Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  The Wyndhams all maintained, then and thereafter, that Balfour had been heroic in his support of George, approving Winston Churchill’s account of the episode which makes the same claim. Publicly, they steadfastly refused to blame anyone for the incident. Katharine Tynan pressed Pamela and Mary on the issue several years later. ‘My brother is nothing if not magnanimous,’ said Pamela. Mary offered the same smooth façade: ‘she … had no condemnation for any of those who had hounded him out of his beneficent public life …’; her only comment was: ‘He was so full of all he was going to do for Ireland … that he could not help talking about it.’48 But privately Mary thought that George had got into his secretary’s ‘clutches somehow morally’, and his lifestyle had not helped: ‘alcohol and nicotine are more insidious that [sic] microbes! … You have never been influenced that way. Bless you! I wish you didn’t Atlas all the world,’ she said to Arthur.49

  On 4 December 1905, torn between free-trading backbenchers and Chamberlain, who, despite increasing ill health, refused to abandon his vigorous tariff campaign, Balfour resigned. He was replaced by Britain’s first Radical Prime Minister – the Glaswegian Henry Campbell-Bannerman, known as ‘CB’, who formed an interim Cabinet. In the election campaign of January 1906 the Liberals, united in their support of free trade, confidently on the moral highground, were spoilt for choice on which issue to attack the Conservatives with next. They won by a landslide – their last outright majority to date, gaining 200 seats to bring their number to 397, to the Unionists’ 156. In an unprecedented show of defiance by his constituents, Balfour even lost the Manchester East seat that he had held for twenty years, and had to be rushed back into the Commons via the more pliant electors of the City of London. ‘Dearest Chang here’s a to-do,’ Percy wrote to his eldest daughter in his neat, backwards-sloping handwriting ‘Arthur out with an enormous majority. I wonder what you think of it.’50

  The ministry of Souls had failed, remarkably, almost cataclysmically, to live up to the hopes promised by these men when young. Balfour could not harness the forces under his whip; and the experience of government had fractured the Souls themselves, exemplified by the return, the day before Balfour resigned, of Lord and Lady Curzon. Britain’s youngest, most glamorous, most brilliant Viceroy had been driven out of his post, and Balfour had let him go.

  The occasion was a clash of egos between Curzon and Lord Kitchener, India’s Commander in Chief. Tension had been building between the two men ever since Kitchener had taken up the post in 1902. In 1905 Balfour backed Kitchener over questions of military reorganization. Employing a by-now habitual bluff, Curzon proffered his resignation, and was appalled when Balfour accepted it. Few thought that Balfour had behaved wrongly: the Viceroy’s delusions of grandeur had reached near-megalomaniacal proportions. But Curzon never forgave Balfour for what he considered a stab in the back, and Balfour’s failure to arrange a single representative of the Government or the monarch to meet the ex-Viceregal pair as they stepped off the train at Charing Cross on 3 December 1905 was pure cattiness. A gathering of Souls, including Balfour, was at Stanway. The party decided it was too far to travel to London for the occasion. ‘We were trying all Sunday to concoct a telegram of greeting which all, including A.J.B., could sign. Nothing less jejeune seemed to evolve itself than “Glad you’re back”,’ Hugo Elcho said. ‘If we don’t look out, it’ll turn into “Glad your back’s worse”,’ remembered Ettie Desborough, making reference to the corsets Curzon wore for his perpetually weak back.51 In the end, they sent nothing at all.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Pamela at Wilsford

  Eddy Tennant was one of the many new Liberal backbenchers to take their places in the Commons that spring. He had taken Salisbury from the Unionists, benefiting from the landslide and from Pamela’s charms: ‘there was many a Tory turned Liberal when they saw her – she was the most beautiful woman I ever saw’, remembered one elderly constituent.1

  Although united on free trade, the Liberals remained split between Radicals and Imperialists, the Cabinet reflective of both. During the campaign a sardonic Percy had written to Mary discussing a speech by John Burns, the Radical President of the Local Government Board: ‘he is against the King & all hereditary Authorities to go. In two or three years time we may see the moderate liberal voting with the Conservatives and out the Government will go.’2

