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About Basil Street Blues
About Michael Holroyd
Reviews
Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs
Biographies by Michael Holroyd
Table of Contents
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Cover
Welcome Page
List of Illustrations
Epigraph
PART I
Chapter 1: Two Types of Ambiguity
Chapter 2: With Virginia Woolf at Sheffield Place
Chapter 3: The Swedish Experiment
Chapter 4: Links in the Chain
Chapter 5: The Breves Process: Tea into Glass
Chapter 6: The Coming of Agnes May
Chapter 7: A Triumph and Disaster
INTERVAL
Chapter 8: Literary Lapses
PART II
Chapter 9: Some Wartime Diversions
Chapter 10: Notes from Norhurst
Chapter 11: Yolande’s Story
Chapter 12: Scaitcliffe Revisited
Chapter 13: Three Weddings and a Funeral
Chapter 14: Eton
Chapter 15: Legal and Military
Chapter 16: The Third Mrs Nares
Chapter 17: Flight into Surrey
Chapter 18: Scenes from Provincial and Metropolitan Life
Chapter 19: Missing Persons
ENVOI
Chapter 20: Things Past
Preview
Acknowledgements
Appendix: Four Family Trees
About Basil Street Blues
Reviews
About Michael Holroyd
Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs
Biographies by Michael Holroyd
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
I am indebted to many individuals and organisations in the preparation of Basil Street Blues. Among the former are: Margit Andréen, I. V. and A-M. Attwell, David Benedictus, Jeffrey Bowman, Christopher Capron, Anne Chisholm, Anders Clason, Keith Clements, G. C. Frowde, Viola Germain, Hilda Gledhill, Winston Graham, Vicky Hall, Leslie Hodgson, Jennifer Holden, John Holroyd, Sessie Hylander, Jeremy Isaacs, Robert Lescher, Maureen Levenson, Richard Magor, John Mein, Niall McMonagle, Michael Ockenden, Anders Öfverstöm, Roger Packham, Griffy Philipps, Merle Rafferty, Michael and Moussie Sayers, Michael Seifert, Michael Sevenoaks, Ronald Stent, Lena Svanberg, Richard Vickers, Mary Young.
I am most grateful to: Head of Administration, the General Council of the Bar; Mary Stewart, Clinic Secretary, Family & Child Guidance Service, Royal County of Berkshire; County Solicitor, Royal County of Berkshire; R. J. Ewing, Bircham & Co, solicitors; Jonathan Barker and Alastair Niven, Literature Department, the British Council, London; Michelle Appleton, the British Council, France; Clare College Archive, Cambridge; Mark Nicholls, Department of Manuscripts and University Archives, Cambridge University Library; Timothy H. Duke, Chester Herald, College of Arms; Naomi da Silva, Family Proceedings Department, the Court Service, Somerset House; P. Hatfield, Eton College Archivist; Mike Waller, Gallerie Moderne; P. Berney, Registration Directorate, General Medical Council; R. Simpson, Suprevisor, Glasgow Necropolis; Avril Gordon, Glasgow City Council; Mark Jones, Deputy Librarian, Gray’s Inn Library; Nadene Hansen, Company Archivist at Harrods; Peter Hunter, Librarian, Harrow School; the Insolvency Service; Elizabeth Stratton, Assistant Archivist, King’s College, Library, Cambridge; T. Shepherd, Regulatory Enquiry Services, the Law Society; Office for National Statistics; N. P. Willmoth, Senior Financial Services Officer, Life & Investment Services, Nat West; Colin Matthew, editor of the New Dictionary of National Biography; Jean Rose, Library Manager, Reed Book Services Limited; V. J. Baxter, Local Studies Librarian, London Borough of Richmond upon Thames; Royal Air Force Personnel Management Agency; the Sandhurst Collection; Scottish Record Office; S. J. Berry, Senior Archivist, Somerset County Record Office; Anthony Howard, Obituaries Editor, The Times; Jonathan Smith, Manuscripts Cataloguer, Trinity College Library, Cambridge; J. P. Rudman, Archivist, Uppingham School; Le Secrétaire Général délégé, Vernet-les-Bains; Patrick Mclure, Secrtary, Wykehamist Society.
To Sarah Johnson, who is now the only person in the world who can read my handwriting, especially when it appears between the lines of my typing, I owe special thanks for putting everything on to immaculate disks. I am also grateful to Philippa Harrison for her editorial sensitivity and thoroughness, to Caroline North, and to Kate Truman.
Quotations from Eton Renewed: A History from 1860 to the Present Day (1994) by Tim Card are reproduced with the permission of the publisher, John Murray. Lines from Nevill Coghill’s translation of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde are reproduced with the permission of Curtis Brown Ltd, London on behalf of the Estate of Nevill Coghill. Copyright Nevill Coghill 1971. Glass sculptures by René Lalique, photographed by Andrew Stewart: Perche (Contents page), Longchamp (page 1), Renard (page 99), Tête de Paon (page 115), Tête de Coq (page 301).
My grandparents with their children at Windsor: Kenneth (left), Basil (middle) and Yolande.
My Swedish grandmother, Kaja, Stockholm c.1913.
The schoolboy at Eton.
The novelist in London.
Brocket in the 1920s.
My father with his schnauzer puppy.
