Authors: Paula Byrne
Mad World (24 page)
The children joined him for dinner. He told them that the only honourable thing to do was to kill himself, but that he would arrange matters to make it look like an accident. He would leave the country first, to minimise
the impact. They tried to talk him out of it: they would always remain loyal to him; they could visit him abroad. When they said goodbye to him, the girls still feared that he might commit suicide. As for the option of a new life abroad, almost everything would be lost, but at least money wasn’t a worry. Recalling the breathtaking speed with which these events unfolded, one of the daughters casually remarked: ‘Suppose my father hadn’t had any money available? Luckily, he always carried a thousand pounds.’
The undertaking never to return was signed. Bendor ensured that the Home Office warrant for his arrest on the charge of committing acts of gross homosexual indecency was kept on file. This meant that the earl’s legal status was that of an involuntary exile who would be liable for arrest if he re-entered the country.
It took a little more than twenty-four hours to make the necessary arrangements. He said goodbye to his daughters and Madresfield, and returned to London. On 8 June, with considerable sangfroid, he put in an appearance at a reception given by the Royal Institute for International Affairs at Chatham House. The next day, he crossed the Channel. On Wednesday 10 June a notice appeared in
The Times
: ‘Earl Beauchamp, accompanied by his son, the Honourable Hugh Lygon, left for Nauheim yesterday to take a cure. His daughters will join him later.’ The absence of any reference to Lady Beauchamp was pointed.
Remarks appeared in less exalted newspapers concerning his need for ‘mud baths’. Further letters of resignation were dispatched. The Baldwins remained loyal. Gossip and sneers circulated in high society: ‘Well, you must expect anything from a man that has his private chapel decorated like a barber’s pole and an ice-cream barrow.’
For the purposes of public consumption, the family maintained the fiction that their father was taking a rest cure for heart problems. In a sense, it was not a lie – his heart was indeed broken. Broken by being forced out of his beloved home and away from his children. Bendor and the countess had their revenge.
But Beauchamp had something that his wife lacked – the love and devotion of his children. It was they who decided to fix a rota to ensure that he always had one of them for company. Hugh led the way, again talking his father out of suicide once they were in Germany. As favourite
child, he spent more time with Boom than any of the others, later travelling to Australia to be with him and keep him from depression and suicidal thoughts. Though he was doomed to become an exile, Beauchamp kept in constant contact through letters to and from his children. Only Elmley refused to write to him, severing all contact, until he married and his new wife brokered a reconciliation.
Sibell, Maimie, Coote and Hugh took Boom’s side completely and would not hear a word against him. Their unwavering loyalty, despite the fact that he was seemingly the wrongdoer, was a source of anger and sorrow to their uncle, Bendor, and their mother. This caused a bitter rift that never healed.
Lady Beauchamp was determined to tell her side of the story. In May, as things were gathering to a head, she sat down to compose a letter to her children. But she could not bring herself to post it for nearly two years. She wrote copies – with minor variants – for each of the girls. She was determined to convince her children that she was the wronged party, emphasising that she had no part in the hiring of detectives and the threat to expose the scandal. Her dignified and candid account belies the story that she had no idea what homosexuality was. She told her children that their father had been shown the greatest mercy and consideration, more than any man of similar conduct could expect. She confronted the issue as boldly as she dared: ‘I think you should now be told by me first what seems right and necessary about the facts.’
In contradiction to society whispers about her being innocent of her husband’s proclivities, she now confessed: ‘For many years, I had strongly suspected that (with Daddy) all was not as it should be – and that one side of his life and desires went contrary to everything that is right, normal and natural.’ She was at pains to make his homosexuality clear without actually saying the word: ‘I think you are old enough to understand what I mean and that you will not wish me to explain further but if any of you do not understand the seriousness, then I must.’
She continued with great poignancy, saying that for the children’s sakes when they were young she refrained ‘through many years of anguish and anxieties from converting my suspicions into actual knowledge’. Such was her mental anguish that she welcomed physical pain because it helped her to escape from her ‘agony of mind’. In justification for her actions, she asked her children to understand what she had undergone for so
many years and asked that the ‘old love will be restored in its fullness and perhaps even increased, for indeed nothing has been done without the greatest and gravest consideration, compassion, understanding and wisdom’. She added that it was for Dickie’s, her youngest’s, sake and his future that she left the marriage – to ‘keep him clear of all the ills that otherwise would doubtless have befallen him’.
