Pearls before Poppies

by Rachel Trethewey

  Missing both her sons, Mary was perhaps more susceptible than her daughter. In November 1916, she told Cynthia that although she was agnostic about spiritualism she thought that perhaps she ought to just give it a chance. She said she was doing it more for Yvo than Ego because she had a feeling that he might want to speak to her. It was only at this point that Cynthia told her about the Knebworth table turning.67 Later that month, Mary went to a séance with a medium in Tavistock Square.68 In December she asked Cynthia to attend another session with her. It confirmed Cynthia’s cynicism, the medium got on the wrong track and thought Cynthia’s husband had been killed in the war. When she realised her mistake, she claimed the younger woman’s scepticism was acting as a mental screen to communication. Cynthia concluded, ‘It wasn’t even a good exhibition of telepathy, and I thought the whole business unpleasant.’69 This unsatisfactory experience left Mary more bereft and confused than ever. She wrote:

  I felt a very deep feeling of disappointment and sadness though I know one must expect all that I’m afraid the rush of people seeking help that way is a great incentive to cheating and will stimulate a veritable growth of quacks and charlatans – I feel very mixed about it all, as if patience and faith were the only attitude and the subtle one.70

  As she struggled through the many stages of grief, Mary felt angry about what had happened to her sons. She most coherently expressed her resentment in her letters to her old lover, Arthur Balfour. Perhaps this was partly because he had some influence over the situation, as in May 1915 he had succeeded Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty in the coalition government. Her letters to him have a different tone from her ones to Ettie – they are more direct with less purple prose. Finally she was able to say what would have been heresy to Ettie; that the war seemed to be a ‘shambles’ and, rather than being a glorious sacrifice, the deaths were ‘a sickening waste’.71 In one particularly frank letter, she wrote:

  What I mind is that others should not have their time – supremely fitted for life and love – and sorely needed in this world to set it right, to save and help many – cut off in golden youth. No one can maintain that that is not tragedy – pure and unadulterated, that it is draped in all the glamour of romance and admired by onlookers does not mean the price is less to pay to those who pay […] If you hold your breath you hear the sound of widows weeping, sisters sobbing and the ceaseless falling falling of the mothers’ tears, the whole air is stifled, surcharged with sadness, which eats into the soul – (at times!) I will not believe that sadness is not sadness – or say it is God’s will and all is for the best.72

  In contrast, Ettie rarely revealed any anger or vulnerability, perhaps fearing that if she ever let go she would succumb to the Cowper melancholy. In a letter to a friend she admitted, ‘My heart feels almost bled to death about Julian and Billy,’ but she rapidly added, ‘the thought of them and of all that shining company is always joy.’73 However, in 1917, after the death of one of the last of her sons’ circle, and around the second anniversary of Julian’s death, her self-discipline finally gave way. She wrote, ‘Two years after is rather a bad time – one ought to have found out the new roads, and new ways of treading them, and yet reconstruction is such a slow and difficult work.’74 Now it was Mary’s turn to help Ettie. Sending her words of consolation she had found helpful from the Bible she wrote:

  Your little pencil letter today had such an anguished cry it pierced my heart […] I only want to tell you that you have all my love and devotion and I’d cut myself into hundreds of tiny bits if I could only help you to know how I love you and that you are a prop and stay to me and my prop seems to be reeling with misery and right now all seems tragedy and failure and darling you have helped so many and now there seems no one to help you.75

  Characteristically, Ettie was determined not to be downcast for long. Although at times she felt like a dead woman who was just going through the motions of being alive, she explained that for the sake of her other children she ‘could not bear to grow numb and unresponsive to this world […] “we must live among the living” – not let all that counts go on ahead, and leave only a sleeping and walking, eating and laughing self here, an automaton’. She finished with a characteristic quote:

  I’ll lay me down and bleed awhile;

