by Siân Evans
George Moore was outraged by Maud’s affair with Beecham; he had loved her faithfully since before her marriage, and had remained single. In 1911 he had moved permanently from Ireland to London to be closer to her. Moore’s letters from that era are querulous and resentful; her decision to leave her husband, not for him but for some married musical Lothario, obviously rankled. ‘Why you should wish to hear my impressions of the music it is difficult to think, for you know many musicians who can talk about it better than I can […] I did not remain till the end of the concert because I wished to fly from your world, which is not my world’3, he wrote on 21 January 1913. Moore did not want to join Maud’s new social circle, which now nearly always included her lover, but insisted on seeing her on her own. ‘I thought you might be coming to dine with me. You didn’t because you feared you mightn’t be amused all the while, and of course life is intolerable if it be not always at concert pitch’4, he wrote in January 1914. The antipathy was mutual; Beecham was always dismissive of Moore’s prior claim on Lady Cunard. In 1957 he remarked that Moore was the sort of person who ‘didn’t kiss, but told’ – in other words, a romantic fantasist.
While Joseph Beecham arranged a season of Russian opera in London for his son to conduct, and provided a smart town house for him in Belgravia, Maud did everything possible to further his career, persuading her fashionable and aristocratic friends to take boxes when he was conducting. A Drury Lane season of opera opened in May 1914, with Der Rosenkavalier, brilliantly conducted by Thomas Beecham without a score, a tour de force. He also conducted the first nights of Diaghilev’s productions of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le Coq d’Or and La Légende de Joseph in June 1914. Margot Asquith, the Prime Minister’s wife, in black tulle and diamonds was among the many VIP guests who joined Lady Cunard’s box at yet another fashionable musical sensation.
It was Maud who arranged for Joseph Beecham to be created a baronet in the King’s birthday honours of 1914, by exerting pressure on her landlord, Prime Minister Asquith, who found it impossible to resist her constant cajoling. The composer Delius wrote to his wife saying, ‘Lady C – who had brought it of course all about, is exultant’. Duff Cooper also recorded in his diary that Joseph Beecham had paid £4,000 to Lady Cunard, £5,500 to Edward Horner, a relation by marriage of Asquith, and £500 to Lady Diana Manners.
Lady Cunard’s exploitation of her establishment contacts to benefit her lover’s father was impressive, but Mrs Greville’s overtures to the royal family were positively Machiavellian. Just over a year after the death of her father, on 25 May 1914, she wrote a personal letter to King George V, and it survives in the Royal Archives, a handwritten masterpiece in manipulation. Mrs Greville outlined her concerns about what might happen to her enormous wealth and her country estate after she was gone, and wondered disingenuously whether she should leave a bequest to a member of the royal family:
the fact is that I am alone in the world, I love Polesden Lacey, I have nobody to bequeath it to and I can never forget King Edward’s kindness to me, he helped me to face life. He was an angel to me and if Your Majesty would consent, I should feel so happy if one of his descendants lived here. I made a will last March extract (copy) of which I enclose […] if Your Majesty disapproved of what I have done, to save trouble when I am gone I could revoke it – I left the sum of £300,000 to go with the place and an additional £50,000 for possible alterations […] it is so sad to have nobody and I just can’t bear to think Polesden may have to go the same way.5
King George V rapidly revised his former disapproving attitude to Mrs Greville. Within three weeks of receiving the letter, on 14 June 1914, he and Queen Mary visited Polesden Lacey for the day, to discuss her proposal. He recorded in his diary:
Mrs Ronny [sic] Greville gave us tea, she showed us all over her lovely house and gardens, a most charming place. She told me confidentially that she intends leaving the place to one of my sons with at least £300,000 to keep it up, to be selected by me and to belong to him and his descendants for ever. He will indeed be a lucky boy.6
The ‘lucky boy’ was the second son, Prince Albert, as his elder brother, the Prince of Wales (known to his family as David), would inherit the Duchy of Cornwall, which would provide him with a substantial income. In addition, when David became King he would have a number of royal residences in which to live: Windsor, Sandringham, Balmoral and, of course, Buckingham Palace. But dutiful Prince Bertie, shy, slightly knock-kneed and hindered by a bad stammer, would be set up for life by a bequest of this generosity, a vast and prosperous country estate and the modern cash equivalent of approximately £15 million for its maintenance. Unsurprisingly, the King and Queen subsequently regarded Mrs Greville with great favour, and all members of the royal family, especially young Bertie, were encouraged to cultivate her at every opportunity. Mrs Greville took great delight in her royal rehabilitation, using it to re-launch her career as the best-connected hostess in London society. Satisfied with the success of her negotiations, she left the decorators in occupation at 16 Charles Street and set out for her summer holiday. She was joining a house party of lively friends at a beautiful mansion called Clingendael in the Netherlands. It was July 1914, and there was barely a cloud in the sky.
