The Pursuit of Laughter (56 page)

This biography is extremely well done, and all the old stories—the Irish dispute, the Marconi scandal, Pemberton Billing’s Black Book (supposed to contain the names of 47,000 prominent men and women who were homosexuals)—are told with skill and freshness. New facts are added, notably to the curious story of how Baldwin became Bonar Law’s successor when the latter had to retire because of ill-health.

Nothing can exceed the strangeness of the men who controlled the armed forces at the beginning of the 1914 war. Lord Kitchener, who said to Carson: ‘I don’t know Europe, I don’t know England, and I don’t know the British Army’, and, on the subject of reporting to the Cabinet, ‘It is repugnant to me to reveal military secrets to twenty three gentlemen with whom I am barely acquainted’. And Admiral Fisher, the First Sea Lord, who so detested Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, that he
bombarded
Bonar Law with letters: ‘I am absolutely unable to remain with W.C. He’s a real danger’, he wrote, underlining the words three times. Bonar Law was of the same
opinion
, and had he lived, Churchill would not have been made Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 20s, but would have been out of office for a generation.

The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law
, Blake, R. (1955)

Admirers of Lord David Cecil’s book
The Young Melbourne
, published in 1939, will be delighted by its sequel,
Lord M
, which deals with the last twenty years of Lord Melbourne’s life, during seven of which he was Prime Minister. Lord David has not set out to write a history of the time, but a biography of the man; and so wonderfully well has he
succeeded
, that after reading these two books Lord Melbourne seems to be an intimate friend whom we have known always.

Born ten years before the French Revolution, when he died Queen Victoria had been eleven years on the throne; his life thus spanned a period of great change, reflected even in the fashionable Whig society where he belonged. William Lamb was the son of the famous Lady Melbourne and of George Wyndham, Lord Egremont, one of her
aristocratic
lovers. When his elder brother died and he became heir, Lord Melbourne refused to give him the
£
5000 a year Peniston Lamb had enjoyed; he knew William was not his son, and to punish him for it reduced the allowance to
£
2000. However, William was now
considered
eligible to marry Lady Caroline Ponsonby, one of ‘the Devonshire House girls’ with whom he was in love.

In his unfortunate marriage, the future Lord Melbourne showed his great qualities:
tolerance
, humour, loyalty and affection. All were needed; first in dealing with Caroline’s extravagantly public love affair with Lord Byron, later with the other manifestations of hysteria, madness and exhibitionism which made life with her so trying. After the
publication
of her novel
Glenarvon
in which she described herself, William, Byron and all their friends and relations in what, in those days, was considered an unforgivable way, Caroline was an outcast from society. But though he suffered deeply, William behaved with
exemplary
loyalty; the novel, indeed, which had seemed to be the last straw, brought them together again. How could he abandon her, just when all her old friends were cutting her? One of his political colleagues once said to him, ‘I will support you as long as you are in the right’. ‘That is no use at all,’ he replied, ‘what I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong.’ In his married life he lived up to this maxim in generous fashion.

Rich, handsome, self-indulgent, well dressed, amusing, Melbourne was also clever in an intellectual way. In politics he would never have made a good party man, for he saw both sides of a question, was undogmatic about everything and never felt very strongly except perhaps about the uselessness of reform. ‘Whenever you meddle with these ancient rights and jurisdictions it appears to me that for the sake of remedying comparatively
insignificant
abuses you create new ones and always produce considerable discontent’ he said (about the administration of the Duchy of Cornwall). ‘“Delay” and “postpone” were still his favourite words,’ writes Lord David. He did not believe in any progressive measures; he thought public education a mistake: ‘You may fill a person’s head with nonsense which may be impossible ever to get out again,’ he said. He thought England was better governed by gentlemen than it would be by merchants and business men, and the repeal of the Corn Laws would ruin the former class. Also, as Lord David says: ‘It was the sort of practical subject that bored him to tears. Absent-minded and indifferent, he sat through one Cabinet meeting after another while his colleagues wrangled interminably about fixed duties and sliding scales. At last they came to an agreement and took their leave. As they went
downstairs
they heard the Prime Minister’s voice calling to them: looking up they saw him
leaning
over the banisters: “Stop a bit,” he said, “what did we decide? Is it to lower the price of bread, or isn’t it? It doesn’t matter which, but we must all say the same thing.”’

Mrs Norton, beautiful, talented, ‘not quite a lady,’ was certainly more trouble than she was worth to Lord Melbourne. He was in the habit of paying her a visit nearly every day, and when her loutish husband decided to divorce her he picked on the Prime Minister, for blackmailing reasons, as co-respondent. Norton lost the case, but it had been extremely unpleasant for Melbourne. It was his last indiscretion. ‘She’s a passionate, giddy,
dangerous
, imprudent woman,’ he said of her some years later.

By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne he was already an anachronism, his
gaiety
, cynicism, indolence and tolerance contrasting strangely with the new, priggish,
strenuous
earnestness. The Queen loved him; and he loved her, and taught her from his store of worldly wisdom and political experience, but they were a strange pair: it was a case of
the attraction of opposites.

