Pearls before Poppies

by Rachel Trethewey

  The news also gave others hope for the future. With typical tactlessness, the Duchess of Rutland held Violet’s remarriage up as an example to Letty Elcho when she was at the height of her grief for her husband, Ego. She wrote, ‘Little Vi adored her husband – She is managing again – if he lives!’32

  Marrying John, Violet did not try to replicate her first marriage. On 28 August 1916 the wedding was solemnised very quietly at Christ Church, Lancaster Gate. The bride’s dress reflected the changing fashions of a world which bore little resemblance to the formal pre-war Edwardian years. Violet wore a short dress of cream georgette, trimmed with tiny pleats of taffeta and finished at the wrist with a band of cream ribbon. Her picture hat of cream brocaded velvet was lined with pink and trimmed with a single pink rose. Her only jewellery was her string of pearls and instead of a bouquet she carried a vellum-bound prayer book.33 Showing their support for Violet’s remarriage, her first husband’s parents, Lord and Lady Lansdowne, attended the wedding. Continuing the low-key theme, there was no reception and after the wedding the couple left for a quiet honeymoon at Ford Manor, Lingfield.

  The Astors had struck just the right tone, as showy weddings were considered inappropriate during the war. The prime minister’s daughter, Violet Asquith’s wedding to her father’s private secretary, Maurice Bonham Carter, in November 1915 was particularly controversial. The Asquiths already had a bad reputation for maintaining their peacetime routine of weekday luncheon and dinner parties with house parties at the weekend. In June 1915 Maurice Bonham Carter wrote that Margot had not changed at all; instead of large dinner parties of twenty, she now had frequent ones of twelve, her clothes were still very new and her bridge playing expensive.34

  However, at first it seemed that on this occasion Asquith and his daughter had decided to show some restraint. They claimed that they were going to have a quiet wedding with the minimum of ceremony and no reception. The prime minister even told his colleagues in the House of Commons, ‘Wedding bells these days must ring in muffled tones’.35 However, there was nothing subdued about the wedding when it actually took place. Margot Asquith was too insensitive to public opinion to scale down her grand style, even when the country was facing wartime austerity.

  There were days of celebrations. First the Asquiths attended a reception in the Speaker of the House of Commons Library, attended by many Members of Parliament, where the bride-to-be was presented with a diamond sun brooch. The occasion was an opportunity for supporters of the prime minister to show their solidarity after the attacks led by Lord Northcliffe earlier in the year.36 The day before the wedding, Miss Asquith was ‘at home’ at Downing Street where selected guests were invited to see the hundreds of wedding presents. The prime minister and his wife had requested that no list of the presents should be published, but details of the valuable gifts appeared in the newspapers. Occupying the place of honour among the jewellery was the gift from the king and queen of a diamond and enamel brooch with the royal cipher in diamonds on a background of blue enamel with a crown above. Queen Alexandra also gave a diamond brooch.

  The ceremony, at St Margaret’s Westminster on 30 November, rivalled a royal wedding. Crowds lined the streets as the prime minister and his daughter arrived by car from Downing Street. Inside, the church was packed with aristocrats, ambassadors and politicians. The wedding was staged like a theatrical show with no expense spared on the costumes. The bride wore a medieval-style wedding dress of ivory satin with long chiffon sleeves and a tulle veil down to her knees caught by the House of Commons’ diamond sun brooch. Her two bridesmaids were dressed in Russian-style apricot chiffon ballet dresses under matching velvet full-skirted coats trimmed with skunk fur. To complete their outfits, they wore Russian hats in gold lace, fur and velvet and carried skunk fur muffs. To complement them, the four pages wore breeches and tunics in apricot velvet decorated with gold embroidery.37

  As an acknowledgement to the reality of war, wounded soldiers formed a guard of honour as the bride entered on her father’s arm, then the service began with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Southwark officiating. The public had been told that there was to be no reception, but most guests returned to Downing Street for a party afterwards. While most newly married couples behaved like the Astors and honeymooned in Britain during the war, the Bonham Carters enjoyed an enchanted fortnight in northern Italy. They had been lent a beautiful villa on the Italian Riviera with a garden which the newlyweds described as like a cross between Eden and Kubla Khan’s Xanadu.

