Joan Page 3
Together they ordered mountains of supplies and equipment, including rifles and ammunition and Worcestershire sauce, ‘without which life, or rather native cooking, is intolerable’. They read all available books and went to see ‘old Africa hands’;10 they underwent a crash course in map-making from Mr Coles, the Map Curator of the Royal Geographical Society. Finally, at the end of January 1898, Grogan and Harry set sail for Beira in Mozambique; Grogan reckoned that he had already completed the Cape Town to Beira leg on his first trip to the continent. In order to acclimatize themselves on arrival, Harry and Grogan went on a hunting expedition to the extremities of the Gorongoza plain, where they encountered blue wildebeest and buffalo, one of which charged Harry. He stood his ground as if receiving a cavalry charge, and shot it dead at three yards. After three months of acclimatization they returned to Beira, with the trophies they collected helping to defray the costs of the expedition. They had also completed a rite of passage; big-game hunters were idolized in Europe and America as ‘real men’.
Grogan and Harry Sharp made their way separately to Lake Tanganyika, where they met at M’towa, the principal station on the Congolese side of the lake. Sharp had pressed on in an attempt to escape the fevers which had afflicted him even more than Grogan. At the start of the journey he had been portly, but had become skeletal by the time Grogan met him at M’towa. His life had been saved by an itinerant doctor, who had nursed him back to relative health before himself succumbing to the fever and dying within days. When Sharp could be moved, the expedition crossed the lake to Ujiji on the German side of the lake – the meeting place of Stanley and Livingstone. At dawn on 12 April 1899, Sharp, Grogan, five Watongas bearing the Union Jack, ten armed Asiskas and 150 porters marched out of Ujiji, accompanied by an escort of German soldiers, each carrying on average a load of sixty pounds. They headed northwest into the Rift Valley lakes, through areas not previously visited by white men, carrying out mapping and survey work and shooting game on the way. As was the custom of explorers, they gave names to the mountains they encountered, and the first of the volcanic mountains of Rwanda they called Mount Sybil, after the daughter of their benefactress. An enormous flat-topped volcano became Mount Sharp and a peak to the east, of an estimated height of 13,000 feet, was named Mount Eyres, after Carrie herself. Here, in the foothills of the volcanoes, they survived attacks by cannibals as they passed along a trail lined not only with bodies but with grinning skulls, skeletons and pools of dried blood. Many of the porters deserted, and there were thefts by natives, encounters with lions and hyenas and yet more bouts of fever.
At Fort Portal in Uganda, Harry decided to go home. He was ten years older than Grogan and over the past months his health had suffered considerably. He had also received an urgent telegraph message saying that there were pressing family affairs at home. He set off with a hundred bearers carrying the unwanted stores and crates of trophies for England. On his return, the drawing room at Dumbleton Hall became adorned with lion skins, huge elephant tusks were hung on either side of the tall double doors leading from the outer to the inner hall and the staircase walls were covered in buffalo and antelope heads.
Grogan achieved his goal of reaching Cairo. By the time he got back to England in March 1900 he was a celebrity, and was met by a barrage of newspaper correspondents. Britain was by now in the midst of the Second Boer War; this great journey was a patriotic good-news story from a continent that was providing very few of them at the time. The Royal Geographical Society invited Grogan to address them; at twenty-five he was the youngest man ever to do so. Carrie Eyres invited him back to Dumbleton Hall to write From the Cape to Cairo, his account of his adventure. On its publication, the book met with considerable success. Queen Victoria summoned Grogan to Balmoral, where he presented her with one of the Union Jacks he had carried with him across the length of Africa.
In October 1900, Grogan finally married Gertrude, three years after they had last seen one another. Most of the rest of Grogan’s life was spent in Kenya, where he accumulated about half a million acres of land. He was also politically active and, after his election as first President of the Colonialists’ Association, became a thorn in the flesh of government authority. Ewart Grogan died in 1967 at the age of ninety-two, having outlived Harry Sharp by more than sixty years. Harry had died aged forty-six in 1905, never having recovered his health after his African adventure.