When the Tories came in, in 1841, he had the sorrow of parting from Queen Victoria. ‘For four years I have seen you daily and liked it better every day,’ he said sadly. Though she lived so near by, as leader of the opposition he could no longer visit her, except very occasionally. The description of his last years, old, ill and rather lonely, is very sad. He was a great family man, and should have had his children and grandchildren about him at Brocket. He and Caroline had had an only son, Augustus, who never developed beyond the mental age of seven. He had died in 1836, when he was 29; his father had always been kind and gentle with him, and had hoped in vain that he might become normal.

Melbourne died in 1848, and was buried near Caroline. To the Queen, now
completely
absorbed in Prince Albert and their children, dear Lord M was a figure from the past.
The Times
obituary was spiteful. ‘I never read so disagreeably toned an article as that on Lord Melbourne,’ wrote Lady Stanley of Alderley to Lord Stanley. ‘It is evidently written by a Tory and will be very painful to his friends. I never liked Lord Melbourne myself, I thought him so selfish and heartless in his opinions of people, still he is one of that bright circle we met so often at Holland House and they are fast disappearing.’ The nineteenth century was already half gone, yet some remnants of the eighteenth century had lingered on in England.

Lord M
, Cecil, D. (1954)

Florence Nightingale was born in 1820, Edith Cavell in 1865. Both became nurses, and both are chiefly remembered in connection with wars: the Crimean War and the First World War. There the resemblance ends, for they could not have been more unlike.

Florence Nightingale was an overwhelming personality and a fighter with a will of iron. Although she was an invalid for her last fifty years she organised and directed, through politicians of both parties, a revolution in nursing, hospitals and the treatment of health in the army without leaving her sofa. Her energy and determination, her perseverance and unremitting work were extraordinary. Lytton Strachey says she was possessed by a demon, and Elspeth Huxley says that she heard God’s voice speaking to her and urging her to his service. She had a talent for making important political and royal friends to further her cause. Politicians she drove and bullied, royal personages she seems to have treated in the way to which they were accustomed. ‘
Sie ist sehr bescheiden
’, wrote the Prince Consort. Nobody else was ever found who could dream of describing Florence Nightingale as ‘modest’.

Needless to say, she had most of the doctors, conservative and obscurantist, against her; yet she won the day.

Her first and perhaps her hardest fight was with her own parents, so hostile were they to the idea of their daughter going into any hospital, where she would certainly see
dreadful
sights unfitting for a lady’s eyes. Nurses in those days were ‘slatterns, more interested in the bottle than in their patients’, or else prostitutes, according to Mrs Huxley. Florence finally overcame their objections, and she was in her early thirties when the Crimean War began. Lurid despatches from
The Times
correspondent which described the sufferings of the wounded and the fatal lack of organisation made a great stir, and Florence Nightingale with a group of nurses sailed for Scutari to help as best she could.

The conditions for the wounded soldiers were indescribably awful, and the general muddle a disgrace. In the filthy, crowded and unsanitary hospitals they died like flies of cholera. Florence made superhuman efforts to reorganise the hospitals, in the teeth of opposition from the army doctors, and mortality declined dramatically. Here again she made friends in high places, and the Commander in Chief, Lord Raglan, was her
devoted
admirer. He was a charming though absentminded man who had fought at Waterloo and was apt to refer to the enemy as ‘the French’. The Crimea made Florence Nightingale into a celebrity and national heroine. Although broken in health her fame and authority were such that she was able to pursue her admirable work from her bed. Prime Ministers and Viceroys queued up to do her bidding. Elspeth Huxley has written a brilliant short biography, somewhere between Cecil Woodham-Smith’s and Lytton Strachey’s essay in
Eminent Victorians
. Beautifully illustrated, it is a model of its genre.

Florence herself wrote voluminous memoranda and several books, the best known being her
Notes on Nursing
, which Strachey says is ‘drawn up with the detailed acrimony, the vindictive relish, of a Swift’. Be that as it may, she laid down rules which should be the ABC of nursing, for example ‘unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care which can be inflicted’ and ‘never allow a patient to be waked intentionally is a sine qua non of all good nursing’. Patients to this day are often wakened, usually to be washed. (A friend of mine, lying in a Paris hospital, may have been thinking of this habit when he said: ‘Always be operated on in France, where there’s no damned nonsense about
washing
.’)

Edith Cavell’s career would have been unthinkable but for Florence Nightingale’s reforms. By the time she came upon the scene even the respectable daughters of
clergymen
became nurses. She trained at the London Hospital from 1896 until 1901. In 1907 she went to Brussels as matron of a school of nurses in charge of a clinic. When war broke out she never considered going back to England; she imagined the clinic would be filled with wounded soldiers. In fact, it was half empty; Brussels was occupied by the Germans.

English soldiers from the Flanders battlefields, some wounded and others not, turned up at the clinic from time to time. Those who were not wounded were hidden in the attics, and Nurse Cavell gave them civilian clothing and helped them to escape across the Dutch frontier, whence they shipped to England and got back into the war. When this activity
was discovered by the occupying power Nurse Cavell and some of her Belgian helpers were arrested in August 1915. Ten weeks later they were tried, found guilty, and shot next morning. Presumably this was done ‘to encourage the others’, for afterwards Brussels was plastered with posters threatening the death penalty for harbouring enemy soldiers.