Basil Street Blues

by Michael Holroyd

  Though my father liked to picture Fraser making lifelong friendships in the glamorous atmosphere of Cambridge, he suspected there had been some setback and attributed it to varicose veins (which he himself had), brought on by the ‘tight elastic garters’ Fraser was obliged to wear. This rumour of illness took many forms and I remember hearing how my grandfather’s brilliant prospects as an oarsman had been blighted by his hernia. The truth appears to have been more complicated.

  Towards the end of 1894 Fraser was given what the Major-General indignantly describes as an ‘arbitrary order, compelling him to give up Classics and take up History’ by his college tutor, Alfred Cooke. Cooke was an Old Etonian Classics scholar with a bewildering medley of occupations – he was a priest, a famous versifier, a conchologist and a talented footballer. Early in 1895, Fraser is asking his friend Oscar Browning for advice as to what he should do. The prolonged difficulty in getting tuition lost him ‘a full year’.

  This friendship with Oscar Browning is surprising. A hugely fat socialite and friend of Oscar Wilde, he had been dismissed as an assistant-master at Eton ‘on unsubstantiated charges of misconduct’ and then returned to King’s as a lecturer in history. A notorious ‘character’ and (in the words of E.F. Benson) a ‘genius flawed by abysmal fatuity’, Browning inhabited a world I had never remotely associated with my grandfather.

  By the summer of 1896 my grandfather, having crammed two years’ work into one, seems to have had some kind of breakdown, raising in the examiners’ minds a question of whether he should be allowed to stay on and complete his studies. While they were deliberating, his father sent him out to Cape Town with his brother Pat (the two of them were good friends) ‘in the hope the entire change would keep him from brooding over his misfortunes’. But ‘the wound still rankles’, he reported. What was this wound? The Major-General wrote in confidence to Oscar Browning with some attempt at an explanation.

  He was not well at the time of the examination: shortly before it commenced he heard of the sudden death of his Godfather who was his best friend, and a great help to him. He was working 8 to 9 hours a day, & at night unable to sleep brooding over his loss… He is not of a nature to confide in others, & keeps his feelings to himself. I am about the only one he confides in. I do not think Mr Cook [sic] understands him in the slightest, & I do not imagine he would take the trouble to do so… he has not met with much consideration since he has been at the university, excepting from yourself, of whom he always speaks in the warmest praise.

  It is obvious that Fraser was unhappy at Cambridge and not prospering there. The contrast with those simple sunlit days at Uppingham must have been dismaying. He had entered a far more ambiguous world.

  When the decision was made to allow my grandfather to stay on for his third year, the Major-General wired the happy news to Cape Town. So that autumn, Fraser returned to King’s, dividing his vacations between Eastbourne and an apartment in London at 22 Montague Place, near the Reading Room of the British Museum.

  But it was a gloomy time. In a letter sent from The Links shortly before Christmas 1896, the Major-General wrote that ‘it would have been a great pleasure’ to invite Oscar Browning to lunch or dine (he had apparently tried to invite himself), ‘but my Daughter is so poorly I regret I cannot ask anyone to the House’. So the family rumour of her illness had been based on fact. But what was wrong with her? Had she found out about her mother’s suicide? Was she suspected of having inherited through the female line some mental instability? There were whispers of a scandal that my own father picked up when a child on the only occasion he saw her. He refers to ‘some story the details of which I never heard, about some awful experience that Norah had at the hands of some man… whom she was visiting’.

  During 1897 and 1898 The Links became something of a sanatorium. ‘Progress is very slow, almost imperceptible, & it will take a long time before, if ever, I am myself again,’ the Major-General wrote in a very shaky hand shortly before Norah’s twentieth birthday and when he himself was in his seventy-fifth year. According to the Eastbourne Chronicle, he had suffered a stroke and was partly paralysed. As for Fraser, ‘I hope he has prospered,’ the old man wrote to Oscar Browning: ‘it will be a crushing blow to him if he has not for he has… I know done his best.’

