1968 had begun with an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in England, stranding the Leslie-Kings there and putting paid to their usual Christmas-time hunting in Galway. They were allowed into Switzerland and spent Christmas, enjoyably enough, with Roger Frewen in his chalet at Villars. But Anita mourned the lost hunting season. She wrote to her friend Kathleen, Duchess of Abercorn, ‘Hasn’t it been too cruel this foot and mouth ruining what promised to be the Blazers best season for years.’ As always, she was free with medical advice, advocating to Kathleen the Nature Cure way of treating kidney problems: ‘Before breakfast take a “sitz bath” – That is put about 6 inches of cold water in bathtub and while warmly dressed on top just hop in and sit for a couple of minutes with feet up on taps and splash the lower back with the cold water.’
Then Bill, the most compliant of husbands, decided, at the age of fifty-eight, to have an awfully big adventure. Anita to Betsan, 10 January 1968:
Bill to my horror has decided to sail around the world without stopping. I hoped the expenses of his boat (built by a friend for £10,000) might halt him but the Daily Express handed him £4,000 to finish it and have commissioned him to write up the trip – I feel this is really a reaction against the fiasco of being driven out of Glaslough by Desmond and Agnes – who were really too awful to go into partnership with!
This trip was the Sunday Times Golden Globe non-stop race and Bill was the oldest of the nine competitors. Even before the Daily Express sponsorship came through he had raised £15,000 from selling cattle so that he could get Angus Primrose to build him a two-masted schooner, Galway Blazer ii. The boat was launched in May from Souter’s yard at Cowes and Anita recorded: ‘The look of the hull somewhat lightened my leaden heart.’ She wasn’t in Plymouth when Bill set sail on 24 August but the Ruck-Keenes were there to wave him goodbye. Bill carried his usual frugal provisions: dried fruit, almond paste and green sprouts, as well as instructive books: the New Testament, the Quran and Tolstoy’s novels. Years later, in 2006, he said in the television documentary Deep Water that he never got depressed during the journey: ‘You are … alone with God … there’s no opportunity to sin.’
Anita had a bad feeling about the voyage. She wrote to Xandra:
How I wish the Sunday Times had not turned it into a ‘competition’ – It destroys all his peace of mind and will force him to slog on with a boat which cannot go fast to windward. Much nicer if he and anyone else who cared had just set off quietly on a great adventure … Knowing how nervy and wrought up Bill is I fear this will key him up – instead of ‘doing him good’ after the shambles of Glaslough which took so much out of him.
Her worst fears were realized when she wrote to Betsan:
On October 31st (Halloween !!) he was turned turtle by a freak wave after a hurricane had blown (out of season) for 2 days and subsided. The wonderful little boat undamaged but the masts snapped off so he crept the 1000 miles to Cape Town with a jury rig – arriving November 21 and Tarka flew out to help him and had a blissful month there.
What she didn’t tell Betsan but wrote in her diary was: ‘Had he come on deck 30 seconds sooner he would have drowned and one would have just heard nothing ever. Jolly old age I’m having.’ The only competitor to finish the race was 28-year-old Robin Knox-Johnson in Suhaili. Bill caught a heavy dose of sea fever and made two further attempts to circumnavigate the globe.
1968 saw the youth of the western world tuning in, dropping out and, in Paris, prising up the cobblestones to throw at the police. In Cleveland Square, Leonie was staging a mild rebellion of her own. She didn’t want to go to the Swiss finishing school which, Anita told Xandra, ‘I set my heart on so long ago’. Instead, Leonie wanted to attend classes at East London College, at the suggestion of ‘a librarian admirer who writes daily poems and hangs around’, Anita complained to Betsan. She grumbled that Leonie ‘half wants to come out – half wants to be an “intellectual” and sleep on a park bench!!’ In spite of every discouragement, Leonie eventually took a degree course at an arts college and became the first member of her family to graduate. It was typical of Anita to put the word intellectual within quotation marks, intellect being something she distrusted as much as cleverness. About this time Leonie gave up hunting, which didn’t go down well. But at Oranmore, at Christmas, Anita was pleased to report that her daughter ‘was content riding and going to lots of parties’. Although Anita professed shame at having once been ‘an idiotic debutante’, this seemed to be her ambition for Leonie.
