Other than that, Flora’s trail goes frustratingly cold. There is nothing in Victoria’s diaries, no letters, no further newspaper reports, no court records to cast their cynical slant on a person’s life. But sometimes, perhaps, the gaps, the silences, and the disappearances are as revealing and resounding as the written record. The next reference to Flora is the sentence in Amalia’s letter to Max, implying that she died around 1925. I had hoped to find her through the surviving members of her family. Her daughter Elie had died tragically young, but what became of Lionel Salanson, the solemn little boy who had come to stay at Knole two summers running in the 1890s, who had played so sweetly with his cousin Vita that she cried when it was time to go to bed? Even old Lord Sackville, so bleak and reserved in his dealings with grown-ups, had looked on indulgently as his two grandchildren struggled to play croquet or to converse in French.
After his parents’ divorce, Lionel Salanson had been consigned to the custody of his father, Gabriel. He was called up soon after the outbreak of the First World War and served as a cavalry officer before being seconded to an air squadron in the Somme as a spotter. Reports in his military dossier praised him regularly as an energetic and conscientious ‘observateur’, ‘plein d’allant’ and ‘plein de sang froid ’, flying on many photographic missions over enemy lines in bad weather and under attack from German planes. He was Mentioned in Dispatches on two occasions in 1916, and was awarded the Croix de Guerre. Photographs of him around this time show a swarthy, stocky young man, standing beside a boxy biplane in a muddy airfield in the Somme. Something in his direct gaze and the slightly sardonic downward twist to his mouth recalls the blustering swagger of his father and the dark smoulder of his mother.
In 1917, Lionel formally transferred to the fledgling airforce (the Aéronautique Militaire) and began training as a pilot in Chartres. But a plane crash during training in April, in which he badly injured his arm, rendered him ‘inapte à tout service de Guerre’. It was suggested, instead, that he might put his excellent knowledge of Russian to good use and act as an interpreter. And so, in September 1918, he was sent on a mission to Siberia to help train Czech pilots who had joined the fight against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. After catching typhus and dysentery in Vladivostok, he was demobilised in 1919, after which his movements, like those of his mother, become hard to follow.
In 1920 he was drafted into the 34 Régiment d’Aviation as a reservist, and in 1925 he married Odette Derminot and went to live in Avoine in the Loire, joining his father there as a wine-grower. Gabriel died in Avoine in 1935, but Lionel stayed on as a ‘propriétaire viticulteur’. What little we know about him now comes from his military dossier. In 1937, as France seemed yet again in peril, Lionel wrote to the military authorities asking to be accepted back as an officer in the reserves of L’Armée de l’Air. His application was rejected on the grounds that, in 1927, he had been dismissed, and stripped of his rank as a reserve officer, for having failed to notify the authorities of a change of address and thereby made himself unavailable for service for well over a year. Police searches to trace him at various addresses in Paris and Sèvres in 1925 had been unsuccessful.
Having served throughout the First World War with some distinction, Lionel found all this very painful, and wrote that he would be only too happy to place on record the testimonials of his comrades from the French front and Siberia. Nevertheless, the authorities ruled on appeal that because he had been in L’Aéronautique for only two years, and because he had shown no interest ‘aérien ou militaire’ since then, and because of his age (he was now forty-seven), he could not rejoin the reserves. He should consider applying, instead, to rejoin the cavalry, ‘son arme d’origine’.
There is no record that Lionel Salanson had children, and so, with his death in 1954, the last of Flora’s lineage was laid to rest. Like Flora, Victoria had only one child – Vita – and neither Amalia nor Henry had any. It was Max and his descendants who multiplied.
Over the two decades before the court case, Max had suffered a series of calamities in South Africa. His fine, thoroughbred herd of cattle had been carried off by the rinderpest in the 1890s, and by 1899 he was bankrupt. His eldest son Lionel had died suddenly the same year. It was a tribute to his general equanimity, and to the love of his family, that he had been as supportive of the Sackvilles as he was in the run-up to the case. He had known all along, he wrote, that the inheritance would go to his brother-in-law in the ordinary course of events, but he had never borne them a grudge for it.
