Toby Darling, I find I need not go to the Girls Club tomorrow so we can have the day to ourselves. I am so looking forward to meeting Beryl, Much Love, Thine, Mother.
To begin with, in the autumn of 1913, Evie had been delighted at the news of Toby’s engagement. ‘My dear Beryl,’ she wrote, dashing off a note of congratulations to her future daughter-in-law, ‘Toby has told me the news and I am delighted and hope you will both be very happy. I am much looking forward to seeing you tomorrow and hope you will get here early.’
Beryl’s first visit to Milton was a resounding success. To celebrate the engagement, George and Evie gave a party for the Fitzwilliam Hunt. ‘My father was secretary of the Fitzwilliam Hunt of which George Fitzwilliam was master,’ Margot Lorne, whose family lived at nearby Tansor Court, recalled. ‘My parents and I therefore knew George and Evie and their children intimately. We were asked over to Milton to meet Beryl and we went. They had a big meet with the hounds, where she was introduced to all the farmers and the people of the Hunt as Toby’s fiancée. And then we had a dinner party to celebrate. There were one or two tables, I should say there were about thirty people present. There was no doubt that Evie was delighted at the engagement. She told us so and obviously was. She said, “Both George and I love her”.’
So enchanted was Evie with Beryl that she insisted she return the following weekend. ‘Beryl Darling,’ she wrote, ‘I am counting the days till Friday and want you much! Can’t you get rid of Toby for a few days so that I have you to myself!! He really must let me have a bit of you. Yours very loving, EWF.’
Beryl and Toby had become engaged within weeks of meeting.
In the late summer of August 1913 they had met at a country-house dinner party given by the Weigalls, who lived in a large half-timbered mansion in Lincolnshire. ‘Beryl wasn’t extremely pretty, but she was very attractive,’ a cousin recalled. ‘She had the most wonderful kindly nature. She was terribly bright and terribly nice. It was not surprising that Toby fell for her.’
The date of the wedding was fixed for late autumn. Evie, thrilled at the prospect, set arrangements for an elaborate society wedding into full swing. In the days following the announcement, she and Beryl spent many happy hours together closeted over material samples for the bridesmaids’ dresses – and Beryl’s own wedding dress – which was to be a special gift from Evie. ‘For a time all appeared to be going well,’ Margot Lorne remembered. ‘Mrs Fitzwilliam, I know, gave Beryl some jewels. Suddenly, I heard that there had been a row. The jewels were demanded – and handed – back.’
‘A pathological occurrence’ – to use the words of a senior QC, spoken almost half a century later – had taken place. Within weeks of Beryl’s first visit to Milton, a series of poison-pen letters began to arrive at the house. Written on the back of a postcard for anyone to read, they were addressed to Beryl Morgan c/o Mrs Fitzwilliam. The information they contained came as a bolt from the blue to Evie.
One of the postcards has been preserved:
What luck you gave up being a teacher in Clifton to be paid companion to Mrs Weigall. Your sisters who married Bristol business men and your lowly relatives, the baker etc here must be pleased and proud at such a grand match for you. How did you ever manage to pass amongst people so very different to those you were born and always lived with.
Evie had taken what little she knew of Beryl’s background on trust. At Toby’s insistence, Beryl had told her that her grandfather owned a ‘small property’ in Gloucestershire and that her mother came from a ‘good old Devonshire family’. In the terminology of the day, a ‘small property’ was the expression used to describe a modest landed estate: Evie had inferred that Beryl came from solid gentry stock.
Alarmed, and wishing to make her own inquiries, Evie wrote to Mrs Weigall, the woman at whose house, so she had been led to believe, Beryl was staying as a guest. When Mrs Weigall failed to answer her letter, Evie instructed George to hire detectives to investigate Beryl’s background. Their inquiries revealed that the substance of the poison-pen letters was true: Beryl’s grandfather, far from owning a small property, was a tenant farmer in Gloucestershire, and her mother, the daughter of a draper from Exeter. Beryl was not, as she had claimed, a guest at Mrs Weigall’s house: she was, as the anonymous postcards had stated, an employee – a paid governess to the Weigalls’ eight-year-old daughter.
