Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  PURSUIT

  The Memoirs of

  John Calder

  ALMA BOOKS LTD

  3 Castle Yard

  Richmond

  Surrey TW10 6TF

  United Kingdom

  www.almabooks.com

  First published by Calder Publications Ltd 2001

  This revised edition first published by Alma Books Ltd in 2016

  © John Calder, 2001, 2016

  Afterword © Alessandro Gallenzi, 2016

  John Calder asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Printed and bound by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

  ISBN: 978-1-84688-365-1

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-84688-367-5

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Follow a shadow, it still flies you.

  Seem to fly it, it will pursue.

  Ben Jonson

  Slow in pursuit, but matched in mouth like bells.

  Shakespeare

  Faint, yet pursuing…

  Judges 8:4

  …aspires

  Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue

  Vain war with heaven…

  Milton

  Dedication

  This autobiography is dedicated to three people described in it, three people who in different ways I know I have let down and to whom I feel a deep guilt that no apology can mitigate. They are first of all my great-uncle Jim (Sir James Calder), who did so much for me and was so generous, both to my father and myself. I lost what he left me, but I remain grateful. Secondly I still feel responsible for the unhappy death of Lisel Field, which I could have prevented. Thirdly I apologize to Reginald Attewell, whose loyalty and long service deserved better recognition than was possible at a time when I was myself in deep trouble.

  Preface

  My pursuits have always varied here and there:

  to do well, and please and show success at times.

  At others: what to do and to go where

  impulse and need demanded. Now what primes

  these memories of the many lives I’ve led

  is to record what happened, who was what,

  put right the lies that other books have fed

  the reading public, and above all to not

  add to those lies. My motivation’s been

  to add a little to the world, to stop the rot,

  the greed and corruption that makes Man mean,

  where good is bad and all ideals insane

  to those who cannot think ahead and choose

  destruction’s path. I see ahead much pain:

  both good and bad have everything to lose.

  But to the end for a better world I’ll sue.

  The chances are not good, but there’s no choice;

  once young, now old, I only can pursue

  what I believe in with my weakening voice.

  Pursuit

  Chapter 1

  Beginnings

  I inherited genes that, once in my body, rebelled against those of my forebears and somehow became twisted out of all recognition of their sources. Both sides of my family, going two generations back, contained patriarchs and staunch conservatives, unthinking in their political views (which were those that stood to their greatest advantage) and in their religious ones (which consisted of a Roman Catholicism of total orthodoxy). My two grandfathers were members of an establishment that they wanted to penetrate ever deeper; both had absolute faith in the power of money and property and believed in a God who was a patriarch, like them, and who would reward them in the next world as well or better than in this. They were not unkind to those who served them, provided of course that they knew their place and were properly respectful of their betters. From an early age my instincts were very different, but this did not become obvious until my maturity, to which they undoubtedly gave another, less flattering, name.

  My great-grandfather, James Calder, came from Buchan in the North East of Scotland, a member of a crofting family, of which I have never had the time to find out more. As a young man he had moved to Alloa in central Scotland, married a Mackenzie, the daughter of a local brewer. The name, Mackenzie, which is also my middle name, always had a mystical quality in family conversation, a name to be proud of. In due course he took over the brewery and changed its name to Calder’s. He also acquired about twenty-thousand acres of land covering the two sides and the middle of the Ochil Hills between Perth and Kinross, bridging a wild and beautiful area of Perthshire and Kinross-shire, to which I constantly return in my dreams. He built, or more likely extended, a large house near Forgandenny called Ardargie, which had formal gardens as well as a home farm and a large walled vegetable garden. It included a stretch of river, a tributary of the May, which boasted a waterfall and a bridge called the Hummel Bummel, so rickety that one crossed it at one’s peril. To prove my hardiness as a child I often bathed in the icy pool below the waterfall. In addition, Ardargie had many farms, and a large grouse moor over the higher ground and mountains, from the top of which one could see the Pentlands, south of Edinburgh, and far into the Highlands to the north. It also had a splendid view of Loch Leven with its castle on an island, where Mary Queen of Scots had spent miserable years in captivity. Behind the loch rise the majestic Lomond Hills, a notable landmark to the east. Westward the mountains stretched beyond the northern reaches of Stirling, and were known as the Highland Line.

  James Calder’s son, my grandfather, was John Joseph Calder. In each generation down to my own there have been at least two Calder boys, the first named after his grandfather and the second after his father. My father was therefore James, being the eldest, and his younger brother was John, although called Ian, its Gaelic form, and the reverse applied to myself and my younger brother. J.J., as he was often called, was a patriarch like his father, and he produced two sons and six daughters, which strangely enough constituted exactly the same make-up as the family on my mother’s side, except that in the latter’s case the two boys died as teenagers, while the six girls survived.

