Asquith (46 page)

At the small hotel soiree after dinner last night (Puffin
¹
) “ obliged ” with a short discourse on Musical Composers, in which he passed in review Bach, Mozart, Scarlatti, Beethoven, Wagner, Grieg and some others, much to the delight and amazement of some 20 or 30 matrons and spinsters with a sprinkling of clergy and old gentlemen—all subjects of King George, as we acknowledged by a few bars of the National Anthem at the close of the proceedings.

^{1
Then aged ten.}

After his return from Antibes Asquith settled down to a regular London regime for the remainder of the winter and the early spring of 1914. He had another week-end at Alderley at the end of January. In February he went to dine and sleep at Windsor. In March he spent a Saturday and Sunday at Easton Grey. And in April he paid a special two-day visit to his constituency.
²
For the rest he was at Downing Street, apart from short but fairly regular week-ends at the Wharf. Easter that year was in the middle of April, and he was then able to go to Sutton Courtney from Thursday to Tuesday.

²
_{See pp. 314-15,
infra.}

From Easter until Whitsun the pattern continued as before. Only two week-ends were spent away from the Wharf, one in Sussex as the guest of Lord De La Warr, and the other with the King at Aldershot, in a Royal Pavilion which had been specially erected for a grand military review. For Whitsun Asquith went to Penrhos, Lord Sheffield’s house in Anglesey, and remained there until the following Saturday, when he motored by way of Shrewsbury and Stratford
³
to Nuneham Park, near Oxford, and stayed there, with “ Lulu ” Harcourt and a large party, until the Monday morning.

³
_{At Stratford he recorded: “ I got out of the motor and revisited the church with the Shakespeare bust and other relics. A typical Dickens verger came up and said “ Have I the honour of addressing our distinguished Prime Minister?” I tried to shake him off with a gruff and uninviting affirmative, but he at once produced an autograph book....”}

Thereafter there were seven remaining week-ends before the crisis one of August 2nd-3rd. Asquith spent five of them at the Wharf, one in London, and one on board the royal yacht, off Portsmouth, again with the King, but this time for a naval review. The last pre-war
week-end at the Wharf was typical enough, except for its rather abrupt end.

“ I motored with Oc to Skindles where we met the McKennae,” Asquith wrote of the Saturday, “and proceeded with them to Huntercombe to engage in a family foursome. I am glad to say that we beat them by 2 & 1: Pamela has certainly improved wonderfully, and did 2 or 3 quite excellent drives.

“ There is no guest here so far except Montagu and Bongie (Bonham Carter) who arrived just in time for dinner—the former after playing tennis with Maxine Elliott, the latter after driving Violet to the Curries’ in Wiltshire. The Somersets and Ottoline (Morrell) arrive some time today—just for the night. Elizabeth has gone to Holland for a week to stay with the Keppels at their place near The Hague. Between now & Tues. I have to think out something to say about the Amending Bill. ...”

On the following day Asquith reported: “ We had a fine Sunday and I played golf with Lady Kitty
¹
(who is pretty good) in the afternoon.” The Serbian crisis overhung the week-end, and Asquith already regarded it as “ the most dangerous situation of the last 40 years.” But when he hurriedly left the bridge table at eleven on the Sunday night and motored back to London with Bonham Carter, it was Ireland and not the Balkans which was the cause of his sudden decision; there had been shooting that afternoon at Howth. Asquith was back in Downing Street by 1.0 a.m. on the morning of July 27th. His peacetime pattern of life was effectively over. The following week-end there could be no question of leaving London.

¹
_Somerset.

