Introduction
Previous: 1931-32
Next: 1935
The Whytes live in Majorca for most of 1933, then move to Cannes for the winter and then to London. Dorothy and little John visit her family in America in mid-1934.
I have to say that I don’t remember my father ever mentioning that he had lived on Majorca when he was five. My sister however does remember him talking about it, as the first place where he went to school.
Sometime in the summer of 1932 Billie and Steuart Davis were in England and came to see us. They told us they were going to take half a big house in Majorca, Son Batle; George Copeland, the American pianist, was to have the other half with his Italian secretary, Francesco – I have no idea of his surname. They invited us to go to stay with them there in the New Year.
Marianne Goodhue “Billie” McKeever (1898-1934) was a close friend of Dorothy’s since their schooldays, and one of John’s godparents. She married Edmund Steuart Davies (1882-1955) in 1925; she was also one of the early lovers of the writer Mercedes da Acosta, who was probably the most visible lesbian in American culture in the early twentieth century.
I actually have copies of photographs of Billie and Steuart taken in Majorca in 1933, probably by their friend Betty Parsons, but am still waiting for permission from the copyright holder to put it up here.
George Copeland (1882-1971) was a very famous pianist, also famously gay. We may speculate about Francesco’s role.
As I have no letters or papers of any sort I can’t tell exactly when we left. I think we spent Christmas at the Cordons. Billy’s diaries would tell, but they are stored in a trunk in England.
The Cordons (or in other records, just “Cordons”) was the house at Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire where the Whytes had been lodging.
Anyway we went – by sea, I’m certain – sometime before John’s fifth birthday [30 April 1933], as I know he spent it there. The Davises didn’t arrive till some time after we did, but they sent us money for the housekeeping. Francesco was there, and an excellent cook and a maid; I think they were sisters. I had done some Spanish at Foxcroft and I soon managed to shop and do the housekeeping; in fact by the time we left I was fairly fluent. Majorca was terribly cheap then except for things that had to be imported from outside Spain. There was a fairly large colony of English people and later we got to know some of them. The only people I remember meeting when we first were there with Francesco were the Nisbet sisters, Norah and Ailsa, who were New Zealanders. Their mother had just died and Francesco asked if we could have them to tea; he knew them and was very sorry for them. They came and I liked them very much; Norah was the one I always knew best. She wrote good poetry and also painted.
Norah Mary Stewart Nisbet (1907-1957) and her sister Ailsa Margaret Nisbet (1909-1988) were born in London, but their mother Ethel Margaret Stewart (1881-1964) was from New Zealand. Records indicate that she was alive and well in 1933, though they had lost their father Vincent Nisbet (1860-1923) ten years before. So Dorothy is incorrect to say that Norah and Ailsa had just lost their mother. Norah Nisbet published “Thirty Poems” in 1932 and “The Man from the Mountains and other poems” in 1935, both with Blackwell in Oxford, and also had nineteen poems published in The Argosy between 1929 and 1937 (some of which must have been in one or other of the collections).
Son Batle was a fascinating old farmhouse which a rich American woman had bought and done over, putting in baths etc. It was a fine old stone building with a big courtyard surrounded by archways, rather like a cloister. I have a strong impression that we arrived in February as I’ve always thought that we spent nine months there, and we left again in November. But we weren’t all that time at Son Batle. After the Davises came Francesco began to dislike me – up to then he had always been very friendly. Then George was due, and I don’t think there was room for all of us; however by that time Billy and I had a great liking for Majorca and we easily found a flat at San Agostin, quite near.
Not the first incident of someone going off Dorothy after she stayed with them for a while; it happened also in Penang.
Son Batle is still standing, just north of the town of Sant Augusti (San Agostin in Spanish) in Majorca, which is about 7 km southwest along the coast from Palma, the capital of the islands. There is a long description of it in Catalan here, including photographs of the big courtyard surrounded by arches.
The rich American woman who had bought it and done it up was none other than the noted anthropologist Mary Cabot Wheelwright (1878-1958), who lived there during summer months (though presumably not in 1933).
