In 1879, when he was sixteen years old and already nearly six feet tall, he ran away to London and joined the Army. I know of no special reasons for this step, reasons stronger than might drive any spirited youth cramped up with a large family in a small cottage on restricted means to go off in search of life and adventure. It is true that his father was something of a disciplinarian (“My old Dad had a very heavy hand. I can feel it still.”), but he respected him and was on good terms with his brothers and sisters. His mother he had scarcely known; she died when he was two years old, after Denton’s birth.
He enlisted at Regent’s Park Barracks as a private in the Royal Horse Guards, the Blues, giving his age as nearly eighteen. In this regiment he served for three-and-a-half years, of which eighty days were spent campaigning in Egypt, where he took part in the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir. In 1882 he purchased his discharge for £28. Nine months later, July, 1883, he re-enlisted in the Second Life Guards: Trooper Alfred Ackerley. From this regiment he purchased his discharge less than a year later, in 1884, for £18. Throughout his service with these two units he refused all promotion. There was a brief moment in Alexandria when his colonel compelled him to “take the tabs,” and reduced him back to the ranks within twenty-four hours for being carried back to camp by the drunks he had been detailed to bring in. It was an anecdote he liked to recall in later life, as he liked also to recall some of his conquests. The conquests were not, of course, military conquests; to the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir I don’t recollect that he ever referred; they were amorous exploits, his own or some crony’s, such as how he was almost caught in flagrante delicto with his color-sergeant’s young wife. I have forgotten these tales now, but he would sometimes regale me with them in the ’twenties when, the ladies having retired to the drawingroom leaving him and me together, he would circulate the port and brandy and, his Gentleman’s cigar in his mouth, reach an unbuttoned stage of mellowness and ease.
The Household Cavalry are a fine body of men, much admired for their magnificent physique and the splendor of their accoutrements, but it will hardly be claimed for them that they are—or at any rate were—refined in their tastes and habits. Conscription and improved rates of pay may have brought some alteration to the scene, but in my father’s young days and on into my own, sex and beer and the constant problem of how to obtain these two luxuries in anything like satisfactory measure on almost invisible means—in his day the Queen’s shilling—represented the main leisure preoccupation of many guardsmen and troopers. Nor is this surprising. Healthy and vigorous young men, often, like my father, the merest boys, suddenly transplanted from a comparatively humdrum provincial or country life into a London barrack-room, exercised and trained all day to the bursting point of physical fitness, and let loose in the evening, with little money and large appetites, to prowl about the Monkey Walk in Hyde Park, the pubs, or West End streets, in uniforms of the most conspicuous and sometimes provocative design—it is hardly surprising that their education in the seductions and pleasures of the world should take rapid strides. The tall handsome youth from the village of Rainhill seated with drawn sword upon his charger in Whitehall, arrayed in plumed helmet, glittering cuirass and white buckskin breeches, and gaped at by admiring spectators who sometimes dropped coins into his highly polished top boots, certainly found life very much to his taste. Unhappily my knowledge of that life and of the years that followed is meager.
At his final discharge he brought away a good conduct badge, a second-class certificate of education, and the War Medal and Bronze Star of the Egyptian Campaign. He brought away two other things, the seeds of success in life and the seeds of death. I will come to the latter in its due place. So far as the former is concerned, something has to be found to account for the transformation of Trooper Alfred Ackerley with his second-class certificate of education and impecunious family background in 1884, into the cultivated, urbane, travelled and polished young man of the world with £2000 a year who picked up my mother on a Channel boat in 1892 and was later to become one of the directors of Elders and Fyffes, fruit merchants, earning £12,000 a year and the title of Banana King when he died.
