Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power

A Morris carpet, pale pink, green, blue and white, covered the floor. The hall had little furniture: a Broadwood piano, four black-lacquer cabinets, and chairs upholstered in Morris’s ‘Honeysuckle’ design.

The light-flooded drawing room, filled with comfortable sofas and chairs, was piled high with periodicals and books rebound by Madeline Wyndham in her favoured vellum. There was no library, books were everywhere in the house, with a trolley for trundling them about.

At the drawing room’s far end stood Madeline’s ‘scrattle table’ – at which she sketched, and wrote, hands constantly moving even as ‘her mind was free, moving among her guests’.

The furniture was eighteenth-century Hepplewhite or Chippendale. On the walls – finally displayed to perfection – was the Wyndhams’ collection of many years: works by the Pre-Raphaelites; the Etruscan School; and Old Italian Masters. Over the main staircase hung Burne-Jones’s cartoon of the Ascension, depicting in glowing raw umber and gilt ‘the figure of Christ blessing those on Earth from above surrounded by the Arch-Angels’.

This might well have been the house depicted by Henry James in The Spoils of Poynton: ‘the record of a life … written in great syllables of colour and form, the tongues of other countries and the hands of rare artists … all France and Italy, with their ages composed to rest. For England you looked out of old windows – it was England that was the wide embrace.’

In every room cushioned baskets awaited Madeline’s pampered fleet of fox terriers; more than thirty peacocks and peahens strutted through the gardens. The South Terrace beyond the drawing room rang to the ‘wild satanic laughter’ of a pair of African jackasses;

fifty to sixty doves, which were fed in the Walnut Tree Court, flew freely about the rooms.

Three times a day, Madeline scattered birdfeed outside to attract wild birds. A packing box used originally for Mananai’s possessions was turned into a squirrel house, still bearing the faded legend ‘Miss Wyndham’s bedroom’.

The house teemed with life.

The Wyndhams’ arrival at Clouds coincided with George’s return from the Sudan with tales of some ‘hot’ engagements and a souvenir in the form of a 3-foot-long Crusader sword liberated from a Sudanese prisoner of war.

Madeline was ‘simply brimming over with thankfulness’ at entering the house with her family safe and well.

From the very first Christmas the family showed themselves diligent and generous squires. Madeline provided each of East Knoyle’s 190 or so schoolchildren with a new, warm jumper.

Semley station’s employees were invited to toast and ale on Boxing Day. On New Year’s Eve the family threw a staff ball with dancing from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m.; an orchestra was bussed in from Salisbury, chairs laid out along the passages for sitting out and rooms provisioned with card tables for those who preferred gin rummy to waltzing. A music show was held in which footmen and kitchen maids displayed their talents.

George reinforced his hero status by rescuing a village child who had fallen through the bathing pond’s ice – although, due to ongoing plumbing problems, he could not have a hot bath afterwards. ‘There is something refreshing in the idea of patrician and plebean [sic] after their common danger being relegated to the humble copper kettle of daily use but that is not what I am paying for,’ wrote Percy to his architect Philip Webb, unable to resist a good-natured dig.

Percy, like all his family, was delighted with their new house. Clouds was the embodiment of their exceptionalism. And though the Wyndhams’ friend Godfrey Webb thought, privately, the house ‘the largest and ugliest in England’, for the most part the Wyndhams were flooded in praise. ‘Influential people (or donkeys as you would call them) are putting it about that this is the house of the age. I believe they are right,’ Percy wrote to his architect, as he surveyed his new domain.

The villagers of East Knoyle and Milton greeted the rising up of a great house in their midst with feudal-like enthusiasm. They twice turned out to cheer the family’s arrival, East Knoyle’s church bells pealing in celebration, when Percy, Guy, Mananai, Pamela and Fräulein arrived on the afternoon of 23 September 1885, and when George and Madeline, delayed by George’s regimental inspection, followed the next day.

