by Ann Bridge
‘We’d better go now,’ said Albert.
So it came about that without any preliminary enquiries or advice I was marched on to my fate. We passed up stairs and along corridors lined, apparently, with the interiors of Cathedral choir-stalls, with policemen standing about like vergers, and what appeared to be pukka vergers standing about like themselves. We paused before the door of a room; something in Gothic characters was written over it in gold. Albert disappeared. I looked up and read the legend – ‘Leader of the Opposition.’ Good Heavens! Was Lord Haldane still that? Then I had torn it! But it was too late now. Down the passage, inexorably, came a murmur of voices, Lord Haldane’s saying ‘But my dear boy, you know I can’t really give her any –’ and then they turned the corner and came in sight, Albert and the little old stout gentleman, who looked and moved so much like an inconceivably wise, learned, and honourable monkey.
I was introduced. We went into his room. I presented Lord Chelmsford’s letter. With solemn courtesy, Lord Haldane asked my permission, read it, and then motioned to me to speak. Mindful of Lord Chelmsford’s injunctions, I got under way as before.
I did not get very far. Almost at once, long before I had asked my first question, the old man weighed in, monumentally. This thing must stand. The Report must stand. There could be no question of going back on such a decision.
‘I am very sorry for you,’ he said. ‘I am very sorry about the whole unfortunate affair. I have the happiest recollections of my few dealings with your husband. I admired his work.’
But these courteous expressions only emphasized a terrific severity. I must leave it alone. He could not hear me.
And then he said a thing which struck out a blinding illumination of the situation. ‘Those who are dealing with this matter wish you well – but they are not autocrats.’ Sir Warren’s very words to me over the telephone the evening before!
It was only too plain. Lord Haldane must be in close touch with Sir Warren. His inexplicable severity was no longer inexplicable; he thought I was intriguing against Sir Warren behind his back.
I retired in as good order as I could in the circumstances. ‘I am sorry to have wasted so much of your time,’ I said. ‘I see that you know as much about this matter as I do myself. Lord Chelmsford told me to put the affair before you as I did before him, and I followed his advice. He knew nothing of it.’
‘Of course he didn’t!’ said Lord Haldane, in a tone which implied that Lord Chelmsford knew nothing about anything. And with more mutual civilities we parted, Albert and I thanking him warmly for having seen us. It was indeed a notable act of courtesy. This old, this learned man, ex-Lord Chancellor and Leader of the Opposition in the House of Lords, on whom I had no sort of claim, official or private, at one word of request left the Debate in the House to come and see me. A striking commentary on the behaviour of Sir Austen Chamberlain!
But it was a crushing defeat – the one really disastrous encounter in my whole campaign. Albert and I returned to his room and discussed it.
‘But why didn’t you tell me he was such a dear friend of Sir Warren Fisher’s?’ I said, when I had told Albert about the autocrats, and learned that Fisher and Haldane were indeed as thick as thieves. ‘And why didn’t you tell me he was Leader of the Opposition? I’d never have gone near him if I’d known that. It was the one thing I ought not to have done.’
Albert had, most naturally, assumed that I knew all that. We had to laugh about it, for if it was disastrous, it was also very funny – and Albert at last took in that I had come much more to ask his advice as to seeing Lord Haldane at all than to get taken to him.
He tried to cheer me up. ‘You did remarkably well, I thought.’
I went off to Dean’s Yard for tea and found Albert’s telephone message written down, and a note, which ran: ‘Please bring me the Minutes of evidence and the Memorandum you spoke of as soon as you can. A.N.’ There, also, I met some people – I have forgotten who they were, but some strategic questions produced corroboration of the fact that Sir Warren Fisher and Sir Claud Schuster knew one another, officially, very well indeed. That, taken with this sequence of times, was enough for me. There must be some sort of collaboration going on between Fisher and Schuster. Albert should have his memorandum. I telephoned to Walford Selby and asked him to send his copy round to Dean’s Yard at once, and as soon as it came I took it to Albert at the House of Lords.
On my return to the House of Lords, I asked Albert point-blank if Fisher was in this? Albert was discreet.
‘I know he saw Schuster this morning just after 12,’ I said.
