Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  Hermione and David threw a party to celebrate their marriage, requiring their guests to dress in nightwear. The press went to town.78 ‘Hasn’t all this racket about poor Hermione’s “Bottle & Pyjama Party” been silly?’ Pamela said to Mary, ‘the occasion really being nothing different to an ordinary Fancy Dress Party – & “bringing a bottle” being one of the rather good “short-cuts” I think of modern days, that facillitates [sic] impromptu entertaining! But the Press must have copy – so they invent long interviews.’79 A month later, the long interviews were about Stephen, one of the protagonists in the ‘Great Mayfair War’ in which he brought uninvited guests to a ball given by Lady Ellesmere, who then threw the ‘gate-crashers’ out. The Old Guard were fighting a rearguard action. Society had changed irrevocably since the pre-war years. But Pamela’s concern was for Stephen. Shortly afterwards, Edith Olivier found her at Wilsford ‘in a panic, quite broken … She and Lord Grey have been warned that it’s the beginning of a “Round-Up” of Stephen and his foppish friends,’ and Pamela was afraid that Stephen ‘would be suspected of real immorality if he continues to be written of in the papers in this company’.80

  Pamela’s concerns for Stephen were amplified by those about Clare, who was in the throes of a second divorce and lining up James Beck, her co-respondent, to be her third husband:81 ‘they quarrel as if they had been already married for ten years (!) cynical this – but you know what I mean … poor little Clare she looks so worn and cross and miserable that I am anguished for her,’ Pamela told Mary. For some time Pamela’s doctor had told her that she had a ‘hard patch in my Aorta … [which] gets affected by any emotional strain’.82 In May 1928 she suffered a bout of illness after a ‘gruelling week’ in London in which she presented two young cousins at court (the Queensberrys’ girls), gave a paper on spiritualism at the Forum Club and chaired a Sunlight League meeting in a stiflingly hot room at Sunderland House: ‘I really did too much and my heart cried out against me.’83 The following month, further anxiety about Clare ‘threw’ her ‘back again [with] rather heightened B.P. and a sense of troubled circulation in my breast’. She assured Mary that she was at Wilsford, ‘happily, wisely resting – & holding as well as I can a quiet Centre of my own – in the midst of these troubles’. She had adopted a raw diet, and was enjoying the latest biography of Emily Brontë, written with a fashionably new psychoanalytical slant.84

  Some five months later, on a Sunday afternoon in November, Pamela was alone in her garden at Wilsford when she suffered a stroke. She died a few hours later without regaining consciousness. She was fifty-seven. David and Christopher reached Wilsford in time. Stephen, who was summoned back from France where he had been holidaying with Siegfried Sassoon, and Clare, now married to Beck (she had sobbed, ‘it’s the end of my childhood’ when told the news),85 were both too late. So was Edward Grey. He had been at Fallodon when he was telephoned on Sunday evening. Just before 10 p.m. that night the Edinburgh–London express train was stopped at the little private railway station on the estate and Edward Grey boarded. He reached King’s Cross at 5.15 a.m., ashen-faced, to be met by Christopher with the news that Pamela was dead.86

  Mananai would never forget the ghastly shock of the telephone call the next morning. In the days after their sister’s death the three remaining Wyndham children, the survivors of Percy’s ‘remarkable quintette’, cleaved together for ‘heavenly days of healing and comfort’ at Babraham.87 The Bishop of Salisbury conducted a bleak funeral at Wilsford, and a grim memorial service was held at St Margaret’s Church in London, at which those attending had to fight their way through pouring rain and packs of pressmen eager to catch sight of the Bright Young Things in mourning, and the widowed Elder Statesman.88

  Pamela did not cease to demand attention even in death. At Glen that Christmas, Stephen said that his mother had ‘rained messages on me!’89 Shortly after she died, headlines were splashed across the popular press. Hermione had told friends of a ghostly experience the night Pamela died, and they had leaked it to the press. The press tenor is exemplified by Utah’s Ogden Standard-Examiner which asked, referencing David’s rakish lifestyle, ‘Did the Ghost of Viscountess Grey Return to Rebuke Her “Naughty Boy”?’ with a mock-up of Hermione with hair standing on end.90 Yet the incident, recounted in Hermione’s memoirs, is curiously touching. She described being woken in the night by the sound of her bedroom door opening, and someone walking over to David’s side of the bed:

