Love – and Marriage
While her sister Diana prepared for a traditional upper-class life, political and social upheavals were never too far away and had an impact on Joan’s own circle. They were of course of daily concern to Sir Bolton. In April 1935, Diana married Major Alan ‘Tim’ Casey, late of the Royal Dragoons, at St Margaret’s, Westminster. Casey had been a contemporary of Graham at Sandhurst, but Diana met her husband while staying at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire; Casey was the new local master of foxhounds. Joan and her sister Patricia were the two adult bridesmaids and carried bouquets of red flowers; there were four little girls and a page who wore a uniform of the Dragoons of 1830. It was a large society wedding, attended by the Japanese, German and French ambassadors and the Chinese minister. Sweden, Italy and Finland were represented by their naval attachés. Sybil gave the newly married couple four Jersey cows from the Dumbleton herd as a wedding present, and after a honeymoon in Vienna the Caseys became farmers at Market Overton in Rutland – Cottesmore hunting country. Unfortunately, along with the marriage came Miss Bailey, Tim’s cook and housekeeper from the house he had lived in as a bachelor. Miss Bailey refused to allow Diana to enter her own kitchen; a situation which lasted while living in two houses until, at last, Miss Bailey’s death thirty years later.
Back in early 1933, Billa Cresswell and John Betjeman had attended a Labour meeting in Cheltenham. Afterwards, as Billa told Alan, there were questions: ‘would the Labour government abolish fox-hunting, and if not why not?’ and ‘how many acres of land that could be cultivated were given over to deer forests?’ Then they sang the Red Flag. Goodness, she was moved!1 The Labour Party had been humiliated in the General Election of 1931, losing four-fifths of its seats. In the same election, Oswald Mosley failed to win a seat as the leader of the New Party. Having started his political career as a Conservative MP, Mosley had subsequently joined the Labour Party before resigning over its unemployment policies. The New Party, which he had launched, originally attracted a great deal of moderate and cross-party support – Alan Pryce-Jones was briefly a member – but afterwards Mosley moved further and further to the right. A visit to Mussolini in Italy impressed Mosley deeply, and having wound up the New Party he founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Bolton Eyres Monsell’s constituency, Evesham, was rural, and depended on market-gardening. Like much of Worcestershire it was badly hit by the agricultural depression of the 1930s. Many of the villages had been emptied of their young men by the First World War and for the younger generation there was considerable unemployment – the nearest industry was in Gloucester. For a constituency like this, fascism, which offered protectionism and isolationism, had considerable appeal, and Mosley himself considered standing in Bolton’s seat in 1935, or at the very least putting up a BUF candidate. The constituency was seen as vulnerable, especially as Sir Bolton’s twenty-five years in the seat were at an end. In March 1935, the Gloucestershire Echo reported that Mosley, one of the most dazzling orators of the twentieth century, spoke for an hour to nearly a thousand people at the Public Hall, Evesham. Six months later in Pershore, the headquarters of the BUF in the Evesham constituency, he gave a speech attacking the Labour Party as communists for backing intervention in the Italian–Abyssinian war. In the event, however, there was no BUF candidate in the Evesham election in November 1935, nor anywhere else. The newly created Lord Monsell’s replacement as the Conservative candidate, Rupert de la Bère, was returned with an increased majority of over twelve and a half thousand. Mosley had missed his opportunity. Billa wrote cheerfully to Alan in Austria on the eve of polling day. She was an ardent Tory. Indeed, there was no party reactionary enough for her, though she was quick to inform him that she was not a fascist – far from it. She was just ‘feudal’. Instead of the Tory squire she said she had hoped for, two years later Billa married Roy Harrod, an Oxford economist and a supporter of the Liberal Party.
