Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  Tommy Bouch also suffered from unrequited love. He was a rich fox-hunting squire, Master of the Belvoir and a man of greatness in that hunting world; but the Coterie saw nothing great in such a role and found him elderly and something of a bore. He adored Diana and wrote her countless poems, some of which were mediocre, most worse. Diana, who considered the typical Belvoir house-party to consist of ‘a collection of senile, decayed relations and a second-childhood aunt’, welcomed him as a county neighbour and a generous friend, but found he could be a trial in London, especially when his jealousy led him to call three or four times a day and bombard her with letters in the intervals.

  And then there was Duff Cooper. His ancestry was interesting. His mother, Lady Agnes, was sister to the Duke of Fife. After two elopements and a divorce she found herself ostracized by polite society and sought solace in nursing. There she met and married Alfred Cooper, a surgeon of considerable ability who specialized in the more embarrassing complaints. His carriage was well known in Mayfair and the fact that ‘Cooper’s clap-trap’ had been seen outside a noble house was the subject of ribald speculation in the clubs. Mr Cooper would have enjoyed the ribaldry; he is supposed to have remarked that he and his wife between them had inspected the private parts of half the peers in London. In old age he grew eccentric, wore white kid gloves to shoot and refused to play bridge until the looking glasses had been draped in cloth so as to remove the chance of cheating.

  Duff himself was far from eligible. A young man working for the Foreign Office examination and living on a small allowance from his mother would not anyway have seemed an enticing prospect to the Duchess of Rutland, but Duff had more against him than that. ‘Writing in my sixty-fourth year,’ he claimed in his autobiography, ‘I can truthfully say that since I reached the age of discretion I have consistently drunk more than most people would say was good for me.’ He might have said the same thing about eating. He was notoriously unsafe with women, viewing almost anyone between the age of sixteen and sixty as his rightful prey. His temper was ferocious; his indolence, except when something particularly interested him, was formidable. He was one of the least tolerant of men; when asked why he had been so rude to a fashionable designer he snarled: ‘I don’t like men who live, by choice, out of their own country. I don’t like interior decorators. I don’t like Germans. I don’t like buggers and I don’t like Christian Scientists.’

  What to the Duchess seemed irresponsibility was to Diana deliciously dashing. Duff’s vices were balanced by a crop of virtues. He was courageous, loyal and generous to a fault. He was exceptionally funny and mocked himself with more vigour than he did anybody else. He wrote and talked with exquisite facility and did anything he set his hand to with competence always and usually with distinction. His love of life was fierce; his failings, indeed, arose generally from his determination to enjoy it to the full. He was perennially optimistic and there were few occasions when his presence did not enhance the pleasure of the participants.

  For a long time Duff was no more than one of the many young men in Diana’s life. ‘Our letters cross as quick as knitting needles,’ wrote Duff in March 1913, but he was in love with at least two other women at the time and the correspondence was more for their mutual entertainment than to fuel the fires of passion. He wrote ruefully to report that he had been crossed in love. ‘Christ I have reason to believe is crazy about me so I shall probably marry the church … I think you are well out of it really. You did not know till now that my feet are ever so slightly web, also I am a somnambulist when crossed, also very decadent and theatrical, inclined to look fast.’ His relationships with women were for Duff an enthralling game; his friendships with other men lacked the savour of flirtation but seemed to him at that time immeasurably more important. He was almost as reluctant to commit himself as Diana, though in his case the reasons were less complex, being little more than a reluctance to sacrifice the delights of bachelor independence. With Diana, too, he feared rebuff, not only from her parents but from her. He was more sincere than was his wont when he wrote to her: ‘… as for loving you best in the world, I think that might happen all too easily. I am really rather frightened that it will, for I feel that you would be terrible then and have no pity.’

