Renishaw Hall

by Desmond Seward

  As for Bloomsbury’s female followers, Edith thought they had faces like felt hats that had been sat on. She sneered at their writing about women whose sole interest, in her view, was their sex and promiscuity. Virginia Woolf was an exception. Edith praises her ‘moonlit transparent beauty’, her large, thoughtful eyes, and tells us she found her company delightful because her conversation, always straight to the point, was so stimulating. Yet if she liked some of Virginia’s novels, she considered Huxley a better writer.

  Sacheverell, the shyest Sitwell, mixed very little with Bloomsburies, who seldom refer to him in their letters or diaries – they may have been taken aback by his erudition. If he sometimes met them at his brother’s dinner parties, we do not know how he reacted. The exception is Lytton Strachey, whom in after years he recalled as having ‘something unpleasant to say about every contemporary in turn’. In Sachie’s opinion, ‘The whole of life and of intellectual experience was for Strachey one long and high pitched giggle.’11

  Where Sitwells and Bloomsburies agreed was in loathing the ‘Philistines of England’, by which they meant the middle classes who failed to welcome modern art and literature – in fact, most of the educated public. They identified the core of their enemy as a group of poets, the ‘Georgians’, who had been publishing anthologies since 1912. Some were very good, as both Sitwells and Bloomsburies admitted, such as Graves, Sassoon or D. H. Lawrence; but others, like Alfred Noyes, were undeniably third-rate.

  The Georgians’ leader was J. C. Squire, editor of a monthly, The London Mercury, that published their verse. Hearty and right-wing, he embodied everything the Sitwells and Bloomsburies disliked, including ‘a predilection for sheep’. Virginia Woolf thought he was ‘more repulsive than words can express’, while Lytton Strachey called him a little worm. But for ordinary mortals the boozy, chuckling umpire of the immortal village cricket match in A. G. Macdonell’s England, Their England was more congenial than his opponents. (‘I am not so think as you drunk I am’ is Squire’s best-known utterance.)

  For all his drinking, Jack Squire was formidable. He disapproved of the Sitwells from the start, savaging Wheels and in 1919 dismissing Osbert’s Argonaut and Juggernaut as the work of an ‘ordinary immature writer of verses’. Osbert never forgave him. Later, Edith can have been no less unamused by a ballad he contributed to Punch: ‘I once saw Edith Sitwell buying Fish’. One of many qualities Osbert disliked about Squire and his ‘Squirearchy’ was their cult of the countryside, and he sneered at them as ‘lark-lovers’. But in terms of public esteem, Squire – an immensely popular figure who was knighted in 1933 – was the winner.

  An even more ferocious foe was Wyndham Lewis, novelist, painter and founder of the Vorticist movement. What antagonised this poverty-stricken arch-Bohemian of the hard right was the combination of private incomes, left-wing politics and smug superiority that in his eyes characterised not only Sitwells, but Bloomsburies as well. In his long, rambling satirical novel of 1930, The Apes of God, he attacked both, Virginia Woolf being wounded to the heart by a wickedly funny parody of her stream-of-consciousness novel Mrs Dalloway.

  It was the Sitwells who suffered most, however, caricatured as the ‘Finnian Shaws’, a clan of rich mountebanks, defined as ‘God’s own Peterpaniest family . . . a sort of ill-acted Commedia dell’Arte . . . a middle aged youth movement’. Osbert received the closest attention as ‘Lord Osmund Finnian Shaw’, who was ‘more or less male’ while credited with the ‘goat-like profile of Edward the Peace Maker’.12 Yet Wyndham Lewis had been an ally of the Trio – contributing to Wheels, painting Edith and staying at Renishaw (losing his only shirt collar during the visit). Unique in being a man who found Edith physically attractive, his defection may have been due to her rebuffing him when he made a pass.13

  Osbert’s revenge was a campaign of teasing that drove Lewis, someone so paranoiac that he always carried a revolver, nearly insane. His most successful ploy was sending a letter, supposedly from the organiser of an exhibition of Jewish art, to the rabidly anti-Semitic Lewis, asking him to contribute a picture. The result was an appalling row with the Jewish artists that almost ended in bloodshed.

