In Tasmania

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  Nonetheless, this does not account for the variety of references to Hordern, leave aside to Orden, Horadern or Horde.

  In his English Devon, he had cut a prosperous figure parading his prize cattle through the streets of Braunton. He had taken a lively interest in local government. He was on the school board and was a member of the parish council and also of the Rural District council. And there were the county set he mixed with.

  In Tasmania, there are no secondary characters. Reasonably well known in England, Hordern ought to have been quadruply so in North Motton, a place where news of the health of the most unassuming person was published. The following was a typical item in the local paper: ‘The many friends of Mrs Elliott (Sprent) will be pleased to know that she is recovering from her recent accident.’ Nor was unpopularity an impediment to a kind notice. A man who died in Hordern’s neighbourhood in 1906 was described as ‘the possessor of a blunt manner’, but was still thought ‘very highly of by those who knew him well’. The ‘Lord of Gratton’ was precisely the sort of person that there should have been stories about. Why were there none?

  The greatest asset an immigrant can possess is the ability to get on at once with his neighbours, but at the Ulverstone museum Hordern appears in none of the records. He was not a member of the Ulverstone Gentlemen’s Club (for ‘social intercourse and mutual recreations during the long winter evenings’); nor was he invited to play in the North Motton Ladies’ and Gentlemen’s cricket match, batting with a broom handle and fielding with his left hand; nor was he listed as a participant at any of the knick-knack parties at the North Motton Church, nor among the congregation gathered to hear the Reverend J.S. Miles’s address on the The Rock of Creation or, on the following Thursday evenings, his series on the Apocalypse. He was not even a member of the North Motton tennis club. He does not appear to be known by anyone. I cannot even find a record of his death.

  ‘I find it very strange,’ said the woman at the museum, ‘because they did an obituary for every man and his dog. He must have done something horrific.’

  It might have meant, of course, that he had developed the same reticence as Richard Blackmore. But this was not quite true, as I found out from Ivy.

  ‘Grandfather would go wearing spats to collect the mail’ – six miles to the post office in North Motton, across muddy fields – ‘which was a bit of a novelty round here.’

  It is a vivid image. Hordern walking through the paths to collect his letters. Wearing white shiny spats. I wondered what on earth this once kind and hospitable and nattily dressed man had done to make himself a pariah in the local community.

  At Boode, he had been carefree and generous. The most generous person my grandfather had ever known. Marooned in Stoke Rivers with nothing left to give away, he clung morbidly to the few relics of the life he had lost.

  Seldom absent was the image of the perch from which he had tumbled: the two estates in his family’s possession since the Middle Ages. Ivy showed me a letter from Laurie Tongs, a cousin who used to farm Hordern’s land at Stoke Rivers. Tongs sometimes had meals with Hordern and his wife. They ate off Hordern’s silver service and afterwards Tongs would be shown ‘the lovely homes on photographs of where your people were born’. Tongs described the couple as ‘so very interesting’, and said of Mrs Hordern: ‘Your grandmother although not accustomed to domestic duties was a wonderful cook and housekeeper.’ Tongs was more circumspect when it came to Hordern. Between the lines, the former landowner emerges as a Coleridgian mariner desperate for company, whose friends were either dead, fictional or beyond the pale. ‘Your grandfather was an inspiration, telling me of his experiences and lending me books. He loaned me Westward Ho! and said that the church dignitary mentioned was one of their previous families.’ Hordern also lent Tongs his treasured red-bound copy of Lorna Doone, saying that ‘half of it was written in his home and he had himself accompanied the author gathering information’. He showed Tongs a photograph of the church where Lorna and John Ridd married. He was obsessed with the book. ‘Mr Hordern told me that he rode to the hounds with a descendant of John Ridd’s,’ and – the familiar boast – ‘that when young he played tennis with the German Kaiser.’

  So – why the pariah? In 1907, at the Devonport annual show, a Shropshire ram was sold whose sire was ‘Kaiser William’. This was the last trace that I found of Hordern the breeder of champion stock. The newspaper did not give his name, only that of his ram. Then it struck me: Kaiser William was a piece of the jigsaw.