Albert became less discreet. Yes, he was. I could give any information I chose to him, Albert, as it was all for Sir Claud; and I need not fear being disloyal to Sir Warren, since he was in it, too. What exactly ‘it’ was, Albert did not explain, and I did not press him. By the purest accident I had stumbled on his secret, and a sufficiently remarkable secret it was. I had made up my mind, quite irrationally, to trust Sir Warren Fisher and to believe blindly his assurances that he was doing his utmost for us. His official utmost was all that we had any right to expect; but the circumstances made it clear, without any further explanation on Albert’s part, that besides his open official efforts, Sir Warren was, to some extent and in an obscure way, intriguing against himself behind his own back, so to speak. And I did not need Albert’s emphatic injunctions that I really must not mention this to anyone.
But I went home rather hugging myself. It was so much more fun to have trusted Fisher on nothing than to have waited to trust him till such a piece of evidence of his bona-fides fell into my mouth like a plum. (The O’M.s are all incurable gamblers, it would seem!) It threw a new and exciting light on Fisher too. And it was excessively hard, at Pendell, to keep a certain new hopefulness out of my words and voice.
Before I left, I arranged with Albert to come down to Pendell the following evening and talk to Owen himself. He came on Friday the 23rd. He put his points, asked his questions, and went off primed. From then till the following Tuesday I remained quiet and inactive at Pendell. Sir Warren was away – I couldn’t even ring him up. I wrote to him, thanking him for a book he had sent me, and told him that I had been more or less surprised into doing something of which he might not approve. Otherwise, we heard nothing. Nevile came down and was very stiff with me for having gone over his head to see Sir William Tyrrell. But most of the time was spent in nursing Owen. The doctor had seen him. He had prescribed strong drugs to make him sleep, and only allowed him to get up at 10.30 and remain up till six, with an hour’s rest in the afternoon. Pendell will always be associated in my mind with those endless conversations in Owen’s room and the Panelled Room ‘about it and about’. His tormented mind moved to and fro, up and down about the subject; the problem, ceaseless to me and May, was how much to let him talk and how far to suppress conversation. Will anyone blame me if then I said again: ‘God do so to them and more also, who through panic, haste, and prejudice brought him to this pass?’
Chapter X
Meanwhile, unknown to me, matters were still moving in London, and I must again draw on my later knowledge to preserve the sequence of events. On the Thursday when I was having my very odd series of interviews, Sir Warren Fisher was preparing to leave London for a week. He was worried at having to leave at such a crucial stage of our affairs, and, after seeing Sir Claud Schuster and discussing the matter with him (with the results which we have seen), he sent for Sir Malcolm Ramsay and told him to see Sir William Tyrrell and see what more he could do. He then went off to South Wales. On Friday, still dissatisfied, he wrote or wired to Mr Knox, his secretary, telling him to get hold of Sir Malcolm Ramsay and make him keep Sunday free, as he should wish to see him then.
On Saturday, 24 March, Sir Malcolm Ramsay and Sir Maurice (then Mr) Gwyer had a long interview with Sir William Tyrrell. Sir William said, broadly speaking, this: the Report of the Board of Enquiry made it clear that as between three delinquents, Mr Gregory and O.O’M. fell into
one class, and Commander Maxse into another – and this seemed to him logically to constitute an impossible barrier to mitigation of sentence. Sir Warren Fisher travelled back from South Wales that night, and on the following morning, Sunday, 25 March, he sent for Sir Malcolm Ramsay and spent several hours with him. On hearing Sir M.’s account of his interview with Sir William Tyrrell, Sir Warren, unable to do it himself, laid it on Sir Malcolm Ramsay to write a memorandum reinforcing O.O’M.’s appeal for mitigation of sentence with all the force at his command. He suggested lines of argument. The Report implied three categories not two. O.O’M. was in a middle one by himself. Hence resignation not dismissal. New facts had emerged. He did not so well know what he was doing as had been supposed. A mistake had undoubtedly been made over his seniority. All this tended to shift him more and more into the Maxse rather than the Gregory category. Having thus put matters in train so far as he was able, on Monday the 26th, Sir Warren left for Northumberland, whence he only returned on the evening of Thursday the 29th.
