Every now and then, there would be reports, secondhand, of the sisters’ slanders: a note from Flora to the newspaper proprietor Lord Northcliffe, or a heap of letters written by Amalia to the Countess de Baillet, vilifying Victoria, which somehow found their way to Victoria after the Countess’s death. Victoria, on the other hand, felt that she had always treated ‘that vile Amalia pretty well’, having topped up her allowance and given her an extra share of Papa’s insurance money after his death in 1908. Lionel was outraged, on his wife’s behalf, by the fact that ‘Amalia has neglected no opportunity of abusing Victoria and uttering the most abominable calumnies about her ever since, by her own wish, she left her father’s house.’
Relations were further complicated by the fact that Amalia and Victoria continued to move in some of the same social circles. In May 1911, Vita and her father attended a fancy-dress ball at the Savoy Hotel in aid of Middlesex Hospital. Lionel was dressed as Thomas Sackville and Vita as an ‘Orientale’, while Amalia, as Victoria observed sarcastically, ‘had the good taste to be there in a Spanish dancer’s dress’ – Victoria clearly thought that Amalia lacked judgement in drawing attention to her origins in this way. That evening, Vita ‘had a curious experience with Amalia’: as Vita sat down at a table reserved for the ‘Hon Miss S. W.’, thinking it was hers, ‘a lady came up & claimed it, declaring “You are not the only one bearing that name, Vita!”’ The lady turned out to be Amalia, and so Vita slunk discreetly away.
There was also some overlap between their professional circles. By a strange coincidence, several family members were among the crowd of over a thousand packed into the Galerie des Glaces in the Palace of Versailles on 28 June 1919 for the signing of the treaty which brought the First World War to an end. Amalia’s first cousin, my great-uncle Charlie, was the British Military Representative to the peace conference. Amalia’s niece’s husband, the young diplomat Harold Nicolson was there, dressed in tails and a black slouch hat, as a member of the British delegation, and it is to him that we owe some of the most poignant descriptions of the day: the splendour of the French Republican guards, their sabres flashing as they saluted the guests, in contrast to the defeated German signatories being led from the hall ‘like prisoners’. Amalia’s husband-to-be, a French diplomat called William Martin, was there, too. As Keeper of the Seals, Martin was responsible for collecting, in advance, all the state seals of the signatories to the treaty and then transporting the treaty itself from the Quai d’Orsay to the Palace of Versailles.
William Martin had entered the French diplomatic service in 1888, and his personnel file is full of consistently good reports from his superiors: ‘parfaite éducation’, ‘excellente conduite personelle’, ‘excellente caractère’ and so on. He spoke good English and Spanish, and had had postings in Lima, Belgrade, St Petersburg and Madrid, before his appointment in 1913 as Ministre Plénipotentiare Chef du Service du Protocole, Introducteur des Ambassadeurs. It was in this role, predominantly social and ceremonial, that Martin had his moment of glory, a couple of months before his marriage, in the Galerie des Glaces.
On 23 August, Harold wrote to Vita from the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, ‘your aunt Amalia is engaged to the Chef du Protocole here – one William Martin (a French man – sort of Lord Chamberlain to the Republic). He is a dip. by profession – so one day she will be an ambassadress – & in any case she will have a big official position here. Isn’t it a joke?’ On hearing reports of Amalia’s engagement, Victoria told Vita how lucky Amalia had been to get anyone to marry her at her ‘tender age’. ‘Il sera bien volé [‘he will be well and truly fleeced’], l’âne Martin, mais c’est son affaire; & j’espère qu’il a un peu de filthy lucre a lui offrir.’
