Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  Links in the Chain

  I like to think of Virginia Woolf having used one of my ancestors to plead the revolution in biography. Unfortunately my father had not been strictly accurate when claiming that our branch of the family was directly descended from the two sixteenth-century brothers George and Isaac Holroyd. The first Earl of Sheffield’s direct ancestor was George, but we succeeded from the younger brother Isaac. Isaac’s most illustrious descendant was Sir George Sowley Holroyd, a Judge of the King’s Bench. Like Lord Sheffield he was painted by Joshua Reynolds, and was the second Holroyd to gain entry (a more modest entry) into the original Dictionary of National Biography.

  My father used to say that most of our family during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been lawyers or soldiers, and that the judges were far more deadly than the generals. I imagined a gallery of hanging judges. But George Sowley Holroyd appears to have been an exceptionally mild man. In an essay for the Edinburgh Review, Lord Brougham emphasised his humour and gentleness, the elegance and ingenuity of his arguments, and the lightness with which he employed his learning. I began to notice as I read this eulogium how I was beginning to compare my own circumstances with this distinguished forebear and, like the reader of an astrological chart, take possession of flattering items. ‘To whatever branch of investigation he had devoted his life in that he would have eminently excelled.’ What an investigative biographer this special pleader might have made!

  QUEM TE DEUS ESSE JUSSIT (‘What God has commanded you to do’). My father quoted these portentous words at the head of his narrative (though he did not provide a translation). This was a family motto which, with Arms showing Five Roses in Saltire, the Crest a Demi-Griffin, Wings Endorsed and holding between its claws a Ducal Coronet, appeared as an armorial bookplate, framed in black, which hung in the lavatory of his flat in Surrey. ‘On the opposite side of the water-cistern, also registering my father’s reduced position, was suspended another framed bookplate which, perhaps because of its complexity, he left without comment. I needed the assistance of the Chester Herald himself to record these Arms correctly. They are: Five Pierced Mullets in Saltire impaled on the Arms of Virginie, daughter of General Mottet de la Fontaine of Compiègne in Picardy, which should properly be blazoned Argent à Chevron Azure between in chief Two Roses Gules slipped and leaved Vert and in base a Mound Sable on a chief of the second Three Mullets Or. The motto below this paraphernalia was COMPONERE LEGIBUS ORBEM (‘To build a world with laws’) which George Sowley Holroyd had apparently chosen. But the name beneath this Motto, Arms and Crest is that of his eldest son, George Chaplin Holroyd, a naval officer who passed most of his life in India, married Virginie (daughter of the Governor of Pondicherry), and finally returned to be buried in Exeter. With this man’s third son, my great-grandfather Charles Holroyd who was born in Hyderabad in 1822, the family finally comes into view. For, in a cardboard box marked Six Cod Steaks 24 × 12 oz among my aunt’s possessions, there is a photograph of Charles Holroyd with his three children taken at Eastbourne in the late nineteenth century.

  Charles Holroyd passed most of his life on the Bengal Military Staff in Assam. During the Indian Mutiny of 1857, he unravelled a plot to massacre the European tea planters in Upper Assam. In heartfelt thanks for saving their lives they presented him with ‘a very handsome silver salver’, and more significantly perhaps, also gave him an interest in their tea gardens.

  Five years after the Mutiny, at the age of forty, Charles married a widow, Mary Hannay, who had two sons by her first marriage. But nine months later, probably when pregnant, she died of apoplexy. Charles, who continued bringing up his stepsons, did not marry again for another nine years. His second wife, Anna Eliza Smith, the daughter of an indigo planter, was Scottish. She gave birth in Calcutta to two boys in 1874 and 1875, Patrick Charles (called Patrick or Pat) and my grandfather Edward Fraser Rochfort (called Fraser); and then a daughter, Norah Palmer, who was born in 1877 at Eastbourne in Sussex, where Charles had retired with the rank of Major-General. According to the privately-printed family tree, Anna died three years later. But I can find no record of her death in London. Then I see in an Eastbourne newspaper that she was buried at the Glasgow Necropolis. So I write to the General Register Office for Scotland in Edinburgh which sends me her death certificate.

