Those Wild Wyndhams (13 page)

Clouds, a place where politicians of all complexions, primarily Souls, convened, was a house of esoteric delights, overseen by a consummate hostess. Madeline Wyndham was impervious to obstacles when the opportunity of delighting people arose. On a September day in 1883, Mananai and Pamela’s lessons had been interrupted by the sight, from the schoolroom window, of an elephant trundling a yellow cart down the drive. Madeline Wyndham, taking a morning constitutional on the Downs, had encountered a travelling menagerie and persuaded it to divert its course so as to amuse her daughters. ‘We fed the “oily phant” with buns and bread and he … drank some beer, his ears were enormous just like umbrellas,’ Mananai reported excitedly to Mary.
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At Clouds, Madeline Wyndham’s munificence was given full force.Regular guests arrived to find hand-bound copies of their favourite books at their bedside (a favourite family anecdote concerned a tiny bound copy of the Lord’s Prayer, which contained a slip bearing ‘the Author’s Compliments’).
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In the evenings, Madeline plied them with blankets while listening to recitals in the hall. Masseuses were on hand to give ‘Swedish rubbing’; in front of a blackboard, Lodge (later President of Birmingham University), who played a key role in the development of wireless telegraphy, gave lectures on ‘electrons’ and ‘cyclones’; gymnastics classes were conducted in the garden; and invariably in a darkened room somewhere in the house a spiritualist was conducting a bout of table-turning for the Wyndhams’ guests.
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Madeline had been a convert to spiritualism since inviting her first medium to Wilbury in 1884,
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and at Clouds the Wyndhams hosted the most prominent theorists of the day – Edward Maitland, Gerald Massey, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Lord and Lady Mount Temple.
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Walburga, Lady Paget, an eccentric vegetarian, thought Clouds perfection in all its entertainments, except for the adders that slithered through the Downs preventing her from walking barefoot through the morning dew.
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In microcosm, Clouds reflected ‘the oncoming of a great new tide of human life over the Western World’, in the words of the sage Edward Carpenter – a post-Darwinian, post-Industrial Revolution experimentalism, seeking to find meaning in and improve the new age.
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The spiritualist craze exemplifies the way, in this age, optimism and anxiety combined. Balfour, Ruskin, Tennyson, Watts, Leighton, Oliver Lodge, Sigmund Freud, Gladstone and William James, psychologist brother of Henry, were all members of the Society for Psychical Research (the SPR), founded by a group of Cambridge scientists in 1882 ‘for the purpose of inquiring into a mass of obscure phenomena which lie at present on the outskirts of our organized knowledge’.
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Their number included two of Balfour’s brothers-in-law: John, Lord Rayleigh, husband of Evelyn Balfour; and Henry Sidgwick, husband of Eleanor Balfour. In an age of extraordinary exploration, it seemed quite possible that science might be able to communicate with a world beyond the earthly plane. One of the SPR’s founders, Frederic Myers, was a reluctant atheist and spoke for many when admitting that his spiritualism was driven by the desire to ‘re-enter … by the scullery … the heavenly mansion out of which I had been kicked through the front door’.
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Madeline Wyndham, who designed beautiful prie-dieus for her children, and illustrated biblical tracts to hang above their beds, had no difficulty in reconciling her powerful religious faith with a belief in a ‘sproits and spiris [sic]’.
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Pamela, who adopted her mother’s creed more enthusiastically than her siblings, in later life explained her teachings: ‘I learned that death is an incident in life … that communication with those we call the dead, under certain conditions is possible … never was I led for a moment to think that [spiritualism] should stand in the place of religion … Spiritualism supports rather than conflicts with [the] narratives of the life of Christ.’
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Percy was more sceptical. But he was certainly a little superstitious. In the spring of 1885, as builders were putting the finishing touches to Clouds, a tall woman dressed in black appeared, asking to see the house. She was shown inside – such requests were not uncommon. She stood in the dusty hall, the walls rearing up around her. ‘This house will be burnt down and in less than three years,’ she announced, before disappearing as mysteriously as she had arrived.
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When later that year Percy arranged with Webb for the insurance of the house and its outbuildings, he expressed particular concern about the provision for loss by fire.

