Patrick wrote to Jim Lees-Milne:
Alan came and stayed with me in Essex before I left. He is not going to marry Joan – but do not spread it, as he hasn’t told her yet. I think he is thoroughly wise. His three weeks in Salzburg must have done the trick, enabling to see the thing in proportion: & I encouraged him wanting to break it off. He talks of going miles away abroad somewhere for a year. I wonder if she will be very upset. He thinks not, and says she isn’t really in love with him so much as with the idea of getting away from home & with the glamour of his life.31
A couple of weeks later he told Lees-Milne that he gathered ‘from Alan’s letters that he has not yet had the courage to break it off with Joan’.32
At the end of November 1933, Lady Eyres Monsell sailed for India and Australia with Joan and some Kettlewell cousins for four months, in order to part her from Alan Pryce-Jones and to persuade her to forget him. Their departure was published in The Times Court Circular.33 A few weeks later – and with much greater anonymity – a young Paddy Leigh Fermor took a small Dutch steamer from Tower Bridge to the Hook of Holland.
4
Earning One’s Living
Even in her absence, Joan was a story:
The other piece of news is that Miss Joan Eyres Monsell . . . is enjoying herself quite a lot, but in a different way to what she does in this country. She rides every morning (the ponies belonging to the Maharajah of Jaipur); she drives in a large and fast car, also belonging to the Maharajah, and she watches polo (Will she do this in England this summer? Probably not); she shoots; she’s becoming a thorough sportswoman.1
Maharajah Man Singh II, who had inherited his title when he was eleven, was young, good-looking and extremely rich. Despite being married he also enjoyed the company of beautiful women. However much Joan liked watching him – and the maharajah was one of the finest polo-players of his time – she still had other things on her mind when she returned from India.
Joan and her mother arrived back in England on 24 March 1934. A month later, Cyril Connolly and his wife, Jean, hosted a dinner party at their new flat above a shop in the King’s Road. Cyril liked to boast that his guests were chosen as carefully as instruments in an orchestra.2 Along with Joan, who was at Cyril’s right hand, the ten people seated around his table that evening included Evelyn Waugh and Peter Quennell. Afterwards, some of the party went on to the Florida nightclub. Cyril recorded his reactions to Joan in his journal:
Found her very attractive. Talked about Alan, whom she says won’t marry her without a grand wedding. We all got very tight at the Florida. Altogether a very pleasant balmy evening, a young party with two really pretty women. Terrible hangover next day, though amiable, tipsy and Eyres-Monsell-conscious in the morning.3
Cyril was at the start of what was to be a highly successful career as a writer and reviewer. He was a famously ugly man and looked like a pug dog – fat and prematurely bald with a little nose and a pasty complexion – but at the same time he could be wonderfully witty, intelligent company. Many beautiful women were attracted by Cyril’s great charm. When he talked, he had the ability to make a woman feel that she was his intellectual equal. Joan and he became close friends, and for much of his life Cyril was at least half in love with her. She once photographed him lying bare-chested on the ground in a pair of shorts, with a croquet mallet at his side. She always kept the photograph in her bedroom, although as the years passed much of the picture was eaten by tiny insects.
At the end of 1933, when Alan had left for Austria, he still had not found the courage to tell Joan that he did not want to marry her. Joan wrote from Admiralty House to Alan’s mother, Vere:
I very nearly came to see Alan off on Friday but didn’t in the end – Of all the depressing and unsatisfactory things seeing people off is the worst. I’m sure I shall really enjoy India [. . .] Anyway I should rather be there than in London if Alan is in Vienna. 4
On her return from her travels four months later, Joan no doubt expected to resume their relationship. Unfortunately, in the interim Alan had fallen in love with another girl. Thérèse ‘Poppy’ Fould-Springer came from a French-Jewish family who owned extensive property in Austria and Hungary and at Royaumont, near Chantilly. In February 1934, Vere received a letter from Alan:
Thérèse Fould is by now really almost my greatest friend. She’s almost a Madame de Sévigné; brilliantly witty and quite delicious too. The awful thing is that I would quite as soon spend the rest of my life with her (no that’s not really true) as with Joan; and what makes it worse is that she’s even richer prospectively. I seem only to take to the daughters of millionaires. They left today for Kitzbühel and I’m inconsolable – so much that after being up very late, I went out to Meidling [the Fould-Springer family home] this morning to have breakfast with them. But I suppose one ought not to marry a Jewess anyhow; especially if one is marrying someone else.5
In April, by which time Alan had seen Joan again, he wrote in his journal.