The handsome, eccentric family was a source of fascination: village children whispered that drawling, impeccably dressed Percy had his valet wash the coins jingling in his pocket, so bleached clean did he seem (in fact, such a practice was quite common and the rumour probably accurate). By contrast Madeline ‘never seemed like an ordinary rich person … she … was the easiest and most sympathetic person to talk to that I have ever met,’ remembered Violet Milford, one of the daughters of the Canon of East Knoyle church.

The house and the village existed in symbiosis. The Wyndhams had brought some staff with them from Wilbury – Tommy the valet, Eassy and tall, tranquil Bertha Devon, a housemaid who joined the family in Cumberland and spent her entire service life in their employ. Others were recruited from the locality. When a bad spate of influenza struck East Knoyle, Madeline Wyndham took Mananai and Pamela with her to visit the sick ‘nearly everyday’,

and shortly afterwards employed a London-trained nurse permanently to attend the parish’s sick. Each day lunch’s leftovers were delivered by the little girls and Fräulein to the cottages of the poor – piled up, as was customary, in one pungent mess. The village’s children remembered Punch & Judy shows in the hall at Christmas; charity bazaars where the female Wyndhams manned the stalls; vast feasts held to celebrate the marriages of each of the Wyndham children where all the toys in the nurseries were turned out on to the lawns – a very heaven.

Clouds was to become famous as a ‘palace of weekending’, in the phrase of William Lethaby, the architectural historian and propagandist for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and for the Arts and Crafts Movement, whose writings disseminated the works of his friends Philip Webb and William Morris to the next generation.

The press would focus on the fact that, from the late 1880s, Clouds was where Arthur Balfour spent each Easter, passing his days playing golf on the private links built by Percy, and engaging in brilliant ‘general conversation’ at dinner, of which he was always the star. Mary recalled those Easters in later years: when she met the golfers for lunch in a ‘small furze hut’ on the links, and as the party drank Château-Yquem provided by Percy, discussions between Balfour, Percy, the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge and George Wyndham, among others, ranged across politics, philosophy, literature and science, while ‘the gorse shed its fragrance and the larks sang’.

Clouds, a place where politicians of all complexions, primarily Souls, convened, was a house of esoteric delights, overseen by a consummate hostess. Madeline Wyndham was impervious to obstacles when the opportunity of delighting people arose. On a September day in 1883, Mananai and Pamela’s lessons had been interrupted by the sight, from the schoolroom window, of an elephant trundling a yellow cart down the drive. Madeline Wyndham, taking a morning constitutional on the Downs, had encountered a travelling menagerie and persuaded it to divert its course so as to amuse her daughters. ‘We fed the “oily phant” with buns and bread and he … drank some beer, his ears were enormous just like umbrellas,’ Mananai reported excitedly to Mary.

At Clouds, Madeline Wyndham’s munificence was given full force.Regular guests arrived to find hand-bound copies of their favourite books at their bedside (a favourite family anecdote concerned a tiny bound copy of the Lord’s Prayer, which contained a slip bearing ‘the Author’s Compliments’).

In the evenings, Madeline plied them with blankets while listening to recitals in the hall. Masseuses were on hand to give ‘Swedish rubbing’; in front of a blackboard, Lodge (later President of Birmingham University), who played a key role in the development of wireless telegraphy, gave lectures on ‘electrons’ and ‘cyclones’; gymnastics classes were conducted in the garden; and invariably in a darkened room somewhere in the house a spiritualist was conducting a bout of table-turning for the Wyndhams’ guests.

Madeline had been a convert to spiritualism since inviting her first medium to Wilbury in 1884,

and at Clouds the Wyndhams hosted the most prominent theorists of the day – Edward Maitland, Gerald Massey, Edmund Gurney, Frederic Myers and Lord and Lady Mount Temple.

Walburga, Lady Paget, an eccentric vegetarian, thought Clouds perfection in all its entertainments, except for the adders that slithered through the Downs preventing her from walking barefoot through the morning dew.

In microcosm, Clouds reflected ‘the oncoming of a great new tide of human life over the Western World’, in the words of the sage Edward Carpenter – a post-Darwinian, post-Industrial Revolution experimentalism, seeking to find meaning in and improve the new age.

