Basil Street Blues (5 page)

As a result of intensive coaching, my grandfather did pretty well at Uppingham. Stephenson noted in 1892 that he was ‘developing into a good run-getting bat’, though he ‘did not punish the loose balls with sufficient severity’. Also, Stephenson added in Fraser’s last year, he was perhaps ‘rather nervous’. This nervousness, his lack of aggression, and the sad fact that he was ‘not a safe pair of hands’ may be said to have marked his later life beyond the cricket field.

Nevertheless, my grandfather was one of the stars in the new philathletic era. This was a vintage patch in Uppingham cricket, full of masterly innings, decisive victories, sensational fight-backs, astonishing records (Fraser making his contribution to all this brave achievement with a 75 against Uppingham’s deadly rivals Repton). He quite outshone Pat, one of the ordinary boys for whom Thring had been concerned, and immediately took precedence over him in class,
Holroyd mi
being placed in a higher form than
Holroyd ma
. Perhaps it was this paradox that helped to gain for my grandfather a reputation for academic brilliance in the family years later. We would have found it difficult to believe that ‘Uncle Pat’ was actually a long way below average, that Fraser himself never reached the upper division of the Classical Sixth where the scholars clustered, or that he won no medals, distinctions or prizes. He appears in several photographs of Constable’s House, the school praepostors, and the cricket eleven. All the boys look far older than similar groups in the twentieth century, and no boy looks older than my grandfather. I can quite easily recognise the man I knew in his seventies and eighties – indeed he already looks nearly half that age, weighed down with a Johnsonian heaviness. I find these photographs curiously disturbing. No one is smiling. Between this solemn young boy seen with his family at Eastbourne and the prematurely-aged praepostor of Uppingham, did my grandfather have any carefree childhood and adolescence? What I have discovered suggests that his youth was much delayed.

Pat left Uppingham after three years and went on to the Military Academy at Sandhurst. That, at any rate, was what my father understood. But ‘Uncle Pat’ did not go to Sandhurst and does not turn out to have been the professional soldier who, with five medals blazing on his chest, marches across my father’s narrative. He was an amateur soldier in the auxiliary military force called the Militia which was enlisted locally, sometimes paraded for drill and could be called on in wartime. A photograph taken in the mid-eighteen-nineties at Eastbourne shows him in his uniform, a mild and handsome face with a well-designed moustache nicely waxed at its tips.

While Pat was drilling with the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Fraser went to King’s College, Cambridge. My father writes enthusiastically of his playing there against the two most brilliant cricketers of the times, C.B. Fry and Ranjitsinhji. In fact he seems to have given up cricket and did not get a Blue. My father also believed that ‘he was an excellent mathematician, worked hard, finally taking a First’. The printed register of King’s admissions records him as having been awarded a Third in the History Tripos of 1897. As something starts going wrong, so the gap between ascertainable fact and family legend widens.

Though my father liked to picture Fraser making lifelong friendships in the glamorous atmosphere of Cambridge, he suspected there had been some setback and attributed it to varicose veins (which he himself had), brought on by the ‘tight elastic garters’ Fraser was obliged to wear. This rumour of illness took many forms and I remember hearing how my grandfather’s brilliant prospects as an oarsman had been blighted by his hernia. The truth appears to have been more complicated.

Towards the end of 1894 Fraser was given what the Major-General indignantly describes as an ‘arbitrary order, compelling him to give up Classics and take up History’ by his college tutor, Alfred Cooke. Cooke was an Old Etonian Classics scholar with a bewildering medley of occupations – he was a priest, a famous versifier, a conchologist and a talented footballer. Early in 1895, Fraser is asking his friend Oscar Browning for advice as to what he should do. The prolonged difficulty in getting tuition lost him ‘a full year’.

This friendship with Oscar Browning is surprising. A hugely fat socialite and friend of Oscar Wilde, he had been dismissed as an assistant-master at Eton ‘on unsubstantiated charges of misconduct’ and then returned to King’s as a lecturer in history. A notorious ‘character’ and (in the words of E.F. Benson) a ‘genius flawed by abysmal fatuity’, Browning inhabited a world I had never remotely associated with my grandfather.

