Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  Six weeks after Perf’s wedding George took a trip to Paris, accompanied by his mistress Gay Plymouth and her daughter, and planning to meet up with Hilaire Belloc while he was there. George’s time in Paris was nigh perfect: he hunted through antiquarian bookshops for books for his library (which needed only the inscriptions on the walls to be complete); and enjoyed the late-spring sunshine on walks with Gay and Phyllis in the gardens of Fontainebleau.

  At the Ledoyen he dined, quite alone, on potage Saint-Germain – a fresh pea soup; a whole brill in mushroom sauce; a cold quail stuffed with truffles, garnished with aspic and parsley, with a salad; hot green asparagus, as thick and fat as the white ones, with a sauce mousseline; a cold salade russe, without ham but with a ‘perfect’ mayonnaise; and the best strawberries that he could ever remember eating. The wine was a Richebourg of 1890 that was to other wines, George told Belloc, ‘in the relation of Homer and Shakespeare to other poets’. He considered it a perfect evening: ‘No Jew was there. No American. No Englishman but myself. I had struck an oasis of civilization. There were few women, and that was fit. For how few women understand?’56

  With hindsight, George might have avoided the mousseline. Four days later, he was dead of a heart attack. The official version, in his Life, is of an entirely respectable demise, nagging heart pains, morphine injections by a nurse, a turn for the worse. The unofficial version is that George died not in the arms of a nurse in the Hôtel Lotti but in those of a prostitute in a brothel.57 Perf Wyndham went to bring his father’s body back to England. ‘He looks very peaceful and very beautiful,’ he told Sibell. ‘England has lost someone as valuable and precious to Her, as He was dear to us – it is an unfathomable callamity [sic] – but callamities must be borne and endured.’58

  Wilfrid Blunt dedicated his poem ‘To a Happy Warrior’ to George, sending copies to the Wyndhams. It immortalized George as poet, warrior, lover, chivalric knight of old, ‘the ultimate man … Whose keener sight / Grasped the full vision of Time’s master-plan’. Mary wrote to Wilfrid immediately, excusing the scrappy paper that was all she had to hand:

  I think yr poem to George most beautiful – quite magnificent & very fine – I am so glad you have done it … you speak of God & Paradise but it’s the most gloriously Pagan thing that I’ve ever read but then I feel that you & George and I are pagans really … there is no mawkish sentiment about you, no cloying & seeing thro coloured glass – but the broad horizon & the big sweep …59

  In the last decade of his life, George had separated from his party’s leadership, moving ever rightwards. Yet his campaigns for tariff reform, naval reform and as a Ditcher had shown what influence the crusading knight could still wield. Wilfrid Blunt considered ‘George’s politics … the least creditable part of him … it was George’s other side that I loved and admired’.60 But among his wider circle there was genuine disbelief that George, barely fifty, would not return from political exile to a second act. ‘I think all must feel that he has been cut off at a time of life when there was still before him the hope and promise of greater things in the future than ever in the past. These are the great tragedies of life,’61 said Arthur in a eulogy delivered to a hushed House of Commons. Hilaire Belloc thought George’s death the ‘end of honesty in public life’.62

  Clouds and almost £20,000 of death duties still owing from Percy Wyndham’s death passed to Perf Wyndham, although George’s foresight in insuring his own life for £30,000 meant that the estate was not financially crippled from the start. A stained-glass window in St Mary’s Church in East Knoyle was dedicated to George by his erstwhile parliamentary colleagues. In just two years, the charmed circle of the Wyndhams had suffered two shattering blows. Sending Mary ‘fondest Love’ on her birthday that year, Mananai added: ‘These anniversaries make one sad yet one can be grateful & look back on happy times all of us together in the past.’63

  More change came a year later when Lord Wemyss died, aged ninety-five, on 30 June 1914. He had tied up almost everything in trusts, even Gosford and Stanway’s household effects. Almost the only thing that Hugo received outright was his father’s London house, 23 St James’s Place. He promptly sold it.64 Mary’s ‘General Account’ was raised to £4,500 a year and Hugo’s personal allowance to £2,000.65 But death duties which obliged the estate to pay out £28,000 a year for eight years66 and personal legacies (Lord Wemyss’s will had over twenty codicils) made Hugo, paradoxically, feel more insecure financially than he had ever done before. He threatened to let Stanway at once and move to Gosford. ‘[A]t present the Change of name seems only to have brought Trouble & the sense of fresh responsibilities & burdens and less freedom…!’ Mary told Wilfrid, adding, ‘I simply hate my new name I feel that Romance & Poetry have fled with my old pretty name!’67 It took Lady Elcho of Stanway years to become accustomed to the cold, hard grandeur of the Countess of Wemyss of Gosford, and she often found herself absentmindedly signing off letters as ‘Melcho’.