  Is it possible to be shocked by something that happened over a hundred years ago? I do feel a jolt as I read that Anna Eliza Holroyd, my great-grandmother, committed ‘suicide by carbolic acid’ at 29 Arlington Street, Glasgow, on 7 January 1880. She was aged thirty, that is twenty-eight years younger than her husband. This Arlington Street address was the home of her uncle, William Smith, an accountant, and his wife. But the ‘informant’ on the death certificate two days later is Charles Holroyd, her husband. This suggests that she had travelled to Scotland alone and that he went up from Eastbourne on hearing the dreadful news, leaving his two sons, Pat and Fraser, aged five and four, and his daughter Norah, who was a couple of weeks short of her third birthday, at home. Were they ever told of their mother’s suicide? No whisper of it reached my father, I am sure, or came down to the rest of the family. There is no photograph of her anywhere.

  Carbolic acid was used as a strong domestic disinfectant which cleaned by its caustic action. Anna would have died through internal burning. What can have driven her to do such an unimaginably painful thing, to kill herself when she had three very young children? There is no report of her suicide in the Scottish newspapers (there was a more dramatic suicide in Glasgow that day by an unnamed woman who threw herself from a bridge in Jamaica Street on the stroke of midnight). Nor is there any fatal accident inquiry concerning Anna on record. She left no Will or inventory, no testamentary deeds. There is simply no living memory of this tragedy, simply a trail of speculation.

  Having lived most of her life in India, Anna may well have found it difficult to settle at Eastbourne where she knew no one. The prospect of spending the next twenty years or so as the wife of a retired soldier nearly twice her age cannot have been very appealing. By the beginning of 1880, she could well have been pregnant again and she may have been subject to unrecognised post-natal depression, the prospect of which renewed her feelings of guilt. All this is possible and could form a contributory cause of her death. But none of it provides a convincing explanation for killing herself so appallingly. Where no easy explanations were available, many women who did not have a tenacious hold on life and who found it eventually intolerable were considered to be mentally unstable. I have been unable to find evidence of her being in love with another man, or having had any connection with that other woman, with dark brown hair, whose body was recovered by lowering a boat from the Carrick Castle that January night. Nor is there any evidence of her husband having ill-treated her – otherwise her uncle would surely not have summoned him to Glasgow, or her mother, years later, have sent a wreath ‘in affectionate remembrance’ when Charles Holroyd himself died.

  Anna Eliza, ‘the Beloved Wife of Major Gen Charles Holroyd’, was buried at the Glasgow Necropolis on 10 January 1880. And that must surely be the end of her story. But it is not quite the end. Over seventeen years later a man was buried beside her. His name – one I have never seen before – was John Stewart Paul and he died in June 1897 at the age of sixty-one. Who was this mysterious man? On the gravestone it is written that he was the ‘brother in law of Major Gen Holroyd’. He turns out to be Anna’s uncle by marriage (the husband of her mother’s sister) who had christened his younger son Charles Holroyd Paul. What can this tell me? It appears that Anna’s family wished to retain the connection with her husband Charles, and that no blame was laid on him for her suicide. In 1901, Anna’s mother was buried in the same plot, and so in 1914 was her aunt, Janet Stewart Paul. In Lair 59 of the Necropolis, the four of them lie together with their secrets.

  The Eastbourne photograph shows the widower and his three children a few years after Anna’s death. They are formally grouped as if in a studio conservatory. The
father, sitting on a stone bench, is attired in morning clothes; the two boys (one sitting on the ground balancing a tennis racket, the other standing next to the bench) are dressed in Eton jackets and collars, with buttoned waistcoats and sober spotted ties. Norah, their sister, is perched on the back of the bench, aged about ten, wearing a long-sleeved pleated dress with a high lace collar and lace cuffs. What struck me most when first examining this picture is how old the father appears in comparison with his children. He is rather old to have a ten-year-old daughter – in his mid-to late-sixties. But, with his bald head and full white beard, half-closed eyes and melancholic expression, he seems nearer eighty. It is as if his wife’s terrible death has marked him for ever. The two boys themselves have somewhat wary and solemn expressions matching their father’s. Only Norah, from her superior position on the back of the bench, confronts the camera direct. She is not smiling, but she has a modern look. She appears forthright and freer than the boys.