Ulla, my mother, when she arrived in England c.1934.
My mother during her cancer treatment.
Haselhurst c.1940.
My aunt Yolande in the 1920s.
The author of Mosaic (photograph © by John Foley).
Philippa: while writing Frank Harris.
Agnes May: the hand-painted photograph commissioned by my grandfather c.1928.
Illustrations of two light fittings by the author’s father.
‘The past puts a fine edge on our own days. It tells us more of the present than the present can tell us.’
William Gerhardie, ‘An Historical Credo’
The Romanovs, An Evocation of the Past as a Mirror for the Present
Towards the end of the nineteen-seventies I asked my parents to let me have some account of their early lives. I had never been interested in my family. My career as a biographer probably arose from my need to escape from family involvements and immerse myself in other people’s lives. ‘We don’t go to Heaven in families any more – but one by one.’ I remember how struck I was when I came across this sentence in Gwen John’s correspondence. That was certainly how I felt. I also remember quoting in my first biography Hugh Kingsmill’s aphorism: ‘Friends are God’s apology for families,’ and feeling a chord of agreement.
My parents, who had long been divorced, and gone through a couple of subsequent marriages, each of them, as well as various additional liaisons, were by the late nineteen-seventies living alone in fragile health and meagre circumstances. They appeared bewildered by the rubble into which everything was collapsing. After all, it had started so promisingly.
The accounts they wrote were very different. This did not surprise me. They had seldom agreed about anything, not even the date of my birth. As a gesture of tact I preserved two birthdays forty-eight hours apart, one for each of them. This had begun as a joke, grew into a habit and finally became a rather ageing conceit which will enable me to claim by the year 2000 the wisdom of a 130-year-old.
My parents’ marriage was something of a mystery to me. What did they have in common? After the age of six I seldom saw them together and could imagine few people more dissimilar. What few scraps of memory I retained brought back echoes of reverberating arguments that floated up to me as I lay in a dark bedroom in the north of England – echoes that, to gain popularity, I would later assemble into dramatic stories for the school dormitory. A breadknife flashed in the dark, a line of blood suddenly appeared, and we shivered delightedly in our beds. But I have few actual memories of my very early years, few recollections of my childhood I can trust, and not many of adolescence. There were probably good reasons for this erasure, though I am hoping that some events may stir from their resting place and rise to the surface as I write.
I was born in the summer of 1935. My mother was Swedish, and my father thought of himself as English, though his mother actually came from the south of Ireland and his paternal grandmother was Scottish. All I knew was that my parents had met on a boat in the North Sea, got along fine on water, then fairly soon after striking land, dashed their marriage on the rocks. I had been conceived, my mother once remarked as we were travelling by bus through Knightsbridge, at the Hyde Park Hotel where King Gustav of Sweden (calling himself Colonel Gustaveson) often stayed. I remember her laughing as we swayed into Sloane Street and travelled on. At another time, in a taxi, she pointed to the Basil Street Hotel with a similar laugh before turning into Sloane Street.
I was largely brought up in the Home Counties by my paternal grandparents and a tennis-playing aunt. But there were irregular intervals, sometimes at odd places abroad, with unfamiliar step-parents who, like minor characters in a badly-managed melodrama, would introduce themselves with a flourish, a bray of trumpets, and then inexplicably disappear. Perhaps the peculiar enchantment that sustained and integrated narratives, enriched with involving plots, were to hold for me sprang from my sense of being brought up by so many characters – parental, step-parental and grand-parental characters – who seldom met, showed little interest in one another, and apparently possessed no connecting story.
In some respects my father had a ‘good war’, or so I believed. But he could not adjust to the peace afterwards. Though increasingly impoverished, he somehow found (I never knew how) the money to send me to Eton College because he had been there himself at the end of the First World War. He spoke of his time at Eton with unconvincing jollity and was evidently looking forward to a second, vicarious, innings there.
My mother didn’t mind where I was educated. She did not have an ideology and simply wanted me to be happy, preferably without too much trouble. She never regarded education, which was full of awkward exams, as an obvious route to happiness. But probably such things were different for men.
They certainly appeared different to my father who had the air of a man acting responsibly on my behalf – as, he implied, his own father should have acted for him. By the time I was sixteen, he judged the moment had come to take me to one side and explain the main purpose of my education – which was to retrieve the family fortunes that would otherwise descend on me, he revealed, in the form of serious debts. Eton was providing me with many valuable friendships that could catapult me, he believed, to success. It did not occur to me to ask why Eton had not provided him with such vaulting associations. He gave the impression of someone who had overshot success and landed somewhere else. In the event, I failed comprehensively in this romantic quest he had assigned me (my average income between the mid-nineteen-sixties and mid-nineteen-seventies was to be £1,500 a year). I did not even know how the exotic family fortunes I was to rescue had originated or where they had gone. Was it all a mirage?
