John Joseph always treated Lancelot2 as his son. The Dale Laces were to become celebrated figures in South Africa, and Northwards, their spectacular residence, later a National Monument, is now part of the Johannesburg College of Education. ‘Living with José is hell,’ John Joseph admitted, ‘but it is worse hell without her.’
What was worse for Ernest was the prospect of living without both José and Alice – and also without his mother who had died in 1896. His political hopes, too, had collapsed when, early in 1895, Randolph Churchill died. What was Ernest to do? He decided to go abroad, as he so often did at moments of crisis, and this time, as if measuring the extent of his dissatisfaction, he travelled from east to west round the world.
‘The glory and the charm of life on the tropical seas – the soft, warm, sweet air, the brilliant sunshine, the sparkling waves reflecting in their clear depths the unutterable blue of the heavens, and at night the silver glow of the moon,’ Ernest rhapsodised. ‘ … What can be better for those who, for a time, wish in this age of over-pressure to know what real leisure means than to pass idle days lounging reading or thinking or taking a stroll watching the porpoises gambolling in the waves or the flying fish flitting from wave to water or last, but not least in some quiet corner engaging in a game of whist or poker? … To anybody suffering from work or worry I could recommend no more efficacious and agreeable remedy.’
He was abroad for over eight months. Sailing in fair weather down the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean to Bombay, he could put his worries far behind him. Then travelling through India and along the North-West Frontier, he grew absorbed by what he saw: ‘the intense glow of colour everywhere … none of it mild or modified or shaded down, but bold, blatant, defiant colour that struck you full in the eye, seized upon you and would not let you go’. Above a tide of jostling people in the streets ‘wheeled and circled vast numbers of kites and crows filling the air with harsh croaking, screaming and whistling, pouncing down directly … and doing their scavenger work with skill and thoroughness’. Beauty and poverty, poverty and beauty, were all around. ‘One of the most pathetic sights is the child-mother, with an old face on a small, frail, youthful, unformed figure, and carrying on her hip a child half as big as herself.’
The novelty of everything, its sheer unfamiliarity, invigorated him. On board a steamer from Bombay to Karachi, he describes how ‘by night buckets of water have to be thrown over you as you lie in bed; also at times there arises a peculiar quiet, deadly wind, which it is death to breathe’. Having reached the Northern Frontier, he began his expedition by riding over a hundred miles through country seldom seen by Europeans to Kalat, the capital of Baluchistan. ‘The roads are merely tracks, and the accommodation such as you could take with you on camels, naturally presented irresistible attractions to anyone fond of riding,’ he wrote. He was accompanied by
an escort of police levees commonly called ‘catch-em-alive-ohs’, gentlemen of a most truculent appearance, though really ‘the mildest-mannered men who ever cut a throat’ … armed with carbines and curved scimitars attached to their sword belts. They were men of fine physique, with long flowing locks, dark eyes, hooked noses, and big black beards, or beards of a most villainous red, dyed that colour to conceal the grey approaches of age … We passed a few shaggy savage-looking shepherds attending flocks – as shaggy as themselves – of sheep that were almost indistinguishable from goats … we galloped merrily, attended by our ‘catch-em-alive-ohs’, their hair flying in the wind, and their arms swinging and rattling against their horses sides … We had left civilisation, with its cares and conventionalities, its duties and restrictions … we were to live alone with nature and with the children of nature.
This is the setting for a boy’s adventure story, a spellbinding novel by Rider Haggard or Conan Doyle, and Ernest seems to become a boy again as he travels, looking at everything with a fresh eye and welcoming the shedding of a politician’s, a banker’s and a gentleman’s responsibilities. He was to ride twelve hundred miles along the North-West Frontier. The lives of the villagers among these arid mountain ranges appeared to him enviably simple and straightforward: a conservative ideal. ‘Their place in the community is fixed, and the duties they owe to it are defined by immemorial custom, and rendered with cheerful obedience; and so generation after generation passes through life into the grave and gate of death, knowing nothing of the fever and the toil and the fret that make men moan in modern England, rich as she is in all the blessings that freedom, progress, and an advanced civilisation can bestow upon her.’
One of his more comic encounters was with the Khan of Kalat who, having ‘a very exaggerated idea of the influence and importance of members of Parliament’, greeted him with a nineteen-gun salute, a band playing ‘God Save the Queen’ ‘in various keys’, and a military parade most of which was hidden by clouds of dust. ‘I believe such infantry has never been seen since Falstaff drilled his troop of “ragged rascals”,’ Ernest reflected. These manoeuvres were followed by an audience with the Khan himself, a shy young man dressed in utmost magnificence and with a tuft of feathers at the front of his turban which blazed with many jewels. He was attended by a line of grave and reverend seigniors posted along the walls of the chamber and by a Prime Minister who was meant to act as interpreter but who had little to do because the Khan replied to whatever Ernest volunteered with ‘a sickly smile or a nod of his head’.
