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Tragedy struck the ill-fated Kennedy family
On 13 May 1948, Kathleen Kennedy, sister of the late US President John F. Kennedy, died in an air crash over France. Four months earlier, she had married Billy Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington and heir to the Duke of Devonshire and the Chatsworth estate. Her death was to be the first of a string of tragedies which were to dog the Kennedy family for the next 20 years. Sue Williams reports.
Instead, the woman who was dubbed “the most exciting debutante of 1938” was killed in an air crash, just four years after her marriage to the Duke of Devonshire’s older son, the Marquis of Hartington.
Kathleen first met William “Billy” Cavendish, heir of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, at a garden party at Buckingham Palace.
She had come to England with her father, Joseph Kennedy, in 1938, when he was appointed US ambassador to the UK and made her formal entrance as a debutante on May 12, 1938.
The couple’s romance blossomed when she was invited to stay with Billy and his family at their Derbyshire home in Ashford-in-the-Water and was taken on a guided tour of Chatsworth House.
After the outbreak of the Second World War, Kathleen was sent back to America, where she worked for a while for the Times-Herald newspaper in Washington as a research assistant to executive editor Frank Waldrop, before getting her own bylined column.
But the war in Europe, and Billy Cavendish in particular, were never far from her thoughts, so she joined the American Red Cross , volunteering for a posting in England and sailed for London on June 25, 1943.
Her official position was the programme assistant at Hans Crescent, a club in London that provided food, supplies and accommodation for officers.
Kathleen and Billy took up where they had left off in 1939 and, in less than a year, they had married.
But, from the start, they were star-crossed lovers. The fiercely Roman Catholic Kennedy clan, especially mother Rose, did not approve of the match because Billy was a Protestant.
Apart from Kathleen’s brother, Joseph, no-one else from the family attended the ceremony.
Tragically all three – Billy, Kathleen and Joseph – were to die within the next four years.
Billy was killed just four months after their wedding by a German sniper while in action in Belgium with the Coldstream Guards. Joseph was to meet a similar end in a wartime skirmish.
Kathleen remained in England after her husband’s death. She had resigned her position at Hans Crescent a few days before the wedding in May but returned as a Red Cross volunteer later in the year.
After the end of the war, she briefly travelled back to the United States to visit her family but returned to London to live there permanently.
Popular on the London social circuit and admired by many for her high spirits – though more traditional members of British society apparently looked down on her boisterousness – Kathleen eventually became involved in an affair with Peter Wentworth-FitzWilliam, 8th Earl FitzWilliam.
The couple planned to wed after Fitzwilliam’s planned divorce.
She was buried in the Cavendish family plot at the church at Edensor, near Chatsworth.
This time, only her father attended, representing the family. Rose had still not forgiven her, though later she was said to have relented and declared herself delighted when her first grandchild was named Kathleen Hartington Kennedy after her daughter.
Fifteen years later, in June 1963, shortly before he was assassinated, John F. Kennedy unexpectedly called at her grave in Edensor, to pay his respects.
He had broken his journey to meet Prime Minister Harold Macmillan – who was also related to the Devonshire family by marriage – and flown by helicopter from an RAF airfield in Lincolnshire to Edensor, where he was met by the then Duke and Duchess.
The party walked together to the grave and watched while the president laid a wreath of roses.
The security-shrouded visit came as a surprise to many, including the police, but not the villagers of Edensor, who had known for a week of the VIP trip but been sworn to secrecy.
Police swarmed through the village on which the full weight of US security suddenly descended.
It was even said that a mobile hospital was set up just over the churchyard wall.
The necessity for that heavy presence was soon to become tragically apparent.
Estate workers had earlier constructed a special bridge from the field into the churchyard to ensure privacy for the president.
After talks with PM Macmillan, Kennedy flew on to Italy to meet President Segni.
Five months later, he was dead, killed by an assassin’s bullet while canvassing for the next presidential election in Dallas, Texas – yet another one of the many tragedies to touch the ill-fated Kennedy family.
Do you remember President Kennedy’s Derbyshire visit to his sister’s grave? Add your memories below.
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