One amusing thing that happened while we were at Son Batle was that a Guardia Civile called – I think they just patrolled round keeping a benevolent eye on everyone – and he took John up in front of him on his grey horse; I took a picture of that and John was very proud and pleased.
John had quantities of toy animals; I can’t know remember the names of any of them except a toy terrier named Plato; I remember Billie Davis saying that of course a son of mine would have a dog named Plato! But I have no idea where John got the name.
Majorca
Majorca was really glorious in the early spring when the almond trees were in bloom.
The Davises left and went back to America; Billie wasn’t at all well, though I don’t know just what was wrong. [She died the following year, aged only 36; see below.] I think it was after they left that we moved to another flat nearer to Palma. This, like the former one, occupied the ground floor of a house of two stories on a hillside, so that the upper flat had its entrance on the road above; there were no stairs inside the buildings. The new flat had a much bigger garden than the other, and we got a wonderful maid, Maria. At the other flat we had had Francisca, who had been at Son Batle, but she had to leave for some reason – I think her mother was ill – and she sent us Maria, a huge fat cheerful person who cooked very well and was strong as a horse. We became very fond of her and I am sorry we never knew what happened to her in the civil war.
The first flat we had was without a bathroom; there were two wells on the verandah where we could draw up water from the cisterns under the house which were filled from the rain-water off the roof, but I don’t remember what we dad for drinking water. We had no bathroom, only a bath which could be filled from the well-water, heated of necessary in saucepans over a charcoal fire. But as we spent most of the day at the beach, in and out of the sea, this didn’t worry us, and we did have a proper loo. There was a lovely beach – we had to go by tram and then walk – and as in those days there were few people we had it almost to ourselves and could go in and out and swim and dive and sun-bathe to our hearts’ content. John adored it and we all got very brown.
The second flat we took had a bathroom, and, we were assured, hot water from the kitchen; it wasn’t till after we moved in that we found that the hot water came from an enormous cauldron which had to have a big fire lit under it, and then have the water pumped through to the bath. It was such a strenuous proceeding that we never undertook it at all, just went on heating water in saucepans. But otherwise the flat was much nicer than the first one, and the garden was much larger.
While we were there John went to the International School and made some friends there. Sometimes he played with a little boy called Sonny Owen, who was American, I suppose. Another of his friends was a boy who was there called Pat who was there with his mother and step-father, Dr. Mayer; he was Mrs. Mayor’s own son by an earlier marriage. He was older than John, but was very nice to him.
Unable to trace Sonny Owen, Dr and Mrs Mayer/Mayor, or Pat.
Zora came to stay at a hotel near us, as we had no spare room. I took several snaps of her at the beach with us, and having picnics.
Dorothy’s aunt Zora, formally Lily Wickersham, lived from 1870 to 1956; she gave Dorothy an allowance which was Dorothy’s main income. 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.
I quite forgot to say that on our way out to Majorca Con Hay and her son John Wardell Smith were on board. I hadn’t seen Con for years – she was one of the daughters of dear old Colonel Hughes, a great friend of Zora’s and of the Hadfields. He was once Lord Mayor of Sheffield, Which reminds me of something Zora once told me. One year the Duke of Norfolk was Mayor of Sheffield when Queen Victoria came there for some reason. I was customary for her to confer a Knighthood, or some other distinction, on the Mayor of a town she visited like that, but there was no honour that anyone could think of that the Duke hadn’t got already, so she had to make the Mayor of Sheffield into a Lord Mayor!
Con and John stayed for only a week or so, at some hotel, but we saw them at least once when we went to lunch with them. It was the same hotel where Zora stayed, the Continental, I think, but am not sure.
Colonel Herbert Hughes (1853-1917), a prominent lawyer, was indeed Mayor of Sheffield in 1905-07, with an interest in language studies, especially Spanish.
Constance Laetitia Hughes (1886-1968) was the second of his four children. Her first husband, who she married in 1908, was Frederick Wardle Smith (1869-1914); they had a son and a daughter. After her first husband’s death she married Charles Malcolm Hay (1878-1928) and had another son. So when she met the Whytes on the boat to Majorca in 1933, she had been twice widowed.
