The Real Peter Pan (30 page)

I have already mentioned his cousin Daphne’s poem ‘Another World’, where the ‘loathly keepers of the netherland’ have ‘cloven feet’ and there is a ‘horn that echoes from the further hill, Discordant, shrill’. Michael is commanding that it has to end. He is saying goodbye to Barrie’s boy-cult.

It was far from certain that Barrie was going to let him have his way.

O
N 9 SEPTEMBER
, while still in Scotland, Michael wrote to his tutor, Robert Dundas, presumably in case it hadn't filtered through to him, that he had given notice to the University:

The comment at the end is probably facetious. We must surely believe that Michael was still (in his mind) bound for the Sorbonne to study art.

At any rate no good honest work found him, and suddenly he did change his mind, writing to Dundas from rooms in the heart of old Oxford across the road from Christ Church at No. 84 St Aldates, a building full of character on the corner of Pembroke Street.

Edward Marjoribanks was an Old Etonian friend of Michael, later to become a Conservative politician. A telegram followed the letter some days later:

By then Michael's address was Barrie's apartment off the Strand. These erratic missives will have done little to give Dundas confidence, but he was allowed to return to Oxford. A relation of his, Andrew Sellon, with an interest in the family tree, described Dundas as ‘a somewhat notorious Fellow, I believe he had the same rooms
that Lewis Carroll once had'. Carroll, or Charles Dodgson, became a lecturer in Mathematics there in 1855, publishing
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
in 1865.

It seems that Elizabeth Lucas had taken Michael aside and persuaded him at least to finish his degree before going to Paris. On 19 December, Barrie wrote to her:

Elizabeth Lucas was a warm friend to Michael, relieving him of the necessity of spending Christmas 1920 with Barrie by taking him to Paris.

Macnagthen wrote of this difficult period being turned around after he was allowed to return to Oxford: ‘Henceforward there was no wavering; he worked loyally and found increasing satisfaction in his work; he was at Eton for a day at the end of March (1921), full of quiet happiness.'

Barrie said much the same of Michael, writing to Elizabeth,

The description is not a happy one on the face of it, suggestive of stress at the very least.

Returning to Oxford had meant of course that his relationship with Rupert would continue as before. No doubt the business with Dundas about Michael's lodgings in college was connected to his being closer to Rupert, as the gates of Christ Church closed at night.

On 13 February, Rupert wrote to his mother of new rooms in college. ‘My rooms are much better than they were: but as yet there are no pictures! … you must give advice on the question. Blue furniture and curtains and a red carpet are the dominant colours.'

The week before, he had written to his mother that ‘the Norway project is rather vague still, I'm sorry to say. Michael may not be able to go, in which case it will have to be given up.'

Whatever the Norway project was, it was evidently planned for the Easter holidays – Easter Day fell on 27 March – when Barrie had already planned to take Michael and Nico elsewhere. Reading between the lines, this looks like a further opportunity for disagreement between Barrie and Michael. In the event, Rupert and Michael spent Easter in Corfe Castle in Dorset, staying at a little inn by the sea. Barrie joined them for a few days at the end of it.

The next we hear is that Michael travelled to Oxford from London on 9 May, Barrie's sixty-first birthday. Nico to Eton, too, which suggests that Michael had been down for Nico's half term. Then, on 17 May, Barrie writes to Michael: ‘The Mill House sounds like a good place, and you had lovely weather for it.' We know no more than this, but it seems likely that Michael and Rupert have again been away together.

Two days later, Thursday 19 May, was a warm summer's day in Oxford, a day in Eights Week, the main University rowing event, a big festive occasion which takes place over four days.

Edward Marjoribanks saw Rupert that morning and Michael around midday. Michael said he was going to swim in Sandford pool that afternoon, and would not be able to watch the Eights. Buxton had not mentioned he was going out. The two young men left the city together shortly after two o'clock.

