Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (TEXT ONLY)

by Paula Byrne

  If Lady Beauchamp expected her children to be softened by her appeal, she was badly mistaken. No sympathy was forthcoming. As for her brother, his last word on the affair took the form of a curt letter to the exiled earl: ‘Dear Bugger-in-law, You got what you deserved, Yours, Westminster.’

  In June 1931, shortly after her father’s departure, Lady Dorothy Lygon, aged nineteen, took up her pen to write to ‘Mr Gossip’ of the Daily Sketch, aka her friend Patrick Balfour (who relied on such missives for his copy). She bewailed the lack of juicy gossip: ‘What meagre news there is in our great metropolis this summer.’ There was talk of a Castlerosse divorce, she noted, but that had come to nothing. There were reports of dreary virgins’ or debutantes’ parties, dull charity balls, rumours of love affairs, new restaurants opening (‘Douglas Byng is singing at a new restaurant called the Monseigneur, damnably hot and stuffy, crowded too, but his songs are good’). And the other latest trendy eating establishment, the Malmaison: ‘not too good, but I’m told it’s cheap’.

  As for the Lygon news, well, all was quiet too. She and Maimie had just returned from a visit to Hugh in Tilshead, where he had set himself up as a racehorse trainer. They were off to a society dance in the evening. ‘Sibell has a new job earning £2.10s at my Aunt Violet Cripp’s hair shop in Bond Street and has hair, face and nails done free as well. She only started yesterday, so is quite a novice as yet. Letty and Richard continue to be very happily married. Elmley is The Complete Politician, and there we all are – Hughie is also very well and probably better than usual, since my evening paper tells me that he has trained 2 winners this afternoon.’

  Coote joked about how boring her news was: ‘This letter is reading like a country Cousin’s Guide to London.’ The hidden agenda of this newsy letter, with its protestations of happiness amongst her siblings, was to dispel the rumours. She told Mr Gossip that her father was in Germany taking the health cure for his heart, nothing more: ‘Halkers [Halkyn House, the Belgrave Square residence] has been shut up since Boom went abroad – poor man, his heart wasn’t at all too good, but I am afraid he will be horribly bored at Nauheim, especially as he is on a diet!’

  When he received this letter Patrick Balfour happened to be in the south of France, with Evelyn Waugh. They had arrived in Villefranche on 9 June, and met up with Evelyn’s brother Alec. Mr Gossip was to become one of Alec’s closest friends, but at the time the older Waugh brother was wary of him: ‘Gossip Writers had a dubious reputation in the days of the ‘‘Bright Young People’’,’ he recollected.

  One morning, Alec came down to breakfast to find Evelyn and Balfour discussing over coffee a report in the Continental Daily Mail. A divorce suit was being brought against one of the richest and most prominent peers of the realm, a man in his sixties, who had been very active in political and public life. ‘So the story has broken,’ Evelyn said.

  It is clear, then, that Balfour knew all about the scandal and so did Evelyn. His first concern was for his friend Hugh.

  Alec Waugh’s book about 1931, A Year to Remember, gives a detailed account of the scandal and its impact on his brother. He explicitly states that the events of that summer inspired Brideshead Revisited. Refusing to name the peer, even in 1975, the year of the memoir’s publication, Alec decided to call him Lord Marchmain:

  In real life Lady Marchmain was the sister of a prominent Duke, and the case was being brought because of a quarrel between her husband and her brother, at her brother’s instigation. A groom for whom Marchmain had formed an attachment many years before was to be cited. The case was never brought because the King intervened. He could not allow a man who had been his own representative to be exposed to scandal. But the case was only dropped on the condition that Marchmain left the country.

  Of Hugh, also not named, he writes: ‘His younger son was very good looking, very charming. He was also a very heavy drinker.’ Alec remembered that the wealthy and distinguished bisexual expatriate writer Somerset Maugham, who knew the family well, made the connection between Hugh Lygon and Sebastian Flyte in New York in 1945: ‘We all know, of course, who Sebastian was. A charming boy. He drank himself to death.’ Hugh had stayed with Maugham in the south of France.

