Those Wild Wyndhams (33 page)

Hugo, whom Balfour once summed up as ‘too self-indulgent to succeed and too clever to be content with failure’,
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was a casualty of politics’ modernization. He was bright but lazy, reluctant to attend the Commons as often as he ought. In 1892 Balfour described Hugo’s speech on the subject of payment to MPs as ‘one of the most brilliantly amusing speeches I have ever heard in the House’, but Hugo’s time as a Member of Parliament was mostly notable for his annual, impassioned speech recommending that the House should rise before Derby Day.
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Politics was still predominantly the preserve of the elite, but whereas a generation or two before Hugo might have held a Commons seat without much effort until he was raised to the Lords, now there was more competition. Seats which once had been in aristocrats’ gift were now determined by the electorate, and the choice of candidates who stood for them now subject to the deliberations of the Conservative Union. Against the odds, Hugo had taken Ipswich in 1885, but he was ‘chucked!’, in Mary’s phrase, in 1895.
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At the time, Blunt thought this a misfortune for Mary as Hugo ‘will have nothing to do being shut out of public affairs’.
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Instead, he hung about with brittle, hard-living members of the Marlborough House Set, habitués of the popular press’s ‘best-dressed’ lists, who frittered away time and money on the Continent yachting, gaming at Le Touquet, and watching bull-fighting in Spain. Mary berated him for ‘The “Common” folk you herd with!!!’ and the ‘bad ways & foolish tricks’ they encouraged. ‘I wish you were a fox hunter & would live 6 months in one place or that you had a passion for agriculture!’ she said, but she knew that Hugo was ‘not really keen about things & never [had] been’.
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In 1900, it was briefly mooted that Hugo might stand as Unionist candidate for Bristol in the general election to be held that autumn. All summer long, Mary bombarded him with excited letters making plans for the campaign trail, ‘quite ready to be a thorn in yr side & to help in every way I can’.
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The candidacy went to Sir Walter Long, a Unionist who had made himself a name on the Local Government Board and the Board of Agriculture. Mary was crushed, particularly since she only found out this news from Arthur: ‘you must have known it was most cruel not to tell me, you said you had been asked – I wired to you … I talk to you about it in every letter & you say nothing, so I quite believed it,’ she wrote to Hugo in a frenzy from Paris. ‘I suppose he [Arthur] couldn’t squash Long,’ she added, unintentionally rubbing salt in the wound
.
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The decision was a further emasculation at Balfour’s hands. In 1899, Hugo had gambled his way to his most spectacular loss on the stock market yet: around £80,000, roughly £7.4 million today.
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‘At last the crash … has come and Hugo is undone!’ Mary told Arthur from the Palace Hotel in St Moritz, where she had met Hugo, post-cure, and been told the news.
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Furious and anguished, Lord Wemyss bailed Hugo out, but made good on his oft-repeated threat to tie up Hugo’s inheritance. He set up a trust of £100,000 for the Elchos during their lifetime. Arthur was one of the trustees.
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It is hard not to see a punitive element therein.

