Edith Sitwell

by Richard Greene

  The letter was moot – Sitwell lived another half-century – but in 1914 she decided to care for Helen Rootham as long as she lived. That arrangement actually went long past Rootham’s death in 1938 as Sitwell then assumed her sister Evelyn as a dependant on the same terms. She remarked in 1945: ‘I should have been lost if it had not been for them.’40 However, in the 1950s and early 1960s, Sitwell felt burdened by this obligation, believing that her early gratitude to Helen Rootham had been overblown and then exploited.

  From July to mid-September, with Helen in Paris for a time visiting Evelyn, Sitwell was chiefly in Renishaw, with two breaks in nearby Harrogate, where she stayed with Inez Chandos-Pole. Edith wrote to Osbert: ‘Dear old boy, how I hope and pray you won’t have to go. I think I shall go mad if you do.’ Meanwhile, there was constant family trouble. She asked him: ‘Did you have an odious letter from Mother? She is drunk all the time now, and I think has really come to imagine that she has done the right thing and covered herself with glory. She says only middle-class people look down on her! … Mother is more than incoherent with ‘emotion’ and whisky. Oh, it’s been a lovely summer.’41

  On 20 July, Sir George recalled Osbert from his regiment to prepare for a career in the Town Clerk’s office in Scarborough. He was drilled in penmanship and taught to form better pothooks, a lesson he soon forgot. In his autobiography Osbert suggests that this was an act of spite on his father’s part, since he was prospering in the army.42 From Edith’s account, however, it seems that he had had another emotional collapse and needed time to pull himself together: ‘Osbert left to rejoin his regiment, the Grenadier Guards, the middle of the night before the war broke out. He was convalescing after a serious illness. For this reason he had to undergo a month’s training before he could be sent to the Front. I must always be grateful to that illness, for all his young friends, with the exception of two, were killed in the first month of the war.’43

  Those summer weeks in Renishaw in 1914 had their bizarre moments. Among the guests at the Hall was Louisa Sitwell’s old crony, Sister Edith Woods, whom Edith Sitwell called ‘Little Dimple’. Sacheverell wrote to Osbert on 18 August: ‘We played a game of consequences in the “Ball Room” last night, & the following sentence appeared, “The Fish-faced negress Edith Sitwell, met the flat-footed sister Edith in the Chamber of Horrors.” You can imagine what a dreadful lull in the conversation ensued. Father came out as “pig-faced & obstinate & pompous.”’44

  In early September, Sir George quarrelled with the solicitor, Sir George Lewis, and with the Londesboroughs over whether to go ahead with a suit that would make Field responsible for losses in the Frances Dobbs case. Apart from the large sum of money involved, Sir George Sitwell thought the new action would clear his wife’s name in a very public way. He was opposed to just settling the case as it involved so much criminal misrepresentation, and he maintained that if she was not cleared in a civil case, she could expect to be arrested and tried as a criminal. For a time, though, it appeared that the suit would have to be called off. Sachie commented: ‘Of course it is playing into Field’s hands, but at the same time Father says Lewis declares Mother will be arrested now whatever happens, & so perhaps we are well out of the case, as there is now no room for it in the papers, owing to the war, which was the whole point of having the case at all.’45

  Nevertheless, the suit finally went ahead, and Field brandished his only weapon when he subpoenaed Osbert in October. The implication was that if the matter was not dropped, Osbert would be cross-examined and his reputation blasted. As it played out, Field put up no defence when the case was heard in November. He was bankrupt so another judgment against him hardly mattered; he did not contest the claim of ‘fraudulent misrepresentation’.46 It looked even to Sir George Lewis that Lady Ida was in the clear. He wrote to Osbert on 6 November: ‘I am delighted to think how satisfactorily the case went, and only trust that your mother will now be free from trouble.’47 At Lambeth, Davidson remarked: ‘I am glad it has ended thus and I suppose that Lady Ida will realise that she has been making a mess of things.’48