4
THE ANSWER LIES with two wealthy gentlemen whom my father met in London during his five years of soldiering. How he met them I do not know; so far as my information goes he had no friends in London when he first arrived there in 1879. One of them he must have met soon after his enlistment in the Blues when he was sixteen years old. Of this gentleman I can give only the briefest sketch. His name was Fitzroy Paley Ashmore and he called himself a barrister. He was a friend of Mr. Justice Darling, and a married man with four children. My father seldom mentioned him except to remark on occasion that he owed to Ashmore everything he knew. My father wrote a beautiful hand and was a faultless speller, he took a pride in his knowledge of English and never failed to look up in the dictionary the words he did not understand when he was reading. This self-discipline in education, which he often recommended to our inattentive ears, he attributed wholly to Mr. Ashmore’s training. Yet their friendship was short, this friendship of a rich, cultivated man in his early thirties with an uneducated boy-soldier of sixteen or seventeen, for Ashmore died, aged thirty-seven, in 1883. The whole episode was therefore contained within four years.
Ashmore lived at 18 Radnor Place, Hyde Park, and it seems to have been given out that my father acted as his secretary. His son, Major-General E. B. Ashmore, CB, CMG, MVO, told me, however, that since his father, who had substantial independent means (he died worth £28,000), did no work at all, it was surprising to learn that he needed a secretary. General Ashmore knew nothing about my father (or so he said) and not much about his own who had died when he himself was eleven; what little he did know he was in no mind to praise. His father’s only interest in life, said he, was to enjoy himself, gamble and go to parties; he was so unpleasant to his wife that she was more relieved than afflicted to find herself a widow, and all his children, including himself, were terrified of him. But if Mr. Ashmore cared not a fig for his wife and children, he took a fancy to my teen-age father and considerable pains to educate him. On August 3, 1882, probably a few days before my father sailed for Egypt, Ashmore drew up a codicil to his will leaving him a legacy of £500, a gift that was to lead to trouble in the end. It was to be held in trust for him by his own father until he reached the age of twenty-one. On October 30, directly after his return from Egypt, he purchased his discharge. Did he go and live at Radnor Place as his benefactor’s secretary? I have no information about this period. In the following year, on June 12, Ashmore had a heart attack and died. Three weeks later my father re-enlisted.
The educational and refining processes begun upon him by Mr. Ashmore were continued by the Count James Francis de Gallatin, my father’s other wealthy friend. Whether he was met through Ashmore or independently I don’t know, but he now supplied Ashmore’s place in my father’s young life. A Count of the Holy Roman Empire and descendant of a famous Swiss-American family, he kept two establishments, one in Mount Street, Berkeley Square, the other in Old Windsor, a house called The Hermitage. Doubtless considerably altered it still stands. He was a bachelor, aged thirty-one, and lived with his mother. He too took to my soldier father in a big way; soon, indeed, he could hardly bear to let him out of his sight.
I have said that my father twice purchased his discharge from the Army; it is more probable that he was bought out, first by Mr. Ashmore and now, in February, 1884, through the persuasions and help of the Count de Gallatin. The indications are that by this time they were close friends and that family introductions, my father to Mme. de Gallatin in Mount Street and Old Windsor, the Count to my father’s family in Rainhill, had been established. Two more basic reasons for this second and sudden retirement of my father from the Army suggest themselves: his old father had been taken ill with cancer of the tongue, and in the April of that year my father would be twenty-one and come into possession of his legacy. He returned to Liverpool and took a job as traveller i
n the business of his brother-in-law, John Graham, a wine merchant. His legacy fell due to him on his birthday, April 1; he did not spend it but “lent” it to the Count. Other records say he gave it to the Count to keep for him. De Gallatin was a generous man as we shall see (a little later he was to take trouble to help Denton gain a foothold in South Africa by introducing him to titled and influential people), and one can hazard a guess at the actual circumstances of this transaction, for he undertook to pay my father the large interest of 20% on the “loan.” It is the kind of thing a rich man might do to help out, as delicately as possible, a friend of whom he was fond and who was short of cash. This £100 a year and whatever commission he earned from his travelling was all the money my father had.
Early in the following year, 1885, old Mr. Ackerley died. The doctors had gradually cut away most of his tongue (radium treatment was not then known), but the cancer had moved to his stomach. At this time occurred another important event in my father’s life: he met and quickly palled up with a local youth named Arthur Stockley, aged twenty.
