Aristocrats Go to War: Uncovering the Zillebeke Cemetery

by Jerry Murland

  A less public incident was the demise of George Schuster’s political career in the Liberal Party. Having been called to the Bar at the end of 1903 he first stood as Liberal candidate for Chelsea and then in 1911 for North Cumberland. He must have been regarded as a promising prospect as several members of the cabinet travelled north to support him at local meetings. On the very day that John Simon, the Attorney-General, was intending to speak at a political meeting in Carlisle in support of George, war was declared. As a candidate with a German name George Schuster had no recourse but to resign.

  But for others such as the working class Siewertsen family who lived the East End of London, anti-German feeling often manifested itself in a more violent form. Hans Christian Siewertsen was German born, and like the Schusters, had been resident in England for a considerable period of time. Hans had married in 1890 and in 1914 he and Mary Anne were living at Rosher Road in Stratford East with their six children. Hans was a fur skin dresser with a local firm and his eldest son, Walter Frederick, began his adult working life in the same trade after leaving school. But like many young men of the period he wanted more out of life and a release from the overcrowded conditions in the family home. His father was very proud when, soon after his nineteenth birthday, Walter enlisted in the Grenadier Guards. In 1914, after war was declared and Walter had left for France with his battalion, the family was subjected to constant verbal abuse and had their property vandalised by neighbours who had previously been counted as friends. A heartbroken Hans could not equate this with having a son serving with the regular army at the front with 4 (Guards) Brigade. He was never to see Walter again.

  In May 1897 Second Lieutenant Regy Wyndham received notice that 17/Lancers were to move from York to Ireland and to be stationed at Ballincollig and Cork. To Regy’s delight the regiment took over the Muskerry Hounds from 12 /Lancers on arrival at Ballincollig and he was chosen to be Whip. Regimental duties aside, he and his brother officers spent a large proportion of their time riding to hounds and enjoying the country sports that the area around Ballincollig offered. Consequently it was with some personal regret that his squadron moved in 1898 to the Cork barracks. At Cork, disaster struck; Regy contracted typhoid in January 1898 and became so seriously ill that his mother was sent for. In February his condition was described as ‘critical’ and his father was preparing to go to Cork to see his son possibly for the last time, but the crisis passed and by early March he was on the road to recovery. The recovery process was slow and Lady Constance brought her son home to Petworth to convalesce until he returned to the regiment in 1899.

  His return to Ireland was overshadowed by the clouds of war that were gathering in South Africa. These soon became reality when embarkation orders arrived for the regiment to report to Tilbury Docks on Valentine’s Day 1900. Regy was one of the three officers who remained behind at Ballincollig with the reserve squadron and did not arrive in South Africa until nearly a year later in March 1901. He arrived in time to see some of the major actions in which his regiment fought and to be under the command of his cousin Lieutenant Colonel Guy Wyndham who temporarily commanded 17/Lancers for two months in May 1901.

  Back from South Africa in 1902 the regiment moved to Piershill barracks at Edinburgh where they settled back into peacetime duties. Here Regy’s military career with 17/Lancers was again disrupted by a serious riding accident in 1903. Hunting was his great passion and after spending time in Ireland with the regiment he was a frequent visitor thereafter. On this occasion he remembered very little of the actual accident. Writing after the event it is clear he had already contemplated the future of his army career:

  ‘I have at last got leave to write my first letter, late enough. I think I remember the day of the mash up to about ten minutes before it occurred. Everyone has been very kind to me. Mother has faithfully sat by me in the best of ways and seen nothing of the spring enjoyments that take place here … It is no use in my keeping my horses as I shall probably be away from my regiment a good time.’