  Before recounting the story of the Beauchamp affair, Alec Waugh told of another encounter that took place in the summer of 1931. It involved W. Somerset Maugham and a young playwright called Keith Winter, who was a friend of Evelyn’s and Balfour’s. Winter was taken to the Villa Mauresque, where Maugham resided. Various other guests came and went, but Winter spent the night with Willie Maugham, teaching him a new sexual trick with his fingertips. Maugham was reminded of the boys he had enjoyed in Bangkok. Winter hoped to be taken up as Maugham’s new paramour, but Maugham dropped him unceremoniously. And the moral of the story? Winter (also unnamed in Alec’s memoir) went on to become a well-known writer, married with three children, a presenter for the BBC, a member of the Savile Club, a lecturer in American universities. Alec Waugh’s message is clear: promiscuous homosexuality is not in itself an impediment to success in life. As with Alec’s own disgrace at Sherborne, it was the discovery and not the act that did the damage. Boom’s big mistake was to get busted.

  * * *

  * The closure has now been cancelled and the document has been released to me for the first time by the National Archives at Kew.

  CHAPTER 10

  Madresfield Visited

  1931 was a year that marked the end of one epoch and the beginning of another – the watershed of the modern world. It was the banking crisis of that year, more than the Wall Street crash of ’29, which ushered in the Great Depression. The frivolous age of the Bright Young Things had come to a sudden end.

  Evelyn was also in a period of transition. He was a recent convert to Catholicism; he had divorced his wife; he was feted as one of the most brilliant young novelists of his age. But he had no fixed abode. 1931 was the year when he would meet and befriend the Lygon girls, whose friendship would endure for the rest of his life. He became part of the family, making their ancestral home in Malvern the nearest place to a home at a time when he owned ‘no possessions which could not conveniently go on a porter’s barrow’. Their story would inspire the book that was in his words his ‘magnum opus’ or, in Nancy Mitford’s, his ‘Great English Classic’: Brideshead Revisited.

  He returned from his five months in Africa as a special correspondent for the Graphic magazine. Eventually, he would get two books out of his experiences there, a comic novel Black Mischief and a work of witty reportage, Remote People, which covered the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie. For much of the year, he continued to drift between the houses of different friends. When he stayed with his brother Alec in the south of France and read the news of the Beauchamp affair, he did not know that his life would become so closely entwined with the Lygons. In 1959, acknowledging a friendship that had endured for three decades, Evelyn wrote to Maimie Lygon: ‘I think it is just 38 years no damn it I mean 28 since I first came to stay in the hotel at Malvern and met you and your pretty sisters.’

  It was Baby Jungman who brought Evelyn to the Lygon sisters. He took up her recommendation to enrol at Captain Hance’s Riding Academy in Great Malvern. It was the autumn of 1931. Baby, an accomplished rider, had been at the academy recently, along with her friend Mary Milnes Gaskell. Both were friends of the Lygon sisters. Whilst at the academy they had stayed at Madresfield. Evelyn wrote to Baby there, sending his love to Hugh and Elmley, his old Oxford chums. He knew the crisis that had befallen the family, but he did not yet know the sisters. Nor had he seen the magnificent family seat.

  Evelyn met Maimie at a party given by Baby Jungman’s mother. Hearing that Evelyn was about to start riding lessons in Malvern, Maimie offered him a lift down to Worcestershire in the family’s chauffeur-driven limousine, an American Packard. In the event, Evelyn took the Great Western Railway to Malvern Link. In future years he would travel to Worcester on a quicker train, where Maimie would pick him up in the car and dr
ive him back to Madresfield: the experience of being a passenger driven up to a stately home by a beautiful flapper girl would be recreated in Brideshead.

  On this first visit to Malvern he booked himself rooms at the County Hotel, a vast building adjoining the spa. It was a stone’s throw from the Riding Academy in Church Street and close to the cinema – filmgoing was still a favourite pastime for Evelyn.

  Baby Jungman’s friendship with the Lygons helped to ease Evelyn’s passage into this new environment. Maimie and her younger sister Coote introduced him to the ferocious Captain Hance. Evelyn wrote to Baby to tell her how grateful he was that the girls had helped to break the ice with Hance, who was devoted to the Lygon family. Evelyn and Captain John Hance got along well, despite Hance’s formidable reputation. Hance had spent eleven years as an army riding-instructor. He swore profusely and could reduce hardened cavalrymen to jelly with his barbs. Famously he had shouted at one unfortunate horseman: ‘You’re not a cadet. You’re an old Piccadilly prostitute on a night commode!’

