The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  At the very end of Gance’s film, in a horrifying hallucinatory sequence, the dead soldiers rise up from the waste land as Jean Diaz turns to the terrified watching civilians and, confronting their guilt, cries ‘J’accuse.’ The dead men are asking those who remain whether they are worthy of such sacrifice. For this Dante-esque sequence which made a nonsense of all the panaceas offered by spiritualists and practising seancists to the bereaved, Gance had borrowed two thousand soldiers while they were on an eight-day respite from the front at Verdun. While filming Gance was acutely aware of the implications of what he was asking the men to do. After the war he explained those feelings. ‘The drama, the source of the psychological impact, stems from the acting of those dead men on leave. In a few weeks or months eighty per cent of them would disappear. I knew it and so did they.’

  The experience of making and watching the film had a shattering effect on all involved. Women watching the film were so distressed that many were carried from the cinema in a faint. To a population who were in part beginning to put a distance between themselves and the slaughter, this film only reawakened the truth of the experience. The film was in some ways the cinematic equivalent of Wilfred Owen’s verse, some of which was published in the same year. Moments of silence and national monuments could provide a temporary reprieve but could never eradicate the pain of truth.

  15

  Resignation

  Early Summer 1920

  Neither the ninth Duke of Devonshire nor his wife, Duchess Evelyn, were extravagant by nature. When the Duchess once attached a stamp to a wrongly addressed envelope she sent a footman on the ten-minute walk to the Chatsworth kitchens to fetch a newly boiled kettle so that she could steam it off. But Victor Devonshire had been forced to consider selling his huge London house well before the war broke out. A reduction in household expenses was a problem that many were struggling with, but a reduction in houses themselves was a predicament reserved only for the few. As early as 1913 Duchess Evelyn had been looking for a way to meet the sum owed as death duties on the estate of Victor’s uncle, the eighth Duke. ‘Could you find out what sort of prices people now give for big houses?’ Duchess Evelyn had written in February of that year to Francis Manners Sutton, the Duke’s private secretary. ‘So many have changed hands lately that someone ought to know.’

  During the war years nothing was done about the proposition to sell but the financial repercussions of the four-year conflict had forced the ninth Duke to agree that the sale of Devonshire House was now inevitable and urgent. Disposal of the mansion would help with the enormous expenses of running the vast Devonshire estates. The agricultural slump of the war years, and the increased taxes imposed on rich landowners even before the war, meant that the Duke was now stretched beyond his means. In the past some of the huge sums owed to the Treasury had already been met by the sale of precious assets. Twenty-five volumes printed by William Caxton and the John Philip Kemble collection of plays were sold in 1914 to Henry E. Huntingdon who paid the Duke $750,000.

  Devonshire House sat at the heart of London’s Piccadilly, opposite the entrance to Green Park and a minute’s stroll from the Ritz. With its dull-looking facade and high unadorned wall designed to keep out the din of street sellers it was not an elegant building when viewed from outside. But once inside first-time visitors would catch their breath at its glamour and grandeur. The Duke knew he would miss the glorious oak carvings of the London house, as well as the huge drawing rooms filled with masterpieces by Van Dyck, Rubens and Rembrandt, the dazzling crystal balustraded staircase and the ballroom, scene for nearly two hundred years of so many spectacular dances. But it was the garden with its two tennis courts surrounded by lawns and statues, fountains and ancient trees that he would find particularly difficult to give up.

  The sale of Devonshire House would, the Duke hoped, be the biggest and final event of many such cash-raising ventures. During the last two years of the war the Duke had authorised the auctioning of land worth nearly £20,000. He planned to net several hundred thousand pounds by selling off property in London’s Chiswick as well as farmland in Derbyshire, especially around the town of Chesterfield, some more from the Bolton Abbey estates in Yorkshire, and further acreage from other counties stretching from Lincolnshire to Somerset and Sussex.

