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4231516
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# Sir Dai Llewellyn

##  Notorious Lothario known as the 'Conquistador of the Canape Circuit' -- or
simply 'Dirty Dai' .

7:00PM GMT 14 Jan 2009

Sir Dai Llewellyn, 4th Bt, who died on Tuesday aged 62, became famous as a
playboy, bon viveur and darling of the gossip columns, his reputation
reflected in soubriquets such as "Seducer of the Valleys", "Conquistador of
the Canape Circuit", "Dai 'Lock Up Your Daughters' Llewellyn" or simply "Dirty
Dai".

![Dai Llewellyn][1]

Dai Llewellyn attending a book launch at the Westbury Hotel, London in 2006

The son and heir of the gold-medal-winning equestrian baronet Sir Harry
"Foxhunter" Llewellyn, and brother of Princess Margaret's one-time paramour
Roddy Llewellyn, Dai Llewellyn was celebrated for his serial seductions of
"It" girls, models and actresses, his relentless appetite for partying and his
outrageous indiscretions.

Good-looking in his youth, with dark Welsh curls, his success with women was
famous. He claimed, in his heyday, to be in the habit of going through Queen
Charlotte's Balls "like a dose of salts". He insisted, though, that he "never
got up in the morning and thought, 'I'm going to screw three girls today'."
But: "If it happened, it happened."

His seduction methods were direct and somewhat lacking in refinement: "I am
not one of these oily Italian method-pullers," he said. "Thirty years, and I
still can't undo a bra. The only trick is that I do not waver. I know what I
want and so do they."

Stories of Llewellyn's priapic exploits, mostly gleefully retailed by the Don
Juan himself, proved irresistible to the tabloid press. The journalist Peter
McKay, who became a friend, was once having lunch with him at San Lorenzo when
Llewellyn suddenly leapt from the table and disappeared for half an hour.
"What happened?" asked McKay when his host returned, looking flushed. "Oh, I
just remembered," said Llewellyn. "I left my secretary tied up in the bath."

## Related Articles

  * [Sir Dai Llewellyn dies of cancer][2]

14 Jan 2009

Nor, it seemed, were members of the opposite sex put off by his claim that
women were "past it by the age of 30", a fact which, in his view, gave older
men the "right" to have affairs with young girls. In later life, however, he
admitted that time and the accretion of several stones in superfluous body fat
were taking their toll on his technique: "At my age and weight, it's taking me
about a month to laugh the ladies into bed."

Quite what Llewellyn did by way of a career was never entirely clear. He once
described himself as a "a kind of upper-class redcoat" who "earned his living
out of being Dai Llewellyn". In practice this seemed to involve a bit of PR
work, organising the odd celebrity party, and a lot of schmoozing of rich
toffs in jet-set nightclubs such as Tramp and Annabel's. "Dai Llewellyn's
London," wrote one interviewer, "is a web of reciprocal favours, backhanders
and feuds which require all his reputed Machiavellianism to manage."

One feud was that with his younger brother Roddy, with whom he fell out in the
1970s after he spilt the beans in the press about Roddy's relationship with
Princess Margaret. Dai claimed that his indiscretion ("for which I have eaten
humble pie ever since") was merely a "pretty tame" section of a four-part
autobiographical series about his own life, published when the affair with
Princess Margaret was already "common knowledge". Roddy Llewellyn, though,
took a different view.

If truth be told, Dai's appetite for humble pie had its limits. When Roddy
Llewellyn told the Daily Mail in 2006 that he could not forgive his brother's
"betrayal", Dai dismissed him, with characteristic insouciance, as a "snob and
a resentful, chippy little twerp", proclaiming that he had become "bored to
tears by the little twit". The brothers were reconciled shortly before Dai's
death.

David St Vincent Llewellyn was born at Aberdare on April 2 1946, followed, 18
months later, by his brother. Their family were Monmouthshire yeomanry who
found coal under the farm in the 19th century and then wangled a Lloyd George
baronetcy. Their father, Sir Harry Llewellyn, 3rd Bt, would win a gold medal
for showjumping at the 1952 Olympics on his horse Foxhunter. A second son, he
had already been knighted for services to sport when he inherited the
baronetcy from his elder brother, Rhys, in 1978. Dai's mother was the second
daughter of the 5th Lord de Saumarez and a descendant of Admiral Sir James
Saumarez, second-in-command to Nelson at the Battle of the Nile. "I hardly had
a relation who wasn't titled," Dai Llewellyn claimed.

