The Bolter Read online

  Countless scandals bubbled just below the public’s line of vision, and that is where, on the whole, they were kept. Unhappy couples were expected to put up and shut up, quietly arranging their lives to live apart if necessary. Before the First World War, only in the very worst, unavoidably public, cases did couples part, in the process miring both themselves and their children in scandal. Idina’s parents were one of them.

  Muriel cited adultery and abandonment. Gilbert and his cancan dancer were spending her money like water. In order to prove her case she had to write to her husband begging him for the restoration of ‘all my rights as a wife’ and offering to live with him. After ‘careful consideration’ Gilbert replied immediately, by return of post, that he would not.6 When the case was heard, the newspapers had printed both letters in full. For a countess with one of England’s oldest titles to divorce her earl was scandal enough to shake the foundations of British society and Idina found that, even though her mother was legally the wronged party, her childhood friends were no longer allowed to come and play with her. Now nine, Idina was both old enough to miss her friends and realise that it was some change in her family life that had taken them from her. At least she had her cousins to keep her company. In this she was lucky. Muriel’s two sisters, Mabelle and Marie, had both had sons, Jack and Gerard, within a few months of Idina’s birth. And, after Annie’s death, Thomas Brassey Jnr had married again, producing a daughter, Helen, just six months older than Idina. This small group might have been enough for a childhood. However, if she wanted to find a husband, when she reached eighteen Idina would have to make her way into the society of the outside world. And then, unlike her peers from conventional families, she would have to battle for acceptance in order to succeed.

  After the divorce, Muriel moved her children out of the small manor house she had occasionally shared with Gilbert and into the countryside nearby. Five miles down the road from the medieval De La Warr stately home that Gilbert had been forced to rent to a family of newly rich bankers, she built a replica of it and called it Old Lodge. She surrounded Old Lodge with a picturesque farm and became a champion breeder of diminutive black-hided Kerry cattle. While Gilbert married twice more, Muriel never married again. She had enough money of her own not to need the burden of a husband. She did, however, devote the rest of her life to another man: the future leader of the Labour Party, George Lansbury.

  Lansbury’s father had been one of Muriel’s grandfather’s huge workforce. Muriel and Lansbury shared a fervent belief in women’s suffrage and Muriel rapidly added trade-union rights to her quiver of causes. She opened Old Lodge to Lansbury and his other campaigning friends, such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Hitherto it had been widely argued that people were poor because they were morally inadequate. Now the Webbs were proposing the near-revolutionary thesis that people were poor as a result of how the economy was organised. In due course the Trades Union Congress decided to field its own parliamentary candidates for election, creating the Labour Party; and in 1910 George Lansbury was elected Labour Member of Parliament for Bow and Bromley.

  Muriel worked hard. Pound by pound she siphoned money out of her friends’ and her own pockets for strikers’ and suffragettes’ food, bail and printing costs and, when necessary, to keep the trades union mouthpiece, the Daily Herald (now the Sun), afloat – at one stage funding an outright buyout for Lansbury. In his autobiography Lansbury wrote :

  Of all the women, outside those belonging to my family and the working classes, whom I have known and worked with, none stands higher in my memory and esteem than Muriel, Countess De La Warr. I never heard her make a speech, though she must have attended hundreds of public meetings and many private gatherings of committees.

  Over and over again her friends saved the Daily Herald from death in the old days when it was independent, and often it was her example and her work which helped women suffragists to hold on in the darkest days of defeat.

