by Paula Byrne
Most startling of all are the wall frescoes, which feature the Lygon children amongst a profusion of delicate flowers, all of which could be found in the gardens of Madresfield. There are also lifesize portraits of the earl and countess, fully robed and kneeling in prayer on either side of the altar, below angels and the figure of Christ. The countess is in her bridal gown and veil, the earl in his Garter robes. The frescoes took so long to complete that by the time the chapel was finished all seven of Beauchamp’s children were included. They are represented as beautiful blond cherubic children picking flowers at the feet of an angel. The angels wear printed cotton smocks – the quintessential Arts and Crafts fabric. The whole effect is of a kaleidoscope of colour.
In Brideshead Sebastian insists on showing his family chapel to Charles, mockingly describing it as a ‘monument of art nouveau’. Waugh’s prose takes flight:
The whole interior had been gutted, elaborately refurnished and redecorated in the Arts-and-Crafts style of the last decade of the nineteenth century. Angels in printed cotton smocks, rambler-roses, flower-spangled meadows, frisking lambs, texts in Celtic script, saints in armour, covered the walls in an intricate pattern of clear, bright colours. There was a triptych of pale oak, carved so as to give it the peculiar property of seeming to have been moulded in plasticine. The sanctuary lamp and all the metal furniture were of bronze, hand-beaten to the patina of a pockmarked skin; the altar steps had a carpet of grass-green, strewn with white and gold daisies.
‘Golly,’ I said.
‘It was Papa’s wedding present to Mamma. Now, if you’ve seen enough, we’ll go.’
Evelyn changes the gold triptych to pale oak and the sanctuary lamp and metal furniture to bronze, but otherwise there is no mistaking the Madresfield chapel.
‘Golly’ is an appropriately ambiguous reaction. Charles is distinctly underwhelmed by the art nouveau chapel: ‘I think it’s a remarkable example of its period. Probably in eighty years it will be greatly admired … I don’t happen to like it much.’ Evelyn’s first impression of the real thing was also far from the usual one of unqualified admiration. He wrote to Baby Jungman: ‘I thought the Boom chapel at Madresfield the saddest thing I ever saw.’ This may be partly because he sensed that its style did not suit Baby’s Catholic sensibility, but the reaction was also shaped by the knowledge that the family represented as the picture of perfection had been fractured beyond repair.
The third room that Beauchamp dramatically remodelled was the Staircase Hall: a vast room that had been created out of three smaller rooms and made in part to house the enormous Italian pink marble fireplace that was an ostentatious wedding present from the Duke of Westminster to his sister. On either side stand tall freestanding Venetian lanterns collected by the earl and countess on one of their many trips to Venice, their favourite Italian city. When Evelyn saw the room, it had two enormous art nouveau hanging lamps. Carved into the cornice circling the room is a quotation from Shelley’s elegy on the death of Keats, Adonais, ‘Shadows fly: Life like a dome of many coloured glass stains the white radiance of eternity until death tramples it to fragments. The one remains, the many change and pass: Heaven’s light for ever shines.’ This was a text that could be read differently according to disposition: the pious countess took comfort in the eternal light of Heaven, while the earl could contemplate the beauty and transience of the youthful male form embodied by the fragile figures of Keats and Shelley.
Ancestral portraits still line the walls of Madresfield. Those of Lord Beauchamp are among the most impressive. A half-length painting of him as a young man on his coming of age is flanked by portraits of Hugh and Elmley. There is a delicate pencil sketch of Maimie by Harold Acton’s brother, who drew similar sketches of the six Mitford sisters. Another fine portrait shows Beauchamp in his Garter robes, bedecked with medals, leaning on his sword and holding a plumed helmet like a young god.
The many portraits of his children show him as he was: a devoted father, the proud head of a large and beautiful family. At the top of the staircase is the huge William Ranken family portrait celebrating the occasion of Elmley’s twenty-first. The earl and his heir are very formally dressed in dark tailcoats; Hugh is impeccable in a white linen suit, the girls in flowing white dresses. The painting was executed in the newly finished Staircase Hall. The men are standing in front of the pink marble fireplace and in the background one can see the extraordinary crystal staircase, the fine paintings, the bust of the countess that guarded one side of the door. There was a matching bust of the earl opposite it. Before long, the bust of the countess would be thrown into the moat as a mark of what the children regarded as her betrayal of the family. Years later, it would be fished out and restored.