In the spring of that same year de Gallatin, perhaps to be near my father, rented for the summer a furnished house in the district in New Brighton, Cheshire, and invited him to stay and bring with him any friend he liked. My father took Stockley. There was a fourth member of the party, a friend of the Count’s, another very handsome youth named Dudley Sykes, of whom I know nothing. In the words of Stockley he was “very good-looking, charming and quite harmless and never did a day’s work in his life.” He was not a guardsman. I have included a photograph of this quartet, taken in this time and place. They are sitting in the garden grouped beneath a tree on a tatty lion-skin rug spread on the grass. Bold and roving-eyed1 Mr. Sykes is bare-headed, the rest wear boaters. Excepting Stockley all sport mustaches in the custom of the period; the Count’s is particularly heavy. They are dressed in open-necked shirts and their flannel trousers are supported by dark cummerbunds. A shaggy dog with a beard like Kruger’s lolls among them. The Count was fond of dogs. Behind them, along the sill of an open window, potted plants are ranged. Would that I had been able to peep and eavesdrop through that window and discover their secrets, if any. But I was not yet born.
What did they do? Stockley, who, I feel sure, had no interesting secrets, went off to Liverpool every day on whatever business he was engaged in, perhaps the fruit trade in which he was to end; my father, still in the employ of Graham, doubtless travelled locally too, trying to gain sales; young Mr. Sykes idled about. In the evenings and at weekends they came together, bathed, played poker and whatever athletic games were available to them (I have a photo of my father and Stockley sparring in boxing gloves). The Count, who paid for everything (“We lived there in considerable luxury,” writes Stockley), had a smart dogcart and cob, in which they probably rattled about. Mme. de Gallatin was not present, and Stockley says they had no female society of any sort. They “created quite a sensation,” he says. The local residents were not used to, were suspicious and perhaps jealous of, so strange a household which contained a rich foreign nobleman with rather poppy eyes and two strikingly handsome young men, and some busybody wrote to Stockley’s mother in Worcestershire to warn her that her son was rapidly “being ruined by an adventurer and his confrères.” “However, this did not trouble me, as I knew it was entirely untrue.”
My father, aged twenty-two, seated in a chair, looks very attractive, more solid and serious than Mr. Sykes with his rather theatrical d’Artagnan face, and the Count by now was clearly bowled over by him. When the party broke up he did not want my father to return to Liverpool; unable to prevent this, he went with him and accompanied him upon his commercial errands. I have a dashingly punctuated letter of his to Stockley, from the Queen’s Hotel, Stockton, written on a Sunday in November, 1885:
“Here we are at the most awful place I have ever seen—Durham was quite charming and I was sorry we did not stop there for Sunday. We get on like a house on fire, the only thing is poor old Roger rather worries as he cannot get any orders—there is no business doing at all—I enclose a check for £8.8s. Will you kindly pay Roger’s dues at the Racquet Club—I believe the sum is £7.17s.6. Pay yourself the 2/6 you paid for me for the cab last Sunday—the balance will do when we meet. I had a full account of my good fortune from Morley—I knew there was a large property in America but I did not know it was so much. The truth is I don’t bother myself much about my affairs. I wish you were with us as it is most amusing. Awfully cheap travelling and we have met very decent people—at Durham I had a pal who was very civil to us. We will be back (D. V. as my mother says) on Friday night. It is now 1:45 and we have just come down to breakfast.”
