Pearls before Poppies

by Rachel Trethewey

  Frank saw his survival as a miracle and thanked God for having spared him. As a dealer he had regularly attended Christie’s auctions for many years. However, after his fortunate escape, he sometimes bought items for sentimental rather than commercial reasons. The Pearl Auction was not the first time he had ‘lifted bidding into the plane of honour’. The art dealer was a friend and advisor on Chinese porcelain to Lord Kitchener, who was a keen collector. Just a few days before he set sail on HMS Hampshire, the secretary of state for war had sent for Frank to ask him to buy on his behalf an enamelled bowl decorated with ‘The Eight Immortals’ at a Christie’s sale. Days after Frank received the shocking news that Lord Kitchener had drowned, he attended the Chinese porcelain sale held on 22 June 1916 at the auction house, determined to honour his friend’s last request. As Lot 165 came under the auctioneer’s elegant hammer, Frank bid £241 10s for the decorated ceramic bowl. No doubt the sinking of the Hampshire revived painful memories of being aboard the Lusitania the previous year because Frank then donated the so-called ‘Kitchener bowl’ to the London Museum as ‘a little tribute to the memory of the great dead’.10

  The real excitement at the December 1918 sale began when the pearl necklaces were auctioned. At 3.30 p.m. there was a flutter of anticipation as Lot 95, the first of the strings, was brought out and shown to the audience by one of Christie’s young women attendants. It sold for £2,200. The tension increased and there was a sense of drama as the lights went up and Mr Anderson introduced ‘the necklace of necklaces’, Lot 101, the most perfect pearls with the Norbury diamond clasp. The first bid was £20,000 then, with his encouraging smile, the auctioneer looked for nods around the room. Bids rose in steps of £500 until the necklace was sold to Mr Carrington Smith with his bid of £22,000. Carrington Smith was one of the jewellers who had served on the Red Cross Jewellery Committee and had helped to receive and grade the pearls.

  Before the auction, The Times expressed a hope that the necklaces would be bought by private collectors rather than by dealers ‘who might not properly appreciate the sentimental value attached to them’.11 In fact, several dealers were buying that afternoon. Mr Carrington Smith was the most prolific, with S.J. Philips and Max Mayer also acquiring jewels. A Hatton Garden diamond merchant, Mayer, who was a world-renowned expert on pearls, bought two relatively modest lots: a scarf pin for £105 and a pair of drop pearls for £370.

  Perhaps his restraint was due to his unfortunate experience with pearls five years earlier. In the summer of 1913 Mayer had sent a string of sixty-one flawless oriental pearls of ‘a fine, warm, rosy tint’ with a diamond clasp to a potential buyer in Paris.12 The pearls had taken ten years to collect and the necklace was known as ‘The Mona Lisa of Pearls’ because of the lustre and quality of the gems, which were perfectly matched and graded. Considered the finest pearl necklace in existence, it was insured by Lloyds Underwriters for £150,000. Unfortunately, the prospective buyer chose not to purchase the pearls and the necklace was returned by registered post in a wooden box, wrapped in blue linen and sealed with seven large red seals. When the parcel arrived back in London, Mayer broke the intact seals and opened the box to find that the necklace was missing. Bizarrely, in its place were sugar lumps and a section of a French newspaper. Not wanting to make the huge insurance pay-out, Lloyds offered a reward of £10,000 for the necklace’s return. After a short investigation, the police arrested Joseph Grizzard, a well-known jewel thief, but the pearls were still missing. Two weeks later, they reappeared after a member of Grizzard’s gang panicked and dropped the pearls, which were wrapped in a small brown parcel, into a gutter in Highbury. A passer-by saw him do this and after opening the intriguing packet he handed one of the priceless pearls to a street urchin, who then played marbles with it. He gave the rest to the police and received the reward. Max Mayer never tried to sell the pearls as a single piece again. Instead, they were divided. By the time of the Christie’s Pearl Auction it seems his pearl collecting was on a less ambitious scale.

