It was Tom who introduced Joan to John Rayner. In February 1936 an article appeared in the Express under the subtitle ‘Vision of Beauty Changes with the Years – Five Experts Look at Mrs. Brown Potter (Toast of the Nineties) and Reveal Today’s Ideals’. The article was inspired by the recent death of Cora Brown Potter, an American society lady and contemporary ‘beauty’ who had become a stage actress. Five Express writers were asked to write a brief paragraph on current equivalents. Between them they chose the actresses Marlene Dietrich and Luise Rainer, and a Miss Pamela Treffry (‘character, beauty of line, repose – such an antidote to dental displays and assertive ingenuousness’); Tom, as ‘William Hickey’, proposed the blues singer Ethel Waters (‘bone-structure like a Benin carving’); and John Rayner, the features editor, chose the Hon. Joan Eyres Monsell – ‘Very blonde, high cheek-boned, looks best in country or riding clothes. When she was in Budapest crowds used to wait outside the hotel for her to come out so that they could get a glimpse of the “English Venus”. She is a daughter of Lord Monsell, First Lord of the Admiralty.’15 Whether or not the Budapest story was true – and it probably owes much to journalistic invention – in a very public fashion John was showing his interest.
In 1933, John Betjeman had been in desperate need of increasing his income in order to marry Penelope Chetwode. Fortunately, his friend Jack Beddington – the director of publicity at Shell – was keen to encourage drivers to use more petrol and, at the same time, associate the company with a caring stance on the environment and English heritage. Together, the two men persuaded the controlling director of the Architectural Review, Jack Regan, that a series of county guides would be both good publicity and a profitable adventure. Betjeman produced a dummy guide to his own favourite county, Cornwall, and saw that his salary would be raised to £400 to cover the extra work involved. Betjeman had a very real love of the appearance of books, their print, layout and varieties of type, and although he resigned from the Architectural Review in 1935, he continued to work for Beddington as general editor of the Shell Guides, distributing the writing of them among his friends. For Hampshire, Betjeman asked John Rayner. Jack Beddington wrote to JR, specifying that he would be paid a fee of fifty guineas with an addition of up to ten guineas for travelling expenses: ‘You will use Maurice Beck as your photographer and you will get the work done this summer [1936].’ When the guide was published in 1937, the following year, under the quirky title Towards a Dictionary of the County of Southampton, commonly known as Hampshire or Hants, it turned out be one of the most successful in the series. Beck’s photographs, however, are rather dull, and he did not share the car with JR. Instead, John took Joan with him in order no doubt to survey Joan as well as the county – she certainly took no photos. By the end of the trip they had fallen in love. The problem being, however, that John also had a wife called Molly and they had a son named Nicholas.
In the spring of 1937, Tom Driberg, Peter Quennell and Joan all sailed for New York on the SS Berengaria. (This was reported in the Tatler as ‘Tall, golden-haired Joan Eyres-Monsell . . . has gone to join her brother in the USA.’16) Quennell was unsatisfactorily married for the second time and had turned his eyes to Joan, but she was receiving cables from Rayner in London. On Tuesday 5 March, Tom reported in his ‘William Hickey’ column, ‘Last day of trip. Bright sunshine, calm seas. We reach Quarantine about 6.30 this evening, dock at 8. I am lucky, say homecoming Americans, to be approaching New York for the first time, after dark when the lights make it even more impressive than by day.’ The homecoming Americans, he continued, included buyers from big New York fashion houses who had been to see the Paris collections:
Quietly dressed middle-aged women they find the trip a rest after seeing 3 or 4 shows of 200 to 250 dresses each day for a week, picking from every 200 perhaps 10 suitable for sale in the States. On board is America’s first consignment of new Paris models: ‘How dreadful if the ship sank with all those dresses,’ said a young woman.