  And then I’ll rise and fight again.76

  Her determination to go on fighting was admired by many, but her old friend, the professor and poet Sir Walter Raleigh, complained to Cynthia Asquith that Ettie was never restful to be with because she was constantly ‘battling’ against life and swimming against the current. He added that her ‘deliberate activity made her mechanical and prohibited any real friendship or the finest companionship’.77

  Although Ettie was indispensable to many of her friends and the person they turned to in a crisis, she was not an easy person to be intimate with; her unwillingness to show her vulnerability put her at a distance from most people. As Raymond Asquith wrote to her, she seemed ‘removed into a tragic world beyond our small horizon and far beyond the range of mortal vision and mortal voices. One does not offer consolation to the heroine of a Greek tragedy – It seems hardly less impertinent to offer it to you.’78

  Like her sons, Ettie was determined to be heroic and set an example. She was an inspiration to others, but perhaps Mary was a more attainable model of maternal grief for many women. She comes across as more human and representative of the way attitudes to war changed as the conflict continued. As Mary wrote at the end of December 1917, ‘Our darling boys are killed by her country’s bullets – When shall we learn that there is some better way than War? But even sin and Death and War do not prevail over love.’79

  For both women, there was a need to make sure that their sons were never forgotten, and to do this they wrote books immortalising them. In her Pages from a Family Journal, privately published in 1916, Ettie recorded every detail of Julian and Billy’s childhood and war experiences. She gathered tributes to her dead sons from among their friends and then published seventy pages of them at the end of the book. Circulated only among her friends, it had a profound effect on its readers, reminding them of happier days and what they had lost. Diana Manners could not stop sobbing as she read it. For Ettie, it was her last chance to control her sons’ lives and shape their lasting image for posterity. Her book helped to establish the narrative of the lost generation of golden youth cut off in their prime. However, some members of that generation, like Raymond Asquith, who was still fighting and was to lose his life later that year, were critical of Ettie’s glossing of reality.80 In one of his final letters to his wife, Raymond complained that Ettie had doctored his contribution to her book. She had cut out his comment that Billy was ‘insolent’. She had also changed the facts about where Billy, Julian and Raymond had fun together, inserting the grandest houses owned by their friends, partly through snobbery, but also to make every moment of her sons’ lives seem as perfect as possible.81

  Although modelled on Ettie’s example, Mary’s A Family Record has a more truthful, nuanced tone. It took her years to write and only appeared in 1932. She told Balfour that writing it nearly killed her with misery as it reminded her how all her hopes and aspirations had been cut off by the ‘holocaust’ of the war.82 At the end of her book, she listed the young men of her circle who had died – fourteen were members of the Coterie and another eleven were sons of her friends – she had known them all since they were little boys. Except for Ego and Raymond, they had all been under 30.83

  It was only long after the conflict that Mary finally felt free to say to Ettie what she really thought. When Yvo died, Ettie had written to Mary that it was the only end worthy of his beginning. In 1931 Mary, albeit very tentatively, challenged her friend. She wrote:

  During the passage of years does not one slightly change not one’s point of view – but perhaps the manner of expressing it? […] I only feel that […] (altho’ we know that it was wholly glorious right and noble that they did) we do not quite think that any o
ther way (their lives, lived out here) would have been unworthy of their beginning? Perhaps you’ll think me mad […] but they might, as thank God, many did – they might have fought and lived?84

  Five

  PATRIOTIC PEARLS

  In some ways, the Pearl Appeal could express better than words the wide range of emotions unleashed by the war. Like the subtly different shades of the pearls, each woman who donated had a slightly different experience and reaction to the conflict. Whereas words often seemed inadequate to capture the ebb and flow of complex feelings, and sometimes pinpointed differences even among the closest friends, the enigmatic element of the Pearl Appeal, which symbolised rather than stated the emotions of the giver, united the donors in a common cause.

