Barbados (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972); revised ed. by E. L. Crozier (1981) When the Moon Was High: Memoirs of Peace and War, 1897-1942 (Macmillan, 1975)