  The Duke had been particularly reluctant to part with Peelings, a glorious Jacobean manor house at Pevensey near Eastbourne. The estate agents handling the handsome property and its forty-seven acres had soon received an expression of great interest from the wife of the Minister for War. Clementire Churchill was a tremendous seabathing enthusiast and she loved the idea of living near the south coast. What is more, ever conscious of her husband’s extravagance and always out to save or make a penny, Clemmie had spotted a little piece of land further down the coast that seemed ripe for development. She thought it would make a ‘delicious little garden villa with good tennis courts, sailing boats etc’. But Winston resisted. He had always set his heart on finding a house in Kent. Since Winston had been a very young child, his old nanny Mrs Everest had impressed on him that with its wonderful fruit orchards and thick rich green hop gardens, Kent was undoubtedly the most beautiful county in England. Peelings remained on the market.

  In 1916 the Duke of Devonshire had been appointed Governor General of Canada and proved to be successful and popular in the role. But by 1920 he was weary of trying to handle all the problems at home from such a great distance. On 14 March he left Canada for the week-long journey back to England. He planned to stay there for a month and a half during which time he had much business to conduct, most of it sad. He had no time to visit the Devonshires’ lovely castle, Lismore in Ireland’s County Waterford, and the increasing volatility of the country made it unadvisable for him to travel there.

  The only bright engagement in his diary was the approaching marriage of his daughter Dorothy, scheduled to take place towards the end of April, a few days after a final ball was to be held at Devonshire House. Dorothy’s fiancé, Harold Macmillan, had just joined his family’s publishing firm as a junior partner, having refused to return to Oxford, a place that risked the recurrence of unhappy memories, after the loss of so many of his fellow undergraduates killed in the war.

  Now aged 26, Harold had served as a captain in the Grenadier Guards and had been badly wounded three times. For the last year he had been an effective and likeable ADC to the Duke in Canada. Harold had ambitions for an eventual political career in Britain and was looking for a free seat to contest. With his intelligence and ease with people from all backgrounds, he seemed to his future father-in-law to be full of promise. The Duke hoped that this marriage would lessen the pain of the loss of another son-in-law, Captain Angus Mackintosh, who within a year of his marriage to Dorothy’s elder sister Maud, and while serving with the Horse Guards, had been shot at Mons and died a month before the Armistice of pneumonia brought on by the Spanish flu.

  Two days after his arrival back in Britain Victor Devonshire wrote in his diary that he still felt ‘very bewildered and strange’. The sale of the London house, perhaps to one of the new American hoteliers, filled him with dread. On top of these anxieties there were worries up at Chatsworth in Derbyshire. During the war most of the gardeners had been away fighting and the dilapidated condition of Joseph Paxton’s magnificent Conservatory was causing concern. On its completion in 1841, 277 feet long, 123 feet wide and 67 feet high, it had been the largest glasshouse in the world. This amazing building, compared by one visitor at the time to ‘a sea of glass when the waves are settling and smoothing down after a storm’, had covered a quarter of an acre. Seven miles of iron pipes fired by eight underground coal furnaces that consumed 350 tons of fuel a year provided the heating for an unmatchable array of exotic plants with delicate temperaments. Mrs S. C. Hall, one of thousands of visitors to Derbyshire’s beautiful new crystal palace, described it in 1851 as filled with ‘the rarest exotics from all parts of the globe – from “farthest Ind”, from China, from the Himala
yas, from Mexico’. There were bananas, and grapes ‘hanging in ripe profusion beneath the shadow of immense paper-like leaves’ and, equally delightful, ‘the far-famed silk cotton-tree supplying a sheet of cream-coloured blossoms’, the deliciously scented cinnamon and ‘thousands of other rare and little known species of both flowers and fruits’.

  But the restrictions on coal usage during the war had caused the warmth-loving plants to wither and with the post-war shortage of fuel there was little prospect of maintaining the voracious heating requirements. Roland Burke, the Duke’s chief agent in charge of the Devonshire lands at Hardwick, Bolton and Chatsworth, had written to Government House in Ottawa in January 1920 to explain that ‘serious deterioration’ to the surrounding greenhouses had taken place. ‘A large quantity of the glass is in a thoroughly dilapidated condition and is worth practically nothing at all, the fruit trees themselves have of course suffered considerably by the wet continually dripping in.’