  Although more women bought items at this auction than was usual at Christie’s sales, the male professionals still bought the vast majority of the lots. Journalists claimed that few women had the ‘courage’ to bid beyond the sum of £50 at auctions and many were ‘overawed by those plain-clothes policemen of the collecting world – the dealers’. The amateur females were deterred by the self-assurance of the ‘top-hatted gentry of the trade’ who were backed by commissions. Apparently, these ladies often went to auctions intending to bid but ended up watching the items they wanted fall for less than they would have paid to the ‘unperturbed Amors and Andrades [dealer] of St James’s Street and the neighbourhood’, their feminine ‘fluttering hesitation’ ending in misses.13 Birdie Wernher was one of the few women with the confidence and independent income to compete on equal terms with the men. At the Pearl Auction she bought two necklaces, however, rather than keeping them for herself she gave them back to be sold again.

  Reflecting a changing society, where financiers, war profiteers and entrepreneurs had more readily available money than ancient aristocratic families, Lady Wernher was one of the few titled bidders of the day. The only other person with a title to buy pearls was Lord Rowallan. Born Cameron Corbett, he was a property developer who bought Rowallan Castle in Kilmarnock, Scotland, as his country estate and he was created a baron in 1911. Known for his strong social conscience and as a generous benefactor, he bought a pearl necklace composed of seventy-one pearls with a ruby clasp for £1,400. His wartime experience reflected the mixed emotions of sorrow and thanksgiving that lay behind so many of the pearls’ stories. During the war, all three of his children, including his only daughter Elsie, served their country. As a widower left to ‘hold the fort’ on the Rowallan estate, he was lonely. However, he made no attempt to dissuade them. His eldest son, Godfrey, wrote, ‘He knew the grave threats our small country faced from the mighty German war machine, and as a Corbett he was committed to the philosophy of service and sacrifice.’14

  It was no surprise that Elsie wanted to play her part in the war like her brothers. Her upbringing had filled her with unconventional ideas and ideals. Several of her late mother’s friends had been militant suffragettes and they influenced her. She had always longed to be a doctor and as a child she used to play with a toy Red Cross hospital while her brothers played with toy soldiers. Before the war she had little outlet for her potential. A gauche young woman, the balls and shooting parties that were part of the social season left her unsatisfied. As soon as war was declared, she could not wait to be actively involved. Aged 21 she became a Red Cross nurse and went to Serbia.

  From May to August 1915 she worked in a children’s fever hospital. She then moved to a surgical hospital where, along with other members of the unit, she was taken prisoner by the invading enemy when Austria–Hungary and Germany launched an offensive against Serbia in the autumn. With characteristic sangfroid, in a letter to her father she assured him that she was well and receiving considerate treatment. She explained, ‘Being taken prisoner is not nearly so exciting as it sounds.’15 She wrote that both friends and foes in Serbia always respected the Red Cross and so she never experienced anything other than ‘the most wonderful helpfulness’.16

  Elsie and her comrades were held prisoner for four months before the Germans agreed to repatriate them. In February 1916, she returned to England looking tired and haggard. However, she was undeterred by her experience and a few months later she went back to work with the Scottish Women’s Hospital’s Motor Ambulance Column. Frequently facing enemy fire, Elsie would drive her ambulance car through rain and snow as fast as she could in the mountains, along treacherous roads with hairpin bends and unfenced precipices. Sometimes the patients she had collected would be screaming out with pain from their wounds in the back of her ambulance, but Elsie was undeterred. On one occasion, the pin in the brake pedal suddenly broke and she bounced to the end of a cart track before coming to rest. However, armed with her new skill in mechanics,
Elsie soon sorted it out and was on the road again. She called her ambulance car ‘Diana’ because she jumped like a hunter over any obstacle.17

  Camping out in tents, Elsie loved the exhilaration of her Serbian life. She admitted that in spite of the language difficulties she found conversation much easier with the different nationalities she came across than with the young men she had hunted and danced with at home.18 Her dedication was recognised when she was mentioned in Despatches for her ‘conscientious and hard work in the evacuation of the wounded’. During one year alone she had driven 9,153 miles and carried 1,122 patients.19 As she wrote in her memoirs, ‘Such danger and hardship as we did encounter were things that I would not have changed for almost anything else life might have brought me.’20

  Both of Lord Rowallan’s sons also took great risks for their country. His youngest son, Arthur, could not wait to leave school and train for the Royal Flying Corps. He became engrossed in building model aeroplanes and was completely calm and cheerful at the thought of active service. Knowing the dangers involved in flying, he showed a fatalism typical of his generation. Shortly after he first took to the air in 1916 he was shot down and killed.

