by Jean Findlay
This educational rigour, coupled with Susan Pringle’s belief that ‘We were made for better things than to be wealthy’13, ensured that her sons went out into the world as the hardworking builders of Empire. The eldest son, Colin Campbell Scott Moncrieff, became an engineer in India, then Director of Irrigation for Egypt, where he was responsible for the Nile Barrages. He was knighted in 1887, returning home as Under-Secretary of State for Scotland. The third child was Charles’s grandfather, Robert, who became an East India Company merchant in Calcutta, from 1850 to 1874, cultivating indigo for use as a dye. He was an unusual boss: his papers record a man who refused to beat the natives, let no one work on Sundays, insisted on morning and evening prayers, and would not take bribes.14 This was rare in the Company, but sadly his enlightened approach didn’t make profits. In Calcutta he met and fell in love with a doctor’s daughter, the Gaelic-speaking Katherine Mackinnon from Skye. They married happily and had nine children, all of whom lived to adulthood, probably because they were sent home from India aged five to live with Robert’s brother David in George Square, Edinburgh.
After 1874, grandfather Robert of Calcutta had a second career. On his return from India he set himself the task of hastening the Zionist cause. At the end of the nineteenth century, in anticipation of the millennium, there was an organised movement of Christians who believed that if the Jews were returned to the land of Israel, it would bring on the Second Coming. Robert was not officially part of this group, but he felt the political pressure, from all over Europe, to establish a Jewish State. He was convinced enough of its necessity to spend twenty years from 1880 till 1900 investigating the Jewish pogroms in Odessa, Constantinople, Romania and Russia, interviewing survivors at first hand. In 1900 he published The Branches and the Branch which catalogued every pogrom since AD 33 and set out his own long theological and biblical justification for the Jews having Israel as their homeland. Robert’s brother-in-law, John Robertson, Moderator of the Church of Scotland from 1909 till 1910, shared and fed his Zionist zeal; he was minister at Whittinghame, a village in East Lothian, and seat of the Balfour family. He had a direct influence on the young Arthur Balfour, Prime Minister from 1902 till 1905 and architect of the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which supported the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine.
Charles’s mother had always been critical of her father’s ‘obsession’ with the Jews, partly because he abandoned his family to follow it, and as the eldest of nine children she, Jessie Margaret, had early responsibility. As a child, she had a series of governesses who made her read the classics and write daily to her parents in India: she became the first professional writer among the Scott Moncrieffs; and in time made enough money from her writing to put her younger sister Kate through London University. Known as Meg, she was tall and strikingly beautiful with a broad forehead, wide-set eyes and a sensitive, motile mouth, ready with a quip or a laugh. On 9 April 1878, aged twenty, she married her cousin, ten years her senior, William George Scott Moncrieff, known as George, a lawyer with a literary bent. Charles, CKSM, would be the couple’s third son, born eleven years after the marriage.
* * *
George was at Edinburgh University in the same year group as Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1870 he contributed to the university magazine edited by Stevenson15 and also appeared with him in a production of Twelfth Night. George later wrote three serial novels for the Ladies Own journal. As his father was a cousin of the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, George was a true inheritor of the Scottish Enlightenment, working at a time when lively minds mixed in a country small enough for innovators in the arts and science to know one another.
By the mid-nineteenth century, few of the Scott Moncrieffs were landed gentry, most had migrated to the professional classes and become lawyers, doctors, clergy and explorers. George’s great uncle, John Irving, was killed on the Franklin Expedition to the Arctic and his frozen remains were brought back years later to Edinburgh for burial on 8 January 1881.16 On the night that George went to the funeral in Edinburgh, Meg gave birth to their second son and named him John Irving Scott Moncrieff after the explorer. He was a brother for Colin born in 1879. By then the family were living in Banff Castle on Scotland’s north-east coast. George was Sheriff Substitute of Banff: a local judge, he presided over civil and criminal cases. The Sheriff courts in Scotland were above the District Courts and below the Supreme Court and dealt with most of the court work, both civil and criminal. There was always more work than one Sheriff could handle, so the role of Sheriff Substitute was common.
