Pearls before Poppies

by Rachel Trethewey

  However, the duchess was a highly controversial figure to promote the appeal because, unlike most of her contemporaries, she had done everything within her power to prevent her son John from going to the Front. As the heir to the dukedom and the Rutlands’ only surviving son, if he died the title and estate would pass to distant relatives. Violet believed that John’s duty to his family outweighed his obligation to fight for ‘king and country’.8 Using her considerable persuasive powers, she did her best to keep her son out of danger. As her daughter Diana explained, Violet was obsessed with getting John a position on the General Staff at headquarters, where he would be out of the firing line.9

  One of Violet’s strategies involved pressuring Diana into seducing an American, George Moore, whom she thought might be able to influence Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the Western Front during the first phase of the war. Moore showered gifts on Diana, giving her an ermine coat, a monkey called Armide and a huge sapphire said to have belonged to Catherine the Great. Twice weekly he sent a vast box of Madonna lilies to her home. Moore also held decadent dances in her honour, which were nicknamed the ‘dances of death’ because no one knew which men present would survive the war. No expense was spared as guests drank vodka or absinthe and ate terrapin, soft shell crabs and avocadoes then danced the night away to the seductive beat of Negro bands. The minute Diana left, the host turned down the lights and stopped the music. The only problem was that Diana found the squat, swarthy married man who was sixteen years her senior, repulsive, however, she had to accept his advances because her mother told her it was to save her brother.10

  Despite the sacrifice of Diana, Violet’s strategy did not go to plan. When John refused to take the safer post offered to him through Moore’s intervention, his mother had to adopt different tactics. The family physician gave false evidence about John’s health, claiming that he had recurring gastro-intestinal and heart problems so John was ruled unfit for active service by the army medical board.11 Although at first John had resisted his mother’s interference, he finally gave in to the relentless family pressure. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he had never glorified war. His sister Marjorie wrote to Ettie Desborough, ‘He sees no glamour in the fight like Julian [Ettie’s son] – for that I pity him poor boy – He sees it as sad work from beginning to end.’12 By the summer of 1915, his plans of battling in the trenches with his regiment, the 4th Battalion Leicestershire, were over. While 249 men from the Belvoir estate were killed fighting on the front line in France, for the rest of the war John stayed safely at Field Marshall Lord French’s side as his aide-de-camp.13

  Although Violet’s actions were considered outrageous by many in society, she was not the only aristocrat to pull strings. In March 1915, of the seventeen heirs to British dukedoms who were of military age, only ten were at the Front, the rest were assigned to staff positions or attached to home forces.14 As well as the obvious motivation of dynastic self-preservation, there were deep psychological reasons for Violet’s behaviour. It was rooted in her earlier experience of losing a child. In 1894, her 9-year-old eldest son, Haddon, died in a freak accident which involved an acrobatic trick at his brother John’s birthday party. He suffered a twisted gut and, after six days of agony, died of starvation.

  Violet was inconsolable, Haddon was her favourite child and she called him ‘my beautiful big fair child of beauty’.15 The only person she felt able to confide in was her friend and fellow Soul, Mary Elcho. She knew that Mary would understand, as she had lost her 3-year-old son, Colin, to scarlet fever shortly before. Mary had tried to hide her grief from her children by putting on a ‘resolute almost jaunty brightness’, but one day when her daughter Cynthia followed her out of the nursery she found her sitting on the stairs ‘weeping as if her heart must break’.16 Having been through it herself, Mary knew just what to say to comfort her distraught friend. She wrote to her of the bitterness, terrible longing and feelings of regret, and she added that nothing could ever fill the silent aching gap in her heart. However, she consoled her friend by reminding her that there was comfort in knowing that for Haddon all the pain was over.17

  Violet was a talented artist so she expressed her all-consuming grief through her art. Withdrawing into a studio in London, she sculpted an effigy of her son. On the foot of the plinth was written:

  Hope of my Eyes

  Something is broken that we

  Cannot mend.18

  The death of Haddon was the great tragedy of the Duchess of Rutland’s life and she never got over it. Even at the end of her life, aged 80, she used to tell Lady Diana how the thought of this dead child could hurt her as agonisingly as ever, but that the thought grew ever rarer.19

  After losing Haddon, Violet sent John away to her brother because his presence reminded her of Haddon’s death. She also maintained a certain detachment from her daughters, Marjorie, Letty and Diana.20 However, she was neurotic about their health and lived in constant fear that tragedy would strike again. For her, the thought of her son John going to the Front to face possible death was unendurable. She was well aware of the risk involved as she watched other mothers within her circle suffer.

