by Siân Evans
The family life of the Colefaxes was less volatile and decidedly less affluent than that of the Corrigans and the Astors, but the years of the Great War were nevertheless busy and sociable ones for them. Sibyl and Arthur had two young sons, and she divided her energies between ‘her boys’ and a growing desire to create a social circle rich in artistic and creative people. She used Old Buckhurst as a weekend place to entertain her friends. It was not as grand as the rural retreats of other society hostesses, more of a ‘house in the country’ than a ‘country house’, but Sibyl took immense satisfaction in decorating it. Once war broke out, she found it difficult to hire gardeners. She applied for and was allocated a number of German prisoners of war, who were supposed to be employed on farm work. Sibyl put them to work to create a wild garden.
She particularly enjoyed the company of theatrical and musical artistes, who would motor down after the curtain fell on their West End stages on Saturday evenings, joining the literary, artistic and political guests already in residence. The August 1914 guest list included Kathleen Scott, widow of Scott of the Antarctic, the Austen Chamberlains and the philanthropic Beits, who were millionaires. Later guests included the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and Bonar Law. There were publishers and media moguls such as the Northcliffes, William Heinemann and Sir Frederick Macmillan. The influential owner of Country Life, Edward Hudson, and his architectural editor, Henry Avray Tipping, were also visitors. Accomplished writers included Desmond MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey and Rudyard Kipling, the son of Sibyl’s old friend from Simla days. The novelist Enid Bagnold, who in 1920 was to marry Sir Roderick Jones, Chairman of Reuters, was another visitor. Celebrated actresses included Gladys Cooper, and Ivor Novello played his evocative wartime song ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ on the piano.
Sibyl was also making a mark among more avant-garde literary circles in her London home in Onslow Square. In December 1917 she organised a charity fundraising evening, with guests reading their poems aloud. The readers included Aldous Huxley, T. S. Eliot and the Sitwells. Meanwhile Arthur Colefax, who was too old for active service, had volunteered to be the head of a scientific department within the Ministry of Munitions, a role for which his background and professional experience made him well suited. However, the post was unpaid, and he turned down lucrative patent cases at the Bar to fulfil what he saw as his patriotic duty. Consequently, by the end of the war the Colefaxes were less financially secure than they had been at its outset, and they had to face the reality that it was too expensive for them to maintain both a London house and one in the countryside.
Economies were also forced upon Sir Bache Cunard, now estranged from his extravagant wife, Maud, who was living in London in some style. He no longer wanted to entertain and so moved into a substantial house called The Haycock in the village of Wansford, 20 miles from Nevill Holt, where he was to live alone for the next eleven years. His daughter Nancy described him as ‘manually an ingenious, gifted man in all his manipulations of wood and iron’, and in the war his practical skills were useful when he organised and ran a munitions factory at The Haycock. Nancy would occasionally visit him; she was fond of her father, but they had very few interests in common apart from her mother, hardly a happy topic of conversation. A number of Lady Cunard’s contemporaries disapproved of her behaviour. Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, a fellow American similarly unhappily married to a British aristocrat, remarked that Maud ‘took a house in London, for it was her ambition to have a political salon in the tradition of the eighteenth century. Ruthlessly determined to success, she bent a conspicuous talent to this end.’4
Meanwhile Lady Cunard exercised her deep-rooted elitism, attracting politicians and aristocrats, artists, writers and musicians, creating a milieu in which her beloved Thomas Beecham’s career as a musical impresario could flourish. They both dreamed of reviving opera on the British stage. Substantial funds were required; Lady Cunard was generous with her own money, and she assiduously cultivated wealthy friends, from whom she wheedled further financial support. Maud always referred to Thomas as ‘Mr Beecham’ in public, but their relationship was no secret among their social circle. A review of a contemporary sculpture exhibition appeared in Country Life on 13 November 1915, and the two separate photographs used as illustrations on the same page happened to be busts of Lady Cunard and Thomas Beecham, a hint to those who suspected that they were a couple.
