Mavis Wheeler

Mavis Wheeler (née Mabel Winifred Mary Wright, also known as Mavis Cole, born 1908, died 14 October 1970) was an artist’s model, the mistress of painter Augustus John, and the former wife of prankster Horace de Vere Cole and archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler. She came to public notice in 1954 when she shot her lover Anthony Vivian, 5th Baron Vivian in the abdomen.

Life

Wheeler was born in 1908 in Woolwich, Greater London. She was secretive about her background, saying her mother had been “stolen by gypsies” as a child. In fact, her father was a grocer's assistant. At the age of 16, Wheeler was working as a scullery maid. During the 1926 United Kingdom General Strike, she hitchhiked to London carrying a golf club, and took a job as nursery governess to a clergyman’s children in Wimbledon. The next year she was working as a waitress at Veeraswamy, Indian restaurant in London.

She met the Welsh artist Augustus John (1878–1961) at the Café Royal in 1928, when she was 19 and he was 50, and agreed to model for him. She became his mistress four years later. He painted her portrait many times.

In 1931 she married eccentric Irish prankster William Horace de Vere Cole (1881– 1936). His most famous prank was the Dreadnought hoax in 1910 where he and several others in blackface, pretending to be an Abyssinian prince and his entourage, were given a tour of the Royal Navy ship HMS Dreadnought. Wheeler was his second wife, and outlived him.

On 16 March 1935, Wheeler gave birth to Tristan de Vere Cole, who was the natural son of Augustus John. Cole was brought up in the John household at Fryern Court, Fordingbridge, from the age of 18 months, partly by his mother, and then later by Dorelia McNeill, common-law wife of John. Cole became a Royal Navy officer and then a television director. He is believed to be the last-surviving illegitimate son of John.

In 1939, Wheeler married the archaeologist Sir Robert Mortimer Wheeler (1890-1976). She was his second wife of three. Their relationship was strained; Cole's diaries revealed that Wheeler hit her when she annoyed him, which he was later shocked at having done.[128] They divorced in 1943 on the grounds of her adultery with Tony Vivian (Anthony Weymouth), 5th Baron Vivian (1906–1991) a British impresario-restaurateur.[2][3]

Criminal trial

In July 1954 Wheeler was arrested for shooting and seriously wounding Lord Vivian. At her trial, the prosecuting counsel said that her love for Lord Vivian was overpowering. This love, the prosecution claimed, had led her to shoot him, on 30 July 1954, at a range of three inches, with intent to murder him at her country cottage at Potterne, Wiltshire.[6] Giving evidence from his hospital bed in Devizes Hospital, Lord Vivian said he was shot while climbing in a window, having lost the key. He and Wheeler lived together in Chelsea, he said, “happily – except she was often jealous even of certain of his men friends”. Wheeler served a six-month prison sentence for unlawful and malicious wounding. On 2 February 1955, she was released from jail and was photographed by the press strolling with Lord Vivian.

Wheeler died on 14 October 1970.

Cole, along with author Roderic Owen, wrote a biography of Wheeler, Beautiful and Beloved, (published by Hutchinson, London, 1974), in which she was described as a “warm and impulsive woman, the friend and confidante of many of the most fascinating people of the 1930s, the glory and the victim of a social system now vanished.”