‘HAVE YOU KILLED your father yet?’ Osbert Sitwell asked Father as they had dinner together at the House of Commons during the glorious dawn of the first postwar Labour government. ‘It’s very important to get it done,’ he added. Father thought that Osbert, who talked extensively of his half-mad father Sir George, succeeded in removing his oppressive shadow. But he was not sure how to proceed with his own parent.
Grandfather, who was fifty-one when Father was born, owned and was the headmaster of a preparatory school. He did not relish his lot in life. Continually he bemoaned the Wyatt family’s decline from fame and riches. The decline had been steep indeed. John Wyatt, the first properly documented member of the family, had been a wealthy Staffordshire farmer in the seventeenth century. His younger son Benjamin was the founder of the Wyatt architectural dynasty whose members were to rival Adam and Nash. Benjamin’s eldest son William was an architect who in the 1750s helped his father build the first important Wyatt houses, Eggington Hall in Derbyshire and Swinfen Hall near Weeford. William married his first cousin Sarah. Sarah’s third son was called Robert Harvey. He in turn married his first cousin Harriet.
This Wyatt habit of marrying first cousins (thirteen did) or cousins (twenty-one did) kept the architectural, painting and sculpting genes going for nearly two hundred years. Another John (b. 1700) invented the Spinning Jenny and spun the first thread of cotton yarn ever produced by mechanical means twenty-five years before Arkwright, but had neither the money nor the business sense to develop it. Among other devices he did perfect was a compound-lever weighing machine and the first design for a suspension bridge. When imprisoned for debt in 1740 and 1744, he occupied himself by making gadgets to ease the work-load of the warders, who reciprocated by allowing him special privileges.
Charles Wyatt (b. 1750) was responsible for a new type of common cement, stucco, of the kind now found on many houses in London and elsewhere. Wyatts stretched their tentacles until they built factories and canals across England, transforming southern Britain into a testament to their extraordinary endeavours. Wyatts developed slate quarries and built great estates; they were there at the start of the Industrial Revolution and were prime movers in its development, becoming rich or going bankrupt because of it.
And glittering in all their starry glory were the architects, Samuel, James, Sir Jeffry (who changed his name to Wyattville), Benjamin Dean, Lewis, Thomas Henry, Sir Matthew Digby – twenty-eight in all, the last one of any merit dying in 1920. There were at least two remarkable sculptors. Matthew Cotes (b. 1777), James’s third son, was a good painter as well as a sculptor. He was responsible for the bronze equestrian statue of George III at the start of Pall Mall. Richard James (b. 1795) was an assistant of Canova and his Musidora is at Chatsworth, the home of the Dukes of Devonshire. Once, on a visit to Chatsworth, the Queen remarked, slightly puzzled, ‘It so reminds me of Windsor.’ And why not? Sir Jeffry Wyattville, with George IV as his patron, built most of Windsor Castle as it is now, and all that you can see on the skyline. He had designed a great part of the present Chatsworth, including the staterooms.
The architectural styles of Jeffry and James Wyatt diverged like the politics of the late eighteenth century. James was a friend and protégé of George III, who of course was hated by his son. Sometimes he was a witness to one of his petrifying fits, brought on by a blood disease called porphyria. On other occasions his turns were brought on by James.
James Wyatt was a rake amongst rakes. Horace Walpole said of Lord Hervey, ‘There are men, women and Herveys.’ With apologies to Walpole, there were women, more women and James Wyatt. His sexual appetite was voracious. Catherine the Great tried to persuade him to leave England to be her personal architect, but it was rumoured that houses were not the only erections the great Empress had in mind for him. His recreations took up almost as much time as his architecture. The Countess of Home sacked him for Robert Adam, complaining of Wyatt’s laziness. Once he arrived two hours late for a morning interview with the King. The King, who was in one of his lucid moods, reproved him. ‘Sleep. Seven hours for a man, eight hours for a woman and ten hours for a fool. Think on it, Wyatt, think on it.’ After James died in a violent carriage accident, it was discovered that three of his housemaids were enceinte by him.