In the New Year’s honours list of 1916, thirty-six-year-old Thomas Beecham was knighted, almost certainly owing to Lady Cunard’s efforts. Later that year, following his father’s death, he inherited both the baronetcy and the family fortune. Lady Cunard always cared far more for Beecham than he did for her; she did not know that by autumn of the same year he was conducting a passionate affair with a soprano called Bessie Tyas, who was playing Mimi in La Bohème at the Aldwych.
Thomas Beecham’s professional fortunes ebbed and flowed during the Great War; air raids had a deleterious effect on the box office, and some of the operas he was conducting, such as Ivan the Terrible, were considered too gloomy to attract the public. Beecham commented on the philistinism of the public: ‘in London grand opera in English is supported by the rich and the poor. The middle classes know nothing about it. They have a meat tea, and then go to the pictures or the music-hall.’ Fortunately, his patroness had a more positive attitude; Lady Cunard sifted through London society to pick out the nuggets. Her lifelong passion for art, music and literature led her to play Chopin and Beethoven on the piano with feeling and skill, and to read the dramas and novels of the greatest writers, modern and classical, and her cultural eclecticism informed her sparkling, scintillating conversation.
Her daughter Nancy Cunard had her own social circle now, and her best friend was Iris Tree. The two girls rented a studio together in Bloomsbury, near the Slade Art School, where they could entertain their friends, known as ‘The Corrupt Coterie’, with bohemian bottle parties. It was a more decorous age, but Nancy was already notorious for her wild behaviour, rebelling against what she considered her mother’s hypocrisy. She resented Maud’s attempts to charm her own friends, such as Osbert Sitwell and Lady Diana Manners. A dinner party hosted by Nancy for her friends at Cavendish Square on 12 December 1915 ended up with everyone very drunk. Lady Cunard was horrified by the guests’ behaviour when she returned to find her home full of sozzled youth. Nancy would often drink to excess; on 11 July 1916 Duff Cooper and his future fiancée called in at Cavendish Square to find Nancy suffering from a colossal hangover and still in her nightwear, having been extremely drunk the previous evening.
While Lady Cunard cultivated fashionable and creative London, her own daughter was coming to dislike her. Nancy was determined to break away from her mother’s household and marriage seemed to offer an escape. She met an officer, Sydney Fairbairn, who had been wounded at Gallipoli. Maud was unhappy at her daughter’s choice; she had hoped for a more prestigious match, but headstrong Nancy replied, ‘I gave my word, and I must’. The couple chose 15 November 1916 to get married; unfortunately there was a smart royal wedding scheduled for the same day, that of Countess Nada Torby and Prince George of Battenberg. Nevertheless Maud attracted an impressive guest list for her daughter’s wedding, despite the grander fixture across town; her guests included the ambassadors of France, Italy and Spain, the Duke of Rutland, his daughter Lady Diana Manners and Duff Cooper, Lady Randolph Churchill and Ivor Novello. Angular Nancy wore an unconventional gold-coloured dress; Maud chose the soft pink and furs that suited her couleur de rose complexion so well. As mother of the bride, Maud had a particularly fraught day; her estranged husband, Sir Bache Cunard, insisted on giving away their daughter. Her handsome and dapper lover, the recently knighted Sir Thomas Beecham, was in attendance, as was her disgruntled old admirer George Moore. There was a reception afterwards at Cavendish Square, then the new Mr and Mrs Fairbairn left for their honeymoon in Cornwall.
Lady Cunard’s gift to the young couple was a house, 5 Montagu Square, but from the outset
the marriage was not a success. Sydney and Nancy were fundamentally incompatible, and she subsequently remembered her brief period as a wife as one of the unhappiest times of her life. Seven of Nancy’s poems were included in an anthology edited by the Sitwells, which was published in November 1916, but while her marriage lasted she felt unable to write, despite George Moore’s encouragement. When Sydney rejoined the army in July 1918 and left for France, Nancy was relieved.