Ernest’s political views appear controversial. He is opposed to what he calls ‘the over-education of the natives’ and the liberty of the press. The over-educated Indian ‘is subtle, ingenious, plausible, with a remarkable skill in metaphysics and mathematics … Many of these highly educated men, unable to find employment in Government offices … turn their attention to journalism and produce the scurrilous prints which spring up like deadly fungi in every part of India, and corrupt the surrounding atmosphere.’
He launched an even more provocative attack on the English missionaries in India. ‘The conversions are very few, and the natives who are converted are by no means a credit to Christianity,’ he explained. ‘Missionaries too often make the mistake of living in India as they would at home. Natives expect extreme asceticism in their ministers of religion … they do not think it right that one who claims to be the messenger of God should live in a comfortable house with a wife and children apparently enjoying the good things of this world. Their ideal is far different.’
On later parts of this journey the traveller, with his vivid and observant eye, increasingly gives way to the glass-eyed politician. In Burma he is still alive to the landscape and the people: ‘its glorious vegetation, its jungles and orchids, its pagodas and monasteries … its comely women, crowned with flowers, and clad in white jackets and short pink petticoats, its yellow robed priests, its enormous bells, and glittering golden palaces’. But then his focus changes, his style falters and runs dry. He has begun to think of his return to England and what he should say after he gets back. And what he says is overwhelmingly banal. ‘As for Singapore, and Penang, and the Strait Settlements, as for Hong Kong and China, as for Japan [where he met the Prime Minister] and the Far East generally, its peoples and its policies, its aspirations, and its openings for trade and commerce … the political situation is decidedly interesting and not unimportant.’
Back in England he was to give several lectures on his travels, which were aimed at repositioning himself in politics. He represents this travel not as a holiday but as an education in foreign policy. ‘I can honestly tell you that I don’t think my time has been wasted,’ he tells his audience. ‘In many respects it has been better employed than if I had remained in the House of Commons … Foreign affairs are taking a far larger share in the thoughts and the discussions and the debates of the English people, and I think you must all admit that foreign affairs can be best studied in the foreign countries themselves.’ He is careful to say flattering things about Britain’s diplomats. ‘The more I travel and the more I see of the representatives
of England abroad the more I am satisfied that our affairs are in the most capable hands.’ But they could be improved. Ernest quotes a Chinese official who tells him: ‘We prefer the English nation to other nations but we don’t always know what you wish … Russia has a fixed policy, Germany and France have fixed policies, but the English have no fixed policy; it seems to change from day to day: if we knew what you wanted we should be glad to back you up.’ And this was important, Beckett adds, because China was a country of ‘first-rate business capacity, and of indispensable industry – people who have only to waken from their sleep of centuries and to adopt modern ideas and modern methods to play a very great part in the world, to create an economic disturbance which will be felt in almost every household in Europe’.
Ernest knew that, because of his allegiance to Lord Randolph Churchill, he had been branded as untrustworthy by the Conservative Party. He did not improve his position early in the twentieth century by making a special ally of Randolph’s son, Winston Churchill (Ernest had been made one of Randolph’s executors and was to appoint Winston as his father’s biographer). At Ernest’s luxurious apartment at 17 Stratton Street, the two of them brought together a small group of dissatisfied Tories and revived the idea of a Fourth Party. For a couple of years Ernest became the leader of this group – regarded by the Cabinet as one of those guerrilla bands ‘ripe for revolt and greedy for reward’. To his colleagues in the House of Commons he was never the team player. He is referring to himself when he says in a speech at Whitby: ‘In the last two Parliaments I have seen young men of ability, full of energy, anxious to serve their country, anxious to get on, who were ready to give all their time and their energies to political work, and it has been rather disheartening to notice how they have been discouraged Parliament by Parliament.’ Between the lines of his speech he is suggesting that there might have been less trouble with women in his life, trouble which dismayed his colleagues, had he been given political advancement and his time and energy been properly employed. Being disheartened there, his heart had strayed elsewhere. For this he blames the rigid political system. There is a bitterness as well as disenchantment in his peroration. ‘For 15 years I have been a member of the House, and only three years of that time have I been in Opposition,’ he says. ‘What is expected of a supporter of the Government is that he should suppress himself, that he should become a mere mechanical perambulator through the division lobbies; he must efface himself; he must have no opinions of his own; a man who ventures to think for himself does not recommend himself to the favour of the leaders of the party. Therefore you have to lead a more or less mechanical existence, or to place yourself in an attitude of criticism towards those whom you would rather support. That is the position of a great number of the Conservative party.’
So what was the solution? The Conservative Party could not get rid of him – his seat at Whitby was safe and he had become popular there. The answer, he is suggesting, would be to give him an appointment in the Foreign Office where his energies would be focused abroad, or to move him to a senior position in the diplomatic service.
Under Lord Salisbury’s and then Arthur Balfour’s premierships, Ernest was to wait over twenty years for political promotion that never came. He remained a talented, unruly, intermittently brilliant but often absent backbencher all this time, doing occasional work on committees until, being raised to the peerage on his uncle’s death, he was obliged to exchange the House of Commons for the House of Lords (his brother Gervase taking his place as the Member of Parliament for Whitby). Like Winston Churchill in these early stages of his career, Ernest was to be remembered as a man who scattered his energies in too many directions and kept bad company. ‘And thus he flitted across the stage,’ a political colleague wrote of him, ‘a graceful, ineffectual figure.’
