Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  The beach was a fashionable meeting place for all Tenby. Under the cliffs a band played patriotic airs and ‘nigger minstrels’ sang and danced; donkeys, led by donkey-boys and ridden by well-dressed infants, trotted obediently to and fro; gentlemen in boaters or top hats, and ladies in long skirts with wasp waists, balancing parasols, promenaded the sands. Bathing – a complicated procedure in voluminous blue serge costumes or long combinations – was permitted between special hours. Horse-drawn bathing machines, strewn along the sands, were used – bathing from boats was not lawful within two hundred yards of the shore. These bathing machines were upright carriages on wheels, advertising the benefits of Beecham’s Pills and Pears Soap. They were looked after by a large uncorseted woman and a company of boys, celebrated for their vulgarity, who shocked Augustus by whispering unheard-of obscenities in his ears. A frantic man, summoned by the shouts of these boys, would canter up and down the sands harnessing horses to the vehicles which were then pulled out into the deep water. The occupants could thus enter the water with the least possible hazard to modesty. Once they had completed their swimming, they would re-enter their horse-drawn dressing-room, regain their clothes, then raise a flag as a signal that they were ready to be towed back.

  As he grew older, Augustus began to avoid this beach, roaming beyond North Cliff Point where he and his companions could bathe from the rocks and lie naked in the sun. He longed for a wider world than that enclosed by the walls of Tenby and was happiest when he and his brother and sisters were invited to stay at Begelly, in a house overlooking an infertile common populated by geese, cattle and the caravans of romantic-looking gypsies. Here, and with the Mackenzie family at Manorbier, the rules and repressions of Tenby were forgotten, Papa was left behind, and the strangely brooding children of Victoria Street were transformed into a turbulent tribe of Johns.

  One of Gus’s best friends at this time was a boy, eighteen months younger than he, called Arthur Morley. With their butterfly nets, the two boys spent much of their time playing along the dunes. ‘We used to go for walks together, sometimes to a place known as Hoyle’s Mouth, a cave in a limestone cliff about 1½ miles from the town near a marsh where flew many orange-tip butterflies,’ Morley recalled. ‘On the floor of the cave we used to dig pre-historic animals… We found that leading out of this cave there was a second which we could reach by crawling along a very small passage with a lighted candle.’24

  His greatest friend was Robert Prust, whose family occupied, with their parrot, a fine house on the south cliff. Robert Prust was keen on ‘Red Indians’, and for a long time Augustus hero-worshipped him. The two of them would lead a pack of braves along the rough grass tracks, across the sand dunes known as ‘the Burrows’ to advance upon the army encampment at Penally. No one took his Indian life more seriously than Augustus. ‘Under the discipline of the Red Man’s Code,’ he wrote, ‘I practised severe austerities, steeled myself against pain and danger, was careful not to betray any emotion and wasted few words.’25 Such a regime was too much for his companions who, one by one, abandoned the warpath to chase the paleface Tenby girls. At last, only the two of them were left. The final betrayal came when, having helped Augustus set fire to a wood, Robert Prust revealed a most un-Indian lack of stoicism. Thereafter Augustus was left to roam the Burrows with only a phantom tribe of Comanches.

  The cult of the ‘Red Indian’ gave Augustus an alternative world to Tenby. Yet everywhere there were encroachments. His hunting ground, the Burrows, was converted into a golf-links; the ‘nigger minstrels’ under the cliffs were replaced by a refined troupe of pierrots who could be invited with impunity to tea; flower shows took over the ice-rink and the annual fair, with its blaring roundabouts spinning away late into the night, was removed from under the old town walls.

  Tenby, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, was becoming a town patronized by relatives of the county landowners of Pembrokeshire, by retired field officers and elderly sea-dogs. It was also a holiday resort for the upper-middle classes, who arrived each summer to play their golf, badminton and high-lobbing lawn tennis, to shoot sea-birds and hunt foxes. There were regattas, picnics and water-parties, much blowing of marine music, balls with polkas and galops at the Royal Assembly Rooms and, in the evening, the twilight ritual of promenades along the cliffs.

