Anita Leslie

Anita Leslie (21 November 1914 – 5 November 1985) was an Irish-born biographer and writer. She was a first cousin once removed of the British wartime Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill.

The eldest of three children born in New York City, to a wealthy Anglo-Irish landowning family (49,968 acres). Anita alongside her brothers Sir John Leslie, 4th Baronet, and Desmond Leslie were born to father Shane Leslie (Sir John Randolph Leslie, 3rd Baronet) and mother Majorie Ide the Vermont-born daughter of General Henry Clay Ide the US ambassador to Spain.

Anita's schooling was abysmal. She spent her childhood partly on a feudal estate in a country torn by conflict, partly in a London town-house where everyone in the 1920s seemed obsessed by cocktails, short skits, bobbed hair and Eton crops, and partly in strange schools and convents in various parts of Europe. But she always felt at home at Castle Leslie and her 1981 autobiography 'The Gilt and the gingerbread' details her early childhood and eventual decision to leave the home of her grandparents and play her part in the Second World War.

During the war she joined the Mechanised Transport Corps, as a fully trained mechanic and ambulance driver. Anita was stationed in Cairo, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan during the intervening years. In 1944 she drove ambulances with the free-French army though northern France and liberated a V2 Rocket Factory in Germany. She wrote letters home from Hitler's office in the Reich Chancellery and took part in the Victory parade in Berlin.

Anita met future husband Bill King in Lebanon in 1943, where King served for 5 months as executive officer of the submarine base at Beirut. She was on a skiing trip after doing duty in Africa in the Motor Transport Corps in 1940–42, although a letter mentions her being in Beirut in 1941–42. Leslie-King then became an ambulance driver in the French Army from 1944 to 1945. For the latter, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1945 by General Charles de Gaulle.

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