Those Wild Wyndhams (32 page)

In December 1899 came Black Week, a trinity of defeats that stupefied an already bewildered British public: ‘The bloody waste of Magersfontein, the shattering retreat from Stormberg … Colenso that blundering battle …’, in the words of H. G. Wells.
³²
At Colenso, the cruel climax, Louis Botha’s 5,000-strong Boer force, concealed behind the Tugela River’s steep banks, mowed down Sir Redvers Bullers’s army of 18,000 men. In a few short hours, and assailed by an enfilade of bullets that came ‘in solid streaks like telegraph wires’, Britain’s strongest force in the field since the Crimea was decimated. ‘It is a weird and soul-shaking experience to advance over a sunlit and apparently a lonely countryside, with no slightest movement upon its broad face, while the path which you take is marked behind you by sobbing, gasping, writhing men, who can only guess by the position of their wounds whence the shots came which struck them down,’ wrote Arthur Conan Doyle, whose rose-tinted account of the conflict,
The Great Boer War
, falters when it comes to Black Week.
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‘I never saw a Boer all day till the battle was over,’ said a dazed General Lyttelton, Alfred’s brother.
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Christmas at Clouds was bleak. A pale and anxious Minnie Wyndham could think of nothing but Guy, trapped at Ladysmith in an apparently never-ending siege. George arrived and went straight to bed, worn down by the flu and on the brink of nervous exhaustion. Madeline Wyndham prayed constantly in front of her prie-dieu, and urged her daughters to do the same. Percy was left to sit by the fire in his favourite armchair, fulminating impotently at the shortcomings of generals who had not even thought to send a reconnaissance force before them. ‘I wish the ferret [Pamela] had been at Colenzo [sic],’ he told Mary. ‘I think she would have asked questions about the banks of the river.’
³⁵

Black Week shook Britain’s confidence and forced a complete overhaul in the Government’s conduct of the war. With the eyes of the world upon it, Britain was faltering. Its army had showed itself ‘mortal and human’, its officers simply ‘the pleasant, rather incompetent men they had always been’, the troops ‘neither splendid nor disgraceful … just ill-trained and fairly plucky and wonderfully good-tempered men – paying for it’, said Wells.
¹
‘The history of the future will have to summarize the causes of the decline and fall of the British Empire in three pregnant words – “suicide from imbecility”,’ declared a trenchant commentator in the
Review of Reviews
,
urging root-and-branch military reform.
²

Lord Roberts – ‘Bobs’, as he was known – was brought out of retirement to replace Sir Redvers Bullers, and told, in the meeting in which he was appointed, that his only son was one of the Colenso dead. The change in command was not enough to protect the War Office from allegations of ineptitude from either Radical anti-war Liberals, led by Henry Labouchere (‘Labby’), or Alfred Harmsworth’s
Daily Mail
, just three years old. George was anticipating an attack when Parliament reconvened in February 1900. But ‘I think I have a pretty good case,’ he said. ‘Anyway I am keeping low like a Boer and shall not fire until they come into the open.’
³

The Opposition came into the open at the Queen’s Address, which declared, ‘we are not interested in the possibility of defeat: it does not exist’. The Opposition moved for an amendment deploring ‘the want of knowledge, foresight and judgment of Her Majesty’s Ministers in preparation for the war now proceeding’. ‘Arthur was
most
foolish to speak at all,’ said Margot of Balfour’s pitiful response. ‘Some want of passion in his nature’ made him unable to give the ‘grand uplifted bugle … sort of speech’ the situation required. Balfour’s intellectual, measured oratory was completely out of step with a country thrown from jingoistic euphoria to the pit of despair in barely three months.
⁴

The role of standard bearer fell to George. Fuelled by incandescent patriotism his speech was, by agreement of all who heard it, the making of his career. He spoke for an hour and thirty-four minutes, leaving out ‘about a quarter of the stuff’ he had prepared. He admitted that blunders and miscalculations had been made. But soon there would be 150,000 British troops in South Africa. The question now was one of faith and courage. Long live the British Empire! said George. All Hail Her Majesty! When he sat down, ‘I thought they would never stop cheering,’ he told his mother.
⁵

‘George has
covered
himself with glory … I have
never
heard anything better in my long experience of the House … is it not splendid!
all
the best and severest judges would agree my praise is not exaggerated,’ Arthur wrote to Mary, in tones more characteristic of his excitable protégé.
⁶
Margot acknowledged that George ‘defended a very attacked office in a very critical moment & did it quite xtraordinarily [sic] well’.
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‘The speech has given him Cabinet rank,’ Percy claimed exultantly.
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Arthur agreed. George’s rise seemed now ‘beyond the reach of fate’.
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The press hailed George as one of the ‘men who will lead Britain into the twentieth century’. His very person seemed proof that Britain could still breed heroes. ‘[F]rom man of fashion to soldier, from politician to statesman, from speaker to orator, from dilettante to critic, he has never yet shown himself contented with the beginning or with the outside,’ commented one article that Pamela liked enough to cut out and keep. The ‘completely thoroughbred’ George with his ‘aspiring and adventurous’ temperament, ‘vivacious and lofty expression’ and ‘richly sonorous voice’ reassured the public that Britain could reach greatness once again.
¹⁰

