Edith Sitwell did her best to avoid her parents, spending as much time as she could among artists and writers in London. Also, she saw something of her friend, Tom Spring-Rice, the diplomat and pianist who had come for musical evenings with the Lanes in 1907. We glimpse the connection through Sacheverell’s letters to Osbert. On 3 March 1912 he describes a museum visit in London: ‘Father whilst climbing the steps in front of the door, tripped in the door-mat, hurtling through the swing-doors, fell down the steps, & knocked over 3 priceless Italian cabinets, the best in the Museum … Father, Edith, & I had tea here [the Curzon Hotel], after which Edith drove me to Grannie’s [Lady Londesborough’s] in a taxi, & then went herself to tea with the Spring-Rices.’11 In another letter, also from the first half of 1912, he writes that he has been out shopping with Edith and Tom for a wedding present for a friend; they went to a Japanese shop in Bond Street and bought a green glass pendant that looked like jade. ‘Edith liked it so much that she doesn’t think she can give it after all, but will keep it herself.’12 Nothing came of her relationship with the cultured and sympathetic Spring-Rice. Having been third secretary in St Petersburg, he was sent to Washington in 1913; he eventually acceded to a peerage and died in 1934.13 However, it is pleasant to imagine that in other circumstances Britain’s outstanding woman poet of the twentieth century might have been styled ‘Lady Monteagle’.
That summer, Edith, Sachie and Sir George went to Florence, staying at the Grand Hotel Baglioni, while making forays to the castello, although the atmosphere was distressing. The Italians had seized from the decaying Ottoman Empire the territories that now comprise Libya in a short but bloody campaign that involved for the first time the use of aeroplanes and other technology that would figure in the First World War. On their way back from the castello one evening the Sitwells were unable to get to their hotel; the streets were crowded with conscripts returning from Tripoli, being carried shoulder-high, and covered with flowers and confetti.14
Meanwhile, the private troubles of the Sitwells were coming to a crisis. Part of the problem was Osbert, who was spending his way through a large allowance and expected his father to keep writing cheques. In 1909, Sir George had decided that his son needed the army for discipline, so sent him to a crammer near Camberley to prepare for his examinations.15 There he became friends with a young man named Willie Martin.16 In the summer of 1911, Osbert invited Martin to stay with the Sitwell family – possibly presenting him as someone with a bright idea. As was her habit, Lady Ida laid out her woes to this brand-new acquaintance. He gave her the name of a financial wizard – Julian Osgood Field – who could fix her debts.
At first glance, Field was a respectable figure, the son of an important American family, educated at Harrow and Oxford, and an acquaintance of Victor Hugo, Maupassant, Swinburne, and Walter Besant. He had produced several books, wrote short stories, and was the editor and translator of an eighteenth-century work on the spiritual life. In fact, he was a crook and a moneylender’s tout. He had been imprisoned for forgery, and when Lady Ida met him he was living in ease at the Grosvenor Hotel, even though he was an undischarged bankrupt pursued by many creditors.17
Lady Ida explained her needs. In the next year and a half she seems to have signed almost any paper Field laid in front of her; taken together, Osbert says, they made her responsible for thirty thousand pounds.18 Her strict liability seems to have been closer to twelve thousand – still a very large sum. Field took her signed bills of exchange for specific amounts, which other people, some of them strangers, accepted and signed as guarantors. He arranged for the bills to be discounted, that is, purchased at a greatly reduced value for immediate cash, by a private moneylender. The transactions were to be further secured by a life insurance policy of eight thousand pounds, which she found herself unable to obtain once the claims for repayment started. Nowadays a woman with one lung would hardly be insurable at all. At one point, Field promised Lady Ida 25 per cent of the profits of a non-existent yeast business.19 In the end, she received six hundred pounds to apply to her original debts.20 Field and his associates pocketed the rest.
