Diana Cooper

by Philip Ziegler

  For a month or so of the summer the family migrated to Rowsley, where entertaining continued but guests were fewer and the style less formal. Billy Grenfell recorded a week in August when the downpour was continuous but ‘the wit and pleasant drawing and cheerful reading of our hostess, as well as the beauty of Haddon Hall in slashing rain, have made life a pleasaunce. Tennis, fencing and battledore fill up the intervals.’ In 1913 H. G. Wells’s game ‘Little Wars’, played with toy mechanical guns and tin soldiers, was all the rage. Diana, Ego Charteris, George Vernon, John Granby and the Austrian Alfy Clary spent all day on their stomachs in a courtyard at Rowsley, shifting the pieces from one place to another. War was still a game but premonitions that it might become something more serious were beginning to be felt. Diana was summoned to the German Embassy where the Ambassadress, a buxom lesbian, was embarrassingly eager to photograph her in the nude. In the interests of international goodwill Diana obliged, but even as she posed she wondered nervously what use might be made of her photograph in case of war.

  Travel was now a regular feature of the programme. In the years before the war Diana went several times to Paris; to Rouen; to The Hague to stay with Violet Keppel – ‘all the brilliant doomed young men the war was to annihilate, George Vernon, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Raymond Asquith, Bim Tennant, flocked to Holland,’ wrote her hostess. ‘Diana Manners, dazzling, disconcerting, came with her mother’; to Florence; to Genoa to visit Viola Tree who was rehearsing for an opera; above all to Venice. It was Venice that provided the apotheosis of these festive years. Diana was staying with Lady Cunard in a party that included the Prime Minister and his wife Margot, Harry Cust and Ronald Storrs. Not far away George Vernon had taken a palazzo and filled it with Diana’s dearest friends: Raymond and Katharine Asquith; Billy Grenfell; Duff Cooper; Denny Anson; Charles Lister, now at the Embassy in Rome; Edward Horner. Hand in hand with the Prime Minister Diana marvelled at the sights of Venice and then in the evening the Coterie would fête and cosset him: ‘On his birthday we dressed him up as a Doge and hung the sala with Mantegna swags of fruit and green leaves and loaded him with presents, tenderness and admiration. I think he was ecstatically happy that day.’

  But it was with her own friends that Diana was happiest. ‘There was dancing and extravagance and lashings of wine, and charades and moonlit balconies and kisses.’ Denny Anson tried to liven up the Piazza San Marco by throwing a series of epileptic fits, was towed off to jail by indignant police and had to be rescued next day by Charles Lister and the influence of the Embassy. There was amateur prize-fighting and a girls’ sparring match. Denny Anson and Duff raced each other across the canal: ‘I can see Duff now, jacket flung to me, miraculously climbing up one of the great posts that moor the gondolas at the entrance steps – posts quite fifteen feet high and in part slimy with sea-water.’ Duff won, and it was all for love of Diana, or so the men said, though any other object would probably have done as well.

  The life of the young and rich in pre-1914 England was an easy one. The idle were in no way disapproved of; even those who worked followed a schedule that today seems hardly taxing. Their self-confidence, even complacency, was daunting. ‘I’ve been to Rowsley,’ recorded Viola Tree, ‘where I’ve had God’s own time. I swear that all of you are without doubt the “Superior People” of history. It is almost too exciting; you are all quite unlike ordinary people – you are like the heroines of Greece and the popular novels. England can never sink while we’ve got a king like good King E and while it is inhabited by a few such as us.’ Viewed from the lofty heights of late twentieth-century rectitude it is easy to condemn the ‘Superior People’ as frivolous and futile, fiddling while the fires were laid for Europe’s holocaust. Whether the modern moralist would have used his time and money any better is an open question, but even the sternest critic can hardly avoid compassion at the contrast between this carefree gaiety and the carnage that was to come. The Coterie left Venice intoxicated by the delightfulness of its existence and vowing to repeat the triumph annually. But ‘this was the Carne Vale of 1913. Only Duff and I ever did return.’

