Those Wild Wyndhams (35 page)

Cliffe sometimes struggled to impose a routine on her own rambunctious charges. In
A Family Record
Mary recorded a plea she received at Gosford from Cliffe, with Yvo, Mary and Bibs at Stanway, asking ‘… Our Dear Ladyship … to write certain things down for them
what they are not to do
… the chief things are, if I may name them, getting out on the roof,
or between
the
ceiling
and plaster,
climbing the garden wall
… after the fruit, or going down to the cellars where the furnaces are, or in the place where Mr. Fletcher keeps the chimney sweep brushes …’. ‘[B]etween the ceiling and the plaster!’ marvelled Mary, equally delighted and appalled by her children’s ingenuity.
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Mary’s love for her children was laissez-faire. They were ‘lapped in love’, given ‘deeply-imbued confidence’ and ‘cherished’,
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but she combined ‘with the maximum of fondness the minimum of possessiveness’.
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She longed for her children’s confidences, but never demanded them.
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The greatest crime her children could commit was to display a lack of enthusiasm. Cincie recalled that when she was well into middle age Mary would still exclaim, ‘“Ices! Cincie,
Strawberry
Ices!” … in the exact tone of voice in which one says “Din Din” or “Walkies!” to a dog’.
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Mary’s children, like her friends, had to compete for her attention with a host of daily trivialities. (‘Mary is generally a day behind the fair and will only hear of my death from the man behind the counter who is struggling to clinch her over a collar for her chow,’ said Margot.)
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They took advantage of this to run wild. But from an early age they were brought into the orbit of their mother’s guests, an ever more eclectic mix.

In 1902 Mary met the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb at a dinner hosted by George Bernard Shaw. The Fabian Society, the epicentre of Edwardian intellectualism, was explicitly not a political party, but advocated a practice of ‘gradualism’ by which the ruling classes would be subtly indoctrinated with ideas of ‘practical Democracy and Socialism’. The Webbs’ Coefficients Dining Society included among its members the poet Henry Newbolt, Edward Grey, Richard Haldane and Lord Milner. Mary returned to Cadogan Square, shining-eyed, full of talk about how her new friends had promised to save her from being first against the wall when the revolution came. ‘I suppose you are going to ask the creatures to Stanway,’ Hugo remarked.
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By September, Beatrice was recording in her diary time spent with ‘Lady Elcho, a fascinating and kindly woman married to a card playing aristocrat, living in the most delightful old house’.
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Through the Webbs, Mary met H. G. Wells. By 1903, C. R. Ashbee, who set up Arts and Crafts workshops in Chipping Campden, near Stanway, was writing in his diary of visits from ‘Lady Elcho the wonderful the nonchalant the strangely fascinating’, whirling over, often with Mrs Patrick Campbell in tow, extravagant in crackling black glacé opera coat. ‘Tigrina’, as Mary called her, had become a frequent visitor at Stanway, as had Harold Large, a charlatan psychic whom Mary nonetheless found amusing. She had become renowned for having ‘these outré people around her’.
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Her children called the more eccentric of these her ‘Freaks and Funnies’. Stories that sound apocryphal were in fact true – for example, Mary’s telegraphing Hugo from Taplow with instructions to provide beds at Cadogan Square for three ‘spiritual’ disciples of a Persian sage invited to London by Sir Arthur and Lady Blomfield: ‘It’s just a sort of neighbourly thing that does help people … they’ll dash round to [the Blomfields’] flat before breakfast & return after dinner just to sleep …’ she told him.
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She found that her guests provided her with all the friction needed to spark a house party into life. Beatrice Webb divided the world into two sorts: the ‘A’s (‘Aristocrats, Anarchists and Artists’) and the ‘B’s (‘Bourgeois, Bureaucrats, and Benevolents’). Mary challenged her to define where she (Mary) stood. Beatrice characterized her as ‘the purveyor of the Bs to the As! A very rare thing requiring great sympathy and one [must] be able and willing to intellectually subordinate oneself, to be able to carry a hostile force to another’. Notwithstanding the barb therein, Mary was thrilled: ‘what she said is really what I mean …’.
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‘Don’t you agree with me, Mr. Balfour, that the only excuse for a dinner party is that it should end in a committee?’ Mrs Webb challenged the Prime Minister across the dinner table at Stanway.
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In 1907 Mary triumphantly reported to Balfour that ‘le beau Norts’ – the staunchly Tory Robert Norton – ‘has fallen head and crop over and become a collectivist’, while Beatrice Webb had succumbed to two glasses of champagne on Saturday night and the following morning ‘actually gone to church…!’
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In the first decade of the twentieth century, Stanway was a house where an ambitious young man could make his mark over the ‘general conversation’ that was rallied across the dinner table like a game of tennis. In Cynthia’s memory, Mary was the delighted spectator, turning her head from side to side with each parry. Yet all knew Mary was largely responsible for generating this conversation: her gift was to throw in ‘bones’ on which experts could seize and opine. ‘If for an instant [the conversation] flagged over an entrée or a plover’s egg she lifted it again and withdrew herself to listen. The result of course was that we all felt we were at our best and came away radiant with satisfaction,’ recalled C. R. Ashbee.
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Mary and Balfour were a well-practised double act. Cincie Charteris drew a picture of long afternoons spent in the ‘boudoir’, Mary’s personal sitting room: curtains drawn across the two great mullioned windows to keep out the icy cold and the fire lit, vigorous debate among some guests, while others nodded off gently in the corner, the reading aloud of treatises and poetry, chows underfoot and sleeping on cushions, books and pictures piled up around:

Arthur Balfour, Walter Raleigh, George Wyndham, Harry Cust, Charles Whibley, H. G. Wells, Evan Charteris, Hugh Cecil, Maurice Baring, Lady Desborough … whose voices and laughter I can hear again; while now with tempered heat they earnestly discuss some burning question of that day; now, like verbal ballet-dancers, glide, twist and pirouette in airiest fancies; now rollick in fantastic exuberant nonsense. I remember how the hours flew, and how much I used to dread the dispersing sound of ‘that tocsin of the soul – the dinner bell’.
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In 1905, the thirty-six-year-old Mananai fell pregnant for the seventh time. This pregnancy felt quite different to the others. ‘I have never felt so “unjumpy” I think before,’ she reported to her mother. In October, the Adeanes went to London, sending their five daughters to Clouds. The wet-nurse had been booked, Mananai’s bedroom newly painted and papered, and the expectant mother was upbeat and enthusiastic: ‘whenever “Twinkie-Twankie” (this one’s name!) chooses to appear … we shall all be prepared!’
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On 3 November, after seventeen years of marriage and, curiously, six years to the day after their first son (the ‘dear little Boy Baby’) had died, Madeline and Charlie became the jubilant parents to a healthy son, Robert. ‘This wonderful gift is a mighty relief and a load off our backs … The anxiety has weighed on us for many years and just in a moment it was gone!’ said Charlie.
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The whole family was ‘wild with delight’.
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Mananai’s always affectionate letters reached new heights of effusion. ‘I couldn’t half thank you or at all thank you Angel for fresh proof in this Joy of the Worlds & Worlds or rather Heavens & Heavens of never failing LOVE you shower upon me & mine … Bless you,’
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she wrote to her mother, when Madeline Wyndham sent little Robert a present. Mananai greeted each new ounce with wonder: ‘this week [he] has put on 14 … & nice firm flesh! Isn’t it a mercy? …’ she exclaimed to Mary, as she completed her lying-in.
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Her great fortune made her ‘long … to give large pieces’ of happiness ‘to the many who have none or so little[.] the feeling of Thankfulness is overwhelming … Baby is a splendid little fellow & we are so grateful for him.’
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Mary and George were godparents. As part of her duties, Mary warned her brother-in-law against indulging the child. Charlie acknowledged ‘The inclination … to spoil a Benvenuto’ but assured Mary of his ‘implicit confidence in Madeline’s sagacity … she is a very remarkable woman – I can say that to you – & her character is so strong that it must influence any children under her care’.
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In contrast to the quiet christenings of his sisters, Robert’s was celebrated with pomp, at Babraham. The estate’s labourers were given the day off. With characteristic diffidence the Adeanes had only let it be known that the service was not private. They were astonished and touched to find the church packed full. A large tea followed; plans were made for enhanced Christmas festivities in due course.
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With little Robert laughing and crowing in his cradle, everything for Mananai seemed more than perfect: ‘LOVE … seems to radiate around,’ she told her father.
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Little over a week after the hollow peace of Vereeniging marked the end of a gruelling guerrilla war, another political titan departed the public arena. In early June 1902, the elderly Lord Salisbury finally relinquished his post as Prime Minister. Arthur Balfour made his way to Windsor for a secretive meeting with the King. Two days later, his name was put forward for approval at the Unionist party conference. It was a nominal gesture. No one was likely to oppose the man groomed for decades as Salisbury’s successor.