As if by magic, or rather thanks to Bobs, British fortunes began to turn, with the relief of Cecil Rhodes at Kimberley and victory at Paardeburg. On 28 February Ladysmith was finally relieved. The Wyndhams rejoiced at the news that Guy Wyndham was safe and well, but ‘[h]ow
could
they have survived …?’ asked an appalled Mananai,
¹¹
reading press reports that the troops had subsisted on a daily diet of just 1½ biscuits, 30 ounces of meal and a Bovril-like soup called Chevril. The relief forces immediately sought out Guy, eager to tell him how George’s speech had made them feel finally as though the country were behind them.
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The British public held their heads higher. Labby’s determinedly ‘pro-Boer’ stance in
Truth
made him, in the estimation of the
New York Times
, ‘the best-hated man in Britain’.
¹³
On St Patrick’s Day Mananai attended a concert at London’s Albert Hall where a new patriotic song to the tune of ‘The Wearing of the Green’ raised the roof with uninterrupted cheering for over ten minutes.
¹⁴

Mananai followed each day’s triumphs and reverses in the press with near-obsessive avidity. Her anxiety for the nation provided an outlet for, and distraction from, her personal grief. Pamela had sent her a copy of her latest work, a religious, mystical compilation of poetry and prose entitled
The Book of Peace
. ‘It is a good book, full and sharp, with the sweet-bitterness of Birth and Death,’ George told Pamela after first ‘incontinently’ reading the work: ‘You have washed the Gates of life … from the insolent and vapid scribblings with which they have been defaced.’
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In the first weeks after the baby’s death the book barely left Mananai’s side. Once she had convalesced she sought out those neighbours who had been bereaved in the war, and devoted herself to charity work, volunteering at the Soldiers and Sailors Yeomanry Hospital, and collecting clothes for the troops abroad.
¹⁶
Even the most minor of reverses could cast her into a deep gloom. ‘I sometimes despair of the end,’ she told her mother. Mananai herself would never make the link, but the analogy with her own grief is clear to see.
¹⁷

That grief is plainly evident in Sargent’s portrait. Sittings began again in the spring of 1900. Of all the sisters, Sargent had been most keen to work on Mananai. Pamela had to beg her parents to exert all their influence on Charlie to make him allow Mananai to return for more sittings. The Wyndhams prevailed, and Charlie and Mananai made their way to London for a week of sittings at Sargent’s studio (as Madeline Wyndham pointed out, much warmer than Belgrave Square at that time of year). The air of patient sadness that Mananai gives off is palpable and at odds with the frippery of her white gown as she gazes off into the distance, apparently lost in thought.

Detained at Clouds by a host of responsibilities, Madeline Wyndham was unable to make more than one brief visit to Babraham around Easter time. Instead she deluged her daughter with gifts. During that spring hardly a week went by without some kind of package arriving at Babraham, whether it was a toy kitchen and modelling clay for the little girls, hundreds of flower bulbs for the garden, or Battersea enamel boxes of the kind that Mananai collected (Madeline Wyndham had begun to practise enamelling under Alexander Fisher. With her own stove set up at Clouds, she was rapidly becoming a proficient amateur. However, on this occasion she was so keen to send Mananai a present that in her haste she melted it). In May an ‘overwhelmed’ Mananai opened a parcel containing a belt – ‘so “out of the way” … & will give such “cachet” when I wear it’ – and a spangled black net dress – ‘
so
beautiful & yet
so
French & smart (such a horrid word but the only one to express one’s meaning)’. That same day came the ‘blessed’ news that ‘Mafeking is well!’
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At the news of Mafeking’s relief after a 217-day siege, punctuated by plucky ‘Kaffirgrams’ of Colonel Baden-Powell (‘All well. Four Hours bombardment. One dog killed’ was a typical example),
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flag-waving hordes poured on to Britain’s streets in such jubilation that ‘mafficking’ was added to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, to denote indulgence in extravagant demonstrations of exultation.
²⁰
A fortnight or so later Bobs’s troops entered Pretoria. In London, Sargent’s portrait of the sisters was the hit of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. ‘[T]he greatest picture which has appeared for many years on the walls of the Royal Academy,’ said
The Times
. The Prince of Wales dubbed the sisters ‘The Three Graces’. Pamela received particular attention for her spectacular looks.
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The portrait hung in the billiard room at Clouds as intended (a room now painted dark blue to complement the portrait)
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but was frequently sent off for public viewing. ‘What it has seen and heard if it could only speak!’ said Madeline Wyndham in 1908 as the picture returned from the Franco-British Exhibition and the Exhibition of Fair Women at London’s New Gallery; the Watts of Madeline also appeared at the latter.
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That the subjects of the portrait were George Wyndham’s sisters enhanced their celebrity. Six months after his Commons speech, George remained the hero of the hour. In August, Mary was delighted to find that every English paper she read in Kissingen spoke of George in glowing terms, and everyone she met was eager to congratulate her on her brilliant sibling. ‘He is no longer Lady E’s brother but I am Wyndham’s sister that’s as it
should be
,’ she told Hugo proudly.
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On 1 September the British public’s delight knew no bounds when their troops annexed the Transvaal. ‘The country is war-mad … blatantly and truculently out of their minds,’ George told Madeline Wyndham. He knew there would be a backlash eventually, ‘but while it lasts I make hay’.
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On receipt of Mary’s proud missive about George, Hugo must have felt a little sour. In recent months his own fortunes had followed rather too closely those of the British in South Africa, without the corresponding upturn. Since Hermione’s death and his fortieth birthday in 1897 his outlook had become ever gloomier. ‘Time is advancing and we two with it,’ he told Mary dolefully on her thirty-eighth birthday in 1900. ‘Its rot to talk about
old age
,’ replied Mary staunchly, but her assurances that Hugo had never been so youthful ‘in being & in seeming’ fell on deaf ears.
¹
The fundamental problem, as Mary said, was that ‘it’s dreadful for you having nothing to do’.
²