It was a convoluted task deciding how to refer to such men of title in the field of war. “Francis St Claire-Erskine” would have been too plain, but “Lord Loughborough” gave no Christian name, hence the unwieldy combination. Peers were also entitled to ranks that set them above the ordinary soldier and were often slotted into roles that did not fit their capabilities. Because of this, there would be numerous examples of poor aristocratic decision-making, often with tragic consequences for ordinary soldiers.
Lord Loughborough—“Loughie”, pronounced Luffy, to his friends—was twenty-three years old. Tall, rakishly handsome and affable, so far he had found it difficult finding a place in society beyond his birthright, let alone meeting the demands of the military. He had been in Rhodesia when the war broke out, but joined up within a month of returning to London in the autumn of 1914. On application, he had been assigned to the obscure new armoured car division of the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
Loughie was dressed in his uniform when he appeared in a court in January 1915 accused of writing a bad cheque. According to the charge, he had, in April 1913, signed a cheque for £200 to cover a gambling debt. Not only had the cheque not been honoured, but it had been post-dated to November to cover the fact that Lord Loughborough had not yet come of age. The newspapers covered that case too and even published a small but embarrassing photo of the young man, head down, scurrying from the Courts of Justice in the Strand.
The reason that this matter had taken so long to get to court was that, two months after writing the cheque, he had fled to Rhodesia. At the time his father, Lord Rosslyn, explained publicly that celebrations for his twenty-first birthday would be delayed for a year while his son was “off farming”. When he finally returned he would “probably hold a dinner”, Lord Rosslyn said, without any mention of the pending court case.
It was the timeline of events that allowed the sitting judge of the King’s Bench, Justice Rowlatt, to decide that, because Lord Loughborough had been still a minor when he wrote the cheque, his actions should be excused and the charge dismissed. It was a fortuitous escape and one from which an important lesson should have been learned but, alas, the incident would be the beginning of an ultimately tragic narrative.
For the moment though, Francis St Clair-Erskine would enjoy some good fortune, if going to war could be seen as such. Two months after his court appearance he joined the Armoured Motor Machinegun Squadron, which was stationed on the Greek island of Lemnos; he arrived in March 1915 as preparations gathered pace for the disastrous Gallipoli campaign which lay ahead.
Torn and faded war records do not reveal any details of when his squadron joined the landing, but it was likely to have been several days after the initial assault on April 25. On May 2 he was wounded, most likely by a Turkish sniper firing from trenches high above the beaches. The same day, at least a dozen men in his unit were killed. A wounded shoulder must have seemed a blessing in the circumstances—he was evacuated immediately, and lay in a Cairo hospital bed two days later.
It was here, convalescing, that Francis Erskine’s life changed for the better when an Australian soldier was given the bed next to him. Jack Chisholm and Francis Edward Scudamore St Clair-Erskine—two elder sons of landed gentry from opposite sides of the world—found themselves in the same wartime hospital, and they would soon share another common bond.
Sheila met Loughie one day when she came to visit her brother in hospital. It was love at first sight, according to a later report in the Singleton Argus, which described Loughie as a “youthful warrior”. He was instantly smitten by Sheila’s dark beauty and frontier-like attitude and quickly made a play for her attention. She was at first distracted—just another admirer—but fell for his cultured English charm when he sat up with her all night nursing a sick stray dog she had adopted and called Treacle.
She recorded the romance in her memoir: “Loughie came to tea the next day. He was tall and slim, with thick brown hair and hazel eyes. He was witty and most attractive. I soon began enjoying his company. We read the Brownings. He pursued me relentlessly and I was flattered by his attention. He told me that he had fallen in love with me at first sight. He constantly said: ‘I love you and you are going to marry me, you will like England and all my friends will adore you.’
“He was persistent. He said: ‘I know I am wild, but with your love I will be different. I could do great things.’ I believed him and I was fascinated by him. We seemed so happy together. I thought this must be love.”
Margaret counselled her daughter against marriage—she was too young and her beau, as witty and charming as he was, had a reputation for being too wild. Her father, Chissie, would not approve.
