Joan Read online

  Shortly after he had turned seventeen in November 1922, and without completing the school year, Graham left Eton. In August 1923 he entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst and stayed until the end of 1924. With a service background of his own, Bolton doubtless considered that the army regime – of drill, physical training, lectures on leadership and strategy – would help make a man of his only son. He must already have been aware of Graham’s artistic interests and, quite possibly, his sexual preferences. How amenable Graham was to all this it is difficult to say, but it is unlikely that he would have been strong enough to resist his father’s wishes. In January 1925, Graham was commissioned into the Royal Dragoons where, ironically, there were aspects which might have appealed to him. A Guards officer was, first of all, a gentleman, and the life was not necessarily unsuited to an aesthete and a dandy. Graham was a tall and handsome young man and his expensive and close-fitting uniform would have suited him very well. Regiments like the Royal Dragoons were largely composed of men from the great public schools and great families, usually with large independent incomes. They considered themselves outside middle-class morality in matters of profligacy and sexuality, and still maintained a connection with the world of Beau Brummell.8 Homosexual encounters would also have been easily available on the fringes of this social circle. There were plentiful working-class rent boys and soldiers from the lower ranks of the Guards regiments who would be willing to provide sexual services, and could be paid to keep their silence.

  Graham should have been happy in such a milieu, if he was to be happy anywhere. But by November, just ten months after his commission, his army career, for whatever reason, was finished.

  Graham had spent the summer before he left Sandhurst in the French Alps with his cousin Gino Watkins. Gino was two years younger than Graham and was about to go to Cambridge. He had travelled out alone, sleeping quite happily on the wooden seat of a third-class carriage, and had met Graham at Chamonix. They spent their time together climbing in the mountains until Graham returned to England. Gino was fair-haired, blue-eyed, sleek and lithe; ‘an elegant and unserious young man, confident in his popularity among acquaintances or his charm of manners among strangers to ensure his enjoyment of the game of life’.9 Such an air of insouciance was something Graham could never possess.

  The Watkins family were very much the poor relations of the Eyres Monsells. Unfortunately Gino’s father, Colonel Henry George Watkins of the Coldstream Guards, ‘possessed an uncanny ability to spot a dud investment from a long distance’. Finding himself embarrassed by his lack of money – for to do things in London was very expensive and not to do them was dull – he left his wife Jennie and went to live in Switzerland. When Gino was only twenty, his mother quietly said goodbye to her three children and their old nanny, then caught a train to Eastbourne, where she hired a taxi to take her to the cliff at Beachy Head. She was never seen again.

  That same year Gino organized his first expedition to Spitsbergen, as a result of which he was made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society even though he was officially under age. He was famous. His last expedition – undertaken in order to establish an air route between England and Winnipeg – was Gino’s crowning achievement. ‘If a man wants anything badly enough, he can get absolutely anything,’ he said. The RGS awarded him its Polar Medal, its first for sixty years. He was, however, diffident about these achievements, as Gino’s biographer and frequent companion on his expeditions recalled:

  Gino was lent a small, simply furnished room on the second storey of the Royal Geographical Society – a room which was to become very intimately connected with him later on. There, during nearly two months, he and I sat at a trestle-table drawn up to the open window. One morning Gino brought a Japanese fan which he had looted from a dance the night before. He leaned back, fanning himself and gazing out of the window whenever he stopped to recall some incident of a journey of which the survey notes reminded him; and he always kept the fan beside him ‘so that,’ he said, ‘I can always give the right impression if anyone very tough and hearty comes to see me.’10

  Unable because of the Great Depression to raise funds for an Antarctic expedition, he went back to Greenland to continue the British Air Route expedition. He spent the Christmas of 1931 at Dumbleton, where he read two or three books a day, helped with the village Christmas tree, and walked as far as the dairy to drink cream as he had done as a child; he also met Stanley Baldwin at a lunch party. He gave a polar-bear skin rug to the Eyres Monsells as his present. The following August, Gino went out alone in his kayak one day to hunt for seals to feed his party. Later two of his companions found his kayak floating upside down upon the water, the paddle floating about 150 yards away and his trousers on an ice floe. ‘He was always appropriate, and it was right that none should see him dead.’11

  Joan’s extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins were close and spent a great deal of time with one another. In their company even Sybil felt at ease. There are a lot of photographs of family gatherings, both formal and informal. When anything happened, everyone cared. A memorial plaque was raised to Gino in Dumbleton church. In an odd coda to this story, some years after both his mother and Gino had drowned, Gino’s brother Tony shot himself in a swimming pool. There was a strain of eccentricity in that branch of the family.

