Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  It’s a sin …

  To say that Hell is hot ’cause it’s not:

  Mind you, I know very well we’re in hell.

  In a twisted hump we lie heaping high,

  Yes! an’ higher every day …72

  Bim’s innocence had been corrupted – although it has been rightly noted that he could still only express this horror in a voice very different to his own. He sent it to Pamela, with anxious enquiries about whether she liked it. He had to ask her view several times before she gave it. Eventually, she appears to have replied with praise: but the delay is indicative. To read ‘The Mad Soldier’ would be a shock for any mother. For Pamela it must have been a striking blow to her world view.73

  Bim’s battalion was sent up to the front line of the Somme on 9 September. His first three days in the trenches were spent under intense shelling: ‘We have had all the kicks and none of the ha’pence in this show, as other batt[alion]s had the fun of repulsing attacks and killing hundreds, while we had to just sit and be shelled … the C.O. is very envious of what he calls the “other chaps’ hellish good shoot”,’ he wrote home.74 After three days behind the front line, his battalion returned to the trenches again as support. This time Bim was shaken – or wired – enough to reveal details he normally kept hidden. He had been directed to follow the Guards to their new location and then bring his battalion, which was in support, alongside. It required three trips back and forth along no man’s land. During the first, he was ‘shot at by Boches on the high ground with rifles … with bullets that scuffed up dust all around with a wicked little “zump”’. The second was ‘an unpleasant journey’ of ‘about half a mile over nothing but shell-holes full of dead and dying, with any amount of shells flying about’ and with only an orderly beside him. Intercepted during the third, he spent ‘that afternoon, evening, and night in a large rocky shell-hole’ with his commanding officer, the adjutant and the battalion’s doctor under severe shelling; ‘about four men were done in in the very next shell-hole a couple of yards away. That night was one of the coldest and most uncomfortable it has ever been my fortune to spend with the stars to see.’

  There was another day still of leading, dodging, weaving to go. ‘My worst job was that of taking messages down the line of trenches to different captains. The trenches were full of men, so I had to go over the open. Several people who were in the trench say they expected every shell to blow me to bits.’ His battalion were relieved at midnight, and got back behind the lines at 2.30 a.m., ‘dog-tired’, to ‘Soup, meat, champagne, and cake … That is the time one really does want champagne, when one comes in at 3 a.m. after no sleep for fifty hours. It gives one the strength to undress.’ Already, from along the lines had come rumours of the dead: ‘Guy Baring, Raymond Asquith, Sloper Mackenzie, and many others … Death and decomposition strew the ground … I must tell you of other things.’

  And so Bim retreated into memory. He told his mother of a pleasant walk of a few hundred yards taken a few days earlier with a Corporal Jukes who, it transpired, was the son of a former keeper at Clouds. Corporal Jukes remembered Pamela’s wedding; remembered when Icke the butler was a mere footman – his sister had been housemaid at Glen under the Bart: ‘And so he is altogether a great family friend … We had a very good talk about people like Mr. Mallet, Mrs. Vine and suchlike hench-folk. Do write and tell me if you remember him?’ So Bim ends an account of forty-eight hours of hell with an enquiry more suited to a polite dinner-party.75

  Raymond Asquith’s death – shot in the chest as he led his men out in an advance from Ginchy, lighting a cigarette to reassure them, and dying before he reached the dressing station – made headlines in England.76 ‘It seems to take away one’s last remains of courage,’ said Cincie.77 Everyone had thought that Raymond would be the man to lead his country into a new era. ‘What a glorious company they are by now, recruited every week from our best and most radiant,’ Asquith said to Ettie, ‘those who, we fondly imagined, were going to make & guide the future here.’78 If Asquith regretted not once writing to his eldest son while he was at the Front, he did not show it. It appears he did not, for he never once wrote to Beb either.

