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

by Juliet Nicolson

  With a sailing date of 2 May and his time in England running out, the Duke went against his own better judgement to ‘have a last look at poor old DH’. Hoping that ‘the pain will soon pass’ he tried to convince himself that ‘Although I really could hardly face it, I am glad I managed to have another glimpse at it.’ Spotted by a persistent reporter from the Daily Sketch, the Duke gave nothing away, but the reporter detected something of the effect the sale of the house was having on its owner. ‘Although the ducal expression is scarcely expressive’, he told his readers, and ‘emotions have never visibly chased each other across the face of any Cavendish’, he was in no doubt that during those weeks ‘the Duke thought a lot’. His preoccupation with such changes in his life was evident to all.

  Only the week before 250 pounds of gelignite was due to be ignited by 450 electric detonators attached to Paxton’s magnificent glasshouse in Derbyshire, The Times reflected on how properties were changing hands all over England. The newspaper summed up the philosophical and resigned manner in which some of the wealthiest landowners were adjusting to altered circumstances.

  For the most part the sacrifices are made in silence ... the sons are perhaps lying in far-away graves; the daughters, secretly mourning someone dearer than a brother, have taken up some definite work away from home, seeking thus to still their aching hearts, and the old people, knowing there is no son or near relative left to keep up the old traditions, or so crippled by necessary taxation that they know the boy will never be able to carry on when they are gone, take the irrevocable step.

  On the night before Paxton’s masterpiece was destroyed, electricians were working up until midnight finishing off the complex wiring of explosives. The story of the imminent explosion had reached the press, and one reporter, anxious for a scoop, wrote up the story without even travelling to Derbyshire. The following morning the published account described how some ‘billion’ pieces of glass had been scattered about the country. In fact the detonation had utterly failed. The edifice seemed obstinately indestructible. The following day they tried again, but after seven or eight efforts Burke told the Duke that ‘Although very high charges were used it had not the slightest effect on the building, the roof remaining quite stationary.’

  Poor Burke wondered if perhaps he had made a dreadful mistake. ‘I am feeling quite guilty’, he wrote to his employer in Canada, ‘in having persuaded you to take the building down as if it can stand the terrific charges exploded beneath it, I believe it would have stood up for many years.’ To those few people still alive who remembered the day when the glass palace had first gone up, the planned destruction promised to be a near-apocalyptic event. Newspaper editors smelled a front-page story and what Burke termed ‘a cinema man’ from Sheffield planned to come out to Derbyshire and record the whole sad sequence from ignition to demolition. Burke promised the Duke that if the film was satisfactory he would send a copy out to Canada.

  The final week of May had brought unusually warm weather up and down the country, with temperatures of 82 degrees Fahrenheit recorded in London. On Saturday 29 May the inhabitants of the pretty town of Louth in Lincolnshire were getting ready to have tea when a massive storm hit the Lincolnshire Wolds. There was no chance for the moisture to be absorbed into the dry ground and soon the accumulated tons of water rose up into a fourteen-foot wave engulfing the River Ludd. All six bridges straddling the river were instantly destroyed by the tremendous torrent and the townspeople were given no warning before being swept up in the terrifying wall of water. One mother watched as her three children clung to the bacon hook in the kitchen. Soon their young arms gave way and they drowned in front of her. Twenty-three deaths were recorded that day and a thousand people were left homeless as, according to one survivor, houses were ‘swept away like sandcastles’.

  Over in Derbyshire the weather had been equally bad and on top of the Louth catastrophe, Burke had little news in his weekly letter with which to cheer the Duke. Thousands of young grouse had been drowned in the recent storms and ‘one of the estate painters – old Hulley who lives in Edensor village’ – had fallen very badly from a cart and severely injured his spine. ‘The doctor is hopeful he may recover sufficiently,’ Burke reported, but acknowledged that at the age of 68 there was no great hope that he would.

