ONE
Edward Wood was born on 16 April 1881 in Devon, a fact which many years later he inadvertently vouchsafed to King George VI on a train journey there. He soon regretted it when the King, displaying all his heavy Hanoverian drollness, pointed to every shack and cow-shed along the way, asking, ‘Is that where you were born, Edward?’, until the butt of his constantly reiterated joke found it hard to continue his courtly laughter.
The Woods of Hickleton were a fortunate family. For centuries they had been respectable York merchants, providing justices of the peace, aldermen and the occasional distinguished soldier or sailor. They were worthy but not of national eminence. Just before the start of the Industrial Revolution, they were wealthy enough to buy an estate near Doncaster and to settle as moderately landed squires. Some short time later, they discovered themselves to be sitting on several hundred acres of Britain’s deepest and finest coal seam, the great Barnsley field. It was seventy yards deep in places and all of the highest quality. This left them wealthy enough to do whatever they pleased.
Charles Wood, born in 1800, went into politics. He married the daughter of Earl Grey, the Whig Prime Minister, and rose to become Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for India. His Whiggery was a tough creed, combining a belief in minimal reform at home and pugnacious optimism abroad. He was awarded a viscountcy in 1866 and was one of those ministers considered close enough to Queen Victoria to be awarded the task of attempting to bring her out of her seclusion years after the death of Prince Albert.
The first Viscount Halifax displayed a number of characteristics that were to reappear in his grandson. He was never a party-minded politician. He contracted a sparkling marriage to the daughter of an earl, which, once his son and grandson had followed suit, gave the family more social standing than their 218th in the precedence of peerage might otherwise imply. He devoted a large part of his life to reform in India, especially in the field of education, holding office there both before and after the Mutiny. Finally, his friendship with the Queen started a tradition of confidentiality and intimacy with the Royal Family that was to prove invaluable to his grandson seventy years later.
In Charles, the second Viscount Halifax, there existed a curious paradox between unquestioning faith in God, which dominated every hour of his ninety-four years, and a fascination for other-worldly phenomena. He was also one of Victorian England’s most splendid eccentrics. He saw himself as the last of the Cavaliers, sported a Vandyke beard and devoted his life to contesting the ‘singularly deserted battlefields’ of theology.1 For half a century the senior lay figure on the ‘High’ side of the Anglican Church, he had been at Oxford during the second phase of the Oxford Movement. His love of ritual, extreme partisan High Anglicanism and all but Catholic beliefs set him at loggerheads with most of his Church for much of his life. He was never happier than when indulging in theological – and preferably also legal – controversy. His Presidency of the English Church Union from 1866 to 1920 saw him champion the High Anglican wing of the Church of England in ecclesiastical disputes virtually incomprehensible today even to aficionados of the genre. He threw himself into the most obscure (and expensive) legal battles over the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874 to the point that he had to resign as Groom to the Prince of Wales’s Bedchamber for advocating the breaking of the law.
He passed on to his son Edward acceptance of Transubstantiation and all the standard Catholic doctrines, barring Papal Infallibility and the Immaculate Conception. When in London, he and Edward worshipped at St Mary’s, Bourne Street, the Church of England’s ‘highest’ and most baroque church. If there was a criticism of Edward Wood’s religion as imparted to him by his father it was, as his friend Fr Ted Talbot wrote in 1949, that ‘In a sense his religion, admirable in its loyalty and diligence, has not one feels had to encounter the sharp north-east wind of deep questioning.’2 Nevertheless, there was a strong sense of realism in the High Anglicanism of both father and son which was to come out in the latter’s politics.
Realism was distinctly lacking in much of the rest of the second Viscount’s life. His strange streak of mysticism and eccentricity led him to edit an excellent book of ghost stories, to be utterly feudal in his politics, to have priest-holes and secret passages built into his house, and to keep yaks, emus and kangaroos in the park at Hickleton. In September 1870, only a year married and father of a six-week-old baby, he went over to France to help fight disease amongst prisoners captured in the Franco-Prussian War. In response to his letters about pulling Zouave corpses out of water butts, his mother felt that he ‘had no right to leave Agnes for the shells, smallpox and cholera of another country’s war’.3 Lady Agnes, Edward’s mother, was a kind, loving and long-suffering soul, who gave him the stability it was not in his father’s power to bestow. The second Viscount did, however, impart to him a deep affection for the East Riding of Yorkshire, which was to dominate his son’s view of the world throughout his life.