The spiritualist craze exemplifies the way, in this age, optimism and anxiety combined. Balfour, Ruskin, Tennyson, Watts, Leighton, Oliver Lodge, Sigmund Freud, Gladstone and William James, psychologist brother of Henry, were all members of the Society for Psychical Research (the SPR), founded by a group of Cambridge scientists in 1882 ‘for the purpose of inquiring into a mass of obscure phenomena which lie at present on the outskirts of our organized knowledge’.

Their number included two of Balfour’s brothers-in-law: John, Lord Rayleigh, husband of Evelyn Balfour; and Henry Sidgwick, husband of Eleanor Balfour. In an age of extraordinary exploration, it seemed quite possible that science might be able to communicate with a world beyond the earthly plane. One of the SPR’s founders, Frederic Myers, was a reluctant atheist and spoke for many when admitting that his spiritualism was driven by the desire to ‘re-enter … by the scullery … the heavenly mansion out of which I had been kicked through the front door’.

Madeline Wyndham, who designed beautiful prie-dieus for her children, and illustrated biblical tracts to hang above their beds, had no difficulty in reconciling her powerful religious faith with a belief in a ‘sproits and spiris [sic]’.

Pamela, who adopted her mother’s creed more enthusiastically than her siblings, in later life explained her teachings: ‘I learned that death is an incident in life … that communication with those we call the dead, under certain conditions is possible … never was I led for a moment to think that [spiritualism] should stand in the place of religion … Spiritualism supports rather than conflicts with [the] narratives of the life of Christ.’

Percy was more sceptical. But he was certainly a little superstitious. In the spring of 1885, as builders were putting the finishing touches to Clouds, a tall woman dressed in black appeared, asking to see the house. She was shown inside – such requests were not uncommon. She stood in the dusty hall, the walls rearing up around her. ‘This house will be burnt down and in less than three years,’ she announced, before disappearing as mysteriously as she had arrived.

When later that year Percy arranged with Webb for the insurance of the house and its outbuildings, he expressed particular concern about the provision for loss by fire.

Clouds’ magical luxury depended on a silent army of staff. Its occupants woke to fires crackling in the grate, laid soundlessly by a housemaid who had risen long before dawn and had then scurried downstairs to clear away the previous evening’s detritus: wine-stained glasses, full ashtrays in the smoking room; pieces of paper from a game, torn up and carelessly thrown aside. While the family and guests breakfasted, staff flung open windows to air bedrooms, whipped off still-warm sheets to remake beds perfectly and emptied chamberpots. Then they dusted, swept, polished and mended linen before preparing the bedrooms again for their occupants to dress for dinner (men attended by their valets, women by their ladies’ maids); and again while the house dined, they were drawing curtains, lighting candles, turning down beds. Rarely did they throw their exhausted bodies on to their own mattresses before eleven or twelve at night.

Sarah, ‘the pretty 2nd housemaid’ at Clouds, was probably glad to leave service when she married Pearson the coachman and set up in his rooms above the coachhouse. She was fortunate in being able to live with her husband. Married footmen, valets or butlers lived separately from their wives, setting them up in a nearby cottage, and visiting them on their days off. The wife of William Icke, Clouds’ butler from 1892,was housekeeper to two spinster ladies in East Knoyle. Her loyalty was rewarded when they left her their house in their will.

Housekeepers and cooks, who bore the courtesy title of ‘Mrs’, could actually be married – the Wyndham children’s nanny of Cumberland days, Horsenail, had in fact married Forbes, graduating to housekeeper in the days before Mrs Vine. Otherwise, a female servant who married would immediately leave her employ.

In 1891 there were over one and a half million domestic servants in the United Kingdom – almost 16 per cent of the workforce.

Service was an honourable profession with loyalty and affection on both sides. Eassy and Bertha Devon both stayed with the Wyndhams until retirement, the former then moving to a cottage in East Knoyle. Nonetheless, in 1898 the average length of stay by a servant in a household was less than eighteen months.