  Meanwhile Burke had heard on the grapevine from London that the new owners of Devonshire House were still flirting with the idea of keeping the house intact and turning it into a luxury hotel. And he did have one good thing to tell the Duke. Earlier in the summer Lionel Earle, His Majesty’s Officer of Works at Westminster, had been in touch with the Duke about the possibility of acquiring the Devonshire House entrance gates and using them on the opposite side of Piccadilly at the entrance to Green Park. He had offered £1,500. The Duke however was determined to hold out for a little more. Shrewsbury School had also been interested in buying them as a war memorial, although it was made clear that they could not afford ‘a fancy price’. Burke now confirmed that the King would be pleased to erect the gates in Green Park and that His Majesty’s Officer of Works would give the Duke £2,000 for the gates and pillars.

  Back in Derbyshire the demolition plans had continued to go badly. The Conservatory had been built so carefully and solidly that all attempts to blow it up had failed to make an impact and the ‘film man’ gave up and went back to Sheffield. However, before he left he had managed to record some of the early attempts at detonation and on Tuesday 22 June Burke wrote from the estate office that he was sending the Duke a film of the failure to destroy the Great House.

  One of the saddest witnesses that day was Paxton’s own great-grandson, Sir Charles Markham. After demobilisation from the Life Guards, Sir Charles had spent a brief but notable period in the diplomatic service in Russia and Cairo before returning home to manage the huge fortune inherited from his father’s coal-mining business in Derbyshire. He had made enough money to relieve another Duke of one of the many properties he too was selling to limit post-war expenses. Charlie bought Longford Hall from the Earl of Leicester in the very summer that he was asked to bring various pieces of apparatus over to Chatsworth to help destroy his grandfather’s creation.

  ‘Another heavy charge’ was placed later that same evening and finally the whole roof caved in. The ‘film man’ was persuaded to return to take some photographs that he cleverly incorporated into his film. Shortly after the detonation a visitor to Chatsworth, amazed by the sight of the coconut palm with ‘its head peering almost to the lofty arched roof’, had watched as the plants withered and the Conservatory ‘became a house of death’. He had stood in the rain looking with deep sadness at

  a dismal expanse of debris stretching away from my feet to where tall trees swayed down as if to hide the spectacle ... Great iron pillars snapped in several places littered the ground. Thick baulks of timber, split and shivered, sprawled about. Over the turf was spread a glittering carpet of broken glass.

  The violence of the final explosion forced one shard of iron to be carried through the courtyard of the house itself, shattering a windowpane and embedding itself in the tooled leather spine of a volume of Martius’ Flora Braziliensis.

  Burke stood the following day with an old man who had known the Great House for most of his life. They agreed that the disappearance of something quite so lovely was a calamity. The Chatsworth Conservatory that had brought light and warmth to living things had suffered and had died, another casualty of the war.

  16

  Hope

  High Summer 1920

  With her tumbling ‘mass of chestnut hair’ which, when unpinned, reached down to her waist, Ottoline Morrell reminded Osbert Sitwell of ‘a rather over-lifesize Infanta of Spain’. But admiring comments on the drama of her appearance were no comfort to Ottoline. For several years she had slept alone in her schoolgirl-narrow bed at home at Garsington Manor. She was feeling increasingly lonely.

  Two years earlier her husband Philip, a former Liberal Member of Parliament, had confe
ssed to her in an agonising scene of remorse that he was ‘dying of grief’. To his wife’s distress he told her that within the next few months both his secretary and Ottoline’s own personal maid were to have babies. Philip was the father of them both. This news had not surprised her as much as it might. Guests had been in the middle of a wartime dinner when the husband of the much loved Garsington housemaid burst into the room with a gun and threatened to shoot Philip. Ottoline wrote an agonised letter to her husband. He did not open it. The subject was confined to conspiratorial silence. Philip’s political career had to be protected and besides, as Ottoline reminded herself in her diary, ‘It does not do to show one is unhappy. People don’t like one.’ They never discussed the incident with others or between themselves. But the humiliation and betrayal had banished all thought of conjugal intimacy.

  Ottoline’s love affair with the philosopher Bertrand Russell had ended in 1916 when Bertie had fallen in love with a beautiful 20-year-old actress, and Ottoline missed the ‘most divine’ physical intimacy that the relationship had on occasion brought her. For a while she had clung, not always with dignity, to her friendship with Siegfried Sassoon. He had left the sanctuary of William Rivers’s hospital at Craiglockhart, and she fancied herself in love with him. His feelings for her, although affectionate, were not what Ottoline was seeking.

