by Paula Byrne
Lord Basingstoke’s paper in a pleasant, childish handwriting.
‘BRADLAUGH v. GOSSETT. THIS FAMOUS TEST CASE FINALLY ESTABLISHED THE DECISION THAT MARSHAL LAW IS UNKNOWN IN ENGLAND.’
He crosses out ‘marshal’ and puts ‘martial’; then sits biting his pen sadly.
‘Adam, how lovely; I had no idea you were in Oxford.’
They talk for a little while.
‘RICHARD, CAN YOU DINE WITH ME TO-NIGHT. YOU MUST. I’M HAVING A FAREWELL BLIND.’ Richard looks sadly at his Collections Paper and shakes his head.
‘My dear, I simply can’t. I’ve got to get this finished by tonight. I’m probably going to be sent down as it is.’
Adam returns to his taxi.
In this poignant little scene, Hugh Lygon enters the fictional world of Evelyn Waugh. His mother is a dominating spirit, as, by way of that nineteenth-century engraving, is Madresfield. Hugh’s passions are captured: drinking, gaming, riding. As is his academic weakness: the childish handwriting, the inability to spell ‘martial’. But hanging over the pen portrait are the qualities that Evelyn so loved. On the one hand, the capacity for friendship – the photographs of fellow Old Etonians, the invitations revealing that everyone wants his company. And on the other, the sense of sadness and hopelessness. In the flesh, Lord Basingstoke is Hugh Lygon. In the imagination, he is Sebastian Flyte in embryo.
As Waugh developed as a writer, he perfected a technique of combining the characteristics of his friends, enemies and acquaintances in order to create composite characters. His later portraits of Hugh are not of Hugh alone. In that sense, the glimpse of Lord Basingstoke in his Oxford rooms, so clearly evocative of Hugh and no one else, is the closest we ever come to the most elusive of Evelyn’s lovers.
Another aspect of Waugh’s creative sophistication was his way of splitting his own identity into more than one character. The full extent of this practice has not always been noticed by his critics and biographers. They have seen that Adam Doure is a self-portrait, but a second double has escaped observation. Adam goes around Oxford trying to find an old friend to dine with. Everyone is engaged. But then as a last resort he calls on a certain Ernest Vaughan. This E. V. has ugly rooms in a second-rate college. They are situated (symbolically) between ‘the lavatories and the chapel’. Caricatures and messy drawings line his walls. Among them is an ‘able drawing of the benign Basingstoke’. Ernest is carefully described, sitting in his wicker chair as he mends darts ‘with unexpected dexterity’. He is ‘a short, sturdy man, with fierce little eyes and a well-formed forehead’. His well-made tweeds are stained with drink and paint. The two men proceed to get drunk over dinner. Ernest sketches Adam. Later, after more drinking in another Oxford pub, Ernest ‘beset by two panders, is loudly maintaining the abnormality of his tastes’. Then with ‘swollen neck and staring eye’, Ernest almost gets into a fight with Imogen Quest’s brother. He is violently sick at the last minute, foreshadowing Adam’s reprieve when he vomits up the poison.
The story ends with a conversation between the Quests and some aristocratic Oxford friends who pass judgement on the hapless Vaughan: ‘Just the most awful person in the world … Isn’t he short and dirty with masses of hair.’
Imogen, bored and repelled by Adam, is intrigued by a glimpse she has had of the awful Ernest: ‘I think he looked very charming. I want to meet him properly.’
‘Imogen, you can’t, really. He is too awful.’
The story ends with Imogen determined to persuade Adam to orchestrate a meeting with his funny little friend. Ernest Vaughan is on his way to becoming an unlikely romantic hero.
Adam Doure is Evelyn Waugh, but so is Ernest Vaughan. On returning to Oxford, Adam meets his own other self, a doppelganger who is also drawn to Basingstoke/Hugh, and who becomes a device for Waugh to fantasise about succeeding in his doomed quest for the love of Imogen/Olivia. Many things are in the balance in this most accomplished of Waugh’s early stories: not only the choice between life and death, but also the question of sexual orientation and the writer’s need to hold together his personal experience and his gift for fantastical invention.*
September 1925 and the new term at Aston Clinton beckoned. It was time once again for Evelyn to say goodbye to Alastair. He felt more ready on this occasion. Alastair and his friend Christopher Hollis were beginning to bore him with their endlessly rehashed conversations about just two subjects, ‘Catholicism’ and ‘the Colonies’.