Clouds’ magical luxury depended on a silent army of staff. Its occupants woke to fires crackling in the grate, laid soundlessly by a housemaid who had risen long before dawn and had then scurried downstairs to clear away the previous evening’s detritus: wine-stained glasses, full ashtrays in the smoking room; pieces of paper from a game, torn up and carelessly thrown aside. While the family and guests breakfasted, staff flung open windows to air bedrooms, whipped off still-warm sheets to remake beds perfectly and emptied chamberpots. Then they dusted, swept, polished and mended linen before preparing the bedrooms again for their occupants to dress for dinner (men attended by their valets, women by their ladies’ maids); and again while the house dined, they were drawing curtains, lighting candles, turning down beds. Rarely did they throw their exhausted bodies on to their own mattresses before eleven or twelve at night.

Sarah, ‘the pretty 2nd housemaid’ at Clouds, was probably glad to leave service when she married Pearson the coachman and set up in his rooms above the coachhouse. She was fortunate in being able to live with her husband. Married footmen, valets or butlers lived separately from their wives, setting them up in a nearby cottage, and visiting them on their days off. The wife of William Icke, Clouds’ butler from 1892,
was housekeeper to two spinster ladies in East Knoyle. Her loyalty was rewarded when they left her their house in their will.
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Housekeepers and cooks, who bore the courtesy title of ‘Mrs’, could actually be married – the Wyndham children’s nanny of Cumberland days, Horsenail, had in fact married Forbes, graduating to housekeeper in the days before Mrs Vine. Otherwise, a female servant who married would immediately leave her employ.

In 1891 there were over one and a half million domestic servants in the United Kingdom – almost 16 per cent of the workforce.
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Service was an honourable profession with loyalty and affection on both sides. Eassy and Bertha Devon both stayed with the Wyndhams until retirement, the former then moving to a cottage in East Knoyle. Nonetheless, in 1898 the average length of stay by a servant in a household was less than eighteen months.
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The turnover at Clouds, from the names on the ten-yearly censuses, was not notably different. The reasons were numerous: marriage; a promotion elsewhere; or abandonment of domestic service entirely. Periodicals like the
Lady
complained of young men and women with ‘ideas above their station’, thinking themselves too good for service. As the century wore on, many did, rejecting the snobbish hierarchy of the servants’ hall for the greater freedom and excitement available in other jobs. All Madeline’s daughters bemoaned the impossibility of finding good staff.

In 1884, domestic calm was rocked by a young woman’s distress: ‘poor Lucy the housemaid in London I’m afraid she has gone mad – she went for a holiday & came back
quite off her head
’. The situation, relayed by Mrs Vine to Madeline, and thence to her daughters, was grave, if comical. Lucy, whose head Madeline thought had been ‘turned’ by the marriage of her fellow housemaid Mary Brown, veered between lucidity and moments of ‘wild’ behaviour. Following a composed conversation with Dr Gibbons, the doctor summoned to examine her, Lucy ‘came down and said to Bertha “if I take
any one
I think
I’ll take Dr Gibbons
!”’

While amused by Mrs Vine’s decorous alarm, Madeline nonetheless took the matter seriously. She reported to Mary:

it is quite too awfully sad … she is
full of
delusions thinks people are coming to take her
away
& that something dreadful will happen because Mary Brown had to sign some cheques for her that they will f[i]nd out she could not wright [sic] and a lot more I told her that she must not let her self give way … but … she is so miserable she would break her heart Bertha & Charlotte had to sit up with her & hold her down in bed.
Don’t
talk about this with anyone but is it not horrid?
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History does not relate what happened to Lucy. She does not appear in the 1891 census either for Clouds or for Belgrave Square. Presumably she was dispatched back to her family: it is likely that Madeline took care to make sure someone would look after her.