At the time when he became involved with Eve Fairfax, Ernest was seen as an ageing playboy with a romantic past: ‘the perfect lover and generous to a fault’ in Rodin’s words (spoken before the bust of Eve Fairfax was cancelled). Getting married, joining the bank and being promoted to senior partner, then becoming a Member of Parliament – all these things, his family hoped, would have steadied him. But his wife had died, the business of banking did not suit his erratic temperament and he was grievously underemployed as a politician. Approaching fifty, it was surely time for him to marry again and settle down. Eve Fairfax must have seemed a perfect choice. She had no money, it was true, but Ernest had little need of money – or so everyone believed. The truth, however, seems to have been that, by the summer of 1905, he was in desperate financial trouble. His creditors were closing in on him, hearing rumours of his extraordinary wealth on the death of his uncle and his elevation to the peerage. The crisis is alluded to in a letter from his daughter Lucille in which she mentions £700,000 as being insufficient to pay off a debt. On 13 July 1906 she writes from Rome, hoping that he has been successful in ‘warding off the worst and that you have got some arrangements with creditors which leaves you at least in peace’. She implies that some of his financial difficulties have arisen from his investments in art and that it would be safer if he would ‘turn your mind seriously to politics’. But it was too late for that.
He must have been paid to leave Beckett’s Bank, and he sold his houses in London and at Virginia Water. He also sold Kirkstall Grange with its extensive outbuildings and the surrounding estate to Leeds City Council for £48,000 (Kirkstall Grange becoming the Leeds Education Authority’s Training College and subsequently part of Leeds Metropolitan University).3
Ernest also unburdened himself of much of his art collection (one or two pictures to Leeds Art Gallery);4 and served a writ on José seeking to retrieve the money he had settled on Lancelot on the grounds that her child was not after all his son. These proceedings were eventually dropped. Most of the next ten years he passed abroad, beyond the reach of British creditors. His letters to The Times reveal him at one time or another in Capri, Paris, Florence, Montevideo and elsewhere. ‘I leave this week for South America,’ he wrote to Rodin on 17 January 1910. He is always on the move. Occasionally one of his adventures would be reported in The Times. In the first week of April 1908, while travelling from Marseilles to Naples, the German steamship Hohenzollern was grounded off the coast of Sardinia owing to one of its passengers – the notorious Admiral von Tirpitz. Tirpitz’s plan was to achieve world status for Germany through enlarging the German fleet so successfully that it threatened Britain’s navy – vital for defending the empire. This had led to an arms race between the two countries that was part of the build-up to the Great War.
‘He [Tirpitz] was a tall man with a greyish beard, a somewhat severe and formal expression, and an unmistakable air of authority,’ Ernest wrote,
… The admiral and captain discussed with complacency the state and growth of the German navy … until they parted for the night their heads full of the days to come when the pride of place hitherto held by England should be seriously challenged, if not altogether overthrown by the might and power of Germany … [Next morning] a peculiar soft bump was felt, followed rapidly by two more accompanied by an uneasy sliding, quivering, rocking motion of the ship. The engines stopped suddenly and everything remained absolutely still. We rushed on deck … close to us grey walls rose out of the water, protecting from the sea a picturesque town of white-walled, red-roofed houses … It was Alghero, a small unvisited town on the north-west coast of Sardinia. How on earth did we come to be there? … The fact was that, without giving any notice to the passengers, the ship had been permitted to deviate widely from her course in order to land Admiral Tirpitz at his country seat in Sardinia … and the captain had run the ship aground.
Stranded there for four days and nights while, urged on from time to time by cheerful messages from the Admiral’s residence, they were joined on the lumpy waters by several Italian fishing craft, a torpedo boat, a cruiser and miscellaneous vessels (all of them providing entertainment for the Sardinian audience on shore). Various prolonge
d and humiliating attempts were made to work out their salvation. Eventually violent hands were laid on their luggage and the passengers were transferred to another boat, which delivered them safely to Naples the following week. All this enabled Ernest to do what he did best: use a personal anecdote for a political purpose – mocking the pretensions and alleged competence of German seamanship. Looking round for some good words to give a ship bearing the illustrious name of Hohenzollern, he concluded: ‘There was no band on board and the cooking was excellent.’
The focus of Ernest’s life had now moved to the Villa Cimbrone. It was a vision: a magic place to which, he believed, he would always return. For what he sought on his travels, what answered his dreams, he would bring back to Cimbrone, hoping to make it the centre of his life. He had found enough money to buy it some time between 1905 and 1907, though he later told his son Ralph that it had been only a farmhouse with a few acres of barren land costing no more than ‘the price of a cow’. This exaggeration obscured the fact that he had more money available abroad than in England. He certainly spent lavishly on the property, extending and remodelling the Gothic building and constructing a belvedere at the top of the parapet wall overlooking the Gulf of Salerno. He also added a new wing with a spacious drawing room decorated with Turneresque watercolours.
A Book of Secrets Page 6
