Black Week shook Britain’s confidence and forced a complete overhaul in the Government’s conduct of the war. With the eyes of the world upon it, Britain was faltering. Its army had showed itself ‘mortal and human’, its officers simply ‘the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always been’, the troops ‘neither splendid nor disgraceful … just ill-trained and fairly plucky and wonderfully good-tempered men – paying for it’, said Wells.1 ‘The history of the future will have to summarize the causes of the decline and fall of the British Empire in three pregnant words – “suicide from imbecility”,’ declared a trenchant commentator in the Review of Reviews, urging root-and-branch military reform.2
Lord Roberts – ‘Bobs’, as he was known – was brought out of retirement to replace Sir Redvers Bullers, and told, in the meeting in which he was appointed, that his only son was one of the Colenso dead. The change in command was not enough to protect the War Office from allegations of ineptitude from either Radical anti-war Liberals, led by Henry Labouchere (‘Labby’), or Alfred Harmsworth’s Daily Mail, just three years old. George was anticipating an attack when Parliament reconvened in February 1900. But ‘I think I have a pretty good case,’ he said. ‘Anyway I am keeping low like a Boer and shall not fire until they come into the open.’3
The Opposition came into the open at the Queen’s Address, which declared, ‘we are not interested in the possibility of defeat: it does not exist’. The Opposition moved for an amendment deploring ‘the want of knowledge, foresight and judgment of Her Majesty’s Ministers in preparation for the war now proceeding’. ‘Arthur was most foolish to speak at all,’ said Margot of Balfour’s pitiful response. ‘Some want of passion in his nature’ made him unable to give the ‘grand uplifted bugle … sort of speech’ the situation required. Balfour’s intellectual, measured oratory was completely out of step with a country thrown from jingoistic euphoria to the pit of despair in barely three months.4
The role of standard bearer fell to George. Fuelled by incandescent patriotism his speech was, by agreement of all who heard it, the making of his career. He spoke for an hour and thirty-four minutes, leaving out ‘about a quarter of the stuff’ he had prepared. He admitted that blunders and miscalculations had been made. But soon there would be 150,000 British troops in South Africa. The question now was one of faith and courage. Long live the British Empire! said George. All Hail Her Majesty! When he sat down, ‘I thought they would never stop cheering,’ he told his mother.5
‘George has covered himself with glory … I have never heard anything better in my long experience of the House … is it not splendid! all the best and severest judges would agree my praise is not exaggerated,’ Arthur wrote to Mary, in tones more characteristic of his excitable protégé.6 Margot acknowledged that George ‘defended a very attacked office in a very critical moment & did it quite xtraordinarily [sic] well’.7 ‘The speech has given him Cabinet rank,’ Percy claimed exultantly.8 Arthur agreed. George’s rise seemed now ‘beyond the reach of fate’.9
The press hailed George as one of the ‘men who will lead Britain into the twentieth century’. His very person seemed proof that Britain could still breed heroes. ‘[F]rom man of fashion to soldier, from politician to statesman, from speaker to orator, from dilettante to critic, he has never yet shown himself contented with the beginning or with the outside,’ commented one article that Pamela liked enough to cut out and keep. The ‘completely thoroughbred’ George with his ‘aspiring and adventurous’ temperament, ‘vivacious and lofty expression’ and ‘richly sonorous voice’ reassured the public that Britain could reach greatness once again.10
As if by magic, or rather thanks to Bobs, British fortunes began to turn, with the relief of Cecil Rhodes at Kimberley and victory at Paardeburg. On 28 February Ladysmith was finally relieved. The Wyndhams rejoiced at the news that Guy Wyndham was safe and well, but ‘[h]ow could they have survived …?’ asked an appalled Mananai,11 reading press reports that the troops had subsisted on a daily diet of just 1½ biscuits, 30 ounces of meal and a Bovril-like soup called Chevril. The relief forces immediately sought out Guy, eager to tell him how George’s speech had made them feel finally as though the country were behind them.12 The British public held their heads higher. Labby’s determinedly ‘pro-Boer’ stance in Truth made him, in the estimation of the New York Times, ‘the best-hated man in Britain’.13 On St Patrick’s Day Mananai attended a concert at London’s Albert Hall where a new patriotic song to the tune of ‘The Wearing of the Green’ raised the roof with uninterrupted cheering for over ten minutes.14
