by Byron Rogers
At the other end of the spectrum the Thomas Beddoes Society, then with a membership of three, also heeded the call. This had been formed by John Lovell Beddoes, social worker (‘somebody has to be’), who had just heard about a kinsman his family had tended to keep secret. ‘When he died they brought pressure on his executor not to publish his writings, and I thought, “Hey, I need to find out about this guy.” I found he was a Romantic poet who was homosexual and committed suicide at 42. I thought, “Wow, let’s have a society.” Mr Beddoes, a bearded chap wearing a T-shirt with a portrait of his ancestor, another bearded chap, on the front, and on the back a line of his verse (‘If there were dreams to sell, what would you buy?’) sketched in the aims of his society. ‘If we can give him a boot and get him better known, so much the better.’
He is doing himself an injustice, for his newsletter attracts contributors like Patrick Leigh Fermor, who revealed he had discovered Beddoes in a cave. Amazing characters surface in its pages, such as the poet’s father, who invented laughing gas and tried it out on Coleridge, whom he first locked in a box made for him by the scientist Humphrey Davy. As a result he was later put in charge of Coleridge’s morphine intake.
‘Thomas Lovell Beddoes wasn’t on drugs himself,’ said his kinsman. ‘Mind you, he was on just about everything else.’ Membership was now fifty, ten of whom lived overseas, he said, another ten were members of the family, five his own friends, and the rest a hardcore of academics. ‘Literary societies have a problem with the academic lot and those who come along for a bit of a laugh,’ he added.
Thus while the Robert Louis Stevenson Club announces, ‘Seeking Mr Hyde – studies in Robert Louis Stevenson, Symbolism, Myth, and the Pre-modern’, a member of the Mary Webb Society said that her membership was a nice way of seeing Shropshire. They had had problems with members getting lost on tours of Shropshire, said a society official.
You get a glimpse of the vast purring expertise of the Jane Austen Society from the first sentence of its newsletter. ‘The committee has appointed a membership secretary on a part-time basis to oversee the increasingly technical development and maintenance of the database, and to avail the Society of the benefits of Internet entries on the World Wide Web...’. But as I read on, I found something wonderful. The Oxford branch was describing its June programme. ‘An expedition, possibly to Bath.’
I kept picking up leaflets and journals. I read of the George Borrow Society, the Barbara Pym Society, the Fanny Burney Society (formed in New Orleans, in a French restaurant), the Edith Nesbit Society, the Leo Walmsley Society... the Leo Walmsley Society? A novelist of the 1930s, praised as few have been. ‘A perfect yarn spinner,’ wrote Rebecca West. ‘I can only say I laid down this book with respectful wonder,’ so Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch said. ‘A magnificent piece of work,’ H.G. Wells. But the world had forgotten Leo Walmsley when his society was formed. Six of the books are back in print now, and they have 200 members reverently visiting every house lived in by the author during his three marriages. ‘We all turned up at his house in St John’s Wood and the lady had a terrible shock,’ said Fred Lane, the secretary. ‘There were 30 of us and she’d never heard of Leo Walmsley, but she showed us round. The only thing is, the more successful a society becomes, the more expensive it is to buy his books. The second-hand trade has heard of Leo Walmsley now.’
‘You see these little stalls laid out at our meetings,’ said Gabriel Woolf, the broadcaster who is the president of the Alliance. ‘You pick up books by people you’ve never heard of, like Leo Walmsley, and suddenly you’re hooked.’ A reading by Mr Woolf is the high point of many literary society meetings, and this year, with the actress Rosamund Shanks, he was doing a reading of Mary Webb, all coffins and country passion. ‘What be the farm to me?’ intoned Mr Woolf, tall and urbane, in his best Shropshire. Later he told me, ‘If you thought that was over the top, you should have seen what we cut out.’ He has also been Dickens, Tennyson, Auden, Saki and Kipling, but for all his gifts there are some writers he will not touch.