In October of that worrying year, Anita told Shane that she had offered Desmond £25,000 for some of the Glaslough land and added: ‘I hope he gives Tarka the whole place and not just a section.’ This hope was unrealistic; Desmond had ambitious plans for the estate, most of them unachievable since, as one of his lawyers pointed out, ‘he seems to have a foot in each of two clouds simultaneously, if not more!’ His latest plan was to build a five-star hotel in the neglected gardens, a scheme that had to be abandoned as the Northern Ireland troubles came closer to the gates of Castle Leslie. Grudgingly, over the years, Desmond, increasingly needy, had to sell parcels of land to Anita, which were put in Tarka’s name.
Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill was published in June 1969 to enthusiastic reviews. In The Irish Times, A. Kingsmill Moore wrote, with unconscious smuttiness: ‘Not since I first read Dickens have characters come so bulging and thrusting out of the covers of a book.’ The Sunday Times called the biography ‘brazen and beguiling’; The Guardian found it of wide historical interest, while disapproving of the Edwardian ruling class: ‘This book is about people who would spend on one party more than a poor man earned in a year.’
By October the book had been reprinted four times. Anita’s Jennie was a softer version of Scarlett O’Hara, an optimistic beauty who painted light bulbs yellow to imitate sunshine and tolerantly defined sins as ‘exaggerated inclinations’. This Jennie is upbeat, courageous, life-enhancing. It’s certainly not a portrait of someone who was thought to be the sexiest woman on the planet; in fact, sex, which played a significant part in Jennie’s story, hardly gets a mention. Not for the first time in her biographies, Anita insisted that lovers were no more than ardent admirers and that, since Edward VII referred to Jennie as ‘Ma Chère Amie’, the couple were no more than close friends, even though His Majesty was a word-class philanderer and Jennie an ambitious sexpot, known suggestively in the popular press as ‘Lady Randy’. According to Anita, Victorian girls were subject to round-the-clock chaperonage and, once married, protected from any friskiness by their cumbersome clothing. She doesn’t speculate that Winston, born seven months after his parents’ marriage, might not have been ‘premature’.
Before Anita’s Jennie was published, its future success in the usa was threatened by the appearance of the first volume of a rival and far more sensational biography; Jennie: The Life of Lady Randolph Churchill, The Romantic Years 1854–1895, by Ralph G. Martin, which stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over seven months. Anita wrote crossly in her diary:
Scribners [her US publisher] much perturbed by Vol l of this vulgar Ralph Martin life of Jennie out just 9 months before mine in USA - tries to make a sensation of fact Winston was born 7 months after Jennie’s marriage – says ‘PROBABLY illegitimately conceived’. What cheek and BOSH! Jerome girls never allowed out of sight – Victorian parents expected all young men to try to seduce their daughters and took NO chances.
Ralph Martin speculated that Winston’s younger brother, John Strange Spencer-Churchill (Jack) was the son of John Strange Jocelyn, later 5th Earl of Roden. To refute this suggestion, Anita enlisted the help of Clodagh, Countess of Roden, asking her to inspect visitors’ books and diaries to prove that the pair were very unlikely lovers. This was for the benefit of the reading public. Anita knew that Jack’s father was Evelyn Boscowen, 7th Viscount Falmouth, known as ‘The Star Man’. Clare had told her this in 1956: ‘He was Jack Churchill’s father but I mustn’t write scandal.’
; In an undated letter, Shane had written to his daughter, ‘As to Star Falmouth … you can calculate when they [Star and Jennie] first met by when Jack was born.’ Anita kept this to herself. Her diary records: ‘Rodens send me verification that 5th Lord could NOT have been Jack Churchill’s father. Silly Ralph Martin got him muddled up with Falmouth and Jack was most probably Randolph’s son anyway.’
Anita was hell-bent on exposing Ralph Martin as an unreliable scandal-monger but she was on shaky ground. Martin was a respected historian, his book endorsed by Martin Gilbert, the greatest living expert on Winston’s life. He told the Sunday Express, which had published Ralph Martin’s account of the Roden connection: ‘As far as I know Ralph Martin is the very first person to have gone through the family papers in the archives with any detailed scrutiny. I have no doubt that if he has based his conclusions on the papers they certainly ought to be taken seriously.’ Worse, Anita’s own family had helped ‘this odious American’, who, in his book’s acknowledgments, thanks ‘Sir Shane Leslie and his charming wife, who gave me so much of their time and memory and made available to me letters, documents and photographs.’ Shane had also helped Anita with her book and had been similarly acknowledged. Jack Churchill’s son Peregrine was thanked by Martin ‘for making freely available his large collection of family letters and photographs, and for permitting me to quote from the Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill and other material on which he holds the copyright’, a helpfulness that Peregrine would later regret. Like other members of his family, he had allowed access to his papers to the rival biographers, so Anita had been allowed to quote from Jennie’s memoirs too. She had also been greatly helped by Winston’s son Randolph, to whom her book is dedicated, and her acknowledgments began with thanks to Her Majesty the Queen and King Michael of Romania. Impressive but unlikely to boost sales.