Lack of money was very evident in my parents’ last years, when my father was living in a rundown flat in Surrey and my mother in a one-room apartment in London. I thought that the exercise of exploring happier years and travelling back to more prosperous times might bring them some release from their difficulties. From being their only child, the sole child from five marriages, I was to become their guardian and a barely-adequate protector. Having, as it were, commissioned them to write for me, I proposed paying them some commission money. After hesitating, my mother accepted the money with eager reluctance. She had always associated men with money, but understandably had not associated me with it, and was worried that I did not have enough. But times were improving for me, as if I were sitting on the opposite end of a seesaw from my descending parents. My Lytton Strachey had eventually been brought out as a paperback and after one very good year, when my Augustus John was published, I settled down at the end of the nineteen-seventies to annual net income of between four and five thousand pounds. I could afford to hand over a little money. Besides, I explained to my mother, she would not take my request seriously unless it was put on a business basis. Desperately needing the money, she gave me a kiss and took it.
But my father would not take anything. He wanted to give money and receive praise: he found it almost impossible to receive money or give praise. He felt deeply humiliated by his poverty. ‘I certainly wouldn’t dream of allowing you to pay 1 cent for anything I write about the family,’ he notified me. I remember reading his letter with exasperation. He was so difficult to help. The truth was he felt embarrassed by my offer which, he wrote, ‘made me feel very ashamed of myself. I am not yet as down and out as you may imagine.’ Now, re-reading his letter after his death, an unexpected sadness spreads through me. It was true that he had been ‘down’ many times, ‘down’ but not quite ‘out’. Cursing the foul blows delivered on him by politicians, he would somehow pick himself up each time – just in time. But in his late sixties and early seventies, with only a State pension and a couple of hundred pounds from a mysterious ‘Holroyd Settlement’, though he would still speak with animation of things ‘turning up’, my father had in fact settled into involuntary retirement. The game was up. ‘I find that time is heavy on my hands,’ he had written to me. That was one of the reasons I had inflicted this homework on him. Nevertheless I emphasised that it was for my sake rather than his own that I was asking him to write an account. And perhaps there was more truth in this than I realised. For after my father and mother died in the nineteen-eighties I began to feel a need to fill the space they left with a story. Neither of them were in the front line of great historical events: their dramas are the dramas of ordinary lives, each one nevertheless extraordinary. From their accounts, from various photograph albums and a few clues in two or three boxes of miscellaneous odds and ends, I want to recreate the events that would give my own fragmented upbringing a context. Can I stir these few remnants and start a flame, an illumination? This book is not simply a search for facts, but for echoes and associations, signs and images, the recovery of a lost narrative and a sense of continuity: things I seem to miss and believe I never had.
I had to distance myself from my parents while they were alive, not out of hostility to them, but from a natural urge to find my individual identity, my own route. ‘When a writer is born into a family,’ wrote Philip Roth, ‘the family is finished.’ Inhabiting their worlds as a child and then an adolescent, I felt invisible; after which I traded somewhat in invisibility as a biographer. But following my parents’ deaths, when they became invisible and I was seen to have attained my independence, my feelings began to change. I was drawn into the vacancy their deaths created, needing to trace my origins. It is an experience, I believe, that possesses many people in these circumstances: to ask questions when it is apparently too late for answers, and then be forced to discover answers of our own.
The unexamined life, Saul Bellow reminds us, is meaningless. But the examined life, he adds, is full of dangers. I have found wonderful freedom in that maverick condition which can be described as meaningless: a freedom in not being tied to social contexts or engulfed in family chauvinism. My identity was shaped by what I wrote, though this identity was concealed behind the people I wrote about – concealed I think from others, and also from myself. But now I must go back and explore. My parents, my family scattered over time and place, have become my biographical subjects as I search for something of me in them, and them in me. For this is a vicarious autobiography I am writing, a chronicle with a personal subtext, charting my evolution into someone who would never have been recognised by myself when young.
My father wrote with a ballpoint pen on blue Basildon Bond paper. I remember thinking that, his name being Basil, this was almost a pun – especially since he was largely playing the history don in this investigation, the don he occasionally felt he would like to have been. The handwriting, as always, is wonderfully clear: thirty lines to the page, three hundred words, as regular as a marching soldier – quite unlike my own unformed and erratic writing.
He had probably prepared this fair copy from an earlier version. It stops suddenly in mid-sentence, at the foot of the thirty-eighth page, leaving him in his truncated schooldays during the early nineteen-twenties suffering from double pneumonia. But there are a couple of stray white pages, numbered 19 and 20, and a fragment of 21, that contain a variant text. They allude rather tantalisingly to ‘the only indiscretion’ of his own father, the ‘real start of our financial disasters’, and a ‘Holroyd Settlement’.
There are signs that in his fair copy my father somewhat held back. Perhaps he remembered an attempt I had made to write about the family ten years earlier and the drama it caused. It had been an attempt at using my family to find a career of my own rather than following one of the uninviting professions they were urging on me.
My father started his saga in its first version in the eighteenth century and moved fairly rapidly on to his parents – my grandparents at whose house in Berkshire I had passed much of my childhood and adolescence. But coming across a privately-printed history of the family prepared in 1879 by Thomas Holroyd, High Sheriff of Calcutta, for his son in Australia (later brought up to 1914 by Caroline Holroyd, Thomas Holroyd’s daughter, also for her brother who was by then a retired judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria in Melbourne, Sir Edward Dundas Holroyd), my father had been able eventually to reach back into the sixteenth century. That privately-printed history had been largely taken from Burke’s Colonial Gentry and Foss’s Lives of the Judges.
