The Bolter (7 page)

Idina the debutante, as depicted in the newspapers, February 1913

This dance, like Josephine’s, was held just before Christmas, and the house was an explosion of seasonal decoration, “the staircase being festooned with greens and holly. The library and dining-hall… were decorated with cut flowers in vases, including hyacinths, carnations, lilies of the valley and American Beauty roses. The ceilings were hung with evergreen, broken by poinsettias.”
²⁷
The mass of red and green
and polished wood and books, along with the sense of impending occasion and limitless wealth, must have given the house almost as charmed a period atmosphere as possible. Still, this, for the Fairfield Osborns, was a small dance, for the beautifully decorated library and dining hall were where the dancing was. The ballroom wasn’t even needed.

Nonetheless, it was certainly an exciting evening for Idina. By now she had been in the city for almost four months, becoming “not unknown as a visitor in New York,” as the
Washington Post
would later write.
²⁸
It was long enough to collect a chain of admirers, and this dance, at the house in which she was resident, was one to which she could ensure every single one was invited.

While Idina remained in the United States she careered up and down the East Coast, turning heads and adding Newport and the Berkshires
²⁹
to the list of places in which she was “not unknown.” Twelve months later she came back to England, and as the spring of 1913 rolled in, she returned to London. But just as the round of parties started, almost as if they no longer presented a challenge, Idina turned back to one of her other interests: the campaign for Votes for Women.

The previous eighteen months of campaigning had seen a wave of violence by militant “suffragettes” who were committed to realizing female suffrage by any means. They had smashed windows, burnt pillar boxes, and chained themselves to prominent statues with such frequency that the protests started to disrupt everyday life in the capital. In February 1913 they had even firebombed the house of David Lloyd George, the chancellor of the exchequer.

In trying to control the protests, the government had been facing the additional problem that many of the suffragettes, once imprisoned, were hunger-striking. Once a prisoner neared death she had to be released. In the spring of 1913 the government passed a bill colloquially and pejoratively known as the Cat and Mouse Act. This allowed it to release prisoners about to die and to reincarcerate them once they had recovered. The suffragettes’ protests increased in fury at this until, on 4 June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison dashed out in front of King George V’s horse in the Derby. She was crushed, and three days later died.

Idina was not a militant suffragette. Instead, her East Grinstead organization was a branch of the NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies), which believed that women’s suffrage should be achieved by peaceful means. NUWSS members called themselves “constitutionalists” or “suffragists.” Davison’s death shook them into making a mark for peaceful persuasion. They instigated a six-week campaign
of local rallies around the countryside which would culminate in a mass demonstration in Hyde Park at the end of July.

The East Grinstead Women’s Suffrage Society organized its own local rally, set for 23 July, just three days before the final rally of the evening, ten protesters marched off, a silk banner billowing overhead. But when they turned into East Grinstead’s High Street they met a mob of fifteen hundred antisuffragists marching against them, hurling “pieces of turf, a few ripe tomatoes and highly-seasoned eggs,” as the
East Grinstead Observer
reported.
³⁰

The suffragists took shelter in a house, but it was charged by the mob and its front door slowly and steadily bent until it cracked. The police dragged the women out the back to the branch’s headquarters at the top of the Dorset Arms pub, where they were trapped for several hours, listening to the crowd outside continuing to bay for their blood.

It was the only violent outburst in the entire six-week campaign, but Idina and her mother’s involvement in the group was enough to confirm society’s unfavorable opinion of Idina.

Ironically, all this outward rebellion meant that Idina was conforming to her mother’s version of normality. Deep down, something in Idina kicked against this. In her mother’s less than full emotional life, the only male figure, George Lansbury, belonged not only to a wife, but also to the electorate and his causes. Idina, having grown up with an absent father and a preoccupied mother, yearned for someone to shower her alone with attention. Three months after the riot in East Grinstead, Idina embraced society’s conventions instead of her mother’s and decided to live a more normal life than she had been brought up with. Now aged twenty, she became engaged to a twenty-one-year-old Cavalry officer who was one of the most eligible bachelors in Britain. He was a man with whom she would fall deeply in love and who, she believed, would belong to her.

Chapter 3

I
dina’s fiancé was called David Euan Wallace and known, like Idina, by his second name. Euan, it is still repeated today, some ninety years later, was an exceptionally good-looking man. In the portrait photograph I have of him, taken at the time, he poses sitting in his then modern khaki Cavalry officer’s uniform, buttons shining, polished leather straps crossing his chest. His nose, cheeks, mouth are all neat, perfectly formed in a young face that looks designed for first love. And, it is also still said, he was kind, charming, and funny.

Euan was a social animal. He liked to go out and about incessantly to gathering after gathering, noting with whom he had lunched, tea-ed, and dined.
¹
In 1910, at eighteen, he had gone to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. The best part of a year later he joined the 2nd Life Guards. The 1st and 2nd Life Guards, together with the Royal Horse Guards, known as the Blues, formed the King’s Household Cavalry. As wars were few and far between, the Household Cavalry were expected to spend most of their career guarding the King’s Household, which involved appearing at London’s society balls and dancing with both debutantes and their disaffected mothers. This is how Euan spent his evenings. The daytimes were busy with parades and polo. Traditionally the officers in these regiments were supposed to be aristocrats and therefore, in theory, gentlemen. Euan Wallace was not, however, in any way aristocratic: he was simply rich.