Anita, usually a very self-effacing author, blamed her publishers for the Ralph Martin fiasco. In March 1969, three months before her biography of her great-aunt was even published, in a letter to Harold Harris, she accused Ralph Martin of plagiarism and of lying about Jennie’s ‘lover life’, which, Anita insisted, began only after her husband had withdrawn from her bed on account of the syphilis, which was the cause of his death in 1895, when he was forty-five. Anita also wrote to Hutchinson’s managing director, the recently knighted Sir Robert Lusty, criticizing the company for its failure to stand up to Cassells, Martin’s uk publisher, or to promote her own Jennie. She reminded Sir Robert that Hutchinson’s publicity department had not brought a single journalist to ‘a champagne press party which she had given for Mr Frewen of England.’ That book had not sold well but its poor sales may not have been the result of the failure of the press party.
Anita had sent an early draft of Jennie to Clemmie Churchill, who had thought it ‘fascinating and dramatic’, which is true enough, although not as fascinating and dramatic as Jennie herself, who continues to enthral biographers. Anne Sebba’s Jennie Churchill – Winston’s American Mother (John Murray 2007) painted a darker picture of an unrooted woman, disastrously married to a syphilitic, unstable man; beset by money worries and taking bad decisions, financially and emotionally. Elisabeth Kehoe’s triple biography of the Jerome sisters, Fortune’s Daughters (Atlantic Books 2004) is also more robust than Anita’s version. In 1969 when Anita’s Jennie was published, Peregrine Churchill successfully brought a copyright case against Martin, which ensured that the Lord Roden story was omitted from the uk edition of Martin’s book. Yet it is Martin’s version of Jennie, especially her promiscuity, which has endured. In November 2008, as part of its High Society series, Channel 4 broadcast Lady Randy, in which Elisabeth Kehoe and Anne Sebba took it in turns to read out a list of Jennie’s lovers, said to number two hundred. The programme also mentioned that Winston, that ‘premature’ baby, was born with a full head of hair and immediately slept through the nights. Part of this titillating account was filmed at Castle Leslie and featured Jack Leslie discussing Randolph’s syphilis. Jennie could no longer be described as a ‘Chère Amie’, whose sense of decorum forbade participation in what Anita called ‘the ultimate relationship’.
Ralph Martin was the least of Anita’s concerns in that publication year. In February, she wrote to Betsan: ‘I really can’t think how to get through the summer with Bill re-masting at Cowes and off again on a solo voyage early Sept and Leonie being a worry generally.’ In August from Oranmore, she wrote to Clodagh Roden, explaining why she couldn’t go to Dublin to try to find out the truth about the Lord Jocelyn story:
I am frantic at the moment – a) going to Plymouth to see Bill off … and then back here where I am left with 12 horses and NO groom – Our dear stableman of 23 years service dropped dead (beside poor Leonie) in July. I have got to advertise for a groom for the hunters and arrange for the Connemara mares and foals to be weaned and their feed … All this without Bill or the stableman is half killing me.
In September she told Clodagh that, as they waited in Plymouth for ‘a strong north wind to blow Bill out into the Atlantic – my heart is lead but he couldn’t not do it’.
