THE BENSON DIARY
Selections from the Diary of Arthur Christopher Benson
Edited by
Ea mon Duffy and
R onald Hyam
Volume I
ATHENE PALLAS
Benefactors vii
Subscribers viii
Foreword Eamon Dufy and Ronald Hyam xiii
Note to Reader xvii
List of Illustrations xix
Introduction Eamon Dufy 1
Prologue: Extracts from an Eton Notebook, 1885–1897 77
1 The Last Days of Victoria, 1897–1901 91
2 Hope and Glory, 1901–1902 171
3 Man of Letters, 1903
4 From Windsor Castle to the Old Granary, 1904
5 Settling into Magdalene, 1904–1906
6 The Shadow of Depression, 1907–1909
7 Edwardian Heyday, 1910–1914
8 War, Mastership and Breakdown, 1914–1922 705
9 The Final Phase: ‘Busy and happy’, 1923–1925 799 Select Bibliography
for Diary Extracts
Chronology of the Life of A. C. Benson
of Persons and Places
A. C. Benson in his study, c. 1924
Introduction
I. Family
Arthur Christopher Benson (1862–1925) was the second and eldest surviving son of a marriage between cousins. His father, Edward White Benson (1829–1896), the son of an unsuccessful Midlands industrialist, had been educated at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, under its legendary headmaster, James Prince Lee, later the frst Bishop of Manchester. A glittering academic career at Trinity College, Cambridge, and a spell as an assistant master at Rugby under Thomas Arnold led to his appointment at the age of twenty-nine to be the founding headmaster of Wellington College, the public school conceived by Prince Albert to educate the sons of British Army ofcers. A man of unfinching principle, restless energy and domineering personality, EWB set his mark on the school with the aid of a terrifyingly eruptive temper and a ferocious resort to the birch. Having established Wellington as a successful public school on the model of Rugby, he spent fve years as a highly ef ective chancellor of the Diocese of Lincoln. There he established Lincoln Theological College, before being appointed by Disraeli in 1876 to be the founding Bishop of the newly established see of Truro. At Truro he planned and began the building of the frst new Gothic cathedral in England since the thirteenth century. In 1882, with the enthusiastic approval of Queen Victoria, he was promoted by the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, to the Archbishopric of Canterbury at the remarkably young age of ffty-three
Arthur Benson’s mother was Mary (‘Minnie’) Sidgwick (1841–1918), EWB’s second cousin, the sister of Henry Sidgwick, who had been one of his pupils at Rugby and who became the most distinguished British moral philosopher of the later nineteenth century. When only a child of eleven, Minnie was earmarked and groomed by the twenty-three-year-old EWB to be his future bride, a courtship whose weirdness neither ACB nor his brother Fred, both incessant family biographers, would acknowledge until long after their mother’s death. The future Archbishop and his all-but-child fancée were married in June 1859, when she was barely eighteen. Minnie, whose most intense relationships were to be exclusively with other women, soon realised that she feared rather than loved her ardent, overbearing yet emotionally and sexually needy husband. Years later, recalling their honeymoon, she would write ‘How I cried at Paris [. . .] The nights! – I can’t think how I lived [. .].’ The impulsive and fun-loving Minnie was unable to reciprocate his passion or meet his relentless and hectoring standards of efciency and
economy in her management of the household. This, combined with confusion about the nature and intensity of her feelings for other women, left the young wife with a sense of inadequacy which persisted into her thirties. But in 1876 she formed a close friendship with a devoutly evangelical married woman, ‘Mrs Mylne’, whom she christened ‘Tau’, and who was inevitably viewed with suspicion and dislike by EWB. Tau helped Minnie attain both personal religious peace and a measure of mature self-understanding and self-acceptance. In the interim, she bore her demanding husband six children with almost production-line regularity: Martin in August 1860, Arthur in April 1862, Nellie (Mary Eleanor) in October 1863, Maggie (Margaret) in June 1865, Fred (Edward Frederic) in July 1867 and Hugh, comparatively tardily and in the midst of personal and marital strain that would culminate in a nervous breakdown, in November 1871. Mary Benson’s emotional entanglements with younger women would complicate her relations with both her daughters: she was, however, adored by her sons. Her quick if relatively untutored intelligence, her empath’s gift of attentive listening, her easy-going non-judgmental temperament and her ready humour, all so unlike their father’s saturnine personality, endeared her to them. As all three boys began to write, she became ‘our most trusted and eager critic’.1 Hers was far from being a smothering love: Minnie was often absent from her children’s lives, most notably after Hugh’s birth, when she took herself of to Wiesbaden for a rest-cure on the eve of her husband’s move from Wellington to Lincoln. She lingered there for months in an infatuation with another woman that, to judge from her later confessional jottings about that time, seems to have come within a hair’s breadth of physical expression. Her conversion experience under the infuence of the evangelical ‘Tau’ Mylne ended that particular temptation, but not her capacity for an apparently ceaseless succession of close and demanding friendships with younger women.2 Like many empaths, she could disengage from intense concern with the present object of attention, including her children, when they or she were not present, and turn to equally whole-hearted preoccupation with someone else. Arthur was later to insist that this apparent neglect had left no adverse mark on any of them: though ‘she did not often walk with us or play with us’ the children ‘were left a great deal and happily to ourselves’. Her sons in particular revered her, and the contrast with their father meant that to all her children ‘her handling of the nursery circle’ seemed ‘perfection’, for ‘she never overruled us or dictated our occupations’. Whereas their father’s company ‘put a strain on us’,