The dining room where Evelyn first ate with the Lygon girls was dominated by a hammer beam roof and a minstrels’ gallery (from which the local choir would sing at Christmas). He described it exactly in A Handful of Dust.
Madresfield was a community as well as a building. Like any stately home, it depended on an army of servants to make it run smoothly. Bradford, the beautiful butler, was adored by the family. There was a kindly spinster called Miss Jagger, a permanent house guest always happy to run errands. A dull and ineffectual governess taught the girls and the place swarmed with under servants – six housemaids, a cook, a kitchen maid, a scullery maid, twenty-four gardeners. The footmen were smart and formally dressed. They wore morning suits in the morning and at dinner tails and waistcoats in the Beauchamp colours of maroon and cream. Bradford the butler was resplendent in his snowy waistcoat, with a gold watch chain.
A servant called Rose Nash, who started work at Madresfield during the years when Evelyn became a regular visitor, recalled that all the housemaids used a contraption called ‘the Donkey’ to clean the staircase and front hall. It was a flat piece of iron with a broom handle. They would put old blankets (or a servant’s old fleecy-lined knickers) underneath it to polish the floors. The homemade polish was a mix of beeswax and turpentine. Clouds of dust would fly from the Donkey, causing bronchial coughs. There was always work to be done: carrying hot water in cans to the bedrooms, emptying the ashtrays in the Drawing Room. But at least there was never a shortage of food in the Servants’ Hall.
Just as Lord Beauchamp was exiled from his ancestral seat, so Evelyn was given the chance to find his spiritual home. He was falling in love with a house, but also – once more – with a family.
CHAPTER 11
The Beauchamp Belles
God, what a family.
(Evelyn Waugh)
‘Mad’, as they called Madresfield Court, was a topsy-turvy Alice in Wonderland world. Fun and fantasy reigned, though always with an undertow of sorrow. Over the next few months, as Evelyn grew increasingly close to the three girls, he would discover the intimate details of their beloved father’s downfall, still raw and painful for the children.
His imagination was fired by this charming family, just as he had been entranced by Diana Guinness’s tales of her and her sisters’ eccentric childhood in rural Gloucestershire. That household had been dominated by the large and colourful personality of Lord Redesdale, the patriarch of the Mitford family, who tried unsuccessfully to tame his brood of wild, unconventional girls. The household that Evelyn stumbled upon in 1931 was without parental guardian: the mistress had absconded and the master had been forced out.
The Lygon sisters, known in society circles as ‘the Beauchamp Belles’, had the house to themselves. Sibell was twenty-four, Maimie twenty-one and Coote nineteen. Lettice had left home and married shortly before Lord Beauchamp left on his world tour. Elmley, the man who once dressed in a purple velvet suit and acted as president of the wild Hypocrites’ Club, was now a dull and rather pompous MP, living mainly in London and in his Norfolk constituency. Hugh drifted in and out intermittently. Dickie, the youngest, was at school or with his mother in Cheshire.
Evelyn had not forgotten Hugh Lygon, who had done so much to shape his taste for aristocratic manner and
almost pathological insistence on being charming and amusing. Hugh and Evelyn’s lives had diverged, but their friendship was still strong. Hugh was increasingly dependent on alcohol, his career was going nowhere and his life was spiralling out of control. He was suffering from what his sisters called ‘second son syndrome’.
Evelyn now saw at first hand the legendary girls whose antics had inspired one of his most celebrated scenes in Vile Bodies, the gate-crashing debacle of 10 Downing Street. The girls invited their friends to stay for house parties and weekends, as in the old days, but without the forbidding presence of their pious mother they were free to invite undesirables such as Evelyn. A middle-class Roman Catholic would not have been allowed to darken Her Ladyship’s door.