But amid the Armageddon the warnings fell on deaf ears, as she later remembered thinking: “Too young, too young, wait six months, wait a year, wait while he goes back and probably gets killed. He loves me so much and I love him. He is sweet to me and fond of animals; can’t we be engaged? I suppose Loughie was spoiled and perhaps not very reliable but he had a great attraction and such a wonderful sense of humour, and he always made me laugh.”
Loughie returned to the Gallipoli peninsula, his shoulder mended, but remained only a few weeks before being injured again, this time “slight and entirely his own fault”, according to his colonel who described him as “brave, crazy and foolhardy”. He returned to Cairo where he soon proposed.
Their engagement was announced on July 20 in the Daily Mirror, which praised the young peer. The rush to the altar received the blessing of Loughborough’s father, the Earl of Rosslyn, of whom the paper commented: “The Earl himself is, of course, one of our most versatile peers. He has been a good soldier, a fair actor, a talented editor and a very brisk war correspondent. He has made at least one speech in the House of Lords. Verily, a peer of many interests!”
On December 27, 1915, at St Mary’s Church in Cairo, Lord Loughborough married Sheila Chisholm, a union described by the News of the World as one of the most interesting weddings of the war because of the match between an Australian commoner and a British peer, adding: “Like most Australian women she is a superb horsewoman and excels as a vocalist.”
Another newspaper columnist noted: “It is refreshing to hear that an Australian girl, after a pretty little war romance, has married into the peerage. With some of Britain’s lordlings it has been a not too infrequent habit either to marry a charmer off the music halls or else wed an American heiress. Now it appears they are marrying on the keep-it-in-the-Empire principle—at least Lord Loughborough has set a new and patriotic fashion in that direction.”
3
“HELLO, CALL ME HARRY”
Sheila watched the man from the deck of the ship Arabia as it docked at Southampton. Loughie had pointed out his father’s car, a large black Rolls Royce with gold handles embossed with the letter R above coronets—the Household of Rosslyn. Then the earl had stepped out, instinctively ducking his head as tall men do before straightening and taking the umbrella from the man who had opened his door.
It was April 1916, dull grey skies and raining and a year since the disastrous landing at Gallipoli which had brought her and Loughie together. The couple had returned to England because his armoured car regiment was being disbanded and Loughie had been granted leave to transfer his commission from the navy to the army where he would join the King’s Royal Rifle Corps.
There was one unexpected shock as the couple was preparing to leave Egypt. News came that Lionel, who had still hoped that Sheila would one day marry him, had been killed in action: “I was absolutely miserable, my first deep sorrow. I loved him but was not in love with him. I tried to make him understand, but he didn’t want to understand. Later I received a snapshot of myself which was found in his pocket. I have thought of him all through these years.”
Lord Rosslyn was on the dock to greet them as they stepped from the gangplank. He was not only tall but handsome, and a man well aware of his own charms: “Hello, call me Harry,” he smiled, a suggestion tha
t seemed quite natural to Sheila, given that she called her own parents Chissie and Ag.
Harry Rosslyn went on: “Well, m’dear, quite a beauty. Loughie, I admire your choice. Now let me see the famous engagement ring, of course I had to pay for it. My son has no idea of money, as you will no doubt realise only too soon, if you have not already done so. Has he told you how often I have paid for his debts?”
The last bit took her by surprise, not because of what he said but because a father would deliberately embarrass his own son in front of his new wife. Sheila smiled and said nothing as she walked to the car: “I was rather shy, unsophisticated. I thought to myself: ‘Head high, walk very tall’.”
Sheila was already aware that her new husband had a gambling problem. The morning after their wedding, spent in a splendid villa overlooking the Nile, he had insisted on attending a race meeting in Cairo where he promptly lost a month’s pay as well as the cheques given by guests as wedding presents.
Loughie apologised, trying to placate her with promises of a baby son “with your looks and my charm”, but the disturbing pattern would continue over the next few months, his periods of leave dominated by nights of drink and gambling. She played down the significance of his problem, dismissing his faults as the “crazy exuberance of youth”.
