Pearls before Poppies
Page 16
Eight
PEARLS FOR MARRIAGE
The complex combination of motives that inspired each donation to the Red Cross Pearl Appeal were as varied as the multi-layered mythology that surrounds pearls. For thousands of years pearls have symbolised love and marriage. However, the superstitions associated with the jewels were often contradictory; these desirable gems were variously thought to symbolise seductiveness or to embody purity, to bring good luck in marriage, or be unlucky to wear on your wedding day as they represented tears and misfortune.1 For some of the women who gave pearls to Lady Northcliffe’s appeal, these superstitions were echoed in their lives. During the war, the accelerated cycles of love and loss resulted in them experiencing the extremes of emotion within a few years which were enough to fill a lifetime.
In a June edition of The Queen, opposite an article announcing that the Red Cross Pearls were to be displayed at an exhibition at the Grafton Galleries later that month, the ‘Fashionable Marriages’ page celebrated the wedding of ‘Mousie’, Earl of St Germans, to Lady Blanche Somerset. It was to mark this joyous event that Mousie’s mother, Emily St Germans, had donated her pearl from Empress Josephine’s necklace. Emily had already known tragedy, when before the war her eldest son had shot himself at the St Germans’ Cornish estate, Port Eliot. In 1916, she had nearly lost her only remaining son, Mousie, when he was severely wounded at the Front. In recognition of his bravery he received the Military Cross.
Emily’s gift of a pearl was given in hope of a new beginning. She was delighted to welcome Blanche (known as Linnie) Somerset into the family. The daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, Blanche had grown up on the family’s Badminton estate. Fortunately, she was an unpretentious girl who preferred the outdoor life to society balls, because she was one of the war debutantes who missed a proper season as no courts were held during the conflict. In 1915, The Sketch explained, ‘It is not a propitious year for debutantes if to be one spells a passion for dances and ices. But Lady Blanche Somerset has no use for those stuffy pleasures.’2
Her engagement photograph showed Blanche’s determination to be a thoroughly modern woman; her hair is cut short and she is wearing a fashionable headband and long tasselled seed pearl necklace. Her openness to new ideas is further emphasised by the statue of an Oriental deity that was prominently placed on the table next to her. Blanche was happiest on the hunting field and she had followed the hounds as soon as she was able to ride. Responding to her future daughter-in-law’s passion, as one of her wedding gifts Emily gave her a fine riding crop. Mousie shared his bride’s love of horses but he also had the touch of the showman about him. It was said that if he had not been an aristocrat, his talent for acting and mimicry might have made him a fortune on the music-hall stage.3
The St Germans’ wedding, which was held at 2.30 p.m. on Tuesday, 11 June 1918 at St Margaret’s Westminster, had the appearance of the pre-war Cup Day at Ascot. Crowds of well-dressed young men and women jostled to get a better view of the young bride. The church was decorated with palms, variegated maples and white flowers. Recognising the groom’s distinguished war service, troops from his regiment, the Scots Greys, formed a guard of honour inside the church. The congregation stopped gossiping and fell silent as the bride, dressed in a gown of silver tissue over charmeuse, with a train of old Brussels lace given by her mother, walked through their ranks with her father, the Duke of Beaufort, to the chancel where Mousie awaited her. According to the gossip columnist from The Sketch, ‘the bridegroom looked far more nervous than he used to do in those very far away days when he was such a popular figure at the rag time dances that used to follow expensive suppers at Ciro’s’.4 Fortunately he had his best man, a brother officer, the Earl of Leven and Melville by his side to steady his nerves.
For the packed congregation, the soldiers in uniform were a physical reminder of the war that had transformed their lives. Across the Channel, a few days earlier the German General Ludendorff had launched his latest offensive against the Allies. Unleashing an overwhelming bombardment, the Germans managed to force the French back and were able to cross the Matz River. However, on 11 June, the day of the wedding, the French counter-attacked with a well-organised operation which combined troops, tanks and low-flying aircraft. After much bitter fighting, the Germans were forced to call off their offensive.5
At such a tense moment, thoughts about what was happening in the war were inevitable. Like so many wartime weddings, this was an occasion for reflection. Watching as their friends said their vows, ‘till death do us part’, Lady Diana Manners and her sister Letty, Lady Elcho, must have been reminded of the admirers and husband they had lost. Although the ceremony revived poignant memories, the wedding was an opportunity to give thanks. The Sketch columnist wrote, ‘There are some things still so entirely joyful in their character that they almost waft us back to the peaceful atmosphere of pre-war days.’6 As the couple signed the register, the anthem ‘Rejoice in the Lord’ was sung.