Most original fashion note last night was provided not by France or America, but by Great Britain’s JOAN EYRES MONSELL, who came down to dinner wearing a purple dress, a scarlet and gold Eton jacket, a single extraordinary earring. It consisted of a bunch of 42 small gilt safety pins. No mere fashion plate, Miss Monsell has spent as much as she could screwing up her pretty but myopic eyes over a Tibetan dictionary. No mere highbrow either, she has been winning satisfactorily at trente-et-un.17
Perhaps being in love had given Joan confidence. Any woman who dressed with such flair knew exactly what she was doing and by now she must have become so used to being in the papers that she had decided that she would enjoy it. Joan spent a week with Graham. His treatment at the Mayo Clinic over the last couple of years had gone exceptionally well. At the time, Elton Mayo, an Australian, was professor of industrial relations at Harvard Business School. After a month of daily talks and reading psychology, Mayo asked Graham to take on the treatment of an outpatient at Boston Psychiatric Clinic, and he had shown such sensitivity to his patients that Mayo had given him further responsibility. As a result, Graham started to lose his own shyness and gain confidence: Mayo commented that he now preferred work to nightclubs. Subsequently, Graham was appointed as research assistant in industrial research at the Graduate School of Business Administration, and joined a team looking into the sociology of industrial workers – he seemed finally to be at ease with the world. Seeing Joan, however, gave him the opportunity to let his hair down. As he wrote to Alan Pryce-Jones in April, after Joan had returned to England, ‘Joan’s hectic visit to the New World ended in such a gay and drunken week in New York as I have seldom lived through.’ Perhaps Joan was also letting off some steam before resuming her affair with a married man.
Molly Rayner had first met her husband John in 1933 and, after finding that she was pregnant, they married in October that year. She was a woman who liked to drop names and she had social aspirations: there are posed photographs of Molly with her baby son in both the Tatler and the Bystander in 1935. She followed the magazines whereas the magazines followed Joan. In the summer of 1936 the couple spent a month travelling round Greece. ‘Greece v. cheap, beer v. good, lovely melons, women don’t wear belts, too hot and so walk very well,’ John wrote to his mother. But by then he had interests elsewhere. It was as if Molly didn’t quite fit. To begin with, Molly Rayner had no idea what was so wrong with her marriage to John but she eventually hired a private detective to follow her husband. The detective reported back that she had nothing to worry about: John was drinking so heavily in the Fleet Street pubs with his fellow journalists that he was likely to die soon from alcohol poisoning, so her problems would be over. Aside from physical attraction, John had in common with Joan a love of places and nature, music, art, reading, wine and good food, not to mention – and this is by no means trivial – an affection for cats. He was also inclined to tease. These traits, as well as other pursuits and interests, informed the way he thought and lived and the people with whom he chose to share his life.18
In mid 1937, soon after Joan’s return from America, John left his wife and moved in with Tom Driberg. In October, when Molly heard that John and Joan were in the south of France on holiday, she telephoned Tom to find out more and asked if her husband had been seeing Joan lately. Tom, out of loyalty, lied to her, saying that, on the contrary, he had been taking Joan out to dinner, and had usually arrived back to find John at home all by himself. He also claimed that he did not know they were in France together. The raggedness of the break continued – Molly was expecting another child. Their daughter, Amanda, was born in April 1938. John always claimed afterwards – probably out of guilt – that he had somehow been tricked by his wife into getting her pregnant, to prevent him leaving home. In later years, apart from paying monthly maintenance and sending Christmas and birthday presents, he had little contact with his first two children.
For some time while he was still married, Joan and JR were spending weekends together at Tickerage Mill near Uckf
ield in Sussex. Dick Wyndham, ‘Dirty Dick’, the owner of the mill, was an artist and a photographer who had won the Military Cross in the First World War. He was a very tall man, thin and gangling, and he dressed appallingly in filthy flannel trousers – his fly buttons invariably undone – and an old ragged mackintosh, but he possessed immense charm. In his emotional life, one attractive woman followed another. It was said that, on his regular trips to the south of France, when he drew up at a wayside hotel, the proprietor, who was an old acquaintance, would invariably greet him with the same remark, ‘Que madame a changé!’ as he led his clients to their room.19
Wyndham had inherited Clouds in Wiltshire, a house built for his family by Philip Webb in the 1880s and decorated by William Morris, but he had found its upkeep impossible and sold it in 1936. In its place, Wyndham bought Tickerage, a far smaller mill house flanked by a mill pond with a shallow lake lying at the bottom of a valley beneath a steep slope covered with apple trees. If Dick was not abroad, he invited gatherings of friends. Although these were essentially masculine affairs, girlfriends were welcome, and a long procession of women found themselves invited to the mill, Joan among them. At one such weekend Joan photographed the host and guests. Along with JR and Joan, the guests included Patrick Kinross (Patrick Balfour’s father having died, he had inherited the title), Constant Lambert, Angela Culme-Seymour (who was married to Kinross), Tom Driberg, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and his boyfriend Tony Hyndman, and Mamaine Paget, who later married Arthur Koestler.
