The Viceroy's Daughters (9 page)

When Cynthia married, I consulted my lawyer as to the propriety of asking her to leave a portion of the entire fortune now hers to assist her father, already embarrassed by the sudden withdrawal of the entire income of his eldest daughter. We made these arrangements with Cynthia and her lawyer that she should leave with me that portion of her income which had accrued from the Marriage Settlement, which was expected to amount to about £3,000 a year.

She even hinted at legal proceedings to be instituted by her sister or herself while protesting at any suspension of the affectionate relations that ought to reign between father and daughter. At the same time, although declaring her intention to carry out the obligations which she had accepted upon marriage, she indicated that circumstances might compel her to modify or terminate it, as in the present situation.

I am unwilling to continue any controversy on the matter. I would not willingly be again addressed in the language which Cynthia employed to me in her last letter and which I cannot forget. She must do as she pleases. A father does not with pleasure in any circumstance accept “an allowance”—the phrase she habitually employs—from his daughter, but he would sooner not accept it at all than know it is found grudgingly and with obvious regret.

 

It was the end of his relationship with his two eldest daughters.

8

Baba Comes Out

The year Baba came out, 1922, saw Curzon suffer one of his bitterest blows. On May 1 the new prime minister, Bonar Law, a sick man, set off on a sea voyage, leaving Curzon to deputize for him. It soon became clear that Bonar Law would not recover (cancer of the throat was diagnosed) and on Whit Sunday, May 20, he resigned.

Curzon appeared the obvious choice as successor. He was foreign secretary, an international figure and a much-respected statesman of superb intellect, with a bottomless capacity for work and flawless public integrity. Stanley Baldwin, although chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House, appeared to have little chance against Curzon. But Bonar Law gave no advice on his successor and the king turned to a former prime minister, Arthur (now Lord) Balfour.

Just as he had done fourteen years earlier when Curzon was seeking support for his election to a parliamentary constituency,
*
Balfour refused to support his old friend. This time he went further still, actively advising the king not to send for Curzon. For the first time, Labour was now the largest opposition party and there were no Labour peers. Balfour added that his uncle, Lord Salisbury, had found the greatest difficulty in governing from the House of Lords even though in his time the opposition party of Liberals had just as many peers as the Conservatives.

While the debating was going on, Curzon and Grace were spending the holiday weekend at Montacute (still without a telephone). It was one of their rare moments together: Grace had just returned from another of her numerous Paris visits. Late on the evening of Whit Monday the village policeman bicycled to the house with a telegram from the king's private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, saying that he wanted to see Curzon the following day.

Curzon, like almost everyone, including the press, was convinced that Stamfordham's summons was to tell him that he would be sent for by the king to form the next government. But when Lord Stamfordham entered the drawing room at Carlton House Terrace, where Curzon and Grace were waiting amid the tapestries and tigers' heads, it was to say that the king had sent for Stanley Baldwin.

For Curzon it was the final crushing of his lifelong ambition. He could not restrain his sobs, and he felt unable to dine with Lord Farquhar the following night to meet the king. He wanted Grace to refuse too, but she told him they could not appear to sulk or seem resentful. The king sent for her to talk to after dinner and said at once: “I suppose Curzon wouldn't come tonight because he didn't want to meet me?” Grace answered truthfully that while Curzon was very hurt and disappointed, he was genuinely unwell. The king said he would send for him and tell him personally the reasons for the decision. This thoughtful gesture so mollified Curzon that within two days he had agreed to continue as foreign secretary and made a generous speech pledging loyalty to Baldwin.

Nevertheless, it was a deep and grievous wound that may well have contributed to his illness that spring—and which meant that he played no part in the coming out of his youngest and favorite daughter. He felt wretched and wrote pathetically to Gracie on May 15:

Went to your room and slept with my head at the foot of the bed so as to escape the early morning light through the shutter chinks, awake 11:30–2:30, took a mild chloral then for about two hours light sleep, the first for ten days.

Poor me. I have had a miserable morning. Leg spinning, back aching, involuntary bursts of tears. The chef gets worse daily and I will give him notice before the end of week. He has given us one ice three times in five days and chicken five days running . . . the doctor came this morning and I inquired eagerly what I had in my leg and the reply was thrombosis, phlebitis and lymphangitis! The right leg is more than two inches longer than the left. I have seen nobody so far as I have not felt up to it.