  Everywhere strict rules of etiquette were observed. One of the first things Edwin John did was to throw away his professional brass plate – though he continued to practise law from his home as if it were merely a gentleman’s whim or hobby, like his shell collecting. He volunteered as assistant organist at St Mary’s, and every Sunday morning lined up his children, like small soldiers, in the hall, to be inspected before taking them off for the service. He himself, in a top hat and frock coat, led the way, and drew many curious glances. He did more: he took up photography; he played the harmonium; he had cold baths in the early morning; above all he did – and was conspicuously seen to do – absolutely nothing whatsoever. His manner was unapproachable: and no one approached him. It was very odd. He redoubled his efforts. His hair grew white, his cheeks turned pink, his collection of cowries multiplied, his solitary walks towards Giltar or along the road to Gumfreston became longer, his collars, always of the stiffest, stiffened further: throughout the district his gentility and rectitude were freely acknowledged. But with the élite of Tenby – the Prusts and Swinburnes, the Morleys and Massays and Hannays and de Burghs, whose children were his children’s companions – Edwin was never on visiting terms. For although his propriety was unexampled, curious rumours persisted of some scandal back at Haverfordwest – rumours fanned into life by Gus and Gwen, Thornton and Winifred.

  So Edwin John, who hated eccentricity, took his place among the town’s most bizarre characters: with the gentleman who tied a rope to his topmost window and, shunning stairs, swarmed up and down it; and with another who wore socks on his hands; with the lady who struggled to keep an airless house, stuffing paper into every crevice of window and door; with Cadwalladyr, the speechless shrimper, massive and hairy and never less than up to his waist in water; and with Mr Prydderch, bank manager and Captain of the Fire, who, ‘swaggering fantastically, his buttocks strangely protuberant’, paraded the town to the music of a brass band until confined in Carmarthen Asylum.

  Edwin John made sure that his children were seen to be educated. Nothing excessive was required; in particular the girls’ education was so reticent as to be almost invisible. As soon as the family had settled into their house at Tenby, Gwen and Winifred were sent to what was referred to as a ‘private school’ a few yards down Victoria Street. It consisted of three pupils, the mother of the third one, a German lady married to a philosopher named Mackenzie, acting as teacher. This arrangement combined for Edwin the advantages of cheapness with those of social prestige in claiming for his daughters a foreign ‘governess’, optimistically described as ‘Swiss’. Mrs Mackenzie was a kind and homely woman who, to a limited extent and more especially with Winifred, took the place of a mother. Her daughter Irene became a particular friend of Winifred’s – the two of them laughed so much together that if one caught sight of the other even on the horizon she would be convulsed with giggles. Gwen, at this time, suffered from back trouble that gave Mrs Mackenzie’s lessons a drastic appearance as she lay, on doctor’s advice, stretched out on the schoolroom floor where Irene and Winifred insisted on joining her.

  When they were older the two sisters attended Miss Wilson’s Academy,26 a school that placed more emphasis on deportment than scholarship. Miss Wilson herself was a stern-looking woman of unguessable age, who later committed suicide in the sea.

  Gus’s education was also unusual. Late in 1884 he went to an infant school in Victoria Street, and at the age of ten was sent to join his brother at Greenhill, a rambling building set on a plateau on the slopes of lower Tenby.27 This school catered for the sons both of tradesmen and of the middle classes, and its pupils, faithfully mimicking the ways of their parents, segrega
ted themselves into two classes: ‘gentlemen’ and ‘cads’. It was run by Mr Goward, a tiny man with a large spectacled face topped by a flame of hair, dressed in mock-clerical neckwear and curiously short turned-down trousers. An ardent Liberal and Congregationalist, he began each day with a Gladstonian homily, followed, according to his mood, by hymns or a rendering of ‘Scots, Wha Hae’.

  Gussie, as everyone called him, was a mutinous pupil, often in trouble for breaking school rules, caricaturing the masters and retaliating when corrected. With the other boys he seems to have been popular. It was here that he won his first serious stand-up fight, collapsing into uncontrollable tears after his victory as if in sympathy with the loser.

