The Bolter (5 page)

Even if she was the innocent party, a woman who obtained a divorce faced exclusion from the somewhat hypocritically bed-hopping high society. She was seen as spoiling everyone else’s entitlement to fun, because once affairs had the potential to lead to divorce, the stakes of illicit sex were dangerously upped. And, by taking a case through the divorce courts, she opened her bedroom door to the eyes of anybody who could read a newspaper. The reaction of Queen Victoria to her son’s being called as a witness in a divorce case summed up the upper classes’ fear of divorce: his “intimate acquaintance with a young married woman being publicly proclaimed will show an amount of imprudence which cannot but damage him in the eyes of the middle and lower classes.”
⁵

Countless scandals bubbled just below the public’s line of vision, and that is where, on the whole, they were kept. Unhappy couples were expected to put up with it, quietly arranging their lives to live apart if necessary. Before the First World War, only in the very worst, unavoidably public cases did couples part, in the process miring both themselves and their children in scandal.

Idina’s parents did.

Muriel cited adultery and abandonment. Gilbert and his cancan dancer were spending her money like water. In order to prove her case she had to write to her husband begging him for the restoration of “all my rights as a wife” and offering to live with him. After “careful consideration,” Gilbert replied immediately, by return of post, that he
would not
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. When the case was heard, the newspapers printed both letters in full. For a countess with one of England’s oldest titles to divorce her earl was scandal enough to shake the foundations of British society, and Idina found that, even though her mother was legally the wronged party, her childhood friends were no longer allowed to come and play with her. Now nine, Idina was old enough both to miss her friends and to realize that it was some change in her family life that had taken them from her. At least she had her cousins to keep her company. In this she was lucky. Muriel’s two sisters, Mabelle and Marie, had both had sons, Jack and Gerard, within a few months of Idina’s birth. And, after Annie’s death, Thomas Brassey, Jr., had married again, producing a daughter, Helen, just six months older than Idina. This small group might have been enough for a childhood. However, if she wanted to find a husband, when she reached eighteen Idina would have to make her way into the society of the outside world. And then, unlike her peers from conventional families, she would have to battle for acceptance in order to succeed.

AFTER THE DIVORCE
, Muriel moved her children out of the small manor house she had occasionally shared with Gilbert and into the countryside nearby. Five miles down the road from the medieval De La Warr stately home, which Gilbert had been forced to rent to a family of newly rich bankers, she bought a nearly identical house and called it Old Lodge. She surrounded Old Lodge with a picturesque farm and became a champion breeder of diminutive black-hided Kerry cattle. While Gilbert married twice more, Muriel never married again. She had enough money of her own not to need the burden of a husband. She did, however, devote the rest of her life to another man: the future leader of the Labour Party, George Lansbury.

Lansbury’s father had been one of Muriel’s grandfather’s huge workforce. Muriel and Lansbury shared a fervent belief in female suffrage and Muriel rapidly added trade-union rights to her quiver of causes. She opened Old Lodge to Lansbury and his other campaigning friends, such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Hitherto it had been widely argued that people were poor because they were morally inadequate. Now the Webbs were proposing the near-revolutionary thesis that people were poor as a result of how the economy was organized. In due course the Trades Union Congress decided to field its own parliamentary candidates for election, creating the Labour Party, and in 1910 George Lansbury was elected Labour Member of Parliament for Bow and Bromley.

Muriel worked hard. Pound by pound she siphoned money out of her own pockets and those of her friends, including the American railroad families the Osborns and the Dodges, to whom the Brasseys had become very close. This was used to pay for strikers’ and suffragettes’ food, bail, and printing costs and, when necessary, to keep the trade unions’ mouthpiece, the
Daily Herald
(now the
Sun)
, afloat—at one stage funding an outright buyout for Lansbury She also hosted key meetings between Lansbury and the leading militant suffragettes, the women of the Pankhurst family. In his autobiography, Lansbury wrote:

Of all the women, outside those belonging to my family and the working classes, whom I have known and worked with, none stands higher in my memory and esteem than Muriel, Countess De La Warr. I never heard her make a speech, though she must have attended hundreds of public meetings and many private gatherings of committees.

Over and over again her friends saved the Daily Herald from death in the old days when it was independent, and often it was her example and her work which helped women suffragists to hold on in the darkest days of defeat.

Her love for human rights and duties kept her very largely out of society. She spent her days almost secretly doing good. Many, many people like myself owe her a big debt of gratitude for the continuous help she gave to causes in which we worked.
⁷

Lansbury was a married man. Muriel is said to have had an affair with him. This may have been the only explanation society could find for her politics, but Muriel and Lansbury certainly spent several decades in a close working partnership. And, during this time, Muriel’s former sister-in-law and Idina’s aunt, Margaret Sackville, was having an affair with the future socialist prime minister Ramsay MacDonald. It was all very cozy. In 1923, MacDonald would put Idina’s younger brother, Buck, into his first government.

But the coziness may have started even earlier. For it was and still is a suspicion among some of the family that Buck, conceived remarkably close to Gilbert’s departure for South Africa in 1899 and some two years after he had taken up with the first of his cancan dancers, may have been Lansbury’s, or even some other man’s, son. And upon his return to England after Buck’s birth, Gilbert did not move back home.

