Those Wild Wyndhams

by Claudia Renton

  Stanway was turned down by the authorities as unsuitable for a hospital.29 A Voluntary Aid Detachment hospital was set up at nearby Winchcombe. The VAD’s volunteers, who provided field nursing services, were predominantly middle- and upper-class women. Medical professionals were initially sceptical, believing them to be ‘playing’ at a serious job, but many volunteers disproved them, and did excellent service in England and in France. The Winchcombe Hospital was a short drive from Stanway in the pony-trap. Eliza Wedgwood, a nearby neighbour, was Commandant. Mary and her daughters (including Bibs, just twelve in 1914) all volunteered, as did Mananai’s eldest, twenty-five-year-old Pamela Adeane, who stayed at Stanway for several months before being reluctantly dissuaded from going out to France (‘I think everybody thinks France is too much for me, perhaps so’). She moved to the Queen’s Hospital, a military hospital in Frognal, North London specializing in ‘heads & jaws’. It was hard work, requiring immense courage and a stomach of steel. Pamela thrived there: ‘I believe one is more useful in a military hospital … they do wonderful things here.’30 She lost a lover in the war, spent it nursing and did not marry until 1919, when she was nearly thirty.

  Winchcombe’s atmosphere was informal and convivial. Cynthia chatted to Sister Awde as she stirred porridge on night duty; Bibs peeled potatoes in the kitchen, sulking at not being considered old enough to help in the wards. When funds ran low, Mrs Patrick Campbell organized a charity matinee in London that raised £400, enough to keep the hospital going until the end of the war.31 In Family Record, Mary presented a rose-tinted view of the hospital as the family’s second home, with Hugo taking convalescents for drives.32 In fact, Hugo was mostly with Angela in France, while Angela’s daughters remained at Stanway: ‘he told me that he didn’t care when I went to London[,] that he didn’t mean to be there much!’ Mary told Arthur in the spring of 1915.33 On the rare occasions he returned, he was ‘carping’ and ‘critical’ about efforts at Winchcombe and Stanway, conducting small feuds with Eliza Wedgwood.34 Mary reproached him for his behaviour when he was ‘so full of admiration & sympathy about everything Angela does’.35 She felt keenly that Stanway’s war effort was less glamorous than Angela’s.36

  Pamela Tennant recalled the war’s opening months as possessing a curious sense of unreality, like ‘the early morning, before the world was numb with pain and broken, before things were stale and tired as they became’.37 Both Bim and fifteen-year-old Kit, a naval cadet at Dartmouth, were still too young for combat – an officer could not officially go to the Front until the age of nineteen. There is a stillness to Pamela’s descriptions of herself at the time, almost as if she were frozen. Reading her account in her memoirs of the mothers who ‘lay awake’ at night and ‘listened’ to ‘the quiet sound of feet, the measured beat of soldiers going by, company after company’, thinking of what lay ahead, the sense is that she was speaking of her own experience.38

  In this limbo, one of the most curious incidents of Pamela’s life took place. In October 1914, she wrote to Mary of ‘The adopted baby’: ‘very good and nice – as far as he goes’, in some ways even ‘better than [a baby] of my own … for one thing, it is such a relief … to be able to hear with perfect equanimity of a Baby having a rise of temperature!’ Joking aside, Pamela said, ‘he is a great solace. I love babies – I like their ways & their ridiculous hands, & perfect feet’, and he had ‘incidental value’ for her ‘in deflecting some of dear [Nanny] Trussler’s zeal from Stephen’.39 This is Pamela’s only letter to Mary mentioning this child, whose name was Oliver Hope.