  It was here, too, that he received from the drill master a smashing blow on his ear that, for the rest of his life, made him partially deaf.

  Regularly, each term, his misdeeds were reported to his father who meticulously committed them to paper. Then, one day, something shocking happened: Augustus struck the second master – instead of the other way about – and Edwin felt he could ignore these delinquencies no longer. Having entered this last enormity in his ledger, he summoned Augustus to his study, read out the full catalogue of his crimes over the years and with a cry of ‘Now, sir!’ had, in his own words, ‘recourse to the old-fashioned punishment of caning’.

  Shortly after this incident, Mr Goward left Greenhill for British Columbia, and both Thornton and Augustus were sent to boarding school at Clifton College, near Bristol. The new school took a number of pupils from Pembrokeshire and was well thought of in Tenby, from where it was seen as a minor Eton College turning out middle-class stalwarts who played the game and administered the Empire.

  Augustus never fitted into this school. The top hat, Eton jacket and collar made him feel uncomfortable and faintly ridiculous. At football, which he liked, he achieved some success. But cricket seemed elaborately unspontaneous: he could never bowl, the long drudgery of fielding bored him, and at batting, which appeared more promising, he was always being given out. It was while day-dreaming on the cricket field that a ball struck him on his ear and did for that one what the drill instructor’s baton had done for the other at Greenhill.

  Though strong for his age, Augustus seldom entered into the games of the other boys and he made no lasting friendships. The only boy for whom he cared at all was, like himself, an outcast in this foreign atmosphere of an English preparatory school, being a ‘half-wit’, but so sweet-natured that Augustus befriended him.

  Everything that appealed to him at this time seemed to lead him away from Clifton: the River Avon flowing westwards under wooded cliffs towards the Golden Valley and the sea; the docks of Bristol where, for a few pence, it was possible to watch a platoon of rats being mauled to death by a dog or ferret; and, in the dark autumn evenings, while he was dreaming over his homework, the distant wail of an itinerant street vendor, which stirred in him a painful longing.

  ‘Gloom, boredom and anguish of mind’28 were his predominant moods at Clifton, but they did not last long. Early in 1891 he left to continue his schooling back at Tenby which, for all its disadvantages, was still the only home he knew.

  St Catherine’s, where he passed the next two-and-a-half years, had recently opened on the north-east corner of Victoria Street.29 There was one classroom and seven pupils – though this number doubled later on – and the atmosphere, far happier than at Clifton, was like that of a family party.

  ‘A lonely adolescent’ was how Augustus later described himself in his early teens. Sometimes he was rebellious, sometimes quiet, at all times conspicuous. He liked to claim that he was a descendant of Owen Glendower, the fourteenth-century Welsh ‘prince’. When one boy expressed scepticism, Augustus marched up to him glaring terrifically and waving his fists before his nose, and the doubter was convinced.

  The school was so small it could not raise a full team for any game, and they devised all sorts of miniature variations – hockey on roller skates; four-a-side football; golf along the sand dunes with one club; and a game with wooden sticks with which you endeavoured, without being hit yourself, to hit your opponent’s elbow. Augustus enjoyed these sports without going out of his way to excel in them. But there was one game at which he did excel. ‘We each had to make a shield of some sort and were given six tennis balls,’ Arthur Morley remembered.

  ‘We were then divided into two sides… The idea was to attack the other side with the tennis balls. Anyone who was hit was out. Gussie naturally was captain of one side, but instead of trying to take his enemies by surprise he stood on the highest dune challenging them all loudly – he had, I think, been studying The Lady of the Lake. He was a striking figure.’30

  With such small numbers and a wide span of ages, little teaching in class was practical, and the boys worked on individual lines under the headmaster’s supervision. Augustus was largely innumerate, maintaining his place in arithmetic at the bottom of the school. But his reading and writing improved greatly. He devoured almost every book he could lay his hands on, especially any volume of poetry, and his stories and essays were so vividly written that the headmaster, who thought he might become a novelist, used to read them to the class.

