1892: WE RETURN to that year which was to be of such consequence to myself and was also, I suppose, one of the most momentous in my father’s life, containing as it did so many of the major events that were to shape his destiny. He lost a wife at the beginning of it and met a mistress, my mother, towards the end. In it too Stockley reappeared and engaged him in the fruit trade in which he was to make his fortune. And in it occurred a somber episode which I find both puzzling and distasteful: Mr. Ashmore’s legacy reared its ugly head. In July a civil action between my father and the Count de Gallatin was tried in the Law Courts before Mr. Justice Collins.
When I first projected this memoir some thirty years ago and was seeking information about my father’s early life, I applied to Arthur Stockley, his partner and lifelong friend, then a man of seventy-three. One of his letters to me contains the following sentence: “I suppose he [de Gallatin] could not help his intensely jealous nature, but there was no cause for him bringing an action against your father over The Cell Farm just because of the Louise incident; however he lost the action and had to pay the costs, which made him quite frantic.” But the case, I afterwards discovered, is reported at some length in The Times of July 21, 1892; my father was the plaintiff and must therefore have brought the action and judgment was given for the defendant (the Count). It is true he was saddled with the costs; it seems the only accuracy in Stockley’s statement.
The action was brought by my father to recover the £500 which he had lent to de Gallatin eight years previously. The Count admitted the loan but asserted that the suggestion to start the pony farm had come from my father, who had proposed that the £500 should be used for running and stocking it. He himself had agreed to this and to transact the business on my father’s behalf. He had had no share in the profits of the farm and claimed that he had told my father, when the latter left him in November, 1888, that he had spent more than £500 on it, that they had better cry quits, and that my father had agreed. Some unpleasantness then arose: after the marriage my father’s relatives began to enquire what had become of his legacy. The Count said that he then proposed to treat the losses at the pony farm as his own and to repay the £500. A correspondence ensued in which he wrote to my father to ask what should be done with the remaining ponies. My father instructed him to send them to Tattersall’s. Two of them fetched £42, the unbroken ones £14. Complaints kept coming from my father’s relatives and he, the Count, had then decided not to repay the £500. Instead he counter-claimed for over £600 as representing his own expenses over the farm. He did not now insist upon his counter-claim. No accounts had been kept, but cheques paid by him to my father were available and the correspondence showed that my father had looked upon the farm as his own.
My father in his evidence stated that before they went to Ireland nothing had been said about buying ponies. They were bought, he said, simply to give him something to do in looking after them. All the arrangements were made by the Count. He himself broke and sold the ponies as they came along, paid wages out of the money received, kept some himself and, if the settlement was by check, paid it into the Count’s banking account. The latter had never put forward any claim for expenses and it was untrue to say that they had agreed to cry quits. My father had made repeated application for the repayment of his £500.
Mr. Justice Collins, delivering judgment, said that the plaintiff was a person for whom the defendant had strong feelings of affection, giving him free quarters and providing him with money for some years, at a time also when he was paying interest on the loan. It was clear that at one time the defendant had wished to pay off the loan, for which he was giving heavy interest. On the one hand the plaintiff had lent £500, on the other he had free quarters and pocket money from the defendant. The question was whether the ponies were the property of the plaintiff or the defendant: the admission of counsel had narrowed the case down to that issue. After looking at the correspondence between the parties there could be only one answer. The defendant wrote to the plaintiff asking for instructions about the unsold ponies, and the plaintiff provided those instructions. How could it be said that it was necessary for the plaintiff to authorize the defendant to sell the ponies unless they were his? The plaintiff also admitted that when he sold the ponies he applied the proceeds to his own purposes. Judgment must be given for the defendant with costs.
I confess to finding almost every aspect of this wretched dispute obscure and can only hazard a guess at the truth of the matter. From my own experience of life and my knowledge of my father’s character in later years, I would say that his version was substantially true. During his four-year association with de Gallatin he was in his early twenties, and if it occurs to readers of this memoir that even when Banana King he seemed somewhat lacking in business sense, he was unlikely to have had much then. Though easy-going, as I knew him, he was also of an independent and obstinate nature, and he had two favorite words of contempt for idle and parasitic people: “loafer” and “sponger.” We have already noted the Count’s failure to detain him in idleness in New Brighton. The pony farm was not much of a job, but it had the appearance of one and the extra attraction of being the only kind of work which this young ex-cavalryman understood and enjoyed. Disguised as a profitable enterprise, it was little more than a toy for him to play with; behind the scene the Count was virtually keeping him: in his letters his reference to him as a pony-farmer is the same as his reference to him as a failing wine-salesman, “poor old Roger”—an affectionate, somewhat patronizing phrase. In later life my father would not have cared to be patronized, and if patronage did not irk him a little then, it was, I believe, simply because of his legacy. This legacy, invested in the Count, must have stood for him as a symbol of prime importance, a symbol of independence and self-esteem; it enabled him to loaf and sponge in a dignified manner, it saved his face. Whatever proposals or suggestions he may have made in the initial transactions for the application of this nest-egg towards the costs of the farm were probably more formal and graceful than sincere; how could he suppose that his devoted and generous friend, who always paid for everything for everyone and had ample means to do so, would take his pretty offer seriously? Nor do I believe that the Count did take it seriously, until the bust-up; he did not need or want my father’s money (he got through three fortunes in a lifetime, Stockley says), he wanted only my father; it must surely have been plain to him that his own best interest lay not in spending his young friend’s capital but in preserving it; doubtless he eagerly agreed to whatever proposals were made, so long as they gained him my father’s company.
