Although refused permission to marry, Joan and Alan had continued to spend much of their time together. The friends they saw most of were the two youngest Lygon sisters either at Madresfield, near Malvern, or at Halkin House, the London family home on the corner of Belgrave Square. In the absence of their parents, Lord and Lady Beauchamp, the Lygon children lived as they wished; they and their friends enjoyed all that the two houses, their servants, cars and horses could provide them with. They had oysters and Chablis for lunch, and drank the finest champagne whenever they wanted. Two years earlier, Earl Beauchamp’s indiscreet homosexuality had led to his downfall, and the Lygon family fell apart. Much as they loved their indulgent father, they knew about Lord Beauchamp’s ‘failing’ and even used to warn their visiting male friends to lock their bedroom door at night. In 1931, the earl’s brother-in-law, the Duke of Westminster, who both hated and envied him, had denounced him to the king. Shortly afterwards, on a June afternoon, a delegation of three fellow Knights of the Garter was shown into the drawing room at Madresfield, to persuade Beauchamp to resign his official posts. They warned him to leave the country by midnight in order to avoid arrest. Lady Beauchamp obtained a divorce shortly afterwards, detailing in the petition that throughout their married life ‘the Respondent habitually committed acts of gross indecency with certain of the male servants, masturbating them with his mouth and hands’.15 Lord Beauchamp’s brother-in-law sent him a note which read, ‘Dear Bugger-in-law, you got what you deserved. Yours, Westminster.’ Beauchamp spent the rest of his life travelling abroad as a fugitive from justice, restless and homesick.
The story was retold, albeit with necessary changes, in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Lord Beauchamp is transformed into Lord Marchmain, the beautiful Mamie was Julia and Coote, Cordelia. But the great unhappiness which befell this generation of the Lygons outlasted that of their fictional counterparts. In August 1936, Lord Beauchamp’s second son, Hugh Lygon – with whom Waugh was said to have been in love at Oxford – died of a fractured skull after a car crash in Bavaria. After the scandal the Lygon children were deserted by many of their friends, who no longer wished to know them. Joan, however, was constant by nature and non-judgemental in her friendship. Coote always remained one of her greatest friends and it might even be said that by agreeing to be photographed at Madresfield – for the Beauchamp scandal was well known in society if not by the world at large – Joan was making a public statement in the weekly magazine.
Just as Joan was finding a degree of independence and fulfilment in photography, it was perhaps to be expected that Graham’s hopes of becoming a concert pianist should come to nothing. His father, Bolton, had no sympathy. Having failed to make a career of the army or to take a degree at Oxford, or even to become a successful explorer like his cousin, Gino Watkins (it was Major Jackson who wrote up and published the account of his adventures), Graham had now proved himself a disappointment at something he had chosen to do for himself. Aged thirty, uninterested in hunting, shooting, politics or work of any ‘manly’ kind, and now seemingly unable to succeed even at an ‘artistic’ profession – the word in itself a euphemism for homosexual – Graham had a nervous breakdown. In an undated letter from this time, he wrote to Alan Pryce-Jones from Italy.
Alan dear,
Here I am in a frightful pensione, full of old English spinsters and retired naval officers being psychoanalysed by a certain Dr. Williams, who, it appears, is very expert.
All this as a result of a nervous crisis at the [?Sharfeseas] when their charming and very able Dutch doctor from Monte Carlo begged me to come here and see him.
In the intervals of the hideous boredom of being all alone I am put to the indescribable embarrassment of telling someone who is outwardly an elderly, dull, proper, middle class Englishman, how I dislike my father, what sort of boys I like and if, as a child, I would toss off with my right hand or my left. The more intimate details of my sexual enjoyment haven’t been touched on yet but I live in fear.
What I shall do if I’m not roaring dotty in a fortnight, I don’t know, but if I make any plans I will tell you.
