The war is over, and Dorothy is an adult. She stays with her aunts in London for almost a year, and then moves to Paris, working up her batik technique and meeting lots of people.
In November came the Armistice, and Lily was sorry not to be in London. She meant to take me back with her at once, but then Bercie was very much upset over the death of a friend of hers, and Lily didn’t want to leave her. I was wild to get away and had a strong feeling that if we didn’t go before Christmas something would happen to prevent it, but my feeling was quite unfounded and nothing did happen, and in the New Year we sailed on the old Baltic. Poor old ship[,] she wasn’t in very good shape. Some of the steel plates had sprung a bit, and when we ran into a series of storms the water came in and washed over the floor of the cabin that I shared with Lily. No passengers were allowed on deck so it was simplest just to stay in my upper berth and read and knit; one huge wave had put out the galley fires, we were told, and we lived on sandwiches and champagne which the stewardess brought us. Once I couldn’t help laughing outright as I looked down from my berth; there was a champagne bottle leaning crazily out of the sponge rack, and the floor was covered with various objects being washed about in the sea-water on the floor as the old ship lurched and wallowed in the heavy seas. At the beginning I used to climb down and pick everything up each time, but this made Lily so nervous that she begged me to leave things alone.
Lily Wickersham, known later as Zora and earlier as Ninnie, lived from 1870 to 1956; she was the ninth of her father’s ten children, the third of her mother’s four, three years younger than Dorothy’s mother Rebecca / Ruby. She never married. She will feature repeatedly in the memoirs, as she gave Dorothy an allowance until her marriage. She is buried in the same grave as her mother, her sister, her brother-in-law and her niece Dorothy in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey; I tracked it down in September 2022, on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.
Bercie Tainter, born Susan Bayard Ryckman (1872-1954) was married to Frank Stone Tainter (1862-1942), who became the borough engineer of Far Hills, New Jersey. She was a close friend of Lily and her sister Lady Bunnie Hadfield.
A rumour got about that there were floating mines in the Irish ship [must be a mistake for “Sea”]. One man, very seasick, was heard to say:
“I don’t care if it does sink, it isn’t my ship!”
However we arrived eventually, and went straight to the HadfieIds’ house in Carlton House Terrace. Bunnie wasn’t there.
Sir Robert Hadfield (1858-1940) was a British metallurgist based in Sheffield, who invented both manganese steel and silicon steel. He married Frances Belt “Bunnie” Wickersham (1862-1949) in 1894; they had no children, but informally adopted Dorothy in her teens after her father remarried. She wrote at much greater length about them elsewhere.
The Comtesse de Buisseret, Bunnie’s great friend, had died during the war. She had five sons and a daughter; the two eldest sons were in the Belgian army, and Bunnie had always been devoted to the second son, François. Indeed most people thought that he had been named for her – her real name was Frances – but he was already quite a big boy when his mother and Bunnie became friends. The Comte de Buisseret was the Belgian ambassador in Russia, and François was there with him when the war broke out. The younger children were at once sent to their grandmother in Virginia when the war broke out, but Michel went to join his father when François came back to join the Belgian army, when he was 17. Bunnie wanted him to train as an officer, in which case he wouldn’t have been in the army till he was 18, but François was quite determined and went into the ranks. He was delicate and had an urgent operation for appendicitis, and various illnesses, and he didn’t see a great deal of active service, but that wasn’t his fault. The only thing he ever told me about his army experiences – that I remember – was that just after the war his unit was stationed in a little Belgian village where a girl had had a baby by a German – she could have been little more than a child when the Germans came. François and some of his friends heard that a number of soldiers meant to turn her and her baby out of the village, in bitter winter weather, and they were able to get her away to safety.
The Countess de Buisseret, née Caroline Sherman Story (1870-1914), was the daughter of American general John Patten Story, and married Belgian diplomat Conrad de Buisseret (1865-1927) in 1896. In 1900 he was created a count by the King of the Belgians, and he was known thereafter as Conrad de Buisseret Steenbecque de Blarenghien.
Their sons François (1899-1933) and Michel (1901-1967) de Buisseret were, like Dorothy, informally adopted by the Hadfields. François followed his father into the Belgian foreign service and died suddenly at a very young age in Rome. Michel seems to have had an interesting life.