Nancy was friendly with Sybil Hart-Davis, the elder sister of Duff Cooper. With both their husbands serving in the war, in the summer of 1918 the two women rented a house together near Kingston Bagpuize, in Oxfordshire, with Sybil’s two children, Nancy’s maid and a cook. The house was often full of their friends, many of them in uniform. One was Peter Broughton-Adderley, a fellow officer of Sydney Fairbairn. Peter had first met Nancy in 1917, while he was on a five-day leave. In the summer of 1918 he sought her out again, staying at Bagpuize, and this time they fell in love. Then he returned to France, and in October 1918 Sybil had to break the news to Nancy that Peter had been killed in action. Nancy was heartbroken by her loss. When news of the armistice came just a few weeks later, she could not celebrate.
The end of the war caused complex reactions. For many it was the end of unbearable tension and strain. Margot Asquith, whose eldest stepson, Raymond, had been killed in battle in 1916, described feeling:
as numb as an old piano with broken notes in it. The strain of four years – waiting and watching, opening and reading telegrams upon matters of life and death, and the recurring news of failure at the Front had blunted all my receptive powers.5
But on Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, many Britons danced in the streets, cheering and embracing total strangers; bells rang, maroons were let off and brass bands played. In the capital, revellers of all classes converged on Buckingham Palace. ‘It was a wonderful sight, and more like a foreign carnival […] Everyone in London, rich and poor, fashionable and obscure, were [sic] standing and shouting for the King, and many of the spectators had tears in their eyes’6, wrote Margot Asquith. The King and Queen made repeated appearances on the balcony to acknowledge the joyful crowds, the King still in the khaki uniform he had worn since the beginning of the war, the Queen with her diamonds and pearls, the gems of mourning.
Over 9 million men had been killed in the First World War, 942,135 of them from the British Empire. The conflict had started in Central Europe and spread rapidly across the rest of the Continent, involving Russia, Japan, Africa, the Near and the Far East, Australia and New Zealand, and North America. By its end, the war had engulfed the ancient regime that had controlled Russia, bringing about a Communist revolution and liquidating its royal family. The mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire had been decimated, and Kaiser Wilhelm had abdicated to live in exile in the Netherlands. America’s international role as a mighty military force and as an influential power-broker was now established in a way that dictated that country’s role throughout the twentieth century.
In Britain the Great War had very long-lasting effects. There was barely a home in the country that had not lost someone in the conflict. There were men returning from war who had survived the armed struggle but who found the peace impossible to bear; they were physically or mentally damaged in a way that affected their own lives and those of their families for decades. Of the previously wealthy, many had suffered the terrible burden of successive death duties as they lost sons and heirs. Increased labour costs led to a shortage of servants and brought about the closure of many of the very grand houses in London, some of which were now sold for new developments. But perhaps the greatest impact was psychological: the rules that had previously defined society and the pre-determined roles occupied by those in it were swept away by the devastation of the Great War.
4
The Aftermath: 1918–1923
The return of peace brought about huge social and political ramifications for all classes of British society. Politically, the British Liberal Party had lost all credibility, and Socialism came to be seen by some as an alternative potential power. Many of the landed gentry had suffered financially, and now had far less disposable income to spend on modes of life they had previously taken for granted.