  The ninth Duke was resigned. The Paxton masterpiece would have to go. On 14 January he had been advised in a telegram from Burke that an offer of £550 had been made for the destruction and removal of the kitchen garden greenhouses. In addition £3,600 was mentioned as a sum for buying the magnificent Great Conservatory in which Queen Victoria had danced over seventy years earlier, when 14,000 lamps had been hung around the upper gallery for the royal ball. Prince Albert’s irreplaceable private secretary, Colonel G. E. Anson, had made it clear to the then Duke and Duchess that Victoria, although already a bride of three years, was to be seated next to her husband throughout the visit, and the royal couple as well as the Chatsworth fountains had danced the night away ‘at an unwonted pace’. The following day, wearing a purple poke bonnet, the Queen had been given a special tour of the garden buildings by Paxton himself. Victoria pronounced the Conservatory to be ‘the most stupendous and extraordinary creation imaginable’.

  In 1851 Prince Albert commissioned another Paxton masterpiece. That year the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park became the centrepiece for the Great Exhibition and the achievement brought Paxton the reward of a knighthood. But in 1920 there was a risk that Paxton’s Chatsworth structure, a thing of immense but fragile beauty, would simply fall apart in the hands of anyone attempting to move it.

  Many of the same families had worked the great Devonshire estates for centuries and the Duke hoped the new generation would resist the lure of well-paid work in the surrounding cities. The Duke believed that men who had been marked by courage in battle fell apart when confined to an office, while those who could still breathe the outside air were certain to survive better. Roland Burke, his chief agent, was struggling under administrative pressure and, although not an old man, his irregular heartbeat was giving his doctor cause for worry. Burke had been warned that he might have to ‘be put on the shelf’ for at least six months, and to take a complete rest. Reluctantly Burke agreed, given that ‘it seems a pity to go west at forty-nine’.

  The Duke was fortunate in the individual he had chosen to run his affairs in his absence abroad. Burke was a man of energy, efficiency and also of compassion. The huge number of staff retained on the estates brought with it problems of a personal nature and in the Duke’s absence Burke felt it important to boost morale. In a letter to the Duke at the beginning of the year he had to break the news that ‘Elliot the under-keeper at Beeley has taken his life’. Poor Elliot had been suffering from depression and shot himself only the day before the switching on of the lights of the huge Christmas tree at Chatsworth. Burke told the Duke that he had managed to persuade Mrs Elliot to allow the two children to attend the tree lighting as usual; Burke knew how much children loved the occasion. He also knew how important it was for their lives to go on as normal.

  And there were other problems. The vicar at the mining village of Pleasley near Bolsover was distressed by the habit of male teachers at the village school of caning little girls across the hands and shoulders. This misuse of male strength he considered ‘positively revolting’. He had written to ask Burke whether he would implore the Duke to use his influence and put a stop to the practice. What upset the Reverend Pyddoke was not just the punishment itself but also the knowledge that it was administered by men because women were unwilling to do it and men were considered ‘more expert floggers’ than women.

  The estate officer at Hardwick also wrote to the Duke informing him that there were staffing problems at the Hall with so many tempted by the competitive wages offered by employers in Sheffield and Derby. The absent Duke received the news that the bricklayers had almost all left already. Burke was further concerned that the much needed revenue from the new admission charge of sixpence was being rapidly exhausted by staff presenting Burke with ‘deserving cases’. The rector’s daughter was ill with typhoid and Mrs Herrington, the wife of the ‘odd man’ at the Hall, was dying of diabetes and ‘her final wish is to have a small holiday by the sea’. Penrose had agreed to help out. What with one thing and another, he told the Duke, ‘We shall all be glad when your term of office in Canada is finished, as no doubt you yourself will be.’

  On 31 March the Duke went up to Derbyshire, delighted at first to be there after such a long absence. ‘Cannot describe how nice it is to be back here,’ he wrote in his diary, although the following morning his mood shifted as he walked round the crumbling garden buildings with Burke. ‘It was’, he wrote that evening, ‘a melancholy scene.’ Only a couple of decades earlier forty-six gardeners had been photographed at Chatsworth in front of Paxton’s magnificent Conservatory. The wooden struts were now rotten, the hundreds of panels of glass all smashed. The decision was taken to demolish it, but the Duke could not bear to witness the event himself, so the day for demolition was set for 25 May, several weeks after his return to Canada.

