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She took to driving glamorous cars and owned a series of Aston Martins and an
Alvis convertible, all of which she drove with considerable élan. In later life
she was proud of her membership of the Institute of Advanced Motorists, whose
test she last took at the age of 80; it was a qualification that did not,
however, always reassure her passengers, who tended to compete for seats in the
back of her car.

In north Wales she taught her two grandsons to play cricket and
backgammon, beating one of them at the latter in the last few weeks of her life
(when he accused her of cheating, she maintained that she was palming pieces
only because the morphine she was prescribed made her absent-minded)

Lady Rose McLaren was a strong character who expressed firm, if
not always logical, views. But she was always ready to change her mind, and
proved a loyal friend. She loved handsome men, fast cars, skiing, cricket and
her garden.

Lady Rose McLaren
(Filed: 05/11/2005)

Lady Rose McLaren, who has died aged 86, enjoyed a brief career
as a ballet dancer before becoming a well-known figure in bohemian London from
the mid-1950s; she also established a successful business supplying flowers for
occasions such as the wedding of Princess Margaret.

She was born Rose Mary Primrose Paget, the fourth of five
daughters of the 6th Marquess of Anglesey, on July 21 1919 at the family's house
on Arlington Street, behind the Ritz Hotel in London. Her mother, Lady Marjorie
Manners, was a daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland; thus, Lady Diana Cooper was
Rose's aunt.

The Angleseys' elder daughters, Caroline and Elizabeth, were to
become famous beauties; their third daughter, Mary, was brain-damaged, and Rose
made herself responsible for her sister's welfare until Mary's death in
1996.

In her early years Rose inhabited a world (captured in her
father's home movies) in which nursery tea was served by white-gloved footmen at
the family's houses, Beaudesert, in Staffordshire, and Plas Newydd on Anglesey;
often she would be taken to other great family houses such as Belvoir and
Wilton. There was a brief experience of boarding school; brief because, when her
father visited her there for the first time, he found her so unhappy that he
removed her at once. After that, her education was entrusted to governesses, and
she grew up a voracious reader, particularly of history and biography.

In those days Plas Newydd played host to a lively artistic group,
chief among whom was Rex Whistler, who was in love with Rose's elder sister
Caroline and painted for the 6th Marquess in 1936-37 an enormous "mural" (in
fact, a 58-ft wide painting on a single piece of canvas) for the dining room of
the house.

In 1934 Rose appeared, with other members of her family, in a
black-and-white silent film made by her father called The Pink Shirts, which
satirised the British Fascist movement. But although she went on to have small
roles in two B-movies, her early ambition lay elsewhere. In her teens she
trained as a ballet dancer with Marie Rambert, and (under the name Rose Bayly)
made her debut at Sadlers Wells in Swan Lake in 1937. Margot Fonteyn, Frederick
Ashton, Robert Helpmann and many other leading figures in the world of dance
were to become life-long friends.

Meanwhile, she was the object of much romantic interest (she even
enjoyed a flirtation with her father's valet). Her most prominent and persistent
suitor was the handsome Valerian Wellesley, now the 8th Duke of Wellington, and
it would have been a resonant match, since the two families had close historical
connections: Rose's ancestor Henry William Paget, the 2nd Earl of Uxbridge, had
been created 1st Marquess of Anglesey for his service at the Battle of Waterloo,
in which he commanded the British, Hanoverian and Belgian cavalry, losing a leg
in the process. But although Rose Paget twice allowed herself to become engaged
to Wellesley, she twice broke it off.

Instead she married, in 1940, John McLaren, second son of Lord
Aberconway, the creator of the famous garden at Bodnant in north Wales. McLaren
was serving as a Mosquito pilot, and in order to see more of him, Rose made use
of her role as a Land Girl to follow him from one RAF base to another, finding
work on farms nearby. He later became a fighter pilot instructor, but died in
1953, leaving his wife with two young daughters.

After her husband's death, Rose McLaren became a prominent figure
in the bohemian group based around Muriel Belcher's Colony Room in Soho, making
enduring friendships with exotic figures such as Francis Bacon, Dan Farson and
George Melly.

In 1957 Rose McLaren started a successful flower business, in
partnership with her friend Pamela Forster. Known as Flower Services, it was run
from Rose McLaren's house at 24 Smith Street, Chelsea. Every morning she would
go to the old Covent Garden market (she found the porters' language "really
rather fierce - they make me feel 10 years younger") to purchase supplies for
her clients. Among her commissions was Princess Margaret's wedding to Antony
Armstrong-Jones in 1960, for which she provided 30,000 pink and red roses to
decorate The Mall. In the same year, working with Cecil Beaton, she supplied
25,000 carnations to adorn the Royal Opera House for a visit by President de
Gaulle.

In 1975 Rose McLaren left London, retiring to her house on the
Bodnant estate and becoming involved in charities and community affairs. She was
county chairman of the Macmillan Nurses, president of the Churchill Club of
Conway and, for many years, president of the Eglwysbach Show.

In north Wales she taught her two grandsons to play cricket and
backgammon, beating one of them at the latter in the last few weeks of her life
(when he accused her of cheating, she maintained that she was palming pieces
only because the morphine she was prescribed made her absent-minded).

For many years she patiently endured the pain that may have been
caused by her early days as a dancer, and she overcame three bouts of cancer,
the first in 1965, before the fourth killed her; she died on November 1.

Lady Rose McLaren was a strong character who expressed firm, if
not always logical, views. But she was always ready to change her mind, and
proved a loyal friend. She loved handsome men, fast cars, skiing, cricket and
her garden.

Although, in the years after her husband's death, she received
many offers, she never remarried. Her two daughters survive her.

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