My Father and Myself (4 page)

At his final discharge he brought away a good conduct badge, a second-class certificate of education, and the War Medal and Bronze Star of the Egyptian Campaign. He brought away two other things, the seeds of success in life and the seeds of death. I will come to the latter in its due place. So far as the former is concerned, something has to be found to account for the transformation of Trooper Alfred Ackerley with his second-class certificate of education and impecunious family background in 1884, into the cultivated, urbane, travelled and polished young man of the world with £2000 a year who picked up my mother on a Channel boat in 1892 and was later to become one of the directors of Elders and Fyffes, fruit merchants, earning £12,000 a year and the title of Banana King when he died.

THE ANSWER LIES with two wealthy gentlemen whom my father met in London during his five years of soldiering. How he met them I do not know; so far as my information goes he had no friends in London when he first arrived there in 1879. One of them he must have met soon after his enlistment in the Blues when he was sixteen years old. Of this gentleman I can give only the briefest sketch. His name was Fitzroy Paley Ashmore and he called himself a barrister. He was a friend of Mr. Justice Darling, and a married man with four children. My father seldom mentioned him except to remark on occasion that he owed to Ashmore everything he knew. My father wrote a beautiful hand and was a faultless speller, he took a pride in his knowledge of English and never failed to look up in the dictionary the words he did not understand when he was reading. This self-discipline in education, which he often recommended to our inattentive ears, he attributed wholly to Mr. Ashmore's training. Yet their friendship was short, this friendship of a rich, cultivated man in his early thirties with an uneducated boy-soldier of sixteen or seventeen, for Ashmore died, aged thirty-seven, in 1883. The whole episode was therefore contained within four years.

Ashmore lived at 18 Radnor Place, Hyde Park, and it seems to have been given out that my father acted as his secretary. His son, Major-General E. B. Ashmore,
CB, CMG, MVO,
told me, however, that since his father, who had substantial independent means (he died worth £28,000), did no work at all, it was surprising to learn that he needed a secretary. General Ashmore knew nothing about my father (or so he said) and not much about his own who had died when he himself was eleven; what little he did know he was in no mind to praise. His father's only interest in life, said he, was to enjoy himself, gamble and go to parties; he was so unpleasant to his wife that she was more relieved than afflicted to find herself a widow, and all his children, including himself, were terrified of him. But if Mr. Ashmore cared not a fig for his wife and children, he took a fancy to my teen-age father and considerable pains to educate him. On August 3, 1882, probably a few days before my father sailed for Egypt, Ashmore drew up a codicil to his will leaving him a legacy of £500, a gift that was to lead to trouble in the end. It was to be held in trust for him by his own father until he reached the age of twenty-one. On October 30, directly after his return from Egypt, he purchased his discharge. Did he go and live at Radnor Place as his benefactor's secretary? I have no information about this period. In the following year, on June 12, Ashmore had a heart attack and died. Three weeks later my father re-enlisted.

The educational and refining processes begun upon him by Mr. Ashmore were continued by the Count James Francis de Gallatin, my father's other wealthy friend. Whether he was met through Ashmore or independently I don't know, but he now supplied Ashmore's place in my father's young life. A Count of the Holy Roman Empire and descendant of a famous Swiss-American family, he kept two establishments, one in Mount Street, Berkeley Square, the other in Old Windsor, a house called The Hermitage. Doubtless considerably altered it still stands. He was a bachelor, aged thirty-one, and lived with his mother. He too took to my soldier father in a big way; soon, indeed, he could hardly bear to let him out of his sight.

I have said that my father twice purchased his discharge from the Army; it is more probable that he was bought out, first by Mr. Ashmore and now, in February, 1884, through the persuasions and help of the Count de Gallatin. The indications are that by this time they were close friends and that family introductions, my father to Mme. de Gallatin in Mount Street and Old Windsor, the Count to my father's family in Rainhill, had been established. Two more basic reasons for this second and sudden retirement of my father from the Army suggest themselves: his old father had been taken ill with cancer of the tongue, and in the April of that year my father would be twenty-one and come into possession of his legacy. He returned to Liverpool and took a job as traveller in the business of his brother-in-law, John Graham, a wine merchant. His legacy fell due to him on his birthday, April 1; he did not spend it but “lent” it to the Count. Other records say he gave it to the Count to keep for him. De Gallatin was a generous man as we shall see (a little later he was to take trouble to help Denton gain a foothold in South Africa by introducing him to titled and influential people), and one can hazard a guess at the actual circumstances of this transaction, for he undertook to pay my father the large interest of 20% on the “loan.” It is the kind of thing a rich man might do to help out, as delicately as possible, a friend of whom he was fond and who was short of cash. This £100 a year and whatever commission he earned from his travelling was all the money my father had.

Early in the following year, 1885, old Mr. Ackerley died. The doctors had gradually cut away most of his tongue (radium treatment was not then known), but the cancer had moved to his stomach. At this time occurred another important event in my father's life: he met and quickly palled up with a local youth named Arthur Stockley, aged twenty.