  It was not long before Augustus established himself as a star pupil. With the headmaster, Allen Evans, a clever Welshman who had passed his written examination for the Indian Civil Service but failed to pass the medical, he was an obvious favourite. On one occasion Evans delivered to the class a triumphal address in which he expatiated on the boldness and idealism of Augustus’s aspirations, picturing him with one foot on Giltar Point and the other on Caldy Island, and in effect comparing him to the Colossus of Rhodes.

  To these encomiums, which might have embarrassed another boy, Augustus responded like a bud in the sun. He had longed for encouragement from his father, but Edwin’s lack of interest had closed him up. The hero-worship he had wanted to fix upon his father he now transferred to Allen Evans. Their special friendship lasted more than a year, but eventually ended painfully. ‘One day when we were at work in the classroom the headmaster and Gussie stood together in a quiet but very bitter argument,’ Arthur Morley remembered.

  ‘I think that the former was accusing the latter of some offence which Gussie was vehemently denying. In the end the headmaster no doubt feeling that the argument had gone beyond the bounds of reason turned towards me and said: “Morley, did you hear what we were saying?” This was embarrassing, but I said: “I could not help hearing, sir.” He then turned to Gussie and said: “There is a boy who talks the truth.”’

  For Augustus, the effect of this scene was devastating. He had been accused of dishonesty and his plea of absent-mindedness over a new school regulation was brushed aside as a lie. Charged publicly with deceit by the man whom he idolized, he was unable to find words to defend himself and broke down before the school.

  This incident appears to have had a lasting effect on him. Episodes in later life would press upon this bruise and unaccountably cause him pain, giving rise to blasts of anger, grating sarcasm. Fifty years later, when writing the first draft of an autobiography, he cursed this ‘amateur pedagogue’, his former hero long since dead, for his ‘appalling meanness of soul’.

  At the age of sixteen, he left school, and a little later, while he was away from Tenby, heard that Allen Evans had committed suicide. Half-seriously, he began to wonder whether he possessed the evil eye. In his fragmentary autobiography, Chiaroscuro, he alludes briefly to the headmaster’s ‘unhappy end’.31 But there is also a sentence, not eventually included in the book, that expresses his sense of retribution: ‘Not long did my master (whom I had loved) enjoy his satisfacton and when he had punctiliously cut his throat, I grieved no more.’

  4

  A CRISIS OF IDENTITY

  ‘We don’t go to Heaven in families now – but one by one.’

  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt

  ‘I am visiting my father,’ Augustus John wrote to William Rothenstein during a stay in
Tenby over thirty years later, ‘and suffering again from the same condition of frantic boredom and revolt from which I escaped so long ago. My antecedents are really terrifying.’

  Yet he loved Pembrokeshire, the exultant strangeness of the place, its exuberance of shadow and light; and since he was never cruelly treated some other factor must have accounted for this extremity of ‘boredom and revolt’.

  It was the indoorness of late Victorian life, the conformity and constraint of his oddly patriarchal background that affected him. For almost forty years, from the death of the Prince Consort in 1861, Britain had been in mourning. Despite the heavy new buildings, the heavy industry, everything seemed at a standstill – everything except for military developments across the Empire. This atmosphere of stagnation was eccentrically reproduced at Victoria House after the death of Augusta John. The widower did something of what Queen Victoria had done. There were no exaggerated manifestations of feeling. The iron will within Edwin John held firm. But though he was calm, he filled the house with darkness – out of which Augustus would burst rather like Edward VII escaping from the formalities of Windsor Castle into the new century.

  ‘Too shy to be sociable, he made few friends; and these few he often found an embarrassment. Walking at his side through the town, I would be surprised by a sudden quickening of pace on his part, while at the same time he would be observed to consult his watch anxiously as if late for an important appointment: after a few minutes’ spurt he would slow down and allow me to catch up with him. This manoeuvre pointed to the presence of a friend in the vicinity… he was delighted when a bemused soldier from Penally Barracks, mistaking him for a retired officer of high rank, saluted him. In reality he lacked every martial quality, except, of course, honour. Excessively squeamish, he would never have been able to accustom himself to the licence of the camp; even the grossness of popular speech shocked him...’32