Barbara is not a snob—‘Give me an interesting dustman rather than a boring Duke to talk to any day,’ she says—but as a romantic novelist she is predictably keen on noble antecedents.
The downstairs cloakroom at Camfield Place has a large framed family tree tracing her husband’s family back, via the Granvilles, to Duke Rollo, grandfather of William the Conqueror, and she has written proudly of the way her mother’s family, the Scobells, are descended from ‘one of the oldest Saxon families in Great Britain’, the de Scoberhulls who were High Sheriffs of Devon in the years before the Norman Conquest.
She finds such connections, like the Dukes and Marquises she writes about, ‘very romantic’; but her own immediate past lies not with the upper aristocracy. Like many writers of her period, she comes from that most fertile of imaginative seed-beds, the dispossessed Edwardian gentry.
One of her prized possessions is an imposing marble bust of her maternal grandfather, Colonel George Scobell, which glares at visitors across the hall of Camfield Place. Even in marble he could almost be a Barbara Cartland hero with his handsome commanding profile, perceptive, searching eyes and bold, sardonic whiskers.
True, he was not a Duke, but a Rector’s son from Sussex, who was sent to Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford, and inherited a small fortune from an unmarried naval uncle who was a Member of Parliament and invented the VC. This enabled George Scobell to travel widely, climb Mont Blanc, and make love to a lot of women of all sizes, shapes and nationalities, before marrying in the early 1870s.
His bride, Edith Palairet, enjoyed an income of £2,000 a year and was connected with the Hamiltons of Philadelphia—and thence with the Dukes of Hamilton. She was a lively, energetic, tolerant lady—which was just as well, for Colonel Scobell’s interest in the fair sex did not cease with marriage.
The Scobells lived in considerable style in Down House, Redmarley, a village some ten miles from Worcester. It was a graceful, many bedroomed Georgian mansion, with its own farm and small estate, and the Colonel—he served loyally for many years with the local militia—employed twelve indoor servants, four men in the gardens, three in the stables, and six on the farm. Most years he reckoned to make a profit of at least two hundred pounds from his land.
He hunted five days a week, fathered four daughters and one son, and remained something of a fire-eater to the day he died, imposing order and obedience upon his family by the sheer strength of his extremely dominating personality. It was a religious household, and a very ordered one—with the Colonel taking family prayers at eight o’clock each morning.
But the Colonel was a restless, frequently irascible character, always dreaming of fresh Mont Blancs to climb. And it was into this little High Victorian kingdom which he ruled so absolutely, that Barbara’s mother was born in 1877. She was the fourth daughter—and the Colonel’s reactions to her sex can be imagined. She was duly christened Mary Hamilton, but throughout her long and very energetic life, was always known as Polly.
Even in extreme old age—she failed to reach her century by a mere three years, and died in 1974—Polly Cartland was remembered for her extraordinary vitality and zest for life. She was a bright-eyed, saintly little lady, and one visitor to Camfield Place remembers her, aged ninety-five, ‘still whizzing around the place like a torpedo’.
A Catholic convert during the last years of her life, her goodness and concern for others were a local legend in the village outside Malvern where she lived. But what really made her what she was, throughout her long and often daunting life, was sheer indomitable courage. Nothing defeated her—neither poverty, nor disappointment, nor the sudden death of those she loved. Through each disaster of her life, she managed to uphold the standards she had learned to value and to live by in her childhood. And like many very virtuous people she imposed these standards powerfully on those she loved.
Disaster dogged her all her life, and the first occurred soon after her marriage, early in 1900, to the handsome, very dashing Bertram Cartland. Until this point, Polly’s life had been extremely happy, sheltered and conventional, and Bertie Cartland was exactly the sort of personable rich young man that girls like Polly always fell in love with.
But Colonel Scobell disapproved, on the grounds that the Cartlands were not country gentry with that all-important stake in the land, but financiers—and Birmingham financiers at that, having made their considerable fortune out of brass-founding and then from business speculation.
This was very bad, of course. But Polly was thoroughly in love by now and had a good streak of her father’s obstinacy too. Against great opposition she married her good-looking Bertie, but instead of discovering the happiness she dreamed of, her father’s fears were rapidly proved right.
The young couple had barely settled into a charming house in the Worcestershire countryside, when all hopes of that comfortable, wealthy life they had been counting on were blighted. Bertie’s father, James Cartland, had invested heavily in his plan to build the Fishguard Railway. There was a brief financial panic, the bank pulled in its loans, and the luckless financier discovered overnight that he was ruined.
Rather than face a straitened future on a mere £6,000 a year—over £100,000 in today’s inflated currency—James Cartland took the time-honoured course prescribed for ruined Victorian businessmen. He promptly shot himself—and by taking what was considered the honourable way out, inflicted years of hardship on the newly-weds.
