Renishaw Hall

by Desmond Seward

  Embarrassed by having produced such a ‘fright’, Lady Ida was often harsh with Edith, who in old age claimed bitterly that her mother had bullied her throughout her childhood because she embodied an unhappy marriage. ‘You’d better run, Miss Edith,’ she recalled Moat warning. ‘Her ladyship is in one of her states and looking for you.’

  Her abnormally long, attenuated limbs seemed dangerously weak, which worried her father. (She may have suffered from Marfan Syndrome, a malady that affects the connective tissues.) She hated George for sending her to a quack specialist who made her wear steel braces to strengthen spine and ankles, and a brace to straighten her crooked nose. She called the apparatus her ‘Bastille’, never forgetting the pain and humiliation. Yet this was the best, most expensive treatment available – she could scarcely complain of neglect.

  In all her writings she says nothing of Sir George shaping her mind, save for his disapproval of her fondness for Swinburne. But her finest biographer, Victoria Glendinning, believes that little as Edith cared to admit it, she derived from George ‘much of his liking for strange information and the habit of books’.6 It is probable that he taught her to enjoy Alexander Pope’s verse, since she recalls learning by heart The Rape of the Lock before she was thirteen – in her bedroom, by candlelight – and The Rape was one of his favourite poems.

  Only from Osbert and Edith do we have accounts of Sir George’s shortcomings. Despite Sachie’s closeness to his siblings, he had nothing but good to say about their father, although fully aware of his eccentricity. He was especially grateful for being taken to Italy in the Easter holidays – by the time he was nine he had seen not only Rome, Florence and Venice, but Lucca and Bologna. ‘Even when I was really young’, he recalls, ‘my father was always talking to me about the paintings and the buildings he had seen, particularly in southern Italy.’7

  As for his mother, Sachie loved her unreservedly. In Splendours and Miseries (1943), the chapter ‘Songs my mother taught me’ is a paean of gratitude. ‘Her character, when I first remember her, was a compound of natural high spirits and a sort of palace-bred or aristocratic helplessness.’ He adds, ‘There was always something tragic in her appearance, which I felt deeply as a child, in spite of her gaiety and powers of mimicry.’8

  Even so, Lady Ida all too frequently lost her temper, and while Sir George was the main target, she savaged the children as well. (As late as the 1930s, watching two Guatemalan volcanoes, Osbert joked that it reminded him of life with his parents.) But Sachie, the youngest, suffered least.

  Nevertheless, Ida fascinated and charmed all her children with her beauty and sense of fun. When very small, she took them to make butter in the dairy at the home farm, to fish for pike in Foxton Dam or to hear an old farmer’s ancient wife sing part of the Hallelujah Chorus in a cracked voice – their naive pleasure causing her much secret amusement. When they were older, discovering that her Swiss maid Frieda knew how to yodel, she persuaded the girl to give a performance for them in her bedroom, although the bashful Frieda would only do so from behind a Japanese screen.

  In July 1907 she arranged for someone else to present her daughter at court – a bit overdue, since Edith was already twenty and girls typically came out at eighteen. Besides inheriting Sir Sitwell Sitwell’s great beak of a nose, Edith had grown to be six feet tall, which accentuated her ‘freakish’ looks. It looks as if Ida did not wish to be seen with such an unsightly child, whom in her superstitious way she regarded as a changeling. In a long white gown and elbow-length kid gloves, ostrich feathers in her hair, and looking more of a ‘fright’ than ever, poor Edith nervously made her curtsy at Buckingham Palace to Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.

  Lady Ida was always trying to outwit the husband she saw as a penny-pinching tyrant. She took advantage of his absence in Italy to order enormous quantities of champagne and give lavish parties, or to go on manic shopping sprees in London, as well as acquiring a taste for gambling. Understandably, she resented being put on a tight rein when he came home and, naively cunning, tried to turn her children against him. Edith recalls her confiding, ‘with a far-away, idealist look in her eyes, “What I would really like, would be to get your father put away in a lunatic asylum.”’9 She also told them that a baronet was ‘the lowest thing on God’s earth’.