  ‘Is that you, Stephen?’ I whispered. No one answered. There was complete quietness in the room. I sat up terrified … ‘David,’ I said hoarsely, ‘someone’s been in here.’ My heart was thumping. ‘There’s someone in the room … whoever it was bent over you.’ David lay back. ‘Don’t worry darling,’ he said sleepily. ‘It must have been Mummy coming to wish us goodnight.’91

  THIRTY-THREE

  The End

  The force of Pamela’s personality made it difficult for her sisters to believe that she was really gone. ‘[I]t seems … so bewildering & less easy to realize somehow to me now than when the blow first fell,’ Mananai wrote to Mary, three weeks after Pamela’s death.1 For years, her instinct was to write to ‘Darling Pamela’ with every piece of family news: ‘[she] still seems here to share as I know she would our family happenings’.2

  The lives of the Adeane children – albeit without the column inches – reflected how dramatically the war had changed their class’s ways. Mananai rejoiced when Sibell Adeane and her second husband Charles Lyttelton (brother of Pamela Adeane’s husband George) moved out of Hawarden, ‘the huge cold gaunt house with miles of basement!’, into the recently deceased Helen Gladstone’s ‘lovely sunny central heated – lit – modern house The Rectory’.3 She mourned when Sibell, four and a half months pregnant, was obliged to undergo an induced miscarriage in ‘a little absolutely new & up to date Maternity Home’ after the doctor said that she would never carry the child to full term.4 In 1929, Robert Adeane married Joyce Burnett. That November, Mananai was overwhelmed, even tearful when she found out that they were to have a baby: ‘isn’t it wonderful? it seems so somehow to me I don’t know why – Robert’s child’, she wrote to Mary.5

  As that Christmas approached, Mananai was wrestling with the implications of the impending Local Government Act for her county council business. It was to come into force on April Fools’ Day 1930, and had given her ‘much extra … work … but most interesting’. She was also carrying on her Red Cross work, trying to launch an ‘Orthopoedic [sic] scheme’ to add to that of massage already existing.6 Mananai’s letters were, as always, enthusiastically loving and short on reflection. She had escaped, by disposition, the fragility and nerviness of her sisters: she had also been helped by a happy marriage, and finding work that she loved.

  From the late 1920s, Mary frequently asserted that she had not long to live.7 Crippling arthritis in both hips required her to walk with the aid of sticks, and left her in near-constant pain. She had been crushed by the sudden, early death, in 1925, of Frances Charteris, Guy’s wife. ‘With Frances there … I felt “safe” about them ALL and could have died tomorrow without a tremor,’ she told Arthur.8 Now, ‘I feel I must – – more broken-winged than ever – trudge on like a snarling wrinkled charwoman, old and harsh with years! A crippled witch groping about with the Fairy Princess gone who ruled us with her gentle gracious sway.’9 Others dis-agreed. An anonymous correspondent, paying tribute to Mary in The Times after her death, wrote:

  Many who remember with admiration and love the brilliant, vivid woman portrayed in Sargent’s ‘Three Graces’ may think that the last phase was the loveliest of all: the frail, shrunken, halting figure, dependent on the two sticks which were always losing themselves, and the monkey-headed hot-water bottle Pongo: the laces and muslin, fastened with little glimmering brooches, framing the finely modelled, deep-lined, ivory face in which the eyes of a young girl shone with inexhaustible fun.10

  Throughout the decade, the publication of memoirs sporadically flun
g the Souls back into the public eye. The first occasion was early on in the decade, when Margot released the first volume of her autobiography. Gossipy, indiscreet and ludicrously self-important, it provoked a ‘controversial maelstrom’, in Balfour’s words.11 ‘All the things that people quote to me from it as containing observations of mine seem to be quite untrue but not intentionally malevolent,’ he said to Mary, declining to even read it.12 There was another flurry in January 1929, when The Times serialized extracts from Richard Haldane’s forthcoming memoirs which criticized the Souls for taking themselves on occasion ‘much too seriously … on the whole it is doubtful whether their influence was on balance good’.13 A number, including Ettie Desborough, wrote anonymously to the Editor to protest. ‘When Lord Haldane says that … he is taking himself too seriously. [The Souls] were not concerned with chaperoning the conscience of anybody. They shared different ideas, different ambitions and different politics,’ said ‘Q’ in a forthright riposte.14 All these letters emphasized the cross-party nature of the group, their lifelong devotion and loyalty to one another. The Souls continued to deny that they were a ‘set’, maintaining, in a distinction perhaps only they could see, that they were simply a group of good friends. It left them in the somewhat awkward position of defending the character of a clique they claimed had never existed.15

