The Bolter (6 page)

The “way” for both Idina and her colleagues was to make themselves as attractive as possible and to marry well. These, after all, were the only means by which they would be able to determine the lives ahead of them. Idina had to have been very aware of the shadow cast over her by her parents’ divorce, but she clearly decided that she wanted to close the gap between herself and her contemporaries and she made the most of what she had in the marriage market that awaited her. She may not have been a natural beauty—that shotaway chin haunted her—but she had high cheekbones and, above them, a pair of wide, blue, bedroom eyes. Knowing that if she wanted to succeed in making men fall in love with her she needed to make the most of her appearance by dressing beautifully, she used the funds at her disposal to do so. She enjoyed the process, teaching herself how to walk and stand so that the folds of material hung just so, making her clothes, as they should, appear a second skin. And, thus dressed, Idina shone among her peers. She had “a much-envied gift for wearing clothes attractively,” as the
Daily Express
would later write. “It has been remarked of her that the simplest gown becomes distinguished when she puts it on.”
¹¹
Yet all that precocious education and easy boredom rapidly led to a potentially sharp tongue. Idina soon learnt that she could make other girls “terrified” of her.
¹²
And years later, when a former classmate and new arrival in Kenya approached her with a “Do you remember me, we were at school together?,” the sharpness would still be there. Idina turned to her, half smiled, and replied, “Oh, yes, you never powdered.”
¹³

Idina, it was clear, was never going to meld with the other girls around her. However, she was now armed with a fast wit and the ability to turn every head in the room. If she could not join them, she would beat them: she would take the few advantages nature had given her and make herself the most attractive young woman in town.

The wave of change of the Edwardian age had begun, along with its political causes, a fashion for female independence. The age of chaperones had more or less vanished. Young women whose fathers could afford to keep them in style stayed single. They traveled the world, attended lectures and political meetings, bought motorcars, hung around in groups, smoked, and stayed out late at friends’ houses, listening to the gramophone. And they had boyfriends, known as dancing partners. Unmarried, they didn’t dare go all the way, for fear of becoming pregnant. But that still left open a wide field of sexual behavior—usually limited to the back of motor taxis since they still lived with their parents in their families’ London town houses. But for the “Saturday-to-Monday,” as Edwardian
weekend house parties were known, the young could rely on the older generation’s exodus to the countryside.

Nonetheless, real freedom came only with marriage. In families where there were any boys to leave money to, most of it went to them. When girls were left money, they were not usually allowed access to the capital until they married. A young woman who wanted to buy or rent her own house therefore needed a husband either so that she could access her own money or so that he could pay for it.

In Idina’s case, joining the marriage market was far from straightforward. The slurry of scandals in which her parents wallowed threatened to muddy the white of her dress. Socialism, suffrage, and divorce had combined to earn Muriel a reputation as a “class traitor.”
¹⁴

The first hurdle for Idina was practical. Muriel had been presented at Court herself but, as a divorcée, was now excluded.

In February 1911, Muriel therefore took Idina to London to stay with her sister Mabelle, now the Hon. Mrs. Egerton, in her house in the highly fashionable St. James’s Place, on the very edge of Green Park.

Muriel adhered to what traditions she could. Mabelle presented Idina at Court and then cohosted with Muriel “a small dance”
¹⁵
for her at the Ritz. Mother and daughter returned to London again for the start of the Season at the beginning of May. Muriel put an announcement in the
Times:
“Muriel, Countess De La Warr and Lady Idina Sackville have arrived at 11, St. James’s Place,”
¹⁶
indicating where invitations could be sent. Idina was “out.”

And Britain was fractured with strikes. The gap between rich and poor was acute. While the wealthy and idle partied, workingmen struggled to feed their families on their weekly wages. In the East End of London, whose slums teemed with just short of a million inhabitants, more than three hundred thousand people lived in what was acknowledged to be extreme poverty. Here there was a single, and inevitably unpleasant, lavatory for every twenty-five households, along with one trickling standpipe, its meager flow of water slowed yet further by the drought settling in to rainless Britain. As the heat in the shade rose to more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit and temperatures in the sun were melting lead at 130 degrees, the stench in these slums rose, fostering unrest. In the summer of 1911, this disquiet over the irregularity of employment (and the fact that the jobs that were available were low-paid, with nothing extra for overtime) found a voice in a man called Ben Tillett. Tillett had been born the son of an alcoholic cart polisher but had succeeded in educating himself in the evenings
after work not only to read and write but to do so in ancient Greek and Latin as well. He was now the leader of the union of dockworkers, the men who unloaded Britain’s numerous ships and kept the harbors they berthed in open. Shipping provided island Britain with crucial contact with the outside world. The threat of a dockworkers’ strike was a threat of ceasing all international trade and halting much-needed food supplies to Britain. In addition to this the British government was acutely aware that Tillett could call on the support of the railway union. A rail strike would hit Britain hard, interrupting the transportation of goods and, more important, food, around the country.

Eventually, in the middle of the Royal Ascot racing week, the high point of the British upper classes’ social season, Tillett called a strike, dramatically preventing a vast new transatlantic liner, the
Olympic
, from sailing. By the end of the week dockworkers all over the country were on strike. The bustling, noisy harbors of Britain were ominously silent. Even the wharfside cranes on the river Thames, whose long bridges usually rose and fell throughout the day, were still. Instead the dockworkers took to the streets; the wide merchant avenues of Britain’s port cities filled with the million laborers who had created their wealth. In London, the strikers marched on Trafalgar Square—as the gunmakers of St. James’s Street and Pall Mall sold out in forty-eight hours. In early August, the railway workers went on strike. Riots began to break out among demonstrators, followed by widespread looting, leading some to fear that Britain was on the verge of revolution. A 2,300-man warship was sent to moor just outside the Liverpool docks, and in London, detachments of troops camped in Hyde Park, ready for action. Finally, the prime minister, Lloyd George, asked the dockworkers to reopen the ports, calling on their patriotism in the face of Germany’s recent territorial move of sending a warship to the strategically positioned country of Morocco. As British Society trembled, Idina’s mother and George Lansbury very publicly acted—for the strikers.