  The four of them were living at a large, rather sombre flint house called The Links built in 1869 close to Beachy Head in the Meads district of Eastbourne. The house itself stood in extensive grounds out of sight of the sea and protected by a high flint wall. Behind this wall, on naturally-sloping, partly-levelled grounds shaded by beech and yew trees, ilex, chestnut and Cedar of Lebanon, lay a sunken garden with a large expanse of lawn over which crying seagulls would sail – a good place for games. During his twenty years there, Charles Holroyd enlarged this property considerably. His Will refers to outbuildings, cottages and pleasure grounds as part of his land. He employed a gardener (who lived with his family in a cottage on the grounds), cook, parlourmaid, housemaid, house parlourmaid, coachman and a governess, Mary Easlea, later described as a companion.

  The Major-General makes his appearance in the local newspapers as someone who ‘took no part in public affairs, for like other residents who have served their country in distant parts of the world, he came to Eastbourne in search of quiet and rest’. He was a Tory and a member of the Church of England, worshipping at St John’s on Sundays and going to the Sussex Club twice a day during the rest of the week. The two boys were ‘rather in awe of him’, my father writes. But as the tennis racket in the photograph suggests, there was an escape through sport. Both boys had guns, made their own cartridges, and would go rough shooting on the Downs. There were also the adventures of bird’s-nesting, moth-and butterfly-collecting, and fishing expeditions at sea. Eventually there was the more permanent escape to boarding school.

  But none of these escapes was available to Norah. Her chief pastime seems to have been stamp-collecting. Though she did have friends to stay – the 1891 census lists a fourteen-year-old visitor from Paris, Georgette Backellery – Norah’s life appears to have been somewhat solitary. She was educated at home under the supervision of Mary Easlea and remained at The Links with this middle-aged companion until after her father’s death at the end of the century. Despite her forthright look in that family photograph, she was said to have been delicate. ‘How much this state of health was a state of mind it is impossible to say,’ my father wrote, adding that he never heard his own father refer to his sister Norah when talking of his boyhood.

  Charles Holroyd was educated at the East India Company’s college at Addiscombe, and his father and grandfather had been Harrovians. His choice for Pat and Fraser was Uppingham, a tiny, unsalubrious, sixteenth-century grammar school in Rutland which, under its evangelical headmaster, Edward Thring, was recognised as one of the most progressive public schools in the country. Thring was a powerful personality, ‘quick and articulate, charismatic, quarrelsome’, the school historian describes him. It was he, rather than Dr Arnold of Rugby, who today appears the radical pioneer in mid-nineteenth-century education. Arnold had been at Winchester and Oxford; Thring at Eton (under the brutal regime of Dr Keate) and Cambridge. Arnold emerged a pessimist, Thring an optimist. Thring was also passionately egalitarian, insisting that ‘every boy in the school must receive equal and full attention’, and that ‘ordinary boys needed as much time as the brilliant’. This inclusiveness contrasted strongly with Dr Arnold’s regime of public expulsions and private removals founded on the belief that, boys having ‘an essential inferiority’ as compared with men, ‘the first, second and third duty of a schoolmaster is to get rid of unpromising subjects’. In Thring’s opinion, Dr Arnold was ‘a very great man, but a bad schoolmaster’. It was true that he had added mathematics, modern history and languages to the school course; but so had Thring added them – as well as chemistry, drawing, carpentry and music too. Both were ordained clergymen, driven by a sense of moral purpose, but Thring’s temperament was far less morbid than Arnold’s. He was a New Testament man and his sermons never lasted longer than ten minutes. Above all he was a genuine innovator, establishing workshops, laboratories, an aviary and gymnasium at Uppingham, emphasising the skill needed even in elementary teaching, discouraging the multiplication of prizes as motives for work, and campaigning on behalf of a liberal education for girls.

  When Thring came to Uppingham in the early eighteen-fifties the school contained twenty-five boys. Thirty years later there were over three hundred boarding in eleven houses, and thirty masters. It could have grown still more but, believing that most public schools were too large, Thring restricted the number of boys to a maximum of 320 with no more than thirty in each house.