In May 1900, at the age of eighteen, Sybil Eyres was presented at court by her mother, and just over two years later she came of age. She was slight and very short-sighted, but she was now also very rich. In thanks, she paid for work to be completed on the tower of St Bartholomew’s Church in Armley. A local newspaper reported Sybil’s visit to see the work in progress:
What a ‘fine bonny lass’ she looked. There were some on that day who thought it wasn’t safe for ‘Miss Sybil’ to go climbing about in the new tower. But ‘Nay’ said the others, ‘she’s going to marry a sailor and it’ll be a bit of practice for her.’11
The sailor was Lieutenant Bolton Meredith Monsell, the only surviving son of five children. His four younger sisters all adored and spoilt him. Known to family and friends as ‘Bobby’, he was tall, immensely good-looking and sociable, as well as charming and amusing. (‘We didn’t see much of that side of him,’12 Joan commented.) In December 1904, he and Sybil were married by the Rector of Dumbleton at St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge. Her Uncle Harry Sharp gave her away. The reception was held at the couple’s new London home in Belgrave Square, and afterwards the bride and groom left for a honeymoon in the New Forest. They joined their names together and henceforth would be known as Eyres Monsell.*
The Eyres brought money to the marriage but the Monsells brought an ancient heritage. A Philip Maunsell served under William the Conqueror and received confiscated English lands as a reward. In the sixteenth century, John Mounsell was a merchant of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis in Dorset and his second son, John, became a prominent London merchant. In a bid to join the gentry, John purchased land in County Limerick in 1612 and the family eventually became prominent members of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy.
Bolton’s grandfather, J. S. B. Monsell, was a clergyman and a prolific hymn-writer – his three hundred hymns include ‘Fight the Good Fight’ and ‘Oh Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness’. His son, Bolton James Monsell, was an army officer who joined the police service in 1886 and became Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police. In turn, this Bolton’s son – Bolton – was a very socially aware and highly ambitious young man. From leaving Stubbington House, his preparatory school in Fareham, he had spent nearly all his early life at sea. In 1894, he entered HMS Britannia as a cadet, went to sea as a midshipman two years later and from 1903 he specialized as a Torpedo Lieutenant. Sybil was a very considerable catch for such a lowly officer – albeit one with a name – and his marriage to an heiress enabled him to buy himself out of the navy and embark upon a political career.
Graham, Bolton and Sybil’s only son, was born in November 1905, and Diana, their first daughter, in 1907. In January 1910 Bolton was elected Conservative MP for the constituency of Evesham and the following year, at the suggestion of Bonar Law, he was appointed a whip. On 5 February 1912, his second daughter was born in London and christened Joan Elizabeth. Joan’s younger sister, Patricia, was born in 1918. All resembled one another physically and temperamentally: the Eyres Monsell children were tall and slim and shared the same high cheek bones; all seemed reserved, and all in varying degrees were private and apparently aloof. Sybil was so painfully stiff and shy that she used to invite the wife of her husband’s political agent, Bertram Cartland, to her own house parties in order to break the ice.* From their mother the children inherited both their shyness and the short-sightedness for which Sybil carried a lorgnette. Physically however they took after the Monsells.
As an adult, Joan never spoke about her family, saying only, vaguely, that she had nothing in common with them (her adored brother Graham was the excepti
on). This was not quite true. Her father was a sailor and on both sides there were travellers, explorers and writers. It is understandable why she might have wanted to share her life with someone who shared these longings.
2
Growing Up
According to the census return of 2 and 3 April 1911, Dumbleton Hall had fifty rooms including kitchens (sculleries, closets and bathrooms were not counted). Bolton and Sybil were at home that weekend, along with ten indoor members of staff – one of whom was designated the ‘electric light assistant’. Their two children, Graham and Diana, were at the family’s London home in Belgrave Square, which was next door to the Austro-Hungarian embassy. To look after them in London they had a children’s nurse, a nursery maid and a Swiss governess, Mlle Fanny Gree. In London there were also eight other members of staff. Graham was five, Diana three.
