When Lady Meux Declared War on Dragonflies
Fred Cripps, a close friend of Lady Valerie Meux in her later years, had a front‑row seat to her eccentricities.
One of the strangest? Her fierce dislike of dragonflies.
Fred recalled a day in the garden at Theobalds when Valerie spotted one. Outraged, she summoned the head gardener — or so she thought — and dismissed him on the spot.
“Gibbons,” she said, “I have given you a gun and cartridges to shoot all the dragonflies here. You have not carried out my instructions; I have just seen one.”
Cripps stepped in, gently pointing out that shooting dragonflies was… not exactly easy.
Valerie relented. Gibbons kept his job.
In truth, Gibbons wasn’t the head gardener at all, but the head keeper — and Valerie later left him £300 in her will.
Fred himself would go on to become 3rd Baron Parmoor, but he never forgot the day Lady Meux tried to wage war on a dragonfly.
Source: Cripps, F. H., Colonel The Hon. Life’s a Gamble, Odhams Press Limited, London, 1957.
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