The Eyres and the Monsells
Every year Joan Leigh Fermor came back to England from her home in Greece three times – for Christmas, in the summer and in the spring, when the Dumbleton woods were thick with bluebells and the sound of cuckoos. A village of whitewashed cottages and red-brick houses on the border of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, Dumbleton was always a home to Joan. ‘One sunny walk in the woods was perfection, the trees all different greens & pale browns, their skeletons still showing, & carpets & carpets of bluebells & white garlic.’1 It was May 1962 and Joan was writing to Paddy, her lover and partner although not yet her husband. Her childhood and early life had been spent in Dumbleton Hall, a large, rather ungainly mansion built in 1830 for the agriculturalist Henry Holland and sold by his descendants to Joan’s family, the Eyres, fifty years later. The Eyres had considerably extended the Hall, and its great wealth of bedrooms made it the perfect place for childhood games of hide and seek. When Joan was born, in 1912, her family, the Eyres Monsells, owned most of Dumbleton and its surrounding land. The hedgerows were full of partridges. In 1928, when Joan was sixteen, the Great Western Railway began the construction of a steam train called Dumbleton Hall in its workshops in Swindon.* Hymns composed by Joan’s great-grandfather are still sung in the parish church of St Peter’s. Her family monuments remain within the walls of the church and their family graves are in the churchyard. After the Hall was sold, Joan’s brother Graham moved to a house on the edge of the village, so Dumbleton remained Joan’s home in England.
Shortly after Joan first arrived in Athens in September 1945, to work at the embassy, she decided that – if she could get some land somewhere – she wanted to live in Greece. She felt guilty over the break-up of her first marriage and Greece suddenly seemed to represent a freedom from her past. Paddy, whom she had met less than a year earlier, already knew and loved the country and was more than willing to agree. England of course had its hold but, as Paddy said, a damp, green, summer’s day in Dumbleton was much like living in a lettuce.2 The attractions of a dry country were somewhat greater, particularly one where the cicadas whirred in the olive trees all summer long, where the people settled the world’s problems over endless cups of Turkish coffee in cafes and enjoyed a passion for sitting up late eating and drinking and singing whenever the slightest excuse cropped up.3 As it turned out, it was some years before Paddy found that piece of land for a house near Kardamyli, a remote village by the sea in the southern Peloponnese. It was Joan who paid for the house by selling her personal jewellery and using her family inheritance. But it seemed a price worth paying for a house that enabled Joan and Paddy to divide their lives across two countries and two cultures.
The money – of which there was a great deal – came from Joan’s mother’s side. Sybil Eyres Monsell was an heiress. Sybil’s great-grandfather, Samuel Eyres, was a mill owner from Armley, on the outskirts of Leeds. He made his fortune from manufacturing worsted, the hard-wearing woollen cloth that was a staple of Victorian wardrobes. On his death in 1868, his obituary in the Leeds Times read:
A Leeds Millionaire has departed this life during the past week. Mr. Samuel Eyres had for a number of years been the principal member of the well known firm of William Eyres and Sons, woollen manufacturers of Leeds and Armley, and the career of his house has been almost exceptionally successful. This was partly owing to the business application of the deceased, and partly to the extreme penuriousness which marked his personal expenditure, and which characterized all his business transactions in which he was engaged . . . We do not find that he ever took an active share in either politics or social questions, his peculiar bent and disposition being to acquire wealth, which he succeeded in accumulating to the extent, it is rumoured, of above a million and a half.4
Not only, as the notice suggests, was Samuel Eyres both a skinflint and a miser, but he was famous for it. Asked why, when he travelled by train, he always sat on the wooden benches of the third-class carriages when he could easily afford the cushioned seats in first class, he retorted: ‘Because there’s no fourth class!’ As a result of his hard work and his miserliness Sam Eyres died, in twenty-first-century terms, a multimillionaire. In his will Eyres left £1,000 a year for his daughter Anne and £500 to Anne’s husband, the Reverend Samuel Kettlewell, vicar of Woodhouse in Leeds. The greater part of the fortune was left in trust to Anne’s two children by Kettlewell, eleven-year-old Henry and nine-year-old Charles.