  Pamela had long had a habit of scooping up children. Bim’s ‘village boys’ were often more frequently at Wilsford than in their own homes. Pamela’s granddaughter, the author Emma Tennant, has recounted her surprise on hearing from an elderly villager that her grandmother had ‘adopted four children in all: Mary and Tossie and Roger’, in addition to Oliver.40 In Pamela’s relatively few surviving letters to Eddy, she mentions at least two instances of taking in a child when their parents could not cope – the bigamous curate’s son,41 and after the war a small South African girl whose mother, abandoned by her husband, was struggling to maintain her family and hold down her job at the War Office.42 Oliver was different. He was the only one of Pamela’s patchwork assortment of strays who actually lived full-time at Wilsford, and the only one left an annuity in her will – £50 per annum.43

  Wilsford School – which Oliver attended briefly from summer 1918 to winter 1919 – records in its register his birth date as 7 July 1912, meaning he was just over two when he was adopted.44 The official story, insofar as there is one, is that Oliver was the son of a ‘tinker woman’ named Hope who died giving birth in Salisbury Infirmary.45 A search for boys born to a woman of that name between 1910 and 1915 yields no results in the England and Wales birth registers. While it is not impossible that the birth simply escaped registration (particularly in a Gypsy community), the hospital element makes a record more likely. It adds to the mystery surrounding this child, whose very name sounds like a fairytale, and whose story peters out into a welter of rumour. He entered the Merchant Navy at a very young age (either running away, or being sent by Christopher, according to who is telling the story),46 and then disappeared so effectively that most of Pamela’s descendants did not know of his existence.47 The surmise, by Emma Tennant, is that round-faced, dark-haired Oliver, similar in looks to both Bim and Pamela, was in fact Bim’s illegitimate son, from a fling with an artist’s model when he was little more than fifteen,48 already very good looking and advanced for his years.49 While unproven, it is entirely plausible that Pamela would have scooped up her son’s illegitimate child. A decade on, she tried to do exactly that with an illegitimate daughter born to her son David with the actress Hermione Baddeley.50 The timing – taking on this child exactly as Bim faced danger – may be coincidental, but it lends force to the supposition.

  In September, when the war was barely a month old, Perf Wyndham was ‘shot dead through the head’,51 leading his men on a charge out of a wood at the battle of the Aisne. ‘How glorious the death is,’ said Mananai, ‘no suffering, no knowing he must die.’52 Bim echoed these sentiments in a poem that Pamela distributed to all the family:

  Father and son have not been long asunder

  And joy in heaven leaves mortals sad and wan

  His death-salute was the artillery thunder

  Praise be to God for such an Englishman!53

  Balfour heard the news from an acquaintance while lunching at the Travellers Club. He waited to see confirmation in the casualty lists published daily in The Times before writing to Mary. ‘We live in the perpetual knowledge that our friends are in hourly peril … and we bear the news [of their deaths] as best as we can,’ he said.54 In those early days, when death was still a shock, not yet a near inevitability, it was strangely easy to believe in its heroic glamour. Cynthia Asquith later wondered how she had mourned these losses so intensely while still swallowing ‘the rather high-faluting platitude that it was all right for them – that they were not to be pitied, but were safe, unassailable, young, and glamorous for ever’.55 Mary found it difficult from the start. After hours writing to her family in sorrow and loss over Perf’s death, she wrote to Arthur last of all, with ‘a pen made of lead’, unable to dissemble further:

  it doesn’t seem like sending youths to war, it seems more like a shambles … despite one’s feelings of pride that they should ‘die in their glory’ the lads that will never grow old … there are times when the feeling of ‘exaltation’ ebbs and fades away and leaves one feeling utterly blank and flat and miserable and grim. It seems such a sickening waste …56

  In a devastating postscript, Perf Wyndham’s will provided that if he died without issue his heir would be Dick Wyndham, the younger of Guy Wyndham’s two sons. He thus doubly disinherited Guy on the one hand and on the other Dick’s elder brother George – whom, the family presumed, he had overlooked simply because he got on better with Dick, and never thought this
provision in the will would come into effect. ‘Dear Percy never realized that when a will is made it is facing the possibility of death at any time …’ said Mananai. Clouds now belonged to Dick – barely eighteen years old. Guy and Minnie, who moved into Clouds with their teenage son (George was already serving in the army), were merely housekeepers until Dick came of age. It was a ‘crushing sadness … a mistake & absolutely contrary to the spirit of Papa’s & George’s Wills & in direct opposition to their wishes’, lamented Mananai, who of all the sisters felt Guy’s misfortune the most keenly. ‘I cannot bear to think that people might think this had been done intentionally & that there had been a split in our united family,’ she told Mary.57

