There is a full-length portrait of Josephine Dale Lace in the Great Hall of Northwards, that grand Rand Lord pile on Parktown Ridge. The painting by the British artist Hal Hurst is awash with Edwardian splendour – a beautiful, if imperious woman in her mid-30s, very much the chatelaine of this Herbert Baker mansion, resplendent in a ball gown that is a riot of pink and deep mauve. It was commissioned when José – as she spelled her name – was abroad while work was being completed on Northwards and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1903.
The hall at Northwards was once the epicentre of the social whirl enjoyed by the city’s ruling elite as Colonel John Dale Lace, “the most popular man on the Rand today” (according to Josephine’s biographer, Daphne Saul) and his wife – arguably Johannesburg’s first party girl – hosted lavish receptions, dances and dinner parties there on a grand and generous scale in the mid-1900s.
There was another painting, also by Hurst, that used to hang in the hall, but it sadly is there no longer – that of José’s son, Lance. This work had a strange shadowy figure in the background, one which, scandalously, bore a very strong resemblance to King Edward VII and was probably put in the painting at José’s insistence, since she was strongly rumoured to have had an affair with him.
She was a woman who knew exactly what Oscar Wilde was on about when he said the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about, and she delighted in gossip about her, and this particular tale, that she’d had an affair with the monarch, was no exception. In fact, as Daphne puts it, she “sedulously fostered” this legend with the suggestion that Edward was Lance’s father. It was a ludicrous fabrication; José first met the king in 1903 during the monarch’s annual vacation in the spa town of Marienbad, in what is now the Czech Republic (it’s known as Mariánské Lázně nowadays). At the time, Lance was eight.
This behaviour, according to Daphne, was typical of José.
“She took a mischievous delight in behaving in a way that caused eyebrows to be raised and tongues to wag,” she writes. That a British writer would later refer to her in a book on Edward, published long after her death in May 1937, as a woman with “short skirts and a murky past” would no doubt have amused her greatly.
The early years
Josephine Dale Lace was born on 10 April 1869 in Richmond in the central Karoo, the youngest daughter of Margaretha and Josias Brink, a court official who went on to become town mayor and to represent the constituency in the Cape Legislative Assembly.
What we know of her childhood comes from her. At some stage, José was persuaded by friends to keep a journal, which she did. Her memoirs stop abruptly at the age of 25, but from her writings it is apparent, according to Daphne, that she was “a naughty and wilful child” who, although adored by her father who never said a harsh word to her, was “spanked on many occasions by her mother”. She was sent to a select school “for young ladies” in England, and entrance was arranged by Sir Charles Mill, then colonial agent for South Africa. Her father died in 1883, leaving the family in some financial difficulty, and, two years later when she turned 16, her mother insisted she return home.
Shortly after her return, José attended a ball in Cape Town thrown by Lady Robinson, the wife of Sir Hercules Robinson, at the time the governor of the Cape. Lady Robinson was greatly taken with the young woman and soon afterwards suggested to Margaretha Brink that her daughter come to live with them at Groote Schuur, the governor’s official residence.
She met Cecil Rhodes while at Groote Schuur and was, after a short while, taken back to London with Lady Robinson, who introduced her to society there. José was just 17 when Lady Knutsford, the wife of the secretary of state for the colonies, presented her to Queen Victoria. There followed balls, receptions, jaunts with the aristocracy and attendance at various fashionable events.
During this time, Rhodes pitched up in London as well, along with José’s mother and a sister, Rose. One evening Rhodes proposed to her. It’s difficult to imagine the scene, but as José described it, they were alone in the back of a Hansom cab, or a horse and buggy, when Rhodes placed her head on his shoulder and said, “Would you like your head to rest there always?” She agreed, but nothing came of this.
The lover
Shortly afterwards, José embarked on her first serious affair. Ernest William Beckett, later second Baron Grimthorpe, looked good on paper – he was educated at Eton and Cambridge, was a Conservative MP and a man said to have inherited several million pounds – but was, unhappily, a total loser. Short and fat, Beckett came with a gambling problem – and a wife, an ailing American woman, Lucy Tracey Lee, who’d borne him two children.
José described the start of their relationship: “I went to lunch with him (I lied to my mother as to where I was going). We had lunch in a private suite [at the Savoy Hotel], so much in love were we with each other that it seemed quite natural when he took me into the bedroom adjoining his suite and with love and fondness I let him unclothe me. He said, ‘I want to teach you what love means’.”
Beckett rented a flat where they could continue to meet in secret and promised to marry José when his wife died. Her family returned to South Africa and, despite their wishes, José remained behind in London, and lived openly, and scandalously, as Beckett’s mistress. The social invitations dried up, but she was, according to Daphne, “radiantly happy and thought the world well lost for love”.
Beckett’s wife died in 1891. He told José that they should, for the sake of decency, wait a bit before getting married. But months passed, and it became clear there was to be no marriage. There were quarrels, and José broke up with him to go on stage. She signed a year’s contract with Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s company and was given a small part (that of “coquette”, appropriately) in a production of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman Of No Importance that was touring the country.
The husband
Then, at a dinner party in London, she met the man she’d marry – twice. John Joseph Lace, born in the Isle of Man but lately resident of gold boom Johannesburg, was a man on the verge of becoming extremely rich thanks to his connections with Barney Barnato, Lionel Phillips, Alfred Beit and other magnates.