My father believed that the ‘royd’ in Holroyd came from a Yorkshire word meaning stream. I do not know where he picked up this piece of learning. In the opinion of a Yorkshire local historian, Hilda Gledhill, ‘royd’ was actually a Norse word meaning clearing or place which had been introduced by the Vikings after landing at Durham in the eighth century and making their way south west into northern Wales. When surnames became more common, people were often called after the land where they lived, Holroyd being someone who occupied a hollow place or valley. My father enjoyed history, and had he come across a rare volume, John Lodge’s The Peerage of Ireland, published by James Moore in 1789, he might have liked to read that the Holroyd family is ‘of great antiquity in the West-Riding of the county of York, and derives its name from the hamlet or estate of Holroyd, or Howroyd, as it was pronounced, in Bark-Island six miles from Halifax, which they formerly possessed’. According to John Lodge, who provided a pedigree going back to the thirteenth century, the word Holroyd ‘signifies, when applied to land, such as was barren and uncultivated…The origin well suits the soil and situation of Holroyd… which joins to the mountainous country separating Lancaster from Yorkshire, called Blackstone-edge.’ It is spacious country with vast skies and steep valleys full of clinging mists; also deep green fields marked out by granite and millstone walls, and miles of brown windswept moors, dramatic and desolate, round which, in the teeth of the weather, the people of the South Pennons quarried out their lives.
For several centuries Yorkshire seems to have been crammed with these Holroyds – butchers, clergymen, clothiers, farmers, landowners, soldiers, yeoman of all kinds. It was as well my father did not gain access to all this early material or he might never have reached the twentieth century at all.
He began his story with two brothers, George and Isaac Holroyd, in the seventeenth century. From these brothers, he wrote, ‘our particular branch of the family is descended’. The elder brother was the great-great-grandfather of the first Earl of Sheffield, now remembered as the friend and patron of Edward Gibbon, or ‘Gibbons’ as my father rather endearingly called him. This Earl of Sheffield, John Baker Holroyd, is one of only two members of the family to have appeared in the original edition of Leslie Stephen’s and Sidney Lee’s Dictionary of National Biography. There his political career is described, his three marriages noted, and the price paid (£31,000) for the house and grounds at Sheffield Place in Sussex recorded (the purchase of which my father, who was having trouble with his central heating, ascribes to the climate of Sussex being more congenial than Yorkshire ‘for his family seat’). There too are listed Sheffield’s various Irish and English titles (Baron of Dunamore in the County of Meath, Viscount Pevensey etc.) and a bibliography presented of his observations, reports, and editing of Gibbon’s posthumous works. There is scarcely a hint of what Leslie Stephen’s daughter Virginia Woolf was to call, in her biographical pastiche Orlando, ‘that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests’.
Virginia Woolf wanted to ‘revolutionize biography in a night’. She wanted to free the imagination of the biographer from that tedious parade of dates and battles, that dubious weight of notes, indexes and bibliographies which remove it from the common reader. She wanted to introduce riot and confusion, passion and humour. And then she also wanted to clear those forests of family trees planted from father to son in the colonising territory of male culture. Such dreams lie between the lines of an essay she wrote in 1937 called ‘Reflections at Sheffield Place’. At the end of this essay she follows not the male heirs (through the first Lord Sheffield’s grandson, an idiosyncratic patron of cricket who in 1891 took an English team, including W.G. Grace, over to Australia and founded the Sheffield Shield competition), but a daughter and then on to her granddaughter Kate Amberley who was the mother of Bertrand Russell. If you hop on to the right line it can take you almost anywhere.
For Virginia Woolf, the great gardens at Sheffield Place, with their series of descending lakes, came to reflect something too intimate to find its way into works of historical reference. ‘No place was more like home to him [Edward Gibbon] than Sheffield Place,’ she wrote, ‘and he looked upon the Holroyds as his own flesh and blood.’
Virginia Woolf hands over the telling of her story to Sheffield’s daughter, ‘the soft and stately Maria’, as Gibbon described her. Only she could bring understanding to this devoted friendship between the Peer and the Historian, or ‘the Gib’ as she sometimes calls him (my father would have liked that). It was a friendship based on opposites, an attachment that (like biography itself perhaps) enabled them both to live lives each could never have lived simply in his own person. In the headstrong figure of Sheffield, Gibbon found someone caught up in those sorts of political and military affairs that, from the calmness of his study and over great distances of time, he sat composing into the sonorous sentences of his Decline and Fall. With his friend Sheffield, he was able to slip off his purple language and become quite racy and colloquial. In matters of the heart, where Gibbon was so ineffectual, Sheffield appeared recklessly extravagant. This emotional extravagance troubled Maria who looked to Gibbon for support. For though he was ridiculously vain and prodigiously fat, over-dressed and top-heavy, a waddling indoor figure of a man, ‘rather testy too, an old bachelor, who lived like clockwork and hated to have his plans upset’ (this must have brought her friend Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf’s mind), yet he was also ‘le grand Gibbon’ whom Maria could not help liking. She saw how only in deference to Gibbon would her father check the self-destructive riot and confusion of his passions, and she felt grateful.