  *

  In July 1914 a presage of the catastrophe to come brought the first touch of tragedy into Diana’s adult life. Constantine Benckendorff and Edward Horner had arranged a party in a boat on the Thames. Several members of the Coterie were there: Claud Russell, Raymond and Katharine Asquith, Duff Cooper and his sister Sybil, Iris Tree and Denny Anson. The band was drawn from Thomas Beecham’s orchestra at Covent Garden and at 11.30 p.m. the party set sail from Westminster Pier. By 3 a.m. they were opposite Battersea Park on the return journey. Earlier there had been some talk of bathing and now Raymond Asquith offered Diana £10 if she could get Denny Anson to go in. What happened then is unclear, Claud Russell was sure Diana made no response but she herself thinks she may have said something like: ‘Oh, the whole idea was we should bathe and nobody’s done it.’ Whether or not he was egged on to jump, certainly nobody tried to stop Anson when he took off his coat, handed his watch to Diana and dived in. Within a few seconds he realized the force of the current and, as he was swept away, called out ‘Quickly, quickly!’ Benckendorff and one of the bandsmen followed to his rescue; Duff had his coat half off when Sybil and Diana seized his arms and held him back as he cursed and struggled to get free. Benckendorff, an exceptionally strong swimmer, was pulled back on board, totally exhausted, a few minutes later. Anson and the bandsman were drowned.

  When the inquest was held a few days later the coroner was startled to find himself confronted by the fine flower of the London bar defending the interests of the various participants: F. E. Smith K.C., later Lord Chancellor; Ernest Pollock K.C., J.P., later Master of the Rolls; William Jowitt, another Lord Chancellor to be; and Hugh Fraser, a future Judge of the High Court. Raymond Asquith conveniently had another case on hand and was excused attendance; no mention was made of his role in encouraging Anson to dive. As a result of the intervention of the Duchess, Diana too was not called as a witness. The verdict was predictably ‘Death by misadventure’, with a few platitudes about the wildness of youth and no particular blame attached to anyone. The press had been having a field-day over the affair and some sort of demonstration was expected outside the court, but the imposing spectacle of Herbert Tree, with a beautiful daughter on either arm, soon stilled the murmurs.

  Diana was given more attention by the press than any other protagonist. After Sir Denis Anson’s funeral the evening papers carried the placard ‘Diana’s Love’. ‘Nothing can exceed the blackguardism of the press,’ commented the Prime Minister, ‘but by misfortune or design some people are always in the limelight.’ London society was no kinder. It was said that she had been heard singing the morning after the tragedy; that she went to the Bath Club and gave an imitation of Anson drowning; that she visited the opera the following night and caused such indignation among the orchestra that they refused to continue with the performance until ‘that woman’ left the theatre. None of this was true, though the Covent Garden orchestra did feel that their colleague had been unfairly sacrificed and Thomas Beecham had to work hard to stop them passing on their indignation to the press. A more justified complaint was that Diana did not personally return Anson’s watch to his family but instead sent it round by Edward Homer. Perhaps correctly, she had felt that she would be unwelcome at the Ansons’ house, but her conduct fed the rumours of her chill indifference. Diana always shrank from painful confrontations, and left it to others to pass on bad news. Thus she earned a reputation for being unfeeling, when at the worst she was guilty of a kind of cowardice. The wreath she sent to Denis Anson’s funeral ‘With Diana’s love’ was the target of an anonymous letter which urged her, when next in Venice, to persuade some man to jump from the top of the Campanile to the roof of St Mark’s – making sure first there was a good crowd to admire the exploit and its instigator.

  The pain caused her by this miserable folly cannot be doubted. Two years later she told Raymond Asquith: ‘I have an hour ago
been thrown entirely off my balance by seeing Denny in the corner – not dripping slime or festering in a shroud, but he always looked at best like “a shrieking mandrake torn out of the earth” so it was as bad as if he had worn the symbols of my murder.’ In less dramatic form the tragedy haunted her all her life; when she wrote her memoirs fifty years later she was still asking herself whether she was to blame and what she could have done to stop it. Shortly after the incident Diana found herself abruptly dropped from the list for the Guards Ball, one of the events of the season which few of her group would expect to miss. No explanation was offered and none was asked for. Indignant, the Duchess organized a rival party at Arlington Street and brought considerable pressure on the faithful and not-so-faithful to attend. Duff was one of those who rallied and he was rumoured too to have knocked down a man whom he heard disparaging Diana in his club. Nothing would at that time have made the Duchess think of him as other than a drunkard and a spendthrift, inconceivable as a son-in-law and dangerous as a friend, but even she was touched by such evidence of loyalty.