 

That season saw the return of the full-scale evening court for the first time since before the war. A ruling from Buckingham Palace stated that the trains of gowns were to be no more than two yards long instead of three so that they would trail at most eighteen inches along the ground. But the Prince of Wales feathers, the embroideries, the veils, the deep curtseys in front of a king and queen blazing with orders and diamonds, were back with a flourish.

At court balls men still wore knee breeches and black silk stockings (with thick black cotton ones underneath to hide their hairy legs) and left their swords in a pile outside the ballroom; at formal dinner parties they took women in to dinner, offering their right arms to do so. At the Curzons' enormous dinner parties their butler stood just inside the drawing room door holding a silver tray on which were little folded cards bearing the names of the male guests: inside each was the name of the lady to be escorted to the table.

Grace took charge of her stepdaughter's season with enthusiasm and skill. She suggested that Curzon should give Baba a sum of £200–250 to cover her clothes, and she offered to take her to buy them in Paris (where Baba had been at school for the previous year). It was the perfect pretext for one of Grace's increasingly frequent visits to the French capital. For what Curzon did not know was that she had taken a lover, General Sir Matthew “Scatters” Wilson, and would often meet him at the Paris Ritz.

Scatters Wilson was a brave, genial, philandering Yorkshire baronet for whom any pretty woman was automatically a challenge. Robust, energetic, clubbable and fond of a joke, he was a sportsman who enjoyed hunting, big-game shooting, cricket and, especially, racing. When Gracie met him he was the Unionist MP for Bethnal Green—a seat he held, ironically, until the change of government that so shattered the man he had cuckolded. He himself was married to the eldest daughter of Lord Ribblesdale, the husband of Margot Asquith's younger sister Charlotte (Charty) Tennant.

Scatters, born in 1875, had been educated at Harrow and served with the 10th Royal Hussars. In the Boer War of 1899 he won the King's Medal with three clasps and the Queen's Medal, also with three clasps, before being invalided home with enteric fever just before the war ended in 1902, after which his service continued first in India and then in England. He was exactly the sort of gallant, dashing, free-spending scamp who appealed to Gracie and he soon established a strong and ultimately disastrous influence over her.

Baba was presented by Grace at an evening court on June 7 to a king in the uniform of colonel in chief of the Life Guards and a queen in silver brocade, in a ceremony which began when the royal family entered the throne room at 9:30
p.m
. precisely. A few weeks later, on Tuesday, July 18, Grace gave a dance for Baba at 1 Carlton House Terrace. It was a grand ball, with powdered, liveried footmen in attendance, lilies, roses, carnations and azaleas sent up from Hackwood and arranged in gilt baskets, women in tiaras and men in white waistcoats and black tailcoats—many of the more energetic dancers with a spare collar or two in their pocket.

As always when royalty was being entertained, the Robert Adam silver was brought up from Kedleston for the dinner party for thirty beforehand. There were two tables, a large round green malachite one for the royal party—the duke of York, his sister Princess Mary and Lord and Lady Lascelles—presided over by Grace, her luscious Gaiety Girl looks set off by a pale pink Vionnet dress worn with pearls and one of Mary Leiter's tiaras. (To ensure that Gracie always got the seating exactly right, Curzon had thoughtfully provided his wife with a table of precedence.) Baba looked slender and beautiful in a dress of white silk and tulle embroidered with tiny crystals. After dinner a further four hundred guests, including the Prince of Wales, arrived to dance. The number of each dance was propped up on the band's piano and every girl carried a small dance card with a tiny pencil attached to write down the names of her partners under the number of the dance they had requested.

Curzon, who was recuperating at Broadstairs, had to miss the party. Also absent from Baba's ball were her sisters. Nancy Astor, who loved the Curzon daughters, may not have been conscious of the schism between Curzon and Irene, since the latter already led a fairly peripatetic life. But she would certainly have discovered that Cimmie, her own favorite and married to a young man whom she also knew well, was no longer seeing her father.

Mistakenly, she attributed it to Gracie's influence. A month before the dance she went up to Grace at a dinner given by the American ambassador and tactlessly asked: “Why have you turned your stepdaughter out of doors?” As no one else had heard of the breach and Grace complained to her neighbor, Mrs. Lloyd George, at this public rebuke for something that was not her doing, the result was that everyone thought Nancy had once again gone too far.