Astonishingly, grandfather barely referred to these Wyatts. If he did it was to make some glancing, sneering remark. It seemed that in the nineteenth century the family contracted what Father called ‘the Cousin Molly bug’. It was probably Horace Walpole’s fault. He was entranced by the Parthenon in Oxford Street, the first important building of James Wyatt. Walpole thought it the most beautiful edifice in England. He could not believe that its brilliant twenty-five-year-old creator could have leaped so suddenly into such genius from mere farming stock. There must be hereditary artistic talent. So in July 1772 he wrote to James asking whether he was descended from Sir Thomas Wyatt, the Tudor poet. James very correctly replied, ‘This is a subject with which I am not in the least acquainted. It is faintly possible there may have been a link, but if so it is a distant one.’ But Walpole had started something. Our late Victorian ancestors converted his innocent enquiry into the statement of a fact. Thomas became one of our family names. Drawings and copies of pictures of Sir Thomas Wyatt and of his son Sir Thomas, whose rash rebellion against Queen Mary nearly cost Elizabeth I her head and her throne, appeared in our drawing-rooms and halls.
One of my great-aunts, Sis, had a storehouse of verses extolling the glories of our imaginary Wyatt ancestors. She would declaim loudly and with enthusiasm, in railway stations and tea-rooms, the younger Sir Thomas’s battle cry,
‘No popery. No Spanish match. A Wyatt, a Wyatt.’
The customers must have been startled. It was all Great-Aunt Sis had to keep up her morale, poor thing, having come down in the world even more than the others. She had married her physical training instructor and lived in a gloomy basement in Brixton. Eventually one of the true Kent Wyatts complained about her boasts. Yet Father always said to me that none of the Kent family did anything of merit after Sir Thomas the elder became the first poet to write sonnets in English. After all, James Wyatt is buried in Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, which is more than Sir Thomas is, and Sir Jeffry is the only commoner to be interred at the Chapel Royal, Windsor.
The Wyatt Question marked the first significant occasion that Father and grandfather were ranged, indignant and intractable, on opposite sides. It was not to be the last. Father had been educated in grandfather’s school. To show there was no favouritism, he was punished more severely than the other boys. Father was hopeless at mathematics and sometimes received help from older pupils. One day grandfather asked him how he had arrived at so many correct answers. Of course he could not explain.
‘You’ve been cheating,’ grandfather shouted. ‘You are a cheat and a liar.’
From then on, he assumed, some canker of evil grew in Father’s soul. He considered him lazy and a disappointment because he failed to excel at sports. Grandfather had had a large part in coaching his nephew, R.E.S. Wyatt, who became Captain of the England cricket team and one of the greatest cricketers of all time. He never concealed his contempt for Father. When he demurred at the age of ten from advancing into cold, eight-foot-high September waves from the Atlantic breaking on the Cornish coast, Father was beaten for cowardice. Corporal punishment was an expedient grandfather regarded as a virtue.
Another penalty was to deprive Father of books for one week. He had a habit of asking those dreadful blanket questions beloved of adults, ‘What are you going to do today, Woodrow?’ One morning at breakfast, when he asked that question, Father decided on a dangerous experiment. It was to find out whether it was possible to speak through a mouthful of runny porridge. Father carefully filled his mouth before answering. The porridge splattered onto the table. Father spent a week alone in his room without books.
Politics was the cause of the final break. Grandfather was a fundamental, thoroughgoing conservative. Once, when Father was eleven, there was a public meeting in a gym to be addressed by the local Tory MP, Sir Archibald Boyd-Carpenter. He couldn’t come but sent his son, John Boyd-Carpenter, then President of the Oxford Union, and later a Tory Cabinet Minister. Grandfather’s speech compensated for what it lacked in sophistication with its extreme vigour. He always trusted to shouting to ensure his points went home, particularly on long-distance telephone calls when he was convinced that unless he made a noise like a megaphone, the Post Office’s technology would not be advanced enough to carry his voice to the other end.
‘It is confounded cheek of the Socialists to pretend they can govern the country. It is against the natural order,’ Grandfather bellowed. This statement was followed by one of his home-made apophthegms: ‘Socialists know nothing about money – they haven’t got any.’
They were not even patriots; they were pacifists and cowards. They should be driven out of Parliament, perhaps imprisoned. Socialists were enemies of the nation.
Because grandfather attacked the Socialists so vehemently Father concluded there must be a great deal of good in them. This was part of the impetus that led Father to join the Labour party. The rest was provided by the war.
Though he never saw active service, Father rose to the rank of Major. He was shocked by the stories told by the men under his command. They spoke of their mothers who had died because they could not afford a doctor or a hospital. They talked of intelligent boys with their education cut off at fourteen because their families were so poor they had to go to work; of squalid homes where there was not enough to eat and less hope; of unemployed fathers who had lost all self-esteem.
Father’s thoughts veered to socialism. If the Army could function without the stimulus of personal gain, why couldn’t Britain after the war?
