Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  But what had attracted Agnes May to Fraser? He was in his early fifties, six feet tall but rather bent, with ears that stuck out as if straining to understand what was going on, and bald though his face was decorated with what, after the rise of Hitler, was to be known as a Hitler moustache. He was a generous but not a glamorous man, a gentleman in the Edwardian style who, though desperately wanting to be young, could not shimmy or foxtrot or even ‘Tip-toe through the Tulips’. He would have liked to belong to the new generation with its jazz and tangoes, its naughty sentimental songs, but he could not really join in. His moment of youth had been too long delayed; and what Agnes May gave him, however vital and necessary, was probably as much part of his imaginative as his physical life. He did not care much for nightclubs and cabarets, thés dansants and musicals. Also he felt guilty at being unable to ‘do the right thing’ and offer Agnes May marriage, and did not object when she called herself Mrs Holroyd.

  The affaire lasted four years altogether, during three of which Agnes May lived in Piccadilly as Fraser’s mistress. Then he had grown tired and she had become bored. The arrangements for their separation were spelt out in an extraordinary Deed of Covenant dated 5 May 1930 and drawn up by a solicitor in Clarges Street, round the corner from Berkeley House, rep resenting Agnes May. In consideration of ‘past services’ and from ‘motives of concern for her interest’, Fraser states that he is ‘desirous of securing to her’ the payment of £33 6s 8d each month – or in other words £400 a year (equivalent to £13,000 seventy years later). The first payment has already been made on 1 April, and these monthly payments were to continue for ten years or during the joint lives of them both ‘whichever of two such periods shall be the larger’.

  But there are conditions attached to these payments. Agnes May must lead a chaste life. If she ‘returns to cohabitation with her husband’ Thomas Babb, or divorces him and remarries, then the monthly allowance will be forfeited. And there are other things she must not do: she must not call herself Mrs Holroyd any longer; she must not ‘come to reside within two miles’ of Fraser’s family house at Maidenhead or ‘hold any communication’ with his family; she must not lay claim to ‘his Lancia car’ or become a bankrupt (though there seems more likelihood of him entering bankruptcy than her). If these conditions are met, the allowance will continue to be paid to her on the first of each month, and she agrees to inform Fraser through his solicitor of ‘her exact place of residence’ every three months – providing that he does not disclose this address to his family as she does not want to be molested by them.

  This strange document has lain for many years with a small bundle of my father’s out-of-date Wills, divorce and tenancy papers, long ago forgotten. ‘She faded out of the picture with a minimum of fuss,’ he wrote of Agnes May in his brief account. ‘I suppose she was given some money but I’ve no idea how much. At the end of it all we were very broke.’

  The Deed of Covenant is signed by Agnes May Babb in a spiky, slightly backward-leaning hand. I touch it with my finger. It is this signature alone that has given me her name and provided a small crack in the dark, enabling me to find out more about her.

  By trawling backwards over the years at the Public Search Room at St Catherine’s House I came across Agnes May’s previous marriages and her birth certificate. Now I travel forwards to find out whether, after she had separated from my grandfather, she remarried. From my grandfather’s point of view the good news (since it put an end to his monthly payments) is that she did marry again on 15 February 1934. Her husband was a thirty-year-old divorcé and ‘company director’, Reginald Alexander Beaumont-Thomas.

  Agnes May Beaumont-Thomas (formerly Babb, previously Lisle and initially Bickerstaff, who for two or three years adopted the name Holroyd) calculates her age on the new marriage certificate as thirty-six (which is only two years short of her actual age) and she describes her father as a hotel proprietor which she remembered having copied down on her certificate of marriage to Thomas Babb. Her father appears to have had a biblical ability to die and come alive again fairly regularly. At the time of her first marriage, she writes that he is ‘deceased’ as her husband William Lisle’s father was; but he was alive four-and-a-half years later when she married Thomas Babb (whose own father was alive), and had died again by 1934 now she was marrying Reginald Alexander Beaumont-Thomas (whose father was also dead). Actually he did not die until 1942. He died intestate, so there is no mention of a daughter. Despite her wealth, his estate, which went to his widow, was valued at only £207 3s 6d.

