by Adam Sisman
According to Olive, however, the rift was simulated. She told her own sons many years afterwards that Ronnie had been forced to quit the Poole area because he was suspected of setting fire to the Hamworthy garage where the coaches were kept in order to collect the insurance pay-out. She alleged that Ronnie’s father had been part of the swindle, indeed that he had put his son up to it, and had kept his head down afterwards. But no one was charged, and no evidence has emerged of any fire, started deliberately or otherwise, so maybe there is no basis to Olive’s story.
Whatever the impetus, the young family now left Poole and moved to Exeter. It would prove the start of a nomadic life for the children, never staying anywhere long enough to make friends or put down roots. Ronnie again set up as an insurance broker, and also started a parallel business, much more profitable, as an assessor specialising in accident claims. He was ‘ambulance chasing’, rushing to the scene of an accident, and thence to the hospital bed, where he would encourage the injured person to pursue a claim against the perpetrator, and offer to invest the pay-out on favourable terms. Perhaps because he was always in such a hurry, he incurred numerous speeding fines.
This was an anxious time for Ronnie. Moneylenders back in Bournemouth were pressing him hard. In desperation, he forged a cheque for £215 4s. The police came to the house and took him away. On 17 February 1934 he was sentenced at the Winchester Assizes to six months’ imprisonment for fraud.
Ronnie’s trial and subsequent sentence shocked his family. The shame was intense, though the accused himself seemed oblivious to it. He conducted his own appeal against the conviction, arguing that it was based on a succession of mistakes and misunderstandings. His sisters remembered watching him shave on the morning when the verdict was due to be announced, apparently certain that he would be exonerated.
His appeal was rejected by the court. The judge refused to reduce the sentence, commenting that it was, in his opinion, a lenient one. But there was worse to come. While on bail awaiting trial, Ronnie had moved his family to Farnham Common in Buckinghamshire, a village between Maidenhead and Slough. On a visit to London he had opened an account with the Clydesdale Bank, depositing a cheque that turned out to be worthless; and over the days that followed he had presented a succession of Clydesdale Bank cheques to shopkeepers and garage proprietors in neighbouring villages, for small amounts up to £10. None had been honoured, because there was no money in the account. In July Ronnie was brought from Winchester Prison to answer charges of obtaining money by deception at the Buckinghamshire Quarter Sessions. In his defence, he claimed that at the time the cheques were presented he had been expecting to receive £50 promised by a friend; and further claimed that he had hoped to deposit a life policy for £1,000, which he had given to another friend in exchange for a loan of £10. Finally he argued that he was owed £50 by a garage proprietor in Exeter. The court rejected his claims, and found him guilty on seven charges of obtaining money and goods on false pretences. The judge sentenced him to a further nine months’ imprisonment with hard labour, to run concurrently.
Again Ronnie appealed, and this time the case was heard before the Court of Criminal Appeal, where he was represented by the young Edward Ryder Richardson, later a recorder and Queen’s Counsel; and prosecuted by Norman Birkett KC, later Lord Birkett, a former Methodist preacher and Liberal MP who would serve as a judge at the Nuremberg trials. This appeal too was dismissed.
Olive had been ‘horrified’ when the police arrived to arrest Ronnie, she told her eldest son many years afterwards. She had never shown much interest in her husband’s business activities, beyond feeling a vague unease about them. Now tradesmen were queuing in the garden while the house was emptied of furniture. Alec Glassey arrived to collect his sister and his two nephews, then aged four and two, who were too young to understand what was happening. Going back to The Homestead was a form of imprisonment for Olive, but she felt that she had nowhere else to go. Returned to the house from which she had escaped, she reverted to being an obedient child again, unable to shield her sons from their uncle, who beat them at any sign that they might have strayed into ‘vice’. The memory of these beatings, and those he received subsequently at school, could stir David to fury even in old age.