In ‘Reflections at Sheffield Place’ Virginia Woolf was indicating the change she wanted to see in historical biography, ‘changing as the furniture changed in the firelight, as the waters of the lake changed when the night wind swept over them’. It is a turning away from the general narratives of history, with their wheeling armies and splendid processions that pass through the gorgeous tapestry of Gibbon’s pages. It is an attempt, in miniature form, to put into practice Samuel Johnson’s advice to biographers not to dwell on ‘those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness, but lead the thoughts into domestic privacies’: an eye-level rather than the overall view of our past.
This is what has attracted me to biography: the idea of an ‘intimacy between strangers’, a closeness growing up during the acts of writing and reading between an author, the reader and their subject, all unknown to one another before the book began coming into existence. For I do not think of biography as being an information-retrieval exercise: information, now the fruit of technology, has little fascination for me unless it takes root in my emotions and grows in my imagination into knowledge. What increasingly absorbs me is the unconscious process of learning. While writing I forget myself, and when I return to my world I sense that I am someone slightly different. The effect of these working holidays is of course cumulative, and perhaps there is significance in my having two birthdays. I was born the son of my parents, the grandson of their parents, and so on; and then, as it were, reborn the child of my writings – for it is they that have taken me round the world and shaped my adult existence. Now I must sit at my desk and see if I can bring together these two people who were consecutively, and who are cumulatively, myself.
My mother’s beginning was dramatic. In 1916 her parents were living at Örebro, 200 kilometres west of Stockholm. They had been married three years, had a two-year-old son Karl-Åke, and my grandmother was over five months pregnant with her second child. On 19 November Karl-Åke was playing in the kitchen where his nurse was cooking – simply boiling water it seems at the fireplace. Some say the child knocked over an oil lamp and started a fire; others that he tipped the boiling saucepan over himself. He was rushed to hospital, lingered there almost three weeks, then died on 9 December. The shock caused my grandmother to give birth prematurely to a tiny daughter on the day after the accident and in the hospital where her son was dying. They called their daughter Ulla. This was my mother.
I knew none of this until my mother wrote it down for me. I am not certain how much she knew of it herself before then – perhaps it is the sort of knowledge we suppress. But while preparing her account she told me that Greta, a neighbour of her mother in Stockholm, ‘is trying to pump her without her knowing so, to keep her mind off her health – let’s see what we’ll get.’ In other words Greta was doing what I was doing.
What we got was to be one of the main sources of my mother’s rapid narrative. She wrote on lined paper, twenty centimetres long, and with forty-six narrow lines to the page which her fast-flowing handwriting often overlapped. She wrote in pencil, suggesting the impermanence of the past, yet with great speed and dash, almost violence, underlining words – names, dates, countries, towns, as well as words that needed special emphasis such as all and dead. Her writing appears full of activity, as if responding to the urgency of these events which streamed confusingly in and out of each other until they came to an end at the top of the thirteenth page. Then she started again, from somewhere near the middle, ending this time with notes of her various dogs: another fourteen pages. My mother had little time for the past. What absorbed her was the eternal present. Nevertheless, as she wrote, and then as I read, an unusual interest in these events seemed to grow up between us.
She noted that her father, a major in the Swedish army, had died in 1945. That surprised me. I had thought it was very much earlier. Only when I came to write this book did I realise he actually died several years later. I never met him. Nineteen forty-five was the year I began making regular sea-journeys with my mother to visit our Swedish relatives in Borås and Stockholm, Göteborg and a holiday island nearby called Marstrand.
My understanding at the time was that, despite being in one of the country’s safest professions, the Swedish army, my grandfather had died young. I imagined him, sword in hand, falling gloriously from a horse during hectic manoeuvres in a northern forest.
From my mother’s notes I see that he was the son of Knut Johansson, a director of the Växjö Match Company in southern Sweden and his wife Amanda Hall who came from a family that ran the Krueger Match Company. On her marriage certificate my mother was to give her maiden name as Ulla Knutsson-Hall. Evidently her father took, or was given, his father’s first name, a second syllable to remind us that he was the son of his father, and finally his mother’s maiden name. He is Karl Knutsson-Hall.
Karl (or Kalle as he was usually called) had a good voice and had once dreamed of being an opera singer. He did sing in a few amateur productions, but his parents wanted him to take over the family’s match empire. Eventually, by way of compromise, he went into the army which was thought to provide a respectable career.
My mother’s maternal family had come from southern Germany, and her great-grandfather, Gustav Jagenburg, worked in Moscow early in the nineteenth century before settling down with his wife at Rydboholm, near Borås. He was a textile manufacturer and his son Rudolf was said to have invented a wondrous dye that never faded. In the eighteen-eighties Rudolf married the daughter of the prison priest at the Castle of Varberg. The second of their six children was my grandmother. Her formal name was Karin though we all called her Kaja.
How Karl and Kaja first met I do not know. But I do know that the Jagenburgs considered themselves socially superior to Karl’s matchmaking family which was lower-middle class. They strongly opposed the marriage of this handsome couple on the grounds that Kaja could do better for herself. There was no money to be made in the army and Karl’s excellent horsemanship did not particularly impress them. But Kaja in those days was a headstrong, passionate girl. A photograph of her in her early twenties among my mother’s possessions shows a sweet face, with watchful slanting eyes, a rather sensuous but determined mouth, her expression provocative and full of character. No one was going to tell her whom to marry. She was in love with this charming officer, and that was enough.
So, in 1913, she married Lieutenant Karl Knutsson-Hall and went up to Boden in the north of Sweden where he was stationed. She was twenty-one and could marry without parental consent; he was four years older.
