Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  The weeks between Harry’s marriage and Pamela’s departure for India had not been easy for any of the Wyndhams. Madeline Wyndham remained in the throes of a breakdown at Bournemouth, under the care of a nurse until early December. Percy stayed at his wife’s side. Pamela was kept at Saighton, out of Percy’s way. Their relations, already at breaking point, deteriorated still further when Percy found out in late October that a stream of letters and keepsakes were still passing between Harry at Fontainebleau and Pamela at Saighton. ‘How long is the writing to continue,’ he demanded of Mary as he realized Sibell’s limitations as a chaperone: ‘In my judgment the things [sic] seems very far from over with the chains, rings and copies of Browning poems! … I feel that they are all so sunk in fatuity that no words can save them.’2 Enraged by his daughter’s ‘freaks’ and tears, furious about the affair that had caused his wife’s breakdown, Percy was astonished that Pamela did not have the sense to realize that ‘Letters from [Harry] after his marriage that would have been harmless under ordinary circumstances cease … to be so after what has passed between them.’3 Percy decided to ban all communication between Pamela and Harry henceforth, but the edict – delivered at Mary’s suggestion more softly by herself – did not end matters completely. The lovers continued to communicate through Sibell. ‘Except by English law I am not one bit married, save to Pamela only,’ Harry told Sibell in a rather belated conversion to chastity, while also declaring Pamela ‘the one pure perfect love of my life’. Pamela received each message with joy. She seems to have thought of Nina not at all.4

  As Pamela prepared to depart for India she saw nothing but pain ahead ‘for the next 10 years’.5 Her gloom did not lift once on board the Ganges. Minna, Pamela’s and Mananai’s shared maid, began unpacking their travel trunks. Mananai and Charlie set off to explore the ship and peruse the Captain’s list of their fellow travellers. Pamela sat in her cabin ‘very mis[erable] very alone’, clutching a bundle of Harry’s letters and a prayer book that he had sent her, waiting for the clock’s hands to reach midnight, the hour appointed for the Ganges to steam out. ‘It hardly seems real,’ she wrote in the first of many lengthy letters to her confessor Sibell. Desperate for the smallest details about Harry, Pamela implored Sibell to write the moment she saw him with ‘long minute descriptions: colour of clothes etc or even if his dog was with him’.6

  The passage, and passengers, to India were familiar to an imperial nation. Ships carrying brave soldiers (returning from leave to garrison the Jewel in the Crown) and ‘the Fishing Fleet’ (unfortunate young ladies who had failed to secure a husband in England now trying their luck abroad) passed Gibraltar, made their way through the Suez Canal and across the Gulf of Aden to Bombay. Pamela was surprised to find how accurate the caricatures were: ‘the people on the steamer are beyond words – typical – & more like the young ladies in “shirts” & skirts in the D[aily] Graphic than I ever expected’, she told Sibell.7 Mananai was more optimistic about the calibre of passengers. ‘There are very many nice people on board, especially men,’ she told her mother, scrolling off a list of names as proof. She was particularly taken by one Lieutenant Baker-Carr of the Rifle Brigade, a ‘delightful & very good looking man’ who reminded her of her brother Guy. Robert Baker-Carr was a seasoned veteran of India, about to take up a post as the Viceroy Lord Elgin’s aide-de-camp. To Mananai’s delight, he was the son of an acquaintance of Madeline Wyndham from her Irish youth. ‘I am trying to describe the people to amuse Papa,’ said Mananai, but she was doing her best to sell the dashing infantry officer to her parents, and to Pamela as well.8

  Pamela was not openly dismissive of Mananai’s plans, but she did not leap to embrace new prospects either. Shipboard life was busy: games of deck quoits and shipboard croquet by day; and nightly concerts. Pamela had brought her guitar with her, but she sang her folk ballads rarely and socialized less. She preferred to be out on deck watching the blue horizon flash unchangeably past: marvelling at the ‘wonderful Opal days … such sunsets … such Waves & Sea’. At dinner she escaped from the chatter of the Captain’s table as soon as was polite and stood in the darkness on the ship’s prow, watching it plough ‘a great white path up the Waters’, with ‘the flying fish, & the funny porpoises, & the lovely phosphor’ lighting up its way. The greatness of the ocean, its space and darkness, gave Pamela a momentary sense of perspective and escape. Surrounded by ‘something Unimaginable … it was all perfect, & beautiful, & great, – & wiped away the dreadfulness of those 3 months’.9