The 1920s saw a quiet revolution among the landowning classes, and a sea change in the social life of London. Before the Great War, the aristocracy had regarded entertaining their peers as a crucial indicator of their importance and status. High-born hostesses of this era included Lady Derby, Lady Spencer, Lady Stanhope, Lady Waldegrave, Lady Shaftesbury and Lady Lansdowne. But four years of austerity during the hostilities, the increased taxation and death duties and the drop in purchasing power of the pound to less than 50 per cent of what it had been worth in 1914 had adversely affected their incomes. One by one, the great palatial London houses were ‘let go’, sold and demolished to be replaced by hotels, apartments and offices. The nobility retreated to their country estates, often also diminished in scale. Even the Dukes of Devonshire, Richmond, Portland, Beaufort, Rutland and Somerset mostly relinquished entertaining on a vast scale in London, preferring to lease a suitable property to ‘do’ the London season or launch the next generation as required. As the journalist Patrick Balfour observed: ‘The older aristocracy was inclined to sell its London mansions, retire to the country and live on such of its estates and with such of its dignity as it could still preserve, thus ceasing to be London Society at all.’1
Surviving sons of the upper classes returning to civilian life now began to go into business, in an attempt to keep afloat financially. Their attempts to infiltrate the City were regarded with a certain amount of scepticism by the stockbrokers, insurers and financiers already there. ‘We want him for clerking, not for breeding purposes’ was the verdict of one banker on a young applicant’s aristocratic references. However, some sections of society had emerged from the war in a stronger and more influential position, including newspaper proprietors, capitalists, Socialists and the artistic avant-garde, which looked at the war with a jaundiced eye.
In particular, the role of women of all classes was reassessed. On 6 February 1918 Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act, extending male suffrage and allowing most women over the age of thirty the vote for the first time, chiefly in recognition of their services to the state during the war. This swelled the electorate from 7.7 million in 1912 to 21.4 million in 1918. The following year the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Acts were also passed, giving women access to professions previously denied them. For the first time Parliament not only needed the votes of a previously unfranchised section of the population but allowed women to join the law-making elite. The first woman to take up her seat as an MP, a role she was to hold for twenty-six years, was Nancy Astor, though her Parliamentary career happened almost by accident.
In October 1919 Nancy’s father-in-law, the first Viscount Astor, died. His son Waldorf inherited the title his father had bought less than four years earlier. Waldorf was automatically elevated to the House of Lords, losing his seat as an MP for Plymouth, which he resented bitterly. He resolved to change the law from within the upper house, but meanwhile he petitioned the King. George V was a deeply conservative character, committed to precedent, to protocol and to wearing the correct insignia on all occasions. Waldorf’s impassioned argument that the awarding of titles and honours enforced class distinctions singularly failed to impress the monarch, and his appeal was refused. (The rule was not overturned until 1963, when Anthony Wedgwood Benn was able to reject a hereditary title in order to retain his seat.)
Nancy sympathised: ‘Some people find it hard to get titles; Lord Astor is finding it even harder to get rid of his.’ Meanwhile, the Conservatives in Plymouth urgently needed a replacement candidate. Waldorf’s brother John Jacob Astor was suggested, but he declined, having lost a leg during the war. However, Nancy had campaigned in the constituency many times on behalf of her husband, and the Astor name carried considerable clout. If she won, she would not be the firs
t woman to be elected (that distinction had already gone to Countess Markievicz, who had won a seat for Sinn Féin but refused to take it up in protest), but Nancy would be the first woman MP actually to sit in Parliament.
Nancy had not supported the women’s suffrage movement that had been so active before the Great War, but she refused to be barred from a course of action because of her gender. Her friend J. M. Barrie complained of her ‘presumptuous ambitions’ in standing for election against a man, but she agreed to contest the seat in Plymouth, planning to retain it until Waldorf could introduce a bill to allow peers to be MPs. However, she thrived in public life, and as events were to prove, she would not retire from it without a struggle.
It is ironic that in 1919 Lady Astor planned to take on a role unwillingly vacated by her husband, while all over Britain women who had found interesting and challenging war work outside their own homes were forced to relinquish their jobs to the menfolk returning from the conflict. Nevertheless, Nancy was popular with the voters, especially the newly enfranchised women of Plymouth, who numbered 17,000. Her informal, unpredictable style of campaigning charmed the electorate. She advocated temperance – not a vote-winner in Plymouth, with its naval tradition and its famous gin distillery – but remarkably, both her opponents, Labour and Liberal, were also teetotallers. Her stance provoked some wry mirth: ‘I would rather commit adultery than have a glass of beer!’ she proclaimed. ‘Who wouldn’t?’ came a voice from the crowd.