By mid-August it was over. Wages were raised, and the dock owners gave guarantees of regular employment. Britain slowly jolted back to normal.

Meanwhile, Idina and her fellow debutantes were fully absorbed by the trial of staying cool in rib-crushing and stifling corsets as they attended the round of dances varying from Idina’s small do to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s ball for several hundred.

Idina, however, breezed through both the heat and the dictates of fashion. She quickly worked out what suited her and how to wear it.
When it came to the dances, having grown up with her male cousins as almost her only friends at home, she was very much at ease with the opposite sex. And sex, or rather sex appeal, was what Idina, both confident yet longing to be reassured and thus willing to go a little further toward extremes than anyone else, promised from every pore.

Where convention demanded cool reserve, Idina threw herself into the rounds of debutantes’
bals blancs
with abandon. Nobody forgot a dance with her—her partners were still recounting those moments to her children thirty years later.
¹⁷
Idina was followed by the newspapers even in the United States, being pictured alongside extraordinary combinations of Prime Minister Asquith’s daughter and the leading actresses and showgirls of the day
¹⁸
and being written up by papers as far away as the
Oakland Tribune
as “very accomplished” and “a great favorite of Society.”
¹⁹

But Idina perhaps pushed boundaries a little too far. The constant company of Satan, the black Pekinese tucked under her arm, may have been too much for many. And, dazzling as she was, Idina was nonetheless not entirely proper. Whereas British Society has always adored the eccentrics whose differences celebrate the values they cherish, it has been less keen on those who might upset the extremely comfortable order of things. Idina was of the latter set. For as Idina danced, her mother’s support for both the Socialist George Lansbury and the strikes crippling Britain immersed Idina in further scandal.

Even during her first Season in London, this showed through. The desire for political change had been very firmly ingrained in Idina’s upbringing. Between debutante dances she returned to Old Lodge and its maelstrom of ideas and, in July 1911, she cofounded the East Grin-stead Women’s Suffrage Society. And, by the end of the Season, although she had been a “success” as a debutante, she was not yet engaged to be married.

Rather than let her daughter appear secondhand by doing the same social round again the following year, Muriel packed Idina off to the United States. On 30 August 1911, Idina sailed to New York on the
Olympic
, released by the strikers.

It was a glittering voyage. Every cabin was full
²⁰
and the passengers’ fortunes were as vast as the new ship aboard which they were sliding across the Atlantic. Among them was a Miss Emilie Grigsby, who declared eight hundred thousand dollars’ worth of extravagantly set diamonds, rubies, and pearls to the U.S. customs officials. Amid the storm of publicity that Miss Grigsby’s arrival in New York caused, one
of the other passengers, Mr. Carlisle, the chairman of Harland & Wolff, the shipbuilders who had constructed the
Olympic
, saw fit to boast that “the
Titanic
, a sister of the
Olympic
, would be ready next March to enter the Atlantic trade.”
²¹

Idina was accompanying a middle-aged couple, both of whom were scions of American industrial dynasties. William Church Osborn, who was heavily involved in New York politics, was the son of railroad entrepreneur William Henry Osborn, and both the grandson of another railman, Jonathan Sturges, and the nephew of the banker J. P. Morgan. Osborn’s wife had been born Alice Dodge and her grandfather had been founder of the Phelps Dodge mining fortune. This had made enough money for one of the partners’ widows to leave the impressive sum of more than thirty-six million dollars in her will.
²²
Alice’s sister, Mary, who never married, was one of Muriel’s closest friends and the greatest donor to all her causes.

The Osborns were traveling with three of their four children: their two younger sons, Earl and William, and their daughter, Aileen, who was a few months older than Idina. When Idina arrived in New York she went to stay with Aileen’s twenty-year-old cousin, Josephine Osborn.

Josephine had even more glamorous family connections than her cousin Aileen. Her father, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was William’s brother but, rather than devote himself to politics, he had become a paleoanthropologist and was now president of the American Museum of Natural History. While Josephine’s father absorbed himself in the past, her mother, Lucretia, who was the sister-in-law of another of J. P. Morgan’s nephews, used her “spacious”
²³
house on Madison Avenue to host a series of balls for family members.
²⁴

Josephine’s own coming-out dance had been held at home two days before Christmas in 1908. Mother and daughter, in pink chiffon and white satin, “received their guests in the ballroom entrance” at 11 p.m. The orchestra had been large enough to play “throughout the affair,” the “dining and other rooms” took thirty tables at which each one of the three hundred guests had been seated for a 2 a.m. supper. Then the dancing resumed. The guests included Kermit and Ethel Roosevelt, children of the former president.
²⁵

Lucretia Osborn’s coming-out dance for her niece Aileen, just a few months before Idina arrived, had been more modest. It was “small and informal,” and the guests, who had “included a number of young married people and many of the debutantes,” had been few enough to be
fed in just three large dinner parties before arriving to dance at 10:30.
²⁶
However, at the end of the autumn in which Idina arrived, her hostess threw a debutantes’ dance for another niece, Josephine’s cousin Sarah Spencer Morgan, the granddaughter of J. P. Morgan’s sister, after whom she was named.