  He was right about that. The accident brought about the end of his army service; he had been badly concussed in the accident and had broken several bones. Recovery was again a lengthy business and by the time he was considering his return to duty, the regiment was under orders to move to India. This may have been the deciding factor that persuaded him to resign his commission, the prospect of being buried away on service in India away from his beloved horses and hunting was probably too much to bear. Although his accident gave him the prefect pretext for leaving the army it does not seem to have prevented him from leading a thoroughly active life in Africa and later in the Rocky Mountains in America. In 1912 he was elected a member of the Jockey Club and settled down to pursue his great passion in life, horses and hunting.

  The young Harry Parnell was an all-round sportsman. He was an excellent shot, a good athlete and regularly ran with the beagles both at Eton and later at university. In his last two years at Eton he represented the school in the Rugby XV; a game he continued to play at Oxford. In 1908, during his last year at the school, he was joined by his younger brother William Alastair Damer Parnell who would follow him into the Grenadier Guards in 1915. When Harry left Eton College in 1909 for New College, Oxford, to study for a degree in Modern History, he initially thought the place to be ‘dull.’ In a letter to his mother, Elizabeth the Dowager Lady Congleton, on 8 October 1909, he gave her his first impressions of his new surroundings:

  ‘I saw my tutor this morning – Mr Fisher – he seems rather nice … I have got quite nice rooms on the second floor … my packing cases arrived from Eton all right. It seems pretty dull here but I expect it will be more exciting next week when the term really commences.’

  His tutor was in fact Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher who became Minister of Education in 1916 during the Government of David Lloyd George and was instrumental in much of the content of the 1918 Education Act. Fisher later returned as Warden of New College in 1926. There is no record of Fisher’s thoughts on his young charge but he must have despaired at his lack of academic commitment. Harry Parnell’s first year at Oxford was not an altogether successful one. He clearly saw student life as an opportunity for a very wealthy young man to behave badly and enjoy himself in the company of like-minded individuals; an attitude that was in direct contrast to that of Alfred Shuster and one that gave Lady Congleton much cause for concern over her son’s conduct. In January 1910 he wrote to his mother about his plans for the summer and added a hint of what might be the result of his lack of application:

  ‘My examinations start on 10 March so they will not interfere with going abroad unless I have to come back in the middle of the time for a viva voce exam which I believe is quite possible.’

  In the event it wasn’t, as he seems to have managed to pass his first year examinations but he was involved in a serious episode two months later which resulted in him being ‘gated’:

  ‘I am gated for the present, which means I have to be in college by 9pm. This is owing to a bonfire we had on Wednesday past I and some other fellows built it in the middle of the quad and after dousing it with spirit set fire to it. Unfortunately it occurred to 2 fellows to break into the Don’s dining room and place all the furniture on the bonfire.

  NB I have not been here a year yet!’

  The bonfire was the work of the New College Twenty Club, a shooting club for wealthy students that Harry belonged to. While some of the group were sent down for their part in this incident, it appears Harry was not. Even so the bill for the destroyed furniture was £60 and placed firmly in the hands of the perpetrators. Harry’s second year at New College was marked with another incident that resulted in him being sent down for two weeks in April 1911 and later for the remainder of the term. He was only readmitted for the start of the autumn term in 1912. The Warden of New College was William Spooner and although he was instrumental in Harry’s exclusion, as well as having fined him on several occasions for riotous behaviour, he does seem to have had a liking f
or his wayward student. Spooner himself was well respected by the students and it was largely his influence, supported by Herbert Fisher and Lady Congleton, which achieved a remarkable turnaround in Harry Parnell’s attitude to his studies. When he finally graduated in 1912 with a second class degree, Spooner wrote to Lady Congleton:

  ‘I feel very much indebted to you for your tolerance and courtesy in circumstances, as you say, have been trying for us both. I feel he [Harry] has made full use of his time here to gain so distinguished a class in addition to getting through his army examinations. I hope this will be the beginning of a prosperous and successful career.’

