THIS week will see the 75th anniversary of the death of Margot Asquith, the Scottish woman who came to be a dominant figure in London society and political circles as the wife of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.

It would be wrong to dismiss her as merely Mrs Asquith, however, as Margot was a considerable figure in her own right, an author who is remembered for her witticisms that are often still quoted nowadays.

Asquith was born Emma Margaret Alice Tennant, the sixth daughter and eleventh child of the wealthy industrialist and MP Sir Charles Tennant and his wife Emma née Winsloe, on February 2, 1864. Always known as Margot, she was brought up at The Glen, the family’s magnificent country estate near Peebles in the Scottish Borders.

She once described her younger self as “a child of the heather and quite untameable,” and spent her time riding horses, playing golf and generally avoiding much of a formal education, though she was a voracious reader and writer all of her life.

After the obligatory spell at finishing school in London and brief studies in Germany, she and her sisters Charlotte (Charty) and Laura entered London society where they were part of a fashionably intellectual set called The Souls. Margot was not beautiful in the accepted sense of that word at the time, but her looks were arresting. She wrote of herself: “I do not say I was ever what I would call ‘plain’, but I have the sort of face that bores me when I see it on other people.” She was, however, slim and trim from her country pursuits. She also had a great capacity for making influential friends, such as Prime Minister William Gladstone.

The death from tuberculosis of her sister Laura in 1888 was a devastating blow to Margot, who consequently suffered insomnia for the rest of her life.

Having been introduced to the Liberal Home Secretary Herbert Henry Asquith, in 1894 at the age of 30 she married the politician, who was then in his 40s, and whose first wife Helen had died in 1891. The couple were opposites in personality, but were happy together and had five children, only two of whom survived childhood, Elizabeth and Anthony. The former married a Romanian prince and found fame as a writer under her married name Bibesco, while Anthony became a renowned film director.

Margot also became step-mother to Asquith’s five children from his first marriage. One of them, Violet Bonham Carter – grandmother of the actress Helena Bonham Carter – later wrote: “She flashed into our lives like some dazzling bird of paradise, filling us with amazement, amusement, excitement, sometimes with a vague uneasiness as to what she might do next.”

In her autobiography, Margot penned her thoughts on marriage generally: “To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has never had a chance, poor devil, you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.”

It was Margot who introduced Asquith to the upper ranks of society, and she oversaw their home life in an exquisitely furnished London mansion, while looking down her prominent nose at other homes. She wrote: “Rich men’s houses are seldom beautiful, rarely comfortable, and never original. It is a constant source of surprise to people of moderate means to observe how little a big fortune contributes to Beauty.”

Asquith became Prime Minister in 1908, and was in post when World War I started. In her memoirs she recalled that on August 3, 1914, crowds gathered in Downing Street: “From the happy expression on their faces you might have supposed that they welcomed the war. I have met with men who loved stamps, and stones, and snakes, but I could not imagine any man loving war.”

Asquith was not a great wartime leader, not helped by Margot’s outspokenness. Though he stayed Liberal Party leader, he was replaced as PM by David Lloyd-George, of whom Margot said: “There is no Lloyd-George. There is a marvellous brain; but if you were to shut him in a room and look through the keyhole there would be nobody there.” She added later: “He couldn’t see a belt without hitting

below it.”

She had trenchant views of other public figures. She said of Lord Birkenhead: “He’s very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head.” Much later she would say of Labour’s Stafford Cripps: “He has a brilliant mind until he makes it up.”

She said of one woman friend: “She tells enough lies to ice a wedding cake.” She also had a particular down on Amercians, quipping: “What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.”

Delighting in gossip, she once wrote: “Rumour is untraceable, incalculable, and infectious.” She was not averse to spreading them, saying: “My dear old friend King George V told me he would never have died but for that vile doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn.”

Before her husband stood down as Liberal leader and was raised to the peerage as the Earl of Oxford and Asquith, making Margot a Countess, she brought out her autobiography in 1920 when she was 56. It caused a scandal with her revelations of just who said what about whoever, and was condemned by The Times as a “scandal which cannot be justified or excused”. The Spectator said “the publication could only be justified had the book been by a dead woman about dead men and women.”

The American critic Dorothy Parker was also an acid wit, writing: “The affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.”

Asquith died on July 28, 1945, heartbroken at the recent death of her daughter Elizabeth, who had been trapped in Romania during World War II.

There was one great story told of Margot Asquith which unfortunately may not be true. She is supposed to have heard the American actress Jean Harlow mispronouncing her first name and replied: “The t is silent, as in Harlow.”

It was more likely the actress Margot Grahame who made the wisecrack. Still, it sounds like Margot Asquith.