Evelyn was pressed to dine every night and the girls, especially Maimie and Coote, liked him from the start. They shared his outrageous sense of humour. Sibell, the difficult sister – known by a close friend as a ‘sacred monster whose mind works like magic’ – was more tricky. Coote described her as ‘a stormy petrel – and a great wielder of the wooden spoon: if mischief was going to be made, she made it’. One of her cousins confessed to two great hatreds in her life: Sibell and custard.
Sibell was very tall, over six foot. She towered over the diminutive Evelyn. She wrote a gossip column called ‘Hectic Days’ for Harper’s Bazaar and was embroiled in her on-off affair with the equally diminutive but extremely powerful Lord Beaverbrook. She was often in London, leaving the two younger sisters alone at Mad with Miss Jagger and the servants to keep an eye on them.
Evelyn was captivated by the Beauchamp Belles. Seven years older than Maimie and nine years older than Coote, he became like an older brother. The girls had been forced to grow up fast in the wake of their mother’s departure and their father’s disgrace. On the surface they seemed to have everything: beauty, grace, elegance and the ease of the aristocrat. They had their own private incomes and long gone were the days when they were dressed in threadbare clothes. They ordered their dresses from Norman Hartnell, designer to Queen Mary, rode around in the chauffeured Packard (or, in Maimie’s case, drove it herself), dined lavishly and moved freely between their London home and their ancestral pile. Like their brother Hugh, they gave themselves no airs, and delighted in clever, stimulating conversation. Sibell remembered that they all liked Evelyn instantly because ‘he had our sense of humour’.
Evelyn’s favourite was blonde Maimie – he was always drawn to blondes. She was a female version of beautiful Hugh, with a face of classical proportions. Her beauty was such that, allegedly, when she walked into a ballroom the band would stop playing to gaze at her. Tall, with blue eyes, she had her hair fashionably bobbed and her lips painted red. Photographs show her dressed in furs and cloche hat, carrying her ferocious one-eyed Pekingese, Grainger.* She was the epitome of glamour. She had a sensuous mouth, flawless skin and was always laughing.
Just as they refused to condemn their father for his unorthodox behaviour, so they had no qualms about brother Hugh’s homosexuality. They themselves were often drawn to bisexual men. Though their outlook was unusually liberal-minded in this regard, in other respects they were typical of their class: subservient to their brothers (whom they adored) and waiting for marriage to transform their lives. ‘To be married, soon and splendidly, was the aim of all her friends,’ writes Waugh of his heroine Julia Flyte. But, like Julia, the Lygon girls were tainted and there were no respectable offers of marriage coming their way. Big sister Lettice was lucky to have got married before the scandal broke.
To outsiders, however, they lived a charmed life. When Elmley’s wife first met the sisters she was amazed by the sense of privilege and largesse. She noticed, somewhat bitterly, that they were ‘financed by their father in a big way’. Each had her own bank account and an open travel account at American Express. They could spend more or less what money they liked. Many people were surprised that Mad was kept open for them, their friends and their parties. The expected state of affairs in the circumstances would have been for white sheets to be thrown over the furniture and the big house closed up until the parental difficulties had been resolved.
Maimie and her sisters were shunned in certain areas of society, though they still made regular appearances in the Court Circular, attending balls, weddings and charity events. Sebastian Flyte describes his family as ‘social lepers’. If that was what the Lygons were, then as far as Evelyn was concerned Mad was the world’s loveliest leper colony. He adored Maimie and was the most faithful of her friends. She was another of the beautiful, aristocratic and cultivated female friends that were so important to him but whom he did not – would never have dared to – pursue sexually. In his biography of the Catholic theologian Ronald Knox, Evelyn reveals much about his own character. He thought that among the keys to Knox’s character were the deep friendships he made at Oxford and his special capacity for friendship with women. The Lygons provided Evelyn with these two kinds of friendship in a single family. When he writes of Knox, ‘he found among women most of the happiest friendships of his middle and later life’, he might as well have been writing of himself. Ever since his boyhood days basking in the love of his mother and nanny, he had always felt safe and happy with women. But of the very wide circle of female friends who adored him, he valued above all the friendship of the Lygons. Because of his strong protective instincts, and his attraction to beauty and vulnerability, he counted them first among equals.