  After Harry joined the Grenadier Guards in 1912 he continued his wealthy, privileged lifestyle that included extensive foreign travel and shooting expeditions to the Rocky Mountains in America. He clearly had an adventurous spirit and after meeting J Forster Stackhouse in 1913 he was determined to accompany him on his proposed Antarctic expedition to King Edward VII Land in 1914. In November 1913 he wrote to his younger brother William, who was still at Eton, outlining his intentions:

  ‘I have been interviewing a J F Stackhouse who is head of the Antarctic Expedition that is leaving England this time next year and I think of accompanying him as he is thinking of making a sort of round trip by the Cape and back by New Zealand and the Panama Canal and will take about 18 to 24 months. I think I could probably get seconded for it and would go as a surveyor.’

  Harry was a qualified surveyor and his interest was just what Stackhouse needed to publicise his expedition, particularly as he had no previous Antarctic experience apart from assisting Scott in arranging his expedition in 1910. Stackhouse desperately needed the patronage of establishment figures such as Harry Parnell if he was to raise the substantial funding necessary for the expedition to go ahead. Apparently before Scott left on his ill-fated 1910 expedition, he had urged Stackhouse to lead a scientific expedition to King Edward VII Land and Stackhouse was intending to use Scott’s old ship, Discovery. The project was doomed from the start, the funds failed to materialize, the public preferring to support the better known explorer Ernest Shackleton, who was also intending to leave from England for the Antarctic in 1914. Despite the outbreak of war Shackleton left for the Southern Ocean on 8 August by which time Harry had been mobilized. Stackhouse was tragically drowned on 7 May 1915 when the RMS Lusitania was torpedoed and sank off Ireland. Even if the Stackhouse expedition had gone ahead it is doubtful that Harry would have gone with them, the great adventure waiting across the Channel would have been far too tempting to miss out on.

  John Lee Steere was born on Friday 14 June 1895 and was the only child of Henry and Anna Lee Steere. Descendants of the family first settled in Ockley during the sixteenth century and today the Lee Steere family estate at Jayes Park still sits above the Surrey village of Ockley nestling in the shadows of Leith Hill, the highest point in south-east England. John’s family was well connected, his grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Lord Charles Fitzroy fought in the Peninsular Wars with the Foot Guards and later at Waterloo where he was military secretary to the Duke of Wellington. In October 1825 Charles Fitzroy married Lady Anne Cavendish, a daughter of George Cavendish, the Earl of Burlington, whose brother, Lieutenant General Henry Cavendish, was Colonel of the Queen’s Bays from 1852 until 1873.5

  The family also has an extensive Australian connection, principally through Sir James George Lee Steere who as a midshipman entered the East India Company’s mercantile marine in 1845 eventually rising to command the Devonshire in 1854. In 1855 his younger brother, Augustus, emigrated to Western Australia and James decided to follow. James and his wife built a house, naming it Jayes after the ancestral estate, and there they raised their family of eleven children. In this colonial environment Lee Steere quickly prospered and in 1868 was elected to represent the south district which was to be the beginning of a career in business and politics that culminated in 1898 when he was appointed KCMG and made his final visit to England.

  In 1908, aged 13, John Lee Steere arrived at Eton College from Wixenford Preparatory School where he quickly settled in under the watchful eye of his tutor Ernest Churchill. His first impressions were the subject of one of his first letters to his mother:

  ‘I am now beginning to get accustomed to life here, I am sure I shall love it. It is such a lovely place, I am quite happy here. I begin fagging on the 5th, I am going to fag for Dawkes the head of house, he has two others, Taylor and Glasbrooke.’

  His Eton school report for 1908 described him as a capable boy who asked ‘rather tiresome’ questions in his mathematics lessons. His tutor concluded with:

  ‘Altogether I am quite content with him and his progress. I am quite clear he is not at all stupid. He is a good little chap and you need have no anxiety on his behalf, he is doing all right and is sound in both head and heart.’