Once François was out of the army Bunnie was determined to build up his health, and she took him to America and sent him to the Thatcher School in Arizona. He grew quite strong and fit there, but he hadn’t much to fall back on and really couldn’t stand a racketting social life.
The reference to “the Thatcher School in Arizona” is very intriguing. Thatcher is a Mormon settlement near the Mexican border, which seems an odd choice for the mainstream Protestant Bunnie Hadfield let alone her Catholic protégé. She probably means not the town public school in Thatcher, which François, born in 1899, would have been too old for in 1919, but the institution now called Eastern Arizona College, and then called the Gila Academy, which at that time offered a two-year commercial course on top of the standard high school education. It offered college level courses only from 1921. It still seems an odd choice.
Anyway they were away when Lily and I were at C[arlton] H[ouse] Terrace, and Lily decided to take a little house for the season and bring me out from there. Bunnie wanted a divorce, and I think she objected to Lily’s living in Robert Hadfield’s house. She herself never meant to go back but in the end she did go, though not till July or August that year.
The idea had always been that when I was old enough, Bunnie would bring me out in London, but as she wasn’t there Lily had to do it all herself, and it wasn’t easy for her as she didn’t know very many people with sons and daughters about my age. However I went to some of the big London balls – the first one was at the Saxton Nobles’ Kent House, I remember that one very well; Lady West chaperoned me there. I had never much enjoyed dances in the States, and never got on well with American boys of my own age, but I found the London Balls great fun from the very beginning. As there were no courts that year, I was presented at a garden-party at the Palace, and that counted. On the whole I quite enjoyed my season, though it wasn’t nearly as glamorous as it was meant to be.
Sir Saxton William Armstrong Noble (1863-1942) was another one of the engineering elite who the Hadfields would have known professionally and socially. His wife Celia (1871-1942) was the granddaughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, so you can’t do better than that in terms of engineering royalty. Their daughter Cynthia (1898-1990) became a famous political hostess, particularly during her marriage to the high-flying diplomat Gladwyn Jebb (1900-1996), who was among other things the first Acting Secretary-General of the United Nations.
“Lady West”, née Katrine Mary Mather (1878-1960) married Sir Glynn Hamilton West (1877-1945) in 1903. He was another engineer, the chair of the Armstrong-Whitworth engineering company, which made an early and successful bet on automobiles; he had also been put in charge of shell production at the Ministry of Munitions during the war. They must have divorced at some point, because he married again in 1940. I have found no record that they had children.
Lily did give a dance for me at Carlton House Terrace; Auriol Barron, who knew everyone, was to be joint hostess, but just then her husband was taken ill in Paris and she had to leave at once. She got in touch with as many people as she could, and put them off or explained; then Lily lost her voice the very day of the dance and I had to do a lot of the telephoning but I did it badly – this sort of thing had never come my way before, and I was pretty hopeless at it, though I should hive been able to manage perfectly well. It was not a howling success, my dance; a good many of Auriol’s friends turned up but didn’t know us nor did we know them, and they weren’t quite sure who anyone was and it was all rather awkward. I quite enjoyed some of it, if not all, but I didn’t meet many new people.
Auriol Barran, not Barron (1893-1930), was born Auriol Camilla Sharlie Blanche Hay, niece of the thirteenth Earl of Kinnoull and granddaughter of the second Baron Greville. She was right to skip the party and rush over to Paris, as her first husband, Rowland Noel Barran (born 1888), died of pneumonia following influenza on 19 March 1919. By her second husband, Sir James Allan Horne (1875-1944), she was the mother of the spy and historian Sir Alistair Horne (1925-2017). Lady Auriol Horne, as she had become, died in Belgium in 1930 when her car spun out of control into the river Scheldt in central Antwerp; her second husband was also killed in a car accident during the Blitz.
Really it all seems very vague and far away now – and so of course it is! I had my first proposal of marriage that summer, and it took me completely by surprise. I know the girl Is always supposed to know when a man is in love with her, but in this case I didn’t; I didn’t very much like the man himself, and I was more offended than pleased though I tried hard to be polite about it. But it made me feel uncomfortable for some time afterwards. I think I was very young for my age. [deleted: I was twenty that April, but in many ways I might have been only sixteen or so.]
