Permission to Resign
Page 5
Yes, I well remember saying to you that I was afraid of Aminta. I always have been. People like us who are frugal and fundamentally religious and serious don’t belong with people like her. I felt that so strongly the first time she came to Bridge End, in her furs and scent and pearls and silk stockings, when the little dog was sick in the hall and Don fainted and Aminta told me that she had never lived with Don. Aminta was very kind to us when we went to China, and amused me always – but I was never happy with her or with Don in the way I’m happy with you and most people.
Well William I didn’t mean to write such a long letter. Send me the Spectator and Nation and Statesman, will you? Write again as you promised. Do you remember this:
“Gentleness, Patience, Wisdom and Endurance
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over destruction’s strength.
To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To endure wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Never to change, nor falter, nor repent:
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free
This is alone Life, Power, Empire and Victory.”
In the last resort I take my stand on that.
Mary Anne’
Chapter III
Sir Warren kept my letter to Owen and gave it back to me many weeks later. At the time he wrote me the attached note, which I received on 9 March.
7th March. 1928.
6 Treborough House,
Great Woodstock Street,
Marylebone. W.1
‘Dear Mrs O’Malley
This little line is written – not by the official who was Chairman of the Board of Enquiry – but by one who in his private capacity has, I hope, a human understanding of your distress. And it is written to assure you that even among the officials, whose conclusions and advice must, I fear, seem to you severe, there is personal friendship to you and your husband. This is not play-acting on our part; and, if I may, I wd. like quite simply to say that you and he have friends who will stand by and see you through, and your children, during this time of strain, and for the future are keeping their eyes open so that no chance of work in some congenial line of life may be lost for him.
In the meanwhile will you try, please, to have trust and confidence and not to be afraid.
Yours sincerely
N. F. Warren Fisher’
I had previously written a letter for Sir Warren which I had sent to Owen to send on if he thought fit, the sense of which was to ask, really, what his offers of help and instructions to sit tight and to trust were worth. But, meanwhile, I had the letter from William Strang and Owen’s own memorandum, quoted above, to read. William’s letter made the seniority point, which Owen’s memorandum omitted. On all this I wrote a letter of seven typed pages to Sir Warren Fisher, making these various points; I spent most of the night of the 9th writing it, wondering if it would do more harm than good, but unable to refrain from the attempt. I posted it on Saturday the 10th, and by the same post sent Owen Sir Warren Fisher’s letter to me. That was at 5 p.m. At 7.30 p.m. I got a letter from Owen and one from Vincent Baddeley (Financial Secretary to the Admiralty) both urging me in the strongest possible terms to do nothing and say nothing.
Then I had a really bad half hour. My heart failed me about my letter, which was a little truculent. At all costs I felt that I must prevent Fisher from reading it. But I had sent it to his private address, and, as Sunday intervened, no telegram to the Treasury would reach him before he got it there by the first post on Monday. I had sent on by the same post his letter to me, for Owen to see – and I found that I had forgotten his address; I had not put it in my book, and it had gone clean out of my head.
I made then one of those extraordinary efforts of will and memory which sometimes succeed and give one the sense of a miracle. Holding down, almost by a physical effort, the rising flood of panic and flurry, I made my mind quite clear and still; and remembered first the wording of the letter, and then the look of the sheet of paper; and then slowly, like squeezing icing out of a tube, I forced the words of the address back in to my mind: ‘6 Tredborough House, Great Woodstock Street, Marylebone.’ Yes, that was it – (I had got one letter wrong, though I didn’t know it) – and physically trembling with relief I dashed the words down on the back of a time-table in pencil and locked it up (panic lest I should lose it again well on me now). After that I had actually to lie down for a little.
Next day, Sunday the 11th, I sent the following telegram to Sir Warren Fisher: ‘Please burn Chateau d’Oex letter unread. Mrs O’Malley.’ On Monday I wrote a little wail of despair to him, explaining what I had done, and a rather abject apology to Owen. That was the worst day I had. I missed the early post and took the letters to the afternoon train. However, it was not a train poste, I found: the officials were brusque and rude; I was trying to arrange with the conducteur to post them in Lausanne when a woman came forward and said in a very kind voice – ‘I am going to Lausanne. I’ll post them at the station for you.’
