a dancer and joined the Grosvenor House cabaret, but has also been described as a minor actress, with platinum hair and blue eyes. She was known as Cecily or Cissie. The Herne Bay Press said: "She had a talent for dancing, and linked with it was a charming personality, so that for some years she enjoyed much popularity locally, appearing in dancing displays at the old Pier Theatre and elsewhere. Her attractiveness won her success as a dancer in London, where she appeared for several seasons in the West End." Cissie and the Sultan Courtship On 25 June 1934, it was announced in the Court Circular that Ibrahim, Sultan of Johor had arrived at the Grosvenor House Hotel in Park Lane at the West End of London, during part of his world tour that year. He left for continental Europe, but returned to the Grosvenor House Hotel on 6 September. Cissie was appearing as a dancer in the floor show at the same hotel, and first met him there. She became his favourite, and the Sultan was "fabulously wealthy": in 1935 he gave £500,000 to the British Government for the defence of Singapore, and in 1940 he gave £250,000 towards the cost of World War II. He was also a six-foot-six-inch-tall playboy, whose playgrounds included Sumatra and London, and the relationship with Cissie continued. The Sultan funded a new home for Cissie in Herne Bay in 1934 or 1935, and by 1935 she was living in the newly built Mayfair Court. She is recorded as living there in 1935; also in 1936 when her father, Lieutenant Hill, retired and came to live with her and her mother. On 20 July 1936, Cissie and her mother Florence Cecilia Hill arrived at Southampton from Colombo on the ship Sibajak. According to local historian Harold Gough, she and the Sultan travelled frequently to Johor and Europe in the 1930s. Sometime in 1937, robbers broke into Mayfair Court and stole £5,000-worth of jewellery from Cissie's bedroom; this brought the affair with the Sultan into the public eye. Descriptions of the stolen items were published, and it was disclosed that two of them were inscribed, "With all my love, S.I." S.I. was Sultan Ibrahim, but Cissie's personal life had been private, and local rumour had invented an Indian maharajah to account for the Hill family's rise in fortune and for the building of Mayfair Court