  With Edward Grey the new Foreign Secretary, and Asquith Chancellor of the Exchequer, Eddy and Pamela were in the inner circle of power. In fact, Eddy – the ‘moderate liberal’ – was ambiguous about the direction of his party, and Pamela had long since ceased to feign any interest in politics. The Tennants’ visits to Grey – a world-famous bird expert – at Fallodon were filled not with political talk but with walks along the sea-shore to watch for eider-duck, curlew, whimbrel and dotterel and listen to ‘their plaintive attenuated cries’; evenings were spent listening to Edward Grey read aloud. Pamela’s times at Fallodon revived her, as though she were filling her lungs with the fresh sea air. ‘I came back with a new stock of patience to hear wrangling voices with, and to cope with seeing the cook, & paying the bills and all the “dreary intercourse of daily life” …’ she told Charlie Tennant, a cousin of Eddy’s, after one such visit in 1908.3 Eddy, Pamela and Grey had grown even closer since Dorothy’s death, in February 1906, in a freak carriage accident. Pamela seems to have been the anonymous author of Dorothy’s obituary in The Times, paying tribute to ‘a friendship which has been one of the high privileges of my life’.4 Thereafter Grey spent Christmases with the Tennants at Glen.

  The birth of the Tennants’ fourth child, Stephen, in April 1906 occasioned rumours that he was an ‘Aarons baby’, the product of a Society doctor said to inseminate artificially women who could not conceive with their husbands either by a stud of footmen or by the insertion of a teaspoon filled with sperm.5 None of this can be substantiated (although Jervois Aarons was Pamela’s doctor), but it speaks volumes about the state of their marriage that it was capable of generating such gossip. People were always willing to talk about the Tennants, particularly after the Bart’s death in June 1906, whereupon Eddy inherited a ‘considerable proportion’ of the Bart’s £3,151,976 estate,6 and of the family empire, now no longer just chemicals but comprising another fortune in shares and mining.7 Eddy was now chairman of, inter alia, the Union Bank of Scotland, Charles Tennant, Sons & Co. Ltd, Tennant’s Estates Ltd and Tharsis Sulphur and Copper Company Ltd, and a director of the Mysore Gold Mining Company Ltd and several other mining companies besides.8

  Since 1901, Eddy and Pamela had lived, when in London, at 31 Lennox Gardens in Chelsea, which the Bart had paid for during the term of his life.9 Now, Eddy sold the family house in Grosvenor Square and bought 34 Queen Anne’s Gate, mere steps from the Foreign Office where Edward Grey spent his days. The Tennants commissioned Blow to add on a wing to house the Bart’s collection of principally English Old Masters previously housed at Glen. The Gallery, which had a separate entrance, was opened to the public in May 1910, between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. on Wednesdays and Saturdays.10 To Pamela’s delight, it was a success from the first, with 150 people visiting in the first two hours alone.11 This was just one of many philanthropic gestures by the Tennants; Eddy’s charitable ‘obligations’ were considerable, and all willingly undertaken.

  In the summer of 1906, the Tennants moved into their new home, Wilsford Manor in Wiltshire. It was featured in a seven-page spread in Country Life on 29 September. A series of handsome black and white photographs accompanying the article showed an elegant stone house in the Jacobean style, with mullioned windows and graceful proportions. The gardens are mature, lush and well tended. The Manor looks as though it had stood undisturbed in its idyllic location for centuries. In fact, explained Country Life, the house had only just been completed by the architect Detmar Blow, whose previous work in Wiltshire had included the underpinning of the East Knoyle church tower some years before.

  Wilsford’s foundation stone had been laid by Made
line Wyndham in 1904. Two years later, the house was complete. From birth, it bore the patina of age. It had been built using local labour, sand from a paddock two fields away, and all the stone of the small farmhouse that had originally stood on the spot. In the course of digging the foundations, the remnants of an Elizabethan stone and flint wall and fragments of old mullions had been discovered, suggesting that a grander house had preceded the farmhouse. Pamela had not been surprised. The beautiful garden, with its yew hedges and great ilex trees, had always seemed to belong to a larger house. The stone and glass fragments were incorporated into the new building. In the digging, the builders had also discovered boar tusks, a few ‘trifling coins’ and numerous fossils, called locally ‘Shepherd’s Crowns’. Pamela would take the name for the title of one of her books.

