Lecture to Byron Society

ANNABELLA

LADY ANNE BLUNT, BARONESS WENTWORTH

LECTURE TO BYRON SOCIETY

The George Inn, London, 12^th May 2004

LORD LYTTON IN THE CHAIR

Lord Lytton, Ladies & Gentlemen

I must begin with a confession. I am a walking advertisement for the government’s anti-smoking campaign. I embraced my beloved pipe for some 40 years and am now paying the penalty with an emphysemic lung. Indeed, lack of resonance makes it impossible to throw my voice more than a few feet without the aid of a microphone, and am liable to dry up completely or to be overtaken by coughing fit if taxed. Added affects of age, the ability to forget in the course of a sentence the subject on which I started out, and you can appreciate why I told your Hon. Secretary Miss O’Connor that she was taking a big risk in inviting me here this evening. Fortunately, we are insured against disaster. My friend and present publishing editor Lionel Kelly, until recently Professor of English Literature at Reading University, has most generously offered to accompany me here, and if necessary to take over in my stead. I will try to save him from that exertion but if he is forced to it I am sure he’ll do a much superior job. And I am sure that he will in any case contribute invaluably to any discussion we might have time for.

In fact, when the time came I was unable to make the journey and Lionel Kelly was asked to deliver the talk and to add, as he saw fit, grace notes if not a cadenza of his own.



                           §

An invitation from the Byron Society is more or less a literary royal command. It is an honour and a somewhat sobering experience to stand before an audience that has such vast collective knowledge and appreciation of the man whose majestic contribution to English writing is mirrored by his involuntary contribution to a peculiarly English tradition of vulgar interest in other people’s private lives, to say nothing of an intra family hostility that one of my predecessors in the field, Doris Langley Moore, described- most tellingly I thought - as ‘exquisite’.

Of course, I am here to talk chiefly about Lord Byron’s granddaughter, Annabella, Lady Anne Blunt; the granddaughter he missed seeing in the flesh by 13 years. But she, like her mother, was influenced and fashioned by the genes and the reputation of the great man, and indeed by those of the emphatic, mathematically precise little lady to whom he was so briefly married. The reputations of Anne’s forebears followed her throughout her life, in her happiest moments of travel and intellectual companionship, and in those moments of despair when it must often have seemed to her that she was destined both to emulate and to suffer the consequences of that fleeting and ill-fated marriage of her grandparents.

One other personal note if I may. I retired to North Devon at the age of 60, persuaded that any claim I might have had to a literary future was well and truly dead. Publishers who had once dined me at some of the best restaurants in and around Soho had gone to ground. I realised that I had reached a point with which some of you may be familiar, though I hope not, where nobody is ever at home, and nobody honours a pledge to phone back. To make things worse, a crass indiscretion on my part in failing lamentably to meet a deadline resulted in a terminal argument with my then editor and the very sad end to my hitherto excellent relationship with one of the most important and delightful figures of the literary scene ‘Jock’ Murray, who had commissioned me to write ‘Lady Anne Blunt’. I decided that I had almost certainly written my last book and that I had better make the most of retirement, with perhaps the odd journalistic assignment to keep the wolf from the door.