Aston Clinton did not meet expectation. Its common room (always the key to a teacher’s happiness) was ‘frightful’. The boys were ‘mad’ and ‘diseased’ (i.e. spotty). It was no more than a crammer for the rich and thick. There was a pub close by, which was something. ‘Taught the poor mad boys and played football with them’ is a typical diary entry. Or ‘Taught lunatics. Played rugby football. Drank at Bell.’ Evelyn was trapped here for the next seventeen months. The one compensation was that he was closer to his friends.
Most weekends were spent at Oxford or London. In October, Evelyn and Richard Plunket Greene returned to Oxford, where they dined with Hugh Lygon and John Sutro: ‘they gave us champagne and we gave them brandy’.
He was disappointed when he hosted an early birthday dinner and not one of his Oxford friends turned up. The day before his birthday, he began a drawing intended as a present for Hugh on his twenty-first, which was to be a week later. Richard, meanwhile, had got a new job at Evelyn’s old school, Lancing. The prospect of Aston Clinton without a real friend in the common room was grim.
He was not invited to Hugh’s twenty-first birthday party at Madresfield. But around the same time, Evelyn and Richard had a party of their own. Three carloads of Oxford friends came down to play a rugby match against the schoolboys. It was a great success. The grown-ups won, though not by such a large margin as Evelyn had feared that they would. He even scored a few tries himself, which would have been an unusual sight. In the course of the drunken evening that followed, Arthur Tandy, a Magdalen man of a thespian bent who hung around on the fringes of their Oxford set, ‘made love’ to Evelyn – that is to say, professed his love for him. He spoke in no uncertain terms: ‘Everything that I said about him cut him to the very soul; throughout the giddy whirligig of his life – and he had been up against things, in his time, face to face with the scalding realities of existence – the one constant thing that had remained inviolate in spite of all else had been his love of me.’ This all took time to say and, according to Evelyn, it bored him inexpressibly. Tandy eventually became British ambassador to the European Economic Community.
Two days later, at the beginning of half term, Evelyn headed for Oxford. He had promised to act in Terence Greenidge’s latest film. They were filming in the Woodstock Road but Evelyn was cross about the other actors, who were people he couldn’t stand: ‘After an hour I could bear it no more and when we came to a scene in which a taxi was to be used I got in it and drove away, rather to everyone’s annoyance.’ That evening he went with friends to the George Bar. A scandal ensued from the night’s activities, though Evelyn managed to escape all the trouble.
A party was in full swing. But not solely with the usual Oxford set. A gang of wealthy homosexual stockbrokers and businessmen had come to Oxford to see Hugh Lygon. There was a rumour that one of them owned 107 newspapers and wore platinum braces. When they arrived, they discovered that Hugh was not there. He was still at Madresfield, celebrating his coming of age. His failure to turn up for the party to which he had invited the stockbrokers was characteristic: Hugh was notorious for bad time-keeping, always arriving late, or sometimes not appearing at all, despite assurances given when arrangements were made. So great was his laxness in this regard that a considerable number of his friends and family had the same idea for a twenty-first birthday present: he was overwhelmed with numerous gifts of clocks and watches of all sizes and designs.
Robert Byron, one of the most active homosexuals among the Hypocrites, opportunistically took Hugh’s place and enjoyed a wild ni
ght with the Londoners. Writing to Patrick Balfour with a graphic account of their activities, he cautioned him not to leave the letter lying about. There was, according to Anthony Powell, a fear that the police might become involved. Though homosexuality was tolerated when indulged in privately by undergraduates, group encounters between gentlemen and stockbrokers were a step too far in an era that had not forgotten the trials of Oscar Wilde.
Evelyn was in at the start of the evening, but not its climax. The ‘syndicate of homosexual businessmen’ stood him champagne cocktails at the George, but he then went off to another bar, the Clarendon, with some friends of his cousin, Claud Cockburn. He was then pursued by Richard Plunket Greene and his fiancée, Elizabeth. Feeling perverse, he didn’t want their company. In order to escape them, he climbed out of a window and broke his ankle on his descent.
