Mananai was the only one of the three sisters truly to enjoy campaigning. The Adeanes were funding Charlie’s campaign themselves, and they had thrown themselves into the contest with vigour. They had set up camp in a ‘snug pretty little house’ lent to them by Lord Sandwich on his Hinchingbrooke Park estate and were planning, said Mananai, ‘to work as hard as we can & be on the spot for all the meetings’.27 Mananai thrived on the excitement. Each day she met up with a band of local Liberal women: the wives of the local chemist; the Hinchingbrooke estate’s land agent; and the leading local non-conformist – and canvassed from 10.30 in the morning until 6 or 7 each night, ticking off lists provided to them of ‘doubtfuls’ and ‘Tories’, snatching quick lunches, once in the carriage and once, to Mananai’s rather doubtful delight, in a ‘pub’. On one day in ‘a poor sort of street in Huntingdon’ she visited seventy houses before lunch. Indefatigable in her charity work, she immediately saw an opportunity to do some good: ‘Some make me very sad … they are so ill & poor – as soon as the Election is over I shall be able perhaps to help them a little.’28
A year later Benjamin Rowntree’s landmark study of poverty in York shocked Britain into acknowledging the relentless urban destitution that meant for a family to survive on an unskilled labourer’s wages they:
must never spend a penny on railway fare or omnibus … never go into the country unless they walk … never purchase a halfpenny newspaper or spend a penny to buy a ticket for a popular concert … should a child fall ill, it must be attended by the Parish doctor; should it die, it must be buried by the Parish. Finally, the wage earner must never be absent from his work for a single day.29
A similar survey by Charles Booth in London rammed the point home.
Scientific evidence showing the parlous state of the nation fed into anxiety about Britain’s Boer War performance and gave heft to calls for social reform. Army recruiters had been appalled to find that the majority of volunteers were so malnourished that they did not reach the required minimum height of 5 foot 3 inches. ‘The building up of the nervous and muscular vitality of our race [is] the principal plank of any Imperial programme of reform,’ said the Fabian Sidney Webb, husband of Beatrice.30 In the decade that followed, imperial interests were used to justify ostensibly ‘socialistic’ reforms of New Liberalism such as the provision of child welfare measures and free school meals.
Imperial concerns had placed themselves firmly at the forefront of British political life, but Bobs’s victories still cast a glow over the ‘khaki election’, which returned 402 Unionists, 183 Liberals, 83 Irish Nationalists and two members of the Labour Representation Committee. ‘Things have touched the button now & I think we shall see very interesting Times in the next few years,’ Margot told Eddy31 – but Eddy, like Charlie, had been defeated. ‘Khaki was well worked by them … the tide is going too strong against us owing to that wretch Labby we are all branded as traitors and pro-Boers!’ mourned Mananai.32 At Glen, Pamela bit her tongue as Margot provided tips for the next campaign.33
George was returned at Dover with a huge majority. In November, he was appointed Ireland’s Chief Secretary. ‘I think it will be a very fine appointment … It will give George a great opportunity of xcercising [sic] his judgment & tho a very hard place I think his charm will attract them,’ said Margot.34 After a meteoric rise (although still without the Cabinet rank he yearned for) George had returned to his ancestral land. Katharine Tynan, an ardent nationalist, saw in him Ireland’s hopes of salvation. But George’s position was more ambiguous than that. For he appointed as his Under-Secretary Antony MacDonnell, the outstandingly able ‘Bengal Tiger’ who had made his name as an administrator in the Indian Civil Service and was widely rumoured to be a Home Ruler. George avowed to Balfour that the Irish Catholic MacDonnell was ‘non-partisan’. Yet he agreed to MacDonnell’s condition – set out in a letter from MacDonnell reminding George that he was a Liberal, Irish Catholic – that he would accept the office only if he could offer more than ‘mere secretarial criticism’ and be ‘given adequate opportunities of influencing the action and policy of the Irish Government’.35
TWENTY-TWO
Growing Families
Sargent’s portrait had caught the sisters like flies in amber, frozen for ever in trinity. In reality, their worlds were moving ever further apart. Of all the siblings, Mary and Pamela saw each other the least. They were ‘widely unlike’, and while Cincie Charteris diplomatically tried to attribute their prolonged absences from each other to ‘their very different ways of life’ – Mary ‘was at everyone’s beck and call’ while Pamela ‘exercised a certain thrift in the spending of her time’1 – the fact was that Mary often found Pamela difficult and remote. Mary was ‘devoted’ to Mananai (‘as well she might be’ said Cincie2) but with the perspective given by an age difference of a decade, she recognized her youngest sister’s flaws better than the rest of her family, and was capable, on occasion, of a ‘heated … skirmish!’ with her, something that faithful Mananai would never do.3 Publicly, Mary maintained her support of her difficult sister: ‘I know you’ll forget any little hardnesses of speech about your Pamela. I could not bear you to think me stupid enough not to see her extra out-of-the-way cleverness,’ Margot wrote to Mary in 1900 – a rare enough apology from Margot, suggesting that Mary must have defended Pamela quite forcefully.4 ‘It is the fashion to abuse Pamela,’ Mary remarked almost twenty years later to Lady Desborough (as Ettie Grenfell became after Willie’s elevation to the peerage), thanking her for understanding her sister as she did.5