  Four days later, Bim’s battalion were ordered back into the trenches. They were to go ‘over the top’ the next day in an attack over 1,200 yards. Bim wrote to Pamela. He knew, in all likelihood, it would be his last letter. ‘Our Brigade has suffered less than either of the other two Brigades in Friday’s biff (15th), so we shall be in the forefront of the battle,’ he explained. He had taken Communion that morning, slept ‘like a top’ the night before, and was ‘full of hope and trust’. He invoked the spirit of his ‘fighting ancestors’, buoyed up by the thought of ‘all the old men … in the London clubs … thinking and hoping about what we are doing here!’ ‘I have never been prouder of anything, except your love for me, than I am of being a Grenadier,’ he added. Bim told Pamela that on going into action he would carry as always ‘four photies [sic]’ of her, and that ‘that line of Harry’s’ from ‘Non Nobis’ rang through his head: ‘High heart, high speech, high deeds ’mid honouring eyes’. ‘Today is a great day for me,’ he ended. ‘Your love for me and my love for you, have made my whole life one of the happiest there has ever been …’79

  Bim played the role expected of him by Pamela to the last, even invoking lines written about her own great romance with Harry Cust. Doubtless puppy-doggish, sweet-natured Bim genuinely believed the sentiments he invoked: the aristocrat worthy of his ancestors and the Guards who went before him. But this was also the officer who had dodged bullets and cowered inwardly in shell holes through long, freezing nights while trying outwardly to appear unmoved; who wrote ‘The Mad Soldier’, and who in ‘À Bas la Gloire’, another poem from that time, mocked the stout generals in their gleaming cars behind the lines. This is the generous spirit of the boy who on first getting a motorcycle drove along Wiltshire lanes with a cardboard placard attached to the back on which was written, in letters three inches high, ‘Apologies for the dust’,80 one who feels, as Bim wrote in his letter, ‘rather like saying “If it be possible let this cup pass from me”’ but then invokes God’s will and the ‘triumphant finish … [that] steels my heart and sends me into this battle with a heart of triple bronze’.81

  On 22 September, Bim was among his company, sniping in a ‘sap’ – a short trench dug from the front line into no man’s land – when he was killed by a German sniper: ‘absolutely instantaneously’, said his commanding officer.82 He was buried in the Guillemont Road Cemetery, a few graves along from Raymond Asquith, two of 400,000 British casualties lost in the 140 days of the battle of the Somme.83 A total of 1.3 million men died on both sides in all. At the end of it, the British had advanced 6 miles.84

  The death of ‘Lord Glenconner’s heir’, ‘the 55th heir to a peerage who has lost his life in the war’, headed The Times’s list of casualties the next day. The paper, noting that his death came just a week after that of his cousin Lieutenant Mark Tennant, reprinted lines from Bim’s final letter: ‘your love for me and my love for you have made my whole life one of the happiest there has ever been. This is a great day for me.’85 Two days later, at Pamela’s behest, The Times published Bim’s ‘Home Thoughts in Laventie’, a gentle, wistful poem in which a soldier buries his head in flowers found growing in the ruins of a blasted, shattered town. Inhaling their scent, he steps back on to the Downs: ‘Home, what a perfect place!’86

  THIRTY-ONE

  The Remainder

  It has been forcibly demonstrated by statistics that the legend of ‘the flower of England’s aristocracy’ falling in the war was no mere myth. One in five of the British and Irish peers and their sons who fought in the war died, compared with one in eight for all members of the fighting services.1 There is no mystery to this: junior officers, leading their troops into battle, were the first in the line of fire; concepts of honour meant patrician males were among the first to join up or were already in the forces when war broke out, when ca
sualties were proportionately at their worst. The Upper Ten Thousand’s exclusivity meant that such losses were almost as acutely felt as in the decimated communities of the ‘Pals’ Battalions’ – for when these specially constituted units that allowed the men of a locality to serve alongside each other were wiped out in battle, so too was the male population of entire towns. Out of the Coterie of some thirty or forty men and women in total, fourteen died.2 ‘Oh why was I born for this time? Before one is thirty to know more dead than living people? Really, one hardly knows who is alive and who is dead,’ Cynthia wrote in her diary, expressing the sentiment that every woman of her acquaintance felt.3