Clearly my father’s job was proving unremunerative and it was not long before a more congenial occupation was suggested. Close to The Hermitage, the Count’s cottage, as he called it, in Old Windsor, was a disused farm, known as The Cell Farm, which the Count rented for stabling and grazing his ponies. The suggestion now was that this small farm might be stocked with more ponies to become a pony farm and run by my father as a business concern: with his cavalryman’s experience he was knowledgeable about horses. It seems that he was staying with the de Gallatins at The Hermitage when this idea was conceived, that it originated in the mind of a third person, and that it was proposed by my father to the Count. It was, of course, instantly agreed to, for it gave de Gallatin his heart’s desire, my father’s permanent companionship. Stockley says that he thereupon bought The Cell Farm for my father, who took up residence there and at The Hermitage in 1886. Soon afterwards he fell ill. I don’t know the nature of his complaint, but it must have been something serious, for the de Gallatins took him abroad to Italy for six months to convalesce. I have a letter from my father to Stockley, written from Rome on the Count’s coroneted notepaper and dated November 2, 1886. Like most of the few letters I use—the only ones I possess—it is rather a bore, but parts of it are relevant to the rest of this sad story:
“We have had a very good time, and shall be settling down at the Villa Rocca Bella, Naples, about next Friday, for which mercy thank the pigs, as the continual packing and unpacking is awful. G. won about £300 at Monte Carlo, you never saw such a lucky beggar in your life and you never saw such an unlucky beggar as yours truly, my past sins were all heaped on my head, as every piece I put down was promptly raked in by the croupier.... If all present arrangements hold good, I shall come back by sea straight from Naples to Liverpool about April next and go on to Ireland from there to see about the ponies of which there are about 9 for me to break in and sell so if you hear of anyone in want of a good one, let me know.
You might let me have any news that would interest a poor invalid, (for I am still under the doctor) write to Naples.”
De Gallatin accompanied him to Ireland in the spring of the following year and bought ten ponies for £50 at Fairhill Fair, Galway. Until they could be transported to England they were left on the estate of a Lord Wallscourt, where their keep and the grooms’ wages had to be defrayed. By the time they were all brought over and assembled at The Cell Farm they had cost the Count another £200.
Thereafter matters proceeded quietly for some eighteen months, my father living with and, presumably, largely on, the de Gallatins, breaking in and selling ponies at no great profit, riding in point-to-point races and taking part in the social life of Windsor. To Stockley, July 2, 1887:
“I have suddenly wakened up to the idea that you must be under the erroneous impression that I am an awful bounder not to have answered your letter before, but really I must assure you with all the veracity of a Roger that when your letter came I was in throes of learning my part and let me also assure [you] a very important part in some theatricals which we played for two nights on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Windsor, to crowded houses, if you don’t believe me look up The Times of that date which speaks of my marvelous talent etc. etc. I had several invitations from various young damsels to come to their boudoirs for supper etc. which with m
y natural modesty I refused, from high moral motives. Joking apart, old chap, I am awfully ashamed of myself.... Let me know if you are coming up, Gallatin is awfully down on me for not writing before....”
Over a year later, in September, 1888, de Gallatin, who had been bitten in the leg by a fly and laid up for a month, wrote to Stockley: “Poor old Roger is as good-tempered and satisfied as ever—we jog on here in our own quiet way—and I think it suits us all—The Cottage is looking awfully neat now and I like it so much that I am going to build some more rooms....” But good temper and the happy domestic scene were not to last much longer; before the year’s end Miss Louise Burckhardt came over from Paris to stay with the de Gallatins. Of this young lady I know scarcely anything. She was of wealthy parentage and Swiss. Arthur Stockley informed me that she came over with some prospect of marrying the Count, to whom she was said to be related; but Stockley’s old-age memory was far from accurate, as I shall have occasion to show later; moreover he was no longer in England at this critical time, he sailed for Grand Canary in November to learn about the fruit trade and was not to meet my father again until 1892, four years later, though they continued to correspond. He never met Miss Burckhardt at all.
Whatever the truth of the matter, finding at The Hermitage handsome young Mr. Ackerley, Louise engaged herself to him. It was quickly done. They announced their engagement before the turn of the year and expressed their desire to leave. The Count was said by everyone who knew him to be an extremely jealous man; he was deeply upset and I expect he behaved badly. However, whether he was upset at losing Louise or at losing my father the reader must decide for himself. I can provide no details of the sequence of events, but I can provide a letter from which the emotional atmosphere, at least, may be gauged. It is from Mme. de Gallatin to Stockley in Grand Canary. It is undated, but internal evidence shows that it was written after the New Year. Dashed off (one can see whence the Count derived his punctuation) in an overwrought state of mind, it is not easy to decipher, but I give it, at something of an occasional guess, in full:
My Father and Myself Page 3