  The Souls remained a tightknit clan and many of their children fell in love. Violet’s three daughters, who were known as ‘the hot house’ or ‘the hotbed’ for their daring attitudes and dazzling good looks, formed the focal point for the next generation. Most beautiful was Diana, known as a ‘scalp collector’ she attracted around her many of the Souls’ children in a group which was known as ‘the Corrupt Coterie’.21 Enjoying fast cars, champagne, drugs and gambling, they were criticised by their elders for their bright flippancy but their wit concealed an underlying earnestness. They had a horror of cant and rebelled against the moral hypocrisy of their parents’ generation.22

  As Balfour had been the leading man of the Souls, Raymond Asquith, eldest son of Prime Minister Asquith, was the guiding light of the Coterie. He was known for his wit, which at times could seem callous. According to his friend, the writer John Buchan, he effortlessly destroyed homilies with a jest and scorned obvious emotion and accepted creeds.23 Like so many of his group, both male and female, despite his brilliance he found it hard to find a role that fulfilled his potential. Educated at Balliol, and then becoming a barrister, he knew that with his brains, looks and contacts he had the world at his feet, but he lacked motivation. As he confessed to one friend, his great difficulty was not doing things but wanting to do them.24 He questioned the value of his extensive education and felt that nothing of real importance ever happened to him.25 Although by the beginning of the war he was married to the intelligent beauty Katharine Horner, he had a close relationship with Diana.

  During the war years, Violet watched as, one by one, most of Diana’s friends and suitors, including Raymond, were killed. It seemed as though a whole generation was being annihilated. All classes suffered heavy losses in the war, however, the upper classes’ losses were proportionately greater than any other social group. Of the British and Irish peers and their sons who served during the war, one in five was killed. The comparable figure for all members of the fighting services was one in eight. These aristocrats were either professional soldiers or the first men to volunteer, and they were rapidly posted to the Front.

  The idea of a ‘lost generation’ is not supported by the figures, as four out of five of all British peers and their sons who joined up came back. However, because the families were so interconnected and so many brilliant young men did not return it felt as though the myth was true.26 Diana recalled that Violet was deeply sympathetic about the deaths of her friends, but for their mothers’ sake more than her daughter’s.27

  Even though she tried everything within her power, the duchess could not isolate her family from the slaughter. The horror of the situation came closest to home when Violet’s son-in-law Hugo (known as ‘Ego’) Charteris, Lord Elcho, was killed in the Egyptian campaign of 1916. Violet witnessed the shattering effects of this loss on both her daug
hter Letty and her old friend, Ego’s mother, Mary Wemyss.

  When, in 1910, Letty and Ego got engaged, both their families had been delighted. The Rutlands cried for joy and the Wemysses welcomed Letty with open arms. The young couple were shy and very serious when they came to see Mary in her sitting room at Stanway. With tears in her blue eyes, a pale Letty asked Mary if she would have her for a daughter. Mary was overjoyed. The most inclusive of women, she collected an eclectic, often eccentric, circle around her including those nicknamed by her children as ‘freaks and funnies’.28 She already had six children who competed with her friends for her time, but there was room in her brood for more.29 The engagement was the start of a bond between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law which was to deepen through the tragedies of the following years.

  Letty and Ego were deeply in love. As the companion sketches of them done at this time by John Singer Sargent show, the young couple were perfectly matched. Her slightly fey, modern beauty complimented his dark, soulful good looks. However, Ego was typically self-deprecating about his handsome image, saying it was not his idea of himself. He felt he was ‘a dreamy, comfortable, sheepish individual’.30 Others always saw in Ego what he failed to see in himself. Diana described her brother-in-law as like a knight of chivalry but one who had the most wonderful sense of humour.31 From his boyhood, he had an inherent integrity so that anyone contemplating a mean or dishonest action would feel ashamed if they looked into Ego’s eyes.