This account of Asquith’s movements during the eighteen months or so before August, 1914, can only give the barest impression of the content of his life. What was within the framework? His political duties apart, for they belong to other chapters, what occupied his time, whether in London, or at the Wharf, or as a guest in someone else’s house? A large part of the answer is reading: the rapid, rather unplanned assimilation of the contents of a highly heterogeneous collection of books. He read for pleasure, particularly novels, but he also read in order to acquire information. He liked “ useless knowledge,” and he was a great setter of literary conundrums. At first, indeed, these figured prominently in his letters to Miss Stanley:

Witty as Horatius Flaccus
,

Short
,
but not as fat
,
as Bacchus
,

Hs a
Jacobin as Gracchus
,

Riding on a little jackass
,

he wrote on April 20th, 1912. “ Who of whom ? ”

Perhaps Miss Stanley was not as good at solving them as he was at setting them, for they soon dropped out. But he retained a strong taste for conversation which was erudite without being ideological. “ There was a nice old Papist don from Oxford staying in the house,” he wrote after an Easton Grey week-end in the spring of 1914, “and I had good talks with him about the texts of Cicero and the Western mss. of the Gospels, and such like succulent topics.” His literary conversation quite often took a simple competitive form. One of the attractions for him of men’s dining clubs was that they provided partners (or victims) for the indulgence of this taste. “ I was near Gosse,” he wrote after a Grillion’s evening much later in his life, “ and had what I thought were two quite good scores off him. He didn’t know the lines about the four Georges (Landor’s) or Moore’s about Lord Castlereagh.”
^a
And after another evening at the same club: “We had an unusually good company at Grillion’s where I went to dinner last night—Baldwin, Archbishop of York, Austen Chamberlain, Fisher, Gosse, etc.—and had quite an excellent talk about books. I challenged them to produce a better twenty years of literary output in England than 1740 to 1760 in the despised eighteenth century.
^b

Asquith’s pattern of reading, which helped to preserve his skill at these contests, was prompted by an eclectic and continuing intellectual curiosity. During a Lympne visit at the beginning of 1914 he “ foraged ” in the library and read Gosse’s
Ibsen
, Fabre on spiders, and Dean Stanley’s
Annals of Westminster Abbey.
A few weeks later he recorded: “ I have been trying for some strange reason to read at nights a History of the Wars of the Roses...” On a Tuesday in March he spent “ a quiet solitary afternoon reading a book by a Jew called Hirsch about the fortunes of his race in the Middle Ages.” In July, a month which possessed not only the hidden quality of being the edge of the European precipice but also the overt one of continuing Irish crisis, he undertook some sustained philosophical reading including T. H. Green’s
Prolegomena to Ethics
and two volumes of “ Chamberlain’s (the German) Kant, translated by old Redesdale who gave it
to me the other day.” He also read
Our Mutual Friend
as one of a number of Dickens novels which he had re-discovered that summer.

Occasionally Asquith’s general reading occupied a whole evening after a quiet dinner in Downing Street, but more often it was fitted into an hour in the early evening, or a train journey or a late session in his bedroom. Whatever the time, he always read for at least an hour before going to bed, His social life was active, although not quite so
mondain
as Margot’s reputation might lead one to suppose. Her great field was the luncheon party. Several days a week in London and most Sundays at the Wharf she would assemble a heterogeneous group for this meal. Particularly in London, Asquith took little part in the selection of guests. He often did not know who they were to be until he emerged from the Cabinet room to greet them. He regarded these parties as very much Margot’s affair, but he usually participated, presiding over the table with a detached benignity which sometimes concealed boredom, but more often interest and amusement.

“We had the usual menagerie at lunch...” was his comment on March nth, 1914. “ We had a huge party ... today,” he wrote on April 22nd, “ including Anne Islington,
¹
Ottoline,
²
Crewe, John Burns & c—as incongruous a lot as even we have ever got together, since Pierpont Morgan sat between Frau
³
and Elizth.” Strangely, perhaps, he did not come to take the incongruity for granted. “We had a curious lunch party even for us,” he wrote on July 22nd, “ —Cambon, Comte d’Haussonville, Chaliapine, Diana Manners, Lady Paget, Raymond, Mrs. Lyall, Count Kessler—were a few of the figures that I found seated at the table. I was rather pre-occupied and did not get much out of this rarely mixed lot.” But July 22nd was a peculiarly worrying Irish day. Asquith’s pre-occupation was not normally such that he could not give his mind to other things.