  The peer’s eldest son, Godfrey, had a luckier escape than his younger brother. He had fought with the Ayrshire Yeomanry at Gallipoli in 1915 before transferring to the Grenadier Guards and serving on the Western Front. In March 1918, his battalion experienced one of the heaviest bombardments of the war in the German Spring Offensive. He was trying to dig out wounded soldiers who were half buried when he heard a swish and a thud and then felt himself being thrown up in the air and bombarded with clods of soil. He tried to pull out his left leg and found that he could not bend it above the knee. He recalled that it felt ‘funny and unreal’ as if it was floating. Soon his whole body was incredibly painful and he felt as if he was going far away. People were running past and he tried to follow but he could not move. His comrades said they would come back later and help him, so Godfrey was left lying in limbo, passing in and out of consciousness for several hours before four soldiers rescued him and took him on a stretcher to a first aid post.21

  At the time of his injury, Godfrey was engaged to Gwyn Grimond, whose father founded the jute industry in Dundee. They met at a cousin’s wedding and Gwyn first really attracted his attention when she played tennis in daring black stockings. At first he had held back from proposing to her because he felt it was wrong that a young girl like her might soon become a war widow, but on his next leave he could not resist asking her. She readily agreed and a date was set for their wedding in June.22 When he was injured, his first thought was of the wedding. He was sent to a specialist femoral hospital at Étaples and when a doctor came to see him, Godfrey’s initial question was, ‘When will I get home?’

  He said, ‘Oh in about 6 weeks.’

  Godfrey argued, ‘I can’t possibly wait as long as that. I’m getting married next month.’23

  However, he had no choice; the wedding had to be postponed and when it finally took place in St Andrews on 14 August 1918 it was a day of even greater celebration. All of the couple’s family and friends knew what they had been through. Godfrey had been awarded the Military Cross for his valour.

  The local newspaper described it as one of the most popular weddings that had ever taken place in the town.24 Recognising Godfrey’s injuries, the Bishop of St Andrews kept the ceremony brief, the whole service lasting only fifteen minutes, and it was agreed that the groom should not kneel down.

  The pearls bought by Lord Rowallan at Christie’s were a symbol of new beginnings. After the wedding, he handed his Scottish estate over to his son, making Godfrey the laird of 6,000 acres. The following year, Godfrey also became a father when Gwyn gave birth to their son. Elsie never married, instead she spent the rest of her life living with Kathleen Dillon, a fellow VAD who had been her constant companion in Serbia. We do not know whether Lord Rowallan bought the Red Cross Pearl Necklace for his daughter-in-law or daughter, but either lady would have been a deserving person to receive it after the challenges they had faced during the war.25

  After Lord Rowallan’s necklace, there were a further twenty-nine lots. Reflecting the wide variety and quality of pearls on offer, prices paid during the afternoon ranged from £22,000 for the Norbury necklace to £30 for the children’s necklaces. Bidding in the auction lasted for three and a half hours. As the hammer fell on one lot after another, Mr Anderson’s smile never wavered as he sought, found and inspired members of his audience to compete with one another and bid higher.

  The whole event was carried out with the understated professionalism expected of Christie’s. As one newspaper explained, ‘A Christie’s auctioneer is not like other members of his profession. He is not garrulous, he never jokes, he never describes his lots in unnecessary detail.’ The journalist added that if the imperial crown should come up for sale at the auction house, ‘the dignified gentleman with the hammer would describe it dispassionately as “lot so and so”, and leave it at that’.26 The Red Cross Pearl Necklaces needed no hyperbole, their beauty spoke for itself.