  In February 1897 my great-grandfather made his Will. He leaves The Links, its grounds and contents (‘furniture plated goods linen glass china books ornaments manuscripts pictures prints statuary musical instruments and articles of vertu…and all wines liquors and consumable stores and all my plants and garden tools’) in trust to his elder son Patrick. The property is given to him under the condition that, until he reaches the age of twenty-five (when it becomes his own absolutely), he allows his brother and sister to live there if they wish, so that The Links can ‘be maintained as a home for my family’.

  ‘The watches jewels trinkets and personal ornaments belonging to me at the time of my death’, many of which must have once belonged to Norah’s mother, he leaves to Norah herself. The residuary estate is to be divided equally in trust between his three children.

  There are pages of instruction designed to protect his daughter from fortune-hunting men. Her third part in the estate is to be retained by trustees ‘for as long as she shall remain unmarried and whether she shall be competent or incompetent to give legal discharge’. In the event of her marriage, this Holroyd money shall be for ‘her separate use free from marital control and without power of alienation’. The one-third interest in the estate then becomes vested in her and the capital eventually passes to her children after they come of age. It is evident that her father had given much thought to these provisions, considerably more than to his second son who is bequeathed nothing beyond his one-third share of the residuary estate. But after Fraser was awarded his degree in the autumn of 1897, his father added a codicil to the Will leaving him various exotic Indian debentures and securities, including 92,500 rupees at the Bank of Bengal and a thousand shares in the fabulous Rajmai Tea Company, the sound and substance of which were to echo down the years – and were still echoing strangely through my childhood, more sound than substance then.

  A second codicil Charles Holroyd signed on 14 July 1898 leaves all his staff an extra year’s wages because of the burden placed on them by his long illness.

  Six weeks later Patrick marries. His wife Coral is the daughter of another Major-General, and the wedding takes place on 7 September 1898 at the parish church of St Mary’s in Bath. Fraser is present, but no one else from Patrick’s family. The husband and wife then go off for their honeymoon, and Fraser returns to The Links. His father was now dying. The cause of his death was given as thirty-two hours of cerebral haemorrhaging with convulsions leading to a coma and eventually culminating in respiratory paralysis. My grandfather was present during this final agony of illness and he is named as ‘informant’ on the death certificate, dated 19 September.

  The funeral was held four days later at St John’s Church, and the body was interred at Ocklynge cemetery. Fraser was there, also Pat and his wife Coral with her father, Major-General Montague. Colonel and Mrs Hannay were listed among the mourners. A friend from India, Richard Magor, connected with the Rajmai tea plantations, came to the service; so did numerous nephews, nieces and in-laws, as well as Mary Easlea, but not Norah Holroyd, the dead man’s daughter. There were special wreaths from the coachman, gardeners and indoor servants, as well as from his late wife’s family. There was none from Norah. But there is one ‘in ever loving memory of my dear father, from his heart-broken Fraser’.

  Probate was granted at the end of October, and the Major-General’s estate was valued at £80,913 8s 10d. A hundred years later such a sum would be roughly equivalent to four-and-a-half million pounds.

  On 4 June 1899 Patrick was twenty-five and The Links became his absolute property. He immediately sold the house which was converted into an expensive ‘Ladies School’ – among its pupils were to be Edwina Ashley, god-daughter of Edward VII,
later to gain fame as Lady Mountbatten; and the Marchioness of Bath who, as Daphne Fielding, was to write a celebrated autobiography, Mercury Presides. Later, The Links was bought by the Methodist Guild, and became a Christian Holiday Centre, its interior partitioned and sub-divided by the tortured geometry of fire regulations.

  The Militia was to do good service in the Boer War and Lieutenant Patrick Holroyd was one of those who volunteered to embark for South Africa. He took his wife Coral, and there, in the summer of 1900, their son Ivor was born. Fraser, who accurately described his occupation as being ‘of independent means’, had meanwhile fallen in love, a complaint that was to carry him off to Ireland. But while the two brothers were abroad what became of Norah? There was a family rumour that she died young. But my father wrote of having seen her once when he was aged about six – ‘someone lying down who was very gentle to a little boy’ and who (my aunt recalled) had ‘beautiful hair’. That must have been approximately in 1913. So I went in search of a death certificate.

