Olga Deterding

Olga Deterding (1927–1978) was a wealthy heiress and socialite who regularly featured in the gossip columns of London Society during the Sixties and Seventies. She inherited an estimated £50 million from her father Sir Henri Deterding the founder of Royal Dutch Petroleum, and at one point in the seventies wanted to buy the troubled Observer newspaper. Known as the Mad Millionairess, she was an infamously eccentric partygoer and died in a nightclub on New Year's Eve after choking on a sandwich.^[1]

Her mother was Deterdings second wife, the White Russian Lydia Pavlovna Koudoyaroff (1904–80), a former mistress of his rival Calouste Gulbenkian.

She was educated at Oxford, but in 1956 she volunteered for duty in the kitchen at Dr. Albert Schweitzer's leper colony in West Africa, which she continued to do until the latters death in 1965.^[2]

She had affairs with the TV Broadcaster Alan Whicker 1966-69 to whom she was for a time engaged, and also with John Routh 1971-75.^[3]

References

1. ^ Andrew Barrow, International Gossip, A History of High Society 1970-80, p248.
2. ^ TIME Magazine 15 January 1979
3. ^ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/5000960/Alan-Whicker-interview-a-journey-of-a-lifetime.html

Persondata
Name	Deterding, Olga
Alternative names
Short description	Wealthy heiress and socialite
Date of birth	1927
Place of birth
Date of death	1978
Place of death