Although Max’s life was never quite deranged by bitterness in the way that the lives of his siblings had been, there were, of course, complaints. In 1924, when he was discharged from his bankruptcy, he sued Cracroft Nourse and Edward Greene for mismanaging the trust established for his benefit in the 1880s, and in particular for a disastrous investment in a hotel in Pietermaritzburg. After the forced sale of Max’s farm in 1899, his trustees had invested £2,000 – two-thirds of the proceeds – in the Camden Hotel. Although this appeared a reasonable investment when run by its original proprietor for a principally military clientele, the business suffered after the end of the Boer War in 1902 and the death of the owner in 1905 (his widow had no experience of the business). In 1908 the trustees decided to take on the mortgage and manage the business themselves. They made advance payments to Max on account, in lieu of interest, but by 1912 were unable to continue doing even that. Max was too poor at this stage to take legal advice.
When he heard from his friend Mr Kufal, in October 1912, that the Camden had gone ‘cronk’, Max wrote to Colonel Greene to register his concerns: the interest payments had stopped, and the underlying value of the investment had slumped with the Pietermaritzburg property market. Max and his wife continued to feel that they were being kept in the dark, as the trustees vainly ‘nursed’ their investment back to health. ‘When they found that they could not put things right, and no wonder for a worse investment you could not think of, then they had to let the cat out of the bag.’ In 1923, the trustees sold the hotel for less than their original investment. The trustees did, however, use the balance of the original proceeds from the farm, around £1,000, to purchase a house in Pietermaritzburg called Fairview for the couple in 1917.
‘Trust funds have no business to be invested in an hotel,’ Max had written to Colonel Greene’s solicitors in 1923.
Hotels are always going smash, changing hands, and are places where everything depends upon the management. You could not have a worse security. And the proof of the pudding is in the eating! . . . What a difference it would have made to my life, during the last 11 years, if I had received what was due to me. We have had to live on £100 a year, the miserable pittance that Lord Sackville allows me. Out of this we have had to feed, clothe ourselves (three persons!) and educate our daughter.
‘I have consulted my son, and my wife and children,’ he concluded, ‘are all agreed that if this request is treated in the same manner as the previous ones we shall have to move the Court, and place the whole thing before it, as the attitude displayed towards me is tantamount to persecution.’ The solicitors wrote back, stating that they were ‘sick and tired of receiving letters from you couched in the terms of the one under reply’, and denying his charges.
Max was very bitter towards Colonel Greene, but blamed the other trustees far less. As he wrote to his friend ‘Cra’ Nourse:
all I can say is that Greene has led me the life of Hell. I have no words to describe to you the depth of misery and destitution to which Greene has condemned me. I have been deprived of all means of livelihood for the last 11 years, and had it not been for the little remittance from England, we should have absolutely starved. I am afraid my poor father little knew what stone he was tying round my neck when he created that Trust. I am sure I could have arranged my affairs a long way better than Mr Greene. I tell you I have had a life that a kaffir would curl his lip at: and Greene, out of sheer spite, seems to have taken a fiendish delight in ‘rubbing it
in’.
When the case came to trial, the court eventually awarded Max damages of £640 for unpaid interest, with costs. In 1931, Max, by now in his seventies, was back in court, this time suing his wife Mary and son Guy, who had replaced Greene and Nourse as trustees, for using Max’s trust funds of around £1,800 to build a house in Pietermaritzburg – with Max’s knowledge and consent – but failing to provide adequate accounts. Some of the money, Max claimed, had been used without his permission to pay Guy’s personal debts.
The fact that Max shared the Sackville tendency to litigiousness has probably skewed the emphasis of his family story. The survival of court records and legal depositions from Max’s lawsuits in 1924 and 1931 tended to bring out the drama of personal conflict, and to ignore the humdrum contentments of everyday life, the satisfaction Max got from his knowledge of Jersey cows or from his beloved daughters, Vivian – with her large and flourishing family – and Ruth.