Neither Tony nor David had any idea where Ronnie had gone, and nobody enlightened them. When questioned, adults became evasive. Like their mother, the boys too were forced to live out a gloomy penance, keeping quiet and out of sight, banned from the main reception rooms in The Homestead and confined to the orchard when they played outside. For month after month they suffered a purgatory of ‘dripping laurels … with red windswept beaches always out of season and creaking swings and sodden sandpits that were closed to enjoyment on the Sabbath’.22 On Sundays they were smuggled into church, amid much whispering, and endured Uncle Alec’s sermons, which seemed to David appallingly long. The ‘Other House’ where their Cornwell grandparents lived was a forbidden subject, never to be mentioned in the presence of the Glasseys: that was where the wickedness had been spawned.
It was characteristic of Ronnie’s breezy attitude that while serving his sentence he ingratiated himself with the prison governor, as if they were golfing chums. He told Olive that when her letters arrived he would show them to the governor, and together they would agree that he was lucky to have such a wonderful wife.
Ronnie was much impressed by the way that Birkett had conducted the prosecution, and sportingly wrote from prison to congratulate him, rather as a loser might congratulate the victor on winning a fair fight. No doubt surprised, Birkett replied, and a correspondence ensued. This was the beginning of an unlikely connection, which strengthened after Ronnie’s release. Birkett accepted Ronnie’s hospitality, and his introductions to obliging young ladies; like so many others, he would be corrupted by Ronnie. In his letters to Birkett from prison, Ronnie pledged to study law after he had served his sentence; on his release he would indeed enrol as a student at Gray’s Inn, purchasing a wig and gown that would accompany him on his journey through life – though this ceremonial purchase marked both the beginning and the end of his legal studies. He would subsequently resolve that his sons should practise law in his place, Tony (for his solidity) as a solicitor and David (for his glibness) as a barrister. Ryder Richardson, who would become a regular guest at Ronnie’s table in the 1940s and 1950s, always said that Ronnie had a fine legal mind; had he been on the right side of the law, he might have risen to the heights of the legal profession.
Though hinted at from time to time, it was not made explicit to the boys that their father had served a prison sentence until they were grown up. Searching his memory David recalled a scene from his boyhood: standing in the road outside Exeter Prison, clutching his mother’s hand and waving up at his father behind a barred window, yelling ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ Excited by this long-forgotten image, David asked Ronnie whether he too recalled this moving moment. ‘Sheer invention from start to finish, son.’ Ronnie conceded that he had done a bit of time in Exeter, but mostly he had been in Winchester Prison and Wormwood Scrubs. (Apparently Winchester was the roughest, ‘because of the gypsies’.) Besides, he explained, it was impossible to see or be seen from within the walls. ‘Anyone who knows Exeter Prison knows that.’ David decided that the scene outside Exeter Prison must have been a false memory, one that had never existed except in his imagination. And yet, in some way, it remained true to him. ‘We should find another name for the way we see past events that are still alive in us,’ he wrote. ‘I saw him at that window but I also see him there now, grasping the bars, his bull’s chest encased in a convict’s uniform, with arrows printed on it, as worn in all the best school comics.’23
After a miserable year, Olive left The Homestead and took the boys to their Cornwell grandparents’ house in Mount Road – known as Bay View, because it stood on high ground, offering a panorama across Poole Harbour to Brownsea Island and the Purbeck Hills beyond. This was a comparatively cheerful place. The boys were treated kindly by
their grandparents, while their three unmarried aunts, all still living at home, would fuss over them and feed them sweets. Their great-grandfather lived in a cottage at the back, with a collection of Toby jugs displayed on his mantelpiece at which the boys gazed with fascination. The only thing lacking, apart from their father, was pocket money. It seemed somehow generally accepted that Ronnie’s boys could not be trusted with cash.