  Chapter 19

  RENISHAW AS PATRONAGE

  loomsbury could not compete with the Sitwells where patronage was concerned. Its sole largesse was a job in the Woolfs’ tiny publishing firm, working their hand-operated press (a privilege available only to one or two acolytes), or a weekend in a country cottage. In contrast, a horde of writers could be invited to stay at Renishaw Hall, whose splendours would not soon be forgotten.

  ‘A sister and two brothers, each of them tall and fair, talk and laugh with each one in the formal Renishaw gardens,’ was a recollection of a visit there during the early twenties that the literary critic Raymond Mortimer prized for half a century. He also recalled the sad appearance of their once beautiful mother, and the courtesy of their formidable father, ‘pondering further, more extravagant landscapings’.1 Many other ‘men of letters’ shared similar memories. However, soon afterwards Osbert was left as the sole patron when his brother and sister began to go their own ways, staying away from Derbyshire.

  In 1925 Sir George handed Renishaw over to Osbert – surprisingly, in view of his son’s attitude to money. Osbert thought that extravagance was part of the ‘artistic temperament’ and made people tolerant and generous, while in emulating his mother he was avenging himself for what he saw as his father’s cruel treatment of her.

  During the previous year, however, Sir George had been shocked by the election of Britain’s first Labour government, and he did not want his son to pay death duties that might wipe out the estate. He also wished to remove Lady Ida from a country where her reputation had become a little rusty after her stay in Holloway. Above all, he hoped to do for Montegufoni what he had done for Renishaw.

  In the event, he and his increasingly frail wife would find there something approaching the happiness that had so far eluded them. He enjoyed bringing the castello and its gardens back to life. Ida, on the other hand, liked the climate and the English society at nearby Florence, which included such friends of many years as old Mrs Keppel and Arthur Acton (Harold’s father), who never objected to paying for her huge whiskies at the Gran Caffè Doney.

  Despite calling Sir George ‘the best father in England’, Osbert’s gratitude quickly evaporated; although for years Sir George always offered to help if he needed money, besides making him an allowance of an extra £1,000 a year, and more than once he paid off his debts. He even helped him buy some Romney drawings, with a cheque for £500. As for meddling, in 1929 his father wrote to say that he had made (and paid for) alterations to the gardens ‘at your desire . . . because it was an old promise to you to complete the garden’.2

  Yet Osbert never ceased to tell his friends that he was a victim of his parent’s parsimony and constant interference. He genuinely seems to have believed this himself, his secret hatred growing by the day. He disliked and discouraged his father’s presence at Renishaw.

  ‘I have spent a month in the summer with you about once in two years,’ Sir George eventually complained. ‘I have never entered the house except with your permission, verbal if you were in England, written by letter if you were abroad. On these occasions I have not slept in the house, but have put up either at the Sitwell Arms, or if I have business elsewhere at Sheffield and have motored over. You have allowed me to use a bedroom for writing letters, and to have some of my meals here.’ He adds, ‘These visits have been in winter when the house is unwarmed and unlighted.’3

  In the same year that Renishaw was handed over, Sachie married a girl from Canada, Georgia Doble, who flatteringly claimed to have read Southern Baroque Art. Reporting the wedding, a Canadian newspaper gave details of the Sitwell family that entranced Edith. ‘The witty and beautiful daughter of the Earl of Londesborough . . . from whom her children inherit their brains, has been the sensation of London more than once,’ she quoted with wild glee in a letter to the h
appy couple. ‘She is a most keen ornithologist and her collection of birds’ eggs is one of the most famous in Europe.’4

  Osbert was not so cheerful. The marriage meant that his adored brother ceased to live at Carlyle Square or at Renishaw. For the first time other than the months with the 11th Hussars, he knew loneliness. Perhaps for the first time, too, he admitted to himself what his father may have already told him – that he was homosexual.

  He would eventually find happiness with David Horner, a handsome, auburn-haired young man, well-born, clever and amusing, with beautiful manners, who was unaffectionately christened ‘Blossom’ by Edith, a name adopted by the rest of the family. They discovered that he was greedy, vain, arrogant and compulsively malicious, even if Osbert turned a blind eye to these little failings. However, the partnership did not materialise until 1929.

  Sacheverell and his wife came to Renishaw less and less after his father gave them the Hely-Hutchinsons’ Weston Hall, which he had recently inherited. (‘I don’t propose to do much here,’ said Sir George, always the landscape gardener. ‘Just a sheet of water and a line of statues.’) Incapable of earning a living, Sachie depended for money on his father and then on his brother – who remained fond of him, but developed a strong distaste for his quarrelsome, mischief-making wife.