At Dumbleton, the young Eyres Monsells were brought up in the nurseries on the attic floor above the main bedrooms, which was where the staff also lived. When she was young, Joan spent more time with the maids and the nursery staff than with her parents, and later said she really only loved her nanny. The children’s mother and father were not seen until teatime, when, after having been spruced up and made presentable, Joan and the others were taken down into the drawing room. Bolton’s sisters, who lived in London, also had children; there were eleven cousins in all and the Eyres Monsell, Watkins, Christian and Daniell children spent much of their time together. There is a photograph of eight of the cousins taken at Sandbanks in Dorset, where all the children used to stay in the summer with the Watkins grandmother. The children are arranged in descending order of height, from Diana on the left. Joan is the fifth along, aged about six. Her gaze at the camera is suspicious and resentful – even at so young an age she never liked having her picture taken.
Dumbleton was ideal for the young; there were all those bedrooms full of toys, there was a rocking horse in the conservatory, a fourteen-acre garden, a swimming pool (which was invariably covered in green weed), woods, and a lake with a boat and an island on which the older children could maroon the younger ones. Graham and Diana had a game they called ‘The Charge’. The main herbaceous borders at Dumbleton were on a steep hill, and the aim was to descend as fast as possible using every mode of transport, with or without brakes, to propel themselves and (willingly or not) their visitors and little sisters down the hill and over the path without crashing into the railings or falling into the lake. This game, needless to say, was a cause of many accidents, tears and much sticking plaster.
At Christmastime, the big rooms in the Hall were decorated with holly and mistletoe; there were great blazing logs in open fireplaces, and splendid meals at which the children sat down together at one table. At breakfast on Christmas morning the presents were all piled on each plate. There was also dancing, a village Christmas tree, church and carols and visits to the well-scrubbed dairy to drink cream. The Dumbleton Dixies gave a performance in the village hall and the cousins blackened their faces, danced and played what instruments they could find. Gino Watkins, a young cousin, and Smith, the genial chauffeur, sang ‘I’m Alabama Bound’ till the strings broke on Smith’s ukulele.
One day in August 1914, while Bolton was playing tennis on the lawn at Dumbleton during a house party, a footman approached with a telegram. The game stopped and the guests rapidly dispersed. Great Britain, its empire and colonies were at war. Bolton returned to active duty in the navy as a Lieutenant Commander. In 1915, he was in command of a monitor (a small battleship) at Gallipoli; afterwards he became a liaison officer between the army and navy in Egypt and was awarded the Order of the Nile for his service. His wife had her own wartime maritime drama on her way to meet him in Egypt: in December 1915, Sybil was on board a Japanese liner, the Yasaka Maru, in the Mediterranean, when the ship was hit by a torpedo. She wrote an account of the submarine attack from Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, which was later published in the Upton Times. Sybil, who always cared about what she wore, appeared to be as much concerned with clothes as anything else:
Now I will tell you about the shipwreck! It happened at about 2.45 in the afternoon. I was dressed in my old brown tweed and my little purple velvet hat as we did not expect to get in till after dinner and I was going to make myself respectable later. I had just gone down to my cabin and I was discussing one or two things with Cameron [her lady’s maid], when there came this violent bang which shook the whole ship. Cameron remarked, ‘There now, there’s that submarine’ and started putting things hastily into her bag! I got down the lifebelts and put one on and my big coat [. . .] Just when the bang came I don’t think I felt frightened; it was just a sort of hopeless feeling that everything one possessed must be lost.1
The lifeboat, which had about twenty-five people in it, was rescued the next day by a small French tug. Everyone was hauled over the sides by two men, arriving on board head first, and there were only old oil cans to sit on.
People of course were dressed anyhow, half of them hadn’t any hats on. One woman was changing her dress, so just had a fur coat on top of her petticoat, and there were several women with small babies and no nurse or anyone with them. It must have been awful for them.
At the end of the war, Sybil was awarded the CBE for her war work as a donor and administrator for King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers in Grosvenor Crescent. Bolton and Sybil’s busy wartime lives meant that they were even more absent than they would otherwise have been from their children’s lives. There was just over six years between Joan and her brother and the young girl had become close to her sibling – perhaps she found in him a substitute masculine figure for her absent father. When Graham was absent at his preparatory school at Bexhill-on-Sea she must have felt it keenly. Joan meanwhile, like her sister Diana, was educated at home.
