THE GREYHOUND DIARY by Judy Montagu Edited by Anna Mathias: Rip-roaring tale of how the illegitimate daughter of an Earl became a Texas rodeo star

To be related to Winston and Clementine Churchill in the years after the Second World War gave a young female ­traveller instant entrée to the drawing rooms of the great, the good and the exceedingly wealthy of the US.

Twenty-six-year-old Judy Montagu was Clementine Churchill’s first cousin, so she was bound to be feted by post-war America. But her chosen mode of transport was far from Churchillian or grand.

Thirsty for adventure, instinctively Left- leaning, single, grieving for her first love who’d been killed in the war, she decided in 1949 to set off on a vast circular road trip across America by Greyhound bus. And ­Greyhound buses, as Judy’s daughter Anna Mathias writes in her enticing introduction to her mother’s vivid travelogue, were a far cry from the modes of transport favoured by the more affluent of society. They were used only by ‘the most disenfranchised Americans’.

Judy longed to strike up conversations with strangers of all social classes – and the best way to do this was to travel by Greyhound bus and take pot luck with whoever ­happened to sit next to her.

You can see where Judy’s strong-mindedness came from. She was the daughter of Venetia Stanley, the much-younger lover of ­ former prime minister H. H. Asquith at the outbreak of the First World War.

All of us who devoured Robert Harris’s 2024 novel Precipice will never forget the passionate, obsessive, highly distracted, State-secret-filled love letters Asquith wrote to Venetia every day in 1914, when he should have been focusing his entire mind on the war.

The only way Venetia could get away from the limpet-like Asquith was, first, to sign up to be a nurse in the north of France, and second, to marry someone else – her great friend Edwin Montagu.

A DNA test later proved that Judy, born in 1923, was not in fact Edwin’s daughter. Venetia had many extra-marital affairs. Judy’s father was one of Venetia’s lovers, Eric Ednam, later Earl of Dudley, who one day casually admitted to Judy: ‘Darling, I am your father.’

What makes Judy’s 1949 travel diary so riveting is its intoxicating mixture of the low life and the high life. One minute, she’s on an all-night Greyhound bus chatting with ‘an old brute who told me such revolting details of her physical condition and that of her husband and children that I almost threw up’.

The next minute, she’s being greeted by the top brass in cities across the US, as the ‘down-to-earth young kinswoman of Winston Churchill’, whisked by taxi to a top hotel or a luxurious suite in a sprawling baronial-style mansion with a maid to unpack and press her clothes: the honoured guest of the local newspaper magnate of ­enormous wealth and influence.

Those were the days when letters of introduction still had huge clout. Judy, with her high-born connections, was well-supplied with them.

A s the guest of the newspaper magnate Jesse H. Jones in Houston, ‘a giant of Texan and American life’, she ‘feels like Rita Hayworth’.

After a glittering few days under his wing, she relishes a hamburger at the Greyhound bus depot, before travelling on to Fort Worth, where she’s greeted with open arms by Jones’s rival, Amon Carter, another newspaper magnate, who’s determined to outdo Jones in his effusive welcome.

He enrols Judy as ‘Honorary Vice-President of the Southwest Cattle and Fat Stock Show’, and invites her to ride in a rodeo.

So this English rose – who in fact served with distinction in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) during the war, along with Churchill’s daughter Mary, and was the first woman ever to be an instructor in gunnery – is presented with red leather cowboy boots, a Stetson hat, and the whole Western riding outfit.

She practises riding a Western- style saddle. On the day of the rodeo, she mounts her horse, which ‘gave a bellow and reared up to ­a completely vertical position, pawing at the air’. She hears herself shouting, ‘Down, you brute,’ before ‘giving it a whack with the slack of my reins’, and sets off at full gallop into the arena, alongside two Texans on enormous steeds, to the rolling of drums and the whoops of the crowd.

She feels marvellous – but then her knees turn to jelly and ‘I began to bounce around again’.

Amon Carter’s tycoon friend Sid Richardson takes a shine to Judy. Carter highly recommends the match, as ‘he’s worth 100 million dollars’. But Judy’s not tempted, as the man is ‘aged 65, with a 45-inch waist, so I couldn’t encourage too many romantic dreams’.

She never knows what she’s going to be called on to do next. One night, in Boise, Idaho, she’s informed at the last minute that she must address the local Chamber of Commerce and their wives at 7.45 the next morning, about ‘Conditions in England’, which fills her with dread.

But she rises to the challenge. ‘I tried to convince a roomful of dyed-in-the-wool Republicans that socialism wasn’t as bad as they thought.’

In Illinois she meets Adlai ­Stevenson, the recently elected governor, who would later run twice for president. Here at last there’s real chemistry: she finds him delightful, funny, inspiring, brilliant and attractive. Her daughter, Anna in her informative notes that the two of them would go on to have a love affair. But she did not marry him. She married the American ­photographer and art critic ­Milton Gendel, and Anna writes that she was a wonderfully ­loving mother.

But she died of a heart attack aged 49 in 1972, after what Anna thinks was ‘a protracted ­nervous breakdown’ brought on by guilt about her son, Anna’s half-brother ­Stephen, who’d been born out of wedlock in 1952, and died as a teenager in 1968 of ­progressive spinal muscular atrophy. He lived in a boarding school in Sussex ‘for boys with various behavioural, health or family issues’.

Yet one still feels that amazing Greyhound bus trip set Judy Montagu up and gave her strength for all that was to follow.