Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  ELEVEN

  The Season of 1889

  In Society’s collective memory, the 1889 Season was a good one, enlivened by the Shah of Persia’s visit, and the bursting into the public consciousness of the Souls after a dinner held by George Curzon for his thirty or so closest friends at the Bachelors’ Club in Piccadilly. It was also the Season in which George Wyndham entered Parliament as the Conservative Member for Dover after a by-election in July 1889 (‘Isn’t it delightful George being an M.P.? & for Dover too such a nice place,’ said Mananai);1 and the eighteen-year-old Pamela Wyndham finally made her debut.

  ‘The Babe’, as Pamela was known to her family and their friends, appeared to have been granted all the blessings that accrue, fairytale-like, to the youngest child. With her delicate features and refined air,2 she was considered the most beautiful of the sisters, second only to George in terms of Wyndham looks and, like him, ‘literary and clever’, as Mary remarked admiringly.3 Pamela’s contemporary, Edith Olivier, whose father was canon of nearby Wilton, said that Pamela ‘seemed to pour ideas into one’s mind like an empty glass’.4 Like George, galloping across the Downs at sunrise and quoting Ronsard, Pamela rejected crude reality in favour of an idealized past. From a young age she collected folk ballads, and noted picturesque examples of village dialect. She read avidly, and kept a tally: seventy books for 1889. She adored the Brontës’ tales of wild moors and love against the odds (‘I can always read anything by them,’ she told Mary),5 the romances of Scott and the diaries of her FitzGerald ancestors. George addressed Pamela as ‘Pamela III’ in homage to Lady Edward (their grandmother, Lady Campbell, being ‘Pamela II’); and there was certainly something regal in the way she comported herself. She disparaged ‘the tyranny of the red blotting pad’ over Mary, which meant that her sister spent her time writing letters rather than reading books: Mary’s never diminishing ‘nest egg’ of unanswered letters ‘is too much of a time-sucker with you!’ said Pamela.6

  Pamela in her late teens, by Violet Manners.

  On seeing Pamela at this age Wilfrid Blunt was struck by her similarity to Mary, but Mary disclaimed the resemblance: ‘Imagination I may have but wit never! & I was so silent.’7 In fact they were very little alike. Pamela was born demanding attention: she was passionately jealous of those she loved. From little more than toddlerhood she sobbed if a sibling received a letter or present from their parents and she did not. At Clouds, she was queen. Villagers and guests alike were well accustomed to recitals from Pamela, singing folk ballads while accompanying herself on her ribbon-bedecked guitar, a Lacôte – the Stradivarius of guitar makers – which she received for her eighteenth birthday.8

  Pamela had a constant sense of expectation, of greatness imminent; a sharp tongue; a facility for damning with faint praise; and her mother’s love of birds: ‘they would fly to her finger when she called, which she thought was marvellous’, remembered Sir Stephen Runciman, a neighbour and contemporary of Pamela’s children.9 The comment might be a metaphor for Pamela’s relationship with people, and when she entered Society, people flocked to her, attracted, no doubt, by her air of lofty unconcern. She did ‘not allow her partners much time for talking or nonsense but kept them going’, said Percy approvingly of her tendency to whisk young men efficiently around the dance floor.10

  At almost a decade younger than most of the Souls, Pamela was still too newly arrived in Society to be a guest at Curzon’s farewell dinner on 10 July 1889. Curzon had been diagnosed with lung trouble. He intended to summer in the healthful Alps, then travel across Central Asia to Persia, the buffer between India and Russia and fulcrum of Anglo-Russian rivalry. Renowned even at twenty-eight for his imperious manner and a self-confidence so fervent that people thought it must be hubristic, he was doggedly pursuing his long-held ambition to be India’s Viceroy.

  Persia’s Shah was in fact being honoured that very same night at a dinner given by Lord Rothschild at Waddesdon Manor – meaning that some of those Curzon had invited could not attend the Bachelors’ Club. The guests arrived to find a long, well-dressed table lit by candles, covered in blue glass and silver, and decorated with crystal bowls of flowers. Behind each chair, instead of footmen, stood club servants. On each chair was a lengthy piece of doggerel by Curzon listing and eulogizing each member of the Gang, both present and absent. Margot Tennant, always mindful of posterity, swiped her copy and recorded the work fifty years later in her memoirs. The verse on Mary and Hugo, with its sly reference to Hugo’s infidelity, exemplified Curzon’s tone:

  From kindred essay

  LADY MARY today

  Should have beamed on a world that adores her.