  Edwin Lutyens’ account of staying at Renishaw for the first time, in September 1908, portrays the family as perfectly normal – despite his being put in the Duke’s Room, which he felt sure was haunted. ‘Sir George Sitwell is very courteous, very civil . . . Lady Ida is a darling.’ He noticed the house was full of pictures, ‘some quite, some very good’.10 He sent off a telegram for colours and materials to redecorate the ballroom, which proved a big success.

  The only thing Lutyens thought odd about his stay was being taken by cab to see Hardwick and Haddon Hall. ‘They have no horses or motors here, but hire taxis from Sheffield.’ Learning that the great architect was in the neighbourhood, the new Duchess of Devonshire, who happened to be at Hardwick, sent a message to say how delighted she would be to meet him. Having made the vast old house habitable by putting in hot pipes, she wanted free advice on decoration. Afterwards, ‘Sir George said he had never seen anybody pick a man’s brains so completely.’

  During further visits to Renishaw, Lutyens modified his opinion. He found Sir George an unusually demanding employer, who actually dared to improve on his plans or even to reject them and was ‘rather sticky about the garden’. He also realised that while the beautiful Lady Ida might be ‘a darling’, her behaviour could be horribly embarrassing when she’d had too much to drink.

  Impudently, young Osbert asked him if any of his twelve brothers and sisters shared his talent. He never forgot Lutyens’ reply, which was that none of them did, and that he attributed his gifts to a childhood illness that had stopped him playing games and made him use his eyes instead of his feet.

  Osbert was miserable at his preparatory school, Ludgrove, where at first he tried to find relief by malingering. He called it ‘Bloodsworth’, claiming he had been sent there because the headmaster was ‘the most famous dribbler in England’. (Osbert did not care for football.) His salvation was an Italian holiday each spring. In 1908 his father was delighted to find how much he enjoyed Rome. ‘No amount of travelling or sight-seeing tires him and he always sleeps and eats well,’ his father wrote proudly to Ida on 30 April after showing him the city. ‘He is such a dear boy, altogether.’11

  ‘I liked Eton,’ Osbert wrote sardonically in his memoirs, ‘except in the following respects: for work and games, for boys and masters . . . It was extraordinary how delightful, easy, cheerful, the school looked [in the summer holidays], without masters, matrons or pupils.’12 A heavy, moon-faced boy, lumpish yet nervous, who mumbled and had atrocious handwriting (which he never tried to improve), his work was invariably third-rate and he avoided all sporting activities like the plague. His favourite relaxation was arranging flowers at the local florist’s shop.

  All he learned was to read voraciously – novels, verse and plays – a habit he retained for the rest of his life. This was why he claimed to have been ‘educated in the holidays from Eton’. He also developed a malicious sense of humour, and the knack of becoming the life and soul of a party. What he would never admit was that during the holidays his father’s influence gave him an intellectual curiosity and, in consequence, a remarkable openness to new ideas.

  Osbert conjures up how Renishaw felt in those days, especially when he was alone there with his father in October or November:

  Then, with so few people in the house, we lived for the most part in the Carolean core of it, and everything as a result looked as strange to us as if we inhabited a different mansion in a different world. But even though we used only the Little Parlour and the Great Parlour, abandoning the large eighteenth-century apartments, nevertheless you could feel the vastness of the stretch of rooms that lay there beyond, on each side, empty . . .

  But were they empty, for at momen
ts during the evenings as we sat by the fire, so many creakings and rustlings made themselves heard, so many of those inexplicable sounds of an ancient dwelling place, that it appeared as though there were more ghosts than human beings in rooms and corridors? One would say to oneself that it must be the wind: but I still do not believe that it was. Phantoms, when one is young, no more prevent sleep than do the hooting of engines or other modern noise – but those we heard were ancient, issued from some cave in time where they had hidden and to which they returned, or so it seemed to me.13

  While Edith gained much from the beauty around her at Renishaw, she found the atmosphere stifling. When not lugged off by her parents to Scarborough, London or abroad, she had to stay in Derbyshire, but not without a hint of rebellion. (Taken to the races to mark her coming of age, she sat with her back to the course.) Looks like hers meant that she did not have any male admirers, and she was unattracted by her own sex. Very lonely, she devoured a vast amount of English verse, especially Swinburne, to whom her governess introduced her.