On 1 November, at the end of that exhausting year, Anita flew to America with her daughter on a two-month lecture tour of Women’s Clubs, on the subject of ‘Jennie’s vitality!!’ Leonie was not turning out the way Anita would have wished. A true child of the sixties, she was a left-wing, vegetarian pacifist who had given up hunting, agreeing with Oscar Wilde’s view that it entailed ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable’. She was taken to America to get her away from the London drug scene and her bookish, poetic boyfriend. Tarka, now twenty years old, spent much of the year in Australia with his friend Tony Huston, son of the film director John Huston, visiting Betsan at Paradise Beach in Queensland and making ‘a film of the outback’. The final entry in Anita’s sparse 1969 diary is dated 29 April and describes an event which would cast a long shadow. ‘We all can only think of Terence O’Neill’s gallant battle and sad resignation. John Brooke, once my friend – I really feel I never want to see again.’ Northern Ireland’s prime minister, Terence O’Neill, had struggled to bring electoral and social reform to the seething province since 1963 but had been forced to resign by a group of dissident Ulster Unionist mps, one of whom was John Brooke, who later became the 2nd Viscount Brookeborough. Civil unrest followed and, in August, British forces were called out to help restore peace. This marked the start of the Troubles, which affected everyone in Northern Ireland, not least the Leslies, whose ancestral home sat on the border between the North and the Irish Republic.
21
This Leslie Half-World
During the 1970s Anita wrote four books, entered into chaotic negotiations with Desmond regarding Glaslough, managed Oranmore, continued to hunt and did her best to micromanage her grown-up children’s lives. In September 1970, waiting in Cornwall for Bill to be able to set sail, in the teeth of gales, on another round-the-world trip, she wrote to Tarka: ‘Having waited so long I may as well wait longer – Really I have nothing to do except get the ponies broken and sold – write my new book and buy Leonie birthday presents (I’m trying to get her a black fringed bag to match her boots!)’
During the decade both her children married, and Clare (1970), Shane (1971), Peter (1975) and Margaret (1976) died. Anita abandoned her diary in 1979 but remained a prolific letter-writer, often writing ten letters a day. She increasingly regretted having relinquished Glaslough and tried to buy back land there for Tarka to farm but, although Desmond was deeply in debt, he had other plans. On 4 April 1970, Anita, again in America to promote Jennie, wrote to Shane: ‘Tarka is seeing Desmond in the faint hope he might be able to buy some of Glaslough farm back before the place is totally sold up to American hotel companies.’ She also told her father that ‘Ralph Martin’s book was a bestseller here for 30 weeks and is still on Book Club adverts.’ Perhaps this was to make Shane feel guilty about having helped Martin but it’s unlikely that Shane, shamelessness personified, felt any guilt at all.
That October Anita visited Glaslough for the first time in eighteen months to attend a family gathering to celebrate Shane’s eighty-fifth birthday. Anita wrote to Kathleen Abercorn:
I hadn’t seen Sammy and Camilla, Desmond’s little daughters before and it’s very curious the conflicting emotions they evoke – Desmond kept saying ‘Aren’t they sweet?’ and I couldn’t say yes – I could see in my mind’s eye his sons just that age playing on those same lawns – on that same swing – One is forced to feel that to like these children is disloyal to poor unhappy Shaun and Mark and Antonia.
The birthday celebrations became rather muted when Shane emerged from the Pinetum ‘staggering and pouring blood from a gash on the head – Had naughtily gone off alone to chop or clip and had fallen.’ Instead of the fiddles and Irish dancing that Desmond had arranged, it was bed for a week and doctor’s visits. ‘At least we had a new worry,’ Anita wrote. Bill’s former farm had been let and was ‘a mass of needs and weeds’. Anita wanted to improve the dismal place Glaslough had become but ‘All I can think of doing is improve their lives by sending up bridles for my old hunters so they can jog around.’
Her sympathy ran out the following month when Desmond wrote her ‘a jeering letter’ for offering too little for the land she wished to buy. Anita instructed her solicitor to increase the offer to £200 per acre and to ‘ask for access through Farm Gate and hope stewards house and farm buildings can be thrown in.’ And then to Tarka on 28 November: ‘What did you say to Desmond on the ’phone?’ According to Desmond, Tarka, who had joined the Blues and Royals, had offered to ‘contribute’ to the upkeep of Glaslough. ‘With what may I ask’, Anita wrote to her son, pointing out that he had only a small American income which, with an allowance from his mother, just covered the £1200 that his regiment demanded as private means. Tarka’s phone call seems to have unhinged Desmond. He now demanded that Anita raise £60,000 on all her assets to ‘invest’ in Glaslough. Tarka seems to have also told his uncle that he, Tarka, owned various building sites around Oranmore valued at £80,000. Anita pointed out that much of this land was liable to flooding. She ended the letter to her son: ‘Let’s stay factual.’
Telling Tales Page 20