For by July 1901 they already had a child—Barbara—and were totally dependent on the allowance they had been receiving from Bertie’s father for their agreeable existence to continue. Bertie could play polo, gamble, drink and ride like any gently raised Edwardian gentleman of means—but suddenly there were no means. What followed then had all the makings of a classic period catastrophe.
Since their house unfortunately belonged to James Cartland’s estate, Bertie had no power to prevent it being sold above their heads. His horses followed. There were naturally appeals to Colonel Scobell, but he declined to help when he learned of Bertie’s gambling debts, and chronic inability to work. Tears, dramas, misery ensued and when all the dust had settled, one small person kept the little family afloat—the indomitable undefeatable Polly.
She was the one who found a suitable house that they could just afford. It sounded rather grander than it was, for Amerie Court was no more than a simple farmhouse on the Earl of Coventry’s estate at Pershore. With a total income of under £300 a year there was no money now for more than one servant and a nanny for Barbara. Polly’s task was simply to ensure that they survived—which she did by such expedients as packaging the sweet Pershore plums which she and Bertie picked from the orchard, and selling them by post to friends in London.
But Polly had a more important aim than the mere survival of her family. Her greatest concern of all was to ensure that she and Bertie did not lose their friends. Their situation was unfortunate, but she had no intention of sinking into shabby obscurity.
‘My friends have always been wonderful to me,’ she said all her life, but she received what she gave.
‘My mother’s pride and high standards kept her going,’ says Barbara, ‘and the invincible courage she showed all through her difficult and often tragic life.’
These ‘standards’ which Polly had known as a girl were all-important, and had to be carefully maintained. Pride demanded it. The few remaining bits of silver with the Cartland crest were ritually polished and displayed upon the sideboard. Old friends like the Cavendish-Bentincks, the Beauchamps and the Coventrys were invited to dinner before the Hunt Balls, and luncheon before the Pershore races—although this always meant that Polly had to work for days to have everything as she had known it as a girl.
She even managed to continue hunting once or twice a week, even if it did mean cycling a good eight miles to the hunt. The Master of Foxhounds provided her with a mount.
So Polly never did lose her friends. Her pluck and charm effectively made certain that she kept her friends. And like the Victorian Lady Bountiful she had been brought up to be, she continued to do good works among the local poor almost until the day she died.
After Barbara there were two more children—Ronald, who was born in January 1907 and a second son, Tony, born in 1913. Polly’s influence upon her children was not unlike old Colonel Scobell’s, for she was a stickler for etiquette. As she herself recalled in a radio interview towards the end of her life,
I was very particular myself about manners. I taught the children from a very early age how to behave at table and how the boys should always open doors for people, and particularly for their sister. I didn’t allow any sloppiness. We all changed for dinner—no sitting down anyhow or anything like that. You see, I had been brought up in a grand house, very strictly, and I wouldn’t have anyone just rushing in to dinner in their ordinary clothes.
But Polly’s most extraordinary achievement was her reclamation of her husband. By sheer force of will—and the power of all-enfolding love—she seems to have saved him from despair and pulled him firmly to his senses. Under her impressive influence he became ambitious. Somehow she coped with his debts—after a tearfully extracted promise of no more gambling.
More important still, it was really thanks to her, and her ceaseless efforts to keep going that Bertie got the chance he needed. She and Bertie were invited to attend a Conservative dinner specially to meet their prospective Parliamentary candidate, Cdr Bolton Eyres-Monsell from Dumbleton Hall, Evesham, who was married to an extremely wealthy heiress from Leeds. There was a lot of talk about the need for a local political organiser. Polly suggested Bertie for the position—and largely thanks to the support of the Coventrys, he became Honorary Secretary of the local Primrose League. It was the start of his career in politics.
For what nobody but Polly realised was that Bertie actually possessed unsuspected talents as a politician. He could speak well—particularly when previously rehearsed by Polly. More important still, he was an effective organiser and by the beginning of the 1909 General Election, he was running the whole campaign. Eyres-Monsell got in by 1,400 votes—and from this point it seemed as if the fortunes of the Cartland family were picking up at last.
In gratitude for Bertie’s work in the election, Eyres-Monsell and his wife invited the Cartlands for a holiday in Switzerland as their personal guests. They stayed for a night or two in the Monsells’ house in Belgrave Square, then had a fortnight at the fashionable resort of Engelberg in the Swiss Alps. They skated, skied, and got to know a number of the Monsells’ friends—including a shy politician from another part of Worcestershire called Stanley Baldwin, and his cousin, Rudyard Kipling.
