The Great Silence (36 page)

On 31 March the Duke went up to Derbyshire, delighted at first to be there after such a long absence. ‘Cannot describe how nice it is to be back here,’ he wrote in his diary, although the following morning his mood shifted as he walked round the crumbling garden buildings with Burke. ‘It was’, he wrote that evening, ‘a melancholy scene.’ Only a couple of decades earlier forty-six gardeners had been photographed at Chatsworth in front of Paxton’s magnificent Conservatory. The wooden struts were now rotten, the hundreds of panels of glass all smashed. The decision was taken to demolish it, but the Duke could not bear to witness the event himself, so the day for demolition was set for 25 May, several weeks after his return to Canada.

Fearing that he might find another set of problems over at Hard-wick, Victor drove the twenty miles to Bess’s magnificent sixteenth-century window-rich mansion, enjoying the pleasingly mild and sunny April weather. He was relieved to find Bess’s old home ‘in wonderfully good order’ although he could not imagine the family ever living there again. Back on the Chatsworth estate, he had a meeting with the vicar after church on Sunday to discuss plans for the village war memorial. This was followed by a whole afternoon with Burke. There was so much to do and he anticipated a ‘fearful life of difficulties before we get things straight’.

Complicated negotiations for the sale of the London house had been equally problematic, but the six-month long discussions had finally been concluded in the autumn of 1919, when contracts for the takeover were exchanged. A completion date of 25 March was arranged, with six weeks’ notice beyond that given for all the contents to be removed. The plan was for the house itself to be demolished and for the land beneath it and around it to be developed. The new owners, the famous building firm Holland Hannen & Cubitt, immediately made a further deal with a Mr Sibthorpe, a London property developer, who had a daring scheme for the land that had cost them one million guineas. A complex of sumptuous offices and entertainment facilities was envisaged with a magnificent cinema at the heart of it. Mr Sibthorpe was undaunted by criticism of his intention to get rid of William Kent’s building. ‘Personally I think the place is an eyesore,’ he retorted.

And so the glories of the house remained in place for one last ball on 14 April, the necessitous times making it seem appropriate for guests to pay for their entrance tickets in aid of charity. For one last night a huge marble vase filled with orchids was placed at the bottom of the staircase and Newman’s, the British band of the moment, supplied the music. The invitation had requested that guests come dressed in costumes reflecting the period 1760–90. The
Daily Telegraph
recorded the scene as guests arrived dressed in ‘powder and patches, tall and nodding plumes above elaborately dressed hair, brocades and figured silks and uniforms that had stepped out of family portraits’, and the huge rooms filled with music and dancing for the final party.

Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, balancing a full white wig, was in a costume of pale yellow taffeta bunched up over a petticoat veiled with old lace and festooned with garlands of pink roses on silver ribbon. Lady Cynthia Curzon wore peacock blue taffeta, while some of the French ladies had followed the dress code to the letter, even ensuring that their faces were
poudré
. But in the newspaper’s three-column report not a single mention was made of the family from whom the house for a few more days would take its name.

Marriage was in the air. The movie star Mary Pickford had been married to her one-time screen partner Douglas Fairbanks at the end of March and their arrival in London on honeymoon had prompted a riot, as enthusiastic fans crushed her when reaching out to touch the bride’s hair at a party given for them in the grounds of the Royal Chelsea Hospital. Her new husband, in the custom of doting newly weds, had to lift her high in the air and carry her to safety.

A week after guests had made their farewell to Devonshire House they were once again invited to dress up for a ducal celebration. The wedding of the Duke’s daughter Dorothy to Harold Macmillan on 21 April took place in St Margaret’s, Westminster, where many Members of Parliament had married including, twelve years earlier, Winston Churchill and Clementine Hozier. The church was filled with the powerful scent of lilies and orange trees, their branches bending with ripened fruit. Dorothy looked enchanting in cream velvet with garlands of orange blossom encircling her waist, while her eight small attendants wore gowns of periwinkle blue satin, with wreaths of grapes hung on silver bands in their hair.

