Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps

by Ursula Buchan

  His holidays he spent climbing mountains. A real passion for mountaineering began when he was only seventeen and climbed a sheer rock face on Ben Alder; it was promoted by trips to the Alps with Anna and some climbing in the Drakensberg in South Africa. This was the perfect antidote to his sedentary London life. He had both the personality and the physique for it. He was spare, wiry, very strong, and had excellent balance. He claimed he had the opposite of vertigo, for he gained comfort from looking down from a great height. He was brave, indeed sometimes foolhardy. In September 1904 he climbed Ben Nevis with Walter and Sandy Gillon, himself a very accomplished climber, who successfully proposed him for the Scottish Mountaineering Club.* After JB’s death, Sandy wrote in the Club’s journal:

  He never served an apprenticeship. He just went at it by the light of nature. When I knew him his methods were original, unconventional, individualistic, but his movements were sure, decided, purposeful, and invariably he finished his climb. His assets were strong fingers and arms, rather short legs of enormous lifting power, an enviable poise … and a body that had limpet qualities … I never saw him tired. Mentally he had purpose indomitable, patience, courage, calm, self-control and nerve.8

  In his fiction, JB wrote some heart-stopping descriptions of terrifying climbs and descents, notably the desperate crossing of the Colle delle Rondini in Mr Standfast and the cat-and-mouse chase with Dominick Medina in The Three Hostages. In The Last Secrets, his book on exploration, he described some real-life attempted ascents on Mounts McKinley [Denali] and Everest.

  In November 1903, The African Colony: Studies in the Reconstruction was published, dedicated to Hugh Wyndham ‘in memory of our African housekeeping’. It was an immediate success, no doubt helped by the fact that a number of London newspapers carried two-column reviews of it on the day of publication. Although JB only went back to South Africa once more, he kept in touch with Lord Milner and the Kindergarten, sending them copies of the book, and continued writing about South Africa in The Spectator and elsewhere. Lord Cromer wrote a twelve-page letter in his own hand, praising The African Colony, remarking on how many analogies there were between Egypt and South Africa. However, by February 1905, it had become apparent that JB would not be offered a job in Egypt. Late in life, he chose to believe that it was the home authorities who declined to ratify Cromer’s choice, on the grounds of his youth and inexperience. Whatever the reason, he was mightily disappointed.

  Restless, stifled, and short of interesting legal work, JB sat down to write his least-known, least-read, book, The Law Relating to the Taxation of Foreign Income,9 a guide to the law in this area for the benefit of both lawyers and laymen. Richard Haldane KC, MP,* suggested that he write it, and agreed to contribute a preface. Published in 1905, it was sufficiently readable to prompt a later commentator to exclaim: ‘There are few other books on tax law which can be read in bed.’10

  He kept up his South African contacts as best he could, joining a dining club that Leo Amery had founded, called the Compatriots, whose president was Lord Milner and which numbered amongst its members F(rederick). S. Oliver, a most unusual and engaging man – he was a Director of the department store, Debenham and Freebody, and author of a well-regarded biography of Alexander Hamilton – who was to become a close friend of JB’s. Other new friends included Violet Markham, a financially independent, Liberal social reformer from a Derbyshire coal-mining family, who was a granddaughter of Sir Joseph Paxton, the designer of the Crystal Palace. She was a force of nature, who was deeply involved and active in social and educational projects, and would later become a town councillor, then mayor, of her native Chesterfield.* She also gained a reputation as a political fixer.

  JB continued to provide financial support to his family. Early in 1905, when Mrs Buchan had made herself ill over worry about Willie in India and keeping up the house, JB advised a holiday and offered to pay all her medical bills. His mother could make money go a long way, but there were limits even to her ingenuity. And the Buchans would have felt it a great deprivation if they had been too poor to give money away liberally to charity. On one occasion in 1905, JB sent money for his mother to buy a dress and stressed to Anna that it should not go to foreign missions or ‘that bottomless sink, the Sustentation Fund’,11 which supplemented the stipends of Free Church ministers.

