Olga Deterding

Who is Olga Deterding?

Olga Deterding 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 following his death in 1939. Her mother was Deterding's second wife, the White Russian Lydia Pavlovna Koudoyaroff, a former mistress of his rival Calouste Gulbenkian. Olga Deterding was educated at Oxford University, but in 1956 she became an unpaid volunteer at Albert Schweitzer's leper colony in Lambarene, West Africa. Without any medical training, she worked in the kitchen and at other tasks. but refused to see even visitors she knew. Deterding remained with Schweitzer for a year until she became ill with a tropical disease. After this, she lived in Tahiti for six months. In Beirut, a city she apparently disliked, Deterding found that a flight to Paris was a week away, but the option of flying around the world to reach Paris meant that she could leave at once. Deterding arrived back in Paris later than if she had remained in Beirut.

From 1966 to 1969, she had a relationship with the broadcaster Alan Whicker, with whom she was for a time engaged, and made Whicker her heir in a will. By now, subject to mood swings, she was suffering from bulimia and an addiction to tranquillisers. Shortly after attempting to commit suicide in Whicker's flat, she suddenly left.