Olive and her two boys were soon on the move again. Frank Cornwell bundled his daughter-in-law and grandsons into the car and took them for a long drive, further from Parkstone than they had ever been before. Presumably he had decided that his son should make a new start, far enough away that nobody would be familiar with his record. In St Albans, on the far side of London, he showed them around a newly built house, named Ambleside after their house in Lilliput. It was fully furnished, to the extent of teddy bears on the beds for the boys. ‘He has provided it for you,’ Olive whispered to them: the boys made appropriate expressions of thanks to their grandfather. In preparation for Ronnie’s release, she went up to London with her sister-in-law Ella, and together they found a smart apartment in Baker Street from which he could begin again in business. Tony and David started at a local nursery school, run by a Mrs Hitchcock. The day came when Ronnie reappeared, the Court reassembled with some new courtiers, and life was fun again.
‘I have paid the price for what I did,’ Ronnie told Olive, ‘but I can never have a receipt for it.’ To her, he seemed unchanged by his recent confinement, except that he had lost weight, which in her view was a good thing. She seemed never to consider that he might have suffered, physically or psychologically, and perhaps Ronnie concealed this from her. In retrospect, David thinks that prison may have accentuated Ronnie’s propensity for violence. Occasionally he would thrash the boys, bizarrely enough with his braces, which had metal fasteners and heavy leather ends that really hurt.
In business, Ronnie took up where he had left off. Using £50 borrowed from a friend he formed Courage & Company insurance brokers, and was soon handling large sums of money – though somehow earnings fell short of expenses. Then he formed another company, Artistic Dwellings and Estates Limited, to acquire and develop property in various parts of the country. In June 1935 an advertisement appeared in the Bath Weekly Chronicle and Herald, addressed ‘To Builders and those interested in Estate Development’; it proclaimed that ‘R. Cornwell & Co., of 7–9 Baker Street, London W.1’, had ‘unlimited funds immediately available for all types of building finance and every type of mortgage’.
On 10 August 1935 a damaging article about Ronnie’s development business appeared in John Bull (a patriotic weekly periodical once owned by the demagogue Horatio Bottomley, coincidentally one of Ronnie’s heroes). Providing details of his convictions, it was illustrated with a photograph of one of the prisons in which he had served his sentence. Ronnie threatened legal action, but facts were facts. According to Ronnie, the article was ‘disastrous’ for the business, which went into voluntary liquidation soon afterwards; ‘it entirely knocked the bottom out of things’. His insurance business ceased trading also. The boys noticed that he began to park the car in the woods behind the house, where it could not easily be spotted. Ronnie kept afloat by borrowing £300 from Olive and £600 from a friend, but this only postponed the inevitable. On 31 March 1936 he was adjudged bankrupt, with liabilities amounting to £20,064 0s 6d, against assets of £795 4s 5d.* Olive too found herself temporarily bankrupt, though the order against her was discharged five weeks later.
The Cornwell household endured serious domestic shortages as the family’s credit dried up. Once again tradesmen lined up in the garden as the house was emptied. In the London Bankruptcy Court, Ronnie was cross-examined at length by the Official Receiver. The court ruled that he should be forbidden from taking part in the management of any company while he remained an undischarged bankrupt.
The case was reported in full in the local Dorset press, causing further embarrassment to the Cornwell family. One piquant detail of the cross-examination concerned a transaction with an unnamed young woman, who had answered an advertisement for a clerical position. During her interview Ronnie had offered to put her in touch with a solicitor looking for someone prepared to advance a loan of £250 in exchange for a position in his office. She agreed to these conditions, and subsequently advanced a further £100. Asked by the Official Receiver whether he thought this a safe investment, Ronnie answered, ‘At the time I had no qualms at all.’ He admitted that he had received a ‘nice fee’ for introducing the young woman to the solicitor.
Frank Cornwell again came to his aid. On his daughter Ruby’s twenty-first birthday in 1936, he apologised that he was not going to be able to give her so much as he had hoped, explaining that he had felt obliged to assist his son. In fact he asked the girls to raid their Post Office savings accounts to help their brother. Through nominees, Ronnie formed a new company, Moreland Developments Limited, engaged in what has become known as ‘buy to let’: the company purchased houses with the aid of mortgages provided by building societies, servicing the interest payments out of the rent roll. As an undischarged bankrupt, Ronnie was forbidden by law from purchasing property or playing a formal role in any company, but he circumvented such snags by using trusted nominees, who were compensated accordingly, and was engaged by Moreland Developments as its ‘financial consultant’. His usual practice was to buy the property himself in the first place, and then sell it on to the company at a profit.