  During the crucial months of the spring and early summer of 1918, as the threat of defeat hung over the British, donating a pearl became a way for women to reaffirm their patriotism and show they would not acquiesce. After the overwhelming German attack in March, the Allies fought back, appointing the French General Ferdinand Foch to co-ordinate the Allied armies. He immediately sent reinforcements to stop the German advance. As the Allies recovered their strength, the Germans found themselves overstretched; they lacked the reserves and supply structures to consolidate their gains and they had advanced well beyond the support of their artillery.1

  The Allies’ line was holding and, crucially, they managed to prevent the Germans reaching Amiens. When Ludendorff realised his troops had failed to make this breakthrough, he called off the offensive and turned his attentions further north, launching a second offensive aimed at driving the British from Flanders and capturing the Channel ports.2 On 9 April the German Army attacked again in the valley of the River Lys, with a secondary assault towards Ypres, using the methods of 21 March. At this time, there was a real fear that Britain might lose the war. On 11 April, General Haig issued his famous Order of the Day, calling on the army to fight to the last man:

  With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight on to the end. The safety of our homes and the Freedom of mankind alike depend upon the conduct of each one of us at this critical moment.3

  At home in Britain people wanted to demonstrate their support for the men at the Front. Reflecting this desire, there was a surge in donations. By the end of the first week in April nearly 700 pearls had been given and before the month was out the first thousand was passed. By the end of May the total number of gems received had reached over 2,000. They came in from all over the country and were given by women from different walks of life. The pearls ranged in value from one worth a few shillings sent from a country vicarage to a pearl of great price from a stately home. As ‘K.R.’ from Eastbourne wrote, ‘As a drop in the ocean, this small pearl seeks to swell the ocean of England’s gratitude to her heroes.’4

  No donation more poignantly reflected General Haig’s call to fight to the last man than Lilian Kekewich’s gift. Her family had given their all for love of their country – three of her sons and her brother-in-law died in the war. She gave pearls to the appeal on several occasions because it symbolised the self-sacrificing concept of duty that her family believed in. Before the conflict, the Kekewichs had lived a privileged life. The daughter of a wealthy brewer, Samson Hanbury, Lilian had grown up in a large Italianate former bishop’s palace in Torquay. In 1884 she married Lewis Kekewich, the son of a well-known Devon family, who owned Peamore House, an elegant Regency mansion at Exminster, near Exeter. The Kekewichs were deeply rooted in the local community and took a paternalistic interest in their tenants and neighbours. They believed in public service, and members of the family had served in the local army regiments, as Justices of the Peace and as high sheriffs of the county for generations.

  As Lewis was a younger son, he left Devon to pursue a business career in London. The couple moved to Sussex, buying an estate, Kidbrooke Park, where they could enjoy country pursuits. Lewis loved shooting and a round of golf, while Lilian was a keen horsewoman and a member of the hunt. They had seven children, but sadly two of their three daughters died in childhood.5 Their four sons, Hanbury, George, John and Sydney, were brought up on exciting stories of military glory. Their father’s brother, Major General Robert George Kekewich, was a hero of the Boer War, who had been commander-in-chief of the garrison during the siege of Kimberley. Uncle Robert provided a role model for his nephews.

  When the boys went to Eton their family’s ethos of public service and militarism was reinforced. Like Julian and Billy Grenfell, they were encouraged to be keen sportsmen. John excelled at football and cricket and, in 1909, he played in the Eton Cricket XI at Lords. The Kekewich boys were brought up in a public-school culture that taught them to conceive of war in the language of the playing field. The right qualities needed for war had been firmly instilled in them, and they were taught to value sportsmanship, leadership, loyalty, honour, Christianity and patriotism.6 Eton had prepared them well for their future. As the Eton Chronicle wrote of its many former pupils who were now serving their country, ‘It was there that they learnt the lessons which are to enable them to withstand the ordeal which must now be undergone.’7 For the four young Kekewichs, it was to be only a brief interlude before they had to put the values they had learnt on the playing fields of Eton into practice.