  The Ganges docked in Bombay, and the party, accompanied by Baker-Carr, headed north for game-hunting near Peshawar, the town that lay at the mouth of the Khyber Pass on the Afghan border. All their Kipling, all the tales of India they had heard and their distillation in exhibitions visited had not prepared Pamela and the Adeanes for the country’s assault on their senses. The dusty windows of the rackety train revealed ‘a new world – new Birds, new grasses, new animals, everything new’. The rushing air was hot and filled with alien smells and sounds. They stretched their legs at stations ‘swarming with natives in brilliant clothes’, and as the train puffed and hissed at the siding drank soup quickly boiled up for them in the waiting room. Once they had reached their destination they travelled in ‘touges’, little dog-carts pulled by small sturdy ponies – ‘too delightful’, said Mananai – while bullock carts bearing their piles of luggage brought up the rear. They jolted past Buddhist rock temples and past Muslims at prayer in the mosque: ‘[they] touch the ground again & again with their foreheads … some pray out loud – calling on Allah in high mettalic [sic] tones’, Mananai reported.10

  The north-west border, from where the Khyber Pass – Kipling’s ‘narrow swordcut in the hills’ – led to Afghanistan, was tribal land, bandit country. Through the Pass wound the ‘kafilas’ of traders heading for Peshawar. The cries of the tribesmen, the clattering of iron pots over hazy campfires, the musty exotic smells of camels, carpets and musk: Kipling had imprinted all these images into the minds of the British public. They were accustomed to press reports touting imperial derring-do in the frequent skirmishes between the British and the guerrilla forces of the bandits. The slash-and-burn tactics employed by imperial forces to stabilize the region were quietly overlooked. Soldiers who burnt down villages, slaughtered livestock and destroyed food stores sat at odds with the propaganda of a noble, civilizing Empire.11

  At Peshawar the party camped out in the wild and trekked over rocky terrain. By day vultures and eagles swooped overhead through sparkling blue skies; on nighttime drives through the arid country they heard the terrifying howl of jackals in the dark. ‘This is the land of the Bible,’ said Pamela; ‘it is very enchanted … & sometimes I am living in an Arabian Nights Tale – & sometimes in the old Scriptures & often – very often – in Fairytales. For there are Blue-birds here – the real Fairybird … and Night shuts down like a great Curtain on the day – & the stars quiver instead of shine.’12

  They parted ways with Baker-Carr, promising to meet him again in Calcutta, and travelled on to princely Rajasthan, where on a swaying howdah they made their way through the forest to the sixteenth-century fort of Chittor. As they passed through the monumental entrance gate, ‘the Native Guard played God Save the Queen … it is wonderful the way the Natives Salaam & bow down to white people’, said Mananai. They made their return at dusk, and as their elephants waded across a river the howdah began to pitch and slide. The mahout barked instructions at his passengers to shift their weight: ‘we all clung on to each other … there was really no fear & we were roaring with laughter all the time but it was anything but comfortable’, Mananai told her mother.13

  They visited acquaintances made on the Ganges, dined with them at Mess and reviewed the soldiers on parade, dazzled by the contrast between the dark skin of the Sikh soldiers and their vibrant red tunics and turbans. At Udaipur they toured the white stone palaces of maharajas. Mananai was appalled to find that they were furnished with pieces ‘all from Birmingham cut g
lass beds & chairs & tables … too dreadful’.14 She thrived on the rough and ready nature of travelling – ‘one goes to bed regularly & can wash & dress quite well’ on trains – and was dazed by the sheer amount she saw: ‘to me it[’s] extraordinary to think that your little “Em-Wem” [Pamela] & “Jessie Rat” [Mananai] are seeing & doing all this – we can never be glad enough’, she wrote, before remembering the reason that had brought them there and hastily amending the line to read: ‘shall have such things to look back on & remember & tell you about shan’t we’.