As the news of Arthur’s succession became public Mary was at Wilton in perfect weather, hugging to herself news that she had known since he was summoned to Windsor. ‘My dear P.M. & F.L.T., L.P.S., & L.H.C.’, she wrote jubilantly to him, savouring the flock of titles that were now his: Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Commons.
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Her old friend and rival Daisy White had already begun quizzing her about when exactly she had known of Salisbury’s intention to resign; and when Daisy tried to show off her own inside knowledge by alluding to the still-secret resignations of various Cabinet ministers (part of the inevitable shuffle that accompanied the handover of power) ‘of course I took it as news’, said Mary magnanimously.
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Mary had given birth to Bibs less than a fortnight before, but she had no intention of recuperating quietly. She was the confidante of the most powerful man in the country, and she revelled in her role. Balfour’s ascendancy marked Mary’s heyday. They were ‘the great days of Mary Elcho at Stanway’, in H. G. Wells’s words.
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To say that Mary came to power when Arthur did is no exaggeration. She had the ear of the Prime Minister, controlling access by guest list and seating plans. Her invitations soared accordingly: she was asked to great houses of influence she had not visited for years, and made the guest of honour at London dinners, where the most influential and ambitious men in the country hung on her every word. She reported such triumphs to Balfour: the compliments on ‘gown, figure, face, prettiness’ paid her by Lord Revelstoke, senior partner of Barings Bank – and an old admirer of Pamela’s – until she hardly knew where to look; a confidence from Sir John (‘Jackie’) Fisher ‘that he had finished the Army thing’ (Fisher was a member of the Esher Committee which had been set up in 1903 to recommend reforms in the organization of the War Office in the wake of the Boer War) while waxing large on Balfour’s fine treatment of Britain’s naval force.
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Ten months later Jackie Fisher was First Sea Lord, implementing a radical restructuring and modernization of the navy, and hurling Britain into a naval race with Germany.

‘I appear to be having one of those odd and apparently causeless “booms” of appreciation which some people have at intervals, they go in cycles regardless of any change of circs [sic],’ Mary told Arthur in 1904, after a successful visit to Chatsworth, the home of the social and political grandees the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. On Hugo’s account the assembled company had been fulsome in their praise of Lady Elcho after her departure, talking ‘of how nice I was! Isn’t that odd? And absurd – I
have
to tell you!’ Disingenuous and delighted, Mary continued: ‘Of course I do think the discovery that I am a
well-informed
woman must greatly add to my assets – prestige! I really must try and live up to the part.’
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The following month, she visited Dresden, where sixteen-year-old Cincie, was being ‘finished’. On the promise of a meeting with the Kaiser, she hastened on to Berlin, with only the oldest of gowns and without a maid. The meeting turned into a two-hour tête-à-tête. ‘You’d have laughed to see us,’ she remarked to Balfour. ‘Me on sofa, as if we were a play, and Fursts, Grafs and Admirals in the next room gazing and muttering! The only people in the same room were Lady E[dward] C[avendish] and Chancellor Bülow and Sir Frank [Lascelles, the British Ambassador in Berlin], who came up every 20 minutes with cigarettes … [I] had quite a “succès fou”.’
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At a time when Anglo-German rivalry was increasing Mary, fearlessly, had ‘got’ the Kaiser ‘onto our army and his army and of course as his soul is in that subject we got beyond making conversation and had a very interesting evening’, discussing the recently published Esher Committee’s reports. The autocratic Kaiser, unsurprisingly, was fiercely opposed to the proposals which recommended ‘divided responsibility’ between an Army Council and the General Staff, and the abolition of the office of Commander-in-Chief.
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