As soon as word got out that she was in town, the invitations flooded in. ‘Everyone has been more than kind – it’s been sort of overwhelming,’ she wrote to Jack a month after her arrival.
In our country one would take such hospitality for granted more or less but coming from the English it’s quite unexpected and very, very comforting. I feel that my devotion to the British over a period of years has not been without foundation and I feel this is a second home more than ever. No one with the exception of Mr Aurean [sic] Bevan, MP for Wales has mentioned a thing about Pops which fact has quite amazed me … Of course a lot of it I can put down to British reserve which feel that some things are better left unsaid but mostly I blame it on their ability to make friends which last all their lives. They are slow about it at first but once made then it’s lasting – wholly and completely.
In London, blitzed and battered as it was by war, the social scene was swinging. ‘You had to go out. Life had to go on,’ remembered Kick’s friend Lady Virginia Ford. ‘You had to behave in what to a later generation would have seemed an uncaring manner. But dear heavens if you didn’t do that you would have gone mad.’ At the most glamorous venues, big bands played through the night until dawn, the evenings following a set pattern. For those up in London on leave, the first priority was to discover who was in town. Women working at factories or at Government establishments were given one day off in every eight; officers in the forces, stationed in Britain at training camps and airfields, were entitled to forty-eight hours’ leave a fortnight. With so many people scattered, as Sally Norton, the daughter of Lord Grantley, recalled, Kick’s set depended on a ‘bush telegraph’, run by Mr Gibbs, the hall porter at Claridges. ‘Ah, Miss Norton,’ Gibbs would say. ‘Lord Hartington is in London. Miss Kenyon-Slaney is staying here. Lord Grantley is over at the Ritz, and here is his room number.’ If the ‘Mr Gibbs’ system failed, everyone knew to congregate at the Ritz Bar at eight for drinks. The taxi service ‘Rely On Us’, which continued to operate throughout the blackout, would ferry them around town – to dinner at the Mirabelle before going on to the Caféde Paris to dance. At two or three in the morning, they would move on to the fashionable Four Hundred Club, where they would stay until it was time to catch the milk train back to camp or to work.
Kick was lucky to be based in London. The American Red Cross had assigned her to an exclusive officers-only club in Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge where her job was to boost the morale of the GIs – as she described ‘5½ days of jitter-bugging, gin rummy, ping-pong, bridge and just being an American girl among 1,500 doughboys a long way from home’. The London posting meant that Kick could go out most nights, her admirers queuing up to escort her.
On her first Saturday night in London, it was Billy, Marquess of Hartington, who took her out.
Of all Kick’s suitors, in every respect but one, Billy was the most eligible. The eldest son of the Duke of Devonshire, his family owned over 180,000 acres of land in Britain and Ireland, bringing in revenues of more than a quarter of a million pounds a year. In addition to their main seat at Chatsworth, they owned Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, Compton Place at Eastbourne and Lismore Castle in Ireland. They had several townhouses in London, including Chiswick House on the River Thames. ‘Chiswick?’ Billy’s grandmother had famously questioned. ‘Oh, we sometimes used it for breakfast.’
Kick had met Billy, who had been mooted as a husband for Princess Elizabeth, at a Royal Garden Party at Buckingham Palace in the summer of 1938. Like Kick, he was nice-looking – as opposed to good-looking. Almost six feet four inches tall, he had a slight self-conscious stoop; his hair was dark, his face pale and elfin, its most striking feature his dark ‘Labrador’ eyes. Aged twenty at the time, he had fallen in love with Kick. ‘I remember going to a dance and sitting next to Billy,’ recalled the Countess of Sutherland, ‘and he spent the whole dinner telling me how wonderful Kathleen [Kick] was.’ As Fiona Gore, the Countess of Arran, remembered, ‘here was this lively American girl who through some odd circumstance had become the toast of the town, and she was paying all this attention to Billy. It gave him such confidence. She swept him right off his oh so steady feet.’
Five years after they first met at Buckingham Palace, Billy was still in love with Kick. Unable to forget her, in the months before she returned to England, he had broken off his engagement to Sally Norton. Within a month of Kick’s arrival in London, he invited her to stay at Compton Place. ‘I have just returned from a day and a half spent in the country with Billy at Eastbourne,’ Kick wrote to her brother Jack at the end of July.
