Those Wild Wyndhams (51 page)

On 22 September, Bim was among his company, sniping in a ‘sap’ – a short trench dug from the front line into no man’s land – when he was killed by a German sniper: ‘absolutely instantaneously’, said his commanding officer.
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He was buried in the Guillemont Road Cemetery, a few graves along from Raymond Asquith, two of 400,000 British casualties lost in the 140 days of the battle of the Somme.
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A total of 1.3 million men died on both sides in all. At the end of it, the British had advanced 6 miles.
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The death of ‘Lord Glenconner’s heir’, ‘the 55th heir to a peerage who has lost his life in the war’, headed
The Times
’s list of casualties the next day. The paper, noting that his death came just a week after that of his cousin Lieutenant Mark Tennant, reprinted lines from Bim’s final letter: ‘your love for me and my love for you have made my whole life one of the happiest there has ever been. This is a great day for me.’
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Two days later, at Pamela’s behest,
The Times
published Bim’s ‘Home Thoughts in Laventie’, a gentle, wistful poem in which a soldier buries his head in flowers found growing in the ruins of a blasted, shattered town. Inhaling their scent, he steps back on to the Downs: ‘Home, what a perfect place!’
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It has been forcibly demonstrated by statistics that the legend of ‘the flower of England’s aristocracy’ falling in the war was no mere myth. One in five of the British and Irish peers and their sons who fought in the war died, compared with one in eight for all members of the fighting services.
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There is no mystery to this: junior officers, leading their troops into battle, were the first in the line of fire; concepts of honour meant patrician males were among the first to join up or were already in the forces when war broke out, when casualties were proportionately at their worst. The Upper Ten Thousand’s exclusivity meant that such losses were almost as acutely felt as in the decimated communities of the ‘Pals’ Battalions’ – for when these specially constituted units that allowed the men of a locality to serve alongside each other were wiped out in battle, so too was the male population of entire towns. Out of the Coterie of some thirty or forty men and women in total, fourteen died.
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‘Oh why was I born for this time? Before one is thirty to know more dead than living people? Really, one hardly knows who is alive and who is dead,’ Cynthia wrote in her diary, expressing the sentiment that every woman of her acquaintance felt.
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The historian David Cannadine has said that ‘it is not necessary to join the clichéd cult of the Wyndhams, the Grenfells, and the Charterises, to recognize that they were uncommonly gifted and promising young men, whose greatness had been predicted before they died and was not just invented afterwards’.
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Enough Souls had demonstrated that predicted greatness could come to disappointing ends. Yet to an extent the mythologization of the ‘Golden Generation’ by their mothers has done them a disservice. This generation had wit and talent. Many had integrity. ‘[H]e had George’s cleverness plus – great scholarly learning & absolute freshness, I looked to him to save the world!’ said Mary of Yvo.
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Their true gold is rendered almost indiscernible under the thick layer of gilt. In 1916, Ettie Desborough’s Pages from a Family Journal, 1888–1915 was privately published (250 copies by Spottiswoode of Eton High Street at a total cost of £375). It was a scrapbook of reminiscence and letters, saccharine and utterly sanitized.
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‘I find Ettie’s book thrilling, it tells of our children’s (the children of the Souls!) Golden Age,’ Mary told Balfour.
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Yet Raymond Asquith, receiving a copy at the Front, was weary of the Souls’ cant, and criticized the way Ettie doctored the book to remove all trace of her sons’ undoubted insolence, arrogance and aggression. ‘Ettie is a snob in [a] harmless sense … She meant to give her sons the best mise-en-scène from a worldly point of view which could be had …’
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Eleven days later, Raymond was killed on the Somme and became mythologized himself as ‘this star of England’. The words, from
Henry V
, are inscribed on his tombstone.

