There were the ‘boys’–and there were the men.
Hannah Mackenzie enjoyed the company of Tommies as much as any woman, but her eyes were on those who mattered. Lord Lucas was a remote figure in London. Far more important in her day-today life was Dr Beauchamp. Sydney Beauchamp, 53, was the darling of private practice: ‘his character was one of singular beauty’, wrote a friend, remembering how at Caius College Beauchamp was known as ‘the Lovely B’.8 Nan observed her housekeeper’s machinations. ‘Hannah handled any man of importance with supreme skill’, she noted. ‘She studied Dr Beauchamp and attended to his needs until she had him tied to her little finger.’ Later, when the clipped and precise Major Churton arrived from the War Office as resident surgeon, ‘Hannah flew straight to him like a bird.’ I look again at that wartime portrait of Hannah Mackenzie and imagine the full force of her charm: the directness of her grey-eyed gaze, the amused yet firm mouth. ‘She was attractive to men,’ her great-nephew Ross told me; ‘it wasn’t so much her looks–it was her character.’
There was one other man who demanded very special attention. Nan’s diary makes no overt mention of Hannah and J. M. Barrie, but the evidence suggests a keen sympathy, even close friendship between the two. Barrie was the literary and theatrical giant of his day. Aged 54, the previous June he had been made a baronet by King George V (having refused a knighthood in 1909). This same year he made £45,000 (around two million pounds today) from a mixture of plays, revues, sales of books and investments. His name was rarely out of the West End or off Broadway–four one-act plays ran in London during 1914. He was, back then, so much more than Peter Pan (now in its tenth year and a Christmas fixture), but for all his towering success and wealth he was a very private man.
Barrie was small–just over five feet, with sunken blue eyes, a huge domed forehead and a deep, mournful voice. He was a compulsive storyteller, with his distinctive Scottish accent, beginning his tales with ‘I always remember…’ He disliked small talk, preferring to get straight to the nub of the matter. When Barrie went up to Wrest from London for the weekend, the fun began in earnest: cricket, croquet, billiards, theatrical revue, fancy dress–yet there was an intensity about him that could go either way. Biographers describe him as entertaining, charming and immensely generous. He could also be selfish, moody, and proprietorial. He had a habit of planting postage stamps on new friends’ ceilings by flicking them up on a coin: there they stayed as badges of ownership. This was very likely his first action on meeting the men of Ward A, because Barrie felt unambiguously possessive of Wrest Park Hospital–just as he felt a fierce affection for Nan and Bron Herbert, friends of just two years. ‘I’m hoping, if you have time, to hear from “our” hospital’, he wrote to Nan that September.
And then he was among them, shaking the slim hand of housekeeper Hannah Mackenzie, complimenting her on arranging his room in the ‘Bachelor Wing’ so finely when most of the house had been so very thoroughly institutionalised. ‘Ah, a fellow Scot!’ I imagine him saying. ‘From Inverness, you say? We must talk, Mrs Mackenzie, we must talk. I was in the Highlands myself just this last August, when war broke out you know. Odd to be fishing in the glens at that time…’
Would Hannah have been overawed by him? I don’t think so. I see our housekeeper, pink faced, strut back to her office in the basement to tell head housemaid Maggie and Hetty the cook about her new friend Mr Barrie. ‘Something special for dinner tonight I think, Mrs Geyton. And a drop of our best Scotch from the cellars.’ This is not so very fanciful. Compare the early stories of James Matthew Barrie and Hannah Mackenzie.
Barrie was born in a cramped cottage in Kirriemuir, Angus in 1860, the ninth of ten children. His father David was a handloom weaver, and the family–though upwardly mobile and with a great belief in education–were poor. Barrie was plucked from Kirriemuir by his ambitious eldest brother Alexander and educated in Glasgow, then Dumfries and finally Edinburgh University. After a spell on The Nottingham Journal, he caught the train south to London to try his luck.
‘There are few more impressive sights in the world than a Scotsman on the make’, he once wrote.9 And of Scottish people who share a home: ‘the affection existing between them is almost painful in its intensity’. By 1914, J. M. Barrie could count among his friends some of the greatest talents of Edwardian England: the architect Edwin Lutyens, artist William Nicholson, writers Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett. That summer, just before the outbreak of war, he dined at the writer Maurice Baring’s then walked back with the Chancellor Lloyd George to 11 Downing Street, talking all the way. You could get no higher than this–yet the Kirriemuir boy in him, the Peter Pan figure, was consistently agog at his good fortune.
Hannah Mackenzie was born in 1881 in Inverness, her childhood spent in a succession of streets clustered around the mouth of the city’s port: Glebe Street, Waterloo Place, Tanners Lane. Her parents were Jessie and James Mackenzie, a reliably fertile couple who produced twelve children over twenty-four years; Hannah was the fifth-born. Father James was a master shoemaker, an artisan. According to the census returns he had also done stints as a stone dresser, a fruiterer-greengrocer and a ‘general labourer’. Jobs were scarce in the Highlands, and with twelve mouths to feed, you did what you could.
The two eldest sons William and James appear in the 1891 census as a compositor (a printer’s typesetter), aged 17, and a painter, aged 16. At least three of the Mackenzie girls went into service, working their way to good positions within the English upper classes. In 1901 Hannah, aged 19, had left home and was working for a loom dresser in Lanarkshire as a general domestic servant, the bottom of a hierarchy of four. She moved on, and on again, pushing ever southwards: as many moves as it took to get the top job.