Diana’s wedding took place shortly before the signing, in June 1935, of the Anglo-German Naval Agreement – the most controversial event of her father’s political career. The terms of the agreement allowed Germany to build up her strength in submarines, but her overall tonnage was limited to only 35 per cent of that of Britain. Konstantin Neurath, the German foreign minister, did not believe that agreement was possible, so he had sent his rival Joachim von Ribbentrop to negotiate, and then be seen to fail. To everyone’s surprise, Sir Samuel Hoare, the new British foreign secretary, agreed to the terms but it was the First Lord of the Admiralty, Bolton Eyres Monsell, who signed the agreement on Britain’s behalf. Ribbentrop proclaimed that this was the happiest day of his life, and Hitler was suitably impressed. Winston Churchill attacked the agreement both at the time and in his memoirs as a defining example of the futility of appeasement. In April 1936, the German ambassador, Leopold von Hoesch, who had attended Diana’s wedding, died suddenly of a heart attack. Hoesch, a career diplomat, was popular and well liked by British politicians, admired for his ability to promote the smooth running of Anglo-German relations. However, he had made known to Neurath his unhappiness at Ribbentrop’s growing relationship with Hitler, and had denounced Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland in March 1936 as a deliberate provocation to France and, ultimately, Britain. By now, Hoesch had become a thorn in Hitler’s flesh, and his death could scarcely have been more convenient. Ribbentrop was appointed German ambassador to the Court of St James in his place.
There were many members of the upper classes who had been attracted by fascism – Sir Oswald Mosley’s social connections were, after all, impeccable – so when Ribbentrop arrived they were all too glad to be taken in by his apparent charm. In Worcestershire, Avon Bank and Wood Norton Hall were particularly receptive houses, and Ribbentrop was invited to shoot at Wood Norton. In Gloucestershire, Lord and Lady Redesdale were ardent fascists: Diana Mitford, their daughter, married Mosley, and her sister Unity befriended Hitler. Whatever Bolton’s own private opinions, he was a member of the government and so, as a sign of goodwill, he too invited Ribbentrop to Dumbleton Hall for the shooting. To show his gratitude, Ribbentrop presented the Monsells with a pair of dark blue silk curtains embroidered with a swastika; they were hung so that one could see them as one came out of the lift. Monsell finally stood down as First Sea Lord on 5 June 1936 but, at Ribbentrop’s invitation, Lord and Lady Monsell (as they now were) attended the Olympic Games in Berlin in August that year. The press reported that while in Gemany, Bolton also had a meeting with Hitler at Stanley Baldwin’s request:
Mr Baldwin has always had a great admiration for Lord Monsell, who retired from active politics a few months ago, although still, by the standards of Westminster, a young man. He is a modest, unaggressive type of statesman, and has long been credited with the ambition to live the life of a country gentleman, though his visit to Herr Hitler suggests that the Prime Minister is anxious to keep his services available to the State from time to time.2
The Monsells had still not returned to Dumbleton by the beginning of September, and so, in the absence of her mother, Joan opened the Evesham Hospital Carnival. The weather was reported to be perfect.3
Joan’s weekends at that time were usually spent at Dumbleton or with the Lygons at Madresfield. You had to be very jolly and young to be invited to a Dumbleton party. One weekend Gerald Berners, who lived at Faringdon House, collected the ballet dancer Frederick Ashton from Didcot station and drove to Dumbleton for what turned out to be a wild weekend, where everyone got drunk and a lot of clothes got flung about. Billa, while swinging from the ceiling and performing a striptease, broke a vast bronze candelabra.4 ‘I was starkers, my dear, absolutely starkers!’5
The Hall still maintained a very high standard of living. The butler, Thomas Spencer, whose wife was the head cook, was in overall charge of fifteen resident servants. These included two footmen, a housekeeper, cooks and four kitchen maids. Spencer kept the staff in order, and arranged with the housekeeper and cook to organize meals and accommodation for family and guests. He was also in charge of the wine cellar and the silver, which was kept securely locked in a massive safe. The Hall had extensive cellarage for wine and for food, including the game – they were especially full after the shooting parties. Shooting was Bolton’s favourite pursuit, and he had taken great trouble to shape the Dumbleton woods into one of the best and most difficult shoots