  Of her spouse debonair

  No woman has e’er

  Been able to say that he bores her …

  Curzon’s recital of his poem raised his already ebullient guests to exuberant spirits. Raucous singing and dancing followed. Even the normally reserved Balfour was capering as if possessed amid fun ‘so loud it was impossible to hear anyone speak’. Eventually the party adjourned to the Tennants’ house in Grosvenor Square where they danced until the early hours. The survivors, including Lady Brownlow, made their way home via the old flower market in Covent Garden, weaving through sleepy streets hazy with the morning sun, their arms full of flowers.

  By lunchtime reports of the Souls’ wild evening were already being exchanged third hand. Frances Balfour had bumped into a fresh-faced Lady Brownlow before eleven o’clock in the morning and been brought back to the Brownlows’ for breakfast. The house was ‘cool as an icebox’ and ‘a bower of roses’ as usual, Frances told Betty Balfour that afternoon, passing on the gossip as soon as she received it. As Lady Brownlow furnished Frances with the details of the night before, her nephew Harry Cust stumbled in, still bleary-eyed, startled to see visitors already present. Lady Brownlow repaired to her bedroom with Frances in tow. She settled Frances into a comfortable chair, and grilled her guest on her views concerning the immortality of the soul.11 It is understandable that Arthur, fond of her though he was, described Adelaide Brownlow as ‘occasionally quite terrible’.12

  The dinner made the Souls famous. By 1890 the World was devoting articles to ‘this highest and most aristocratic cult … as liberal in its views as it is exclusive in its composition … Certain intellectual qualities are prominent among the Souls and a limited acquaintance with Greek philosophy is a sine qua non.’13 Three years later Henry Labouchere’s radical Truth got its hands on an ‘Expression Exam paper’: a quiz set by female Souls to while away a rainy afternoon and printed it in full:

  1. Explain the following: The dull box. A greenhouse. A gorge riser. Gilletmongering. Atrophasia. Stinche. A Lou-good. Jephson. Whippingham. A felbrig. A float-face. Barloon.

  2. Describe accurately the Block including the duties of the Mopper and the chief blockites, and explain in a few lines: a Stodgite, a groffality, blue face and horns, a John Stone, a Molly Corker, poivre aux pieds, manchettes, Eternity soup, six cloisters, type drawers.

  3. Analyze the following phrases: This is distinctly Sir Giles. She almost pecked him. He has got a touch of egg. I have got three dentists today. Je suis mariée, vous n’êtes pas. He’s got a cruet.14

  The Souls professed themselves appalled by the disclosure, presuming that an enterprising servant must have filched the crumpled-up paper from a wastepaper basket.15

  ‘Lady Mary’ was one of those unable to attend the dinner, but her absence was nothing to do with the Shah. Instead she was in bed at Cadogan Square, frustrated and bored. Six weeks previously, she had given birth to her fourth child, a boy, christened Colin. The story went about among Mary’s friends that when asked the sex of the child, Hugo said he did not know: ‘the usual hardy annual’, he presumed.16 Mary was not hardy. More or less annual childbirth had weakened her to the extent that, a month after Colin’s birth, and despite for the first time following to the letter her lying-in’s requirements, her condition was so far from improved that she was returned to bed.17 D
r Collins warned her that she would risk her life if she had any further children. By Mary’s own account it appears to be at this point that sexual relations between the Elchos ceased entirely for a period of some six years.

  The rude health of Mary’s childhood had long since abandoned her. Her family and friends attributed it to her frenetic socializing. She rushed around, forgot to eat, slept little, never sat still and worried constantly. A light schedule consisted of ‘only one, or perhaps two! Operas a week’.18 Mananai thought Mary should be forced to stay in bed one day in seven simply to regain the energy she expended.19 Instead Mary, who was prone to illness and on occasion thought herself the victim of septic pneumonia, arsenic poisoning and diphtheria, relied upon purported ‘miracle cures’.20 In the spring of 1891 after a particularly fierce bout of influenza, she took the ‘Salisbury system: lots of hot water, which really does suit me & meat, no farinaceous food & very little vegetable’. ‘Sounds odd, doesn’t it? but its [sic] really easier to digest & for the pains gives more nutriment & doesn’t create fermentation acidity etc,’ she explained to her sister-in-law Evelyn de Vesci, adding that her mother ‘told me I looked 5 years younger!’21 She became dependent on her annual spa trips to the Continent, taken at each Season’s end, to recoup the reserves of health and energy she had plundered during the rest of the year.