  Usually his love-letters were romantic, ecstatic, delicately ironic; a little too well-honed to stem from the heart. After seeing her portrait painted by Sir John Lavery he erupted:

  If I were a painter then you would be properly painted. Not once but a thousand times, in every dress you have ever honoured, in every setting you have ever shone in. And if I were a millionaire I would found a picture gallery in which only pictures of you might be exhibited. The gallery would be open only to the nobility and clergy, the entrance fee would be £1,000 and visitors would have to take off their shoes on entering. And if I were an architect I would design that gallery to look something like a church but more like a heathen temple. And the best of your pictures should hang above the high altar where the pale-faced high priest of Dianolatry would worship every hour. And if I were a musician I would make music so passionate that when it poured out of the temple organ it would reach the souls of your thousand idolaters and make them drunk like wine. And if I were a poet I would write psalms and prayers so beautiful and so unhappy that your picture, half intoxicated with the incense streaming up from the censers, would stretch out its hands in pity to the worshippers below. And if I were God I should let all those unfortunates die in the ecstasy of their devotion – all except one who should love for ever after in a palace of pearl and purple with you sitting on a throne of chrysoprase by his side. But unfortunately I am neither artist, millionaire, architect, poet, musician or even God, but only a rather sentimental, shy young man with ambitions beyond my energy and dreams beyond my income. So shall I send you a small box of chocolates, or would you rather have a postal order?

  It was irresistible nonsense, but no less nonsensical for being irresistible. Diana relished it but did not take it seriously. The Duchess too would have appreciated it, indeed she appreciated Duff and most of her daughter’s other friends, enjoyed their attentions, only jibbed when it seemed possible that they might present themselves as putative sons-in-law. Some years later Diana summarized her mother’s opinion of the young men in her life at this period: ‘Edward, drunk and dangerous; Patrick, the same and hideous; Vernon, mad; Charles, just a gasp of horror; Alan, gesture of sickness; Claud, never heard him speak or met his eye; Raymond, missed my character.’ The description was a caricature; but the least suspicion that her daughter was becoming too fond of one of these ineligibles was enough to set the Duchess fuming. Diana’s friends recognized the obsession and delighted in feeding it. Raymond Asquith wrote to his sister: ‘I wish I might live to see the Duchess of Rutland’s face on the simultaneous announcement of engagement between Marjorie and Oc [Arthur Asquith] and Diana and Cis [Cyril Asquith] respectively. As I don’t belong to an Empire-building family, I take a certain pride in belonging to a mother-wrecking one.’ The Duchess had confidence in Diana’s prudence; yet as she surveyed the career of her headstrong daughter she must have asked herself from time to time whether her confidence might not prove misplaced.

  *

  The last years before the First World War were the most carefree of Diana’s life. The family – an extended family with a plethora of aunts and cousins – would spend Christmas and see in the New Year at Belvoir. ‘That ass Diana doesn’t like country or tree-tops or chapel practice or anything,’ complained Marjorie. ‘It is a waste, by Jove!’ Diana did indeed feel cut off in this remote fastness: at other times of the year a retinue of male admirers would usually follow her to Belvoir, but Christmas was sacred to the clan, with only the Trees thrown in as a sop to the children and the Duchess.

  This was the season of the servants’ ball, ‘that most appalling of all orgies’. Whatever members of the family were at Belvoir had to attend for at least six dances. Nervous giggling outside the door was followed by dances with the butl
er, the chauffeur, the head groom. The waltz was an animated affair in which Diana’s partner, after four rounds of vigorous pat-a-cake with her knees and feet, inquired, ‘Shall we do a little gliding, milady?’ Someone presumably must have enjoyed the affair, but not the daughters of the house. ‘I adore children of the soil and what Viola calls peasants, and prize-fighters, and all plebeians practically, but I abhor genteel servants,’ wrote Diana splenetically. ‘They’re despicable for their trade alone. I’d sooner be a cod-fish than a bower.’

  Diana’s affection for peasants and prize-fighters illustrated the romantic illusion of the British upper classes that they understood the workers and could establish a good relationship with them if only the middle classes would go away. She knew nothing of the problems of the proletariat, let alone of that still unborn concept ‘The Third World’. If poverty or misery was thrust under her nose she was as distressed as any other teenage girl, but it would not have occurred to her to seek them out; she would indeed actively have avoided them. Socialists were either like Charles Lister, well-intentioned but misguided idealists, or dangerous revolutionaries jealous of the good fortune of their superiors. Diana and most of her friends were unthinking conservatives. At Bakewell, not far from Rowsley, she canvassed for Lord Kerry, the Unionist candidate, against the moderately radical Mr Himners. She found the electorate divided ‘between fools and eloquent wise men’; enjoyed the former but was perpetually confounded by the latter.

