Hugh Gaitskell spouse Dora Gaitskell, Baroness Gaitskell
Personal life
Whilst a WEA lecturer in the late 1920s Gaitskell lived for a time with a local woman in Nottinghamshire. This is thought to have been his first adult relationship. Until the early 1930s he rejected marriage as a "bourgeois convention".According to Michael Bloch, Gaitskell enjoyed a number of same-sex relationships while at Oxford, including with John Betjeman, and in the 1930s in Vienna, with John Gunther.By the mid-1930s Gaitskell had formed a close relationship with a married woman, Mrs. Dora Frost (née Creditor), who came out to join him in Vienna for the latter part of his stay there. Adultery still carried such stigma that she thought it best not to help him during his Parliamentary campaign in Chatham in 1935. After her divorce, hard to obtain prior to the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937, they were eventually married on 9 April 1937, Gaitskell's thirty-first birthday, with Evan Durbin as best man. Dora had a son, Raymond Frost (b 1925), from her first marriage. The Gaitskells had two daughters: Julia, born in 1939 and Cressida, born in 1942. Dora Gaitskell became a Labour life peer one year following her husband's death, and died in 1989.Gaitskell had a long-term affair in the 1950s with the socialite Ann Fleming, the wife of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. She wrote to Evelyn Waugh about a dinner party in 1958 in which Gaitskell and friends from Oxford days "held hands and recited verse because in early life they had loved each other in the same set", until the arrival of her husband "silenced the eminent homos" who "did not seem too pleased." Woodrow Wyatt wrote that "there was a scintilla of platonic homosexuality in [Gaitskell's] affection for Tony [Crosland]"In private, he was humorous and fun loving, with a love of ballroom dancing. This contrasted with his stern public image. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group.
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