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  Lucretia Osborn’s coming-out dance for her niece Aileen, just a few months before Idina had arrived, had been more modest. It was ‘small and informal,’ and the guests, who had ‘included a number of young married people and many of the debutantes’, had been few enough to be fed in just three large dinner parties before arriving to dance at 10.30.27 However, at the end of the autumn in which Idina arrived, her hostess threw a debutantes’ dance for another niece, Josephine’s cousin Sarah Spencer Morgan, the granddaughter of J. P. Morgan’s eponymous sister.

  This dance, like Josephine’s, was held just before Christmas and the house was an explosion of seasonal decoration, ‘the staircase being festooned with greens and holly. The library and dining-hall . . . were decorated with cut flowers in vases, including hyacinths, carnations, lilies of the valley and American Beauty roses. The ceilings were hung with evergreen, broken by poinsettias.’28 The mass of red and green and polished wood and books, along with the sense of impending occasion and limitless wealth, must have given the house almost as charmed a period atmosphere as possible. Still, this, for the Fairfield Osborns, was a small dance, for the beautifully decorated library and dining-hall were where the dancing was. The ballroom wasn’t even needed.

  Nonetheless, it was certainly an exciting evening for Idina. By now she had been in the city for almost four months, becoming ‘not unknown as a visitor in New York’, as the Washington Post would later write.29 It was long enough to collect a chain of admirers and this dance, at the house in which she was resident, was one to which she could ensure every single one was invited.

  Idina remained in the United States for a year, careering up and down the East Coast, turning heads and adding ‘Newport and in the Berkshires’30 to the list of places in which she was ‘not unknown’. Twelve months later she came back to England, and as the spring of 1913 rolled in, she returned to London. But just as the round of parties started, almost as if they no longer presented a challenge, Idina turned back to one of her other interests: the campaign for Votes for Women.

  The previous eighteen months of campaigning had seen a wave of violence by militant suffragettes who were committed to realising female suffrage by any means. They had smashed windows, burnt pillar boxes and chained themselves to prominent statues with such frequency that the protests started to disrupt everyday life in the capital. In February 1913 they had even firebombed the house of David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  In trying to control the protests, the Government had been facing the additional problem that many of the suffragettes, once imprisoned, were hunger-striking. Once a prisoner neared death she had to be released. In the spring of 1913 the Government passed a bill colloquially and pejoratively known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’. This allowed it to release prisoners about to die and to reincarcerate them once they had recovered. The suffragettes’ protests increased in fury at this until, on 4 June 1913, Emily Wilding Davison dashed out in front of King George V’s horse in the Derby. She was crushed, and three days later died.

  Idina was not a militant suffragette. Instead her East Grinstead organisation was a signed-up branch of the NUWSS (National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies), which believed that women’s suffrage should be achieved by peaceful means. NUWSS members called themselves ‘constitutionalists’ or ‘suffragists’. Davison’s death shook them into making a mark for peaceful persuasion. They instigated a six-week campaign of local rallies around the countryside which would culminate in a mass demonstration in Hyde Park at the end of July.

  The East Grinstead Women’s Suffrage Society organised its own local rally, set for 23 July, just three days before the final rally of its one hundred thousand supporters in Hyde Park. In the early evening, ten protesters marched off, a silk banner billowing overhead. But when they turned into East Grinstead’s High Street they met a mob of fifteen hundred anti-suffragists marching against them, hurling ‘pieces of turf, a few ripe tomatoes and highly-seasoned eggs’, reported the East Grinstead Observer.31

  The first house the suffragists sheltered in was charged by the mob and its front door slowly and steadily bent until it cracked. The police dragged the women out the back to the branch’s headquarters at the top of the Dorset Arms pub, where they were trapped for several hours, listening to the crowd outside continuing to bay for their blood.

  It was the only violent outburst in the entire six-week campaign, but Idina and her mother’s involvement in the group was enough to confirm society’s unfavourable opinion of Idina.

  Nonetheless three months after this, she was engaged to be married – to one of the most eligible bachelors in Britain. He was a man with whom she would fall very deeply in love.