  ‘Weel, I’ve always voted Cavendish and hope to till I die,’ said one old lady. Diana pointed out that Mr Victor Cavendish had been Duke of Devonshire for eighteen months and Lord Kerry was member in his place.

  ‘I don’t fancy Kerry. He’s a wee bloody mouse.’

  ‘Well, anyway, he’s preferable to Himmer, my pretty.’

  ‘Who’s Himmer?’

  ‘Why, his opponent!’

  ‘Do you mean Himners?’

  ‘Oh, blast you, of course I do!’

  ‘Then why did you say Himmer? I believe you’re a suffragette!’

  The ‘wee bloody mouse Kerry’ won by over a thousand votes. Diana’s interest in politics was largely confined to the knockabout fun of elections. Certainly she was no suffragette and would have considered any such activity common and pointless. She had no wish to vote, being confident that she could get what she wanted from life without recourse to so arcane a method. No divine discontent stirred within her. When a clairvoyante predicted that she could accomplish whatever she wanted she wrote to Patrick Shaw-Stewart: ‘Sometimes I long to be a man and hear the mad claps of an appreciative multitude, but alas the longing doesn’t last long. There is no joy so lazy and delicious as to find one is a woman who depends.’

  When the family returned to London towards the middle of January it was to an endless sequence of concerts, operas, charity matinées, ballets and, above all, parties. London in the last years before the war was gripped by an almost frenetic gaiety, when, in Osbert Sitwell’s phrase, ‘the great, soft, headless amorphous mob of rich people of indeterminate origin produced by the business activities of the previous century was bent on pleasure’. The easiest way to obscure the difference between nouveaux riches and aristocrats was for the former to lure the latter to their houses with lavish entertainments. The presence of Lady Diana Manners was considered one of the ultimate accolades, proof to the hostess at least that she had made it to the inner circle.

  These years saw the birth of ragtime. New night-clubs burgeoned every week in which negro bands moaned platitudes about the Mason-Dixon line or stirred the hearts of their listeners with the syncopated rhythm of ‘Who Paid the Rent for Mrs Rip Van Winkle?’ Even in the magnificent halls of Stafford or Bridgewater House the fox-trot and the tango disturbed the aristocratic calm, though the more traditional Baron Ochs’s plaintive waltz from Der Rosenkavalier above all haunted those last London summers. Diana was considered somewhat raffish by the staider hostesses. The Cecils, who lived only one house away in Arlington Street, rarely visited their neighbours. Lord and Lady Salisbury felt that, though the Duchess of Rutland had amusing people to the house, ‘foreign actresses and people like that’, it was not quite the sort of place to which you sent your children; so the young Cecils were left somewhat wistfully outside. Sylvia Henley escorted Diana to a ball. At 2.30 a.m. she decided it was time for bed, but could see no sign of her charge. Diana finally reappeared from a night-club at 4.15. Such an excess might seem modest today but was dashing indeed in the climate of 1912 and 1913.

  The Edwardians adored dressing up. Diana’s first public appearance was aged fourteen as a Knight of the Round Table; since when, reported the Aberdeen Journal, ‘no fancy dress ball has been complete without her’. She was constantly being called on to make spectacular entries as the Queen of Sheba borne by sweating slaves or to play the central role in some tableau vivant depicting Titania surrounded by her fairies or ‘Venus and Child’ by an unknown Tuscan artist. She responded to such calls with alacrity, loving to be the centre of the picture and also finding in such extravagances a release from the constraints of everyday life. To dress up was a visual expression of her craving for new experience and her wish to be all things to all men. ‘Your game,’ wrote Duff Cooper perceptively, ‘is to play all games. Catherine of Russia one day, Mimi of Bohemia the next, David Copperfield’s child wife alternately with the Emperor Claudius’s only too grown-up one. Cleopatra sometimes, sometimes Desdemona, occasionally Juliet, still more occasionally Portia, but never, never Cordelia.’ Apotheosis of this fantasy world took place at Earl’s Court, where a replica of the courtyard at Warwick Castle provided the scene for a revival of the Eglinton Tournament. Lady Curzon was Queen of Beauty, but Diana stole the show in a black velvet Holbein dress designed by herself and wholly out of period, mounted on the horse that played Richard II’s Roan Barbary. By her side rode Prince Youssupoff on a snow-white Arab ‘foaming and flecking and pawing’.