The intrepid, well-connected and well-travelled Colefaxes were among the first to get an inkling of the disaster that was about to engulf Europe. For their summer holidays in 1913 they had visited Sarajevo, then a sleepy backwater of the Balkans. It was completely by chance that a year later they were staying with the Northcliffes at Sutton Place on Sunday 28 June 1914. Sibyl remembered enjoying an idyllic tea on the sunlit lawn under the cedars when a telegram arrived addressed to Molly Harmsworth from her husband, Lord Northcliffe, the press baron, who had returned to town earlier that afternoon. It read: ‘The Heir Apparent to the Throne of Austria and his wife were murdered at Sarajevo at 2.30 today, signed N.’ That small group of people were among the first in Britain to hear the news of the assassination that signalled the start of the Great War.
While Lady Cunard dedicated herself to advancing the career of her lover Thomas Beecham, her daughter Nancy was devising her own social life. She was ‘presented’ at court and was launched on a social life in 1914, the last season before the war. Nancy often clashed with her mother; she always resented having been suddenly transplanted from rural Leicestershire to London. She missed her father and felt sorry for his isolation because of Her Ladyship’s affair. Maud saw Nancy as a decorative adjunct to her social life, but Nancy became a truculent and difficult teenager. Asked during a parlour game who she would most like to see next enter the room, she replied, ‘Lady Cunard, dead’.
Highly strung and volatile, when she was eighteen Nancy witnessed a tragedy that probably affected her subsequent mental health. On the evening of 2 July 1914 a group of fifteen well-heeled young people boarded a pleasure launch at Westminster to sail up the Thames for a midnight supper party. The dance music was provided by a small band selected from Beecham’s orchestra. The party-goers included Lady Diana Manners and her future husband, Duff Cooper, Raymond Asquith (the eldest son of the Prime Minister), Iris Beerbohm Tree (Nancy’s best friend), Count Constantin Benckendorff (the son of the Russian Ambassador) and Sir Denis Anson, a hot-headed young aristocrat who had inherited his title just a month before. At 3 a.m., near Battersea Bridge, Denis Anson suddenly took off his jacket and his watch and dived into the Thames, probably as the result of a bet. He was swept away by the strong tide, and one of the musicians, William Mitchell, jumped in to save him, as did Count Benckendorff. The Russian was picked up by a launch, but the other two men were lost, and their bodies were not found for several days. Nancy arrived home at 6 a.m. severely traumatised, and had to be put to bed. The casual loss of two of their number horrified the jeunesse d’orée, the wealthy and cultured crowd with whom Nancy Cunard was mixing, but worse was to follow; within a month Britain found itself dragged into a conflict that would decimate the youth of that generation.
3
The Great
War
When the news first broke in Britain that the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife had been shot by an opportunist Serbian nationalist after their chauffeur became lost in Sarajevo, on the evening of 28 June 1914, there was little reaction at first. The Court Ball was postponed, and several embassy dinner parties were cancelled, but the incident was largely dismissed as an isolated murderous act in a rather obscure corner of Central Europe. King George V had a slightly better grasp of the possible implications, but typically viewed it as another anarchic attack on the institution of monarchy, observing sagely that it must have been a dreadful shock for the Austro-Hungarian Emperor.
Country Life briefly abandoned its usual fare of articles such as ‘The Heron as Pet’ or ‘Are Salmon Colour-Blind?’ to run an editorial on 4 July 1914, speculating that ‘Doom and woe shadow the Royal Family of Hapsburg [sic] as they did the characters of Greek tragedy’, but overall the upper classes were more concerned with the issue of Home Rule for Ireland and the outcome of the annual cricket match between Eton and Harrow.
