This bereavement, keenly felt though it was, acted as a mere prelude to the most tragic event of Bobby’s life, which took place three and a half months later.
Margaret had been advised by her doctor not to add to the five healthy children she had produced. However, when she fell pregnant at the end of 1905, it was decided to proceed with the pregnancy. Margaret rested as much as she could during the intervening months, and all seemed to be on course for another addition to the family when, on 4 July 1906, she went into labour. As Bobby recorded in his diary:
M. was restless getting up ... so I called Mrs Ingram. We sent for Blacker by telephone, at 2.35 he arrived. I was outside hearing very unusual noises, at 3.20 a baby girl was born — soon after 3.45 Blacker came out and asked for Reid to be sent for. Jamie soon came, and reassured me, but M.’s heart failed far too much. They tried everything. About 4.45 she asked for me so I went in, and her colour terrified me. I held her while the oxygen cylinder was tried. She was conscious but I felt it was hopeless ... I lifted M. up. She asked for relief from suffocation ... She said ‘Delia’ but said she must not be frightened. Then ‘the Boys’. Then she was propped up with pillows, but all useless, and at 5.55 my darling breathed her soul away in my arms. God help me.
The rest of the entry for that day is fragmented by the grief and horror of the scene he had just witnessed. The triteness of their dialogue was recalled: ‘She had said to me, “Am I dying?” I had answered, “I don’t think so — why should you?”.’ And then the realization of the devastation that this death signified for him and his children began to sink in:
I closed her eyes and with them all that belonged to youth and lovely ideals. My own Margaret, how can I live without her? But I must for the children ...
My children, our children, how can I bring them up? I have no knowledge of children. M. trained them so well. God help me. Nothing earthly helps one, the future is the only stable thing ...
The following morning Bobby went to see the Red Earl at Spencer House. Addled though the old man’s head was, he tried to comfort the distraught Bobby: ‘He was so dear. Kissed me, and nearly broke down.’ From there Bobby returned to Althorp. He read the children some stories and put them to bed — only to find all of them, apart from baby Margaret, later congregated in the Picture Gallery, ‘sobbing’. Bobby wrote: ‘My poor motherless ones. I can’t comfort them as M. could have done. Felt hopeless …’
The coffin was sent to Althorp Park station by train, the door of the carriage being opened to reveal ‘a bank of blossoms, wreaths piled upon wreaths, sweet messages of sorrow and affection’. Members of Lord Althorp’s Volunteer company — reserve soldiers who had Bobby as their honorary commanding officer — bore the coffin to Brington church, Bobby walking behind, solitary in his grief.
The Spencer children were excused the pain of the funeral service, and therefore did not hear the priest exhorting the congregation ‘to sympathize and sorrow for the family that had been for so many centuries associated with the parish, and to all of you must come the thought of how frequently during the past few years you have seen the clouds of heavy sorrow breaking over that house ...’ A simultaneous service was conducted for Margaret in the Chapel Royal — ordered in the King’s own hand, and seen by one courtier as ‘a rare mark of esteem’ for the 38-year-old viscountess.
The Northampton Reporter listed Margaret’s accomplishments for its readers, before opining:
... but it was in home life that she was at her very best. And greatly as she will be missed by the public, deep as will be the sorrow evinced by the outside world, it will be as naught compared with the grief in the home. For her bereaved husband the fullest and the most generous sympathy will be felt; and for the children, the eldest 17 years, the youngest a day, the people at large will mourn as for their own.
Bobby’s summation of his grief, and his utter feeling of despair, was:
My M. gone, my whole life broken. God help me. I must live on for our children, but shall I ever be able to do it without my own M.? — Va gone. My sister, that was hard enough to bear; but now my beloved M., my constant loving help meet for nineteen years gone too, how can I go on? I must and so I suppose I shall.
