Too Close to the Sun (3 page)

In February 1887, Henry moved his brood into 22 Prince of Wales Terrace, a new town house in a Kensington cul-de-sac that he had taken at six guineas a week until the end of May. Haverholme Priory had to be tenanted. “Alack, HP is a thing of the past,” Henry wrote in his diary the day the maids unpacked the trunks. But it wasn’t. He held on to Haverholme for another forty years. When he really did have to let it go, the grief of it killed him.

On March 9, Henry left England, comforting himself on the steamer with Thompson’s
History of the Paraguayan War.
Almost as soon as he arrived in Queensland, he realized that the financial prognosis was disastrous. Back in the 1870s, he and Harold had started a mining company in addition to the cattle station. Since the California rush of 1849–50, the prospector had been a familiar figure in the imperial landscape. When a vigilant opportunist from New South Wales recognized, in the Californian seams, rock formations similar to those at home, he returned to the mountains of his youth, found a mine, and triggered the Australian gold rush. After yellowy glints were spotted in a creek running off Mount Britten, on the western fall of the coastal range, Harold and Henry sank money into a mill at the diggings. With land in England no longer a gold mine—even without a gambling earl—the Finch Hattons were speculating on any possible fresh source of income. But Henry returned to find that all efforts to float the company had failed. “No sale is possible now at almost any price,” he concluded.

It was not all bad news that year. Back in Prince of Wales Terrace, baby Denys was born on April 24, 1887. His eyes were topsoil-brown, and he was long. The news reached his father by cable sixteen days later. “Hurrah at last!” Henry wrote in his diary that night. “No words to express the relief and delight.” But Henry was suffering from rheumatism in his shoulder and a bad case of homesickness. “My darling Nan,” he wrote on August 15, after receiving the mail, “I thank everything [
sic
] seems cosy and happy…I do long for her so dreadfully.” Although his rheumatism turned into sciatica (“Never had so much torture in my life”), Henry managed to keep up his fishing trips, got in a spot of possum shooting, and even had a pop at the cockatoos. He was glad to see the back of the year, notwithstanding the acquisition of another son. “So ends 1887, and I hope 1888 may have more luck in store for us all,” he wrote in his diary on December 31. “It’s been a vile year for me on the whole, away from home and bothered with station affairs and minor anxieties—and mostly alone.” Then, on June 15, he learned by cable that his gambling half brother, George, had died at the age of seventy-two. “Poor dear old W. [Winchilsea],” Henry wrote in his diary. “I hope he knew how fond of him we all were. But he was always thinking we must hate him for ruin brought on the family by him. We didn’t.” George’s only son had predeceased him, and the title—but not the money, as most of that had gone to the bookmakers—passed to his half brother Murray, who was thirty-six.

WHEN DENYS WAS
a few weeks old, Nan and the children moved up to the Haverholme estate in Lincolnshire. Situated a hundred miles north of London, where the torso of England flattens out and slims down, the village on the estate, which was called Ewerby, was populated by tenant farmers and agricultural laborers. The single road that wound in and out was rarely troubled by motor vehicles (until 1896 the open-country speed limit was four miles an hour and each car, preceded by a man with a red flag, required a crew of three). The Winchilseas owned almost the whole village—the pub was called the Finch Hatton Arms—and Nan and the children could walk to the Priory without leaving family land. Their new abode, the Cedars, was the Haverholme dower house. It was a solid redbrick structure overly decorated in the late-Victorian fashion, with shardy potted palms in every recess and porcelain gewgaws on dark, heavy sideboards. But the servants had been with the family for many years, and Nan was a natural homemaker. Purple loosestrife was still blazing around the pond when she and the children moved in, and blackberries lolled from the bushes in Evedon Wood. Denys, nicknamed Tiny, was wheeled in his perambulator along the lanes north of the village and on to the Priory, past the clay pits of the brickworks and through the cow parsley and creeping cinquefoil of the deer park, where the air, damp from the Slea, was scented with water mint.

Henry’s elder brother Murray was much in evidence on the estate. A trim and determined man with a handlebar mustache, Uncle Murray was a towering figure in the world of egg collecting. He had the finest collection of eagles’ eggs in the country, all stolen from the nest personally. In 1875, he had married Edith Harcourt, granddaughter of the second Earl of Sheffield. The flighty Edith was proud of her eighteen-inch waist—one can hardly imagine, looking at photographs, where her organs were stored. She lived in the grand manner, sending out stiff dinner invitations printed with the instruction “Decorations,” and at her London residence footmen served beluga caviar on solid silver platters, followed by
Suprêmes de Turbotin Grand Duc, Carré d’Agneau Pré Salé,
cold pineapple soufflé, and roe on toast. Murray, on the other hand, was a deeply serious figure who worked tirelessly to discharge his civic responsibilities, whether he was investing in drainage in Ewerby, setting up schemes to assist farmers and their laborers, or presiding over meetings in his role as high sheriff of Lincolnshire. When he inherited the title from the Gambling Earl, he found that checks signed “Winchilsea” were hard to cash, and immediately set about retrenchment. The land portfolio stood at just under thirteen thousand acres, and this he reduced to eight thousand through the sale of Eastwell Park, a Kentish estate with a particularly dazzling mansion. It took Murray years to untangle the problems George had bequeathed. According to
The Times,
“the succession led to a vast network of legal difficulties upon which, it is stated, no fewer than 22 firms of lawyers were engaged at different times.” At the end of it, finances were savagely depleted, but nobody was going to starve. Rents were still flowing in from different parts of the country, even if they had fallen.

