The Real Peter Pan

by Piers Dudgeon

  Carter: I do not know the gentleman’s name, but he would be about 6 ft. 2 in. [Rupert Buxton].

  Juror: Did you form the impression that the bodies were clasped?

  Carter: Yes, that was my impression.

  Juror: And you thought they became separated when you were drawing them up?

  Carter: Yes.

  Dean: I suppose as you were pulling them up the weight suddenly became lighter?

  Carter: Yes.

  Summing up for the jury, the Dean said,

  The deceased were seen bathing in Sandford Pool, and one of them swam to the weir and sat on one of the stones, and in a few minutes his friend proceeded to swim across to him. When he got half way across he appeared to be in difficulties and his friend at once dived off the stone on which he was sitting [and went] to his friend’s assistance. He reached him but apparently he no sooner got to him than they both disappeared and were not seen alive again. In the ordinary way there was a great deal of water tumbling over the weir, which caused a suction towards the weir, and there were certain eddies which, unless a man was a strong swimmer were very dangerous, but the water just now was low.

  The view of the jury was that Michael had accidentally drowned while bathing, and that Rupert lost his life trying to rescue him. As the Dean gave the jury’s verdict, he was reported to have been overcome with emotion and burst into tears.

  After the same verdict was reached in the case of Alastair Grahame a year earlier, this should come as no surprise. Oxford, and Christ Church in particular, did not want these deaths to look like suicide.

  It was never likely that there would be a verdict of suicide for a number of reasons, not least that the court could not claim to be unprejudiced.

  The coroner was connected to the University. The coroner for the Oxfordshire area at this time was one Harold Galpin. Mr Marshall was described as a ‘University coroner’. It is not clear whether the University had sufficiently frequent cases of accident and suicide actually to run its own coroner’s office, or whether Marshall had been drafted in from outside. Either way, Marshall was in the employ of the University.

  The Foreman of the Jury was the Dean of Christ Church College, and according to a nephew of Barrington-Ward, who knew all of them, of the six other jurors four at least were dons at Christ Church – J. G. Barrington-Ward, the Reverend A. E. Rawlinson, J. C. Masterman and Theo Chaundy.

  Further, there are clear discrepancies between the evidence of the witnesses and what the Dean, as Foreman of the Jury, said in his summing up about one of the deceased (Michael) getting into difficulties. On the day in question as both witnesses – Beecham and Gaskell – gave evidence, the water was calm and still, and Gaskell said that the water was low, free of reeds, and there was no backwash. Moreover, the Coroner pointed out that there could have been no suction towards the weir at the time, neither were there any eddies.

  Beecham could not report any struggling to substantiate his statement that they two men were in difficulties. On the contrary, all that he had seen was ‘their heads close together’. Gaskell had stated that the two men appeared as though they were just standing in the water with their heads above the surface.

  Bedevilling any attempt to pick at the case in more detail is the disappearance of the transcript of the Inquest. Neither the Oxford University Archive, nor the Oxfordshire Record Office, the Christ Church College Archive, or the separately administered department of Bodleian Special Collections, has a copy of it.

  Being a University court there should be a record in the University archive or in the Bodleian Library. The Oxfordshire Record Office is the most likely other source, but while they hold all the city Coroner’s Inquest files for 1921, including some undertaken at the Settling Room, all of them in chronological and in numerical order (which would indicate if any was missing), there is no sign of the Llewelyn Davies–Buxton case. One is reliant on newspaper records.

  Then, of course, there is the state of mind of the deceased, which was never a matter of analysis at the Inquest, even though when Rupert was lodging at the Deanery he was observed to have been depressed.

  Much was made of Michael’s ineptitude as a swimmer. But flatmate Edward Marjoribanks gave evidence that while ‘Mr Davies could not swim very well … It was his pride, however, to swim about twenty yards.’ And again, as Peter Llewelyn Davies, a sober man who visited the site as I did, wrote to Dolly: ‘The place is too calm, and the distance from bank to bank too small, for the question of swimming capacity to enter into it at all.’

  Perhaps an open verdict would have been the better one.