1 A. C. Benson (ed.), Mary Benson: A Memoir, intro. Gwen Watkins (Rye 2010), p. 70
2 Rodney Bolt, As Good as God and as Clever as the Devil: The Impossible Life of Mary Benson (London 2011).
3 she ‘laughed us out of our little tempers; and if there was trouble, we confded instantly in her’.1
By contrast, for the Benson children, their father was an awesome and frightening presence. His stern and perhaps panicky disapproval of his young wife’s practical failings led periodically to ‘painful scenes, tearful admissions, serious entreaties and severe reproaches’.2 Only when ACB had been through his father’s papers while preparing his biography, and discovered that forbidding fgure had lovingly preserved every childish letter and clumsy drawing, would he come to realise the depth of the Archbishop’s love for his children, and his unfulflled yearning for their closeness and confdence. In his lifetime, however, EWB’s desire both to shape them and protect them from the world’s contagion froze any possibility of unguarded af ection. Though the relentless fogging schoolmaster never beat his children, and according to Arthur never imposed punishment of any sort, nevertheless, even trivial childish misdemeanors were as liable to meet with ‘stinging rebukes’ as if they were capital crimes. Delay in eating their vegetables, throwing stones into the goldfsh pond, or playing with their fngers during family prayers could evoke the ‘appalling atmosphere’ of their father’s indignation, as if it were the most grievous moral turpitude.3 So, according to Fred Benson, the Archbishop’s children entered his presence fearful of his ‘blighting displeasure’, with ‘washed hands and neat hair and low voices [. . .] were never frank with him’, but ‘sat on the edge of our chairs, and were glad to be gone’.4 Arthur recalled how as a child just beginning to be fascinated by ‘the mystery of music’, he had crept down to the drawing-room early one summer morning, ‘and began to pick out chords on the piano’. His father, who had little use for music except as an aid to worship, emerged from his study and, despite his evident approval of his son’s early rising, ‘all he said was, “Hadn’t you better read a useful book?”’ In later life ACB would be an enthusiastic amateur performer on piano and organ; but under that withering paternal dismissal, he recalled, ‘my musical experiments were at an end, not to return for many years’.5
The Archbishop’s frequent episodes of black depression, moreover, cast a gloom over the household that prompted their mother to plead, vainly, that he seek medical help. Little wonder that the eponymous hero of ACB’s frst novel, Arthur Hamilton, wrote ‘I hate Papa’ on a scrap of paper, and buried it in the garden. Work on his father’s biography after the Archbishop’s sudden death in 1896 would therefore overthrow Arthur’s childish intimidated
1 Mary Benson: A Memoir, p. 32. 2 Mary Benson: A Memoir, p. 24.
3 R H Benson, Confessions of a Convert (London 1913), p. 15
4 E. F. Benson, Our Family Afairs (London 1920), p. 39
5 A. C. Benson, The Trefoil: Wellington College, Lincoln and Truro (Lincoln 1923), p. 47
perception of his remote and forbidding parent, and smite him with guilt –‘he loved me – I loved him not’. Unsurprisingly, his father became a recurrent presence in the teeming dream-life recorded in the diary, dreams in which the stern cassocked fgure frolicked with toys and children’s games, kissed his son tenderly and spoke plainly of the love he felt for him.1
ACB’s siblings were all in their own ways remarkable, though Martin, the eldest, a precocious paragon of ‘godliness and good learning’, died of cerebral meningitis in February 1878 while still a schoolboy at Winchester. This loss devastated his father, who had doted on but also emotionally driven the boy. In their Wellington and Lincoln days, Arthur had been moderately close to the coolly self-sufcient Martin, and of course shared the family’s ‘shock and bewilderment’ at his death, but the elder brother’s departure to Winchester in the autumn of 1874 while Arthur was still a boarder at prep school had weakened that earlier bond, and in later life Benson could write of Martin’s death relatively unemotionally.2
Nellie, the next in age to ACB, features only retrospectively in the diary. Like her sister Maggie, Nellie inherited their father’s proneness to depression, but not his imperious temperament, and she was the only one of the Archbishop’s children not intimidated by him. Despite recurrent bouts of ill health, she was an energising, cheerful and sometimes iconoclastic presence in the family, ‘the best of us’, in Arthur’s opinion, in whose company, he thought, ‘nobody could be morbid or haunted or unduly fanciful’.3 Like all the Benson children, Nellie’s closest emotional relationships were with members of her own sex – most ardently with the robustly bisexual composer and sufragist Ethel Smyth.4 Smyth had originally been Maggie’s close
1 There is a sensitive discussion of their relationship in Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise, pp. 15–19; for typical dreams of this kind, see below, 3 November 1901, 6 January 1911
2 See the full and illuminating account of Martin Benson as ‘the exemplar’ in David Newsome’s Godliness and Good Learning: Four studies on a Victorian Ideal (London 1968), pp. 148–94; Mary Benson: A Memoir, p. 77; A. C. Benson, The Trefoil, pp. 85, 246–50.
3 Brian Masters, The Life of E. F. Benson (London 1991), p. 89
4 Dame Ethel Mary Smyth (1858–1944) was one of the most remarkable women of her generation. A keen cyclist at a time when the bicycle was still considered an unsuitable mode of transport for women, she discovered a vocation to music in her mid-twenties, and despite ferce opposition from her father, studied composition in Leipzig and became a prolifc and versatile composer, perhaps best remembered now for her 1891 Mass in D, her French-language opera The Wreckers (1902–4) and her comic opera The Bosun’s Mate (1913–14). Her outstanding talent and services to music were recognised by honorary doctorates from the Universities of Durham, Oxford and St Andrews, and by her appointment as Dame of the British Empire in 1922, the frst female composer to be thus honoured. An ardent supporter of woman’s sufrage, she was briefy imprisoned for a protest in which she smashed a window, and she composed the movement’s anthem, ‘The March of the Women’. She was the author of a series of lively autobiographical books, beginning with the two-volumed Impressions that Remain (1919).