¹
_{Wife of Lord Islington, formerly Sir John Dickson Poynder, Governor of New Zealand, 1910-12.}

²
_{Lady Ottoline Morrell.}

³
_{The German governess.}

Nor did he regard a luncheon party as something which worked against the transaction of the day’s business. When Margot was away he often went to some trouble to find guests of his own— although the result was usually a smaller and less variegated collection than she would have been likely to provide. “ Are you coming to lunch
tomorrow? ” he wrote to Miss Stanley on January 16th, 1913. “ You
must
. We have at any rate 3 poets—Yeats, De la Mare, and “ AE ” (Russell), and possibly another. Also the great impresario—E. M.
¹
— & Birrell. It might be amusing.” And on another occasion: “ My luncheon party (improvised) was very
chic:
The Assyrian
²
(fresh from Seville) and my two fav. nieces Dinah and Kathleen.”
³

¹
_{Edward Marsh.}

²
_{Edwin Montagu.}

³
_{Daughters of Margot’s brother Frank Tennant.}

There were also occasional Downing Street dinner parties, but these were less frequent than the luncheon ones. Sometimes they were fairly large formal gatherings. “ The guests have slowly disappeared from a regular Downing St. dinner,” he wrote on December 8th, 1913. “ No Masefields, but Sir E. Cassel, Mrs. Keppel, Murrays, Harcourts, Aubrey Herbert,
See. See.
Thank God, they are all now in their taxis, and I am alone.” But more often they were small gatherings of close friends and relations, assembled at short notice and without much regard to even numbers or a balance of the sexes. Dinners of this sort were quite frequently the prelude to some other activity—a play (he would see perhaps six or eight a year) or an evening party at some other house.

Official dinners were mercifully rare in Asquith’s life, and when one arose he usually greeted it with mild complaint, and escaped as soon as he could. “ The Speaker’s dinner was like such things generally are: neither better nor worse,” he wrote on February 21st, 1914. “ I sat between the host and Illingworth, and after dinner talked shop with Birrell and the Impeccable.
¹
There was a
levée
later, but we got away by 10.30, and I went on with a party of gay and giddy youths
²
to the Silken Tent
³
, where we played 2 or 3 rubbers of Bridge.” A month later he wrote: “ I have got to dine at 7 with the Chambers of Commerce: a foolish bit of good nature wh. has come home to roost.” And a fortnight after that: “ I am in for a rather dreary function tonight—a dinner here at the House of Scotch members given by McK. Wood.”
⁴

¹
_{Asquith’s name for Sir John Simon, then Attorney-General.}

²
_{In fact they were all members of the Government.}

³
_{Asquith’s name for Edwin Montagu’s house in Queen Anne’s Gate.}

⁴
_{The Secretary of State for Scotland.}

Apart from occasional special engagements like this last Asquith
dined only rarely at the House of Commons. On one occasion indeed he expressed a forlorn surprise at finding himself there. “ I find I have nowhere else to go. . . .” he wrote. His speeches were mostly delivered at the beginning rather than the end of debates, and his votes (about which he was not in any event over-meticulous) could easily be delivered after dinner at Downing Street or some almost equally convenient address. In general he dined out, during the session, about five times a fortnight. One of these engagements would probably be at a dining club, and one of the others might be a men’s dinner with some other minister or ministers; Grey, who did no mixed entertaining after his wife’s death, quite often secured Asquith to dine with some visiting foreign dignitary. But the others would be ordinary social dinners. For the most part, however, they would be “ scratch ” gatherings of close friends rather than elaborately organised parties with a wide selection of guests. When Asquith was present on such a “ grand ” occasion, he usually commented with a mixture of surprise and mild distaste: