A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  Beatrice Davis was a very attractive woman, small with a trim figure, clear classical features, a delicate complexion and deep-blue eyes. She always dressed well – for many years a dressmaker made most of her clothes – and was particularly admired for her stylish, audacious hats. Her combination of elegance, charm, intelligence, wit, professionalism and beauty made many men go weak at the knees. And an influential woman with these qualities is certain to be gossiped about.

  There were many rumours about Beatrice’s private life. Until she was well into her seventies she knew how to make herself appealing to men, and undoubtedly had many lovers. (The journalist Elizabeth Riddell once commented that she invariably saw Beatrice on the arm of some well-preserved military gentleman or other.) It was said that a male author stood no chance of having his novel accepted by A&R unless he went to bed with Beatrice. She was also said to be bisexual. Australian literary circles have always compensated for being small by the intensity of their gossip, and the reason these stories flourished – because Beatrice was enigmatic as well as influential – is at least as interesting as the stories themselves.

  Beatrice’s friend Hal Porter once shrewdly remarked that ‘the Lady Beatrice has always been attracted to the devil in the basement’. All her life Beatrice, no slave to convention herself, was drawn to people who lived on the edge, including many writers. Though she had a gracious house on the fringe of Sydney Harbour and was apparently the epitome of middle-class respectability, Beatrice was a complex person, sometimes displaying Anglophile gentility, even pretension, at other times uninhibitedly doing as she pleased without apparently giving a damn for anyone’s opinion. The novelist D’Arcy Niland summed her up the first time he met her, saying to his wife Ruth Park, ‘There goes a gentlewoman … and she’s a little beaut, too!’ And so she was.

  PART I

  1909–1937

  Bendigo and Sydney

  Little Sweetheart

  Beatrice Davis was not a sentimental woman, nor did she feel strongly connected to her childhood. Yet among her possessions found after her death was a small, loose-leaf book with a dark cover, like a child’s first photograph album. It does not hold family photographs, though the subjects are clearly Australian: the women in their long Edwardian dresses with high necklines and tight sleeves, and the dark-suited men in stiff collars and hats are frozen against wide streets lined with gum trees and scored with the tracks of horse-drawn vehicles – streets that probably dwindle to tracks before vanishing into scrubby bush.

  Presiding over these hot and dusty thoroughfares are public buildings whose stem façades, urns and cornucopias, elaborate porticoes and Corinthian pillars recall the banks and town halls of nineteenth-century English provincial cities. These edifices insist that this is a town of substance, of great prosperity, despite being thousands of miles from Home. The last photograph in the album, taken from a hilltop with the town stretched out below, shows the source of this affluence: the gracious bungalows, churches and solid public buildings are punctuated by chimney stacks and the skeletal headframes of mines. This is Bendigo, Victoria, founded on the richest gold-bearing reef in the world.

  Beatrice was born here in 1909. Her great-grandfather Joseph Davis, a gunsmith by profession who had been one of England’s biggest military suppliers, had come to this rough mining settlement with his family in 1852 under shady circumstances – he apparently owed money to the Board of Ordnance. He was evidently a well-educated man with an inquiring and lively mind and a judicious way with words. A rationalist by nature, he came down solidly on the side of science, dismissing the study of theology as fit only for the weak-minded. Joseph’s interest in science and lack of it in religion were inherited by Beatrice, who studied chemistry at university and who, according to a colleague at Angus and Robertson, had ‘no religious sense at all’.

  Joseph’s son William, Beatrice’s grandfather, carved out a solid, steady career as a banker. He set up business in the small town of Kilmore and in 1875 became manager of the Colonial Bank of Australasia in nearby Bendigo, where he remained for the rest of his life. William was an important citizen; his portraits show a steady-eyed, bewhiskered man with a long Victorian chin and an expression of unrelenting rectitude. He held civic offices appropriate to a pillar of the community, being a board member of the Benevolent Asylum, a justice of the peace and treasurer of the local fire brigade. William Davis was also keenly interested in the arts, an enthusiastic amateur actor and member of the Bendigo Shakespearean Society who also gave regular public lectures on the works of Charles Dickens.

  His wife matched him artistically and intellectually. Ellen Hayes belonged to a lively Irish family of independent and enterprising women. She was a teacher by profession, running her own school for several years. Like her granddaughter Beatrice she was also musical, with a special interest in the piano. Ellen and William Davis lived in a large and pleasant house on Quarry Hill, Bendigo, and owned property in other parts of the town. Ellen gave up teaching to raise her family of three boys and two girls. Their third son, Charles Herbert Davis, born in 1872, was Beatrice’s father.

  Educated in Bendigo, Charles was articled to a local lawyer when he left school at seventeen, completed the University of Melbourne’s articled clerks’ course, and was admitted to practise as a solicitor in 1895. He opened his own practice in the Bendigo Arcade, Pall Mall, the centrally located lawyers’ precinct. Charles was a ‘deliberative, calm and invariably courteous’ man, a keen reader with a large library.1 He inherited musical talent from his mother, playing the piano and having a pleasant tenor voice, and he also wrote poetry, some of which he set to music as parlour songs for voice and piano (with such titles as ‘Twilight’ and ‘A Rose’). He also composed more technically ambitious works, including a sonata for piano and cello.

  Charles liked a well-organised, disciplined life and was attracted to the army as well as to the law. In his early twenties he was commissioned into an infantry battalion of the Victorian Defence Forces – he became a good friend of John Monash, who was later commander of the Australian forces in France in World War I – and was promoted to captain four years later, in 1900. The following year, at very short notice, he commanded the guard of honour at the opening of Australia’s first parliament, in Melbourne on 9 May 1901 in the presence of the Duke of York and Cornwall (later King George V). By 1910 he was Lieutenant-Colonel Davis, commanding Bendigo’s 2nd Battalion.

  Good-looking in a solidly English way, from a prosperous family, and with a steady income, an interest in music and literature, and a part-time career as a dashing soldier, Charles Davis could fairly be considered a good catch, but by thirty he was still unmarried. And then in 1905 he met Emily Beatrice Deloitte.

  Emily came from a Sydney family with great style and pride of lineage and relatively little money. Her grandfather William Salmon Deloitte, the son of a French aristocrat forced to flee to England during the revolution of 1789, had come to Australia in 1838, settled in Sydney, married Bessie Maria Marley and set up in business as W.S. Deloitte & Co., Merchants. His business fortunes were erratic, but he maintained a steady presence in the colony, becoming justice of the peace for the City of Sydney and an original member of the Australian Club. He and his family lived in a large and beautiful house in Wharf Road, Snails Bay (now Birchgrove).

  William and Bessie had seven sons and six daughters, brought up according to the rules of the time. The boys were encouraged to study for professions; their sisters stayed at home, played the piano or did needlework and waited for suitable young men to marry them. Bessie never left her room before luncheon and had to be waited upon constantly (if she wanted to sit up late at night, one of her children was expected to stay up with her). But beneath this leisured façade lay unpalatable reality: the Deloittes were often short of money. A stroke left William paralysed for the last nine years of his life and his eldest son, also William, suffered a disabling spinal injury. The other sons had to find what work they could to help keep the large
family. The youngest, Marmaduke, who became Emily’s father, was forced to leave school at fourteen to help the family finances.

  Marmaduke became an insurance broker and married Emma Millett, a young woman with family connections in Bendigo. Marmaduke and Emma had five daughters: Mary, Phyllis, Emily Beatrice, and twins Brenda and Enid. The two most closely involved in Beatrice’s story are Emily, who became her mother, and Enid, her aunt.

  Marmaduke and his family lived next door to ‘Wyoming’, a splendid house owned by Marmaduke’s brother Quarton.2 Quarton Deloitte, who was considered the best-dressed man in Sydney, lived there with his wife, two uniformed maids, and a resident gardener whose job was to tend the lawns that sloped gently down to Sydney Harbour. Quarton’s standards were exacting – he once stormed into David Jones demanding that a pair of corsets be removed from a window display – and he dominated his youngest brother. He seems also to have given Marmaduke’s family some financial support; at any rate, Emma was obliged to go through the household accounts with her brother-in-law once a month, and woe betide her if she had been extravagant or made a mistake.