Do write to me
Love
Graham16
He subsequently went for treatment at the Mayo Clinic in Boston, Massachusetts.
Graham’s struggles, while acute, were by no means extraordinary. Just a few years younger than the ‘Lost Generation’ who had sacrificed so much in the First World War, many young men and women Graham’s age could never, through no fault of their own, live up to the expectations of their parents. Just as daughters were still obliged to become debutantes and marry, so it was taken for granted that sons would manage their estates or go into respectable professions. There were many upper-class parents who alienated their children, both by interfering in their lives or through their own preconceptions of what their children should become. Refusal to conform to these preconceptions was taken as proof of immaturity, and a demonstration of wayward behaviour. Such inter-generational disconnection was made worse by a bully like Bolton. If the intensity of Joan’s relationship with Graham can be explained by the absence of a loving father in her childhood, when he was browbeaten by their father, she became even more protective of him. Joan and Graham contra mundum.
Unfortunately for her parents, Joan’s identification with ‘artistic’ types extended far beyond her brother, and most of her male friends – including Mark Ogilvie-Grant, Maurice Bowra, Patrick Balfour, Tom Driberg, Robert Byron, Brian Howard, Eddie Gathorne-Hardy and John Banting – were either homosexual (Joan herself wrote ‘queer’) or at least sexually ambiguous. The ‘artistic’ bohemian people she felt drawn to just happened to be more interesting, and simply more fun. Legally, however, they were also indulging in criminal behaviour.
Brian Howard, his sometime boyfriend John Banting and Eddie Gathorne-Hardy were the most outrageous. The flat Brian and Eddie shared at 39 Maddox Street was so decrepit that there was fungus growing on the stairs. According to John Betjeman, the atmosphere was sometimes enlivened by Banting throwing knives ‘when in the mood’. All three were regulars of the gossip columns. At Eton, Brian Howard had seemed the most sophisticated and flamboyant of pupils, his poetry already praised by Edith Sitwell. Then, at Oxford, he cut an extraordinary figure – ‘tall, dark, pale-faced with enormous eyes and very long eyelashes, fantastically distinguished in appearance’,17 and with two black spaniels trotting beside him. He seemed destined for a brilliant career, but it never happened. He became a critic for the New Statesman and wrote occasional articles and poetry for other magazines, but his reputation, after years of drink and drugs, was one of underachievement and of wasted talent. But all that lay in the future. ‘I would prefer to think of him in the dewy dawn sunlight, champagne in hand, all set for glory,’18 said Alan Pryce-Jones, of a distant, youthful memory.
Eddie Gathorne-Hardy was the second son of the Earl of Cranbrook, and was Brian’s ‘companion in fantasy’. He wore horn-rimmed spectacles and was high-browed, both literally and figuratively. He had a bent for scholarly research, an enthusiasm for recondite Cornish culture and was also an accomplished botanist. His character was a mixture of formality and excess, as well as impossibly demanding. There is a well-known story of a conversation between Eddie and Maslin, the repressed homosexual family butler:
‘Do you know what I’m going to do today, Maslin?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I’m going to go up to London, Maslin, and I’m going to pick up a very nice good-looking guardsman, take him back to my flat and I’m going to have him, Maslin.’
‘You’re a very lucky young gentleman, Mr Eddie.’19
He was a gift for writers; Miles Malpractice in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies is largely based on Eddie.