After an early childhood spent at Gobion Manor near Abergavenny, the family
moved to Llanvair Grange in Monmouthshire. Dai was sent to prep school at
Hawtrees, and then to Eton, where his romantic inclinations were aroused by
the custom of soliciting letters from girls at nearby schools. "All the
letters that came back were put in a rack, and if the postmark said 'Ascot'
then you knew it was from a Heathfield girl; West Sussex was 'Southover'."
Unfortunately, Dai was a late developer. His voice did not break until he was
15, so the coveted letters never did arrive in his rack.

He made up for lost time when he went to study Philosophy at the University of
Aix-en-Provence. There he lost his virginity to an older, American woman "who
smelt so disgusting that it put me off doing it again for several months".

On his return to Britain, however, he "met someone wonderful and never looked
back". His career as a fully fledged cad and bounder had begun.

After Aix, Llewellyn got a salesman's job with Qantas, ran a travel agency in
Cardiff and moved for a while into advertising. Then, in the late 1960s, he
was invited to lunch by Victor Lownes, who ran the Playboy Club and had
recently bought the Clermont casino from John Aspinall and wanted Llewellyn's
advice. When Llewellyn suggested that it needed "more window-dressing to bring
the Arabs in", Lownes responded my making him the club's "social secretary".
"Start on Monday," Lownes ordered. "Double the salary."

According to Llewellyn, his job description was "to sit at a table, drink a
lot of claret, eat a lot and have a simply lovely time". Though he
subsequently left the Clermont and opened Tokyo Joe's in Piccadilly and
Wedgies on the King's Road (eventually resigning from both, "exhausted"), he
continued to live the onerous life of a Mayfair boulevardier into the 21st
century.

It was Nigel Dempster, in the early 1970s, who first noticed Llewellyn's
impressive track record in the bedroom and elevated him to the status of
gossip column fixture: "There was no Aids or anything -- it was a marvellous
time," Llewellyn reminisced. Quite what Sir Harry Llewellyn made of his son's
chosen career is not recorded. While Dai admitted that his father would
probably have preferred him to be "slightly more sensible", he felt that his
parents were at least relieved that he had not turned out to be a "pansy".

Llewellyn claimed to have fallen in love three times, firstly with Lady
Charlotte Curzon, to whom he claimed to have proposed 100 times in a single
evening (she turned him down). In the 1970s he was engaged to Beatrice Welles,
daughter of Orson, but their relationship became so tempestuous that people
stopped inviting them to parties. Inevitably, he broke it off.

In 1980 he married Vanessa Hubbard, the convent-educated niece of the Duke of
Norfolk. Signalling his determination to go on as if nothing much had
happened, he reportedly rolled up at the wedding, reached out of the car and
handed a near-empty bottle of champagne to a group of gawping youths. The
couple had two daughters but divorced seven years later.

Other women in his life included the 1960s pin-up Annegret Tree, Tessa Dahl,
daughter of Roald ("much prettier than Sophie"), Judith (now Lady) Wilcox and
the Swedish-born interior designer Christel Jurgenson, to whom he was briefly
engaged in 2006.

After succeeding in the baronetcy on the death of his father in 1999, Dai
Llewellyn bought a house at Aberbeeg, near Abertillery, and briefly flirted
with the idea of returning to his roots and becoming a respectable pillar of
Welsh society. In practice he spent little time in Wales, and in 2003 he
announced he was packing his bags, claiming he had been forced out by rampant
nationalism.

Llewellyn promised the (largely indifferent) Welsh people that he would return
across the Severn Bridge only for his own funeral, but in 2007 he injected
some excitement into the Welsh Assembly election campaign by announcing that
he would fight the marginal Cardiff North seat for the UK Independence Party.
Britain's withdrawal from the EU was "the most important issue there is", he
proclaimed, and the Assembly was "a load of Horlicks".

He never grew up. On a visit to South Africa aged 60, he claimed to have
fallen through a bedroom floor into a cellar while "attempting to roger a girl
called Nettie", the girlfriend of a friend. "I wish I could tell you this was
an isolated incident," he told a journalist.

Sir Dai Llewellyn is survived by his two daughters and numerous former
girlfriends. His brother succeeds him in the baronetcy.

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