  At the end of the afternoon, the final sum raised was £85,290 12s 4d, and by the time donations and money raised at the Grafton Galleries and Christie’s exhibition were added the total was nearly £100,000. This was a vast amount of money, given that a gardener working for one of the women who donated to the appeal would be paid about £24 a year in 1918 and the top salary for a chef was £150.27 As Sir Arthur Stanley for the Red Cross told the audience, everyone involved should be proud of the result.

  The money was much needed, and The Times wrote:

  It may be more than a fancy that the money given for these sacred things will do more than other money could do for those on whom it will be spent. The guns are silent, the trenches are empty, but the victims of the guns and of the trenches are still with us in their thousands, still needing care and sympathy. It will be long indeed before we whom they have saved will have paid our debt to them; and then only will the tears be dried, the memories purged of all bitterness.28

  Sixteen

  PEARL RIVALS

  The Red Cross Pearl Auction marked the end of an era and the beginning of a challenging new one. With the war over, the Red Cross hospitals at home and abroad began to close. The money raised was now needed for the rehabilitation of returning soldiers.

  The women who had given their pearls, worked in the hospitals and served on fundraising committees would now return to their peacetime roles. However, after their wartime experiences the world could never be the same again. The romantic idea of heroic knights riding off into battle to fight a holy war had died on the fields of Flanders; it could not survive in the brutal reality of modern warfare. The world had also changed for pearls, no longer would they remain the exclusive possessions of the elite; in the post-war world there would be new types of pearls, new fashions and different women wearing them. The Red Cross Pearl Necklace Auction was one of the last times when natural pearls would reign supreme. Soon, cultured and artificial versions would rival their supremacy. The traditional values they represented, of chivalry, piety and patriotism, would be equally challenged in the coming decades.

  The formal end of the Pearl Necklace Appeal was on 23 May 1919. Lady Northcliffe went to Marlborough House to present a cheque to her friend and colleague, Princess Victoria who, after thanking those who had given so generously, handed it to Sir Robert Hudson, chairman of the Joint Finance Committee of the British Red Cross Society and the Order of St John of Jerusalem.

  Although the reporting of this final meeting was bland, it concealed a secret love story that was one of the keys to the Pearl Necklace Appeal’s success. Lady Northcliffe and Sir Robert Hudson had been in love with each other for years. Molly Northcliffe had first met the widower in 1908. Over the next decade a complicated love triangle developed between Lord and Lady Northcliffe and Sir Robert. Divorce was not an option because Northcliffe still relied on his wife and no one wanted the scandal it w
ould have caused, so compromises had to be made. As the years passed, Northcliffe accepted Hudson as a friend, not a rival. Although they were opposites in character and political beliefs they respected each other.

  Throughout the war they had worked together on The Times Red Cross Fund. No newspaper had ever worked so closely with a charity. All gifts of money, large or small, received by the Red Cross were acknowledged in the newspaper and treated as being part of The Times Fund. The organisation estimated that 2,000 columns of The Times had been placed at their disposal as a free gift to their cause. With uncharacteristic modesty, Lord Northcliffe explained, ‘All a newspaper can do in such a movement is to act as a constant reminder, and a faithful seconder.’1 However, Sir Robert and his Red Cross colleagues knew the incalculable value of this free publicity, declaring, ‘Without the constant help of the Press our needs could never have been made known to the vast scattered public from whom we have drawn our support.’2

  By the end of 1918 the amount raised in the fund had reached more than £14 million. Acknowledging the achievement, King George wrote a letter of thanks emphasising, ‘the value of the help thus rendered to our own sick and wounded cannot be estimated’.3

  Over the war years, the relationship between Northcliffe and Hudson went beyond the professional to become personal. When Northcliffe travelled on his war mission to America in 1917, he had a premonition he would not return so he asked Robert to look after his wife.4 The following year, working together on the Red Cross Pearl Appeal brought the love triangle even closer. While Molly headed the campaign, Robert, as head of the Red Cross finances, was often by her side, joining her at the exhibition and the auction. However, her husband also played a vital role, providing the publicity which helped to make the appeal such a success. The two men and Lady Northcliffe worked brilliantly as a team, as was evident during the attempt to change the lottery law in Parliament in August 1918. One member of the triumvirate would follow up on the other’s earlier move, using their different skills and contacts to achieve the best result for the Red Cross.