Mad World (15 page)

They had arrived in Florence by train. Having exhausted the sights of the city, Beauchamp hired an enormous motor car for the drive south to Assisi and Rome. By this time they were all beginning to be fatigued by their exertions with Ruskin and Baedeker in hand. After ten days’ recuperation on the island of Capri, they left for England.

Byron thought Lord Beauchamp a man of exquisite and unusual taste, despite his being a stickler for punctuality with a mania for timetables. Beauchamp, for his part, wrote to Robert to thank him for being a delightful travelling companion, and for setting such a good example to Hugh: ‘It is … so much more delightful … to take an interest in everything – religious functions and daily customs. Everything that is different from England. Too many people bury their noses in a detective novel as they go thro’ beautiful scenery and prefer internationalism in cookery to the native delicacies.’ No doubt he was thinking of his son with his nose in the
Daily Sketch
and his unadventurous attitude to foreign food. Byron told his mother (whom he always addressed as ‘Mibble’) that he had been transformed by Beauchamp from an idiot into a person.

Lord Beauchamp took a great interest in his sons’ friends, dropping into Oxford to see them and taking them out to dine. It was on one such occasion that he met the scruffy Terence Greenidge and, horrified by the young man, temporarily removed Elmley from the university. Lady Beauchamp did not visit, but she never forgot to send presents for the young men. Once she sent Byron a delicate box covered in shells.

Byron was so besotted by the family in these early days that he began writing a love story based on an incident with Elmley, when a young lady turned her head and said ‘
Are
you a Viscount?’ He was more than a little starstruck, impressed that Lord Beauchamp appeared in newsreels around
the country. He reported his sightings to his doting Mibble: ‘Hugh and I spend our days visiting cinemas in search of Lord Beauchamp meeting foreign royalties on Dover pier.’ Years later, Dover pier would have very different associations for ‘Boom’.

In May 1924, Lord Beauchamp visited Oxford, full of plans for Elmley’s coming-of-age party. Byron noted that the handsome earl had ‘grown fatter’ and spent a couple of hours with the boys. Byron was invited to take luncheon with them in the Magdalen College guest room. Pride of place was given to ‘a bottle of Tokay, that the steward had brought from the cellars of the late Emperor Karl of Austria’. Byron, still impressed with Lygon largesse, was mesmerised: ‘It has the most wonderful taste – so extraordinary as to be like seeing a new primary colour.’

His birthday present for Elmley was a gigantic scrapbook ‘bound in white suede with gold ciphers, which I spent
hours
designing’. Byron excitedly told Mibble all about the plans for the party at Madresfield. The celebrations were to begin on 5 August with the annual agricultural show in the grounds. There would be a house party of thirty. Boom had timetabled the weekend in such a way that it would be necessary for Elmley to make seven speeches.

No one loved throwing a party more than Lord Beauchamp, whether it was a ball for the servants or a spectacular birthday celebration for the children. Madresfield parties were famous for their extravagance and style. Back in the Edwardian years a visiting lord had described a weekend party for forty guests: ‘Everything was done in great style: minstrels in the gallery at dinner, numbers of footmen in powder and breeches and a groom of the chambers worthy of Disraeli’s novels.’

For Elmley’s twenty-first, some guests had to be accommodated in tents in the grounds. The guest list survives. It assigns the bedrooms and gives details of meal times, post times, and, needless to say, daily prayers in the family chapel.

William Ranken, the society artist who had been commissioned to immortalise the occasion with a magnificent family portrait, was given Bachelor Room Number One (he was indeed a confirmed bachelor). There were four other Bachelor Rooms and a host of other berths for visiting worthies – the Blue Bedroom, the Japanese Bedroom, the Ebony Bedroom, the Stanhope Bedroom, the Pyndar Bedroom and so on. On the principle that what was good enough for the least among their guests
was good enough for the hosts, Boom, Elmley and Hugh gave up their own rooms and decamped to the tents in the grounds. Young and undistinguished guests such as Byron were under canvas, but they had the benefit of a mess tent.

