SCANDAL AT DOLPHIN SQUARE

Built as a prestige development in the mid-1930s and attracting a clientele of MPs, diplomats, spies, prime ministers and even the royal family, Dolphin Square in Pimlico was a magnet for scandal from the very first. 20th century living at its most hi-tech and aspirational, it included a shopping arcade, restaurant, swimming pool and eight squash courts. In the early days Ethel Snowden, wife of a Chancellor of the Exchequer, was one of a number of residents to flirt with Nazism, and in 1939 Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, moved in with his wife Diana Mitford, whom he had secretly married in the presence of Hitler three years earlier. An outstanding orator, Mosley was pushing hard for a negotiated peace and in 1940 he was arrested in Dolphin Square and interned, with Lady Diana soon following. Meanwhile the opera-loving sisters Louise and Ida Cook, the latter an author of Mills and Boon romances, ran a safe house in Dolphin Square for escapees from Nazi Germany and smuggled valuable jewellery out of Europe by wearing it openly on opera trips. In the post-war years the country's favourite entertainers, the Crazy Gang, favoured Dolphin Square, including Bud Flanagan who recorded the Dad's Army theme tune "Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler". Spy rings and brothels have been run from the block, and it has been home to many a clandestine couple, including the film actor Peter Finch and Laurence Olivier's bipolar wife Vivien Leigh, an arrangement mirrored lower down the theatrical scale by the Carry On stars and Dolphin residents Sid James and Barbara Windsor, whose husband was for a time the prime suspect for a murder. The pranks of Princesses Beatrix and Christina, both nieces of the Duke of Edinburgh, included filling the swimming pool with detergent, and when Lady Diana Spencer worked at a nearby kindergarten she regularly visited a Dolphin Square bank. Other notable second homers have included Princess Anne, plus numerous prominent MPs such as Andy Burnham. 288pp, photos.