It seemed that the St Germans had every reason to look optimistically to the future. Within a year their first child was born. The new countess gave birth to a daughter, Rosemary, at Lowther Gardens, London, in February 1919, and two years later the couple had a second daughter, Cathleen.
The St Germans were not the only ones to have something to celebrate. Pearls were also given to mark second marriages. The bittersweet legacy of the Red Cross Pearl Appeal is illustrated in the story of Lady Violet Astor.
In 1909, at the age of 19, Lady Violet Elliot, daughter of the Earl of Minto, married Lord Charles Fitzmaurice, youngest son of the Marquess of Lansdowne. The wedding was held in Calcutta because the couple had met in India, where Lord Minto was the viceroy and Charles had been his aide-de-camp. Although Charles was fifteen years Violet’s senior, it was a love match. Violet was known for her sharp wit and beauty while Charles’ kindness and sense of humour endeared him to everyone he met.
Within the first years of their marriage they had two children, Margaret and George. Lord Charles’ career was also flourishing and from 1909 until the beginning of the war he was equerry to the Prince of Wales, later King George V. When not needed at court, Charles and Violet enjoyed escaping to their estate of Meikleour, in Perth. When he inherited the Scottish estate Charles took the name Mercer Nairne. The family became part of a close community and their tenants took a personal interest in Lord and Lady Mercer Nairne and their children.
At the outbreak of the war in August 1914 Charles requested that he might go on active service with his regiment. A major in the 1st King’s Royal Dragoon Guards, he arrived in France on 8 October 1914 as part of the British Expeditionary Force. Shortly afterwards, he wrote to his father, saying, ‘Tell Mother not to fuss about me, it is no good and I am only one of thousands.’7 Just weeks later, he was killed at Ypres on 30 October 1914.8
Friends wondered how Violet would cope. Only a few days after Charles’ death, Lord Lansdowne wrote to his colleague Andrew Bonar Law that Lady Lansdowne and ‘Charles’ poor little wife are very brave, but it is not easy’.9 Like Letty Elcho, Violet was left a widow with two young children. Margaret was just 4 and George not yet 2 years old, so they were too young to really understand what had happened. In the days immediately after the news, Violet’s sister-in-law, Evie, Duchess of Devonshire, helped with the children. Evie wrote to her mother:
Margaret explained to me that her father had gone to Heaven and that God would no longer have to look down to find him, she illustrated this by standing up and staring at the carpet. She thinks it must be very difficult for God to see everybody at once.
George was too young to remember his father properly. However, his aunt said that when he saw a ‘soldier boy’ at his grandparents’ house, Bowood, he was fascinated, blowing the soldier’s whistle and crying bitterly once he had to go up to bed.10 Evie wondered whether he had mixed this military figure up with his father, but she was reassured when he made it clear that he knew it was just a boy.11
Violet’s des
perate loneliness was plain for all to see. As the months went by she tried to turn her sorrow into something more positive by doing charity fundraising for other victims of the war. Charitable work was a prerequisite for society ladies during the war. Inheriting a tradition of philanthropy from their Victorian grandmothers, it was now seen as part of their patriotic duty to use their connections and time to raise money for war charities. However, not everyone felt that this was the best use of these women’s time and there seems to have been a pecking order of what was considered the worthiest war work. Margot Asquith argued that if young women only served in this way it was not as ‘humanising’ as facing the horror and squalor of more hands-on duties like nursing. She believed that the ‘committee girls’ were missing a wonderful opportunity which could have been the making of them.12 She wrote to her step-daughter in 1915 describing committee work as unimaginative as it added nothing to a girl’s experience of life.13
While making her sweeping statement, Margot seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she was criticised for not serving on enough charity committees or doing any obvious war work herself. Admittedly, she did make private visits to London hospitals to talk to troops and she regularly drove to Folkestone or Dover on Sunday mornings to meet refugees, but she believed her main war work was to keep Asquith and their family happy. She was honest about her limitations and when Queen Mary organised a group of society women to sew for soldiers, Margot said she believed that it would be wrong to compete with shops that were already struggling to survive. Instead, she suggested that they should supply surgical shirts which were not sold in shops and immediately ordered a large number from her sewing woman.14
