Augustus John (6 page)

Aunt Rosina – ‘a little whirlwind’, Winifred remembered her, ‘battering everyone to death’
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– had a curious ferret-like face which, the children speculated, might cause her to get shot one day by mistake. Her choice of religion seemed to depend on her digestion, which was erratic. ‘At one
time it might be “The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion”, with raw beef and hot water, at another Joanna Southcote and grapes, or again, The Society of Friends plus charcoal biscuits washed down with Rowntree’s Electric Cocoa.’
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The two aunts toured the neighbourhood of Haverfordwest in a wicker pony-trap known locally as ‘the Hallelujah Chariot’, bringing souls to Jesus. Strong men, it was said, pickled in sin, fell prostrate to the ground before them, weeping miserably. Their presence dominated Victoria Place. Each day began with morning prayers, and continued with the aid of improving tracts,
Jessica’s First Prayer
and
The Lamplighter.

Although the theatre was out of bounds, the children were permitted to attend an entertainment called ‘Poole’s Diorama’. This was a precursor of the cinema – a vast historical picture, or series of pictures which, to music and other sound effects, was gradually unrolled on an apparently endless canvas across the stage. At one corner a man with a wand pointed to features of interest and shouted out his explanations to the audience. But when ‘The Bombardment of Alexandria’ was depicted the aunts judged matters had gone far enough and bustled the children outside.

Even more exciting, though viewed with some family misgivings, was the children’s first visit to the circus. Though later in life Augustus used to object to ‘that cruel and stupid convention of strapping the horses’ noses down to their chests’, this circus, he claimed, corrupted him for life. It wasn’t simply a question of the animals, but the dazzling appearance of a beautiful woman in tights, and of other superb creatures, got up in full hunting kit and singing ‘His Moustache was Down to Heah, Tiddy-foll-ol’ and ‘I’ve a Penny in my Pocket, La-de-dah’.

In summer the family used to go off to Broad Haven, twelve miles away, where Edwin had a one-storey house specially built for him out of the local stone.
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And the aunts came too. But here the regime was less strict and the children happier. Their house on St Bride’s Bay had a large lawn and faced the sea, in which the children spent much of their time. Yet even in the waves they were not beyond religious practices which extended offshore with dangerous ceremonies of Baptism by Total Immersion.

The Johns at this time were an isolated family. The uncompromising reputation of the aunts, the formidable respectability of Edwin, and their rather lowly origins, limited the number of their friends while failing to win them entry into the upper reaches of Haverfordwest society. The children were at ease only in the sea or roaming the wilds at Broad Haven. ‘Our invincible shyness,’ Augustus later recorded, ‘comparable only to that of the dwarf inhabitants of Equatorial Africa, resisted every advance on the part of strangers.’ Their grandfather, William John, used to exhort
them: ‘Talk! If you can’t think of anything to say tell a lie!’ And: ‘If you make a mistake, make it with authority!’ But the children were speechless.

The only adults with whom Augustus appears to have formed any friendly contact were the servants. At Victoria Place the one room where he felt at home was the kitchen. He passed many hours sitting on a ‘skew’ by the kitchen fire, listening to the quick chatter and watching the comings and goings. Sometimes an intoxicated groom would stagger in, and the women would dance and sing to him till his eyes filled with remorse. It was natural theatre, full of melodrama and comedy, and the fascination of half-understood stories.

The children needed the influence of their mother, but she was absent more and more. One day, in the second week of August 1884, the servants were lined up in the hall of Victoria Place, and Edwin John informed the household that his wife had died. The servants stood in their line, some of them crying quietly; but the children ran from room to room, chanting with senseless excitement: ‘Mama’s dead! Mama’s dead!’

‘Have I any claim to the throne? My father kept everything dark, but I had an uncle descended from Owen Glyndwr.’

Augustus John to Caspar John (16 February 1951)

‘We come from a long line of professional people,’ Edwin John would tell Augustus when questioned about their antecedents. Since he was seeking to enter fashionable Pembrokeshire society, he had his reasons for not being more explicit. Augustus, who had little sense of belonging to his parents’ families, did not probe further. They couldn’t
all
have been middle-class lawyers, he thought; then he would glance at his father again and reflect that perhaps it was better to remain in the dark. At least
he
would be different.

