Country House Society

by Pamela Horn

  Of course, not all the young officers killed were university men. One of the earliest victims, killed on 1 September 1914, was George Cecil, grandson of the Victorian Prime Minister Lord Salisbury. He had already embarked on a military career before the war broke out, and had passed his examination for a French interpretership. When war came, like other youngsters, he was anxious to take part, despite the fact that he was still only eighteen. As Lady Cecil, his mother, subsequently recorded, it was on an extremely hot day, 12 August 1914, that he and his friend, the Hon. John Manners, with other members of the Grenadier Guards departed for the front. His mother and sister went to the station to see the men set off, Lady Cecil taking a basket of fruit each for her son and his friend to sustain them on what was bound to be a hot and uncomfortable journey. The night before he left, George had written his will and left it in the care of his banker, to be sent to his mother only if he were killed. In it he bequeathed his shares and cash to his teenage sister, Helen, his sword to his mother, as ‘it is an emblem of sorts. I want Papa to have my watch. Otherwise distribute my few goods as you think fit.’82

  Following his arrival on the Continent, on 21 August, he wrote a cheerful letter to his mother, assuring her that up to then ‘we have had the greatest fun in the world. We have now all recovered from the effects of inoculation.’ However, six days later the picture had considerably darkened, after they had been involved in a ‘violent artillery duel between us & the enemy’. They were now retreating ‘by strenuous stages, hardly any sleep & very early start, until one day, very tired, we billeted out at a certain town, as we thought at least 20 kilometres from the enemy. This evening, just as we were sitting down to dinner, the alarm was given that hostile cavalry had been seen quite close to the town … Soon, sounds of very heavy firing were heard. I then had to go to brigade headquarters to carry messages.’ Shells continued to rain down and he ‘had the greatest luck. I was stepping [into] the gateway when a shrapnel burst about 50 yards to my left and all the ground was cut up by this shrapnel … We cleared out and started on a ten mile walk. The men were so footsore & tired that we took nearly seven hours.’83 Five days later, when taking part in the Battle of Lanrecies, he was shot through the head and chest. His body was never recovered, and for months thereafter his distraught mother pursued the military authorities in an attempt to get details of what had happened.84 For a time she had the vain hope that he might have been taken a prisoner-of-war. His close friend, the Hon. John Manners, was killed the following day. According to the young Helen Cecil, her ‘mother’s period of mourning lasted the length of the conflict’.85

  Another victim of the war in its early months was Julian Grenfell. Confident as ever, on 21 November 1914, he had written to his friend and near neighbour in Buckinghamshire, Nancy Astor, the vivacious American-born wife of Waldorf Astor. They lived at Cliveden near Taplow. In the letter he declared they had given ‘these Huns a great walloping, when they apparently outnumbered us (at one time) by about 5–1. I have enjoyed it all tremendously every minute of it: but it has been damnably cold. The worst trenches are the ones under heavy shell fire – most of them are. Then you simply crouch in the wet clay for 48 hours and wait for the shells coming. You can hear them coming, and bet on whether they are going to land in the trench or outside it. The noise is the worst thing – it makes your head simply buss by the end of the day … I wish I could get some cavalry work, and get in at the brutes with our swords and horses.’86 Less than six months later, on 13 May 1915, Julian received a head wound when fighting near Ypres. Shrapnel penetrated his brain and although he was taken to a Boulogne hospital, his condition quickly deteriorated. On 16 May, as Julian’s younger brother, Billy, was about to depart for France, Lord and Lady Desborough received a telegram informing them of their son’s condition. They were able to get permission to go to him and remained in the hospital with him until he died, after suffering great agony, on 26 May.87 Billy, who had arrived in Boulogne with his battalion, was also able to visit Julian briefly before he was himself despatched to the front. Julian was buried in a war cemetery near Boulogne.