  CHAPTER 3

  IDINA’S FIANCÉ WAS A TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD CAVALRY officer called David Euan Wallace and known, like Idina, by his second name. Euan, it is still repeated today, some ninety years later, was an exceptionally good-looking man. I have a portrait photograph of him, taken at the time, in which he poses, sitting in his then modern khaki cavalry officer’s uniform, buttons shining, polished leather straps crossing his chest. His nose, cheeks, mouth are all neat, perfectly formed in a young face that looks designed for first love. And, it is also still said, he was kind, charming and funny.

  Euan was a social animal. He liked to go out and about incessantly to gathering after gathering, noting with whom he had lunched, tea-ed and dined.1 In 1910, at eighteen, he had gone to the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. The best part of a year later he joined the 2nd Life Guards. The 1st and 2nd Life Guards, together with the Royal Horse Guards, known as ‘the Blues’, formed the King’s Household Cavalry. As wars were few and far between, the Household Cavalry were expected to spend most of their career guarding the King’s Household, which involved appearing at London’s society balls and dancing with both debutantes and their disaffected mothers. This is how Euan spent his evenings. The daytimes were busy with parades and polo. Traditionally the officers in these regiments were supposed to be aristocrats and therefore, in theory, gentlemen. Euan Wallace was not, however, in any way aristocratic: he was simply rich.

  Euan’s great-great-grandfather, a Lanarkshire Scot called Alexander Baird, had founded one of the fastest-grown industrial fortunes in the world. In 1816, finding his income as a tenant farmer too meagre to support his wife, eight sons and two daughters, Baird had taken a lease on a coalfield and given it to his twenty-year-old eldest son, William, to run. By the time his sons died in the 1860s, William Baird & Co. was running Gartsherrie, the largest ironworks in the world, producing three hundred thousand tons of iron a year. Murray’s Handbook for Scotland describes Gartsherrie as ‘a group of blazing Iron Furnaces . . . [in] a desolate, black district – of smoke, coal, ashes – treeless, sunless’.2 Between thirty and forty thousand people depended upon the Bairds. The Bairds built them houses, schools and churches, donating over half a million pounds to the Church of Scotland directly. But they could afford to: Gartsherrie made them £1 million profit a year. They had become the richest family in Scotland and, at one time, it was said, the richest in Britain. The family spent its money carefully – in land. The brothers Baird bought up hundreds of thousands of acres of country estates and houses across Scotland, so establishing themselves as the new landed gentry.

  Far from spreading the fortune between innumerable descendants, the Baird dynasty then shrank. The seven of the eight Baird sons who went into the family business spent their lives working too hard to find wives. Instead it was their elder sister Janet who produced two sons and a son-in-law to take over the firm and its profits. The son-in-law was Euan’s grandfather, David Wallace. However, at the age of just fifty-four, David Wallace died, leaving Euan’s father John, known as ‘Jack,’ with the best part of £1 million at the tender age of fifteen.

  Jack therefore saw no need to follow his father into the family firm. Instead, to the disapproval of his Glasgow peers,3 when he reached twenty-one and received the money he started to divid
e his time between the estate of Old Glassingall (the inspiration for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped), which his father had bought, and a house he bought in Mayfair, London. Armed with a fortune and great deal of time, Jack Wallace began to turn himself from newly rich Scot to high-living English gentleman. He married, had a single son, Euan (whom he sent to the English public school Harrow) and lived well. But, by the age of forty-six, Jack Wallace too was dead. Euan was, just as Jack had been when his father died, only fifteen. The £1 million had shrunk to a mere £250,000 (£15 million today). It was a fraction of the sum Jack had inherited. But at fifteen years old £250,000 was enough to make Euan already a rich young man – certainly rich enough for the cavalry.

  Being a cavalry officer was an expensive occupation. Applicants needed no less than £2000 a year in private, unearned income. An officer needed a manservant to maintain his uniforms, both khaki by day and glittering red and gold by night. He needed at least one groom to look after his string of a minimum of four horses: two chargers, on which he would occasionally parade, and polo ponies. He also needed to afford to behave like a gentleman and pick up the bill whenever one appeared.