Meg built up her weekly contributions to three Sunday newspapers as well as writing short stories for Blackwood’s Magazine17. She corresponded with R. L. Stevenson and with the novelist Margaret Oliphant. Having read some of her work in Blackwood’s, Oliphant advised her not to write so much in Scots, or, if she must, to tone it down to a very easy level. However, Meg did not take her advice and continued writing in Scots, sacrificing the larger English audience. This was the dialect that she heard around her and her stories were inspired by George’s work in the law courts, among life’s real dramas. Literary influence came from both of Charles’s parents.
Meg’s diaries, written daily for fifty years from 1882 to 1936, chronicle in detail the experience of a liberal Scottish Victorian household. Reading the visitors’ book of Banff Castle, you get the impression life was a succession of plays, parties, fishing and painting expeditions, trips to hear religious preachers and public debates. Most visitors record a trip to the assizes court to hear George’s judgments. Scottish high society was a small pool, in which the Scott Moncrieffs were middle-sized fish.
When the Prince of Wales visited Banff in 1883, Meg and George were invited to a ball given for him on 16 November by their neighbours at Duff House. Meg wandered into the drawing room to rest after dancing and the Prince entered. The company stood and chatted with him both in English and French,
very much in the big voice of Henry V – to whom I always mentally compare him – only he didn’t say such clever things. Our loyalty was soon satisfied with standing – but the Prince blocked up the doorway so there was nothing for it but to stand. Count Herbert was behind him – a tall young man with dark hair and moustache and fierce dark eyes – ‘A horrid, wild-looking fellow’, George called him, ‘who would think nothing of calling you out.’18
Count Herbert Bismarck, son of Otto, was in 1883 Minister of Foreign Affairs for the First German Empire, which would ‘call out’ the entire British nation three decades later for the First World War.
Built in the eighteenth century, Banff Castle was one of those old Scottish edifices that are often colder inside than out, like a primitive fridge. Meg, though full of enthusiasm for every aspect of life, developed a bad cough, which wouldn’t go away. In 1885 a bad cough in a thin and sensitive lady was mortally suspicious: her friend and neighbour Posie Gordon Duff had TB and would soon die of it. The doctor prescribed Meg opiates to rest her nervous body and amyl nitrate to help dilate her lungs. She asked her sister Mary to come and read to her Tennyson’s ‘Lotus Eaters’, ‘which,’ she wrote, ‘can only be perfectly enjoyed in the drowsiness which follows an opiate!’19
The family doctor advised six months in Egypt with Meg’s Uncle Colin, who was working there as Director of Irrigation. Leaving the boys was painful, but they had a good nanny and household staff and George would be often at home. Meg and her sister Mary sailed for Egypt on 5 November 1885. On 13 November they reached Malta, ‘I had a bad night and was faint however a few drops of amyl nitrate revived me.’20 Amyl nitrate has a hallucinogenic effect like LSD. Combined with her prescribed opiates, her tall thin figure, beauty and artistic taste in clothes she looked like a Victorian version of the quintessential glamorous addict.
They reached Cairo on 20 November to stay with Uncle Colin, whose exotic household comprised an English butler, a German female cook, a Nubian male housemaid, and an Arab groom. It was a far cry from Banff – ‘oh so hot, a south wind bringing air from
the desert’.21 While there she wrote six extended articles on life in Cairo for the Scotsman in Edinburgh, which were signed ‘From our Correspondent in Cairo’. From their socio-political content the readers would never guess they came from a pale, thin, coughing lady with a silk parasol. The articles took eight days to reach Edinburgh and she received the printed copy another eight days later.
In Cairo Meg’s cultural life was intense and the social life glittered in the heat. Lord Rosebery, who was married to the heiress Hannah de Rothschild and later became Prime Minister, gave the finest parties, and was a friend and colleague of her uncle. To Meg, Colin was a crinkly-eyed, bewhiskered relative; to society he was a man held in high regard as a key player22 in the abolition of the corvée, the unpaid labour system. He had buried two wives, one in India and the second in Egypt, and was at a low ebb personally. It was a comfort for him to have his two favourite nieces Mary and Meg to stay for six months. He sent for the best doctor available who said she had ‘no organic illness’,23 no TB, only weakness, and told Meg to fatten up. But she gained no weight in Egypt and the mental and imaginative effort employed in her writing always took its toll on her energy, as it would years later with her youngest son, Charles.