That obtained, I imagine that expenses were seldom discussed between them; from the doting Count’s point of view the less said about them the better; unbusinesslike himself (“The truth is I don’t bother myself much about my affairs,” he had said in that letter to Stockley) but a lavish spender, he paid readily and unobtrusively for everything without counting the cost, and far from wishing to break into his young friend’s nest-egg, he had at one time tried, it seems—I wonder when and why—to pay the loan of it off. All this while the sun shone and “We jog along here in our own quiet way—and I think it suits us all”; when the clouds gathered, the scene changed, and the word most stressed in Mme. de Gallatin’s charges against my father is “ingratitude,” saddest of words.
If my father’s capital sum was important to him for the preservation of his dignity in Old Windsor, its monetary value could never have been greater than when he wished to leave with Louise. It must have been humiliating for him to be paid for all along the line by his fiancée (as I assume happened, unless Aunt Maggie or some other friend lent him money), rich though her parents might be, and be presented penniless to them. In the days when I knew him one could not take a lady out to dine, even a relative, without giving her champagne; it wasn’t “done.” It was now, however, that the mortified Count totted up a bill that had never existed. I find it hard to believe that in such a situation my father would have agreed to cry quits —unless in the kind of proud and angry way in which one might say, “Put it where the monkey put the nuts!” Cash was then too important to him. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that if he behaved ruthlessly, the Count behaved spitefully; had he restored to my father at their parting even a portion of the loan the dreary suit might never have been brought.
But all this is of less interest to me than the question: Why did my father bring the matter to court? By the time it was heard, four years had elapsed and he was a widower with a handsome allowance of £2000 a year. When were the wheels of justice set in motion? Some time after the marriage in September, 1889, it seems. They are reputed to turn slowly; they can also be stayed and matters settled out of court. After all, whatever unpleasantness had arisen at his parting from the de Gallatins (and the scene may well have been pretty nasty) they had been devoted friends to him and he was deeply in their debt for much love, care, and kindness. There had been plenty of time to calm down and reflect on this. On the face of it it seems a mean thing to have done, and my father as I knew him was not mean, though he could be stubborn and relentless, as we shall see. Who were these relatives who began annoying the Count a year after the event? Except for Aunt Maggie and, perhaps, John Graham, they were all down at heel: my father entirely supported his three spinster sisters, Susan, Sally, and Emily, in their declining years until they died. Had he perhaps promised the indigent part of his family the legacy if they could extract it? Did they keep the dispute going while he was abroad? Could they have filed the suit in his absence? Even so, why did he allow it to come to court? Stockley says that the judge ticked him off, remarking that he had not “behaved well.” Nothing of this appears in The Times report and no official transcript of the trial survives. Or did the Count drive him to law by forcing on his counter-claim? There is a fragment of evidence to which we shall come which shows de Gallatin to have been of a vindictive nature: Stockley himself, who liked and continued friendly with him in spite of everything, uses the word. It may therefore be that the Count pushed the matter to an issue. Is that why he got saddled with the costs?
At any rate, considering the whole sad affair in its obscurity as objectively as one can, it looks like one of those bitter lessons so many of us learn who try to buy the human heart with cash. That it taught the poor Count a lesson I have reason to doubt; I am convinced that it taught one to my father. Never while I knew him thirty years later would he accept hospitality if he could help it. He dispensed it, and as lavishly as the Count; he would take none in return. I used to think it selfish of him never to allow others, however much they begged and however comfortable their means, the pleasure of treating him in return for all his treats. Constant visitors to our house and table, people who stayed with us, often for weeks, and enjoyed the delights of his cellar and my mother’s five-course meals, frequent guests of his at his favorite restaurant, Romano’s in the Strand, all tried to secure him to themselves as a guest, but he would have none of it. Occasionally, I remember, he seemed cornered and we dined out at the compelling invitation of some prosperous friend; but always, at the end of the meal, my father managed, by some ruse, to get hold of the bill and settle it himself, even though this involved unseeming scuffles over the wretched piece of paper, merely chuckling at the embarrassed or disappointed expostulations that followed. It seemed as though it made him positively uncomfortable to be paid for, or even to receive gifts of any value: when I was a schoolboy and a wealthy friend of his, Captain Bacon, Chairman of the Manchester Ship Canal, sent me a check for £100 for some now forgotten literary project I had in hand—my school magazine perhaps—and wrote, “Put it in your own pocket if you don’t need it all for that,” my father made me return the check. Yet if he disliked being under obligations to others, he was not above bribing his own way in life and, like any de Gallatin, expecting gratitude and loyalty in return for generosity. When we dined out or stayed in a hotel, head waiters would be liberally tipped beforehand to ensure that we received special attention, every privilege; my father would actually say, “There, see that I am well looked after and I shan’t forget you later.”