The whole family were there [Royaumont] and so unnecessarily nice that I’m sure, no I’m not, that they actually want me to marry Thérèse. But I must be wrong. Or has she said something? The awful thing is that I want to marry her.
Then Joan – oh, it’s absolute hell.6
Poppy was short, dark and plump – physically she could not have been less like Joan. She was barely twenty years of age, and even less well educated and less worldly-wise than her rival. She was determined, however, and before long Alan decided that he would marry her after all and this time he had the support of her parents. His own parents, he wrote, knew nothing about Jews and were certainly not anti-Semitic, but they included Jews in the ‘category of foreigners who were usually a trouble to know’.7 A few months later, Patrick Balfour told Lees-Milne that ‘Joan seems to have recovered and has some other chaps.’8
John Betjeman wrote to Alan from Uffington in October.
My darling Bog,
I was staggered by the announcement in The Times, particularly because I remember a man called Fould-Springer who had rooms under me at Magdalen and whom I very much disliked [. . .] Still you are not engaged to him, are you?
Oh Bog, Bog, how I miss you and how I envy your SUCCESS. Don’t marry without a long period of probation. Think of Cracky, Sarx [George Schurhoff] (who has got a job as Superintendent of the Cancer Hospital in Vienna), Li and all those of our friends who immediately drift away, however much one likes them. Oh God – the difference of being married from being a bachelor. It is like living on another planet.
My God, Bog, have a care – I do hope I shall see you. I am not what I was at all. I find it even quite odd to speak to people I haven’t seen for some time. It may even be a strain speaking to you. The fear of death is worse than ever, particularly when one works in a word factory. Avoid all work. I hope your marriage will enable you to do that. They are putting the electric light wires right across our view.
Love, JB9
In November, Joan was in Vienna but Alan refused to see her. She sent him a brief note, ‘I’m so sorry you find it impossible to see me. I thought that we should remain friends, which is all I want.’ Just before Christmas they did meet. Cyril held a party (in his diary he called it ‘a very good landmark of 1934’) attended by, among others, Joan, Patrick, Alan (without Poppy), Evelyn Waugh, Bunny Garnett, Henry Yorke and his wife ‘Dig’ (her real name was Adelaide), and the economist Roy Harrod. A few days later, Alan married Poppy Fould-Springer at Chantilly, with Patrick Balfour as best man. However hurt Joan might have felt at being jilted, it was because of Alan, who was such a social butterfly, that Joan was now invited to all the best parties and came to know everyone who was anyone in artistic and literary society.
In the summer of 1934, Joan and Penelope Betjeman went on a tour of Ireland on horseback, with a pre-war one-inch Ordnance Survey map as their only aid. At Clonmel they picked up two ponies and a rally cart which, although not smart, was comfortable and had room for their luggage, a spare saddle and a
big sack of oats. They took it in turns to ride and drive. The larger pony fitted the cart better, so they rode the other, but she shied at any car and they had great trouble getting her to pass them, even when they were parked. Ireland seemed not to have changed much since the eighteenth century. ‘There is still Georgian architecture everywhere, and you ride and drive along non-tarmac lanes for days without seeing a car or telegraph pole,’ Joan wrote in the unpublished account she made of their travels. Everywhere there were still burnt-out ruins from the recent Troubles: the big classical barracks near Clonmel; large houses near Fermoy; and, on one side of the Shannon, the Hermitage – a Georgian house belonging to Lord Massey:
It was destroyed in the Troubles by the Irish, who heard a foundationless rumour that English soldiers were to be quartered there. We borrowed brakeless bicycles and rode to see it, and found ragged robin growing in the lovely round hall, and ivy growing over the pilasters and the remains of a plaster frieze of grapes and cornucopias.
On the other side of the river, at St Senan’s Well, they met a woman who talked about fairies:
She did not think there could be any now, she said, no one ever saw them. Maybe there were some in the old days. They used to live in the hills or those ruined forts, like the one in the wood we had just passed. One man she knew had seen a leprechaun, and of course, there were banshees.