  The Beaumont-Thomases are married at Biggleswade in Bedford and Agnes May gives her address as ‘The Red Lion Hotel, Sandy’. But to have remarried, she would have had to get divorced. The decree nisi had been granted on 13 June 1933, and the bad news for my grandfather is that he has been named as co-respondent – though it is more than three years since he has been living with her. Perhaps this is no more than a legal convenience since his name is written with no great accuracy on the divorce proceedings – Edwin (instead of Edward) Fraser Rochford (instead of Rochfort) Holroyd. It seems unlikely that damages would have been sought against him but he may well have had to pay the court costs. What is surprising is that even an inaccurately-named co-respondent has been necessary, since husband and wife were living apart for more than eight years (had she gone back to him, her adultery with my grandfather would have been condoned). The speed with which she marries again is spectacular – even quicker (three days versus eleven days) than her first remarriage. For this was a very good marriage she was making. Her late father-in-law, Richard Beaumont Thomas (the name was not then hyphenated), a steel and tinplate manufacturer of Brynycaerau Castle, Llanelly, Carmarthen, had left £419,285 18s 9d to his three children on his death in 1917. Such a sum would be worth £14 million at the end of the century.

  For two years Agnes May Beaumont-Thomas continued living with her company director husband in Campden Hill Gate. Then they leave London – perhaps to one of the properties he had been given in Gloucestershire, perhaps abroad (his first wife had been French and they had married in Paris). I can find no further trace of them. So Agnes May disappears from my story, like an alarming comet passing over the night sky.

  *

  But was there nothing more I could discover about the ramifications of this affaire? Suddenly I recalled the mysterious ‘Holroyd Settlement’ my father had mentioned in the account he wrote for me of his early years, and which still provided him in his old age with a couple of hundred pounds or so a year from the National Westminster Bank. This Settlement had occasionally been spoken of in hushed and hopeless whispers during my early years. I remember my mother telling me how she and my father took me, aged six or so, to the home of a famous lawyer, Sir Andrew Clark, who had been a friend of my Uncle Kenneth’s at university. He was reputed to be the cleverest barrister in England and was much disliked for his arrogance (he later gained fame for a brilliant investigation into the Ministry of Agriculture known as the Crichel Down Inquiry, and also for cutting off his daughter with exactly one shilling when she married an unacceptable man). My mother was terrified that I would smash one of the precariously-placed objects in his drawing-room as I wandered happily from table to table and my father appealed to him to release us from the iron grasp of our family Trust. I broke no china that afternoon, nor was the Trust Deed broken. My grandparents, my uncle, my aunt, everyone wanted it broken: and yet it could not be broken. The letter of the law was too strong. Somewhere in its legal depths, like treasure in a long-sunken wreck, lay the money we so desperately needed. It remained as if in a chest whose key is lost, its contents slowly disintegrating.

  But what the origins of this complex affair were I never knew. At my request the National Westminster Bank now sent me the documents from its vaults and I could see what I had begun to suspect: that the ‘Holroyd Settlement’ was the legal arrangement made by my grandfather in 1927 after he left his family, together with a Supplemental Deed dated 27 May 1932 which reveals some
thing of what happened over those five years. It is a ruinous story.

  Two properties are identified in this Supplemental Deed. The first is Agnes May’s expensive love nest in Piccadilly, the lease of which did not expire until June 1946. The second is an oddly-crenellated, nineteenth-century town cottage with a small garden. It resembles a gate house to some grander building. Auckland Cottage, 91 Drayton Gardens, in unfashionable Fulham, is where my grandfather retired in April 1930. The rent on this house was £200 a year (equivalent to £6,000 in the late nineteen-nineties) and the lease did not expire until March 1944. These two properties Fraser handed over to Magor and Anderson, his trustees, in place of his Maidenhead house. They were to sell or sub-let them once he returned to Maidenhead so that his payments to his wife and children, promised in the principal deed, could be kept up. All his Rajmai Tea shares were now in other hands. A small design shows the details of these loans and overdrafts he had so far secured.