Maimie’s wild side appealed to Evelyn. She was unrestrained, known as the sister who danced on the tables in the local pub. Like Hugh, she loved to drink – an important qualification for any friendship with Evelyn. Coote always maintained that Evelyn was closest ‘first to Maimie, then myself’. Maimie’s vitality drew him like a magnetic force and Coote was happy to be pulled along behind. Coote was the only plain-looking child in the family. She had round, full cheeks and thick glasses. She was tall and ungainly with large feet. It must have been extremely difficult to be the ugly duckling in a family of swans. But she had a caring and sweet nature. She was also intelligent and a great reader.
Once Evelyn had found his way to Mad, he renewed his Oxford friendship with Hugh. Elmley was a different kettle of fish. He wasn’t often there, and when he was he seemed, in Coote’s words, a forbidding character, difficult to get on with: ‘Shy, serious’.
Life at Mad was an odd mixture of the formal and the unrestrained. With only Miss Jagger and the hapless governess Miss Bryan as chaperones, the girls led a wild life. From abroad, Lord Beauchamp issued orders concerning the upkeep of his home. Madresfield had long been known for its lavish hospitality (Hugh’s parents once entertained 2,366 visitors in the course of a single month). But now the socialising was on the children’s terms. Hunting, of course, was essential. The young people threw dinners, drank copious amounts of champagne and frequented the local pubs, the Forester’s Arms at Barnards Green and the Hornyold Arms Hotel in Malvern Wells.
The Forester’s Arms was owned and run by a great friend of the Lygons, a man called Wally Weston. He had lost a leg while serving in the First World War. For two days and nights he lay unnoticed in the mud of the Dardanelles, shot through the thigh and the knee. He was only nineteen at the time. Taken to Liverpool, he had his leg amputated and a prosthetic, cork one fitted. He worked on the railways before becoming a landlord.
Wally was something of a local hero. He trained boxers and wore a Stetson. One of his most famous pupils was Jack Hood, the British middleweight champion of the day. A local girl remembers seeing Wally ‘running like a stag’ as she walked to school: ‘With his walking stick, he would hop and run, hop and run, with the boxers, all the way down Guarlford Road.’ Wally also trained Hugh Lygon, who was an excellent boxer. He became one of Hugh’s great friends. Wally kept a gymnasium at the back of the pub, where he would train and give massages to Hugh and his friends. Mad itself also had a training gym.
Another local girl, Mary Wells, recalled that Wally often entertained the Lygon
s in the special back room of his pub. When she was twelve years old Wally encouraged her to go into the back room and meet the family from the big house. There the young ladies would be sipping drinks. They would let little Mary sit on their laps. Robert Bartleet, the vicar’s son from Malvern Priory, a hearty beer-drinker, was another great favourite of the Lygons, whom Evelyn would come to know well. When Evelyn was away from Mad, he would crave news of Bartleet and Wally Weston. He found another source of amusement in the dashing Master of the Hounds, Tommy MacDougal, whom Evelyn affected to believe was illiterate.
Also at Malvern at this time was the Tory leader’s son, Arthur ‘Bloggs’ Baldwin. The Baldwins were neighbours of the Lygons and had been one of the very few families of high standing who had supported Lord Beauchamp. Most people in society had taken the Duke of Westminster’s side, and the duke made it very clear that one was expected to take sides. Lord Beauchamp lost all but a very few of his most loyal friends. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, was one of them.
One of the reasons for the Baldwins’ support was their own family experience. Their eldest son, Oliver, lived happily with his male lover for over thirty years, and was completely accepted by his family. Lady Baldwin once wrote to his partner Johnny Boyle, to whom she was devoted: ‘Thank you for loving my Oliver.’ Her view contrasted sharply with that of her husband’s cousin, Rudyard Kipling, who found homosexuality repulsive.