The Duke was delighted that his mother, who had not been well, was able to attend, albeit in her bath chair. ‘She greatly enjoyed herself,’ he wrote in his diary that night. He himself had ‘spent most of the time with the Queen who was really charming’ and the day proved to be one of the happiest of what was turning out to be a predominantly gloomy visit. News of escalating violence in Ireland inspired by the republican movement only added to the Duke’s concern. In early April twenty-two offices of the Inland Revenue as well as over a hundred and twenty police stations in Dublin and other cities all over Ireland were burned down, and the anger and determination of the Irish Republican Army showed no signs of abating.

With a sailing date of 2 May and his time in England running out, the Duke went against his own better judgement to ‘have a last look at poor old DH’. Hoping that ‘the pain will soon pass’ he tried to convince himself that ‘Although I really could hardly face it, I am glad I managed to have another glimpse at it.’ Spotted by a persistent reporter from the
Daily Sketch
, the Duke gave nothing away, but the reporter detected something of the effect the sale of the house was having on its owner. ‘Although the ducal expression is scarcely expressive’, he told his readers, and ‘emotions have never visibly chased each other across the face of any Cavendish’, he was in no doubt that during those weeks ‘the Duke thought a lot’. His preoccupation with such changes in his life was evident to all.

Only the week before 250 pounds of gelignite was due to be ignited by 450 electric detonators attached to Paxton’s magnificent glasshouse in Derbyshire,
The Times
reflected on how properties were changing hands all over England. The newspaper summed up the philosophical and resigned manner in which some of the wealthiest landowners were adjusting to altered circumstances.

For the most part the sacrifices are made in silence ... the sons are perhaps lying in far-away graves; the daughters, secretly mourning someone dearer than a brother, have taken up some definite work away from home, seeking thus to still their aching hearts, and the old people, knowing there is no son or near relative left to keep up the old traditions, or so crippled by necessary taxation that they know the boy will never be able to carry on when they are gone, take the irrevocable step.

On the night before Paxton’s masterpiece was destroyed, electricians were working up until midnight finishing off the complex wiring of explosives. The story of the imminent explosion had reached the press, and one reporter, anxious for a scoop, wrote up the story without even travelling to Derbyshire. The following morning the published account described how some ‘billion’ pieces of glass had been scattered about the country. In fact the detonation had utterly failed. The edifice seemed obstinately indestructible. The following day they tried again, but after seven or eight efforts Burke told the Duke that ‘Although very high
charges were used it had not the slightest effect on the building, the roof remaining quite stationary.’

Poor Burke wondered if perhaps he had made a dreadful mistake. ‘I am feeling quite guilty’, he wrote to his employer in Canada, ‘in having persuaded you to take the building down as if it can stand the terrific charges exploded beneath it, I believe it would have stood up for many years.’ To those few people still alive who remembered the day when the glass palace had first gone up, the planned destruction promised to be a near-apocalyptic event. Newspaper editors smelled a front-page story and what Burke termed ‘a cinema man’ from Sheffield planned to come out to Derbyshire and record the whole sad sequence from ignition to demolition. Burke promised the Duke that if the film was satisfactory he would send a copy out to Canada.

The final week of May had brought unusually warm weather up and down the country, with temperatures of 82 degrees Fahrenheit recorded in London. On Saturday 29 May the inhabitants of the pretty town of Louth in Lincolnshire were getting ready to have tea when a massive storm hit the Lincolnshire Wolds. There was no chance for the moisture to be absorbed into the dry ground and soon the accumulated tons of water rose up into a fourteen-foot wave engulfing the River Ludd. All six bridges straddling the river were instantly destroyed by the tremendous torrent and the townspeople were given no warning before being swept up in the terrifying wall of water. One mother watched as her three children clung to the bacon hook in the kitchen. Soon their young arms gave way and they drowned in front of her. Twenty-three deaths were recorded that day and a thousand people were left homeless as, according to one survivor, houses were ‘swept away like sandcastles’.

Over in Derbyshire the weather had been equally bad and on top of the Louth catastrophe, Burke had little news in his weekly letter with which to cheer the Duke. Thousands of young grouse had been drowned in the recent storms and ‘one of the estate painters – old Hulley who lives in Edensor village’ – had fallen very badly from a cart and severely injured his spine. ‘The doctor is hopeful he may recover sufficiently,’ Burke reported, but acknowledged that at the age of 68 there was no great hope that he would.