  The lesser tragedy was soon submerged by the greater. ‘Goodbye, my darling,’ wrote Duff late in June 1914. ‘I hope that everyone whom you like better than me will die very soon.’ It seemed an idle joke but it was not long to remain so. On 4 August 1914, less than a month after the disaster on the Thames, war broke out. Diana’s untroubled youth was over.

  THREE

  THE GREAT WAR

  It must be wonderful to be in England now. I suppose the excitement is beyond all words … It reinforces one’s failing belief in the Old Flag and the Mother Country and the Heavy Brigade and the Thin Red Line and the Imperial Idea which gets rather shadowy in peacetime, don’t you think?

  Julian Grenfell’s awful exultation at the coming of war found its echo among others of Diana’s acquaintance. Herbert (‘Beb’) Asquith, Raymond’s younger brother, was another who found the moment provided a new purpose for him and welcomed it wholeheartedly. Among her closest friends, however, there is no evidence of that eagerness for war which Nicholas Mosley, in his biography of Grenfell, detected among the British upper classes. For Raymond Asquith at the Bar, Patrick Shaw-Stewart in Baring’s Bank, Charles Lister in the Diplomatic Service, all that was involved was an interruption to a successful career. Duff, as a clerk in the Foreign Office, was not allowed to join the army, but he would have been as unenthusiastic as any of his friends. None of them believed that the interruption could last more than a few months; nor were they, outwardly at least, preoccupied by the danger involved; but they all regretted the necessity. Men like Edward Horner and George Vernon were less dedicated to their careers, but they were still getting too much fun out of their peacetime lives to relish this distraction.

  Nobody in Diana’s circle seems to have asked whether the war could have been avoided, still less whether it was just. For Diana it was enough that Britain was involved – ‘there it is and what do I do?’ She did however feel that she should make a positive effort to end the fighting before it was too late. On 7 August 1914, she wrote to Edward Horner:

  I think it’s up to the Coterie to stop this war. What a justification! My scheme is simple enough to be carried out by you at once. It consists of getting a neutral country, either America or Spain or Italy or any other you can think of, to ask each fighting country to pledge their word – on condition that each one’s word is given – to cease hostilities, or rather suspend them totally until a treaty or conference is made. That they should then meet, agree not to dissolve until a decision of Peace is come to … It seems to me an admirable suggestion. For God’s sake see to it, backed by Patrick and the P.M. How splendid it would be! ‘Who stopped the war?’ ‘Oh, haven’t you heard, Edward and Diana, members of that Corrupt Coterie!’ You mightn’t believe it, but this is written more seriously than I’ve ever written. Do see to it! God, if I were only Judith or Jael or Salammbô or Corday or Monna Vanna – or at worst the crazy Kaiser’s mistress.

  As Diana herself remarked when she quoted the letter in her memoirs, it might have been written by Daisy Ashford. But it would be wrong to ridicule the generous impulse. Behind the naiveté, the touching belief in the powers of her circle of friends, there was an appreciation of the need to avoid disaster which was signally lacking in those in authority. If more people had felt the need to act, rather than to wring their hands and deplore the passage of events, the lives of millions might have been spared.

  Edward Horner had no illusions about his capacity to head off Armageddon. Within a few days of war being declared, he was off with the North Somersets, taking with him his mother’s two best hunters, a valet and a cook. Soon, stripped of all such agreeable appurtenances, he would be in France. Julian and Billy Grenfell and Tommy Bouch followed him there. Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Charles Lister and George Vernon were destined for Gallipoli. Ego Charteris joined the Gloucestershire Yeomanry and also set off for the Middle East. Raymond Asquith enlisted in a shadowy body called the London Volunteer Defence Force which, since it did not exist and would probably never be allowed to exist by the War Office, guaranteed its members the certainty of staying alive at least until after Goodwood, 1915. In fact, in spite of his vigorous efforts to the contrary, he did not go to France until October of that year. ‘Isn’t it awful,’ said Diana to John Simon when she met him, ‘looking very juiceless’, in the street. ‘Raymond is going out next Wednesday.’ ‘No, I think it’s quite right,’ replied Sir John, with all the confidence of a desk-bound cabinet minister. ‘The time has come now when one can only feel sorry for those who are unable to go.’