There was nothing unusual or foolhardy about swimming in Sandford Pool. Arthur Bryant, a friend and contemporary of Rupert at both Harrow and Oxford, wrote that the couple had been to Sandford together to swim several times before. While on the following day Thomas Ripon said, ‘There are bathers there almost every day in the summer, and I believe that Rupert was a good swimmer.'

The couple walked there through Christ Church Meadow, a spacious and beautiful pasture belonging to the college and a popular place for walking and picnicking during the day, when its wrought iron gates are open to all.

Moving southwards through the meadow, which is bounded on its west side by the Thames and on the east by the Cherwell, the couple approached the place where cattle graze and the two rivers converge. Here, on an island, the many college boathouses will have been busy, as this upstream stretch of the river is where the Eights Week rowing events occur.

The path, altogether the most lovely river walk in Oxford, leads past eights and fours and sculls, past river boats and flocks of grazing geese, and continues on its way south under a road bridge and a railway bridge, over Hinksey Stream by means of a footbridge and a further bridge over the weir stream, where a narrow path leaves the main one for Sandford lasher.

Here the river thunders through the weir into a large still pool, perhaps 100 metres across, by means of a series of sluice gates
between concrete piers, which support a railed pathway, which Rupert and Michael took across the river to the west bank on the other side.

It led them past a nineteenth-century obelisk, which in their day would have carried the names of only three Christ Church students who died here – Richard Phillimore and William Gaisford who drowned in 1843, and George Dasent in 1872.

For, ‘the pool under Sandford lasher, just behind the lock, is a very good place to drown yourself in', as du Maurier's great friend Jerome K. Jerome had written in
Three Men in a Boat
(1889).

Today, owing to these deaths and people's interest in an additional and more recent two, the railed pathway is barred and the single lifebelt by the obelisk is unobtainable. But it is still possible to find a way onto the side of the lasher where Rupert and Michael went that day by walking past Sandford Lock and through a field leading to the west bank.

It is an idyllic spot, the pools, high and low, separated by the weir, are quite beautiful and tranquil in summer. Hither the boys came, ‘either wildly gay or very serious' (as Barrie wrote to Rupert's mother afterwards), gazing over their gloomy grave, sensing the gentle motion of the leaves on the trees, the grass springing under their feet and the soft thunder of the lasher in the distance.

Later it was reported that one of the men swam over to the weir and sat on it basking in the sun. It would have been the poor swimmer Michael left alone on the bank, gazing at the pool where two universes met.

Did he turn to Shelley, dreaming that he could somehow lose himself in the otherworld of the pool, wet and remote – ‘What am I that I should linger here? – Vision and Love – Sleep and death Shall not divide us long'? Or, as he watched the muscular Rupert
drop his clothes beside him and swim strongly out towards the weir, did Michael not know that death was on him?

T
HERE WERE TWO
eye-witnesses to the drowning, Charles Henry Beecham, engineer’s assistant at the nearby Sandford Paper Mills and his assistant Matthew Gaskell, both of whom testified that the pool was ‘as still as a mill-pond’.

They gave their evidence on Saturday 21 May to a Coroner’s Inquest, which was conducted by F. E. Marshall, described as ‘one of the University’s coroners’, at the Settling Room, Gloucester Green, in the city.

Beecham said that when he went up to the weir with Gaskell to regulate the water which fed the paper mill, he was standing on the Oxford side [the east side].

Gaskell was then called and corroborated the evidence of Beecham. Asked if he would like to add anything, he said: ‘I think not.’

Answering a question from the Dean of Christ Church, the Very Reverend Dr H. J. Wright, he said that it had taken less than a minute from the time he heard the shout to get the lifebelt. Gaskell was then asked whether he could say whether the men were clinging to each other as though one was trying to help the other.

Thomas Frederick Carter, of 34 Nelson Street, Oxford, employed by the Thames Conservancy, then said he was in the depot at Osney, when, just before five o’clock, he received a call to go to Sandford Pool. The superintendent sent him to commence dragging in the pool for two undergraduates who had been reported drowned. When he got to the pool, dragging operations were commenced. With two other assistants, operations were continued, and up to dark neither of the bodies had been recovered. At seven o’clock the next morning dragging was recommenced. One body was recovered shortly after two o’clock about thirty yards from the weir, in about twenty feet of water.