John Hughes Wardell Smith was Constance’s oldest child. He was born in 1909, so would have turned 24 in 1933. I find him turning up as a British diplomat in the 1950s and 1960s, but have no information on when and where he died.
I can only vaguely remember the people we met there in Majorca, except for the Nisbets. I know one day we drove round the island, I suppose in a hired car, and saw Soller and Formentor. Another day a lot of us hired a launch and went to Ibiza, where there was a blue grotto, much larger, as I remember, than the one at Capri. Or was that Formentera and not Ibiza? I believe it was.
Sóller is a port and Cap de Formentor the most northerly point in Majorca.
Formentera is better known for its caves than Ibiza, and some of them are large and blue, though I don’t find any formally known as the “Blue Grotto”.
I remember an elderly American couple who we once asked to tea on a Sunday. The charming old wife said with a smile that she was so sorry they couldn’t come, but there was to be a very good bull-fight in Barcelona that Sunday, and they were crossing by the night boat an Saturday to see it; she said they never missed a really good bull-fights. Billy and I never went to one, but one couldn’t help hearing a lot about them – it is really one of the things that has always put me off considering Spain as a place to live in. An Englishman we knew slightly told us he was going to one, just to see what it was like. Next day he came to see us and told us he had been absolutely horrified. We had warned him but he had insisted on seeing it all the same. It reminds me of a time when Zora and Uncle Bobby and Bunnie were in Spain and went to one. Bunnie and Zora were escorted by two men – Spaniards, I think – who told them to shut their eyes before the most gruesome parts, so they didn’t mind it, but Uncle Bobby, who was very fond of animals, got in a awful state and said it must be stopped at once and before he had made a real scene his friends managed to get him out – Zora said she thought they might all have been lynched by the crowd otherwise. He wanted to go at once to the mayor – which would hardly have helped as the mayor himself, presumably, was there.
Uncle Bobby was Sir Robert Hadfield (1858-1940).
“Bunnie” is Dorothy’s aunt, Zora’s older sister, Lady Frances Hadfield (1862-1949).
Cannes
By autumn we had had enough of Majorca, and the International School had been closed as a child there got polio. We were told it was endemic in the island. Majorca was the cheapest place we ever lived in. If I remember rightly our flat was about £5 a month (it was, of course, furnished) and the wages of our dear Margherita were the same. [The Bank of England historical inflation calculator has £5 in 1933 equivalent to about £312 in 2025. The family’s income was Dorothy’s allowance from Zora and Billy’s dwindling returns on his Malayan rubber shares.] But even so we decided to leave. Zora found us a little villa in Cannes, Le Roitelet, and sometime in November we crossed by ship to Marseilles and went on by train. The Roitelet was near the Palm Beach casino, in a little back street. It wasn’t too bad. It had more bedrooms than we ever used but only one large sitting-room, which had to serve as dining-room; there was a garage and some of the bedrooms were over that.
There is still a building called Le Roitelet at 66 Avenue des Lérins in Cannes, five minutes’ walk from the Palm Beach Casino. It is now surrounded by (and frankly dwarfed by) blocks of holiday apartments, but would have felt much less crowded in 1933.
I forgot to say that when we left Majorca the landlady came to go over the flat and make sure we hadn’t spoilt anything; she was most complimentary and wished we were staying on. One other little incident was amusing; one day I was coming out of the Cathedral in Palma with John, and an old lady stopped us and said what a pleasure it was to see a gentleman in church – John being five years old. At that time one saw many women, but seldom a man, at Mass there.
On the ship crossing to Marseilles John made friends with a Mr. Curteis (I think he spelt it like that) an elderly schoolmaster who was teaching in Cannes. He was very nice and we saw a good deal of him later; I remember he used to come to tea and I would get a sort of bun and split it and toast it, which made it seem very English and he did so enjoy it.
I have been unable to trace Mr Curteis. He sounds very pleasant.
1934
I have lots of pictures, but no definite dates, for that winter, and only a few hazy memories. I know we saw a good deal of the Del Grandes, Enrica especially, and also her sister who had married one of the Ruspolis and had a boy about John’s age and another who was only a baby; the older boy and John played together. John went to the Convent in the Bd. Alexandre III – which is now, I think, a girls’ school only but then took small boys in the kindergarten. He learned to read in French there; he couldn’t yet read English. I didn’t want him to start too young, I had a feeling that once he did his nose would never be out of a book, and how right I was!