For Byron, the celebration was the embodiment of ‘a phase of civilisation either forgotten or derided’. Lord Beauchamp was always in control, only losing his cool at one point: ‘he reached such a pitch of exasperation that he took to ordering the girls about as if they were servants’. Byron thought that the organisation was marvellous. No detail was spared, down to the typewritten slips indicating who was to take whom in to dinner.

For the servants’ ball, Lord Beauchamp wore the insignia of the Order of the Garter and ‘the frequenters of such functions who were there say there never has been a party on such a scale before’. A delegation consisting of the Mayor and the entire Corporation of the City of Worcester arrived in full civic regalia in order to present an address to Elmley. The family, looking rather glum, was photographed in their company in the great hall. Reporters and photographers from the
Daily Sketch
and the
Tatler
attended, though Byron had fun running away from them. He asked his mother to keep copies of the news articles. To his astonishment, ‘Elmley remained quite oblivious of everything.’

There was also a part of Byron which recoiled against the extravagance and tedium of country-house living: ‘Really Madresfield was tiring. What a horrible existence it must be flitting from one house party to another, making meaningless conversation to vapid girls, who for all you know expect to be made love to, wandering aimlessly about, worried to death lest you have not got an invitation to the next.’ The homosexual Robert felt uncomfortable around the young female guests.

He refused his next invitation to a Madresfield party in January: ‘if it’s going to be anything like the last I don’t think I shall face it. I cannot stand the smart guards officer with his loud voice and
savoir-faire
.’ Once one has turned down an invitation to a place such as Madresfield, one is not asked back. Robert did not attend Hugh’s coming-of-age party, even though he continued to idolise Beauchamp and to be good friends with the brothers. Lord Elmley helped him with his journalism by sending his credentials to Barbara Cartland, who passed his name on to Lord Beaverbrook. Barbara Cartland was in love with Elmley and desperate to
marry him. Elmley did not reciprocate the affection, though he did take Miss Cartland’s virginity.

It was clear to all the Eton and Oxford friends of the Lygon boys that their father’s devotion to his children was extraordinary. And they repaid him amply with warmth and loyalty.

It is not hard to understand why Lord Beauchamp cast such a spell over Hugh’s friends, first Robert Byron and then Evelyn Waugh. William Lygon was the perfect aristocrat, not only tall, dark and handsome, but also intelligent, cultured and very artistic. He was an energetic and highly successful public servant, driven by a sense of noblesse oblige.

His father, Frederick, the sixth earl, was pious and severe. Frederick was a second son who inherited the title after the death of his brother, Henry. The latter was a delicate and sensitive child who grew up to become a soldier and a passionate horseman. A family history records, in a tactful phrase, that Henry ‘never seems to have formed any long-term attachment’. He spent long periods abroad with a ‘friend’, Gerard Noël, and their two valets. Algiers and Egypt were favoured destinations, partly in the pursuit of better health but perhaps also because of the opportunities they offered for short-term attachments. He died a bachelor, brought low by consumption in his mid-thirties.

Frederick, by contrast, was a scholar, bibliophile and music lover who was deeply interested in religion. He became closely involved with the Oxford Movement and there was real concern that he would cross over to Rome. He made a vow of celibacy in the hope that within his lifetime there might evolve a united church in which Canterbury would be in communion with Rome and that he might then become a priest. He converted two rooms at Madresfield into a private family chapel, as if in readiness for the day. But once he became earl, with the need to beget an heir, he extricated himself from his vow and married the beautiful and talented Lady Mary Stanhope.

On becoming the Earl Beauchamp in 1866, Frederick threw himself into the life of the house and the county of Worcestershire (his Catholic sympathies meant that he was viewed with suspicion in royal and political circles, so he confined himself to the shires). He rebuilt large parts of Madresfield in the Gothic style. He beautified the gardens. And he began the tradition of an agricultural show for his tenants (in
Brideshead Revisited
Charles and Sebastian watch just such a show whilst sunbathing on the roof of the house).