  In June, after JB returned from Cape Town, where he had conducted an appeal for the Transvaal Chamber of Mines, he tried to address the problem of Anna’s lack of interesting occupation and pressing need to get away from Glasgow from time to time. He was too busy to be able to spend much time in Scotland, but he could make her more independent of her parents. He wrote to his mother: ‘I am very sorry for you all but especially for my old Nan [Anna]. She is suffering what anyone must suffer who has an extended horizon and a limited opportunity. It is a complaint common to most young women nowadays. Had I been a minister in Glesca [Glasgow] and William a doctor in Strathbungo, and had we all lived together there would have been no horizon and therefore no complaints.’ His solution was to open a bank account for Anna, and pay £100 into it yearly. ‘That will give her pocket-money for clothes and any travelling she wants to do. I look to you all to see that she spends it on herself or at any rate by herself.’12 Anna wrote in her memoirs, Unforgettable, Unforgotten: ‘I thought then, and I think now, that it was a remarkable thing for a young man to do. But it gave him pleasure, I believe, and it made all the difference in the world to me; to have a cheque-book of my own made me feel like a millionaire. Even when I no longer needed it he could hardly be persuaded to give it up.’13

  That summer JB wrote to Anna, referring to his mother as ‘the old obstructionist’ because she wouldn’t take a holiday. Mrs Buchan was at risk of relapsing into a debilitating state of anxiety, and for someone normally so decisive, she was finding it difficult to settle anything. JB told his sister that she needed to be ‘removed by force’ and made to have a holiday in August, probably in St Abbs, and he got his way. Urged on by their sons, the Glasgow Buchans also finally moved to a smaller house at 35 Maxwell Drive, Pollokshields.

  Mrs Buchan could be a severe trial to her children, especially when they began to go out in the world. Yet they retained their deep affection for her, a testament to how important she had been to them in childhood and how seriously they took the Fifth Commandment. Both JB and Willie had cause to be stern with her from time to time, but from exasperation rather than ill-feeling. Willie, so far away in India, looked forward to letters, even if they took three weeks to arrive by sea, and was often prey to anxiety about his mother, which he could only suppress by very hard work.

  Meanwhile, there was just a hint from JB to his sister that he had been courting an American woman, for he told her that the girl had sailed for New York in July ‘leaving me broken-hearted. Though I bear it with manly fortitude, life can never be the same to me again, as story-books say.’14 Since there is no other mention of this woman in any letters, we must assume the tone was ironic. Certainly, he was getting out a great deal, going to dinner parties and even, although usually under protest, dances. But he was thirty years of age that summer and was now looked upon, both by his family and his contemporaries, as a confirmed bachelor.

  It was well-nigh inevitable that, sooner or later, JB would meet Susan Grosvenor. By 1905 he was acquainted with Richard Haldane, Sir Edward Grey and Arthur Balfour, all of whom were well known to her mother. And he had met Susie’s cousin and best friend, Hilda Lyttelton, when staying with her parents in Pretoria.

  The couple’s first meeting took place some time in the spring of 1905, when JB was taken to dinner at her home, 30 Upper Grosvenor Street in Mayfair, by a mutual friend. The custom was to call to thank the following week and, when he did so, JB found Susie alone in the drawing room; she gave him tea and they pursued a rather stilted conversation. When they recalled that meeting later, JB told her that he thought her haughty, while she thought him conceited and difficult to talk to. ‘Why we should have belied our rea
l characters in this way I cannot imagine.’15 I think we all can.

  When they met, Susie was twenty-three years old, shy and unassertive amongst strangers, but with a well-developed sense of humour and, in particular, a finely tuned appreciation of the absurd, which would too often cause her to collapse in helpless giggles. As a girl, she had had to leave the Opera House in Bayreuth during a production of Wagner’s Parsifal, helpless with mirth when the dove descended from the heavens upside down. She was kind, very gentle, and a tender support to her sometimes ailing, and always hypochondriacal, widowed mother, Caroline (née Stuart-Wortley), known to her as ‘Baba’, towards whom she felt a great protectiveness.