  The death of this dynamic young officer shocked members of the elite social circle in which he and his family moved, and particularly those who were personal friends of Ettie Desborough, his mother. As Lady Cynthia Asquith noted in her diary, ‘One is haunted by the thought of Ettie seeing her glorious son die by inches. How can such things be endured by women?’88 She also wrote to Billy Grenfell, who was undergoing his own baptism of fire. On 12 June he replied and already he seemed to have become reconciled not only to his brother’s death but perhaps to his own. ‘Death selects our bravest and best,’ he wrote, ‘but the barrier between two worlds is so gallantly and light-heartedly crossed here by many every day, that one can hardly feel it as a separation or even an interruption of their gallant and beautiful lives. Death is swallowed up in victory.’89

  Billy also wrote in a similar fashion to his close friend Nancy Astor, with whom he was more than a little in love, despite the fact that she was married and was the mother of young children. She was his ‘Darling Nance’ and as he declared,

  How could a man end this life better than in the full tide of strength & glory – Julian has outsoared our night, & passed on to a wider life … We are just off to the trenches, looking like Iron Pirates, so no more now except all my love.90

  About a fortnight later he wrote in a more flippant tone during a period of respite from the trenches that

  such a Chamber of Horrors we have past [sic] through, shells thicker than flies, & flies thicker than air, & our nearest & dearest neighbours 37 English & 22 German corpses of varying age & savour … There is fine Bosch stalking & shooting for them as likes [it].

  It is v. boring behind the lines; I s’d like a week in Paris …

  This is written between the overs of the boringest cricket match I have ever played in. But for cricket we should have been a finer nation.91

  Billy, a noted sportsman, preferred the more vigorous recreations of boxing and tennis, at which he was a noted expert. In another undated letter he noted drily that the war was ‘so gigantic that apparently only a very small number can take part in it at the same time. The rest are kept in reserve for 1920. One is … tempted to doubt whether it is wholly an advantage that the Army should be run by the stupidest of the stupid.’92 His last letter to Nancy was written on 28 July, two days before he was killed at the Battle of Hooge. His body was never recovered.

  Billy’s death, following so quickly that of his brother, devastated his parents, not least when they discovered that the attack in which he died had been a mistake, ‘one of the worst of the many blunders of the war’.93 Despite the overall heavy death toll in these years, within London society the loss of the two brothers in such quick succession was profoundly shocking. Significantly Queen Mary herself visited Ettie in early August to offer sympathy. To Duff Cooper, who had been at Oxford with Billy and had already learnt of the deaths of many of his friends, the news came as a terrible blow; ‘When I think of Oxford now I see nothing but ghosts.’94

  Ettie herself was determined to show a brave face to the world and to carry on as usual. Lady Cynthia Asquith noted admiringly the amazing way in which she appeared, on the surface, to be ‘absolutely normal in company. The same old extraordinary zest unimpaired, and the exaggerated interest in everyone and everything.’ But directly the two women were alone, she showed a different side: ‘Tears pour down her cheeks, and she talks on and on about the boys, and yet preserving such wonderful sympathy for others … She told me she found the complete, sudden disappearance of Billy harder to bear than the long, loving farewell to Julian.’95

  Other mothers, too, displayed the same steely determination not to let grief dominate their lives. The Hon. John Manners’ mother, whose son was killed less than a month after the declaration of war, proudly declared that if she had six such sons ‘she would give them all’. While a mere four days after a memorial service had been he
ld at Stanway for the teenage Yvo Charteris, his mother, Lady Wemyss, took out three convalescent soldiers from Winchcombe hospital for a drive through the Cotswolds, followed by tea. The next day she again gave them tea, this time at Stanway, her home. In the weeks and months ahead she carried out a range of war work, seeking to numb her pain by constant activity.96

  For Lady Diana Manners, who had lost so many members of her close personal circle, the solution, according to her future husband, Duff Cooper, was to treat sorrow ‘like an illness which must be got over as soon as possible, doing all she can to be cheerful, laughing and talking till tears come like a sudden seizure and she has to give way. She tells me that when she cannot stop crying she reminds herself that in a comparatively few days she will cease to wish to.’97