  On the evening of 19 May, Barrie was at home in the Adelphi writing his daily letter to Michael. In it he wrote that he hoped he would be able to come down for the opening performance of their play, Shall We Join the Ladies?, now only a one-act play – he had been unable to take it further and decided to let the audience work it out – which starred Gerald du Maurier as Dolphin, a butler.

  At eleven o’clock, with the intention of posting the letter, he walked out of the flat and took the lift to the ground floor. As he opened the gate of the lift and moved into the hallway, he was approached by a stranger who raised his hat, said he was from a newspaper and asked if Sir James could oblige him with a few words on the incident. Barrie asked what he was talking about. It was in this way that he learned of Michael’s drowning.

  He turned around and went back into the lift. In a daze, he telephoned Gerald and Peter first, and then his secretary Cynthia Asquith, who recalled that he spoke ‘in a voice she hardly recognised’: ‘I have had the most terrible news. Michael has been drowned.’

  When Cynthia arrived at the flat, Gerald and Peter were already there. They tried to persuade Barrie to go to bed, but he would not. Eventually they left for their own beds, and when Cynthia arrived the following morning, Barrie had still not slept. He had been pacing up and down the length of the study floor all night long.

  Nico was playing cricket at Eton while Michael drowned, and in the evening sang at a Musical Society concert. He was told of his death after lights out, at around 10 p.m. by Macnaghten, but had gone to sleep not really believing it. The full import of the event only hit him when Peter arrived at his bedside the following morning, and Macnaghten, himself a suicide in later years, made it worse by coming in, kneeling by his bed and holding both their hands. The boys then drove to Slough for breakfast and on to Adelphi Terrace. Nico recalled, ‘Uncle Jim’s immediate reaction on seeing me was “Oh – take him away!” Strangely I don’t remember feeling hurt at this.’

  Nico was given the responsibility of telling Nanny, who was working as a midwife at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. He was excused from the funeral and went to stay at Cannon Hall with the du Mauriers. In the 1970s, in interview with Andrew Birkin, he concluded that suicide was likely: ‘I’ve always had something of a hunch that Michael’s drowning was suicide – he was in a way the “type” i.e. exceptionally clever, with varying moods.’

  When D. H. Lawrence heard about it, he wrote from Hotel Krone, Ebersteinberg, Baden Baden to Mary Ansell: ‘My dear Mary, we had your note after your second trip to England. No, I hadn’t heard of the boy’s drowning. What was he doing to get drowned? J. M. Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die.’

  Two of Lawrence’s master-ideas were that possessive love is a deathly force, and that ‘accidents’ harbour a deep intentionality in both perpetrators and victims.

  For Boothby and Michael’s close friends his death was devastating and a watershed. Boothby spoke to Andrew Birkin of the many ‘desperate, hysterical letters … I can see Roger Senhouse being led up the High in Oxford, sobbing.’

  In the wake of the tragedy we can begin to see what Michael meant to his friends, and how different their lives might have been had he been released to carry the real Peter Pan into his own and their lives. Nico said that Roger Senhouse used to tell him that ‘for quite a long period after Michael was drowned, Boothby would say, looking upwards! �
�� “I think you’ll be pleased with what I did there, Michael!”’ Boothby himself said that had Michael not died, he would not have gone off the rails as he did, that Edward Marjoribanks, who ‘was devoted to Michael’, would not have committed suicide after he got into Parliament. He said that Michael’s death ‘altered the whole course of Roger Senhouse’s life’, referring to his affair with Lytton Strachey, and Clive Burt, he believed, would have done far more with Michael still there as muse.

