Death Sits Down to Dinner (36 page)

“Yes we do. But Jackson, there is no need for you to hurry home. Why don’t you spend another couple of days in town and do some Christmas shopping?”

“Thank you, m’lady, I think I will.” Mrs. Jackson glanced at the clock. She had plenty of time to change and catch the half past ten train to Kew, and meet Mr. Stafford at the Lamb and Flag before their visit to the Orchid House.

Author’s Note

One of the joys of writing about the early 1900s is the many eccentric true-life characters that populated the time. I found them so intriguing that I wanted to include a few of the more flamboyant ones in
Death Sits Down to Dinner
. Here is a little more information.

Winston Spencer Churchill

NOVEMBER
30, 1874
–JANUARY
24, 1965

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

—WINSTON S. CHURCHILL

Winston Churchill was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill, the third son of John Spencer-Churchill, seventh Duke of Marlborough, and Lady Randolph Churchill (née Jennie Jerome), daughter of an American millionaire. As the third grandson of a duke, Winston would inherit no title and very little money.

Winston loved to live life well. He was never without a Romeo y Julieta cigar clamped firmly between his teeth, and he drank a bottle of his favorite champagne, Pol Roger, as a nightcap in bed every night as he wrote letters or read. One of his favorite ways to relax was soaking in a deep, steamy tub with a good book. He passionately believed in the British Empire, loved the ideal of glorious war, and was horrified that women should be given the vote—a woman’s job was to provide heirs, hopefully to adorn her protected world, and to look after the welfare of her husband and family. If she was unfortunate enough to come from the lower orders it was her fate to be burdened with the exhausting life of an Edwardian working mother. Conversely, he was a huge advocate and supporter of welfare reform for the working and poor classes, notably the elderly and those too sick to work. He staunchly supported the prime minister, Herbert Asquith, and the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, on welfare reform and the People’s Budget, which passed those reforms into law—money for which was garnered from property taxes levied on the landed classes. He was also involved in breaking the power of veto exercised in the House of Lords, which made him hugely unpopular with his fellow aristocrats.

Winston revered his father, a well-known and powerful figure in politics, and it was likely that this need for approval from his disinterested parent drove Winston’s early political ambitions. By the time he was thirty-one, he had crossed the floor of the House of Commons, forsaking the Conservative Party for the Liberal Party, a move he was rewarded with six years later with a senior cabinet position as home secretary. His defection from the Conservative Party alienated fellow members of the aristocracy who viewed his actions as treacherous, irresponsible, and self-serving. Eloquent to the point of upstaging the entire House in parliamentary debate, Winston was by turns laughed at, envied, and adored. But many considered him a visionary especially in preparations for what was to be World War I.

In 1911 Winston became First Lord of the Admiralty. Never wavering for a moment in his conviction that war with Germany was inevitable, he spent huge sums in strengthening Britain’s navy. He was fascinated by the innovations of aircraft and flight and saw aircraft as potential weapons of war and invaluable in aerial enemy reconnaissance. Future battles would be fought in the air, he decided, and founded the Royal Navy Air Service in 1912.

As Britain was drawn into war with Germany, Winston was not destined to be First Lord of the Admiralty for long. In 1915 he was the leading political and military engineer of the disastrous Gallipoli landings in the Dardanelles. He took much of the blame for the fiasco—450,000 dead and critically wounded—and when Prime Minister Asquith formed a wartime all-party coalition government, the Conservatives demanded his demotion.

There are hundreds of amusing anecdotes told about Churchill throughout his long, ruthless, and sometimes glowing political career, but the one about the Siege of Sidney Street told in
Death Sits Down to Dinner
is quite true, and he certainly did have a precarious moment on a railway station platform with a particularly aggressive member of the militant suffragettes.

Churchill married the beautiful and strong-minded Clementine Hozier after a lengthy and some thought promising friendship with the prime minister’s daughter Violet Asquith. Violet was so devastated when Churchill dropped her in favor of marriage to Clementine that the Asquith family feared for her mental health. Winston and Clementine’s marriage was a happy one and their relationship remained flirtatious. She called him Pug and he called her Cat.