  In the Tasmanian bush, stories that Hordern had told about his friendship with the German Emperor boomeranged back to haunt him. In the opinion of Tasmania’s chief justice, the Habsburg and Hohenzollern families were afflicted with hereditary insanity and notorious throughout the world ‘for evil and eccentric living, fouled by disease and debauchery’.

  Nearly 2,500 Tasmanians were killed in the trenches of the First World War, more than a third of all males between the ages of 18 and 44. Tasmanian parents expected of their children the sort of consoling courage displayed by Sergeant Stanley Robert McDougall, a 27-year-old blacksmith from Recherche. He was awarded the Victoria Cross after he attacked an enemy post alone, killing seven men and capturing a machine gun. ‘He turned on the enemy firing from the hip … seized a bayonet and charged other advancing Germans, killing three men and an enemy officer who was about to kill an Australian officer. He subsequently used a Lewis gun on the enemy, killing many and enabling many others to be taken prisoner.’ Returned soldiers were invited to recruiting parties at which films of battles were screened. Afterwards they rammed home the message that Tasmania was no place for a healthy young man. ‘We have not room in Australia for fit flag-wavers,’ called out a hefty lad at a meeting in Ulverstone, ‘but there is still plenty of room in France for a man with a rifle.’

  North Motton alone sent 49 men of whom 14 paid with their lives, among them Corporal Arthur Baker. In 1914, Arthur married Hordern’s daughter Ethel. Three years later he was shot dead at Passchendaele. His grave was never found.

  The same year saw three of Hordern’s sons fighting in France. Ivy brought out for me some of the silk cards, decorated with purple and green pansies, that her uncle Brodie had written to her mother from a muddy field in Europe. One silk card was stamped ‘Love from the Front’: ‘Expect by the time this reaches you all hands will be busy preparing for a picnic on the Leven River. How we boys would like to be with you.’ He was writing from the battlefield. ‘I can see the shells bursting behind the firing line. I can see an aeroplane not far from here, but we all like France tip top.’ In another letter Brodie mentioned having spent his leave in ‘Dear Old Blighty’ where he had seen their wounded brother Joe in a rest camp. He was unaware that in Tasmania their eldest brother Will had died, aged 35, of tuberculosis.

  Will had contracted his illness in the Boer War where he fought before sailing to join his family at Stoke Rivers. He was buried at Sprent, somewhere near the hulking tomb of Colonel Crawford, whose coffin the No. 1 West Devon Company had escorted here through the village that was once called Eden. When I asked about Will’s grave, the woman in the Ulverstone museum said: ‘It’s a simple grave. Unmarked. All on his own. But he has no headstone. No obituary. No nothing. He’s not even registered in the cemetery.’

  XIX

  THOMAS MANN IN A LETTER ALLUDES TO THE DEPTH OF HOSTILITY that his countrymen experienced in the antipodes. ‘Another is held prisoner … in Australia. He has the hardest time of it, although not physically.’ An anti-German mania raged through Tasmania before and during the First World War. More than a thousand Tasmanians had been born in Germany, including 340 emigrants who came in 1870 by bounty. Many of them lived in Bismarck. The village swiftly changed its name to Collinsvale (although maintaining the name of its potatoes). In Launceston, naval reserves with fixed bayonets encircled a building hoping to smoke out a reported spy. When a terrified Karl Haverland emerged from the Commercial Travellers’ Association, he held up documents to prove
that he was exempt from German military service.

  Meetings were held in Hobart to discuss Germany’s use of poison gas and the rape of women by Prussian officers. Homing pigeons were confined to their cages; and in this paranoia informers and nosy parkers flourished. Tasmanians were urged to treat Germans as a race apart. ‘Cut off their telephones, close their businesses and cease social intercourse with them,’ wrote ‘Briton’ in the Mercury. The same paper carried headlines like: ‘Men and Women Torn Open with Bayonets and Roasted to Death.’ A.W. Loone of the Legislative Council recommended that Germans be torn limb from limb. Anti-German attitudes were particularly strong on the north-west coast where those alleged to be ‘pro-German’ became prime targets. Down the road in Ulverstone, the Austrian Gustav Weindorfer, a solitary-minded naturalist and founder of the Cradle Mountain National Park, watched his dog die from strychnine poisoning after vindictive rumours that his kitchen stove (carried up to his chalet by Errol Flynn’s father) was in fact a wireless transmitter for establishing contact with enemy ships – and his clothes-line an aerial. A figure such as Hordern walking on his own in a sparsely populated area in the dress of an English country gentleman was a strong candidate for suspicion. That he might have named a ram after the emperor of the enemy was a matter for franker concern. The discovery that he had been ‘a bosom friend of the Kaiser’ – that clinched it.