One of the people I remember best that summer was Glory Hancock. She was a friend of my aunts’, though younger than they were. She was divorced and lived in a little house in what was then Alfred Place West near the S[outh] Kensington tube station. We went about quite lot together with an admirer of hers and another man whose name I can’t remember. Glory had done very well in the war as a nurse in Belgium and the Belgian government gave her the title of Comtesse d’Hellancourt – I think that is right – which she later used. She fascinated me, but there were people who didn’t approve of her at all.
Madelon Battle “Glory” Hancock (1881-1930), later Countess de Hellencourt, is one of the most glamorous names to appear in my grandmother’s memoirs, if only briefly. She was born in Pensacola, Florida, where her father was a naval doctor, and brought up in Asheville, North Carolina. She met her husband, British army officer Mortimer Hancock, in New York in 1904, and they had one son. She threw herself into battlefield nursing at the outbreak of the first world war, and was reputedly the most decorated nurse of the entire conflict. She was not actually divorced until 1923 but her marriage was clearly over in 1919.
In the late summer Bunnie and François came back from America, and I met François for the first time. He was very good-looking with fair wavy hair, but he wasn’t very tall, as he would have liked to be. In the autumn Lily and another friend, Mary Syers, who was later to marry the Earl of Enniskillen – she was a war widow – took a house in Kirk[c]udbrightshire and François came to stay with us. All the world was dancing mad at that time and in the evenings we used to dance to a gramophone, F and I, and we did some quite professional-looking steps; in one he more or less threw me up in the air; it was great fun. We went for walks and the autumn foliage was lovely in its way; not brilliant as it was in America, but all shades of gold and brown, rather like a glowing tapestry.
Mary Cicely Nevill (1879-1963) did indeed lose her first husband, Thomas Scott Syers (1883-1918) in the war, and in 1932 married John Cole, 5th Earl Enniskillen (1876-1963); both were then in their 50s. Her daughter Sonia Syers (1918-1982) married her stepfather’s nephew David Lowry Cole (1918-1989), who in due course inherited his uncle’s title and became the 6th Earl of Enniskillen. He and Sonia had divorced by then, but as Sonia Cole she became a well-known archaeologist and anthropologist, associated closely with Mary Leakey.
By the time summer was over, and I was still neither engaged nor married, it had to be decided what to do with me next. Someone, probably Bunnie, thought it would be a good idea for me to go to Paris to polish up my French. At Foxcroft we had to speak French each afternoon for an hour or so, but it was hardly recognisable – we said things like “Do-ez me up, s’il vous plaît” and my accent had deteriorated very much. Glory knew of a school in Passy, run by Mademoiselle de San Carlos, and Lily wrote there and arranged for me to go. Her signature was read as “Winkleheirn” [rather than “Wickersham”] and I was supposed to be Jewish; In fact one of the girls who was there, and with whom I made friends, Antoinette Bourgois, was bitterly disappointed when she found that I wasn’t Jewish. Her mother had had a great friend whom she had converted and Antoinette had been hoping that she could do the same with me.
I have found an advertisement for Mademoiselle de San Carlos’s finishing school in a 1930 handbook for Continental Schools. “The late Marquise de San Carlos de Pedroso” must be María de los Dolores Inés Madán y O´Sullivan (1846-1921), second wife of the Spanish stateman José Francisco María Pedroso y Cárdenas (1828-1874), created Marquis de San Carlos de Pedroso in 1865. They had two daughters, Maria (born 1870) and Catalina (born 1872), but it’s not clear which was running the school. The Marquise wrote a book with the title “Les Americains chez eux”, “The Americans at Home”.
I have not been able to identify Antoinette Bourgois with any certainty. It’s quite a common name, and it’s quite possible that my grandmother has misspelt the surname for the even more common “Bourgeois”, with an e.
