Madeline Wyndham’s body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, her ashes buried in the family plot at East Knoyle on 12 March. She was the last Wyndham to be buried there. Pamela was not among the large crowd of mourners. For several months the Glenconners had been touring America, visiting Grey, who had come out of near retirement to serve as Ambassador to the United States. Pamela decided not to cut short their trip. ‘I was absolutely convinced she was going to die before I returned so it was no extra grief to me,’ she explained to Mary from the Biltmore Hotel in New York, adding that she had taken the precautionary step of leaving an obituary she had written with Frederick Lowndes, who edited The Times obituary section, so that he could publish it if her mother died while she was away. Pamela’s spiritualism had rendered her strangely impervious to grief. She had sought out mediums in every place the Glenconners visited, from Chicago to California (Eddy had privately chartered a Pullman to make the journey).31 Her first act upon hearing the news of her mother’s death – in Boston – had been to go, anonymously, to a medium named Mrs Chenoweth. It was a ‘very beautiful’ sitting, she told Mary, ‘and the very first person who came was darling Mamma, it gave me such a great comfort … I can truly say I am thankful she is released – into the fuller Life, which I know is now hers! … I dwell in the thought of her joy.’32
America had given the spectacularly wealthy Glenconners a rapturous reception. ‘… I never knew I was so delightful! or could be so clever! – how overlooked I have been until now! What have the people in London been thinking about? – didn’t they know that when I was with them? … my room is a bower of roses, the table groans under cards …’ Pamela wrote in her diary as they arrived in New York.33 They were fulfilling a semi-ambassadorial role, helping promote relations between the nations (the subject of an address made by Eddy to New York’s Sulgrave Institution).34 Their every step was followed by pressmen, fascinated by the ‘Scottish Magnate’ and his eccentrically beautiful wife, who organized her thirteen-year-old son to give dance recitals at their hotels.35
In England the work of the press barons – both Lords Beaverbrook and Northcliffe were friends of Pamela’s – was coming to fruition. The public was avid for tales of upper-class eccentricity. Pamela and her family provided it to perfection. Less than six months after their return to England Eddy died, aged sixty-one, in a private nursing home after suffering complications from what was intended to be a routine operation.36 He left Wilsford and Queen Anne’s Gate in trust to Pamela. Christopher, now the second Baron Glenconner, inherited Glen. The remainder, valued at £814,479 gross (a sum of over £17 million in today’s money), was divided predominantly between David and Stephen, with a large lump sum to Clare, a bequest to Edward Grey and an annuity to Nanny Trussler.37
Pamela, a widow not yet fifty, proved her mettle. She let out Queen Anne’s Gate to a shipbuilding magnate and his wife on a rolling seven-year lease, so that Christopher could move back in when he married, and took 4 Buckingham Street, a ‘dear little house’ two doors down from Guy and Frances Charteris on a street ‘like Quality Street in its prettiness’. Pamela decorated the house with cream-coloured walls, ‘dark Columbine blue’ curtains and carpet, and chintz sofas and chairs; the ‘dark red roses & pink roses look so lovely against the … blue curtains’, she told Dorothy Carleton. The magnate and his wife had been happy to caretake the larger pictures in the Gallery, so Pamela had brought ‘only a picked few of the smaller canvassed pictures’ with her to the new house. She listed them for Dorothy and Wilfrid: two Turners, two Bonningtons, a Constable, three Nasmyths (‘great favourites’), two Lancrets, two Hogarths, one Floris, the Orpen of Madeline Wyndham, the Lawrence crayon of Charles Dickens, The Leslie Boy by Raeburn, Mignard’s portrait of Colbert, the Reynolds of ‘the dew bird’, Miss Stephens by Zoffany, The Widow Wadham and The Uncle Toby by Leslie, a woman’s head by Angelica Kauffmann, the Millais of Lady Millais as Marguerite, the Natier of the Duc de Guise, Morland’s Industry and Idleness ‘and a Fragonard’.38
From the moment of Eddy’s death, Margot had scrutinized the Tennants, hawk-like, for sufficient distress. Mary described to Ettie Margot’s behaviour during a fraught visit to the Tennants at Glen, where they had repaired immediately after Eddy’s death; ‘no tears, no heart, the dry-eyed are relegated to an everlasting limbo of callousness & cruelty,’ she added wryly. As for Pamela, who refused to break down in front of Margot: ‘I think one may as well … be thought “to have done one’s husband to death”.’39 Shortly afterwards, Pamela began to hear reports from friends of a ‘story of falsehood’ and neglect reeled out by Margot at dinner parties40 – that Pamela and her children had shamefully abandoned Eddy to die alone in his nursing home.