  John Joseph inherited his father’s house Ardargie and the northern part of the estate, while his younger brother James took the southern part and a second house, Ledlanet, which had been converted into a shooting lodge and extended by his father. Ledlanet will play a large part in this narrative. It was a pleasant stone-built house in the Scottish baronial style, with the usual public rooms, three of them, aside from the dining room and a small outer and large inner hall, and with nine bedrooms and three servants’ rooms behind a green baize door. It contrasted in every way with Ardargie, which was a large rambling house, set low down between the higher ground north and south, near a river and overlooking a small trout loch. The Ledlanet Loch was much larger, but a good ten-minute walk away. Ledlanet was set high on a hill with a splendid view from the first floor over the Kinross valley and Loch Leven. Tall trees blocked the view on the ground floor. The best farmland was my grandfather’s, the best grouse moor and wild mountain scenery my great-uncle’s. The two brothers divided the family business interests between them: my grandfather took over the Alloa brewery, his younger brother a whisky distil
lery at Stronachie that happened to be on his own land and beside the winding road leading through the hills. In addition, he took up a timber business, mainly dealing in home-grown softwoods and hardwood. This latter had grown of necessity because there was much forest on the Calder estates, not just in the Scottish central belt, but further up north, where more land had been bought in Ross-shire. It was my great-uncle who developed the timber business into an international concern, importing from Canada, the Baltic states and Russia, and eventually buying up timber yards at many British ports. He became Timber Controller in both the First and Second World Wars and received as recompense a knighthood in 1921, further to an earlier CBE. He allowed his distillery to be merged into the Distillers Company, the creation of Harry Ross, a magnate who persuaded many Scottish distilling families to pool their interests into a giant corporation powerful enough to establish Scotch whisky as an international drink.

  Sir James became Chairman of the management committee of Distillers Company, at the time his most important business interest, and between the wars travelled for the purpose of whisky promotion. The far-Eastern travels were commemorated in Chinese and Japanese artefacts that adorned Ledlanet. Among the many photographs later discovered in the house were those of Joseph Kennedy, a business associate, and his sons, including John Kennedy, later to become US President. The whole Kennedy family were frequent visitors. Joe Kennedy was American Ambassador to Britain in the Thirties, and his boys learnt to shoot grouse on the moors at Ledlanet. The connection of course was whisky, which Joe Kennedy imported into the U.S. during Prohibition.

  My other grandfather was Canadian, a self-made man called Marcellin Wilson. Although he was a French Canadian, the Wilson name came from an ancestor, a soldier in Wellington’s Peninsular army who, when wounded, had been left behind in Portugal and eventually emigrated from there to Canada. My grandfather grew up on Île Bézard on the St Lawrence river near Montreal. He was a farm boy, who by dint of will power acquired land and made successful speculations out of which he was able to found a bank, the Banque Canadienne Nationale. As a small boy I would be given $20 notes with his portrait on them. Foolishly I never kept one. He became a successful Canadian industrialist with a finger in many pies and undoubtedly made a fortune out of prohibition in the United States during its thirteen years’ duration, from 1920 to 1933. He was heavily involved in Canadian distilling and also imported whisky and gin from Scotland. It was this connection that brought my parents together in the Twenties. My grandfather was also a politician who became a senator and treasurer of the Liberal Party, which in those days was the ruling party of Canada. He was a close associate of Mackenzie King, Canadian prime minister for virtually the entire period from 1921 to 1948.

  A little should be said of my two grandmothers. The Scottish one was really English, born in Liverpool and from a Lancashire merchant family called Broadbent. Strict and stern, it was often said of her that she would have preferred to have been a nun. As a boy I spent many holidays, especially the long summer ones, at Ardargie, and although I was naturally quiet and obedient, a bookworm in fact, I was always aware of her disapproval of something. I realize now that my mother and her very different background were held against me. Consequently, I always went in trepidation of her. My grandfather had a library of leather-bound nineteenth-century classics, and I read my way through much of it. Occasionally she would retrieve a book from me, dismissing it as unsuitable, and return it to the shelf, where I could always easily find it again once alone.

  The other grandmother was a housewife from an old French-Canadian family, the Geffrions, who had certainly brought a dowry with her. She overprotected her grandchildren when they came into her orbit as she had overprotected her children. Occasionally, when I was a child, living with my mother in Montreal, in a house just a few doors away, she would see me passing and a message would be sent out to the effect that I was not wearing a hat or overshoes (in winter) or suitable clothing. In her house my hands were constantly inspected, which inevitably led to a trip to the bathroom to wash them, followed by a painful trimming of fingernails. I doubt very much if she ever had a non-domestic thought; her phobias were dirt and untidiness. At the end of her life she went into a coma for several years and was artificially fed, only occasionally emerging to murmur the name of one of her daughters.