  Stanway’s reprieve came at a greater cost to Mary than she could possibly have imagined. Two days before Lord Wemyss’s death came the news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in the faraway crumbling Balkans. On 23 July 1914, Austria-Hungary issued an impossible ultimatum to Serbia. The house of cards built on secrecy and paranoia began tumbling down. The ten days that followed were a blur of ultimatums; crisis talks between the diplomats of the Great Powers; mobilization orders issued, halted, partially revoked, reissued. Germany came out in support of Austria, Russia in support of Serbia, France in support of Russia. Sir Edward Grey appealed to Germany, through its Ambassador Prince Lichnowsky, for peace; the Germans tried to persuade Sir Edward Goschen, Britain’s Ambassador in Berlin, to stay neutral if an attack on France was routed through Belgium. For this was the basis of Germany’s Schlieffen Plan, which was intended to wipe out French resistance in a matter of weeks. And Britain, since the 1839 Treaty of London, had sworn to uphold Belgian neutrality at all costs. So, suddenly, war went from a remote possibility, which allowed Grey to spend his usual Sunday in Wiltshire on 26 July, to a probability in the week that followed, to a certainty, as Grey left the Foreign Office, brushing off in the doorway Prince Lichnowsky who had come to make a final appeal, and went to address the Commons in an historic speech on 3 August. ‘Mr. Speaker,’ he said, as the cheers around him died down, ‘Last week I stated that we were working for peace not only for this country, but to preserve the peace of Europe. Today – but events move so rapidly that it is exceedingly difficult to state with technical accuracy the actual state of affairs – it is clear that the peace of Europe cannot be preserved.’

  Slowly and clearly, Grey laid out before the Commons the ententes and alliances to which Britain was party. He stressed that no secret engagement was to be sprung upon the country. He sketched for the MPs massed around him the nature of the 1839 Treaty by which Britain had promised to defend Belgium’s neutrality, reminding them that Gladstone himself had upheld it some fifty years before:

  We worked for peace up to the last moment, and beyond the last moment. How hard, how persistently and how earnestly we strove for peace last week, the House will see from the papers that are before it. But that is over so far as the peace of Europe is concerned. We are now face to face with a situation and all the consequences which it may yet have to unfold.68

  The only step that Britain could take was to issue Germany with an ultimatum: unless Germany guaranteed Belgian neutrality by midnight the following night, Britain would declare war. So Britain did. That evening, so it was said, an exhausted Edward Grey stood at the window of his room in the Foreign Office. The dusk was gathering, and the gloaming pierced by the fireflies of warm yellow gas as the lamp-lighters moved steadily from one streetlight to the next. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe,’ Grey said, turning to the man who stood beside him. ‘We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’69

  TWENTY-NINE

  MCMXIV

  Early in the evening of 4 August 1914, as news of
the British ultimatum spread, crowds began to mass in London’s political heartland. Motor-cars carrying men and women in evening dress waving the Union Jack wound their way slowly among the crowds thronging Whitehall, Parliament Street, Trafalgar Square and the Mall. People scaled the plinth of Nelson’s Column and pedestals of Whitehall’s statues; spectators eagerly leant out of the windows of Government offices. Outside Buckingham Palace, where the Victoria Memorial was ‘black with people’, the cheering and singing reached fever pitch at 7 p.m., and again at half-past nine when the Royal Family appeared on the balcony. In Trafalgar Square, where two days before Keir Hardie had been shouted down attempting to address a socialist anti-war convention, the ebullient crowd was provoked to fresh heights of enthusiasm as the occasional field gun or ammunition wagon lumbered by. But, as the hour of the ultimatum approached, a ‘profound silence fell upon the crowd … Then as the first strokes rang out from the Clock Tower, a vast cheer burst out and echoed and re-echoed for nearly twenty minutes. The National Anthem was then sung with an emotion and solemnity which manifested the gravity and sense of responsibility with which the people regard the great issues before them,’ reported The Times.1