in the country. The household staff all lived in, apart from the butler and odd-job man, although the male staff were separated by different staircases which led to individual bedrooms. At Belgrave Square, accommodation was much more cramped and the staff all ate, worked and slept in the basement. Servants travelled between Dumbleton and London by bus or by train and if they travelled to Paddington they went on by taxi to Belgravia. Fruit, vegetables, eggs, milk and meat were also sent up daily by the early train from Evesham to London, to Cowdray for the polo, or to the Monsells’ yacht, the Heartsease, which they owned for a couple of years in the 1930s, employing a permanent crew of fourteen. Bolton kept a Rolls-Royce and a Lagonda, as well as a little two-seater car which he would drive at speed up and down the drive with the ladies, making them squeal with excitement. The Hall, village and family in many ways supported a small welfare state, providing employment and looking after its people. Milk came from the dairy and eggs from the hens, and whatever else was needed was supplied. Like every country house, Dumbleton Hall relied for its smooth running on a plentiful supply of cheap labour, but in the hard years of the late 1920s and the 1930s Depression, there were plenty who would gladly have exchanged this cheap labour for the unemployment they faced. The view from the country house basement was still a good deal more attractive than that from the dole queue.6
Joan’s small green pocket diary for 1936 is the only one of hers that survives from these years. At the beginning of the diary there is a list: ‘Great Symbol; Psychic Heat; Illusory Body; Dreams; Clear Light; Intermediate state; Transference’. Her Tibetan classes continued every Tuesday evening. Some days in the diary are also marked by Tibetan letters or hieroglyphs, which she was seemingly using as a private code. Joan was not conventionally religious, but at this period in her life she was fascinated by all things Tibetan, and, since the two elements are so closely bound up together, that included both culture and religion. More to the point perhaps, Joan was also always self-questioning – in her letters she was always blaming herself for her indecision. On the final page there is some doggerel verse:
see arriving on the scene
Joan, the happy scholar of home
one shoe laced, and one undone
where to begin? Ah, there’s the fun
one gate leading from the Park
one book praised by Freya Stark
one to marry, black as ink
maharajah – Maeterlinck*
gives no advice, but Graham says
do you hesitate with your [story?]
patchwork means a sense of quiet.
must the light be on or off?
must he be a tough or toff?
how many sheets? Can you pull the plug?
on the bed? Or neath the rug?
at the keyhole? Crowds? Alone? ‘I don’t know’ cries Schizo Joan.
The Maharajah of Jaipur was frequently mentioned in the London society columns of the 1930s. In July 1935 the Bystander published a picture of Joan and the maharajah together at a charity party – cabaret, supper and dancing – in aid of the Artists General Benevolent Fund. Joan possessed an Indian jewel: precious stones inlaid in gold. Many years later when Joan sold her jewellery to build a house, this was one piece she held back. But the full story of her admirer, the ‘one to marry, black as ink/maharajah’, she did not reveal.
The arrangements Joan jotted down in the diary show that 1936 started at the Chelsea Arts Club Ball on New Year’s Eve. On 29 January, she was lunching at the Ritz; the next day she went to a concert with Billa. On 1 February at 7.30, Joan was at the Café Royal to meet Cyril Connolly. The Café Royal, at the Regent Street quadrant, was enjoying a revival of popularity. The old Café, which in its glory days had been the resort of Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas and Max Beerbohm, had been destroyed, and the mirrors and golden caryatids only survived in the grill-room. In its place there was an ugly modern restaurant encircled by the spacious Café Gallery, where one could dine and drink until the early hours of the morning and could always find friends. As Osbert Lancaster remembered, ‘the food was good and cheap, the house burgundy at five bob a bottle excellent.’7 When he came to draw the Café, he included Connolly among its diners. For the coronation of George VI they produced the Café Royal Cocktail Book, compiled by the President of the Bartenders’ Guild. Hundreds of cocktails were listed, from the A.1 (‘invented by Albert’) to the Zubrowka (‘invented by S.T. Yakimovitch – If extra kick is required a dash of Absinthe may be added. Shake and strain off into the cocktail glass, putting a small piece of lemon peel on top’). Cocktails were consumed almost religiously. Patrick Balfour wrote an article for the Listener called ‘Society’.