  Diana was as stage-struck as any of her family and would have relished a chance to play Titania in the theatre rather than simpering in a tableau vivant. Herbert Tree would allow her a walk-on part in some of his productions, mingling with the crowd and muttering ‘Yes, Antony, we’ll lend you our ears’ at appropriate moments. Sometimes too she believed that she might have been a concert pianist and practised the Liebestod assiduously in the ballroom at Arlington Street. She told Alan Parsons that she could play it faultlessly ‘with the technique of the platform player. The face of nature is changed when one feels Richter fathoms beneath one.’

  Spiritualism was much in vogue in London society. Lady Wemyss told of a seance conducted by a Mrs Herbine, during which Harold Large addressed the gathering on the curious case of a man whose brain exuded a scent of sandalwood whenever he thought hard. Diana, seated on the floor, ‘rocked with ill-suppressed laughter at the grave absurdity with which HL told the tale’. Robust scepticism was Diana’s usual attitude; she visited palmists and clairvoyants for the fun of it, but with little expectation of enlightenment. When Letty, on the verge of her engagement to Ego Charteris, was assured with a plethora of convincing details that she was about to marry the man she loved, Diana assumed that the Duchess had done an efficient job of briefing the clairvoyant in advance. Yet her cynicism was not impregnable. When an aviator friend vanished in mid-Channel, she wrote to Marie Mathieu, a celebrated medium, to ask if he was really dead – hardly the behaviour of a sceptic. Her attitude, in fact, reflected the same eagerness to believe in something‚ yet reluctance to accept anything in particular, which marked her religious life. She inclined towards a vague and optimistic pantheism. When Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s mother died Diana wrote to him: ‘People here say, no one since the year dot has been as Godless as me, but it’s not true, is it? There is nobody in the world who had more trust in God, who is me and you, the stars, the dead, all. Of course it matters very little what one believes, so long as one believes in something. I, thank God! am brainless enough to believe absolutely.’

 
From March or April the season of weekend house-parties was under way. Every Friday evening or more usually Saturday morning the upper classes would pour out of London to congregate twenty, thirty or forty strong in the country houses within a railway-journey’s distance of the capital, to shoot, fish, hunt; play golf, tennis and after-dinner games, of which adultery was the most popular; or to conduct the business of the country in dignified seclusion. Belvoir was a great centre for such gatherings and Diana found herself reluctantly on duty, showing guests the terraced gardens or walking with them to the elegant eighteenth-century kennels some half a mile from the house. Some weekends were more imposing than others, as one in which: ‘the passages were lined with great men, ambassadors hung on banisters – glorious men who like Atlas carry empires on their very incapable-looking shoulders. Conceited schoolboys like F. E. Smith and others like Rosebery bristling with independence, Alfred Lyttelton brisk as a brush. One and all with great brows oppressive with their minds.’ To alleviate the mass of solemn statesmen was ‘a marvellous girl called Vita Sackville-West, rollingly rich, who writes French poetry with more ease than I lie on a sofa’.

  When Diana’s presence was not needed at Belvoir, a score of other country houses were eager to receive her. There was Avon Tyrrell with Lord and Lady Manners; ‘Diana was looking radiant,’ reported Billy Grenfell, ‘and was exquisitely witty and full of joie de vivre’. She and Angie Manners dressed up as suffragettes and pelted the company with biscuit boxes thrown from the top of a gazebo. There was Stanway with Lord and Lady Wemyss, a beautiful house but short on comfort, ‘lukewarm water, blankets that are no prison to one’s wayward toes, and every horizontal object wears a coat of dust, like a chinchilla. It’s a wonder that the inmates look as clean as they do.’ Welbeck with the Duke and Duchess of Portland; Beaudesert with the Angleseys; Hatton with Alfred de Rothschild, his private detective, lawyer and doctor permanently on the premises; Blenheim; Hatfield; Sutton Courtenay; Hackwood with the Curzons; it is tempting to portray a group of bored and blasé fainéants endlessly touring the countryside in search of diversion, but in fact Diana and her friends enjoyed themselves hugely and were just as likely to spend an afternoon reading poetry aloud or acting scenes from Shakespeare as in the more traditional diversions of the English upper classes.