The people Joan and Penelope met they found hospitable, friendly and eccentric: ‘An old woman in black came hurrying along the stony road from a remote farm. She was going to a funeral she told us delightedly. Hadn’t we heard that Jimmy O’Brian was dead?’ Everywhere they went they experienced something new. Joan’s particular interest was in the buildings they encountered: dilapidated Georgian mansions in green fields with drives overgrown with grass, and ‘colour-washed cottages and farmhouses, pale blue, yellow, pink and cyclamen, looking clean and neat’. She seems to have been particularly enchanted by Ballynatray house and village, near Lismore:
It has a wild garden of roses and tall mallows, and a ruined abbey, haunted and romantic. Inside the abbey a statue of St. Molanafide, a 5th century saint, has rosaries and flowers laid before it by the villagers, and a stone in the wall will grant you wishes if you kiss it and sleep for three nights with three ivy leaves off it under the pillow. For dinner we had cold venison shot in the park. Afterwards, in the dusk, herons flapped slowly along the pale water. The Irish call them Judy of the Bog (or sometimes Norrie of the Bog). All night we heard the call of sandpipers and the whistling of curlews.
Writing nearly seventy years later, Deborah Devonshire said of the house:
In the 1930s Ballynatray took paying guests and Penelope Betjeman and Joan Eyres Monsell slept there on a riding tour. One of the party discovered an unwelcome object far down in the bed: the mustard plaster worn by someone who died of pneumonia. I cannot help wondering if John Betj. invented it. It would have been typical of the house – and of John. The last time I went to Ballynatray, three pigs and a couple of hounds were asleep in the sun, guarding the door.10
In her recollections of the trip to Ireland Joan frequently mentioned that she was taking photographs although unfortunately these Irish pictures have been lost. ‘We wanted to take a photograph of it [a Queen Anne deanery] and as no-one seems to mind in Ireland we walked up to the front door and rang the bell.’ The account, which must have been written at the end of the journey, remains only in typescript. She may have hoped that it would be published – and the very fact that the typescript was put between red covers and preserved suggests that she took some satisfaction from it. Although, as her letters demonstrate, Joan could write very well, she had more confidence in herself as a photographer. John Betjeman’s attitude as deputy editor of the Architectural Review was that the ‘Archie Rev’ was nepotistic: he used the magazine to commission work from his friends. In the second half of 1933 alone there were articles by W. H. Auden – ‘What is Wrong with Architecture?’ – two more by Patrick Balfour, ‘London, Morecambe and Elsewhere’ by ‘Cracky’ Clonmore, a poem, ‘Pylons’, by Stephen Spender, and Betjeman himself wrote a piece on railways. There was also an item on Nazi architecture. It was Betjeman who suggested that Joan should photograph buildings, and make them a speciality, since they were both so interested in architecture. Betjeman’s friends were also Joan’s friends. They were all creative people and doubtless gave her encouragement, and so photography became something more than just a hobby. From the mid 1930s onwards she described herself in official documents as a ‘journalist’.
Cameras were easily portable. She could even take them abroad with her when she travelled, and Joan travelled a great deal. Traditional ‘female’ subjects did not interest her – Joan did not photograph nature, flowers or fashion. In all her hundreds of pictures there is nothing to do with ‘being a woman’ per se, neither are there pictures relating to social concern or politics in an era when there was no lack of significant political events. Aside from places, buildings and monuments, Joan photographed people – especially her friends – and these are some of her most evocative pictures. John Betjeman wrote to Billa, comparing Joan’s pictures of her plump figure lying in the grass to those found in a glamour magazine: ‘Whenever I feel sexless I only have to turn up those photographs Joan took of you, to feel that I have read London Life cover to cover.’11 Joan took two photographs of the poet and aesthete Brian Howard; in one Howard lies languidly along the length of a sofa, and in the other he is draped across Joan’s lap, enacting a kind of dissolute and irreligious pietà. But among all her photographs, there are no pictures of her family, not even of the babies or children. It is as if they were beyond the pale. Graham detested being photographed even more than Joan, and there are even fewer pictures of Graham than there are of her. ‘All photographers are “bullshitters”,’12 he said, although presumably he excluded his sister from this assertion.