The turnover at Clouds, from the names on the ten-yearly censuses, was not notably different. The reasons were numerous: marriage; a promotion elsewhere; or abandonment of domestic service entirely. Periodicals like the Lady complained of young men and women with ‘ideas above their station’, thinking themselves too good for service. As the century wore on, many did, rejecting the snobbish hierarchy of the servants’ hall for the greater freedom and excitement available in other jobs. All Madeline’s daughters bemoaned the impossibility of finding good staff.

In 1884, domestic calm was rocked by a young woman’s distress: ‘poor Lucy the housemaid in London I’m afraid she has gone mad – she went for a holiday & came back quite off her head’. The situation, relayed by Mrs Vine to Madeline, and thence to her daughters, was grave, if comical. Lucy, whose head Madeline thought had been ‘turned’ by the marriage of her fellow housemaid Mary Brown, veered between lucidity and moments of ‘wild’ behaviour. Following a composed conversation with Dr Gibbons, the doctor summoned to examine her, Lucy ‘came down and said to Bertha “if I take any one I think I’ll take Dr Gibbons!”’

While amused by Mrs Vine’s decorous alarm, Madeline nonetheless took the matter seriously. She reported to Mary:

it is quite too awfully sad … she is full of delusions thinks people are coming to take her away & that something dreadful will happen because Mary Brown had to sign some cheques for her that they will f[i]nd out she could not wright [sic] and a lot more I told her that she must not let her self give way … but … she is so miserable she would break her heart Bertha & Charlotte had to sit up with her & hold her down in bed. Don’t talk about this with anyone but is it not horrid?

History does not relate what happened to Lucy. She does not appear in the 1891 census either for Clouds or for Belgrave Square. Presumably she was dispatched back to her family: it is likely that Madeline took care to make sure someone would look after her.

Reportage of such untoward incidents was part of the traffic of communication between Madeline and her daughters: their own children picked up snippets and came to Clouds wide-eyed, alert to a servant to whom such gossip had lent an air of celebrity. Lizzie Beaver, the still-room maid (in charge of cakes, jam and preserves, so a good person for hungry children to befriend), nearly died when, returning from the village to Clouds early in the morning of 31 December 1886, she got lost in snow and fog, and was only found at midday on New Year’s Day, frozen half to death. Howard ‘the married stable-man’ slipped over when carrying a heavy sack and injured his back badly enough to be confined to lying ‘quite still’ for a lengthy period of time. The daughter of Wareham the under-coachman suffered from paralysed legs, ‘the awful result, it was thought, of sitting on a cold stone when she was very hot’. Eassy raised the alarm in 1888 with fears about her own heart, although Dr Collins pronounced her as suffering only from ‘nervous shock’ – most likely a panic attack, for reasons unknown. In 1892, Enfield, who had replaced Forbes as butler in 1888, was struck by a sudden ‘chill’ and ‘rheumatic pains’ one Friday night that left him ‘unable to wait at dinner’, followed swiftly by ‘inflammation of the brain … he died in convulsions at 2.30 o’clock’.

Enfield’s wife, who had gone to London ‘to be confined’, was left to give birth to a fatherless child.

In her youth Madeline Wyndham had compiled a photograph album of ‘all the dear Servants at Petworth’, with handwritten commentary beneath, explaining who each subject was.

Yet she, like most, thought nothing of loaning her daughters a spare footman when they had large house parties ‘in the same way the poor borrow a frying pan, or a rub of soap’, said an ex-butler, Eric Horne, scornfully in a bestselling memoir published in 1923.

Percy rewarded his favourite, William Mallett, the clerk of works responsible for all maintenance on the house and estate, with a house that was two cottages knocked into one. It allowed Mallett – who had worked his way up from house carpenter – a comparatively palatial four bedrooms for his family of eleven. But Percy’s attitude towards his staff was aristocratic, to say the least. Hyde, Clouds’ head keeper, lost a finger when Percy swung round carelessly and pulled the trigger of his gun. That might have been sheer absent-mindedness. The occasion on which Percy shot a beater called Fletcher in the foot for picking up the wrong pheasant most certainly was not.

SEVEN (#ulink_aaa09714-50e6-5f32-8ba1-7bc2dcd4a684)