  Immediately on leaving the army Graham went on a scientific and big-game shooting expedition in central Africa with Major F. G. Jackson. In going to Africa, Graham would at least have avoided his father. Jackson, who was sixty-five at the outset of these travels, was an explorer and imperialist in the manner of Cecil Rhodes. He had made significant polar expeditions in the 1890s serving in both the Boer and First World Wars. His travels with Graham were motivated more by a love of adventure and the opportunities for big-game hunting they presented than any genuine scientific or imperial endeavour – and Graham’s parents were paying for them. Graham and Jackson began their journey at Beira in Mozambique and travelled westwards across the continent. At Nyansa in Rwanda, the king gave an exhibition of sports in their honour: spear throwing, archery and high jump. In Jackson’s published account of their travels, The Lure of Unknown Lands, there is a photograph showing a Watusi tribesman leaping over Graham – who was six foot three and wearing a double-crowned hat – with space to spare.

  After seven months without news, at Stanleyville on the Congo they found letters from England and comparatively recent newspapers. They stayed ten days in Stanleyville before taking a paddle steamer to Kinshasa, and from there a train to Matadi and a steamer for Europe. They had walked nearly 1,700 miles from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic.

  The expedition over, Graham arrived in Oxford in October 1927 to study history at Merton College. If Bolton and Sybil had hoped the rigours of their son’s African adventure would curb his ‘artistic’ tendencies, they were to be disappointed. Although obliged to write essays and attend lectures, Graham was not the most assiduous of scholars. Indeed, after the disciplines of Eton and the Guards, it was probably at Oxford that Graham felt himself sufficiently liberated from his father to enjoy himself fully. Shortly after his arrival at Merton he celebrated his twenty-second birthday, and took the opportunity to be as eccentric and as uninhibited as he dared. Only a couple of weeks after the start of his first term, on 2 November, he was fined £1 for making a noise in his room. With his looks, Graham would have stood out anywhere, but he set a fashion for wearing black polo sweaters and minute bow ties. He held tea parties wearing fancy dress and gained a reputation for being ‘dashing’ – the ‘fastest’ man in the university – and it was alleged that he took drugs. This was jazz age Oxford. Osbert Lancaster, a new friend who was also a ‘figure’ at Oxford and who also dressed to be noticed, set the scene:

  The student body as a whole formed an admirable chorus-line against which the principals could make their exits and their entrances. On the one hand were the hearties, grey-flannel trousers or elaborately plus-foured, draped in extravagantly long s
triped scarves indicative of athletic prowess; on the other the aesthetes, in high-necked pullovers or shantung ties in pastel shades from Messrs. Halls in The High, whose hair in those days passed for long and some of whom cultivated side-burns.12

  Both Osbert and Graham were unquestionably aesthetes. Lancaster also recalled, with regard to his own lack of enthusiasm for Anglo-Saxon and Middle English studies, how his tutor ‘very soon, I fancy, came to realise that to arouse, let alone maintain, my interest in the insufferable Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a task well beyond his powers, and it was seldom long before we had abandoned Grendel and his mother in their gloomy mere and gone on to discuss the latest performance of Les Biches* or the social implications of Graham Eyres Monsell’s party the previous Saturday’.13 In his favour, Graham was acknowledged as the most accomplished pianist – jazz and classical – in the university, as well as its finest skier.

