‘I won’t be known as the Baroness Lovell Cocks!’

Diamond merchant Herman Laub was the first of her three husbands, her only Jewish spouse and had the unhappy distinction of making Lady Cocks Europe’s longest-serving agunah (Hebrew for chained wife) by refusing her a get (a religious divorce). Thanks to her ex she spent 45 years halachically married to him, a situation only finally resolved by the Orthodox lawyer Joanne Greenaway.

During their marriage, the couple lived in Belgium but after their civil divorce, he retained custody of their son and daughter, and Lady Cocks would travel back and forth from London to see them.

“I had to get away from him,” she says, “and when I left, he stole everything from me, my engagement ring, all my jewellery, everything.” After her civil divorce, she had thought to sell some of her jewellery to buy a flat in London, but discovered to her horror that Laub had removed the jewels from their settings and replaced them with glass. “I was left without a penny,” she says.

But she was glad to have left him. “He insulted me every day — and I had endured it for far too long. Leaving wasn’t just about seeking happiness. It was about honouring my own worth and refusing to live one more day in a life that diminished me.

“As I prepared to turn this significant page in my life, the silhouette of a new chapter began to take shape on the horizon. It would promise not only a change of scenery but a transformation of the heart and spirit. It was here that Trevor Mound entered the narrative, a figure as contrasting to Herman as daylight to dusk”.

She met Mound on a train back from Brussels to London, a journey she made only after fog delayed all flights.

“In my mid-40s, society might have considered me a middle-aged woman, but all of a sudden, I felt rejuvenated, invigorated by the love and new beginnings that Trevor offered. And so, after our respective divorces became legally finalised, we were wed.”

However, had her mother still been alive, they would not have. As she writes in her memoir, Mrs Davis would not have approved of her daughter marrying a non-Jew. But her mother had died and so Lady Cocks, as she has would become, went with her second husband  to Calcutta, where he was the British Deputy High Commissioner.

It was in Calcutta that, bored with an endless round of diplomatic lunches and dinners, and just as bored with the diplomatic wives, that the then Valerie Mound began to work with Mother Theresa and her nuns to help the city’s orphans. She can’t praise the nun, who knew she was Jewish, enough. “She was the most beautiful person in the world, and we worked together for a long time.” She also formed deep bonds with some of the orphans, relationships that endured long after her marriage to Mound had ended.

You could say he inadvertently helped bring about its demise. Mound had asked her to look after a VIP guest in Calcutta: one Michael Cocks. Valerie was resentful: why should she squire around a visiting dignitary and his wife, particularly when she wasn’t getting paid for her services.  

By chance another woman in the embassy said she ought to make use of the Foreign Office allowance for the wife of the head of mission.

It was the first she had heard of such an allowance, then £5000, and she asked Mound where it was. Casually, he said he had used it to pay some tailors’ bills. It would be final nail in the coffin of their already floundering marriage and before long Mrs Mound was back in London, where she divorced husband number two.

It was a chance phone call from the Ladbrokes businessman and Jewish philanthropist Cyril Stein that catapulted the future Lady Cocks back into the orbit of the Jewish community. He asked if she would take three months to organise a cross-communal event at the Albert Hall in support of Israel. She accepted with enthusiasm. Even in Brussels as Mrs Laub, she had built a reputation for organising events, “earning a little notoriety as someone who could handle the stickiest of situations with the grace of a diplomat and the guile of a street trader”.

The Albert Hall event was a great success and, almost in parallel, she reconnected with Labour MP Michael Cocks, made a life peer in October 1987. She asked if he would take her kibbutz cousins on a tour of the Houses of Parliament. He agreed and that, she says, was the decisive moment when she met “the love of my life”. The couple, divorced from their previous spouses, married in 1979 and were together until 2001, the year of his death.

Now a scarcely believable 93, Lady Cocks —  “I wouldn’t mind a boyfriend now, men have always liked me” — retains a salty sense of humour. When her third and final husband was awarded his life peerage he told her, she says, that he would take the name of his clergyman father and become known as the Baron Lovell Cocks. That, declared the daughter of Brick Lane, ever alive to innuendo, was too much. “I won’t be known as the Baroness Lovell Cocks!”

As so often, the lady had the final say.