Anne died only a few months after her father. Her widower promptly left Woodhouse, claiming that it was a rough area and that the vicarage was damp. Furthermore, he was unwell and the boys were delicate, and it was not appropriate that they should ‘meet with associates other than such I should like them to have’.5 Kettlewell resigned his incumbency, moved south, married again and devoted the rest of his life to writing about Thomas à Kempis from his new home at 26 Lancaster Gate in London. Meanwhile, the income from the wealth was accumulating at a rate of some £50,000 a year, which was invested by the trustees in a mixture of land and property, including the Grand Hotel, Scarborough. The first part of the Dumbleton estate, including the Hall, was bought at auction by the trustees in 1875. According to the sale particulars, the estate was ‘one of the most compact and remarkable freehold properties in England’:
It comprises a substantial, stone-built mansion containing accommodation for a Family of Distinction, seated on rising ground, surrounded by charming pleasure grounds, ornamental plantations and a well-timbered park, in addition [there] are several first-class farms, with superior residences and good homesteads, corn mill, brickyard, numerous small occupations and cottages, including the whole of the village of Dumbleton and the well-arranged schools, with teacher’s residence embracing altogether an area of 2,182 acres, 0 roods and 35 perches.
The purchaser of the estate also became Lord of the Manors of Dumbleton and Didcot and had the right to appoint the rector of Dumbleton.
At the age of twenty-one, Henry and Charles each came into their considerable fortunes. Henry, who had attended Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, from which he graduated with a poor third as a Bachelor of Law, had changed his name by Royal Licence from Kettlewell to Eyres. In October 1880 he married his second cousin Caroline Sharp, the daughter of a wealthy Yorkshire landowner, at St Bartholomew’s Church, Armley, ‘in the presence of a large and fashionable company’.6 In gratitude Henry presented the church with an enormous Schulze organ at a cost of £20,000. He had already given his fiancée a diamond tiara, which she wore in her hair with real flowers, and a pearl necklace; afterwards the bride left for her ill-starred honeymoon on the continent in a travelling dress of ruby satin, trimmed with plush, with bonnet to match. In their absence, additions and improvements were being made to their new house in Upper Grosvenor Street. By the spring of the following year Henry and Caroline – always known as ‘Carrie’ – had reached Rome, but during their stay at the Hotel Constanzi they fell ill with malaria. Instead of being ordered to return north, the local medical attendant suggested they convalesce in Naples. Unfortunately, both went down with typhoid fever. Carrie, who was now pregnant, recovered, but Henry died on 6 April at the age of only twenty-three.
Charles Kettlewell was tall and good-looking, but he was also weak-willed and suggestible. Because he was still a minor when his grandfather died – and presumably because of the amount of money involved – the courts appointed a guardian; his mother was dead but rather than appoint his father for some reason they chose a certain Captain F. Bowyer Bowyer-Lane. Captain Bowyer-Lane lost no time in taking young Charles off to ‘see life’, which meant the captain travelling around Europe while obtaining large sums of money from his ward. In Vienna, Bowyer-Lane was already the lover of a Hungarian woman called Lina Stern – a former mistress of the emperor’s son, Crown Prince Rudolf – whom he subsequently married. At the age of nineteen, Kettlewell was soon introduced to Lina’s sister Ernestine. Ernestine herself was only about seventeen when Bowyer-Lane induced them to marry. In later court actions she was described as a ‘High Class Viennese Prostitute’, and in the decades to come there were to be many complicated court proceedings relating to Charles’s activities.
After coming into his inheritance in 1880 Charles commissioned a 420-foot schooner, the Marchesa, from a shipyard on the Clyde. He wished to make a voyage which would be more than a pleasure trip – it would have a serious anthropological, biological and geological purpose, and to that end he invited Francis Guillemard, a twenty-nine-year-old doctor and naturalist, on board with him. Guillemard, who wrote an account of the voyage in his unpublished autobiography, had already travelled extensively and worked in South Africa during the First Boer War after taking his MD. He also knew that he had to get Kettlewell away from Bowyer-Lane, a man he called ‘one of the most finished scoundrels [he] ever came across’. Now that Bowyer-Lane was Charles’s brother-in-law he had access to Charles’s £40,000 a year. Charles, however, seemed afraid of his former guardian and anxious to get away from him; Bowyer-Lane was a very bad sailor, and indeed hated the sea.