She concluded by saying that the hardest thing of all for her to bear was that she would never again be able to see her husband, telling the children to ‘assure him that my forgiveness will never cease and that my prayers for him will be unceasing’. She was clearly finding comfort in her faith: ‘All I can do is to accept the inevitable and trust Daddy to God’s mercy which never fails us when we turn to him … I pray that peace and forgiveness may be granted to him and that his soul may yet find peace and solace – if not in this world, in the world beyond … Out of it let us rise in Newness of Life and may it yet be used for good in helping others.’
If Lady Beauchamp expected her children to be softened by her appeal, she was badly mistaken. No sympathy was forthcoming. As for her brother, his last word on the affair took the form of a curt letter to the exiled earl: ‘Dear Bugger-in-law, You got what you deserved, Yours, Westminster.’
In June 1931, shortly after her father’s departure, Lady Dorothy Lygon, aged nineteen, took up her pen to write to ‘Mr Gossip’ of the
Daily Sketch
, aka her friend Patrick Balfour (who relied on such missives for his copy). She bewailed the lack of juicy gossip: ‘What meagre news there is in our great metropolis this summer.’ There was talk of a Castlerosse divorce, she noted, but that had come to nothing. There were reports of dreary virgins’ or debutantes’ parties, dull charity balls, rumours of love affairs, new restaurants opening (‘Douglas Byng is singing at a new restaurant called the Monseigneur, damnably hot and stuffy, crowded too, but his songs are good’). And the other latest trendy eating establishment, the Malmaison: ‘not too good, but I’m told it’s cheap’.
As for the Lygon news, well, all was quiet too. She and Maimie had just returned from a visit to Hugh in Tilshead, where he had set himself up as a racehorse trainer. They were off to a society dance in the evening. ‘Sibell has a new job earning £2.10s at my Aunt Violet Cripp’s hair shop
in Bond Street and has hair, face and nails done free as well. She only started yesterday, so is quite a novice as yet. Letty and Richard continue to be very happily married. Elmley is The Complete Politician, and there we all are – Hughie is also very well and probably better than usual, since my evening paper tells me that he has trained 2 winners this afternoon.’
Coote joked about how boring her news was: ‘This letter is reading like a country Cousin’s Guide to London.’ The hidden agenda of this newsy letter, with its protestations of happiness amongst her siblings, was to dispel the rumours. She told Mr Gossip that her father was in Germany taking the health cure for his heart, nothing more: ‘Halkers [Halkyn House, the Belgrave Square residence] has been shut up since Boom went abroad – poor man, his heart wasn’t at all too good, but I am afraid he will be horribly bored at Nauheim, especially as he is on a diet!’
When he received this letter Patrick Balfour happened to be in the south of France, with Evelyn Waugh. They had arrived in Villefranche on 9 June, and met up with Evelyn’s brother Alec. Mr Gossip was to become one of Alec’s closest friends, but at the time the older Waugh brother was wary of him: ‘Gossip Writers had a dubious reputation in the days of the ‘‘Bright Young People’’,’ he recollected.
One morning, Alec came down to breakfast to find Evelyn and Balfour discussing over coffee a report in the
Continental Daily Mail
. A divorce suit was being brought against one of the richest and most prominent peers of the realm, a man in his sixties, who had been very active in political and public life. ‘So the story has broken,’ Evelyn said.
It is clear, then, that Balfour knew all about the scandal and so did Evelyn. His first concern was for his friend Hugh.
Alec Waugh’s book about 1931,
A Year to Remember
, gives a detailed account of the scandal and its impact on his brother. He explicitly states that the events of that summer inspired
Brideshead Revisited
. Refusing to name the peer, even in 1975, the year of the memoir’s publication, Alec decided to call him Lord Marchmain:
In real life Lady Marchmain was the sister of a prominent Duke, and the case was being brought because of a quarrel between her husband and her brother, at her brother’s instigation. A groom for whom Marchmain had formed an attachment many years before was to be cited. The case was never brought because the King intervened.