Once on his feet again, Ronnie took Hazel Cottage, a large ‘Tudorbethan’ house in Rickmansworth, built on what had until recently been farmland. For the boys, the relocation to Rickmansworth was the first of a bewildering succession of moves within the Metroland on the edge of north-west London, where old villages had become islands in stockbroker-belt suburbia, and green fields had been replaced by golf courses. David came to loathe its bogus rusticity; his character Aldo Cassidy would sneer at its cautious commuters as ‘Gerrards Crossers’.
In the mock-raftered drawing room stood one of the earliest television sets, ‘an upended mahogany coffin’, as David remembers it, ‘with a tiny screen that shows fast-moving spots and just occasionally the misted features of a man in a dinner jacket’.24 Looking back on his boyhood, David would write that he and his brother had lived ‘in the style of millionaires or paupers’. When Moreland Developments went into compulsory liquidation three years after its formation, the company supposedly owed Ronnie £80,000. This colossal sum (the equivalent of £11 million today) gives some indication of the kind of accounting that enabled Ronnie to support himself in such style. For the boys, these ups and downs were disturbing; even when times were good, they could not feel secure.
At Hazel Cottage the Cornwells employed a cook, a cleaning woman and a gardener. A very beautiful girl arrived to be the boys’ nanny. This was Annaliese Lieschwitz, a German refugee in her late teens whom Ronnie had met through some American officers. In retrospect, David assumed that she was his father’s mistress and associated her with ‘a hazily remembered memory of carnal flurry’, though he was never certain whether this was a real memory or an imagined one. Annaliese taught the boys snatches of German, a language which took hold of him and never let go. From her they learned to ask Bitte, darf ich den Tisch verlassen? when they wanted to get down from the table after a meal. If we can trust the fictionalised version given in A Perfect Spy, David loved her in a way that he never loved his own mother. But then she too was gone, and though he searched for her over the years, he would never find her.*
Once again everything was ‘marvellous’. The boys’ bedroom cupboards were stuffed with new toys – though, like the houses they had inhabited before, it was empty of books. Weekends were one long adult party. The boys kicked footballs around the garden with riotous ‘uncles’; at night they went to sleep to the sound of music and raucous laughter from downstairs. Ronnie made a down payment on a stylish car, manufactured by a new British company called SS (which changed it
s name to Jaguar after the war). One memorable day he and the boys motored to Pendine Sands in South Wales, a seven-mile stretch of beach where several world land-speed record-breaking runs had been made. There they raced the car back and forth as fast as it would go.
Tony was growing into a tall, gangly youth, with curly brown hair, strong and confident. Ronnie would always cast him as the stolid, reliable one, against David’s more erratic and unpredictable nature. The two boys were close; their shared experience of life on the move had isolated them from the conventional world and bound them together. Tony recalls his little brother as very charming, but also very vulnerable; he felt a duty to watch over him. ‘Tony was my minder, protector and only friend,’ David recalls. He looked towards his big brother as his guardian.
At Christmas Ronnie took the family off to St Moritz, accompanied as always by several members of the Court. Though St Moritz was going through a period of decline in the late 1930s, ski resorts remained the preserve of the privileged, inaccessible to most Britons. They stayed at the Kulm, a luxurious five-star, family-run hotel with a long tradition of providing for wealthy English visitors. Ronnie and Olive took a suite, with the two boys sharing a room. For Tony and David this was an adventure, the first time they had ever been abroad. They learned to ice skate, and Ronnie took up curling. As in England, but on a grander scale, he entertained lavishly, giving cocktail parties in the Grill and keeping open house in the Cornwell suite, where they received a stream of visitors. Olive became increasingly concerned about how they would pay for it all, but Ronnie told her not to worry. On the evening before their departure he marched into their suite and announced airily that he had bought the hotel.