I turned to her and tried to thank her, but all I found myself saying was ‘They’re rather – they’re rather –’. I meant to say ‘urgent’, but her kindness, after the rudeness of the officials and my sense of helplessness and despair was too much; I broke down, stuffed them into her hand, and ran across the line and up into the fields crying.
That was my one real collapse – my nadir of misery and despair.
But Ruth Mallory came that day to stay with me – blessed Ruth, when I was sick for home and stood in tears in alien fields. Next day I wrote another and a better letter to Fisher, and on Wednesday I typed and sent it. Here it is:
March 13, 1928
Villa Prima-Flora
Chateau d’Oex
‘Dear Sir Warren
I have now given myself time to think more carefully over what I wanted to say to you, and tried to say in the letter which I asked you to destroy. It is your kindness in writing to me which emboldens me to write to you – you have offered friendship and invited trust, and if I ask more from you in the way of advice than you are able to give, you will remember that; and if I express myself badly or seem indiscreet, I hope you will remember first my inexperience in writing letters to people like you, and secondly the urgency of my distress. For a fortnight now I have known of this, but I have had no one from whom I could ask advice or help – I am terrified of making matters the little worse that they could be by some indiscretion, and yet I feel a responsibility to my husband and children that I cannot evade. My husband is almost knocked out for the moment; we have £300 a year and three children, and the boy’s health is seriously damaged by our time of Government service in China. I am sure you will see that I feel I ought to be up and doing to look out for a living somehow – try to get a job for myself at once, perhaps, and see about something later for my husband. Pity evaporates almost as quickly as our spring snow here – just now sorrow for our misery, which is very great, is still alive, but if we wait it may be too late. I am told that you have it in your power to help us more than anyone; certainly no one could need help more than we. And you have told my husband to do nothing, and told me not to worry. But I think you will see the difficulty I have in understanding how you can possibly help my husband by recommending him for a job, when you have just reported him to be unfit for the job he did admittedly rather well, and he has in consequence been removed from it with every circumstance of disgrace. And I really want – I know you cannot be very explicit – but I want to ask you whether I at least ought not to try for work at once? If I had any idea of how long my husband would be “out”, as the poor say, I could judge better about this.
That is my first difficulty. This is the second.
There are people who w
ant to try to do something to – what shall I say? – vindicate my husband. They feel, rightly or wrongly, that if the Report was severe, the sentence was savage. My husband will have nothing to do with anything of the sort. He will see no one and say nothing. He says that his duty is to do nothing to embarrass the Government, but to keep perfectly quiet. But I – oh, surely you must be able to see that to lift off even the least scrap of this load of public ignominy would mean more to me than any money? And I ask myself all the time – am I bound to such scrupulousness towards a Government which has punished an impropriety admittedly grave, but four years old, with such a penalty?
So I have thought and thought, and at last it seems to me that the right and proper thing for me to do is to put before you, his judge, certain matters which I think ought, in the interests of justice, to be taken into consideration. That can embarrass no one, because you need take no notice. But if you think that what I have to say has any weight, if it moves you to feel that inadvertently a little less than justice was done to my husband, then perhaps – I don’t know what then. Disgrace is disgrace and sacked is sacked and that is that. But still I feel that I must put these things before you.
The first point is this:
In para. 20 of the Report it is said that “he (my husband) occupied an official post in the Department only less responsible than that of Mr Gregory himself”. These words can only be taken to mean, and will only be taken to mean one thing – that he was second in the Department. But when he began his dealings in francs my husband was only fourth in the Department; Mr (or is he now Sir?) Esmond Ovey was second and Mr Selby was third. My husband only became second later. I do not know how this slip crept in, but it is used in the Report as constituting an aggravation of my husband’s offence. And it is bitter to know that it is not strictly true. Mr Selby or Mr Gregory could corroborate this I am sure. Sir Hubert [Sir Hubert Montgomery, Chief Clerk in the Foreign Office] ought to know too.