  Some of these grief-stricken families turned to spiritualism in an attempt to contact the dead. This was true of Lady Wemyss, Cynthia Asquith’s mother, who had lost two sons.98 Lady Cynthia herself also contacted a palmist in an effort to discover the fate of a close friend, Lord Basil Blackwood, who was initially thought to be missing. In fact he had been killed and the palmist herself held out no hope to her of his survival. Even Duff Cooper in January 1917 decided to have a séance with a spiritualist. ‘I had never done such a thing before. I was most disappointed … I came away very sceptical of the whole business.’99 But others among his friends had a different view. The previous December he had attended a dinner party where a fellow guest was Clare Tennant, whose brother, Edward, had been killed in the summer of 1916 in the Battle of the Somme. She claimed to have taken part in a number of séances and to have had ‘many messages’ from her brother and also from young Yvo Charteris, who, according to her, was apparently much discontented with the afterlife.100

  So far, Duff Cooper himself, as a Foreign Office clerk, had been granted exemption from conscription to the armed forces. However, in May 1917, with the government seeking ever more men for the Army, it was decided to release some civil servants. Duff Cooper welcomed the move, which one uncharitable acquaintance described as combing out ‘the scrimshankers’.101 Duff passed his medical examination successfully and on 18 June noted in his diary that to his ‘delight … I am to be allowed to join the army’. He was accepted into the Grenadier Guards and by 5 July was on his way to begin training at Bushey in Hertfordshire.102 After his previously pampered existence he found the transition to military life rather uncomfortable at first, but he soon settled down and on 22 November 1917, was gazetted as an officer in the Grenadiers. For some time he continued to remain in England and to enjoy an active social life in his free time, meeting Lady Diana and also more disreputable friends.

  Thus on 27 February 1918 he went to a ‘small party in Teddie Gerard’s flat’. She was an Argentinian-born actress and singer, and Duff found it all ‘most amusing – everybody there being slightly drunk but not too much, everybody also being rather amorous to one another quite promiscuously and nobody being jealous … Ivor Novello played the piano … There was plenty of champagne.’103 Nor did he give up his gambling habits and on 1 March noted that he had been sent for by his commanding officer, who told him ‘he had heard I was one of a set of officers who had been gambling very high – that I had lost a large sum of money and I had paid up like a gentleman of which he was glad’. Nonetheless, he ‘warned me that gambling was against King’s Regulations and generally gave me a short lecture on the subject’.104

  Even this did not bring about Duff’s reformation and when he was in reserve, away from the front line in France, during June 1918 he noted that he and some fellow officers had ‘played that absurd game Marmora. I like a fool lost £220 … We got rather drunk.’105

  Duff Cooper had arrived in France on the 28 April 1918 and was pleased to discover when he reached the front line that he was ‘no more frightened than other people’.

  We had a good deal of excitement at night and were often severely shelled … Later when we were in reserve we had an unpleasant moment when they started sending over gas shells in the early morning … I had some difficulty in finding my gas mask which I had imprudently taken off to sleep. We had a sergeant killed that morning.106

  Despite the dangers he faced, he avoided injury and behaved with considerable bravery when he single-handedly captured a number of German soldiers. For this he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order, ‘a rare achievement for a subaltern in the Guards’, comments Philip Ziegler.107 Lady Diana Manners, needless to say, was immensely proud of his achievement.