Muriel then took to a new religion. Her mother had brought her up
to pursue two things: the vote for women and scientific knowledge. Muriel now made her own mark by breaking away from the latter dramatically. She took up with an Irishwoman called Annie Besant, who was in the process of attempting to overturn almost every convention she encountered. Besant, who had long been separated from her own husband, had been an advocate of Marxism, then social democracy. She had organized a groundbreaking strike by the young women working for the match manufacturer Bryant and May, in which she succeeded in helping them improve their pay and conditions. She had then been put on trial for publishing a book advocating birth control. She was freed on appeal, but the court case had lost her her own children; full custody of them was given to her estranged husband. She then published a book,
The Law of Population.
⁸
This also argued for birth control, and declared that abundant recreational sex within a marriage was healthy for women.

In the late 1870s, when
The Law of Population
was published, it ran in direct contradiction to the belief of the Victorian establishment that women did not and should not enjoy sex, which was considered an unavoidable moment of regrettable bestiality unfortunately necessary to produce children. The work was condemned in the
Times
as “an indecent, lewd, filthy, bawdy and obscene book.” Besant, who rapidly became one of Muriel’s closest friends, continued to preach her views; her audience included the adolescent Idina. Despite the scandals, Besant was nonetheless elected to the London School Board in 1889. In the same year, she converted to the cult of Theosophy. Theosophy had been brought to Europe in the late nineteenth century by a Ukrainian mystic, Madame Blavatsky. The underlying principle of Theosophy, a combination of Hinduism and Buddhism, was that the dogmas of revealed religion had corrupted pure communication with God. Within a very few years, Besant was president of the British Theosophical Society, and Muriel followed her into the cult.

Theosophy was widely recognized but was veiled in scandal on several counts. One was its association with Besant. Another was its link to Besant’s former publishing partner Charles Leadbeater, who had also become a Theosophist. Besant and Leadbeater declared themselves clairvoyant, and said that they were searching for the New Messiah, who would be a young boy whom their clairvoyancy would enable them to identify. Shortly afterward, Leadbeater was accused of interfering with the sons of Theosophists and had to flee to India to escape arrest. Besant remained in Britain and, perhaps spotting the depth of
Muriel’s open purse, suggested that Idina’s brother, Buck, might be the New Messiah. Muriel was attracted to the reforming zeal of the Theosophists, and their acceptance of her despite her divorce. She went along with the plans for Buck to be anointed, and funded whatever was required.

Idina, her sister, and her brother in their pony cart, drawn by miniature Shetland ponies bred by their mother

Muriel was not alone in her conversion to Theosophy. Lady Emily Lutyens, daughter of the Earl of Lytton and wife of the leading British architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, was also a keen Theosophist. The late nineteenth century had seen a vogue for spiritualism, with fashionable parties procuring a mystic for postprandial entertainment, which often included table-turning. Theosophy caught this wave of fashion.

By 1911 Besant’s society had sixteen thousand members. Besant and Leadbeater had changed their minds about the New Messiah. In a move that managed not to offend Muriel or any of the society’s other keen donors who had sons in the running for the title, they chose an eleven-year-old Brahmin boy from India, called Krishnamurti. Muriel, her own son rejected, nonetheless deepened her bonds with Theosophy. She offered Krishnamurti a home at Old Lodge with her children—all of whom, including Idina, were still living there.

All these political, social, sexual, and religious theories had
inevitably played a huge part in Idina’s childhood. While Muriel ricocheted between London and Sussex, preoccupied with politics and religion, the formal part of the children’s education had been looked after in the upstairs schoolroom by a golden-hearted governess, Miss Rowden, whom Idina, Avice, and Buck called Rowie or Row and visited until the day she died.
⁹
After the morning’s lessons were over, the afternoons had been spent on rumbustious ponies, careering through picturesque fields and either over or through their bottle-green hedges. Then, from teatime on, after most other Edwardian children had been banished back to the upper reaches of their homes, Idina and, as soon as they were old enough, her siblings, had remained in the drawing room, where they were plunged into the cut and thrust of the politics of the day. All grew up able to maintain a conversation with anyone, about anything.

From left to right: Idina; her sister, Avie; and their brother, Buck

Despite the social fallout from the divorce, it had been a childhood that Idina clearly enjoyed. And, later, the moment she had an opportunity to build a house for her own family, she built one that bore more than a passing resemblance to Old Lodge. But then, having spent her adolescence debating workers’ and women’s rights with the politicians of the day, in her mid-teens Idina had been sent to board at a “finishing school”—an institution where girls with ink-stained fingers were transformed into future society hostesses.

School was not an enjoyable place for Idina. After the discussions she had become used to at home, she had found her fellow pupils intellectually disappointing and quickly earned a reputation for being “already precociously educated and easily bored.”
¹⁰
But these girls and their lifestyle and traditions were part of the environment in which Idina would make her way when she left school and joined the adult world, which she did just after Krishnamurti arrived at Old Lodge.