George came out to join her in March 1888 and they spent a month visiting pyramids in the sunset and seeing the citadel before they sailed back, visiting Europe on the way. Banff is still cold in April and soon Meg’s coughing started again. George resolved to search for work further south and was appointed Sheriff Substitute of Falkirk in Stirlingshire.
When they moved for his new job, they found a less daunting home, Weedingshall House between Polmont and Falkirk. Through two slim, pencil-shaped gateposts ran a drive flanked by beech trees, with a valley sloping to the left and open parkland to the right. The house itself was unostentatious: of sandstone, three storeys high with around twenty chimneys and a variety of windows, large, small, curved, bay and square with views to the distant Perthshire hills. It had an unplanned look but was possibly at least partly designed by Robert Adam in 1791.24 The stable block and laundry lay just beyond the house, hidden from the approach. Today Weedingshall House is a children’s home, still untouched as a building within its original grounds and garden, but hidden in a maze of block and tile housing which stretches from Polmont to Falkirk as part of Edinburgh’s dormitory suburbia. In 1889, before the advent of cars, it stood alone in rolling farmland.
Behind the house was a walled garden with fruit trees. Meg brought poppy seeds and rose cuttings, which could only grow under glass at Banff, but flourished here outside in the sheltered garden. On 25 September 1889, in a bedroom overlooking this well-nurtured and colourful sanctuary, Charles Kenneth, was born. His father took over his mother’s diary at this point and recorded that he arrived quickly at half past eleven and weighed nine pounds, and that Nurse Paton arrived at half past one and ‘took possession of us’.25 Meg’s handwriting resumed two days later to note that her latest short story had been accepted by the Scotsman Weekly. Throughout her pregnancy she had been turning out three columns a month and many short stories. She did of course have a staff of eight, and never cooked or cleaned. Three weeks after giving birth she noted that she took in the waist of her dress from thirty-five inches to twenty-nine.
Colin and Johnnie, aged twelve and ten, had been sent to boarding school in Edinburgh for the first time that September. Colin sent sad letters home. As soon as the new baby was born, his brothers came home for a week and spent time watching him being fed and bathed by his nurse. Johnnie said, ‘He looks like a tea-roll with sugar on him.’26 The boys were sent back to school but the following Saturday Colin turned up by himself, having got to Waverley Station, boarded the train alone without a ticket and walked from Polmont. He was taken back to school by George, both parents being convinced that boarding was the surest way to foster independence and self-discipline and gain the best in education. A week later, early on a cold October morning Colin was found huddled in the porch of Weedingshall House. He had arrived at 6 a.m. but had been too afraid of his parents’ anger to pull the bell until breakfast time. This time Meg kept him home for a week, allowing him on to the bed with her and the baby, all the while recording in her diary frantic letters and conversations between her and George and the headmistress of his school. Meg, still weak from the birth, copied into her diary, ‘Character is formed by compression; emotions and experience that evaporate in expression, contribute little. A pain, a want, a disappointment borne silently strengthens us perceptibly.’27 At the end of a week at home Colin was sent back again, after much discussion of sacrificing present pleasure for his future, and doing his duty towards his parents who knew what was best for him. He was a tender-hearted child, and although it hurt to be parted from his mother and baby brother, he put on a brave face. Photographs of Colin from then on always look as though he was putting on a brave face.
Boarding school was not only far from loved ones, but far from a loved place. Meg created a beautiful home with pictures and fabrics and furniture from her travels to Europe, to Egypt and from her own childhood in India. She read daily to her children, when they were at home, not only scripture but also fiction. Robert Louis Stevenson, their friend and correspondent, was read and discussed, as were George Eliot, Jane Austen, Milton, Ruskin and all the great poets. Meg was no prude and her tastes often put aesthetics before Victorian morality; by contrast, school for Colin and John must have seemed bare and philistine.
