Bruce Chatwin

by Nicholas Shakespeare

  There is a portrait of the first recorded Chetwynde in the Bayeux Tapestry, a tall, beaming spear-holder. He was so tall that the designer had to squeeze his name Turald beside his sword-belt, instead of over his head. Turald was a Norman from Rouen who served with William the Conqueror. His spoil would be part of Lady Godiva’s manor.

  The Domesday Book has Chetwynde as a demesne of 300 acres with a priest, a mill and two eel fisheries and values the manor at 50 shillings. Turald, who owned 13 properties in Shropshire, treated it as waste ground. It is from this giant Norman, who took the name de Chetwynde, that the Chatwins most likely descend.

  The Chetwyndes were knights, mill-owners and sharp-eyed businessmen. About one of them, George I, lately arrived from Hanover, complained: “This is a strange country. The first morning after my arrival in St James’, I looked out of my window and saw a park with walks and a canal, which they told me was mine. The next day Lord Chetwynde, the Ranger of the Park, sent me a brace of fine carp out of my canal and I was told I must give five guineas to Lord Chetwynde’s servant for bringing me my own carp out of my own canal in my own park.”

  Bruce inherited the Chetwynde acumen. He was ruthlessly protective of his interests. “My trouble is that, under a somewhat bland mask, I am from my Sotheby’s days a rather hard-nosed business pro,” he wrote to his literary agent in 1987. “Not for nothing did I once draw up a new form of draft contract, revolutionary in its day, which ultimately gave the art auction business a new flexibility.”

  Little is known about the Chatwin branch until the nineteenth century, despite efforts to elevate them higher by Bruce’s great-uncle Philip, a leading force behind the Birmingham Archaeological Society. They were probably groomsmen to the Chetwyndes who came into the Black Country looking for work. The first known Chatwin, who died in 1810, was a builder from Halesowen, five miles west of Birmingham. The second was a button-manufacturer who patented a method of making cloth buttons which, for the first time, would have no metal visible. A century on, Bruce’s father Charles – John Chatwin’s great-great-grandson – remained a connoisseur of hand-stitched garments. After dancing with a friend’s wife at the Pytchley Hunt Ball, Charles Chatwin ran his fingers down the back buttons of her dress. “Mmm, I don’t suppose you made those yourself.”

  Bruce was conscious of his Birmingham background and minded being put down by public school boys. One night near Faizabad he was stung into argument by the poet and Jesuit priest Peter Levi. “Peter was scorning Birmingham and aroused me to a certain sense of fury.” He took pride in the captains of industry in his ancestry. References to Birmingham run through his books and in certain company he would talk in a Birmingham accent. But he was aware, like his forebears, of the difference between middle class and gentry. Because of their regional accent, Victorian industrialists once they had money would often rather go to Vienna, even to southern Chile, than risk being disdained as provincial in London.

  What was true of Bruce’s distant cousin Charles Milward, who settled in Patagonia, was true of him. “The extraordinary thing about Milward is that he could never shake off Birmingham,” Bruce wrote to his parents from Punta Arenas, where Milward had built himself a house in the image of his father’s rectory.

  Nor would Bruce in all his travels shake off the influence of his father, a wise old sailor and a sound lawyer for whom everything had to be right.

  Charles Chatwin’s earliest memory was of George V’s coronation in 1911. Aged three, he stood on the corner of Maas Road and waved a Union Jack. He remembered a man wearing a leopard-skin beating a drum.

  He was a robust child who suffered from a form of epilepsy, petit mal, and was educated at home until he could be trusted not to have seizures in public. His Edwardian history came straight from his mother’s leather-bound copies of Punch. As an adult, he would describe his favourite cartoon, which depicted the problem of taking life head on. A man asks George, the gardener: Why do you always pull the barrow instead of pushing it?

  George: Because I hate the very sight of it.

  “That made me laugh.”

  He grew up to be a big, socially awkward, decent man and bossy as some shy people are. He had apple red cheeks and sharp, bridge-deck eyes which remained blue all his life. “They are the eyes of a man who has never known the meaning of dishonesty,” wrote Bruce, who inherited their colour. “They have never tempted him to anything mean or shoddy.”

