Basil Street Blues (8 page)

My grandfather was determined to turn expensive failure into expansive success. He acted boldly, moving from 15 Sloane Street to larger premises, Imperial Court, between Harrods and Harvey Nichols, round the corner in Basil Street. Here he sought to develop the business. In the nineteen-twenties directories, Breves is listed as ‘builders, decorators, electrical, heating and sanitary engineers, furnishers, designers and manufacturers of panelling, parquet floors, upholstery, carpets, bedding, curtains, blinds, picture restorers, vacuum cleaners, removals’. In short, Breves did everything and, like a circus performer, did it all at once. It made a small loss each year.

But my grandfather was still a man of wealth. Brocket, his home at Maidenhead, was an imposing, red-brick, Edwardian house with attics and cellars full of servants. The family owned a carriage and pair and, after 1908 when Fraser bought an Enfield Allday, they had a car. The ex-coachman, Thatcher, drove it during the week and my grandfather took over the wheel at weekends. Then there was my grandmother Adeline, ‘one of the most accomplished backseat drivers in the country’, according to my father. Fraser himself did not drive for long: the new technology did not suit him. The Enfield Allday, for example, having no self-starter, had to be ‘wound with a starting handle’, my father remembered. ‘There was too a petrol tap which had to be turned on to allow the petrol to flow from the tank to the carburettor. This small point my father always overlooked. My brother and I used to hide behind the garage and listen to him trying to start the car. It was rare entertainment.’

My father’s time at Scaitcliffe ended abruptly. In his account he wrote: ‘When I was twelve Vickers made me sit for the Common Entrance examination. He did so, he said, to accustom me to sitting an exam. He made it abundantly clear that I hadn’t the faintest chance of passing, so it was to everyone’s dismay that I achieved the bottom form at Eton.’ He was still in the lower half of Scaitcliffe and had been there little more than two-and-a-half years. He had obviously longed to get away, but did so just as he was beginning to enjoy the place.

What he had endured at Scaitcliffe, he now endured again at Eton, only it was worse because his brother was not simply a glowing memory but a very obvious presence in the school – ‘one hell of a big fellow’. And he was not pleased to see his younger brother turning up so unexpectedly. Kenneth was ‘in the library’ which meant he was among the elite of their school house. He played for the ‘twenty-two’ (Eton’s second cricket eleven) and also had his Field colours (which meant he was in the top team of that peculiar Eton game which somehow fails to combine the qualities of soccer and rugger). Above all Kenneth was a member of the fabulous Eton society known as ‘Pop’ which meant he could wear fantastically coloured waistcoats and ‘stick-up’ white collars that dazzled younger boys. In the school hierarchy it was impossible for such a swell to talk to a lower boy. Not understanding the social oligarchy of the school, Basil was hurt that his brother with whom he sometimes stole apples from the potting shed roof at Brocket had no word for him at Eton. ‘My brother actively disliked me and avoided as much as possible having anything to do with me,’ he remembered. He obviously embarrassed Kenneth. ‘As usual when nervous I gave my half-witted display,’ he concluded with a Thurber-like touch, ‘and set a seal on my misery.’

In his diaries, the novelist Anthony Powell, writing some seventy years later, remembers being in the same division as my father, whom he described as being ‘red-faced, hearty, one would say boring’. But he adds that he ‘did not know him at all’. Since there was two years’ difference in age between them, this Holroyd seems more likely to have been my uncle who was closer in age to Powell and, by Etonian standards, far more boringly successful.

Basil forgot the trick he picked up at Scaitcliffe of keeping ‘out of the way’ and reverted to his nervous habit of talking ‘my head off’. That was the voice my mother was first to hear on board the
Suecia
when she sailed to England, the voice which was so raucous on bad days and, on good days, could ‘talk anybody into anything’. That he did not relearn the discretion of his late Scaitcliffe period may have been due to his removal from Eton after a little over two years. ‘I got double pneumonia and was taken in an ambulance to Brocket.’ After an examination by the family doctor and a period of convalescence looked after by Nan, he was sent to Leysin in Switzerland. ‘I was pronounced in good order within a few weeks,’ he wrote. ‘Then came the question of whether I returned to Eton or not. My mother, still convinced that I was ailing, opted for a Swiss education. She found the story of my fight for life very tellable at her weekly bridge parties. So I was sent to Chillon College.’