Robert Byron was another member of the Eton and Oxford circles in which Joan found herself and helped influence both her aesthetics and her imagination during this period. In 1927, he, Mark Ogilvie-Grant and their friend David Talbot Rice had travelled
with rucksacks on their backs up Mount Athos in Greece.* Byron, who was among the writers invited by Betjeman to contribute to the Architectural Review, had been an exuberant and rather overpowering presence at both Eton and Oxford. His influence on John’s taste and writing was considerable. Brian Howard said of Byron that in his company one felt ‘like an empty electric battery which has suddenly and mysteriously become recharged’.20 Passionately interested in all things Greek and Byzantine, he loved travel and published early. Byron’s friend, Christopher Sykes, wrote that for Robert:
foreign travel was part of an immense design of life. He was a gay young man, apparently living for pleasure. He rarely spoke seriously about these things in my hearing. When his second book, The Station, came out in 1928, I read it with surprise at the gravity and scholarship it displayed.21
In September 1935, Byron attended the Third International Congress of Persian Art and Archaeology at the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. The group he travelled with included Christopher Sykes, William Allen – who was an authority on the Caucasus – and Joan who, according to the Yorkshire Post, ‘has been studying Persian art all last summer in the intervals of the Jubilee season’. Despite many other temptations and Russian generosity, delegates gathered every morning in a small dark theatre to listen to lectures which many of them must have found obscure. Byron, who was correspondent for The Times during the Congress, wrote in his summing up:
Yet duty prevailed, even over those who had failed to realize, on successive previous evenings, that after ten courses of hot and cold hors d’oeuvres, with appropriate vodka, a Russian banquet was still to begin. Two medals and two books on Persian art were the hosts’ reward to each heroically Iranian-minded guest. And by the end each guest realized that he or she had in fact contributed something (if only a smile and a subscription) to a real intellectual event.22
Byron was, in truth, completely without illusions – the tradition of archaeological learning had been all but extinguished during the Revolution. He continued: ‘[It] survived thanks to the few brave men who refused to be intimidated by public odium and destruction of their fellows.’ Recognizing their service by allowing contact with foreign minds was the least that could have been done. Having been to Russia a few years earlier, Byron was better placed than most to assess the continuing effects of the Soviet experiment. He wrote to his mother:
The people look uglier than ever – one couldn’t believe ugliness on such a scale was possible unless one had seen it. There is the same total ignorance and disregard of standards in other countries – for example, now there is an Underground in Moscow (for which the plans were prepared before the War) no one can believe that anywhere else has had such a thing in years. All the modernist buildings have grown shoddy and horrible in three years’ weather. The persecution continues – since the murder of Stalin’s friend Kirov here, between 20,000 and 80,000 people have been ‘liquidated’ i.e. sent away, heaven knows where, after being given a few days notice to sell all they possessed.23
Aside from the Congress there was a great accompanying exhibition with treasures from remote museums all over the Soviet Union. There were also the glories of Leningrad’s architecture to enjoy – and Joan had taken her camera with her. How much she found of interest in the academic papers it is difficult to say – to any but an expert, lectures on ‘The Systematic Classification of Persian Pottery between the 10th–14th Centuries A.D.’, ‘The Function of the Bactrian Kingdom as a Clearing House of Ideas’ and ‘The Sassanian Development of Vault, Dome and Buttress and the Revolution Caused by these Developments in European Architecture’ must have seemed very abstruse, to say the least. Joan perhaps felt the effects of her negligible formal education, but she was on a mission to educate herself.
Byron’s most famous book was The Road to Oxiana, his account of a ten-month journey he made with Christopher Sykes from August 1933 to June 1934. Many years later, Bruce Chatwin was to regard The Road to Oxiana as ‘a classic text, indispensable’ and he must have discussed Byron – one of his heroes – with Joan, but it seems that it was one of Byron’s previous books that had an influence on her. First Russia, Then Tibet was published in 1933.
