Babe in the Wood

In these leveling times when British professional men clip their own boxwood and their wives push their own prams, London exhibits no district more decorous and decorative than St. John's Wood. But in Queen Victoria's gilded reign a century ago, this first of the city's garden suburbs had another reputation. Then noble Britons liked to steal away from their confining Mayfair mansions and visit leafy little hideaways in St. John's Wood. There George IV and Napoleon III kept their well-hidden mistresses; beauteous Lily Langtry waited for Edward VII at 20 Wellington Road; many less famous women lived in well-kept seclusion with nothing to do but listen for the diurnal rumble of their lovers' carriage wheels as their carriages turned into the gravel drives. When Novelist George Eliot, famed for her indifference to marriage vows, went to live there, the Countess of Cork snapped: "Of course, poor dear. Where else could she go?"

With a mixture of incredulity and nostalgic delight, Britons learned last week that staid St. John's Wood had sustained and harbored a liaison of Edwardian style right into the welfare-state era. In a London court, one Jacqueline Gray, a 41-year-old onetime model, sued 81-year-old Sir Strati Ralli, Bt. (family motto: "Keep to the straight path") for the return of jewelry worth $34,000. Miss Gray charged that Sir Strati had taken the jewelry from her to have it insured, and had refused to return it.

Sheepishly, Sir Strati told the court that he had kept Jacqueline as his mistress for 16 years, tucking her away in an $84,000 Georgian house in St. John's Wood, with her mother as chaperone. When he called (always at noontime), Jacqueline sent her mother to the movies. Three years ago he found himself "getting a bit frail" and tried to break off the liaison. Jacqueline objected; there were telephone calls, and a somewhat ruffled Sir Strati had to confess to his wife to prevent Jacqueline's turning up while a birthday party for his grandchildren was in progress.

Sir Strati stoutly denied having given Jacqueline jewelry: "Why should I? I never visited her in the evening, and you don't wear jewelry like that in the daytime." The judge was sympathetic: "An allowance of -L-40 a week taxfree, with other bills paid," he observed, "does not sound like a very mean allowance for the casual interviews they had. Miss Gray received -L-38,000 over the years, a fortune in itself."

The jury not only ruled for Sir Strati, but, applying the newfangled idea of equal rights for women before the law in an oldfangled way, callously ordered Sir Strati's ex-mistress to pay costs.

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