Along the way, Lady Ida tried to turn her social connections to her advantage and volunteered to introduce those who backed her bills into social circles normally closed to them. This was the inducement offered to Frances Bennett Dobbs, an elderly eccentric in Streatham with a good deal of money and few friends. Field contacted David Herbert, a ‘private inquiry agent’ who maintained a second, professional identity as ‘Oliver Herbert’ and worked mainly as a rent-collector – a man with the business ethics of Uriah Heep. He was managing Dobbs’s money and offered to marry her, despite already having a wife, not to mention a girlfriend with whom he was living at a second address. He arranged for Dobbs to back a note of Lady Ida’s for three thousand pounds and then to sign another, which she later claimed was presented to her merely as a duplicate of the first. The two notes totalling six thousand pounds were then discounted for £4450 by a lender named Charles Owles.21 They came due in July 1912, but Lady Ida could not pay.
On 8 August, Herbert wrote to Sir George: ‘I have something very urgent to convey to you re your wife – Lady Ida Sitwell. She got me to obtain the signature of a lady client of mine to a bill. My client threatens serious proceedings unless paid, so please let me know what is to be done. Am quite unable to get reply from Lady Ida.’ Much the same letter was sent on the same day to her brother, the Earl of Londesborough. Herbert soon afterwards threatened to denounce her at a ball to be held in Scarborough in aid of the Lady Ida Sitwell Convalescent Home for Children, but he backed off once six hundred pounds was paid to his solicitor.22 The moneylender Owles, who held the dishonoured bills, brought the matter to court in October and obtained a default judgment against Lady Ida. Having backed the notes, Dobbs was also on the hook.
Osbert, now in the 11th Hussars, had something of a nervous breakdown in August 1912. He was unhappy in the cavalry, and Sir George accepted that he should seek a more congenial regiment,23 but Osbert’s worries went much deeper. In the preceding year, Lady Ida had asked him to find backers for her notes among his fellow subalterns. Although his biographer concludes that he made no money from his mother’s borrowings, he was certainly involved in them from the beginning. She kept to herself the full details of her involvement with Field, but it is difficult to believe Osbert’s claim: ‘She told us nothing.’24 He had his mother’s confidence to a degree and was willing to act as her agent.
Osbert was desperate about the situation of Willie Martin, who had not only introduced them to Field but had himself backed at least one bill for Lady Ida. When she did not pay by November 1912, the money-lender R. Leslie Limited demanded from Martin the amount of £825 6s then due. Martin was served with a bankruptcy order, so he put the matter in the hands of a solicitor. Martin appealed to Osbert, ‘you know my whole life is ruined if I become a bankrupt. What am I to do? I am so worried.’25 On 20 November 1912, that solicitor demanded a meeting with Osbert.26 The immediate danger was that Osbert, who would be commissioned a second lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards on 7 December 1912 and posted to the Tower of London, would be revealed as a swindler willing to prey on his brother officers. Although Martin’s debt was dealt with, Lady Ida’s letters on the subject would haunt Osbert.
The stress worsened Lady Ida’s tuberculosis. Sachie reported to Osbert from Scarborough on 26 December 1912: ‘Mother is still very ill. I never knew how really seriously ill she has been. She has had lots of blood & congestion of the brain, & very nearly became off her head … Every day after dinner Mother goes to get her medicine, and you know what that means. Before she undresses she has a glass of hot whiskey.’27
No longer Edith’s governess but still an emeritus member of the household, Helen Rootham took Edith’s fight on to herself and confronted Lady Ida. Edith had to be got clear of the scandal. Sachie wrote to Osbert: ‘Mother is now at daggers drawn with Miss Rootham. Please warn [Edith], & tell her how things are happening.’ Sir
George agreed that there was a practical reason to keep Edith and Lady Ida apart. Edith had been with her mother a great deal in 1911, and the fraudsters swarming around Lady Ida might ‘get at’ Edith28 and induce her to say something that would have to be repeated in court: she could even be subpoenaed. ‘I escaped from them for a short while, as a Ticket-of-Leave Woman.’29 A ticket-of-leave was granted to a convict who wanted to live abroad and was a reward for good behaviour. Abroad for Edith Sitwell meant London. She took a flat with Helen Rootham, who would serve as chaperone.