‘This actor came up to me, a very pale, gentle type, announced he was going to do a one-man show on William Cowper. I tried to be as encouraging as I could but I remember thinking, “Who the hell wants to see Cowper?” I thought no more about it till one morning I opened The Times and read that The Life and Work of William Cowper had opened in Carlisle. Not a ticket had been sold, but the usherettes, the report said, had heard him through.’
Other men’s enthusiasms always come up when members meet. ‘If you really want to meet crackpots, join a literary society,’ said the Reverend John Waddington-Feather, representing the Brontës. ‘The only reason the council sent me was for fear of some of our weirdos coming.’
‘I met this woman, lots of teeth and ambition, banging on about Shelley,’ said John Lovell Beddoes. ‘She runs something called the Shelley International and they meet once a year under his portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. But I lost interest when she told me Thomas Lovell Beddoes had been a woman.’ They told me about the Sherlock Holmes Fellowship, which meets to hear lectures on Victorian headgear, and of one lady, a devotee of nature poetry, who so terrified local farmers they did not dare take down a hedge in case a poet had once paused by it.
On the floor speakers came and went, describing their year in literature. The George Eliot Fellowship announced a George Eliot day culminating in a recital on her old piano, also a walk which would take in a school ‘once attended for a short time by her brother Isaac’.
An American lady, the founder of the Dymock Poets Society, described a recent collision between literature and Ledbury District Council. Dymock is a small village just outside the town, where in the years before the Great War, Robert Frost and Edward Thomas lived and their friends came to see them. When Ledbury acquired a new housing estate, the council decided to name its streets after the poets. The only thing was, there were seven streets but only six poets, until someone remembered one of them had had a girlfriend called Eleanor Farjeon, also a writer. The Council solemnly debated this and came to the conclusion it was too difficult a name to spell, at which point a television news crew descended on Ledbury with ‘Farjeon’ written on large placards. They invited passers-by to pronounce it. The impasse ended when a councillor remembered that W.H. Auden had got married in Ledbury.
He did not know that Auden was a homosexual, and that bride and groom, their marriage having been to obtain a British passport for her, parted later that day. When the next estate was built, the Council, said the American lady, called all the streets after cider apples.
Peter Ahearne, a member of the Thomas Hardy Society and a coach driver, offered his transport services. Kenneth Oultram, editor of the Alliance’s fanzine, informed the meeting that after years of trying to get them interested in literature, the Royal Mail had finally succumbed. Stamps were appearing which would feature Dracula, Frankenstein and the Hound of the Baskervilles.
Delegates were beginning to steal away. Fanny Burney went, in the shape of Lucy Magruder, a schoolteacher representing the Burney Society of America, who was over for a month’s holiday, in which time she would attend a Mrs Gaskell day in Manchester, visit every parish church associated with Jane Austen, then go on a German tour ‘in the footsteps of Mrs Gaskell’. ‘Oh dear, perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you all this,’ said Mrs Magruder. ‘You’re laughing already.’
The faces looked down from where their partisans had put the photographs, John Buchan’s cleverest-boy-in-the-school face, Hardy, whom his wife said looked like Dr Crippen, and only one face was missing, a plump, balding businessman’s face with a beard. ‘I’ve often thought that strange, but there it is,’ said Kathleen Adams. William Shakespeare alone has no society.
Secret Garden, Private Grief
N THE MIDDLE OF England there is a secret garden. You can pass and not know it is there, the wall around it is so high, the wrought-iron gate in the arch so beautifully made as to be forbidding. When people move to the village of Farthin
gstone, near Daventry, they assume that whatever lies beyond that gate must belong to someone. Only the gate is never locked.
But even before I opened it, I had seen something else. About 100 yards away there was a seat set so deep into a wall this formed a cave about it. Cut into the seat was, ‘Stranger. Whate’er thy land, or creed or race, rest awhile. There is virtue in the place.’ It was a creepy sensation, for this was a tiny village with one church, one pub and one small shop, set on a ridge with no main roads near. Like most English villages in the year 2000, none of its population of some 150 was about in the day. What was so special about this place that some distant, and mysterious, agency should direct attention to it? I opened the gate.