  Amount owing Name of Bank No. of shares

  £24,500 Mercantile Bank of India Ltd. 1,000 Transferred to the name of the Nominees of the Bank. 100 Collateral.

  £8,000 National Bank of India Ltd. 227 Transferred to the name of the Nominees of the Bank. Guaranteed by Messrs. Geo. Williamson & Co.

  £10,000 Major Holroyd 300 In Major Holroyd?s name.

  (He owes Lloyd?s Bank for this amount.)

  £5,000 Barclays Bank Ltd. 125 The amount of £5,000 is being repaid at the commencement of June.

  Total number of shares 1,752

  All the family were required to sign this new Deed, Basil getting as his witness the British Consul in Venice where he happened to find himself in the early summer of 1932.

  But he was back in England that July and accompanied Fraser to a nursing home near Blandford in Wiltshire where his Uncle Pat had gone following an operation. My father hardly knew his uncle, beyond recognising him as a handsome, mild-mannered man with a liking for drink. In the account he wrote for me almost fifty years later, he recalled ‘finding my Uncle Pat tiptoeing down the stairs at Brocket when he was staying a few days with us. It was one o’clock in the morning and he was on his way to the dining-room for one more whisky.’ According to my father it was whisky that killed him at the age of fifty-eight. He was suffering from a duodenal ulcer, an infected appendix, a blockage of the intestinal canal and chronic constipation. That was how Fraser found him at the nursing home. As with their father, and with his son who died in infancy, Fraser is again ‘present at the death’ on 15 July 1932. Even Basil’s regular high spirits temporarily drooped, those high spirits on which he depended to overcome his sense of being unwanted, ‘an evident mishap’. He never forgot that awful white room in the nursing home and ‘my father’s great distress at his brother’s death’.

  On the death certificate issued three days later, Fraser gave his address as Brocket, Maidenhead. The signing of the Supplemental Deed that summer of 1932 had been his act of negotiation back home. But it cannot have been a happy return. His two sons lived mostly in London, and Brocket was a household of squabbling women – even their dogs quarrelled. Yolande by now hated her mother, and her mother hated Nan who had stayed on after the children grew up despite Adeline’s many high-pitched invitations for her to leave. All Yolande’s filial affections seemed to have been transferred to Nan. Between the three of them there were incessant plots and counter-plots, and much yapping at the ankles.

  But Fraser was a man of illusions. It was to these illusions we were responding when retrospectively we pictured him as a brilliant mathematician, barrister, athlete and so on. Though his romantic illusions might be shattered, his financial illusions still glimmered in the city of glass he had attempted to create in the West End of London. His optimism shone blindingly forth. Were there moments of panic and doubt? In any event, there was nothing for it but to go on and hope for the best.

  When my father had his signature witnessed by the British Consul in Venice on 18 May 1932, he was endeavouring to sell glass to the Venetians. Over the next couple of years he talked Fraser into forming a new department for glass light fittings: table-lights, wall-lights and hanging lights which were sometimes inverted fruit bowls suspended from the ceiling by ropes, decorated with opalescent shells, and fitted with flared flames of frosted or tinted glass. These had several seasons of popularity and were installed by some famous restaurants including Quaglino’s and Claridge’s. But they were not profitable because of the breakage when drilling the glass to the metalwork. One of his designs appears on the title page of this book.

  But Basil was keen to develop this side of the business and made contact with a German glass manufacturer called Stensch which, following the Anglo-German trade agreement of April 1933, appointed Breves Lalique as its British agents. Early in 1934 Basil went over to Berlin to meet the Stensch family, and made friends with their twenty-year-old son Rudi, who had been sent down from Bonn University. Being a Jew, he explained to Basil, he had been ‘retired’ from Bonn as a result of the national boycott on Jewish professions introduced by the new Chancellor, Adolf Hitler. Possibly the non-completion of a university career did not strike my father as so very grave a matter. In any event it was his easy-going habit to offer anyone he liked a job in Breves Lalique. He had come over with one of his cousins from Australia (the one who had begun so promisingly in the IRA) and together ‘these two exuberant, extrovert fellows painted the town of Berlin red’, Rudi remembered. ‘…For us Jews, then being very subdued under the first impact of nazidom, it was a wonderful tonic.’ Their air of innocence, their very ignorance, was appealing. For they lit up the hope that this anti-Semitic phenomenon would soon blow away almost as if it had never been, like an illness that passes, leaving no marks, and is forgotten.