Although Margot was not the most appropriate person to criticise others, there was an element of truth in her wariness of committees. There was a danger that the fundraisers’ enthusiasm for organising charity events could be counter-productive because so many bazaars, sales and auctions were held that people lost interest in them and potentially valuable items sold for low prices. At one sale, a waistcoat once worn by Edward VII only fetched 6s, while a glove belonging to Queen Victoria received no bids at all.15 Appearing charitable could become a competitive chore, as Cynthia Asquith complained in her diary. As crowds of women swarmed around her stall at the great Caledonian Market Fair, Cynthia ‘hated’ trying to sell ‘filthy bits of jet trimming, alleged to be off Queen Alexandra’s dress’. Apparently the jet did not appeal to anyone and Cynthia felt thoroughly humiliated because she was faint with fatigue after manning the stall for an hour while ‘that Bovril Duchess of Rutland’ was still full of energy after ‘selling assiduously’ for two days.16
In November 1915, Violet Mercer Nairne was a stallholder at a grand bazaar and variety festival held at Claridge’s Hotel in aid of War Emergency Entertainments, which provided hospital concerts to wounded soldiers. Valuable gifts donated included oil paintings by John Singer Sargent and William Orpen and a court train of Duchesse lace worth 200 guineas. If these eclectic items failed to attract visitors, it was hoped that unusual entertainments including palmistry, thought reading and lessons in conjuring would encourage them to pay the 2s 6d entrance fee. Joining Violet as stallholders were the Princess of Monaco, the ever-energetic Duchess of Rutland and Lady Diana Manners.
These women would be reunited to support the Pearl Appeal, three years later. Unlike so many of the other charity appeals, Lady Northcliffe’s well thought out campaign was focused, and captured the public imagination. It became so fashionable that even Margot Asquith abandoned her wariness of committees and served on the one set up to promote the pearls.
Although Violet tried to distract herself with good works, nothing seemed to lessen the emptiness left in her life by Charles’ death. She was one among an army of widows. It is estimated that 160,000 women lost husbands and double that number of children were left fatherless by the war.17 So many young women were widowed that society’s customs and attitudes had to change. From the Renaissance, widows had worn black clothes and no jewellery except pearls as a sign of humility. During the Victorian era, the rules became more complicated; one etiquette advisor stated that no ornaments except jet could be worn by a widow in the first year of mourning, while a rival advised that diamond ornaments or pearls set in black enamel were acceptable.18
However, during the war, strict rules about mourning were modified. It was partly a matter of morale because it was soul destroying for troops on leave from the trenches to see the streets full of thousands of women of all ages shrouded in black crepe. With so many women needed for war work it was also impossible for bereaved wives to retire into the periods of seclusion demanded by the old etiquette of mourning. It was felt that alternative forms of mourning dress were needed to reflect the fact that soldiers had not died in the normal way, but for their country.19
Violet’s mother-in-law, the Marchioness of Lansdowne, and her sister-in-law, the Duchess of Devonshire, campaigned for the abolition of wearing black in public. They suggested that, instead, a white armband should be worn to symbolise their pride in the dead. In a letter to newspapers in August 1914, before Charles had been killed, the marchioness and the duchess wrote that they had close relations serving in France and they ‘did not know what their fate has been, or yet may be, but if it is their fortune to die for their country we shall not show our sorrow as for those who come to a less glorious end’.20 Many women followed their lead. In June 1915, The Sketch commented that there was ‘still extraordinarily little mourning to be seen in London’. Setting the standard, Lady Desborough refused to wear black because she was ‘determined to fly no flag of distress over the glorious death’ of her sons. She believed that to do so would ‘be casting shadows’ over their triumph.21