  Bruce’s father was a doer, not a dreamer. He had a photographic memory and could assimilate information quickly. “I never read novels,” he said. “I prefer law reports.” His two enthusiasms were amateur dramatics and mucking about in boats at Barnt Green reservoir and on the south coast. He fell into the Law, his father’s profession, because there was little money to train him as a doctor, which he would have preferred. In 1933 his father died young and Charles became sole practitioner of Messrs. Gem & Co. at 2 Bennetts’ Hill, Birmingham.

  He channelled his healing compassion into his legal practice, winning respect as a fair-minded solicitor who specialised in family law from cradle to grave: land, inheritance, wills and settlements. “As a lawyer, I did not want to know what happened to bring about a divorce, but I felt sorry for both.” He sorted out people’s businesses and did his best to keep his clients away from litigation. “If you don’t want to go to court, go to Charles Chatwin,” clients said to each other. Not having an academic background, he laboriously wrote his contracts in longhand. “A lot of his work was holding hands with old ladies after they’d been burgled,” says Guy Norton, son of the senior partner. “Charles was very good at that.” He was a President of the West Midlands Rent Assessment Panel and sat on boards of the Children’s Hospital and the Commercial Union. “I am,” he said, “a very pink conservative.”

  Favourite among Charles’s clients were the Quakers and Unitarians who had helped make Birmingham the Second City, “the City of a Thousand Trades”. He was influenced by their uprightness, their nonconformity, their ethos of interdependence – for instance, the sharing of capital assets. His good friend was the Quaker lawyer, George Barrow, who worked next door at Wragge & Co. They talked boats incessantly. In 1934, together they bought for £130 a six-ton gaff cutter, Noctiluca, named after the marine life which cause the sea’s phosphorescence. In the same year, they took down the wall between their offices to allow them to communicate more easily. Charles amalgamated his practice with Wragge & Co., as one of five partners, on a salary of £600.

  Barrow remembers his partner as a tolerant man, patient, always on to the latest gadget. “He didn’t lose his wool. He was expansive, but never about personal affairs.” To Patrick Lawrence – also of Wragge & Co. and another co-owner of Charles’s boats – Charles Chatwin gave the impression of an inward, Pickwickian figure. “Charles was one of the most sensible men I’ve ever met. If there was some scandal, he’d quietly not let the file go outside his office. In the nicest possible way, he swept that sort of thing under the carpet. He wasn’t surprised by human frailty, but he was going to make sure he didn’t have it himself.”

  One day Barrow telegraphed from London: COMING HOME. BRINGING LUNATIC. The Master of Lunacy had agreed that Barrow’s client, “a lunatic so found by inquisition”, might be committed to Charles’s custody while Barrow was on holiday. The young man, who had run off with a nurse and married her, stayed with the Chatwins at West Heath Road, where he turned out to be adept at cards. “Mrs Chatwin,” says Barrow, “was delighted to have him as a bridge player.”

  Unmarried in his late twenties, Charles lived at home with his widowed mother, Isobel. He rolled his own cigarettes and wore a dark blue suit, dressing as his partner recalls “one down from a city solicitor, one up from a country solicitor”. He was strong, prudent, common-sensical – and impeccable. “From the rest of us, he would come in for some ‘heavy-duty’ teasing for being stolid, forbearing and virtuous,” says Hugh, his youngest son. “Two more different and complementary people than Charles and my mother M
argharita are hard to imagine.”

  Charles was on a train to London to attend a party when he first set eyes on Margharita, a young woman with long legs and brown eyes. “Brown eyes are naughty eyes,” she would tell the infant Bruce on her knee.

  Charles was too shy to introduce himself, but on returning to Birmingham he told his mother about “the jolly nice girl” he had seen. Two weeks later he walked into the drawing room and was astonished to find her talking to his mother. Margharita Turnell had been offered a job with the local MP, Ronald Cardand, and was in need of lodgings. Isobel Chatwin, who led the Woman’s Branch of the King’s Norton Conservatives, insisted she stay with the Chatwins. “Hands off, this one’s mine,” Charles said to his brother Anthony, who had a way with the girls.