Arthur was often as baffled by Mary and Hugo’s push-me-pull-you relationship as everyone else, and in particular, the way she tolerated his continuing, flagrant infidelity. ‘I cannot conceive why you permitted yourself to be saddled with her,’ Arthur wrote, on hearing that Hugo had dumped his latest paramour, the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, on Mary at Stanway for three weeks in 1896, while ‘Mrs. P.C.’ recovered from a theatrical flop and conducted an affair with Hugo under Mary’s nose: ‘Had you been in robust health, with no worries … of your own, I should still have thought that England might have been searched through before a less suitable recipient of three weeks’ hospitality could have been found.’
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An answer is found in a letter from Mary to Percy in 1899. Percy had written lamenting that Mary would not be able to enliven a sticky dinner with her presence. Delighted, Mary replied, claiming to have inherited from Percy her consuming interest in people from all walks of life: ‘If I thought about it at all I should probably find that I prided myself on being a sort of Nasesmith [sic] Hammer! Able to crack iron hazelnuts to cut thick or thin – and to sing (or talk) both high & low!’
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James Nasmyth’s steam hammer, one of the Industrial Revolution’s greatest inventions, could vary the force of its blow. In a famous demonstration the hammer was used to break an egg in a wineglass while the glass remained intact. Hugo, difficult, childish, stubbornly impervious to improvement, was the iron hazelnut Mary could not crack. He gambled;
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he rowed with tenants on the Stanway estate so that she and Smith, Stanway’s agent, had to step in; as a ‘landlord and financier’ and a ‘husband’ Hugo was hopeless. ‘I wish Hugo would do himself justice,’ she told Arthur. ‘I wonder if it’s my fault and if I could manage him differently and better. He makes one always hope and yet he so often disappoints hope, one can neither count on him nor give him up!’
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As Mary made her way to Gosford that autumn, flustered and despondent at the prospect of a perpetually aimless Hugo, her sisters were preparing for their own stint on the campaign trail. Eddy Tennant and Charlie Adeane had been approved as the Liberal candidates for Peebles and Huntingdonshire respectively. Margot had her doubts about both men’s conviction. The Boer War had provoked yet another rift in the fragmented Liberals between anti-war Radicals and pro-war Imperialists. Over a period of months Margot delivered Eddy several lengthy lectures on corporate political loyalty: ‘What no man who thinks for himself like you & Adeane can grasp (tho I know you do) [is that] they don’t come off these big things H Rule Disestablishment etc … they
don’t
happen … Compromise & stick to yr regiment even if they are going to do a stupid thing.’
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Margot was still more mistrustful of Pamela. As she revealed to Eddy tidbits of the party leadership struggles between Asquith, Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Lewis ‘Loulou’ Harcourt she hoped, pointedly, that ‘Pamela will keep our party dirty linen to herself.’
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Pamela was not interested enough to be a double agent. Mary was astonished to find that she was even ‘
really
canvassing’. ‘I am
indeed
,’ Pamela triumphantly replied from the rented Peebles villa from which the Tennants were conducting their campaign, although ‘I don’t know enough about politics to “canvass” in the ordinary sense of the word … I just tell them how keen I am my husband should win – how long we’ve been here & how many children I have!’
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Pamela did not quite express Lord Salisbury’s visceral loathing for the ‘nauseous mire of a general election’, requiring ‘weeks of screwed-up smiles and … mock geniality … the chuckling reply … to the coarse joke … the wholesale deglutition of hypocritical pledges’,
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but she intensely disliked the campaigning process: ‘long drives, of 18 miles home in pelting rain & wind after a whole days visiting & canvassing & putting up at little evil smelling whisky-drenched Inns and attending hot long meetings!’ Unruffled by public singing, she hated public speaking. She gave a talk to the 150 members of the Women’s Liberal Association of Innerleithen, learnt by heart in advance, with ‘a dreadful stomachache from nervous excitement & terror’.
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Her sisters-in-law were horrified by what they considered an insufficiently committed approach, particularly since the Bart was bankrolling Eddy’s candidacy. When the Tennants visited Glen halfway through the campaign, Charty cornered Pamela at breakfast for a ‘tremendous talking to’. Politics were ‘the
life
of the country, the history that is being formed around one’, she said hectoringly over the marmalade, imploring Pamela to exercise ‘a mind that merited being
bent
upon wider issues’, and praising ‘powers of
observation
’ that warranted being turned to ‘
larger
matters’. As always, Pamela gave Charty short shrift. ‘It was really all very good advice but I am perfectly certain [if] I read all Joe [Chamberlain]’s speeches I shouldn’t be much the wiser for it! [and] if in going into cottages, I tried to speak about what I don’t understand, I should make lamentable mistakes & failures.’
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Canvassing was more than ever a requirement of an expanded franchise. From the turn of the century there was a marked expectation that women would take a more involved political role.
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Charty and Pamela both accepted that, although Pamela dragged her heels. For Kate Courtney, Liberal Unionist sister of the Fabian Beatrice Webb, political involvement led her to suffragism: ‘I cannot understand the state of mind of a man who encourages women to canvass electors … organize meetings, speak at them, and even coax and bother electors to go to the poll by every art they possess, but draws the line at the simple act of voting themselves. It is nothing but stupendous egotism,’ she said in 1913.
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None of the Wyndham sisters expressed any particular position on female suffrage. In this they resembled most women of their class, feeling that the social and political influence they wielded was far in excess of that granted by a vote, and with corporate loyalty to class outweighing that to gender.
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The person in the family who felt most strongly was Eddy, a strident opponent, who later became President of the Scottish Anti-Suffrage League.
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(It is cheap but irresistible to suggest that Eddy had suffered enough from strong women in his life.)