Connolly loved Tickerage. In his 1945 book The Unquiet Grave, he listed it as having the magical qualities which helped him keep angst at bay:
The mill where I sometimes stay provides another cure for Angst; the red lane down through the Spanish chestnut wood, the apple trees on the lawn, the bees in the roof, the goose on the pond, the black sun-lit marsh marigolds, the wood-fires crackling in the low bedrooms, the creak of the cellar-door, and the recurrent monotonies of the silver-whispering weir, what could be more womb-like or reassuring? Yet always the anxious owner is flying from it as from the scene of a crime.20
Wyndham was a generous host, and he provided good food and good wine. He was also a good listener who enjoyed good conversation. Tom Driberg said these weekend parties were the best he ever attended. Many years later, Mamaine Paget’s twin sister Celia recalled in a letter to Joan:
It’s good to remember the old days at Tickerage: the intellectual treasure hunts (you won one of them), the bluebell wood, walks across country on summer nights under the full moon with nightjars whirring, the marvellous food and wine, playing croquet – John Piper says when he went there once we were playing it uphill. Dick certainly was a very special person, and I miss him still.21
Once the decree absolute came through in March 1939 dissolving JR’s marriage to Molly, he was free to marry Joan. Their modest wedding took place in July at Caxton Hall Register Office in Westminster. They were both dressed in blue and Joan wore a spray of orchids. John Betjeman was one of the witnesses, the other was a Mr E. G. Wood – a young man they had met on the stairs together with the young woman he himself was marrying. John’s colleagues did not find out until they saw the story in the evening papers. This struck them as impressively casual and aristocratic, the effect he had doubtless intended. The wedding was widely reported. While John Betjeman was just a ‘friend’, Mr E. G. Wood got the headline: ‘Cabby as Witness at Wedding’. The Daily Mirror even carried his photograph, sitting at the wheel. After all, both JR and Joan described themselves as ‘journalists’ in the marriage register, and knew how to make a good story for the press.
Joan’s parents can only have been relieved that she was at least now married and no longer living openly with a married man. They must long have abandoned hope that she would live any sort of respectable life. And JR had a reasonable salary so he was not marrying Joan for her money. Cyril Connolly, however, whose marriage to Jean had collapsed amidst adultery, recrimination and general mayhem, said Joan’s wedding was the unhappiest day of his life.
6
Wartime London
Joan and JR started their married life in his small flat in Blue Ball Yard, an eighteenth-century yard with stables off St James’s Street in Piccadilly. JR wrote to his mother that it felt like starting all over again, and that life was very enjoyable. But, within weeks, Joan was almost a widow. In August they went to stay in Hammamet in Tunisia, where Graham had been lent a house. They hired a car for four or five days and drove down to the oases and the city of Kairouan. John was bitten by a dog and they were frightened that it might have been rabid, but the Institut Pasteur confirmed that it was not enragé. However, a week or so after their return to London, John fell ill. Joan looked up typhoid in a medical dictionary and he seemed to have all the symptoms, but the Daily Express staff doctor turned out to be incompetent and had no idea what John was suffering from. When his temperature rose above 104 degrees, a tropical disease specialist was called in, but he diagnosed malaria and gave him the wrong medicine. Finally, at Joan’s instigation, Lord Dawson of Penn, the physician to the Royal Household and former President of the Royal College of Physicians, came to see her husband. He only needed to stand at the door of John’s hospital bedroom to give a correct diagnosis of typhoid fever. John was moved into a private nursing home in Portland Place, where he lay ill and delirious for days. Amidst all this, on Sunday 3 September, Neville Chamberlain broadcast to the nation announcing that the country was at war.
