Foreign News: Violet to Copenhagen

Last week Detroit lost, and Copenhagen was about to gain a rare and spectacular British diplomatic hostess. Leslie C. Hughes-Hallett, British consul in Detroit, sailed from Manhattan to become consul general at Copenhagen. Of greater interest was the fact that Consul Hughes-Hallett was taking along his blue-eyed, dark-haired wife, Violet Holmes-Tidy Hughes-Hallett. She likes snakes and rats.

As a child in India, Hostess Hughes-Hallett was taught by her father, a British Army officer, to love all animals and especially those that other people despised. When she was three, Father Holmes-Tidy got her used to snakes by keeping a 14-foot python as a house pet. Live snakes are not always available to city dwellers, and when the Hughes-Halletts first moved to Detroit, Mrs. Hughes-Hallett had a hard time getting enough pets. She solved the problem by calling up the Police Department and requesting that any snakes they found be turned over to her. Commented indulgent Husband Leslie: “Once it was rather difficult for Violet to get snakes, but now they are arriving in carload lots.”

Beside the consul and his consort, soon there were living at the comfortable Hughes-Hallett establishment in Detroit’s Indian Village, three white rats named Mehitabel, Ermyntrude and Sonia; a special brown-and-black-spotted rat called

The Sultan; a guinea pig named Winnie-the-Pooh; two garter snakes, Becky Sharp and Thackeray; two four-and five-foot pilot black snakes, Pythagoras and Snookie; an adolescent alligator, John Lewis; Mrs. Hughes-Hallett’s mother and two bubbling, healthy children, Son David (now at Cambridge) and Daughter Kathleen (an Olympic-team fencer).

Mrs. Hughes-Hallett also collects Chinese prints and Bessarabian rugs, is an accomplished pianist and mezzo-soprano, has sung under the name of Mme Vimara, has composed an opera called Chimera and a march named Dynamic Detroit, and has a book of poems entitled White Magic to her credit. Detroit is more likely to remember her, however, for her frequent appearances around town with a pet bull snake (“A perfect lamb,” she called him) coiled around her neck, and for her always interesting parties.

Most unusual of Mrs. Hughes-Hallett’s fiestas was one for Dr. Emil Rothman on his return from Cleveland after a serious abdominal operation. Suddenly a long-faced butler wheeled a hospital operating table into the centre of the drawing room, with careful solemnity folded the sheets back, revealing a dummy with a pink tissue-paper stomach. The “stomach” was split open and out came spaghetti and link sausages.