  Sachie’s biographer, Sarah Bradford, describes Georgia as ‘highly sexed, materialistic, ruthless and socially ambitious. Behind her elegant back, Osbert called her “Juggins”.’5 The fact that she was notoriously unfaithful – for a time she was Oswald Mosley’s main mistress – did not endear her to her brother-in-law, whose dislike grew steadily as the years went by.

  From 1921, even before he gained possession of Renishaw, Osbert had been inviting the creative to stay, rather as Ottoline Morrell did at Garsington, but with more discrimination. (The Sitwells did not admire Lady Ottoline, nor her excessively open door.) During their visits, a slightly bewildered Sir George and Lady Ida mingled with them.

  Despite Sachie’s ‘desertion’, Osbert went on supporting Willie Walton, although sometimes Willie’s weakness for women caused trouble. One admirer, scheming to ensnare him, told Lady Ida that he had forced himself on her with what might be serious consequences. If only it had proved to be true, commented Edith, the lady in question, who was no longer young, ‘would have left Abraham’s Sarah at the starting post’.6

  In 1924, Peter Quennell found a ‘strange Peacockian household’ at Renishaw. Fellow guests included Walton, Helen Rootham, a Georgian poet named Wilfred Childe and ‘the charming old eccentric’ Ada Leverson, who had once been Oscar Wilde’s ‘Sphinx’.

  He gives us a pathetic glimpse of Lady Ida, who rose late before putting on a black silk dress and a black silk toque, after which she would totter gently into view, supporting her steps with a small cane. She seemed very old, although only in her mid-fifties. ‘Ain’t it amusin’, Henry’, she asked Moat at luncheon, showing him a caricature of Sir George dressed as a scoutmaster. ‘Very amusing, I am sure, milady,’ he replied with an unappreciative growl.

  Outside, beyond the statues guarding the house, stretched a broad industrial valley, and after dark Quennell could see red light from the pit-heads shining through the leaves of the trees planted to screen them. ‘Yet there was a sad magnificence about Renishaw that is reflected by the Sitwells’ prose and verse,’ he thought. ‘Few writers have owed so much to the surroundings of their childhood.’ However, even Quennell’s not very marked sense of decorum was shocked by Osbert’s behaviour. Whenever Sir George spoke, his son would make loud popping noises with a finger in his mouth, as if opening a champagne bottle.7

  ‘Blighted skies and blasted trees and blackened exhaustion’ was how Renishaw Hall seemed to the lugubrious Siegfried Sassoon, who decided the lake was too shallow for suicide. He detected ‘wicked influences’. As for the Trio, they were ‘Regency relics’.8

  In contrast, the painter Rex Whistler (of whose work Osbert was a keen supporter) loved it, returning again and again. So did Whistler’s mother figure, Edith Olivier, who thought their host reincarnated Horace Walpole. ‘A vast pile of a house – 18th century windows and battlemented’ was how it seemed to her. ‘Filled with pictures and tapestries – and lovely beds. Mine is a marvel with great red plumes at the corners of the canopy – rising from vases elaborately painted in green, grey and blue.’ The other guests were Edith Sitwell and Sachie (with Georgia), Walton and Lord Berners. In the morning Edith read Miss Olivier her poem ‘Gold Coast Customs’, its bleaker verses reducing both to tears.

  Edith Olivier was thrilled by the way the oil lamps lit up the tapestries, creating a ‘feeling of mystery and madness’. She adds, ‘They say the house is haunted but the ghosts are the living people. Every evening Lord Berners and Willy Walton play violent impromptu duets on the piano – in order to drive Sir George to bed. When they succeed, we sit round and Osbert tells many amusing and cruel stories about people he dislikes.’9

  Neither Beverley Nichols nor Anthony Powell cared for Sir George. ‘When he came in to luncheon he glared at me as though I were an intruder and when Osbert introduced me he merely sniffed and went away to sit by himself in a corner,’ Nichols wailed in The Sweet and Twenties. ‘He suddenly looked at me and said, “I never know anybody in this house.”’10 But not everyone took to Beverley Nichols.