  Her love for human rights and duties kept her very largely out of society. She spent her days almost secretly doing good. Many, many people like myself owe her a big debt of gratitude for the continuous help she gave to causes in which we worked.7

  Lansbury was a married man. Muriel is said to have had an affair with him. This may have been the only explanation society could find for her politics but Muriel and Lansbury certainly spent several decades in a close working partnership. And, during this time, Muriel’s former sister-in-law and Idina’s aunt, Margaret Sackville, was having an affair with the future Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. It was all very cosy. In 1923 MacDonald would put Idina’s younger brother Buck into his first government, making him Britain’s first hereditary peer to become a Socialist minister. But the cosiness may have started even earlier. For it was and still is a suspicion among some of the family that Buck, conceived remarkably close to Gilbert’s departure for South Africa in 1899 and some two years after he had taken up with the first of his cancan dancers, may have been Lansbury’s, or even some other man’s, son. And upon his return to England after Buck’s birth, Gilbert did not move back home.

  Muriel then took to religion. She became a prominent Theosophist. Theosophy was a cult that had been brought to Europe in the late nineteenth century by a Ukrainian mystic, Madame Blavatsky. The underlying principle of Theosophy, a combination of Hinduism and Buddhism, was that the dogmas of religious practice had corrupted pure communication with God. It was regarded as scandalous on several counts. Principal among these was the fact that the President of the British Theosophical Society, an Irish woman named Annie Besant, had written a book, The Law of Population,8 promoting the use of contraception and advocating abundant recreational sex within marriage as being healthy for women. In the late 1870s, when The Law of Population had been published, it ran in direct contradiction to the belief of the Victorian establishment that women did not and should not enjoy sex, which was an unavoidable moment of regrettable bestiality unfortunately necessary to produce children. The work was condemned in The Times as an ‘an indecent, lewd, filthy, bawdy and obscene book’. Besant, who rapidly became one of Muriel’s closest friends, continued to preach her views; her audience included the adolescent Idina.

  By 1911 the India-based Theosophical Society had sixteen thousand members. Besant, together with a co-Theosophist, Charles Leadbetter (who had moved to India as the police pursued him for allegedly interfering with the sons of his followers), claimed to have discovered the New Messiah. This was a Brahmin boy called Krishnamurti. Besant and Leadbetter brought him to England. Muriel offered the boy a home – with her own children at Old Lodge.

  All these political, social, sexual and religious theories inevitably played a huge part in Idina’s childhood. While Muriel ricocheted between London and Sussex, preoccupied with politics and religion, the formal part of the children’s education was looked after in the upstairs schoolroom by a golden-hearted governess, Miss Rowden, whom Idina, Avice and Buck called ‘Rowie’ or ‘Row’ and visited until the day she died.9 After the morning’s lessons were over, the afternoons were spent on rumbustious ponies, careering through picturesque fields and either over or through their bottle-green hedges. Then, from teatime on, after most other Edwardian children had been banished back to the upper reaches of their homes, Idina and, as soon as they were old enough, her siblings, remained in the drawing room, where they were plunged into the cut and thrust of the politics of the day. All grew up able to maintain a conversation with anyone, about anything.

  Despite the social fallout from the divorce, it was a childhood that Idina clearly enjoyed. And, later, the moment she had an opportunity to build a house for her own family, it would bear more than a passing resemblance to Old Lodge. But then, having spent her adolescence debating workers’ and women’s rights with the politicians of the day, in her mid-teens Idina was sent to boarding school.

  School was not an enjoyable place for Idina. After the discussions she had become used to at home, she found both the lessons and her fellow pu
pils intellectually disappointing and quickly earned a reputation for being ‘already precociously educated and easily bored’.10 But these girls and their way of life were the environment in which Idina would have to make her way.

