Bloomsbury's Outsider

by Sarah Knights

  Having finally found a tenant for Hilton, in October Bunny and Angelica moved to Lower Claverham Farm at Berwick in Sussex. As Vanessa had complained to Bunny that she could not bear to be separated from her daughter, Lower Claverham was selected for its relative proximity to Charleston. Bunny disliked it from the outset: it was cramped, they had insufficient furniture, and knowing it was a temporary let, Bunny couldn’t invest in cultivating a garden. There he and Angelica received several visits from Leonard and Virginia Woolf. They came in March 1941, just a week before Virginia drowned, having weighed down her pockets with stones. Her death was a great blow to Angelica, who returned to Charleston, briefly united with Vanessa and Duncan by grief.

  It was with little regret that after eight months Bunny and Angelica vacated Claverham in June 1941, their landlord requiring it at short notice. After some searching (by bicycle as petrol was rationed) they found a thatched bungalow at Alciston, even closer to Charleston. But then Angelica became liable for National Service. She took up an offer from Mrs Curtis, the headmistress at her old school, Longford Grove, to work there as an art mistress. Angelica’s departure coincided with Richard’s decision to enlist in the RAF marine aircraft section, responsible for flying boats and Air Sea Rescue. Bunny wondered whether he should have discouraged him from enlisting, but recognised that Richard was his own man with his own moral outlook.

  Bunny received a commission from the Air Ministry to write a propaganda book, War in the Air, intended for American consumption. He told Constance, ‘I never realised how terrific our victory in the air had been last summer. Thus my book has a magnificent subject.’31 Bunny was also asked by the Ministry of Information to write a pamphlet on the campaign in Greece and Crete. This type of propaganda involved placing events in an historical context so close as to be almost immediate. Bunny was disciplined and scrupulous in this work. His method is apparent in advice he gave to the American historian Bruce Campbell Hopper on the subject of writing a history of air warfare: ‘Start with the scientific technical advance whatever it may [be]: show how that influences policy by making something new & [a] practical proposition – then tell the story of the actual air warfare as an illustration of carrying out this policy & using the new weapon. In that way the reader will never be allowed to forget that the means are changing every few months.’32

  In September 1941, when Air Commodore Groves invited Bunny to become his private secretary he jumped at the offer, but the job went through so many bureaucratic hoops that it emerged unrecognisable. The following month, however, a suitable post was found. Bunny would be working again under Groves, but as a civilian at the newly established Political Warfare Executive (PWE). ‘As you know’, he wrote to Angelica, ‘I can say nothing about my work. But it is certainly most interesting.’33 Once again Bunny was to be involved in hush-hush propaganda.

  Lodging with Leonard Woolf in his Clifford’s Inn flat, Bunny was glad to be in London again. Dining, one day, in a restaurant he saw Duncan at an adjacent table, but his old friend cut him dead. Angelica longed to be with Bunny in London. She dreamed about an ideal life, telling Bunny it would be ‘purely domestic – to have a moderate sized family and a house – a large house where we could be really free and live as we liked […]. I should like to have a great many friends and to live in an atmosphere of being alive – I would paint every day.’34 Bunny responded with a pragmatic proposal. ‘I am going now’, he wrote in November 1941, ‘to do something which may annoy you & which many people would think very unscrupulous. That is to ask you to marry me.’35

  Part Four

  Angelica

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘The most important work in this war is propaganda […]. It is a writer’s job & as we have truth on our side [we] shall have a wonderful opportunity.’1

  Bunny’s marriage proposal was made with no great confidence. He was doubtful about the ethics of marrying a woman twenty-six years younger than himself and concerned that it would cause an irreparable breach between Angelica and her parents. He thought the age difference would curtail their marriage, doubting they would stay together for longer than a decade. Such pessimistic considerations were hardly the most romantic bases for wedlock, but Bunny was acutely aware that it was a huge step for Angelica, and he did not wish her to take it lightly.