  Still, trouble had a way of falling out of the sky. Around 8:10 a.m. on 16 December 1914 three German warships appeared out of the fog and discharged five hundred shells on Scarborough. A coastguard station on Castle Hill was hit, and new holes were blown in the old castle itself. In the town below, seventeen people were killed, and dozens of houses damaged or destroyed.49 Part of a shell came through the front door at Wood End, and shrapnel penetrated deep into the house. Sir George took refuge in the cellar with the servants, while Lady Ida remained in bed. After it was it over, she got up and boarded a train for London. She appeared at Edith’s flat bearing a heavy shell fragment for Osbert: ‘Here you are, darling! I’ve brought it with me specially, for you to take to France. I’m sure it’ll bring you luck!’50

  No luck from this grisly object rubbed off on Lady Ida herself. The moneylender Charles Owles had died, but his executors still expected payment for the bills of exchange. The judgment in favour of Lady Ida meant they could pursue only Field, who had no money, so the one way forward was to allege that Lady Ida was part of a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud. Edith Sitwell always claimed that her father could not face facts; whether this was strictly true or a case of the pot calling the kettle black, in late 1914 he failed to see that the evidence against Lady Ida was strong and that she was still in trouble. If the matter was not quickly put to rest, she could be imprisoned.

  At the instigation of Owles’s executors, Lady Ida, Julian Field, and David Herbert were prosecuted for conspiring to cheat and defraud Frances Dobbs of six thousand pounds. When served with his summons, Field said, ‘What! Conspiracy with Lady Ida Sitwell. I never heard of such a thing. This is very pleasant. I must go and see my solicitor about this.’51 In a hearing at Marlborough Street Police Court on 22 January 1915, Lady Ida declared, ‘I am absolutely innocent.’52 On 12 February, the three were committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court, with Field and Herbert released on bail and Lady Ida on her own recognisance.53

  Early 1915 was a bad time for her to be tried. On 30 January, the Daily Mail reported on the defence case at Marlborough Street on the same page as it listed the names of the three hundred men drowned, including a group of gallant Newfoundlanders, in the sinking of HMS Viknor off the coast of Ireland. On 8 February, Prime Minister Asquith rose in the House of Commons to announce that casualties in the British Expeditionary Force in Western Europe had reached 104,000 of all ranks. Often enough, law reports were framed by long lists of the dead, wounded and missing, each name representing heartbreak to some family. In a time of national sacrifice, stories of Lady Ida’s spending and borrowing could only stir distaste and resentment among prospective jurors.

  In all of this, Edith Sitwell was worried not about her mother but about Osbert. Field’s lawyer hinted again that if Lady Ida tried to shift the blame to their client, he would have to ask questions about Osbert. He knew that at one point in the scandal Lady Ida had said that some of the money was borrowed to cover Osbert’s debts, and he was willing to probe the point. Edith was certain that this and any other imputation against her brother must be lies. Moreover, she believed Lady Ida’s vigorous defence strategy was a piece of treachery in that it exposed Osbert to disgrace in order to keep herself out of prison. Evidently at Blanche Sitwell’s suggestion, Edith put this view to Archbishop Davidson before the trial to see whether he might be able to control Lady Ida. He wrote to Blanche on 8 February 1915: ‘Ida S. is a problem which I can’t solve! Edith was very nice about it all when she dined here the other day, and I feel intensely for her. But I fear Ida has lost all sense of self respect if she is ready to give away Osbert by a lying story.’54

  On 8 March 1915, the scene shifted to the Old Bailey. As ever, Sir George hired good help, replacing the barrister Sir Frederick Low, who had been elevated to the bench, with Gordon Hewart, KC, who went on to become Lord Chief Justice.55 The judge, Charles John Darling, had also
heard the case in November, which was decided by a special jury. Darling had once served in Parliament with Sir George Sitwell and had no obvious prejudice against Lady Ida. After the criminal trial started he realised he had some social connections with her, yet heard the case through.56 While an intelligent man, he was not a first-rate judge. A former journalist, he was inclined to show off his wit in the courtroom and was criticised for ‘levity’.57

  Lady Ida’s spending and borrowing landed her in a criminal case for fraud. The News of the World (14 March 1915) and other newspapers gleefully reported the Sitwells’ humiliation.

