Belinda, Lady Montagu of Beaulieu, respected embroiderer and first wife of the vintage car-mad peer – obituary

Belinda, Lady Montagu of Beaulieu, who has died aged 90, was the first wife of the flamboyant third Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, founder of the National Motor Museum at his family seat in Hampshire.

In her own right she became a noted embroiderer, her commissions including presentation cushions for the late Queen and for King Charles when he was Prince of Wales, ecclesiastical work for cathedrals and churches – and seven wall hangings recounting the story of Beaulieu Abbey.

Elizabeth Belinda Crossley was born on January 11 1932 on a farm on the Cadland estate at Fawley, Hampshire, to Captain John Crossley, a younger son of the 1st Lord Somerleyton, the Liberal Unionist politician and former Paymaster-General Sir Savile Crossley, 2nd Bt, and Sybelle, née Drummond, a relation of the Earls of Perth.

From the age of 15 she studied at the Byam Shaw School of Art and went on to study mural painting at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. She began her career as a commercial artist, including working as an assistant to Alfred Wurmser, supplier of captions and animated graphics to BBC Television.

Belinda had known the dandyish young Lord Montagu – who had inherited his title aged two – since childhood, when she would cycle and ride her pony around the Beaulieu estate. When she married him in 1959 she had no illusions about what she was taking on.

Four years previously, after a series of brushes with the English criminal justice system, followed by a trial in the full glare of publicity, Montagu had been jailed for a year for “consensual homosexual offences” with an RAF serviceman during a weekend party at a beach hut on his estate.

The conviction had caused the break-up of his engagement to a previous fiancée. But Belinda was made of sterner stuff.

When she married Lord Montagu in a lavish ceremony at Beaulieu, Belinda was keen to emphasise her ordinary background: “I’ve not got a bean,” she assured an interviewer. “It’s been said I’ve got money, but take it from me I’m a plain working girl. I’ve even worked as a waitress in a cafe so you can tell I’m not the Society type I’ve been painted.”

For 15 years Lady Montagu was an energetic and popular chatelaine of Palace House, Beaulieu, running a staff of 30 and helping with her husband’s motor museum, for which she designed posters and displays. She also presided in early years over the annual Beaulieu Jazz Festival (for which she painted an old merry-go-round used as a stage) until it was cancelled in 1961 following reports of “nude bathing parties, fights with broken bottles, drunken orgies and innocent bystanders beaten up”.

“One great advantage was that Belinda knew Beaulieu well, having been brought up there, and our families were old friends,” Lord Montagu recalled in his 2000 memoir Wheels Within Wheels. “She was therefore able to involve herself in local activities without problems. I was much aided by her cultivated tastes in redecorating the house and she was enormously supportive in the early days of the museum.”

In March 1973 she came to the rescue of the teeny-bopper heart-throb David Cassidy, who, as is recorded on an information board erected on the estate, stayed at Beaulieu for a few days “to escape the clamour of adoring fans”. She gave him a fishing lesson on the Beaulieu River and took him for a spin in one of her husband’s vintage cars.

She and her husband had a son and a daughter, but the marriage ended in 1974, and the same year Lord Beaulieu married his second wife, Fiona Herbert, with whom he had another son. But he and Belinda remained close, and when he published his memoir he dedicated it to both of his wives and to his three children.

Belinda Montagu continued to help the estate, designing and creating souvenirs such as tea towels and mugs and experiencing a new lease of life as an embroiderer after enrolling at Southampton College of Art for a City and Guilds course.

As well as her wall hangings chronicling the story of Beaulieu Abbey, now hanging in the abbey’s former refectory, her other commissions included kneelers for the 1999 wedding of Prince Edward and Sophie Rhys-Jones at St George’s Chapel, Windsor; a large embroidered appliqué for the New Forest Association, of which she was patron, to mark the 900th anniversary of the forest’s creation; kneelers for Salisbury Cathedral, and an altar frontal and kneelers for the chapel at Buckler’s Hard, near Beaulieu, to mark the 1998 marriage of her daughter Mary to Rupert Scott.

She also collaborated on a project to teach embroidery skills to local women in Bali, Indonesia.

In 2019 “The Art of Belinda, Lady Montagu – her story in stitches”, an exhibition celebrating her painting, drawing and needlework, was opened in the former private wing of Palace House by her son Ralph, who had succeeded on his father’s death in 2015 as the 4th Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.

He and her daughter Mary survive her.

Belinda, Lady Montagu of Beaulieu, born January 11 1932, died December 15 2022