Kipling and Bertie got on rather well together—so did Polly and Stanley Baldwin. The holiday was deemed a great success, and in Eyres-Monsell Polly now had what she needed—a personal friend who could help Bertie politically. The friendship deepened and, a few months later, Monsell invited Bertie to become his Political Secretary at a salary of £150 a year. Bertie was starting to succeed, and within a year had taken on the organisation of five counties for the Primrose League, making him a very busy man indeed.
His next step up the ladder of success came early in 1914 when it was decided to evacuate 10,000 Protestant women and children to avoid a bloodbath when rebellion threatened Ulster. Preliminary arrangements were chaotic, and Bertie was recommended to sort out the muddle—which he did with great efficiency.
But even more important were the social opportunities which Bertie’s new success was offering the Cartlands. There were the shooting parties and the balls at Dumbleton, the Primrose League teas at Amerie Court, contacts with many well-known politicians and their wives. Polly was in her element. She had survived those grim disasters of the early years of marriage. The years of effort had been proved worth while, those ‘standards’ she so ardently believed in had been vindicated.
There were even plans for Bertie to go in to Parliament himself one day. Then came the war to put an end to all such golden dreams.
This was the world of Barbara’s childhood and one can see her in the photographs in the family albums for this period which Polly religiously kept—a solemn, long-haired, self-possessed small girl, sitting alone in the garden at Amerie Court, or holding her well-scrubbed brother, Ronald, firmly by the hand.
Included with the photographs, Polly has preserved the first story Barbara wrote—aged five. It is copied out in crayon, and has the title boldly written on the front page:
Once upon a time there was a little girl and her name was Mary.
Now this little girl was very fond of making slides.
Her father was the village doctor.
One evening the Doctor came home late.
Mr Joe Carter stepped into a slide. Poor old man. He said I hope no slide will be made down Winter Hill or it will be a bad look out for old Betsy Gray.
Then Mary felt very unhappy for it was just down Winters Hill that she had made all her slides. That evening when she had been put to bed she got up and got a spade. When she got to the hill she found that the dirt at the side of the road was quite hard but she found some in a garden at the top of the hill.
The End.
Barabara was clearly an intelligent girl and one can understand the all-important influences that she was now absorbing from her family—and particularly from Polly. There was that exciting splendour of life in a grand Georgian house which she remembered as a small girl in her visits to her grandfather, the forbidding Colonel Scobell—and there were even grander houses for her still to visit, owned by her mother’s friends. ‘I have always found something profoundly moving and romantic in ancient houses’, she explains. ‘They form an important background for my books.’
But, more important still were the actual lessons she was learning from her mother—the importance of the family, and the role of manners and conventional Edwardian morality. And most intriguing of all, for the development of Barbara’s philosophy of life, was Polly’s example of the power of the woman in the home. She managed to enshrine the Edwardian myth of the tender, loving, feminine woman—and used these qualities to rule the wayward male in her life.
Then with the war Polly had a different task. Bertie was thirty-eight and could easily have found himself a job at the War Office or behind the lines. But Polly was too patriotic to encourage any husband to such ignominious behaviour. Bertie would do his duty—so would Polly. It was a woman’s task to bear parting bravely, and to inspire her husband to become a hero. And this she did with Bertie.
Late that October Polly travelled to Southampton to see her husband off to France. He had been commissioned in the Worcester Regiment and before he left they had a few magical days together.
One charming friend of the Monsells they had met at Dumbleton was Wilfred Ashley, the widowed son-in-law of the great Edwardian financier, Sir Ernest Cassel. He lived at Broadlands, the magnificent eighteenth-century house at Romsey which had once belonged to Palmerston, and invited the Cartlands to spend Bertie’s embarkation leave with him.
It was an unforgettable event for Polly, and would have fascinating echoes too for Barbara later in her life. Polly and Bertie were charmed by the handsome Mr Ashley, thrilled by the splendours of the house, and particularly taken by their host’s two motherless daughters, Edwina and Mary. On the Sunday, Polly took the little girls to church. Later she told Barbara that, ‘she thought Edwina very pretty and intelligent, but Mary, thin and rather peaked, with red hair, looked wistful and as if she needed mothering’. A few days later, Bertie was in France.
Despite his age, Bertie had a distinguished war as an infantry officer in France, and was mentioned in despatches ‘for gallant and distinguished service in the field’. Early in 1917, after some months of illness, he was offered the post of Garrison Adjutant at Folkestone. It was a post that would have suited him—and by almost any reckoning he had earned himself a break after his time in France. But even now there was Polly’s estimation to consider. He still had to make her proud of him and do what he felt to be his duty. And so largely for Polly’s sake he turned down Folkestone and early in the summer of 1917 was back in the trenches yet again.