  The first day offered prime opportunities for judicial mirth, which aided the defence. When called, Frances Dobbs described Herbert’s handling of her business, their short engagement, and the presentation of the two bills for signature. She claimed that since her mother died she had been surrounded by swindlers, ‘the robbery and murder gang … You can never get out of it once you are marked down. You can never free yourself in this world. They “do you in” in the end.’ Under Hewart’s questioning, Dobbs, once unhappily engaged to a clergy man, said the gang was connected with the clergy of the Church of England. Darling intervened: ‘With regard to your marriage, did you propose to be married by a clergyman?’ With the court laughing, she said she did not want a clergyman, ‘but we did not get so far as that’.58 At the end of her testimony, Dobbs, chief witness for the prosecution, appeared mad.

  Field offered no evidence in his own defence; presumably, cross-examination would have revealed him as a career swindler and made his inevitable sentence all the harder. Herbert came to the witness box on 9 March, and gave evasive testimony about his bigamous engagement to Dobbs. Cross-examining him, Hewart dwelt on the double life Herbert led – two names, two houses, two telephone numbers, very nearly two wives. The accounts are not clear on this point, but it appears that Hewart tried to show collusion between Herbert and Dobbs. The Sitwells believed that Frances Dobbs was part of the original scheme to entrap Lady Ida. His line of questioning indicates that the Sitwells had them investigated but could not find enough evidence to clinch the point. For all his skill, Hewart could do no more than insinuate the connection and hope to plant a doubt in the jurors’ minds. He also asked Herbert about his letters to Sir George and the Earl of Londesborough, as well as his threat to denounce Lady Ida at the ball in Scarborough in 1912, representing these as attempts at blackmail.59

  When Lady Ida was called on 11 March, she appeared fragile. Thin and tired-looking, she wore a black cape and Cossack cap. Her testimony took almost two days to complete. Led by Hewart, she described her money troubles and her introduction to Field. She said she had written letters at the dictation of Field, and was questioned especially about one of 6 April 1912 in which she made a gift to him of the proceeds from the Dobbs transaction, apart from a thousand pounds owing to Herbert as a fee.60 The letter showed that she was gullible and that she had not profited from the bills. Her answers confirmed to some degree the claim Hewart had made in his opening statement that she was a ‘child’ in matters of business.61

  Under cross-examination another impression emerged. Opposing counsel questioned her over a series of letters in which she appeared frantic for money and was actively pursuing backers for her bills. In one she said she was willing to explain the transactions to potential backers, which made short work of the claim that she had no understanding of business. She was presented with other letters that revealed the worst of her personality, as she spoke bitterly of servants who had paid her tradesmen’s bills. In one, she referred to Henry Moat (who walked out on the Sitwells in 1913 and stayed away for a decade): ‘I owe my butler £145. I want to get out of his clutches, the brute!’62 When asked whether this was how she spoke of someone who had advanced her money, she could only nod her head.

  Field’s lawyer read out a letter that Osbert had long feared becoming public: it showed that she was looking for dupes among young officers and that Osbert was helping her. On 29 December 1911 she had referred to the search for another backer in the transaction that involved Willie Martin: ‘I find Glass is only twenty. My boy thinks that if he were with him for a few days he could get hold of him; and he quite hopes that if he joins the 11th Hussars there must be some boy he can get hold of.’ The judge demanded to see the letter and asked, ‘Do you say that your boy really said these things?’ Having been fairly sympathetic towards her, Darling was shocked. During the rest of her testimony he intervened repeatedly and with increasing scepticism.

  On 12 March, with the preceding day’s testimony widely reported, Edith wrote to Sachie who was still at Eton: ‘I know how painful all this is for you, but try not to worry too much about it, my poor old darling. A notice will be put in the paper after the case is over, that Osbert never did any of these foul things. I saw Osbert today, and he was quite calm, though naturally awfully upset, as I am, and as you must be. She is a monster. There is no other word for it … Osbert is well again, and goes back to the front, I am afraid, on Sunday.’63

  On the second day of Lady Ida’s testimony, Hewart attempted to repair the damage. He led her to say that it was only at Field’s suggestion that she sought young officers to back the bills. This had the unintended effect of giving the judge another chance to intervene:

  ‘Do you mean to say you did not realise what you were doing by

  asking your son to get “some boy” to back a bill for you?’