  Powell’s antipathy may have been due to embarrassment at his own gauche manners. Strolling with Walton on the lawn before luncheon, they ran into Sir George. ‘I have just been reading about medieval painted chambers,’ he told them. ‘Strange, very strange, rather horrible at times.’ As Powell admits, Walton and he guffawed by way of reply. ‘Sir George showed no sign of irritation, simply walking away.’11

  Most visitors admired their host’s father, however. Harold Acton thought he looked like a Van Dyck portrait, while Quennell describes him as ‘tall, noble-looking . . . always ceremonious and gravely courteous’. The romantic Edith Olivier called him ‘a shadowy man, exquisite and cruel and sinister and blade-like’. In contrast, Evelyn Waugh did not find him in the least frightening, let alone sinister, but ‘very gentle’. Some sensed his kindness, which took a practical form – Siegfried Sassoon managed to borrow £100 from him, as did Rex Whistler, who sent a touching letter of thanks.

  Osbert never ceased baiting his father, whom he invariably referred to as ‘Ginger’ behind his back, because of his red beard. However, Sir George never lost his dignity, always ‘playing a straight bat’. At one Renishaw dinner party in the twenties, after alerting the other guests, Osbert persuaded his friend Lady Aberconway to ask his father loudly, ‘Is there much incest in Derbyshire?’ ‘I regret to say there is,’ he answered, unruffled. ‘Generally in isolated farmhouses.’12

  There was plenty of luxury, with superlative food (a chef was hired from the Ritz Hotel in London), while the cellar – chosen by Osbert – was excellent. Vintage champagne flowed. He always breakfasted on melon or pineapple, which were expensive delicacies in the days before refrigeration and never served to guests. Beverley Nichols went into ecstasies over the perfumed log fires, the scent of Parma violets everywhere.

  Ninety years ago luxury and comfort were not quite the same thing as they are today. When Lutyens – by then Sir Edwin, designer of the Cenotaph – came again in 1928, he grumbled at his bath, the only one in the house, being on the floor above and the WC on the floor below, while ‘there was no po in my bedroom’. (He found Sir George suave, smiling and fussy, Lady Ida gaunt and unhappy, and Osbert looking more than ever like George IV.)13 Even so, during winter Renishaw was warmer than most houses, thanks to an abundant supply of logs and servants.

  The atmosphere was not only luxurious, but relaxed. Peter Quennell recalled with amusement Moat’s outrage at male guests bathing naked in the lake,14 while there was a good deal of horseplay, including apple-pie beds. There were also charades.

  When Edith was old and bedridden, the ballet dancer Robert Helpmann told her a story that gives some idea o
f Renishaw’s ambience at the height of Osbert’s pre-war regime. Having invited Somerset Maugham to stay, Osbert asked the party to wear fancy dress on the first evening of the great novelist’s visit, but then changed his mind. He forgot to tell Helpmann, who swept down the stairs dressed as Queen Alexandra only to find all the other men in dinner jackets. Maugham showed no hint of surprise when he shook hands with him.15

  No one fell quite so desperately in love with Renishaw as did Evelyn Waugh. Gradually it cast its spell over him, in the end more completely than Madresfield (the model for Brideshead Revisited). Renishaw was his earliest experience of country house life, before he knew Madresfield.

  He first came in August 1930 when he was twenty-seven, finding the entire Sitwell family in residence, plus William Walton and Arthur Waley (famed for his translations of Chinese verse). ‘Very dark hall’, is how he recalled his arrival. ‘Many other rooms of great beauty, fine tapestry and Italian furniture.’ He noticed that the lake was black with coal dust and that pit-heads, slag-heaps and factory chimneys could be seen from the gardens.

  Never, apparently, having been in a house with footmen before, Waugh was taken aback by the staff’s ‘feudal familiarity’. He noted down with amazement the response of a ‘footman’ (probably one of the butlers, Robins or Moat) to Edith’s asking one of her brothers to go in her place when Lady Ida summoned her. ‘Well, come on,’ said the man. ‘One of you’s got to go.’16

  Among Osbert’s more attractive qualities was kindness to servants. He inspired lasting devotion in his housekeeper at Carlyle Square, Mrs Powell. Robins, who had been his batman in the 11th Hussars, became Renishaw’s butler, remaining until retirement in 1952 with a generous pension and cottage in the park. When he burned a big hole in a valuable carpet and expected the sack, Osbert told him, ‘After we’ve been together for so many years, you can’t imagine that it will make any difference?’17