Euan’s great-great-grandfather, a Lanarkshire Scot called Alexander
Baird, had founded one of the fastest-grown industrial fortunes in the world. In 1816, finding his income as a tenant farmer too meager to support his wife, eight sons, and two daughters, Baird had taken a lease on a coalfield and given it to his twenty-year-old eldest son, William, to run. By the time his sons died in the 1860s, William Baird & Co. was running Gartsherrie, the largest ironworks in the world, producing three hundred thousand tons of iron a year. Murray’s
Handbook
for Scotland describes Gartsherrie as “a group of blazing Iron Furnaces… [in] a desolate, black district—of smoke, coal, ashes—treeless, sunless.”
²
Between thirty and forty thousand people depended upon the Bairds, who built them houses, schools, and churches, donating over half a million pounds to the Church of Scotland directly. But they could afford to: Gartsherrie made them a million pounds’ profit each year. They had become the richest family in Scotland and, at one time, it was said, the richest in Britain. The family spent its money carefully—in land. The brothers Baird bought up hundreds of thousands of acres of country estates and houses across Scotland, so establishing themselves as the new landed gentry.

Far from spreading the fortune between innumerable descendants, the Baird dynasty then shrank. The seven of the eight Baird sons who went into the family business spent their lives working too hard ever to find wives. Instead it was their elder sister Janet who produced two sons and a son-in-law to take over the firm and its profits. The son-in-law was Euan’s grandfather David Wallace. However, at the age of just fifty-four, David Wallace died, leaving Euan’s father, John, known as Jack, with the best part of a million pounds at the tender age of fifteen.

Jack therefore saw no need to follow his father into the family firm. Instead, to the disapproval of his Glasgow peers,
³
when he reached twenty-one and received the money, he started to divide his time between the estate of Old Glassingall (it inspired the setting for Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Kidnapped)
, which his father had bought, and a house he bought himself in Mayfair, London. Armed with a fortune and great deal of time, Jack Wallace began to turn himself from newly rich Scot to high-living English gentleman. He married, had a single son, Euan (whom he sent to the English boarding school Harrow), and lived well. But, by the age of forty-six, Jack Wallace, too, was dead. Euan was, just as Jack had been when his father died, only fifteen. The million pounds had shrunk to a mere 250,000 (worth 25 million today). It was a fraction of the sum Jack had inherited. But 250,000 pounds was enough to make Euan a rich young man—certainly rich enough for the Cavalry.

Euan Wallace

Being a Cavalry officer was an expensive occupation. Applicants needed no less than two thousand pounds a year in private, unearned income. An officer needed a manservant to maintain his uniforms, both khaki by day and glittering red and gold by night. He needed at least one groom to look after his string of a minimum of four horses: two chargers, on which he would occasionally parade, and polo ponies. He also needed to be able to afford to behave like a gentleman and pick up the bill whenever one appeared.

And thus Euan had behaved until September 1913, when as a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant slipping across London’s ballroom floors in a flash of burnished leather, polished brass, and crimson, his fortunes had taken a dramatic turn. His great-uncle William Weir, then still a senior partner of William Baird & Co., had turned up at his beloved mistress’s a little early one afternoon to find her in the arms of one of her fellow actors. Uncle Willie had turned on his heels. On 15 September 1913 he had drawn up a new will. Eight days later he had died from a fatal combination of heartbreak and shock. Childless, he had left almost a hundred thousand acres of Scottish estates and two million pounds to be divided equally between Euan and one other nephew. Overnight, in an age overflowing with millionaires, Euan became one of the richest young men in Britain. He was rich enough for his social ambitions to withstand marrying a girl from a scandalous family. Within a fortnight he had proposed to Idina.

Putting the scandals to one side, Euan and Idina appeared a perfect couple. They were both glamorous and seemingly dedicated to a nonstop social life. They were enough in love to call each other pet names.
⁴
Moreover, the vastness of Euan’s fortune was seen as a match for the antiquity of Idina’s family name.

But, in the rush and blush of sexual excitement and first love, they overlooked a fundamental difference in their approach to life. They may both have been startlingly energetic, and the life and soul of any party, but for Euan this social life was the be-all and end-all. For Idina, whose
eyes had been opened a little wider in her youth by a mother who lived “very largely out of Society,”
⁵
it was no more than passing entertainment. Instead, like her grandmother, Annie Brassey, what Idina wanted from life was adventure. Yet all couples have their differences and, for as long as things are going well, these are, for the most part, trifling.

And, at the beginning, things went very well. Indeed, in the world that Idina and Euan inhabited, their life could hardly have been better. Their engagement was announced in the
Times
on 13 October 1913 and their families’ solicitors immediately set about drawing up a marriage contract. This set up a Marriage Trust into which Euan put the then impressive sum of one hundred thousand pounds for Idina. Among other conditions, the contract stipulated that if Idina left the marriage she would forfeit the lot.