Mabel liked coining words. Sporks were unspeakably dull, poggers were flirtatious, sneevish was an irritable state of mind and poons were thoroughly good sorts and entertaining too. After thirty years of marriage to George, Mabel needed the company of poons. Marguerite arrived at the hotel on 22. August. Here, in Mabel’s view, was an undoubted poon. For them both this date would figure as an anniversary for the rest of their lives.
5
Sporks, poggers and poons
Marguerite described herself as ‘utterly unstable’ and ‘in a state of flux’ when she met Mabel Batten. She had no settled country, relationship or plan. She divided her time between hunting, travelling and chasing women. ‘I was as wax in her hands,’ she wrote in notes for an autobiography, ‘but those hands were entirely trustworthy. She was to become a spur to my work and from the first my true unfailing inspiration. She was a whole generation older, but of so gay and youthful a spirit, of so balanced, generous and masterly a mind, courteous, kindly and gallant a heart …’
Mabel Batten was a memsahib, a colonial expatriate, for whom marriage had been a financial and social necessity and sexual affairs de rigueur. Many men were acquainted with her gallant heart and youthful spirit. She secured their letters in boxes with combination locks. A green leather box opened at 1327, a grey leather one at 365. These letters made no reference to gallantry with women, but showed no fear of adventure. She was scathing about ‘elderly virginal scandalmongering’ and ‘dowdy second class gossipy old maids’. Used to the warmth of the Indian sun, she loathed the English climate and liked to winter in Morocco, the Canary Islands, or Monte Carlo.
Marguerite noticed that when Mabel and George breakfasted together in the Savoy gardens they had nothing to say to each other. They had married in Simla in 1875 when Mabel was eighteen and George a widower of forty-three. He wooed her with curry paste, pots of honey, three pheasants and a copy of Mrs Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. In those days he had called her his chirpy little bird and his sweet unselfish affectionate darling. Together, they had starred in amateur theatricals: Cut off with a Shilling and School for Scandal. George organized Monday popular concerts at Government House in Simla, coached Mabel’s voice and sang duets with her mother, Minnie Hatch. When Mabel said Yes, she would marry him, he sent round four diamond engagement rings and told her to ask her father which she should choose.
Born in Barrackpore, Calcutta, Mabel had travelled as a child to Japan, North Africa and Europe. In her teens she studied music in Bruges and Dresden. Her mezzo-soprano voice proved popular at musical soirees, her rippling laugh, dark blue eyes, ‘luxuriant auburn hair’, big bust and tiny waist proved popular with men. She knew she was pretty and she expected to be indulged. Her cousin, Una Troubridge, was to say of her, ‘She accepted homage as a matter of course. She had always received it.’
Her father, George Cliffe Hatch, was Judge Advocate-General of Northern India. Her two brothers, George and Arthur, were colonels in the army. Of her two sisters, Annie remained Annie Hatch, looked after their mother, had protruding eyes and, as time passed, was short of money. Emma, the eldest, married the Honourable Edward Bourke, fifth son of Richard Mayo, Viceroy of India, who was assassinated in 1872.
Mabel married ‘dear old George’ without illusion of love. Cara was born in 1876. And George had an unmentioned love child, another daughter. A Bombay scribe wrote to him from time to time on her mother’s behalf, asking for money.
George had an unremarkable career in the Bengal civil service. He was Secretary to the Department of Revenue and Agriculture when he wooed Mabel. He feared he would not be enough for his own darling Mab, his little bird of a wife. He feared she had a roving eye: ‘I do hope that you do not think me exigent or wanting in trust in you’, he wrote soon after their engagement:
I do darling trust you as much as I love you. In fact I could not do one without the other. When, as in our case, a young girl accepts a man much older than herself the world is always ready to seize any opportunity for making cynical remarks and that is a reason for being more than ordinarily careful not to give such opportunities and probably it is this fact that makes me rather sensitive. I feel sure darling that you are perfectly loyal to me, but …
The wedding was at Christ’s Church, Simla, on 20 November 1875. On 8 November Queen Victoria’s errant son Edward, Prince of Wales had arrived on a four-month state visit to India with an entourage of less than respectable friends. It was at a cost of £100,000 to the Indian government, and more to the British treasury. The Prince’s host in Northern India, Sir John Strachey, Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, was married to George’s sister. She congratulated Mabel for having found a kind, affectionate husband. ‘You will of course be at Agra when His Royal Highness is there, and then we shall see a good deal of each other.’