Life under the Tories had been cruel. Life by its nature might be unfair but it didn’t have to be that bad. There must be scope to relieve the worst poverty, to provide decent medical care and housing, to offer equal opportunity in education. The Tories would obviously do nothing about it. And the Tories had been negligible in their supposedly strongest areas: defence and managing foreign policy to prevent war.
Thus it was that in 1945 Father was chosen by the Labour party to fight Aston. He covered every alley, yard and back-to-back house there. Ugly, cramped, wretched in their despair, these places were more like stables than dwellings for human beings. Poverty walked in the corridors and ugliness covered the rooms with her black wings.
Father stayed with a family called the Meadows. They put pails in his bedroom and a strategically placed towel to catch the water dripping through the roof, even though this was one of the best houses in the area. Yet the outrage felt by Father at these conditions was not wholly shared by Jim Meadows and his wife Edna. They had jugs of bubbling ale from the pub, roast beef, and roast potatoes. Miserable houses do not necessarily make miserable people. That explained why in Aston many people stayed Tory despite rotten landlords and conditions.
While out canvassing, Father approached a house with boards instead of windows, slates falling off the roof and holes in the walls. He knocked on the front door, which almost fell in. An unshaven man clambered past its remains. His trousers were torn and his shoes had no soles. ‘I’m the Labour candidate. We can count on your vote?’ Father began confidently. He was startled by the man’s response. ‘Get on with you,’ he glared. ‘You lot don’t even believe in the Union Jack.’
As the campaign went on, signs of hope began to appear. Father could not forget the huge crowds that cheered Churchill in the streets when he came to Birmingham. Yet Father had been among them cheering Churchill, though he was the Labour candidate. Maybe others had done something similar. Reports came in of Labour stickers going up in areas they had never been seen in before. The unimaginable started to be the believable: the Tory majority of 12,000 was at risk.
The results were announced on 26 July. Father had won by six votes. The celebrations lasted all day. Half the night, Jim Meadows played ‘Strephon’s a Member of Parliament’ from Iolanthe on the record player, shouting Woodrow instead of Strephon. On 28 July, Clement Attlee was acclaimed as Prime Minister.
Soon afterwards Father was sent to India as part of Stafford Cripps’ Cabinet Mission to arrange independence. It was a change from Aston. The Viceroy’s house shone in the majestic sun of the full British Raj. Strict protocol was upheld and the Viceroy and Vicereine, Lord and Lady Wavell, were more royal than the King and Queen. (It was the Prince of Wales before the war who remarked that he never knew how royalty lived until he stayed with Lord Lloyd, the Governor of Bombay.) The splendid Viceregal bodyguard, the magnificently apparelled Pathan servants made taller by their handsome conical turbans, all contributed to the pomp and display designed to impress Indians of all classes with the might and power of Britain.
After dinner at the Viceroy’s house came a period of horror when little groups sat with hushed voices awaiting the summons for one of them to sit alone with the Viceroy or the Vicereine for a few grand minutes of petrified and petrifying conversation.
One of the three Cabinet Ministers with the Mission was A.V. Alexander of the Co-operative Party, who had been made First Lord of the Admiralty. He was very fond of jokes, of drink and of playing the piano loudly. During a tedious evening in the Viceregal drawing-room, he whispered to Father that he would like to liven up the atmosphere by playing the piano, but there wasn’t one in the room. Father made the request for a piano to a supercilious ADC. He consulted the Viceroy, who approved.
Six enormous Pathans marched in with a grand piano. The old guard of British India and the young guard, just as conscious of privilege and status, waited for the usual trite diversion. After he had played music hall songs for a while, A.V. felt his shoulder tapped by Father.
‘I dare you to play The Red Flag. If you do I’ll sing the words.’
A.V. thought this a bit risqué, but buoyed up by whisky, he was willing. So out it came.
‘The people’s flag is deepest red. It shrouded oft our martyred dead.’
On Father trundled in his atrocious voice, ‘Then raise the scarlet Standard high. Beneath its shade we’ll live or die. Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.’
The forty or so listeners sat silent and incredulous with shock. So this was what the first Labour government with an absolute majority was all about – a bloody Communist revolution: no person of property or standing was safe. Surely the Viceroy would express his alarm and deep displeasure to no less a personage than the King?
But Lord Wavell was the only person in the room who was amused. Later he said to Father with a wink, ‘I know poor Mr Attlee has to pretend to like singing that balderdash at Labour conferences. As for you, Woodrow, you are about as revolutionary as a rich man’s chauffeur. You want to straighten out the road but you don’t want to drive off it.’ He added with more verve than viceregal elegance, ‘Tradition has you by the goolies, old boy.’