* * *
* There seem to be two private jokes for Hugh Lygon’s benefit in the story’s names. ‘Ernest’ inevitably evokes Oscar Wilde’s play: Evelyn would have known of Hugh’s triumph at Eton in the role of Cecily, who is in love with ‘Ernest’. And in Gilbert and Sullivan’s well-known comic opera Ruddigore, ‘Basingstoke’ is famously used as a code word by Sir Despard Murgatroyd to soothe his new wife, Mad Margaret, when she seems in danger of relapsing into madness – the name of Lord Basingstoke is thus linked to the Lygons by way of the code name ‘Murgatroyd’ used by Elmley when they filmed The Scarlet Woman.
CHAPTER 6
The Lygon Heritage
‘A party of queer men from London arrived to see Hugh yesterday,’ wrote Robert Byron to his mother from Oxford. ‘As he is at Madresfield celebrating his majority with becoming pomp, I looked after them.’
A night in their company provided some compensation for his not being at Hugh’s party himself. The previous year, by contrast, Byron had attended the coming-of-age party of Hugh’s older brother, Elmley. He had been overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the event, and deeply impressed by the organisation of Lord Beauchamp, who had conducted the celebrations as if they were a military campaign. Hugh’s coming-of-age party was also held at Madresfield Court. Once again, no expense was spared – even though Hugh was the ‘spare’ and not the ‘heir’.
Until Evelyn Waugh appeared at Madresfield in 1931, Robert Byron was the most favoured Oxford friend of the aristocratic Lygons. He had known them since Eton. During the summer months he stayed with them at Walmer Castle in Kent, where Lord Beauchamp put in an annual stint in his capacity as Warden of the Cinque Ports. It was there that the earl acquired his family nickname (only to be used behind his back) ‘Boom’. At Walmer, Byron met the striking Lygon sisters. Lettice, the oldest of them, was particularly lovely. He judged her ‘the most beautiful human being I have ever seen – oversize feet and yet the most lovely figure’. Byron in turn made a lasting impression on eleven-year-old Coote: she never forgot his ‘café au lait suit’ and his pince-nez spectacles.
In 1923, Lord Beauchamp invited Byron to accompany him and his sons on a tour of Italy during the Easter vacation. Byron later credited Hugh’s father as the man who opened his eyes to the world and the wonders of foreign travel. He himself became a renowned travel writer. Many critics consider his book The Road to Oxiana (1937) to be the foundation stone of the modern genre of literary travel-writing.
Byron kept a diary, and his remarks about the earl shed light on how someone of Evelyn’s generation (with their well-documented anger at their fathers) saw this rather unusual patriarch. Venice was Lord and Lady Beauchamp’s favourite Italian city, so the travel party went there first before moving on to the historic towns of northern Italy, after which they headed south to Naples and the island of Capri.
Byron remembered that Hugh’s father was an indefatigable sightseer ‘who maps out every moment of every day, weeks beforehand’. Whilst they were in Venice their travel bible was Ruskin. In Florence and Rome, it was Augustus Hare. Byron’s diary details the churches and galleries they visited, as well as the obscure little restaurants that Lord Beauchamp insisted upon frequenting – he had a passion for local Italian dishes. Byron was suspicious that the secondi piatti sometimes consisted of horse meat.
It was this visit that first inspired Byron’s love for Byzantine art, and he had the most knowledgeable of teachers in Lord Beauchamp. Byron’s greatness as a travel writer came from his way of finding the essence of a culture in a magical alchemy of its architectural history and the customs of its people. It was Beauchamp who sharpened the young man’s eye, wherever he went, for both the buildings and the locals. For his part, the earl was delighted to have a boy in the party who shared his interests and enthusiasms. Hugh was emphatically uninterested in culture – his boredom was an endless source of exasperated amusement to the other men. Lord Elmley took a little more interest, but Robert was the passionate sightseer. He was the kind of son for whom Beauchamp had longed. In Florence the party dined with Harold Acton at his exquisite family home, La Pietra. Acton took them to the famous tea-rooms, Doney’s, and to the nightclub, Raiola’s. This was the first time that Hugh became animated.
Byron recalled his wonder as the party climbed to the top of Giotto’s bell tower in Florence. Hugh showed little interest in the magnificent view. He stood reading the Daily Sketch whilst Robert was overcome by the view of the Duomo and the other historic buildings. Hugh was more interested in the racing news and the gossip column report on the London party scene.