Secondly, in a Report such as this I am sure you will agree with me that implications or suggestions are as damning as direct statements, and there are three to which I wish to draw your attention. They all occur – or two certainly – in the evidence of one witness. Lt-Cmmdr Maxse told you that when he returned from sick-leave in Dec. 1923, he came “into a going concern”. Now my husband’s direct dealings closed in June 1923, and his indirect ones only began well on in 1924 – the Report gives no date, but if my memory serves me it would be about July. So any “going concern” into which Commander Maxse came in December 1923 did not then include my husband. It may seem a small point, but there is clearly in it an element at least of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, as there is in what follows. There is the question of “yielding to persuasion”. My husband has stated in his protest that he denies ever having persuaded Cmmdr Maxse to deal in francs. I can remember an afternoon spent in the study at our house – I could give you no date, because Commdr Maxse was always coming, but it was autumn or winter, 1924 – when I heard my husband urging him not to gamble in francs, because his financial circumstances made it so fearfully risky. Yet my husband lies under this imputation equally with Mrs Dyne and Mr Gregory. Thirdly there was the suggestion that my husband was a regular frequenter of Mrs Dyne’s house for the purpose of discussing deals. I know from my own knowledge that this was not true of my husband in the sense that it was true of Commdr Maxse and Mr Gregory. From 1923 till he went to China in 1925 he was living in the country, not in London except when at the Office; and long after he had gone to China the “circle” continued to flourish without him.
Now if some of the most damaging parts of the Report can be proved, perhaps to you alone, to be based on half-truths, might there not later be a chance of clearing our name to some extent? That is what I want so terribly. My husband did do wrong, he did gamble in francs, did commit an impropriety. But I would most humbly submit that the Report and the sentence together make his impropriety and his offence appear far greater than the facts – if you accept his statements and mine – warrant. The gambling in francs alone has not ruined Mr Villiers, his senior, a wealthy bachelor with far less temptation to try to increase his income. Most of our statements can easily be checked. If they are verified, surely much of the gravamen of my husband’s offence disappears? The statement as to his seniority in para. 20 goes: his position in the “circle” in regard to his “systematic operations” (known to be limited to three) is greatly altered; he is cleared from the charge of having seduced Commander Maxse from the path of rectitude. He has denied that he well knew that what he was doing was wrong. There remains the fact that he began it. But he began it for himself – can it seriously be suggested that he corrupted the guileless innocence of poor Mr Gregory, who but for him would still be leading a blameless life? It has seemed to me all along that without these further imputations it would have been impossible to lay so much stress on the fact of a junior, fourth down in the department, being the first to do something which he did to such a mild extent.
Will you forgive me if I ask you – if you had known all that you now know before drafting the Report, would you have drafted it precisely as you did? Now that you have seen my statements and my husband’s, do you not think that justice calls upon you to verify such of them as are verifiable? If you then satisfy yourself that they are true, even any of them, can you be satisfied to leave us under the stigma of behaviour so disgraceful as to necessitate summary removal from the Service? Can you be quite easy and happy in your mind to let my children grow up in the shadow of disgrace not wholly deserved? And in poverty too? If we were cleared, work would be easier to get; and education and good doctoring and good food even, all the things they can now only have by charity – it is that, however kindly given – would be more easily obtainable.
Please forgive the great length of this letter. Excuse its being type-written, but my writing is very bad. And if it seems to you indiscreet or uncalled-for or wrong in any of the thousand ways in which it may be wrong, if you will recall the circumstances in which it is written you may perhaps be lenient to me. I can get no advice. I have had to meet this sharpest crisis in our lives, spiritual as well as material, quite alone. I feel that I must contend for my husband’s good name, but I am terribly handicapped by my ignorance and inexperience, as well as by anxiety and distress and confusion of mind. If I have seemed discourteous or presumptuous in any of my expressions, I can only ask your pardon, and say that I have at least tried to write with moderation on a subject of which it is hard for me even to think without despair and tears.