  No wonder he was cold-shouldered. No wonder he kept to himself. No wonder he did not have an obituary. And there was another reason.

  Crawford had warned that Union was Strength. ‘Individual unsupported action in such enterprises is erroneous and too often the forerunner and the cause of failure.’ Down in his Sleepy Hollow, Hordern was all alone.

  A clubbable man, to whom a good dinner and riotous party were necessities of life, he had chosen in North Motton a society that was limited. ‘In England, he had partied, partied, partied,’ one of his descendants told me. In Tasmania, he barely left his front door. As Edward Braddon had found out, living a few miles away: ‘dinner parties (those saddest of festivities) do not trouble the Tasmanian’. Braddon’s struggle to combat tedium would have been Hordern’s. ‘If, when some neighbour tells me of his Brahma hen laying a score of unexpected eggs, a cynical feeling shows itself in me, I check it in its birth and am all interest.’ Compelled to take comfort in ‘homely pleasures’, Hordern withdrew more and more into himself, his books and his bottles.

  Broadly confined to Stoke Rivers, he cannot have found his memories excellent company; nor his neighbours, who would not have cared a fig for Lorna Doone. Laurie Tongs was an exception: he could read and write. Many in North Motton could not. They could not tell the time by a clock, but relied on the morning and evening star. They planted crops according to phases of the moon and buried their dogs and cats facing east. They ate off earthen floors from handleless bowls and spoke in an ancient dialect with words like ‘teem’ meaning ‘to drink’.

  ‘You don’t meet anybody here who’s read anything. They think it’s swank,’ says a Somerset Maugham character stuck in Samoa. He could only face the evenings, wrote Maugham, ‘when he was fortified by liquor’.

  And drink is what I suspect Hordern did.

  One day in the Ulverstone museum I let slip to the archivist about champagne bottles hurtling through the window. She gave me a sharp look.

  ‘You do realise we are in the Bible belt. If you were a drinker that would really put you on the outer. And may I say that no matter we’re a hundred years down the track, we’re no different. If anyone comes in here with yellow hair and a ring in his nose, he’d never get in. Terrible, isn’t it?’ She looked around. The room was empty. Not a ring in sight. Even so, she felt the need to bend her head and speak in a low voice. ‘My grandfather – because he was a drinker, they never helped him one bit. That’s not what I call a good Christian society.’

  The pieties of a place increase astronomically the further you are from home. North Motton had a Methodist and an Anglican church – St John’s Church of England, consecrated in 1889 by Bishop Montgomery. ‘Church would be full,’ remembered Ivy, whose family filled a pew ‘back a bit on the left’. The church was more than the spiritual centre of the village. It was the focus of its social life; the venue for dances, tennis matches and knick-knack parties. The woman in the museum told me: ‘That’s all they had – the church.’

  The intensity of religious feeling was characterised by one lady in Wynyard who crossed out in her Bible anything she found objectionable, deleting the entire ‘Song of Solomon’ and any reference to biological functions. Hordern’s wife was a similar case. Her Christianity, already muscular, had toughened since coming to live in Stoke Rivers.

  Ivy remembered her grandmother getting in a horse and cart to go to St John’s. On Sundays she went twice. Mrs Hordern was so religious, Ivy said, that she did not allow a daily paper in the home, only the weekly Sunday Companion, old copies of which Ivy pored over as a child.

  ‘We read and read them, lovely stories.’

  ‘What kind of stories?’

  ‘How the sins of the fathers were visited on the children.’

  It was Hordern’s misfortune that he had not migrated to Tasmania during Kemp’s time, when alcohol and not potatoes was the currency. It was unfortunate, too, that out of all the places in Tasmania he could have chosen to live he had selected a temperance zone. North Motton was no place for a drinker, even a reformed one. During the First World War it was even less tolerant.