  By then the war was drawing to an end, and on 31 October Duff was granted leave to return to England. Unlike almost all his pre-war friends and university contemporaries, he had emerged from the conflict unscathed, as well as with a good military record. But for many men and their families the situation was very different, not merely as a result of personal loss and injury but on economic grounds, too. Although special war-time legislation had reduced the burden of death duties levied on landed estates in respect of those who had died as a result of the war, for the largest properties these could still represent a crippling burden. That was especially true when an owner’s death was quickly followed by that of his heir, killed at the front. This was true of the Wyndham family of Clouds, with George Wyndham dying suddenly in 1913 and his son and heir, Percy, killed in France on 14 September 1914. In some cases it was necessary to sell the whole or part of an estate in order to meet the duties. In 1915 the Amesbury Abbey estate in Wiltshire was put on the market after the death of its owner, Sir Edmund Antrobus, was followed by that of his only son in battle. In this instance the farms were purchased by their tenants, but the abbey itself remained unsold. Again, at Hawarden in Flint, when the young squire was killed, the duties paid at his death were six times the old-style succession duties levied on his predecessor’s estate in 1891. In the immediate aftermath of the war outlying parts of the estate were sold for the then substantial sum of £112,000.108

  So it was that when the Armistice was finally signed on 11 November 1918 and the war came to an end, many found difficulty in believing it was over. To Mrs C. S. Peel, it seemed ‘almost as if one heard a dead silence and then … the whole nation gave a sigh of relief. A few moments later the people had gone mad.’109 To Country Life it was ‘Britain’s Proudest Moment’. ‘Before the war,’ it declared,

  it was frequently asserted by evil prophets … that the British race had fallen into the sere and yellow leaf. Decay was assumed to have set in … It will be proudly related as long as the race exists how resolutely the unmartial English nation set about remedying its defects … The end was the victory celebrated on Monday last, the greatest ever achieved in the annals of the race.110

  The teenage Helen Cecil, whose only brother had been killed so tragically at the beginning of the war, nonetheless shared in the general mood of celebration. In a letter written to her mother on 12 November from her Great Wigsell home in Sussex, she described the general scene of jubilation;

  I never thought I should live to be so happy as I am today or that I should ever see East Sussex as it is today. The maids were out hanging up the washing when I sent the news down & they skipped & hopped like young rabbits. Every body was running round for hours telling everybody else and we [her governess and herself] have not expected to be fed, clothed or washed today, but I feel that man does not live by bread alone these days! 5 minutes after the news had reached us it was at High Wigsell, 10 mins. later Robertsbridge was flying flags.

  Hawkhurst is a fine sight, arches of flags, real crowds of people, perfect strangers nearly kissing each other in the streets & the joy bells ringing. The school children have cheered till they can’t speak & the cottagers have ruined themselves buying flags. All this was absolutely spontaneous … God save the King is written all over the village & sung all over Sussex. I feel most perfectly drunk myself.111

  According to another account, in many towns sexual relations ‘between perfect strangers took place promiscuously in parks, shop entrances and alley-w
ays’. In Oxford, a woman walked up and down the Cornmarket waving a flag, ‘with her skirts kilted up to her naked middle, and was cheered as a sort of presiding Venus by the Army and Air cadets quartered in the colleges’. At Cambridge the cadets smashed up the office of the Cambridge Magazine, which was the only literary periodical that had embraced the pacifist cause.112

  In London, the celebrations were especially rowdy. Duff Cooper, returning to the capital with Lady Diana Manners from a visit to the Norfolk country house of their friends, Venetia and Edwin Montagu, described it as being ‘in uproar – singing, cheering, waving flags. In spite of real delight I couldn’t resist a feeling of profound melancholy, looking at the crowds of silly cheering people and thinking of the dead.’ That night he and Diana dined at the Ritz, where there ‘was an enormous crowd’, and on their return to his St James’s Street home, he noted that the streets were still ‘full of wild enthusiasm. Diana shared the melancholy with which these filled me – and once she broke down and sobbed.113

  Lady Desborough spent the morning of 11 November at Avon Tyrrell, which was a military nursing home, with her daughter Monica, who was working there. ‘I was so thankful to be with you today – how proud I am of your most splendid 4 years & a quarter, never flinching or looking back,’ she wrote in the evening to her daughter. To her friend Mary Wemyss she wrote in a different vein: ‘All day the thought of you has burnt in my innermost heart. Victory, & you & I look in vain for our Victors.’114