First port of call was North Devon Cricket Club with its picturesque thatch-roofed pavilion and scorers’ box, the Atlantic Ocean (or Bristol Channel) lapping up to its protective wall. On a warm sunny day I had found the nearest thing I was ever likely to find to heaven on earth and I signed up there and then as occasional umpire for mid-week games against some of the club, university and college sides that like me were seduced by that unique greensward. It was there that I began to hear mention of a cricket personality - not ‘a writer’ note, ‘a cricketer’ – by the name of Malcolm Elwin, redoubtable captain, ‘swing’ bowler and eternal number 11 bat, who had played for the South Oxford Amateurs before landing up at Instow in North Devon and on occasion, I believe, gracing the Devon’ Minor Counties side. He was of course the portrayer of Noels, Milbankes and Byrons whose books had been a primary source when I began to write Lady Anne some ten years earlier. Since then Doris Langley Moore’s Ada and Elizabeth Longford’s Pilgrimage of Passion had appeared and Elwin had departed this life and was by now I felt sure captaining St Peter’s fifth or sixth eleven and entertaining the heavenly host with inexhaustible tales of the Byron clan, or so I conjectured as I stood at square leg trying to hide from the fierce wind that the Bristol Channel seemed to funnel in my direction. It was then that I began to think of looking out the yellowing pages of my unfinished typescript and resuming the task that I had put down so reluctantly before leaving London. After all, others before Elwin had written knowledgeably about Byron. Ada, daughter of his house and heart was at long last recognised as the tragic and transitory genius that she was, a very significant contributor to the development of the computer. I have often wondered what Byron might have had to say about that. There were two distinguished biographical works on Wilfrid Blunt, the villain of my piece.

But I had made other biographical starts that had all ended up in a plastic box under the bed, and I had a momentary urge to look at some of them too as possible subjects for a late surge of activity. One of them had a distinctly Byronic flavour.



I can’t help wondering how many even among this informed audience, ever paid more than passing attention to those parenthetical words in Canto V of Don Juan, which I think portray Lord Byron as a man who was just as much part of the radical tradition of his own land as of the classical pastures of Greece.–

But to resume, - should there

be (what may not

Be in these days?) some

Infidels, who don't,

Because they can't, find out

the very spot

Of that same Babel,

or because they won't

(Though Claudius Rich

Esquire, some bricks has got

And written lately two memoirs upon't)

Believe the Jews, those

Unbelievers who

Must be believed, though they

Believe not you.





With what apparent ease were contemporary events and philosophy worked into the fabric of epic verse. And what a remarkable man was this Claudius Rich Esq. And how interesting that Byron was one of the very few contemporaries and even fewer successors among the English intelligentsia to recognise his importance.

Though I once wrote some outline notes in an anthology called ‘The Spirit of the East’, there is to this day no biographer of Rich. Even to know vaguely about him 200 years on is to presuppose an intimate knowledge of the Indian empire and of Britain’s relations with Mesopotamia and Persia, and in particular with the Ottoman vilayet of Baghdad, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Rich and his wife Mary arrived there, in Baghdad, in the year 1808, just a year after (I hope I am right) Byron’s first published work, Hours of Idleness, saw the light of day and the sharp end of the critic’s tongue. Rich was 21 years of age. Mary was piped aboard the Residency yacht, carried on a mule-borne palanquin, followed by a retinue of servants and flanked by a Sepoy guard of honour. The young couple were accompanied on the Tigris voyage from Basra to Baghdad by a flotilla of the Indian Navy and when they arrived at their destination they were carried through a thousand-strong guard to the British Residency that had been established just ten years earlier. Think of it, 21 years of age.

I must not devote too much time to this diversion in my talk, but it is germane to my theme and it was, after all, Byron to whom we owe our first glimpse of him. Indeed, a passing mention in Byron’s poem is to this day the summit of Rich’s fame. Yet this man who was soon to be known throughout the East if not in his own country as the ‘Magnificent Nabob’ surely merits recognition in our national halls of fame. He had no schooling. He was born in Burgundy, Dijon, but after losing both his parents was brought to England by an uncle, taking up residence in Bristol. Fortunately he was bilingual at an early age and languages came easily to him. He picked them up, one after another, by reading grammars and dictionaries in his uncle’s library, and then wandering about the harbour district of Bristol in search of seafarers on whom he could practice the spoken word. As well as Latin and Greek he had, by the age of 16, mastered Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac, Farsi and Turkish. And at that tender age he pronounced his ambition for the future: ‘Let me but get to India, leave the rest to me’.