On Tuesday the 27th, I went up to London again, and, as before, stayed at Dean’s Yard. I still felt that I ought to be doing something more. Several people had suggested that there might be real use now in getting a general drive on official opinion, and causing the pressure of such opinion to make itself felt. With this idea in my head I went to the Colonial Office and saw Ralph Furse. I spent an hour with him. He listened to my story with his head on one side. But he rose at once to the occasion. He had someone in mind who might help. This someone proved to be Mr J. C. C. Davidson, then the Minister for the Colonies. That was coming rather near the throne, so to speak. I said I must wait to hear what Van had to say before entamer-ing an advance in that quarter. What was said to J.C.C. was said to the Prime Minister, and I mustn’t go behind Van’s back. I promised to dine with Ralph and Celia on Thursday and let Ralph know then whether he should move or not.
But Van was tiresome. He wouldn’t see me on Thursday, and I went to dine with Ralph without any sailing orders from him. We had, however, a long and most interesting evening, spent largely in discussing Fisher’s position.
Next morning I did manage to see Van, at No. 10. I put my case to him quite baldly. A friend of mine knew a friend of the P.M.’s, and was anxious to speak to him on our behalf. I should like it – but I was anxious to do everything on the square with him, Van.
‘I don’t propose to mention any names unless you ask me for them,’ I added, ‘for I imagine you would just as soon not know them.’
Van looked very fine at that, and smiled. Yes, he thought what I proposed could do no harm. ‘But don’t on any account approach the King!’ he added in some apparent alarm. ‘You weren’t thinking of that, I hope?’
This suggestion nearly choked me with mirth, but I assured Van gravely that I appreciated to the full the perils of an appeal to the Crown, and would attempt nothing of the sort.
He wished me all manner of luck, and as he showed me out he said – ‘On the whole I think you had better not have seen me this morning!’
‘Very well,’ I said, grinning, ‘I haven’t!’
And wishing him Goodbye I ran across to the Colonial Office. Ralph was out, but I left a line for him – ‘Carry on.’
Sometime that day, Sir Warren telephoned. He asked me to lunch at the flat next day, Saturday, and I accepted.
So, on Saturday the 31st, just a fortnight after my first momentous visit, I found myself again at Treborough House. Sir Warren’s and my taxis drew up at the same time, and we went in together. He was very gay and cheerful. At lunch I reported progress. I told him that I had found out, quite by accident, of an activity of his left hand that his right hand knew not of, and that I was glad I had trusted him before I found out how trustworthy he was. He wanted to know what I was referring to.
‘Oh, that doesn’t really matter,’ I said.
I told him about Lord Haldane and my crushing disaster there, and made him laugh very much over it – and I told him about Mr J.C.C. – without mentioning Ralph’s name.
‘You’d better tell your friend to hurry,’ he said.
So I telephoned there and then to Ralph and gave him that message. Sir Warren then told me that Sir Malcolm Ramsay had written a memorandum on our behalf – ‘a beautiful thing – really quite Biblical’. This was the first I heard of the famous Malcolm Memo. He also told me about his interview with William Strang. He had liked William. I teased him a little by telling him how all the young men in the Foreign Office now signed their notes to one another, ‘Yours inflexibly and fastidiously’, and so on. It was on this occasion that he quoted W.T.’s quotation of my remark to him, and I told him rather blisteringly what I thought of Sir William’s behaviour over that.
Presently, while we were having tea, he said, ‘As a matter of pure babyish curiosity – do tell me what it was that you found out I’d been doing that made you realize you’d been right to trust me?’
So I told him how, piecing together William’s casual mention of Schuster’s call on him, and Albert’s urgent summons to me within a few hours, I had Sherlock Holmes’d some machinations of his with Schuster.
He was tremendously amused. ‘What fun it all is, really,’ he said. ‘If it comes right, as please God it does, how we shall laugh later on to think of you and me sitting here today, victim and executioner, conspiring together to defeat the ends of justice.