Amalia and William were married in Paris at the end of August. Although the wedding was celebrated ‘dans l’intimité’, according to Le Gaulois, the witnesses included Monsieur Stephen Pichon, the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Sir George Grahame, the British chargé d’affaires – a high-level diplomatic turnout reminiscent of Flora’s marriage in Paris thirty years before. Victoria noted dismissively that Amalia was now fifty-one, and her husband fifty-four, and therefore, as she described it, ‘no blooming virgins’ – just as she had scoffed a quarter of a century before at Amalia’s young ‘sparks’, many of whom, she claimed, were ‘counter-jumpers’. It was ironic, though, that Amalia was getting married just as Victoria’s own marriage was coming finally to an end. For twenty years, Victoria had turned a blind eye to her husband’s affairs, but she could no longer ignore the presence in their lives of the latest, and most long-lasting, mistress, Olive Rubens. The other irony, as Harold had hinted and Victoria noted, was that there was talk of William Martin getting posted to England, in which case Amalia might ‘come as Ambassadress to England! Ce serait drôle!’
In 1920, Martin was appointed Ambassador to Lisbon, but the humid summer climate did not suit either him or his new wife, and within months he was asking for a couple of months’ leave in France. He left Lisbon for good in 1921, barely a year after taking up the post. From that point, his career rather petered out – in postings as the French delegate to various international commissions in Eastern Europe. But his ambitions – and certainly those of Amalia – were undiminished, particularly as, he told his superiors, she was the daughter of a former British ambassador and closely related to the great aristocratic, political and diplomatic dynasties of Salisbury and Derby. There were even links, through the De La Warr family, with the government of Ramsay Macdonald.
By 1924, Martin was begging for an appointment to crown his career – Spain, perhaps, which he knew very well; England, where his wife was well connected, he claimed, and tirelessly promoted France’s interests in conversation with prominent ‘hommes politiques’; or the United States, where Amalia had spent several years as the daughter of the British Minister. Poor William Martin certainly did not want to retire at sixty, but in the end he had to settle with being made a Grand Officier de la Légion d’Honneur in 1925, and a pension of 12,000 francs a year. For the rest of their life together, he and his wife lived in genteel poverty.
Many of these years were spent in East Kent: at first, tucked away among the woods near the church in Doddington, in a one-storey lodge with Gothic windows; then in the village of Lyminge. The writer Sir Sacheverell Sitwell recalled meeting Amalia in the Lord Warden Hotel in Dover, where she was staying between houses, in the late 1920s. He had not seen her since he was a boy in the early 1900s, when Amalia, whom he remembered as ‘very Spanish and very charming’, used to stay at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire with his mother Ida. Amalia was at the hotel with her husband, ‘a very distinguished old Frenchman with beautiful manners’, and told Sitwell that she had come to live there ‘because it was near Knole, which had been her home’. Sitwell had found this ‘very pathetic’, and Amalia ‘the victim of circumstances over which she had no control’.
Amalia nursed her resentments into old age. In December 1934, she wrote to her brother Max, after a long silence, thanking him for his letter and for sending a photograph of himself (which resembled their father so closely that at first she thought it was him). ‘We were waiting for each other to write,’ she began, before embarking on her version of the past. ‘O! dearest brother what tragedy lies behind all this . . .’ She recalled the day in 1896 when her father received Henry’s letter, asking for his legitimacy to be recognised. She had been alone with her father at Knole – and ‘that awful woman Victoria was away with her husband on a shooting visit’. ‘Father turned deathly pale & handed me the letter saying: “I am in a fine hole”.’ Although she had persuaded her father to write ‘a nice, kind letter’ to Henry, he changed his mind as soon as he had done so, claiming that he could not send it ‘without Victoria seeing it’. At that moment, Amalia had immediately known that ‘all was up & that the most terrible case was in front of us’.
In Amalia’s skewed version, Victoria was not their father’s child at all, but sim
ply the ‘fille de père inconnu’ her baptism certificate described her as – ‘& in that lies all the vengeance, cruelty & revenge of that woman’. Victoria, Amalia continued, ‘knew she was nothing & she was determined to be something’ – specifically, Lady Sackville. But ‘what she is no one knows’: she had not been brought up with the others, and had been sent off to the convent when their mother died; and yet, she ‘had a terrific influence over father. He could do nothing or say nothing without consulting her. He was terrified of her.’ ‘I now understand why,’ she added darkly. The judgement in Henry’s case had been a ‘blot on English justice’. And if ever the papers, proving Pepita’s marriage to their father, fell into her hands, Amalia promised, she would reopen the case, ‘shattering to pieces that infernal plot’. Their father, ‘cowed by that woman’, may have behaved ‘shamefully’ and ‘wickedly’, but had he lived, she argued, and been put in the witness box, he would have told the truth.