The Prince of Wales, too, saw a good deal of Mabel. She was one of the prettiest women around. ‘The Prince’s tastes are low and childish’, Lady Strachey wrote to her sister-in-law in England:
He has a perfect mania on the subject of dress … fresh orders come nearly every hour about what the suite are to wear and if a button is wrong it is at once noticed and remarked upon. His other tastes are for eating and drinking. He is at times thoroughly selfish and inconsiderate … As for his moral character, it is as bad as possible and the respectable part of the suite are always in agony lest he misbehave.
As a memento of his misbehaviour with Mabel, he gave her a portrait of himself set in an amethyst pendant. She flaunted signed framed photographs of him throughout her house. Their affair continued after his return to England and on visits to Europe. They met up at Homburg and for the races at Goodwood and Ascot. He gave her tortoiseshell combs set with diamonds, an inscribed silver gilt flask, jade ashtrays, a moonstone brooch. One year at Homburg he gave her a ring, set with a turquoise heart and tiny diamonds. It was made, he told her, from his first scarf pin. In his scarcely legible handwriting he wrote discreet letters to her alluding to the times of their afternoon trysts.
Letters from other prestigious lovers went into Mabel Batten’s locked boxes. Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India from 1876, sent poems. George benefited from Mabel’s popularity. Civil servants improved their promotion prospects when their wives had sagacious affairs. A network of nepotism linked jobs, spouses, lovers. Lytton made George his Private Secretary. He thought him incompetent but a cheap option. ‘Batten,’ he wrote to his wife Edith in 1879, ‘is the only civilian of adequate standing whose services can be secured without additional expense to the Government of India.’ Lady Lytton disliked George. ‘He had such abominable manners and often would get so cocky’, she said.
The diarist and poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, cousin of Mabel’s brother-in-law Edward Bourke and confidant to both Mabel and the Viceroy, suspected Lytton gave George the job to manoeuvre himself close to Mabel. ‘I warned him of the imprudence and of the opportunity it would give for evil tongues’, he wrote in his diary. Security was strict after the assassination of the previous viceroy. Guards at the court were on duty day and night. Mabel could not be smuggled in unobserved. Lytton told Blunt that to his ‘chagrin’ she ‘consoled herself’ with his aide-de-camp.
She consoled herself, too, with Blunt and told him of her love affairs and ‘those of all Simla’. He called her ‘gay, fond of pleasure, quite depraved, but tinged too with romance’. Lytton asked her not to have an affair with Blunt but, in July 1880 (a month before Radclyffe Hall was born), in England for the Goodwood races, she was his guest at Crabbet Park, his ancestral home in Sussex. ‘I found her door ajar about 12 o’clock,’ Blunt wrote, ‘and stayed with her till daylight.’
It was not for long, given the summer solstice, but she inspired a poem from him called ‘Butterflies’. Mabel had, he claimed, found no one to satisfy her ‘nameless cravings’ until Blunt crept into her bed that night:
Where is the noon can match with thy sunrise?
Whose is the heart shall win thy constancy?
Thou with thy foolish lo
ves, mad butterflies,
What dost thou ask of my sad heart and me?
The answer was, not much. But foolish loves and open doors were more fun than being with George.
She called him Dear Old George and Foxy but did not pretend to find him other than dull. He retired from the Bengal civil service in 1882, brought her and Cara to London, ensconced them in a house at 3 Ralston Street, in a leafy part of Chelsea, and spent much time with fellow old colonials at the Oriental Club in Hanover Square. At home he collected recipes which he pasted into a book and he was particularly fond of acrostics. He ‘spent many happy hours working them out’.