  The historian David Cannadine has said that ‘it is not necessary to join the clichéd cult of the Wyndhams, the Grenfells, and the Charterises, to recognize that they were uncommonly gifted and promising young men, whose greatness had been predicted before they died and was not just invented afterwards’.4 Enough Souls had demonstrated that predicted greatness could come to disappointing ends. Yet to an extent the mythologization of the ‘Golden Generation’ by their mothers has done them a disservice. This generation had wit and talent. Many had integrity. ‘[H]e had George’s cleverness plus – great scholarly learning & absolute freshness, I looked to him to save the world!’ said Mary of Yvo.5 Their true gold is rendered almost indiscernible under the thick layer of gilt. In 1916, Ettie Desborough’s Pages from a Family Journal, 1888–1915 was privately published (250 copies by Spottiswoode of Eton High Street at a total cost of £375). It was a scrapbook of reminiscence and letters, saccharine and utterly sanitized.6 ‘I find Ettie’s book thrilling, it tells of our children’s (the children of the Souls!) Golden Age,’ Mary told Balfour.7 Yet Raymond Asquith, receiving a copy at the Front, was weary of the Souls’ cant, and criticized the way Ettie doctored the book to remove all trace of her sons’ undoubted insolence, arrogance and aggression. ‘Ettie is a snob in [a] harmless sense … She meant to give her sons the best mise-en-scène from a worldly point of view which could be had …’8 Eleven days later, Raymond was killed on the Somme and became mythologized himself as ‘this star of England’. The words, from Henry V, are inscribed on his tombstone.

  Edward Wyndham Tennant, Pamela’s memoir of Bim, was published in 1919. She first began sending chapters to her publisher, John Lane, in 1917. Writing her son’s life was ‘like bearing him over again, a moral parturition’, she said.9 She did not have to edit too much to provide the mise-en-scène she wished for Bim. ‘The Mad Soldier’ and ‘À Bas la Gloire’ were included – quite possibly Pamela was trying to show that Bim, in 1916, was already moving towards work worthy of the greatest war poetry, and would have achieved work similar to Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and that of Siegfried Sassoon had he lived. She maintained that ‘War’ was, for Bim, ‘Romance’, and that he had died in the best, most fitting way, too exalted for the life of an ordinary mortal.

  Mary first began collating material for her own memoir in January 1917. Sitting on the floor, ‘amongst heaps of “dead leaves” fluttering papers of the past … has almost killed me with misery’, she told Balfour. ‘I know I ought to feel grateful for the many happy years, but … I see … life’s hopes and aspirations – and incidentally one’s own heart! – lie bleeding in the dust.’10 Rereading all these letters, Ego’s times from school to university, ‘the sweet short track of little Yvo’,11 Mary could see only ‘the long years of preparation leading up to the holocaust’.12

  Lacking Pamela’s facility for writing for publication and Ettie’s facility with emotion, Mary laboured over Family Record for fifteen years, looking up to the Pyramid for inspiration from her boudoir at Stanway, struggling to avoid the ‘dragon’s teeth’ of cliché and hyperbole.13 She was terrified she might not do justice to her sons – worse still, might expose them inadvertently to criticism.14 It was written, so she told Ettie, ‘in heart’s blood…!’,15 and was published privately in 1932. Of the three memoirs, Mary’s is the most painful, truthful reading. Her sons ‘emerge luminous’, as she had hoped.16

  Since the war’s start Mary had questioned the assumption of a glorious death. Yet, except to Arthur, it took courage to give voice to the heresy. When she first began working on the memoir she had asked Ettie to write a tribute to Yvo for inclusion. This was fairly common. Ettie did so willingly and ended by proclaiming Yvo’s death ‘the only end worthy of his beginning’. Revisiting these words in 1931 Mary baulked. ‘Lovely as every word of it is,’ she wrote, tiptoeing carefully towards her point, ‘… during the passage of years does not one slightly change not one[’]s point of view – but perhaps the manner of expressing it? … I only feel that … (altho’ we know that it was wholly glorious right and noble what they did) we do not quite think that any other way (their darling lives, lived out here) would have been unworthy of their beginning? Perhaps you’ll think me mad … but they might, as thank God, many did – they might have fought & lived?…’17

  In December 1916, Asquith’s Coalition collapsed. Balfour replaced Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s ministry – although without a seat in the new Prime Minister’s streamlined War Cabinet. Grey, since July Viscount Grey of Fallodon, retreated gratefully to his Northumberland estate. ‘I read nothing remotely connected with the war except the newspapers,’ he told Eddy Tennant, expressing his relief at being able to share ‘general anxiety’ without feeling personal responsibility for the events that took place.18