The Marchesa was very well appointed within and without, having curtains, brass lamps and fringed cloths on the tables. At last, in January 1882, she set sail from Cowes with thirty people on board. Kettlewell, who was accompanied by his wife Ernestine, was captain, but in name only; Lt Richmond ffolliott Powell and Guillemard were, in effect, the only officers on board. After a voyage through the Mediterranean via Sicily and a stop in Ismailia, Egypt, for a spot of quail shooting, they docked in Socotra and the Maldives before the Marchesa reached Colombo in Ceylon in April. In Ceylon, Charles immediately bought a half interest in a tea plantation. From Ceylon, the schooner proceeded via Singapore to Formosa and the Liu-kiu Islands, 250 miles east-north-east of Formosa, which Guillemard found ‘approaching one’s ideas of a terrestrial paradise’. They left ‘laden with the mingled memories of ruined castles and the waving of innumerable fans’, with a south-west breeze wafting them to Japan. The stop there was brief; the Marchesa left Yokohama for Kamchatka at the end of July. Guillemard was enraptured:
Ah! Those mornings of the far north! Does not the current of our blood, thickened by the fogs of a London November, or languidly pulsating under the sweltering heat of a tropic sun, quicken at the very thought of them? Do we not all feel young again as we recall the sound of our footsteps ringing on the frozen ground, and picture the wondrous beauty of the combination of pine-tree, sunlight and snow.7
Charles, ‘who had little in the way of camp lore and backwoodmanship’, managed to get lost just as night was falling and had to be rescued by some of the crew, who climbed up the almost perpendicular cliff of a fjord in the dark with lanterns to get at him.
They stayed two months in Kamchatka and did not return to Japan until the beginning of October. Four months’ travel on a return trip to Japan was followed by six weeks cruising in Chinese waters. Leaving Hong Kong at the end of March 1883, some weeks were devoted to exploring the islands of the Sulu Archipelago in the Philippines, during which time Charles bought, or thought he had bought, one of the islands. After the Philippines, they proceeded to North Borneo, which was at the time still the territory of the North Borneo Company. The Marchesa started its homeward voyage, returning to Singapore to take in stores. On another visit to Ceylon, Charles spent £20,000 on a second tea plantation at Deltota in the centre of the island, eighteen months after he had bought his first.
Although many of the zoological specimens – including the gem of the collection, the Twelve-Wired Bird of Paradise – were to die on the journey, the schooner was always full of wildlife:
In the early morning our Dorei Bay cassowary [. . .] was as playful as a puppy. His favourite diversion was to get up a sham-fight with a ventilator, dancing around it in the approved pugilistic style, now feinting, now getting in a right and left. The blows were delivered by kicking out in front, and appeared to be almost ineffective, and quite unlike the really formidable method of attack adopted by the ostrich. The decorum of our service on Sundays was often considerably disturbed by his appearance among the congregation, engaged in a lively skirmish with a kangaroo – an amusement which invariably drew a select gathering of our dingo ‘Banguey’, various dogs, and a tame pig to see fair play.8
The schooner docked in Southampton on Easter Monday, 14 April 1884. The voyage had taken just over two years. Those animals and birds which survived were handed over to the Zoological Society of London, and the skins of those which had died and been preserved by Guillemard were presented to the Cambridge Zoological Museum. At the end of the voyage, Guillemard, despite all the problems of making notes on board ship when surrounded by bird cages, spent two more years writing The Cruise of the Marchesa to Kamschatka & New Guinea: with notices of Formosa, Liu-Kiu and the Malay Archipelago, which was eventually published in 1886 and dedicated to Charles for ‘one of the pleasantest of many pleasant cruises’.
The Cruise of the Marchesa is a fascinating account of a late-nineteenth-century voyage of scientific discovery, but Guillemard’s references to the ship’s human inhabitants are very discreet. He must have been aware, though, of much else that was happening. In August 1884, only four months after their return home, a deed of separation was drawn up between Charles and Ernestine. Two law cases subsequently ensued: Kettlewell v Kettlewell and Lane, and Kettlewell v Kettlewell. Charles petitioned against Ernestine on account of her adultery with Captain Bowyer-Lane. Ernestine and Captain Lane counter-filed, naming countless adulteries with prostitutes and blaming Charles for her venereal disease, which Charles himself had contracted in Japan. In October 1882, on landing at Yokohama, Ernestine claimed Charles had gone up country for several weeks: ‘After his return she had reason to complain of legal cruelty. They lived together for some time in Bryanston Square, where he neglected her very much, and absented himself from their house for days and nights. There was no truth in her husband’s charges against her and Bowyer-Lane. Corroborative evidence of the legal cruelty was then given.’ Charles Kettlewell’s petition was dismissed in favour of Mrs Kettlewell and Bowyer-Lane, and on Ernestine’s petitions the judge pronounced a decree nisi with costs and awarded a £3000 annuity.
In 1885, as if intent on using his money to buy his way into respectable society, Kettlewell became a governor of St Bartholomew’s Hospital. In July that year, the Prince of Wales and three princesses went down by special train to Swanley in Kent in order to open the Kettlewell Convalescent Home. The home had been erected by Charles as a memorial to his brother Henry, and was for the use of the patients of St Bartholomew’s. The brothers’ father, the Rev. Samuel Kettlewell, said a short prayer at the opening.
Charles died in Aachen in Germany in February 1909, at the age of forty-nine. The will he had made took five years to discover, but in any event there were no assets. Over the previous twenty-eight years he had run through the whole of his vast fortune and was technically bankrupt. His financial and legal affairs were totally chaotic and his funeral expenses were paid by family trustees. Carrie bought her brother-in-law’s great collection of stuffed birds and presented them to Leeds Museum. Years later, Guillemard was asked to identify the birds but all his careful numberings and identification notes had been lost. In 1910, a hunt started for the property on ‘the Island of Sooloo’ which Charles had bought during the cruise of the Marchesa. It was never found. The Ceylon plantations were finally sold by the trustees in 1932 for enough profit to pay off his borrowings from the estate and the sums due to Charles’s last wife, Mabel. Within Joan’s family, Charles Kettlewell was always known as ‘the Wicked Uncle’.
Henry’s early death meant that he was never able to squander the Eyres family inheritance in the manner of his brother although his widow Carrie was willing to make her own, more modest, financial speculations. Carrie returned to Dumbleton and her late husband’s posthumous daughter was born on 21 August 1881. Caroline Mary Sybil Eyres was christened at St Peter’s Church, where her grieving mother, Carrie, had installed a new east window in the chancel, ‘To the Glory of God and in loving memory of Henry William Eyres’. The infant Sybil appears as an angel at the feet of Christ in the bottom of the central light. Over the next few years, Carrie oversaw the remodelling of Dumbleton Hall. The north wing of the house was very much enlarged – out of all proportion to the original building – in order to provide staff accommodation and service bedrooms. A porte-cochère, the very height of fashion in the 1890s, especially for railway stations and grand hotels, was added at the front door and a new conservatory adjoined the southern side of the house and extended into the garden. The original three-storey house was built by George Stanley Repton, the son of the landscape gardener Humphry Repton. It was sizeable if undistinguished; Repton’s buildings invariably looked better in the imagination than they do in reality. The trustees had had a lake dug in the grounds and a boathouse built beside it. Dumbleton village was improved, too, with a new village hall, a new dairy and a laundry, as well as a group of four cottages which, after Sybil said that they looked more like palaces than estate workers’ houses, became known as ‘The Palaces’.
The Hall was home not only to Carrie and Sybil, but also to Carrie’s mother Maria Sharp, her thirty-nine-year-old brother Arthur Henry ‘Harry’ Sharp and Harry’s seven-year-old daughter Maud. Harry, although only in his thirties, was a widower and a retired barrister. Carrie also invited her nephew Eddie Watt and his best friend Ewart Grogan to stay. Both had been Cambridge undergraduates until Grogan was sent down for rowdiness. Grogan’s own mother was dead so ‘Aunt Carrie’ took him under her wing and he became part of the family. When a revolt broke out in Matabeleland, which had recently been invaded by Cecil Rhodes, Grogan set out for southern Africa and signed up as a trooper in the Matabele Mounted Police. Inevitably, the Ndebeles’ spears were no match for the Maxim machine gun, and thousands of the natives were killed, after which Grogan became part of Rhodes’s personal bodyguard for a time. Grogan drifted into Portuguese East Africa in search of game, where he nearly died of blackwater fever and a burst liver abscess. After accidentally killing a Portuguese man in a brawl in a bar over a girl, he left Africa in a hurry and returned to Dumbleton Hall.
Carrie decided that Grogan needed to marry and saw Eddie’s sister, her niece Gertrude Watt, as the ideal wife. Having recovered his strength, Grogan went out to New Zealand with Eddie to meet his family, who were some of the wealthiest landowners and sheep ranchers in the country. As Carrie had hoped, Ewart Grogan and Gertrude were taken with one another and more than willing to marry, but Gertrude’s stepfather considered Grogan a charming fortune hunter and told him he had to ‘prove himself’ first. On his return to England he went to stay again at Dumbleton. Aware of Cecil Rhodes’s vision of a railway and telegraph stretching the length of Africa – an Africa preferably under British rule – Grogan decided that he would be the first man to trek from Cape Town to Cairo, despite his friends in the Foreign Office warning him that to strike due north for the Nile from Lake Tanganyika would be suicidal. Carrie not only offered to finance the whole expedition, but encouraged her brother Harry Sharp to join it. Harry was, as Grogan put it, ‘bored with the dismal day to day life of the ultra rich’.9
Together they ordered mountains of supplies and equipment, including rifles and ammunition and Worcestershire sauce, ‘without which life, or rather native cooking, is intolerable’. They read all available books and went to see ‘old Africa hands’;10 they underwent a crash course in map-making from Mr Coles, the Map Curator of the Royal Geographical Society. Finally, at the end of January 1898, Grogan and Harry set sail for Beira in Mozambique; Grogan reckoned that he had already completed the Cape Town to Beira leg on his first trip to the continent. In order to acclimatize themselves on arrival, Harry and Grogan went on a hunting expedition to the extremities of the Gorongoza plain, where they encountered blue wildebeest and buffalo, one of which charged Harry. He stood his ground as if receiving a cavalry charge, and shot it dead at three yards. After three months of acclimatization they returned to Beira, with the trophies they collected helping to defray the costs of the expedition. They had also completed a rite of passage; big-game hunters were idolized in Europe and America as ‘real men’.
Grogan and Harry Sharp made their way separately to Lake Tanganyika, where they met at M’towa, the principal station on the Congolese side of the lake. Sharp had pressed on in an attempt to escape the fevers which had afflicted him even more than Grogan. At the start of the journey he had been portly, but had become skeletal by the time Grogan met him at M’towa. His life had been saved by an itinerant doctor, who had nursed him back to relative health before himself succumbing to the fever and dying within days. When Sharp could be moved, the expedition crossed the lake to Ujiji on the German side of the lake – the meeting place of Stanley and Livingstone. At dawn on 12 April 1899, Sharp, Grogan, five Watongas bearing the Union Jack, ten armed Asiskas and 150 porters marched out of Ujiji, accompanied by an escort of German soldiers, each carrying on average a load of sixty pounds. They headed northwest into the Rift Valley lakes, through areas not previously visited by white men, carrying out mapping and survey work and shooting game on the way. As was the custom of explorers, they gave names to the mountains they encountered, and the first of the volcanic mountains of Rwanda they called Mount Sybil, after the daughter of their benefactress. An enormous flat-topped volcano became Mount Sharp and a peak to the east, of an estimated height of 13,000 feet, was named Mount Eyres, after Carrie herself. Here, in the foothills of the volcanoes, they survived attacks by cannibals as they passed along a trail lined not only with bodies but with grinning skulls, skeletons and pools of dried blood. Many of the porters deserted, and there were thefts by natives, encounters with lions and hyenas and yet more bouts of fever.
At Fort Portal in Uganda, Harry decided to go home. He was ten years older than Grogan and over the past months his health had suffered considerably. He had also received an urgent telegraph message saying that there were pressing family affairs at home. He set off with a hundred bearers carrying the unwanted stores and crates of trophies for England. On his return, the drawing room at Dumbleton Hall became adorned with lion skins, huge elephant tusks were hung on either side of the tall double doors leading from the outer to the inner hall and the staircase walls were covered in buffalo and antelope heads.
Grogan achieved his goal of reaching Cairo. By the time he got back to England in March 1900 he was a celebrity, and was met by a barrage of newspaper correspondents. Britain was by now in the midst of the Second Boer War; this great journey was a patriotic good-news story from a continent that was providing very few of them at the time. The Royal Geographical Society invited Grogan to address them; at twenty-five he was the youngest man ever to do so. Carrie Eyres invited him back to Dumbleton Hall to write From the Cape to Cairo, his account of his adventure. On its publication, the book met with considerable success. Queen Victoria summoned Grogan to Balmoral, where he presented her with one of the Union Jacks he had carried with him across the length of Africa.
In October 1900, Grogan finally married Gertrude, three years after they had last seen one another. Most of the rest of Grogan’s life was spent in Kenya, where he accumulated about half a million acres of land. He was also politically active and, after his election as first President of the Colonialists’ Association, became a thorn in the flesh of government authority. Ewart Grogan died in 1967 at the age of ninety-two, having outlived Harry Sharp by more than sixty years. Harry had died aged forty-six in 1905, never having recovered his health after his African adventure.
In May 1900, at the age of eighteen, Sybil Eyres was presented at court by her mother, and just over two years later she came of age. She was slight and very short-sighted, but she was now also very rich. In thanks, she paid for work to be completed on the tower of St Bartholomew’s Church in Armley. A local newspaper reported Sybil’s visit to see the work in progress:
What a ‘fine bonny lass’ she looked. There were some on that day who thought it wasn’t safe for ‘Miss Sybil’ to go climbing about in the new tower. But ‘Nay’ said the others, ‘she’s going to marry a sailor and it’ll be a bit of practice for her.’11
The sailor was Lieutenant Bolton Meredith Monsell, the only surviving son of five children. His four younger sisters all adored and spoilt him. Known to family and friends as ‘Bobby’, he was tall, immensely good-looking and sociable, as well as charming and amusing. (‘We didn’t see much of that side of him,’12 Joan commented.) In December 1904, he and Sybil were married by the Rector of Dumbleton at St Paul’s Church, Knightsbridge. Her Uncle Harry Sharp gave her away. The reception was held at the couple’s new London home in Belgrave Square, and afterwards the bride and groom left for a honeymoon in the New Forest. They joined their names together and henceforth would be known as Eyres Monsell.*
The Eyres brought money to the marriage but the Monsells brought an ancient heritage. A Philip Maunsell served under William the Conqueror and received confiscated English lands as a reward. In the sixteenth century, John Mounsell was a merchant of Weymouth and Melcombe Regis in Dorset and his second son, John, became a prominent London merchant. In a bid to join the gentry, John purchased land in County Limerick in 1612 and the family eventually became prominent members of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy.
Bolton’s grandfather, J. S. B. Monsell, was a clergyman and a prolific hymn-writer – his three hundred hymns include ‘Fight the Good Fight’ and ‘Oh Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness’. His son, Bolton James Monsell, was an army officer who joined the police service in 1886 and became Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police. In turn, this Bolton’s son – Bolton – was a very socially aware and highly ambitious young man. From leaving Stubbington House, his preparatory school in Fareham, he had spent nearly all his early life at sea. In 1894, he entered HMS Britannia as a cadet, went to sea as a midshipman two years later and from 1903 he specialized as a Torpedo Lieutenant. Sybil was a very considerable catch for such a lowly officer – albeit one with a name – and his marriage to an heiress enabled him to buy himself out of the navy and embark upon a political career.
Graham, Bolton and Sybil’s only son, was born in November 1905, and Diana, their first daughter, in 1907. In January 1910 Bolton was elected Conservative MP for the constituency of Evesham and the following year, at the suggestion of Bonar Law, he was appointed a whip. On 5 February 1912, his second daughter was born in London and christened Joan Elizabeth. Joan’s younger sister, Patricia, was born in 1918. All resembled one another physically and temperamentally: the Eyres Monsell children were tall and slim and shared the same high cheek bones; all seemed reserved, and all in varying degrees were private and apparently aloof. Sybil was so painfully stiff and shy that she used to invite the wife of her husband’s political agent, Bertram Cartland, to her own house parties in order to break the ice.* From their mother the children inherited both their shyness and the short-sightedness for which Sybil carried a lorgnette. Physically however they took after the Monsells.
As an adult, Joan never spoke about her family, saying only, vaguely, that she had nothing in common with them (her adored brother Graham was the exception). This was not quite true. Her father was a sailor and on both sides there were travellers, explorers and writers. It is understandable why she might have wanted to share her life with someone who shared these longings.