At the very least, their mother’s honour would have been spared. Amalia reassured Max how loved and respected Pepita had been in Arcachon, and told him that she had paid for their mother’s coffin not to be disinterred, and for a woman to tend the burial plot. As for Victoria, ‘where is she now, some say shut up, mad others say. She is queer & sees no one. I don’t know & I don’t care.’ Amalia herself, on the other hand, was ‘happily married not rich but holding my position all the same & Willie is beloved by all his “collègues”, he is retired, pensioned off & alas! the pension is small but better than nothing’. Most important of all, ‘I have proved by my marriage to the world we are legitimate because had I not been so I could not have married Willie his position was too great. I have done that woman [Victoria] in the eye & when she read in the papers I had been at a banquet at Buckingham Palace & received by the King & Queen she must have had a fit . . . O! the tragedy of it all dearest brother but O! the victory I have had over that woman.’
There is the most tantalising reference in this letter of 1934 to another of the ‘victims of a woman’s ambition’: the middle sister. ‘Poor Flora,’ wrote Amalia, ‘died 9 years ago in abject poverty she had gone to the bad, I tried to save her but it was no good, she left a son who is not much I am afraid, her husband is still alive but no one sees him, he behaved so badly to her etc.’
After the collapse of Henry’s court case, Flora at the age of forty-four had gone on the stage. ‘She has already made her debut in Paris,’ reported the Daily Mirror, ‘where, dancing in bare feet, she had a wonderful reception.’ Amalia was quoted on Flora’s lessons in Paris with Professor Teresa Cerutti, ‘who is undoubtedly the leading exponent in France of what is known as the “mimed” dance’, in which the dancer ‘expresses different emotions and incidents’. Amalia went on to tell the papers how she, too, proposed to go on the stage very shortly, making a pointed reference to Pepita’s legacy: ‘You see, the stage is in our blood – that part, at least, of our inheritance is undeniable. It is now absolutely essential that we should earn our living, for the expenses of recent litigation have left us practically destitute.’
Towards the end of 1910, Flora moved from Paris to London to try her luck there. She had a little postcard printed of a pencil drawing of herself, her eyes half-closed, a smile on her lips, and a wreath of roses haloing her head and blooming on her breast. ‘The Honourable Miss Sackville West’, it is captioned, beneath a Sackville coat of arms floating in the top left-hand corner. The serenity of the image belies her state of mind that Christmas. What we know about her movements and her mood comes from a correspondence with a Monsieur Vidal, with whom she had recently embarked on a relationship that was partly professional – he was, purportedly, her manager, her ‘tyran au théâtre’ – and partly something more, a man whom she wanted to become her ‘grand ami’. As so often in Flora’s letters, the tone is rather desperate, full of ‘le spleen’, as she traipses for auditions from theatre to theatre, several of them fairly small and some distance from the centre of town. She even considered, in an attempt to win sympathy, offering her services for free at a charity concert in aid of the families of miners killed in the terrible Pretoria Pit explosion in Lancashire in December 1910. She began to despair of ever finding in London someone who could sing in French to accompany her dancing – to recruit a singer from France would cost too much money. She was worried, as a result, that she would have to cancel her audition with the great theatre manager, Alfred Butt.
At this time, Flora felt that the world was against her. Her brother Henry was no help: he had disappeared for the time being and, according to Flora, needed to pull himself together after the failure of his lawsuit. She was also concerned about what the Sackvilles and their lawyers might be up to, convinced that she was under surveillance by a private investigator. Suffering from a terrible cold, and constantly racked by bouts of crying which left her feeling drained of energy, she was all alone in a deserted capital. ‘Tout est mort,’ she wrote to Vidal: it must be the English way of celebrating Christmas. She was also very discouraged by Vidal’s distance and apparent indifference. He had not sent her any money in order to help her stage her act – money for the set, props and accompanist, and for her accommodation at the Hôtel Metropole – but she also felt let down by him as a friend. It ‘only goes to show,’ she wrote, ‘that you can’t rely on anyone in this world . . . What a dreadful thing life is for those with no luck.’