  In 1909, in another act of defiance, Edith ran away from her grandmother’s house at Bournemouth and went with a maid to the Isle of Wight. There, at Bonchurch, she laid a wreath of flowers and libations of milk and honey on the grave of her hero Swinburne, who had just died. But she returned immediately to her grandmother’s, meekly accepting a scolding.

  Yet Edith had an audience, of sorts. In her melodious voice she was always reading selections of her favourite verse to her brothers, who believed she was a genius, revelling in her wild humour. She was also encouraged by her former governess, Helen Rootham, who had been engaged in 1903 and had stayed on as a companion. Helen was liked by nearly everyone (although not by little Sacheverell, who loathed her); even Osbert admired the way she played the piano. She has been described, perhaps a little too imaginatively, as ‘a cross between Miss Havisham and one of Bernard Shaw’s “new women”’.

  Plain and lonely herself, Helen grew very fond of the clever, sensitive girl whose odd looks deprived her of friends. She did her best to develop Edith’s talents, making her play Chopin and Brahms, teaching her to appreciate Ravel and Debussy and to read Baudelaire, Verlaine and Rimbaud (whose verse Helen had translated). They went to Berlin and Paris together, visiting art galleries, going to concerts.

  Besides being an excellent musician, Helen was a gifted linguist who spoke Russian and Serbo-Croat. Although a Catholic, she was fascinated by Madame Blavatsky’s occultism and the writings of the Orthodox seer Vladimir Solovyov (a friend of Dostoyevsky, who used him as a model for Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov). Helen also took an interest in alarming aspects of the spirit world.

  ‘I saw a ghost when I was young,’ Edith told Elizabeth Salter years later. ‘It was a face in a golden helmet on the Roman road that runs through Renishaw.’14 No doubt, she saw it with Helen’s enthusiastic encouragement.

  Deciding that Edith had heard a phantom walking in the ‘ghost passage’, Helen went through the house at night with her, reciting the Catholic prayers for the dead. They heard footsteps overhead, then coming down stairs, with ‘a horrible suggestion of the very soul of evil’, after which a shapeless black mist floated past. That night it visited Helen, but was driven off by her prayers. Edith said the ghost was never seen or heard again. The story sounds as if Helen’s obsession with the occult had a lot to do with the phenomenon.15

  Sacheverell profited more from Eton than Osbert, developing highly individual tastes. He was encouraged by an imaginative tutor, Tuppy Headlam, to use the school library and read what he pleased. Among the books he borrowed were Ernest Fenollosa’s Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art, just after its publication in 1912, while he devoured William Beckford and Gustave Flaubert. The son of a man who admired the new as well as the old, Sachie was at the same time fascinated by what was most up to date in art and literature. At sixteen he began a correspondence with Filippo Marinetti, impressed by his Futurist Manifesto. He also took Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist magazine, Blast.

  He responded far more than his siblings to his father’s influence and to what had been created at Renishaw. This was where he learned that the art of past ages is always worth re-examining. When he grew up, he was one of the first to sing the praises of Francesco Solimena and, with Osbert, founded a Magnasco Society. Pictures by these two Baroque masters hanging on the walls at home must have been the earliest examples of their work he ever saw, since even in Italy few galleries would have bothered to display them – they were considered vulgar beyond words.

  These years at Renishaw shaped all three children’s development, as it was here that their father kept his most treasured possessions – and he obviously spoke to Osbert and Edith just as he did to Sacheverell. What he said played a crucial role in forming their taste. Sadly, his daughter could never forgive him for seeing her as the ugly duckling that she was, while for a different reason Osbert, too, would grow to hate him. Sachie was very much the exception.