One body was taken to the hotel while they dragged for the other, which was recovered an hour later.

Summing up for the jury, the Dean said,

The view of the jury was that Michael had accidentally drowned while bathing, and that Rupert lost his life trying to rescue him. As the Dean gave the jury’s verdict, he was reported to have been overcome with emotion and burst into tears.

After the same verdict was reached in the case of Alastair Grahame a year earlier, this should come as no surprise. Oxford, and Christ Church in particular, did not want these deaths to look like suicide.

It was never likely that there would be a verdict of suicide for a number of reasons, not least that the court could not claim to be unprejudiced.

The coroner was connected to the University. The coroner for the Oxfordshire area at this time was one Harold Galpin. Mr Marshall was described as a ‘University coroner’. It is not clear whether the University had sufficiently frequent cases of accident and suicide actually to run its own coroner’s office, or whether Marshall had been drafted in from outside. Either way, Marshall was in the employ of the University.

The Foreman of the Jury was the Dean of Christ Church College, and according to a nephew of Barrington-Ward, who knew all of them, of the six other jurors four at least were dons at Christ Church – J. G. Barrington-Ward, the Reverend A. E. Rawlinson, J. C. Masterman and Theo Chaundy.

Further, there are clear discrepancies between the evidence of the witnesses and what the Dean, as Foreman of the Jury, said in his summing up about one of the deceased (Michael) getting into difficulties. On the day in question as both witnesses – Beecham and Gaskell – gave evidence, the water was calm and still, and Gaskell said that the water was low, free of reeds, and there was no backwash. Moreover, the Coroner pointed out that there could have been no suction towards the weir at the time, neither were there any eddies.

Beecham could not report any struggling to substantiate his statement that they two men were in difficulties. On the contrary, all that he had seen was ‘their heads close together’. Gaskell had stated that the two men appeared as though they were just standing in the water with their heads above the surface.

Bedevilling any attempt to pick at the case in more detail is the disappearance of the transcript of the Inquest. Neither the Oxford University Archive, nor the Oxfordshire Record Office, the Christ Church College Archive, or the separately administered department of Bodleian Special Collections, has a copy of it.

Being a University court there should be a record in the University archive or in the Bodleian Library. The Oxfordshire Record Office is the most likely other source, but while they hold all the city Coroner’s Inquest files for 1921, including some undertaken at the Settling Room, all of them in chronological and in numerical order (which would indicate if any was missing), there is no sign of the Llewelyn Davies–Buxton case. One is reliant on newspaper records.

Then, of course, there is the state of mind of the deceased, which was never a matter of analysis at the Inquest, even though when Rupert was lodging at the Deanery he was observed to have been depressed.

Much was made of Michael’s ineptitude as a swimmer. But flatmate Edward Marjoribanks gave evidence that while ‘Mr Davies could not swim very well … It was his pride, however, to swim about twenty yards.’ And again, as Peter Llewelyn Davies, a sober man who visited the site as I did, wrote to Dolly: ‘The place is too calm, and the distance from bank to bank too small, for the question of swimming capacity to enter into it at all.’

Perhaps an open verdict would have been the better one.

On the evening of 19 May, Barrie was at home in the Adelphi
writing his daily letter to Michael. In it he wrote that he hoped he would be able to come down for the opening performance of their play,
Shall We Join the Ladies?
, now only a one-act play – he had been unable to take it further and decided to let the audience work it out – which starred Gerald du Maurier as Dolphin, a butler.

At eleven o’clock, with the intention of posting the letter, he walked out of the flat and took the lift to the ground floor. As he opened the gate of the lift and moved into the hallway, he was approached by a stranger who raised his hat, said he was from a newspaper and asked if Sir James could oblige him with a few words on the incident. Barrie asked what he was talking about. It was in this way that he learned of Michael’s drowning.