Bobby’s spirit was broken, and it was never to recover. Every anniversary — of Margaret and his initial meeting, of their engagement, of their wedding, of her birth, of her death — set off a stream of profound grief in his diary entries for the remainder of his life. He was the saddest of widowers — genuinely inconsolable. On 25 July 1914, he wrote:
Tired and sad — 27th anniversary of OUR wedding day. Can hardly believe THAT. It began the nineteen blessed years. Now I know that those years were my life. These 8 last years have been only an existence. I miss Her. I doubt my getting to Her in the hereafter. The loneliness seems very very great.
The only time he appeared glad that she was not alive was when their two oldest sons, Jack and Cecil, were on active service in the First World War. Nearly every day brought news of casualties, among them the sons of Bobby’s friends. It made him fret endlessly about his own boys’ safety: ‘My eldest Boy on land and my 2nd on the sea. Would be beyond endurance. I feel thankful She has not this anxiety.’
Both survived, although one was wounded and only saved from death by a brave brother officer; the other becoming a highly decorated hero in his own right. As an act of gratitude to God for sparing them, and out of a wish to establish a lasting memorial to his wife, Bobby decided to give Dallington to the people of Northamptonshire as the ‘Margaret Spencer Convalescent Home’, together with five acres of gardens.
Dallington had been an auxiliary military hospital during the war, with nearly 2,000 wounded servicemen passing through it between November 1915 and May 1919. It was now decided that it would serve twenty male and twenty female patients, with priority being given to prisoners of war and ex-servicemen. Bobby opened the new facility on 1 December 1920 with the words:
My gift of this house is a small token of my sense of the Divine mercy which has brought my sons safely through the war, and it was in my mind when I first thought of giving this home that it should be in memory of a period of existence which I cannot believe could be equalled in happiness, peace, and contentment ...
In private, he confided to his diary that night: ‘Spoke. Not well. My own M., it was about you. Of the radiant happiness of our life at Dallington. It was hard work getting through it. I left at once, choking a good deal.’
In 1919 ‘Mr Gossip’, from the Daily Sketch, gives us a vivid snapshot of Bobby in late middle age:
I have just seen the best-dressed man in the world, in a tall hat and a mackintosh. Earl Spencer, clad thus, was taking a stroll along Piccadilly and St James’s Street early yesterday morning. He is a bit greyer than he was in his ‘Bobby Spencer’ and House of Commons days, but he is still slim, aristocratic, and immaculate, his collars are still hugely high, and his cravats spotlessly white, and he doesn’t, by ten years at least, look his 62. It is refreshing in these Bolshefied days to find remaining so perfect an example of the good old school.
Although Bobby’s outward appearance suggested otherwise, ‘Mr Gossip’ had been eyeing a deeply impoverished man. Around this time he had been forced to sell four of Sarah Marlborough’s surviving estates: Sandridge, the original Jennings patrimony, in Hertfordshire; Elkington, in Northamptonshire; Stantonbury, in Buckinghamshire; and Theddingworth, in Leicestershire. None of the three latter estates fetched so much as twice the price Sarah had paid for them nearly two centuries before, so depressed were land prices in the late 1910s.
Spencer House was again let out, this time to an American millionairess, Mrs Leeds, who later married Prince Christopher of Greece. Economies were made at Althorp, the gardeners who had been killed in the war remembered in stone plaques, but not replaced, the house staff reduced to a handful. And yet it was not enough.
On 8 October 1921, the Daily Telegraph reported:
Our Northampton Correspondent states
: Earl Spencer, K.G., has closed Althorp House for an indefinite period, as he finds himself so impoverished by high taxation and the increased cost of living that his trustees advise him that it is impossible to maintain the estate under present conditions. He left Althorp yesterday for his Norfolk home at North Creake, and after a short tour abroad will spend most of his time at his town house in St James’s Place, close by Spencer House ...
Bobby had spent the preceding week bracing himself for the pain of separation from Althorp. He drove to Brington to say goodbye to the family tombs, feeling anger and sadness that ‘I have to leave my home. My own M.’s resting place. My 2 sisters, my old Brother and beautiful C. — R.I.P.’