  The day before the Armistice she had greeted Sassoon at the large front door, a bright peacock feather in her hand, her delicate musky scent inescapable. Bach’s music had filled the grey-painted hall, swirling round its pinkish-red curtains and the house smelled deliciously of incense and baskets of spicy oranges, their colour disguised beneath a skein of cloves. An invisible but all-pervasive mist had floated in from outside, clouding for a moment the ground-floor rooms, where the oak panelling had itself been painted ‘a dark peacock-blue green’.

  But Ottoline had found Sassoon in a highly nervous condition, talking incessantly and jumping from one subject to another ‘He cannot concentrate his mind, stammers, and then dashes on all about himself,’ she later wrote in her diary. She found him to be ‘spoiled and his head very swelled’. In what Virginia Woolf called ‘her queer nasal moan’ used when upset, she announced that she never wanted to see Sassoon again, finding him ‘so coarse, so ordinary’ and so changed from the young man she had first met two years before.

  The cost of running Garsington and entertaining all her friends had accelerated. The contributions made by its two full-time lodgers, the painters Mark Gertler and Dorothy Brett, were not enough to cover their upkeep but Ottoline did not press them for more. She never refused self-invited guests even though sometimes she confided to her diary that their presence depressed or discomforted her – ‘I imagine them having dirty underclothes,’ she wrote, and as a result she felt ‘contaminated and damp’.

  And yet she pronounced herself’sick of the eternal money question’ which ‘weighs us down for ever’. ‘We are ruined,’ Philip told her as she went one more time to her jewellery box. This time, the most precious of all the jewels her mother had given her, ‘the French crown jewel necklace’, went under the hammer at Christie’s. Ottoline was unsentimental about the sale. Just as she was unconcerned about eating a bun that had fallen on the floor (however dusty, it was there to give sustenance) so necklaces were there to bring in cash. A quarter of a century earlier, her mother had paid £500 for it, and this time the pearl necklace that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette netted her £1,300, which helped pay off some of the farm’s debts. For now, Ottoline reasoned, she would far rather relinquish a jewel and be certain of remaining at Garsington. The bright vibrancy of its garden seemed to her ‘a miracle of beauty’, especially ‘the long nasturtium border and along by it a double row of zinnias and behind them the asters and behind that the sunflowers and some apricot roses coming up between’.

  Money worries diminished in importance, however, when Otto-line allowed herself to dwell on her physical appearance. She was aware that she had developed ‘an obsession with my own ugliness’ and Brett had given her cold comfort when she cheerily dismissed her friend’s looks as ‘not so bad’. The psoriasis that Ottoline had suffered from for much of her life was becoming ‘horribly depressing’ and there were times when she felt as if’every little pore is a possible spot’. Augustus John had recently finished a portrait of her for which she had dressed in a flamboyant black hat and a black silk dress which although dramatic had the unfortunate effect of flattening her bosom and eliminating much of her femininity. While she thought the top half of her face looked ‘fine and tragic and like me’ she was disappointed by everything from the nose downwards: ‘the mouth is too open’, she thought, ‘and indefinite as if I was washing my teeth and all the foam was on my mouth.’ Ottoline watched Virginia enviously, looking ‘exquisite with her lovely lip and nose’, although disappointed that Virginia ‘has no ordinary human feelings at all. If one draws near to her and kisses her one finds nothing, nothing, no response at all, no drawing near, only delicate aloofness pushing away.’ Perhaps the psoriasis repelled Virginia; that month the skin disease had erupted all over Ottoline’s powdered face.

  She tried to alter her appearance. She cut off her long hair which when short became thicker and curlier. And she went one step further. She dyed it bright red. She experimented with wearing different fabrics as a means of cheering herself up, rejecting anything in wool, preferring silk and feeling more confident in things ‘slippery and light’.

