Post-war Life and Marriage
On 1 January 1949, King married divorceé Anita Theodosia Mouira Leslie (1914–1984). She was the eldest child of Sir John Randolph Shane Leslie, 3rd Baronet and his wife Marjorie Ide, the Vermont-born daughter of the US ambassador to Spain. Bill and Anita probably met in Lebanon in 1943, where King served for 5 months as executive officer of the submarine base at Beirut. She was on a skiing trip after doing duty in Africa in the Motor Transport Corps in 1940–42, although a letter mentions her being in Beirut in 1941–42. Leslie-King then became an ambulance driver in the French Army from 1944 to 1945. For the latter, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945 by General Charles de Gaulle. As Anita Leslie, she wrote over a dozen books, including Love in a Nutshell (1952), The Remarkable Mr. Jerome: The Life and Times of Leonard Jerome, Sir Winston Churchill's American Grandfather (1954). In 1974 she wrote the biography of Francis Chichester, the first person to sail around the world single-handedly with only one stop. The Kings had two children, Richard Tarka Bourke King (b. 1949), and Leonie Rose King (b. 1951).
After the war, King took up farming and was an avid fox hunter, as was his wife. In 1946, the Kings bought Oranmore Castle, a 15th century Norman keep built on Galway Bay in county Galway, Ireland for ₤200-. Other sources report that Anita Leslie-King was given the castle by her mother, who had bought it in 1946. 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." 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 asthma.
Read more about this topic: Bill King (Royal Navy Officer)
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