‍Lady Jane with Sheikh Medjuel el-Mezrab whom she wed in 1855

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‍LADY Jane Ellenborough was a magnificent horsewoman who could shoot a pheasant from the saddle at full gallop and speak nine languages.

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‍She was also a talented artist, writer and musician and was extremely rich and beautiful. She was a star in the bedroom too.

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‍In the early 1800s she was known in the Press and by the public as a lover of men and trod a scandalous path, her husbands and lovers included two kings, a baron, a count, a Greek war hero and a Bedouin sheik half her age. She was to have five children but only two survived to adulthood.

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‍Her life revolved around ballrooms and bedrooms and ended in a Bedouin tent. Stories of her affairs and scandals were in and out of newspapers of the time such as The Standard, The Morning Herald and the Times. But in truth she was a lonely and unhappy person.

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‍Jane was born Jane Digby in Holkham Hall, Norfolk on April 3, 1807, daughter of Admiral Sir Henry Digby and his wife Lady Jane Elizabeth Coke. The Admiral seized the Spanish treasure ship Santa Brígida in 1799 and his prize money established the family’s fortune.

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‍His daughter Jane’s first marriage was to Edward Law, the Earl of Ellenborough, who became Governor General of India. They had a son who died in childbirth. But her successive love affairs led to their divorce in 1830 and from then on, the beautiful aristocrat played the field for years hopping from one lover to the next and four husbands in her search to find the man of her dreams.

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‍But it wasn’t until she was 46, and in the desert that the former debutante found him. On her travels to Syria, she hired a new Bedouin escort named Sheikh Medjuel el-Mezrab, in his late twenties. He was the brother of the head of the Mezrab tribe, who had the hereditary right to conduct travellers to and from Palmyra, an ancient desert city 150 miles from Damascus, which Jane longed to visit.

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‍The Bedouins knew the position of all the wells along the route; provided camels and camps and repelled attacks from desert marauders. Foreign travellers were often murdered or kidnapped. The British Consul in Damascus warned her not to go but she did.

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‍She set out on what she called her “greatest adventure”, wearing a cloak over a simple cotton shift, and soft yellow kid boots on her feet. On her head, a white keffiyeh (long scarf) was held in place by a band of coloured silks.

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‍Medjuel was armed with knives, pistols and a sword, and carried a hooded hawk on his wrist. With difficulty, she mounted a loudly protesting camel and her caravan set off across the desert.

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‍The Bedouins pitched their black tents in the open desert lit by campfires, and sang wild, sad songs under the stars. Jane was mesmerised by the herbs, aromatic bushes and scarlet poppies that punctuated the sand. 

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‍Gazelles, jerboas and hares ran alongside her. It was a long way from the English mansion she grew up in.

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‍Medjuel showed her how to use the keffiyeh to protect her face and nostrils from the burning heat, and how to lie down and sleep comfortably on the camel’s back. They became close.

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‍One-night marauders poured into the encampment, brandishing lances and screaming war-cries. Medjuel fought them off with a pistol in one hand and a sabre in the other, shouting orders to his men. Jane was in awe of him.

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‍The caravan passed through the Valley of the Tombs with its strange towers dating back 2,000 years; and soon they glimpsed Palmyra’s magnificent, ruined temples and arches, gleaming like ivory in the sun. Jane fell in love with the place.

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‍She went on to buy land in Damascus and build a palatial villa where she devoted her time and energy to establishing a beautiful garden of desert flowers.

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‍One morning she saw a lone horseman riding through a sandstorm to her gates on a camel. It was Medjuel. He had come to ask her to marry him.

‍She became a Bedouin wife on March 27, 1855 and they were married for 28 years, spending half of each year as nomads and the other half in Damascus planting the flowers they collected in the desert, until Jane’s death from dysentery in 1881, aged 74.

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‍Medjuel, in tears standing at her graveside with her horse, had brought a block of pink limestone from Palmyra to Damascus and wrote her Arabic name in charcoal to be carved into the face by a local stone mason …. He wrote Shaikhah Umm al-Laban (sheikha mother of milk) because of the colour of her English skin. It is still visible to this day.

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‍From the Baltimore Sun, June 15, 1924 …

‍LOVE IS BLIND, THEY SAY

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‍FUNERAL PARLOUR THAT PUTS ON LAST PICTURE SHOW FOR STARS

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‍Joan Rivers’ funeral at Campbell’s illustrious funeral parlour
Inset actor Heath Ledger, Judy Garland and Joan

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‍WHAT DOES millionaire child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have in common with John Lennon, Judy Garland, Jacqueline Kennedy, Mae West and Greta Garbo?

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‍Answer: They all used the same exclusive and prestigious funeral parlour in Manhattan, a place of secrets. A place where every wish, every dream is catered for – at an enormous cost.

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‍Gold coffins; gold rooms; ashes turned into anchors on the seabed and even a one-way ticket for your remains to journey to the outer reaches of space.