  And thus Euan had behaved until September 1913, when as a twenty-one-year-old lieutenant slipping across London’s ballroom floors in a flash of burnished leather, polished brass and crimson, his fortunes had taken a dramatic turn. His great-uncle William Weir, then still Senior Partner of William Baird & Co., had turned up at his beloved mistress’s a little early one afternoon to find her in the arms of one of her fellow actors. Uncle Willie had turned on his heels. On 15 September 1913 he drew up a new will. Eight days later he had died from a fatal combination of heartbreak and shock. Childless, he had left almost a hundred thousand acres of Scottish estates and £2 million to be divided equally between Euan and one other nephew. Overnight, in an age overflowing with millionaires, Euan became one of the richest young men in Britain. He was rich enough for his social ambitions to withstand marrying a girl from a scandalous family. Within a fortnight he had proposed to Idina.

  Putting the scandals to one side, Euan and Idina appeared a perfect couple. They were both glamorous and seemingly dedicated to a non-stop social life. They were enough in love to call each other and themselves ‘Little One’ and ‘Brownie’.4 Moreover, the vastness of Euan’s fortune was seen as a match for the antiquity of Idina’s family name.

  But, in the rush and blush of sexual excitement and first love, they overlooked a fundamental difference in their approach to life. They may both have been startlingly energetic, and the life and soul of any party, but for Euan this social life was the be-all and end-all. While for Idina, whose eyes had been opened a little wider in her youth by a mother who lived ‘very largely out of Society’,5 it was no more than passing entertainment. Instead, like her grandmother, Annie Brassey, what Idina wanted from life was adventure.6 Yet all couples have their differences and, for as long as things are going well, these are, for the most part, trifling.

  And, at the beginning, things went very well. Indeed, in the world that Idina and Euan inhabited, their life could hardly have been better. Their engagement was announced in The Times on 13 October 1913 and their families’ solicitors immediately set about drawing up a marriage contract. This set up a Marriage Trust into which Euan put the then impressive sum of £100,000 for Idina. Among other conditions, the contract stipulated that if Idina left the marriage she would forfeit the lot.

  The customary six weeks later, Idina and Euan married ‘very quietly’7 in Christ Church in Down Street, W1, a building that remains invisible until you are upon one of its two side doors, through which you angle your way to the altar (there is no straight route to God even for the wealthy of Mayfair). Idina was given away by her grandfather, by now Earl Brassey, wearing a traditional bridal blue serge travelling dress.8

  The best man was one of Euan’s cavalry colleagues, a fellow Scot in the 2nd Life Guards called Stewart Menzies. Stewart was two years older than Euan and his closest friend. He was not only best man at the wedding, he was also the trustee of the Marriage Trust. Menzies was someone who could slide through any social situation. He was well connected – his mother was lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary – and he basked in the notoriety of the (now discredited) rumour that he was the illegitimate son of King Edward VII. He was also a person who knew how to spot an opportunity and turn it to his advantage. Within a few years he would become a legendary chief of British Intelligence. The head of the British Secret Service is called Control, or C for short. However, for thirteen years it was Stewart Menzies. Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, called his hero’s wise, tolerant boss M instead of C, after Menzies. John le Carré based George Smiley’s faithless wife, Lady Anne, on Menzies’s own first marriage.

  In 1913 Stewart Menzies was already one of the most influential officers in the 2nd Life Guards as he had been appointed to adjutant, the right-hand man of Colonel Ferguson, who commanded the regiment. As adjutant he was responsible for the day-to-day organisation of the troopers and officers, disciplinary affairs and matters relating to the general well-being of the regiment – whom the officers married being one of these. An officer, for example, could on no account marry a divorcee. Idina, as the daughter of parents who had not just divorced but who continued to make headlines for their less than conventional behaviour, was a borderline case. Nor was it usual for young junior officers, as Euan was, to marry at all. But Stewart was ferociously fond of Euan. And there is one law for the rich, and another for the phenomenally rich. Euan was now one of the latter.

  After the ceremony the guests – the women’s buttoned-up ankles flashing under their hobble skirts – tripped along Curzon Street to the Brasseys’ house at 24 Park Lane. They wafted up the curving staircase and through the drawing rooms to the Durbar Hall. There Idina’s wedding presents, an array of diamonds and star sapphires twisted into tiaras, bandeaux, watches and rings,9 had been spread out among her grandmother’s spears and botanical specimens from the South Seas.

