Arnold Lunn - Marriages

Marriages

Towards the end of 1913 Lunn married Mabel Northcote, the granddaughter of Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh. They had three children, Peter, John and Jaqueta. Though not keen on mountaineering, Mabel shared her husband's love of skiing. She was the first woman to pass the British First Class skiing test, and she was a founder member of the Kandahar Ski Club. When her brother became 3rd Earl of Iddesleigh in 1927, she acquired the courtesy title of "Lady Mabel". Her husband wrote: "In the aristocracy of M�rren she welcomed this modest reminder of the fact that inventing the Slalom was not the only Lunn claim to respect." The Swiss, however, could never understand how Arnold could be "Mr. Lunn" and his wife "Lady Mabel", and their feelings were aptly conveyed by a member of the Kandahar who congratulated him when he was knighted "on making an honest Lady out of Mabel."

"Mabel," Lunn wrote, "was invincibly English and I was much consoled during the dark days of 1940 by the fact that her confidence in final victory was never shaken." Lunn once said something nice to their daughter Jaqueta about the latter's courage during an air raid. For this he was later reproved by Mabel. "I want Jaqueta to feel," she said, "that the only thing which calls for comment in war time is cowardice." Lunn was an agnostic when they married, and Mabel a devout Anglican, which she remained all her life. Lunn wrote: "Mabel's husband, brother and three children became Catholics, but I never expected her to follow our example. Humanly speaking, she was bound to remain a member of the Church of England." An Anglican vicar once asked Lunn to preach in his church. "I asked you," he said, "because you have never written anything unpleasant about Anglicanism since you became a Roman Catholic." But Lunn could never have written "anything unpleasant" about Mabel's Church, and when the first shock of his conversion was over, "Mabel soon yielded not merely notional but real assent to the belief that the doctrinal differences which separated Mabel the Anglican from Arnold the Catholic were infinitely, yes infinitely, less than those which had separated Mabel the Anglican from Arnold the agnostic."

Lady Mabel Lunn died on March 4, 1959.

Two years later, on April 18, 1961, Lunn married Phyllis Holt-Needham. In the early 1930s, Lunn was on the point of advertising for a secretary when his wife told him that she had found the perfect secretary for him, the niece of a friend of hers. As his wife had made up her mind, all that remained was for Lunn to demonstrate his "manly independence by a formal interview before engaging her candidate for the job." Two days later "a rather shy-looking young woman" was ushered into his office, Phyllis Holt-Needham. An account of the interview is given in Lunn's book Memory to Memory. At the time Lunn was exchanging controversial letters with J. B. S. Haldane, published later under the title Science and the Supernatural. Phyllis, who was an agnostic and very familiar with modern attacks on Christianity, confidently expected that Haldane would demolish Lunn, and was "both surprised and annoyed" by his inability to do so. Her first reaction was to find fault with Haldane as a controversialist and to be "unduly complimentary" about Lunn's controversial talents. Gradually, however, she began to suspect that it was the weakness of Haldane's case which enabled Lunn to get the better of his "intellectual superior," and this was the first step in her return to the Christian faith.

Although Phyllis was only mildly keen on skiing and never an accomplished practitioner, she was Assistant Editor to Lunn of the British Ski Year Book. In recognition, the Club elected her an Honorary Member.

Not long before his first wife died, Lunn wrote, she "confided to a friend that if anything ever happened to her, Phyllis would take me on, and few second marriages have been so warmly welcomed by the husband's children and friends, and for less obvious reasons by the husband's hostesses."