Maudie Littlehampton
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Maud, Countess of Littlehampton, known as Maudie, is a cartoon character created by Osbert Lancaster. From the late 1940s until Lancaster’s retirement in 1981 Maudie was the leading character in his regular cast of his pocket cartoons in The Daily Express.
For a humorous exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1973, Lancaster created a lineage and background for Maudie. She is supposedly the only daughter of Sir Julian Manifest, Bt, and his wife Lady Claribel Manifest, third daughter of the 5th Marquess of Pontefract. Lancaster's biography of her records her as a debutante in the late 1920s, which would put her year of birth at about 1910 (Lancaster was born in 1908).[1][2]
At some unspecified date in the inter-war years Maudie married her distant cousin, William Courantsdair, Viscount Draynefleet, the eldest son and heir of the 7th Earl of Littlehampton, who succeeded his father in the earldom in 1937. During the Second World War, during which her husband was on active service in the Household Cavalry, she worked in MI5, MI6, SOE, PWE and the YWCA. Lancaster adds that she was also constantly liaising with the Free French, and towards the end of the war worked in the British Embassy in Cairo.[1]
Willy Littlehampton's political activities in the House of Lords were few but effective, and in the post-war decades Maudie contemplated going into politics. At the 1951 General Election she stood as a Liberal candidate,[n 1] but lost her deposit twice: the first time to the Labour candidate, in a game of pontoon.[4] Her policy was to have no policy, as neither of the other parties had one.[5] Thereafter, her eclectic views – extreme right on some matters and extreme left on others – prevented her adoption by any of the British parties. She was a non-party independent member of her local council, and as chairman of its planning committee she successfully strove to preserve the green belt around the town of Draynefleet.[1]