Later I proceeded to a cocktail party, to which my neighbour at luncheon had invited me. This is perhaps the most popular form of entertainment among the upper tribes of the British Islanders. It is a refreshingly simple function, at which the guests drink coloured liquid from little glasses, crowd together, prattle without restraint about anything that comes into their heads, and the evening proceeds are carried away by a garrulous enthusiasm which is positively child-like in its intensity.8
Cyril’s is the name which occurs most often in Joan’s diary. Lees-Milne described dining at Cyril and Jean Connolly’s King’s Road flat to Ann Gathorne-Hardy, to whom he was briefly engaged:
The Connollys are marvellous people to know [. . .] They are quite rich, about £1200 a year I should think, and they like to spend it all on food, drink, travel and their friends. They are both extremely intelligent; he is brilliant, untidy, dirty and ugly. They give lots of dinners at which 8 or 10 sit down to the most gorgeous meals [. . .] They never go to cinema or plays after, instead one sits round the fire and drinks [. . .] Above all they know and invite all the people one likes best in England.9
The guests the night he was invited included the Peter Quennells, the Peter Rodds*, John Sutro, Christopher Sykes and his sister Angela, Countess of Antrim, Joan, Coote Lygon, and the publisher Kenneth Rae. Connolly loved to play the role of host; organizing successful parties gave him considerable pleasure – and there were many successful parties in the Connollys’ untidy rooms. This bohemian disorder had one serious drawback however: none of their pets had been house-trained. Alan Pryce-Jones recalled ‘a pair of lemurs, which frolicked up and down the curtains, in spite of, or because of, a chronic looseness of the bowel’,10 and Aldous Huxley, a fastidious neighbour during a time they lived abroad, claimed that he had once watched Jean Connolly, after she had distributed raw meat to their tame ferrets, wipe her blood-stained fingers down the front of the Chinese coat she was wearing.11
Connolly, who believed that he was destined to be a serious novelist, left many unfinished excerpts of draft novels among his papers, hundreds of pages with which he could do nothing. In 1935, his single finished novel, The Rock Pool, was at last published by the Obelisk Press (in the copy Connolly gave Joan, he said it was from ‘Auntie C’). The book, which is about decadent inhabitants of a resort in the south of France, had previously been turned down by British publishers as obscene on account of its lesbian content, but some contemporary critics received the book generously. The Rock Pool seems wooden and awkward, as if Connolly so loved being the centre of attention that he could not even share his self-absorption with his own creations. In the main, Connolly was a journalist, although – as he was always happy to admit – he would prefer to lie in bed or in his bath than write. While expressing a personal preference for the lingua franca of American novels he was, simultaneously, reviewing non-fiction for the Sunday Times, novels for the New Statesman and, together with the crime writer Francis Iles, crime fiction for the Daily Telegraph.12 Joan apparently took Cyril’s advice on what to read. In her diary she wrote down a list of recent books: Butterfield 8 by John O’Hara; Tender is the Night by Scott Fitzgerald; Frost in May by Antonia White; two thrillers – The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull and Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles – and a horror story, The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore. Perhaps The Southern Gates of Arabia, an account by Freya Stark of what is now the Yemen, was one book wholly of Joan’s choosing; it is unlikely that Cyril would ever have wanted to go to Arabia.