Both his paternal grandfathers, William John
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and David Davies, had been Welsh labourers living in Haverfordwest; while on his mother’s side he came from a long line of Sussex plumbers, all unhelpfully bearing the name Thomas Smith. William John’s son, who was named after him, was born in 1818. At the age of twenty-two he married a local seamstress, Mary Davies, the same age as himself. On the marriage certificate he described himself as a ‘writer’, which probably meant attorney’s clerk (the
occupation he gave on his children’s birth certificates). That he had cultural interests, however, is certain. By the end of his life he had collected a fair library including leather-bound volumes of Dickens, Scott, Smollett and an edition of Dante’s
Inferno
with terrifying illustrations by Gustave Doré; and he had done something rather unusual for a man of his class in the mid-nineteenth century: he had travelled through Italy, bringing back with him a fund of Italian stories and a counterfeit Vandyke to hang in his dining-room.

William and Mary John had begun their married life in a workman’s cottage in Chapel Street, then moved to Prendergast Hill and in 1850 were living at 5 Gloster Terrace. Each move, though only a few hundred yards, denoted a rise in the world, and the climax was reached when, in 1855, they transferred to Victoria Place. The basis of their fortune was an investment in a new bank which had turned out well. In 1854 William was admitted a solicitor and shortly afterwards started his own legal firm in Quay Street. He served for several years as town clerk of Haverfordwest, bought a number of properties and, on his death, left a capital sum of nearly eight thousand pounds (equivalent to £300,000 in 1996). In politics he was a Liberal, had acted as Lord Kensington’s agent in all his contests up to the late 1870s and was well known for his speeches in Welsh at the Quarter Sessions. But although, in the various directories of the time, he is listed among the attorneys, he is not among the gentry.
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Between 1840 and 1856 William and Mary had six children who survived, three sons and three daughters. Edwin William John, the fourth child and second son, was born on 18 April 1847. No. 5 Gloster Terrace, where his earliest years were spent, was a tall thin house into which were crammed five children,
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their parents and a maternal aunt, Martha Davies, who helped to look after her nephews and nieces. There was also another Martha Davies of about the same age, who acted as a general servant.

In later years Edwin John let it be known that he was an old Cheltonian. In fact he was at Cheltenham College for only three terms and, according to his younger sister Clara, this year produced a devastating effect upon him. His disposition, tolerable before he attended public school, was ‘impossible’ ever afterwards. He fell victim to the cult of appearances, forgetting all he knew of the Welsh language and becoming obsessed by his social reputation.

Edwin’s main education had been conducted locally in Haverfordwest. He knew Lloyd George’s father, William George, a Unitarian schoolmaster at a private school in Upper Market Street where Edwin went for several years. William George ‘was a severe disciplinarian’, he recalled, ‘ – rather passionate, sometimes having recourse to the old-fashioned punishment of caning.’

It was the eldest son Alfred, not Edwin, who had originally been intended for the law.
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Alfred married a Swansea girl and had three children in three years, but after a period working in his father’s law office his spirit suddenly revolted. While still in his twenties he ran away to London – and eventually to Paris – to play the flute, first in an orchestra, later in bed.
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The burden of family responsibility then passed to Edwin who, leaving Cheltenham at the age of sixteen, was immediately articled to his father and, in the Easter term of 1870, became a solicitor. On his twenty-fifth birthday, William John made him a partner, and the practice became known as William John and Son. When the father retired seven years later, the son took it over entirely. He had done all that could have been expected of him.

He had even married with his father’s ‘lawful consent’. The legal atmosphere was so pervasive that, on the marriage certificate, his wife accidentally gave her own profession as that of solicitor.
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Her father Thomas Smith’s profession she described as ‘Lead Merchant’.