He was promoted Major and survived the dangers and discomforts of the front line for a year. At times he wrote that he was ‘miserably depressed . . . and awfully homesick (wife-sick)!’ But Polly’s love was still his inspiration, and one of his constant hopes was still to win a medal that would make her proud of him, although as he wrote somewhat sadly, ‘One is too old really to be ambitious for mere gauds and baubles, especially when you see how these are dished out.’
He never got his medal, but was killed with the rest of his battalion in the last big German push of May 1918.
It was a hero’s death. For Polly the agony was doubled when, a whole month after the report of her husband’s death in action, she received a telegram from the War Office saying he was not killed, merely ‘missing’. The uncertainty dragged on almost until the Armistice when his death was finally confirmed.
But Polly never wavered. Nor did the children. For the little family it was an even worse disaster than James Cartland’s death had been. Polly’s high hopes were at an end. Now she would never be the wife of a Member of Parliament and never know the success she had wanted for Bertie. Life would be infinitely harder for the children too. For once again the Cartlands were extremely poor. The children lacked a father and Polly would have the task of raising them on her own.
Barbara was nearly seventeen, and away at boarding school, when she heard the first news of her father’s death. Judging from the letter that she wrote to Polly, she took it rather well.
You are such a brave Mother that you will make up for all. You and Daddy were an absolutely ideal Mother and Father and you, my Angel, were a perfect wife and a perfect Mother.
I feel so awfully proud of him and in a way it’s lovely to remember him so young and cheery.
But the most remarkable of all the letters of condolence Polly received came from her eleven-year-old son, Ronald, from his preparatory school near Haywards Heath.
My Angel,
Thank you so much for your two letters, Darling. I know I am the eldest son, I must be everything to you, and Pray God I shall never offend him who is dead or you, my darling. I shall soon be with you, Angel, and then I hope I shall be able to cheer you up.…
Of course, darling, I will follow Daddy; but will you please explain to me in your next letter what you mean by this—‘I want you to start where your Father left off’.
I wish I was at home to help you answer your two hundred letters. Darling, where shall we live now? I, being the son who should and will look after you, must know, for you, darling, are alone. There is no Daddy to keep us alive. But God will keep us.
Forgive such a short letter but I have four others to write, Darling. I will be your right hand, my dearest one.
All my love, Angel,
I am ever,
Your ever loving son,
Ronald.
Bertie’s death united his small family more certainly than if he had survived. And once again, as in her early days of marriage when she inspired Bertie to achieve, Polly’s great role was now to fill her children with ambition. For now, in addition to those ‘standards’ and beliefs which she had taught them, they had a hero father as a great example.
For her children Polly made their life appear a personal crusade. She prayed for them, she spurred them and inspired them with her love, and as Barbara herself has written, ‘She lit a flame in all three that was to burn brighter year by year. She made them believe in themselves and their capabilities. She made them see that anything was possible if they really wanted it and worked hard enough. To Polly there were no heights that her children could not attain.’
For Ronald, even at eleven, this meant politics. Barbara remembers him a few years earlier, already copying his father by making political speeches in the playroom—and when he had finished, applauding himself with great enthusiasm. Tony, who was seven, would also follow in his father’s footsteps—as a soldier.
Barbara’s scope for changing the world was far more limited than her brothers’—and anyhow neither Barbara nor her mother believed in women trying to achieve success by copying their menfolk. Now that Barbara was nearly through her finishing school—at Netley Abbey, Hampshire—and was already something of a beauty, there was only one right ‘career’ for her—marriage. Polly prayed that she would fall deeply in love as she had, but she also longed for Barbara to marry a man with money. She knew only too well the problems and difficulties of poverty and debts. She would not have been human if she had not hoped that Barbara would have what she had lost—‘Park Gates’.
Polly was so unhappy without Bertie that it was Barbara who decided, now she was grown up, that they should live in London. At eighteen she was longing for excitement, fun—and lots of young men to dance with her.
So Polly found a terraced house in Nevelle Street, South Kensington to rent. It was almost Belgravia—if not quite Mayfair—and several years later, to make ends meet, the resourceful Polly opened up a shop. Before the war, of course, this would have been unthinkable. But by the early Twenties a few smart ladies had already realised it might be ‘fun’ to have a dress shop or a milliner’s and sell to their friends.
Polly followed suit. In the country she had a friend, a Vicar’s spinster daughter, who was an inspired knitter and specialised in fashionable knitted dresses. Polly decided she could sell them—and opened up a little shop called ‘Knitwear’ in a flat in Pont Street.
Long before this, the first night the family arrived in London, Barbara and Ronald walked together up towards South Kensington underground station, and stood there, hand in hand, gazing at the lights. Suddenly their future seemed to lie before them.
‘I,’ said Ronald, echoing Polly’s extravagant ambitions, ‘I shall be Prime Minister.’
‘And I,’ said Barbara, ‘will get to know everyone in London.’