Mananai followed each day’s triumphs and reverses in the press with near-obsessive avidity. Her anxiety for the nation provided an outlet for, and distraction from, her personal grief. Pamela had sent her a copy of her latest work, a religious, mystical compilation of poetry and prose entitled The Book of Peace. ‘It is a good book, full and sharp, with the sweet-bitterness of Birth and Death,’ George told Pamela after first ‘incontinently’ reading the work: ‘You have washed the Gates of life … from the insolent and vapid scribblings with which they have been defaced.’15 In the first weeks after the baby’s death the book barely left Mananai’s side. Once she had convalesced she sought out those neighbours who had been bereaved in the war, and devoted herself to charity work, volunteering at the Soldiers and Sailors Yeomanry Hospital, and collecting clothes for the troops abroad.16 Even the most minor of reverses could cast her into a deep gloom. ‘I sometimes despair of the end,’ she told her mother. Mananai herself would never make the link, but the analogy with her own grief is clear to see.17
That grief is plainly evident in Sargent’s portrait. Sittings began again in the spring of 1900. Of all the sisters, Sargent had been most keen to work on Mananai. Pamela had to beg her parents to exert all their influence on Charlie to make him allow Mananai to return for more sittings. The Wyndhams prevailed, and Charlie and Mananai made their way to London for a week of sittings at Sargent’s studio (as Madeline Wyndham pointed out, much warmer than Belgrave Square at that time of year). The air of patient sadness that Mananai gives off is palpable and at odds with the frippery of her white gown as she gazes off into the distance, apparently lost in thought.
Detained at Clouds by a host of responsibilities, Madeline Wyndham was unable to make more than one brief visit to Babraham around Easter time. Instead she deluged her daughter with gifts. During that spring hardly a week went by without some kind of package arriving at Babraham, whether it was a toy kitchen and modelling clay for the little girls, hundreds of flower bulbs for the garden, or Battersea enamel boxes of the kind that Mananai collected (Madeline Wyndham had begun to practise enamelling under Alexander Fisher. With her own stove set up at Clouds, she was rapidly becoming a proficient amateur. However, on this occasion she was so keen to send Mananai a present that in her haste she melted it). In May an ‘overwhelmed’ Mananai opened a parcel containing a belt – ‘so “out of the way” … & will give such “cachet” when I wear it’ – and a spangled black net dress – ‘so beautiful & yet so French & smart (such a horrid word but the only one to express one’s meaning)’. That same day came the ‘blessed’ news that ‘Mafeking is well!’18
At the news of Mafeking’s relief after a 217-day siege, punctuated by plucky ‘Kaffirgrams’ of Colonel Baden-Powell (‘All well. Four Hours bombardment. One dog killed’ was a typical example),19 flag-waving hordes poured on to Britain’s streets in such jubilation that ‘mafficking’ was added to the Oxford English Dictionary, to denote indulgence in extravagant demonstrations of exultation.20 A fortnight or so later Bobs’s troops entered Pretoria. In London, Sargent’s portrait of the sisters was the hit of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. ‘[T]he greatest picture which has appeared for many years on the walls of the Royal Academy,’ said The Times. The Prince of Wales dubbed the sisters ‘The Three Graces’. Pamela received particular attention for her spectacular looks.21 The portrait hung in the billiard room at Clouds as intended (a room now painted dark blue to com
plement the portrait)22 but was frequently sent off for public viewing. ‘What it has seen and heard if it could only speak!’ said Madeline Wyndham in 1908 as the picture returned from the Franco-British Exhibition and the Exhibition of Fair Women at London’s New Gallery; the Watts of Madeline also appeared at the latter.23