Already I wanted to become a Catholic. In London we lived very near the Oratory and I went there often, and talked to one of the priests there. I wrote to Papa telling him what I was thinking of and he cabled back urging me to do nothing till I heard from him; then he wrote terribly upset and begging me not to do anything hasty; he was not a member of any particular church himself, but he was very much opposed to the Catholic one. I never quite understood all his reasons, though he told me some of them, things had happened when he was a boy that upset him very much. One thing was that a penknife he had was stolen, and he was convinced that an Irish Catholic boy had taken it; later the knife was returned to his desk and he thought that the boy must have gone to confession and that the priest had told him to give It back. That seems to we a good, and not a bad, thing, but Papa for some reason thought it was very bad. Another episode was that a poor woman was told by the priest that she must give a sack of potatoes to help with the building of a new church – presumably the potatoes were to be sold; I suppose she grew them. But that may have been greatly exaggerated; it was just something Papa had heard. anyway I told the priest at the Oratory and he advised me to wait and said that all would come right, as it did, for when I was going to marry a Catholic Papa was quite content that I should become one as he thought it best that husband and wife should have the same religion.
The school in Passy was a finishing school and there were others there as old or older than I was; some of them were just living there but were perfectly free to go and come as they liked and to study various things. One, Vera Bideleux, was studying Rhythmics; she was English but had always lived in France and was completely bi-lingual. Another, Colette Blanc, was Rumanian; she was studying drawing and design, hoping to get into the Arts Decoratifs school. Then there was Marguerite Quersin, Belgian, who was studying at the Sorbonne and the College de France. Those were the ones I saw most. At first they put me in a class with girls who were just learning French, but I protested and was put with the French and Belgian girls; I really knew the language pretty well and could understand everything though I had a bad accent and I couldn’t always find the exact word I wanted. We had a drawing class once or twice a week, and I did so well at that that it was suggested that I should go to an Academy near for drawing and painting; Colette already went there, and also had lessons in design from a Professor Bruneau, so I did that too. As I had a flair for design I did quite well, and when Colette and i went to do the examination for entrance into the Arts Decoratifs we both passed in.
I actually remember meeting Vera Bideleux a couple of times when I was a child. Like my grandmother, she was born in 1899; she married Rowley James (1900-1938) in 1931 and died in 1983. She had at least one daughter.
We’ll hear a lot more about Colette Blanc (1898-1973); her father was a Swiss architect, Louis Blanc, who designed much of late nineteenth century Bucharest; her mother, born Irina Berendei, remarried after his death, and as Irina Procopiu was one of the ladies in waiting at the court of Queen Marie. Colette married a lawyer, Gheorghe Polizu-Micşuneşti; he was executed by the Communist regime in 1952, but she did not find out that he had died for twenty years. They had one daughter.
Marguerite Quersin again is a common name; but I find a Marguerite Amelie Quersin born in Brussels in 1897, and someone of that name published a book of poetry, “Bonheurs de ce matin” [“Morning Joy”] in Paris in 1921, which is plausibly the same person.
Adrien Bruneau (1874-1965) is described by French Wikipedia as a pioneer of educational cinema, now “fallen into oblivion”. He taught at Arts Déco from 1911 to 1926 and had a distinguished career in teaching.
At Easter Colette and I went home with Vera, who lived in Havre. She had three sisters, Elsa, Maisie and Squeak whose name was really Muriel. There were dances and all sorts of amusements and we had a very good time.
Vera Bideleux’s sisters were a long-lived lot. Elsie (later Elsa Philips) lived from 1901 to 1996, Maisie (real name Mary, later Mrs Philips) lived from 1903 to 2002, and Muriel, later Mrs McLeod, was born in 1904 and died five weeks after her hundredth birthday in 2004.
After we came back I went to a little chalet in the grounds of the school where Marguerite Quersin and I were the only girls, though a teacher lived there too. Marguerite took me to some of the lectures at the College de France. And I went on with my drawing at the Academy and went to some theatres and operas; the girls who were real pensionnaires were taken quite often, always with a chaperone, and anyone who wanted to go, and whose parents were willing to pay for the tickets, could go too.
And then Lyman, my brother, was working in a bank in Paris. He had done well during the war. He had left Yale rather ignominiously as he failed his examinations two years running; the first time Bunnie persuaded Papa to let him go back for another year- she paid for it – but he failed again. It wasn’t for lack of brains, but he just wouldn’t work; he joined a glee club and learned to play the mandoline very well, but I doubt if he opened a book while he was there. Then he thought he would like to be an architect, and Bunnie paid for him to go to Boston Tech [as MIT was called in those days]. He did very well to start with and was considered most promising, but the War had started in Europe and he was wild to go and drive an ambulance and did so; he got the Croix de Guerre and we were all very proud of him. Then when America came into the war he was used for a time as liaison officer, as he spoke French, but later he was sent back to the States to a training camp, and was there when the war ended. Then, helped by his knowledge of French, he came to the Paris branch of the Bankers Trust. We saw more of each other in Paris than we had done for years, and he was very good to me. He took me out a lot to thés dansants and brought one of his friends; I don’t remember any of them, though I met several.