Seen through the prism of the court records, the story of Max’s son Guy’s life is similarly one-sided. In 1925, after his first wife Therese had left him, Guy installed his two daughters, aged four and seven, in the care of a housekeeper, Mrs Grier, in a house on the coast, while he commuted to his job as a clerk in the Office of the Registrar of Deeds in Pietermaritzburg. Over the summer, complaints that Guy and Mrs Grier (who often called herself ‘Mrs West’) mistreated the girls came to the notice of the Child Welfare Society. Mrs Grier, already known to the society as an undesirable character (‘not suitable either morally or physically to have the care of young children’) would thrash the girls on the hands and legs with sticks and brushes. The society asked the authorities to investigate, but there was insufficient evidence for the police to proceed.
Life for the two girls became even more miserable after Guy married a woman called Daisy in 1928. That year, the elder daughter, Zelda, who had long been described as ‘of doubtful intellect’ was committed to an ‘institution for the feebleminded’ in Cape Town. And two years later, Guy applied for his nine-year-old daughter Carmen to be committed to an institution, too, ‘where she will be under proper supervision’. ‘The child is out of control,’ he wrote; ‘She cannot be trusted to go anywhere alone.’ Carmen had been sent to several schools in Pietermaritzburg ‘to see if she would improve, but she appears to have made up her mind not to submit to any discipline’. She had been sent, soon after Guy’s second marriage, to stay with his octogenarian grandmother, ‘Granny Norton’, at Greytown, but returned a few months later as she was found to be unmanageable. Part of the problem lay in the tension between Carmen and Daisy. Despite a series of whippings, Guy wrote, ‘the child is disobedient and defiant to her step-mother’. There were also reports ‘that the child had misconducted herself with a boy at school’.
The Child Welfare Society supported Guy’s application, confirming that Carmen had had a very unsettled childhood, that she was thrashed at home by her stepmother, and that her father and stepmother did not live in harmony. ‘I am of the opinion,’ their officer concluded, ‘that a committal to an Institution where there is proper discipline will benefit the child. I consider that the step-mother will never do anything with this child; she illtreats the child, and I have personally seen marks on the child which were the result of a severe thrashing.’ As a result, Carmen, like her sister, was sent to an institution on the other side of the country, the House of Bethany, in Cape Town. It was not until 1932 that Therese learned the fate of her two daughters. By now she was settled and financially secure with a new husband, Mr Butler-Deane, and applied for custody of Carmen. Now that she was displaying ‘a keen and satisfactory interest in her child, visiting her regularly and furnishing her daughter with a musical education’, that her ‘domestic life and social surroundings’ were eminently respectable, and ‘that little interest has been displayed towards the child by her father Mr Sackville West’, it was decided that Carmen should be released from the House of Bethany in 1937 into her mother’s care.
Guy was a poor husband and father, and by 1932 he was having trouble with Daisy, with whom he had two young sons, Cecil and Reginald. Once again, he applied to the Child Welfare Society for an order placing the boys in care. ‘I have had serious differences with my wife,’ he wrote, which ‘culminated this morning in . . . my wife in a rage throwing plates at my head & I left the house . . . I know that she will not properly care for the children but leave them for long periods in the care of Natives & I ask that they be placed at the Peter Davis House in the care of the Child Welfare Society.’ Had this application been successful, it would have resulted in all four of Guy’s children being in care. (When I mentioned this to Adam Nicolson, the grandson of Guy’s first cousin Vita – expecting him to be taken aback by the contrasts in the lifestyles of the different branches of the family – Adam only half-jokingly compared the standard of parenting to Vita’s own care of her sons, Nigel and Ben.)
The Child Welfare Society did not feel there was enough evidence to warrant the removal of the boys; and the magistrate pointed out, furthermore, that since Guy already had ‘two other children in Institutions in the Union’ and that he was heavily in arrears with the payment for their maintenance, it would be very unusual for more of his children to be admitted to homes.