  Two Oxford dons were rivals for the attentions of the undergraduates: George Kolkhorst and Maurice Bowra. Kolkhorst was known as ‘the Colonel’, because he was so little like one; a young Spanish don at Exeter College, he was a natural eccentric. He wore white suits and an eye glass and carried an ear trumpet ‘to catch any clever remarks’. On Sunday afternoons, he held sherry and marsala parties in his gas-lit rooms in Beaumont Street, which he furnished with Japanese coats of armour and oriental figures under domes. The room smelled of dogs and chicken soup and of the mice living in the armour. Graham gravitated naturally to the Kolkhorst set, and was a regular visitor at Beaumont Street.

  Maurice Bowra was the most influential don in Oxford. Although in some ways very much part of the Oxford establishment, Bowra was also an anti-institutional figure. In his autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells, John Betjeman remembered his ‘grand contempt for pedants, traitors and pretentiousness’. Bowra was not an eccentric like Kolkhorst, but the students who gathered in his rooms found themselves both dominated and stimulated by his overwhelming and life-enhancing personality. His circle of favoured undergraduates included students who were later to become celebrated in their own right: John Betjeman, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, Hugh Gaitskell, John Sparrow, Isaiah Berlin, Harold Acton, A. J. Ayer, Kenneth Clark and very many others. Bowra also later became an intimate of Joan. Graham must have spoken of all this to his sister and she can only have envied him for his opportunities. Joan’s world at this time was still limited to the confines of school and the pony club.

  While the vast majority of students no doubt got on with their work and lived quite modestly and conscientiously, less academic necessities were a concern for many. Where there were so few opportunities to meet women, homoeroticism and sentimental male friendship were considered by many as both acceptable and normal, although egregious homosexual behaviour was still an offence punishable by expulsion. ‘Men who liked women were apt to get sent down,’ Cyril Connolly wrote.14 While they might later have suppressed or lost interest in their former sexual behaviour, for the time being many were caught up in the prevailing culture. Connolly himself went on to be a famous womanizer, but his early experiences were all with his own sex. John Betjeman was alleged to have had sex with W. H. Auden for £5, and he swooned over Hugh Gaitskell (‘Hugh, may I stroke your bottom?’ ‘Oh, I suppose so, if you must.’).

  Whatever his social reputation, Graham’s behaviour and academic work were never satisfactory. Too much of his career at Oxford was spent socializing with well-bred young men and dining at the George, a bohemian cafe-cum-restaurant at the corner of Cornmarket and George Street, whose habitués called themselves ‘the Georgeoisie’. Having failed to return to classes a full month after Christmas 1927, Graham was not allowed to return to Oxford for the remainder of his second term.

  When he returned to Oxford for the summer term, the student magazine, Cherwell, carried two drawings of Graham – one a portrait of his head and shoulders, which occupied nearly a full page and another, much smaller sketch of Graham on a ski slope. There were also a few paragraphs of gossip relating to him at which Graham took – or pretended to take – offence. Cherwell was edited at the time by Maurice Green, with Osbert Lancaster as his deputy.* Their editorship had already caused many confrontations with the university proctors, the most recent of which had resulted in a heavy fine for publishing an indecent joke about the writer Godfrey Winn.

  When Graham next met Maurice Green in the George, he handed him his card ‘in the approved style’ and challenged him to a duel. The Daily Mirror and several regional newspapers took up the story, under the headline ‘A Real Duel – Undergraduate Pinked at Oxford’:

  Graham Eyres-Monsell [sic], son of the Conservative Chief Whip, fought in eighteenth-century costume of knickerbockers and silken hose in Dead Man’s Walk, Merton. It was no mock affair, one of the duellists stated on Wednesday. [. . .] Apart from the principals and seconds, only two persons saw the duel, one being a Munich doctor who arrived at the meeting place armed in readiness with bandages and cotton wool and the other a curious passer-by who inquired if all the fuss was for films. Mr Eyres-Monsell said that when he challenged Green it was not with any seriousness. ‘But one thing led to another and finally we had to fight. I never thought the affair would result as it did. It might have proved very serious. As a matter of fact I have made up my quarrel with Green and we are quite good friends.’15

  Most of the undergraduates, including the ‘Munich doctor’ were members of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, and they had hired props from a theatrical costumier. A photograph appeared in the Saturday edition of Cherwell, together with a fictitious account of the duel. In university circles it was all regarded as a successful hoax, and three days later cheers greeted Graham and Maurice Green when they arrived for a debate at the Union.