When, some forty years ago I became aware of a glaring imbalance in the biographical scene and made up my mind to do something about it, Annabella was one in a long line that started with Rich and a few other neglected men and women of empire, and led to the likes of Howard Carter and Sir Leonard Woolley. I have to confess that I became almost paranoid about the determination of some of our best writers to go on producing more and more biographies of Dickens, George Bernard Shaw, T.E. Lawrence, Jame Joyce, Yeats and all those other irresistible Dubliners, and royals and aristocrats of easy virtue, not to mention Wilfrid Blunt. I became almost obsessed by a sense of mission, a one-man search engine for subjects that would restore balance to the scene. Now of course, my subjects are being duplicated and triplicated..

Let me add a few parting thoughts on Claudius Rich for the benefit of anyone here today who might be looking for a subject. The Recorder of Bombay, Sir James Mackintosh, said of him: ‘He far exceeded our expectations and we soon regarded his wonderful oriental attainments as the least part of his merit…With the strongest recommendation of appearance and manner, he joined every elegant accomplishment and every manly exercise; and combined with them, spirit, pleasantry and feeling.’ Sir James determined to make of him a philosopher. More to the point, he determined to make him his son-in-law by pointing his daughter Mary in his direction soon after his arrival in Bombay. He was praised as much by the local people as by the East India Company that employed him. Oh that the politicians who guide our destinies today were given to reading history! He fought the battles of the local Iraqis with their Ottoman rulers and, as Byron noted in Don Juan, found time to visit the mounds of Babylon in the south and Kuyunjik in Kurdistan, the ‘little sheep’ in Turkish, which turned out to be the northern extremity of ancient Nineveh. He wrote the first archaeologically informed account of the remains of Babylon since Roman times in his Memoir of 1818, providing an accurate drawing of the ancient city on the east bank of the Euphrates. Soon he was in correspondence with the great German scholar Georg Frierich Grotefend about the translation of cuneiform tablets he had acquired. At Mosul he traced the walls of Nineveh; ‘its perpendicular height is 43 feet, its total circumference 7,691 feet he wrote with astonishing accuracy. He told of immense bas-reliefs representing men and animals, dug up from shallow trenches in the ground and speedily smashed into fragments that could be transported and sold.

He was offered a senior appointment in Bombay in 1821. By then he of course had reached his 34th year. He had enjoyed a lengthy and glorious period of office in Baghdad. He sent Mary on to India and went off to Persia to make a quick survey of Persepolis and other ancient sites. He arrived at Shiraz where there was a severe outbreak of cholera. The expatriate population had left along with the wealthier Persians. Rich set up an emergency centre for nursing the sick, and set out to calm the population, but he himself contracted the disease and died alone on the 5th October, 1821. He was buried in the royal garden of Shiraz and the local population erected a monument to his memory. On it was inscribed in Farsi words of gratitude, and in English an anonymous tribute, ‘Never did the British character attain so high an eminence in Turkish Arabia as when he presided in Baghdad’. His book, Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan and on the Site of Ancient Nineveh, was published posthumously in 1836, edited by Mary his wife. His narrative of a journey to the site of Babylon came three years later.

Enthusiasm really has run away with me. I have said enough, I think, to suggest that Byron’s light hearted (satirical?) words, and (though others may find different meanings) indicate a certain scepticism about those Old Testament tales that the Jewish scribes picked up in Chaldaean Babylon in the years of the Captivity. ‘All very well for the Jews’, he seems to say, ‘but there’s no reason why other religions and cultures should take them too seriously’. In fact, that ‘very same spot’ with its clamorous tower is nowadays identified by archaeologists and biblical scholars not as Babylon but the nearby site of Borsippa, which in those days was deemed to be a satellite of the great metropolis of Babel.