It seems probable that the marriage never recovered from the burning to death of their infant son Karl-Åke at the end of 1916. They had no more children after my mother Ulla and by the nineteen-twenties, when the family moved to Stockholm and my mother was old enough to notice things, Karl was spending more time with his brother officers than with his wife. They seemed to regard him still as a romantic bachelor. ‘A more gentlemanly officer than Karl Hall could not be found in 1920s Sweden,’ wrote one of his subordinates who recalled this ‘idyllic warrior’ during their company’s ‘legendary manoeuvres in Trosa during 1922… and the merry ball in Trosa’s grand hotel where Karl Hall reigned over the dusty recruits and young beauties… a generous, chivalrous heartbreaker.’
Ulla went first to the Margaretha School in Stockholm and then to Franska Skolan at 9 Döbelnsgatan where she began to learn her many languages. In the holidays she often went to Växjö where the Hall family had a large country house. Her most enduring memory was of twin earth-closets in a red building with white gables where ‘I used to sit with my cousin’. Her father being the eldest of nine children, there were plenty of these cousins with whom to play. At the end of the garden stood a lake where they would all swim (‘trod on a snake once on the way down the slope’, my mother wrote). What she most enjoyed were the children’s suppers by this lake in the endless summer evenings – sandwiches made from newly-baked brown bread with delicious fillings. ‘I once ate 15!’ my mother boasted. ‘A record.’ She was looked after during those early holidays by Karin – not her mother (who disliked the Hall family and didn’t often go to Växjö) but one of her in-laws whom she thought of as her ‘nanny’.
At the age of twelve Ulla was sent to a French family in the Haute Savoie for three months to practise her French. But there was another reason for removing her from Stockholm. Her parents had decided to separate. This was not a friendly arrangement but a stubbornly-fought duel that lasted almost four years and according to the family was to lead to a change in the Swedish divorce laws. Up till that time ‘we lived in various nice flats’, my mother wrote. But after she returned from France everything changed. Mother and daughter moved rapidly between small apartments and boarding houses pursued by Karl. Sometimes at night there were drunken brawls in the street and on one memorable occasion Karl staggered towards them shouting and waving a revolver.
Kaja was determined to win her divorce. But though Karl was apparently drinking heavily and had, Kaja told her daughter, contracted venereal disease from an extra-marital liaison, there seemed no way for her to obtain a legal divorce unless her husband consented to it. His condition of consent was a million kronor, which he calculated Kaja’s father (he of the miraculous unfading dye) could afford to pay him. There was a prolonged and bitter feud that my mother found unnerving. ‘I suffered,’ she wrote. But what struck me as strange when reading her brief account was that she didn’t appear to blame her father for those dreadful years. Perhaps she romanticised him, not knowing him so well, and missing him. Kaja had never been very ‘understanding’ with her as a child and was, Ulla felt, too ‘demanding’ with her husband.
Eventually Kaja won the divorce battle largely because one of her uncles was Riksmarskalk of Sweden (equivalent to Lord High Chamberlain in England). After ‘Lex versus Hall’ was settled in 1932 it became easier for women to get divorced in Sweden.
Following their divorce Karl retreated into a home for alcoholics where he was nursed by the daughter of a priest (the home was apparently managed by the Church). Then in her mid-twenties, Marianne was half Karl’s age, but ‘understanding and kind which was what he needed’, my mother insisted. So they married. As a bonus, she was ‘very good-looking’, my mother observed. This suggests that she must have seen Marianne, but she gets her name wrong (Margareta instead of Marianne) which suggests she did not actually know her. Perhaps they met only at Karl’s funeral. In my mother’s speedy narrative, the happy couple are disposed of rather brutally: ‘My father died of T.B. and god knows what else,’ she wrote. ‘He caught T.B. from his wife who was later killed by being squashed by a lorry against a wall whilst walking with a girlfriend in Stockholm – 5 years after Papa died.’ This must have been based on what Kaja was telling her neighbour, Greta. In fact Karl’s cause of death is given as a respectable heart attack (‘Infartus cordis kardiosclerasis’).
In her ’teens Kaja had done some sewing and cutting in her father’s textile workshops in Borås. Then, arriving in Stockholm as a married woman, she persuaded her father to introduce her to Countess Margareta von Schwerin, known as Marg, who in 1927 was to open the celebrated fashion house Märthaskolan where elegant ladies had their dresses made. Before long Kaja became a consultant there and was coming into contact with Swedish high society. She took her work seriously and, she would tell her daughter, was never late, not even by five minutes, for an appointment. ‘I can see Kaja entering the salons well aware of the impression she made, so sure of herself and her beauty,’ a friend of my mother’s wrote to me. ‘Everyone had to admire her, and then entered Ulla, pretty, laughing and much more warm at heart, everybody felt.’
Kaja soon floated free from the disreputable business of her divorce and settled into her work as a couturier for Märthaskolan. This was a school of dress as well as a fashion house and in those days the greatest single influence in the creation of Swedish femininity. The Countess Margareta von Schwerin herself was really a fashion reporter with strong opinions as to what would be useful for young girls. She travelled widely and dealt with most of the French couturiers. But she did not promote a single style or confine her interests to high fashion. She was an ambitious woman and wanted to dress all women in Sweden, whatever their age or status. She saw herself as an educator. Her mission was to give Swedish women confidence in the home and at work by the way they presented themselves.