  The previous spring had been the longest period Mary and Balfour ever spent under one roof, when Balfour came to Stanway for five weeks to recover from a mild stroke. Ettie was also there: a trinity of Souls, as of old.16 That year, Mary wrote to Arthur imagining what people might say about them: ‘How pathetic to see Arthur and Mary Wemyss. How sad is the end of life – the necessary onslaught of illness and old age. How sad to outlive Romance. I believe they were lovers once, tho’ nobody knows the truth about these things!’17

  Arthur died at Whittingehame in 1930. Mary was at Hyères. Two days before that, she had woken feeling out of sorts, edgy, nervous and tearful. From Hyères she sent a bunch of rosemary and thyme, the only flowers, besides family flowers, thrown into his grave.18 ‘I cannot yet realize how great the blank will be,’19 she wrote, upon the loss of her ‘unfailing friend’.20 Her lifelong confidant had gone. With the publication of Family Record in 1932, she began work on her Souls memoir in earnest.21 Ettie and Evelyn de Vesci, friends spanning fifty years, continued to marvel at Mary’s energy. She was as ‘Napoleon-like’ as ever, said Ettie, as Mary planned a day that involved leaving Stanway after breakfast, lunching in London and dining at Taplow Court, after stopping off in Surrey for tea.22 Yet Mary was also prone to fits of depression and gloom, and mental demons could drive her into fits of anxiety. She reached such a crisis in 1936.

  In 1932 Dick had put Clouds – estate and contents – up for sale. Only the most precious objects – the Orpens of Madeline and Percy, the Watts of Madeline, George Wyndham’s bust by Rodin – were kept in the family. Everything else – from eighteenth-century Italian cabinets to a pair of ice-skates – was auctioned off over the following months. ‘The prices weren’t too good – but not too bad,’ Dick Wyndham told his father.23 It took four years for Knight, Frank & Rutley, the estate agents, to find a buyer for the ‘dignified mansion’ and its 3,000 acres. In 1936 it was sold for a little over £39,000 to a property developer, who parcelled it up. The eventual buyer of Clouds – now marooned on just 26 acres – demolished a third of the house before the Second World War, just to make it manageable.24

  Mary, adrift without Balfour, the Family Record that had accompanied her for fifteen years complete, Clouds sold, and agitated by Margot’s prolific publications, began to try to pin down her past. Her progress on her memoir of the Souls had been faltering. Now she reattempted it, as an article which she intended for publication under the title ‘Friendship’s Garland’.25 Becoming frantic at her inability to capture it properly, she sought the help of Evelyn and her brother-in-law Evan Charteris. The manuscript horrified them. The article was meant to be ‘character sketches’ of ‘ball throwers’ that Mary had admired,26 but in reality it was full of titles, names and ‘unsubstantiated assertions’, said Evan.27 ‘I think it is an impossible document for the public to play about with,’ said Evelyn. She thought it could attract only ‘unkind derision & criticism … a saddening document’.28 Yet their attempts to dissuade Mary – now ‘verging on a nervous breakdown’ in their view – failed. Evan agreed to go to Gosford to help her edit the work. Mary had told him that she would ‘go mad’ if he did not help her, ‘& she looks a wraith – & agonized & distracted’, he explained to Evelyn.29

  On arriving at East Lothian, Evan was dismayed by what he saw. Gosford had reached its nadir with Angela and Hugo’s decision to turn it into a hotel of sorts, taking in paying guests. Evan’s description is redolent of Fawlty Towers: ‘the little dining room (marble hall end) – now a gaudy cocktail bar – with a rather pretty barmaid – cheap little tables – & cheaper chairs – disposed in the true bar manner’, Hugo ‘sulky as a bear’ striding the corridors, barking at a man in plus-fours turning into the saloon to ask him what he was doing there. Angela was ‘always in the house – usually in the Bar – following guests about, spying what she can & giving them fits with a monster Alsatian which barks & bays along the corridors’; while Connor, ‘in great distress about the situation financial & social … weeps for the good name of the Brigadier & Mumsey [the tenth Earl and Countess of Wemyss]’. There was only one guest when Evan arrived, ‘& it has now got so bad a name locally & I believe universally that it is commonly regarded as doomed’.30 No one escaped Evan’s furious eye: ‘Guy [Charteris] with no more manners than a fish hook … wraps – papers – cards – bridge scores strewn about – dogs fighting and being screamed at – never a moments serenity or peace – everyone snapping & scrapping. I have paid my last visit there.’31