  She was of medium height, slim, with a good figure, graceful in movement and with an erect carriage. She had particularly fine, long-fingered hands, as well as masses of pale blonde hair, which she piled on top of her head, with a fashionable, if faintly ridiculous, ‘teapot handle’ to it. She was good-looking rather than classically beautiful, having not entirely escaped the heritage of the Stuart-Wortley undershot jaw. Dora Carrington, the artist, who met her in 1916, thought her face was ‘Johnesque’ (like an Augustus John drawing). She was an attractive, agile and responsive dancer,16 although she endured the Season without much enjoyment. She was not at all keen on country sports or games, much preferring to spend her time reading.

  Her origins were markedly different from JB’s. On her father’s side she came from an English aristocratic family that could trace its lineage directly back to Gilbert Grosvenor, ‘le gros veneur’ (‘the fat hunter’), nephew of Hugh Lupus, himself nephew of William the Conqueror. Her father, Norman Grosvenor, who died when she was only sixteen, had been the fifth of five sons and two daughters of Robert, 1st Lord Ebury. Ebury, a Whig, was a younger son of the Marquess of Westminster, and uncle of the first Duke of Westminster. Norman’s mother, Charlotte Wellesley, was a niece of the ‘Great Duke’ of Wellington. Norman’s connections and upbringing were, therefore, very grand indeed, even if, as a younger son, he could only ever have expected a modest patrimony, since the laws of primogeniture exerted such an iron grip.

  His wife’s family, the Stuart-Wortleys, had made their money out of coal-mining in Yorkshire, her grandfather having been raised to the barony as the 1st Lord Wharncliffe. The Stuart-Wortleys could trace their descent directly back both to the Earl of Bute and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Alexander Pope’s great enemy), and were connected to Lady Louisa Stuart, the confidante of Sir Walter Scott. Caroline Grosvenor’s father, James a younger son, had been Recorder of London and Solicitor-General, but a riding accident finished his career and put him in a wheelchair, and there was never much money. Caroline’s mother, Jane, was a well-known philanthropist and her four sisters were notable for their good looks, artistic propensities and unworldliness.

  Norman Grosvenor had been a particular friend of Edward Burne-Jones, as well as W. S. Gilbert, Leslie Stephen (father of Virginia Woolf), and the social reformers, William Morris and Charles Booth. His politics were Radical, or what we might term progressive Liberal. According to his daughter Susie, he was regarded by many of his stuffy relations as a traitor to his class, the more so because he declared himself, most daringly, to be an agnostic in religion. This caused great hurt to his gentle mother, as well as his enthusiastically Evangelical father* (who had spent years trying to make the Church of England more Protestant by advocating the revision of the Book of Common Prayer), not to mention his two devout maiden sisters. But as Susie wrote later of her godly Grosvenor relations: ‘They were all, except his mother, a little blind to the fact that he [Norman] practised the Christian virtues of charity and loving kindness to an extent which they rarely attained.’17

  In his ample spare time, Norman had been a very accomplished amateur pianist and composer. His works were praised by critics but never published, since he did not think them good enough. This gentle, cerebral, charming man was no seeker after fame nor, sadly for his immediate family, fortune. He had been a short-lived Liberal MP for Chester, and then gone into business, becoming the Managing Director of the Sun Fire and Life Insurance Company. He helped to found, in 1878, the People’s Concert Society, which provided classical music for people in the East End and for a number of years he served as its president.

  Caroline gave Norman two daughters – Susan Charlotte, born in 1882, and Margaret Sophie Katherine, known as Marnie, born in 1887. For the first few years of their married life, the Norman Grosvenors lived mainly at Moor Park, the Palladian country house near Rickmansworth, owned by his father. Moor Park was then one of the great houses of England, a neo-classical palace in a Lancelot Brown-designed park. It had been, two hundred years before, when still Jacobean in outline, the home of Sir William Temple, whose ‘Moor Park’ apricot received a favourable mention from Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park. In Susie’s childhood there were fourteen indoor servants, including three footmen. It was a veritable Downton Abbey.