This is the first mention of the Del Grandes. I find records of Carlo Del Grande, born 1872, his wife Anna Mock (1876-1954) and their children Giuseppina (1898-1961), Umberto (1900-1964) and Enrica (dates unknown). Carlo was a concert pianist, and you can still get the piano rolls that he recorded, including a four-handed version of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony.
Enrica was a professional singer (alto); I find mentions of her performances in French newspapers from the 1920s, especially around Cannes, but I have not found dates for her birth or death.
Giuseppina did indeed marry Sforza Ruspoli (1882-1953) from a prominent Italian family in 1923, and they had two sons, Alessandro (1925-1981, a bit older than John) and Mario, whose birth date I do not have apart from Dorothy’s recollection that he was a baby in 1934. This Alessandro Ruspoli is a different person to his cousin, the famous socialite Alessandro “Dado” Ruspoli, 9th Prince of Cerveteri (1924-2005). Giuseppina later married Bernd von Arnim (1891-1971) in 1959, when both were in their sixties.
Zora, Dollie Sperling and the latter’s brother, Owen Rigg, were spending the winter at one of the hotels, either the Windsor or the Beau-Sejour, and for part of that time Jack Whyte was there, and also Lyla Lamb with Helen and Jessica. I remember now, it was the Windsor where they all stayed. Of course we saw a lot of them all. I know we dined there at least once, but we had to take John, who went to bed in Zora’s room while we dined. We had a good daily woman who did all the housework and I cooked, but I think she came only in the mornings. John had picked up quite a lot of French and often went off to a shop near us to get bread or butter, simple things like that. He had a bicycle with two little wheels on either side of the back wheel, which held it steady when they were down, and as he got more proficient they could be moved up so they didn’t touch the ground and it was just like an ordinary bicycle.
Dollie Sperling, born Blanche Lucy Rigg (1872-1946), had married Frederick Harvey Erskine Sperling (1868-1921) in 1906 and was a close friend of Zora’s. I am getting the impression that they were a couple.
Owen Davys Rigg (1866-1952), Dollie’s older brother, was a career soldier in the British army.
John Frederick “Jack” Whyte (1865-1947) was a second cousin of Billy’s on the Whyte side but, confusingly, a first cousin once removed on the Ryan side. He had had a distinguished career working as a British agent in the Persian Gulf, but would have retired before 1934.
Letitia Mary Whyte (1872-1938), known as Lyla, was the second of Billy’s four full sisters, and his favourite. She married Stephen Eaton Lamb (1860-1928) in 1898, and they lived at Scotby in Cumbria. Mildred Helen (1901-1969) was the second of her five children, and Jessica (1916-1969) the youngest. Neither married.
[paragraph moved up from later in the typescript] One incident I’ve just remembered before we left Cannes. One day Lyla, Helen, Jess, Billy, John and I went to the Île Ste. Marguerite by launch. Lyla had been in a very nervous state ever since Stephen died, and anyway she felt nervous in any sort of boat or ship. When it got near the time to come back she just couldn’t face it and said so. I told her that if she felt like that there was no need for her to go, that I’d stay with her at the hotel there, and one of the others could go back to Cannes and collect whatever we’d need. But then she said no, she’d go after all. She told me later that the moment I’d said she needn’t go, she felt quite different.
Sometime during that time Mary Blount, Billy’s eldest half-sister died; she was old and had been ailing for a long time, but we were all very fond of her. Billy had to go to Dublin, though I don’t know if he was in time for the funeral. He inherited several thousand pounds from her, which meant that we could at last pay off P. M. Robinson.
Billy’s oldest sister, Mary Jane Elizabeth Whyte (1857-1934), was the daughter of my great-grandfather’s first wife and so a half-sister to the other thirteen siblings; after her mother died (probably as a result of childbirth) she was brought up by her maternal grandparents. She married Robert Martin Blount in 1892. They had no children. She outlived seven of her nine half-brothers.
