Susan Mary Guinness

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1438995/Shoe-Taylor.html

Shoe Taylor, who has died aged 58, became the long-standing mistress of the eccentric politician, businessman and writer Jonathan Guinness (now Lord Moyne) after an eventful decade during which she pursued the life of a wandering hippy.

Her story was told in 1989, when Guinness (best known for his vigorously Right-wing views - he was chairman of the Monday Club in the early 1970s) published an account of her life in a doomed attempt to forestall tabloid gossip about his polygamous relationship with Shoe, with whom he had three children, and his second wife Suzanne, with whom he had two.

Susan Mary Taylor (known as "Shoe") was born over her father's butcher's shop at Oldham, Lancashire, on July 26 1944. As a child, she helped out in the slaughterhouse: "The slaughterer slit the carcass down the middle, and pushed the steaming insides, or rops, towards me. My job was to pick them up, pull each part away from the slime which holds it together and put it in the rops bucket, separating the large intestines from the small, the stomach from the throttle." Meanwhile, her father told her: "Don't forget the maggots." It was not work for a beautiful young girl with dreams of glamour, but there was romance amid the offal: one February 14, her father gave her mother a Valentine's gift consisting of a raw sheep's heart pierced with a meat skewer.

After leaving school aged 14, Shoe drifted from job to job, working as a nursing cadet, delivery van driver for her father and eventually setting up in business as a hairdresser. But the rops bucket never seemed far away, and she longed to escape. After seeing The Sound of Music, it "became obvious" that her destiny lay in Austria, even though she knew nobody there and had not a word of German.

Accordingly, aged 21, she hitchhiked across Europe hoping to meet a version of the von Trapp family, thus becoming perhaps the only person in the world to have been inspired to adopt an alternative lifestyle by Julie Andrews. Instead, she charred for a princess and became a hippy, embarking on a vagabond life of hitching and busking her way round squats and communes in Europe, north Africa and Asia, risking her health with drugs while trying to improve it with macrobiotics, eastern mysticism, alchemy and magic.

In Britain, she joined "love-ins" and Legalise Pot rallies and associated with Alan Ginsberg, Felix Topolski and Venetia Stanley Smith; in Beirut, she became a circus performer, riding a hermaphrodite elephant called Sally; in Munich, she danced in the chorus of Hair. She also worked as a tea lady for the Beatles at Apple Studios and performed topless as "the world's strongest woman" with a burlesque circus act from Paris.

She sat at the feet of a guru in India; worked as a geisha in Japan (where her form was used as a mould to make dummy western women for shop windows), and spent a summer on the Spanish island of Formentera where she got high and learned to play the tom-toms.

Shoe Taylor survived several brushes with the law - and with death. In Tunis she was jailed, then deported, for taking cannabis through customs; she did two stints in Holloway for the same offence. Following the hippy trail to Marrakesh, she met Jean François, a young Frenchman who "read the Bhagavad Gita and the Tibetan Book of the Dead and was on a serious spiritual search". Looking for the best hash cakes in Morocco, he took her to Rabat, where they were kidnapped - and she gang-raped - by five Arab men.

By the time she met Jonathan Guinness in 1978, Shoe Taylor had become a bulimic recluse living in a stone hut in the foothills of the Pyrenees, reduced to scrounging around restaurants and guzzling leftovers which she would then immediately vomit.

She turned up at a St Sebastian's Day party which Guinness was giving at his house in the Costa Brava village of Cadaques; they met again at a local art exhibition and struck up a conversation. She was "good-looking with her high cheekbones, balanced features and bold, brown-eyed gaze," Guinness recalled. "She strode like an athlete. She looked wild, but only up to a point because she was in fact quite tidy. Her gipsy appearance owed more to the casting department than the caravan site."

Guinness immediately realised that they had something in common when she told him she had done time in Holloway. He informed her that his mother (the former Diana Mitford, later Lady Mosley, who died last Monday) had been a political prisoner during the war. This was a test, as he later explained, to make sure that Shoe Taylor was non-political. She passed with flying colours: not only had she never heard of Diana's husband, the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, but, Guinness recalled, "she didn't even know that Britain does not suppose itself to go in for political prisoners. I liked this".

He sent her a copy of his mother's autobiography, A Life of Contrasts, and they began a correspondence, she writing to him as "Dear Ear", as if he were "the reeds to which the barber whispered King Midas's secrets".

As a result of her bulimia (which she had developed after the gang rape), Shoe Taylor had lost all her teeth, replacing them with a temporary set of "big men's ones with a gold eyetooth so that the rest would seem more real". Although Jonathan Guinness was twice married and had several children, he and Shoe began an affair. She bore him three more children and eventually moved to Cornwall as his mistress. Guinness paid for her upkeep while remaining married to Suzanne, his wife since 1964.

Shoe's affair with the Guinness heir was a society rumour for years before he published her biography, Shoe: an Odyssey of a Sixties Survivor, in 1989. He claimed that it was intended to forestall a tabloid smear, but the book only fuelled his reputation for eccentricity, while revealing Shoe's rackety past in explicit and often gynaecological detail.

The experience would have been humiliating for most women, but not for Shoe, who gamely undertook publicity photographs with her children, as well as with Jonathan (both standing on their heads). She drew strength from her lover's devotion, shaking off her addiction to drugs and her bulimia, though not her enthusiasm for new age therapies. Earlier this year, after having surgery and chemotherapy for breast cancer, she was to be found belting out Beatles hits through a battery-powered megaphone in the foyer of the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool - part of a "free-thinking" therapy she had discovered.

By this time, Jonathan Guinness had succeeded his father as Lord Moyne. In 2000 he was declared bankrupt and disqualified from serving as a director for five years as a result of his dealings with a company wound up by the High Court in 1997; two years ago he was acquitted of embezzlement by a Swedish court. He and Shoe helped to make ends meet by selling magnetised wristbands as a treatment for arthritis. They remained devoted to each other.

Shoe Taylor died on July 17. Her son and two daughters survive her.