  However, while they basked in the sun under the orange trees, there were repercussions at home.38 The extravagance of the wedding was widely criticised at a time when economy was expected.39 The socialist Herald ran an editorial entitled ‘The Human Comedy: that Asquith Wedding’ attacking the conspicuous display of wealth.40 Ripples of discontent spread throughout the country. In the village of Great Leighs in rural Essex, the Reverend Andrew Clark recorded the disapproval of his parishioners. They resented the government calling on them to practise economy and telling them that extravagance was sinful when the prime minister had spared no expense on his daughter’s wedding.41

  Even Violet Asquith’s sister-in-law, Cynthia Asquith, wrote in her diary, ‘There is something terribly grim about a pompous wedding now. It seems so unnecessary and irrelevant, and one feels so remote.’ However, she did recognise that it was hypocritical of her to say this as she had enjoyed a lavish pre-war wedding in 1910. She added, ‘This is unkind [of me] because, if one were the bride oneself, no doubt one wouldn’t feel one’s glamour in the least impaired.’42 Cynthia was more generous about the wedding of the Duchess of Rutland’s son John to Margot Asquith’s niece, Kathleen ‘Kakoo’ Tennant, in January 1916. Falling in love with Kathleen had been one of the reasons John had eventually given in to his mother’s pressure and accepted that he would not fight at the Front. Cynthia described the couple, saying their vows as ‘the most movingly lovely sight’. She explained, ‘It made one cry to think they would ever be old or dead. John looked a glamorous, knightly figure with perfect technique: he held her hand and everything in the most inspired way.’ Apparently Kakoo looked ‘divine in the best wedding dress ever seen’.43

  Unfortunately, not everyone was as delighted by this second Asquith wedding and it also caused resentment. Lloyd George’s mistress and private secretary, Frances Stevenson, noted in her diary that both weddings had ‘pained’ the French. They could not understand the attitude of a prime minister who allowed such a display in his family at a time when everyone was preaching economy and sacrifice.44 Once he was prime minister, Lloyd George was careful not to make a similar mistake when his daughter Olwen was married in June 1917. The wedding and reception were simple and the wedding cake was a cardboard imitation.45

  It was not only wedding arrangements which needed to be handled with sensitivity during the war. Once the vows were said many newlywed couples had to negotiate their way through complicated emotions about the past. In the Astors’ new life together, both husband and wife were aware of the need to prevent Violet’s previous marriage overshadowing their present happiness. At first, John felt jealous of his wife’s love for her first husband. Although Violet had remarried, Charles was never far from her thoughts. Two years after her second wedding she wrote to her former mother-in-law, Lady Lansdowne, ‘Just a line of love as it is the fourth anniversary of our great sorrow. Although I have a very new life now old and wonderfully happy memories are never forgotten and the wound is far from healed.’46

  When the Pearl Appeal was launched, Violet attended the first meeting, served on the general committee and in April she gave one of her jewels. Donating a pearl was a discreet way for Violet to remember her first husband while also giving thanks for her new one. By the time of the appeal she had another very special reason for thanksgiving. As she attended Lady Northcliffe’s launch she was pregnant, and on 1 June 1918 John and Violet’s first son, Gavin, was born.

  However, reflecting the e
ver-present balance of joy and sorrow in Violet’s life, a few months later in September 1918, as the ‘big push’ against the Germans came, John and his regiment came under heavy attack at Cambrai. John’s right leg was shattered by a shell, gangrene set in rapidly and it was only the amputation of his leg in a field hospital that saved his life. John returned to England as a hero.

  After his father’s death, John and Violet inherited Hever Castle; the childhood home of Anne Boleyn was a romantic place to begin their married life. The couple had two more sons, Hugh and John, and as Violet’s friends and family had hoped, her second marriage gave her the security she needed.