In 1902, however, Mary and Pamela were united by the common bond of pregnancy, giving birth just weeks apart in May. The children were born into a new era of peace – the Treaty of Vereeniging that marked the end to the Boer War was signed on 31 May, the day that Mary’s third daughter was born. They were Edwardians, not Victorians: Bertie, the Prince of Wales, who succeeded his mother upon her death on 22 January 1901, was crowned Edward VII in August 1902, after appendicitis had forced cancellation of the original ceremony in June.
Bertie’s designation inspired a host of nicknames – ‘“Edward the Caresser” & (only I think this is too prophane [sic]) “King of the Jews” … Mrs K[eppel, Bertie’s mistress] has been called “Mistress without Robes” … very wrong only rather funny,’ reported a shocked but amused Mananai to Percy.6 Mananai had been in London for the Queen’s death, when a ‘pall of unknown sadness’ fell over ‘a mourning City’. As bells tolled and paperboys’ sandwich boards shrieked of war, Mananai had mourned ‘poor England’, a country beset by misfortune and change.7 The coronation and the peace promised the fresh and new. Pamela longed to call her son, born on 22 May, ‘David Pax! It sounds so short and manly,’ she told Mary. At Pamela’s suggestion, Mary named her own child Irene Corona after the peace and the coronation, although she was known always as ‘Bibs’. Pamela and Mary were both delighted with their new arrivals. ‘David Pax is such a squawler … you never heard such a voice – peppery & imperative,’ said Pamela.8 Mary thought Bibs was like spun wire, with a combination of fragility and toughness ‘that makes me ache for the little creature … her eyes shine like stars’.9
Both sisters knew how anxiously Mananai awaited the birth of her own child due that autumn. After the terrible loss of 1899, Mananai began to visit Schwalbach, a German spa providing the ‘iron cures’ recommended for ‘women’s problems’.10 She also subscribed to the popular theory that a baby’s sex might depend on the month in which it was ‘started’: ‘I had a feeling I must begin the same day of the same month as last time (May) … I don’t feel to trust any other month,’ she told Madeline Wyndham, herself enthusiastic about the scheme.11 Her sisters felt a twinge of guilt at having so effortlessly succeeded where Mananai had failed. ‘You, at least, can feel you have not mopped up a possible son from darling Madeline!’ Pamela told Mary when Bibs was born.12 To quiet disappointment, in October 1902, Mananai gave birth to a fifth girl, named Helena.
Helena Adeane w
as the only one of the newborn cousins whose paternity was not questioned. The Adeanes were devoted to one another, moving together between London and Babraham, where at the turn of the century Charlie built a large hall in the grounds, named the Madeline Hall after his wife.13 In January 1901, Charlie went to Egypt, while Mananai, run down after the election’s excitement and her exertions during the ‘benevolent season’, made a longed-for trip to Ireland to see George and Sibell, followed by several weeks’ convalescence in the gentle sunshine of Hyères. ‘It will be so strange being a “grass widow”,’ she said of this rare separation.14
It is unlikely that the angelically blonde Bibs was, as some rumoured, actually Arthur Balfour’s child. Bibs looked like her undoubtedly legitimate brother Yvo, and Hugo doted upon her – in marked contrast to his coldness towards Mary Charteris. More plausible is the suggestion that David Tennant was the son of Edward Grey,15 a close friend of the Tennants’, godfather to their second son Christopher, a reluctantly prominent Liberal Imperialist and an obsessive birdwatcher and fly-fisherman, pursuits of which he wrote lyrically in a series of essays published under the title Recreation.16
Fishing was the foundation of the two Edwards’ friendship, forged in the mid-1890s. Their decades-long, quietly affectionate correspondence is mostly blow-by-blow accounts of days thigh-deep in a rushing river, with only occasional intrusions of finance or politics.17 Both quiet, unostentatious and honourable men,18 they were politically as well as temperamentally aligned. Both became senior members (Grey was a Vice-President, Eddy a member of the Executive Committee) of Lord Rosebery’s Liberal League, a vehicle for imperialist views founded in 1902 when Rosebery, who had supported the Boer War and advocated ‘cleaning the slate’ of ‘obsolete policies’ like Home Rule, moved to the cross-benches.19
The reluctant politician: a beaky Edward Grey at the despatch box.