  At 10.45 the following morning, George V signed a formal proclamation of war against Germany. It is trite but accurate to say that most people truly thought the war would be ‘over by Christmas’. Earl Kitchener, the hastily appointed War Secretary, discomfited the Cabinet when he predicted an engagement of several years. Mary had lunched with Kitchener the day war broke out. She and Ettie were at Alice Salisbury’s house and Kitchener stopped by, having been urgently recalled from Dover – where he had been about to depart for Egypt – to Downing Street. In other times, the Souls’ talk would all have been of this dramatic development. But as mothers of adult sons their main preoccupation was with their children.2 That afternoon, Mary made her way back to Stanway. At Oxford station she bumped into Sibell Grosvenor on the platform. ‘Perf is getting ready,’ said Sibell, ashen-faced.3

  As a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, Perf was a member of Britain’s Regular Army, of which six infantry divisions and five cavalry brigades were deployed to the Western Front as part of the British Expeditionary Force (the BEF)4 in the late summer of 1914. These professional soldiers termed themselves ‘the Old Contemptibles’, after an apocryphal story that the Kaiser had vowed to wipe out Field Marshal Sir John French’s ‘contemptible little army’. By the end of the year the Old Contemptibles had nearly all been mown down at the battles of Mons, Le Cateau, the Aisne and Ypres. The BEF was now composed of the Territorial Army’s yeomanry and Kitchener’s volunteers, who flocked in their thousands to his imperious finger. Three hundred thousand men enlisted in the first month of the war, exceeding by 50 per cent Kitchener’s target. The total number of volunteers for the first week of September 1914 alone was 174,901.5

  Conscription was not introduced until 1916, when all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-one were called up. Instinctively, the British revolted against it. ‘It is repugnant to the mental constitution of a freedom-loving people and the British nation would never stand it,’ Eddy Tennant declared, addressing Liverpool’s Liberal Reform Club on the subject of Home Defence in 1913.6 Hugo, blinded by patriotic fervour, was not of this mind. The day after war broke out, Mary breakfasted with him in Stanway’s dining room. He was silent behind his newspaper, except for the occasional snort of disgust. After an hour or so, Angela Forbes came into the room. Hugo looked up. ‘I’m afraid I’ve done something rather rash,’ he told his mistress. ‘I’ve dismissed all the servants.’7

  Hugo had told his male household staff they must join the army, or be sacked. Mary was horrified: beyond Hugo’s typical disregard for her and for the obvious logistical difficulties (‘I shall have no chauffeur, no stableman, no odd man to carry the coals! I may have 100 parlour maids but someone must carry the coals!’ she protested to Balfour, helplessly, seeking his advice),8 she felt that it smacked of the chain-gang. Her footman’s elderly father had ‘begged’ his son not to go,9 but both Stanway’s footmen, the odd-man, two gardeners, one carpenter and four keepers enlisted in that first wave.10

  All over the country, aristocrats and squires were vigorously enjoining their tenants to fight, with generous terms: promising to keep jobs open; to house families rent free; even to pay them part of their wages. Charlie Adeane threw himself into the campaign at Babraham.11‘Are you a man or a mouse?’ asked Lord Lonsdale in a recruiting poster of his own devising distributed throughout the Lake District. ‘If I had twenty sons, I should be ashamed if every one of them did not go to the front when his time came,’ said Lord Derby, the chairman of the West Lancashire Territorial Association.12

  This was doubtless true. The sons of the elite who were not already, like Ego, part of the armed forces – Ego had held a commission in the Gloucester Yeomanry, a Territorial Army cavalry regiment, since 1912, and left Stanway to join them on 6 August 1914 – mostly joined up as soon as they could. Bim Tennant, who had quit Winchester in June, planning to spend several months in Germany before entering the Diplomatic Service, joined the Grenadier Guards at the age of seventeen – having, said Pamela, ‘the distinction of being the youngest Wykehamist to take up arms in defence of his country’, and still a year below the official age for enlistment.13 Guy Charteris was gazetted into the Shropshire Light Infantry, subsequently moving to the Scots Guards. With difficulty Mary persuaded Yvo Charteris – who on 4 August had stood in a London street with shining eyes, reading the proclamation of war pasted to a lamppost14 – to see out his final term at Eton. In the early spring of 1915 he joined the King’s Royal Regiment, and then the Grenadier Guards. Raymond Asquith’s initial decision not to join up was seen as a dereliction of duty. By 1915 the pressure of the metaphorical white feather was such that he joined the Grenadier Guards as well.15