‘Not justice!’ I told him. Well, tyranny if I liked – anyhow to defeat the powers that be, on whose side he should properly be ranged. And indeed we were conspiring. But meanwhile I had yet another idea in my head. I had heard through Will Arnold-Forster that Ramsay Macdonald, the Labour leader, had written a letter to Joris Young, at the instance of the last-named, saying that ‘So far from disapproving of a mitigation of Mr O’Malley’s sentence, I regard him as a serious loss to the Foreign Service, and should welcome his reinstatement.’ But as this letter was only read aloud to me over the telephone, and then burnt, it was not much use. Since my failure with Lord Haldane, my notion now was to try to get hold of Ramsay Macdonald and somehow persuade him to let Mr Baldwin know his views. This scheme I put up to Sir Warren, and this he also blessed. Do it, by all means, if you can, was his line.
As before, I was forbidden to mention the memorandum to Owen, and returned to Pendell that evening with very little of the news for which he was starving, except that Ralph was mobilized, and that we had Sir Warren’s sanction for a raid on Ramsay Macdonald. We discussed ways and means for the latter. The idea of Arthur Ponsonby, whom Owen knew very well since 1923, occurred to us. I telephoned him at his London house and ascertained that he was at Haslemere. So, taking lunch with us, we set out for Shottermill Priory in the car on Sunday. We lunched at Hindhead – and a little thing happened which shows better than paragraphs of description Owen’s state of mind. He turned the car into an open space by the side of the road for lunch – started to back it to get it in neatly – forgot that he was going on and not returning, and turned it right round facing London again! He was always doing things like that in those days, and each one struck me a blow at the heart. Even if we got him reinstated, would he recover his nervous balance? And if we failed? Then the years stretched ahead very black – Owen eating out his heart in injured health, in uncongenial employment, in poverty perhaps; with the sense of bitter injustice poisoning all the springs of hope and happiness at the source. It was a grey drizzling mild day, and these gloomy reflections still hang in my mind across the pictures of blurred slopes of wood, sodden meadows, and swollen sluggish streams which surround Shottermill Priory.
We found it, after many false shots. We found Mrs Ponsonby. ‘Our Arthur’ was playing golf at Cowdray, but would be back to tea and would, she was sure, be delighted to see us. We did not want to plant ourselves on her for the whole afternoon, so, promising to return to tea at 4.30, we went off to Cowdray Castle and clambered about the ruins. I remember that I felt exceedingly cold and very sick – I began to wonder if I was going to be
ill. That was an indulgence for which I had no time to spare, so I hoped and decided that I wasn’t.
When we returned they were all at tea in the crypt of that amazing house. Owen explained to Mr Ponsonby that – ‘this is a ramp of my wife’s that she’s come to talk about – I’m merely her chauffeur’ – and when tea was over the others went upstairs, and Mr Ponsonby and I drew chairs to the open hearth, where logs smouldered, and I began.
Those beginnings to interviews – how I hated them! The interviews themselves, in retrospect, stretch out in a ghastly series, mostly with people quite unknown to me – with Sir Warren Fisher, with Walford Selby, with Mr Vansittart, with Sir John Tilley, with Sir Victor Wellesley, with Sir William Tyrrell, with Lord Chelmsford and Lord Haldane, with Ralph Furse, with Mr Ponsonby, with Sir Claud Schuster, with Mr J. C. C. Davidson. With the solitary exception of that with Lord Haldane, the beginnings were much the worst part of them. There was always the painful opening gambit; the endeavour to create an atmosphere of sympathy rather than of hostility; the attempt so to say one thing that I should be allowed to say the next; to use such sweet reasonableness as should cause me to be thought a responsible person, and such cogency as should carry conviction. What is hard to realize and, looking back from a distance, even to remember, was the painful, disconcerting and unwonted conviction that all these people would much rather not see me than see me – were indeed only seeing me at all from a sense of duty or obligation. That certainty is a very trying wicket on which to play a winning over.
But Mr Ponsonby was very kind to me, like almost all the rest. I told him roughly what was happening. I told him our grounds for having a shot at reinstatement, and took him over some of the more serious errors in the Report. He listened gravely.
‘It’s a damning indictment of the whole Report,’ he said at the end.