At any rate, Byron was and has remained one of the few writers and scholars who were aware of this remarkable man. His grave, like those of almost all the Englishmen who brought glory to the nation in the days of empire, has disappeared beneath the accretions of time. But he is not alone in his neglect. There is, we are told in the gossip columns, a legion of biographers sharpening pencils in readiness for a third life study of the current prime minister or chancellor of the exchequer or a 23-year old multi-million pound footballer. I am reminded of Evelyn Waugh’s advice to prospective authors looking for a subject. ‘Start with biography’, he said, ‘and always make sure that there are at least two existing works on the same subject’. Both writers and readers he seemed to say like to operate in an atmosphere of cosy familiarity. I once sat in the India Office in its old days in Blackfriar’s Road days and counted the number of biographies and university theses devoted to T.E.Lawrence, he of Arabia, in its records. I gave up when I reached 200 or thereabout. I hope most sincerely that any serious writers looking for subjects in the future, especially those journalists who are returning from present-day Iraq pregnant with literary ambition, might perhaps look to the three great men of the British Residency in Baghdad who have been ignored so far – Rich of course, Sir Henry Rawlinson who retired from the Indian army to become Political Resident in 1844 and who occupied his time in Baghdad translating the cuneiform, and John Gordon Lorimer, whom Gertrude Bell thought one of the most brilliant men she had ever met in the East, and that, from Gertrude Bell is an accolade indeed. I am afraid that in these days of Anglo-American publishing, the response is likely to be muted. So what of the residual elements of the Byron family?

When I resumed work on Lady Anne - in the belief, shared by her daughter Juudith, that it was time she was rescued from obscurity - my hopes were not high. As someone remarked at the time, there were at least two works on virtually every other member of the family; there must be something wrong with Anne as a subject. Some to whom I spoke expressed Judith’s fear that she was perhaps a bit of a prude, something of a bore. My own previous experience was mixed. I had, after all, rescued perhaps the finest of 20th century political agents in Arabia, Captain Shakespear, from an obscurity so impenetrable that members of his own family knew nothing of his achievements; only to discover that one gentleman of the press, sent a review copy by my publisher Jonathan Cape, retorted ‘If it’s about Arabia and not about Lawrence, I am not interested’. There are of course worse offenders. Those who make a living by plagiarising the work of others, for example, even going as far as to lecture on this and that as if they themselves had conducted the necessary research but never conceding an acknowledgement. They are hardly significant enough to merit comment. Of course we all plagiarise, but most of us have the common decency to reveal our sources. Occasionally, writers foolishly engage in this sort of folly. A common ploy I find is for the plagiarist to include one’s most obscure work in their bibliography but to omit the works from which they have actually stolen the material. Then there are the doubters. When my Howard Carter came out, one broadcaster insisted that I had it wrong; it was Carnarvon who discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, not Carter. ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica says so’ he observed. An interviewer or commentator who takes the trouble to look up a subject in Britannica before he goes on air is not to e taken lightly. He was quite right of course, most reference books of the day mistook the patron for the archaeologist, and most archaeologists and politician despised Carter anyway. A difficult chap with no educational background. The political and academic institutions of Britain excelled themselves in the case of Carter. He did not receive a single honour in his own country, for perhaps the most important discovery in history, though Yale gave him a doctorate.