He returned to Althorp, for a final, melancholy tour:
Went round the rooms. Long Gallery. All the best bedrooms. After tea, parting from the dear pictures. It will be a relief to get off tomorrow. But shall I ever get back again? I feel it so very much, and my loneliness makes me dread living anywhere else. This old family home so woven into my life. Hard indeed to have to part with it. God preserve it.
18. The Curator Earl
Bobby died in the summer of 1922, leaving the remaining Spencer land, as well as Althorp and Spencer House, to his thirty-year-old eldest son, Jack, and his wife, Cynthia. At this stage, we move from the historical to the near-contemporary, for I can clearly remember my grandparents, as well as some of the great-aunts and -uncles who were their siblings.
Grandfather was a figure of awe; his moustache bristled, his stomach bulged under outsized trousers, and he had the uncompromising air of a man who had no time whatsoever for fools. However, Viscount Palmerston’s view of John, First Earl Spencer — ‘The bright side of his character appears in private and the dark side in public’ — applied equally to the Seventh Earl.
Jack had been brought up at Dallington, going to Harrow at thirteen, a few months before his mother’s death. Bobby had been very worried that his sensitive eldest son would be picked on by the older boys, but noted in his diary for 3 March 1906, on the occasion of Jack’s first exeat: ‘A bright spot seeing the precious Boy, who told me that he was not bullied, no one was now. And that all was well. He said that he found the food bad.’
By this early age, Jack had already made his first political speech, on behalf of the Liberal Party, in Dallington. However, his interest in politics was confined to his youth, and he was the first Spencer, in the direct line, who was eligible for political office but did not actually hold one, since the First Earl of Sunderland, three centuries before.
By the time of Jack’s coming of age in 1913, Bobby and his children had been occupying Althorp for three years. It was decided to turn the birthday celebration into an enormous party, with 1,000 guests from the tenantry of the Spencer estates in Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire and Norfolk. They were all given lunch and tea, and there was an air of easy privilege about the afternoon of the sort that was snuffed out the following year with the advent of war.
My grandfather became a Life Guard, eschewing the family’s naval traditions. His life was nearly brought to an end when a German bullet lodged in his kneecap, leaving him immobile in no-man’s land. He thought that he would bleed to death, but a brother officer — my father told me his name was Henry Boyd Rochford — ran out, slung Grandfather over his back, and brought him to safety, and to surgery. The wound fortunately proved serious enough to keep him out of the front line for the remainder of the Great War.
I have often heard that my grandfather suffered from strong jealousy over his two younger brothers. Certainly Cecil, exactly two years grandfather’s junior, was the sort of young man it would be easy to envy. Very good-looking, he had a reputation even as a naval cadet for being devastatingly attractive to women. He was a close friend of the Prince of Wales — later Duke of Windsor — when they were together at naval college.
Cecil was, by all accounts, utterly without fear. It was therefore no surprise to the family when he emerged as something of a hero during the First World War. His proudest moment lay in the capture of Zeebrugge harbour, when his coastal motor boat purposefully drew much of the hostile German fire, in order to help the more powerful Royal Navy vessels to penetrate the enemy defences. Indeed, as Vice-Admiral Sir Roger Keyes reported in his official dispatch of events on the night of 22 to 23 April 1918:
C.M.B. No. 23 (Lieutenant the Hon. Cecil E.R. Spencer) escorted ‘Vindictive’ close inshore, and kept touch with her until ‘Vindictive’ gave ‘the last resort’ signal, on which C.M.B. No. 23 laid, and lit, the million candle-power flare, by whose light ‘Vindictive’ eventually found her way in.
For his bravery, Cecil was awarded a bar to his Distinguished Service Cross. By the end of the war he had a plethora of foreign decorations as well. They are displayed with pride in their own case at Althorp, the White Ensign from his torpedo boat hanging in the entrance hall.
His gallantry in battle made his ultimate demise — being thrown by his horse after a polo match on Malta, in 1928 — even more pathetic. His coffin was laid to rest off the Maltese coast, not far from that of Captain Sir Robert Cavendish Spencer, his great-uncle.