Shocked at her discovery, Evie insisted the wedding be postponed for a year. In a dramatic change of tone, she sent her future daughter-in-law a poisonous letter of her own. ‘My Dear Beryl,’ she wrote archly, dismissing the ‘Beryl Darling’ of old:
I am sorry you have had all this worry but it had to be. By putting off the wedding it will give you both time to look round and know one another better. Do you feel I wonder that you can live with Toby for the rest of your life in a small cottage on £1,000 a year?
That is what it would have to be, for even if Toby did succeed to this place, unless he married money he could never live here as the succession and death duties would be so big. Certainly the son who does succeed will have to marry money, otherwise it will go back to the head of the family at our death. When your wedding does take place, surely one of your married sisters can arrange for you to be married from an hotel in London? I hate all this swagger and would like you to have a simple wedding in accordance with your own social position.
If you have 7 bridesmaids it means 7 presents Toby has to buy and he has not got the money nor has his Father …
Had you been a Duke’s daughter you were entitled to it, but being like myself ‘a nobody’ I would like simplicity as I do hate climbing.
It was an extraordinary letter, coming as it did from a former chorus girl.
Beryl’s ‘social position’ had touched a raw nerve. Thirty years earlier, Evie’s own marriage had scandalized society. When she and George Fitzwilliam first met, she had been a ‘Gaiety Girl’ appearing in the second row of the chorus in a production of Little Jack Shepherd at the Gaiety Theatre in London. In the mid-1880s, to be ‘on the stage’ was worse than being a ‘nobody’. Girls of good breeding were forbidden even to look at an actress, as Lady Warwick recalled:
In those days etiquette for girls was very, very strict. I can remember walking with my chaperone and being suddenly told to ‘look the other way now, dear, and take no notice’. The reason was that some man we knew was passing in the company of a lady friend whom it was impossible for us to know. No man in such circumstances would take the slightest notice of anybody in his own world whom he chanced to meet.
In smart social circles, to marry an actress was regarded as a heinous offence. George Fitzwilliam was an officer in the Royal Horse Guards when he married Evie: ‘A fellow marrying like that is asked to go,’ recalled Lieutenant Colonel Burns-Hartopp, the Senior Subaltern in George’s regiment. ‘He is asked to send in his papers. If an officer married an actress, he had to go. It was true of all the Guards regiments.’ Forced to resign his commission, George was condemned by his relatives for his bohemian lifestyle and for bringing the family into disgrace. ‘George hasn’t one ounce of family pride or feeling in his constitution,’ his cousin, Charles Fitzwilliam, exclaimed angrily in a letter to his uncle.
Even in 1914, the social stigma attached to actresses still lingered, evident in an anecdote Lady Warwick recorded in her memoirs: ‘“Just imagine,” remarked a very exclusive grande dame to me one day,’ she wrote. “I found a portrait of my niece on one page, and opposite to her was the chorus girl whom that fool — is going to marry! Why should one rub shoulders with a creature like that, even in a weekly paper? What are we coming to?”’
‘My mother’s reactions to things were so sudden it was like a thunderstorm rolled up,’ Toby remembered, ‘then it would disappear and the sun came out. You just did not know where you were.’
Following her outburst over the anonymous letters, Evie’s relationship with her future daughter-in-law appeared to recover. ‘Darling,’ she wrote to Beryl two weeks late
r, ‘I’m not one bit angry but I’ve had nothing to write and absolutely no time. I have had to write reams and reams every day about Cooks until I am sick of saying how many there are in the kitchen etc and still we are without a Cook. Will you come to us on Saturday for a week. I must teach you Bridge. Thine.’ Two days later, came another note: ‘Darling, Do be an Angel and get me 3 yards of good white Crepe de Chene and send to me at once; pay about 6/- or 7/- a yard for it and I will pay you back. I also want a champagne colour wooley [sic] jacket from Debenhams. Will you go there and try one on and tell them to send it to me on appro. I have an account there. I don’t like a collar to my coats. Thine.’