Success as a photographer at least gave Joan a certain amount of independence, and brought her a small income other than that controlled by her father. She was undoubtedly fortunate, however; unlike other contemporary woman photographers – Helen Muspratt, Barbara Ker-Seymer, Edith Tudor Hart, Dorothy Wilding, Madame Yevonde – the Eyres Monsell money meant that photography need never be Joan’s primary income. She was, in effect, a semi-professional. Folded among the pages of her sister Diana’s album there are instructions for developing film – ‘Wash for 1½ hours [. . .] Light may be turned on again when film has passed through developer 10 times’ – but although there was certainly space for a darkroom at Dumbleton, Joan did not develop her photographs herself. Her archive contains very many cardboard boxes, manila envelopes and cartons of prints and negatives, but apparently they were always developed by other hands.
At least as a photographer Joan could have some say in the matter of making her own images rather than being solely the subject of others’ view of her. Just how welcome Joan found this publicity it is difficult to say – she was essentially a private person – but two of her closest friends, Patrick Balfour at the Sketch and Tom Driberg at the Daily Express, were gossip columnists, so she can have had no illusions and must have just gone along with it. As Alan Pryce-Jones said, ‘experience had already taught her to be wary.’ Why the gossip columnists were attracted by Joan is made clear in a story in the Bystander in July 1933 of a party held at Admiralty House at which both she and her sister Diana were present: ‘Diana Eyres Monsell is unusually tall; she has a sincere, honest, character, and makes friends slowly. Her sister Joan is smart and up-to-date . . . It was interesting to see the contrast in the sisters and their friends.’13 In other words, Diana, who was chiefly interested in dogs and horses, was worthy but dull while Joan was more fun and made better copy. A couple of months later in yet another piece in the Bystander, Joan was described .as ‘very amusing and well-known among the high-brow set. Her engagement was announced some little time ago but promptly denied, but she is a strong-minded young lady and it is certain she will always strike out on her
own.’14 In December the same magazine published ‘Young and Original, A Gallery of Portraits’, which included a quarter-page photograph of Joan, who, it said, was ‘one of the more intelligent and original of London’s ex-debutantes’.
It is remarkable the extent to which one can find out the life Joan led and who she mixed with throughout much of the thirties by consulting the magazine and newspaper archives from those years. One can even trace the colours of the evening dresses she wore from the writers in the society columns: red, turquoise blue, ‘a lovely green lace dress’, a dress of black and white printed crêpe-de-chine, ‘cyclamen purple’, a white dress and a bracelet of orchids around her wrist. Along with the Bystander, Joan was also a particular favourite of a magazine published by the Illustrated London News called the Sketch. This weekly had lots of high-quality photographs to illustrate its articles and trivial gossip about high society. In October 1932, its columnist Mariegold reported that Osbert Sitwell gave Joan lunch at the Ritz. A month later at the Embassy Club it was informing its readers that Joan Eyres Monsell’s ‘good looks are in the best tradition of royal beauty, for she was wearing a positively Imperial purple dress’. Shortly after her return from India in 1934, Joan attended Wagner’s Ring Cycle by herself but she went to the ballet Euclid with a young man about town, Hamish Erskine. In June 1934, the Sketch devoted a whole page to Cecil Beaton’s bathroom at his house in Wiltshire. One of the bathroom walls was decorated with the outlines of the hands of his friends. The friends included Augustus John, Tilly Losch, Rex Whistler, Lady Colefax and Siegfried Sassoon, and just below the window, to the left of the towel rail, were Joan’s fingerprints. The social engagements sometimes crossed into the more private; in the same week that Sir Bolton Monsell told Alan Pryce-Jones that there was no question of marriage to his daughter, the Sketch published a page full of photographs under the title ‘Young Mayfair in Worcestershire’. The pictures were of a recent house party given by Coote Lygon and her sister Mary, known as ‘Mamie’, at Madresfield Court. Their guests that weekend included Joan, ‘the brilliant young author’ Alan Pryce-Jones, John and Diana Mason and Mark Ogilvie-Grant who was ‘well-known as a clever artist’. All except Joan appeared in a photograph captioned, ‘In this snapshot a group of the young Intelligentsia may be seen engaged in the simple pleasure of making daisy-chains.’ Another ‘charming picture’ was of Joan by herself, posed demurely under a cherry tree; perhaps she acquiesced because she was so at ease with her surroundings.
Joan Page 7