  To the side of the ‘Jacobean’ main building was a long, low cottage-like nursery wing with thatched roof. It overlooked on one side a courtyard with a large old tree in its centre, and on the other side the bowling green and lawns. At its far end was the Stone Parlour, a room open on three sides to the elements, and furnished like a cottage kitchen with scrubbed pine table and dresser, where Pamela sat with her children to draw, play, paint and write, drinking in the sweeping views over the lawns down to the River Avon which ran through Wilsford’s grounds.12 As far as the eye could see, the land belonged to the Tennants.13

  The gardens were Wilsford’s true glory, and the same process of strenuous preservation had taken place there in order to fit the ancient hedges and trees to the new house in the best way. Pamela described the process vividly to Wilfrid Blunt:

  transplanting enormous bushes & moving trees – Napoleonic measures in horticulture … You see my great desire has been to avoid, in our new building, the sight of bare walls. So to ensure this I have had the great big creepers moved, last autumn, & arranged onto poles, or racks (if they were voluminous) to support them. Then up went the walls, & then in March (when roses may wander) they were cautiously laid against the walls again – & there they now stand – vines, reaching to above the first floor – & roses topping the string course! My Delight! … well, I had one rose wheeled slowly up in a barrow by a stout gardener, three men holding her [the rose’s] hair up in its wake, & staggering so you can imagine it has been worth doing.14

  Those Napoleonic efforts had paid off. The gardens photographed by Country Life are verdant. A plate illustrating ‘The House and Bowling Green’ shows mature yew hedges, and an ancient tree under which sit two small figures in wicker chairs: Pamela, and a schoolgirl, Clare, enjoying the peace of the garden so recently created – in Pamela’s words, ‘a rambling farmhouse garden that has never been spoiled, and some yew hedges of a noble size’.15

  While browsing through a little bookshop in London, Pamela had discovered a sundial, lying on its side in two pieces almost hidden away under dust and cobwebs, obscuring the words ‘come light visit me’ inscribed on its dial. She restored it, and placed it in the garden: ‘So, there now it stands: “where leaves spread out their budding fan to catch the balmy air” … I feel [it] is enjoying itself out in the open once more,’ Pamela told Sidney Cockerell, erstwhile apprentice of Philip Webb, and now the Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.16

  It was a very large ‘Family Cottage’ indeed, but Wilsford reflected Pamela and Eddy’s aversion to ostentation. ‘I want to be heard if I shout for my boots,’ said Eddy.17 The Tennants employed surprisingly few staff – a collection of maids supplemented by help from the local village – although there were eighteen gardeners for the grounds. The house was furnished elegantly and comfortably, and was papered with Morris prints; its interior bore the marks of the Arts and Crafts movement, with finely turned wooden balustrades flanking wide staircases. Visiting Wilsford almost twenty years after it had been built, Cecil Beaton, a friend of Stephen Tennant, recorded ‘a large long oak room, very comfortable and informal with enormous soft chairs, bowls of fat hyacinths, freesia & a lovely untidy litter of books’.18 A profusion of bird cages was hung along the walls and the house, as always, was massed with the fresh flowers Pamela loved: she had named each bedroom after her favourites: Celandrine, Jessamine, Hyacinth. As at Clouds, guests often found, beside their beds, books specially ordered for them, but ‘Life at Wilsford was not luxurious at all – it was comfortable, yes – but no luxury,’ said Susan Lowndes, daughter of Pamela’s friend the novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes and her journalist husband Frederick and a frequent visitor to the Tennants.19

  Wilsford was not a political house per se, but most of its literary guests reflected a strongly imperialist view, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry Newbolt and Lord Northcliffe, as the Daily Mail’s Alfred Harmsworth had become. Another frequent visitor was Oliver Lodge, whom Pamela had known since her childhood at Clouds. Invasion scares were moving from fantasy literature to the front page. It was the age of the ‘dreadnoughts’ – as England and Germany raced to build the behemoths introduced by Jackie Fisher that rendered all other battleships obsolete20 – and of a corresponding realignment of foreign policy by Edward Grey as Britain entered into ententes with France and Russia.