  One evening three months later, Charles drove her in his Austin 10 to Far Forest and proposed. He was 30. She was 26.

  “Mother never liked to talk about the past,” says Hugh. “A lot of pain there. Not a rejoicing thing.”

  Margharita Turnell came from Sheffield. “You can tell people from Sheffield by the way they look at knives,” she said. One of her father’s jobs had been in cutlery. The Turnells were sheet-metal workers, railway guards, corn merchants. Bad luck and disappointment clung to them, their history one of spiralling descent. At school Margharita was nicknamed Toenail or Turnip.

  Turnell means “hill overgrown with thorn bushes”. The English Turnells were Huguenot emigrants. Margharita’s family traced themselves to an argumentative mercer from Tickhill, on the outskirts of Sheffield.

  Margharita’s grandfather Sam Turnell had been a commercial traveller in the wine trade who sailed to Australia for his health and died on the journey. Sam’s wife was born in scandalous circumstances to a young heiress who became pregnant by the music master and ran away with him to Ecclesfield, where he scraped a living as the church organist. Sam’s brother, William, was a railway guard who was crushed to death between the buffers at Penistone.

  Bruce’s grandfather, Margharita’s father, was also named Sam. On his marriage certificate he called himself an architect, but most likely he was helping out his architect brother, Ernest. As a young man, Sam liked to tap-dance and ride a tram to the moors to shoot grouse. He looked good on a hard polished floor, or in bowler hat and breeches galloping a horse across the sands. His favourite phrase was “Watcha cocky”; his keenest hobby, to draw meticulous plans of houses that were never built.

  By the time Bruce knew him, Sam Turnell was a thin, melancholy man with a nose he would say had been broken by a cricket ball and a face that went on forever. He had brushy brows and long narrow hands that he kept thrust into the pockets of his tweed suit, to hide the nails he bit. He wore this suit, buttoned with a single button and a narrow black tie, even to the beach. “Sam had the face of a sad clown,” wrote Chatwin in On the Black Hill. “Nets of red string covered his eyeballs and his eyelids seemed to rustle as he blinked. The presence of an attractive woman drove him to acts of reckless flirtation.”

  “I adored him,” wrote Bruce. “He was a great walker and I preferred to walk with him over the Yorkshire Moors rather than play with children my own age.”

  More often than not, Sam Turnell walked to escape his wife, a headstrong, superstitious woman who had been raised in Aberdeen, in a middle-class Scottish household with a buder. Mary Mathieson’s father had married and lost two fortunes and she was supposed to have had relatives in the Indian army. This partly explained, to Bruce, her dark tan. Somewhere in her Highland past there was also a story of gypsies.

  Bruce’s grandmother had plenty of Romany temperament. “I like to think she was a gypsy,” wrote Bruce, “a changeling perhaps or a castaway left at the Manse.” She wore gold earrings, collected brass and took pride in her wonderful legs that she would show off at the least provocation. An effigy of a black cat was important to her and the correct hanging of a horseshoe. “An addict of the Ouija board and horoscopes, she was also given to any kind of gambling. Her husband lost his last penny in the slump, so she ‘made do’ betting on the horses”. Once she invested a pound on “Grackle” in the Grand National and the horse came in at 33–1. A later bet of six shillings each way financed her son’s engagement ring.

  Bruce knew his grandmother as “Gaggie”. Forty years later, in the back-lands of Brazil, he would find her gypsy double under a jackfruit tree.

  Gaggie had arrived in Sheffield, after her father’s death, to keep house for her brother, a doctor practising in Broomhill. When her brother married, she rowed with his wife and never spoke to either again. Desperate for somewhere to live she moved in with Sam Turnell, the tap-dancing “architect”, who lived next door.

  They married in October 1911. Sam was 38, Mary 27. Her inheritance enabled them to settle in an elegant house in Broomhill. Bruce’s mother, the eldest of their three children, was born in February, 1912. Known to her family as “Margie”, Margharita was named after Sam’s favourite flower.

  Sam was now working for Jonas & Colver, the knife manufacturers. He rose to become a manager. “Then, evidently, he did something wrong,” says his son, John Turnell. The firm despatched him on a mysterious mission to South America.