There my father’s narrative stops. The difference between Chillon and Eton ‘was immense’, he wrote. ‘I had spent most of my time loathing Eton.’ Yet he would have preferred to return there than remain a prisoner of Chillon. Kenneth had now left for Clare College, Cambridge; so Basil had survived the bad years, and happier times lay ahead. I never heard my father speak of Chillon College which must have been near Geneva but which no longer exists (neither the Municipalité de Leysin nor the Fédération Suisse des Ecoles Privées has any knowledge of it). It was evidently one of those private boarding schools that specialise in educating American, British, French, German and Italian nationals, some of whose parents work in Switzerland, others of whom are sent abroad to be ‘finished’. For my father it represented exile, under the shadow of failure at Eton.

He remained in Chillon for the best part of two years. But now that people could travel abroad again in the early nineteen-twenties, his family was able to visit him, starting their holidays in Switzerland and travelling leisurely back through France. It was at Dinard, the fashionable watering-place in Brittany, my father remembered, that during one of these journeys Fraser first saw a display of Lalique glass. Later, in about 1926, he went to a Lalique exhibition mounted at showrooms in Great Portland Street. It had been brought over to London by the Curzon family following a grand exposition of decorative art in Paris. Though the glass did not attract great attention in the British newspapers, it impressed my grandfather who went over to Paris the following year, saw René Lalique and tried to get himself appointed sole agent for the glass in ‘Britain and the Empire’. He was just too late, the agency having been acquired by ‘a likeable rogue’ called Keir. But Fraser managed to pull off a deal with Mr Keir. He now had the magical ingredient, like the earlier ‘Breves Process’, necessary for success.

Between the mid-nineteen-twenties and the mid-nineteen-thirties my grandfather pursued an extraordinary strategy. He sold for cash, or lodged with Barclays Bank as a means of raising loans, all his Rajmai Tea shares – indeed he got rid of ninety more shares than he actually possessed (these ninety shares were ‘sold’ to his friend ‘Nipper’ Anderson and must have been part of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’). He then acquired another 1,000 shares and used them to get more loans. By these means he raised the equivalent today of almost one million pounds. What was so strange about this programme is that it went against everything in which he believed. He disapproved of selling shares, most especially Rajmai shares, because it struck him as an act of disloyalty. It was this rapid buying and selling, this playing of the market, that he had disliked in Lowenfelt. Also, tea was doing rather well in the nineteen-twenties before the government placed a fourpenny tax on it. The Industrial Fatigue Research Board had come up with the finding that ‘a cup of tea aids efficiency and curbs industrial discontent’. It was patriotic to drink Indian tea in Britain. You drank it for prosperity as you would later dig vegetables for victory. A survey in 1927 showed that the British were drinking more tea and less beer – and also that birth rate figures were falling.

But Lalique glass dazzled Fraser and, though they did not guess why he had taken this dramatic change of direction, it seems to have been uniformly popular in his family. Adeline liked having it around the house; Yolande thought it beautiful; and the two boys, Kenneth and Basil, saw a future for themselves in this new family business – a far brighter future than on a tea plantation. René Lalique, then in his mid-sixties, had become recognised as a pioneer in this Age of Glass. He was an astonishingly versatile artist who exploited its texture and colour, using motifs from nature (flowers, fish, birds, animals) in the jewellery, sculpture and ornamental tableware he designed in his Paris studio. Fraser gazed at this glass as if it were a magic crystal. He looked about him – there were hunger marches, miners’ strikes, lengthening dole queues and street demonstrations protesting against unemployment throughout Britain; there was the Wall Street Crash in the United States, civil disobedience in India, the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, revolution in Argentina, revolt in Peru, the rise of Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy, and throughout the world an economic crisis – Fraser looked and saw, reflected in his glass, that all was well. The omens were good, he decided, for further business expansion.

The Basil Street offices were converted with a Chinese-style background into glittering showrooms by 1928. A gallery, with beige carpets, walnut veneers to the showcases, and brown walls paling into ivory at the ceiling, was prepared during the early nineteen-thirties in New Bond Street. A special lighting division was set up in Newman Street, off the Tottenham Court Road. There was also a smart office in Brown’s Arcade near Oxford Circus and an apartment in Carlyle Square in Chelsea, where orders were dispatched and drinking glasses, salad dishes, scent bottles, flower vases, car mascots, glass sparrows, fish, cocks, horses, eagles and other amazing objets d’art sent out on approval. The Breves Lalique catalogues during the late nineteen-twenties and the nineteen-thirties show the wonderful range of goblets, bowls and plates, jugs and decanters, statuettes, paperweights, ashtrays that became available, decorated with leaves, dragonflies, peacocks, beetles, swallows, sunflowers, cupids, water-nymphs – a witty, decadent array.