  Hance had set up the very first residential riding school in Malvern. He ran it with his wife ‘Mims’, his son Reggie and his daughter Jackie, teaching men and women from all over the country, steeplechasers and competition showjumpers, as well as those who wanted to improve their hunting skills. Several of their pupils went on to win at Aintree, the toughest jumping racecourse in the land.

  At the time Evelyn attended the school, Hance was at work on a book called School for Horse and Rider, in which he argued that the problem with the British civilian attitude to riding was that after a course of ten or a dozen lessons people would be left simply ‘to pick up the rest by haphazard experimentation upon a horse’. His book is a passionate manifesto for a newly rigorous and systematic equestrian education. He explained that the minimum period of enrolment in his school was a week, with lessons from 9.30 to 11.30 and 2.30 to 4 in the afternoon, followed by a lecture at 5.30. Every aspect of horsemanship was covered, with particular emphasis on correct posture and good jumping technique. The book is full of illustrations with such captions as ‘A good jump over a blind and hairy place’, ‘A very common sight – the rider’s leg drawn too far back’, and ‘A correct half-passage side-saddle without the help of the leg on the off-side. Note delicate handling of the reins.’ Though he did not say so in the book, he was a hard taskmaster who would throw horse manure at people who could not get their technique correct.

  Evelyn joked to his friends that he had taken up riding as a means of social advancement, but this was not strictly true – he had begun to take riding lessons when he was in North Wales, far from high society. Of course it was the case that invitations to big houses in the country carried the expectation, even the obligation, of a ride to hounds, but the real reason for his enrolment at Captain Hance’s was that it was Baby Jungman’s suggestion. Improving his riding was a way to be close to her.

  Despite his determination, he never became proficient. His passion only lasted a couple of years, though he later hunted with the Lygons, despite frequent falls. Coote – like all her siblings, a superb rider – laughingly described Evelyn as one of the worst riders she had ever seen, but she said that he and Captain Hance developed mutual admiration for each other’s very different capacities.

  The Lygon girls took immediately to Baby’s writer friend. They insisted on his coming to dine at Madresfield. Maimie picked him up after Captain Hance’s lecture and he found himself being driven up to the great house.

  Evelyn had by this time been a house guest in several stately homes. English country houses were becoming a passion, their demise a theme of his novels. Like many, he saw them as a symbol of England. At the same time, his affection for the stability of the country house was connected to his own rootlessness.

  Madresfield was special because it had been home to the same family for eight centuries. Like the mythical Brideshead, the real Madresfield had been remodelled several times. Parts were Jacobean, but there had been a major renovation in the style of Victorian Gothic.

  Madresfield is a red-brick, moated manor house with yellow stone facings around the doors and windows. On sunny days one could see the golden carp and the blue flash of a kingfisher in the moat, which is twenty feet wide. (Charles Ryder compares Julia Flyte to a kingfisher.) On autumn days such as those when Evelyn first saw the place, a mist would rise out of the moat. The surrounding parkland was once royal hunting country. The house is set in 4,000 acres and has 136 rooms, many of them immense, some tiny.

  Four separate avenues of oaks, cedars, poplars and cypresses lead up to the house. There is an enclosed lawn with a succession of statues of Roman emperors. The grounds boast a rock garden, a yew maze said to be better than that at Hampton Court, a wonderful variety of trees and flowering shrubs. In the topiary garden there is a bronze sundial which has carved on it: ‘That day is wasted on which we have not laughed.’ Evelyn and the girls made that motto their own.

  This was the house that was the nearest place to home for Evelyn during these nomadic years. Despite its vast size, it feels homely and inviting, but it is nevertheless a million miles away from Underhill. For Evelyn, it was like entering an enchanted world. A door leading from the hall opened into the library, one from the library led up to the chapel, another to the long gallery and a side door to the minstrels’ gallery above the old Tudor dining room. Room upon room was filled with treasures, old masters, fine porcelain, antiques, objets d’art. In Brideshead, with all the careless ease of the aristocrat, Sebastian says to Charles, who is fascinated by the house and its treasures, that there are a ‘few pretty things I’d like to show you one day’.