in troduction 5 friend, but Nellie’s mother Minnie was equally smitten, a complication that placed severe strains on what Minnie called ‘the awful inner tie between mother and daughter’,1 and was only resolved by Nellie’s untimely demise. After reading modern languages at Lady Margaret Hall (where her studies were cut short when Maggie went up to Oxford by a summons back to home duties) Nellie threw herself into unpaid social work on behalf of deprived girls and women in the inner city, and helped establish the Women’s University Settlement in Southwark. Her continuing work among the poor led directly to what proved to be a fatal infection with diphtheria in 1890, rife at that time among the poor in the neighbourhood of the Archbishop’s country house, Addington. She was only twenty-seven Her death signalled the end of the shared activities, amateur dramatics and home entertainments which had bound the Benson children, like so many other tight-knit middle-class Victorian families. As Arthur recalled sadly, ‘Many of our family customs died with Nelly: our Christmas acting, our holiday magazine, and our round games. No one desired to renew them, and they were never revived again.’2
Arthur’s younger sister Maggie was the most formidably intelligent of the Archbishop’s children (her Oxford supervisor commented on the ‘absolute remorselessness’ of her intellect), but she inherited not only the Archbishop’s academic prowess, but his depressive mood swings and his domineering personality. Her mental collapse in 1907 would result in a paranoid distrust of her mother, and a corrosive jealousy of Lucy Tait, daughter of EWB’s predecessor as Archbishop and the inseparable companion who now shared Minnie’s bed. A stellar undergraduate career at Lady Margaret Hall, where she read philosophy and political economy, might have led to an academic career, and her considerable artistic talents elicited the admiration of John Ruskin. She too returned home, however, to help manage the Archbishop’s household. Despite her brilliance and the organisational abilities which came to the fore in her archaeological work in Egypt, she was in some matters astonishingly innocent. In 1890, aged twenty-fve, she wrote an embarrassed and circumlocutory letter to her mother asking to be told the facts of life.3
In 1895, however, she escaped the increasing frustrations of home by going to Egypt to excavate the Temple of the Goddess Mut at Karnak. The excavation continued over the next three winters in collaboration with the Scottish archaeologist Janet (‘Nettie’) Gourlay, to whom she formed an intense emotional attachment. Their exemplary account of the dig, The Temple of Mut at Asher (1899), was the frst such publication by any female archaeologist. Though a career as a professional Egyptologist now lay open
1 Bolt, As Good as God, p. 186
2 Mary Benson: A Memoir, p. 78
3 Printed in David Williams, Genesis and Exodus: A Portrait of the Benson Family (London 1979), pp. 108–9
1900
Saturday 6 January 1900 (Dunskey)
The War hangs all this time like a dark evil cloud over everything. Nothing has happened lately – one or two tiny successes send one’s thermometer up. But it is a dark prospect & there must be weary months ahead.
Friday 12 January 1900 (London)
[A literary lunch in London: Gosse, the host] was of course the most brilliant, fitting about like a butterfy & talking beautifully of a Russian Novelist Dostoievsky [sic] (?) (Crime & Punishment), in which he said you as it were opened a door & went into another life – it was your own life that became unreal – you throbbed & thrilled with the tragedy of the book – you felt yourself close to the very bone & fbre of life.
We broke up gradually – but G. told a splendid story.
The Master of Trinity (Butler)1 came up to town for some function & came in canonicals – gown & bands & cap. Instead of taking a cab he got into an omnibus. Everyone regarded him with amazement, as he sate like a dissipated Stewart prince, with a serene & all-embracing smile; who should get in but the Master of Jesus, rough Morgan,2 who took a place at the far end, hoping to be unnoticed – at last Butler’s eye fell on him – he nodded & smiled & said, across the bus “Ah, is it you, dear Master of Jesus; & how are you?”
There was a sudden sensation in the bus, the spectators suddenly perceiving that B. was a lunatic, & they sate looking at him, ready to dart their eyes away if he looked at them. The conductor collected fares, but he was so afraid of Butler that he thought he had better leave him undisturbed – but the Master, seeing the conductor leaving the Bus, called playfully “Boy, boy –what are the expenses of this transit?” The conductor was so horribly taken aback that he said nothing but held up two fngers. Butler looked vacantly at him & then turned to Morgan – “and now, dear Master of Jesus”, he said “I must ask you to interpret this symbol for me.” Morgan lost all sense of decorum at the scene, & said loudly “For God’s sake, Butler, pay your twopence & have done with it”.
Saturday 13 January 1900 (Terling Place, Witham, Essex)
[ACB often stayed at the Essex estate of his relation, Professor John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh (1842–1919), the Nobel Laureate physicist.] Lord
1 Henry Montagu Butler (1833–1918). See 23 February 1905 ( p. 393) and, for another characteristic Butler anecdote, 25 May 1905 ( p. 412).
2 Henry Arthur (‘Black’) Morgan (1830–1912), reformist Master of Jesus from 1885
the last days of victoria , 1897 – 1901 147 Rayleigh very genial at dinner. He looks better & stronger than he used, though far from strong – more distinguished – I like his big tall forehead, tranquil eye, shapely hands, and odd fexibility of form. He told me that on some Chemical Studies he is publishing he wanted to put the motto “The works of the Lord are great, sought out etc” but the printer’s reader pointed out that the “Lord ” might be taken for himself!
Tuesday 16 January 1900
[At lunch with Gosse in London] We talked of the deplorable barbarism of Upper Classes – the absence of the development of intelligence, of which the disastrous results are now apparent in S Africa – the scorn felt for our utter stupidity in Germany & France. I was forced to admit it. At Eton it results partly from home infuence & partly from masters – the tone there is “do your work conscientiously – it is dull, but never mind. Then play for all you are worth – to be interested in anything is eccentric & to talk about it is priggish.” Went down to Brighton to Goodhart in his stately house.1
Thursday 18 January 1900 (Rye)
I like the beauty of the people, girls, boys, young men & women, one sees at Brighton; I have seldom seen so much beauty in the people one meets in the streets [. .] I pay my homage to the eternal & compelling charm of youth –tho’ I don’t want to be young again. I am happier than I ever was when I was young. Independence & loss of sensitiveness, indif erence to people’s disapproval in small matters a huge gain [. . .] I went of in the afternoon to Rye.
Now let me dip my pen in rainbow hues – or rather let me be exact, fnished, delicate, to describe the charm of this place. It was a tedious journey: & I left my bag at Brighton containing money, cigarettes, books, papers, journal etc – all that makes a journey supportable.
Henry James, looking somewhat cold, tired, & old met me at the station.2 Most af ectionate, patting me on the shoulder & really welcoming with abundance of petits soins 3 The town stands on a steep sort of island rising from the great sea-plain: inland it is separated from hilly country by one valley only – but south & south-east the fat plain stretches like a green chessboard for miles. You see the winding stream, very pale in the sunset, the ship-yards, the houses of Rye harbour, the strand dotted with Martello
1 Arthur Murray Goodhart (1866–1941) was the Eton colleague who would take over Benson’s House in 1904. A musician and precentor at Eton, he became Principal of the Guildhall School of Music (1892–6).