Yours sincerely
Mary O’Malley’
And then another of those curious, almost accidental episodes happened, which again turned the course of events. This time the mark goes to Hope Costley-White. I had now got Ruth with me; I had shot my bolt at Sir Warren Fisher; and though I still felt doubtful about the wisdom of letting the occasion of the Zinoviev Debate (at which the whole question of Mr Gregory’s connection with the Zinoviev letter and the francs case was to be discussed) pass without a single question, I had decided to stay where I was for the time being. I knew that through Will Arnold-Forster (who was a leading member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Labour Party, and a close friend of ours) the Labour people had made overtures to Owen, asking him to put the facts of his case before them so that they might take it up – and I knew that he had refused to say anything till his resignation was accepted. I saw, and he saw, the risk that the Government might muzzle him by not accepting his resignation till the Debate was over, and all chance, or at least the best chance, of raising his case lost. But he had decided, and I was prepared to follow suit. I was in bed, resting after the labours of composition and typing of the previous days, on the morning of Thursday the 15th, when a letter from Hope was brought in. George Young had been to see her, she wrote, more than once. (Joris Young – later Sir George Young, Bart. – had been in the Diplomatic Service, and was also a member of the Labour Party’s Foreign Affairs Committee.) He sa
id it was urgent that Owen should meet the Labour people. He would not. I must come home and see about it. ‘He says it is essential that you come home this week – as soon as you get this, if possible.’
Chapter IV
I read the letter at noon. Ruth and I left on the 8 p.m. train for London that evening. In the interval we packed John off to the school as a boarder, took our tickets, and packed a sufficiency for me – I also sent two telegrams, one to Pendell, where Owen was staying, merely giving the time of my arrival at Victoria; one to Hope as follows: ‘Arriving Victoria fifteen fifty Friday arrange meeting Baddeley that afternoon. Marianne.’ I was determined to get Vincent Baddeley’s advice at once, before seeing anyone else. But there I reckoned without Hope.
I enjoyed the journey. I was thankful beyond words to be going back to Owen, and deeply relieved to be about to get to the centre of things, where I could see, hear and judge for myself how matters stood. I amused myself working on a mass of suggestions for the next Wives’ Fellowship Joint Conference, which I had been asked to look over and work up into a programme – I got it finished before we reached London.
At Victoria we found the Rolls from Pendell waiting, with Jane, my daughter, who was living with her governess at Pendell Court, in the kind care of May and Archie Bell – May was her godmother. But we also found Hope! Hope, full of subdued determination, who said that I must come back with her to Dean’s Yard at once, and see Joris Young at 5.30. So we packed into the Rolls with Jane and drove off to Dean’s Yard and tea, over which Hope explained that she had suppressed my message to Vincent Baddeley because Joris said it was imperative that he should see me before anyone else did. She then ran out to a meeting and left me alone. Jane had gone to the schoolroom. I sat over the fire in the diningroom at 19 Dean’s Yard, with the sober portraits of former Headmasters of Westminster School looking down on the deserted tea-table, and spent the first of many hours of solitary meditation and anxiety that I was to pass with those portraits before a month was out. I was apprehensive about the meeting with Joris, before I could get any advice, and wondered what Owen would say to it. I was worried about Owen, hearing for the first time from Jane that he had been in bed with a temperature for nearly a fortnight. Fretted by these thoughts and by inaction, it occurred to me at last that I might as well try to find out whether Sir Warren Fisher would be in town over the weekend, in the, as I thought, unlikely event of Owen’s being willing that I should see him. I went to the telephone, rang up the Treasury, and asked for his secretary. Getting him, I asked rather nervously if Sir Warren Fisher would be in town over Sunday? The secretary would find out – but what was my name? This was a terrible complication, but I could only give it and hold the line as I was bidden.