Pamela’s instinctive jealousy of Grey as a rival to her husband’s attentions was quickly mollified by admiration of his character. By the turn of the century, she numbered Grey and his wife Dorothy among her closest friends: ‘two of the elect’, she said, ‘each of them nearly the nicest person in the world’.20 The Greys divided their time between Fallodon, Grey’s Northumberland family seat, and a small tin-roofed cottage in Itchen Abbas, a village in the New Forest within cycling distance of the Tennants in Wiltshire. Beneath the reclusive Dorothy’s forbiddingly reserved façade, she was, in Pamela’s estimation, ‘a woman in a thousand … gracious, sympathetic, eagerly appreciative of all distinction in thought, action and character … No one who ever knew her well was not the better for her influence …’21 The connection between Pamela and Grey was particularly intense. They had ‘nearly every taste and interest in common’. The ‘peculiar sympathy’ between their minds ‘eludes words, because it is so intimate!’ said Grey.22
It was common knowledge within political circles that the Greys’ marriage was, at Dorothy’s request, un mariage blanc – a sexless marriage. Most thought the courteous Grey was celibate. But Lloyd George, the unabashedly philandering ‘Welsh Goat’, maintained that Grey was a man of ‘sham honesty’ in both public and private life.23 Certainly Grey’s reputation as the most reluctant of politicians sits oddly with his part in the ‘Relugas Compact’ of 1905 in which he, Asquith and Haldane tried to weaken their leader, Campbell-Bannerman, in the Commons by forcing him upstairs to the House of Lords. As for his private dishonesty, Marie Belloc Lowndes – Pamela’s close but indiscreet friend – recalled in her memoirs that after many years of marriage Dorothy Grey had suggested to her husband that they resume a physical relationship, but Grey refused. The implication was that Pamela had forbidden it, but the anecdote is inconclusive. Pamela would most likely have issued this edict even if she was not having sex with Grey.24 Pamela was very demanding with those she loved.
This approach extended to her children. Charlie Adeane spoke to Mary with ‘the greatest admiration’ of the way in which Mananai ‘has obtained complete control over all her children by love & influence. Punishment & Reward can never obtain this. I think you all inherit this wonderful power – a very rare one – from your mother.’25 This was certainly true of the docile, loving and obedient Adeane girls. But Pamela’s was a hothouse love. She loved her children ‘in a French and not an English way’ said Osbert Sitwell, commenting on Pamela’s wish to be constantly with her children – ‘the last thing, as a rule, that an English parent of her kind would desire’ – and to ‘regulate absolutely’ their lives.26
‘O, I almost wish I didn’t love the children so dreadfully,’ Pamela said, recounting her anxiety when Stephen suffered scarlet fever.27 She immortalized her children in two of her most successful books: The Children and the Pictures, in which the subjects of the Bart’s Old Masters came alive and joined the Tennant children in midnight adventures; and The Sayings of the Children, which recorded their childish wisdom. She kept them close to her, yearning for the days when they went no further from her than Glen’s village school each morning on their ponies,28 sobbing when delivering seven-year-old Bim to the train that was to take him to boarding school for the first time,29 and making every excuse to keep her younger sons at home. Only Clare, whom she thought ‘spiritually short-sighted’,30 did she willingly send to school. She was fiercely jealous of the children’s nanny, Rebecca Trussler, a stout, middle-aged Cockney who joined the family in 1906.31 When Stephen – whom she dressed, long after his infancy had passed, as the girl she wished he had been – was eight years old, she appeared on stage with him in a charity tableau at the Royal Albert Hall, cradling him in her arms as though he were an infant.32 Her children were her acolytes. ‘What a child we could have,’ she once told her son David with reference to their striking good looks.33 Such looks were on constant display. Visitors arriving at Glen were startled to find the family seated in greeting, in the hall, ‘in a sort of photographic pose’: a tableau of perfection, with Clare pouting gently, Stephen perched on her knee, and Pamela, the beautiful, youthful mother, at the centre of it all.34 As a young man, Stephen wrote a scrap of thinly veiled autobiography in which Pamela appears as the remote Lady Brandon, ‘whose charm and beauty had greeted her in the glass every morning for more years than she cared to remember [and] was greedily exacting as to the admiring allegiance of her family and immediate circle’.35