Gilbert Vernon Wildman-Lushington

JULY
11, 1887
–DECEMBER
2, 1913

In deepest regret for a gallant officer of achievement and promise.

—WINSTON S. CHURCHILL, CONDOLENCES ON CAPTAIN WILDMAN-LUSHINGTON’S DEATH

I don’t think if I sat up all night for weeks that I could have come up with such a fabulous name as Gilbert Vernon Wildman-Lushington
.
Captain Wildman-Lushington, Royal Marines, was originally one of four officers selected for flight training in 1911 out of two hundred naval officers who applied. In late 1913 he was appointed as Churchill’s personal flying instructor. He was twenty-six years old when he took Churchill ‘up’ in his Farman bi-pusher aeroplane. Churchill had enough confidence in his new instructor to take the controls after only a handful of lessons and not only flew the plane but successfully landed it (the most dangerous part of early flight was landing). Churchill was so exhilarated by his experience that he invited the young flying officer to his birthday party that evening. Two days later, on December 2, 1913, Wildman-Lushington was returning from a flight toward Sheerness but as he came down to land at Eastchurch the machine slideslipped into the ground and Wildman-Lushington was killed. He was buried in Christchurch Cemetery on Portsdown Hill with full military honors.

Maud, Lady Cunard

AUGUST
2, 1872
—JULY
10, 1948

Let me introduce you to the man who killed Rasputin
.

—MAUD CUNARD, ON INTRODUCING THE GRAND DUKE

DMITRI PAVLOVICH, WHO TURNED ON HIS HEEL AND

LEFT HER HOUSE, NEVER TO RETURN

She was the American wife of Bache Cunard, the fabulously rich grandson of shipping magnate Samuel Cunard, who founded the Cunard Line. It was a marriage that she found so unforgivably boring that she abandoned Bache and went to live in London. The couple was to legally separate, but Bache Cunard financially supported his independent wife for the rest of his life.

Lady Cunard was probably the most lavish hostess of her day and entertained fashionable London society at countless scintillating dinners, innumerable extravagant balls, and invitations to ultrasophisticated country-house parties at her husband’s country seat at Neville-Holt, where anything might happen. Her celebrated London salon was a center for musicians, painters, sculptors, poets, and writers, as well as politicians (anyone was invited as long as he or she was famous or interesting), but nerves of iron were necessary to withstand Maud’s quicksilver repartee and often wounding tongue. Herbert Asquith, the prime minister, considered her a dangerous woman, because although she was not greatly interested in politics, she beguiled senior politicians into revealing state information at her dinner table. Maud was not a particularly endearing character but was renowned for serving up her guests’ frailties at dinner after the fish course. However, there was one occasion when Maud Cunard met her equal:

“Do you mind if I smoke?” Lord Birkenhead asked Lady Cunard long before dinner was over.

“Do you mind if we eat?” Lady Cunard responded sweetly.

“Not if you do it quietly,” retorted his lordship.

At a time when discreet infidelity was an acceptable pursuit among the aristocracy, Maud was the longtime mistress of Sir Thomas Beecham. The anecdote related by Lady Shackleton in
Death Sits Down to Dinner
about the window-cleaner spotting Lady Cunard in bed with Sir Thomas is actually true, and nearly cost Lady Cunard her powerful place in society.

Sir Thomas Beecham

APRIL
29, 1879
–MARCH
8, 1961

There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn’t give a damn what goes on in between.

—SIR THOMAS BEECHAM

Beecham’s grandfather, also Thomas Beecham, was the rich industrialist who owned Beecham’s Powders, a laxative and cure-all for headache and stiffness of the joints.