It is curious that Dorothy did not mention the death of Billy’s only surviving older brother, Thomas Aloysius Whyte (1876–1931), either here or in her account of 1931. She does mention it in a later installment.
Percy Malcom Robinson, an engineer, a banker and a member of the Straits Settlements Legislative Council, had loaned Billy the capital to invest in his Hibernia rubber plantation in the first place, and was now wanting it back.
London
We decided to go and live in London, where John could go to a good day school. Again I have no dates, but sometime in the spring or early summer [of 1934] we left Cannes; we probably stayed at 22 Carlton House Terrace [home of Sir Robert and Lady Hadfield, Dorothy’s uncle and aunt], but not for long as I took John to America that summer. Papa hadn’t been at all well, and wanted Billy and John and me to go over, but Billy simply couldn’t get away; I think it was owing to Mary Blount’s death that he had to go to Ireland, to wind up her estate; he was trustee for various relations. [As mentioned above, Billy’s surviving older brother Tim had died in 1931, and his younger brother Maurice was not in good health; the other six brothers had all died years before.] Billy did think of coming over later to join us, but that never came off, possibly because of the expense.
Billy came to Southampton to see us off. Maisie was staying with her parents there, and brought her baby – also John – to meet us, and then I think Mrs. Bideleux took the baby home and Maisie had lunch with us. We walked back to the docks and asked the policeman on duty where the Aquitania was, and to our horror he said she was just moving off! But luckily he was mistaken and she was still tied up; it was another ship that had just sailed. So I think they were able to come on board and see our cabin – a very nice double one – and I remember their waving good-bye, and I was so glad that Maisie was there as I hated leaving Billy alone. He went to Garland’s Hotel and had the “Old Comrades” (R.D.F.) dinner that night, took Bunty out next day from her school at Ascot, then after giving Jack Whyte luncheon he went up to Scotby – no, first to the Wakeman-Colvilles’ at Coton; Agnes was there with her fiancé, Geoffrey Thompson. At Scotby there was only Helen at first, but later Jess came from Oxford where she’d been to two dances with Dick, and had thoroughly enjoyed herself. She said she hadn’t been to bed those two nights!
Mary Jacqueline “Maisie” Bideleux (1902-2002) was one of four Anglicised sisters from Le Havre who had been very friendly with Dorothy since early in her Paris days. She had married William John McKendrick “Ken” Warden (1904-1980) in 1928 and they lived in Singapore. They were a formidable mixed doubles tennis team in Singapore in the 1930s.
John Christopher Warden, their only child, lived from 1933 to 2008.
Mrs Bideleux was born Anna Maria Skoglund (1874-1951). She was Swedish.
Gladys Louisa Wakeman (1883-1959) married Hugh Davenport Colville (1882-1962) in 1906. He was a naval captain who retired in 1922. Her family lived at Coton Hall in Shropshire, the ancestral home of American Civil War-era general Robert E. Lee; Gladys and Hugh changed their surname to Wakeman-Colville in 1927 in order to inherit the property, but appear to have sold it not long after.
Their daughter Agnes (1909-1974) married the future Sir Geoffrey Stuart Thompson (1905-1983) in 1934.
“Bunty”, formally Esther Theresa Mary Whyte (1917-2000) was Billy’s niece, the daughter of his older brother George and a favourite elder relative of mine from my childhood. She grew up at the Whyte ancestral home, Loughbrickland House.
“Dick” is Lyla Lamb’s son, Helen and Jessica’s brother Richard Anthony Lamb (1911-1999), who I met once or twice. At this stage he was studying history at Merton College, Oxford.
From one of Billy’s letters to me, which I kept, as I kept all his letters – not many, as we weren’t often separated – I see that John had asked, as a birthday treat, to have a flight over London – he’d already had one over Cannes. Robin Gossip came too, the elder son of Dr. and Mrs. Gossip from Penang, who were then living in London. We all went to Croydon and hired a little plane, as one could do then. Both boys felt rather air-sick but seemed to feel it was well worth it.