Mabel disliked acrostics intensely. She preferred the Count de Mirafiore, son of the first King of Italy Victor Emmanuel II, who wooed her with furs, boas and jewels. He gave her an emerald ring that had once belonged to the King of Serbia and a brooch of two diamond tortoises, which she called Sophie and Edward.
London offered wider opportunities than Simla. Mabel played the piano and guitar, coached her voice, sang at salons and private functions and was praised as one of the best amateur lieder singers of her day. The composers Fauré, Delius, Elgar and Percy Grainger wrote songs for her. John Singer Sargent did an oil portrait of her as she sang at full throttle. John Koopman and Edward Poynter painted her, too, and editors of the society columns referred to her as ‘the April Grandmother’.
She gave singing lessons, published her own compositions and banked modest royalties from Boosey of Bond Street. Her best known song, ‘The Queen’s Last Ride’, was inspired by the funeral of Queen Victoria in February 1901. It was sung on the first anniversary of Victoria’s death by a former student of Alberto Visetti’s, Louise Kirkby-Lunn, at the Queen’s Hall in a concert conducted by Henry Wood. Mabel’s old flame Edward, now the King, presided.
By 1906 Mabel was fifty and plump with a taste for mauve silk housecoats, lace frocks and long earrings. Her scent was specially made from verbena and white lilac by J & E Atkinson of Old Bond Street. She wore stays of heavy pink brocade, was particular for her stomach to appear flat and she always sat erectly. Her once-luxuriant hair was flecked with grey. She tried to henna it, but ‘with poor results’. She read through gold or platinum lorgnettes and was slightly deaf.
She slept with a pillow in the small of her back, called her hot water bottles Jones and Charlie, the gold eagle lamp holder above her bed Walter, and a large pear-shaped piece of quartz of which she was particularly fond, The Plump of Peking. She always got up late. She would moue, pout her underlip, say in a little-girl voice, ‘Darling I feel sneevish’, and give a sidelong glance. She had excessive pairs of shoes, was afraid of bees and wasps, repeated favourite anecdotes and always said ‘Bless you’ when parting.
Her daughter Cara became extravagantly unconventional. Under the nom de brosse Rognons de la Flêche, she painted works of sexual surrealism – mermaids on a fishmonger’s slab, nudes in shoes, with whips. She believed in occult forces and did supernatural things with ouija boards, aromas, a rosary and a motor horn. Her husband, Austin Harris, Vice-Chairman of Lloyds Bank and an art collector, was said to weep when he saw the household accounts and to economize by turning off lights even when people were in the room. Cara, not on speaking terms with him, had a live-in lover, Frank Romer, an orthopaedic surgeon. Her children called him Nunkie. Stone deaf in one ear, she used an ear trumpet – a concession to disability Mabel deplored. She kept an orange and blue macaw, which spiced the marital silences with, ‘Fuck off you silly bitch.’ And she made and scripted ambitious home movies. The Sun Never Sets: An Epic of Endurance, filmed on the Isle of Wight, was set in the African jungle. It featured friends in pith hats standing over a tigerskin rug with shotguns. The cat filmed in close-up starred as the lion. Treason’s Bargain had five acts and 106 scenes. The credits thanked Sibyl, Lady Colefax for providing the elephant, but there was no elephant in it.
Toupie Lowther lost the 1906 Homburg tennis final 6–4, 6–4 to Dorothea Chambers (seven times winner of Wimbledon). On the terrace of the Savoy, Mabel talked with her and Miss Douglas, Toupie’s friend of the moment, and with Marguerite and Dolly Diehl. ‘Toupie is always very well groomed’, Mabel wrote to Cara who lived in Aspenden Hall, Buntingford, Hertfordshire. She thought them all infinitely amusing and not in the least sporkish.
Marguerite discerned in Mabel the motherly recompense she craved. She spoke of her ‘natural domination which it never occurred to me to dispute’, she elevated her judgement saying she had irreproachable literary taste and was unsurpassed as a critic. Mabel had a languid ease, an accepting indolence and nothing of the rebarbative manner of Mrs Visetti. Here was ‘a woman whom one would long to protect while coming to in turn for protection’.
She showed a ‘calm unshakeable belief
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 5