Mad World (16 page)
Authors: Paula Byrne
Beauchamp was a keen sportsman (as his son Hugh would be), being especially fond of swimming and boxing. A photograph of him at the time shows him resplendent with tricorn hat and plumes, sword and sash. He cuts an equally striking figure wearing morning dress in a caricature by ‘Spy’ published in
Vanity Fair
. He had something of the dandy about him. To Robert Byron and Evelyn Waugh, he was the quintessential Englishman: dashing and at ease with himself.
His radical opinions and tactless comments made him both friends and enemies. In Australia he earned the nickname ‘Big Chump’, a pun on the name Beauchamp, for his occasional gaffes, such as when he made a reference to the country’s criminal past. He was frequently outspoken. At Cobar in 1899 he enraged French colonists when he condemned the controversial Dreyfus trial, in which the framing of a Jewish army officer revealed the anti-Semitism of the French establishment. Beauchamp publicly thanked God that he was an Englishman and not a Frenchman.
He travelled around the country, going deep into the outback in order to meet the real people of Australia. He insisted on stopping at every small settlement. In one of his speeches, he said that the lessons of true Christianity could be learned from the natives. Imperialism, he protested, could lead to ‘a policy of force and repression and war’. He advocated ‘not only the gospel of trade, but the Gospel of love and Christianity’. These were not the orthodox views of a Victorian imperial proconsul.
Though he travelled throughout Australia, he loved Sydney. It would become a second home to him in his lonely later years. He felt free there, responding to the city’s energy and excitement, its lack of class distinctions, the absence of that rigidity of views which was so much part of his life in England. The wood-blocked roadways were crammed with steam trams, omnibuses, hansoms and carriages. The brightly lit streets remained thronged until midnight and there were hundreds of bars and clubs full of young people. He frequented a thriving scene of arty bohemian private clubs, such as ‘The Dawn and Dusk Club’. Artists and writers, rather than politicians and petty officials, were his friends.
Sydney was synonymous with youth and vitality. The weather was bright and sunny and the beaches a huge draw. Later, Beauchamp would write ‘the men are splendid athletes, like Greek statues. Their skins are tanned by sun and wind, and I doubt whether anywhere in the world are finer specimens of manhood than in Sydney. The lifesavers at the bathing beaches are wonderful.’
In October 1900, after just a year and a half in his new post, he returned to England on half-pay. He held the governorship for another year, but did not return to Australia. It is not clear whether injudicious words or deeds were the reason for his being called home so soon.
When he returned to Malvern in 1901, there was a cheering crowd three miles long to greet him. He was thirty and beginning to feel the pressure to produce a son and heir. A year later he married Lady Lettice Grosvenor, sister of the Duke of Westminster. It was the society wedding of the year. She had the right credentials and character to become a great society hostess.
Lord Beauchamp was known for his love of formality, but he was interested in people of all classes. This was a trait that his children inherited. An American tourist visiting the Madresfield Agricultural Society was amazed to see the earl bareheaded in a grey summer suit, speaking warmly to the agricultural workers, shaking them by the hand and stopping to chat.
He was soon immersed in politics as a member of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords, setting himself against his father’s Conservatism, particularly over the question of free trade. His Belgravia home became a meeting place for party grandees. When the Liberals came into government under Henry Campbell-Bannerman in 1905, Beauchamp had great expectations. ‘We shall ’ave Hindia or Hireland, but we don’t know which,’ his valet was said to have declared with eager anticipation. But there must have been some black mark against his name, because rather than becoming a viceroy he only accumulated an assortment of minor appointments: Member of the Privy Council, Captain of the Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms, Lord Steward to the Royal Household, eventually Lord President of the Council. Honours were showered upon him: he was created KCMG in 1899 and a Knight of the Garter in 1914. At King George V’s coronation in 1911, it was Beauchamp who carried the sword of state. That same year he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Gloucestershire
and in 1913 Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. In August 1914, he represented the government at Buckingham Palace when the King signed the declaration of war.