  My father was a victim of his own early celebrity. Brought up at Ardargie, he went to a Catholic public school1 at Fort Augustus near Inverness, where he was educated by Benedictine monks. I never heard him comment much on it and I have no idea whether he was happy there. In those days it was not an issue: children did what their parents intended for them, especially if they came from a class which was aware of its superior position and was upwardly mobile. He joined the army in 1914, and was, so I was brought up to believe, under age when he did so. As his birth certificate tells me that he was born in 1895, I do not see how this is possible, sixteen being the military age then. He started in the Scottish Horse as a Second Lieutenant. I was told that he was a captain at sixteen, but this too does not accord with the dates. However, his military career was much honoured in the family: he was promoted to captain, mentioned in despatches and awarded the Military Cross. He went through the trenches, was badly gassed, took Hill 60, which was his major moment of glory, and ended up in the Lovat Scouts and as an observer on a reconnaissance plane. My reference books tell me that Hill 60, a military observation point in Belgium, was taken on 17th April 1915 by two regiments, one of them Scottish, but lost again in May. Family pride, and no doubt commercial considerations, led to my grandfather acquiring “the Hill” after the war and building a hostelry there. My father related this to me with disgust when I was about seven.

  After the war my father showed little inclination to go to university – New College, Oxford, had at one point been on the cards – nor did he want to work for his tyrannical father in the brewery, although I believe he did so for a short time. He eventually started a pig farm, but that enterprise ended in disaster: his entire stock was wiped out by swine fever before any of the piglets were old enough to go to market. There may have been other unsuccessful business ventures. No one ever went to the trouble to tell me about my father’s early days, and those who could have are all now gone. He had a romance with an Irish girl, which somehow did not please his family, presumably because she was not of their class, and they disentangled him from that love affair. He then went to Canada with introductions from his uncle to his whisky contacts in Montreal. One of these was to Senator Marcellin Wilson, and that is how he met my mother, the youngest of the six Wilson girls. Her eldest sister, Juliette, was already married to another Scot, Colonel Rupert Dawson, son of the whisky distiller Peter Dawson, whose estate was not far from the Calders’, at Braco in Perthshire. But I do not believe there was any direct contact there before my father went to Canada.

  My mother was the youngest of the family. She had once been taken to a day school at a Montreal Convent and cried until brought home, and in the end was educated privately – and poorly – in her parents’ house. She later learnt English, but she must have had some lessons as a child. The Canadian-French spoken in the family must have been supplemented by Parisian French, as her father was a cosmopolitan by nature who often visited France, and whose philanthropic pursuits included setting up a residence for Canadian students in Paris in the Cité Universitaire district. He would have insisted that the family could speak proper French as well as the local patois. He was to become a Commandeur of the Légion d’Honneur as a result of his philanthropy in France.

  My mother’s character was a strange one, and I shall return to it later. The spoilt baby of the family, a nouvelle riche and indulgent one, whose cultural aspirations tended to be showy and superficial, she was accustomed all her life to having anything she wanted, rather like Galsworthy’s Fleur Forsyth. Her elder sisters all married, three of them to Canadians of similar backgrounds, one to Rupert Dawson and one, the fourth,
to an Englishman, Henry Winkworth. My father, who was a good-looking man with his military bearing, fashionable moustache and good manners, having no doubt a little French from wartime service in France, must have appealed to her strongly.

  They were married in Montreal, and my Scottish grandparents went over for the wedding. My grandmother told me many years later of her memories of that day, especially of their disgust at the “waste” at the wedding lunch. This was large and long, with many courses, each accompanied by a different wine. Most of the guests drank a little from each glass and left it when the next arrived, so that at the end of the feast the table was covered with half-full wine glasses. The sumptuousness of my Canadian grandfather’s ostentatious hospitality was very upsetting to the frugal sensibilities of his Scottish guests.

  At some time in the Twenties my father went with his new wife to start a business at Hudson’s Bay, The Calder Trading Company, which apparently did quite well, the only really successful business venture of his entire life. I doubt if my mother ever spent much time there, but in any case she could not stand the climate of a lonely and bleak outpost of northern Canada, and she made him sell it. She had earlier visited Ardargie with my father, her only visit to Scotland until the Second World War broke out, and she hated every minute of it. The discomforts of a Scottish country house without central heating, the indifference of its inhabitants to the temperature and the climate, and the iron discipline and simple food, did not appeal to her. Worse was my grandmother’s disdain of a little colonial girl who could not speak English properly and expected to be pampered and the centre of attention all the time. From then on it was either London, where she felt at home among the flappers, or frequent visits by steamer, first-class, to Canada, always accompanied by a lady’s maid and a large number of wardrobe trunks. Her father had made arrangements for her to have a considerable income and a house in Montreal only a few doors away from his own.