That the subjects of the portrait were George Wyndham’s sisters enhanced their celebrity. Six months after his Commons speech, George remained the hero of the hour. In August, Mary was delighted to find that every English paper she read in Kissingen spoke of George in glowing terms, and everyone she met was eager to congratulate her on her brilliant sibling. ‘He is no longer Lady E’s brother but I am Wyndham’s sister that’s as it should be,’ she told Hugo proudly.24 On 1 September the British public’s delight knew no bounds when their troops annexed the Transvaal. ‘The country is war-mad … blatantly and truculently out of their minds,’ George told Madeline Wyndham. He knew there would be a backlash eventually, ‘but while it lasts I make hay’.25
TWENTY-ONE
The 1900 Election
On receipt of Mary’s proud missive about George, Hugo must have felt a little sour. In recent months his own fortunes had followed rather too closely those of the British in South Africa, without the corresponding upturn. Since Hermione’s death and his fortieth birthday in 1897 his outlook had become ever gloomier. ‘Time is advancing and we two with it,’ he told Mary dolefully on her thirty-eighth birthday in 1900. ‘Its rot to talk about old age,’ replied Mary staunchly, but her assurances that Hugo had never been so youthful ‘in being & in seeming’ fell on deaf ears.1 The fundamental problem, as Mary said, was that ‘it’s dreadful for you having nothing to do’.2
Hugo, whom Balfour once summed up as ‘too self-indulgent to succeed and too clever to be content with failure’,3 was a casualty of politics’ modernization. He was bright but lazy, reluctant to attend the Commons as often as he ought. In 1892 Balfour described Hugo’s speech on the subject of payment to MPs as ‘one of the most brilliantly amusing speeches I have ever heard in the House’, but Hugo’s time as a Member of Parliament was mostly notable for his annual, impassioned speech recommending that the House should rise before Derby Day.4 Politics was still predominantly the preserve of the elite, but whereas a generation or two before Hugo might have held a Commons seat without much effort until he was raised to the Lords, now there was more competition. Seats which once had been in aristocrats’ gift were now determined by the electorate, and the choice of candidates who stood for them now subject to the deliberations of the Conservative Union. Against the odds, Hugo had taken Ipswich in 1885, but he was ‘chucked!’, in Mary’s phrase, in 1895.5 At the time, Blunt thought this a misfortune for Mary as Hugo ‘will have nothing to do being shut out of public affairs’.6 Instead, he hung about with brittle, hard-living members of the Marlborough House Set, habitués of the popular press’s ‘best-dressed’ lists, who frittered away time and money on the Continent yachting, gaming at Le Touquet, and watching bull-fighting in Spain. Mary berated him for ‘The “Common” folk you herd with!!!’ and the ‘bad ways & foolish tricks’ they encouraged. ‘I wish you were a fox hunter & would live 6 months in one place or that you had a passion for agriculture!’ she said, but she knew that Hugo was ‘not really keen about things & never [had] been’.7
In 1900, it was briefly mooted that Hugo might stand as Unionist candidate for Bristol in the general election to be held that autumn. All summer long, Mary bombarded him with excited letters making plans for the campaign trail, ‘quite ready to be a thorn in yr side & to help in every way I can’.8 The candidacy went to Sir Walter Long, a Unionist who had made himself a name on the Local Government Board and the Board of Agriculture. Mary was crushed, particularly since she only found out this news from Arthur: ‘you must have known it was most cruel not to tell me, you said you had been asked – I wired to you … I talk to you about it in every letter & you say nothing, so I quite believed it,’ she wrote to Hugo in a frenzy from Paris. ‘I suppose he [Arthur] couldn’t squash Long,’ she added, unintentionally rubbing salt in the wound.9
The decision was a further emasculation at Balfour’s hands. In 1899, Hugo had gambled his way to his most spectacular loss on the stock market yet: around £80,000, roughly £7.4 million today.10 ‘At last the crash … has come and Hugo is undone!’ Mary told Arthur from the Palace Hotel in St Moritz, where she had met Hugo, post-cure, and been told the news.10 Furious and anguished, Lord Wemyss bailed Hugo out, but made good on his oft-repeated threat to tie up Hugo’s inheritance. He set up a trust of £100,000 for the Elchos during their lifetime. Arthur was one of the trustees.12 It is hard not to see a punitive element therein.