  Despite their ink-stained fingers and well-worn Latin grammars, the ‘way’ for both Idina and her colleagues was to make themselves as attractive as possible and marry well. These, after all, were the only means by which they would be able to determine the lives ahead of them. Idina had to have been well aware of the shadow cast over her by her parents’ divorce, but clearly decided that she wanted to close the gap between herself and her peers and made the most of the advantages she had in the marriage market that awaited her. She may not have been a natural beauty – that shotaway chin haunted her – but she had high cheekbones and, above them, a pair of wide, bedroom-blue eyes. She also had the money to dress well, and did so, teaching herself how to walk and stand so that the folds of material hung just so, making her clothes, as they should, appear a second skin. And, thus dressed, Idina somehow shone. She had ‘a much-envied gift for wearing clothes attractively’, as the Daily Express would later write. ‘It has been remarked of her that the simplest gown becomes distinguished when she puts it on.’.11 Yet all that precocious education and easy boredom rapidly led to a potentially sharp tongue. Idina soon learnt that she could make the other girls ‘terrified’.12 of her. And years later, when an old classmate and new arrival in Kenya approached her with a ‘Do you remember me, we were at school together?’, the sharpness would still be there. Idina turned to her, half smiled and replied, ‘Oh, yes, you never powdered.’.13

  Idina, it was clear, was never going to meld with the other girls around her. However, she was now armed with a fast wit and ability to turn every head in the room. If she could not join them, she would beat them: she would take the few advantages nature had given her and make herself the most attractive young woman in town.14

  And, by 1911, when Krishnamurti arrived at Old Lodge, Idina, who turned eighteen in February that year, was trying to do just that. The wave of change of the Edwardian age had begun, along with its political causes, a fashion for female independence. The age of chaperones had more or less vanished. Young women whose fathers could afford to keep them in style stayed single. They travelled the world, attended lectures and political meetings, bought motor cars, hung around in groups, smoked and stayed out late at friends’ houses, listening to the gramophone. And they had boyfriends, known as dancing partners. Unmarried, they didn’t dare go all the way, for fear of becoming pregnant. But that still left open a wide field of sexual behaviour, though usually limited to the back of motor taxis since they still lived with their parents in the family’s London townhouse. Although for the ‘Saturday-to-Monday’, as Edwardian weekend house parties were known, the young could rely on the older generation’s exodus to the countryside.

  Nonetheless, real freedom came only with marriage. In families where there were any boys to leave money to, most of it went to them. When girls were left money, they were not usually allowed access to the capital until they married. A young woman who wanted to buy or rent her own house therefore needed a husband either so that she could access her own money or so that he could pay for it.

  In Idina’s case, joining the marriage market was far from straightforward. The slurry of scandals in which her parents wallowed threatened to muddy the white of her dress. Socialism, suffrage and divorce had combined to earn Muriel a reputation as a ‘class traitor.’15

  The first hurdle for Idina was practical. Muriel had been presented at Court herself but, as a divorcee, was now excluded. In February 1911 Muriel therefore took Idina to London to stay with her sister Mabelle, now the Hon. Mrs Egerton, in her house in the highly fashionable St James’s Place, on the very edge of Green Park. Muriel adhered to what traditions she could. Mabelle presented Idina at Court and then co-hosted with Muriel ‘a small dance’16 for her at the Ritz. Mother and daughter then returned to London for the start of the Season at the beginning of May. Muriel put an announcement in The Times: ‘Muriel, Countess De La Warr and Lady Idina Sackville have arrived at 11, St. James’s Place,’17 indicating to where invitations could be sent. Idina was ‘out’.

  So were the scandals. Krishnamurti’s arrival in England, and Leadbetter’s departure with the police in hot pursuit, had received a large amount of press attention. In addition to this, as the summer heat rose to unprecedented levels, Britain was fractured with strikes, and Muriel and George Lansbury were supporting them.

  The spring and summer of 1911 were long and baking hot. As temperatures rose to 100 degrees, Idina’s fellow debutantes were fully absorbed by the trial of staying cool as they attended the round of dances varying from Idina’s small do to the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire’s ball for several hundred in rib-crushing and stifling corsets.

  Idina, however, breezed through both the heat and the dictates of fashion. She quickly worked out what suited her and how to wear it. When it came to the dances, having grown up with her male cousins as almost her only friends at home, she was very much at ease with the opposite sex. And sex, or rather sex appeal, was what Idina, both confident yet longing to be reassured, and thus willing to go a little further towards extremes than anyone else, promised from every pore.