  In asking Angelica to marry him, therefore, Bunny laid before her all the objections he could think of. Time and again he asked her to carefully consider the situation, to think about the implications of having children, to realise her freedom would thus be constrained. He told her not to embark on marriage or children ‘unless the desire to do so is your own’. ‘I am already old’, he explained, ‘& the risks for you are therefore greater as I am much more likely to get ill & die, or to become unable to adapt myself after the war & so fail to earn a living. Your tastes will also diverge more & more from mine because you will be expanding in every direction, while I shall be contracting or standing still.’2 Writing to Angelica on 18 November 1941, Bunny declared outright that he would not be hurt or annoyed by a refusal.

  Bunny’s attitude towards marriage with Angelica was markedly different to that of his marriage with Ray. He informed Ray that he could not be faithful and was likely to hurt her. Now he assumed Angelica would not be faithful and would consequently hurt him. He told her she could trust him ‘to behave as you would wish if you fall in love with someone else’.3 He thought that even if he were to dislike this hypothetical lover, he would be able to behave in a civilised manner. On the positive side, Bunny recognised marriage would make things easier socially, because he and Angelica could acknowledge publicly that they were a couple. Bunny also hoped it might encourage Vanessa and Duncan to accept the relationship. Most importantly, marriage would enable Angelica to avoid war work, as conscription of single women was to be enforced in December 1941. If Angelica remained unmarried, she would have to join one of the women’s forces.

  Angelica replied: ‘The fact that you have asked me to marry you makes me happy & rather proud.’4 She did not reject Bunny’s proposal and on the whole thought the pros outweighed the cons. She was, anyway, in love with Bunny: he filled a gap in her life which neither her putative father, Clive, nor genetic father, Duncan, was able to fill. When Angelica was asked, in relation to this biography, what attracted her to Bunny, she replied ‘he was warm and rather slow – and all that added up to someone to me very attractive because what I needed was a father-figure and that he was exactly’. She also found him ‘very well-made, physically’. Referring to a photograph where he is captured from back view, climbing into a first-floor window wearing only a pair of espadrilles, she said: ‘you can see exactly how beautiful his body was’.5

  At the beginning of December Angelica told Bunny, ‘I now naturally often think of our getting married, and I think I am drawing nearer and nearer to the assumption that we shall be’.6 She tried to discuss the matter with Vanessa, but Vanessa could not get beyond concern for Duncan’s feelings. The upshot was that Vanessa told Angelica that ‘we – this household – can’t really share your happiness as we might if you were living with someone who could easily & freely come here with you’.7

  Bunny endeavoured to get to The Cearne to see Constance once a fortnight. Now eighty, she was physically frail and nearly blind, but still retained her fierce independence and clear mind. Angelica recalled Connie’s joy at seeing Bunny, which resembled ‘the unbridled pleasure of a puppy on the return of its master’.8 He remained the centre of her world. One evening when Bunny was at The Cearne, Constance suddenly began speaking gibberish. Bunny helped her to bed and she regained her speech after a while, but it was a worrying episode.

  Now a civil servant, Bunny needed a uniform appropriate to status. On Savile Row he was fitted for an ‘extremely smart & expensive’ dark suit, in which, he declared, he looked ‘as gloriously respectable as a jackdaw in his spring plumage’.9 He couldn’t resist adding a black hat and umbrella, the latter, according to Frances
Partridge, ‘the best make, perfectly rolled and taken out in all weathers’.10 In town he was inclined not only to dress smartly, but with some flair. He liked well-tailored suits and sky blue was a favourite colour.

  Through Duncan’s connections, Angelica obtained a job working for the Cotton Board based at the National Gallery. Bunny was overjoyed: if they were both working in London they could live together. But there was the problem of where William would go in the school holidays. Bunny wanted to get rid of Alciston and Leonard’s flat was too small for them all. For the time being, William would be billeted on Barbara Bagenal, Frances Partridge or Noel Olivier. Angelica could not wait to live with Bunny, telling him ‘my heart is beating twice as fast nearly all the time for thinking of coming back and being with you’. ‘We must never’, she added, ‘be separated for so long again.’11 Leonard generously offered to vacate his flat so that Bunny and Angelica could live there. But Bunny decided to find another and in January 1942 he moved from 159 to 134 Clifford’s Inn.