This was a crucial time. At twenty-five, Edith Sitwell had been granted, under hideous circumstances, the opportunity to make her own life. Fifteen-year-old Sachie sounds a note of self-pity in a letter to Osbert on 20 February 1913: ‘As Edith has, I do sincerely hope, escaped from home for good, I shall be left from now till I am 19 or so alone with them during the holidays. Neither of them are really fond of me neither is Edith. I am hated here, consequently you are the only person who could be fond of me.’30 Edith did love him, but this was not the moment for her to turn back. She spent most of 1913 at a rooming house run by a Miss Fussell at 14 Pitt Street in Kensington. Helen covered her own expenses, while Sir George paid for Edith and provided a servant. In many ways, it was a continuation of the life they had led together on and off in London, Paris, and Berlin since 1905. Lady Ida believed they were in league against her. Writing to Sachie from Italy on 9 June, she raged against Sir George, who had as allies ‘Miss Rootham & Edith who I hate. I do hope you will persuade him that I never want to see Edith again, Miss Rootham was detestable since when I was ill not a word, she is the only person I know who never did. I know you like her but I hope some day you will find out what a deceitful liar she is.’31
Bad news kept coming. A Yorkshire cricketer named John Philip Wilson had guaranteed a note for four thousand pounds with a mortgage on his reversion – a matter that threatened to destroy the young man and to become a scandal in their own county. Sir George and the Earl paid off this amount.32 However, the case of Frances Dobbs would not go away. Once judgment was granted by default against Lady Ida, Dobbs disputed the claim against herself on the grounds that she had been the victim of a fraud. Her efforts to prove this point were stymied when Lady Ida dodged service of a subpoena. Justice Horridge adjourned the case, urging Lady Ida ‘for her credit’s sake’ to come forward. Her barrister said that she had been very surprised to read of these things in the newspaper, to which opposing counsel drily responded that her solicitors had received twenty-three letters concerning the matter.
Lady Ida was a poor witness, and when asked about her husband’s wealth remarked vaguely that he owned some collieries. She confirmed that she had written, as dictated by Field, a letter to Herbert that included this sentence: ‘You who have known me for so long and known my people know that Miss Dobbs will be running no kind of risk.’ She did not know Herbert and he did not know her family; the deceptive letter was intended for Herbert’s use in persuading Dobbs to sign the bills. Although Horridge concluded that Dobbs was indeed liable to Owles for both bills, he described this letter as ‘most improper’. Observing that a ‘horrible fraud’ had been committed against Dobbs, he urged the Sitwells to settle the matter if there was an appeal of his judgment.33
Lady Ida herself now appeared in the press as a swindler, and it seemed that Edith Sitwell would soon have to go into the witness box. Helen was trying to prevent that. She wrote to Osbert on 1 November: ‘I have just received the enclosed telegram. If you meant to say in it that Edith should take no part in the case that is coming on, you may rest assured that she never would with my approval.’34 There was no going back to the old arrangements. By the beginning of 1914, Edith and Helen needed a new place to live permanently. Edith wrote to her father in measured terms that conceal how important this negotiation was for her:
You understand I was only able to be at Miss Fussell’s for nine months in the year, at the price arranged. So the whole year would have worked out at £120 – plus extra food … When Helen is able to pay exactly half of the entire expenditure you will be paying about £20 a year more for me than you were doing at Miss Fussell’s, and that is probably what we should have had to pay her if we had stopped. At present, as Helen has already told you, she is only able to pay for herself, to the exclusion of the servant. I don’t think you will find that a heavy drain. We will see if we can find someone else like Miss Fussell, but if not, a flat is undoubtedly cheaper than rooms.35