My grandfather’s youngest brother was George, the baby of the family before the late arrival of Margaret. Reading Bobby’s diaries, it is clear that George was something of a favourite. Whether he was spoiled or not as a child, he was always represented to my father’s and my generation as a black sheep — to the extent that my sisters and I were never allowed to meet him. My father told me that Uncle Georgie had the dubious distinction of having been the only man in British service history to have been dishonourably discharged as an officer from both the Army and the Navy; but I have no idea if that was simply family folklore. The intimation was that he drank and spent freely. However, I have spoken to contemporaries of his who claimed he was one of the most charming of men. It would appear that it was this natural allure that was the cause of my much more awkward grandfather’s envy.
There were three sisters, too. Aunt Delia, born in 1889, seemed impossibly old to me, as a child. She was tiny — bent over by age, but her mind still sharp. She had, as a seventeen-year-old girl, filled the gap left by her mother’s death as best she could, both with regard to the other children, and frequently acting as companion to her father on official functions. When she announced her engagement in 1913, the local newspaper said: ‘There is no more popular lady in Northamptonshire, in whatever circles she moves, than Lady Adelaide Spencer ...’
Perhaps because she had had to be so mature from such an early age, she married a much older man — Sidney Peel. He was forty-three, she just twenty-four. Eighty years earlier, their fore-fathers had fought hard in the Commons, the Whig Jack Althorp versus the Tory Sir Robert Peel. The newspapers noted that the two families had produced three Chancellors of the Exchequer in the 1830s, Francis Baring being the third.
My father told me the sad — and unverifiable — story of how one of the senior staff at Althorp gave Delia as a wedding present some elasticated underpants, so that they could expand when she became pregnant. The sadness lies in the fact that Aunt Delia never achieved that state, although she adored children and was believed to want them passionately.
A gifted musician, especially with the violin, Aunt Delia was a memorable person, full of intelligence and wisdom, but with a discernible steeliness about her which her younger siblings always respected and bowed to.
Lavinia I never met, for she died in 1955, aged fifty-five. She was, apparently, a vibrant character, always in trouble, one of the last of the Spencer children to be brought up in any large measure at Spencer House. Her special childhood friend was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later the Queen Mother. In the summer of 1998, one of the visitors to Althorp was a man in his nineties who had worked in the Stables as a boy, and who claimed to have caught these two young ladies clandestinely smoking together round the back of the carriages.
She had a reputedly difficult marriage with Lord Annaly,
who lived across the valley from Althorp at Holdenby, Charles I’s one-time prison, and she would discuss at length the problems she had with him, with my ever receptive grandmother. Lavinia’s son, the Hon. Lukie White, represented England at international cricket after the Second World War, in the so-called ‘Victory Tests’ against Australia.
Aunt Margaret I knew very well. She was the little girl who was born the day her mother, also Margaret, died. There are many reasons for regretting her death, a couple of years before I started researching this book, but her vast knowledge of the Spencer family largely died with her — and that is partly my fault. I had often tried to persuade her to record her memories, and, thankfully, she did write down lyrical snippets of her early memories in A Spencer Childhood. However, this was just a tantalizing taste of her wider recollections.
The family myth was always that her father, Bobby, had never forgiven young Margaret for ‘killing’ her mother, and had effectively banished her to be brought up by the house staff, away from the rest of the family. Indeed, until I read Bobby’s diaries, this was a record of events that I had always believed to be so. However, so affectionate are the father’s references to all his children — Margaret included — that I doubt this to have been the case.
Aunt Margaret was a life-enhancing force, her deep and generous laugh always at the ready, a passion for gossip evidence of an enquiring, rather than a malicious, mind. To visit her in her small cottage in Burnham Market, between the Spencer estate in Norfolk and Nelson’s native village, was to experience humour of the greatest breadth, and intelligence of a rare intensity. The local community was fiercely protective of their ‘Lady Margaret’. Few were not bewitched by her mischievous chuckle. I loved her dearly.
The Spencer Family Page 34