*

Thomas and Zadock Smith had been born at Chiddingly in Sussex, the sons of Thomas Smith, a village plumber. The elder son, who inherited his father’s business, moved to Brighton and in 1831, at the age of twenty-two, married Augusta Phillips. They lived in Union Street, and between 1832 and 1840, Augusta gave birth to three children, Sarah Ann, Emily and Thomas, who was later to inherit the Smith plumbing business. Early in 1843, she was again pregnant and her condition must have been serious. She was given an abortion, but afterwards was attacked by violent fevers. On 25 May, at the age of thirty-two, she died.

A year later Thomas Smith married again. His second wife was a twenty-six-year-old girl, Mary Thornton, the daughter of William Vincent Thornton, a cupper from Cheltenham. Before her marriage she was living in Ship Street, Brighton, and it was here that Thomas Smith and his three children now moved. In the next fourteen years they had at least ten children, but the mortality rate among the boys was high, four of them dying before their twelfth birthday.
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Thomas Smith was ‘a person of full habit of body’ and outlived nine of his seventeen children.

In its way Thomas Smith’s career was comparable to that of William John. From humble beginnings he became a successful and respected local figure. By the age of fifty he was a Master Plumber, glazier and painter, employing ten men and three boys in the painter’s shop he had bought next door in Ship Street, and in the home a cook, housemaid and nursemaid. His will might have drawn a nod of approval from the Town Clerk of Haverfordwest. In one respect at least it is superior to William John’s:
he left a sum of almost fourteen thousand pounds (equivalent in 1996 to approximately £522,000).

Mary Smith’s third child, born on 22 September 1848, was named Augusta after her father’s first wife. From a comparatively early age she appears to have shown a talent for art. She was sent to ‘Mrs Leleux’s Establishment’ at Eltham House in Foxley Road, North Brixton, and here, in December 1862, she was presented with a book,
Wayside Flowers,
as a ‘Reward for Improvement in Drawing’.

She continued drawing and painting up to the time of her marriage, and to some extent afterwards. The few examples of her work that survive show her subjects to have been mostly pastoral scenes. A study of Grasmere church, seen across a tree-lined river and executed in soft cool colours, is signed ‘Augusta Smith’ and dated 1865;
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a picture of cattle with friendly faces, painted three years later when she was nineteen, is signed ‘Gussie’. But a charming ‘Landscape with Cows’ painted after marriage and simply signed ‘A. John’ is part of the Dalton Collection in Charlotte, North Carolina, where, attributed to her son, it hangs happily in company with Constables, Rembrandts, Sickerts and Turners.

For Augusta, painting was only a pastime. Her father’s taste for biblical Christian names, and the fact that almost none of his daughters married before his death, suggests an Old Testament view of women’s place in the scheme of things to which, while he lived, Augusta was obedient. But on the night of Thursday, 20 February 1873, Thomas Smith suffered a stroke. For five days he lay paralysed on his bed, gradually sinking until, at four o’clock on the following Thursday afternoon, he died.

His relatives filled three mourning coaches at the cemetery. Such was his reputation as an honest tradesman that, despite appalling weather, a great concourse of people gathered at the grave, while in Brighton itself nearly every shop in his part of the town had one or two shutters up. ‘In fact,’ the
Brighton Evening News
(4 March 1873) commented, ‘so general a display of shutters is seldom to be seen on the occasion of a funeral of a tradesman, only but honourably distinguished by his strict and uniform integrity during a long business career.’

Four months later, on 3 July, Augusta married Edwin John at St Peter’s Church in Brighton. It was said to be a love match. One of the tastes they held in common was music: she would play Chopin on the piano, while he preferred religious music and in later life wrote a number of ‘chaste and tuneful compositions’ for the organ, including a setting for the Te Deum and a berceuse. The three eldest children, who were unmusical, were all encouraged to draw and, to amuse them, Augusta ‘painted all round the walls of their nursery’.
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But the strongest reaction Augusta produced on all her children was
through her absence. She died, apparently among strangers, at Ferney Bottom, Hartington, in Derbyshire. The cause of her death was given as rheumatic gout and exhaustion. She was thirty-five years old;
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her daughter Gwen was eight and Augustus was six-and-a-half.