Reportage of such untoward incidents was part of the traffic of communication between Madeline and her daughters: their own children picked up snippets and came to Clouds wide-eyed, alert to a servant to whom such gossip had lent an air of celebrity. Lizzie Beaver, the still-room maid (in charge of cakes, jam and preserves, so a good person for hungry children to befriend), nearly died when, returning from the village to Clouds early in the morning of 31 December 1886, she got lost in snow and fog, and was only found at midday on New Year’s Day, frozen half to death. Howard ‘the married stable-man’ slipped over when carrying a heavy sack and injured his back badly enough to be confined to lying ‘quite still’ for a lengthy period of time. The daughter of Wareham the under-coachman suffered from paralysed legs, ‘the awful result, it was thought, of sitting on a cold stone when she was very hot’. Eassy raised the alarm in 1888 with fears about her own heart, although Dr Collins pronounced her as suffering only from ‘nervous shock’ – most likely a panic attack, for reasons unknown. In 1892, Enfield, who had replaced Forbes as butler in 1888, was struck by a sudden ‘chill’ and ‘rheumatic pains’ one Friday night that left him ‘unable to wait at dinner’, followed swiftly by ‘inflammation of the brain … he died in convulsions at 2.30 o’clock’.
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Enfield’s wife, who had gone to London ‘to be confined’, was left to give birth to a fatherless child.

In her youth Madeline Wyndham had compiled a photograph album of ‘all the dear Servants at Petworth’, with handwritten commentary beneath, explaining who each subject was.
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Yet she, like most, thought nothing of loaning her daughters a spare footman when they had large house parties ‘in the same way the poor borrow a frying pan, or a rub of soap’, said an ex-butler, Eric Horne, scornfully in a bestselling memoir published in 1923.
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Percy rewarded his favourite, William Mallett, the clerk of works responsible for all maintenance on the house and estate, with a house that was two cottages knocked into one. It allowed Mallett – who had worked his way up from house carpenter – a comparatively palatial four bedrooms for his family of eleven. But Percy’s attitude towards his staff was aristocratic, to say the least. Hyde, Clouds’ head keeper, lost a finger when Percy swung round carelessly and pulled the trigger of his gun. That might have been sheer absent-mindedness. The occasion on which Percy shot a beater called Fletcher in the foot for picking up the wrong pheasant most certainly was not.
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As Percy became East Knoyle’s squire, he abandoned national politics for local. To an extent, his hand was forced. Gladstone’s 1884 Franchise Act extended household suffrage to the countryside, adding 1.7 million voters to the electorate.
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Of far more radical effect was the associated 1885 Redistribution Act, which in Robin Hood fashion took seats from over-represented rural constituencies to give to the under-represented towns. Manchester’s representatives were doubled from three to six, Wiltshire’s reduced from fifteen to six. Percy’s West Cumberland seat was one of over seventy abolished.

H. M. Hyndman’s Democratic Federation, whose members included William Morris and Eleanor Marx, daughter of the revolutionary thinker Karl, did not think it went far enough. It showed its socialist colours by renaming itself the Social Democratic Federation and organizing a series of unruly street meetings of the unemployed demanding ‘work or bread’.
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At the opposite end of the political spectrum, Percy thought it the beginning of the end of aristocratic rule. Paradoxically he was saved, in his mind, by Gladstone himself.

In June 1885, Gladstone resigned, discredited by General Gordon’s martyrdom and finally brought down after being defeated on an amendment to the Budget. Lord Salisbury formed a caretaker government. An election was held over three weeks in late November and early December. Almost on the day the election ended, Herbert Gladstone ‘flew the Hawarden Kite’, leaking to the press the spectacular news that his father, deep in thought over the summer, had converted to Home Rule and was prepared to take office to implement it. The election results showed how meaningful this was. Parnell’s Irish Nationalists, now formally committed to Home Rule, held the balance of power.