Osbert Sitwell, who was in the army, noted that throughout his life to date many members of royal families and foreign heads of state had been assassinated, so he and his fellow officers initially overlooked yet another skirmish in the Balkans. However, he was aware that throughout the summer of 1914 there had been unprecedented signs of restlessness among four of his army friends. One yearned to join a polar expedition; another was mulling over a transfer to an African regiment; the third wanted a ranch in South America; while the fourth dreamed of exploring China. Coincidentally, Sitwell wrote, there was a craze in London for consulting a celebrated palm-reader, but she was dismissed as a charlatan when, time after time, she appeared to ‘dry’, unable, she explained, to see any indication of the future in the palms of her young male clients. Meanwhile, as Sitwell recorded, the parties continued:
The whole of London still seethed with a feeling of summer and gaiety. The children of the rich feasted, and from the ballrooms, wreathed in roses where they waltzed to the deep-hearted rhythm of the Rosenkavalier Waltz, the sons could not see the ruins, the broken arches and cut and twisted trees which were all their future […] no-one mentioned the possibility of war.1
On 28 July, Austria declared war on Serbia, and Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered the British Fleet to war station. By the beginning of August the situation had escalated, and it seemed that Britain could not avoid being drawn into a Continental war; the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, warned that ‘it can but end in the greatest catastrophe that has ever befallen the Continent of Europe at one blow’.
The outbreak of the Great War seems to have caught the British establishment largely by surprise. It was so little anticipated that the Prime Minister’s own daughter, seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Asquith, had left for a holiday in the Netherlands with Mrs Ronnie Greville and the Keppels on 25 July, only nine days before hostilities were declared. The house party included the Duchess of Rutland, her daughter Lady Diana Manners, Harry Cust (widely believed to be Lady Diana’s father), Lord and Lady Ilchester, Lady de Trafford and her daughter, Sir Fritz and Lady Ponsonby and their children, and the charming royal fixer and Mrs Ronnie’s relative by marriage, Sir Sidney Greville. Clingendael, the exquisite mansion in which they were all staying, picturesquely spanned a canal and had rose-garlanded stables, a Japanese garden and an observatory. Amply staffed and provided with a fleet of chauffeur-driven motors, Clingendael was an idyllic setting for this large group of wealthy friends. They had known each other since before the reign of their favourite monarch, Edward VII, and still enjoyed each other’s company. As in the old days, George Keppel had devised an itinerary of expeditions and amusements for every day, from barge trips and picnics to visits to cheese factories and picture galleries, arrangements described by Harry Cust as ‘George’s summer manoeuvres’.
However, it was ‘summer manoeuvres’ of another type that brought an abrupt halt to the fun. First Elizabeth Asquith received a telegram from Margot, her stepmother, urgently recalling her to Britain. She made the return trip by boat with a number of young Englishmen who had been summoned to rejoin their regiments, but still very few people seemed alert to the situation. Then, out of a clear blue sky, it seemed, on Sunday 2 August the British newspapers carried reports that the Germans had crossed the frontiers of France and Luxembourg. Urgent telegrams were despatched to holiday-makers on the Continent, and the dash began for the Channel. In complete contrast to the leisurely and luxurious outward trip, the house party packed and hurried to the coast. By the following day, Bank Holiday Monday, the international crisis was on everyone’s minds as the nation played cricket, paddled or watched their children build sand-castles. That evening the boat from the Hook of Holland arrived at Harwich, carrying 780 exhausted and stressed passengers instead of the usual 100 holiday-makers. Alice Keppel, needless to say, had been provided with two cabins by the purser; the old King’s mistress could still turn on the charm when necessary.
When war was declared, there was a great reaction of patriotism and jingoism. Recruiting efforts were apparent everywhere; music-hall singers warbled, ‘We don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go’. Men signed up with their friends and fellow workers from factories, mills, great country estates and small towns. Those who were among the first to go to France were full of misplaced optimism. Osbert Sitwell heard some of the most confident telling their batmen to pack their evening clothes as they would be needed when the officers got to Berlin within weeks. By the late autumn of 1914 all four of Osbert’s ambitious and restless friends were dead.