Joan’s diary also records a visit to an exhibition of Paul Nash’s work with John Betjeman, a ‘Byzantine Party’, and, on 21 February, her taking of the 6.13 boat train to Paris, where, on the 27th, she attended a Surrealist exhibition in the rue de Clichy. Later in the year, she went to see an exhibition of work by the Jewish-Hungarian artist and photographer László Moholy-Nagy, a former professor at the Bauhaus who had left Germany for England when the Nazis came to power. In addition, she made arrangements for lunches, cocktail parties, and the occasional visit to the ballet or opera (ever eager to learn, she took the score with her, so that she could follow the music). In September she went with the Betjemans to Rome, where they stayed in a house belonging to Gerald Berners. Betjeman wrote to Berners: ‘Joan and Pegriloppy are very cultivated. Never out of the Galleries. We enter every open church. I am taking notes now like Peyellowppy, so as not to get muddled. Joan is very keen on churches.’13
Joan was now a young woman of twenty-four, endlessly interested in all sorts of things and leading a full and varied social life. Furthermore she was both beautiful and intelligent – in itself a source of endless surprise to the press. However, the pocket diary for 1936 offers little insight into her emotional life and the entries peter out long before the last pages. And it offers no hint of what was for her the most important story of all: 1936 was significant, because it was the year Joan met and fell in love with John Rayner, the man she was to marry.
John Rayner was born in Dulwich in August 1908. His background was solidly middle class. His father, Jack, was a journalist; the literary editor of the Weekly Dispatch from 1915 and its news editor in the 1920s. Through his father’s connections, John grew up in a literary household. In 1919, Jack bought the goodwill and stock of the Eldar Gallery in Great Marlborough Street, which promoted contemporary artists, particularly Walter Sickert. As a boy, his son attended a preparatory school in Seaford near Newhaven – the future art historian and spy Anthony Blunt was a fellow pupil, while John had a lasting memory of rejecting the sexual advances of the headmaster. From his prep school, John won an exhibition to Cheltenham College. Although his mother continued to deal in art to help with the family finances, when Jack Rayner died unexpectedly in 1925, John, aged seventeen, had to leave the school. The editor of the Weekly Dispatch gave him a job, starting him ‘on line’ – paying him by lines printed. This arrangement swiftly changed to a regular salary when he saw John’s ability, and the young man was soon writing gossip columns under the name of ‘John Grosvenor’. In September 1931 he took a job as assistant to the features editor of the Daily Herald at a salary of twelve guineas a week, and two years later he became features editor himself. In January 1934, when he was still only twenty-six, John was taken on by the Daily Express, which offered him a commencing salary of twenty-five guineas a week. He became in turn associate features editor, literary and features editor, and, in 1938, day assistant editor, by which time his salary had risen to thirty-five guineas a week.
Under the editorship of Arthur Christiansen, John – who was known within the office and by many of his friends as JR – had dramatically altered the design of the paper, giving it more interesting formats, bigger and bolder typography, and more colourful headlines. Traditionalists might not have approved but everyone copied him, and by the middle of the 1930s the Express was the biggest selling newspaper in the country. Christiansen also surrounded himself with some of the most forceful, energetic men of his generation, so that his conferences were conducted in a spirit of short-sleeved exuberance which set the tone for the next day’s paper. A former editor of The Times, Sir Edward Pickering, reminisced about his years on the Express:
Alan Moorehead and O’Dowd Gallaher were monopolising the foreign bylines; Tom Delmer was beginning to establish that long list of countries that he was expelled from; Tom Driberg was having a glorious row with Frank Buchman of MRA [Moral Rearmament]; Jimmy Agate was a frequenter of the office at midnight correcting his book reviews with meticulous care; John Rayner was producing feature pages as elegant as his own shirts; Lucy Milner was looking more elegant than any Woman’s Page illustration.14
Rayner was tall, broad-shouldered, and in his passport he described himself as having grey eyes. Not only was he good-looking, he also knew how to look good. Tom Driberg – one of Joan’s many flamboyant, and gay, male friends – had got to know him when he was still working for the Daily Herald. Meeting at a party, Driberg said that he had nowhere to live, so John invited him to stay in his flat in Devonport Mews in Bayswater. It became a long-lasting friendship. Driberg had attended Oxford with John Betjeman and Cyril Connolly, and like many of that crowd his university career came to an abrupt end. When he arrived in the examination room still hungover from a night’s drinking and instantly fell asleep on the table in front of him, the college authorities told him to pack his bags. After working as a waiter in an all-night cafe and as an occasional prostitute, in 1928 – with help from Edith Sitwell – Tom found a place at the Express, writing the social column. He made it his own. Rather than fill his paragraphs solely with trivial social chitchat, he enlivened them with commentaries on social and political trends and artistic fashions – and Joan, of course, was one of his favourite subjects. His writing was open-minded, witty and interesting: like Driberg himself, it was never dull.