By the summer of 1896 my grandfather, having crammed two years’ work into one, seems to have had some kind of breakdown, raising in the examiners’ minds a question of whether he should be allowed to stay on and complete his studies. While they were deliberating, his father sent him out to Cape Town with his brother Pat (the two of them were good friends) ‘in the hope the entire change would keep him from brooding over his misfortunes’. But ‘the wound still rankles’, he reported. What was this wound? The Major-General wrote in confidence to Oscar Browning with some attempt at an explanation.

He was not well at the time of the examination: shortly before it commenced he heard of the sudden death of his Godfather who was his best friend, and a great help to him. He was working 8 to 9 hours a day, & at night unable to sleep brooding over his loss… He is not of a nature to confide in others, & keeps his feelings to himself. I am about the only one he confides in. I do not think Mr Cook [
sic
] understands him in the slightest, & I do not imagine he would take the trouble to do so… he has not met with much consideration since he has been at the university, excepting from yourself, of whom he always speaks in the warmest praise.

It is obvious that Fraser was unhappy at Cambridge and not prospering there. The contrast with those simple sunlit days at Uppingham must have been dismaying. He had entered a far more ambiguous world.

When the decision was made to allow my grandfather to stay on for his third year, the Major-General wired the happy news to Cape Town. So that autumn, Fraser returned to King’s, dividing his vacations between Eastbourne and an apartment in London at 22 Montague Place, near the Reading Room of the British Museum.

But it was a gloomy time. In a letter sent from The Links shortly before Christmas 1896, the Major-General wrote that ‘it would have been a great pleasure’ to invite Oscar Browning to lunch or dine (he had apparently tried to invite himself), ‘but my Daughter is so poorly I regret I cannot ask anyone to the House’. So the family rumour of her illness had been based on fact. But what was wrong with her? Had she found out about her mother’s suicide? Was she suspected of having inherited through the female line some mental instability? There were whispers of a scandal that my own father picked up when a child on the only occasion he saw her. He refers to ‘some story the details of which I never heard, about some awful experience that Norah had at the hands of some man… whom she was visiting’.

During 1897 and 1898 The Links became something of a sanatorium. ‘Progress is very slow, almost imperceptible, & it will take a long time before, if ever, I am myself again,’ the Major-General wrote in a very shaky hand shortly before Norah’s twentieth birthday and when he himself was in his seventy-fifth year. According to the
Eastbourne Chronicle
, he had suffered a stroke and was partly paralysed. As for Fraser, ‘I hope he has prospered,’ the old man wrote to Oscar Browning: ‘it will be a crushing blow to him if he has not for he has… I know done his best.’

In February 1897 my great-grandfather made his Will. He leaves The Links, its grounds and contents (‘furniture plated goods linen glass china books ornaments manuscripts pictures prints statuary musical instruments and articles of vertu…and all wines liquors and consumable stores and all my plants and garden tools’) in trust to his elder son Patrick. The property is given to him under the condition that, until he reaches the age of twenty-five (when it becomes his own absolutely), he allows his brother and sister to live there if they wish, so that The Links can ‘be maintained as a home for my family’.

‘The watches jewels trinkets and personal ornaments belonging to me at the time of my death’, many of which must have once belonged to Norah’s mother, he leaves to Norah herself. The residuary estate is to be divided equally in trust between his three children.

There are pages of instruction designed to protect his daughter from fortune-hunting men. Her third part in the estate is to be retained by trustees ‘for as long as she shall remain unmarried and whether she shall be competent or incompetent to give legal discharge’. In the event of her marriage, this Holroyd money shall be for ‘her separate use free from marital control and without power of alienation’. The one-third interest in the estate then becomes vested in her and the capital eventually passes to her children after they come of age. It is evident that her father had given much thought to these provisions, considerably more than to his second son who is bequeathed nothing beyond his one-third share of the residuary estate. But after Fraser was awarded his degree in the autumn of 1897, his father added a codicil to the Will leaving him various exotic Indian debentures and securities, including 92,500 rupees at the Bank of Bengal and a thousand shares in the fabulous Rajmai Tea Company, the sound and substance of which were to echo down the years – and were still echoing strangely through my childhood, more sound than substance then.