  Chapter 15

  LEAVING THE NEST

  fter such a dismal career at Eton, there seemed little point in sending Osbert up to Oxford, although he would have liked to go. His father hoped a spell in the army might instil self-discipline, so he was sent to a crammer to prepare for the Sandhurst entrance examination. When he failed it twice, Sir George obtained a commission for him as a second lieutenant in the yeomanry, from which he was immediately seconded to the 11th Hussars, a crack cavalry regiment – known as the ‘Cherry Pickers’, on account of their crimson breeches. They were garrisoned at Aldershot, where Osbert spent six months in 1911.

  Osbert’s career as a Hussar was a black comedy, shudderingly recalled in Great Morning. At dawn, every day except Sunday, NCOs made him undergo the inane routine of sabre drill (four cuts with a cavalry sabre, over and over again) and to ride bareback without a saddle, facing his mount’s tail – forced to remount every time he fell off, which he did all too often since his ‘singularly vicious and oafish horse’ threw him regularly. ‘I abominated [horses], and the brutes, with that animal instinct of theirs, knew of my loathing and returned it a thousand fold.’1 Nor did he think much of the full-dress uniform with its yellow frogs and plumed fur busby – a ‘pseudo-Hungarian affair’.

  Having failed to learn to shoot properly with a twelve-bore at home – ‘I was a profoundly, almost an inspired bad shot’ – he was no less useless with a cavalry carbine. Since the main amusements of his dashing brother officers, who had names like ‘Pongo’ or ‘Snorter’, were hunting and shooting, these deficiencies did not endear him. In turn, they taught him to ‘plumb the depths of the real and active hatred that the stupid in England . . . cherish towards beauty in every form’.

  London was only a short rail journey from Aldershot, however, so occasionally he could run up by train and visit theatres or art galleries. He never forgot the night he first saw the Ballets Russes perform Stravinsky’s Firebird, when Tamara Karsavina was dancing. It was one of the great formative experiences of his life. ‘Now I knew where I stood,’ he wrote thirty-five years later. ‘I would be, for so long as I lived, on the side of the arts . . . I would support the artist in every controversy, on every occasion.’2

  Osbert’s time in the cavalry coincided with being dragged into the whirlpool of his mother’s financial problems. Her husband had been bailing her out for years, but by 1911 she had amassed debts of over £2,000, after promising him she would keep within her income of over £1,000. In desperation, Lady Ida asked her son for advice. He told her to go to somebody who had been recommended by Willie Martin, a fellow pupil at his crammer’s.

  This was an elderly Anglo-American gentleman, a charming old Harrovian with literary pretensions called Julian Osgood Field, who lived at the Grosvenor Hotel. Invited to stay at Renishaw, Mr Field made an excellent impression on his hostess, gaining her complete confidence. In reality, he was an undischarged bankrupt who had been to prison for forgery, a professional swindler and blackmailer.

  After persua
ding her to sign two bills for £6,000 in the name of a Miss Frances Dobbs – a rich old lady from Streatham who had fallen into the clutches of one of his shady friends – Field had them discounted by a moneylender named Owles. He then involved her in further transactions so that by the end of the following year she owed more than £11,000, but had received less than £600. Ida was reduced to such straits that she was forced to sell her jewellery and borrow from the servants, at one point owing £125 to the butler Moat.

  When Lady Ida complained to Field about receiving such paltry sums, he cowed her by threatening to tell her husband, after which he bullied her into trying to find other victims to underwrite the sums she owed. In a letter to him, she wrote that when her son joined the 11th Hussars, ‘there must be some boy he can get hold of’. Eager to help his mother, Osbert persuaded the aforementioned Willie Martin, now a subaltern in the Rifle Brigade, to guarantee a bill. Ida herself wheedled a young Yorkshireman called John Philip Wilson into borrowing money from Field. Inevitably, Martin found himself pestered for money, and threatened to tell his colonel.

  Eventually Sir George discovered what was happening. He discreetly settled the debts of Martin and Wilson, with those of his wife, except for the £6,000 owed to the moneylender Owles. He knew Field had broken the law by pretending to Owles that Miss Dobbs had agreed to extend her bill, and thought Field would have no option other than to pay Owles the £6,000. He did not realise that Field was penniless.