Mananai was the only one of the three sisters truly to enjoy campaigning. The Adeanes were funding Charlie’s campaign themselves, and they had thrown themselves into the contest with vigour. They had set up camp in a ‘snug pretty little house’ lent to them by Lord Sandwich on his Hinchingbrooke Park estate and were planning, said Mananai, ‘to work as hard as we can & be on the spot for all the meetings’.
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Mananai thrived on the excitement. Each day she met up with a band of local Liberal women: the wives of the local chemist; the Hinchingbrooke estate’s land agent; and the leading local non-conformist – and canvassed from 10.30 in the morning until 6 or 7 each night, ticking off lists provided to them of ‘doubtfuls’ and ‘Tories’, snatching quick lunches, once in the carriage and once, to Mananai’s rather doubtful delight, in a ‘pub’. On one day in ‘a poor sort of street in Huntingdon’ she visited seventy houses before lunch. Indefatigable in her charity work, she immediately saw an opportunity to do some good: ‘Some make me very sad … they are so ill & poor – as soon as the Election is over I shall be able perhaps to help them a little.’
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A year later Benjamin Rowntree’s landmark study of poverty in York shocked Britain into acknowledging the relentless urban destitution that meant for a family to survive on an unskilled labourer’s wages they:

must never spend a penny on railway fare or omnibus … never go into the country unless they walk … never purchase a halfpenny newspaper or spend a penny to buy a ticket for a popular concert … should a child fall ill, it must be attended by the Parish doctor; should it die, it must be buried by the Parish. Finally, the wage earner must never be absent from his work for a single day.
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A similar survey by Charles Booth in London rammed the point home.

Scientific evidence showing the parlous state of the nation fed into anxiety about Britain’s Boer War performance and gave heft to calls for social reform. Army recruiters had been appalled to find that the majority of volunteers were so malnourished that they did not reach the required minimum height of 5 foot 3 inches. ‘The building up of the nervous and muscular vitality of our race [is] the principal plank of any Imperial programme of reform,’ said the Fabian Sidney Webb, husband of Beatrice.
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In the decade that followed, imperial interests were used to justify ostensibly ‘socialistic’ reforms of New Liberalism such as the provision of child welfare measures and free school meals.

Imperial concerns had placed themselves firmly at the forefront of British political life, but Bobs’s victories still cast a glow over the ‘khaki election’, which returned 402 Unionists, 183 Liberals, 83 Irish Nationalists and two members of the Labour Representation Committee.
‘Things have touched the button now & I think we shall see very interesting Times in the next few years,’ Margot told Eddy
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– but Eddy, like Charlie, had been defeated. ‘Khaki was well worked by them … the tide is going too strong against us owing to that wretch Labby we are all branded as traitors and pro-Boers!’ mourned Mananai.
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At Glen, Pamela bit her tongue as Margot provided tips for the next campaign.
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George was returned at Dover with a huge majority. In November, he was appointed Ireland’s Chief Secretary. ‘I think it will be a very fine appointment … It will give George a great opportunity of xcercising [sic] his judgment & tho a very hard place I think his charm will attract them,’ said Margot.
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After a meteoric rise (although still without the Cabinet rank he yearned for) George had returned to his ancestral land. Katharine Tynan, an ardent nationalist, saw in him Ireland’s hopes of salvation. But George’s position was more ambiguous than that. For he appointed as his Under-Secretary Antony MacDonnell, the outstandingly able ‘Bengal Tiger’ who had made his name as an administrator in the Indian Civil Service and was widely rumoured to be a Home Ruler. George avowed to Balfour that the Irish Catholic MacDonnell was ‘non-partisan’. Yet he agreed to MacDonnell’s condition – set out in a letter from MacDonnell reminding George that he was a Liberal, Irish Catholic – that he would accept the office only if he could offer more than ‘mere secretarial criticism’ and be ‘given adequate opportunities of influencing the action and policy of the Irish Government’.
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