  Mananai reported proudly to her parents every conquest her little sister made, from elderly misty-eyed Englishmen on ferries, made nostalgic for ‘Home’ by Pamela’s singing, to those rather younger, attracted by her vibrancy.15 Baker-Carr met up with the party again when they reached Calcutta. There too they found Eddy Tennant, the eldest son of the Tennant clan. Quiet, responsible, good-natured Eddy had been sent out to India to check on the progress of his sister Lucy Graham Smith. On paper he was immensely eligible: vastly wealthy, tall and good-looking. His fundamental shortcoming was summed up in one pithy sentence by his younger sister. ‘Eddy lacks drive,’ said Margot of her favourite brother.16 More brutally one of Eddy’s children, who had inherited his aunt’s acidic streak, later declared that his father was so boring that he couldn’t even remember what he looked like.17 That Pamela and Lucy were in India for the same reason did not appear to disconcert anyone. Diffidently, Eddy made his interest in Pamela plain. There was an uncomfortable afternoon when both he and Baker-Carr accompanied Mananai and Pamela to the Eden Gardens cricket ground. The group got caught in a thunderstorm and retreated to the Adeanes’ rooms to sit it out, where a drenched Eddy and Baker-Carr cast dark looks across the sitting room at one another.18

  Pamela did not mention these suitors in letters home, but told her friends that she was ‘much happier – happy even’. ‘“Miss Pam” … seems in tearing spirits and possessed of a mind that responds at once to every pleasurable stimulus,’ said Arthur to Mary, having been shown Pamela’s latest letter by George. ‘I put her at the head of all the letter writers I know at least for certain qualities … the vividness of the presentation and the life and colour … glowing in every line were extraordinary.’19 But Pamela was not so perennially buoyant as Arthur either supposed or hoped. To Mary and to Sibell, she confided that misery still frequently leapt upon her: upon receipt of a postbag empty of letters from Harry; upon glimpsing others in love, as when the party met up with Guy and Minnie Wyndham at Lucknow, who seemed to exist in ‘a nimbus of pure happiness’.20

  Pamela was no enemy of misery. She once proposed, in some seriousness, the instigation of a national holiday of grief: an annual two-day ‘regular out of door … celebration of being really, thoroughly, impossibly, cruelly unhappy’ in which people would only wear black and croon and rave in the streets.21 Later in life she sank frequently into deep depression, sobbing in a darkened room for days, and recounting the experience at length to a select group of friends when she felt better. ‘“Life” is one damned thing after another … hardly has one pulled one’s bleeding roots from under one severing blow, than one has to trail them before another hatchet, & have yet another length hacked away … I wonder why – then – we are all sent into the world with such a longing for joy: for happiness as one’s birthright,’ she wrote to Mary later in life.22

  The seeds of her emotional self-indulgence are plain to see in her letters written at this time, but the unhappiness of a heartbroken twenty-two-year-old is very real, her isolation in chattering, stifling rooms, bemused and angry at the hordes around her who seemed to have happiness so easily in their grasp. At those times ‘all the strength & philosophy’ that she tried to practise ‘goes for very little … one flattens ones nose against the glass window, at the hot sausages inside’, she told Sibell. In Lucknow’s steamy heat, with green parakeets chattering about her, Pamela’s heart and mind were back in rainy England with Harry.23

  Those writing to her from England were evasive on the subject of Harry. ‘… I feel so far away & wonder sometimes if anybody but myself remembers anything about that time,’ she said to Sibell.24 Pamela felt as though a curtain had been drawn across her past as soon as she stepped on board the Ganges. She did not know that the story was far from forgotten and that Arthur was once more engaged in damage limitation – this time on her behalf – as the scandal threatened to rear its ugly head once more.

  Of all the Souls, Lord and Lady Brownlow had felt the greatest rage, as they railed at their nephew’s ‘deception’. Lady Brownlow openly denounced Nina; Lord Brownlow refused to countenance Harry’s continued representation of Stamford, the Lincolnshire parliamentary seat that was in the peer’s control.25 In fury, Cust announced his intention to stand as the Unionist candidate for North Manchester in a by-election planned for the spring of 1894. Most of the Souls were alarmed by his impetuous decision, drawing attention to himself when he would do better to lie low. But Balfour, conscious that the previous autumn he had promised to help Harry escape social opprobrium and political ostracism if Harry would marry Nina, agreed to support him.

  Millicent Fawcett, a radical Liberal Unionist and President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (the NUWSS), caught wind of the ‘most ghastly story’ of Harry, Nina and Pamela. Appalled that Cust should represent the honest burghers of Manchester,26 she began to circulate the story around local political associations. She tried to recruit Lady Frances Balfour, a fellow suffragist, to her cause. Harry promptly sought the help of Arthur, who confronted Mrs Fawcett, fearing rightly that to leave the belligerent Harry to deal with the situation was a recipe for disaster.