It’s right on the East Coast and has been blitzed quite badly but the family continues to go there during the summer months. For 24 hours I forgot all about the war. It’s the most lovely spot and all the fruit which one never gets in London at your disposal. Peaches sell for $1.50 apiece over here and I returned to London clutching a dozen under my arm. Billy is just the same, a bit older, a bit more ducal but we get on as well as ever. It is queer as he is so unlike anyone I have ever known at home or any place really … It’s all rather difficult as he is very, very fond of me and as long as I am about he’ll never marry. However much he loved me I can easily understand his position. It’s really too bad because I’m sure I would be a most efficient Duchess of Devonshire in the post-war world and as I’d have a castle in Ireland, one in Scotland, one in Yorkshire and one in Sussex, I could keep my old nautical brothers in their old age. But that’s the way it goes. Everyone in London is buzzing with rumours and no matter what happens we’ve given them something to talk about.
Yet beneath the bravura, Kick’s letter to Jack hinted at feelings of hurt and rejection – that Billy’s love for her, however strong, was constrained by his ‘position’. ‘I can’t really understand why I like Englishmen so much,’ she continued, ‘as they treat one in quite an off-hand manner and aren’t really as nice to their women as Americans but I suppose it’s just that sort of treatment that women really like. That’s your technique isn’t it?’
‘I think Kick had a thing about Billy right from the beginning,’ her close friend Janie Compton recalled. In May 1940, when he was serving as an officer in the Coldstream Guards, after Kick received news that the British Expeditionary Force had been defeated in France, she wrote anxiously to her father:
At the moment it looks as if the Germans will be in England before you receive this letter. In fact from the reports here they are just about taking over Claridges now. I still keep telling everyone ‘the British lose the battles but they win the wars’. I have received some rather gloomy letters from Janie and Billy. Billy’s letter was written from the Maginot Line. Daddy, I must know exactly what has happened to them all. Is Billy all right?
In society circles, Billy and Kick’s engagement had been predicted almost from the moment they first met. The gossips blamed Kick for the fact that it had not happened; her string of unrequited suitors was well known. ‘Stop all this foolishness,’ Lady Astor had implored her in the spring of 1942, ‘and come right over and marry Billy.’ But as Kick knew, contrary to the gossip, she and Billy had not been lovers before the war. Their relationship had been a non-starter. Billy was unobtainable: he had not asked her to marry him, and, as she believed after returning from her weekend at Compton Place, he never would.
The truth was, as Billy confided to a friend, he regarded his love for Kick as a ‘Romeo and Juliet thing’. It was unthinkable that he should marry a Catholic. To do so would be to betray centuries of family history and tradition.
The Devonshires’ fortune and reputation had been founded on their opposition to Catholicism. In the 1530s, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, Sir William Cavendish, a Crown Commissioner appointed by Henry VIII to seize Catholic assets, had been rewarded for his loyalty with grants of land from the spoils of confiscation and a position at Court. His rapid advancement had enabled him to win the hand of Bess of Hardwick, a wealthy Derbyshire heiress whose legacy i
ncluded the valuable Hardwick and Chatsworth estates. In the Glorious Revolution, Protestant intriguing further consolidated the family’s wealth and prestige; in 1694, Sir William’s descendant was honoured with a dukedom after backing the right horse in the contest between the Protestant William of Orange and the Catholic James II. By the close of the nineteenth century, the Devonshires had become as virulently anti-Irish as they were anti-Catholic. In 1882, Billy’s great-uncle, Lord Frederick Cavendish, Chief Secretary to Ireland, was sensationally murdered in Phoenix Park in Dublin by ‘The Invincibles’, an Irish Nationalist terrorist organization. Four years later, his grandfather, the 8th Duke, kept the Whig Party out of power when he founded the breakaway Liberal Unionist Party in opposition to Gladstone’s policy of Home Rule for Ireland.