On several occasions in the 1930s, Guy brought actions for divorce – later withdrawn – against Daisy on the grounds of her adultery and violent behaviour towards him. At stake was the custody of his sons. In a letter to the magistrate in November 1932, he claimed that his now-estranged wife was a ‘woman of immoral habits and that four nights last week she did not return to her room until midnight’. Surely, he wrote, this justified him in ‘pressing for the custody of these children from a woman who does not care a straw what happens to them!’ He had also heard that the children, who were living with Daisy, had had only one bath that month. ‘All this can only have had a bad effect on their health and, in after years, they will probably suffer. Besides, Mrs West’s language is dreadful and the children, who are both talking, are picking up bad words. The influence which Mrs West has over them is of a poisonous nature and the children ought to be removed and placed into respectable quarters. The whole affair,’ he concluded, ‘is too squalid for words.’
Cecil and Reginald had a miserable childhood, fought over – but neglected at the same time – by their parents. As a result, the boys spent much of their time at boarding school. Cecil eventually worked on the South African railways as a fitter, and lost contact with Reginald, who emigrated, it is thought, to Canada. Until his death in 2009, Cecil was the last known surviving grandchild of Max to bear the name Sackville West. After her death, photographs of Guy and Reginald were found tucked away in a drawer in Vita’s study at Sissinghurst, where they must have lingered for decades without explanation or acknowledgement.
Guy’s story is a shabby postscript to his father’s story: an illustration of the very different trajectories that applied either side of the succession struggle. Vita’s first cousins included, on the one side, the ‘illegitimate’ side, the hapless Guy and the elusive Lionel Salanson; and on the other, ‘legitimate’ side, completely oblivious of the other branch, two future Lord Sackvilles and inheritors of Knole.
See Notes on Chapter 12
13
Slaving Away at Knole for Nothing
The month after Henry’s suicide, as Victoria sunk into a depression that would last well into the following year, she wrote in her diary: ‘I have slaved away at Knole to keep everything together & I get no help or kindness from Lionel. These eternal pin-pricks & difficulties & his eternal flirtations and love affairs making life extremely unpleasant, especially now that my Vita is married & naturally away so much. What am I to do eventually? I feel so ill. How long can I stand it?’
She had already started to think of buying herself a bolt-hole. But even this was not without its humiliations. When Lionel asked her what she planned to call the house she was proposing to buy in Hampstead, she replied, ‘Sackville
House, of course!’ ‘And why?’ he asked. ‘Because it is my name.’ ‘No! it is not; it is mine,’ he insisted.
Victoria’s husband was beginning to deny her the name that was hers by birth and by marriage in much the same way as she in the past had attempted to deny it to her siblings. To Victoria, who had been particularly sensitive on this subject ever since childhood, it was as if her husband was taunting her with her illegitimacy.
In contrast to Lionel’s plea to his wife a quarter of a century before to remember ‘this is your house, Vicky’, Victoria was
being progressively eased out of Knole. She was being forced to confront the spectre, in the longer term, of her own disinheritance. Her brother-in-law Charlie was already making his expectations clear, writing ‘a very pompous letter’ in 1918, to advise Lionel and Victoria not to sell any more heirlooms. ‘Poor Charlie!’ Victoria noted. ‘He used to be so nice!’ And on a visit to Knole, Victoria’s nephew, Eddy, at this stage a precocious teenager, stated his intention of altering the Orangery at Knole when he became the owner. ‘He speaks quite freely about being here!’ Victoria noted.
Her frustration reached such a point that, on 23 November 1917, she devoted a separate entry in her diary to her many resentments: ‘I feel so much like leaving my home tonight and yet restraining my offended feelings, that I must put it to paper, as some relaxation for my misery.’ That very evening Lionel had been rude to her in front of Olive Rubens. Cheerful, warm-hearted and gentle – the temperamental antithesis of Victoria – Olive had at first been treated as a family friend by Victoria, who encouraged her confidences in much the same way she had those of her husband’s other lovers. But by the end of 1917, Victoria’s tolerance was strained. Olive had been staying at Knole for the past month while Lionel was home on leave (occupying a room, at his insistence, right below his and connected to it by a private staircase). During dinner, Lionel was ‘full of petites attentions for Olive, even offering to share a pear with her, and it is a fruit he never eats’. He then proceeded to speak slightingly of Victoria’s friends, particularly those with an artistic bent, such as Edward Knoblock and Osbert Sitwell.
The Disinherited Page 24