  The university authorities took matters less lightly. The principals were each fined £10 and the seconds – Osbert was Graham’s – £5. Although he succeeded in passing his preliminary exams during the summer term, in June 1928 he was fined both for smoking in hall and for holding another noisy party. He also appeared for debt in the Vice Chancellor’s court. The debt had still not been paid by the following October, and the Warden’s and Tutors’ Committee passed a resolution that Graham be sent down unless he paid his kitchen and buttery expenses, which were known as ‘battels’. They still had not been paid at the end of November, he was gated and told to pay by the following Wednesday or be sent down. Early in May 1929 he was nearly sent out of residence yet again for the non-payment of battels. Then in June the warden and tutors at Merton decided that Graham would not be allowed to continue at Merton unless he passed a scripture exam before October. He also had to return to the Vice Chancellor’s court for not having paid a debt of £34 4s 9d, which he had run up at Sidney Acott’s music shop in the High Street. Maurice Green became a distinguished journalist and his double-first degree was counted among the most brilliant of his generation, but after only two years Graham returned home to Dumbleton, his name was taken off the college books, and his university career came to an inglorious end.

  Not long after her brother had left for Eton, Joan’s sister Diana was sent to St James’s School, which stood on the slopes of the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. She hated it. The school had been founded by two sisters, Alice and Kitty Baird, in 1896. Although the Miss Bairds tried to make school life pleasant, St James’s came as a considerable shock to any girl used to home comforts. The position of the house, a converted nineteenth-century mansion, was exposed, and sometimes it was bitterly cold. The bedroom annexe had three outside walls and windows to the floor. Even in winter, the windows were kept open at night, and the girls woke to find that snow had drifted into the room. The school uniform was basic – white cotton shirts, navy blue coats and skirts, and in summer the girls wore yellow straw hats with yellow knots and black velvet ribbon, which they called ‘scrambled eggs’. Juniors were only allowed to wash their hair once a month – no doubt to discourage vanity – and all girls were only allowed to bru
sh their hair three times a week.

  Examinations were not regarded as being of much importance. Miss Alice, the headmistress, adopted an American system which, in her words, ‘developed the spirit of enquiry and curiosity and joy in learning’. There were no rigid timetables and girls were to regard the teacher as a friend and helper. What the Miss Bairds most wanted to instil was citizenship and public service. St James’s girls were to be prepared for their intended status in society; educating them for a career was of secondary importance, if considered at all. It was not until the 1960s that a girl from St James’s went on to university. Such was the sense of excitement at this great achievement that the whole school was given the day off.

  When Joan joined her sister at St James’s she hated it every bit as much. Joan regarded her school career as hopelessly unsatisfactory, and her consequent lack of a university education was a lifelong regret. She had learnt neither Latin nor Greek, and it was a cliché among her school contemporaries, ‘to think the only thing I learnt at St James’s was how to curtsey.’ Joan joined the Girl Guides, which was strongly encouraged (Baden Powell and his wife were close friends of Alice Baird and in July 1927 the Chief Scout and Guide paid their first visit), but perhaps the school’s only lasting virtue as far as she was concerned was that it encouraged the arts. Along with a music club, a ping-pong club and a junior branch of the League of Nations, there was also a photography society at the school and it was through photography that Joan would one day find a means of liberation.

  After leaving St James’s, Joan attended a finishing school in Paris. The sisters of the French teacher Mlle Delpierre, a strong disciplinarian whose ‘silent presence at the top of the stairs could quell a Boot-Hole riot’,16 ran the school at the Villa St James in the rue de Charles Lafitte, where older girls could improve their French accent. St James’s in Malvern also had a connection with a Swiss finishing school at Beaupré outside Geneva. Here Joan learnt to ski, although, unlike Graham, never very confidently.