A second codicil Charles Holroyd signed on 14 July 1898 leaves all his staff an extra year’s wages because of the burden placed on them by his long illness.

Six weeks later Patrick marries. His wife Coral is the daughter of another Major-General, and the wedding takes place on 7 September 1898 at the parish church of St Mary’s in Bath. Fraser is present, but no one else from Patrick’s family. The husband and wife then go off for their honeymoon, and Fraser returns to The Links. His father was now dying. The cause of his death was given as thirty-two hours of cerebral haemorrhaging with convulsions leading to a coma and eventually culminating in respiratory paralysis. My grandfather was present during this final agony of illness and he is named as ‘informant’ on the death certificate, dated 19 September.

The funeral was held four days later at St John’s Church, and the body was interred at Ocklynge cemetery. Fraser was there, also Pat and his wife Coral with her father, Major-General Montague. Colonel and Mrs Hannay were listed among the mourners. A friend from India, Richard Magor, connected with the Rajmai tea plantations, came to the service; so did numerous nephews, nieces and in-laws, as well as Mary Easlea, but not Norah Holroyd, the dead man’s daughter. There were special wreaths from the coachman, gardeners and indoor servants, as well as from his late wife’s family. There was none from Norah. But there is one ‘in ever loving memory of my dear father, from his heart-broken Fraser’.

Probate was granted at the end of October, and the Major-General’s estate was valued at £80,913 8s 10d. A hundred years later such a sum would be roughly equivalent to four-and-a-half million pounds.

On 4 June 1899 Patrick was twenty-five and The Links became his absolute property. He immediately sold the house which was converted into an expensive ‘Ladies School’ – among its pupils were to be Edwina Ashley, god-daughter of Edward VII, later to gain fame as Lady Mountbatten; and the Marchioness of Bath who, as Daphne Fielding, was to write a celebrated autobiography,
Mercury Presides
. Later, The Links was bought by the Methodist Guild, and became a Christian Holiday Centre, its interior partitioned and sub-divided by the tortured geometry of fire regulations.

The Militia was to do good service in the Boer War and Lieutenant Patrick Holroyd was one of those who volunteered to embark for South Africa. He took his wife Coral, and there, in the summer of 1900, their son Ivor was born. Fraser, who accurately described his occupation as being ‘of independent means’, had meanwhile fallen in love, a complaint that was to carry him off to Ireland. But while the two brothers were abroad what became of Norah? There was a family rumour that she died young. But my father wrote of having seen her once when he was aged about six – ‘someone lying down who was very gentle to a little boy’ and who (my aunt recalled) had ‘beautiful hair’. That must have been approximately in 1913. So I went in search of a death certificate.

Birth, death and marriage certificates were still held in 1996 at St Catherine’s House in the Aldwych. The National Statistics Public Search Room there looked like a medieval place of torment. I joined the panting crowds of fellow-researchers, sweating, glazed, cursing as we bumped against one another, jostling with decades of unwieldy volumes and staring at the lists, and more lists, of the dead. All of us apparently were hunting for our family stories. But I could find no death certificate for Norah Palmer Holroyd. Had she secretly married? She seemed to have vanished.

I had no other information about her, except a whisper my father had picked up from among the grown-ups that she lived with a Dr Macnamara. The family whispers had it that he was a Svengali, with an uncanny hold over this unmarried girl, plotting to get her money. There appeared to be no way of checking this. The trail had ended.

Then I had an idea. Maybe Norah made a Will. Wills and certificates of divorce were then lodged at Somerset House which was just the other side of the Aldwych from St Catherine’s House. The crowds are less dense there and the torture more refined. No one who searches for a Will was allowed to take off his or her overcoat in winter lest it contain high explosives. The central heating was kept high, very high, and all the staff worked in shirtsleeves. In this unbalanced atmosphere I began my hot pursuit. I started in the year 1913, tracking backwards and forwards, and came across a Will Norah had made in 1907. This revealed that she died, aged thirty-six, on 22 October 1913. There had been no death certificate because she died at Vernet-les-Bains, a spa town in the far south west of France that was popular among British travellers in the late nineteenth century. Evidently she had visited her brother Fraser, and met her nephews and niece, shortly before setting out on that last journey.