CHAPTER VIII
There is a stillness here –
After a terror of all raving sounds –
And birds sit close for comfort upon the boughs Of broken trees.
Leonora Speyer, ‘April on the Battlefields’, 1919
Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb’ entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt!
‘Thou gentle art, in melancholy hours when life’s unruly course has
bound me in, how often hast thou set my heart alight with
warming love, and borne me upwards to a better world.’
Franz von Schober, ‘An die Musik’, set to music by Schubert
For several years after 1915, the great house in Grosvenor Street, the music room that once rang with harmony and the chatter of high society, stood empty. As on the day he left, the children’s toys lay scattered about the nursery, their abandoned books in the schoolroom. In Edgar’s study, prominent on his desk, lay a large volume, embossed in gold lettering with the words ‘Dinner Parties’.
Edgar returned to America in 1921. He had sold his shares in the UERL. Speyer Bros was dissolved in 1922. In 1923 he rejoined Speyer & Co and Speyer-Ellissen. In 1925 he was granted American citizenship. He remained in the United States, apart from trips to Europe, for the rest of his life. From his house in Washington Square, waited on by an English butler and footman, he continued to enjoy a style of life which retained something of Grosvenor Street. ‘The aroma of Edwardianism’, noted Claud Cockburn, meeting him in 1929, ‘still hung about him like the scent of a good cigar’.1 Edgar was 59 when he returned to America, too young, as he had told Eduard, to remain inactive, but the ten years of life that were left to him seem to have been years of enforced though cultivated leisure.
He affected indifference to his ordeal, dismissing it, Claud Cockburn observed, ‘with an amiable shrug’.2 To Mathilde Verne he wrote:
I am entirely indifferent to what they say or don’t say about me. My reward lies in what I have done, and in the loyalty of people like you, who have preserved a sense of justice, and of the fitness of things. The others do not matter.3
Time might soften but it did not eradicate the memory. Leonora would sometimes rail at England’s ingratitude towards Edgar’s contribution to the amenities of London life, the bounty he had lavished in philanthropy and the enrichment of art and music. Music, travel and the acquisition of objets d’art continued no doubt to bring such consolation as they could. But the wellsprings of his creativity seem to have dried up and there was bitterness in his heart. Pity was felt at a broken life, blighted hopes and lost illusions. The thought, wrote Mathilde Verne, ‘made and makes me flame in anger against his destroyers’.4
How is Edgar Speyer remembered? His record, he predicted in his public response to his treatment, ‘can be safely left to speak for itself’.5 But can it? No commemorative plaque alerts the passer-by in Grosvenor Street to the former occupants of No 46. A Mount Speyer stands in drear and dismal solitude amid the wastes of Antarctica – ‘our mountain!’, as Leonora called it, acknowledging to Captain Scott the unlikelihood of ‘our ever seeing it’;6 but the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge houses no monument to Edgar. University College, London and the King Edward VII hospital, chief beneficiaries of the Bawden Trust, record nothing of his guiding hand.
Of the millions of commuters on the Underground, few will have heard of the man who saved it from collapse and presided over its completion. When the Promenaders join in Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ or Parry’s ‘Jerusalem’ on the last night of the Proms, they pay homage to the garlanded bust of Sir Henry Wood, but not to his indispensable patron. They will not know that Parry wrote to express to Edgar his shame at the outcry against him, that Elgar wrote to him of ‘the indebtedness of the English people to you’ as ‘a great uplifting force’7 in the nation’s musical life. No. ‘He will be chiefly remembered’, said his obituary in the Manchester Guardian, ‘as the man who more than any other was the object of attack by those who sought during the war years to drive out of the country or to have interned every resident of German parentage’.8
In February 1932, Edgar returned to Berlin to undergo a minor operation on his nose. He haemorrhaged. The doctors could not stem the flow and he bled to death. It was almost 40 years to the day since he had acquired British nationality and ten years since he lost it, and a year before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
Eduard Beit von Speyer died in 1933, leaving one surviving son, younger brother of the son killed in the war, who emigrated the same year with his wife and two sons to Switzerland, and from there to America in 1941. James Speyer died the same year. Faithful to Germany, he had sought to alleviate her plight under the Peace Treaties and was prominent in financing American loans to the Weimar Republic.
Unlike Edgar, Leonora reinvented herself. When arthritis put an end to her career as a violinist, she turned to poetry, so successfully as to win the Pulitzer prize in 1927. Her granddaughter recalls that in after years: ‘she did describe her wonderful life in England’ and how ‘she suffered ostracism when the tide turned against them’. Of their great ordeal, she adds: ‘My grandmother rarely spoke of this part of their lives, and when she did so it was brief and bitter.’9 Leonora died in 1956.
All three of Edgar’s daughters, whom the Home Office had deprived of their British citizenship, eventually returned to England. Pamela, the eldest, married Count Hugo Moy. A few years after their union he was thrown from his horse in a riding accident and killed. She came to live in Sussex, where she died in 1985. His second daughter, Leonora, known as ‘Baba’, was married for less than a year. She met the concert pianist, Maria Donska, a pupil of Arthur Schnabel, and set up house with her in Kent. She died in 1987. Speyer’s youngest daughter, Vivien, came to England as one of the first members of the US Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She died in 2001, aged 94.
Number 22, Washington Square, where Edgar lived out his life of gilded exile, belongs to New York University. It houses the Institute for the Advanced Study of Law and Justice. The irony would not have been lost on Edgar.