It was Tom who introduced Joan to John Rayner. In February 1936 an article appeared in the Express under the subtitle ‘Vision of Beauty Changes with the Years – Five Experts Look at Mrs. Brown Potter (Toast of the Nineties) and Reveal Today’s Ideals’. The article was inspired by the recent death of Cora Brown Potter, an American society lady and contemporary ‘beauty’ who had become a stage actress. Five Express writers were asked to write a brief paragraph on current equivalents. Between them they chose the actresses Marlene Dietrich and Luise Rainer, and a Miss Pamela Treffry (‘character, beauty of line, repose – such an antidote to dental displays and assertive ingenuousness’); Tom, as ‘William Hickey’, proposed the blues singer Ethel Waters (‘bone-structure like a Benin carving’); and John Rayner, the features editor, chose the Hon. Joan Eyres Monsell – ‘Very blonde, high cheek-boned, looks best in country or riding clothes. When she was in Budapest crowds used to wait outside the hotel for her to come out so that they could get a glimpse of the “English Venus”. She is a daughter of Lord Monsell, First Lord of the Admiralty.’15 Whether or not the Budapest story was true – and it probably owes much to journalistic invention – in a very public fashion John was showing his interest.
In 1933, John Betjeman had been in desperate need of increasing his income in order to marry Penelope Chetwode. Fortunately, his friend Jack Beddington – the director of publicity at Shell – was keen to encourage drivers to use more petrol and, at the same time, associate the company with a caring stance on the environment and English heritage. Together, the two men persuaded the controlling director of the Architectural Review, Jack Regan, that a series of county guides would be both good publicity and a profitable adventure. Betjeman produced a dummy guide to his own favourite county, Cornwall, and saw that his salary would be raised to £400 to cover the extra work involved. Betjeman had a very real love of the appearance of books, their print, layout and varieties of type, and although he resigned from the Architectural Review in 1935, he continued to work for Beddington as general editor of the Shell Guides, distributing the writing of them among his friends. For Hampshire, Betjeman asked John Rayner. Jack Beddington wrote to JR, specifying that he would be paid a fee of fifty guineas with an addition of up to ten guineas for travelling expenses: ‘You will use Maurice Beck as your photographer and you will get the work done this summer [1936].’ When the guide was published in 1937, the following year, under the quirky title Towards a Dictionary of the County of Southampton, commonly known as Hampshire or Hants, it turned out be one of the most successful in the series. Beck’s photographs, however, are rather dull, and he did not share the car with JR. Instead, John took Joan with him in order no doubt to survey Joan as well as the county – she certainly took no photos. By the end of the trip they had fallen in love. The problem being, however, that John also had a wife called Molly and they had a son named Nicholas.
In the spring of 1937, Tom Driberg, Peter Quennell and Joan all sailed for New York on the SS Berengaria. (This was reported in the Tatler as ‘Tall, golden-haired Joan Eyres-Monsell . . . has gone to join her brother in the USA.’16) Quennell was unsatisfactorily married for the second time and had turned his eyes to Joan, but she was receiving cables from Rayner in London. On Tuesday 5 March, Tom reported in his ‘William Hickey’ column, ‘Last day of trip. Bright sunshine, calm seas. We reach Quarantine about 6.30 this evening, dock at 8. I am lucky, say homecoming Americans, to be approaching New York for the first time, after dark when the lights make it even more impressive than by day.’ The homecoming Americans, he continued, included buyers from big New York fashion houses who had been to see the Paris collections:
Quietly dressed middle-aged women they find the trip a rest after seeing 3 or 4 shows of 200 to 250 dresses each day for a week, picking from every 200 perhaps 10 suitable for sale in the States. On board is America’s first consignment of new Paris models: ‘How dreadful if the ship sank with all those dresses,’ said a young woman.