  The hybrid of Tudor and Victorian features appealed to Evelyn, who was a great apologist for the Gothic Revival. The house had its major reconstruction in the 1860s, but Evelyn would have been told by the girls that the most remarkable renovations and improvements were entirely new, undertaken by their father. A leading patron of the Arts and Crafts movement, he had imprinted his taste on every detail from the decoration of the chapel and the library to the many artefacts, lamps, tiles, wall-hangings, window panes, William Morris fabrics, doorplates and carvings that had been introduced. His hand and eye were everywhere in the house that he loved and from which he had just been exiled.

  When one sees Madresfield today, the Arts and Crafts style merges seamlessly into the hybridity of the house, yet at the time when Evelyn Waugh saw it, it was contemporary, fresh and cutting edge. It shows Lord Beauchamp as a pioneer.

  He and his wife had commissioned C. R. Ashbee to decorate the library. Ashbee’s decorations were original and unique: among his materials were silver-wire, hammered metal, coloured stones and enamel from his guild workshop. His designs ranged from architecture to furniture to jewellery. In 1902, he moved his workshops to Chipping Campden, hoping to create an Arts and Crafts paradise for skilled labourers in the beautiful Cotswold town. This placed him in close proximity to Worcestershire, the county dominated by the Beauchamps.

  Between 1902 and 1905 Ashbee designed carvings for the four doors of the library and two large bookcase ends. The latter show the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, forming the centre of a series of images depicting the many paths to learning and wisdom – the scholar, the doctor, the musician, the reaping farmer. At the very bottom of one of the stack ends is a little boy filching a volume, a jokey allusion to the proverb carved above, ‘Thou shalt not steal’. The design, finished by means of intricate pewter doorplates, played simultaneously to Beauchamp’s aestheticism and his wife’s piety.

  Above the flight of stone stairs to the chapel is a slightly later addition, a stained-glass window executed by the artist Henry Payne to a design by Beauchamp. It is an illustration of the story in St Matthew’s Gospel of the Roman centurion who begged Christ to heal his servant. The centurion is kneeling at the feet of Christ, in his hand a huge sword. In the left-hand corner of the window is a woman lying on her deathbed whilst a young boy, in tears, is being comfor
ted by his elder sister. The face of the kneeling centurion is Beauchamp’s own, the sword an allusion to the Sword of State which he bore at the coronation of George V in 1911 (it was shortly after this that the window was designed). The scene behind him replays the death of his mother, his own grief at her death and his sister’s support. At the top of the window there is a grass enclosure with five lambs, representing his children. The face of the Christ resembles that of the earl’s late father.

  The figure with the face of the earl himself is sometimes described as that of a sinner seeking forgiveness, but this is to miss the point. In the Gospel story the centurion is not a sinner, he is a master asking for his beloved servant to be healed – the earl always cared for his servants, one way or another. Matthew’s purpose is to illustrate that the high-ranking Roman centurion has extraordinary faith despite being a pagan. He says to Jesus: ‘Lord, I am not worthy to have you enter under my roof; only say the word, and my servant will be healed.’ Jesus’s reply is ‘in no one in Israel have I found such faith’; he heals the servant. There is an underground theological tradition of reading this story as Jesus’s endorsement of a homosexual relationship. Historically, it was certainly the case that many Roman masters had sexual relations with their male servants. Whether or not this thought occurred to Lord Beauchamp, there was clearly a complex set of emotions at work in his design of the window – guilt, sorrow, love and faith, but perhaps also desires recognisable to only a few.

  Close to the stained-glass window is a little door that opens into the chapel. It was originally two bedrooms known as the King’s Rooms, where Charles II was supposed to have stayed during the Battle of Worcester. The chapel was built as part of the 1865 redesign in the days when there was a resident chaplain taking services for the household every morning and evening. But the extraordinary feature is the Edwardian Arts and Crafts decoration. It was commissioned in 1902 as a wedding present from Lady Beauchamp to her husband. Beauchamp took a deep interest in every aspect of the design. The paintwork, stained glass and metalwork were designed and made by the Birmingham Group, the altar cross an elaborate creation of Arts and Crafts metalwork, decorated with champlevé enamel. Everything is of a piece, from candlesticks to sanctuary lamps to gold-embroidered altar frontal.