2 Henry James had been settled in Lamb House, Rye, from 1898; despite ACB’s comment on his elderly appearance, he was only ffty-seven at this time.
3 ‘Little attentions’, care or consideration.
Edmond Warre, headmaster of Eton (1884–1905), 1890
‘The sleepy autocrat’ (p. 237)
ACB, newly appointed housemaster, with the boys of his House, 1892
Baldwin’s End (Kindersley’s House), Eton, June 1903
‘The house burnt to the ground & two boys burnt to death’ (p. 264)
ACB (right) bicycling with a friend, c 1885
An indefatigable cyclist into his ffties, ACB’s love afair with ‘my brother the bicycle’ (p. 259) survived its uncomfortable beginnings on a penny-farthing, which was replaced by the modern safety bicycle in the late 1880s
health, complimenting us on our looks, as if discharging a natural courtesy. Presently we went in to lunch. It was hard to talk to Mrs H who rambled along in a very inconsequent way, with a bird-like sort of wit, looking sideways & treating one’s remarks as amiable interruptions.
Lunch was long & plentiful – rather coarse fare. We were served f rst with odd little cakes of mincemeat, one for each, a little high perhaps. The solid niece regarded hers stolidly but didn’t taste, with an air of knowing too much about its composition. Hardy of ered claret, & rose on each occasion to pour it in my glass. Mrs H struggled with & chipped at a great chicken, stuf ed, with an odd little dish of bits of cold bacon beside it. She stood to carve, & treated the chicken as if she were engaged in some curious handicraft – after which she devoted herself in a serious silence to her meat. Hardy f lled my plate with odd thin slices of lamb, & sluiced his own plate of cold lamb with hot gravy. Then came a great apple-tart. It was a meal such as one might have got at a big farm-house – two tiny youthful maids waited, bursting with zeal & interest. The room was a dull one, rather slatternly. It was distempered in purple, much streaked & stained. Two wholly unsatisfactory portraits of Hardy, one a Herkomer – giving him a solid almost sleek air, whereas really he looks very frail, worn & thin. He was carefully dressed, with a tie curiously chosen to carry on the line & pattern of his coat.
Mrs H produced cigarettes, & Hardy said he never smoked; but Gosse playfully insisted that Mrs H should have one. She said she had never smoked, but lit a cigarette & coughed cruelly at intervals, every now & then laying it down & saying “There, that will be enough” but always resuming it, till I feared disaster. Hardy looked at her so f ercely & scornfully that I made haste to say that I had now persuaded my mother to smoke.
Hardy’s talk was dry & dispassionate. He told me some local things, spoke of the wisdom of letting labourers buy a little land, saying at intervals “That wins them over – they are thenceforth on the side of the Squire.” He took the democratic view very strongly. But though he was quite talkative he struck me as very uncommunicative – it was all at f rst quite impersonal talk [. . .]
After lunch we went out into the garden. Such an odd little place, the trees all straggling densely up, with little ill-kept lawns, like small rooms, lying in the wood [. .] Hardy seemed aggrieved that the trains ran so close to the house, but assured us that he did not mind them. Both he & Mrs H said they didn’t care to walk out much, but paced a little in their own wood [. . .]
Mrs Hardy to guard herself from the weather, assumed the funniest little bonnet, like a large bun made of fowers with four white-metal ornaments on the top. The stout niece had some thought of croquet, & brought out balls which sank deep in the mossy irregular lawn. Hardy said “If you had told me
edwardian heyday , 1910 – 1914 655 you wanted to play croquet, I would have had it put to rights. It is level underneath!” It certainly was not level on the surface! [. .] Hardy sate on a little bench in the sun & talked freely & amiably. He told me how Cockerell of the Fitzwilliam had asked him for a MS, & when he suggested that C. should come & choose, C. contrived to carry away all the MSS, & to give them to various museums etc. These MSS were not drafts, however. Hardy said he wrote his frst drafts on scraps of paper, altered them & then copied them fair for the printers destroying the frst draft & corrected the proofs a good deal – “I hope they won’t lay hands on the corrected proofs” he said [. . .] Then Mrs H took me of to look at various things [. . .] There was a picture of Archdeacon Giford, her uncle “such a handsome & distinguished man” she murmured [. . .] Then we went out & pinched the pods of the Noli me tangere1 to see them writhe & coil up & shoot out the seeds. Mrs Hardy got entirely absorbed in this & went on doing it with little jumps & elfn shrieks of pleasure [. . .] Then we came in. Hardy fetched a letter to show Gosse to ask his advice, & we then extricated ourselves. Hardy stood at the door & waved his hand as we burrowed in among the dark trees.
It was intensely interesting, but it gave me rather a melancholy impression; the poor house, uncomfortable & rather pretentious, in its close plantation, airless & dark, like a house wrapped up & put away in a box; the crazy & fantastic wife, the stolid niece didn’t seem the right background for the old rhapsodist, in the evening of his days. It gave me a sense of something intolerable, the thought of his having to live day & night with the absurd, inconsequent, hufy, rambling old lady. They don’t get on together at all. She confded to Gosse once that they were always squabbling. “I beat him!” she said. Gosse said that it was very improper, so she added, “but with The Times rolled up.” Today she told Gosse that he was more difcult to live with than ever, so infated with his own greatness. That he wouldn’t let her have a motor, & would accept no honours except what he could keep to himself. This referred to the O.M. & the fact that he had refused a knighthood. The marriage was thought a misalliance for her, when he was poor & undistinguished, & she continues to resent it.
He is not agreeable to her either, but his patience must be incredibly tried. She is so queer, & yet has to be treated as rational, while she is full, I imagine, of suspicions & jealousies & afronts which must be half insane. She must be a singular partner for a man interested in a feminine temperament; and they neither of them seemed at all content, & he waiting stolidly for destiny to declare itself – the thought which lies behind all his books [. . .] He seems a
1 ‘Touch me not’: a yellow-fowered herbaceous plant (Impatiens noli-tangere) whose pods explode and expel seeds when touched.