Dr James Gossip (1889-1977) was from Inverness, and had moved to Penang in 1920; his wife, born Elsie Marguerite Grange (1897-1980) was from Lancashire. They married in Penang in 1923. Their older son Robin Grange Gossip lived from 1924 to 2008.
America
We must have sailed about June 20th and reached New York about the 28th after a very good trip. There was a children’s playroom with all sorts of things that John liked; it was quite difficult to pry him loose for meals or to come out on deck to get some fresh air.
Passenger records survive showing Dorothy and John boarding the Aquitania in Southampton on 16 June, and arriving in New York on 24 June, so Dorothy’s memory is a few days out. Their race is recorded as “English” (the options also included “Irish”). John had a passport and a visa, but Dorothy is noted as claiming U.S. citizenship on arrival. One of their fellow passengers was the marine biologist Charles Maurice Yonge.
Billy had a lot to do at Loughbrickland over letting, or selling, land – he was Magda’s trustee, with Harry Monahan, but Harry left it all to Billy as being the one most interested in the future of the estate. It, Loughbrickland, was entailed in the main line, but left to Magda for her lifetime.
Magda, nee Magdalena Esther Mary Grehan (1885-1972), was the widow of Billy’s elder brother George. She lived in Loughbrickland as a widow for over fifty years.
From there he went on to Coolavin. In the meantime all I know of our doings in America is what I can gather from snapshots, and Billy’s letters to me, and my own not too reliable memory.
We reached New York and were met by Papa and Lyman, I think. Lyman had married May Tiedemann, a widow with two children, a girl, Frances, and a boy, Carl. They had a house quite near ours and we saw a lot of them. Carl was three years older than John and Frances older still, but Carl and John played together. A cousin of Sally’s had lent John a tricycle which he loved and to ride round the block on it, not crossing any streets.
See Dorothy’s detailed note about her father, Henry Deming Hibbard (1856-1942).
Dorothy’s brother Lyman Charlton Hibbard (1893-1956) had married May Tiedemann née Glenn (1895-1968) in 1933. Her first husband was Carl Hans Tiedemann (1890-1929). Her children were Frances Glenn Tiedemann (1921-1991) and Carl Hans Tiedemann II (1926-2016).
One tragedy happened while we were in Plainfield. I had rung the Davises at Southampton soon after I arrived but only Steuart was there and he told me Billie was in hospital – no, I think he said a convalescent place – I didn’t really gather what was wrong, but he said he’d tell her I was in Plainfield and we’d all meet later. Then a few days later I saw in the paper that she was dead. I went to the funeral, which was at Southampton, but was too late to see her again. It was a great blow; she had been my dearest friend since Foxcroft days, and though we didn’t see each other often, and she very seldom wrote, I always knew she was there. Years later Edith Cobb, her sister, was to tell me more about her death. Apparently she had been ill but was supposed to be better. Several times she felt worse and Steuart was sent for, only to find her quite all right again. He had one son by his first marriage – Billie had no children – and it was the boy’s 21st birthday, and they were having a party to celebrate, when Steuart was sent for again. He didn’t think it was serious, and felt he couldn’t leave the party, so he didn’t go till it was over, and found her dead; I think it was a heart attack. This was in July. I went and came back by train. All the McKeevers were there, of course, and other friends whom I had heard of but had never seen. On the way back I got into the wrong subway and was taken to Brooklyn. I got out of the train and looked about but couldn’t see any signs to help, so in despair I asked a man who looked to me like a gangster but who couldn’t have been nicer – I think he actually took me to the right train.
Perhaps not surprisingly, since she got this information at second hand several years later, Dorothy is misinformed about some of the details of poor Billie’s premature demise. Edgar Steuart Davis (1913-1993), Steuart’s son by his first marriage, was born in November, so his 21st birthday would not have been until several months after Billie’s death which is recorded on 5 July 1934. So it was probably a Fourth of July party that Steuart and Edgar were attending when Billie died.
Billie’s sister Edith (1895-1977) married Boughton Cobb (1894-1974) in 1918. They had at least four children.
I went in to spend a few nights in New York with Carol Iredell, who was alone in the family apartment. I remember she suggested going to a film and I said no, it would be so hot, and she told me the cinemas were the coolest places in New York as they were air-conditioned; it was the first time I’d heard of that.