In Assisi, Lord Beauchamp and Robert Byron inspected in minute detail Cimabue’s frescoes in the vault of the upper basilica of the church of St Francis. Hugh complained about missing breakfast and then moaned about the luncheon menu. Doting father that he was, Beauchamp could not help calling his adored second son ‘something of a little philistine’. But Hugh, tall, languid and charming, could get away with anything.
They had arrived in Florence by train. Having exhausted the sights of the city, Beauchamp hired an enormous motor car for the drive south to Assisi and Rome. By this time they were all beginning to be fatigued by their exertions with Ruskin and Baedeker in hand. After ten days’ recuperation on the island of Capri, they left for England.
Byron thought Lord Beauchamp a man of exquisite and unusual taste, despite his being a stickler for punctuality with a mania for timetables. Beauchamp, for his part, wrote to Robert to thank him for being a delightful travelling companion, and for setting such a good example to Hugh: ‘It is … so much more delightful … to take an interest in everything – religious functions and daily customs. Everything that is different from England. Too many people bury their noses in a detective novel as they go thro’ beautiful scenery and prefer internationalism in cookery to the native delicacies.’ No doubt he was thinking of his son with his nose in the Daily Sketch and his unadventurous attitude to foreign food. Byron told his mother (whom he always addressed as ‘Mibble’) that he had been transformed by Beauchamp from an idiot into a person.
Lord Beauchamp took a great interest in his sons’ friends, dropping into Oxford to see them and taking them out to dine. It was on one such occasion that he met the scruffy Terence Greenidge and, horrified by the young man, temporarily removed Elmley from the university. Lady Beauchamp did not visit, but she never forgot to send presents for the young men. Once she sent Byron a delicate box covered in shells.
Byron was so besotted by the family in these early days that he began writing a love story based on an incident with Elmley, when a young lady turned her head and said ‘Are you a Viscount?’ He was more than a little starstruck, impressed that Lord Beauchamp appeared in newsreels around the country. He reported his sightings to his doting Mibble: ‘Hugh and I spend our days visiting cinemas in search of Lord Beauchamp meeting foreign royalties on Dover pier.’ Years later, Dover pier would have very different associations for ‘Boom’.
In May 1924, Lord Beauchamp visited Oxford, full of plans for Elmley’s coming-of-age party. Byron noted that the handsome earl had ‘grown fatter’ and spent a couple of hours with th
e boys. Byron was invited to take luncheon with them in the Magdalen College guest room. Pride of place was given to ‘a bottle of Tokay, that the steward had brought from the cellars of the late Emperor Karl of Austria’. Byron, still impressed with Lygon largesse, was mesmerised: ‘It has the most wonderful taste – so extraordinary as to be like seeing a new primary colour.’
His birthday present for Elmley was a gigantic scrapbook ‘bound in white suede with gold ciphers, which I spent hours designing’. Byron excitedly told Mibble all about the plans for the party at Madresfield. The celebrations were to begin on 5 August with the annual agricultural show in the grounds. There would be a house party of thirty. Boom had timetabled the weekend in such a way that it would be necessary for Elmley to make seven speeches.
No one loved throwing a party more than Lord Beauchamp, whether it was a ball for the servants or a spectacular birthday celebration for the children. Madresfield parties were famous for their extravagance and style. Back in the Edwardian years a visiting lord had described a weekend party for forty guests: ‘Everything was done in great style: minstrels in the gallery at dinner, numbers of footmen in powder and breeches and a groom of the chambers worthy of Disraeli’s novels.’
For Elmley’s twenty-first, some guests had to be accommodated in tents in the grounds. The guest list survives. It assigns the bedrooms and gives details of meal times, post times, and, needless to say, daily prayers in the family chapel.
William Ranken, the society artist who had been commissioned to immortalise the occasion with a magnificent family portrait, was given Bachelor Room Number One (he was indeed a confirmed bachelor). There were four other Bachelor Rooms and a host of other berths for visiting worthies – the Blue Bedroom, the Japanese Bedroom, the Ebony Bedroom, the Stanhope Bedroom, the Pyndar Bedroom and so on. On the principle that what was good enough for the least among their guests was good enough for the hosts, Boom, Elmley and Hugh gave up their own rooms and decamped to the tents in the grounds. Young and undistinguished guests such as Byron were under canvas, but they had the benefit of a mess tent.