It was no time to put pricey propositions to her father, but having a separate home (along the lines of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own) was essential. In May 1914, Edith Sitwell and Helen Rootham took a flat at 22 Pembridge Mansions, Moscow Road, in Bayswater. This was a poor but lively spot where their neighbours included the Greek Orthodox Cathedral and the New West End Synagogue. They were surrounded by dozens of small businesses, among them a school of dance, a button maker, a chiropodist, a cigarette maker, and a depot of the Aerated Bread Company.36 Pembridge Mansions was a working-class block of flats, with little to recommend it but a fine view of the trees in Kensington Gardens. It had no lift, and Edith’s and Helen’s flat was approached by five flights of bare stone stairs; since they were not properly marked it was always possible to go up the wrong stairwell. Inside the flat were naked light bulbs and doors without knobs. Some years later, Sitwell sent directions to Joe Ackerley: ‘half way up Queen’s Road, on the right hand side, you will find Moscow Road. This is not the rich Jewish red-brick block of flats, but the untidy, dingy, badly lighted block of flats just past the garage clock; and my name is on the board in the hall.’37
There was a difference between Sir George’s desire to get Edith out of the way of subpoenas and Edith’s desire to live permanently as a writer in London. Her father was surprised and unhappy that she was making such a break. Though accustomed to rows with her mother, Edith tried to avoid them with her father – not least because he was impossible to push around. As they moved into the new flat, Edith gathered that Lady Sitwell had left her a diamond pendant, which could be sold for furnishings. She wrote to Osbert: ‘don’t tell the wife of the Red Death or the Red Death itself, about the pendant, what I told you about today. I don’t want them to know. This is not the atmosphere. Don’t on any account let on, or I am lost. Burn this letter.’ Soon enough, she asked Sir George to have the pendant released to her but it turned out that she had confused the pendant to which she was entitled with another of greater value. Her father wrote: ‘In the entailed list in the box of diamonds, the diamond link at the top of the locket is mentioned, & there was never anything of the kind attached to the star I handed over to you. This I think identifies the locket.’38 In a twist of property law, the most valuable women’s jewellery in the Sitwell family had to be handed down in the male line. As a consolation, he offered her carpets and curtains from Lady Sitwell’s properties in Bournemouth, but it was not what she wanted.
While Sir George never liked spending money, something happened in 1913 that may have darkened his view of Edith. Among his mother’s papers he found letters written by his crusading aunt Blanche Sitwell – his father’s sister to whom Edith was especially close. In those letters Blanche had criticised him severely, and despite his normal reserve he thought it worth quarrelling with her. About a year and half later, she told Archbishop Davidson what had happened, and his reply to her, contemptuous of Sir George as ‘a queer person’, survives among correspondence transcribed by Joan Wake. We do not know exactly what Blanche said about Sir George that so stung him, but in a handwritten note Wake suggests that Blanche had ‘naughtily’ listened to the young Sitwells’ complaints against their father and passed them on to Lady Sitwell. If so, Sir George now had some idea what his children were saying about him.39
On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo, bringing on the July crisis. Doubtless listening to sad talk of soldiers making their wills, Edith decided to try to secure Helen’s future, so on 28 J
uly she wrote a letter ‘To my brother Osbert Sitwell. To be opened in the event of my decease before 15th November 1918’. It read:
This letter is being placed with my will, for you to read when I die. There are some things I should like to happen, and I think you will do them for my sake, if I should die before you. Do you remember the letter in The Way of All Flesh – well, this isn’t that kind of letter. It is because we are bound up as brother and sister much more than most brothers and sisters, on account of having had such a terrible childhood, and such an appalling home. I don’t believe there is another family in England who have had parents like ours.
In a surge of emotion, she committed herself to providing for Helen whose steadfastness in recent times had enabled her to break free of her parents:
Well, if I should die, I leave Helen Rootham to your care; I know you will do what you can for her – because she has been so good to me – such a good friend to me, as you know. The £5000 which will one day be mine if I live till Sachie is of age (twenty-one) I have left to her. But if I die before that sum becomes mine – then Osbert, for my sake, I implore you to make her an allowance, that allowance that would have been mine. For my sake, give her, or see that she gets £200 a year. Otherwise, she is quite unprovided for, and it is too dreadful to contemplate. I think I shouldn’t be able to rest in my grave.
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