ACB’s study, the Old Lodge, c. 1924
The sentimental books that made ACB famous were scribbled ‘in an armchair in intervals of work’ (p. 438), the pages dropped one by one into the basket under the desk and sent, uncorrected, to be typed
The Old Lodge, exterior (now Benson Hall), c. 1924 ACB expanded Professor Newton’s shabby and diminutive house into a ‘palace in Arabian Nights’ (p. 801)
The drawing room, the Old Lodge, c. 1924
As with most of the Old Lodge, this grand room was demolished under ACB’s successor as Master, and bête noire, A. B. Ramsay
Benson’s self-designed ‘Great Room’ (now Benson Hall), c 1924 ‘I took [Thomas] Hardy to my house, & he as a former architect was amused at my devices’
Benson’s staf, 1920s
Benson’s beloved valet and factotum, Jesse Hunting, housekeeper, Ellen Spicer, and maid, Martha Sharpe, in the courtyard of the Old Lodge
College photograph, 1924
Taken in front of the Pepys Library
of college photograph, 1924
Detail
Seated: V. S. Vernon Jones (far left), A. S. Ramsey (third left), ACB (centre), Professor Nuttall (third right) and David Keilin (far right)
Monday 19 June 1916 (Tremans)
[On the journey there, read ] a book by Hugh Walpole on Conrad1 which seemed to me like a very small lump or pinch of Henry James dissolved in infnite quarts of not very fresh water, and then still further diluted. In one place he spins of a list of epoch-makers, not one of whose names is known to me. I suppose HW must increase & that I must decrease – but I admit frankly that there is something rather humiliating in fnding Hugh Walpole go so far ahead of one, while one feels his mind to be of so very thin & paltry a character – a mere echo. Yet he has a force & a charm which I certainly haven’t got – more vitality, I expect.
Saturday 24 June 1916
[Travelling to Cambridge by train.] At one place a handsome Major in uniform got in – he had been seen of by a pretty & very sad-looking daughter – the train waited nearly ¼ of an hour; and not one word did their loving English hearts say to each other. They just stood dumb – obviously & poignantly miserable – side by side on the platform. They couldn’t forget the presence of others, & yet were too simple to wish to pose before an audience.
Thursday 29 June 1916
[At lunch in the Athenaeum] Lord Curzon came & lunched hard by with some old ex-Indian. Curzon is a dreadful man – his pale bulky face, his lank hair, his self-important voice, his rueful, self-conscious eyes, combined with an air, at all events, of intense respectability, make him a most disenchanted prince. His left hand was very feeble & he said he had lost power in it. His talk was self-absorbed & uninteresting, with now & then a personal enquiry, thrown like a bone to a dog – & not awaiting or expecting an answer. He looked to me, and is a pompous, able, self-absorbed, unpleasant man – isolated not by genius but by simple conceit & rapacity. He is far from the Kingdom of Heaven. I looked on him & did not hate him exactly, but thought him ugly & tedious in body & mind, tho’ with an undoubted strength.
Saturday 1 July 1916
[The day the Battle of the Somme began; Percy Lubbock came to stay.] Percy is running Ramsay for the Headmaster-ship of Eton2 [. .] Now Ramsay is a poky, narrow-minded, parochial, stubborn, pig-headed little fellow, the worst sort of person to be put in charge of Eton, like a swine-herd driving pigs, because he will encourage them in that fatuous belief in the glory and
1 Hugh Walpole, Joseph Conrad (London 1916) from the Writers of the Day series.
2 Edward Lyttelton had resigned. For Allen Beville Ramsay, see 13 October 1903 ( p. 286).
war , mastership and breakdown , 1914 – 1922 759 majesty & beatifc vision of Eton, which is the worst point about it. I said much of this to P. – & that the one thing was for schools frankly to take up a modern curriculum, try to learn what the world is like, – & not to feel so self-important. Ramsay will do nothing of this. He knows nothing but Eton, & is provincial to start with, totally devoid of inspiration. P. only said that I didn’t understand Eton, or like Eton – & I don’t.
Sunday 2 July 1916
A calm rather hot day. The big British attack has begun – (can that be the strange tremor in the air, rather than sound – a thickening of the medium, which has been going on all these days?1 It must be 120 miles away, the great fght). It is tremendous to think of, but like all battles in this war, it will last I suppose six weeks2 [. . .] [Percy] spoke to me of the women working under him, with great horror. He says they can work so hard & steadily & with such goodwill, but must be commanded. If not, there is nothing mean, underhand, ungentlemanly, scheming they won’t do. He described an intrigue of Duchess Adeline3 & others, on P’s own Commission – to get a secretary thrust out of ofce not because she is inefcient but to job someone else in. Louis Malet4 discovered it & told Mr Justice Younger,5 the chairman – he buried his head in his hands, & at last said “but it’s so unladylike”. He says that their attitude is complacent: “Well, now you see we have proved that we can do everything just as well as men & must be admitted to all their privileges.” But P says that if any enterprise is left to undiluted women, it disappears, like a fsh into a net, among intrigue & extravagance & unscrupulousness. They are unprincipled, he says, & need a frm hand over them.
Wednesday 5 July 1916
[Travelling back to Cambridge from Tremans in a railway restaurant car, in the next compartment] sate Horatio Bottomley editor of John Bull, 6 a rogue
1 Systematic British and French bombardment of the German lines on the River Somme, in northern France, had begun seven days before the battle itself.
2 In fact the Battle of the Somme did not end till 19 November 1916
3 Adeline Marie Russell, Duchess of Bedford (née Somers-Cocks; 1852–1920): the Duchess was Chair of the European War Fund, a body created by the Order of St John and the Red Cross, for which Lubbock was working.
4 Sir Louis du Pan Mallet (1864–1936), diplomat and civil servant, who had been appointed Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1913, but was expelled when Turkey came into the war allied with Germany.
5 Robert Younger, Baron Blanesburgh (1861–1946) was a Scottish lawyer and High Court Judge, Chancery Division (1915–19).
6 Horatio Bottomley (1860–1933) was a fnancier, journalist, founder and editor of the periodical John Bull, politician and con-man. When a Liberal MP (1906–12), he was forced to resign after being declared bankrupt; his fortunes were restored by the war, for
Select Bibliography
This bibliography is based on the books cited or substantially used in the introduction and notes. Standard works of reference, such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, are not included.