He could not allow a man who had been his own representative to be exposed to scandal. But the case was only dropped on the condition that Marchmain left the country.
Of Hugh, also not named, he writes: ‘His younger son was very good looking, very charming. He was also a very heavy drinker.’ Alec remembered that the wealthy and distinguished bisexual expatriate writer Somerset Maugham, who knew the family well, made the connection between Hugh Lygon and Sebastian Flyte in New York in 1945: ‘We all know, of course, who Sebastian was. A charming boy. He drank himself to death.’ Hugh had stayed with Maugham in the south of France.
Before recounting the story of the Beauchamp affair, Alec Waugh told of another encounter that took place in the summer of 1931. It involved W. Somerset Maugham and a young playwright called Keith Winter, who was a friend of Evelyn’s and Balfour’s. Winter was taken to the Villa Mauresque, where Maugham resided. Various other guests came and went, but Winter spent the night with Willie Maugham, teaching him a new sexual trick with his fingertips. Maugham was reminded of the boys he had enjoyed in Bangkok. Winter hoped to be taken up as Maugham’s new paramour, but Maugham dropped him unceremoniously. And the moral of the story? Winter (also unnamed in Alec’s memoir) went on to become a well-known writer, married with three children, a presenter for the BBC, a member of the Savile Club, a lecturer in American universities. Alec Waugh’s message is clear: promiscuous homosexuality is not in itself an impediment to success in life. As with Alec’s own disgrace at Sherborne, it was the discovery and not the act that did the damage. Boom’s big mistake was to get busted.
*
The closure has now been cancelled and the document has been released to me for the first time by the National Archives at Kew.
1931 was a year that marked the end of one epoch and the beginning of another – the watershed of the modern world. It was the banking crisis of that year, more than the Wall Street crash of ’29, which ushered in the Great Depression. The frivolous age of the Bright Young Things had come to a sudden end.
Evelyn was also in a period of transition. He was a recent convert to Catholicism; he had divorced his wife; he was feted as one of the most brilliant young novelists of his age. But he had no fixed abode. 1931 was the year when he would meet and befriend the Lygon girls, whose friendship would endure for the rest of his life. He became part of the family, making their ancestral home in Malvern the nearest place to a home at a time when he owned ‘no possessions which could not conveniently go on a porter’s barrow’. Their story would inspire the book that was in his words his ‘magnum opus’ or, in Nancy Mitford’s, his ‘Great English Classic’:
Brideshead Revisited
.
He returned from his five months in Africa as a special correspondent for the
Graphic
magazine. Eventually, he would get two books out of his experiences there, a comic novel
Black Mischief
and a work of witty reportage,
Remote People,
which covered the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie. For much of the year, he continued to drift between the houses of different friends. When he stayed with his brother Alec in the south of France and read the news of the Beauchamp affair, he did not know that
his life would become so closely entwined with the Lygons. In 1959, acknowledging a friendship that had endured for three decades, Evelyn wrote to Maimie Lygon: ‘I think it is just 38 years no damn it I mean 28 since I first came to stay in the hotel at Malvern and met you and your pretty sisters.’
It was Baby Jungman who brought Evelyn to the Lygon sisters. He took up her recommendation to enrol at Captain Hance’s Riding Academy in Great Malvern. It was the autumn of 1931. Baby, an accomplished rider, had been at the academy recently, along with her friend Mary Milnes Gaskell. Both were friends of the Lygon sisters. Whilst at the academy they had stayed at Madresfield. Evelyn wrote to Baby there, sending his love to Hugh and Elmley, his old Oxford chums. He knew the crisis that had befallen the family, but he did not yet know the sisters. Nor had he seen the magnificent family seat.
Evelyn met Maimie at a party given by Baby Jungman’s mother. Hearing that Evelyn was about to start riding lessons in Malvern, Maimie offered him a lift down to Worcestershire in the family’s chauffeur-driven limousine, an American Packard. In the event, Evelyn took the Great Western Railway to Malvern Link. In future years he would travel to Worcester on a quicker train, where Maimie would pick him up in the car and drive him back to Madresfield: the experience of being a passenger driven up to a stately home by a beautiful flapper girl would be recreated in
Brideshead
.
