Basil Street Blues (45 page)

This letter shows the paradoxical device of his new authority. It has the regretful air of an employer dismissing an employee. Its succinct superiority must have been galling. But anxious not to offend George’s Uncle Frederick at the Valuation Office, Charles Townshend offered him his job back as cashier. George thanked him – however ‘I prefer to discontinue my services’.

In retrospect G.B.S. applied a blinding Shavian polish to his arrival in England. Armed with the English language he proposed to advance on London and become ‘a professional man of genius’. ‘When I left Dublin I left (a few private friendships apart) no society that did not disgust me,’ he wrote. ‘To this day my sentimental regard for Ireland does not include the capital. I am not enamored of failure, of poverty, of obscurity, and of the ostracism and contempt which these imply; and these were all that Dublin offered to the enormity of my unconscious ambition.’

‘Like Hamlet I lack ambition and its push,’ he wrote. Yet it was not ambition he lacked: it was (like Hamlet) advancement. He insisted that he never struggled, but was pushed slowly up by the force of his ability. ‘It is not possible to escape from the inexorable obligation to succeed on your own merits,’ he confessed. He did not cross the Irish Sea for love of the English. ‘Emigration was practically compulsory,’ he told St John Ervine.

Agnes died of phthisis on 27 March. Between the two opportunities offered by her death and that of the book-keeper, George had never hesitated. Looking back on his twenty years in Ireland he summed up: ‘My home in Dublin was a torture and my school was a prison and I had to go through a treadmill of an office.’

He packed a carpet bag, boarded the North Wall boat and arrived in London. It was a fine spring day and he solemnly drove in a ‘growler’ from Euston to Victoria Grove. Shortly afterwards he travelled down to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight following Agnes’s funeral there. The family selected a headstone and an epitaph to be cut on it: ‘
TO BE
WITH CHRIST WHICH IS FAR BETTER
’ – from a passage in Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians
where Paul compares the folly of living with the wisdom of dying. Nearly sixty years later Shaw was to write to Margaret Mackail, exposing what he felt about his own childhood: ‘as the world is not at present fit for children to live in why not give the little invalids a gorgeous party, and when they have eaten and danced themselves to sleep, turn on the gas and let them all wake up in heaven?’

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I am indebted to many individuals and organisations in the preparation of
Basil Street Blues
. Among the former are: Margit Andréen, I. V. and A-M. Attwell, David Benedictus, Jeffrey Bowman, Christopher Capron, Anne Chisholm, Anders Clason, Keith Clements, G. C. Frowde, Viola Germain, Hilda Gledhill, Winston Graham, Vicky Hall, Leslie Hodgson, Jennifer Holden, John Holroyd, Sessie Hylander, Jeremy Isaacs, Robert Lescher, Maureen Levenson, Richard Magor, John Mein, Niall McMonagle, Michael Ockenden, Anders Öfverstöm, Roger Packham, Griffy Philipps, Merle Rafferty, Michael and Moussie Sayers, Michael Seifert, Michael Sevenoaks, Ronald Stent, Lena Svanberg, Richard Vickers, Mary Young.

I am most grateful to: Head of Administration, the General Council of the Bar; Mary Stewart, Clinic Secretary, Family & Child Guidance Service, Royal County of Berkshire; County Solicitor, Royal County of Berkshire; R. J. Ewing, Bircham & Co, solicitors; Jonathan Barker and Alastair Niven, Literature Department, the British Council, London; Michelle Appleton, the British Council, France; Clare College Archive, Cambridge; Mark Nicholls, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cambridge University Library; Timothy H. Duke, Chester Herald, College of Arms; Naomi da Silva, Family Proceedings Department, the Court Service, Somerset House; P. Hatfield, Eton College Archivist; Mike Waller, Gallerie Moderne; P. Berney, Registration Directorate, General Medical Council; R. Simpson, Suprevisor, Glasgow Necropolis; Avril Gordon, Glasgow City Council; Mark Jones, Deputy Librarian, Gray’s Inn Library; Nadene Hansen, Company Archivist at Harrods; Peter Hunter, Librarian, Harrow School; the Insolvency Service; Elizabeth Stratton, Assistant Archivist, King’s College, Library, Cambridge; T. Shepherd, Regulatory Enquiry Services, the Law Society; Office for National Statistics; N. P. Willmoth, Senior Financial Services Officer, Life & Investment Services, Nat West; Colin Matthew, editor of the
New Dictionary of National Biography
; Jean Rose, Library Manager, Reed Book Services Limited; V. J. Baxter, Local Studies Librarian, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames; Royal Air Force Personnel Management Agency; the Sandhurst Collection; Scottish Record Office; S. J. Berry, Senior Archivist, Somerset County Record Office; Anthony Howard, Obituaries Editor,
The Times
; Jonathan Smith, Manuscripts Cataloguer, Trinity College Library, Cambridge; J. P. Rudman, Archivist, Uppingham School; Le Secrétaire Général délégé, Vernet-les-Bains; Patrick Mclure, Secrtary, Wykehamist Society.

To Sarah Johnson, who is now the only person in the world who can read my handwriting, especially when it appears between the lines of my typing, I owe special thanks for putting everything on to immaculate disks. I am also grateful to Philippa Harrison for her editorial sensitivity and thoroughness, to Caroline North, and to Kate Truman.

Quotations from
Eton Renewed
:
A History from 1860 to the Present Day
(1994) by Tim Card are reproduced with the permission of the publisher, John Murray. Lines from Nevill Coghill’s translation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s
Troilus and Criseyde
are reproduced with the permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London on behalf of the Estate of Nevill Coghill. Copyright Nevill Coghill 1971. Glass sculptures by René Lalique, photographed by Andrew Stewart:
Perche
(Contents page),
Longchamp
(page 1),
Renard
(page 99),
Tête de Paon
(page 115),
Tête de Coq
(page 301).

Michael Holroyd – the most famous biographer in Britain – turns his attention upon himself and his own family in
Basil Street Blues
(the title comes from the Basil Street Hotel where the author was conceived in the 1930s.) Born into a family rich in eccentricity, Holroyd was largely brought up by his grandparents in Maidenhead because his exotic Swedish mother and reserved English father couldn’t stand living together. (His grandparents’ marriage provided no better model – his grandfather having had a four-year affair with a woman he met at a bus stop before coming back to his grandmother). Towards the end of Holroyd’s parents’ lives he persuaded them to write their own stories and using the results, plus his own memories and researches he has written this moving and self-revealing book.

L
YTTON
S
TRACHEY

"Holroyd’s prose... is as elegant as ever. He is one of the few biographers who has retained a pronounced sense of humour.”

The Times

"Masterly: full of new insight."

Sunday Express

"You will be won over by Strachey’s originality, independence and humanity; by his hatred of humbug and prudery; by his life-saving gift for comedy."

Evening Standard

A
UGUSTUS
J
OHN

"An entertaining, essentially comic story.. Holroyd tells it with great skill and elegance.”

Sunday Telegraph

"One of the most entertaining lives ever written... Very funny... thought-provoking."

Mail On Sunday

"A wonderfully engrossing, entertaining and even moving book."

Daily Telegraph

B
ERNARD
S
HAW

"A masterly exercise in biographical magic.”

Spectator

"This elegant volume gives the quintessence of Shaw...[it does] justice to a great Irishman."

Irish Independent