 

Irene was not her father's daughter for nothing: she had inherited much of his strong will, and she was determined to take control of her own life, a difficult goal in an era when, despite their brief foray into wartime freedom, women were still regarded as dependent upon, and subordinate to, men. Hunting was her ruling passion and she was able to devote most of the year to it, but late spring and summer also had to be filled. Anxious not to cause awkwardness during her sister's season, she turned to another of her loves, traveling, then an altogether more leisurely affair. In Jerusalem she had met Ronald Storrs, who had been appointed governor of Jerusalem and Judaea two years earlier (when the League of Nations granted the British government a mandate to govern Palestine, Jordan and Iraq).

Storrs, then forty, was the first of a number of men to recognize Irene's potential as wife to a governor or ambassador. Handsome, dignified, with an air of confidence and authority that would later make her into an admirable public speaker and head of committees, she was a strong presence in any room she entered—and she was very rich. Storrs proposed to her so frequently that, worried, she wrote to her father.

Curzon was alarmed: he considered Storrs an undesirable, though more on social than professional grounds (“Did you know he went to the Revelstokes uninvited and had to leave?” he wrote to Gracie). As he still would not communicate directly with Irene, he got Baba to write to her and after a few days inquired casually what had happened. Baba told him that Storrs had proposed to her sister repeatedly, the first time a few days after she had arrived. “But she had already found out he was a bounder and refused. The next morning she got my letter and felt entirely justified.”

Irene seized this opportunity to extend the olive branch yet again. From the Hotel Britannia in Venice she wrote to her father on August 26. So conscious was she of his enmity that she dared neither salutation nor affectionate ending.

I want you to know that I was greatly touched by your care and thought for me in getting Baba to write to me over Ronald Storrs in Jerusalem. My inner repulsion to him anyhow prevented anything happening after his proposal but Baba's letter reached me the morning after and I took it as a guidance, and I have treasured the thought that you got her to write it. Thank you, Daddy.

Cim and Tom come here next week. I expect you were proud Baba was such a success in London this summer and stood out in every way, in distinction, poise and charm. Gracie was marvellous to her and she realises it profoundly. Those two years of mine abroad before the war have been the background and basis of all this travelling interest I now have for seeing the world. My German has come back quite easily. I wish Cim and Baba could have had it. I am grateful to you for it.

 

Baba was an immediate success when she came out. Acclaimed as the prettiest debutante of the 1922 season and “the most beautiful brunette in London,” from the first she was noted for her chic and an individual style that led rather than followed fashion. Where the vogue was for hair cut short and waved at the sides with the rest tied up in a small bun at the back, Baba enhanced the proportions of her oval face with long hair drawn back and knotted in a loose bun on the nape of her neck. Instead of the long, loose dresses that embraced the new freedom, her silhouette was crisp and exquisite. “Lady Alexandra, in dark blue, emphasised the attractions of the perfectly tailored suit,” recorded
The Lady
, and when she began to wear dresses of soft, peppermint-green chiffon that fitted close to her slim figure yet floated as if in a breeze, it was a fashion quickly copied.

It was also observed that the royal princes greatly admired this new young beauty. The Prince of Wales, several years older and deeply in love with Mrs. Dudley Ward, the pretty wife of a Liberal MP, thought of her affectionately as a glamorous golfing or dancing partner for his youngest brother, Prince George. Another link was her friendship with Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the beloved of the Duke of York.

Prince George soon became deeply smitten, sending her little notes and presents from the palace (“Baba dear, here is the bag I promised but you'll probably think it is
too
awful. If so let me know and I'll try and get another”). Baba taught him to drive in her little two-seater—for a young man to take a girl “motoring” was a favorite courtship ploy in those days when cars were still comparatively new, roads were empty, narrow and twisting, and most people were driven by their chauffeurs. With no driver's licenses, learning to drive was considered the work of an afternoon, and the tutoring took place on the way back from a morning's golf at Swinley.

“I did so enjoy Saturday and we did have fun even tho' your poor nerves must have been terribly shaken from my driving,” wrote Prince George on his return to HMS
Excellent
in Portsmouth. Both of them had been startled, as they stood up to change seats on arriving at the main road, to see a Daimler pass with the stately figure of Queen Mary in the back—the prince was already overdue at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. “We must have some more golf and I hope so much to see you again soon and you are so sweet to me. Please don't forget the wee photie, will you? . . . I'll write again soon. Much love. G.”