Books by A . C . Benson (in chronological order of publication):
A. C. Benson, Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B.A. of Trinity College, Cambridge, Extracted from His Letters and Diaries, with Reminiscences of His Conversation, by his friend Christopher Carr of the same college (London 1886)
— William Laud, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury: A Study (London 1887)
— and H. F. W. Tatham, Men of Might: Studies of Great Characters (London 1890)
— Le Cahier Jaune: Poems (Eton 1892)
— Poems (London 1893)
— Babylonica (Eton 1895)
— Lyrics (London 1895)
— Thomas Gray, an Essay (Eton 1895)
— Essays (London 1896)
— Lord Vyet and Other Poems (London 1897)
— Fasti Etonenses: A Biographical History of Eton (Eton 1899)
— The Life of Edward White Benson, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, 2 vols (London 1899)
— The Professor and Other Poems (London 1900)
— The Schoolmaster: A Commentary upon the Aims and Methods of an Assistant-Master in a Public School (London 1902)
— Ode on Japan (London 1902)
— The Myrtle Bough: A Vale (Eton 1903)
— The Hill of Trouble, and Other Stories (London 1903)
— Poems of Whittier, with introduction by A. C. Benson (London 1903)
— The Olive Bough (Eton 1904)
— Alfred Tennyson (London 1904)
— The House of Quiet: An Autobiography (London 1904)
— The Isles of Sunset, and Other Stories (London 1904)
— Rossetti (London 1904)
— Peace, and Other Poems (London 1905)
— Edward Fitzgerald (London 1905)
— The Upton Letters (London 1905)
— The Thread of Gold (London 1905)
— Walter Pater (London 1906)
— From a College Window (London 1906)
— The Letters of One: A Study in Limitations by Charles Hare Plunkett (London 1907)
— and Viscount Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty’s Correspondence, 1837–1861, 3 vols (London 1907)
— The Altar Fire (London 1907)
— Hymns and Carols (Eton 1907)
— Beside Still Waters (London 1907)
— At Large (London 1908)
— The Gate of Death: A Diary (London 1909)
— Poems of Arthur Christopher Benson (London 1909)
— The Silent Isle (London 1910)
— Ruskin: A Study in Personality (London 1911)
— The Leaves of the Tree (London 1911)
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories (London 1911)
— Thy Rod and Thy Staf (London 1912)
— The Child of the Dawn (London 1912)
— Along the Road (London 1913)
— Joyous Gard (London 1913)
— Watersprings (London 1913)
— Herb Moly and Heartsease (London 1914)
— Where No Fear Was: A Book about Fear (London 1914)
— The Orchard Pavilion (London 1914)
— Escape and Other Essays (London 1915)
— Father Payne (London 1915)
— Hugh: Memoirs of a Brother (London 1915)
— (ed.), Brontë Poems: Selections from the Poetry of Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell Brontë, with introduction by A. C. Benson (London 1915)
— Meanwhile: A Packet of War Letters (London 1916)
— Life and Letters of Maggie Benson (London 1918)
— (ed.), Cambridge Essays on Education (Cambridge 1918)
— The Reed of Pan: English Renderings of Greek Epigrams and Lyrics (London 1922)
— Magdalene College Cambridge: A Little View of Its Buildings and History (Cambridge 1923)
— The Trefoil: Wellington College, Lincoln and Truro (Lincoln 1923)
— Memories and Friends (London 1924)
— and Lawrence Weaver (eds), Everybody’s Book of the Queen’s Dolls’ House (London 1924)
— Chris Gascoyne: An Experiment in Solitude from the Diaries of John Trevor (London 1924)
— The House of Menerdue (London 1925)
— The Canon (London 1926)
— Rambles and Refections (London 1926)
— Cressage (London 1927)
— (ed.), Mary Benson: A Memoir, with introduction by Gwen Watkins (Rye 2010)
Books by other members of the Bens on family :
E. F. (‘Fred’) Benson, Dodo: A Detail of the Day (London 1893)
— Six Common Things (London 1893)
— The Luck of the Vails (London 1901)
— David Blaize (London 1916)
— Queen Lucia (London 1920)
— Our Family Afairs (London 1920)
— Miss Mapp (London 1922)
— Mother (London 1925)
— As We Were: A Victorian Peep-Show (London 1930)
— (ed.), Henry James: Letters to A. C. Benson and August Monod (London 1930)
— Final Edition: Informal Biography (London 1940)
Margaret (‘Maggie’) Benson and Janet Gourlay, The Temple of Mut in Asher (London 1899)
Margaret (‘Maggie’) Benson, The Soul of a Cat, and Other Stories (London 1901)
— Subject to Vanity (London 1905)
— The Venture of Rational Faith (London 1908)
Mary Eleanor (‘Nelly’) Benson, Streets and Lanes of the City, with a brief memoir by her father (posthumous; London 1891)
— At Sundry Times and In Divers Manners (posthumous; London 1891)
Robert Hugh Benson, The Light Invisible (London 1903)
— By What Authority (London 1904)
— The Sentimentalists (London 1906)
— The Religion of the Plain Man (London 1906)
— Papers of a Pariah (London 1907)
— A Mirror of Shalott (London 1907)
— Lord of the World (London 1907)
— The Necromancers (London 1909)
— A Winnowing (London 1910)
— Confessions of a Convert (London 1913)
I. A. Richards opening the sealed box containing the Diary, with David Strachan, the College carpenter, 1975
Index of Persons and Places
Benson routinely mentions scores of places, pupils, friends and acquaintances, without further comment or discussion: inclusion of all such glancing references would have swollen the index unhelpfully, and most have therefore been excluded. Page numbers in bold indicate pages on which biographical or other context is supplied. Numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Plate sections are prefxed by volume number (I. or I I.).