  In 1927 he lost his job altogether. Margharita was at home when he came in and told her: “The steel works have gone bust.” He remained unemployed until the mid-1930s, living off his wife’s capital, but Gaggie’s money ran out and the Turnells moved from their pillar-fronted house into smaller and smaller lodgings, finally settling in 136 Sandygate Road, a semi-detached with a green-painted dining room, three ducks flying up the wall and a fine view over the Rivelin valley across the hen-house roof.

  “They had friends when they had money, and then they didn’t have so many,” says John Turnell. Possessions were sold. It became difficult to keep up appearances. Gaggie felt Sandygate Road demeaned her and hated it. Then, in about 1935, Sam found a job as a quantity surveyor for a firm making metal windows. (Bruce, casting him in rosier lights, claimed he sold stained glass). Sam worked for Mellowes until he retired, but the pay was meagre. He was living a cut above the breadline with a wife and three children. The only supplementary source of income was that brought in by Gaggie from the horses. She regretted having married him. They fought continually. Slowly, the marriage unravelled. “Sam, you’re useless, Sam!” Gaggie would snap in a thickening Scots accent.

  To escape Sandygate Road, Sam walked the moors. He took John with him and later Bruce. They walked past the Three Merry Lads pub, past Red Mires dam, past Ashopton – now under water – and back along Manchester Road. All day, sometimes 20 miles a day, said John, who complained it put him off walking. “We all wanted to escape home.”

  The experience of walking the moors with his grandfather would germinate Bruce’s theory of walking and his conviction that the human frame is designed for a day’s march. “When people start talking of man’s inhumanity to man it means they haven’t actually walked far enough.”

  Bruce’s mother was 14 when Sam lost his job at Jonas & Colver. Gaggie, to remove Margharita from the house, sent her to Dieppe to stay for six months with the parents of her French governess. She returned home speaking French, with a taste for French magazines and clothes. Unable to afford new dresses, Gaggie, from cut-outs and curtains, taught Margharita how to design her own. Margharita said: “We were brought up poor as church mice, but Gaggie always made sure we were properly turned out.”

  Margharita sought refuge from the grime of Sheffield in parties and matinées. Hugh ascribes his brother’s appetite for the exotic to their mother’s passion for European fashion and American films. She loved going with her sister Kay to the cinema, identifying with the heroines. Her favourite film was Gone With the Wind. She confided to Hugh, whom she took to see it, that Scarlett’s predicament, sitting in a house with no money and taking down the green velvet curtains to cut into a dress, was similar to her own situation in Sandygate Road. Both of her siblings would later work in films; Kay as a continu
ity girl, John as an actor, and afterwards as a cost controller at Denham Studios. “If you’ve got good eyesight, and are quick, and know where to look, you’ll see me in the farewell speech of Goodbye Mr Chips.”

  For Margharita, the most accessible theatre was Sheffield’s political stage. She worked as an assistant for the local Conservatives, looking after old ladies and organising whist drives in Sheffield, Blackpool and Wales. In 1934, aged 21, she moved to London, sharing with Kay a one-bedroom flat in Great Portland Street. She canvassed the Paddington ward for Conservative Central Office, until the chief agent sacked her “for giggling at the policy”.

  In the winter of 1937, Margharita caught the train to Birmingham with a recommendation to join the team of Ronald Cardand, MP, brother of a young romantic novelist, Barbara. She was coming back from her interview when Charles Chatwin boarded the train.

  Bruce liked to think of his mother as glamorous. In On the Black Hill he cast her as Jo Lambert: “a strange, long-legged woman, with scarlet lips and nails, and sunglasses set in wedges of white Bakelite . . . She had always been famous for her taste and her ability to ‘make do’ on a shoe-string.” He detected in her lively brown eyes “suggestions of Southern ancestry” and told friends that Margharita had been a cabaret performer. If ever she danced, it was probably to perform demure turns as part of her fund-raising activities for the Conservative Party.

  To Hugh, their mother was “morally very correct, with a bit of Scarlett O’Hara trying to burst out”. Sensitive to her lack of formal education, she played at not being bright, but she could think fast, “flirt with the best” and was always looking at the funny side of people.