So one way and another I enjoyed that year. For Christmas both Lyman and I went to Cimiez, where Dollie Sperling and Lily were spending the winter. Then as I say Easter was spent in Havre, and on our way there in the train we were talking about our plans for the next year and we thought what fun it [w]ould be if we could all share a flat in Paris; we’d all had enough of the school.
Blanche Lucy Rigg (1872-1946), known as Dollie, married Frederick Harvey Erskine Sperling, known as Harvey (1868-1921) in 1906. She was two years younger than Zora. She does not seem to have had children.
The authorities agreed, so it was decided that if a suitable place could be found we would be allowed to live there with a maid and a chaperone. Vera was going back to Rumania with Colette that summer, and the job of finding the flat fell on Lily and me. We finally did find a furnished flat in the rue Boissonade, which was then a cul de sac as it was barred in the middle by a building which later was removed. The flat had a drawing-room, dining-room, large bedro[o]m, small one, kitchen and bath, and the maid had a room at the top of the house. Vera and her sister Maisie, who came too, shared the big bedroom with its double bed, and Colette and I had two divans in the dining-room, which also held the piano where Vera practised. We put away the more repulsive ornaments and pictures, made covers for the furniture – not very successfully – and cushions out of any clothes we didn’t happen to be wearing, wrapped up in odds and ends of material. We had a riotous time there.
Our chaperones changed; we began with Dolly Nevill, a sister-in-law of Mary Syers, who could stay only till Christmas, and then Mrs. Bideleux, mother of Vera and Maisie, came till Miss Crawhall, a Scotswoman, carne for the rest of the time we were there, till July, that is. As there were the four of us, and it was very seldom that we were all going to the same place at the same time, the chaperone couldn’t really do much in the way of keeping an eye on us. Each week-day morning Col and I went off to the Arts Décoratifs, where we spent the morning drawing in charcoal, always plaster casts, which had to be exact representations of the object. It was very wearisome but one stayed in that lowest class till one had obtained 2 marks of 15 – the highest mark – or one 15 and two 14s. it took me the whole year to get out of the lowest class, and at that rate it would have taken a lifetime to get into the top class of all.
But Monsieur Bruneau, who had given lessons in design to Colette and me, was now the chief professor of decorative art, and came once or twice a week to us at the Arts Décoratifs, giving us various subjects to work out. He told Colette and me that our work might do well for making batiks, and suggested that we should go to the studio of Mademoiselle de Saint Félice at Neuilly. So we did; Mlle. de S.F. took pupils for all kinds of decorative work, and also had girls working there from her own designs; batiks were quite a small part of all she did and taught, and we were free to learn anything else we liked; I did a little book-binding using papier-batik that I had made myself, but on the whole I stuck to real batik work, and so did Colette. We had our own ideas, though, and Mlle de S.F. didn’t approve of them and was rather scornful. However we went on doing things our way, and when, at the end of the year, there was an exhibition of the pupils’ work, we sold more than any of the others – indeed I think we were the only ones who sold anything at all! Col and I also sold some Papiers Batik to book-binders, I think we got 5 francs a sheet, which was then about a shilling; they were easy and quick to do but not such fun as batik work on silk, and not nearly so remunerative.
I am struggling to find much on Mademoiselle de Saint Félice.
Maisie was studying conventional drawing and painting at Délécluse’s studio, where Simon Elwes was also working. Vera was doing Rhythmics and persuaded us all to join a class; it was fun but we didn’t take it very seriously.
The Académie Delécluse, founded in the 1880s by Auguste Joseph Delécluse (1855-1928), was particularly noted for encouraging young women artists.
Simon Elwes (1902-1975) would have been only a teenager at this time but became a notable painter in the UK during and after the second world war.