  Ego and Letty’s wedding at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in February 1911 was a joyous occasion, and afterwards Ego wrote to his mother from their honeymoon, ‘You are not losing me and you have gained little Letty.’32 There was never any jealousy between the two women for Ego’s affections and they enjoyed each other’s company. Mary had ‘a dancing gaiety’ which made her fun to be with.33 Open-minded and tolerant, her large brown eyes lit up as she listened to the latest news from her son and his wife. She was delighted to see Ego so happy, and the once diffident young man grew in confidence as he basked in Letty’s adoration.

  When their sons, David, and then Martin, were born, Ego became a doting father who looked forward to giving them their first cricket lessons. The couple enjoyed spending time quietly with their children. Ego would read while Letty played the piano, then they would have a game of chess.

  Although Letty adored her children, Ego always came first. There was great physicality in their love for each other. When they first fell in love, Letty wrote breathlessly to her ‘beloved one’ from her bed, ‘Oh! I want you, my honey, yes I want you, want you, want you!!’34 In the year before they married she dreamt of him every night. Several years into their marriage the intimacy between them was as great as ever. She wrote, ‘It was perfectly heavenly, our afternoon yesterday wasn’t it. I loved you better than ever.’35 The couple hated being apart even for a short time. Seeing Ego off on the train for a short separation Letty lacked the courage to turn around on the platform as she did not want to make a fool of herself by bursting into tears. She minded him going away much more than she expected and could not bear the loneliness of life without him.36

  In another letter to her ‘darling love’, she jokingly told him, ‘I nearly killed myself with a hat pin when I failed to find your darling head on your uncrushed pillow!’37 The empty bed made her feel for an awful moment that he was dead. She added, ‘I would give everything I have in the world to know that you were undressing next door, and would soon come and snuggle!’38 While they were separated she clung on to anything associated with him, from the envelope he had licked to his empty dressing room which smelt ‘deliciously’ of him. She described her excitement at being reunited with him as like being married over again, ‘only better because I know how wonderful it is going to be – I don’t merely make a shrewd guess’.39

  War was to end the Wemyss family’s enchanted life. The immutable quality of Stanway, with its time-tinted golden stone gatehouse, church and tithe barn nestling in the Cotswold countryside would remain the same, but the lives of those who lived there would change beyond recognition. First Ego and then his younger brother, Yvo, signed up to fight. Ego had always loved anything military. As a boy, every inch of the family’s London town house was taken over by a war game invented by his mother’s friend, the writer H.G. Wells, which involved playing with toy guns and tin soldiers.40

  While Ego was training with his regiment, Letty rushed to wherever he was posted to spend the night with him. Sometimes their arrangements had to be changed at the last minute because Ego had to be on duty, leaving them disappointed. On other occasions, Ego found it hard to switch from his role as a soldier to a lover. After seeing each other during one of his leaves in September 1914, he apologised for making Letty cry. He told her, ‘I would give anything to have those 48 hours over again and live them differently. I didn’t behave in a very lover-like fashion to you I am afraid but I love you dreadfully all the same.’41 However, although there were occasional misunderstandings, their brief encounters added intensity to their relationship. Ego told his wife, ‘We have had wonderful times, much the best time together since we married.’42

  In April 1915, Ego was posted to Egypt with his regiment, the Gloucester Hussars. After Turkey entered the war at the end of October 1914 on the side of Germany, the British Government declared Egypt a protectorate of the British Empire. Troops defended the Suez Canal which was a vital route for the British Empire. When Ego left Stanway for the final time, his mother remained strong during their last goodbye. She wrote that love and pride gave her strength, ‘Ego had never failed me and I could not fail him then.’43