  It was an extraordinary tribute, particularly that he might have made Boothby’s life different to how it turned out. That would have been quite an achievement. After Michael died Boothby, who would enter Parliament in 1924, earned the nickname ‘the Palladium’ at Magdalen for his ‘twice nightly’ appetite for homosexual sex. In 1963, five years after he gave up his seat and was raised to the peerage, he began an affair with East End cat burglar Leslie Holt, who introduced him to the gangster Ronald Kray, one of the twins foremost in organised crime in London in the 1950s and ’60s. Kray supplied Boothby with young men and arranged orgies in exchange for personal favours. When the Sunday Mirror broke the story in 1964 and the German magazine Stern named the parties, Boothby denied the story and threatened to sue the Mirror, and because senior Labour MP Tom Driberg was also involved the Labour-backed Mirror backed down, sacked its editor, apologised and paid Boothby £40,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

  According to Peter Llewelyn Davies in a letter to Dolly Ponsonby, Barrie bore Michael’s death ‘somehow, with wonderful composure, and physically at least with better success than could have been expected’.

  On 31 May, Barrie wrote to Rupert’s mother:

  Dear Lady Buxton,

  I have just read your very kind letter, but I have been thinking a great deal about you since the 19th and feeling sorrowful for you. I am very glad that you have a daughter. Michael was son and daughter to me, and all I have been doing of any account in the last ten years was trying to be father and mother to him. I cared for him a great deal too much but the circumstances of our two lives perhaps excused it. I should like by and by to be allowed to see Rupert’s sister, with the hope that she might come in time to look upon me as a friend.

  I suppose I knew Rupert more intimately than you knew Michael. There is not any subject I can pretend to know much about, but I know more about boys than any other, and one of my grand ambitions for Michael was that he should form a deep friendship for someone who was worthy of him. This was slow in coming, for though there were a few at Eton for whom he had a warm attachment, continued at Oxford and elsewhere, Rupert was the one great friend of his life. [Michael] has often talked to me about this, sometimes for hours, far into the night, reappearing to do it after he had gone to bed, and the last letter I had from him, on the day they died, was largely about your boy. Rupert treated me quite differently from any other of my various boys’ friends. They were always polite and edged away from me, as of a different generation, but he took for granted that Michael’s friend should be mine also. Michael knew me and my ways as no other person did, and he was more amused than words can tell by the way Rupert took me in hand. I shall never forget the glee with which he told me one day that Rupert was going to ask me to dinner all alone, and how I hoped Rupert would, and how he did and also came to me. I was very proud of his treating me in that way, and Michael knew I liked it, and I daresay the two of them chuckled over it, for they could both be very gay tho’ neither was facing life lightly.

  They were either wildly gay or very serious as they walked together to Sandford…

  Yours sincerely,

  J. M. Barrie

  There was never any likelihood that Rupert’s sister would go anywhere near him; nor did she. The letter seems to corroborate Peter’s view that Barrie’s state of mind was stable, but it was in contrast to Denis Mackail’s view – ‘He never got over it. It altered and darkened everything for the rest of his life’ – and to Barrie’s own statement in a letter to Dundas a year after the tragedy: ‘What happened was in a way the end of me.’ But then Peter was aware that it wasn’t long before Barrie was making notes for a story based on the tragedy.

  To be entitled Water or The Silent Pool or The 19th, it told of a dream he had of Michael returning from the dead. The boy was unaware that he had been drowned until ‘the fatal nineteenth’ approached again and he realised the inevitability of his death being repeated and went with Uncle Jim, holding his hand, into Sandford Pool – ‘He said goodbye to me and went into it and sank just as before…’

  Chillingly, he then added – ‘Must be clear tht [sic] there is nothing suicidal about it.’

  Afterword

  THE RECENT REVELATIONS and prosecutions of high-profile figures for sexual offences are bound to make one wonder whether Barrie’s motivation in the matter of the Llewelyn Davies boys was sexual. Even in his day there were many who assumed that it was. According to Nico, the youngest of the boys, it was common talk on the literary cocktail party circuit.63

  Homosexuality was illegal in England, even between consenting adults, until 1967, when the age of consent was set at twenty-one. Only occasionally would a court case break through the surface of Victorian respectability, most notably in 1895, just as Barrie began frequenting Kensington Gardens, when there were three.