  Mary busied herself, moving between London, where Yvo’s Grenadier Guards were stationed in Chelsea Barracks – and Ego and Guy Charteris’s billets around the country. ‘I am living – here there & everywhere, like a soldier,’ Mary reported to Wilfrid Blunt in an undated letter written from Cadogan Square,58 recently returned from seeing Ego in Newbury, where Letty had taken ‘tiny little lodgings … like a dolls house’ near by. The night before Mary and Mary Charteris had dined with them, Ego ‘so beautiful in his khaki’, and George Vernon, a member of the Coterie and like another son to the family. Mary had brought down a picnic of ‘grouse! & roses & champagne … we had leopard skins stretched on a sofa, the piano acted as a sideboard … & we had a feast & talked camp shop – the arrival of transport, horses rifles – & the death of all the young friends who are giving their lives in France – it was a wonderful evening.’59 A few months later, Mary and Bibs visited Ego in Hunstanton, staying at the Le Strange Arms. This time (in a turn of events that seems delightfully apposite given the du Maurieresque name of the inn), Bibs was suspected by locals of signalling to the enemy when she left her window open, the light on in her bedroom and the blind flapping in the wind.60

  At Cadogan Square, Mary started a ‘War Salon’ to amuse Yvo,61 filling the house with interesting guests – Hilaire Belloc, the Observer’s editor J. L. Garvin, Curzon and Balfour. At one of these gatherings in 1915, Cincie invented a new game: to discover everyone’s secret complex. To general hilarity, she decided that Balfour, now advising Asquith’s government on defence, and attending meetings of the War Council, formed in November 1914, ‘was obsessed with the notion that he had caused the War and was feeling, secretly, very worried about it’.62 At another, the Elchos, Charles Whibley and Lord Hugh Cecil debated Grey’s Commons speech that had brought England into the war. Whibley attacked Grey ‘for shilly-shallying … he didn’t even know himself which way his own speech was going to sum up’; Lord Hugh maintained that the war was ‘the inevitable, logical conclusion of the Entente Cordiale’, the speech ‘an absolute masterpiece’ of ‘Mark Antony oratory’ which was the only way Grey could secure the support of the Radicals for the war. Cincie agreed with Lord Hugh on every point.63

  Mary found it difficult to engage in such discussions. From the war’s very beginning, she had felt desolate. ‘Hopeless’ reports of the war alarmed her – the ‘parallell [sic] lines & the germans [sic] living like trapdoor spiders – with the hills armed with Howitzers on cement floors!’64 She worried about Britain’s shortage of artillery shells which had been apparent almost from the war’s outbreak, and fretted that she was not doing enough war work, which might serve as talismanic protection for her own sons.65 More than ever, she was drawn to her boxes of papers, but this correspondence was capable of making her break down, sounding ‘so still and small a note, so faint and futile in the midst of the bloody horrors and the Hellish Din’. ‘Are all letters flattery?’ she asked Arthur. ‘If not, they have built me a pretty monument, but are they worth keeping? Who cares? And does anything matter? Except explosive Big artillery! The one thing we have not got.’66

  In the early spring of 1915, with Mary ‘“out of sorts” mentally and physically’,67 her doctor, Halliwell, prescribed a rest cure at Stanway. For three weeks, she was confined to her room in total isolation. Yvo was highly amused to hear of this latest development: ‘How is your languid self’, he wrote to his sister Mary,

  and how is Stanway, and how pray is that strange recluse or unspeakable monster, whom none may look on, closeted and communing with her spirit, dwelling on the heights until she emerge a full Mahatma? I suppose in the silence of the night the house echoes to the sound of beds, wardrobes and all manner of furniture being trundled round the room, and again to the rustlings of many sheet and blanket ‘manias’. She will awake after a month and find Mockett [the butler] waiting with a sheaf of telegrams to the effect that her three sons are at the Front, her eldest daughter doing time for card-sharping, her second eloped with a young cavalry officer, her youngest truant from school and God knows where. But she will have forgotten them, so what matter? With renewed zest she will wheel the grand piano round in the drawing room and wander off over the hills with a pack of wild and aggravated chows, till Stanway falls in ruins about her. What a curious sight Halliwell must be, entering the forbidden room like the Steward of Glamis?68