  My great-grandfather was one of the last parents to interview Thring who died in the autumn of 1887. Six months later the Major-General’s elder son Pat arrived at Uppingham, and he was followed a year later by his brother (my grandfather) Fraser. Within these eighteen months Uppingham had grown to almost four hundred boys and in one respect at least begun to change. Thring argued that ‘organised games received excessive attention’. Though he encouraged games at which masters could play in the teams – this being a good way for everyone to get to know one another better – he disliked the worship of competitive athletics which he considered unfair to the ordinary boys. A year after Thring’s death, however, rugby football began to be played at Uppingham and the spirit of Dr Arnold entered the school. The great man there in the late eighteen-eighties and early eighteen-nineties was H.H. Stephenson, the legendary cricket coach, who had captained the first English team to tour Australia.

  I occasionally heard my grandfather speak of Stephenson as we drank our cider together in the evenings. His tone was reverential, for we were after all discussing one of the great heroes of the game and ‘the best cricket coach at any school’. I loved these stories of my grandfather, but generally he was too barricaded by worries to entertain me with them, though I sometimes pleaded with him and made him smile. Only at moments would he bow down his head, hush his voice, and whisper, ‘Ah! Stephenson!’ Such an exclamation conveyed more than any inventory of facts. I would stare into the past and nod my understanding. I got the impression that he venerated Stephenson because he had received from him all the attention and encouragement he missed at home. He may even have received special attention on account of being a kinsman of Henry North Holroyd, third Earl of Sheffield, the great cricket patron of those days in whose grounds at Sheffield Place the Australians always opened their tour of England.

  As a result of intensive coaching, my grandfather did pretty well at Uppingham. Stephenson noted in 1892 that he was ‘developing into a good run-getting bat’, though he ‘did not punish the loose balls with sufficient severity’. Also, Stephenson added in Fraser’s last year, he was perhaps ‘rather nervous’. This nervousness, his lack of aggression, and the sad fact that he was ‘not a safe pair of hands’ may be said to have marked his later life beyond the cricket field.

  Nevertheless, my grandfather was one of the stars in the new philathletic era. This was a vintage patch in Uppingham cricket, full of masterly innings, decisive victories, sensational fight-backs, astonishing records (Fraser making his contribution to all this brave achievement with a 75 against Uppingham’s deadly rivals Repton). He quite outshone P
at, one of the ordinary boys for whom Thring had been concerned, and immediately took precedence over him in class, Holroyd mi being placed in a higher form than Holroyd ma. Perhaps it was this paradox that helped to gain for my grandfather a reputation for academic brilliance in the family years later. We would have found it difficult to believe that ‘Uncle Pat’ was actually a long way below average, that Fraser himself never reached the upper division of the Classical Sixth where the scholars clustered, or that he won no medals, distinctions or prizes. He appears in several photographs of Constable’s House, the school praepostors, and the cricket eleven. All the boys look far older than similar groups in the twentieth century, and no boy looks older than my grandfather. I can quite easily recognise the man I knew in his seventies and eighties – indeed he already looks nearly half that age, weighed down with a Johnsonian heaviness. I find these photographs curiously disturbing. No one is smiling. Between this solemn young boy seen with his family at Eastbourne and the prematurely-aged praepostor of Uppingham, did my grandfather have any carefree childhood and adolescence? What I have discovered suggests that his youth was much delayed.

  Pat left Uppingham after three years and went on to the Military Academy at Sandhurst. That, at any rate, was what my father understood. But ‘Uncle Pat’ did not go to Sandhurst and does not turn out to have been the professional soldier who, with five medals blazing on his chest, marches across my father’s narrative. He was an amateur soldier in the auxiliary military force called the Militia which was enlisted locally, sometimes paraded for drill and could be called on in wartime. A photograph taken in the mid-eighteen-nineties at Eastbourne shows him in his uniform, a mild and handsome face with a well-designed moustache nicely waxed at its tips.

  While Pat was drilling with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Fraser went to King’s College, Cambridge. My father writes enthusiastically of his playing there against the two most brilliant cricketers of the times, C.B. Fry and Ranjitsinhji. In fact he seems to have given up cricket and did not get a Blue. My father also believed that ‘he was an excellent mathematician, worked hard, finally taking a First’. The printed register of King’s admissions records him as having been awarded a Third in the History Tripos of 1897. As something starts going wrong, so the gap between ascertainable fact and family legend widens.