Most original fashion note last night was provided not by France or America, but by Great Britain’s JOAN EYRES MONSELL, who came down to dinner wearing a purple dress, a scarlet and gold Eton jacket, a single extraordinary earring. It consisted of a bunch of 42 small gilt safety pins. No mere fashion plate, Miss Monsell has spent as much as she could screwing up her pretty but myopic eyes over a Tibetan dictionary. No mere highbrow either, she has been winning satisfactorily at trente-et-un.17
Perhaps being in love had given Joan confidence. Any woman who dressed with such flair knew exactly what she was doing and by now she must have become so used to being in the papers that she had decided that she would enjoy it. Joan spent a week with Graham. His treatment at the Mayo Clinic over the last couple of years had gone exceptionally well. At the time, Elton Mayo, an Australian, was professor of industrial relations at Harvard Business School. After a month of daily talks and reading psychology, Mayo asked Graham to take on the treatment of an outpatient at Boston Psychiatric Clinic, and he had shown such sensitivity to his patients that Mayo had given him further responsibility. As a result, Graham started to lose his own shyness and gain confidence: Mayo commented that he now preferred work to nightclubs. Subsequently, Graham was appointed as research assistant in industrial research at the Graduate School of Business Administration, and joined a team looking into the sociology of industrial workers – he seemed finally to be at ease with the world. Seeing Joan, however, gave him the opportunity to let his hair down. As he wrote to Alan Pryce-Jones in April, after Joan had returned to England, ‘Joan’s hectic visit to the New World ended in such a gay and drunken week in New York as I have seldom lived through.’ Perhaps Joan was also letting off some steam before resuming her affair with a married man.
Molly Rayner had first met her husband John in 1933 and, after finding that she was pregnant, they married in October that year. She was a woman who liked to drop names and she had social aspirations: there are posed photographs of Molly with her baby son in both the Tatler and the Bystander in 1935. She followed the magazines whereas the magazines followed Joan. In the summer of 1936 the couple spent a month travelling round Greece. ‘Greece v. cheap, beer v. good, lovely melons, women don’t wear belts, too hot and so walk very well,’ John wrote to his mother. But by then he had interests elsewhere. It was as if Molly didn’t quite fit. To begin with, Molly Rayner had no idea what was so wrong with her marriage to John but she eventually hired a private detective to follow her husband. The detective reported back that she had nothing to worry about: John was drinking so heavily in the Fleet Street pubs with his fellow journalists that he was likely to die soon from alcohol poisoning, so her problems would be over. Aside from physical attraction, John had in common with Joan a love of places and nature, music, art, reading, wine and good food, not to mention – and this is by no means trivial – an affection for cats. He was also inclined to tease. These traits, as well as other pursuits and interests, informed the way he thought and lived and the people with whom he chose to share his life.18
In mid 1937, soon after Joan’s return from America, John left his wife and moved in with Tom Driberg. In October, when Molly heard that John and Joan were in the south of France on holiday, she telephoned Tom to find out more and asked if her husband had been seeing Joan lately. Tom, out of loyalty, lied to her, saying that, on the contrary, he had been taking Joan out to dinner, and had usually arrived back to find John at home all by himself. He also claimed that he did not know they were in France together. The raggedness of the break continued – Molly was expecting another child. Their daughter, Amanda, was born in April 1938. John always claimed afterwards – probably out of guilt – that he had somehow been tricked by his wife into getting her pregnant, to prevent him leaving home. In later years, apart from paying monthly maintenance and sending Christmas and birthday presents, he had little contact with his first two children.