Charlie, as he was known by the family, grew up blithely. With the two older boys at boarding school, Meg concentrated all her efforts on the baby. They had a large, black, shaggy mongrel called Dido and when Charlie reached ten months, Meg wrote ‘Baby said Dido after me – he grabs her head and squeezes her velvet ears into his mouth.’28 Meg’s diary was filled with exact descriptions of baby developments: his first steps, the first time he left his bed by himself and climbed tentatively downstairs, slipping one stockinged foot before the next.
Until he was three he had a Belgian nanny who only spoke French and he learnt the language fast, like a game. She was however very tough and was dismissed to be replaced by Miss Helen Stephen who became a friend of the whole family and confidante for life. Charlie loved history and at the age of five when learning about Queen Elizabeth I, said enthusiastically, ‘Oh aren’t you glad Elizabeth’s dead?’
‘Why?’
‘Because she might have killed Victoria as well as Mary.’29
On Christmas Day 1883, when Charlie was four, he was initiated into the yearly family ritual. The children came early into their parents’ room in their dressing gowns and sang a hymn and opened their stockings. Then George, Colin and John read Milton’s ‘Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity’, verse about. Charlie sat on the bed ‘looking half robin, half cherub … with his ruffled brown features and his red dressing gown’. George said that his favourite lines were ‘as when the sun in bed/ Curtained with cloudy red/ Pillows his chin upon an orient ware’. And his youngest son nodded his head: ‘Yes, I sink so, I sink so, too.’30
As a toddler Charlie saw his mother not only writing daily, but, more unusual still, carving her own oak writing desk. Carving oak is a hefty physical task and Meg’s exertions were really a challenging distraction from another temptation: Washington Ray, known as Tony, a schoolmaster from the local boarding school, Blair Lodge, developed a lasting and deep admiration for her. A jealous husband would not have stood for the frequent visits, the many presents of flowers, fruit and books or the intimacy of discussions, nor for the inscription on the bookshelf above her desk, arranged in Latin by Tony.
HIC FLOREAT MI HORTULUS LIBRORUM
AURO CARIOR INDICISQUE GEMMIS
QUI VISUS JUVET ANTEQUAM LEGATUR
QUO LECTO TOLEREM DOMI QUOD ANGAT
Let this little garden of books flower for me
Dearer than gold and Indian gems
May seeing it delight before it is read,
So that after reading, I
might bear the torment at home31
Passion for a man not her husband would certainly cause torment. But George had a large family of older female advisers, who steered him away from jealousy and towards friendship. He invited Tony to play golf with him, join them for tennis and fishing, and set up a weekly club to discuss the latest books and literary magazines. This discussion was essential to Meg and fed her journalism. George made sure that Meg’s sister Mary who taught at the boarding school Johnnie and Colin attended, was invited as often as possible. In 1895, Tony transferred his affections and fell in love with Mary. They married, and together as teachers they would have a profound influence on Charles’s life.
CHAPTER 2
Childhood
Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus.
Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé, 1927
On 4 January 1895, when Charlie was five years old, his mother held a New Year party at Weedingshall. The first half of the evening was a production of a play she had written called The True Lover for five characters. George, Charlie’s father, acted a rich old gentleman who had a niece with three suitors and had to decide which one was ‘true’ out of a lawyer’s clerk, a seedy schoolmaster and a shy gardener. In true fairy-tale tradition, the honest lover turned out to be the gardener. After the performance, complete with lights, costumes, wigs, painted scenery and live music, the audience of forty-two relatives and neighbours had ices in the drawing room and played dancing games. There was a screen across the room between ladies and gentlemen. A lady, unseen, threw a ball and the gentleman who caught it came and led her away to dance. Next each gentleman took two crackers and pulled them with the lady of his choice, then, wearing the hats from the crackers, they danced a cotillion. Midway through the dancing there was a grand supper organised by the new cook. Meg was an exacting mistress, and throughout Charlie’s childhood the cooks were always ‘new’.