Edward Wyndham Tennant
, Pamela’s memoir of Bim, was published in 1919. She first began sending chapters to her publisher, John Lane, in 1917. Writing her son’s life was ‘like bearing him over again, a moral parturition’, she said.
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She did not have to edit too much to provide the
mise-en-scène
she wished for Bim. ‘The Mad Soldier’ and ‘À Bas la Gloire’ were included – quite possibly Pamela was trying to show that Bim, in 1916, was already moving towards work worthy of the greatest war poetry, and would have achieved work similar to Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and that of Siegfried Sassoon had he lived. She maintained that ‘War’ was, for Bim, ‘Romance’, and that he had died in the best, most fitting way, too exalted for the life of an ordinary mortal.

Mary first began collating material for her own memoir in January 1917. Sitting on the floor, ‘amongst heaps of “dead leaves” fluttering papers of the past … has almost killed me with misery’, she told Balfour. ‘I know I ought to feel grateful for the many happy years, but … I see … life’s hopes and aspirations – and incidentally one’s own heart! – lie bleeding in the dust.’
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Rereading all these letters, Ego’s times from school to university, ‘the sweet short track of little Yvo’,
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Mary could see only ‘the long years of preparation leading up to the holocaust’.
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Lacking Pamela’s facility for writing for publication and Ettie’s facility with emotion, Mary laboured over
Family Record
for fifteen years, looking up to the Pyramid for inspiration from her boudoir at Stanway, struggling to avoid the ‘dragon’s teeth’ of cliché and hyperbole.
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She was terrified she might not do justice to her sons – worse still, might expose them inadvertently to criticism.
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It was written, so she told Ettie, ‘in heart’s blood…!’,
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and was published privately in 1932. Of the three memoirs, Mary’s is the most painful, truthful reading. Her sons ‘emerge luminous’, as she had hoped.
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Since the war’s start Mary had questioned the assumption of a glorious death. Yet, except to Arthur, it took courage to give voice to the heresy. When she first began working on the memoir she had asked Ettie to write a tribute to Yvo for inclusion. This was fairly common. Ettie did so willingly and ended by proclaiming Yvo’s death ‘the only end worthy of his beginning’. Revisiting these words in 1931 Mary baulked. ‘Lovely as every word of it is,’ she wrote, tiptoeing carefully towards her point, ‘… during the passage of years does not one slightly change not one[’]s point of view – but perhaps the manner of expressing it? … I only feel that … (altho’ we know that it was wholly glorious right and noble what they
did
) we do not quite think that any other way (their darling lives, lived out here) would have been
unworthy of their beginning
? Perhaps you’ll think me mad … but they
might
, as thank God, many did – they might have fought & lived?…’
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In December 1916, Asquith’s Coalition collapsed. Balfour replaced Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s ministry – although without a seat in the new Prime Minister’s streamlined War Cabinet. Grey, since July Viscount Grey of Fallodon, retreated gratefully to his Northumberland estate. ‘I read nothing remotely connected with the war except the newspapers,’ he told Eddy Tennant, expressing his relief at being able to share ‘general anxiety’ without feeling personal responsibility for the events that took place.
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Grey had worried daily about Bim’s welfare when at the Front, and was devastated by his death. On first hearing the ‘terrible news’, he sent Eddy two letters in as many hours: ‘I will come to you at a word whenever you want me …’
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In April 1917, a fire at Fallodon all but destroyed the house, and all Grey’s papers. It was ‘a melancholy business’ – although he was the first to admit that it was nothing to compare with that suffered by the Glenconners. There was no question of rebuilding until after the war. In the interim, Grey stayed with the Glenconners at Queen Anne’s Gate, and at Itchen Abbas.
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It is still debated how far Grey, a Foreign Secretary who spoke no French and never once visited Germany, could have avoided Britain’s entry into the war. Diana Bethell, Clare Tennant’s daughter who more or less lived at Wilsford in the post-war years, remembered as a small girl tugging at Grey’s sleeve asking, ‘Will there be another war? Will there be another war?’ ‘The subject always made him shake, and brought the same answer: “There will never ever be another war” he would repeat.’
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What is clear is that neither Pamela nor Eddy ever held Grey responsible for the war that caused their son’s death. Perhaps that was also because, to Pamela, Bim was not lost. As she explained in
The Earthen Vessel
, published by John Lane in 1921: ‘When the time came to need the comfort offered by Spiritualism, I turned to it … in just as common-sense and practical a manner as I would have gone about to book a passage or to send a cable to New Zealand, had it so chanced that my son had gone to that quarter of the globe.’
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The spiritualist craze that arose in the war years and continued throughout the 1920s was a bereaved society’s response to incomprehensible loss. In post-Reformation England, people began to believe in witchcraft when Puritan austerity stripped them of Catholicism’s amuletic defences against evil. Now, a society shorn of its husbands, brothers and sons reached out for mediums, book tests and séances as solace in its pain. In 1915, Cincie had predicted that the great numbers of casualties would force a change in the way society treated its dead. ‘Now they are so many one
must
talk of them naturally and humanly, not banish them by only alluding to them as if it were almost indelicate.’
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Instead, society began talking to them.