  Fearing that he might find another set of problems over at Hard-wick, Victor drove the twenty miles to Bess’s magnificent sixteenth-century window-rich mansion, enjoying the pleasingly mild and sunny April weather. He was relieved to find Bess’s old home ‘in wonderfully good order’ although he could not imagine the family ever living there again. Back on the Chatsworth estate, he had a meeting with the vicar after church on Sunday to discuss plans for the village war memorial. This was followed by a whole afternoon with Burke. There was so much to do and he anticipated a ‘fearful life of difficulties before we get things straight’.

  Complicated negotiations for the sale of the London house had been equally problematic, but the six-month long discussions had finally been concluded in the autumn of 1919, when contracts for the takeover were exchanged. A completion date of 25 March was arranged, with six weeks’ notice beyond that given for all the contents to be removed. The plan was for the house itself to be demolished and for the land beneath it and around it to be developed. The new owners, the famous building firm Holland Hannen & Cubitt, immediately made a further deal with a Mr Sibthorpe, a London property developer, who had a daring scheme for the land that had cost them one million guineas. A complex of sumptuous offices and entertainment facilities was envisaged with a magnificent cinema at the heart of it. Mr Sibthorpe was undaunted by criticism of his intention to get rid of William Kent’s building. ‘Personally I think the place is an eyesore,’ he retorted.

  And so the glories of the house remained in place for one last ball on 14 April, the necessitous times making it seem appropriate for guests to pay for their entrance tickets in aid of charity. For one last night a huge marble vase filled with orchids was placed at the bottom of the staircase and Newman’s, the British band of the moment, supplied the music. The invitation had requested that guests come dressed in costumes reflecting the period 1760–90. The Daily Telegraph recorded the scene as guests arrived dressed in ‘powder and patches, tall and nodding plumes above elaborately dressed hair, brocades and figured silks and uniforms that had stepped out of family portraits’, and the huge rooms filled with music and dancing for the final party.

  Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, balancing a full wh
ite wig, was in a costume of pale yellow taffeta bunched up over a petticoat veiled with old lace and festooned with garlands of pink roses on silver ribbon. Lady Cynthia Curzon wore peacock blue taffeta, while some of the French ladies had followed the dress code to the letter, even ensuring that their faces were poudré. But in the newspaper’s three-column report not a single mention was made of the family from whom the house for a few more days would take its name.

  Marriage was in the air. The movie star Mary Pickford had been married to her one-time screen partner Douglas Fairbanks at the end of March and their arrival in London on honeymoon had prompted a riot, as enthusiastic fans crushed her when reaching out to touch the bride’s hair at a party given for them in the grounds of the Royal Chelsea Hospital. Her new husband, in the custom of doting newly weds, had to lift her high in the air and carry her to safety.

  A week after guests had made their farewell to Devonshire House they were once again invited to dress up for a ducal celebration. The wedding of the Duke’s daughter Dorothy to Harold Macmillan on 21 April took place in St Margaret’s, Westminster, where many Members of Parliament had married including, twelve years earlier, Winston Churchill and Clementine Hozier. The church was filled with the powerful scent of lilies and orange trees, their branches bending with ripened fruit. Dorothy looked enchanting in cream velvet with garlands of orange blossom encircling her waist, while her eight small attendants wore gowns of periwinkle blue satin, with wreaths of grapes hung on silver bands in their hair.

  The Duke was delighted that his mother, who had not been well, was able to attend, albeit in her bath chair. ‘She greatly enjoyed herself,’ he wrote in his diary that night. He himself had ‘spent most of the time with the Queen who was really charming’ and the day proved to be one of the happiest of what was turning out to be a predominantly gloomy visit. News of escalating violence in Ireland inspired by the republican movement only added to the Duke’s concern. In early April twenty-two offices of the Inland Revenue as well as over a hundred and twenty police stations in Dublin and other cities all over Ireland were burned down, and the anger and determination of the Irish Republican Army showed no signs of abating.