What was important was that he made her laugh, like the night he dressed her in the borrowed uniform of a young officer and took her to visit the “low night haunts” he frequented around Cairo. Her concerns were probably also allayed by his station in life. Money didn’t seem to be an issue, particularly when she met his cousin Geordie Sutherland, a man so rich that he had lent the admiralty his 200-foot private yacht, Sans Peur, to be used as a patrol vessel.
Even so, Loughie’s gambling bothered her and she made him promise that he would stop. It lasted until they were aboard the ship taking them back to England where he spent the nights playing poker in darkened cabins to avoid being spotted by German submarines. Their boat would be torpedoed a week later. Sheila found the trip exciting rather than frightening, but worried about her new husband: “He seemed to have quite forgotten his promises. I didn’t remind him of them as I was determined not to be a nagging wife.” It was a long drive to Calcot Park, the Rosslyn home near Reading where the earl’s third wife waited with their two young children. She was a former actress named Vera Bayley but was known as Tommy, and was more than eighteen years younger than her husband and just five years older than her stepson.
Sheila’s first weekend in England was strange; she was driven in a convoy of cars and servants to a country estate of Lord and Lady Tichborne where the men played golf and the women sat home knitting for the troops.
At dinner she was seated next to Lord Birkenhead, who turned to her and asked how many children she had.
“None,” Sheila replied, to which Lord Birkenhead raised his voice:
“You should be ashamed of yourself; a young, strong, healthy, beautiful woman like you. How long have you been married?”
“Four months.”
“Oh . . . er . . . I’m sorry. Well, when you do have a child take my tip and have a twilight sleep.”
Sheila sat dumbfounded, unable to conjure a response to the inappropriate lord and glad when he “turned to the more interesting woman on his left”.
The men played poker after dinner and, since no one offered to teach her how to play, Sheila went to bed with Loughie’s promise of not gambling “too high” ringing in her ears. She sat by the dying fire in her bedroom, alone and frightened in a strange, cold house with strange people who knew each other and told jokes she couldn’t understand. Her husband appeared at 5 a.m., drunk and having lost a large sum of money to his father, which the earl and the rest of the house found amusing the next day.
There are two ways of viewing the life and times of Loughie’s father, James Francis Harry St Clair-Erskine. The first would be to marvel at his adventures and nerveless deeds at the racecourses of England and the card and roulette tables of Monte Carlo where he won, and lost, money in sums few could imagine, let alone risk. The same attitude could be taken to his war stories, first as a soldier and then as a war correspondent during the Boer War, and his subsequent careers as a professional stage actor in London and New York (the first English peer to claim this honour), a newspaper owner and finally an author of some controversy. It seemed there were no bounds to his talents and derring-do.
But a more realistic assessment of the activities of the 5th Earl of the Scottish House of Rosslyn would provide a less charitable perspective. By his own admission Rosslyn, as he referred to himself, was a flawed man who laid waste to his family’s fortune and estate, cheated on two of his three wives and mostly rebuked or ignored his five children. The earl was well aware of his failings when he wrote his 1928 memoir, titled My Gamble with Life. It began: “I was heir to an earldom, so respected in the Kingdom of Fife and throughout Great Britain, that to live up to my father’s reputation—not to speak of my grandfather’s, who died before I was born—was a matter of no great ease. I can remember my father boxing my ears and telling me that if I was not a bigger man than himself I should disgrace the name.” And yet that’s exactly what he did.
Just three months after his own father’s death, the 21-year-old 5th Earl attended the Newmarket thoroughbred sales “in my dead father’s fur coat and with a long cigarette holder” and spent £6000 on one horse and several thousand more on others. The rot had set in early and within six years he had gambled away the bulk of his £50,000 inheritance, the equivalent of A$10 million today, coming to a head in 1893 when he placed £15,000 on Buccaneer, which had triumphed the year before in the Gold Cup at Ascot and was his favourite among the racehorses he owned. The horse finished fourth and the earl faced financial ruin.