Murray was fascinated by the development of the motor vehicle; this, he was sure, would catch on, and he foresaw its potential contribution to farming methods and distribution. Many were still hostile to the introduction of cars, largely because the landed class had invested heavily in the railway. But Murray, one of the strain of male Finch Hattons who did not favor half measures, was among the first to celebrate when, in 1896, an act of Parliament recognized a class of road machine weighing less than three tons and exempted it from the three-man-crew rule, at the same time raising the speed limit to twelve miles an hour. In honor of this development, champions of the internal combustion engine organized the first Motor Car Tour from Whitehall to Brighton. On November 14, Murray inaugurated the rally by burning a red flag at the starting line, and he drove the route himself, presiding over the official dinner at a hotel the same night. But Murray was to regret his involvement in motoring. He had become chairman of the Great Horseless Carriage Company. This outfit, based on a good idea, was managed by a rogue named Harry J. Lawson, a bicycle maker turned motor trader who had learned a few tricks about making money during the bicycling boom of the 1890s. He had started a syndicate that was to acquire the rights to all cars sold in Britain. After hauling in thousands of investors, Lawson juggled shares and accounts and took anyone who appeared to be infringing his patents to court. There was a loud din of publicity when the whole rotten edifice came tumbling down, and Murray lost his entire investment. It was a trickster’s market, with so many peers struggling to diversify, and in 1898
Punch
ran a cartoon of a lord displaying a sandwich board advertising the Bust Tyre Company. Another fraudster actually paid Murray and two other peers to join his board—a fact he freely declared during his bankruptcy proceedings (all reported in
The Times
), stating quite truthfully that with lordly names on his prospectus he was able to recruit subscribers.

ON AUGUST 6, 1888,
Henry left Australia for good. He and Nan had been apart for almost eighteen months. Nine weeks later, at the Cedars, he picked up his second son for the first time. Denys’s hair, at first light brown, had darkened to the same sweet-sherry color as his father’s. He had inherited, too, his father’s long nose, but not his gloomily deep-set eyes: Denys’s eyes were wider apart, and shaped like large almonds. Both he and his sister, Topsy, with her flaxen-gold hair, were angelically handsome. Toby was the odd one out. He had a wider face and a squarer chin, and less of his mother’s streamlined fluidity.

The children’s lives were enmeshed with those of their Haverholme cousins—Murray and Edith’s children Muriel, six years older than Topsy, and George, Viscount Maidstone, known as Maidy, who was the same age as Toby. The five chased one another along the warm gravel paths of the Priory, followed the undergardener as he trenched celery, and netted sparrows in the ivy after dark. They nursed finches by the kitchen range, cornered the butler in the pantry to solicit arrowroot biscuits, and trapped mice in the passages, stuffing their bodies into matchboxes then forgetting they were there. When the cedars were dumb with snow, the cousins threw paper darts from the window of the day nursery and pored over picture books in the firelit library. In spring, they floated homemade rafts down the Slea, picked off the snails that stuck to the tendrils of the water buttercups, and built crow’s nests in the yews, which they reached by rope ladders and stocked with chocolate creams. In August, the whole family decamped to rented villas in the genteel resort of Felixstowe in Suffolk, Granny Fanny in attendance with her own army of servants and Uncle Harold coming and going from town by train. “Chix having a fine time by the briny,” Nan reported to her diary in June 1891. But in March 1892, Maidy died of influenza in Cannes. He was seven. Denys was not quite five. This death changed everything. Provided Edith had no more sons, when Murray died the earldom would pass to Denys’s father. Henry went to Sleaford Station to meet the little coffin, and walked behind it all the way to the Priory.

When Denys was six, the family moved back to the capital. Both the Priory and the Cedars were let, and for a decade London was their main residence. The volatile existence of the Finch Hattons reflected the uncertain times. In the 1890s, agriculture was so depressed that landed families regularly let their piles and squatted in town houses. There was little stigma attached; it was part of the social, political, and economic upheaval of an uneasy decade in which landowners found themselves displaced from property that had been in the family for centuries. When the Liberal chancellor introduced death duties in 1894 (and on a graduated principle, too), the breakup of the huge estates quickened pace. Few great houses were built, and hundreds were sold or demolished in the new trend toward liquidation as opposed to accumulation. Like many, Henry persevered in his quest to find new sources of revenue. In 1890 and 1891, he went prospecting in Ireland, without success. On January 1, 1892, Nan wrote in her diary, “I wish us all joy—as much happiness and rather more prosperity than last year.” But life was still good for the rich in the richest city of the richest country in the world. The poorest of the poor, meanwhile—some as young as six—fashioned matches at the Bryant and May factory in London’s East End for eleven and a half hours a day. They were fined if they dropped a match, and many developed bone cancer from the phosphorus fumes. One-third of Londoners lived in poverty. In 1889 the dockers, who broke their backs unloading freight shipped in triumph from all corners of the empire, had gone on strike. While Denys was busy growing up, the world that had sustained the great landed fortunes was dissolving in the acid bath of labor disputes. In 1902, when Lord Salisbury resigned as prime minister for the last time, an era died. Many, unwilling to change with the times, were to seek a new world elsewhere, or, at least, to seek the old world in a new setting.