I must return to Annabella. It was my research on Gertrude Bell that led me in the first place to Lady Anne. I could not help but be struck by the rapport and mutual admiration of these two women, one old enough to be the mother of the other, yet sharing so many interests and achievements, in travel, devotion to Arab lands, language and culture. Pity the chain of mutual admiration was broken when Freya Stark, such a fine writer and mediocre traveller, showed herself to be indifferent to both her females predecessors. Anne and Gertrude were known in succession by their Arab hosts simply as Al Khatun, a Turkish word meaning ‘the lady’; or ‘lady of esteem’ as one Arab authority translated it. From what little I knew already, I couldn’t help wondering what pitfalls lay ahead of Lady Anne. I confess that when it came to writing the book, I was never so ill at ease as when I tried to reconcile the anomalies of her marital position. Here was a woman of singular attractiveness, of wealth and intellect to whom the greatest names of modern Europe paid respect, and proudly called their friend – Wagners, Goethes, Mozarts, Schumanns and Schuberts – who was taught drawing by Ruskin and music by Joachim and Halle, wealthy, adored by close friends such as the Nightingales and by the lesser folk among whom she had moved easily since childhood, admired by the international equine community for her vast knowledge of the Arab horse. Writer and scholar of distinction. The brains of the uneasy business partnership that she formed with her husband. Yet she was totally submissive to the arrogant, narcissistic Wilfrid, and in the end she accepted compete humiliation as her lot, seeking shelter in the religion she had adopted, perhaps subconsciously, as a final, desperate concession to her husband. I consulted with my wife and my women friends. I even debated the matter with male friends, few of whom were total strangers to human frailty. Most, I have to say, were unsympathetic to her plight. Why oh why did she acquiesce so completely in her impossible position, eventually leaving her home and family to a philandering husband whose bed-hopping marital exploits put Casanova in the shade? She was of course throughout her life the prisoner of a strange upbringing at the hands of a mother who hovered on the edge of genius and madness, a self-righteous and morally irreproachable grandmother, and a succession of governesses. In the end, I asked questions but offered no explanations. I am suspicious of psychoanalysis as a biographical weapon. Its answers seem to me to beg as many questions as they solve.

Some of you may be familiar with the home called Ashley Combe that Lovelace built on Porlock Bay amid some of the scenic splendours of the West Country for the brilliant and attractive lady whose charms he had spoken of so rhapsodically to Lady Byron in the days when he was persona grata. It must have been a delightful and original country residence but I was only able to find out just how interesting it was after I had completed the book and it had gone to press. Biographers among .you will know how impossible it sometimes is to get at the simplest facts when researching a book. By the time I arrived at the site, there was no house and not a single resident was able to tell me anything about the grand residence that had existed there, save that it had been taken over in wartime by Dr Barnardo’s as a refuge for its children and that soon after the war it had been demolished. Even in the small museum that today stands close to the old house, no one seemed to know about the house or the family. I was told that there was no photograph. In fact, it was not until the book was published and reviewed in the Western Morning News that I began to learn more. The reviewer, it appeared, had spent his childhood at Porlock and played amid the declining splendours of Ashley Combe, remembering well its fine Italian garden, the underground passages and mazes that Lovelace had constructed for the children of his family. The review was read by an old resident of the area who had emigrated to Canada and now lives on Lake Victoria. As a young newly wed he had seen Ashley Combe being demolished and had asked the contractor if he could have one or two of the fine Gothic revival tiles and other bits and pieces lying on the ground. ‘Take as much as you like’, replied the contractor, and so the young man took away a vanload of building material, including two entire chimney stacks, and the front door. When he subsequently moved to Canada he shipped it all over and today some of the early Victorian relics of Ashley Combe are much admired ingredients of his house on Lake Victoria. That will all have to await the second edition of the book. The last of the family to live there was Mary, Ralph’s second wife, and she alone seems to have truly enjoyed the country retreat, though Lovelace entertained Layard and Sir Henry Rawlinson there in the days when the monumental wall-reliefs of Nineveh and Nimrud were appearing at the British Museum. On separate occasions Ada seems to have made some memorable visits, and to have entertained Babbage and a local gentleman of distinction there. Anne, her early love of horses and other animals to the fore, made it her childhood heaven and established what must have been a sizeable menagerie there. You may remember from the book that when she and Wilfrid went there on their honeymoon the place was deserted and they left without stopping for so much as a cup of tea.

Ashley Combe reminds me of Ralph, elder son and heir of the Lovelaces, who made it his country seat in the dismal years of his marital difficulties, the squabble with his serious, intellectual father, of his disdain for his grandfather, and the rather foolish attempt to join Harriet Beacher Stowe in the vindication of Lady Byron. ‘Asrtarte’, his effort to give literary substance to the rumour of Lord Byron’s incest and the injustices inflicted on Grandmama, was a classic example of selective writing based on the letters that his father had kept hidden since Ada’s death, and up to his own demise. But at Ashley Combe he was able to entertain his few friends, mostly fellow rock climbers and mountaineers, among whom was perhaps the best woman climber of her day, Gertrude Bell. His correspondence with Gertrude in the Bodleian shows another and much more likable side to Ralph. He again might make a biographical subject. Whatever the difficulties or the shortcomings, I feel that the essential biographical circuit has now been completed. But of course there remain some glaring omissions in the Byron family saga. There is also Judith, the daughter who never hid her convictions under a bushel. If ever a well documented opportunity stared the literary world in the face I would have thought that the Rt. Hon. Judith Baroness Wentworth, as she liked to be addressed, was it. Other black holes in the Byron constellation will be more difficult to fill. One that must surely attract a writer of real merit is the elusive Byron or Ockham, Byron’s grandson who bore his own name before succeeding to the Ockham barony in infancy. Midshipman Lord Ockham who, unlike brother Ralph, despised his own aristocratic background and scandalised the Royal Navy by cold shouldering the wardroom and insisting on fraternising on the lower deck. The anonymous working man who deserted the Navy to find employment as one of Brunel’s labourers, whose lady partner refused his offer of marriage in the belief that he was a ‘gent’ in disguise, who died of consumption at an early age in the arms of his sister Anne. I wonder if there is somewhere a diary or notebook or a batch of letters that would fill in the empty spaces?

I hear and read of interesting theories on the subject of biography. There is for example, the modern school, I have heard it called ‘existential’, that holds all writing to be necessarily subjective and therefore fictional. That any attempt at objectivity is bound to fail if only because no human mind lends itself to scientific analysis, nor can ever be a perfect study in consistency, self understanding, and logic. Some, indeed, hold that any purpose in biographical writing other than to tell a good story through the medium of diaries, letters and reported conversations is inherently dishonest. I can see what they mean. And I must say that if anyone is ever to do justice to Medora and the Leighs, those tragic, angry figures who flutter uncomfortably at the edges of all studies of Lord Byron and his successors, it will surely have to be an accomplished writer of fiction with a penchant for deep and devious research. Such a writer might also embrace Ockham. There is, of course, the opposite view which has its own vociferous supporters. It argues that fact is sacrosanct and that the biographer’s task is simply to research and record fact, not to decorate or elaborate it. What one might call the Gradgrind approach. Where the late Roy Jenkins’s policy fits in, of eschewing all investigation, letting other writers do the research and using their findings as the basis of biography, I know not. I am not myself convinced that we yet know all that’s worth knowing about Gladstone, despite the attentions of such heavyweights as Morley and Jenkins. It seems to me that the late Doris Langley-Moore, whose Ada has probably enjoyed more widespread acclaim than any of the other works in the Byron genus, seems to straddle both theories with aplomb. Her works are full of the most literal diary entries even down to the underlinings, the sqiggly ‘and’ or ampersand which she religiously conveys, and the occasional mis-spelling, yet she doesn’t for a moment hide her own views on the people she is writing about, especially her bête noir Lady Byron. She introduces the first-person observation with alarming suddenness, so that the reader can never be quite certain whether she is speaking or herself or her subject. For myself, the debate is, as Belloc might have said, ‘much too broad and much too hollow; and learned me on either side use arguments I cannot follow’.

May I conclude by saying that it has been a delayed but enormous pleasure to have contributed, however imperfectly, to the bibliography of Lord Byron and his heirs. I expect others will follow, but I hope that before they begin to make up for my inadequacies they will give some thought to the possibilities that still exist for original biographical work, and for the belated recognition of some neglected and deserving Britishers.



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