  Shortly afterwards, on a cool April night, Mary, Mary Charteris, Bibs and Letty waved off ‘the Gallant Glittering Gloucesters’69 to Egypt in preparation for the Allied naval attack on Turkish forces in the Dardanelles. Allied control of the strategically vital strait would allow munitions to be shipped through to Russia. Britain’s Government also hoped that victory in the Dardanelles might persuade the neutral states of Greece, Bulgaria and Romania to join the Allied side, and provoke the collapse of the tottering Ottoman Empire. The night before the Gloucesters left, the two Marys, Bibs and Letty had dined with Ego and his friend and fellow officer Tom Strickland.70 As part of their kit, the two had been issued with ‘little bottles of iodine’ with instructions to apply instantly ‘to a fresh wound’. ‘It would hurt a great deal to paint all round a very large wound,’ remarked Ego wryly.71 Letty followed them out a week later, taking nineteen-year-old Mary Charteris with her as a companion, ostensibly to do VAD work. Two months later, Mary returned from Egypt to announce that she was engaged to Tom Strickland. They married in Egypt, in December 1915. The coincidence that their daughter should be married in Egypt was not lost on either Mary or Wilfrid.72

  A week after Ego’s departure, Mary wrote to Arthur, distressed about the Gloucesters’ shambolic artillery:

  these men have been mobilized since the very day war broke out, they contain the flower of England’s nobility (what a flowery Daily Mail phrase) … and the flower of the darling yeoman men who left their crops – and their sheep at the most critical moment … they go with guns bought from (scrapped by?) the Germans after the Boer War. Now my dear! You are in with everything … all their councils and hob nob and gossip with Kitchener the God of War and with all the Bosses, just you order some nice little (or big) right little tight little guns to be dispatched at once, to reach them before their horses are fit.73

  Balfour had been on the Shell Committee, as the Cabinet Munitions of War Committee was known, since Easter, working with Lloyd George to rectify the ‘deplorable’ munitions output.74 Within weeks the ‘Shell Crisis’ and disaster at Gallipoli would force Asquith into a Coalition government. Balfour was brought back into office proper, as First Lord of the Admiralty, replacing Winston Churchill, disgraced after the Dardanelles.75

  Arthur had always held the political fates of Mary’s male family members in his hands. Now, in a sense, he held their lives. Yet the tenor of Mary’s relationship with him during the war years was not markedly different to that of the decade preceding. At Downing Street, shut out by Asquith’s infatuation with the young Venetia Stanley, a close friend of Asquith’s daughter Violet, who had become the Prime Minister’s confidante and obsession, Margot agitated to be told official secrets in order to boost her own sense of self. Mary discussed developments with Arthur and was honest in her views. She only ever pressed him for information when it directly concerned her sons, and even then her tone was measured and humorous. She under
stood if Arthur could not give her information. She knew that, if he were able, he would.

  Many women – and men – were capable of compartmentalizing to mourn loved ones lost in a war negligently handled by generals that they nonetheless believed was just and necessary. Looking back, it is incredible, near impossible, that women of this generation and class watched their sons being sacrificed in a war governed by their husbands and lovers without ever once breaking faith. Pamela and Mary were two of these women. Yet, for different reasons, they did not. For Mary, Balfour was only ever trying to improve a situation rendered parlous by the neglect of others, drawn back into service by the need of the country. She mourned when he was brought back to the Admiralty: ‘so weary, reluctantly obliged to shoulder a heavy burden because all the nation trusts him’.76

  After the war, Pamela helped Grey write Twenty-Five Years, his staunch, quiet defence of his conduct as Foreign Minister that took Britain into the war. That she seems never once to have considered Grey culpable is unsurprising; even had such thoughts occurred to her, she would have excised them before they took root. She defended her own, even down to rubbishing Margot’s criticisms of Grey’s and Eddy’s wartime fishing habit. Margot proposed they should use the time in visiting the war wounded instead. Pamela replied, ‘I admit that the surface appearance of this fishing business, now, in Wartime, is ridiculous … I used to think the same as you – till I realized what a conventional view it was. It is not self-indulgence on his part, but relaxation – & [Eddy] needs relaxation … his way is in fishing, yours is in buying new clothes, mine is studying Psychological aspect of things.’ Unsurprisingly, Margot underlined the section alluding to her love of clothes in red ink.77