Pamela’s approach to childrearing was considered strange. ‘I never care for a woman draped in her children – let them go,’ said Margot.36 ‘I do NOT cart my children about like Pamela,’ Mary retorted hotly to Hugo when he charged her with having taken Bibs to Clouds to amuse herself, rather than leaving her at Stanway with her nanny, Cliffe: implicitly the latter was better parenting as providing stability and routine.37 Cliffe herself complained, as politely as she could, of the Liberty Hall atmosphere among the Tennants when visiting with Mary Charteris and Bibs in 1906, shocked that nine-year-old Clare, attending school in Salisbury each day, ‘as a rule dines with her mother, at 8, I feel that is much too late for Mary … they do not rest at all in the day.’38
Cliffe sometimes struggled to impose a routine on her own rambunctious charges. In A Family Record Mary recorded a plea she received at Gosford from Cliffe, with Yvo, Mary and Bibs at Stanway, asking ‘… Our Dear Ladyship … to write certain things down for them what they are not to do … the chief things are, if I may name them, getting out on the roof, or between the ceiling and plaster, climbing the garden wall … after the fruit, or going down to the cellars where the furnaces are, or in the place where Mr. Fletcher keeps the chimney sweep brushes …’. ‘[B]etween the ceiling and the plaster!’ marvelled Mary, equally delighted and appalled by her children’s ingenuity.39
Mary’s love for her children was laissez-faire. They were ‘lapped in love’, given ‘deeply-imbued confidence’ and ‘cherished’,40 but she combined ‘with the maximum of fondness the minimum of possessiveness’.41 She longed for her children’s confidences, but never demanded them.42 The greatest crime her childr
en could commit was to display a lack of enthusiasm. Cincie recalled that when she was well into middle age Mary would still exclaim, ‘“Ices! Cincie, Strawberry Ices!” … in the exact tone of voice in which one says “Din Din” or “Walkies!” to a dog’.43 Mary’s children, like her friends, had to compete for her attention with a host of daily trivialities. (‘Mary is generally a day behind the fair and will only hear of my death from the man behind the counter who is struggling to clinch her over a collar for her chow,’ said Margot.)44 They took advantage of this to run wild. But from an early age they were brought into the orbit of their mother’s guests, an ever more eclectic mix.
In 1902 Mary met the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb at a dinner hosted by George Bernard Shaw. The Fabian Society, the epicentre of Edwardian intellectualism, was explicitly not a political party, but advocated a practice of ‘gradualism’ by which the ruling classes would be subtly indoctrinated with ideas of ‘practical Democracy and Socialism’. The Webbs’ Coefficients Dining Society included among its members the poet Henry Newbolt, Edward Grey, Richard Haldane and Lord Milner. Mary returned to Cadogan Square, shining-eyed, full of talk about how her new friends had promised to save her from being first against the wall when the revolution came. ‘I suppose you are going to ask the creatures to Stanway,’ Hugo remarked.45 By September, Beatrice was recording in her diary time spent with ‘Lady Elcho, a fascinating and kindly woman married to a card playing aristocrat, living in the most delightful old house’.46 Through the Webbs, Mary met H. G. Wells. By 1903, C. R. Ashbee, who set up Arts and Crafts workshops in Chipping Campden, near Stanway, was writing in his diary of visits from ‘Lady Elcho the wonderful the nonchalant the strangely fascinating’, whirling over, often with Mrs Patrick Campbell in tow, extravagant in crackling black glacé opera coat. ‘Tigrina’, as Mary called her, had become a frequent visitor at Stanway, as had Harold Large, a charlatan psychic whom Mary nonetheless found amusing. She had become renowned for having ‘these outré people around her’.47
Those Wild Wyndhams Page 24