Like many children who lose a parent at a very young age, Beauchamp idolised his late mother and the memory of her devotion to the underprivileged. She had undertaken welfare work in the Newcastle slums and had opened a school for orphaned girls. He followed in her footsteps, undertaking charity work in the East End and becoming Chairman of the Church of England Liberal and Progressive Movement. He spoke in the Lords on a wide range of subjects from free trade and tariff reform, to juvenile smoking, vivisection, and the employment of women. He was active in pushing through a bill that set up juvenile courts and abolished prison sentences for children. He was described as having ‘an impish spirit of mischief which has caused him to be described as the Lloyd George of the House of Lords’.
He also supported home rule in Ireland. The Irish took to him, but they were aware of his foibles. A miner told an English newspaper that ‘he’s a decent man and he’ll shake hands with anybody’. To which another remarked: ‘Though he always looks first to see if your hand’s been properly washed.’
In May 1918, he introduced a Sexual Offences Bill which included a provision that the transgressions of both sexes should be dealt with on a basis of equality. In June he moved all the stages of a bill enabling women to become Justices of the Peace. In 1924, just two weeks after Elmley’s coming-of-age party, an opportunity arose for Beauchamp to gain a position of genuine political eminence. Earl Grey resigned for personal reasons from his position as Leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords. Beauchamp positioned himself for the succession and was duly elected by his peers in the autumn. ‘No better choice could be found than in Lord Beauchamp,’ remarked one commentator; he ‘is known to possess those qualities of tact and personal charm, which, equally with his stock of personal acumen and his alertness in debate, are essential to every successful leader’. His first task was to position his party on the opposition front bench in the chamber: he was bitterly disappointed when Lord Curzon, Tory Leader of the House, ruled that the new Labour Party should take precedence. The Liberals were a fading cause.
Another of his positions was as Chancellor of London University. In his installation speech, he contrasted London with the ancient universities (Oxford and Cambridge) that were not accessible to ‘all comers’. London was the first university to ‘open its doors to women’ and also made it easier for those from poorer backgrounds to benefit from a university education. He honoured those students who worked in employment all day and then spent their evenings preparing for examinations: ‘At a time when universities were becoming more and more the playground of the rich, London University came into existence as an intellectual treasure house for the poor.’ Beauchamp must have felt frustrated by his sons and their contemporaries, who viewed Oxford as their playground. It is easy to see why Lord Elmley used a pseudonym when he appeared in Terence Greenidge’s frivolous amateur films.
Lord Beauchamp was also an artist and craftsman. He had his own studio at Madresfield Court, mainly devoted to sculpture. It was there that he produced his finest piece,
The Golfer
, which was displayed in the Paris Exhibition of 1920. It depicts a naked golfer, raising his club as he concentrates on his shot. It is still in the smoking room, though the club is missing. The piece was widely acclaimed for the perfection of detail ‘in the portrayal of an exceptionally difficult pose’. In the library at Madresfield there is another fine sculpture of a naked youth. Beauchamp was also keenly interested in embroidery. There seemed to be no end to his talents.
The nearer you get to the hub of the wheel … the easier it is to stay on.
(Evelyn Waugh,
Decline and Fall
)
The broken ankle sustained while escaping from an Oxford bar was something of a turning point in Evelyn’s life. He was forced to return to the family home, sit still and read quietly. Enforced absence from the party scene made him think seriously about becoming a writer.
Boredom was alleviated by visits from the Plunket Greenes. They brought him a silver flask as a get-well present. Richard and his fiancée Elizabeth were delighted that her parents had finally agreed to their marriage. The wedding was fixed for 21 December, with Evelyn hobbling along as best man. Though pleased for them, he felt they were ‘remote from me behind an impenetrable wall of happiness’.
He turned his attention to a study of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They formed a subject that brought together his love of Victoriana, his fascination with beauty, his interest in both painting and writing, and his yearning for a ‘brotherhood’ of like-minded young men. He worked on it back at Aston Clinton, where he also finishing the drawing of Hugh that was to be his twenty-first birthday present. He was growing ever
fonder of the boys, some of whom he thought charming. The best part of the day was when he went to talk to them in the evening.