  Her diary was her confessional although she was doubtful that the pages would ever be filled with any deep sense of satisfaction. ‘Inside me is always the tossing search,’ she wrote, ‘to search for the hole in life in which I should naturally fit.’ At the back of the leather journal she kept a running list of the books she was reading: the poetry of Dante, Ezra Pound, some Proust, and a novel by a new writer, Rebecca West, a tale of an army officer’s homecoming called The Return of the Soldier.

  T. S. Eliot and his wife Vivien had stayed one weekend and Otto-line immediately felt an empathy with Vivien whom she found to be ‘so spontaneous and affectionate’ and who, like Ottoline, suffered from migraines and gastric upset. The T at the end of Vivien’s surname as she signed it in the visitors’ book at the end of the weekend resembled a J with its long, tapering and slightly fragile tail. Ottoline had no interest in any romantic association with Tom, but she was frustrated by her own fear of his intellect and was determined to overcome it. After a ‘delightful evening’, Ottoline made ‘a valiant effort’ and invited Eliot upstairs to her book-lined workroom on the first floor of the house. But after they had talked in front of the fireplace, she was not sure how well the conversation had gone. ‘He makes me very shy,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘I feel his mind is so accurate and dissecting and fits in every idea like a Chinese puzzle and my mind is so vague and floating. And I feel he must think me such an ass.’

  The crude boorishness of post-war society troubled her. As a supporter of the Sinn Fein movement she had been to a volatile meeting at the Albert Hall where the sight of an old man being dragged out by his neck and another biting a fellow protestor in the leg convinced her that ‘truly we are near primitive brutes’. That spring, though, there was an evening of joy for Ottoline, who never failed to be elated by the theatrical, when she heard a recital by the singer Raquel Meller and was enchanted by her ‘Spanish, beautiful, liquid melting face and very lovely voice’. For Ottoline she encompassed ‘a most absolute expression of poignant romance and feeling’. She told her friends of the beauty of the voice of the woman who by chance bore almost the same name as her mother’s adored gamekeeper. On the bus back home she had sat next to a veteran of the Crimean War, a conflict that evoked Ottoline’s irrepressible sense of romance. The old soldier told her how once, wounded and lying in a hospital bed, he had received a visit from Florence Nightingale who had bent over and kissed him.

  In preparation for the summer Ottoline had indulged herself by buying a lovely new Chinese velvet coat a
nd by having ‘two pieces of stuff’, one of yellow cloth, the other of grey blue satin, made into dresses at the dressmakers, Victoire. She also ordered a Henry IV-shaped jacket and full skirt in reddish plum satin. She could not really afford it but like Iris, the heroine of Michael Arlen’s Green Hat, her sense of life’s completeness evaded her even in the acquisition of her favourite clothes. ‘I love being really rather gorgeous,’ she wrote, while admitting that ‘it is absurd too and in my other side I am so unhappy at the selfishness of getting so much for myself.’

  Clothes and opera singers and friendships with poets were not enough to banish loneliness or to alter the circumstances of the narrow white-sheeted bed. She longed for either silence or the deep intimacy of requited love. She never seemed to have enough time or even patience for her 14-year-old daughter. Julian had whooping cough that May and the noise irritated and unsettled her. Ottoline went alone for a weekend to Underley, a large comfortable house in Cumbria where the ‘no-noise velvet pile carpets’ brought her a brief interlude of cherished quiet.

  In June 1920 Ottoline pasted a photograph on to the blank page opposite her entwined initials. She wrote two words: ‘summer’ and ‘Garsington’ beneath the picture. The photograph had been taken in the sealing-wax red panelled Red Room. In the picture Mark Gertler, the ever-present Garsington lodger, sits beside her, half invisible inside the huge fireplace, boyish, curly headed. Standing next to her is T. S. Eliot, whose signature in Ottoline’s visitors’ book had become almost as frequent as that of Lytton Strachey. Eliot, large nosed, in tweed jacket and pale trousers, a book tucked under his arm, is looking down at Ottoline in her floor-length satin dress, from beneath which protrude her high-heeled, tightly laced shoes. She beams up at him from her seat in a high armchair in evident admiration.