After leaving Bexhill-on-Sea, Graham entered Eton College in September 1919, two months before his fourteenth birthday. He was beginning to make his way in the world. On his first day and in the same house – Corner House – Graham found a new friend in Alan Pryce-Jones, the much-indulged son of a colonel in the Coldstream Guards. They were both young aesthetes in the making, and their friendship was intimate and life-long. Pryce-Jones later wrote how Graham had ‘early developed the art of rejecting unnecessary ties of thoughtless friendship and devoted himself whole-heartedly and generously to the very few chosen’.2 Corner House overlooked the rat-infested graveyard of Eton Chapel and had been in use as a boys’ boarding house since 1596. It was not a pleasant environment:
A narrow staircase with uneven wooden treads worn shiny, smooth and razor-edged by generations of boys led up to three boys’ passages. There was little uniformity about either the passage or the boys’ rooms. In parts the passages were so narrow that two people could pass only by turning sideways [. . .] the appearance of the boys’ side was mournful to a degree; in fact taken as a whole it was like a slum tenement, with two dingy bathrooms with concrete floors at the end of the middle passages for the use of forty-one boys.3
Pryce-Jones recalled Aymer Whitworth – their housemaster and Classics ‘beak’ – as a rather austere man, but to Alec Dunglass (who later became Alec Douglas-Home), Whitworth had a great understanding of human nature, and of the young male going through ‘the dark tunnel of adolescence’.
A generation of star pupils – Harold Acton, Cyril Connolly, Brian Howard, Eric Blair (George Orwell), Anthony Powell – had just left Eton, but among Graham’s contemporaries were Henry Yorke (Henry Green), A. J. Ayer, Ian Fleming, Peter Watson – who later funded Connolly’s Horizon – James Lees-Milne, Hamish Erskine – an early, fruitless obsession of Nancy Mitford – and Nancy’s brother, Tom Mitford. School days passed in a regular rhythm from divisions (lessons) at 7.30 a.m. until 5.45 p.m., followed by a long period of prep. Each day there was also compulsory chapel attendance and two periods of PE or military drill. The day ended at 9.15 p.m.
At Lent 1921, Graham was recorded as being in OTC (Officer Training Corps) No. 1 Squad. A
ged fifteen, he was already five foot nine and physically robust. The free life he enjoyed on the Dumbleton estate had suited him. He had learnt to ski in Switzerland and he played tennis avidly. Graham’s school fellows Jim Lees-Milne and Tom Mitford were near neighbours, and – together with his sister Diana – regular opponents at tennis matches. Lees-Milne disliked Graham and found his behaviour terrifying.
At children’s tennis tournaments he used to bash his racquet over my head so that I looked like a clown peering through a broken drum, and once at Wickhamford* he let out my father’s parrot so that it flew away, and [he] drove the car out of the motor house into a ditch.4
Probably Graham, who never wavered in his sexual inclinations, was already active in other ways. A discreet homosexuality was as much a part of the Eton environment as arts and games. In this exclusively male atmosphere, love affairs flourished. The prettier young boys became a substitute for girls – prefects sent fags on bogus errands so that others could ogle them. Boys who did not excel at games retreated into femininity. ‘We were feminine,’ wrote Henry Yorke, ‘not from perversion [. . .] but from a lack of any other kind of self-expression [. . .] we screamed and shrieked rather than laughed and took a sly revenge rather than having it out with boxing gloves.’5 Peter Watson, ‘a slow-speaking, irresistibly beguiling young man’, enticed Alan Pryce-Jones up to his room. He led him to his bookcase, where he extracted a little bottle from behind the Latin dictionaries which he ‘unscrewed in ecstasy, murmuring, “Smell this: it is called Quelques Fleurs.”’6 And Jim Lees-Milne’s relationship with Tom Mitford went well beyond tennis:
On Sunday eves before Chapel at five, when the toll of the bell betokened that all boys must be in their pews, he and I would, standing on the last landing of the entrance steps, out of sight of the masters in the ante-chapel and all the boys inside, passionately embrace, lips to lips, body pressed to body, each feeling the opposite fibre of the other.7