The Earthen Vessel
, its subtitle
A Volume Dealing with Spirit-Communication Received in the Form of Book-Tests
, records the results of Pamela’s book tests carried out between 1917 and 1920 with Mrs Leonard, a medium on a salaried position with the Society for Psychical Research who communicated through her spirit guide, Feda.
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From January 1918, the sittings were paid for by the SPR, who sent a professional notetaker to attend the sittings ‘in the interests of investigation!’, said Pamela, thrilled to have the accuracy of ‘dear Bim’s book tests & messages’ recognized in this way, happier than at any point since Bim had died. As a child, ‘Step fearless into the dark’ had been one of Bim’s favourite expressions. Now Pamela found the phrase running round her head. ‘It seems to match the endeavour somehow,’ she said.
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A book test involved a medium, acting on spirit information, directing the sitter to a line of a page of a book in a room in a house. The sittings were conducted mostly at Clouds, Wilsford and Queen Anne’s Gate, attended by Pamela and Eddy, their sons, bereaved cousins and close friends. Chief among those friends was Oliver Lodge, whose longstanding interest in spiritualism had become obsessive since the death of his own son, Raymond, in the war in 1915. Lodge and his wife Mary, devotees of Mrs Leonard, lived in close proximity to the Glenconners. They rented from Eddy Normanton House, a property just across the way from Wilsford, and Lodge wrote the preface to
The Earthen Vessel
.
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Pamela recounts an intensely loaded atmosphere: the receipt of the message from Feda, the hunt for meaning, the triumph when a book corresponding to the description was found, the relief and joy when the extract produced a message. Later Stephen recalled Pamela’s face when she received a book test that worked: ‘so wonderful, so uplifted & happy’.
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Pamela claimed always to have held spiritualist beliefs. But there is little evidence of her ever employing them until she was confronted with death. Her early letters dwelt long on Christ, those in her middle years on her children. Only when Hester died did Pamela seize upon Lady Betty Balfour’s suggestion that Hester’s touching ‘Earth through me’ might have been ‘necessary to her development in another life’, as giving her hope.
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After Bim’s death, spiritualism became an obsession for her: scarcely a letter goes by without Pamela recommending the latest spiritualist tract or recounting a message received.

As the number of mediums and sittings proliferated (by 1918, Mrs Leonard had a three-month waiting list for sittings),
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the War Office became concerned, fearing that officers, caught off-guard, were leaking confidential material in sittings. The
Daily Mail
’s Harold Ashton began a campaign to expose fraudulent mystics. Pamela appeared as a witness for the defence in one of the first trials, that of the American Mrs Brockway charged with pretending to tell fortunes in December 1916. It was a sensation, ending in a furore when the defence counsel, Ernest Wild KC, came to verbal blows with the sceptical magistrate and stormed out of court.
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At Pamela’s behest Eddy exerted his influence to have Mrs Brockway’s deportation order sending her back to the United States commuted to one to Paris, a safer journey than across the submarine-infested Atlantic.
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