Among the bits and pieces my mother left after her death are a few photographs of our trips together to Sweden from the late nineteen-forties and the nineteen-fifties. There I am sitting on the floor with my pretty cousin Mary. She is smiling, blonde and lively; I, aged nine or ten, am blank-faced and bird-like, decked out in foreign tailoring, with blue and yellow Swedish cufflinks, a frilled handkerchief and bow tie (my God! What would my schoolfriends in Surrey have said?). Behind us, sitting and standing in rows, a contingent of the family has formed up for the photograph. I can recognise my grandmother Kaja, a formidably handsome woman looking frankly at the camera; and I can see my mother, unsmiling, with a similar gingham frock and hair neatly arranged like my grandmother’s – she is on her very best behaviour. But I cannot identify anyone else. Which is Elis? Where is Inga?
But with my mother’s written account before me I can at last make some sense of this family group. My grandmother was in her mid-fifties at the time these photographs were taken, though she looks younger. And these are her brothers and sisters, their wives and husbands and children, who have lined up before the camera. There is a bank manager, an engineer, a doctor, a businessman: all respectable middle-class people. Of course there are some lapses from respectability. One of the brothers, for example, an import–export manager, imported syphilis from a Hamburg brothel and has never quite recovered. My grandmother believes it must have addled his brain – why else would he have married a waitress from a Borås hotel? My mother likes Kristina, her waitress-aunt, who has always been kind to her. But my grandmother cannot stand her and makes pointed remarks such as, when Kristina comes into the room with some drinks: ‘You must be used to carrying trays.’
My grandmother is a snob. Snobbishness is her form of authority. It cows other people, and this suits her. That is why she looks so young in the photographs and my mother so ill-at-ease. My grandmother believes in appearances and, living up to her beliefs, she appears splendidly superior.
Kaja always walked, sat, spoke and generally carried herself with soldierly precision. She had the unquestioning air of an officer – more so than her ex-husband. She assumed the posture of high command, straightened her back, raised her chin, yet somehow retained her attractiveness. This is a determined and successful couturier we see in the photographs.
Kaja revelled in this work and felt proud of being part of the Countess’s team at Märthaskolan. She allowed herself one acknowledged admirer, Birger Sandström, a middle-aged gentleman with a brilliant white moustache, whose presence breathed respectability. He escorted her to parties and she employed him almost as a fashion accessory. It was a discreet arrangement which became easier to manage after 1934 when Ulla sailed for England.
I like to think of Virginia Woolf having used one of my ancestors to plead the revolution in biography. Unfortunately my father had not been strictly accurate when claiming that our branch of the family was directly descended from the two sixteenth-century brothers George and Isaac Holroyd. The first Earl of Sheffield’s direct ancestor was George, but we succeeded from the younger brother Isaac. Isaac’s most illustrious descendant was Sir George Sowley Holroyd, a Judge of the King’s Bench. Like Lord Sheffield he was painted by Joshua Reynolds, and was the second Holroyd to gain entry (a more modest entry) into the original Dictionary of National Biography.
My father used to say that most of our family during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been lawyers or soldiers, and that the judges were far more deadly than the generals. I imagined a gallery of hanging judges. But George Sowley Holroyd appears to have been an exceptionally mild man. In an essay for the Edinburgh Review, Lord Brougham emphasised his humour and gentleness, the elegance and ingenuity of his arguments, and the lightness with which he employed his learning. I began to notice as I read this eulogium how I was beginning to compare my own circumstances with this distinguished forebear and, like the reader of an astrological chart, take possession of flattering items. ‘To whatever branch of investigation he had devoted his life in that he would have eminently excelled.’ What an investigative biographer this special pleader might have made!
QUEM TE DEUS ESSE JUSSIT (‘What God has commanded you to do’). My father quoted these portentous words at the head of his narrative (though he did not provide a translation). This was a family motto which, with Arms showing Five Roses in Saltire, the Crest a Demi-Griffin, Wings Endorsed and holding between its claws a Ducal Coronet, appeared as an armorial bookplate, framed in black, which hung in the lavatory of his flat in Surrey. ‘On the opposite side of the water-cistern, also registering my father’s reduced position, was suspended another framed bookplate which, perhaps because of its complexity, he left without comment. I needed the assistance of the Chester Herald himself to record these Arms correctly. They are: Five Pierced Mullets in Saltire impaled on the Arms of Virginie, daughter of General Mottet de la Fontaine of Compiègne in Picardy, which should properly be blazoned Argent à Chevron Azure between in chief Two Roses Gules slipped and leaved Vert and in base a Mound Sable on a chief of the second Three Mullets Or. The motto below this paraphernalia was COMPONERE LEGIBUS ORBEM (‘To build a world with laws’) which George Sowley Holroyd had apparently chosen. But the name beneath this Motto, Arms and Crest is that of his eldest son, George Chaplin Holroyd, a naval officer who passed most of his life in India, married Virginie (daughter of the Governor of Pondicherry), and finally returned to be buried in Exeter. With this man’s third son, my great-grandfather Charles Holroyd who was born in Hyderabad in 1822, the family finally comes into view. For, in a cardboard box marked Six Cod Steaks 24 × 12 oz among my aunt’s possessions, there is a photograph of Charles Holroyd with his three children taken at Eastbourne in the late nineteenth century.