Pamela confronted her sister-in-law: ‘Margot, I do not open my letter with the conventional term of endearment, as I cordially dislike you. Will you write me your apology for perverting the truth of my conduct towards Eddy on his death bed? I do not require a long letter; having neither time nor inclination for anything beyond the apology for which I ask. Yours, in utter sincerity …’41 Pamela subsequently explained that she had been with Eddy on the day of his death for almost fourteen hours straight, from ‘4 a.m. till about 6.30 (or 6 … I cannot recall accurately)’. She was only absent at the moment of death because she had ‘fainted through anguish and lack of food’ and been taken back to Queen Anne’s Gate by Eddy’s brother Jack to eat and change.42 Margot backtracked enough to give a semblance of apology, and Pamela graciously accepted it as though it were fulsome: ‘we will not quarrel for Eddy’s sake’, she told her sister-in-law.43
To Pamela’s mind this was still very much a present obligation, as she remained in close contact with her dead husband. ‘I have received two most excellent Messages in Book Tests from Bim & Eddy together … they are singularly Good and made me happy,’ she wrote to Mary three months after Eddy’s death.44 She spoke of her dead as though she had just put down the telephone to them, encouraged by Oliver Lodge, so nearby at Normanton House, where he had built a large room to serve as a laboratory for further psychical experiments.45 Her granddaughter Dinah Bethell remembered her sitting on her bed each morning, recounting the previous night’s conversations with Bim.46 More bitterly, Stephen recalled arriving back at Wilsford, having been taken by his friend (and lover) Siegfried Sassoon to meet the elderly Thomas Hardy. He burst into the house, eager to tell his mother about the encounter. Pamela, according to Stephen, barely looked up from her spiritualist tract.47
In February 1922, The Times reported that it was ‘authorised’ to announce that Pamela and Grey would marry in the early summer of that year.48 At half-past eight on the morning of Sunday 4 June, Pamela and Grey were married at St Michael’s Church in Wilsford. Christopher Tennant gave Pamela away; Edward’s sister Mrs Curtis was the only other witness. The ceremony was kept so secret that the villagers of Wilsford did not even know of it until it was over.49 Grey had in fact proposed on Whitsunday a full year before, cycling over to Wilsford after an ‘odious paragraph’ of speculation in the press. Then, Pamela had refused. At the time she told Lucy Graham Smith that it was because her sons still needed her, and expressly asked Lucy to tell ‘your immediate circle’ – meaning Margot – that Grey ‘would not have suggested a thing so early had he not thought that the paragraph in the Press had worried me’.50 A year later, Pamela had decided to bow to her sisters-in-law no longer. ‘[T]he great step was taken, at last, by me,’ she told Wilfrid.
I had no really valid reason for refusing any longer, and now that it is taken, I am quite certain it was right. Edward is so very fond of me, and I can be of use to him: and he is a wonderful LOVER and makes me very happy in a hundred ways … I feel – like Philip Sydney’s mother – who made her second marriage so late in life that, like her, I could inscribe inside my wedding ring ‘NO Spring till now’ …51
The press leapt on the news. The Times on 6 June reported ‘A “Marriage of the Minds”’, talking of the newlyweds’ many shared int
erests (the correspondent is anonymous, but the tone smacks of Marie Belloc Lowndes). A double-page spread in the American press, on ‘The Romantic Miracle of England’s Loneliest Man’, claimed that Grey’s sight had been cured by his nuptials: ‘Now all of England is saying that the healing touch of the woman he loved brought life to the stricken nerves that had been pronounced dead by surgery.’52
Grey’s sight had continued to deteriorate to the point that he was practically blind, and neither operation (which he tried) nor love (which he had) was going to fix it. But the marriage was very happy. The Greys moved, in London, to Mulberry House, an elegant Lutyens house on gas-lit Smith Square in Westminster,53 but on the whole they divided their time between Wilsford and Fallodon. Pamela was spotted shopping in Newcastle with a green parrot on her shoulder (the same parrot was walking on her bed at Mulberry House the last time that Mary saw her sister).54 ‘He was sometimes a long-suffering husband,’ recalled David Tennant’s wife, Hermione – but the example she gave was simply of Pamela, ‘not renowned for her punctuality’, keeping a resigned Grey waiting by the car,55 a far cry from the tales of Pamela terrorizing Eddy. A ‘very perfect friendship’ had become still better a marriage.56 ‘I feel I can write to you … telling you that I am happy, I was going to say – at last,’ Pamela told Wilfrid, remembering distant Stockton days when her cousin had asked her if she was happy, and she had been unable to reply.57