  Evan’s attempts to help with editing had been futile. ‘M is incorrigible … she concedes an exclusion of a name or the alteration of a sentence or paragraph & the next day it is returned – she is a naughty child up to every sort of subterfuge & dodge secretly determined to get her own way.’32 He was more concerned about Mary’s mental state:

  [she] has been undone by coming here … the Souls & Moby Dick [Wyndham] have played havoc – & her state of mental agitation is worse than I can recall it to have ever been … I wonder if she ought not to try psycho-analysis …? I know nothing about it beyond its claim to reduce complexes – & here at any rate are the complexes allright [sic] – complexes which are biting into her reason – dominating her outlook & blotting out all other considerations.33

  The article was never finished. The following February, Mary’s children and grandchildren held a ‘Family Banquet’ for her at her club, the Albemarle, on Dover Street as her seventy-fifth birthday approached. The Adeanes did not attend, Mananai was recovering from the flu and Charlie had duties as Lord Lieutenant which he could not miss. ‘We don’t want to complicate things (which leaving things open does) so I feel we ought to say no,’ said Mananai.34 Two months later, Mary had a small house party at Stanway: five or six of her oldest friends, and a new young writer and his artist sister whom ‘she had newly taken to her heart’. To her guests she seemed as vibrant as ever – although she confided to one of them that she did not think she had long to live. This time she was right. She died a week later on 29 April 1937, at the age of seventy-four. She had been taken ill at Stanway in the afternoon, and died that night with ‘a swiftness merciful to her’, wrote the anonymous correspondent in The Times: ‘a rare spirit has passed away’.35 Hugo lived another two months, rivalrous to the end, and died in his sleep at Gosford, in his eightieth year.

  Mananai and Guy, the two quietest of Percy’s ‘remarkable quintette’, lived long enough to experience the sadness of seeing the world once more descend into war. Guy Wyndham died in the darkest days of the Blitz, on 17 April 1941, peacefully in his sleep in Wiltshire. Two months later, on 31 July, Madeline Adeane at the age of seventy-two suffered a fatal heart att
ack at Babraham, cheated of her hope to live long enough to see what became of Adolf Hitler. She had been engaged ‘literally’ to the very day of her death in her county council and charity work. ‘The gap she leaves there … cannot be filled,’ wrote a correspondent in anonymous tribute.36 Under the headline, ‘One of “The Three Graces”’, The Times noted the passing of a dynasty: ‘She was the last survivor of the gifted family of the Hon. Percy and Mrs. Wyndham, whose home at Clouds in Wiltshire, was, during the 30 years before the last War, a delightful social and intellectual centre.’37

  And so it ends. But not, perhaps, if one takes Pamela’s word for it. In 1928 she had made a ‘pilgrimage’ back to Clouds, taking David, bearing wreaths for the graves of her parents and George. They had found the graveyard ‘profoundly beautiful & peaceful’. Except that the rosemary on Madeline Wyndham’s grave was overgrown, everything was as it should be. David had read aloud from Shelley’s Adonais for George; Pamela had recited lines for her parents: a ‘little Persian rhyme’ that Madeline Wyndham had loved, and for her father Proverbs 4:18 – ‘But the path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.’38

  Pamela and David had gone into the house, to be greeted kindly by Mrs Mosselman, and wandered around the place. The house was warm and lived in, Pamela told Mary, and scattered with children’s toys. In the library, Pamela had stood by the Rodin bust of George and ‘received a fine, and convincing RAP (– one of my raps that are so astonishingly apposite!) … I laughed, & said “All Right! – Message received!”’ The atmosphere of the house was still overpowering ‘like a tangible, all encompassing actuality! Just like great mid-summer Lilies or Honeysuckle, come towards you … on the air in Summer evenings’.