  That afternoon Idina and Euan left for Egypt. Honeymoons then lasted a month or more. It was long enough to ride around the Pyramids and float down the Nile to the temple of Karnak. It was long enough, too, to go deep into the Sahara, followed like pharaohs by a caravan of cooks, tent-riggers and armed guards, where at night they could lie out under the stars and bathe in the emptiness of the desert, the only sound the distant clatter of pans and the Bedouin hum. Newly-wed, and the fear of pregnancy diminished, Idina completed her introduction to sex: an activity for which she not only discovered she had a talent, but which she clearly found so intensely enjoyable that it rapidly became impossible for her to resist any opportunity for it. And, in an untypically British way, she had grown up listening to the words of her mother’s great friend, the Theosophist Annie Besant, that abundant sexual activity within marriage was good for a woman’s health.

  She was pregnant within the first month.

  This, however, was still an age in which the less said about a woman’s waistline, or lack of it, the better. A lady simply uttered a small prayer of thanks for the just-invented brassiere10 – which was considerably less uncomfortable than a corset – altered the style of her clothing, and continued with life until she became too undisguisably large to be seen in public. In any case, when she returned from Egypt, Idina was busy. She had two homes to create.

  The first of these was in London, where she and Euan would spend most of the year. From here he would motor back and forth to the Life Guards’ barracks in Windsor. Nineteen fourteen was still the age of the motoring enthusiast and, rather than seeing the journey as a chore, both Idina and Euan regarded motoring as an intense pleasure. Euan’s diaries are littered with references to how well a particular car or motorcycle performed when he took it out and Idina was the daughter of two motor racers. While her parents had still been together, they had instigated motor-car races along the mixed-sex seafront at Bexhill. Once they were apart, Gilbert went on to be Chairman of Dunlop Tyr
es. Muriel became an active member of the committee of the Ladies’ Automobile Club. This was a controversial position. As late as 1908 The Times felt obliged to mention that: ‘Doubts have been felt – no opinion is expressed here – on the question whether feminine nerves are as a rule, so well qualified to stand the strain of driving as those of men . . . Of course they can learn at least as much as men can, and the more they learn the better.’.11 Idina inherited a disdain for such prejudice and the enthusiasm of both her parents, gaining a reputation for driving flat out in fast cars.12

  In choosing their London home, Idina and Euan clearly felt they had to live up to their fortune. None of the houses on Park Lane was for sale so instead they slipped just around the corner of Marble Arch, still more or less at the top of Park Lane, and still overlooking Hyde Park. Their new home was in a terrace of just under a dozen houses in Connaught Place. The houses in this street were wide, deep and tall. Stretching over seven floors, they provided several thousand square feet of high-ceilinged living space, with the floors joined by a wide stone staircase. The entrances were in the quiet, Connaught Place side, but the main rooms were on the other, facing Marble Arch and Hyde Park. It was a cavernous space for such a young couple, even if a family was already on the way.

  Compared with Idina and Euan’s other home, however, Connaught Place was a pied-à-terre. William Weir had left Euan three adjoining estates in Scotland: Kildonan, Arnsheen and Glenduisk. Weir had made his home at Kildonan, which surrounded the south Ayrshire village of Barrhill.

  A couple of hours’ drive south of Glasgow, Barrhill was an old staging post, where travellers and coaches had changed horses, on the single road cutting through the centre of the region, from coast to coast. The village itself was a handful of houses astride the River Duisk, which ran along the bottom of the valley. Surrounded by purple-tinged moorland, it was another world from London. And there, a few feet above the Duisk, amid a riot of elephantine rhododendron and manicured lawn, spread Kildonan House. The west-facing front consisted of a small, two-storey, eighteenth-century manor house: just three windows across on the first floor and one either side of a pillared and porticoed front door. To the rear of this neat, pretty house spread a monstrosity of an L-shaped Victorian extension, all gothic stone and ivy on the outside, and on the inside a jigsaw of windows, brick, tile and half-timber. A way in which to rid themselves of some of the weight of their fortune presented itself to Idina and Euan.