  As transport to the Continent became cheaper and faster, spa tourism became a feature of the English social calendar. Each mineral spring – Kissingen, Baden-Baden, Ems, Schwalbach and Carlsbad to name just a few – had different medicinal properties. A multitude of guidebooks (most in convenient pocket editions) explained to the eager health tourist which resort would best suit their ailment: which of the alkaline, saline, sulphurous and ferruginous waters were aperient and which suited those prone to diarrhoea; which were best for gout, for skin diseases, for anaemia, for chlorosis and for ‘female diseases’ (these covered everything from hysteria to failure to conceive). Many also listed the notables who favoured each spa, allowing the socially ambitious, and snobbish, to factor in the calibre of fellow cure-takers when choosing their destination. Kissingen, the first spa Mary visited, in August 1890, was her favourite. By the turn of the century she rarely ventured anywhere else, making the journey each August, third class by rail, after several weeks’ worried consultation of Bradshaw’s railway timetable. She detailed with relish in her letters home all the elements of her ‘kur’ and her body’s response, dutifully swallowing the three revolting glasses of water required daily that were mixed with whey to mitigate their horrible taste. At the giant Kurhaus that lay in the centre of each town she was subjected to inhalations, to lengthy baths and to ‘douches’ in which the bloomer-clad patient stood inside a cage and was pummelled by jets of water from all angles. The only respite came when she was menstruating, for then the treatment temporarily ceased: ‘[I] am rather longing for Bets[ey] so’s to give me a Kleine Pause,’ Mary informed Hugo wearily from Kissingen in 1900.22

  Throughout the Season, Mary had received reports of Pamela’s excellent progress through the social scene. Pamela nonetheless maintained an amused distance from ‘worldly’ Society’s preoccupations. She thought a Saturday-to-Monday at the Brownlows’ Ashridge quite the nicest of the summer – principally, so she told Mary, for an ‘Elysian conversation’ about books and poetry with a fellow guest, Frank Myer, which proved so different from the commonplace small talk dwelling on dance partners and grandees: ‘he talked so agreeably, & after the ordinary “partner shah twaddle” it was doubly delightful’.23 Her dancecard was perpetually full, but Pamela always expressed her preference for intellectual engagements. While dinners with the Burne-Joneses and Henry James were ‘really delightful’,24 she described balls and parties in a wry, self-mocking tone, amused at her own frivolity, clear that, unlike most, she could see the Emperor’s new clothes for exactly what they were.

  At a ball held by the Rothschilds towards the end of July, Pamela was inundated with compliments on her gown: a simple white tulle dress, its bodice trimmed with ‘a tiny wreath of forget-me-nots’. It was a ‘dream-dress’, she told her admirers. The inspiration had appeared to her in sleep the night before. On waking she had headed straight to Woollands’ department store and trimmed the dress herself. ‘It was such fun & really it looked very pretty & every one admired it!!!’ she boasted to Mary, proving by her own effort the prophetic power of dreams – a concept in which she wholeheartedly believed.25

  Pamela’s Season ended in a flurry. She danced until 4 a.m. on consecutive nights (at Mrs Hope’s and at the Dudley House Ball). The next day she lunched with her parents at White’s to watch the Royal Procession. The gentlemen’s club had been opened to women specifically for that occasion. ‘It was like another Jubilee all the poor women kept fainting all round in the crowd, they kept handing glasses of water and salts to them from where we were.’ In the evening, they attended the opera, Otello at the Lyceum, where only the fact that Desdemona was ‘very ugly & rather fat’ made the harrowing last scene bearable. The next day Pamela wrote to Mary as London emptied and the Wyndhams prepared to visit the Leconfields at Petworth. ‘It seems incredible that my first Season should be over … I am not at all sorry it is over but filled with a sort of placid triumph at having managed to have had such a delightful time on this to most people unsatisfactory Earth!’26