At Elizabeth and Richard’s wedding, he was depressed. A few days later he went with Olivia to a debauched party full of Russian émigrés. He despised Olivia for dancing ‘the disgusting dance of hers’ – the Charleston, about which she was crazy. She was drinking as much as ever. Whilst she kept him at arm’s length she flagrantly threw herself at other men in his presence. He planned a Christmas trip to Paris and seemed relieved, for once, to escape the Plunket Greenes.
This was Evelyn’s first trip abroad. He went with Bill Silk, a ‘toping actor-manager’, who, like many of his kind, was homosexual. Silk was in love with actor Tony Bushell, another of Evelyn’s friends. It rained constantly and most of the art galleries were closed for the Christmas season. The second evening they visited a male brothel. Evelyn and Silk asked how could they amuse themselves and were told ‘
Montez, messieurs, des petits enfants
’ (‘Come upstairs, gentlemen, we have little boys’).
After drinking expensive champagne, they were presented with the
petits enfants
who ‘howled and squealed and danced and pointed to their buttocks and genitalia’. A boy dressed as Cleopatra sat on Evelyn’s knee and started to kiss him. He claimed that he was nineteen and said that he had been in the brothel for four years. Evelyn found him attractive, but he had better uses for the 300 francs that the patron demanded for enjoyment of him. So he decided instead to arrange ‘a tableau by which my boy should be enjoyed by a large Negro’. They went upstairs to a squalid room, and the boy lay there waiting for the black man’s advances, but at the last minute a further argument over the price of witnessing the scene led Evelyn to take a taxi back to his hotel ‘and to bed in chastity’. His diary entry ends with an equivocal: ‘I think I do not regret it.’
Evelyn’s school-mastering life at Aston Clinton was rendered much more bearable by a present given to him by Richard Plunket Greene: a motorbike. ‘It is called Douglas and cost £25.’ He dined with Julia Strachey in London, noting in his diary that she had cut off all her hair, making her look like Hugh Lygon. This was the era when girls were beginning to bob their hair and cultivate the look of lovely androgyny. The fashion pleased Evelyn at a time when his own sexual preferences were veering ambiguously.
He went on his motorbike to Oxford where he had luncheon with
Brian Howard and Harold Acton. It was quite like the old Hypocrite days: eating fried oysters, ‘trying on the hats of strange men, riding strange bicycles and reciting Edith Sitwell to the chimneys of Oriel Street’. But his accounts of these visits seem tired and sad. Once again, he was trying to recapture his undergraduate years whilst knowing in his heart that it was time to move on.
Evelyn’s popularity as a schoolmaster was greatly enhanced by the motorbike. From the moment he first rode up the driveway astride it, he became ‘the idol of the school’. He would bribe the boys into behaving better by letting them tinker with its engine. His two favourite pupils, Charles and Edmund, were extremely fond of him, and he of them. His diary mentions them often. On one occasion they took him to see a pond that they had been digging in great secrecy, and he helped them catch fish to put in it. He was upset when he caught Edmund out of bounds and had to beat him. He gave him a Sulka tie as recompense. He also invited the boys to tea. Every evening he would go to their dormitory to say goodnight to them (but nothing more). He took over the school’s literary society and designed the cover for the school magazine. He was trying to recapture his own schooldays – or to reinvent himself as a version of J. F. Roxburgh.
Evelyn loved his home comforts and was pleased that the headmaster had given him a room over the stables, which he converted into a sitting room. He went running with the boys and in return they helped him to fit out his rooms.
The summer term of 1926 began with just a handful of boys in residence, owing to transport problems caused by the General Strike. Evelyn took little interest in the strike other than the opportunity it gave him to relieve boredom under the colour of duty by motoring up to London on his bike and signing up as a volunteer police dispatch rider. On his second day the strike was called off and he returned to school.
He enjoyed the fine weather, reading aloud his favourite
Wind in the Willows
to the boys in his sitting room, while eating strawberries. And he completed his extended essay on the Pre-Raphaelites, dashing it off in between marking exam papers, and delighting his father with the result.