Abercrombie, Lascelles 721
Aberdeen, John Hamilton-Gordon, 7th Earl (later 1st Marquess) of 214
Acland, Sir Francis Dyke 639, 639
Addington Park (Surrey) 5, 80, 84, 86, 127, 724, 911, 912, 920
Abbott, Edwin 669
Abbotsford (Roxburghshire) 348–9
ADC (Cambridge University Amateur Dramatic Club) 802, 828, 921
Ainger, Arthur 33, 34, 55, 77, 78, 94–5 (host at Tan-yr-allt), 104, 117, 133, 143 (bibulous Eton supper), 224 (unforthcoming about Cory), 228, 261, 263, 266, 293, 307 (introduces ACB to E. Horner at Mustians), 325, 330, 342 (a ‘hard defniteness’ about him), 344, 557, 558 (on holiday in Norfolk with ACB), 588, 616 (in Scottish Borders), 632 (in Cornwall), 912, 918, I.4
Aitken, William 861
Albany, Charles Edward, Duke of (Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) 139 (Coburg succession), 140, 145, 208, 298–9 (ACB goes to Claremont to see), 383, 511, 863, I 8
Albany, Princess Helen, Duchess of 18, 28, 139, 140 (represents Queen Victoria at EWB’s memorial), 208 (ACB visits), 298–9, 380–4 (Christmas with), 416–17 (visits Cambridge), I 8
Albert Victor (‘Eddy’), Prince, Duke of Clarence and Avondale 380
Alexander, Sidney 631
Alexander of Teck, 1st Earl of Athlone, Prince 298, 379–82, I.8
Alice, Princess, Countess of Athlone 162, 379–82, I.8
Alington, Cyril Argentine 508–9, 826
Allbutt, Sir Thomas Cliford 561, 686, 738, 841
Alnwick (Northumb.) 136
Ambleside (Lake District) 420, 513, 706
Amersham 642
Anglesey (Wales) 135, 187
Anglesey Abbey (Cambs.) 406
Anhalt, Prince Aribert of 160–1
Anson, Sir William Reynell 242
Archer, William 711
Armitage Robinson, Joseph 20, 260, 376, 589–90, 592, 687–8, 714
Arnold, Frances 420
Arnold, Dr Thomas 420, 882
Arnold, Sir Thomas Walker 757
Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, Prince 93, 138, 142, 562
Ascot (Berks.), St Michael’s nursing home 62–4, 784–9, 830, 919, 920
Ashbourne (Derbyshire) 642
Ashton under Hill (Worcs.) 321
Ashwell (Herts.) 281
Asquith, Cyril 718, 733
Asquith, Herbert Henry, 1st Earl of Oxford and 18, 82–3 (ACB congratulates Margot Tennant on engagement to), 173 (looks ‘like a bishop’), 295–6 (a ‘healthy machine’, gossips, Randall Davidson on), 331, 539–40, 560 (‘strong features & no knees’), 616, 643, 661 (‘always with a pretty woman & always tipsy’), 717–19, 733–4 (Geofrey Madan on A’s household), 770, 868–9 (in Cambridge), I.22
Asquith (née Tennant), Margot, Countess of Oxford and 7, 82, 83, 401–2 (Hugh’s Torrey-Alexander Mission anecdote), 436, 699 (‘old fshwife’), 769, 818, 868–9, 911, 912, 921, I 22
Asquith, Raymond 310
index of persons and places 924
Athenaeum (London club) 23, 173, 299, 326, 443, 454, 593, 596, 627, 645, 688, 725, 733, 751, 752, 763, 831
Athlone see Alexander of Teck, Princess Alice
Audley End (Essex) 365, 742, 761–2, 829
Austen Leigh, Augustus 177, 315
Austen Leigh, Edward 362
Austin, Alfred 606
Avebury, John Lubbock, 1st Baron 241, 464–5
Aylsham (Norfolk) 216, 222
Baden-Powell, Robert, Lt General 154
Bailey, Harold T. 823
Bailey, John 867–8
Baits Bite Lock (Cambs.) 395, 410
Baldwin, Stanley 803–4, 820, 822–3
Balfour, Alice Blanche 351, 353
Balfour, Arthur Balfour, 1st Earl of 18, 82–3, 115, 132–3 (correspondence with ACB about EWB), 209, 212, 243, 264, 305, 350–3 (ACB’s visit to Scottish home of), 421–2, 477, 486 (conversation with ACB at RSL), 603 (anecdote about Churchill on), 651, 660, 692 (dream), 841 (charming at RSL), 868, I 3, II.7
Balfour, Eustace James 351, 353
Balfour, Gerald William 351–3, 422
Balfour of Burleigh, George Bruce, 7th Lord 855–6
Balliol College, Oxford 44 (Sayle), 83, 95 (Jowett), 134, 185 (‘medium personalities’), 187 (Eddie Cadogan), 234 (Francis Elliot), 252, 387 (Jowett), 410–11, 459, 605 (Stachan-Davidson), 680 (Geofrey Madan), 685 (Robert Browning), 733 (Madan)
Bargiel, Woldemar 181
Baring, Maurice 86, 94, 98, 301, 401–2 (Torrey-Alexander Mission), 478, 833
Barlow, Sir Thomas 481
Barnes, Mgr Arthur 360, 646, 767, 914
Barnes, Ernest, Bishop of Birmingham 55, 387, 465, 845, I.13
Barnes, Sir Hugh Shakespear 646–7
Barrie, Sir James Matthew 229, 630, 711–12, 868, 914
Barton, Dr and Mrs 682
Bateman, Sir Alfred 295
Bateson, William 429, 534
Bathori, SS, beaching of 106–7
Battenberg see Louis
Beardsley, Aubrey 307, 777, 872
Beatrice of Saxe-Coburg, Princess 467
Beck, Edward A. 394, 415–16, 600
Beddgelert (Gwynedd) 121
Bedford, Adeline Marie Russell, Duchess of 242
Beeby, C. E. 351
Beeching, Henry Charles 744
Beerbohm, Sir Max 10, 18, 187 (A Christmas Garland), 550, 637, 671, 688, 770 (W. Nicholson on), 778, I.15
Beit, Sir Alfred 242
Bell, Clive 827
Bell, George 735
Bell, Gertrude Margaret 295, 619–21, I 20
Bell, Sir Hugh 619
Bellars, Alfred Ernest 463–4, 487, 512 (‘quite a treat among the men’), 519–21, 546–7 (social tensions in college beginning), 560, 579 (‘dreadful little cad’), 583 (preaches dissension), 917
Belloc, Hilaire 10, 18, 86, 288 (‘more poetical’ than Chesterton but both look ‘so common’), 288, 564, 597–9 (drunk at Pepys Dinner), 604, 607–8 (visit to at Shipley), 637, 704 (anecdote about), 917
Bennett, Arnold 10, 627, 630, 637, 711