  Rudi took my father and his cousin to Leipzig where they were to make a reconnaissance of Germany’s major commercial trade fair. ‘I particularly remember when we all went to the local firemen’s ball,’ Rudi wrote to me, ‘and your father and his cousin insisted on driving our car right into the hall and in the centre of the dance floor. They then snatched the helmets of the worthy firemen, donned them on their heads, appropriated the buxom partners of these firemen and began to dance some weird Scottish jig. The impact of these young blades on the oh so German “Spiessbürger” [petit bourgeois] was quite sensational… Heinrich Himmler, you should have been there to watch it!’ For a moment the world of P.G. Wodehouse rode triumphantly over the Nazis’ campaign against decadence.

  After a week Rudi returned to Berlin and a few days later he received a telephone call from Basil who sounded in deep trouble. ‘In a muffled voice he told me that he was at the Eden Hotel in Berlin and would I please send him immediately a wire saying that I had heard from London that your grandfather [Fraser] had been taken very ill and would Basil please return post haste. I would get an explanation later.’

  My father gave his explanation next day at a thé dansant on the roof of the Eden Hotel. It appeared that he and his cousin had become involved with two young women they met at a Leipzig bar, and all four of them spent the night at a hotel. The cousin promised to take his companion to Paris the next day. This gave my father no option but to add that he would take his lady to Stockholm. But next morning he woke to find his Australian cousin had gone in the night. He was left with a girl on each arm and two hotel bills. He paid off the bills and saw that one of the girls got home in a taxi, while the other girl – who appeared in the daylight to be a dramatically painted woman with a loud Saxon voice (a veritable Saxhorn) – he took by train to Berlin. The fake telegram arrived and ‘the histrionic performance of your father when he explained to the girl that, alas, he could not proceed with her to Sweden and how all his life his greatest pleasures were being spoilt by quirks of fate, was masterful’, Rudi wrote. ‘We both took her to the station and put her on the train to Leipzig.’ Then the two young men went on to another railway station in Berlin’s working-class northern district, where my father was to catch the train to Stoc
kholm. Over a few drinks while waiting for his train, Basil repeated his offer for Rudi to come over and work as a trainee for Breves Lalique in London. ‘At that time I faced the problem of many young German Jews whose careers had been suddenly aborted – what to do with my life,’ Rudi remembered. ‘So I accepted with alacrity. I had been in London once before as a schoolboy and had felt at home. If I had to become a refugee there was only one country I would choose.’

  It was in the autumn of 1934 that the great Lalique galleries finally opened at 4 New Bond Street. ‘The ornamental glass associated with the name of M. René Lalique deserves recognition as the first attempt in Europe to explore the full possibilities of glass as a plastic material, and Messrs Breves, its agents in London, are to be congratulated on the general effect of their new galleries,’ wrote The Times. ‘A plain shopfront faced with travertine, with the name in white metal above, opens to a deeply recessed window which allows a clear view of the whole interior. As far as possible all the working features such as doors, and the decorations of the new galleries are constructed of Lalique glass, in association with stainless steel.’ René Lalique himself, a shy seventy-three-year-old with a white moustache, arrived from Paris hidden in an enormous overcoat, almost two hours late, missing the ceremonial speeches by the French Ambassador and the Mayor of Westminster. But he was not too late to avoid a reporter from the Manchester Guardian who noticed him among the guests (including everyone from Lady Oxford to Princess Bibesco) and described his ‘somewhat brisk military appearance suggestive of Cheltenham rather than the Champs Elysées’.

  About this time my mother arrived from Sweden.