On the eve of returning to South Africa, Lace was captivated by José, and promptly professed his love for her. Despite the fact she was
still deeply in love with Beckett, she accepted his marriage proposal.
They were married on 12 August 1893, at a registry office in Hanover Square. This was followed by a celebratory luncheon at the Savoy Hotel. This time, however, there was no sex. José made Lace promise that he wouldn’t consummate the marriage until they could have a religious cere-mony, a request that suggested José was not altogether too sure about her feelings for the man she’d just married.
Lace, meanwhile, had no such doubts. Before returning to South Africa, he’d cabled the news through to The Star, and a small announcement appeared in the newspaper on 28 August 1893. His plan was to return early in 1894 to collect his wife.
José meanwhile continued to work as an actress – and she again took up with Beckett, who now wanted to marry her. José told him that she and Lace were engaged, and then, in fact, already married. Beckett begged her to have the marriage annulled on the grounds of non-consummation.
In a quandary, she cabled Lace and begged him to release her from the marriage contract. He refused and immediately returned to London. Once there, Lace convinced José that they live together for three months in what could be regarded as a “trial marriage”. It didn’t work. She was hopelessly in love with Beckett, and eventually Lace, somewhat gallantly, sued for divorce on the grounds of desertion. Lace returned to South Africa, and José moved back in with Beckett.
She fell pregnant in May 1894, a full six months before the divorce was made final. Beckett was now again refusing to marry her, although when Lancelot Ernest Cecil was born in February the following year, he did agree to pay for the boy’s upbringing and education and gave her an undisclosed sum of money. He soon wanted it back though, probably to pay gambling debts. He instituted proceedings against José claiming Lance was not his son. The case was eventually dropped.
José returned to South Africa in 1896 and sought out Lace, who was very much in the news at the time. As part of the Reform Movement, he’d been among those in Johannesburg who’d been rounded up and arrested following the Jameson Raid. Like most of his fellow Reformists, he spent three months in Pretoria Central, was
tried and eventually fined £2 000 for his part in the insurrection.
The couple remarried in the Holy Trinity Church, Cape Town, in November 1897, and José added “Dale” to the surname.
Thereupon the Dale Laces returned to Johannesburg with a bang.
Life in Joburg
After London, Johannesburg must have come as something of a shock to José. In 10 hectic years, the mining camp had mushroomed into a metropolis of 100 000 citizens. It was a place of little or no sophistication. Municipal services were primitive in the extreme, the mayor was a political stooge, the market was a disgrace, public transport was hopeless, the police were corrupt, illegal immigrants seemed to be everywhere, and on the streets gangsters ruled.
Olive Schreiner, writing to a friend, put it thus: “Here’s this great fiendish hell of a city sprung up in ten years in our sweet pure African veld.
“A city which for glitter and gold, and wickedness – carriages and palaces and brothels and gambling halls – beats creation.”
Life for the Dale Laces, of course, was not that unbearable. They were fabulously wealthy. In 1899, they moved into Norman House, a large mansion in Doornfontein that once belonged to Barney Barnato. It is said that Dale Lace had a bath on rails installed in the house so that, at the touch of a button, one could move from the bathroom straight into the bedroom.
When war broke out in October 1899, the Dale Laces left Johannesburg but returned some months later after its occupation by the British on 31 May 1900. Dale Lace was later instrumental in raising the Johannesburg Mounted Rifles, a colonial unit in the South African War and took the honorary rank of colonel. José, meanwhile, busied herself with charity work – particularly for the Nazareth House for Children in Yeoville – and, on occasion, organised cricket matches for British army offi-cers. In 1901, they bought the property on which Northwards was finally completed in 1904.
The Dale Lace era
Once the couple was ensconced in Parktown, the “Dale Lace” social era took off. So did the José mythology. It was said that she bathed in milk twice a week. She slept in black silk to off-set her pale complexion. She had a carriage drawn by four zebra. When she went shopping, a member of her house staff would sound a bugle, a fanfare that no doubt alerted merchants that a potential windfall was on its way.
The Dale Laces were, alas, also a particularly arrogant and spoilt couple. José would, according to Daphne, “lay about her with her riding whip if anyone was ill-advised enough to get in her way when she was out driving in one of her carriages”. On several occasions, the colonel unsuccessfully tried to sue deserting domestic staff members for breach of contract.
Once, he found himself in the dock after he assaulted a cab driver and drove off with his carriage. He was fined £5.
Another time, he beat up a journalist who wrote a satirical parody of José’s appearance at the theatre.
She was wearing a rather revealing dress, apparently.
Beginning in 1907, though, the Dale Laces found themselves in increasingly severe financial difficulty. Northwards burnt down in 1911. It was restored by its new owners the following year. The Dale Laces moved to the relative obscurity of their farm, Boschkop, in what is now Randburg.
In 1925, they moved into a small house in Ferreira Street, Kenilworth, in the south of Johannesburg.
The couple were temporarily estranged towards the end of the 1920s and early 1930s, when Dale Lace took a mistress but were together when they died in 1937, within three weeks of each other. It is said that her ghost can sometimes be seen walking the minstrel gallery above the hall at Northwards.