Anita Theodosia Moira King (née Leslie; first married name Rodzianko; 21 November 1914 – 5 November 1985), generally known as Anita Leslie, was an Irish-born biographer and writer.[1] She was a first cousin once removed of the British wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill.
The eldest of three children born in New York City, to a wealthy Anglo-Irish landowning family (49,968 acres). Anita Theodosia Moira Leslie, alongside her brothers (Sir John Leslie, 4th Baronet and Desmond Leslie) were born to Sir John Randolph Leslie, 3rd Baronet (a.k.a. Shane Leslie) and his wife, Majorie Ide, the Vermont-born daughter of General Henry Clay Ide the US ambassador to Spain.[2]
Anita's schooling was abysmal. She spent her childhood partly on a feudal estate in a country torn by conflict, partly in a London town-house where everyone in the 1920s seemed obsessed by cocktails, short skirts, bobbed hair and Eton crops, and partly in strange schools and convents in various parts of Europe. But she always felt at home at Castle Leslie and her 1981 autobiography, The Gilt and the gingerbread, details her early childhood and eventual decision to leave the home of her grandparents and play her part in the Second World War.
During the war Anita Leslie joined the Mechanised Transport Corps, as a fully trained mechanic and ambulance driver. Anita was stationed in Cairo, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan during the intervening years. In 1944 she drove ambulances with the Free French army through northern France and liberated a V2 Rocket factory in Germany. She wrote letters home from Hitler's office in the Reich Chancellery and took part in the Victory parade in Berlin.
Anita met future husband Bill King in Lebanon in 1943, where King served for 5 months as executive officer of the submarine base at Beirut.[3]
She was on a skiing trip after doing duty in Africa in the Mechanised Transport Corps in 1940–42, although a letter mentions her being in Beirut in 1941–42.[4]
She served as an ambulance driver in the French Army from 1944-45. For the latter, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945 by General Charles de Gaulle.[5]
On 1 January 1949, Leslie married King. After the war, Anita took up farming and was an avid fox hunter, as was her husband Bill. In 1946, the Kings bought Oranmore Castle, a 15th-century Norman keep built on Galway Bay in county Galway, Ireland for £200-.[6]
Other sources report that Anita Leslie-King was given the castle by her mother, who had bought it in 1946.[7] For a while, the Kings lived in a hunting lodge outside Oranmore village, designed by Bill, and built while he and Anita went on a "world sailing cruise."[8] To help combat his wife's asthma, King developed an organic farm and garden to feed his family. Both Anita Leslie's mother and grandmother had suffered from asthma.[9]
She married, firstly in 1937, Paul Rodzianko (1903-1993 a great nephew of Mikhail Rodzianko) and secondly, Commander Bill King in 1947 who during World War II served as a submarine commander and later a transatlantic and circumnavigator yachtsman. The Kings had two children: