Devastated by the death of his wife and the miserable, ignominious end to his viceroyalty, Curzon virtually retired from public life, devoting most of his intellectual energy to the chancellorship of Oxford University, to which he had been nominated in 1907, and to the rectorship of Glasgow University, to which he was elected in 1908. More importantly for his daughters, he installed himself in the house that was to become their home. For, ignoring his father’s adverse reports on its size and expense, he had finally leased Hackwood.
Palatial enough to suit even Curzon, who had acquired its lease for a premium of eight thousand pounds (the original asking price was fourteen thousand pounds), its rent of three thousand fifty pounds a year included the wages of keepers for the excellent shoot. There were nine lodges and cottages, vineries, greenhouses, a cricket ground, kitchen garden, coach house and infirmary. The entrance hall was fifty-two feet long, with tapestry panels; there was a ballroom, a large library, an oak-paneled saloon of forty-five by thirty-three feet and a morning room almost as big, a dining room sixty feet long, bedrooms galore, with a large nursery suite in the east wing above the billiard room and the smoking room, servants’ bedrooms, a steward’s room, a housekeeper’s room, furnace rooms, dairies, sculleries, bakehouses, cellars, larders, a lamp room, a plate room and a boot room.
Curzon immediately set about improving those aspects of the house which he considered needed remodeling. A large mound outside interfered with his view; he had it lowered, necessitating the removal of almost fifteen thousand cubic feet of earth before it was level. The drains, which gave trouble, were cleaned—Curzon devoted many letters to the question of sludge in the filters—and the lake was dredged. A ratcatcher was called in, the breakfast room and library painted, two bell-pushes, with ivory labels marked “Maid” and “Valet,” fitted in all the family and guest bedrooms. Four radiators were fitted in the icy ballroom, and in an organ hall covered with Persian carpets he installed an Aeolian organ on which he would play with childlike gusto and enjoyment.
The house was furnished with the utmost grandeur. Curzon’s tastes ran to the imperial—gilded furniture, crimson velvet hangings, gold tassels and huge chandeliers. There were crimson silk damask curtains with cords and tassels, a carved gilt threefold Louis XIV screen and panels of crimson velvet with appliqué borders in the saloon. Even the billiard table had a cover of crimson velvet with a design in gold and silver thread. Tapestry curtains set off the more exotic fruits of his travels—ivories, Persian rugs, ebony chairs and tiger skins.
Almost at once he began hosting some of the great house parties for which the Edwardians are known. His most famous ones were at Whitsuntide, in late May or early June, with firework displays in the park, charades, games, croquet, tennis, walking, talking and the clandestine love affairs that were a feature of Edwardian high society.
For this was a world of rigid etiquette but flexible morals, where anything was permissible if there was no public scandal. Thus certain conventions took on the force of iron rules. Letters, for instance, always had to be left out to be stamped and posted by servants: if a woman posted her own it suggested a secret correspondent. Every well-brought-up girl was taught from childhood to close the door of her bedroom as she left it—open doors could be thought to signal availability—and forbidden to look into the windows of gentlemen’s clubs, as this could also be interpreted as invitation (although the same young women were expected to use every art, including the sidelong glance, to allure those same gentlemen when seated next to them at dinner). Going on the stage was disreputable, yet the private equivalent—charades, tableaux and amateur dramatics—was popular in the grandest and most respectable houses.
Provided one observed these outward forms, romantic possibilities were ever present. The formality between the sexes was such that friendships, always ostensibly platonic, between men and married women were a recognized social relationship. Many were truly platonic—Lady Desborough, for instance, had a host of male friends with whom she corresponded, many of whom wrote to her for years without ever using her Christian name. Others were covers for love affairs under the accepted convention that they were nothing more than friendships.
Curzon, like the rest of his circle, viewed his friends’ liaisons with sympathy, relished hearing the latest gossip about them, and pursued his own affairs wholeheartedly but discreetly. It was different, of course, for the lower classes. When Curzon found that one of the housemaids in his employ at Carlton House Terrace had allowed a footman to spend the night with her he sacked her without hesitation (“I put the wretched little slut out in the street at a moment’s notice”) and years later believed that Edith Thompson (of the famous Thompson–Bywaters murder case) should be hanged, not because he thought she was guilty of murder but because of her “flagrant and outrageous adultery.” This regard for the outward form while pursuing private inclination was an ethos which was later to color the thinking of his daughters.
Curzon was a loving and thoughtful, if distant, father to his three children, interested in every detail of their clothes, education and health. “My darling Twinkums,” reads a note brought up to the nursery in February 1908. “I am so sorry my pretty is whooping worse. This afternoon as I was lying with the window slightly open, I just caught a sound of it in the distance, like the cry of a far away owl. Love to all the kittens. Your loving Daddy.”
Whenever he was away, letters scribbled on small black-bordered sheets of paper arrived for all of them in turn. Frequently—as, later, with his second wife, Grace—they contained an admonition to write to him more often. “Darling Cim, What is Mrs. Simkin doing? I get long and beautiful and well written letters from Irene but where is little Cim? Silent as a mouse. Not even the sound of a nibble.” Only Mary, viewed as a perfect, saintlike figure in death, had written to him as copiously and frequently as even he could wish.
Long letters came when he and the children’s aunt Blanche took a restorative sea voyage in the autumn of 1908 to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, where his fame preceded him but the lack of occupation made his stay nearly intolerable.
Auntie Blanche and I have been here for over five days and are already rather tired of it. The roads are abominable and driving upon them almost a torture. The surroundings of the town are bare and brown and barren—all thrown up by some ancient volcano—and there is nothing to do.
The Spanish authorities have found me out and write splendid articles about me in the local newspapers. The Governor and the Mayor called upon me in tight trousers and top hats with gold canes in their hands and tonight they have organised a special performance at the theatre in my honour. When I go out young Spanish boys pursue me with postcards on which they request me to write my autograph.
It was not surprising that the girls grew up with the idea of their father as a majestic being of immense importance and all-seeing knowledge.
When Mary Curzon died, the main presence in the children’s lives was their devoted Nanny Sibley, who from then on gave up her life to her three charges, refusing to return to the fiancé she had left in India. As the girls grew older, they spent most of their time in the gray-carpeted schoolroom with a succession of governesses.
One of the first of these had taught Lady Cynthia Charteris (now Lady Cynthia Asquith). “Can you,” asked Curzon of Cynthia, “recommend this daughter of Austria, your sometime preceptress, as a suitable person to be entrusted with the upbringing of three high-minded orphans?” Lady Cynthia could. In later years, however, she did not tell him about her former governess’s report of how Curzon would “enter the schoolroom in a procession of one at the beginning of the term, arrange all the books and pictures, and draw up the timetable of lessons.”
His interest in his children’s education did not stop at organizing their timetable. Luncheon would be treated as an impromptu lesson or, more often, an examination. Day after day events in the history of the nation would be described in Gibbonian prose, in the Derbyshire accent with its short a’s which their father retained all his life (“the grass on that path needs cutting”). Then came the questioning, dreaded most perhaps by Irene, the eldest, who frequently felt so nervous she could hardly swallow her food.
It was often disguised as a game. “I see a battlefield,” Curzon would intone. “I see a man in armor, on a large, heavy horse, richly caparisoned . . .” The children would be asked in turn which incident their father had been describing and where it fitted into the pattern of history. When they could not answer, he would turn to the quaking governess, who was usually equally at sea. The only response that any of them could give was: “We have not got as far as that,” to which Curzon would reply that they never seemed to move beyond William the Conqueror. It was the same with geography, Bible studies or other subjects in which he thought they should be educated. Interestingly, the one subject of which he never spoke and in which he felt women should never “meddle” was the one that later attracted all three girls: politics.
Out of doors, their hair in pigtails and dressed in navy-blue serge sailor suits, the children would help their father in an activity characteristic both of his energy and of his attention to detail. When Curzon had first arrived at Hackwood he had told the astonished head gardener, who had kept the gardens there for many years, that he did not know how to keep lawns free of plantains and that he, Lord Curzon, would show him the correct way.
Accordingly, preceded by a footman carrying a small rush mat on which Curzon could rest his right knee and a narrow pronged spike for the removal of the enemy, the former viceroy and his daughters would emerge onto the Hackwood lawns. There he would vigorously attack the hated weed while the girls stood around him, each holding a little wicker basket in which to put the debris of roots and leaves. Anyone who spotted a plantain their father had not seen was given sixpence; a thistle rated one shilling. Indoors, Curzon showed the same dedication to removing grubby fingermarks from doors and walls, leading his children around bedrooms and drawing rooms with handfuls of bread crumbs to remove any stains they found.
His eldest daughter, Irene, was already enthralled by the sport that would dominate her life for the next twenty-five years. Horses and hunting had become her passion. The hunts local to Hackwood were the Tyne and the Garth, and in her first season at the age of twelve, out with the Tyne on November 14, 1908, riding first Dandy and then Topsy, she was awarded the fox’s brush (tail). She went home ecstatic.
At the end of the season there was an even greater triumph, this time with the Garth, who met seven miles from Hackwood at Long Sutton House. Hounds found a fox in nearby gorse and ran for two hours covering seven miles of country; Irene—again riding first Dandy then Topsy—was this time given the ultimate accolade, the mask (head).
Later, her sisters came out hunting with her. Irene’s hunting journal, laboriously filled with handwriting that had not yet become atrocious, records that on October 29, 1910, during her third season, “Cim got the mask and Baba the brush.” As it was a cub-hunting day it was, no doubt, an easy way of maintaining cordial relations with a local grandee: halfway through the season, on January 21, 1911, there was a lawn meet at Hackwood (followed by a six-mile point), both of which Irene must have adored.
Cimmie preferred the activities at her boarding school, The Links, in Eastbourne, where the thirty-seven pupils wore a uniform of white blouses and striped ties, played cricket, tennis and lacrosse, roller-skated, swam in the summer and skated in the winter. It was run by Miss Jane Potts, governess to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter Princess Alice, and it aimed to produce happy, healthy, well-brought-up young women who could embroider and play the piano—exactly fitting the Curzonian feminine ideal of accomplishment rather than education. Cimmie loved it.