Charles Holroyd passed most of his life on the Bengal Military Staff in Assam. During the Indian Mutiny of 1857, he unravelled a plot to massacre the European tea planters in Upper Assam. In heartfelt thanks for saving their lives they presented him with ‘a very handsome silver salver’, and more significantly perhaps, also gave him an interest in their tea gardens.
Five years after the Mutiny, at the age of forty, Charles married a widow, Mary Hannay, who had two sons by her first marriage. But nine months later, probably when pregnant, she died of apoplexy. Charles, who continued bringing up his stepsons, did not marry again for another nine years. His second wife, Anna Eliza Smith, the daughter of an indigo planter, was Scottish. She gave birth in Calcutta to two boys in 1874 and 1875, Patrick Charles (called Patrick or Pat) and my grandfather Edward Fraser Rochfort (called Fraser); and then a daughter, Norah Palmer, who was born in 1877 at Eastbourne in Sussex, where Charles had retired with the rank of Major-General. According to the privately-printed family tree, Anna died three years later. But I can find no record of her death in London. Then I see in an Eastbourne newspaper that she was buried at the Glasgow Necropolis. So I write to the General Register Office for Scotland in Edinburgh which sends me her death certificate.
Is it possible to be shocked by something that happened over a hundred years ago? I do feel a jolt as I read that Anna Eliza Holroyd, my great-grandmother, committed ‘suicide by carbolic acid’ at 29 Arlington Street, Glasgow, on 7 January 1880. She was aged thirty, that is twenty-eight years younger than her husband. This Arlington Street address was the home of her uncle, William Smith, an accountant, and his wife. But the ‘informant’ on the death certificate two days later is Charles Holroyd, her husband. This suggests that she had travelled to Scotland alone and that he went up from Eastbourne on hearing the dreadful news, leaving his two sons, Pat and Fraser, aged five and four, and his daughter Norah, who was a couple of weeks short of her third birthday, at home. Were they ever told of their mother’s suicide? No whisper of it reached my father, I am sure, or came down to the rest of the family. There is no photograph of her anywhere.
Carbolic acid was used as a strong domestic disinfectant which cleaned by its caustic action. Anna would have died through internal burning. What can have driven her to do such an unimaginably painful thing, to kill herself when she had three very young children? There is no report of her suicide in the Scottish newspapers (there was a more dramatic suicide in Glasgow that day by an unnamed woman who threw herself from a bridge in Jamaica Street on the stroke of midnight). Nor is there any fatal accident inquiry concerning Anna on record. She left no Will or inventory, no testamentary deeds. There is simply no living memory of this tragedy, simply a trail of speculation.
Having lived most of her life in India, Anna may well have found it difficult to settle at Eastbourne where she knew no one. The prospect of spending the next twenty years or so as the wife of a retired soldier nearly twice her age cannot have been very appealing. By the beginning of 1880, she could well have been pregnant again and she may have been subject to unrecognised post-natal depression, the prospect of which renewed her feelings of guilt. All this is possible and could form a contributory cause of her death. But none of it provides a convincing explanation for killing herself so appallingly. Where no easy explanations were available, many women who did not have a tenacious hold on life and who found it eventually intolerable were considered to be mentally unstable. I have been unable to find evidence of her being in love with another man, or having had any connection with that other woman, with dark brown hair, whose body was recovered by lowering a boat from the Carrick Castle that January night. Nor is there any evidence of her husband having ill-treated her – otherwise her uncle would surely not have summoned him to Glasgow, or her mother, years later, have sent a wreath ‘in affectionate remembrance’ when Charles Holroyd himself died.
Anna Eliza, ‘the Beloved Wife of Major Gen Charles Holroyd’, was buried at the Glasgow Necropolis on 10 January 1880. And that must surely be the end of her story. But it is not quite the end. Over seventeen years later a man was buried beside her. His name – one I have never seen before – was John Stewart Paul and he died in June 1897 at the age of sixty-one. Who was this mysterious man? On the gravestone it is written that he was the ‘brother in law of Major Gen Holroyd’. He turns out to be Anna’s uncle by marriage (the husband of her mother’s sister) who had christened his younger son Charles Holroyd Paul. What can this tell me? It appears that Anna’s family wished to retain the connection with her husband Charles, and that no blame was laid on him for her suicide. In 1901, Anna’s mother was buried in the same plot, and so in 1914 was her aunt, Janet Stewart Paul. In Lair 59 of the Necropolis, the four of them lie together with their secrets.
The Eastbourne photograph shows the widower and his three children a few years after Anna’s death. They are formally grouped as if in a studio conservatory. The father, sitting on a stone bench, is attired in morning clothes; the two boys (one sitting on the ground balancing a tennis racket, the other standing next to the bench) are dressed in Eton jackets and collars, with buttoned waistcoats and sober spotted ties. Norah, their sister, is perched on the back of the bench, aged about ten, wearing a long-sleeved pleated dress with a high lace collar and lace cuffs. What struck me most when first examining this picture is how old the father appears in comparison with his children. He is rather old to have a ten-year-old daughter –’’