  The Coterie had disintegrated; all that was left was Duff and Alan Parsons in Whitehall and the women bemoaning the disappearance of their admirers. Diana wished to do more than keep the home fires burning. ‘How can I best serve my country in this crisis?’ she asked Duff. ‘How but by writing hourly to me?’ Duff replied, but this was not good enough. Yet, service with the army and navy was almost impossible; other varieties of employment, such as work in an armaments factory, inconceivable both to her and her mother. There remained nursing, a vocation both useful and compatible with gentle birth. But nursing did not mean the same thing to everyone. For the Duchess it conjured up visions of some sequestered grange, an ethereal being in white gliding through the wards, a smile here, a kind word there, perhaps a laying-on of hands. Emptying bed-pans and dressing wounds would be left to some resident Caliban. Diana would accept no such nonsense. If she was going to nurse then she would do it properly.

  Her first intention was to go to France, where various field hospitals were being set up behind the lines and where, incidentally, she would be near some of her dearest friends. Her mother was outraged and called in Lady Dudley, who explained that for an attractive girl to mingle with the libidinous soldiery so far from home could lead only to Rape. Diana was unconvinced but reluctant to defy her mother altogether. Similarly short shrift was given to a project to join Maxine Elliott, Lady Sarah Wilson and Lady Drogheda in their barge on the river Yser where, reported the Prime Minister, they conducted ‘some unnamed mission of philanthropy. What a Trinity! I am told that Diana Manners feels tempted to join the gentle bargees.’

  A compromise was reached. Diana would not go to France but she would leave home and do a serious job of nursing in a London hospital. On 3 October she applied to be admitted to Guy’s and end her ‘life of grim monotony’. ‘I shouldn’t think they’d have me,’ she wrote gloomily to Raymond Asquith, ‘even if I get out of the castle with their Graces’ love-crown still on my brow.’ Asquith was disturbed by her resolve and sceptical about her motives. ‘I can’t help thinking that it is not a thing like the Slade School to be lightly undertaken as a mere essay in parent-dodging. The contract is lengthy, the drudgery unbearable and the uniform disfiguring … A hospital has all the material discomforts of a nunnery without the spiritual glamour of chastity.’

  Guy’s Hospital is at Southwark, south of the Thames; a stark Victorian barracks with eighteent
h-century trimmings, probably warmer than Belvoir Castle but in every other way making the ducal seat seem a paradise of comfort. Diana expected to be ‘lonely and sick in the extreme’. Although she was now twenty-two she had led a sheltered life, never sleeping from home except in carefully selected house-parties, chaperoned everywhere, cosseted and indulged in one way, stiflingly repressed in another. She was used to a world of deferential servants, admirers assuring her that she was the centre of the universe, parents guarding her from any tremor of impurity. Now she found herself transported to a world where she was nobody; subjected to strict discipline; expected to speak only when spoken to; dressed in a stark and unbecoming uniform; called at six, lights out at ten-fifteen; entrusted only with the most menial tasks; kept on her feet for nine hours with only brief breaks for meals; most taxing of all, confronted constantly with pain and misery.

  The hospital viewed with some suspicion this gorgeous apparition. Nurses were not expected to feature in the newspapers or to have a retinue of elegant young men waiting regularly outside the gates for their emergence. The Prime Minister was not supposed to inquire about their welfare. After her first visit to her family in Arlington Street she was summoned to the Matron’s office and given a severe rebuke for gossiping about hospital matters. If she was thought to be picking at her food or in any other way showing herself superior to her surroundings, she was at once slapped down and reminded of the sacred nature of a nurse’s vocation; she was nothing, the task was all. She would not be accepted until she proved that she could do as good a job as any other nurse, and keep on doing it after the novelty had worn off.