  When Ego went to Egypt, Letty proved herself to be her mother’s daughter by pulling every string possible to enable her to join him there, while her young sons were left in Mary’s safe hands at Stanway. For Letty, it was a great adventure and those months in Egypt were among the happiest of her life, which she described as ‘paradise’.44 Although Ego was frustrated not to see active service, he resigned himself to enjoying a sybaritic lifestyle until he was called on to fight. Letty took a large, airy villa by the sea at Ramleh, near Alexandria, complete with a Berber cook and a houseman. When Ego was off duty, the couple spent time playing tennis or swimming and dozing on the beach. Letty described her husband as looking tanned and beautiful. He told his mother that in spite of ‘this infernal’ war they had real fun together.45

  However, the war’s sinister presence always lurked in the background. Letty did VAD work at the Deaconess Hospital, Alexandria, which was overflowing with the wounded from Gallipoli. During the mornings, she cared for two badly injured young men, one was paralysed and the other blind and dying from an infection in the brain. She found the work rewarding. On sunny days, she wheeled her patients along the white marble corridors onto the verandas where they could feel the sea breeze.

  Letty was mortified when she caught scarlet fever and had to go into hospital herself. After returning to England for a few months, she could not wait to get back to Ego. In October 1915, just as she was about to sail, news came that Ego’s little brother Yvo had been killed at Loos in France. Aged just 19, he looked so boyish that his men teased him that he was too young to be at the Front, but he was determined to fight. A few weeks after he arrived, Yvo was leading his men ‘over the top’ when he was hit by four bullets, he died instantly.

  Young in spirit but old in understanding, Yvo had known that he might not return. Mary recalled the last time she had been with him at Stanway, they had gone for an evening stroll around the grounds. Yvo, with his hands in his pockets, had kept looking up and down, turning his face from side to side as though he was saying farewell to every twig on every tree of his beloved home. Just before he went out to France, Mary travelled on the overnight train with him to the family’s Scottish estate, Gosford. As he lay stretched out asleep, Mary had a premonition:

  He looked so white and still, and though I said to myself, he is still safe, he is still alive and under my wing, yet all the time as
I watched him sleeping so peacefully there lurked beneath the shallow safety of the moment a haunting, dreadful fear, and the vision of him lying stretched out cold and dead.46

  Just weeks later, Mary’s premonition came true. Her daughter Cynthia had to tell her the news. No words were necessary, Cynthia’s face told her all. When her mother heard, Cynthia recalled, ‘She was wonderful, quite calm after the first moment of horror. About five minutes afterwards she said something so sweet and natural, just what one feels when one is dazed, “What a bore!”’47 Although, neither Letty nor Ego could be with Mary to comfort her, they both wrote letters. Letty told her mother-in-law that when she ‘thought of his [Yvo’s] love for you and all his family, and of Stanway and the birds, and I felt that he must have almost enjoyed fighting for his “loves” and that he knew it was all worth dying for’.48

  Ego wrote his mother a profound letter which was to guide her in the years to come. He told her that his one consolation was that she could cope with the grief, ‘Your soul is big enough, large enough for that purpose. The mere thought of your tackling it strengthens me. That sounds selfish and detached, but I have faith in you.’ However, his assessment of the future was bleak, ‘The only sound thing is to hope the best for one’s country and to expect absolutely nothing for oneself in the future. To write down everyone one loves as dead – and then if any of us are left we shall be surprised.’49 In the last lines of his letter, he added that Mary and his father should write off their sons and concentrate upon their grandchildren, ‘which thank God exist’.50 He signed off, ‘Goodbye, Darling, I love you till all is blue.’51

  In January, Ego’s regiment moved to Salhia. Letty met him once a week to spend the night together at the camp. Then, in February Ego became ill with flu, and his recuperation allowed him to enjoy a holiday with Letty at Luxor. The weather was exceptionally hot and they napped in the afternoons before walking down to an orange grove for tea. They were given a sightseeing tour of the Tombs of the Kings by the archaeologist Howard Carter and then saw Karnak by moonlight. They both agreed that they had never been so happy before. Ego said they had ‘a delicious time’ and Letty described the five days as ‘heavenly’.52