  The clash between Mrs Fawcett and Harry Cust posited radicalism and suffragism against historic patriarchy. ‘Up to our generation the whole of the social punishment in these cases has fallen on the woman and none or next to none on the man,’ Mrs Fawcett told Balfour. ‘But now, whether we like it or not, a movement is making itself felt towards equality … if for the last four or five generations the H Custs of the world had been disciplined by a healthy “coercion” of law and public opinion, the whole of this pitiable business might have been prevented and two lives at least saved from going to shipwreck …’27

  The idea of opening out patrician Harry Cust’s behaviour to the common man’s judgement was anathema to the Souls. Balfour, suppressing his own misgivings about Cust’s candidacy, icily told Mrs Fawcett that he could not see how episodes in Cust’s private life made him unfit for public duty. He reproved her for making ‘the unhappy story of a most unhappy woman [that is, Nina] … the common topic of political gossip’ through ‘the length & breadth of Manchester’. He threatened her with legal action if she continued to mention ‘Miss Wyndham’s’ name.28 Lady Frances explained that while she personally abhorred Cust’s behaviour, ‘all that need be known in Manchester was the seduction of his wife before marriage … and that would not tell against him in a working class constituency’.29 Cust, adopting an ill-considered and heavy-handed approach that displayed his contempt for women and for anyone he did not consider his social equal, threatened Mrs Fawcett with a libel suit for defaming himself by repeating the story.

  Then, as now, justification was a total defence against defamation. One cannot defame a person by saying something about them that is true. Accordingly, and in return, Mrs Fawcett threatened to subpoena everyone who knew anything of the matter, including Balfour: all of whom she intended to call as witnesses to Harry’s actions. Prominent local politicians, many of them with Radical roots, began to weigh in, expressing their disgust at the idea that Cust might be imposed upon them by a decadent aristocratic ‘clique in London’. In June, Balfour finally told Cust, in terms courteous and unequivocal, that, for the sake of the party and the Souls, he could not stand.30 The existing Unionist candidate for North Manchester stood again, and Cust did not stand for re-election at Stamford in 1895, remaining in political exile until 1900, when he re-entered Par
liament as member for Bermondsey, another working-class constituency, where presumably his past did not tell against him.

  Of all this, Pamela was almost ignorant. Their party set sail from Bombay on 20 March 1894, on the Peninsular – ‘one of the best ships & we have the best cabins on board’, reported Mananai to her parents.31 There were a few disappointments: Charlie had not bagged himself a tiger, and time constraints had forced them to drop items from their itinerary: ‘one can’t do everything’.32 Most importantly, Pamela finally seemed better. Mananai had been as encouraging as she could to Baker-Carr, on Pamela’s behalf. They left with the Lieutenant promising to write, and to visit when next in England. As Pamela and the Adeanes lay out on deck at night, looking up at the moon and stars and tousled by warm night winds, their previous crossing’s misery seemed a world away.

  The travellers docked at a misty Southampton in April, with Pamela’s guitar intact, and a parrot that Mananai had brought back home for a pet. In the summer that followed, Pamela’s family spoke with relief of her buoyant spirit; how pretty and well she was looking; and enthused about her hordes of admirers, and innumerable engagements. ‘How much better she is again,’ said Mananai, hoping that finally her sister’s fortunes would improve.33

  FIFTEEN

  Rumour

  The travellers returned to a political landscape irrevocably altered by Gladstone’s retirement from politics little over a month before their return. Few had thought that the octogenarian’s fourth ministry, which began in 1892, would be anything but short-lived, although the young Welsh Radical David Lloyd George was one of many in the Commons who marvelled at how, in moments, the shrunken figure huddled on the front bench could become ‘an erect athletic gladiator, fit for the contest of any arena’.1 But Gladstone was broken when his second Home Rule Bill, after battling its way through the Commons – in a sense literally, for a fistfight broke out on the benches between Unionists and Home Rulers at its final reading – was rejected by the House of Lords. In an incandescent final speech in the Commons, Gladstone asked his fellow Members how long ‘a deliberative assembly, elected by the votes of more than six million people’, could continue to be defied by the inherited wealth and privilege of the Lords.2 As he left the House for the final time that evening, making his way to Windsor to offer the Queen his resignation, he was applauded to the rafters by MPs, all aware, even then, that an era was at an end.