  Bunny enjoyed his work at the PWE, but doubted his suitability, the ‘penalty of getting a job in which everyone is picked for brains’.12 According to the historian Andrew Roberts, the PWE ‘recruited some of the most exceptional, unusual and talented people of any of the nine secret organisations of the Second World War’.13 Established in September 1941, it was largely responsible for coordinating British foreign propaganda and was staffed with writers and journalists who, it was assumed, would be good propagandists because they could write and use their imaginations. Certainly the PWE included some remarkable intellects, Noel Coward, Raymond Mortimer, Freya Stark, E.H. Carr and Richard Crossman among them. But initially it was somewhat chaotic as most recruits were new to propaganda – itself a relatively recent innovation. Recruits were given no formal instruction and were expected to learn on the job.

  Moreover, the PWE took some time to find a niche as it had been established by Churchill in the shadow of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), and took over some of the SOE’s responsibilities. This caused friction between the two organisations, resulting in time-wasting and point-scoring. While it might have been sensible to merge the two organisations, creating a single department, this did not happen. Instead, according to the historian Charles Cruickshank, ‘For the rest of the war the two bodies were forced to live together, suffering all the discomforts of a close union, and enjoying none of the blessings’.14

  At the outset, the PWE underlings – and there were many of them – were completely unfamiliar with the ‘Whitehall machine, which consists of a large number of cogs at the lower levels enmeshing with a progressively smaller number of cogs enjoying greater seniority, experience, innate ability, and remuneration’.15 As might be anticipated, in an organisation staffed with independent-minded writers, the little cogs often questioned the decisions of the big wheels. Soon after admission, Bunny sensibly proposed that PWE propaganda leaflets should mimic the printing and design current in the countries in which they were to be dropped. This proposal fell on stony ground, but gradually, and under the direction of Robert Bruce Lockhart, the PWE would become a potent force in British propaganda.

  The PWE was housed in small and inconvenient quarters on the south side of Berkeley Square. When Bunny and his immediate superior, David Stephens, Secretary to the Executive, were instructed to find other accommodation, Bunny favoured taking over the upper portion of Bush House, above the BBC. Given that the PWE was, in theory, supposed to vet the BBC’s foreign-services broadcasts, this seemed a perfectly sensible solution. Both Stephens and Bruce Lockhart supported the move, which took place in early 1942.

  Bunny worked extremely hard often until late in the evening, writing propaganda leaflets and items for overseas broadcasts. John Lehmann, the editor of Penguin New Writing, bemoaned ‘the steady drain of authors of every sort into the war-machine, either into the Armed Forces, or into jobs which allow them little or no time or opportunity for writing’.16 As George Orwell commented while working for the external services of the BBC: ‘To compose a propaganda pamphlet or a radio feature needs just as much work as to write something you believe in, with the difference that the finished product is worthless.’17 By ‘worthless’, he meant of no lasting value to the author.

  In January 1942 Frances Partridge observed that her nephew William Garnett ‘is at the stage when it’s as much as life is worth to let any expression cross his face, and he remains silent and impassive until some gust of amusement creates an explosion from within’.18 So like his mother in his long silences, William had to adjust to many changes. Not only had he lost Ray and his childhood home, but his great friend and ally, his brother Richard, had gone to the war. Now seventeen, William would soon need to consider which direction to take, a decision made all the tougher by the realisation that the war might continue beyond his eighteenth birthday.

  On 7 May Frances and Ralph Partridge were surprised when Bunny telephoned asking if they would come up to London the following day to act as witnesses at his marriage to Angelica. Having hastily purchased presents, they joined William, Bunny and Angelica for lunch at the Ivy before attending the wedding, which took place in the City of London register office, a temporary office, as that in the Guildhall had been destroyed by bombing. Angelica, who looked lovely in a funereal black hat and veil, was twenty-three and Bunny fifty.

  There is no evidence that Bunny recalled the flippant remark he made twenty-three years previously about marrying ‘it’. Why would he? It was an entirely private remark intended to amuse Lytton Strachey. As Bunny said of Lytton, ‘Everything, including his own deep feelings and beliefs, was the subject of constant jokes and gay exaggerations. To take Lytton au pied de la lettre is to misunderstand him entirely.’19 The same might be said of Bunny in this context.

