MICHAEL , THE FOURTH of five sons of Arthur and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies, was born on 16 June 1900, at 31 Kensington Park Gardens, on the north side of what were once the private gardens of Kensington Palace.
Sylvia was a du Maurier, the third of five children born to Emma and George du Maurier. Her father had risen from a penurious and rootless childhood to become a famous cartoonist, notably for the society pages of Punch magazine, and the author of three bestselling novels: Peter Ibbetson (1891), Trilby (1894) and The Martian (1896).
Before he had found fame on Punch, he had trained as an artist in Paris, smoked opium, exercised his beautiful tenor voice and engaged in séances and experiments in hypnotism. Arriving in London in 1860, he shared an apartment with James McNeill Whistler, mixed with Pre-Raphaelite artists such as Rossetti, Millais and Edward Burne-Jones and became something of a touchstone in London’s literary and artistic community, with Henry James his closest friend.
Sylvia was her father’s favourite child. Brought up in an enlightened, bohemian atmosphere at New Grove House on the edge of sprawling Hampstead Heath, high above the city, she was ‘a graceful beauty, her charm enhanced by the endearing crookedness of her mouth and a tip-tilted nose’, according to the biographer Diana Farr.7
Her skin was white, her shoulders wide and splendid; her hair very dark, a fine frame for that pale face which in repose had a noble almost Grecian quality. But perhaps her most remarkable feature was her eyes, set wide apart with a serenity which attracted the young, the shy and the hesitant.
Sylvia’s unusual beauty, charm and grace, matched by a mocking wit and sense of fun, were already welcomed in London society when, at twenty-three, she first met Arthur, her future husband. They were the perfect foil to Arthur’s dark good looks and more serious demeanour: ‘We used to think he was a young warrior in an Italian picture,’ the composer Sir Hubert Parry, a family friend, once said of him.
Three years older than Sylvia and a rising barrister, Arthur was the second of seven children of the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies and his wife, Mary. The family home was miles to the north in Kirkby Lonsdale, a village between the Lake District and the Yorkshire Dales.
The Llewelyn Davieses were Christian, highbrow, but politically progressive. Arthur’s father had been President of the Cambridge Union and more recently Chaplain to Queen Victoria. Ottoline Morrell, one of the original Bloomsbury set, wrote of him:
He had been a friend of F. D. Maurice and Robert Browning and even Thomas Carlyle. He was a shy, sensitive reserved man, and had rather a stiff, dry, unsympathetic manner, but after a time I had broken the ice. I found this old man, sitting in his little study, a great solace and very interesting…
Besides the intellectual prowess and unsympathetic manner, the Reverend John Llewelyn Davies was an original member of the famous Alpine Club, and was the first to climb the highest peak within the Swiss frontier (the Dom, 14,911 feet). He was also a supporter of women’s rights and workers’ rights, a champion of trade unionism and had nerve enough to lambast imperialism from the pulpit while the Queen herself was in the congregation – the reason he found himself living hundreds of miles to the north in 1889 as Rector of Kirkby Lonsdale.
Dolly Parry, one of Sir Hubert’s daughters, wrote of the appointment:
It was regarded as a sort of banishment. He was a Broad Churchman, and on a very high moral and intellectual plane. Mr Gladstone [who was on his fourth stint as Prime Minister] was criticised for this appointment. I heard so much of it from my father and mother, though only thirteen – that I had my own reasons for disliking Mr Gladstone in my youth. He didn’t approve of Mr Llewelyn Davies and he cut down trees.
For his part, John Llewelyn Davies was never in the least bitter and grew to love Kirkby and his walks over the Fells, where he turned the vicarage into a hive of reformatory endeavour.
Dolly’s close association with the family had begun with her mother’s great liking and admiration for Arthur’s sister, Margaret, who was General Secretary of the Women’s Co-operative Guild from 1889 to 1922. The intellectual and social achievements of the Llewelyn Davieses knew no bounds. Arthur’s Aunt Emily founded Girton College, Cambridge, and his own list of accomplishments, before being called to the Bar, included Junior and Senior Scholarships at Marlborough School (a major English public school), Minor and Foundation Trinity Scholarships at Cambridge University, where he took a First Class Degree in the Classical Tripos and won the Lebas Essay Prize in 1884, the First Whewell International Law Scholarship in 1887 Law, and the Inner Temple Pupil Scholarship in Common Law in 1889.
His brothers Crompton and Theodore had both been Apostles at Cambridge – members of a secret society to which only select undergraduates were elected and which would shortly include the philosopher G. E. Moore (Principia Ethica), the poet Rupert Brooke, and many members of the Bloomsbury set, such as John Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey and his brother James.
Crompton’s story is an especially adventurous one. He became a successful lawyer, friend of Lloyd George and supporter of Sinn Féin and married Moya O’Connor, an attractive, dynamic woman who smuggled guns during the War of Independence and was reputed to have been one of Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins’ many lovers. Crompton actually helped Collins draft the Free State constitution and knew him well. After he was ambushed and shot through the head in August 1922, Crompton was appointed Arbitrator and Inspector General in Land Matters for the Free State.
Arthur and Sylvia were a handsome couple with diverse and attractive strains in their character and background, which seemed to predict a lasting, dovetail attraction between them, rather than any serious kind of conflict, and a rich harvest of possibility for the generations to follow.
Fate, in the shape of Mr Barrie, was to determine otherwise.
7 Diana Farr, Gilbert Cannan: A Georgian Prodigy (1978).