He turned around and went back into the lift. In a daze, he telephoned Gerald and Peter first, and then his secretary Cynthia Asquith, who recalled that he spoke ‘in a voice she hardly recognised’: ‘I have had the most terrible news. Michael has been drowned.’

When Cynthia arrived at the flat, Gerald and Peter were already there. They tried to persuade Barrie to go to bed, but he would not. Eventually they left for their own beds, and when Cynthia arrived the following morning, Barrie had still not slept. He had been pacing up and down the length of the study floor all night long.

Nico was playing cricket at Eton while Michael drowned, and in the evening sang at a Musical Society concert. He was told of his death after lights out, at around 10 p.m. by Macnaghten, but had gone to sleep not really believing it. The full import of the event only hit him when Peter arrived at his bedside the following morning, and Macnaghten, himself a suicide in later years, made it worse by coming in, kneeling by his bed and holding both their hands. The boys then drove to Slough for breakfast and on to Adelphi Terrace. Nico recalled, ‘Uncle Jim’s immediate reaction on seeing
me was “Oh – take him away!” Strangely I don’t remember feeling hurt at this.’

Nico was given the responsibility of telling Nanny, who was working as a midwife at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. He was excused from the funeral and went to stay at Cannon Hall with the du Mauriers. In the 1970s, in interview with Andrew Birkin, he concluded that suicide was likely: ‘I’ve always had something of a hunch that Michael’s drowning was suicide – he was in a way the “type” i.e. exceptionally clever, with varying moods.’

When D. H. Lawrence heard about it, he wrote from Hotel Krone, Ebersteinberg, Baden Baden to Mary Ansell: ‘My dear Mary, we had your note after your second trip to England. No, I hadn’t heard of the boy’s drowning. What was he doing to get drowned? J. M. Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die.’

Two of Lawrence’s master-ideas were that possessive love is a deathly force, and that ‘accidents’ harbour a deep intentionality in both perpetrators and victims.

For Boothby and Michael’s close friends his death was devastating and a watershed. Boothby spoke to Andrew Birkin of the many ‘desperate, hysterical letters … I can see Roger Senhouse being led up the High in Oxford, sobbing.’

In the wake of the tragedy we can begin to see what Michael meant to his friends, and how different their lives might have been had he been released to carry the real Peter Pan into his own and their lives. Nico said that Roger Senhouse used to tell him that ‘for quite a long period after Michael was drowned, Boothby would say, looking upwards! – “I think you’ll be pleased with what I did there, Michael!”’ Boothby himself said that had Michael not died, he would not have gone off the rails as he did, that Edward Marjoribanks, who ‘was devoted to Michael’, would not have committed
suicide after he got into Parliament. He said that Michael’s death ‘altered the whole course of Roger Senhouse’s life’, referring to his affair with Lytton Strachey, and Clive Burt, he believed, would have done far more with Michael still there as muse.

It was an extraordinary tribute, particularly that he might have made Boothby’s life different to how it turned out. That would have been quite an achievement. After Michael died Boothby, who would enter Parliament in 1924, earned the nickname ‘the Palladium’ at Magdalen for his ‘twice nightly’ appetite for homosexual sex. In 1963, five years after he gave up his seat and was raised to the peerage, he began an affair with East End cat burglar Leslie Holt, who introduced him to the gangster Ronald Kray, one of the twins foremost in organised crime in London in the 1950s and ’60s. Kray supplied Boothby with young men and arranged orgies in exchange for personal favours. When the
Sunday Mirror
broke the story in 1964 and the German magazine
Stern
named the parties, Boothby denied the story and threatened to sue the
Mirror
, and because senior Labour MP Tom Driberg was also involved the Labour-backed
Mirror
backed down, sacked its editor, apologised and paid Boothby £40,000 in an out-of-court settlement.

According to Peter Llewelyn Davies in a letter to Dolly Ponsonby, Barrie bore Michael’s death ‘somehow, with wonderful composure, and physically at least with better success than could have been expected’.

On 31 May, Barrie wrote to Rupert’s mother: