Edith Marguerite Harrington

Edith Marguerite Shand, (née Harrington, later Mrs. Tippet) (14 June 1893 – 3 January 1981) sometimes known by her middle name of Margot, was the first wife of the English journalist Philip Morton Shand and through her only child Bruce, paternal grandmother of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

Edith Marguerite Harrington was born at 32 Linver Road, Fulham, London on 14 June 1893, the second of the six children born to George Woods Harrington (1865-1920), an accounts clerk, and his wife Alice Edith Harrington, née Stillman (1865-1935). The son of a butler, her father changed employers many times during his working life but his modest income meant that he always had difficulty accommodating his growing family, moving first to Putney, then to Acton and eventually to Isleworth. As was common practice in large Victorian families, the elder children lodged with their grandparents due to space constraints; by 1901 Edith’s elder brother Cyril was living with his grandfather and by 1911 Edith was living there too.

On leaving school, Edith found work as a milliner but by the outbreak of the First World War she had moved on to become a secretary and was living in a small apartment in Hammersmith. Around this time she met her first husband, Philip Morton Shand, known as Morton, then working as a clerk at the War Office and living at the Shand family home in nearby Kensington. Shand was an English journalist, architecture critic (an early proponent of modernism), wine and food writer, entrepreneur and pomologist. They married at St. Peter's Church, Hammersmith, London on 22 April 1916 and set up home together in a splendid mansion block overlooking Battersea Park where her only child, Bruce Middleton Hope Shand, was born on 22 January 1917.

Unfortunately, the marriage was to be a short-lived and unhappy one, ending in divorce after just four years. Shand was to prove a serial womanizer who cared little for his child and Edith divorced him on grounds of his adultery on 4 July 1920. Thereafter, he failed to acknowledge or provide for his son, marrying three more times and fathering more children.

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