So our days were fairly full, but in the evenings we had many amusements; Colette had a lot of Rumanian friends in Paris, mostly students; some of them played in jazz bands to supplement the money their families sent them, and they often played in our salon; they also took us out when they had enough to pay for an evening of dining and dancing. Then I had various friends, and so had the Bideleux girls. One thing that was very nice for me was that Gascon and Mariette Mills heard that I was in Paris and got in touch with me; Gascon’s cousin Rosalie Hinkley had married a cousin of mine, so that though there was no relationship there was a connection. The Millses had no children of their own and were very good to me, often having me to stay at their place at Rambouillet – a delightful hunting-lodge of the time of Louis XIV – quite a large house, really, where they had lovely parties. Through them I met many interesting people, mostly artists, Oleg Tripet-Skrypitzine and Picabia and Fernand Léger and Guy Arnoux and lots of others. Mariette herself was a good sculptor and did some fine work; Gascon went in for carpentry and with little assistance built a chalet in the grounds of their house.
“Gascon Mills” is Lawrence Heyworth Mills (1872-1943), born in Switzerland, an American citizen who lived most of his life abroad. “Gascon” seem to have been his nickname.
Mariette Benedict Thompson (1876-1948), his second wife, was also an American expat born in Paris, and was a moderately well known sculptor.
Rosalie Hinckley (1887-1981) was indeed Heyworth Mills’ first cousin; she was born and died in New York. Her husband Cornelius Wendell Wickersham (1885-1968) was my grandmother’s first cousin, the son of former Attorney-General George Woodward Wickersham (1858-1936).
[handwritten note added in margin] They bred Samoyeds – snow-white & had white goats tethered on the lawn, & when all the Samoyeds were loose & raced about the green lawn round the white goats it was a lovely sight.
In Paris they lived just across the street from us in the rue Boissonade. We seldom used our front door; as our flat was on the ground floor we could go in and out through the windows, and usually did so. Miss Crawhall also did; she usually carried an umbrella, and when we were in the drawing-room it was quite usual to see an umbrella come in through the open windrow followed by Miss Crawhall herself.
When the warm weather came we often went out to the country on Sundays, taking the little train from the Gare Montparnasse and going to some place in the country where we could eat a picnic lunch and play games and generally let off steam after our week in the city. In those days one never went out without a hat and gloves and the clothes we wore in Paris were quite unlike these we could wear for an expedition like that.
For Easter in 1921 we all, except for Maisie, went to Cimiez; Colette’s sister Marie-Louise, who was doing her medical studies in Scotland, came to Paris to go with us. She was older than Colette and not only very intelligent but quite a fascinating person – not strictly pretty, but most attractive and with a perfect figure. Shortly before that I had met a rather lonely young Englishman, Philip Bateman, and had asked him to join our party the following Sunday. After that we saw him several times, and so when Marie-Louise arrived he met her too, and it was love at first sight for both of them. So when we were at Cimiez Philip turned up there and stayed in the same hotel, the Grand, where we were, and where I had been years before when my grandmother was alive.
Philip Bateman’s son notes that in 1920, his father:
was fortunate to obtain a post in Paris as foreign correspondent for the Financial News. It was here that he met Dorothy Whyte. An American friend of his mother’s had introduced him to her niece, Dorothy. “You will like Dorothy,” she said. “She shares a studio flat in the Rue Boissonade with three charming girls. Go and see them. They will do you good.” As Philip put it: “With those words she changed the course of his life.” The girls, all students, were fun and extended the hand of friendship to Philip. There was English Maisie, Swedish Inga, American Dorothy Whyte and Rumanian Colette. While Philip liked Maisie (and she him), life was to take a different turn, and in his writings he stated that he always regretted not having married Maisie. The reason was that fate had arrived in the form of Colette’s sister Marie-Louise from London where she was studying medicine and Philip “forgot sweet little Maisie” as he put it, and could think of nobody but the dazzlingly attractive Rumanian. She was nicknamed Morit and was the daughter of a lady-in-waiting to Queen Marie, Madam Irina Procopiu. He proposed to Morit, and to his astonishment, was accepted.
Bateman’s son calls my grandmother by her married name, which is presumably how Bateman referred to her in later life. Sadly I don’t know any more about “Swedish Inga”.
Much more about the Romanian connection when we get to the summer of 1921.