Bribery did not always work; the displeasure, as in de Gallatin’s case, was then severe. It was one of my father’s boasts that his employees in Elders and Fyffes never struck, their needs were always anticipated and provided for, their wages raised before the point of demand was reached. The firm was therefore regarded as a happy family, and my father was godfather to innumerable staff children, none of whose birthdays and the silver christening mugs he bestowed, he ever forgot. But in the General Strike a shocking thing happened; some of these happy employees, the transport side, the van-drivers, were either obliged or felt obliged out of another loyalty, to their unions, to join the strike. They lost their jobs, and out of this situation trouble brewed also for two other persons, a taxi-driver and myself. My father had a pet taxi-driver named Mickey. I never saw this man, but there was something about him that took my father’s fancy. His rank was at Waterloo Station which my father used for his Bow Street office, coming up from Richmond where we lived, and in course of time a sort of friendship grew up between them so that Mickey became his special driver. Refusing other fares he would meet my father’s regular train and drive him to his office. Soon he was calling at the office in the evening to drive him back to Waterloo, sometimes right down to Richmond; whenever a taxi was wanted by my father for anything it had to be Mickey’s if possible. This man was a character, my father delighted in him, gave him handsome tips and presents, such as hands of bananas, sent presents to his family and talked about him so much that we used to ask after him, as though he were a pet dog. But in the strike his union called him out, and he met my father’s train no more until the dispute was settled. My father never spoke to him again. Walking past him at Waterloo without a look, he would enter another taxi. Poor Mickey was genuinely upset; he had, I think, formed a personal attachment to my father. He called a number of times at the Bow Street office but was refused admittance. He even drove all the way down to Richmond one day to ask my mother to intercede for him. She did, but my father remained unmoved. The man had let him down and was never seen or heard of again. Some months later, suddenly at table, following some light remark I happened to make, my father unleashed upon my startled head a perfect torrent of reproach for not having put myself and my car at his service in his time of need as the sons of his colleagues, he said, had done for their fathers. It was the most shocking and unique experience for me, this violent discharge of pent-up grievances which he had been nursing for so long. The notion of helping him had never crossed my mind. Had I realized what was going on in his head, that he was silently waiting and hoping for my offer and suffering in his pride because it did not come, I would gladly have helped him, though I was a socialist at the time and my sympathies lay with the strikers. I said I was very sorry but I hadn’t thought, to which he retorted, No, of course I hadn’t thought, he realized that, I never did think of anyone but myself, I was just as selfish and ungrateful as my sister Nancy, and he did not know what he had done to deserve two such selfish and ungrateful children. What he had done we ourselves did not then know, but we found out later.
Returning now to the legal dispute, how interesting is Stockley’s reversal of the facts forty-six years later. He was, I believe, an honest man, as this world and the business world go, of a rigid moral code, severe and self-righteous (his standards of human perfection were King George the Fifth and Rudyard Kipling): perhaps the final order of his loyalties affected his beliefs. Or did my father contrive, out of uneasiness, to throw dust in his eyes, as he seems to have done in another matter to which we shall soon come? It is possible that Stockley was not back in England when the action was judged in July, and heard of it only afterwards from my father, whom he ran into by chance at the Tivoli. But the margin must have been slight, for both these events took place in that same month. At any rate he had no part in the legal proceedings and tried to keep out of the squabble. He was friendly with both de Gallatin and my father; the former had been best man at his wedding three years previously and godfather to his son and heir. But he was not to be allowed to sit on the fence. He was busy inaugurating in Covent Garden the banana business which, starting in an almost costermongerish way, was to become Elders and Fyffes, and my father, bored with idleness, asked if he could come in as “office boy.” He was accepted. But when de Gallatin heard that he was to be employed by Stockley, he wrote angrily to the latter to say he “must choose between them” who was his friend. “It was a ridiculous request,” says Stockley, “and I did not hesitate.” When Mme. de Gallatin was dying some years later she summoned him and he went (“I never blamed her as she was devoted to G., and one can understand a mother’s unreasonableness”), but the Count was never again seen by him or by my father and disappears out of their story to arise later as a ghost in my own.
The year 1892, therefore, was a momentous one in my father’s life; in it he lost a wife, gained a job which was to make his name and fortune, and picked up my mother on a Channel boat. She was not, as we have seen, his first conquest, nor was she to be his last, and it may therefore be permissible to wonder how long the affair would have continued had not an accident occurred.