  Lloyd George’s conviction that strong drink was a far greater foe than Germany was boosted by George V, who ordered the royal household to abstain from alcohol during hostilities, save for medicinal purposes. In Tasmania, his bold example was followed by plenty in the north-west. Temperance and Total Abstinence societies sprang up faster than thistles. The Early Closing of Liquor Bars League, a campaign to stop hotels and bars from serving alcohol from six o’clock in the evening, won an overwhelming majority and was stoked by enthusiastic Baptists like Harry Benjafield, who believed that drink caused men’s wounds to reopen. In letters to the press, the white-bearded Benjafield – prize pear-grower, vaccination expert and author of Bimetallism: a remedy for our depression and How and why do I breathe? – estimated drink to be ‘ten times worse than the Devastating Hun’. It was in the evening, he warned, from the hours of 6 p.m. till 10 p.m., that Drink linked arms with the Kaiser to wage his infernal war against the human race.

  As a childhood friend of the Kaiser and a drunk who had lost heart Hordern would not have stood a chance.

  Geoff Williams was a churchwarden in the area for 42 years. He confirmed to me: ‘I heard he was a drunkard.’

  I had another question. ‘I have a perception that the Horderns thought of themselves as better than anyone else.’

  ‘Spot on.’

  And I realised that Hordern had suffered the fate of the man in the Somerset Maugham story: ‘They resented his attitude of superiority … and they did not see why he should put on airs.’ I could see him with a disappointed expression that his natural kindliness made off-putting, staring at his wife and family with glazed eyes, swaying slightly on the veranda and clutching a six-week-old copy of the Live Stock Journal that emphasised his exile.

  XX

  ON ONE OF MY VISITS, IVY AND MAUD TOOK ME DOWN THE HILL TO see Hordern’s grave in North Motton.

  The cemetery was reached past a weatherboard house. A luminous skeleton dangled against the window and over the fence a polo match was going on. Hordern’s was the first grave we came to, a grey slab of weathered marble set on a concrete plinth. Some of the lead letters spelling his name had been removed or bent back by young fingers. His name in its final misspelling read: DERN.

  ‘Real young tinkers!’ snorted Ivy, ashamed not to have come here in a while.

  Nettles grew along the side of the grave which abutted a red granite memorial to Hordern’s wife, who had died in 1939.

  There was a whinny and from over the fence a piebald
head looked at us. Glancing back at Hordern’s gravestone, I saw that the absent metal letters exposed a pattern of nail holes like woodworm. A jack-jumper ant crawled over his age – he was 63 – and disappeared into the nettles.

  ‘When did he die?’

  Ivy, the archivist, retrieved the date from her head. ‘He died on August 16, 1918.’

  ‘Mum – did she go to the funeral?’ Maud asked.

  ‘I think she couldn’t. She was working at the post office.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  Ivy ripped off a nettle. ‘With the drink, wasn’t it? He asked Granny to forgive him before he died, for what he’d done to her, losing her that money and what they had to do coming out here. He must have died a happy man to be forgiven, and then he must have died a horrible death.’

  ‘Cirrhosis?’

  ‘That’s right. He was like that before he ever got in with Granny. He only drank milk when he used to go courting her. Didn’t want her to know, I suppose. It was the life they lived. You know those rich people, you start socially – and then …’

  Another of Ivy’s relatives was partial to alcohol. ‘I said: “Send her up to us. She wouldn’t have time to drink.”’

  I dug out the edition of the North-West Advocate for Saturday, August 17, 1918.

  There is nothing like reading a newspaper on the day after a death to remind you that life goes on; that the skeleton in the cupboard is also a jumble of harmless bones. The local temperance branch meeting had decided to form a Band of Hope. The North Motton tennis club was seventeen shillings and fourpence in credit for the season. The film The Great Secret was playing at the Majestic Theatre in Devonport. And a new advertisement: ‘Worms: the children’s enemy’. Comstock’s Dead Shot worm pellets were a safe, sure and reliable remedy in the shape of a lolly and children could take them without hesitation. Plus of course Vitadatio: ‘You may publish this as you think fit … I never felt better than I am today.’