  Later, Marmaduke, his wife and daughters moved farther up Wharf Road to number 17, a large house named ‘Ianthena’. It had six bedrooms, an anteroom and drawing rooms, a conservatory, and a bathroom with a modern gas bath-heater. Governesses gave the Deloitte girls a rudimentary education suitable for young ladies, the most important part of which was music. The sisters all learned to play the piano and violin; when anyone from the large network of Deloitte cousins came to visit, the dining-room carpet would be rolled back for dancing and the girls took turns to play.

  It was from this household that Emily Beatrice Deloitte, a pretty 23-year-old with no intellectual interests, trained to do nothing but play the piano beautifully, went to visit her mother’s brother Edwin in Bendigo and met Charles Davis.

  He was immediately attracted to her; she was young, very sweet, and they both loved music. Emily returned to ‘Ianthena’ with an engagement ring. After the customary two-year interval, she and Charles were married on 25 April 1907 at St John’s Church, Snails Bay, and Emily went to live with him in Bendigo. She was twenty-five, Charles thirty-four.

  Charles and Emily Davis settled in a wide-verandahed bungalow named ‘Huddersfield’ at 40 Lilac Street, Bendigo, some distance from the centre of town. The house probably belonged to Charles’s parents. Emily must have been dismayed: though pleasant with a shady garden, it was a far cry from ‘Ianthena’ or ‘Wyoming’. She had been used to a household full of noise and company – the visits of relatives, picnics and night fishing on the harbour, chatting to her friends on the porch while someone practised scales or arpeggios upstairs. Now from her front verandah she surveyed not the sparkling harbour but mile after mile of flat, grey-green bush, its quiet broken only by the rhythmic thumping of mining machinery.

  Nor did she feel entirely comfortable with her clever, bookish new family. The Davises enjoyed debating everything from the nature of the universe to the current political situation: Emily, no great reader, was unable to join in. Her Irish mother-in-law no doubt looked sharply at this pretty young woman who had never had to earn her own living, did not know how to run a house and had no intellectual interests apart from music. Charles spent little time at home. He was running his law practice, involved in the army, and an active member of several local organisations, including the Art Gallery Committee and the Benevolent Society. His young wife was not entirely starved for company – when Charles was otherwise occupied she had her uncle’s family, her sister Phyllis came for long visits and there were Charles’s friends – but time probably hung heavily on her hands. She and Charles started a family soon after their marriage. Their first child, John Deloitte, was born early in 1908, their daughter Beatrice Deloitte on 28 January 1909.

  As a child Beatrice was always called Trix or Trixie – a common diminutive of Beatrice – to distinguish her from her mother, who was always known as Beatrice rather than Emily.3 Beatrice never much liked Trix: from her early twenties she insisted on her full name. Years later, when an author asked whether she might call her Bea, she snapped, ‘You certainly may not!’

  Beatrice was a beautiful child, with big blue eyes and curly hair, but despite her angelic appearance she was apparently not the archetypal sweet little girl. There are no family photographs of her clutching favourite dolls; instead there she is, aged about six, laughing, bare-foot, in a pretty white dress, playing horses with her brother. (Given Beatrice’s later relationships with men, it is probably significant that she is holding the reins while John plays the horse.) She and John were inseparable. Once they ganged up against a local minister of whom they did not approve: when he came to visit they put weed killer into his horse’s feed, causing the animal to become very sick and almost die. John and Beatrice were horrified and guilty, but never confessed.

  When Beatrice was six her younger brother Charles Deloitte, always known as Del, was born. It soon became clear that Beatrice and her two brothers were very different characters. John was calm, quiet and patient, a contrast to the quick, astute Beatrice. She didn’t always win her arguments with him: he knew how to deal with her occasionally dictatorial manner. Del was a carefree soul with a sunny disposition and wicked sense of humour. Though they fought occasionally, the three Davis children remained close all their lives.