My grandfather gave a magnificent fancy-dress party in Knightsbridge for everyone associated with ‘Breves Lalique Galleries’. It was opening time in the West End. The lights were switched on, and all stood dazzled and ready for the boom which my grandfather sensed would sweep through the business world, bringing prosperity to the nineteen-thirties and a well-earned peace into which he could retire in the nineteen-forties.

This was to be my father’s future. Meanwhile, the School Clerk’s records at Eton have him going up to University College, Oxford, in the summer of 1925. But if that was his intention he did not carry it out. Instead (and to my surprise since he never referred to it) he turns up as a pensioner (that is, an ordinary student without financial assistance from the college) at Trinity College, Cambridge, in the Michaelmas term of 1926, having passed one paper in mathematics for the ordinary Bachelor of Arts degree in Easter that year. The examination he took was called ‘The sun, the stars, and the universe’. But as he studied only one subsidiary course, ‘I do not think that your father was intending to take an ordinary B.A.,’ writes Jonathan Smith from Trinity College Library. ‘Your father’s social life here is a bit of a mystery. Unfortunately he does not show in our personal names index to club and society records, nor does he make an appearance in the
Trinity Review
.’

What a contrast to Kenneth at Clare College! He appears in pictures of all sorts of clubs, teams, societies with a sheen of maturity spread over his rather blasé handsome features, so resplendent in his gleaming blazer, so sophisticated with his casual cigarette. And he had worked a bit too. He is listed in the third class for parts I and II of the Architectural Diploma, and in the second class for part III. It is not a bad record for someone who had entered the lowly Third Form at Eton.

My father stayed only four terms at Trinity and ‘left without a degree’. He had left Scaitcliffe early by accident; he had left Eton early through illness; why had he left Cambridge early too? No one has the answer to this until I happen to mention it to one of Kenneth’s stepsons. He tells me that my uncle (his stepfather) revealed that Basil had celebrated his return from Switzerland by amassing spectacular gambling debts at Cambridge.

It must have been shortly after my father went down from Cambridge that Fraser, having paid off all his debts, made him and Kenneth directors of Breves Lalique in the late nineteen-twenties. ‘In my brother’s case it could have been all right,’ my father commented, ‘but in mine it was madness.’ Yet it was a fine madness, and nothing is so becoming in Fraser’s career as his championing of Lalique with his two sons in the decade before the Second World War.

To all but his children, Fraser had kept his marriage looking reasonably harmonious all these years. But he was deeply unhappy. Why was Adeline so discontented? Was it his fault? He was always buying her costly trinkets – surely she had everything she wanted? And that was probably the trouble: she wanted such unrewarding things and did not know why they failed to satisfy her.

Of all the Corbet sisters, Adeline had probably made the best marriage – or so it seemed. Yet she was the one who always complained. While she was crying out that she was at death’s door, it was the others who actually died. And when she prayed to God to relieve her of some disaster, it seemed that these disasters were visited on her sisters. Two of these sisters, the delicate Atty and the mysterious Sloper, had passed away very young and long ago in Ireland. Then the beautiful Alice, having finally married ‘Nipper’ Anderson, was drowned while sailing away with him for a new life in the United States. Iley now had Parkinson’s Disease – they would put her hands on the piano and she would play a few bars, then stop: and soon she stopped altogether. Lizzie’s life was also clouded by an awful tragedy, one of her twin sons having been run down and killed in the road outside her house. Her brother-in-law, the jovial Tom White, had grown enormous – over eighteen stone – and on medical advice taken up golf (though it was said he could never see the ball). He and his wife Minnie (a mere sixteen stone) would play together at Maidenhead. One day Tom broke his club and seemed to explode. He was presented with his death certificate on the sofa afterwards at Brocket. Minnie went on playing rather half-heartedly, but did not long survive him. Lannie had by this time received her passage money to Australia – had in fact received it more than once. But she would not go, even though her beloved daughter Joan, now living with her lesbian girlfriend in England, had quarrelled and refused to see her anymore. But after her ‘protectors’ Tom and Minnie died, she could no longer stay. So finally she went, and was given a pittance by her son and restricted access to her grandchildren over what was to be a lonely exile in Australia.