Kick was an Irish-American Catholic, the daughter of a man who publicly celebrated Irish nationalism. Of lesser importance, but significant, was her social pedigree. If Billy succeeded his father, he would become the 11th Duke of Devonshire. Seven out of ten of his predecessors had married the daughter of a Duke, a Marquess or an Earl. Of the three exceptions, the 8th married the daughter of a German Count and the 6th Duke had died unmarried; only one, the 3rd Duke, had married a commoner – and that was way back in 1718. His wife, Catherine Hoskins, was an heiress from Surrey. The one thing Kick had in her favour was that she was an heiress too. In the 1920s, Joe Kennedy had set up a trust for his nine children; by the mid-1940s, they were reputedly worth $10 million each.
Yet all the money in the world could not count against the weight of history, embodied in the prejudices of Billy’s father, Edward, the 10th Duke of Devonshire. ‘The one thing he has always dreaded,’ Kick admitted to her family, ‘is that one of his sons should marry an RC.’ A rotund, shabby figure, he was described by his younger son Andrew Cavendish as ‘the worstdressed, the most unostentatious, and least ducal figure’. Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, the diarist, concurred: ‘He was a frustrated man, hated being a Duke and was really a bit bored by all his possessions and palaces.’ Field sports and the countryside were Edward’s great passions. One of his favourite pastimes was to sit for hours, a grocer’s apron tied around his waist, making salmon lures from feathers he had collected from the hats of his titled guests. The Duke’s dislike of ‘Papists’ was legendary. It was said that he had contemplated moving the master bedroom in his London townhouse to avoid seeing the spire of Westminster Cathedral. ‘I think it’s fair to say that my father was a bigoted Protestant,’ Andrew Cavendish recalled. ‘My father and mother both felt very strongly that Catholics proselytized and that our family had a long tradition opposed to Catholicism.’
It was a widespread prejudice among the Protestant English aristocracy. The deep schism dividing the two faiths stemmed from the forging of power and identity and the defence of ownership over hundreds of years. The 10th Duke believed, along with the majority of Protestants of his generation and class, that all Catholics were bent on plotting the recatholicization of England. It was a view that had some foundation: in the Britain of the 1940s, Catholic children grew up praying for the conversion of England, well versed in ‘Faith of Our Fathers’, a martial hymn to the English martyrs. In the Duke’s world the allegiances of the Reformation, the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution still resonated. Catholicism, so he believed, posed nothing less than a threat to the state: the strongest proof of a popish plot was the Catholic Church’s stipulation that the Protestant party in a mixed-faith marriage should sign an agreement to raise their offspring as Catholics: if they refused, the Church would not sanctify the union. The Duke was horrified by his eldest son’s infatuation with Kick: if Billy were to marry her, it would be tantamount to defeat in the battle his family had so successfully waged against Catholicism for centuries.
At great personal cost, motivated by a sense of duty, Billy had resolved to honour his father’s – and his family’s – beliefs. In the summer of 1943, his position remained unchanged: he loved Kick as passionately as he had done before the war, but he would never ask her to marry him. ‘The religious difficulties seemed insurmountable’: knowing that he ‘would never be happy or be much good without her’, as he would later write to her mother, he felt ‘that if she could find someone else she could really be happy with, it would be much better & more satisfactory for her’.
But within months, Billy would change his mind.
31
William John Robert Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, eldest son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, was being heckled. The political meeting at the school hall in Darley Dale, an isolated hamlet on the banks of the River Derwent in Derbyshire, was packed.
‘Do you think a boy like this can represent us?’ one of the hecklers yelled.
‘Young man, you ought to be in the front line, not standing there talking politics,’ a woman shouted.
Billy Hartington, speaking from the stage, struggled to make himself heard. ‘I’ve been in the Army five years and have seen action overseas,’ he responded. ‘I hope to take my place in the front line shortly.’
His answer was barely audible, drowned out by laughter and shouts of abuse, hurled from around the hall.
‘What can you, the son of a Duke, do for the working man?’ one man demanded.
‘Did you ever do a day’s work?’ shouted another.
‘Well,’ Billy stuttered, ‘I’ve been in the Army for five years …’
The rest of his sentence was lost.
It was January 1944. Billy had resigned his commission in the Coldstream Guards to stand for Parliament in West Derbyshire. ‘The by-election was a grave error of judgement on my father’s part,’ admitted his brother, Andrew Cavendish. ‘My family treated it like a rotten borough. I suspect my brother was pushed into it.’ ‘He should never have come back. He should have stayed with his regiment,’ Lady Maureen Fellowes, a close friend of the Devonshires, remembered bitterly. ‘He was just too nice. He would never have said, “Go to hell, Father.” He didn’t want to hurt anyone.’