  Where convention demanded cool reserve, Idina threw herself into the rounds of debutantes’ bals blancs with abandon. Nobody forgot a dance with her – her dance partners were still recounting those moments to her children thirty years later, during the Second World War.18 Even in the United States, Idina was followed by the newspapers, being pictured alongside extraordinary combinations of the Prime Minister, Asquith’s, daughter and the leading actresses and showgirls of the day19 and being written up in print as far away as the Oakland Tribune as ‘very accomplished’ and ‘a great favorite of Society’.20

  But Idina perhaps pushed boundaries a little too far. The constant company of Satan, the black Pekinese tucked under her arm, may have been too much for many. And, dazzling as she was, Idina was nonetheless not entirely proper. And whereas British society has always adored the eccentrics whose differences celebrate the values they cherish, it has been less keen on those who might upset the extremely comfortable order of things. Idina was of the latter.

  Even during her first season in London, this showed through. The desire for political change had been very firmly ingrained in Idina’s upbringing. In between debutante dances she returned to Old Lodge and its maelstrom of ideas and, in July 1911, she co-founded the East Grinstead Women’s Suffrage Society. And, by the end of the Season, although she had been a ‘success’ as a debutante, she was as yet not engaged to be married.

  Rather than let her daughter appear second-hand by doing the same social round again the following year, Muriel packed Idina off to the United States. On 30 August 1911 Idina sailed to New York on the Olympic, released by the strikers.

  It was a glittering voyage. Every cabin was full21 and the passengers’ fortunes were as vast as the new ship aboard which they were sliding across the Atlantic. Among them was a Miss Emilie Grigsby, who presented $800,000 of extravagantly set diamonds, rubies and pearls to the US customs officials. Amid the storm of publicity that Miss Grigsby’s arrival in New York caused, one of the other passengers, Mr Carlisle, the chairman of Harland & Wolff, the shipbuilders who had constructed the Olympic, saw fit to boast that ‘the Titanic, a sister of the Olympic, would be ready next March to enter the Atlantic trade’.22

  Idina was accompanying a middle-aged couple, both of whom were scions of American industrial dynasties. William Church Osborn, who was heavily involved in New York politics, was the son of railroad entrepreneur William Henry Osborn, and both the grandson of another railman, Jonathan Sturges, and the nephew of the banker J. P. Morgan. Osborn’s wife had been born Alice Dodge and her grandfather had been founder of the Phelps Dodge mining fortune. This had made enough money for one of the partners’ widows to leave the staggering sum of over
$36 million in her will.23 Alice’s sister, Mary, who never married, was one of Muriel’s closest friends and the greatest donor to all her causes.

  The Osborns were travelling with three of their four children: their two younger sons, Earl and William, and their daughter Aileen, who was a few months older than Idina. Nonetheless, when Idina arrived in New York she went to stay with Aileen’s twenty-year-old cousin, Josephine Osborn.

  Josephine had even more glamorous family connections than her cousin Aileen. Her father, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was William’s brother but, rather than devote himself to politics, he had become an anthropaleontologist and was now President of the American Museum of Natural History. However, while Josephine’s father absorbed himself in the past, her mother, Lucretia, who was the sister-in-law of another of J. P. Morgan’s nephews, used her ‘spacious’24 house on Madison Avenue to host a series of balls for family members.25

  Josephine’s own coming-out dance had been held at home two days before Christmas 1908. Mother and daughter, in pink chiffon and white satin, ‘received their guests in the ballroom entrance’ at 11 p.m. The orchestra had been large enough to play ‘throughout the affair’, the ‘dining and other rooms’ took thirty tables at which each one of the three hundred guests had been seated for a 2 a.m. supper. Then the dancing resumed. The guests included Kermit and Ethel Roosevelt, children of the former President.26