Arthur was often as baffled by Mary and Hugo’s push-me-pull-you relationship as everyone else, and in particular, the way she tolerated his continuing, flagrant infidelity. ‘I cannot conceive why you permitted yourself to be saddled with her,’ Arthur wrote, on hearing that Hugo had dumped his latest paramour, the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, on Mary at Stanway for three weeks in 1896, while ‘Mrs. P.C.’ recovered from a theatrical flop and conducted an affair with Hugo under Mary’s nose: ‘Had you been in robust health, with no worries … of your own, I should still have thought that England might have been searched through before a less suitable recipient of three weeks’ hospitality could have been found.’13 An answer is found in a letter from Mary to Percy in 1899. Percy had written lamenting that Mary would not be able to enliven a sticky dinner with her presence. Delighted, Mary replied, claiming to have inherited from Percy her consuming interest in people from all walks of life: ‘If I thought about it at all I should probably find that I prided myself on being a sort of Nasesmith [sic] Hammer! Able to crack iron hazelnuts to cut thick or thin – and to sing (or talk) both high & low!’14 James Nasmyth’s steam hammer, one of the Industrial Revolution’s greatest inventions, could vary the force of its blow. In a famous demonstration the hammer was used to break an egg in a wineglass while the glass remained intact. Hugo, difficult, childish, stubbornly impervious to improvement, was the iron hazelnut Mary could not crack. He gambled;15 he rowed with tenants on the Stanway estate so that she and Smith, Stanway’s agent, had to step in; as a ‘landlord and financier’ and a ‘husband’ Hugo was hopeless. ‘I wish Hugo would do himself justice,’ she told Arthur. ‘I wonder if it’s my fault and if I could manage him differently and better. He makes one always hope and yet he so often disappoints hope, one can neither count on him nor give him up!’16
As Mary made her way to Gosford that autumn, flustered and despondent at the prospect of a perpetually aimless Hugo, her sisters were preparing for their own stint on the campaign trail. Eddy Tennant and Charlie Adeane had been approved as the Liberal candidates for Peebles and Huntingdonshire respectively. Margot had her doubts about both men’s conviction. The Boer War had provoked yet another rift in the fragmented Liberals between anti-war Radicals and pro-war Imperialists. Over a period of months Margot delivered Eddy several lengthy lectures on corporate political loyalty: ‘What no man who thinks for himself like you & Adeane can grasp (tho I know you do) [is that] they don’t come off these big things H Rule Disestablishment etc … they don’t happen … Compromise & stick to yr regiment even if they are going to do a stupid thing.’17 Margot was still more mistrustful of Pamela. As she revealed to Eddy tidbits of the party leadership struggles between Asquith, Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Lewis ‘Loulou’ Harcourt she hoped, pointedly, that ‘Pamela will keep our party dirty linen to herself.’18
Pamela was not interested enough to be a double agent. Mary was astonished to find that she was even ‘really canvassing’. ‘I am indeed,’ Pamela triumphantly replied from the rented Peebles villa from which the Tennants were conducting their campaign, although ‘I don’t know enough about politics to “canvass” in the ordinary sense of the word … I just tell them how keen I am my husband should win – how long we’ve been here & how many children I have!’19 Pamela did not quite expres
s Lord Salisbury’s visceral loathing for the ‘nauseous mire of a general election’, requiring ‘weeks of screwed-up smiles and … mock geniality … the chuckling reply … to the coarse joke … the wholesale deglutition of hypocritical pledges’,20 but she intensely disliked the campaigning process: ‘long drives, of 18 miles home in pelting rain & wind after a whole days visiting & canvassing & putting up at little evil smelling whisky-drenched Inns and attending hot long meetings!’ Unruffled by public singing, she hated public speaking. She gave a talk to the 150 members of the Women’s Liberal Association of Innerleithen, learnt by heart in advance, with ‘a dreadful stomachache from nervous excitement & terror’.21 Her sisters-in-law were horrified by what they considered an insufficiently committed approach, particularly since the Bart was bankrolling Eddy’s candidacy. When the Tennants visited Glen halfway through the campaign, Charty cornered Pamela at breakfast for a ‘tremendous talking to’. Politics were ‘the life of the country, the history that is being formed around one’, she said hectoringly over the marmalade, imploring Pamela to exercise ‘a mind that merited being bent upon wider issues’, and praising ‘powers of observation’ that warranted being turned to ‘larger matters’. As always, Pamela gave Charty short shrift. ‘It was really all very good advice but I am perfectly certain [if] I read all Joe [Chamberlain]’s speeches I shouldn’t be much the wiser for it! [and] if in going into cottages, I tried to speak about what I don’t understand, I should make lamentable mistakes & failures.’22
Canvassing was more than ever a requirement of an expanded franchise. From the turn of the century there was a marked expectation that women would take a more involved political role.23 Charty and Pamela both accepted that, although Pamela dragged her heels. For Kate Courtney, Liberal Unionist sister of the Fabian Beatrice Webb, political involvement led her to suffragism: ‘I cannot understand the state of mind of a man who encourages women to canvass electors … organize meetings, speak at them, and even coax and bother electors to go to the poll by every art they possess, but draws the line at the simple act of voting themselves. It is nothing but stupendous egotism,’ she said in 1913.24 None of the Wyndham sisters expressed any particular position on female suffrage. In this they resembled most women of their class, feeling that the social and political influence they wielded was far in excess of that granted by a vote, and with corporate loyalty to class outweighing that to gender.25 The person in the family who felt most strongly was Eddy, a strident opponent, who later became President of the Scottish Anti-Suffrage League.26 (It is cheap but irresistible to suggest that Eddy had suffered enough from strong women in his life.)
Those Wild Wyndhams Page 23