Pamela and Grey undoubtedly had a sexual relationship. Marie Belloc Lowndes, who never left a confidence unrevealed, said in her memoirs that Pamela had a miscarriage shortly after her marriage, which she attributed to an overlong drive to a political meeting.58 This was in the early spring of 1923. At fifty-two, older than what is now the average age for menopause, Pamela’s chances of miscarriage were extremely high. Her doctor prescribed three weeks of bed-rest, and no exertion for a further three months: ‘a holiday for 3 months! A lovely prescription! … I believe Dr Aarons is going to combine a douching or ichth[y]ol treatment during the 3 weeks to increase the slender hope for the future,’ Pamela explained to Marie Stopes from Wilsford in March.59
Pamela had not forgotten her debt of gratitude to Stopes. She agreed with pleasure (when most other grandees who were approached regretfully declined) to become a patron of Stopes’s first birth-control clinic, the Mothers’ Clinic, in Holloway, North London, on its opening in 1921. She even hoped to connect that ‘fine work’ with her Home for Working Mothers in Westminster, where ‘I have the Infant Welfare scheme … The mothers who attend there, & they are continually increasing, would benefit by your work being made known to them.’60 Throughout the 1920s, Pamela arranged for contraceptive devices to be provided to Wilsford’s villagers. In some instances, this was to help women who already had large families. ‘I want to help [her] to feel secure … can I get one of the little rubber fitments you invented? If so where –’ she said of one early case.61 Yet Pamela, like Stopes (and many more, including John Maynard Keynes, Havelock Ellis and Balfour),62 was an advocate of eugenic theory, then part of a progressive ideology. Eugenics applied in this context meant the use of birth control to prevent breeding among, in Stopes’s words, the ‘inferior, the depraved, and the feeble-minded’.63 In an undated letter to the Stopes Society, Pamela asked for ‘some appliances’ that she could ‘take down … & explain … the use of’ to a woman in Wilsford village: ‘She is not of very high intelligence, & it is really of importance that she should not bear a child. She has just married … I should be glad to be of use to her.’64
Despite her belief in Stopes’s work, Pamela always gracefully resisted appearing on platforms at Stopes’s meetings. Possibly this was her old fear of public speaking. She was probably also reluctant to become the controversial movement’s figurehead that Stopes clearly wished her to be. On her remarriage, she gave up public support entirely. ‘I have been a breaking reed, I fear: not in conviction, but in supporting you in public,’ she told Stopes, explaining that ‘Lord Grey is averse to my taking up public work, though he knows & admires your work …’65 It is most likely that Grey could not countenance Pamela having public involvement in this work.
Pamela was not to have another child. In 1925, she wrote to Mananai recounting another prolonged period of bed-rest, with troublesome heart and raised blood pressure. She explained that the underlying cause was ‘the change’ – the menopause. ‘[S]he has had to give up doing everything & live the life of an invalid,’ Mananai told Mary.66 The Greys and Stephen spent the winter in Madeira and the spring in Vernet-les-Bains.
Grey’s Twenty-Five Years had just been published, to remarkable commercial success (six impressions in six months) and critical acclaim. It was widely considered to vindicate Britain’s entry into the war. Grey’s dedication to Pamela explained that she had read over what he had written each day, offering suggestions and improvements. It seems that this amounted, in some cases, to rewriting. Twenty-Five Years contains an anecdote of Grey, as a child, seeing the Northern Lights and thinking them Paris burning in the 1870 Siege. It replicates almost exactly a supposed childhood memory of the Wyndhams, published in George’s Life and Letters that same year.67 In one biography of Grey Pamela has been presented as a society dalliance who had no impact on his life and work.68 This is emphatically not so.