Joan wrote to Penelope Betjeman from Blue Ball Yard.
Darling Penelope,
John has been desperately ill with typhoid, in fact on Tuesday everyone was sure he was going to die but suddenly he fell asleep & got over the crisis. Since then he has recovered a bit and his temperature is down a lot. It used to go to nearly 106. He was delirious for several days, the most nerve-wracking thing & most unfair that he should suffer mentally as well as physically. He still has three special nurses & tubes of oxygen outside his door & the most depressing thing is he is almost certain to have a relapse.
I am sleeping at [B]elgrave [S]quare now, except when I slept at the nursing home, as it was so gloomy here alone. I feel very unreal & the war hardly exists. Let me know if you ever come to London.
Best love Joan.1
In the midst of all this the October edition of the Architectural Review included a seven-page report and photo shoot on Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, full of pictures of row upon row of funeral monuments, weeping angels and long avenues of cedar trees. The article ought to have been the highlight of Joan’s career so far and a matter of great satisfaction. Instead it was all too horribly real. Her new husband had almost died and she could not know what horrors the declaration of war might presage. Slowly, John recovered but at Christmas he was still too weak to leave Portland Place. Joan went to stay at Tom Driberg’s new house, Bradwell Lodge in Essex. The lodge was a half Tudor, half Georgian house with a belvedere – a room built by a former owner on top of the house with a view all around, so that he could watch out for smugglers. Her fellow guests were Tom’s brother Jack, Constant Lambert and Patrick and Angela Kinross. In the mid 1930s, Patrick had changed from being a gossip columnist to travel writing, with books on journeys through Asia and central Africa. With the imminence of war and his father on the point of death, it had seemed a desirable time to prepare for some sort of permanence by marriage. But his choice of wife could not have been more disastrous. Angela Culme-Seymour was very beautiful. She had a complexion like camellia flowers, large dark eyes and long bewitching eyelashes, but Angela was not made for permanence: she had left her first husband, Johnny Churchill, while changing buses in Malaga in the south of Spain – it had seemed a good idea at the time.2 JR, although unable to come himself, had sent Tom a house-warming present of a visitors’ book, an inch and a half thick, printed with the name of the house and Tom’s initials. Rationing had not yet begun, so there was plenty of food, but Tom could scarcely boil an egg, so he hired a cook from
a London agency. The cook turned out to be ‘a highly superior Scottish matron’ who had previously held posts in ducal households and had never worked without the assistance of at least a kitchen maid. She did not hide her pained surprise at the inadequate and chaotic kitchen arrangements, but the cooking was splendid. Her forbidding presence rather chilled the Christmas spirit and Tom was relieved when she left.3
JR attributed the typhoid to the ice in a gin and tonic which he had drunk after a hot walk along the beach at Hammamet. There were no long-lasting effects from his illness, although he believed that the typhoid triggered his deafness in later years. Joan had saved his life, and he remained perpetually grateful to her for her generosity in summoning Lord Dawson, but the considerable bill had to be paid off in £50 instalments and Joan had very little money of her own. At the beginning of January, while still in the convalescent home, JR wrote to John Betjeman. He had noticed that Betjeman, who now made regular radio broadcasts, was giving a talk that day on the Home Service about the poet Sir Henry Newbolt.
I hear you are in a state about the war. I have been in here for nearly 4 months & hope to be out in under a week. But will have to convalesce. Have you any books to recommend, old or new . . . ? I wish I cd. leave the [Daily Express] & become a bird watcher, preferably in Surinam. Love to Π [Penelope], tell her we are married in the eyes of the State, & if she quarrels with that she’s a King’s Enemy. JR.4
Finally, JR was able to leave hospital, and after spending time in their London flat, Joan and he went down to Brighton, Cornwall and Dorset in order to convalesce. Meanwhile, Betjeman was making attempts to join the armed services, but in January he was turned down on medical grounds by the RAF; he later claimed he had been rejected because the interview exposed his fear of spiders. He wrote to Joan to ask if her father could help. Joan herself was trying to find work as a photographer. She replied from Cornwall:
Joan Page 10