Tom Driberg, who wrote the ‘William Hickey’ social column in the Daily Express, was another of Joan’s close friends and regularly found a place for her on his page. In November 1935, after Sir Bolton had stood down as MP for Evesham and been raised to the peerage as Viscount Monsell, ‘William Hickey’ reported:
Tories in the Government are profoundly relieved by the news that Sir BOLTON EYRES MONSELL is to remain First Lord of the Admiralty. On his elevation to the peerage he will probably take the unimaginative title of Lord Monsell. He was originally Monsell: gained Eyres by marriage. His daughter, Joan – unusually tall, with attractively narrow eyes, very fair skin – has one pursuit which is exceptional in government or any other circles here. She is busily learning Tibetan.24
5
Love – and Marriage
While her sister Diana prepared for a traditional upper-class life, political and social upheavals were never too far away and had an impact on Joan’s own circle. They were of course of daily concern to Sir Bolton. In April 1935, Diana married Major Alan ‘Tim’ Casey, late of the Royal Dragoons, at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Casey had been a contemporary of Graham at Sandhurst, but Diana met her husband while staying at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire; Casey was the new local master of foxhounds. Joan and her sister Patricia were the two adult bridesmaids and carried bouquets of red flowers; there were four little girls and a page who wore a uniform of the Dragoons of 1830. It was a large society wedding, attended by the Japanese, German and French ambassadors and the Chinese minister. Sweden, Italy and Finland were represented by their naval attachés. Sybil gave the newly married couple four Jersey cows from the Dumbleton herd as a wedding present, and after a honeymoon in Vienna the Caseys became farmers at Market Overton in Rutland – Cottesmore hunting country. Unfortunately, along with the marriage came Miss Bailey, Tim’s cook and housekeeper from the house he had lived in as a bachelor. Miss Bailey refused to allow Diana to enter her own kitchen; a situation which lasted while living in two houses until, at last, Miss Bailey’s death thirty years later.
Back in early 1933, Billa Cresswell and John Betjeman had attended a Labour meeting in Cheltenham. Afterwards, as Billa told Alan, there were questions: ‘would the Labour government abolish fox-hunting, and if not why not?’ and ‘how many acres of land that could be cultivated were given over to deer forests?’ Then they sang the Red Flag. Goodness, she was moved!1 The Labour Party had been humiliated in the General Election of 1931, losing four-fifths of its seats. In the same election, Oswald Mosley failed to win a seat as the leader of the New Party. Having started his political career as a Conservative MP, Mosley had subsequently joined the Labour Party before resigning over its unemployment policies. The New Party, which he had launched, originally attracted a great deal of moderate and cross-party support – Alan Pryce-Jones was briefly a member – but afterwards Mosley moved further and further to the right. A visit to Mussolini in Italy impressed Mosley deeply, and having wound up the New Party he founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Bolton Eyres Monsell’s constituency, Evesham, was rural, and depended on market-gardening. Like much of Worcestershire it was badly hit by the agricultural depression of the 1930s. Many of the villages had been emptied of their young men by the First World War and for the younger generation there was considerable unemployment – the nearest industry was in Gloucester. For a constituency like this, fascism, which offered protectionism and isolationism, had considerable appeal, and Mosley himself considered standing in Bolton’s seat in 1935, or at the very least putting up a BUF candidate. The constituency was seen as vulnerable, especially as Sir Bolton’s twenty-five years in the seat were at an end. In March 1935, the Gloucestershire Echo reported that Mosley, one of the most dazzling orators of the twentieth century, spoke for an hour to nearly a thousand people at the Public
Hall, Evesham. Six months later in Pershore, the headquarters of the BUF in the Evesham constituency, he gave a speech attacking the Labour Party as communists for backing intervention in the Italian–Abyssinian war. In the event, however, there was no BUF candidate in the Evesham election in November 1935, nor anywhere else. The newly created Lord Monsell’s replacement as the Conservative candidate, Rupert de la Bère, was returned with an increased majority of over twelve and a half thousand. Mosley had missed his opportunity. Billa wrote cheerfully to Alan in Austria on the eve of polling day. She was an ardent Tory. Indeed, there was no party reactionary enough for her, though she was quick to inform him that she was not a fascist – far from it. She was just ‘feudal’. Instead of the Tory squire she said she had hoped for, two years later Billa married Roy Harrod, an Oxford economist and a supporter of the Liberal Party.
Joan Page 8