Edward was born without a left hand. He does not seem to have been adversely affected by this at all, though it may have added to a tendency to be slightly sensitive. He was certainly highly successful at putting it into the background. He had a false hand in the form of a clenched fist with a thumb on a spring, which he became so adept at manipulating that when out hunting he had no trouble in opening a gate while holding his reins and horn. Many years later, when crossing the Atlantic in a battleship, his Private Secretary, Charles Peake, ‘could not but admire the beautiful judgement and economy of movement with which he went up a vertical ladder using only his right hand without haste or hesitation’.4 He was also born with a slight lisp, which, far from conveying the sense of weakness it sometimes can, made his sonorous voice more interesting to listen to.
Far more than any of this, Edward’s character was moulded by a series of tragedies which befell his family between his fifth and tenth birthdays. His three elder brothers died, each within two years of one another and each of classic Victorian child-killing diseases. Henry died of lung congestion in 1886 aged seven, Francis of the same in 1888 aged fifteen, and Charles of pleurisy after a long illness in 1890 at the age of twenty. Those last two years, 1888 to 1890, saw the deaths of a bewildering succession of family and friends, leaving the second Viscount with only Edward on whom to concentrate his boundless ambitions and devotion. From being the sixth of six, and very much physically the runt of the litter, the nine year old was catapulted into being the sole focus of his father’s almost fanatical love.
The second Viscount never spoke down to his sons and always wrote to them as equals, but the pressure he exerted on Edward would horrify a modern child psychologist. At the age of eleven the boy received weekly letters at prep-school telling him ‘You are to get a first class at History at Oxford and do all sorts of grand things.’ An only mildly critical Maths report would bring the admonition, ‘I want for my darling to do everything perfectly’ because, as he never tired of pointing out, ‘I long for you to do your best… that you may turn out the pride and happiness of our life – we have all had so much sorrow in the past that now everything seems to centre on you.’ If Edward became old before his time, and became rather serious, sensitive but ambitious, it was due to emotionally blackmailing letters such as that received on his twelfth birthday: ‘You do not know how precious you are in my eyes my own dearest child – my only little son left now that God has taken my other three to himself – all my hopes and joy are bound up in you… what should I do without you?’5
Edward Wood had a blameless Eton, where he concentrated on those sports which his disability allowed him, such as tennis, fives and bicycling. He also kept up a lively theological correspondence with his father. But it was at Christ Church, Oxford, that he blossomed and where he could indulge his appetite for country sports and High Church services. He joined the dining clubs Loder’s and the Bullingdon, got into slight debt, went beagling and generally did all the other things expected of wealthy and well-born undergraduates. Already, though, there were signs of wisdom beyond his years; an Oxford contemporary, Lord William Percy, remembered how, ‘On Mafeking night, each member of Loder’s drank a bottle of port to celebrate. Everyone got completely drunk, but Halifax immediately went out and tickled his throat to make himself sick, thus avoiding the worst effects. This was typical.’6 Through impressive management of his time combined with a capacity for hard work which never left him, Wood took a first in History and then won a Fellowship to All Souls. These merely whetted his father’s ambitions: ‘I am quite determined that you are to be Prime Minister and reunite England to the Holy See.’7
On going down from Oxford, Wood found himself wealthy. Dispersed for a generation amongst uncles and aunts, the family wealth tended to percolate back down to him. In 1904, an aunt left him both No. 88, Eaton Square, and Temple Newsam, the Jacobean palace outside Leeds known with good reason as ‘the Hampton Court of the North’. The year before, his father had also offered him Garrowby, the largest of the family estates. Wood decided to go on a Grand Tour of the Empire, secure in the knowledge that he had a fortune to return to in England.
He stayed with Lord Curzon at Calcutta, visited Benares, Agra, Ceylon and New Zealand, saw the Act of Federation in effect in Australia and met members of Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’ in South Africa. Finally, in 1907, he visited Canada, scene of the reforms of his Whig great-uncle, Lord Durham. On his return he took the most sensible course open to a man of conservative political instincts at that time and stayed well out of politics. The Liberals had won a landslide victory in 1906 and so Wood instead took up his Fellowship at All Souls. This putting off of the start of his parliamentary career showed a talent for felicitous political timing that was not to leave him. It was in the civilized and intellectually gifted atmosphere of All Souls that he wrote a life of his father’s hero, John Keble. Because of his desire to be objective, this turned out to be a well-researched and closely argued but excruciatingly dull book.
The political climate had sufficiently improved by the time John Keble was published in 1909 for Wood to decide to follow his grandfather into politics. The Whig Party was long since dead, its traditions ignored by the Liberal Party which had ingested it. Wood therefore, more for lack of an alternative than for any positive reason, decided to stand for the Conservatives. His ideological commitment to Conservatism was never strong, although he did inherit from his father a slightly whimsical belief in oligarchy.