  George – a frequent and honoured guest at Wilsford – was fast becoming a figurehead of the naval lobby, coining the belligerent demand in respect of dreadnoughts at the Wigan by-election in 1908: ‘We want eight and we won’t wait!’21 His support for tariff reform, once tentative, was now ardent, even as Balfour refused to move beyond his cautious position. George had ostensibly recovered from his crisis of 1904, but something had cut loose. He returned to the backbenches in 1906 ‘an incorrigible Tory!’, glad to have ‘shed our Financiers and Brewers’, eager to fight for ‘The Church’, ‘the Realm’ and ‘the Empire of the English’,22 allying with Marie’s writer brother Hilaire Belloc over a mutual hatred of the ‘corrupting influences’ of ‘Levantine finance’ and the plutocracy, and displaying an overt anti-Semitism hitherto no more pronounced than that casually expressed by the rest of his class. Balfour laughed off George’s new stridency, comparing him to his Tory ancestor Sir William Wyndham, who had refused to kowtow to Walpole’s Whig hegemony. Wilfrid Blunt found his cousin’s alteration of political character repugnant.23 Pamela thought nothing of it. In her eyes George was a poet, and a poet he remained.

  Margot Asquith – a less welcome family member – made her first visit to Wilsford in July 1906. She had to admit that the house was ‘perfectly lovely’, although she took pleasure in pointing out the impracticality of the thatch on the nursery wing; while it was ‘charming from the outside … I cd hardly sleep for thinking of the heat of Clare’s bedroom over the kitchen,’ she noted in her diary.24 Relations between the sisters-in-law remained strained. In 1903, Pamela had scored a palpable hit with an allegorical short story, ‘in which Margot figures as a princess in a glass house, herself as a beetle beloved by God, and my father [Asquith] as a Muscovy duck …’, Margot’s stepson Raymond wrote in his diary, anticipating with interest a visit by the Tennants to the Asquiths at The Wharf, their house in Sutton Courtenay, Berkshire.25 Yet the two couples were tied closer than ever since the Bart’s death, which left Eddy in the peculiar position of holding the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s pursestrings. Margot’s marriage settlement had provided that she would receive £3,000 per annum while her father was alive, £1,000 per annum after his death.26 The loss of income hit the Asquiths hard, particularly as Asquith’s political duties became more pressing, and Margot’s bridge habit became more expensive. In 1919, Eddy estimated that he had given Margot, by way of loans and extensions, around £25,000 in excess of her allowance (well over three-quarters of a million pounds in today’s money) since the Bart had died.27

  Margot took the opportunity of her visit to draw a character sketch of Pamela in her diary: ‘remarkably clever & very beautiful. Charming with other people’s children & a wonderful mother herself but she lacks nature & humanness … she has not felt anything very deeply yet, she has always controlled her own destiny … She
is not a citizen of the world … she lives in an adoring, uncritical milieu …’ She thought that Pamela, ‘self-scanned and self-secure’, would get ‘more heart when her own has been squeezed’.28 Pamela often defended herself against accusations of remoteness, claiming that it was simply shyness. But her frostiness towards Margot stemmed from dislike, as Margot well knew.

  Margot’s sketch had much truth to it. Pamela surrounded herself with acolytes, whether family or minor literary figures, and her papers are crammed with their missives: breathless pages from Wommy declaring undying devotion; paeans from F. W. Bain, bestselling author of The Digit of the Moon, addressing her as ‘Shri’ the beautiful, sensuous princess heroine of one of his tales;29 a declaration from Sidney Cockerell that to him and Bain Pamela was ‘a Great Golden apple out of reach on the topmost bough’.30 One of the more intriguing is a folded scrap of almost translucent paper covered in tiny pencilled handwriting. It was written by an admirer in the gods at Covent Garden’s Opera House watching Pamela in a box below. The author tracks her every move: her anxious study-ing of the programme; fiddling with her glove and bracelet; her asides to the man beside her; the expressions fleeting across her face as the violinist played on. Pamela looked tired and lost in thought, thought her correspondent, who presumably having tightly folded up this love letter pressed it into her gloved palm as they met briefly in the buzzing, brightly lit foyer before going their separate ways. The signature on it is almost illegible, but appears to read ‘Sholto’ – possibly Sholto Johnstone Douglas, a Queensberry cousin to whom Pamela was close.31