Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia in order to ensure his conquest of Troy. The ruling classes have been doing it ever since with their daughters, often with the connivance of mothers who went through the same experience. A sweeping statement but exemplified in the story of Winifred Burghclere and her four daughters, Juliet, Alathia, Mary and Evelyn, as told by William Cross.
Winifred the sister of the more famous Lord Carnarvon, was no great beauty but a formidable lady. Following the imperative of the day, the family were desperate to find her a husband and settled on the dull personage of the 36-year-old Alfred Byng, Captain in the 7thHussars. She was twenty-three.
The marriage proved a disaster with Byng showing more interest in his valet and groom than his wife. He was though polite. Winifred remained dutiful and suffered in silence, relieved no doubt when her husband died of a ‘stoppage of the bowels’ nine months later. It did mean, though, that Winifred faced a bleak and uncertain future as a widow with little to offer in terms of money or land, and she faced immense pressure to find a new husband—one her family had to find acceptable. Thirteen years later she fixed upon Herbert Gardiner, a rising star in the Liberal Party and dedicated herself to his political career and having children for the greater good.
Juliet was born in 1892, Alathea in 1893 and Mary in 1896. In 1903, aged 39, she gave birth to Evelyn. And then stopped, disappointed that she’d not been able to give Herbert a son and heir.
Mary Gardiner to the left
And now the wheel turns as her four daughters experience a recurring pattern in the English aristocracy, childhood neglect, sometimes benign, and cast iron expectations for the girls of these families. The two pictures, above and below, exemplify the millstones that would grind down the four girls.
Whilst Winifred and Herbert were hosting parties and advancing Herbert’s political career (he reached the giddy position of President of the Board of Agriculture but did gain a title: Lord Burghclere in the process) the four children were left under the supervision of nurses, maids and governesses controlling everything from lavatory training to deciding what books they might read. Still in early childhood, Winifred had them posing for high society magazines, the first stages of the cattle market culminating in ‘coming out’ around the ages of 17 – 18 and finding a husband.
The shy and fussy Juliet was shunted with military precision from social engagement to social engagement in search of a husband. Alathea experienced similar pressure when she came of age in 1913.
The First World War accelerated the process, women put under even more pressure. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury got involved, urging patriotic young men and women to get married ‘in order that our beloved country may not lack men to defend it in future.’
And here, a high class cattle market, with a vibe of lost souls
Mary succumbed in 1914, marrying Geoffrey Morley, heir to a hosiery and textile millionaire, and sharing with her a love of horses. It worked for a time, Mary producing two daughters, Mary and Elspeth, before things went awry.
In 1915 Alathea married the chocolate millionaire Geoffrey Fry, much to the delight of Winifred, mother and daughter finding out too late that Geoffrey was a predatory homosexual who used his wealth and connections to groom young, vulnerable or ambitious young men.
In 1916 Juliet also succumbed, marrying Captain Alexander Cumming Russell but, as it was rumoured, running away from her husband on the night of the wedding. She had realised too late she didn’t want a husband. She didn’t like men. ‘Winifred sulked. Juliet sulked. The captain returned to the war.’ Juliet’s decision to go her own way— scrubbing floors for a living if needs be—shocked the domineering and strait-laced Winifred still further.
Now it was Mary’s turn. Fed up with motherhood and bored out of her skull by a husband who put his business before her, Mary drifted from her role as mother goddess to scarlet woman. She fell for Alan Hillgarth, charmer, novelist and future diplomat, and was pictured drunk, teetering down a London Street causing the over-firm Winifred embarrassment and grief.
Undeterred, the indomitable Winifred focused on the remaining unmarried daughter, Evelyn who also became the despair of her mother.
“She engaged herself to a guardsman of impeccable background (but inWinifred’s) view of insufficient income. Her next fiancé was the ADC to the Rajah of Sarawak but he, it transpired, was already married. To clear her head of that particular nonsense, her mother dispatched her . . . to Australia—a voyage from which she returned engaged to the ship’s purser.” Finally, she married the novelist Evelyn Waugh, much to her mother’s outrage who regarded him as a second-rate schoolmaster in a third-rate school.
Evelyn Waugh
Worse, after checking up on him at Oxford, she discovered rumours of lewdness, drunkenness and homosexuality. She need not have been alarmed. The marriage barely lasted a year.
By this time, Winifred’s head was spinning. Juliet was advertising herself as a domestic help amidst rumours that she was one of those mysterious lesbians; in 1928, Mary’s divorce was finalised with her named as the guilty party. And then there was Alathea.
Her marriage with Geoffrey Fry, the chocolate millionaire, had started well. She was noted as a glamorous, generous and witty hostess, their dinner parties were the talk of the town. On the surface everything seemed rosy. But Fry was very much a Jekyll and Hyde character, charming in political and diplomatic circles and of course with the boys he patronised, but a monster to his wife and child. In Alathea’s hearing he once vented his disappointment in the lack of a male heir, telling his daughter Jennifer that: “he wanted to drown her in a bucket of water like a kitten,” and pushing her away as a child. Bullied by a domineering mother unable to escape a hellish marriage, Alathea suffered severe mental health problems and the once glamorous hostess was placed under medical supervision for the rest of her life.
As to what happened to the surviving girls who lived on to the swinging sixties and no doubt compared the general permissiveness with what shaped and warped their own younger lives—the book is available on Amazon.
2 comments:
As much as I feel sorry for these women I can see too that parents want their children to marry well if only to protect them from the poverty others knew.
I remember my mother always asking me about the prospects of whatever young man I was dating. She was sizing them up long before they had made a mark in the world. That's what parents do whether they say it out loud or not. You want your progeny to be protected.
In the end I chose well. :o)
Maria, I agree to a degree. When it comes to our daughter I’m very Jane Austenish - us he of good family, how many horses does he keep? He must of course have at least 14,000 acres and an income to match 😀
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