An added frisson of interest for the popular press was that this elder statesman breakfasted with stepchildren who were leading lights of the Bright Young Things. Immense wealth, good looks (‘Of course, we have the fatal gift of beauty, darling,’ Stephen commented)69 and utter disdain for convention made Clare, David and Stephen irresistible to the press. David founded the notorious Gargoyle Club, a louche Soho nightspot that drew into its mirrored rooms everyone from the Prince of Wales to Tallulah Bankhead and the Bloomsbury Group. He married, in 1927, the pint-size revue star Hermione Baddeley, famous for her rendition of Noël Coward’s ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’, written especially for her.70 Stephen was the androgynous beauty immortalized by Cecil Beaton, whose ‘Silver Room’ in Mulberry House, wallpapered in silver foil, with a polar-bearskin rug on the floor, was the subject of a Vogue spread (Pamela said it looked like an iceberg).71 Several of Beaton’s most famous photographs of the Bright Young Things were taken at Wilsford, including that, in Pamela’s drawing room, of Beaton, Stephen, Baby and Zita Jungman, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, Rex Whistler, Elinor Wylie and Rosamond Lehmann lying on a rug underneath a tigerskin. In another, on the bridge over the Avon, men and women alike are dressed as Regency dandies in breeches with powdered faces, the river still as glass below them. Clare was an icy Society beauty, regularly featured in the press.
In Broken Blood, a family biography, Pamela’s descendant Simon Blow alleged the corruption of an industrious, Presbyterian line by Pamela’s blue blood. Certainly her extraordinary self-possession infected her children, but the way that David and Stephen Tennant, in particular, fascinated, titillated and outraged the press is redolent of the impact Eddy’s sisters had had when launching themselves upon Society forty years before. Perhaps Wyndham blood melded with generation-skipping Tennant insouciance.
Moving in and out of their circle was Dick Wyndham, who had lived at Clouds for only a couple of years, during a disastrous early marriage. After his divorce in 1924, Dick, a playboy with artistic pretensions, moved to the French Riviera and let Clouds, first to Sibell’s son Bend’Or, then to a wealthy Dutch couple, Adriaan and Nancy Mosselman. Despite a substantial income, Dick had developed a habit of selling off a painting a year to keep his funds buoyant. In 1927 it was The Wyndham Sisters.
Dick justified the sale as providing an annuity for Guy Wyndham, who had remarried in 1923 and had two small sons with his wife Violet (née Leverson). Sargent was rapidly falling out of fashion, but Dick thought he could get £20,000 for the painting – ‘an entirely artificial value over and above what Grandpapa payed [sic] for it’ – which, invested, would provide an income of £1,200 a year. He explained to Mary:
I look upon this painti
ng as really belonging to you and Aunt Madeline & Pamela, so would do nothing without your consent. Personally I feel very strongly that it ought to be sold … The alternative is keeping a picture in a house, where neither I nor any heirs will ever be able to live. I feel sure that Grandpapa would have been the first to chuckle at his good buy – the painting is ‘sentiment’ and I feel that Father’s income is a more practical sentiment, particularly as none of the family get any advantage from the picture.72
The Wyndham Sisters was sold to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1927 for £20,000. There is no evidence that any of the money did go towards supporting Guy.73 Pamela later heard from the Mosselmans that Dick had not even bothered to tell his tenants that he was intending to remove the painting. ‘The first they knew of the matter was the men trampling in to unhook it! What a lack of touch,’ she commented to Mary.74
Pamela in later life was as ripe for anecdote as ever. She appears in Hermione Baddeley’s memoirs as an imperious grande dame, whisking David off on Alpine tours with more suitable young women, and recruiting the press baron Lord Beaverbrook to have a quiet word with Hermione over lunch. ‘Marriage is not for a clever young actress like you …’ he advised. ‘You keep your mind right there on your career. Don’t get married. D’you hear me?’75 In Hermione’s account, on discovering that David and Hermione had had an illegitimate daughter, Pauline, Pamela swoops in: ‘“By the way”, said David, “you know how fond she is of babies. She asks if you’d like Pauline and her nanny to live at Wilsford?” I couldn’t believe my ears. Not only was she trying to marry David off to some suitable girl, but she wanted my baby too …’76 The story has a happy ending. After pitching up at David and Hermione’s low-key wedding at Chelsea Registry Office in April 1928, draped in fox, with a feathered toque and Christopher and Stephen in morning suits, Pamela softened. She approached Hermione at the reception held at the Gargoyle ‘and pressed the most beautiful pearl, emerald and diamond ring into my hand. “This is something very precious from me to you” she said. “The first man I ever loved gave it to me.”’77
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