‍For over a century, Frank E. Campbell has been the mortuary of choice for New York’s power brokers and world celebrities. In some circles, to end up anywhere else would be a fate worse than death.

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‍The Funeral Chapel occupies a five-storey building at 1076 Madison Avenue, in the heart of one of the city’s most expensive shopping districts.

‍A service might include a dozen horse-drawn carriages. Private jets and Rolls-Royce Phantoms can be reserved for grieving family members. The gold-hued coffin used for Ivana Trump’s service in 2022 cost $125,000. Or she could have had a sarcophagus for $150,000.

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‍The funeral parlour boasts in newspaper ads that they will fly anywhere in the world to arrange the dear departed’s funeral — at a cost of course.

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‍The staff, including bodyguards for hire, are sworn to secrecy but for the first time back in 2024 a New York Times writer, Alex Vadukul was given an exclusive tour of the luxury rest home for the stars’ last picture show.

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‍The mourners have been as famous as the bodies — Mickey Rooney, Lauren Bacall, James Mason and Otto Preminger to name but a few.

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‍In his feature in the newspaper’s archives Alex says: “In 1980, after the murder of John Lennon, the Campbell team arranged for a decoy hearse with a coffin and Beatles memorabilia, to lure away the horde of journalists camped out front.

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‍“In 1994, when Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in her Fifth Avenue apartment, a Campbell undertaker sipped through the crowds outside her building and embalmed the body in her home.

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‍“My guide paused at a photo of a scuba diver placing a starfish-shaped sculpture made from human ashes on the ocean floor. ‘We have the ability to send a client’s ashes to a coral reef off the coast of Miami,’ he said. ‘It’s a segment of reef we have total access to’.”

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‍There is even a new rooftop patio with a nightclub, The Terrace at 1076 … for those mourners who want to celebrate life through the evening.

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‍The inner workings of Frank E. Campbell are almost as mysterious as the afterlife itself. Its pallbearers, doormen, cosmeticians and embalmers honour a code of silence when it comes to clients. Its website makes no mention of its illustrious customers.

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‍William Villanova, the president of Frank E. Campbell since 2018, says that discretion is a crucial part of his job.

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‍“We appreciate that people are curious, however privacy is our standard,” said Mr. Villanova, 54. “But people try. They sure do try. We’ve seen them hiding inside cars, behind cars, behind trees, dustbins. Anything to get a glimpse. But I never discuss our clients.”

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‍As for sending ashes into space Frank E. Campbell has a brochure entitled: ‘An Out-of-This-World Memorialisation.’

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‍The description of the service notes: There’s no more compelling send-off for someone who loves science fiction, marvels at space or simply longs to be at one with the cosmos.’

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‍He added: “The family gets the coordinates of where they will be sent into space, and the ashes go up in a rocket.”

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‍He stressed that everyone was welcome at the home for the dead. It had handled services for notorious figures like Jeffrey Epstein and 1930s crime boss Frank Costello.

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‍“We do not judge the dead,” Mr. Villanova said. “Maybe the public saw someone a certain way, but to someone else, that was their father or their mother. We see the grandchildren crying.”

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‍The funeral parlour’s founder Frank Campbell was born in Illinois in 1872. As a teenager he built caskets for a local undertaker before moving to Manhattan. He died in January 1934, aged 61 and was buried in a solid bronze sarcophagus.

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‍It stayed under a staircase for 50 years, in a cemetery row.

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‍CIRCUS COUPLE WHO MADE THE BIG TIME IN THE VICTORIAN PRESS

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‍IT WAS a giant wedding, literally. The bride wore a wedding dress given to her by Queen Victoria and her groom sported a gold watch from the monarch.

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‍They were both giants who found favour with the Palace, the Telegraph reported on June 17, 1871, from St Martin-in-the-Fields church in Trafalgar Square, London.

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‍Anna Swan was 7ft 11ft tall and Martin Bates was 7ft 9in. They had met and fallen in love working for PT Barnum’s Circus.

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‍“A man may get used to being eight feet high, but to be eight feet high and to be stared at by a devout congregation of idlers on the occasion of marrying a lady who is eight feet high also, is a trying conjunction of matters. However, Captain Bates got through his difficulties tolerably well.”

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‍The couple went on to have the longest and heaviest baby ever born, at 22 lb and measuring 28 in long at their home in Seville, Ohio, where they built a ranch house with 14ft ceilings and bred ponies.

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‍Sadly, their baby only lived for around 11 hours. His father said after his passing: “He was perfect in every respect and looked like an ordinary child of six months.”

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‍Anna died unexpectedly of heart failure on August 5, 1888, at her home the day before her 42nd birthday. Her husband ordered a 15-foot-tall statue of a Greek Goddess from Europe, for her grave. He later died, aged 82, of a kidney disease.

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‍TERRY MANNERS

‍30 March 2026

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