The Great Lady in her stately pile

On the weekend, the Jet-Set Hobo sat down for a chat with one of the Grand Dames of Beirut: Yvonne, Lady Cochrane Sursock. Among her other qualities, this indefatigable and splendid lady is a living link to a bygone age. “I’m 87,” she told me, “and my Grandfather was born in 1815, the year of the Battle of Waterloo.” Yet even as Lady Cochrane approaches her tenth decade, it is evident that she was once a very great beauty. I asked her if she thought Lebanon would be better off under an aristocratic, not to say feudal system, to which she responded that it would depend on what kind. But after a bit of prevarication, she admitted, yes.

We sat together in the study of the Palais Sursock, a room lined with books and heavy gold brocade curtains, some of them rather threadbare. The price of upkeep on these houses, don’t you know? Lady Cochrane spoke of the utter ruination of her country, and the city she loves; describing the lost garden city and the coastline around Beirut which was once a playground, but is now little better than a sewer; she told of greedy developers knocking down a Roman temple and baths, to build yet another high rise block of flats. “We had a minister who listed 600 houses as historical places, now little more than a decade later, only three or four are left.”

A butler brought us tea and biscuits and closed the shutters on the windows, as night drew down. When eventually I left her magnificent home however, it was the Lady herself who showed me to the door. As I passed out of the gate, and back into the present day, I noticed the stone wall around the house was riddled with bullet holes, presumably from the civil war.  As bleak as things must seem sometimes, for someone who knows what has been lost in the last half-century or so, at least there aren’t gun battles in the streets these days.

At one point I’d said to Lady Cochrane that while her pronouncements were grim, there was often a smile on her face and a twinkle in her eyes. The look she flashed me in response, well it might best be described as girlish.