The jingoism and confidence expressed as Britain went to war soon dissipated. Within six months, as the opposing forces dug in during the long wet winter of 1914–15, there was a growing awareness of the heavy toll the war was taking on the men fighting at the front. The British public who had cheered the men signing up in the autumn of 1914 were appalled by the stream of maimed figures returning from the battlefields of France. The casualty figures were grim; and thousands of wounded and traumatised soldiers were sent back to Britain for treatment and recuperation. Many died from their injuries en route, but those who survived were sent to recuperate in hospitals or private homes. This was an era before the government-funded National Health Service, so the wounded were reliant on the Red Cross or the philanthropy of wealthy individuals who set up hospitals. Within weeks of the conflict starting, the Duke of Devonshire gave over the ground floor of his opulent London home as the temporary headquarters of the Red Cross. Women of all classes wanted to support the war effort; Queen Mary was tireless in her charitable activities, and the hostesses were quick to follow the royal example, offering their own homes as hospitals and convalescent homes.
Mrs Greville turned over most of Polesden Lacey for use as a convalescent home to King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers. It was run on luxurious lines; she retained the use of the east side, and her private apartments on the south side, for her own use, while the patients lived on the west and north sides of the house, with a resident staff of nurses and orderlies. Mrs Greville continued to entertain her circle of ambassadors, peers and politicians at Polesden, and showed King George V and Queen Mary over the site in 1915 when they visited to raise morale. Throughout the war Queen Mary would visit the injured in a variety of hospitals and convalescent homes; she would sometimes manage three or four in an afternoon. On one such visit, overhearing one of her entourage muttering, ‘I’m tired and I hate hospitals’, the Queen replied crisply: ‘You are a member of the British Royal Family. We are never tired, and we all love hospitals.’
Nancy Astor was playing tennis at Cliveden when she first heard that war had been declared. Within months the tennis court had been replaced by a state-of-the-art hospital built by the Canadian Red Cross to accommodate 200 soldiers. Waldorf paid the salaries of ten medical officers, twenty nurses and a staff of orderlies. Winston Churchill visited the hospital on 3 May 1915; t
he Astors knew the Churchills from the early years of their marriage, though Nancy’s later relationship with the politician was often stormy. King George V and Queen Mary also visited on 20 July 1915.
Nancy took a genuine interest in the recovery of the patients, 24,000 of whom passed through the hospital. She was no ministering angel, but galvanised the patients into putting up a fight. She could be generous and inspiring – she offered a gold watch to one badly injured Canadian soldier who was in the hospital at Cliveden, if he recovered, and when he survived four operations she was as good as her word.
Sadly, not all those who were treated at the hospital survived. The Cliveden War Cemetery is a melancholy memorial, a peaceful and elegant sunken garden in the Italian style on the side of the hill, surrounded by trees, and ornamented with Roman sculptural fragments such as broken columns. It was originally created in 1902 as a neo-classical garden, but was consecrated as a burial ground and contains forty-two graves from the Great War, including those of two nurses.
Dominating the site is an impressive symbolic bronze statue of a female figure with outstretched arms, representing Canada; Nancy was the model. There is also an eloquent memorial to the Cliveden staff who joined the services but never came back. The Octagon Temple, the family mausoleum, which stands on a scarp looking out over the Thames, bears a bronze plaque on the exterior, listing the names and regiments of fifteen men who had been employed by the Astors but who lost their lives in the Great War.
Waldorf Astor applied for active military service in 1914, but he was rejected because of his weak heart and respiratory problems, so he continued as an MP and also became an inspector of ordnance factories with the rank of major, an unpaid and unpopular job. Nancy supported his burgeoning political career and became an astute and very well-connected hostess in London. In 1916, when Lloyd George became Prime Minister, Waldorf was made a Parliamentary Secretary along with Philip Kerr, who was to become a close friend to both the Astors. Under Nancy’s influence Kerr converted from Catholicism to Christian Science. Many said that he was in love with her, but Nancy always insisted he was primarily Waldorf’s friend rather than her own.