Carol Iredell (1902-1988) was a friend of Dorothy’s from her childhood in Plainfield, New Jersey.
Poor little John got into trouble while I was away. He had gone up to my old playroom, which I’d often told him about, and had found a lot of toy soldiers, which he began to play with. Suddenly Sally appeared and told him he was a very naughty boy and shouldn’t have touched them. He didn’t understand but thought he’d done something dreadful and never told me about it for years. The soldiers had belonged to Ames, Sally’s elder son who had committed suicide – I’m not sure of the year but we were staying at Coolavin at the time, I know. Ames was quite an expert on military history and used those soldiers to reproduce historic battles, but poor little John couldn’t know that Sally never got over Ames’s death. It was a tragedy.
Sally Ames Brooks (1858-1946) was Dorothy’s stepmother. Her first son was Charles Ames Brooks (1883-1931). The newspaper reports of his death on 22 December 1931 state simply that he was struck by a train near the Plainfield North Avenue railway station, but presumably his mother knew that there was more to it. The noted architect Henry O. Milliken and Princeton politics professor J. Dayton Voorhees were among his pallbearers. Dorothy and her family were indeed in Coolavin for Christmas 1931 when Ames died.
One day we went over to Montclair to the Youngmans’; Louise Earle, the wife, was one of my oldest friends. She had three girls and a boy.
Dorothy has previously mentioned her schoolfriend Louise Earle (1898-1993). She married Arthur Vreeland Youngman (1900-1973). Her obituary record gives her only two daughters and a son, but this may be incomplete (or Dorothy may be wrong).
Later we went to stay with May and Lyman at a cottage they had taken at Amagansett, Long Island. May’s sister and brother-in-law, Fran and Sid Moody, were living near there; they had a girl, Alliene, and a younger boy, Sidney, just John’s age. He didn’t like John; up to then he had been the youngest of the children in the family and had always been made much of, and now John held the centre of the stage. They were both six.
May’s sister was Frances Trent Glenn (1899-1975), who married Sidney Clark Moody (1895-1974) in 1925. He was originally from Illinois, but they settled in Plainfield NJ. Their daughter Mary Aileen Moody (1925-2020) married John William Bainton (1925-1989). Their son Sidney Clark Moody jr (1928-2012), who was three months younger than John, became a noted journalist and married Patricia Ivins (1927-2022), whose grandparents had unwittingly sparked one of Dorothy’s early rows with her stepmother.
Actually we didn’t go to Carol’s – or I didn’t – till after we came back from Long Island and Connecticut, and the day we went in Papa and John came with me and we took John to the Empire State Building and the Science Museum, then lunched, and then went to Grant’s tomb. I wrote to Billy that John loved it all, subways and elevated railways included. Then he and Papa went back to Plainfield and I spent two nights with Carol.
It is an odd coincidence that my father visited New York for the first time aged six, and I too visited it for the first time with him when I was six; and I brought my own son there for the first time two months before his sixth birthday.
More sadly, New York was also where my father died in 1990.
We had a lovely time on Long Island, and lots of bathing. From there we went on to stay with Van Wyck and Eleanor, and also with Nancy and Billy Manhard; I forget which we went to first. Both the Brooks boys, Charlie and Kenyon, were at home. Van Wyck was well and had had a great success – I think it was that year – with the “Flowering of New England” which won the Pulitzer Prize. Kenyon was busy collecting weapons of all kinds – or rather firearms.
Both they and the Manhards lived in Westport, Connecticut, so it was easy to go from one to the other. We crossed from L[ong] I[sland] by a ferry to Greenwich, I think, but went back to Plainfield by train.
Van Wyck Brooks (1886-1963) was the younger son of Dorothy’s stepmother Sally. He married Eleanor Kenyon Stimson (1884-1946) in 1911. Their two sons were Charles VanWyck Brooks (1912-1991) and Oliver Kenyon Brooks (1916-1986).