At the end of November, Evie invited Beryl to spend Christmas at Milton. Yet despite the invitation, Beryl sensed a high-handedness in Evie’s manner that suggested all was not well. Hoping to clear the air, she resolved to confront her future mother-in-law. At the beginning of December, some weeks after she had received a particularly chilly reception at Milton, Beryl wrote to Evie. ‘My dearest Mum, I have been thinking very deeply about things,’ she ventured. ‘I feel I must write you this letter and I can only hope you will not misunderstand me when you have read it – but I don’t think you will. I can see that things are really no different to what they were when I came to Milton last and I can’t help feeling that Mr Fitzwilliam is not so pleased that Toby and I are going to be married one day as he was at first. Don’t you think he would be happier if I did not come to Milton for Xmas or indeed until he really wants to welcome me as a future daughter-in-law. It is not that I do not want to come, far from it, as you know how empty Xmas would be for me without Toby, but I could not be happy with you myself, feeling as I do that I should in some way be spoiling either yours or Mr Fitzwilliam’s happiness. If there is still any other reason that hurts or worries either of you please tell me as now you have thoroughly gone into the matter of those cruel letters I feel there still must be something and misunderstandings are so hard to bear. Words will never be able to express how awfully sorry I am that things are in this state. Please Mum do not misunderstand all I mean in this letter, it is not written in any anger whatever but simply that I feel that neither of you can really want me at Milton at present.’
There was no ‘misunderstanding’. The simple truth, though Evie did not communicate it, was that she did not want her son to marry the granddaughter of a draper. ‘I remember my father telling me that he and my aunts were scandalized by Evie’s attitude,’ Deirdre Newton, one of the Fitzwilliams’ Dundas cousins recalled. ‘Such hypocrisy, they said, you could never find. Beryl and Toby were very happy together. She was delightful. My father and his sisters were always very [sic] in defence of her.’
Beryl, it seems, did spend Christmas at Milton, but Toby, sensing his parents’ antipathy towards her, was becoming anxious. In common with other would-be heirs to large estates, he was dependent on his father for an income. Though he was working as an assistant to Walter Long, the Conservative MP, his salary was negligible: it was his private income which kept him in the style to which he was accustomed.
From the age of twenty-three, Toby had received an allowance of £800 a year from his father, approximately £50,000 at today’s values. On his marriage to Beryl, George was proposing to increase the allowance to £1,000 a year: what worried Toby was that its payment depended on his father’s whim.
Knowing his parents’ capriciousness and concerned about their ambivalence towards Beryl, in the spring of 1914 Toby wrote to George to ask if his allowance could be paid on a formal basis. In a letter to the family solicitor, he explained the reasons behind his request. ‘I feel I could never place a wife of mine in such a position, that if any time she or I had a difference of opinion with one of my parents, my father could entirely deprive us of funds and a living. I admit that such a possibility is very remote but I also am certain that it ought not to exist.’ In addition, Toby wanted a small amount of money to be formally settled on Beryl so that she, and any children they might have, would be provided for in the event of his death.
Evie’s reaction to Toby’s request was extremely hostile. Blaming Beryl and her relatives for putting Toby up to demanding a marriage settlement, she sent him a furious letter:
My dear Toby
I am sure you have been most ill-advised by Beryl and her people about this money business.
You ought to know your father well enough now to know that he would always do the right thing. If you marry her now you will estrange yourself from us forever. I really thought you had at last met someone who really cared for you for yourself but it seems it is not so.
You had much better break it off before it is too late. You can ask Beryl to show you my letter to her.
At the same time, Evie had written a second letter. It was the one she wanted Toby to see:
My dear Beryl
I think that both you and your people are very ill advised to even suggest settlements. I feel disgusted with the whole thing, as people in your position in life don’t think of settlements but just insure their lives. I come of the same class of people as yourself so I am not writing of what I do not know.