  War offered the patricians an opportunity to lead the country that half a century of political reform, ideological advancement and agricultural crisis had taken away. They had been abused by the radical press and politicians for their reactionary attitudes, their idleness, their parasitical lifestyles. This was ‘the supreme opportunity’ for an embattled class ‘to prove themselves and to justify their existence … to demonstrate conclusively that they were not the redundant reactionaries of radical propaganda, but the patriotic class of knightly crusaders and chivalric heroes, who would defend the national honour and the national interest in the hour of its greatest trial’.16 All their years of hunting and shooting, and controlling and caring for their tenantry, had equipped them to perfection. And so, infamously, Ettie’s son Julian Grenfell, a professional soldier, and a warrior so bloodthirsty that it would not be a surprise to discover him cannibalistic, declared from Ypres in October 1914: ‘I adore war. It is like a big picnic …’17

  Aristocratic women were also enthusiastic about their war effort. They besieged the London hospitals, asking for positions as probationers. Shops selling domestic uniforms experienced a run on caps and aprons.18 First-aid classes were set up in the ballrooms of the great houses of London; plans were made to turn stately homes into convalescent homes and hospitals; and at Charing Cross Station a line of Rolls-Royces idled as the ladies inside them waited to greet and transport Belgian refugees arriving on the trains.19 Stanway’s Belgian refugees, Monsieur Beyart, his wife, his mother-in-law and his three-year-old twin girls, were installed above the stables, to the disgruntlement of the coachman Prew and his wife, who were induced to move.20 Mary described M. Beyart as a ‘charming Belgian notaire’,21 but in fact the Beyarts became notable for their ‘ingratitude’, said Angela Forbes.22

  Angela herself used Stanway as a dumping ground for her children while she made her way to France to volunteer in a hospital. A few months later, armed with £8 worth of provisions from Fortnum & Mason, and, in her own words, ‘hardly’ able to ‘make a cup of tea’,23 she set up a canteen in the waiting room of Boulogne’s railway station, which became known as Angeli
na’s, and its proprietor as ‘la dame avec la cigarette’ for her largesse with her Woodbines.24 Angelina’s was totally shambolic – for some time, washing up was done in one tin pail, in which Angela also washed her hair – and a roaring success.25 Angela’s raucous Memories and Base Details records the throb and thrum of wartime Boulogne – the ‘gigantic hub of the war machine’ – where hospitals and canteens mushroomed and trainloads of soldiers rattled in at odd hours. There was red tape to battle, generals to wheedle, the Red Cross to be prevailed upon for more supplies and petrol. Angela found the war invigorating – better for her than the days of peace.26

  Angela was one of many women previously accustomed to hopping across the Channel for gambling at Biarritz or golf at Le Touquet who now made the journey equipped with bandages and tin cups, setting up makeshift hospitals, ambulance units and canteens.27 The Duchess of Westminster and Lady Dudley established field hospitals at Le Touquet; the dowager Duchess of Sutherland, whose ambulance unit was driven out of Belgium by the German advance, set up a 160-bed hospital in Calais. Further afield, Lady Muriel Paget, wife of Arthur, organized an Anglo-Russian hospital on the Eastern Front. These redoubtable grandes dames, accustomed to getting their own way through influence and charm, were wearisome to the authorities in their aristocratic disregard for rules. They were also shameless: in the earliest weeks when nurses still outnumbered patients, ‘body-snatching’ was common as ambulances from competing hospitals vied to get the best cases.28 France was not considered suitable for their daughters: the injuries, fresh from the battlefield, too gruesome for them, their virginity too precious to risk. Publicly prim reference was made to men ‘not being able to control themselves’. Privately, there must have been concern that young women, freed from the confines of their upbringing, might throw off their own moral code.