  On leaving school, Hanbury and George joined their father in business. In his spare time, George became a Master Scout, founding a Boy Scout troop in Sussex. Following in his uncle’s footsteps, John went to Sandhurst, but instead of taking up his commission he went to Alberta where he ran a ranch. He then returned to England for a short time before going to Penang in 1913 to become a planter. When war was declared, John gave up his new life abroad and returned to England to fight.

  His brothers also soon signed up, with their background it seemed the natural thing for them to do. Every man in the Kekewich family was expected to do his duty. At the outbreak of war in 1914, although he was now 60 years old, Major General Robert Kekewich commanded the 13th (Western) Division, which was stationed at Salisbury Plain. Robert’s health was not good; he suffered from gout, insomnia and heart problems. He began to worry that his illness would prevent him from serving his country as he wished. On 5 October the camp doctor sent him home on sick leave because he was having a nervous breakdown. For several weeks, he was cared for in the Home Hospital in Exeter where his treatment included massage and rest. At the end of the month he was considered to have improved enough to return to his home, Whimple Rectory, near Exeter. However, his doctor noted that he still experienced waves of depression when he worried that he was not serving his country and his anxiety was exacerbated by the frequent reports of the deaths of his friends and fellow officers.

  A few days after his return home, his sister Julia spent the afternoon with him. She noticed that he seemed very depressed about the war but she did not think he was suicidal. After having dinner together, he seemed more cheerful, although he went to bed early at 9.15 p.m. Early the next morning, Julia was awakened by the sound of a gunshot coming from Robert’s bedroom, followed by a heavy thud. She knocked and entered to find her brother lying in a pool of blood on the floor with his head on a gun case and a shotgun by his right side. He had shot himself in the head and died immediately. After finding him, Julia ran into the cook’s room and instructed her to send the groom into the village for a doctor.

  The inquest into his death recorded a verdict of ‘suicide whilst temporarily insane’.8 Even for a man of his military experience, the reality of the First World War was destabilising. In fact, his reaction to the war was not insane, the conflict was enough to test anyone’s sanity. If he had remained in command of the 13th Division, within a year he would have led his men into the bloodbath of Gallipoli.

  The major general’s death shook the whole community. In the close-knit local villages where Robert had grown up and was known by everyone as ‘the General’, his neighbours tried to make sense of his suicide. He had always seemed rock-li
ke, the man villagers went to if they were in trouble, knowing that he would always be there with sound advice or a helping hand. In Whimple Parish Church on the Sunday after his death, his friend the Reverend Sanders recalled the ‘kindly neighbour’ who was ‘all that an English gentleman should be’. In his sermon, the vicar asked his parishioners:

  Who will hesitate to say that our brother who is gone has died for duty? Full well he knew that he was not the man he had been – not the man he had been in the Kimberley days and the far off Egyptian days. Full well again, did he know what the task before him - the training of a new Army – was like. What of that? He recognised it as the call of duty. Cost what it might, in the hour of his country’s need he would do his best. Only as he goes down under it, as it costs him his life, in charity let us say that he is entitled to a place on the roll of honour as clearly as if he had died on the battlefield.9

  Major General Kekewich was given full military honours and his funeral was one of the largest military funerals Devon had seen. The coffin was brought from Whimple Rectory to the crossroads near Countess Weir, where it was placed on a gun carriage. A long procession formed behind the coffin as 400 officers and men of the 3rd Battalion Devon Regiment and 400 officers and men from nearby Topsham Barracks gathered to pay their respects. Many of the villagers lined the route to say their final farewell to the General, the old soldiers among them stood to salute. As the cortege wound its way slowly towards St Martin’s, the ancient, red sandstone church at Exminster, the band of the 3rd Devon Regiment played Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’. After a brief service, the buglers sounded the last post before Robert was laid to rest beside his ancestors overlooking the River Exe.10