A passageway of tall box hedges led to lawns, and beyond the lawns there was on one side a beautiful ironstone building with columns. No doors. This was open to the weather like a shrine, and on the other side of the lawns there were more columns in the same stone, forming a cloistered walkway around a courtyard. The courtyard was also open, this time to the sky. Everything was so quiet, the craft so perfect, that the questions mounted. What was the place? Who had had it built?
There was a metal plate on a bench in the shrine-like building: ‘In memory of my daughter Jane, 1972, and my husband Arthur, 1978, who found happiness here.’ But behind this, in the building itself, was an inscription cut into a stone niche like some memorial to the Roman dead. The garden, this read, was given to the village by Philip and Georgette Agnew in memory of their daughter Joy, who was just 22 when she died in 1921. The garden was called Joymead. Not the Agnew Garden or Joy’s Garden, but that much older word, Joymead.
In the cloisters there was another inscription in another niche, added by the Agnews in memory of their son Ewen, and those others ‘who lost their lives in the Great War or died from its consequences’. That last phrase must have been significant, for Ewen, according to the date, died in 1930. There was one other thing, a sundial, there in memory of a grandson, Joy’s son, Michael Evans, killed in World War II. All that beauty was becoming overlain by sadness. And it didn’t end there.
In Farthingstone church the three lovely stained-glass windows on the south side, commissioned from William Morris’s old firm, are in memory of the three dead Agnew children, the third being a girl who had died in infancy. The private grief of one family rolls round and round the village, and at every turn there is this perfect taste.
Who, and what, were they? Artistic, certainly, the quality of these memorials showed that. But where had they lived? The cost suggested it had to be the Big House. However, this was yet another shock as I started to piece the story together, for though the stables had survived, themselves as grand and as big as any manor house, there was no manor house.
But there was once. Called Littlecourt, it had been bought, and greatly altered, by the Agnews in 1899. When the last of them, old Mrs Agnew, died in 1957, the village was startled to learn that the House, around which their own lives had turned, was to be pulled down. This, it was said, was one of the provisions of her late husband’s will, that on her death nobody else might go through the unhappiness the family had known there. And the extraordinary thing is, the House was then demolished, an Irish team moving into the village so that in the end not a stone remained.
Such things happen in history. Richard II tore down the palace of Sheen after the death of his first wife, but you do not encounter this extravagance of grief among late-20th century ratepayers. You can just imagine the consternation in the local council offices, an official being confronted by the fact that not only was the House unoccupied, it no longer existed.
I learnt all this from Peter and Sue Stanton, a young couple who moved to Farthingstone ten years ago, and as part of the village’s Millennium History researched and wrote an account of the family. ‘When we first came I was astonished to find anyone could go into Joymead at any time,’ said Peter, a sales rep. ‘I had thought it a private place, I didn’t know then that it was the village’s big secret. But when we started to write about the family we found people knew so little about them. We knocked on every door and managed to get just one picture of Joy, not even one of her wedding, yet all this was just two generations ago.’
The Agnews, they found out, had been part of the family firm which, in the nineteenth century, starting in a small shop selling clocks in Manchester, moved into the fine art business to the point where they negotiated purchases for the National Gallery. It then diverted into print, the Philip Agnew of Farthingstone, that man of grief, being, of all things, the proprietor of the humorous magazine Punch. The Stantons wrote to the firm, still in business in Bond Street, and an elderly nephew replied.
He remembered Philip, he wrote, as an extremely serious man, fond of music and so teetotal he would not allow any alcohol advertising in his magazines, which was strange, for his wife was from a family in the wine business in Egypt. As a small boy, the thing that had most impressed him was her fear of thunder, at the slightest approach of which all curtains had to be drawn and the lights put out, ‘a rather unnerving experience for a young visitor,’ he added dryly.
The Stantons contacted Mohammed Al Fayed, the present owner of Punch, who allowed them access to the magazine records. Here they found that Philip’s father, Sir William Agnew, had left £1,353,592 on his death. Now, not long before this the great trade union leader Joseph Arch had campaigned for a weekly wage of 12s a week for agricultural labourers. For most of the population of Farthingstone it must have seemed as though the gods had come to the ridge when a family with this kind of wealth turned up.