BENSON, A. C. xv–xvii, xix; same-sex love 6, 28, 45, 47–8; depression 60–6, 80 (1890 ‘a most black year’), 81, 308–9 (1904), 475–6, 491, 501, 507–37 passim, 782–95; dreams 78, 87 (‘deformed hairy child’), 151, 184–5 (red train, and his father kisses him), 242–3, 268 (stufng a dog’s head), 285 (disorderly classes), 300 (eyeless lizard), 354 (trial for his life), 370 (Newton), 385 (Mary Cholmondeley), 554 (Tidal wave, naked football match), 569 (Maggie), 577 (‘dripping passages’ and ‘windswept scafolds’), 587 (Winterbotham making excuses to leave him), 610 (snakes and burning hill), 625–6 (Lubbock and Mallory under mound of stones), 692 (made Prime Minister but could not fnd House of Commons), 769 (Asquith drowned), 771 (poem about ogres, ghosts and ghouls), 791 (pursuit), 811 (King and Queen display their mouths), 844 (preventing Rylands becoming RC),
index of persons and places 925
benson, a. c . cont. 866 (naked Ariels), 874 (Eton chapel demolished); religious views 48–69, 78–9 (doubts about orthodoxy), 97–8 (clerical dogmatism), 123, 130–1 (rejection of Christ’s divinity), 309, 322–3 (the simple religion of Christ ‘parcelled out into all these poky plots’), 376 (biblical inspiration), 379, 385 (the world gives ‘no clue to the nature of God’), 401, 402 (religious ritual nonsensical), 434–5 (womanly pious parsons), 445–6 (clergy smother religion), 447 (Bible as the record of human imagination about God), 491, 522, 544 (immortality?), 565 (Incarnation anthropomorphic), 622, 642, 643 (the fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man), 755–6 (Christ merely an exemplar), 802, 824 (dogma and historical Christ outdated), 865, I.1–2, I.6–7, I.15–18, II.12–14, II.16–17, II.19, II.21–2, II.24 works mentioned Alfred Tennyson 167, 194, 294, 384; Along the Road 10, 69, 86, 356; At Large 10; Beside Still Waters 10, 491 751; Cambridge Essays on Education 70, 830; Child of the Dawn 53, 54; Chris Gascoyne 809, 921; Coronation Ode: ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ 10, 26, 171, 194–5, 204–5, 227–8, 710, 823; Edward Fitzgerald 10, 14, 294, 355, 384 384 (Gosse berates ACB about the book), 387; Everybody’s Book of the Queen’s Dolls’ House 808; Fasti Etonenses 68, 86, 96, 912; From a College Window 6, 14, 472, 511, 638; Hugh: Memoirs of a Brother 714, 919; Hymns and Carols 92, 370; Guy 836, 851, 852; Le Cahier Jaune 68, 82, 468, 777, I.16; Lord Vyet and Other Poems 68, 82; Lyrics 68, 85, 109; Mary Benson: A Memoir 873; Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton 3, 10, 28–9, 45, 50–1, 477; Memories and Friends 8, 10, 82, 305, 340, 799, 801, 832; Ode to Japan 193, 197; Ode to Music 173–4, 202; Paul the Minstrel 338; Poems 68, 109, 263; Poems of Arthur Christopher Benson 29, 81, 109, 119, 193, 263; Poems of Whittier 194; The Professor 153, 163, 167; Rambles and Refections 10, 563; Rossetti 10, 237, 249, 250, 258, 261–3, 278, 287 (Gosse criticises proofs), 294, 298 (leaves proofs on train), 322 (good review in Times), 384 (Gosse), 438, 601, 626, 914;
benson, a. c ., works mentioned cont. Ruskin 584, 586, 622; The Gate of Death 438; The Hill of Trouble 128, 207, 248–9, 268, 303, I.16; The House of Menerdue 851, 866, 874, 875, 876; The Leaves of the Tree 10, 592, 594, 599; The Letters of Queen Victoria 10, 13, 211, 277–8, 294, 297, 311, 325, 342, 369, 364, 370, 468, 475, 500, 507, 510–12; The Life and Letters of Maggie Benson 6, 370, 386; The Life of Edward White Benson 49, 68, 88, 91, 115, 127, 129, 132, 134, 145, 153, 675, 913; The Myrtle Bough 129, 171, 280, 289, 468; The Schoolmaster, 67, 171–2, 193–4, 203, 205, 207; The Reed of Pan 830; The Thread of Gold 10, 15, 438, 441; The Trefoil 3–4, 7, 10, 19, 799, 821; The Upton Letters 10, 14, 245, 313, 438, 472; Thomas Gray 85; Thy Rod and Thy Staf 659; Walter Pater 10, 14, 30, 410, 461 (‘ferocious’ review by Frank Harris), 472; Watersprings 620
Benson, Edward Frederick (‘Fred’) 2, 3, 6–7, 31 (David Blaize), 45 (Capri), 48, 49, 65 (help during depression), 82 (Dodo), 88, 94, 108, 136 (ACB implores to marry), 141 (dislikes Tremans), 354–5 (unreliable anecdotalist), 357, 422–3 (family discuss his condescension), 431, 444 (at play by), 487, 547, 556 (his mysterious Venetian life), 575–6 (Hugh more open than), 589, 602–3 (so sporty but neurotic), 618, 619 (hates enquiry), 643 (with ACB to see Philip Burne-Jones), 690, 703–4, 754–5 (and Maggie’s death), 756 (waiter bans Hock as German), 792, 796, 799, 810 (sends MB’s diaries to ACB), 832 (they discuss ‘the homo sexual question’), 858 (ACB’s ‘great stand-by ’), 874–5, 909, 910, 920, 921, I.2, I.10, I.18 Benson, Edward White (‘Papa’) xv, xix, 1–4, 77 (his approval), 87 (views of marriage), 88 (ACB’s dependence and sense of loss), 94, 133, 140–1, 164 (Wellington), 297 (National Gallery), 363, 388, 404 (ACB’s refections on EWB’s career), 421, 483, 511 (Fairford’s windows), 545 (friends), 589 (appearance in ACB’s dream), 632 (Truro Cathedral), 648 (caning), 810–11 (‘lost treasures’ and in ‘Mama’s old Diaries’), 812 (‘statue of papa’),