  Their mother apparently spent little time with them; indeed, Emily’s attitude to domestic matters, including children, verged on the regal. Her marriage certificate might describe her occupation as ‘home duties’ but she carried out few of these, preferring to escape into music whenever possible. Her sharp-eyed daughter – never her greatest fan – was wont to say that the pinnacle of her mother’s ambition was to play the piano and look decorative. She was able to do both because Charles’s income and social position allowed for hired help, and most of the work around the home was done by Maria Richardson, known as Bobs. A young woman from Bendigo, Bobs had worked as a maid or housekeeper for Charles’s father and knew the family well. Little Beatrice loved Bobs, and was closer to her than to her own mother.

  However, from her earliest years the most important person in Beatrice’s life was her father. She was apparently closer in temperament to the Davises than to the Deloittes, though her musical talent, which she showed very early, came from both sides of the family. Her mother was probably her first piano teacher. Charles Davis doted on Beatrice, his ‘little sweetheart’, and she adored him. When he went away to war, she took one of his boots to bed with her.

  Like so many other towns across Australia, Bendigo reacted quickly to the declaration of war in August 1914. The first local recruits were accepted for the Australian Expeditionary Force less than two weeks later, and a rally was held at the Royal Princess Theatre with stirring lectures on the subject of patriotism. (This was much better publicised than a town hall lecture the following evening by Sir Ernest Rutherford on the subject of radium – a substance, he said, with enormous possibilities.) The first contingent of volunteers from the Bendigo district left on 7 September.

  Though he had been actively engaged in drilling new recruits on the parade ground at Epsom racecourse about five kilometres from town, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Davis did not go overseas with them. He was appointed senior assistant censor, which meant working in Melbourne, then he became cable censor and finally chief censor. He did not go to war until mid-1916, when he became commander of the 38th Battalion of the AIF, formed mainly from local Bendigo volunteers. Charles Davis must have hated having to leave Bendigo for the battlefields of France. He was in his forties – old for a soldier – with a wife and three children, the youngest still a baby; it was already apparent that the war would not end quickly, and he had no idea when he would return.

  Charles and Emily decided that she and the children would live with her parents in Sydney until the war was over, when they would come back to Bendigo and Charles would resume his legal practice. Emily’s family were
no longer living in ‘Ianthena’; the implacable Quarton Deloitte had quarrelled with them over his niece Phyllis’s engagement, and life in Wharf Road had become so uncomfortable that Marmaduke and his family let ‘Ianthena’ and fled to the north side of the harbour, to Neutral Bay. By the time Charles was ready to embark for the front, Marmaduke, Emma, Brenda and Enid were living in ‘Lynton’, 42 Ben Boyd Road, where Emily and the children would join them. (The two eldest Deloitte daughters, Phyllis and Mary, had already married and left home.)

  Neutral Bay, a tuck of Sydney Harbour originally named by Governor Arthur Phillip as an anchorage for foreign ships until their credentials could be determined, was then by no means the fashionable suburb it later became. In 1916, years before completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it was connected to the city only by ferry, and a steam tram grumbled up the steep, winding road from the wharf to a small cluster of shops in Military Road at the top of the ridge. Neutral Bay was a suburb of camphor laurel trees, small houses of cheap sandstone and rickety weatherboard, with a scattering of grander residences. ‘Lynton’ in Ben Boyd Road, about halfway up the hill to Military Road, was a modest bungalow and, with five adults and three children, it was a tight squeeze. Beatrice, John and Del slept on the balcony with their Aunt Enid. John and Beatrice, who had recently started school, walked to the Neutral Bay Superior Primary School about five minutes away, where the poet Mary Gilmore, whom Beatrice would know in years to come, had been a teacher in the 1890s.

  Brenda and Enid spent their time knitting socks for the troops, as well as organising and performing in fundraising concerts and concert parties at the army camps. Brenda was the family star, playing piano, violin and cello for the Amateur Orchestral Society and the Philharmonic Society; Enid also played piano and violin. With three musicians in the family including her mother, young Beatrice was unlikely to get away with skimping on piano practice. In the evenings everybody sat around the large dining table – lit by a single hanging gas lamp to save money – reading, writing letters or sewing, or doing homework.