  Birth, death and marriage certificates were still held in 1996 at St Catherine’s House in the Aldwych. The National Statistics Public Search Room there looked like a medieval place of torment. I joined the panting crowds of fellow-researchers, sweating, glazed, cursing as we bumped against one another, jostling with decades of unwieldy volumes and staring at the lists, and more lists, of the dead. All of us apparently were hunting for our family stories. But I could find no death certificate for Norah Palmer Holroyd. Had she secretly married? She seemed to have vanished.

  I had no other information about her, except a whisper my father had picked up from among the grown-ups that she lived with a Dr Macnamara. The family whispers had it that he was a Svengali, with an uncanny hold over this unmarried girl, plotting to get her money. There appeared to be no way of checking this. The trail had ended.

  Then I had an idea. Maybe Norah made a Will. Wills and certificates of divorce were then lodged at Somerset House which was just the other side of the Aldwych from St Catherine’s House. The crowds are less dense there and the torture more refined. No one who searches for a Will was allowed to take off his or her overcoat in winter lest it contain high explosives. The central heating was kept high, very high, and all the staff worked in shirtsleeves. In this unbalanced atmosphere I began my hot pursuit. I started in the year 1913, tracking backwards and forwards, and came across a Will Norah had made in 1907. This revealed that she died, aged thirty-six, on 22 October 1913. There had been no death certificate because she died at Vernet-les-Bains, a spa town in the far south west of France that was popular among British travellers in the late nineteenth century. Evidently she had visited her brother Fraser, and met her nephews and niece, shortly before setting out on that last journey.

  Norah’s Will fills a few of the empty spaces in her life and plants some signposts over this lost territory. Whatever immediately happened to her when The Links was sold late in 1899, she was according to the Census living at Beaufort House at Ham in Surrey at the beginning of 1901. The house was occupied by a Dr William Simpson Craig who was replaced as its occupant by his son-in-law Dr Macnamara in 1907, the year Norah made her Will.

  When probate was granted in the summer of 1914, Norah’s estate was valued at £11,992 16s, which would be equivalent to approximately half-a-million pounds at the end of the century. The chief beneficiaries were indeed Dr and Mrs Macnamara who continued living at Beaufort House until 1920. But Norah’s Will gives a good reason for allowing what money she controlled to pass out of the Holroyd family. For fifteen years she had been able to ‘enjoy the income’ of a one-third share in her father’s residuary estate. But because she was dying unmarried, her capital would pass to Pat and Fraser. For this reason ‘I do not consider it necessary,’ she writes, ‘to bequeath to my said brothers or either of them any portion of the savings accrued or which may accrue in my lifetime in respect of the income of the said share and I have for that reason made the dispositions hereinafter contained without reference to my said brothers.’

  But there is no malice against Pat and Fraser whose sons and daughter are each left a specific gift – for one nephew ‘my gilt Empire clock’; for another ‘my sleevelinks and tie clips’; and for her niece ‘my gold watch and chain’. All of them receive £100 on their twenty-first birthdays. But my father, who was born four days before his aunt made her Will, is not mentioned; and, since there was to be no codicil, nor did Pat’s daughter born in 1908 receive anything. The implication is that Norah’s contact with her brothers’ families had grown more distant during the last six years of her life.

  Her largest legacy of all – £1,400 – goes to ‘my friend Frances Mary Macnamara wife of the said Eric Danvers Macnamara’ who is himself merely given ‘my gold ring set with two diamonds and my crescent scarf pin’. Unless Norah’s solicitor had advised against the impropriety of leaving the bulk of her estate to a married man, the conclusion any reader of this testament reaches is that the special friend of this woman with the watch chain, tie and cufflinks, was not the doctor but his wife.

  Dr Macnamara was a well-known psychiatrist who practised in Harley Street. He ‘devoted his life to mental disease’, his obituary in the British Medical Journal states, ‘...even his domestic life had many associations with his special study’. Norah Palmer Holroyd was almost certainly the subject of one of the papers he published in medical journals and encyclopaedias on neurological and psychopathological matters – on paralysis, insomnia, the use of morphine and what was called ‘functional insanity’.