Meanwhile Burke had heard on the grapevine from London that the new owners of Devonshire House were still flirting with the idea of keeping the house intact and turning it into a luxury hotel. And he did have one good thing to tell the Duke. Earlier in the summer Lionel Earle, His Majesty’s Officer of Works at Westminster, had been in touch with the Duke about the possibility of acquiring the Devonshire House entrance gates and using them on the opposite side of Piccadilly at the entrance to Green Park. He had offered £1,500. The Duke however was determined to hold out for a little more. Shrewsbury School had also been interested in buying them as a war memorial, although it was made clear that they could not afford ‘a fancy price’. Burke now confirmed that the King would be pleased to erect the gates in Green Park and that His Majesty’s Officer of Works would give the Duke £2,000 for the gates and pillars.

Back in Derbyshire the demolition plans had continued to go badly. The Conservatory had been built so carefully and solidly that all attempts to blow it up had failed to make an impact and the ‘film man’ gave up and went back to Sheffield. However, before he left he had managed to record some of the early attempts at detonation and on Tuesday 22 June Burke wrote from the estate office that he was sending the Duke a film of the failure to destroy the Great House.

One of the saddest witnesses that day was Paxton’s own great-grandson, Sir Charles Markham. After demobilisation from the Life Guards, Sir Charles had spent a brief but notable period in the diplomatic service in Russia and Cairo before returning home to manage the huge fortune inherited from his father’s coal-mining business in Derbyshire. He had made enough money to relieve another Duke of one of the many properties he too was selling to limit post-war expenses. Charlie bought Longford Hall from the Earl of Leicester in the very summer that he was asked to bring various pieces of apparatus over to Chatsworth to help destroy his grandfather’s creation.

‘Another heavy charge’ was placed later that same evening and finally the whole roof caved in. The ‘film man’ was persuaded to return to take some photographs that he cleverly incorporated into
his film. Shortly after the detonation a visitor to Chatsworth, amazed by the sight of the coconut palm with ‘its head peering almost to the lofty arched roof’, had watched as the plants withered and the Conservatory ‘became a house of death’. He had stood in the rain looking with deep sadness at

a dismal expanse of debris stretching away from my feet to where tall trees swayed down as if to hide the spectacle ... Great iron pillars snapped in several places littered the ground. Thick baulks of timber, split and shivered, sprawled about. Over the turf was spread a glittering carpet of broken glass.

The violence of the final explosion forced one shard of iron to be carried through the courtyard of the house itself, shattering a windowpane and embedding itself in the tooled leather spine of a volume of Martius’
Flora Braziliensis
.

Burke stood the following day with an old man who had known the Great House for most of his life. They agreed that the disappearance of something quite so lovely was a calamity. The Chatsworth Conservatory that had brought light and warmth to living things had suffered and had died, another casualty of the war.

High Summer 1920

With her tumbling ‘mass of chestnut hair’ which, when unpinned, reached down to her waist, Ottoline Morrell reminded Osbert Sitwell of ‘a rather over-lifesize Infanta of Spain’. But admiring comments on the drama of her appearance were no comfort to Ottoline. For several years she had slept alone in her schoolgirl-narrow bed at home at Garsington Manor. She was feeling increasingly lonely.

Two years earlier her husband Philip, a former Liberal Member of Parliament, had confessed to her in an agonising scene of remorse that he was ‘dying of grief’. To his wife’s distress he told her that within the next few months both his secretary and Ottoline’s own personal maid were to have babies. Philip was the father of them both. This news had not surprised her as much as it might. Guests had been in the middle of a wartime dinner when the husband of the much loved Garsington housemaid burst into the room with a gun and threatened to shoot Philip. Ottoline wrote an agonised letter to her husband. He did not open it. The subject was confined to conspiratorial silence. Philip’s political career had to be protected and besides, as Ottoline reminded herself in her diary, ‘It does not do to show one is unhappy. People don’t like one.’ They never discussed the incident with others or between themselves. But the humiliation and betrayal had banished all thought of conjugal intimacy.