For some time while he was still married, Joan and JR were spending weekends together at Tickerage Mill near Uckfield in Sussex. Dick Wyndham, ‘Dirty Dick’, the owner of the mill, was an artist and a photographer who had won the Military Cross in the First World War. He was a very tall man, thin and gangling, and he dressed appallingly in filthy flannel trousers – his fly buttons invariably undone – and an old ragged mackintosh, but he possessed immense charm. In his emotional life, one attractive woman followed another. It was said that, on his regular trips to the south of France, when he drew up at a wayside hotel, the proprietor, who was an old acquaintance, would invariably greet him with the same remark, ‘Que madame a changé!’ as he led his clients to their room.19
Wyndham had inherited Clouds in Wiltshire, a house built for his family by Philip Webb in the 1880s and decorated by William Morris, but he had found its upkeep impossible and sold it in 1936. In its place, Wyndham bought Tickerage, a far smaller mill house flanked by a mill pond with a shallow lake lying at the bottom of a valley beneath a steep slope covered with apple trees. If Dick was not abroad, he invited gatherings of friends. Although these were essentially masculine affairs, girlfriends were welcome, and a long procession of women found themselves invited to the mill, Joan among them. At one such weekend Joan photographed the host and guests. Along with JR and Joan, the guests included Patrick Kinross (Patrick Balfour’s father having died, he had inherited the title), Constant Lambert, Angela Culme-Seymour (who was married to Kinross), Tom Driberg, Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender and his boyfriend Tony Hyndman, and Mamaine Paget, who later married Arthur Koestler.
Connolly loved Tickerage. In his 1945 book The Unquiet Grave, he listed it as having the magical qualities which helped him keep angst at bay:
The mill where I sometimes stay provides another cure for Angst; the red lane down through the Spanish chestnut wood, the apple trees on the lawn, the bees in the roof, the goose on the pond, the black sun-lit marsh marigolds, the wood-fires crackling in the low bedrooms, the creak of the cellar-door, and the recurrent monotonies of the silver-whispering weir, what could be more womb-like or reassuring? Yet always the anxious owner is flying from it as from the scene of a crime.20
Wyndham was a generous host, and he provided good food and good wine. He was also a good listener who enjoyed good conversation. Tom Driberg said these weekend parties were the best he ever attended. Many years later, Mamaine Paget’s twin sister Celia recalled in a letter to Joan:
It’s good to remember the old days at Tickerage: the intellectual treasure hunts (you won one of them), the bluebell wood, walks across country on summer nights under the full moon with nightjars whirring, the marvellous food and wine, playing croquet – John Piper says when he went there once we were playing it uphill. Dick certainly was a very special person, and I miss him still.21
Once the decree absolute came through in March 1939 dissolving JR’s marriage to Molly, he was free to marry Joan. Their modest wedding took place in July at Caxton Hall Register Office in Westminster. They were both dressed in blue and Joan wore a spray of orchids. John Betjeman was one of the witnesses, the other was a Mr E. G. Wood – a young man they had met on the stairs together with the young woman he himself was marrying. John’s colleagues did not find out until they saw the story in the evening papers. This struck them as impressively casual and aristocratic, the effect he had doubtless intended. The wedding was widely reported. While John Betjeman was just a ‘friend’, Mr E. G. Wood got the headline: ‘Cabby as Witness at Wedding’. The Daily Mirror even carried his photograph, sitting at the wheel. After all, both JR and Joan described themselves as ‘journalists’ in the marriage register, and knew how to make a good story for the press.
Joan’s parents can only have been relieved that she was at least now married and no longer living openly with a married man. They must long have abandoned hope that she would live any sort of respectable life. And JR had a reasonable salary so he was not marrying Joan for her money. Cyril Connolly, however, whose marriage to Jean had collapsed amidst adultery, recrimination and general mayhem, said Joan’s wedding was the unhappiest day of his life.