  While such a report would be unacceptable today, it did at least indicate that John had settled into school life and by 1909 he had become a regular member of the school beagling fraternity, reporting his many hunting adventures in his letters home. Beagling is still a popular activity amongst the boys at Eton and its origins go back as far as 1858 when there were two beagling packs at the college. Many boys brought their own dogs for the season and one hound called ‘Bellman’ was owned by a young Bernard Gordon Lennox while he was at the school in 1896.

  Apart from running with the beagles John Lee Steere was also focused on his future career. Described as ‘always good-tempered and cheery with an undercurrent of seriousness in his character’ he had clearly decided on joining the army from an early age; a choice which was probably influenced by his grandfather and demanded some academic application in order to enter the Army Class which prepared boys for the army examinations. In December 1909 he assured his mother that he was working ‘as hard as I can in trials (school examinations) to get into the Army Class.’ This he managed to do and three years later he entered Sandhurst as a prize cadet in February 1913.

  Another keen beagler was Howard St George who began life at Eton in the same term as John Lee Steere. Howard’s elder brother, George Baker St George was already a senior boy at the school and no doubt this eased Howard’s transition from his preparatory school at Hazelwood to the harsher rough and tumble of life at Eton. Described in the Eton Chronicle as one ‘who had no taste for book learning’ Howard was a keen follower of the beagles at Eton and in 1912 was elected one of the Whips. He was also an accomplished distance runner and came third in the steeplechase in his final year. John Lee Steere and Howard St George would without doubt have known each other at school, coming into frequent contact through their common interest in beagling.

  The St George boys were related to the County Galway Irish aristocratic family through their father Howard Bligh St George who is described in Irish census records as a ‘gentleman of means’. In 1891, much to her father’s surprise, he married Florence Evelyn Baker, the daughter of George Fisher Baker, the American financier and philanthropist who was chairman and cofounder of the First National Bank of New York. George Baker was spectacularly wealthy. In 1909 his shares in the First National were said to be worth twenty million dollars. Initially the St George family lived in the small town of Screebe in the west of Ireland, where George, Howard and their sister Gardinia were born, but in 1905 relocated to Clonsilla Lodge near Blanchardstown, just outside Dublin.

  It was at Dublin that Evelyn St George was introduced to the painter William Orpen by her husband’s cousin Annie.6 Orpen was commissioned by the family to paint two full length portraits of Howard and Evelyn, an enterprise that began as a formal business arrangement but blossomed into a love affair with the latter that was to last for fifteen years and resulted in the birth of a daughter, Vivian, in 1912. Their deepening relationship is apparent in the series of portraits Orpen painted of Evelyn concluding with his monumental portrait of her which was completed in 1914.

  Initially their affair was conducted in secret but became public after 1912 when
Evelyn moved to Berkeley Square in London where she had a flat. At Berkeley Square the lovers continued their liaison and began appearing together with increasing frequency in London society. This did not go unnoticed by the press and was often commented upon in the popular press society pages, particularly as Evelyn St George was over six feet tall and her lover was only just over five feet tall. Inevitably they became known as ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.

  In 1912 the St Georges were also renting an estate at Ashorne Hill near Leamington Spa in Warwickshire but by this time the relationship between Evelyn and her husband Howard was beyond repair and although they ostensibly led separate lives they still maintained a public façade. Despite this, Evelyn was from all accounts a loving and devoted mother to the children and William Orpen was instrumental in helping her overcome her grief when Howard was killed in 1914.

  The Stocks family fortune was made in the north of England and dates back to 1603 when a John Stokes began mining coal in the Shibden Valley near Halifax. Later members of the family ran and developed the Stocks brewing empire along with the mining interests and by 1850, when the family were living at Upper Shibden Hall, their property consisted of ‘extensive quarries and coal mines and one of the largest breweries in the country.’ As prominent businessmen the family also became involved in local politics having a great influence in the incorporation of Halifax as a Borough in 1848.