An even greater change was in the attitude to remarriage. Instead of frowning upon widows remarrying soon after their first husband’s death, it was positively encouraged. With so many young widows it was no longer realistic to expect them to behave as though their emotional and sexual lives were over for ever, which was the underlying message of the ritual of mourning.22 There was also the pragmatic reason that, with so many men being killed during the war, there was a need to replace them by those who remained having more children. Cynthia Asquith noted in her diaries a conversation with Lord Curzon who was ‘rather amusing about the war-born necessity of some sort of polygamy, and we agreed that widows must have babies, even if their husbands have been dead for more than 9 months’.23 Equally keen to boost the population, and with the hint of a eugenic agenda, Cynthia’s step-mother-in-law, Margot Asquith, wrote in her diary that she thought that for the sake of the race ‘splendid boys’ like the unmarried Grenfell brothers should all have children before they were sent to fight.24
Two years after her first husband’s death, Violet Mercer Nairne remarried. Her second husband was Captain John Jacob Astor. Part of the American Astor dynasty, John was the second son of William Waldorf, who was one of the richest men in America. In 1890 Waldorf moved to England and became a newspaper proprietor, owning the Pall Mall Gazette and The Observer. There was much rivalry between the Astors and the Northcliffes, as Waldorf disapproved of Lord Northcliffe using The Times to promote his own views.
John Astor was known for his charm and courage. At the outbreak of the war, he volunteered for the British Expeditionary Force and went to France as a Household Cavalry signalling officer. In October 1914, he was wounded at Messines and invalided home.25 John had first met Violet in India when her father was viceroy, and while he was convalescing they renewed their friendship. Soon he fell deeply in love with the stylish young widow and wanted to marry her, but it took time for Violet to agree. Her grief for Charles was still raw and the thought of loving, and then possibly losing, a second husband who would be returning to fight in France made her feel vulnerable. In 1916 she finally accepted his proposal. Friends understood the ambivalence she had experienced. One wrote, ‘I send you all my love and my sympathy for I think one needs as much sympathy in
one’s joys as one’s sorrows. I know what you have been going through these last weeks and what an agony of decision you have been through.’26
In an environment where death was ubiquitous, no one saw Violet’s remarriage as hasty. Her friends and contemporaries were all too aware that life could be short and so it had to be lived to the full. Many wrote letters of congratulations to Violet, expressing their relief that her loneliness was over. Ettie Desborough, who understood the pain of bereavement more than most, was particularly effusive, she sent her ‘one line of great love and every happy wish that I can think of in the whole world’. Typical of Ettie, with her penchant for younger men, she could not resist adding, ‘I have always been deeply in love with John […] I do think you are both very blessed and lucky people.’27
Violet’s late husband’s family were also supportive. According to the Duchess of Rutland, Violet’s mother-in-law, Lady Lansdowne, had helped to persuade her that it was the right thing to do. She told her, ‘He is a man who has loved you always – you must think of him!’28 When the tenants on Meikleour, Charles and Violet’s estate, were informed, they looked forward to welcoming Captain Astor to Scotland. The estate manager, John Renton, told Violet, ‘They all expressed their pleasure and asked me to convey their congratulations to you.’29
Both of Violet’s sisters, Ruby and Eileen, also encouraged her; they were pleased that love and joy had come back into her life. John’s family were equally delighted. Knowing how much his son loved her, John’s father wrote to Violet, ‘For some years it has been a fervent wish with me that he should marry in accordance with his inclinations, and this I know he is doing.’30
Her friends and family understood that the isolation of widowhood, particularly for very young women, could be stultifying and detrimental. One friend wrote that she was so young to have known such great sorrow, another claimed, ‘No lady under 50 is able to take care of herself.’ It was seen as the right move, not only for Violet but for her children. A new husband could provide love and support and become a father figure to George and Margaret. Blanche St Germans’ mother, the Duchess of Beaufort, who had been left a widow with two small children in 1893, but had married the Marquis of Worcester two years later and went on to have three more children, including Blanche, wrote, ‘Dear I can’t wish you better than you may be as happy in your second marriage as I have been in mine and that you and dearest Charlie’s beloved children may have found as kind and dear a friend as my boys found in Worcester.’31