  Maynard Keynes wrote to Bunny, saying he thought he was doing wrong in marrying Angelica. Bunny wondered whether Maynard had been spurred to write the letter by Duncan or Vanessa. He chose not to reply, but later regretted this, as he might have explained that he and Angelica wanted a child. Back at Clifford’s Inn after the ceremony, Angelica commented, ‘Now perhaps at last the neighbours will respect me’.20 Vanessa and Duncan did not attend the wedding, but two days beforehand, Angelica thanked Duncan for a letter which ‘has made me much happier, and I am glad that you see that I am not marrying for superficial motives’.21 Bunny thought Vanessa opposed the marriage because she misguidedly believed that he married Angelica to ‘revenge some imaginary slights received in the past – that I was acting because of some psychological chip on my shoulder’. He did not understand why Vanessa could not perceive what was blindingly obvious: ‘One look at Angelica would have been enough to convince any normal person that it was natural that I should be in love with her and wish to marry her.’22

  Later that afternoon Bunny and Angelica, together with William and Richard (who now joined them on his first day of leave) took the train to Northumberland, where they stayed at the Crown Inn, Stannersburn, near Hexham. It was a strange honeymoon, for it encompassed not only Bunny’s sons but also a farm which had been bought in memory of Ray. Called Ridley Stokoe, it was located in the hamlet of Tarset, near Hexham. Bunny had purchased it only a few weeks previously for £2,200.

  For many years Bunny had benefited from the financial advice of Maynard Keynes and Ralph Partridge, both astute players of the stock market. He was able to buy the farm having sold investments bought on Maynard’s advice, though prevailing upon Richard to lend him money to secure a mortgage. Ridley Stokoe comprised three-hundred-and-thirty acres of moor and crag, wild wood and river, fields and a farmhouse. Bunny had not bought it so much to make profit (it was hard land to farm and any profit would go to the tenant farmers), but more because he had a romantic attachment to that craggy, remote countryside, an attachment inherited from Ray. As a girl, she loved walking those wild moors and Bunny thought that Ridley Stokoe would enable Richard and William to share their mother’s pleasure. He contemplated burying Ray’s
ashes there, telling Tim White that she had stayed a little way down river in the same valley and often talked about it.23 Richard and William were immediately captivated by the landscape, and for William it would become an important refuge and focus in years to come. Bunny observed that his younger son was ‘a completely different animal here’, and that Richard, once he had sloughed off the formal carapace of the RAF, was ‘plodding slowly along, good tempered & amused’.24

  Bunny’s marriage was made public in an announcement in The Times on 11 May, a conventional notice recording that Angelica was the ‘only daughter of Clive Heward Bell & Vanessa Bell’. That particular untruth could not be publicly revised, although Clive, staying with Frances and Ralph, ‘became suddenly unbuttoned, as if released from a vow, and for the first time dropped all pretence that Angelica was his daughter’. He told the Partridges that he was ‘devoted to old Bunny’, and according to Frances, gleefully referred back to ‘the days when both Vanessa and Duncan were always telling him what a fascinating character Bunny was’.25

  In the summer of 1942, Bunny became Secretary to an Agricultural Committee overseeing propaganda expressly aimed at peasants in enemy and occupied countries, propaganda intended to cause a reduction in the overall output of food. Bunny was also involved in supplying the BBC with material to broadcast in their ‘Dawn Peasants Programme’, a subversive prototype of BBC Radio Four’s Farming Today. The interdepartmental problems which had dogged the PWE at its inception continued, particularly between the Agricultural Committee of the PWE and the BBC. Bunny was in an especially frustrating position as he was expected to ensure the Agricultural Committee vetted the BBC’s scripts, although the latter continually failed to submit them. As Bunny observed, this lack of cooperation could prove disastrous, for instance when ‘tagged on to an item designed to encourage the sabotage of threshing machinery was the report of the death sentence being inflicted on a Poznan farmhand for agricultural sabotage’.26 In August, Bunny was sent to the Directorate of Plans to assist the journalist and social reformer Ritchie Calder, who occupied a new post, as Director of Plans and Campaigns. As well as drafting propaganda leaflets, Bunny was involved in writing strategic papers on subjects including Anglo-American Co-operation. With the US now in the war it was important to address how planning and training could be integrated between the two allies.