  Blanche St Germans was not as lucky. The pearl her mother-in-law had donated with such high hopes for the future turned out to symbolise misfortune in marriage. Although Mousie had survived the war, in 1922 he was seriously injured in a riding accident while hunting. He went to South Africa to recuperate but died in Johannesburg on 22 March, he was 32 years old. With no sons to inherit, his title passed to his first cousin, Granville John Eliot. Aged only 25, Blanche and her daughters returned to her parents’ home at Badminton. The effects of the tragedy on the young widow are captured in a photograph by the society photographer, Bassano, taken at this time. The countess, wearing a cloche hat, fur-trimmed coat and her long string of pearls, stares into the distance as though she is on the brink of tears.

  Nine

  THE PEARL EXHIBITION

  A striking poster advertised the Pearl Exhibition at the Grafton Galleries. It shows a statuesque Red Cross nurse standing serenely with a long skein of pearls held in her outstretched hands; one end of the necklace is draped around a red cross. Looking like a medieval damsel, the nurse’s headdress is a white wimple, while a red cloak is draped around her shoulders and her long flowing white dress has a green girdle around the hips. The First World War was often portrayed in terms of a medieval conflict. The young men going off to battle were compared to gallant knights fighting for their country in a Crusade. Reflecting this perception, one pearl given by a donor who identified herself only as ‘MFK’ was sent ‘in proud memory of a very perfect knight, George Alexander Geddie’.1 The religious symbolism of pearls was also emphasised in the poster as the jewels were bound around the cross. By the end of June, well over 2,500 pearls had been donated to the appeal. From Saturday, 22 June to Monday, 1 July the public were invited to come and see them at the New Bond Street gallery.

  Many of the people who visited the exhibition had been to the Grafton Galleries before. Stylishly refurbished in 1893 and located at the corner of New Bond Street and Grafton Street, it had a history of holding major exhibitions. In 1910, it had hosted critic and painter Roger Fry’s landmark exhibition, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, which was largely devoted to the work of Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin. Two years later, Fry returned with the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition which included more English artists, notably Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Frederick Etchells, alongside work by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.

  The first exhibition had caused outrage. Failing to appreciate the latest French art, some society ladies thought it was a sort of joke and giggled at the paintings. Others, who took it more seriously, believed this modern art would undermine the existing social order. It was seen as a foreign threat to native English art and morality.2 The artist Philip Burne-Jones, son of Sir Edward, one of the leading lights of the Pre-Raphaelites, wrote to The Times describing the paintings as an ‘egregious collection of canvasses’ which disfigured the walls of the Grafton Galleries. Accusing the post-impressionists of shunning beauty and seeking their inspiration in the tavern and gutter, he attacked them for bringing about ‘the anarchy and degradation of art’.3 However, for the more avant-garde it marked the exhilarating start of a new era. Virginia Woolf claimed that at that moment human character changed. She saw the exhibition as symbolising the way European ideas imposed themselves upon the insular English consciousness. According to her, it altered attitudes to Englishness and the country’s relationship with the Continent.4

  During the war, the Grafton Galleries reverted to less challenging subject matter. In June 1916, an exhibition was put on which was in many ways a forerunner to the pearl one. A collection of John Singer Sargent’s drawings were displayed as part of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters’ Exhibition. Organised by the prime minister’s daughter, Elizabeth Asquith, to raise money for the Art Fund, which helped actors, authors, musicians and painters, the forty-six drawings spanned twenty-six years. Like the pearls, Sargent’s portraits and sketches were reminders of a pre-war culture that valued beauty and refinement.

  In the Edwardian era, Sargent had been the high priest of British fashionable society. His portraits of languid women dressed in frothy pastels defined the look of the era and immortalised this generation for posterity. Between 1886 and 1907 he painted over 350 portraits and it became the ultimate status symbol to sit for the American artist in his Tite Street studio in Chelsea. Aware of the alchemy of his paintbrush, he was pursued by aristocrats and arrivistes who wanted him to transform them into modern icons.5 Sargent’s charcoal sketches grew out of this demand. Bored with painting endless portraits of society women which he described as a ‘pimp’s profession’, the artist offered them a sketch as an alternative.6 Instead of having to complete a time-consuming portrait he could do a charcoal drawing in an hour.

