Her parents divorced in 1903[1] and the first volume of her autobiography is brief on her childhood years,[2] although she later records that her father worked overseas in the Empire and that she had a peripatetic upbringing that variously included Kenya, Italy and Ireland.

Mabel then attended Haberdashers' Aske's School for Girls[2] describing her period as a pupil as a mixture of good friends, boredom, bad food and teaching that she loathed.

Returning to London she applied to work at the National Munitions Filling Factory in Hayes, Middlesex lying about her age since she was under eighteen years.

It exploded, killing several workers and seriously injuring Lethbridge who had extensive injuries that included the loss of a lung, an ear and her left leg which was blown off.

[5] In 1922 she married Noel Eric Sproule Kalenberg, a Cambridge University graduate[9] and a member of a Jewish family of Dutch extraction long established in Sri Lanka.

[12] Mabel Lethbridge had recognised that people wanted living accommodation in Chelsea where her family resided and accordingly opened an estate agency with a prestigious address in Cheyne Walk.

It was a major success allowing Lethbridge to remove herself from the poverty of the immediate post war years, maintain a house in London and a rural retreat in Chertsey, Surrey.

The severe injuries that she had received as a worker at the Hayes Munitions Factory necessitated many more operations and her health was not improved by living in a polluted London.

In the post war period St Ives maintained a vibrant writing and artistic community with whom Lethbridge became involved in part, because of her enjoyment of bohemian values but also as a benefactor.

She provided the abstract painter Sven Berlin and his wife with a cottage and a studio and championed Bryan Wynter, the latter subsequently marrying her daughter Suzanne in 1949.

The Sydney Morning Herald noted that Lethbridge's success "depended upon her quick recognition of the change of fashions… One can marvel at this story of immense and unscrupulous pluck and can but admire the dauntless Peggy.