She travelled a good deal; and it was obviously agony for her when she saw things of which she disapproved, and which badly needed investigation, not to be able to set to work immediately with a strong committee of maiden ladies. She could hardly, figuratively speaking, keep her hands off the Sultan of Java. ‘I came away thoroughly disgusted by this passing sight of Javanese royalty and all it revealed in idleness, sloth and sensuality.’ He appears, from her account, to have been a singularly harmless old man, who left the government of his country in the hands of the Dutch Resident while he lived quietly in his palace, surrounded by his numerous family of wives and children.
Oddly enough, in spite of her addiction to public and near-public life, Miss Markham joined the Anti-Suffrage League, formed to stop women getting the vote. In this matter she certainly shows her less attractive side, for she is insensitive enough to write: ‘I am sure the suffragette movement was huge fun, and that they enjoyed themselves immensely. Smashing windows, being arrested and bailed out by distracted relatives, slapping policemen and heckling Ministers must have been a great change from many a placid life in town or country, varied only by conventional amusements.’ Yes, indeed; and huge fun too, to be held down by six wardresses in Holloway Prison while a tube was thrust up your nose and you were forcibly fed, a rather unconventional amusement indulged in by the Home Office of those days.
Perhaps Miss Markham agrees with those who consider that Parliament is not a place where women shine? Not at all. Strange to say, no sooner had the suffragettes won their victory than Miss M jumps on the band wagon. ‘I was one of the little body of women… who stood for Parliament on the first occasion that women were qualified to vote and to offer themselves as candidates.’ She was not elected, and did not stand again. No great loss, we may feel. From her own point of view, given her odd predilection for busy-bodying, she was much better off sitting on numberless committees and boards. She even found time to be married, but (presumably as an ardent feminist, famous in the committee world) she kept her maiden name.
Miss Markham was born at the right moment, and we can congratulate ourselves that we shall not see her like again. When unemployment returns there will be another UAB, and those serving on it may be gruffer, harder, more unsympathetic than she; but at least what they are doing will be their work, done for a wage, not just for the fun of interfering in the old Now-my-good-man-where-is-your-self-respect way. She and a few like-minded and right-minded female enthusiasts may still be able to form committees to see to the morals of fallen women or study the reasons for the breakdown of family life; or they might get taken on as prison visitors, though here there is a danger that the prisoners might complain that it was not part of their sentence. But, by and large, their day is done. Whenever we feel inclined to abuse the Welfare State we should force ourselves to read a chapter of Miss Markham’s autobiography.
Laying it down with, it must be admitted, a sigh of relief, we feel there is something missing. Of course—Dame Violet! How has she escaped it? We must pin our faith to the New Year Honours, and hope they will make good this curious omission.
Return Passage: The Autobiography of Violet Markham, Markham, V. (1953)
Unshocking Gems
This small and pretty book is a gift to the givers of gifts. It is guaranteed not to shock or annoy the recipient; no explicit sex, no violence, no sleaze (whatever that may mean, there’s certainly none of it).
The Murrays, generation after generation, have been publishers, ever since their best-selling author in Byron’s day. They can be relied upon for decent type and paper, and bindings that last. In recent years they have produced tiny gems, like John Betjeman’s A Nip in the Air, as well as long, well-written biographies such as David Gilmour’s triumph, Curzon.
The present John Murray’s father, known as Jock, kept a commonplace book. It contains the usual Chinese proverbs; he who eats his towel gets a dry mouth. Confucius, or some other sage; no matter. All sorts of little jokes and oddities are here, illustrated by Osbert Lancaster and others. Hardly any Goethe, probably too deep, and perhaps too anti-clerical; no La Rochefoucauld, too bitterly cynical and worldly no doubt. The French quoted are, on the whole, bitter. Balzac says every great fortune is founded on great crime, and Voltaire, about biography: ‘We must respect the living but the truth is good enough for the dead.’ What is truth, the victim might ask.
Dr Johnson figures, and Byron of course, and there are reminders of the best-sellers of our own times: Betjeman, James Lees-Milne, Patrick Leigh Fermor. When a book by the latter was published a queue to 50 Albemarle Street stretched halfway down Piccadilly.
We were invited to comment on attributions. ‘How do I know what I think till I hear what I say?’—Lord Hugh Cecil, I have been told.
A Gentleman Publisher’s Commonplace Book, Murray, J.G., Evening Standard (1996)
Rebel Hearts
Not quite the moment, perhaps, to publish a book which is simply a résumé of all the newspaper stories of the last decades concerning the tragedy in Northern Ireland, just when it is possible to hope for better times. Anyone interested knows it by heart already, it has been television fare night after night for so many years.
Kevin Toulis lives in Edinburgh, but his ancestors were Irish and from childhood he has been familiar with ‘the old sod’. As a journalist he went over to see for himself.
It is so readily imagined that we hardly need him to describe the agony of sorrow suffered by the parents of an only son, an innocent bystander, blown to bits by a bomb at Harrods. (Those not politically involved are called ‘innocent’.)
In Ireland Toulis found, among nationalists and among Loyalists, heroes and saints and murderers and martyrs. ‘Great hatred, Little Room,’ as Yeats wrote of Ireland. But now that Britain and the Irish Republic are members of the European Community there is in fact plenty of room for hatred and dislike to be contained without violence.
Sometimes it seemed as if the IRA was the Loyalists’ secret weapon. The sight of a hooded gunman was a boon to extremists. In the Republic it is noteworthy how few vote for Sinn Féin. Most people prefer to live and let live.
The numbers of dead are not to be compared with those suffered in natural disasters, earthquakes, floods, or even with road accidents. But the killing is deliberate. There may be a target, often it is haphazard, sometimes all the victims are ‘innocent’.
Kevin Toulis talked to everyone and saw both sides and prudently went back to Edinburgh. He may have been a wiser man, except that he must have known it all long since. Perhaps he will go to the Balkans now, for a glimpse of something worse still.
Rebel Hearts: Journeys within the IRA’s Soul, Toulis, K. Evening Standard (1995)
A Case of Myopia on a Grand Scale
However many histories, biographies and autobiographies one reads about the first quarter of the twentieth century, it is a period which never fails to interest and amuse; and as escapist literature for those whose minds are darkened by the thought that this third quarter of the century may be mankind’s last, and that Conservatives and Liberals alike may be blown up into infinitesimal particles of the final giant mushroom, they have a special value, even though reading about the politicians of the past is not particularly reassuring. Hypnotised by events of small importance, like Home Rule or Tariff Reform, they floundered almost without noticing what was happening into the Great War, not one of them having the faintest notion of what the results would be.
Although Bonar Law was only Prime Minister for a few months, he was at the heart of affairs from 1911. Mr Blake says he was an ambitious man in those days; he also seems to have been a modest man, with plenty to be modest about. Lord Derby’s description of him in a letter to the King when he became Leader summed up his character perfectly:
‘He has all the qualities of a great leader except one—and that is he has no personal magnetism and can inspire no man to real enthusiasm.’
He was honest and people trusted him. ‘The difference bet
ween Bonar Law and me,’ Lloyd George told Baldwin, was that ‘poor Bonar can’t bear being called a liar. Now I don’t mind.’
Lloyd George relied on him throughout the years when they were in coalition; he was a loyal and hardworking colleague. But he was an extremely limited man; art, literature (except for Gibbon and Carlyle) and music bored him to death; food he did not care about, he drank milk and ginger beer; he hated society and yet was miserable in the country. His amusements were bridge, chess and golf. ‘He was an adding-machine’, said a man I spoke with who had sat in Parliament with him; ‘but he was, also, the finest speaker to wind up a debate I ever heard.’
That this Scotch Canadian Nonconformist teetotaller should have led the Conservative Party is just as strange, in its way, as that Disraeli should have done so a generation earlier.
He only allowed himself to indulge in his quiet pleasures when he had plenty of time to spare, and he was deeply shocked when, visiting Asquith on a Monday morning in the middle of a political crisis during the war, he found him playing bridge with three ladies. ‘Fond of bridge as he was himself,’ says Mr Blake, ‘he regarded it as wrong that the leader of a nation engaged in a struggle for its existence should be playing cards on a Monday morning, and should oblige one of his principal colleagues to put off all arrangements in order to visit him at his country house fifty miles away from London.’
This biography is extremely well done, and all the old stories—the Irish dispute, the Marconi scandal, Pemberton Billing’s Black Book (supposed to contain the names of 47,000 prominent men and women who were homosexuals)—are told with skill and freshness. New facts are added, notably to the curious story of how Baldwin became Bonar Law’s successor when the latter had to retire because of ill-health.
Nothing can exceed the strangeness of the men who controlled the armed forces at the beginning of the 1914 war. Lord Kitchener, who said to Carson: ‘I don’t know Europe, I don’t know England, and I don’t know the British Army’, and, on the subject of reporting to the Cabinet, ‘It is repugnant to me to reveal military secrets to twenty three gentlemen with whom I am barely acquainted’. And Admiral Fisher, the First Sea Lord, who so detested Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, that he bombarded Bonar Law with letters: ‘I am absolutely unable to remain with W.C. He’s a real danger’, he wrote, underlining the words three times. Bonar Law was of the same opinion, and had he lived, Churchill would not have been made Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 20s, but would have been out of office for a generation.
The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law, Blake, R. (1955)
‘Stop a Bit.’
Admirers of Lord David Cecil’s book The Young Melbourne, published in 1939, will be delighted by its sequel, Lord M, which deals with the last twenty years of Lord Melbourne’s life, during seven of which he was Prime Minister. Lord David has not set out to write a history of the time, but a biography of the man; and so wonderfully well has he succeeded, that after reading these two books Lord Melbourne seems to be an intimate friend whom we have known always.
Born ten years before the French Revolution, when he died Queen Victoria had been eleven years on the throne; his life thus spanned a period of great change, reflected even in the fashionable Whig society where he belonged. William Lamb was the son of the famous Lady Melbourne and of George Wyndham, Lord Egremont, one of her aristocratic lovers. When his elder brother died and he became heir, Lord Melbourne refused to give him the £5000 a year Peniston Lamb had enjoyed; he knew William was not his son, and to punish him for it reduced the allowance to £2000. However, William was now considered eligible to marry Lady Caroline Ponsonby, one of ‘the Devonshire House girls’ with whom he was in love.
In his unfortunate marriage, the future Lord Melbourne showed his great qualities: tolerance, humour, loyalty and affection. All were needed; first in dealing with Caroline’s extravagantly public love affair with Lord Byron, later with the other manifestations of hysteria, madness and exhibitionism which made life with her so trying. After the publication of her novel Glenarvon in which she described herself, William, Byron and all their friends and relations in what, in those days, was considered an unforgivable way, Caroline was an outcast from society. But though he suffered deeply, William behaved with exemplary loyalty; the novel, indeed, which had seemed to be the last straw, brought them together again. How could he abandon her, just when all her old friends were cutting her? One of his political colleagues once said to him, ‘I will support you as long as you are in the right’. ‘That is no use at all,’ he replied, ‘what I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong.’ In his married life he lived up to this maxim in generous fashion.
Rich, handsome, self-indulgent, well dressed, amusing, Melbourne was also clever in an intellectual way. In politics he would never have made a good party man, for he saw both sides of a question, was undogmatic about everything and never felt very strongly except perhaps about the uselessness of reform. ‘Whenever you meddle with these ancient rights and jurisdictions it appears to me that for the sake of remedying comparatively insignificant abuses you create new ones and always produce considerable discontent’ he said (about the administration of the Duchy of Cornwall). ‘“Delay” and “postpone” were still his favourite words,’ writes Lord David. He did not believe in any progressive measures; he thought public education a mistake: ‘You may fill a person’s head with nonsense which may be impossible ever to get out again,’ he said. He thought England was better governed by gentlemen than it would be by merchants and business men, and the repeal of the Corn Laws would ruin the former class. Also, as Lord David says: ‘It was the sort of practical subject that bored him to tears. Absent-minded and indifferent, he sat through one Cabinet meeting after another while his colleagues wrangled interminably about fixed duties and sliding scales. At last they came to an agreement and took their leave. As they went downstairs they heard the Prime Minister’s voice calling to them: looking up they saw him leaning over the banisters: “Stop a bit,” he said, “what did we decide? Is it to lower the price of bread, or isn’t it? It doesn’t matter which, but we must all say the same thing.”’