  Gazing down from the walls of the Octagon Gallery at the 1916 Grafton exhibition were the prime minister’s children, Elizabeth and Anthony ‘Puffin’ Asquith, next to Lady Diana Manners, her sister Marjorie and the pictures of Letty and Ego Elcho that marked their engagement. To see the image of her brother when the family were still waiting to know whether Ego was alive or dead was too much for Cynthia Asquith. She wrote in her diary, ‘It is a real nightmare to see so many of one’s friends so blatantly depicted staring at one from four walls.’7

  Many of the reviews of the exhibition were critical; it was too ‘pretty-pretty’ for audiences who now faced the bleak reality of war. The Scotsman complained that Sargent’s subjects were mostly ‘stylish young women, and whether it is due to their sameness or to the limitations of the medium the effect is almost as monotonous as that produced by Lely’s beauties at Hampton Court, and only slightly less insipid’.8 The sketch of Lady Diana Manners came in for particular attack. The Ladies’ Field claimed, ‘You do not flatter a woman by drawing her like a doll.’9 Like the world they represented, these sketches suddenly seemed outdated; they reflected the past, but the present demanded a grittier realism.

  The Pearl Exhibition attracted a similar audience to the Sargent one. Many of the women who gave to the Pearl Appeal had been painted by the artist; then, their long strands of pearls were fashionable symbols of their opulence, now they had a new, more practical purpose. There was great anticipation about the Pearl Exhibition, The Queen claimed that it took ‘easily the first place in social life in London that week’.10 Before it opened to the general public, there was a private view by invitation only on Saturday morning from 11.30 a.m. until 1 p.m., for the royal family and women who had donated pearls. Reflecting the sombre nature of the event, many women were dressed in mourning. The queen, in a dark-blue gown of charmeuse with an overdress of georgette lightly embroidered in gold, arrived early with Princess Mary. Dressed in a black velvet gown with a sequined coat, Queen Alexandra came later with Princess Victoria, the president of the appeal. The royal party was greeted by Lady Northcliffe who, chic as ever, wore a black satin gown embroidered in Chinese blue with a splendid silver fox fur. By her side was the head of the Red Cross Finance Committee, Sir Robert Hudson.11 He wrote enthusiastically to Lord Northcliffe:

  The opening of the Pearl Exhibition was an amazing triumph for your lady. The ease and naturalness with which she managed the Queens and half a dozen Princesses, talking to all of them in turn and keeping the ball going for nearly an hour, was a thing to be seen.12

  As the elegantly dressed visitors walk
ed into the cavernous Long Gallery, shafts of natural light from the ring of glass panels in the roof illuminated the nine cases displaying the pearls. The central one contained the royal gifts which were arranged like a family. Queen Mary’s jewel was at the centre, while Queen Alexandra’s pearl was arranged with Princess Victoria and the Princess Royal’s gems on either side. Reflecting the way the Pearl Appeal had caught the imagination of people from all walks of life, a miscellaneous case filled with rings, brooches and tiepins given by people who had no necklaces from which to draw was close to some of the most valuable jewels in the collection. Among the curiosities was a large pink pearl weighing 16.4 grains and an even larger ‘black’ pearl which was dark grey, weighing 21.6 grains. A last minute addition to the display was a magnificent pearl presented by the Aga Khan.13 However, the most emotive sight was the collection of pearls given ‘in memory’ or ‘in honour’ of men who had fallen; like the rows of white crosses in a war cemetery, there were too many to count.

  Showing respect to the sentiment behind every gift, no attempt had been made to arrange the pearls according to their value. Instead, each pearl was treated the same. It was mounted separately and bore the name of its donor and a registered number. The pearls were suspended on royal blue silk strings and set on a background of cream velvet. An empty case was set aside for gifts which came in during the exhibition.