  Mary was delighted to receive Pamela’s ‘capital’ letter.27 She had packed off children and servants to Stanway, and on doctor’s orders was spending a blissful fortnight at Felixstowe’s Bath Hotel, doing nothing but lying on a wicker chair, basking in the sunshine, reading intermittently and looking out to sea. Much as Mary missed her children ‘it really is a great rest being without them for a time’, she admitted to Evelyn de Vesci. She received regular updates from Mrs Fry, and by return of post sent to her children paper ‘jumping donkeys & cats & clowns’ that she made to amuse them.28 ‘I shall hardly know [Colin] when I see him,’ she added. ‘Babies alter so much at first.’29

  In September 1889, the Wyndhams gained another grandchild when Mananai gave birth to a girl at the Adeanes’ London house, 65 Cadogan Place, a new-build just doors down from the Elchos. The Adeanes had been hoping for a son, and Mananai had decorated Babraham’s nurseries accordingly: the day nursery papered with a Morris trellis of birds and roses, the two night nurseries painted pale yellow and pale blue.30 They bore the disappointment of the sex bravely. ‘Having a little baby does make me love you more … if that is possible,’ Mananai told her mother, who came up to London with Percy and Pamela after the birth.31 Mary ‘loaned’ her the use of Wilkes as a nurse. Charlie, who spent most of his wife’s lying-in at her bedside eating muffins, gave her a small enamelled locket studded with diamonds intended to hold the baby’s first ‘fluff’.32 Pamela was godmother, but she felt nonetheless ‘left behind & wretched’ with ‘Mamma, you & worst of all Madeline … all three away from me on a shelf of experience I knew nothing about’, she later recollected to Mary.33

  Because the child was a girl she was christened with little fuss, a month later, after Mananai had been churched. The Wyndhams and Pamela were again in Ireland so Georgie Burne-Jones was Pamela’s proxy at the font. Mananai wore a white ‘nun’s veiling dress’ that had been part of her trousseau and a white felt hat with a large bow. The infant, who made ‘just enough cry to be lucky’,34 was named Pamela Marie after her maternal and paternal aunts who stood as godmothers – and ‘Of course because of Lady Edward FitzGerald,’ said Queen Victoria knowledgeably when she enquired of her maid of honour the child’s name; she recalled meeting the famous beauty when she was a small child and Lady Edward’s looks had long gone. ‘Is it not wonderful she should have such a memory and take such an interest in all one’s belongings? It sounds trivial but these are the little things that make one love the Queen,’ said Marie Adeane.35

  TWELVE

  The Mad and their Keepers

  In 1891, after two years of travelling, George Curzon returned to
England. The Souls celebrated with another Bachelors’ Club dinner. Yet snobbish Curzon was appalled by developments in his absence. As the Souls gained in prominence, they had invited into their midst the talented and amusing, regardless of social background. For Curzon, the ‘degradation’ wrought upon ‘our circle’ was epitomized by ‘the Cosquiths’, a shorthand he used to describe Herbert Henry Asquith, the middle-class barrister shortly to leapfrog directly from Liberal backbencher to Home Secretary under Gladstone; and Oscar Wilde, lecture-giving aesthete, whose notoriety had taken a darker turn with the publication of his first novel, The Picture of Dorian Grey, in instalments in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (it was deemed so scandalous that the newsagent W. H. Smith refused to sell those editions of Lippincott’s at its stalls).1

  ‘Gone forever is the old Gang and a few magnificent souls [sic] like you and Harry [Cust], [Doll] Liddell, Mary Elcho and myself remain. The rest are whirling after new Gods and baring their heads in the temple of twopenny Rimmons,’2 Curzon told Harry White, sadly and grandly, upon hearing that Ettie Grenfell had invited Oscar and Constance Wilde, Henry Asquith and his wife Helen,3 and the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his wife (also called Helen) to Taplow Court, the Grenfells’ house in Berkshire. Curzon urged White to capsize the interlopers’ punt while on the river.4 In fact, Mary had turned traitor too. In the previous six months alone, she had gone to the theatre ‘à quatre’ with Wilde, Arthur and Ettie, and had had Wilde to dine at Cadogan Square where he kept his end of the table ‘alive with paradox’, and her guests, including Arthur, George and Sibell, and Edward Burne-Jones, stayed until well after midnight: ‘so I suppose they weren’t bored’, she said with relief.5 With her consuming interest in people, and her expansive warmth, Mary was to become renowned for introducing new people into the Souls.