When I married Mr Fitzwilliam nothing was ever mentioned about money nor thought of, we just lived in our own happiness.
I should have thought that you would have known Mr Fitzwilliam well enough by now to know that he is the most just and generous man that ever God put breath into and that once you had belonged to us your future was secure, but all this has upset everything.
As you think best to take the line you are doing I must explain to my friends and relations the reason why.
The people I have told so far were flabbergasted and tell me they had no settlements whatever. Mrs Faudal Phillips had no settlement, Sir Charles Fitzwilliam tells me he made none and he tells me that none of his brothers had money settled on their wives and I can mention many others …
I can only think that it was your people who have persuaded you, anyway I hope it did not come entirely from you otherwise I fear for Toby’s future happiness, as you have taken this line you must do exactly as you like, only don’t now ask me to be present at the wedding because I have finished with it all.
Yrs, Evelyn W. Fitzwilliam
If Toby marries you he will estrange himself forever from us.
Toby was devastated. Without foundation, the woman he loved, the mother of his future children, had been insulted by his own mother. ‘I would write to Mother myself in reply to her letter,’ he told his father, ‘but I fear I dare not trust my powers of self-restraint, so will you please point out to her that I cannot take her suggestion as to breaking off my engagement.’ Assuring his father that Beryl was no fortune-hunter, he reiterated their love for one another: ‘Beryl and I have become more and more to each other every day in fact were our engagement to be broken off now my life and ambitions in which I see so much future help from Beryl would be ruined and for Beryl myself I honestly believe that not only would all the happiness of life be taken from her for ever but I think even worse might happen.’
Siding with Evie, George sent the following reply to his son: ‘I do not intend to discuss the business any further as I am damned sick of the whole thing as I have always been. So long as you do not engage in any business competitive to any I am already engaged in and so long as you are not politically opposed to me your allowance will be paid regularly. I agree with your mother in what she has written as I saw her letter.’
The letter George referred to was the last letter Evie wrote to Toby before his wedding. Thwarted in her attempt to prevent the marriage, she gave full vent to her spleen:
‘Under no circumstances will I ever have Beryl here again,’ she began:
I am very very sorry indeed for you as you have been let in for this marriage and I feel convinced that were you to break it off she would sue you for breach of promise.
When she first came here and saw this place with you alone she thought she was in for a real good thing, but when she s
aw we were opposed to the whole thing, she suddenly insists upon settlements. I have tried to trust her but failed, the reason being that when I first knew her (having first explained to her I was nobody) I asked her who her people were. She told me her grandfather owned a small property in Glos and that her mother came of a good old Devonshire family. Her grandfather was a farmer and her mother was the daughter of a draper in Exeter, so why should she try to deceive me? There is no necessity for it to me. You can show her this letter if you like. She may have told you the truth and if so why not me? I have no intention of ever meeting her again if I can possibly help it and my sympathies are with you entirely in having to marry her. She must know by this time that she will ruin your life by so doing.
The torrent of accusations against Beryl – of her lies and deceit – was, as it transpires, remarkable.
A closer investigation of Evie’s background suggests that her whole life was constructed on a lie. Though she openly confessed to being a ‘nobody’, she was in fact quite literally a nobody. It is doubtful whether anyone ever knew who Evie Fitzwilliam really was.
To her friends in the smart Northamptonshire hunting set, to her Fitzwilliam relatives and to the wider world, according to the entries she and George submitted to Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage and to Debretts, Evie claimed she was the eldest daughter of one Charles Stephen Lyster.
She rarely talked about her childhood: on the very few occasions when she did, Evie gave the impression that it had been an unhappy one. In the mid-1880s, when she was appearing as a chorus girl in London’s West End, Kate Rickards was her closest friend: ‘She told me that her father had been a doctor,’ Kate recalled. ‘I think they [her parents] were dead and she was brought up by a brother or a stepbrother … she was very unhappy at home and I think she ran away from home, or left home.’
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 18