Sir Thomas, who was extraordinarily handsome, deeply talented in music, and possessed of a stupendous ego, bankrolled and conducted his own orchestra and was the impresario of His Majesty’s Theatre and the director of the Royal Opera House. Sir Thomas demanded the very highest standards from his players. He once noticed that his leading cellist was not striving for the perfection required of her. He brought the music to a halt and said to her, in front of the entire orchestra, “Now, madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of bringing pleasure to thousands and all you can do is scratch it!” Sir Thomas, Lady Cunard’s lover for many years, was often unfaithful to her as he was so irresistible to women. When his wife died after many years into their marriage, Lady Cunard confidently expected Sir Thomas to marry her, but he abandoned her in favor of a much younger woman.

Constance Gladys, Marchioness of Ripon

APRIL
22, 1859
–OCTOBER
28, 1917

Gladys would have appreciated a Beethoven symphony so much more if she had been a personal friend of the composer.

—E. F. BENSON

Lady Ripon was six feet tall and so beautiful that even the most glamorous in her company looked like they needed “a touch of the sponge and the duster,” according to the writer E. F. Benson. She was, in her mature years, the most influential patroness of the arts, one of society’s greatest leading ladies, and, as it turned out, had a talent for event planning and an excellent head for business.

Lady Ripon was a close friend of Oscar Wilde, who dedicated his play
A Woman of No Importance
to her; her other celebrated friends included the opera singer Nellie Melba, whose success in London was largely due to her support, and Sergei Diaghilev, director of the Russian Ballet.

It took Lady Ripon less than a year to revitalize the half-empty Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, which was verging on bankruptcy, with the help of her friend Sir Thomas Beecham. She made the Royal Opera one of the main events of the London season, second only to Royal Ascot and Cowes Week. She was immensely well connected and invited everyone she knew to the season’s operas, carefully making sure that invitations were extended long after tickets were sold out. She also developed the brilliant idea of selling tickets in advance for performances and made it extraordinarily chic to take a box for the entire season at an exorbitant price—paid in advance. But she was singularly feted for the discovery of the flamboyant and fascinating Ballets Russes, which she invited to perform on the night before the coronation of King George V, in 1911. It was a gala event of such magnificence and popularity that the Lady Ripon’s Ballets Russes became a sensation for years to come.

Vaslav Nijinsky

MARCH
12, 1889
–APRIL
8, 1950

I jump and sort of stop in the air for the moment.

If the Ballets Russes was the crowning glory of Lady Ripon’s dazzling reign as society’s grandest dame
,
then Polish-born Nijinsky was its superstar and international crowd-pleaser. A dancer of tremendous athleticism, Nijinsky’s theatrical and gravity-defying leaps into the air held audiences spellbound. The dancer was fond of relating how his father threw him into the Vistula River when he was seven, one icy winter night, to teach him how to swim. As he sank to the bottom of the muddy, freezing river he found that he had been invested with superhuman strength and, with one push, shot up through the swirling water and through the ice on its surface to land safely on the bank.

For his solo performance in
Le Spectre de la Rose,
Nijinsky wore a skin-colored silk tricot, which clung so tightly to his athletic body that it revealed every muscle and sinew, onto which were sewn hundreds of red and pink silk rose petals. He gathered a tremendous following among society ladies—who either did not care or failed to notice that Nijinsky was very much in love with his director of the ballet, Diaghilev.

The sets and costumes designed by Léon Bakst were so exotic that the enthralled devotees of the Ballets Russes paid astronomical sums for their tickets, which were sold out months in advance. The ballet’s brilliant savage colors of blue, scarlet, emerald green, and pink and its oriental themes became immediately fashionable among the beau monde. For London’s stylish ladies it became chic to lounge in a boudoir made over to look like a Turkish seraglio in a pair of sheer chiffon, baggy scarlet pants, suffocating in an atmosphere of incense. The Ballets Russes had revitalized color!

Nijinsky was the ballet’s choreographer and his successful career was assured for many years, until he married and was dismissed from the ballet by Diaghilev. Nijinsky spiraled into debt, alcoholism, and schizophrenia with long bouts in mental asylums until his death of kidney failure when he was sixty.

Nellie Melba

MAY
19, 1861
–FEBRUARY
23, 1931

If I’d been a housemaid I’d have been the best in Australia—I couldn’t help it. It’s got to be perfection for me.