  Grey had worried daily about Bim’s welfare when at the Front, and was devastated by his death. On first hearing the ‘terrible news’, he sent Eddy two letters in as many hours: ‘I will come to you at a word whenever you want me …’19 In April 1917, a fire at Fallodon all but destroyed the house, and all Grey’s papers. It was ‘a melancholy business’ – although he was the first to admit that it was nothing to compare with that suffered by the Glenconners. There was no question of rebuilding until after the war. In the interim, Grey stayed with the Glenconners at Queen Anne’s Gate, and at Itchen Abbas.20

  It is still debated how far Grey, a Foreign Secretary who spoke no French and never once visited Germany, could have avoided Britain’s entry into the war. Diana Bethell, Clare Tennant’s daughter who more or less lived at Wilsford in the post-war years, remembered as a small girl tugging at Grey’s sleeve asking, ‘Will there be another war? Will there be another war?’ ‘The subject always made him shake, and brought the same answer: “There will never ever be another war” he would repeat.’21 What is clear is that neither Pamela nor Eddy ever held Grey responsible for the war that caused their son’s death. Perhaps that was also because, to Pamela, Bim was not lost. As she explained in The Earthen Vessel, published by John Lane in 1921: ‘When the time came to need the comfort offered by Spiritualism, I turned to it … in just as common-sense and practical a manner as I would have gone about to book a passage or to send a cable to New Zealand, had it so chanced that my son had gone to that quarter of the globe.’22

  The spiritualist craze that arose in the war years and continued throughout the 1920s was a bereaved society’s response to incomprehensible loss. In post-Reformation England, people began to believe in witchcraft when Puritan austerity stripped them of Catholicism’s amuletic defences against evil. Now, a society shorn of its husbands, brothers and sons reached out for mediums, book tests and séances as solace in its pain. In 1915, Cincie had predicted that the great numbers of casualties would force a change in the way society treated its dead. ‘Now they are so many one must talk of them naturally and humanly, not banish them by only alluding to them as if it were almost indelicate.’23 Instead, society began talking to them.

  The Earthen Vessel, its subtitle A Volume Dealing with Spirit-Communication Received in the Form of Book-Tests, records the results of Pamela’s book tests carried out between 1917 and 1920 with Mrs Leonard, a medium on a salaried position with the Society for Psychical Research who communicated through her spirit guide, Feda.24 From January 1918, the sittings w
ere paid for by the SPR, who sent a professional notetaker to attend the sittings ‘in the interests of investigation!’, said Pamela, thrilled to have the accuracy of ‘dear Bim’s book tests & messages’ recognized in this way, happier than at any point since Bim had died. As a child, ‘Step fearless into the dark’ had been one of Bim’s favourite expressions. Now Pamela found the phrase running round her head. ‘It seems to match the endeavour somehow,’ she said.25

  A book test involved a medium, acting on spirit information, directing the sitter to a line of a page of a book in a room in a house. The sittings were conducted mostly at Clouds, Wilsford and Queen Anne’s Gate, attended by Pamela and Eddy, their sons, bereaved cousins and close friends. Chief among those friends was Oliver Lodge, whose longstanding interest in spiritualism had become obsessive since the death of his own son, Raymond, in the war in 1915. Lodge and his wife Mary, devotees of Mrs Leonard, lived in close proximity to the Glenconners. They rented from Eddy Normanton House, a property just across the way from Wilsford, and Lodge wrote the preface to The Earthen Vessel.26Pamela recounts an intensely loaded atmosphere: the receipt of the message from Feda, the hunt for meaning, the triumph when a book corresponding to the description was found, the relief and joy when the extract produced a message. Later Stephen recalled Pamela’s face when she received a book test that worked: ‘so wonderful, so uplifted & happy’.27

  Pamela claimed always to have held spiritualist beliefs. But there is little evidence of her ever employing them until she was confronted with death. Her early letters dwelt long on Christ, those in her middle years on her children. Only when Hester died did Pamela seize upon Lady Betty Balfour’s suggestion that Hester’s touching ‘Earth through me’ might have been ‘necessary to her development in another life’, as giving her hope.28 After Bim’s death, spiritualism became an obsession for her: scarcely a letter goes by without Pamela recommending the latest spiritualist tract or recounting a message received.