but Zog remained until the spring of 1941 until he was offered Lord Parmoor's house in Buckinghamshire. In total, the Ritz was damaged nine times during bombing raids, and the Restaurant had to be closed twice. Edvard Beneš would entertain guests at a private luncheon at the hotel several times a week during the war years. In 1942, Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower and Charles de Gaulle met in the Marie Antoinette suite of the hotel to discuss operations, Brendan Bracken, who served as an observer and mouthpiece on political society in London, and Anglo-American politician Ronald Tree spent much time at the Ritz, and Tree lived there during the winter of 1940. Laura Long, who would later become Laura Spencer-Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, the second wife of John Spencer-Churchill, 10th Duke of Marlborough, the architectural writer James Lees-Milne, Harold Acton and writer Norman Douglas were regular diners at the Ritz during wartime. According to Alastair Forbes and Felix Hope-Nicholson, during World War II, the basement bar at the Ritz was reserved for gay and lesbian guests, while the one upstairs was for heterosexual guests. Hope Nicholson described it as "notoriously queer", and stated that "the Ritz bar became too chic, too popular and above all, too queer for the authorities". Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar, MP Harold Nicolson, Brian Howard, and Pauline Tennant were all regulars at the basement bar. Post-war years The hotel was owned for some thirty years by the Bracewell-Smith family, who also had significant stakes in the nearby Park Lane Hotel. Although the family were quick to earn a profit from the hotel, there was a turbulent period in the years after World War II, with a workers strike in 1946, and the restaurant attracting significant criticism in its quality of cuisine. On one occasion, a group of patrons of the Ritz, known as the "Friends of the Ritz", met with Sir Bracewell Smith in Park Lane Hotel to complain about the standards; Smith himself dined at the Ritz and informed them that it was quite satisfactory. Several suicides also darkened the reputation of the Ritz in the postwar years, including that of horse trainer Peter Beatty from the sixth-floor window in October 1949, and that of French gangster Baron Pierre de Laitre, who strangled love interest Eileen Hill to death in his second-floor room in March 1953 when she refused to marry him, before killing