In January, Flora was shown an article in a small English paper about a woman who had announced her imminent debut on the English stage under the assumed name of an old English family, claiming she was the daughter of a peer. The source of the story had not dared to name the woman or the family, but Flora naturally suspected that the story had been placed by the Sackvilles (possibly through an intermediary, the journalist Basil Tozer, whom Flora later threatened to sue) in an attempt to distance themselves from the shame of Flora’s debut.
In March 1911, Flora made her English debut at the London Palladium. The Palladium had opened on Boxing Day 1910, just a few months before, to provide a new style of entertainment for the middle classes: entertainment that was popular – there was seating for up to 3,000 people – and yet also contained elements more ‘cultured’ than the staple music-hall fare. A typical ‘variety’ bill of a dozen acts might include Cockney comedians and circus performers – jugglers, tightrope walkers, tumblers and so on – as well as scenes from Shakespeare, potted versions of opera, and ‘ballets divertissements’.
In a cultural sense, then, Flora’s divertissement in La Danse des Fleurs followed in her mother’s dainty footsteps. The Playgoer and Society Illustrated noted ‘Flora Sackville West’s sensational Oriental dancing fantasy . . . The whole of the fantasy has been arranged by the artist herself, while the exquisite music is specially composed by Mlle Jeanne Vieu, the celebrated French composer.’ According to the Observer, her performance ‘proved to be quite pleasing, although it was not marked by any high development of terpsichorean skill. What Miss West had to do was to pose as the Houri of an Arab Prince’s dreams, and this she did very prettily if with hardly sufficient technical accomplishment to provide the title with a raison d’être.’ The papers also noted her aristocratic connections. The New York Times, in April that year, published a photograph of the beautiful Flora, dressed exotically, under the headline ‘Peer’s Daughter as a Dancer’.
Victoria was staying in the South of France when she read of Flora’s debut. ‘What a worry!’ she wrote in her diary, although she did concede that ‘the Harem skirt’ which Flora was wearing was considerably ‘better than the thin gauze she first intended to wear!’ Two weeks later, pictures of Flora dancing at the Palladium appeared in the Sketch and made Victoria ‘boil with indignation. She has no shame!’
The following year, according to a notice in The Times in February 1912, Flora and a Mlle Phine de Nocker were performing a series of six ‘causeries littéraires musicales et dansées’ at Marble Arch House, in London, illustrating ‘song and dance in many countries and a
ges’; the first subject was to be ‘Athens and the Athenians’, followed in subsequent weeks by the song and dance of ‘The Directoire, Ancient Egypt’, and ‘Japan and the geishas’. They took a version of their show to Spain a couple of months later, as Flora hoped to launch her career in the homeland of her mother. A sympathetic interviewer from the Heraldo de Madrid was very taken with Flora on the day before her debut at the Trianon Palace in April, and even more taken with Phine de Nocker who sang, out of sight, while Flora mimed her Persian, Bohemian and Greek dances on stage; the interviewer thought this was a great shame, as he would have liked to see more of Mlle Phine’s beautiful, mysterious eyes. The interview appeared in a regular column, appropriately entitled ‘Las Luchas por La Vida’ (‘Fighting for Life’), and Flora described her struggle to be recognised as legitimate, how she, a peer’s daughter, had been forced to earn her living on the stage. She referred to the case she had recently brought against her sister Victoria and her brother-in-law Lionel for defamation – presumably, for circulating those stories that she was a mere fortune-hunter, capitalising on the family name.
After that, references to Flora are patchy: a note in the records of the High Court that Flora had changed solicitors in her case against the Sackvilles, but no reference to its outcome; a letter from Lionel to Victoria celebrating some clever ‘move’ by Pemberton that had dealt with Flora for good; a photograph, dated 1912, of a semi-clothed, bosomy Flora, her dress parted provocatively at the top of the thigh, that suggests she had succeeded in her threat to the family to ‘go to the bad’.
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