Frederick and Mary’s first child was a daughter, named after her mother. She was the one who became a very close friend of Edward Elgar. In 1872, when little Mary was three, a brother, William, was born to great jubilation. Madresfield had an heir. Church bells were rung in celebration all across the three counties of Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. When William was only five his father took him to the House of Lords and sat him on the steps of the throne, as was a peer’s privilege with his heir.

Despite all his wealth and privilege, William never got over the loss of his mother. She died in childbirth when he was three years old. Queen Victoria, still mourning her beloved Albert, wrote to Frederick to commiserate, telling him that ‘having gone through the same terrible trial, she is able to understand his present suffering and feel deeply for him’. Little William was devoted to his father, but, like many pious people, Frederick lacked warmth. He was described by his peers as bigoted, pompous and disagreeable. William would grow up to marry a woman with some of the same characteristics as his father.

From Eton he went on to Christ Church, Oxford, as was the custom for the family. He was styled Viscount Elmley until he succeeded to his father’s earldom in 1891. At Oxford he was popular, a clever and articulate man, cultured and studious. He was President of the Union. He was following in his father’s footsteps as an ardent Anglo-Catholic, but he also had a strong Evangelistic streak and became president of the Oxford Mission, which was dedicated to bringing poorer men to Oxford. It was rumoured that he was seen preaching for the Salvation Army in the open air in the East End of London.

His glittering academic career was halted after he attended a twenty-first birthday party at Blenheim Palace, a few miles from Oxford, without having a proper
exeat
for absence from college. Refusing to apologise, William was sent down. The dean had been waiting for an opportunity to get rid of him. The young earl had already attracted the unwelcome attention of the college authorities when he had put up notices criticising the expulsion from the university of certain members of the Bullingdon Club after one of their riotous evenings of debauchery and window-smashing.

Beauchamp’s rancorous relationship with the Dean of Christ Church,
curiously akin to Evelyn’s feud with Dean Cruttwell, stemmed from a deception that had been practised on him over the news of his father’s death. In late February 1891, William had travelled home to Madresfield from Oxford in order to celebrate his nineteenth birthday with the family. On his return to college, he was met by the dean who told him that his father was ill and that he must return home at once. On arrival at Worcester station he saw a newspaper billboard announcing in the headlines ‘Death of Lord Beauchamp’. He bought a paper and later cut the article out and pasted it into his scrapbook. Next to it was a handwritten note that said ‘this was the first intimation I had of my father’s death’. He never forgave the dean for what he considered to be a gross act of cowardice in keeping news of the death from him.

None of this is enough to amount to sufficient cause for the expulsion of an earl from the university. One senses that there may have been some grosser misdemeanour that was never publicly acknowledged. After Beauchamp was sent down, he was said to have suffered a mental breakdown. He was sent on a cruise to recuperate, spending many months in the Mediterranean, with a stay at Madeira. When he returned, he began to take his place in public life.

In 1895 he was elected Mayor of Worcester, the first peer in England ever to be chosen for a civic office of this kind. His commitment to the betterment of the working classes also led him to become a member of the London Board of Education. He gave a garden party for the National Union of Teachers in the gardens at Madresfield. The
Christian Review
described him as ‘tinged with Christian Socialism’.

He was beginning to look like a dangerously progressive radical. This may have been one of the reasons why at the remarkably youthful age of twenty-seven he was appointed Governor and Commander in Chief of New South Wales. Some saw it as Secretary of State Joseph Chamberlain’s ruse to remove a potentially awkward young man from the Upper House, whilst the
Daily Mail
considered the posting to be ‘experimental, interesting and original’. Further afield, where the newspapers were less deferential, the story went that he was shipped out to the colonies because he had formed an indiscreet attachment to his mother’s maid; thus claimed the
Boston Globe
and various other American papers. There may well be a grain of truth in the story – save that the servant in question was almost certainly not a maid.

Letters and telegrams poured in to congratulate him on his new position. He took his sister Lady Mary with him as his hostess. She was a much-loved lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. Not amused to lose her, the aged Queen commented drily: ‘Well, I suppose he must take his nanny with him.’