  The first of the trials of Oscar Wilde was brought by Wilde himself against the Marquess of Queensberry, who left a card at his club accusing him of ‘posing as a sodomite’ after the Marquess became aware that Wilde was having an affair with his son, the poet Lord Alfred Douglas. It opened at the Old Bailey on 26 April. The prosecution paraded a motley squadron of some dozen young male witnesses – many but not all of them rent boys – to testify that Wilde and Alfred Taylor (Wilde’s procurer), were indeed guilty of twenty-five counts of gross indecency and conspiracy to commit gross indecencies, though sodomy wasn’t specifically among them. Wilde therefore lost his case against Queensberry, and the Crown prosecution indicted Wilde with gross indecency and brought him to trial at the Old Bailey. This second trial produced a hung jury, but a third saw Wilde convicted and sent to prison for two years, an experience that assisted his passage to an early death at forty-six.

  The aggressive nature of the Crown’s prosecution of Wilde is said to have been linked to a homosexual affair between Liberal Prime Minister Archibald Philip Primrose, the 5th Earl of Rosebery, and the eldest of Queensberry’s fetching sons, Francis Douglas. Queensberry is said to have threatened to expose this affair if the Crown didn’t deal severely with Wilde. Rosebery, whose wife, the daughter of a Rothschild banker, had died and left him a bachelor some years before, suffered severe depression right up to Wilde’s conviction, whereupon he made a remarkable recovery.

  This is worth mentioning because Rosebery’s private secretary was Barrie’s closest friend, Thomas Gilmour, which suggests among other things that Barrie will have been privy to the whole case and well aware of the risks that a prominent citizen ran by importuning young boys.

  Barrie himself became a correspondent of Rosebery, writing to him after the dust had settled, on 2 November 1897:

  A play of mine – a version of my novel The Little Minister is to be produced at the Haymarket Theatre on Saturday next, and I have dared to hope that if you were disengaged you might have sufficient interest in it to come. I think your children might enjoy it. A box would be reserved if we thought it was a possibility that you would come.

  In Wilde’s case, it is likely that more than one of his sexual encounters were with boys below the age of consent, which for heterosexuals in Great Britain and Ireland was sixteen. The abuse of minors was rampant. In a letter to Leonard Woolf in 1907, the Bloomsbury sexual anarchist Lytton Strachey wrote:

  Have you ever been to the Trocadero? It’s filled with little messenger boys, who do their best to play the catamite, but it hardly comes off. The nearest one of them got was to put his arm round [Maynard] Keynes’ neck as he was helping him on with his coat! Remarkable? The truth is that sodomy
is becoming generally recognised in England – but of such a degraded sort! Little boys of 13 are what the British Public love. There are choruses of them at most Comic Operas, and they flood all but the most distinguished of the Restaurants.

  When Michael’s cousin Daphne du Maurier was fourteen she wrote a story about Barrie,64 whom she knew very well, she didn’t think twice about giving him a procurer – ‘depressive Mr Tibbs’, who picks up a boy called Maurice, a thinly disguised Michael Llewelyn Davies, in the West End of London close to the Trocadero, and takes him to meet Tommy Strange, who, we learn, ‘likes young gentlemen’.

  The Trocadero itself would hardly have suited Barrie as a point of procurement. In those days cinemas were the more discreet pick-up joints, dark to the eyes of the law if not always to eagle-eyed managements. ‘Barrie must have slipped into thousands of cinemas in his time,’ his official biographer Denis Mackail recorded, but for some reason ‘had to abandon one of the nearest to the Adelphi’.

  In 1921, while the film of a night time shoot of London was being edited by a newsreel production company, a keen pair of eyes recognised Barrie lurking about in the area around the Adelphi. To everyone’s surprise there he was, snuggled up in hat, scarf, and raincoat, refreshing himself at a coffee-stall at two in the morning.

  The question posed was why would a 61-year-old man, who would never normally frequent a coffee stall, let alone at two in the morning, be propping one up around the corner of his apartment? Not only (to Barrie’s embarrassment) did the news clip show at countless cinemas up and down the country, but a frame from it appeared in the press, with caption-writers wondering at Barrie’s habit to prowl about the streets and patronise coffee-stalls in the small hours.

  Perhaps we should be charitable: Michael had died but six months earlier.