Mrs Agnew, the Stantons found, had been a poet, contributing Verses descriptive of the Pastoral Beauties of her Northamptonshire home, which must have done wonders for the circulation of Punch. She wrote in faded, archaic language, as in this to Mary, Queen of Scots:
Flow down O brooke, o’er flow in meres
And flood thy wintry medes
That Mary of the Many Teares
May know how my heart bleedes.
Which would account for the name Joymead. Mrs Agnew tried to revive Morris Dancing in Farthingstone, kitting her dancers out in full Tudor costume: bonnets, baggy breeches, slashed sleeves, the lot. Under the trees they stare bemusedly out of a yellowing group photograph.
The family was active in public works, meeting most of the cost of bringing water to the village, laying on electricity, restoring the church, so that there seemed to be no end to their benevolence. Mr Agnew became a magistrate (though, as his local newspaper obituary records, ‘he was not of the disposition to sit in judgement upon others and punish them’), and finally High Sheriff of the county. And, even when their grief came upon them, they remembered Farthingstone. After Joy’s death from tuberculosis, Philip Agnew gave, with Joymead, enough money to pay for a resident caretaker, also for a brass band to play once a fortnight through the summer evenings, and for a village tea to be held there on each anniversary of the birthday of his daughter who, as a child, had written, ‘In the very heart of England, safe from the tumults of the world, lies a small village...’.
Her brother Ewen, himself with not long to live, spoke at the opening of the garden. ‘Let (this) be a place where the old and infirm may spend calm evenings in the sunset of their lives; where the middle-aged, gazing southwards over this peaceful English valley, may gather comfort and strength, mental and physical, against the coming years; where young men and maidens may find a pleasant trysting-place; where children may gambol from morn till eve without causing anxiety to their mothers’ minds...’. It was 1922. The General Strike was just four years away, a post-war depression was gripping agriculture, yet in Farthingstone one of the gods, high-minded and distant, was speaking to nymphs and shepherds in the Arcady his family had created.
That same year they handed down the Rules of the Garden. No-one might cut flowers, beat carpets, allow ‘any horse, pony, mule, ass, bull, ox, cow, calf, heifer, steer, sheep, lamb, goat, hog or sow’ to enter, or himself delive
r ‘any public speech, lecture, prayer, sermon, address of any kind’. There would be no animals, no politics, no religion in Eden. ‘They sound like instructions from another world,’ said Peter Stanton. But what was it like to be one of the nymphs and shepherds, and to live in Farthingstone under such unremitting benevolence? English villages are places of transit as much as any town. Could anyone in Farthingstone remember life under the Agnews?
‘I was in the shop the other day and someone said to me, “You must be the oldest woman in the village.” I was flabbergasted. You are, you know, when someone says something like that to you. But I think I must be.’ Rachel Frost was fourteen in 1939, when she left school to work in the Big House. Mr Agnew was dead, but Mrs Agnew lived on, alone except for the butler, the cook, the houseboy, the head housemaid and underhousemaid, and Rachel, the lowest of all, the kitchenmaid. ‘At mealtimes we all used to sit round a table, according to rank.’ Rachel’s father and uncle worked in the gardens, her mother as a young girl helped with the washing up.
‘She thought the world of Miss Joy. “Nelly, where are you?” That was my mother’s name, “I’m in the Blue Room.” “Quick, I’ve got some trifle for you.” I remember Mr Agnew as a tall man on a horse. We children would salute him, and very gravely he would touch his cap. But by the time I knew Mrs Agnew, she was this little lady living all on her own. Oh, she used to dress terrible, an old sweater tied around her, wearing shoes too big so you could hear her flip-flopping down the corridors. These Hussar officers we had billeted on us, they called her Waltzing Matilda. She was always in black after Miss Joy died, and would never talk to us, just sent instructions for lunch and dinner, though she hardly ate at all.