Only two more ingredients were necessary for the career of a bright and successful young Tory politician: Wood required a wife and a safe seat, both of which came within four months of one another. In the eighty or so interviews I have conducted with her husband’s colleagues, friends, relations and servants, one constant rejoinder has been made: all agree that Lady Dorothy Onslow was in charm, friendliness, sympathy and kindness a paragon amongst women. She was the perfect wife and they proceeded to live that most infuriating thing for a modern biographer – model lives together. Her tremendous personality and wisdom proved invaluable to him. Although a constant source of strength, she never had, nor sought, any influence over policy. None of his great offices – the Viceroyalty of India, Foreign Secretaryship or the Ambassadorship to Washington – could have been accepted unless Lady Dorothy had been up to them. Capable men were regularly turned down for such posts because of an unsuitable wife. Lady Dorothy fulfilled a vital role in complementing her husband’s image of a sound family man who could always be trusted to do the decent thing.
Neither was she merely the political wife who stares adoringly up at her husband during interminable speeches and belaboured jokes. Her giant Garrowby housekeeping account books, kept between 1911 and 1939 and listing to the last farthing how much was paid to the poulterer, confectioner, fishmonger and so on, show her to be more than just a hostess. Her engagement diaries, detailing exactly which white lie she had told to whom to excuse herself from which social occasion, stand testament to her common sense. On other matters she could be remarkably candid: she openly admitted that her mother was born illegitimate, despite Burke’s Peerage generously attesting to the contrary. She had lived in New Zealand for a time when her father was Governor-General and had all the independent spirit of his family. Her sister-in-law used to get her way by feigning paralysis or throwing inkpots and once walked into a crowded diplomatic party stark naked. Her nephew kept a parrot in his bedroom and never went on a train without his pet snake.8 The family had provided three Speakers of the House of Commons and Dorothy inherited from her father a deep sense of noblesse oblige.
She had to show her mettle very soon after her wedding on 21 September 1909. The honeymoon was cut short so that her husband could take part in the general election campaign. As the heir of a local grandee, Wood had found no trouble in those more deferential times being selected as the Conservative candidate for the nearby seat of Ripon. Lady Dorothy’s friend, Blanche Lascelles (who later married George Lloyd), recorded in her diary how, when out canvassing in the biting cold of January 1910, they took it in turns to buy blue silk for the rosettes and chilblain-cream for their feet.9 Wood was elected with a 1,244 majority in a poll of 11,000, which, although it was reduced eleven months later to 874, was considered strong enough to dissuade anyone from standing against him again. A political career spanning half a century was thus based on only two contested elections.
This immensely tall, rather sad-eyed twenty-nine-year-old on the verge of his political career had had an early life rich with influences. The loss of his brothers, combined with a profound sense of Original Sin, had produced a tolerant, practical, slightly diffident man. Although intensely private, he cannot be described as shy. Truly shy people do not go into politics and Wood did not find speaking to large crowds more than normally harrowing. Anyhow, there was too much Yorkshire and his father in him for shyness. It is doubtful, however, whether he had much of a sense of humour. One biographer has detected ‘a lugubrious sense of irony’.10 His set-piece jokes were laborious and, although he enjoyed teasing and gossiping amongst close friends, he appears to have been responsible for virtually no bons mots or witty remarks. He tended to speak in an Establishment tongue which colleagues had no difficulty in understanding, despite his circumlocution. He once started a sentence, ‘I should have thought that one might say that it could be reasonably held that…’. For foreigners it was different. The Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, complained that ‘he would express his thoughts in so ornate a way that few could understand him’.11
There is also the fact of his legendary stinginess. He had somehow contracted ‘a deep-seated abhorrence of everyday expenditure’, which stayed with him for the rest of his life.12 This was more than merely a case of being ‘Yorkshire tight’ and cannot exclusively be explained by his father’s prodigious expenditure on ecclesiastical campaigns and the building of secret passages at Garrowby. R. A. Butler recorded how at the Foreign Office, ‘one day a messenger brought in four biscuits and two cups of tea. Halifax pushed away two biscuits and said, “Mr Butler does not want these. Nor do I. Do not charge me.” ’13 There are many such examples of this sort of parsimonious behaviour. But these must be set against the great generosity he showed in 1925 when he sold Temple Newsam to the City of Leeds for less than he could have realized on the open market, and again in 1948 when he gave 164 paintings to the museum the City had opened there.
Wood had a genuine modesty and found it hard to lose his temper. His life until then had been a conventional and faultless progression along a well-trodden aristocratic career path. Hon. Edward Wood MP was, in January 1910, a patient, dispassionate and reserved man who was keen to find reason and logic in the world. He was about to enter the worst possible place for someone of that temperament – the pre-First World War House of Commons.