Mrs Norton, beautiful, talented, ‘not quite a lady,’ was certainly more trouble than she was worth to Lord Melbourne. He was in the habit of paying her a visit nearly every day, and when her loutish husband decided to divorce her he picked on the Prime Minister, for blackmailing reasons, as co-respondent. Norton lost the case, but it had been extremely unpleasant for Melbourne. It was his last indiscretion. ‘She’s a passionate, giddy, dangerous, imprudent woman,’ he said of her some years later.
By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne he was already an anachronism, his gaiety, cynicism, indolence and tolerance contrasting strangely with the new, priggish, strenuous earnestness. The Queen loved him; and he loved her, and taught her from his store of worldly wisdom and political experience, but they were a strange pair: it was a case of the attraction of opposites.
When the Tories came in, in 1841, he had the sorrow of parting from Queen Victoria. ‘For four years I have seen you daily and liked it better every day,’ he said sadly. Though she lived so near by, as leader of the opposition he could no longer visit her, except very occasionally. The description of his last years, old, ill and rather lonely, is very sad. He was a great family man, and should have had his children and grandchildren about him at Brocket. He and Caroline had had an only son, Augustus, who never developed beyond the mental age of seven. He had died in 1836, when he was 29; his father had always been kind and gentle with him, and had hoped in vain that he might become normal.
Melbourne died in 1848, and was buried near Caroline. To the Queen, now completely absorbed in Prince Albert and their children, dear Lord M was a figure from the past. The Times obituary was spiteful. ‘I never read so disagreeably toned an article as that on Lord Melbourne,’ wrote Lady Stanley of Alderley to Lord Stanley. ‘It is evidently written by a Tory and wil
l be very painful to his friends. I never liked Lord Melbourne myself, I thought him so selfish and heartless in his opinions of people, still he is one of that bright circle we met so often at Holland House and they are fast disappearing.’ The nineteenth century was already half gone, yet some remnants of the eighteenth century had lingered on in England.
Lord M, Cecil, D. (1954)
Heroines and Saints
Florence Nightingale was born in 1820, Edith Cavell in 1865. Both became nurses, and both are chiefly remembered in connection with wars: the Crimean War and the First World War. There the resemblance ends, for they could not have been more unlike.
Florence Nightingale was an overwhelming personality and a fighter with a will of iron. Although she was an invalid for her last fifty years she organised and directed, through politicians of both parties, a revolution in nursing, hospitals and the treatment of health in the army without leaving her sofa. Her energy and determination, her perseverance and unremitting work were extraordinary. Lytton Strachey says she was possessed by a demon, and Elspeth Huxley says that she heard God’s voice speaking to her and urging her to his service. She had a talent for making important political and royal friends to further her cause. Politicians she drove and bullied, royal personages she seems to have treated in the way to which they were accustomed. ‘Sie ist sehr bescheiden’, wrote the Prince Consort. Nobody else was ever found who could dream of describing Florence Nightingale as ‘modest’.
Needless to say, she had most of the doctors, conservative and obscurantist, against her; yet she won the day.
Her first and perhaps her hardest fight was with her own parents, so hostile were they to the idea of their daughter going into any hospital, where she would certainly see dreadful sights unfitting for a lady’s eyes. Nurses in those days were ‘slatterns, more interested in the bottle than in their patients’, or else prostitutes, according to Mrs Huxley. Florence finally overcame their objections, and she was in her early thirties when the Crimean War began. Lurid despatches from The Times correspondent which described the sufferings of the wounded and the fatal lack of organisation made a great stir, and Florence Nightingale with a group of nurses sailed for Scutari to help as best she could.
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 38