In the spring of that same year de Gallatin, perhaps to be near my father, rented for the summer a furnished house in the district in New Brighton, Cheshire, and invited him to stay and bring with him any friend he liked. My father took Stockley. There was a fourth member of the party, a friend of the Count's, another very handsome youth named Dudley Sykes, of whom I know nothing. In the words of Stockley he was “very good-looking, charming and quite harmless and never did a day's work in his life.” He was not a guardsman. I have included a photograph of this quartet, taken in this time and place. They are sitting in the garden grouped beneath a tree on a tatty lion-skin rug spread on the grass. Bold and roving-eyed
¹
Mr. Sykes is bare-headed, the rest wear boaters. Excepting Stockley all sport mustaches in the custom of the period; the Count's is particularly heavy. They are dressed in open-necked shirts and their flannel trousers are supported by dark cummerbunds. A shaggy dog with a beard like Kruger's lolls among them. The Count was fond of dogs. Behind them, along the sill of an open window, potted plants are ranged. Would that I had been able to peep and eavesdrop through that window and discover their secrets, if any. But I was not yet born.

What did they do? Stockley, who, I feel sure, had no interesting secrets, went off to Liverpool every day on whatever business he was engaged in, perhaps the fruit trade in which he was to end; my father, still in the employ of Graham, doubtless travelled locally too, trying to gain sales; young Mr. Sykes idled about. In the evenings and at weekends they came together, bathed, played poker and whatever athletic games were available to them (I have a photo of my father and Stockley sparring in boxing gloves). The Count, who paid for everything (“We lived there in considerable luxury,” writes Stockley), had a smart dogcart and cob, in which they probably rattled about. Mme. de Gallatin was not present, and Stockley says they had no female society of any sort. They “created quite a sensation,” he says. The local residents were not used to, were suspicious and perhaps jealous of, so strange a household which contained a rich foreign nobleman with rather poppy eyes and two strikingly handsome young men, and some busybody wrote to Stockley's mother in Worcestershire to warn her that her son was rapidly “being ruined by an adventurer and his confrères.” “However, this did not trouble me, as I knew it was entirely untrue.”

My father, aged twenty-two, seated in a chair, looks very attractive, more solid and serious than Mr. Sykes with his rather theatrical d'Artagnan face, and the Count by now was clearly bowled over by him. When the party broke up he did not want my father to return to Liverpool; unable to prevent this, he went with him and accompanied him upon his commercial errands. I have a dashingly punctuated letter of his to Stockley, from the Queen's Hotel, Stockton, written on a Sunday in November, 1885:

Clearly my father's job was proving unremunerative and it was not long before a more congenial occupation was suggested. Close to The Hermitage, the Count's cottage, as he called it, in Old Windsor, was a disused farm, known as The Cell Farm, which the Count rented for stabling and grazing his ponies. The suggestion now was that this small farm might be stocked with more ponies to become a pony farm and run by my father as a business concern: with his cavalryman's experience he was knowledgeable about horses. It seems that he was staying with the de Gallatins at The Hermitage when this idea was conceived, that it originated in the mind of a third person, and that it was proposed by my father to the Count. It was, of course, instantly agreed to, for it gave de Gallatin his heart's desire, my father's permanent companionship. Stockley says that he thereupon bought The Cell Farm for my father, who took up residence there and at The Hermitage in 1886. Soon afterwards he fell ill. I don't know the nature of his complaint, but it must have been something serious, for the de Gallatins took him abroad to Italy for six months to convalesce. I have a letter from my father to Stockley, written from Rome on the Count's coroneted notepaper and dated November 2, 1886. Like most of the few letters I use—the only ones I possess—it is rather a bore, but parts of it are relevant to the rest of this sad story:

De Gallatin accompanied him to Ireland in the spring of the following year and bought ten ponies for £50 at Fairhill Fair, Galway. Until they could be transported to England they were left on the estate of a Lord Wallscourt, where their keep and the grooms' wages had to be defrayed. By the time they were all brought over and assembled at The Cell Farm they had cost the Count another £200.

Thereafter matters proceeded quietly for some eighteen months, my father living with and, presumably, largely on, the de Gallatins, breaking in and selling ponies at no great profit, riding in point-to-point races and taking part in the social life of Windsor. To Stockley, July 2, 1887:

Over a year later, in September, 1888, de Gallatin, who had been bitten in the leg by a fly and laid up for a month, wrote to Stockley: “Poor old Roger is as good-tempered and satisfied as ever—we jog on here in our own quiet way—and I think it suits us all—The Cottage is looking awfully neat now and I like it so much that I am going to build some more rooms....” But good temper and the happy domestic scene were not to last much longer; before the year's end Miss Louise Burckhardt came over from Paris to stay with the de Gallatins. Of this young lady I know scarcely anything. She was of wealthy parentage and Swiss. Arthur Stockley informed me that she came over with some prospect of marrying the Count, to whom she was said to be related; but Stockley's old-age memory was far from accurate, as I shall have occasion to show later; moreover he was no longer in England at this critical time, he sailed for Grand Canary in November to learn about the fruit trade and was not to meet my father again until 1892, four years later, though they continued to correspond. He never met Miss Burckhardt at all.