SIR IAN
ANSTRUTHER Ysenda Maxtone Graham looks back on the extraordinary life of her great-uncle
I always say hello to the charmingly smiling man in the cloth cap on the landing just outside the Gents’ – that spot in The London Library where the smell of wood polish and the smell of disinfectant come up against each other with sudden force. The photograph is of Sir Ian Anstruther (1922–2007), benefactor and Vice-President of The London Library, whose father Douglas Anstruther was the brother of my grandmother Jan Struther, the author of Mrs Miniver (1939). The photograph was taken by Anstruther’s son-in-law, the photographer Henry Bourne, in one of Anstruther’s three favourite places in the world. Those three favourite places were: his country estate, Barlavington, tucked under the South Downs in West Sussex, where he lived when he wasn’t in London; The London Library, to which he donated the funds for the building of the Library’s rarebooks wing in the 1990s; and his house in Provence, Les Aumarets. The garden of the last is the setting for the photograph. ‘It was taken the Easter before he died, ’ the third of his four daughters, Harriet, recalled, ‘and he was so relaxed and happy, in his favourite spot where he had his breakfast and read his paper each morning. He really loved it there. ’ Anstruther had a deep need for calm and order in adulthood. This sprang from a childhood of unwelcome surprises. For twelve years, from the age of five to seventeen, he was fought over in the courts by his mother Enid and his mother’s sister, his aunt Joan Campbell. His youngest daughter, the writer Eleanor Anstruther, is working on a fictionalised account of this relationship and the extraordinary story of her father’s childhood. She recounted to me some of the distressing details. Anstruther’s parents, Douglas and Enid, were married in 1914 and spent their honeymoon in a barracks in Edinburgh
Sir Ian Anstruther, 2006, in the garden of his house, Les Aumarets, Provence. Photograph by Henry Bourne.
before Douglas went off to the war: an inauspicious start to what turned out to be an unhappy marriage that broke down in 1925. There were three childen: Fagus, born in 1917, Finetta, born in 1920, and Ian, born in 1922. Fagus, a sweet-faced boy, fell down the stairs at Strachur, the family house in Argyllshire, when he was four, which blinded and crippled him. He was sent off to a home where he died at the age of 15. Unsuited to motherhood, Enid had the two-year-old Ian taken off her hands when the marriage broke down. He went to live with his grandmother Sibyl and his unmarried aunt Joan, partly at Strachur and partly in Bryanston Square in London. Finetta stayed with her mother. ‘At some point, ’ Eleanor said, ‘it was decided that Ian would be the heir’ . The heir to what? Well, the heir to a large fortune. Ian’s aunt Joan Campbell had inherited a sizeable chunk of South Kensington, the Alexander Estate, which includes Thurloe Square and
Alexander Square. (Not that she visited South Kensington much; it was in an unfashionable part of London compared with Bryanston Square. It was as if someone living in central London today owned a sizeable chunk of New Malden.) With the Alexander Estate went the large estate in Argyllshire; whoever inherited all this would be a wealthy man. Having no child of her own, Joan set her heart on Ian being the Little Lord Fauntleroy figure, whom she would bring up in a suitable way to prepare him for his life as a wealthy laird and landlord. Ian adored his aunt Joan as much as she adored him; she was a much warmer, more motherly person than his real mother. ‘Enid should perhaps never have been a mother at all, ’ Eleanor said. ‘She liked to “moon about writing poetry” , and after her divorce she became an ardent Christian Scientist’ . Ian was much happier away from her, in a loving, woman-heavy household with his grandmother Sybil, his aunt Joan, and Joan’s female companion, Pat Dancey. One day in 1927, when he was five, Ian’s nanny took him round to tea with his mother who was living at 39 Evelyn Gardens, off the Fulham Road. (If Thurloe Square was unfashionable, red-brick Evelyn Gardens was seen as shockingly down-at-heel.) There, his mother kidnapped him. ‘Nanny arrived back at Bryanston Square after tea, ’ Eleanor said, ‘without Ian, and with a note saying, “Ian is going to come and live with me” ’ . This was when the 12-year court case began. Through all those years, Ian was shunted between his mother’s household and his aunt’s. The only possession he took with him wherever he went was his beloved golliwog. His poor sister Finetta didn’t get a look-in. Being a girl, she was not to be groomed for heirdom, and had no choice but to live with her mother. Every now and
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