  Whatever he believed her to be suffering from, her death certificate at the Marie de Vernet-les-Bains in the Pyrenees provides no cause of death. It is as if she simply gave up living. She died at four o’clock in the afternoon of 22 October 1913 at the Hôtel du Parc, an ‘établissement thermal’. There appear to have been no friends with her. The note of death is of a life unlived, ‘célibataire’, ‘sans profession’, signed at ten o’clock the following morning by two local Frenchmen and the mayor. There is no more.

  After his sister’s death, Fraser increased his holding in Rajmai Tea to 1,752 shares, and continued to hold this special number, with a nominal value of £10 a share, until the decline and fall of his own fortunes.

  5

  The Breves Process: Tea into Glass

  In the late eighteen-nineties my grandfather fell into the company of a large, noisy, ramshackle Irish family. The Corbets had been brought up in the Sunday’s Well district of Cork and were utterly unlike Fraser’s own family – indeed that was probably their principal charm. There were eleven Corbet sisters and one brother who, to compensate for his solitary condition, had been blessed with fifteen Christian names which his sisters were obliged to learn by heart: Roland, Hudson, Sands, De Courcy, Blennerhassett… He sailed away to the United States, built up a chain of garages and eventually perished under a car.

  The sheer femininity of these vivacious Corbet girls, with their waspwaists and prominent busts, their bright eyes and lilting voices, seems to have bewitched Fraser after the invalidism of The Links, the heavy male world of Uppingham and his worrying time at Cambridge. Though apparently penniless, these Corbets were always laughing. My grandfather was enchanted by their happy-go-lucky ways.

  He had been introduced to them by a new friend Stephen (nicknamed ‘Nipper’) Anderson who was to become a partner in the Magor family’s tea merchant company. ‘Nipper’ Anderson was on the verge of being engaged to the beautiful Alice Corbet and would take several years advancing to the verge of marrying her. When Alice came over from Ireland to see him, she brought with her a selection of her sisters: Iley, who played the piano so delightfully; Ida, who had escaped from a convent and gone on the music hall stage; Lizzie, the jolliest of the lot of them, famous for her punctuality (she once turned up for a train half-a-day early, fell asleep in the waiting-room, and missed it); Lannie, who would one day emigrate to Australia; and the very pretty and petite Adeline.

  Their parents were both dead
. If you spoke to Ida she would tell you that their father Michael Augustus Corbet had been a dedicated physician, and how her mother had died transporting medicines on horseback through the snows of winter. If you questioned Adeline, she would whisper of their father’s unmitigated brilliance as a poor professor at Cork University. Each sister had her own story; and all relished the others’ repertory of stories. On Adeline’s birth certificate – she was born at 6 Lower Janemount in Cork on 13 July 1876 – her father’s profession is given as ‘Traveller’ which means neither gypsy nor hedge scholar, but commercial traveller.

  The eldest of these Corbet girls is Minnie. She has married the huge and friendly Tom White, director of a pharmaceutical company, and lives in Bray, County Wicklow. They have no family of their own but act in loco parentis to Minnie’s unmarried sisters, the delicate Atty, the mysterious Sloper and others. But these sisters are rapidly getting married. When ‘Nipper’ Anderson hurried over to Ireland soon after Fraser’s father’s death to meet the rest of Alice’s family, he took Fraser along with him. It was a holiday he needed. There were picnics by the sea and sunny days at the races, trips up to Dublin, walks around the magical waters of Glendaloch, and always the congenial company of this tumultuous family teeming with enjoyment.

  Alice, as we know, is to be engaged to ‘Nipper’ Anderson. Lizzie has recently married and, as Mrs Parsons, gone to live in Bristol. Ida’s career as a singer in the music halls is being brought to an end by some passionate love letters from an older man, William Temple, whom (despite the disapproval of his mother, ‘old Lady Temple of Leeswood’) she suddenly marries. Even the youngest sister of all, Lannie, will soon be engaged to a champion cyclist and billiards player. Romance is in the air and there seems no time to lose. Fraser’s attention is caught by the next youngest sister, Adeline, a slip of a girl with a sensuous curving mouth and elaborate, altitudinous hair. She is called ‘Bang’ by her sisters: Fraser they call ‘Josh’.