In a move of desperation he sold the stable of racehorses, including Buccaneer. In the light of day it must have seemed calamitous. The earl was also forced to sell the family’s home, the cold and forbidding Dysart House at Fife in Scotland, to a linoleum manufacturer, along with his father’s pride and joy, a steam-driven yacht “of great splendour”. The family’s silverware followed soon afterwards in a three-day sale at Edinburgh.
And there was more to come as Rosslyn continued to gamble. Ruin was inevitable and four years later, having lost an estimated £250,000 on horses and cards, the earl faced the ignominy of being declared bankrupt. He was banned from taking his seat in the House of Lords; having inherited an estate of more than 3500 acres, plus coalmines, he placed what little was left in the hands of a trust while he turned his hand to acting and journalism to earn a living.
There might be room for some level of sympathy for Rosslyn’s plight, if only because his story was all too common among his titled peers, at a time when money was easy to obtain and borrowed off the back of family estates with no thought for the longer-term consequences. Most of the members of the gentlemen’s clubs of London—places like White’s and the Jockey Club—lived off borrowed money.
Among the earl’s closest friends was Queen Victoria’s oldest son and the future King of England, Edward VII, who, as Prince of Wales, proposed the toast at Rosslyn’s first wedding in 1890 to Violet de Grey Vyner, daughter of an English aristocrat. Violet was financially “plentiful” and for a time helped prop up her husband’s wastefulness. So close were Rosslyn and the prince that two years later Edward became godfather to Rosslyn’s first son, Francis Edward Scudamore St Clair-Erskine—Sheila Chisholm’s new husband, Lord Loughborough.
But the marriage of Loughie’s parents would only last a few years, doomed by Rosslyn’s erratic behaviour and long absences from home. The pair had been estranged even before he filed for bankruptcy, from the time when he was caught buying a £2000 turquoise necklace for an unnamed “beauty of her day”. The earl was confronted by his father-in-law and admitted to the purchase, but he insisted there was nothing untoward about the gift. Violet and her father begged to differ and, after a short, failed reconciliation, she move
d into a property in York owned by her father. Repeated pleas by Rosslyn for her to return to him were rebuffed. Their children, Rosabelle and Francis, then aged five and four respectively, went with their mother and rarely saw their father again during childhood.
Rosslyn resigned his commission in the Fife Light Horse and took to the stage, forming a company of players—Lord Rosslyn’s Theatrical Performances—which toured the country for two years. When the South African wars broke out in 1899, he tried to rejoin but was rebuffed. Instead, he took a job as a war correspondent for the Daily Mail, witnessing the Battle of Ladysmith against the Boers and being taken prisoner twice.
On his return from South Africa, Rosslyn started his own newspaper and followed his dream of becoming a stage actor. In 1902, he headed for the New York stage, where he appeared in a series of small roles.
He also returned to the gambling tables of Monte Carlo, somehow convincing others to contribute £1200 into a syndicate through which he would run a complicated roulette scheme. The inevitable happened and that scheme eventually folded, but Rosslyn would return year after year with predictable results.
In 1905 he met and married an American actress, Georgina “Anna” Robinson—a marriage that officially lasted two years, but had quickly soured. He later accused her of being “a drug fiend and addicted to drink” and she, in turn, accused the earl of being a liar and a philandering wastrel.
The couple lived in London for the first year of their marriage and then used Anna’s money to lease a castle in Scotland, so Rosslyn could entertain his friends in more style. But it had clearly been a hasty decision on both parts and they soon split up. In 1906 they somehow got back together and hired a yacht for a reconciliation cruise. But when he brought another woman aboard named Muriel Saunders, Anna erupted in anger and left the boat, never to see him again.
Muriel believed Rosslyn would marry her after his divorce from Anna Robinson. But he fled to South America for a year before venturing back to London where, by chance, he met another actress, Vera Bayley, whom he swept off her feet and married. He was thirty-nine years old and Vera, daughter of a professional soldier, had just turned just twenty-one, being only four years older than his daughter. The following year they had a son, James Alexander, followed by a daughter, Mary, in 1912 and a third child, David, in 1917, six months after his older son, Loughie, had become a father and he a grandfather.
Sheila Page 4