The Cavendish family had held the seat for almost 200 years. In 1938, Billy’s father had supported his uncle, Henry Hunlocke, as the Tory candidate. The old Duke saw it as a means of keeping it warm for his eldest son. Early in 1942, when Hunlocke resigned from Parliament, the Duke insisted that Billy leave his regiment and return to West Derbyshire to fight the seat.
Billy’s victory was meant to be a fait accompli. Yet both the Press and the Devonshires had underestimated the tenacity of his socialist opponent, Charles White. They had also misjudged the mood of the electorate after four long years of war. The hecklers crowding the school hall at Darley Dale were White’s men. They – and their candidate – viewed the contest as a personal vendetta. White’s father, the one man to have wrested the seat from the Cavendish family in the previous two centuries, had been beaten by Billy’s uncle in 1938. Focusing his campaign on the injustices of Britain’s class system, White presented himself as a champion of the people – the cobbler’s son fighting the heir to the Dukedom from the ‘Palace on the Peak’.
White began the campaign by casting doubt on Billy’s courage and patriotism, accusing him of having used his aristocratic connections to dodge the war in order to contest the seat. Speaking at a political meeting, he told the audience, ‘Lord Hartington will have to explain to the parents and relatives of serving men and women in West Derbyshire how he can more or less please himself so far as military service is concerned while men and women in the ranks must comply with the rigid military requirements and discipline.’ Sniping at the Devonshires’ historic stranglehold over the constituency, he continued: ‘Boys and girls are sacrificing their lives to kill dictatorship on the Continent: political dictatorship must not be allowed to develop here.’
‘He looks absolutely repulsive. He hates the Cavendishes like poison,’ was Kick’s verdict on Charles White. During the three-week campaign, she did not leave Billy’s side. In spite of the hopelessness of a permanent future together, in the six months
since her return to England, she and Billy had become inseparable. ‘She fell in love with him,’ said her close friend Janie Compton, ‘it was as simple as that.’
Alarmed that Kick’s Catholicism might rebound on Billy’s electoral prospects, the Duke, who regarded her as nothing less than an ‘evil influence’, had ruled that she must travel incognito. ‘News of me wouldn’t add any votes,’ she wrote home to her family, ‘so I was known as Rosemary Tong, the village girl. Wasn’t allowed to open my mouth, although I did go canvassing for votes one afternoon with Billy’s sister.’ Whenever and wherever Billy spoke, Kick was at the back of the crowd, gauging the audience’s reaction. The class bitterness shocked her: ‘It really was something to see,’ she told her family. ‘He was asked every sort of question from the Beveridge plan right on down to “Why isn’t the park at Chatsworth plowed up?” “Why didn’t your father pay more death duties?” “What do you know about being poor?”’
As the days wore on, the viciousness of the campaign intensified. Touring the villages and remote hamlets in the largely rural constituency, Billy was ridiculed wherever he went, his privileged position a constant target.
‘In the interests of the national salvage campaign, may I ask how it is that, when everybody’s railings and gates have been taken away, the big gates at Chatsworth are still standing?’ one man challenged Billy.
‘They were made in 1690 and are considered works of national importance,’ he replied. ‘If we are asked to have them melted down, we’ll do so right away.’
Behind the scenes, White disseminated rumours that Billy’s politics were linked to Oswald Mosley’s. Billy’s brother, Andrew Cavendish, had recently married Debo Mitford, whose sister, Diana, was the wife of the British fascist. ‘Are you in favour of Mosley being at large?’ White’s supporters were primed to ask. ‘I am not my brother’s keeper,’ Billy was forced to reply defensively. ‘My sister-in-law and my brother – who is at the moment in action in Italy – don’t hold with Mosley. They loathe him.’ Even Billy’s ability to milk a cow became a campaign issue. ‘Can you milk a cow?’ White asked him at one meeting. ‘Yes,’ he replied, his frustration evident, ‘I can milk a cow, and I can also spread muck. Some of my opponents seem rather good at that too.’
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 37