  Thanks to Lord Ebury, the style of life there was markedly old-fashioned. Not only did Susie, her sister and her parents live there, but all Norman’s brothers, with their wives and children, nursemaids and governesses, along with the unmarried sisters. Lord Ebury treated them all almost like children, standing in the hall to give each their bedroom candle before everyone was sent to bed. He introduced a cheap harmonium to the splendid hall for Sunday evening hymn-singing and directed conversation at the interminable meals. The grown-up sons, in particular, took to playing elaborate games and indulging in wordplay to avoid the potentially explosive topics of religion and politics. The older female Grosvenors busied themselves in visiting the poor on the estate and in Rickmansworth, in an endless round of small benevolent works.

  After eleven years, Caroline had had enough of such an airless life and she, Norman and the two girls went to live in London, in houses on the Westminster Estate, first in Green Street and then, most happily, at 30 Upper Grosvenor Street. They were plainly very contented together, and provided a secure and affectionate environment for their daughters, and rather more indulgence than was vouchsafed by other adults who, Susie remembered, were inclined to squash children at every turn.

  A governess taught the girls at home. Susie read incessantly and very widely, including Dante in the original, with a crib, and she even attempted Hegel. Norman gave her a ‘most unVictorian’ run of his library. But she found it impossible to learn anything by heart. Her formal education was so sketchy that it was forever an impediment to her. Her governess had been chosen for her moral standing rather than her skill as a teacher and, although Susie learnt some English and history, her knowledge of geography and mathematics was lamentable. She wrote many years later: ‘I still mourn the fact that I was never taught to concentrate or to have exactness of mind when I was a child, and that I was never told of their vital importance in later life … We drew profiles [doodles] on our copy books and showed up sloppy and inaccurate work. We were scolded for this, but I don’t think we were as much to blame as our elders, who should have seen that all was not well with our education.’18

  In 1898, aged only fifty-three, Norman died of cancer after a long illness. He was buried in the family plot in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Northwood, and Caroline spent years making a plaster headstone of an angel with outspread wings battering on a door, which was then cast in bronze. Apparently, being an agnostic didn’t prevent her believing in angels.

  Mrs Grosvenor was only forty years old when her husband died, and his death was most likely the genesis of a periodic melancholic pessimism (what her sisters referred to as ‘Kyo’s disillusionment’) which at times undermined her daughters’ resolve. The girls, aged sixteen and eleven, also felt the loss very keenly. Mrs Grosvenor continued to live in society, but there was not a great deal of ready money, and she was at least partly beholden to the Duke of Westminster. When the estate sold the top end of Upper Grosvenor Street in the late 1920s, so that the Grosvenor Hotel could be built, she had to move across the road to the smaller, nar
rower No. 2.

  Her relative impecuniousness, as well as her restlessness and intellectual curiosity, prompted her to spend much of the year abroad, taking her two girls to stay in hotels in cities or spas in Germany, France and Italy in particular, as well as spending two winters in Cairo. The beneficent effect of all this travelling was that the girls spoke European languages proficiently, especially German and French, and were exposed to the architecture and art of Dresden, Cologne, Paris and Florence. They were cultured far beyond what was usual for girls of their class. Moreover, in Cairo, Susie had her first opportunity to get to know men of her own age in a more relaxed environment than at home, for the place was swarming with underemployed army officers.

  Although far from free from the ingrained sense of entitlement of her class, Susie understood the duties, as well as privileges, of her position. And, since her mother never considered university for her, she had to find some other way of immersing herself in something useful while waiting to meet potential husbands. When not staying in a variety of country houses (where she was often accompanied by her grey parrot), she worked as a volunteer for the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward at the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Tavistock Place, handing out meals to disabled children. She also worked several days a week at the Charity Organisation Society office in Baker Street.

  She gave up working for the COS on her marriage, but never lost her interest in the problems of what were then called ‘the less fortunate’. To a man like JB, who had spent his own childhood and youth rubbing shoulders with the poor, and had compassion for but no illusions about them, Susie’s philanthropic instincts were very appealing.