  ‘I did not mean boys. I meant officers.’

  ‘Do you really wish me to believe you thought your son could get hold of the Colonel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You knew that was absurd?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘One of the majors?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you think about the captains?’

  ‘I was not sure about the captains.’

  ‘Then, lieutenants, second lieutenants, and probationers?’

  ‘Not a probationer.’

  ‘Why did you exclude probationers?’

  ‘Because they were too young.’

  ‘Yes.’64

  This exchange must have had an effect on the jurors, some of whom would have had sons or brothers in uniform.

  In his summary of the evidence, Darling dwelt upon the vulnerability of young men in the army, away from home and without their parents – quietly painting Lady Ida as a predator. He noted that although the letter about the Hussars was not related to the Dobbs transaction, Lady Ida and Osbert Sitwell could have been charged with a crime if the letter had been acted upon.65 He instructed the jury to remember that the case rested on intent to commit fraud, and that they could consider ‘that Lady Ida was a person so weak, so easily influenced, that when she did a thing which an ordinary person would say showed intent to defraud she did not realise what she was doing and did not have any intent’. However, such a defence, he said, was hard to make where the person went about the world, wrote letters when Field was not present, and had no recognisable mental illness. Nearly an instruction to convict, his words stand as a rebuttal to the efforts of Osbert and Sachie over the years to excuse their mother on such grounds as poor education and the inability to do arithmetic; Osbert even proposed menopause as an explanation for the scandal.66 It is reasonable to speak up for a parent, and in Osbert’s case he was scrubbing at stains on his own reputation, but it remains a form of special pleading.

  After an hour and twenty minutes, the jury returned, convicting Lady Ida and Julian Osgood Field while, mysteriously, acquitting David Herbert. In sentencing, Justice Darling told Lady Ida that he accepted that she was greatly influenced by Field and that he had dictated many of the letters, ‘but for all that you must have known, from your knowledge of the world and your education, that you were doing something dishonest. You copied the letters without a word of question, careless what happened or who suffered so long as you got money.’ Taking into consideration her poor health, he sentenced her to three months, and she was taken to Holloway Prison.<
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  The conviction came as such a shock that no one in the family thought to tell Sacheverell, who, Sarah Bradford tells us, learnt of it at school from the Sunday Express.67 Osbert returned to the Front, where, with lieutenants in short supply, the Grenadiers overlooked the scandal. According to Edith, Sachie’s housemaster at Eton said, ‘It is a good thing a war is on, so that your brother can fight for his King and country – otherwise nobody would ever speak to him again.’68 Cruel words, but Osbert did serve competently and honourably in the trenches.

  Sir George Sitwell believed that his wife, though foolish, was the victim of a miscarriage of justice. He worked all day for the last two weeks of April, writing a petition to the Home Secretary to have the sentence overturned. The Archbishop saw the ‘immense’ document – but what he really wanted, he told Blanche Sitwell, was to sit down and have ‘a conversation with that strangely constructed nephew of yours!’ Three times Sir George refused his invitation to have a pious talk and told Davidson to put his thoughts in writing.69 Davidson visited Lady Ida, and he later told Joan Wake: ‘She cried a little, and it was so pathetic to see her wiping her eyes with a large coarse prison pocket-handkerchief.’70

  In the midst of all this, the Dowager Countess of Londesborough was gravely ill. According to Edith, she had been weak for a very long time and now faced the amputation of a foot. Before that could happen, she died on 15 May 1915.71 In a last general rebuke to her other daughters and granddaughters, she left all her money and jewellery to Lady Ida’s sister Mildred Cooke. The Home Secretary was kinder. Lady Ida was given an early release. Edith wrote to Sachie from Pembridge Mansions on 19 May: ‘Mother came out yesterday, and I went to see her at Aunt Millie’s. She seems absolutely unchanged; rather nervous, it is true, but she actually made jokes about the life in there. Of course, she is hardly believable, isn’t she? However, Osbert says she is amiably disposed. Isn’t it heavenly?’72