Van Wyck’s great success was indeed The Flowering of New England, but it was not published until 1936, two years after Dorothy’s 1934 visit, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1937. However by 1934 he had already published eleven literary monographs, and had been prominent for many years. His high point probably came in 1944, when he published The World of Washington Irving and got on the front cover of Time magazine.
I find a Nancy Manhard, nee Ponton (~1886-1936), married to William Edward Manhard of Westport Connecticut, and who is recorded in a lot of transatlantic passenger records, and also appears with Dorothy and the Sperlings in a photograph taken in Pompeii in 1912. The records of William Edward Manhard are confusing, and I think there may be several people of the same name who have got combined by my sources: the suggested dates are 1883-1969, with a couple more marriages thrown in.
I had been writing to Billy to suggest finding somewhere where we could P.G. [stay as “Paying Guests”] while house-hunting. Originally Billy had thought we could all go to Lyla’s first, but there was a mix-up over dates, as Lyla had thought I wouldn’t get back till October and had the house full all September; I wrote I was just as well pleased as I wanted to start house-hunting at once and then go to Lyla’s for a rest.
I had missed him terribly, and I wrote to him to say I hoped we’d never be separated like that again, and we never were, for more than a few days.
Zora was in England, but only till Sept. 15th, which was probably why we came by an earlier ship than I had originally meant; evidently I had planned to get back about the middle of September. But then I booked by the Europa, which got us back on Sept. 6th or 7th, I’m not sure which.
England
Billy met us at Southampton, and also Mr. Bideleux. There was trouble with the customs over some of the dresses I’d bought in New York at Klein’s for sums like $2 and $5 [roughly $50 and $120 at 2025 prices]; a stupid young customs man made me take them to another official – all sorts of clothes, not just silk things which were taxed quite heavily just then. I think the senior official told the other one he had no business to make me bring all those things, and anyway didn’t charge me much.
We probably spent a few nights with Zora at 22 Carlton House Terrace, but quite soon we were installed with some cousins of Wilfrid Taylor’s called Tollemache; the odd thing is that I can’t remember where they lived. Somewhere near S. Kensington, I think. They took a few P.G.’s and they had a cat and her kitten, which John liked very much. They gave him to us, and we called him Nicky, but we couldn’t take him till we were settled in our new abode. He had a passion always for riding on anything that moved. Once when we were still there John was pushing a chair round the room with the kitten on it, when an old lady who was there told him he was being cruel to the kitten, and lifted it down. John and the kitten looked at her with much the same puzzled expression; then John began pushing the chair again, the kitten jumped up on it, and they continued happily as before.
I have been wondering for months about Wilfrid Taylor, but the vital clue that he had Tollemache relatives solved it for me. He was Wilfrid Doneraile Stanhope Taylor (1868-1954), son of Thomas Edward Taylor MP, married to Margaret Annie Halcombe (1864-1940) with four daughters born between 1892 and 1901. His family is not mentioned at all by Dorothy. In the 1901 census he lives with his wife and three daughters (the fourth not being born yet) in London, and his profession is given as “Secretary (Private)”; in the 1911 census, he is residing with his daughters and brother in Egham, Berkshire, and his profession is given as “Insurance Agent”; throughout the 1920s, his address on the electoral register is given as 22 Carlton House Terrace, along with Sir Robert and Lady Hadfield and their other live-in staff. So my guess is that he was actually Sir Robert’s secretary, or a staffer of some kind.
Hi mother, born Louisa Tollemache (1833-1928), had five brothers who had thirty-two children between them, so I am not going to attempt to guess which of Wilfrid’s Tollemache cousins took the Whytes as paying guests.
If we did go to Lyla’s I have found no record of it, but we may have done, as we didn’t move to Coleherne Court till November. As I remember we took it from sometime in September. We had to have it all painted; the arrangement was that if we did that when we went in we wouldn’t have to pay fair having it done over again when we left. Then we had to buy all our carpets, furniture, etc. We did that mostly at auctions and got some very nice things. The prices were very low in those days; Billy kept a record of all we spent but I can’t put my hand on it at the moment.
There is a very amusing family coincidence involving Coleherne Court, but I will save it for the next entry; I’m breaking here because the move to Coleherne Court is a break in the typescript.
Next: 1935 (starting November 1934)