Primrose Dunlop: socialite jilted at the altar by an ‘Ottoman prince’
After Venice entered the solemnities of Holy Week in 1990, the city’s canals rippled to a sensation as intriguing as any of its pre-Lenten medieval masquerades. The unlikely protagonist was the 36-year-old Australian.
After Venice entered the solemnities of Holy Week in 1990, the city’s canals rippled to a sensation as intriguing as any of its pre-Lenten medieval masquerades. The unlikely protagonist was a 36-year-old Australian called Primrose Dunlop, about to be elevated to the status of Ottoman princess after her marriage to Prince Giustiniani, aka Lorenzo Montesini, at the Basilica di San Pietro di Castello. Thereafter the couple would be borne triumphantly, the bride resplendent in a diadem of gold oak leaves, at the head of a regatta of gondolas to a candelit reception in the long marble hall of the Palazzetto Pisani.
Yet just before this fairytale could be played out, the groom and his lover (who was also the best man) absconded before Dunlop could slip into her Balenciaga wedding dress, making their exit to Paris pursued by the paparazzi, who could not believe their luck. The treasurer of the Conservative Party, Lord McAlpine, and the bestselling British novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford were among the 70 guests left looking at the moonlit waters in bewilderment. Yet before too many tears were shed, the reality of the proposed match came to light - though accounts differ.
Dunlop, known to her friends as “Pitty Pat”, was the daughter of the wealthy Sydney socialite Lady Potter. By day Pitty Pat worked for McAlpine’s Sydney office; by night she boulevarded the city’s better-heeled cocktail parties and wrote a column for Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph. Whenever her finances allowed, she flew to London and ignored her jet lag to launch herself on to the fringes of British high society. The problem was that her finances would not stretch to enough of these excursions for her liking.
Enter Montesini, a dashing Sydney socialite who had grown up in the raffish postwar glamour of the Egyptian city of Alexandria and claimed to have royal Ottoman blood via his maternal grandmother, Princess Anna Grazia Papajionavi Giustiniani. He variously styled himself as Prince Giustiniani, Count of the Phanaar, Knight of Saint Sophia and Baron Alexandroff, though his mother’s illegitimacy cast considerable doubt on the authenticity of these titles.
Not that that worried Pitty Pat’s mother, who utilised Montesini as a “spare man” at dinner parties. He cheekily called her “the Empress” in return. Montesini paid for his tuxedos by working as a steward for Qantas, the airline. His long-term partner was Robert Straub, whom he had met while both were conscripted into the Australian army in 1967 to serve in the Vietnam War. Amid the hostilities, their relationship blossomed one night on a beach.
Over a cocktail with Montesini and Straub, Pitty Pat bemoaned the expense of flying to London. Straub reportedly suggested that she marry Montesini to obtain cheap tickets. In return, the gay couple would have cover for their relationship. The match was firmly approbated by Potter, delighted at the thought of her daughter’s impending “ennoblement”. The engagement was announced in 1989, yet denizens of smart Sydney dinner parties were already speculating that Montesini’s royal connections were bogus and that he was in fact an Egyptian-born chancer in a long-term relationship with another man. Montesini later claimed that he wanted to call off the wedding long before the date. Each time he raised the subject with the Empress - who seemed to have taken full ownership of the fantasy - she would scold him: “Now now, Lorenzo.”
“I was in this bubble. Midsummer madness. I tried to be as sane as I could, but it did get completely out of hand [and] I found myself on a plane heading for Italy,” Montesini later told the American TV station ABC. Finally, his nerve broke after being presented with a bill. “I was asked to pay for a rather large lunch and I said ... ‘That’s it, not doing it’.” He later lamented that Sydney’s wealthy set dropped him “like a stone”. He settled for a quiet life with Straub, who died in his arms, of Aids, in 1995.
For her part, Pitty Pat kept her counsel on the wedding that never was. Three years later she met George Kirk, a Pole who had deserted the Royal Navy in Tasmania and made his fortune in Australia as a property agent. On the eve of their wedding in 1993, she received another bombshell. This time the shock was more felicitous - he had discovered that he was Count Jerzy Krasicki v Siecin, tracing his lineage to a 15th-century noble family in Poland. Pitty Pitt had married for love and returned down the aisle a countess.
Anne-Margaret Primrose Dunlop was born in Sydney in 1954 to Roger Dunlop, an army doctor, and Primrose (nee Anderson Stuart), who would tell anyone willing to listen that she was second cousin twice removed of the 6th Earl of Rosebery. Her mother later married Sir Ian Potter, a wealthy stockbroker, thereby acquiring the title Lady Potter. Her stepdaughter Carolyn would later marry Simon Parker Bowles, then brother-in-law to Camilla (now Queen Camilla). Aged 22 Primrose married Roger White, a member of the Plymouth Exclusive Brethren, but the restraints of that sect were not for her and the union was later annulled.
Her husband predeceased her in 2018. She is survived by their daughter Zofia, who in 2022 was reported to be a design student living in London. If she never lived down the Venetian fiasco, Countess Primrose Krasicki von Siecin never complained and was described by friends as witty, unpretentious and fun.
- Primrose Dunlop (Countess Primrose Krasicki von Siecin), Australian socialite, was born on March 11, 1954. She died of dementia on February 5, 2025, aged 70
The Times