The Memoirs of Ellie Warburton

Script.

Part 1

1.

Where to start? Why not with the first time we three Warburton Sisters made the news? Which was during our visit to Hawarden Castle in 1896. I was the cause of the hoo-hah but being only three years old, what I know comes from other people’s accounts and what I imagine went through my infant brain. We were invited to the annual Hawarden fête because one of Daddy’s brothers was a local Liberal MP. Incidentally, Mummy and Daddy were replacing Mama and Papa in families that considered themselves modern which our mother, if not our father, did.

Daddy was, as usual, conspicuous by his absence. For example, when Matty was born in autumn 1890 he was in Kashmir, when Vicky appeared in summer 1891 he was somewhere up the Amazon and when Ellie (me) arrived on May Day 1893 he was in California. The son of a rich, self-made cotton manufacturer, Hugo Arthur Warburton was educated at Rugby and Cambridge. As an adult he played the stock market assiduously and indulged in the late Victorian pastime of the well-heeled, travelling abroad and collecting plants. Otherwise he existed on his own isthmus, from time to time visiting the mainland where the rest of humanity lived.

So it was Mummy who took us to the fête. She was born a Partington and their estate included Grangefell Hall, the village of Grangefell-by-Bowland, undulating wooded country and miles of Pennine moorland. By the late 1880s the estate was virtually bankrupt which was when Daddy, increasingly disenchanted with the smoke and grime of his native Manchester, on the look-out for an imposing house with large grounds as his English base, surprisingly came to the rescue. I say surprisingly because he was not a social animal but he happened to attend a reception where he met the Honourable Charlotte Partington, known as Lotty, who had been sent to Manchester to find a wealthy husband to save the estate. The rest, as they say, is history or at least it’s ours.

The family, minus its paterfamilias, travelled to Hawarden by coach and train via Preston, Manchester and Chester which was exciting, though the house itself was a big disappointment, not at all my idea of a castle. On arrival we were ushered into a large room overlooking a terrace, where Matty, Vicky and I were told to sit on stools which we obediently did. Then the old, old man came slowly into the room. Perhaps it was the reverence that greeted his arrival or maybe it was his white hair but I immediately thought of the pictures of God in my Bible Stories for Children. His wearing a black frock-coat, rather than a long white night-shirt, did not upset the image. He smiled at us and in a mellifluous, if quavering voice - well, God was very old - enquired, ‘Who, pray, are these delightful little Miss Muffets sitting on their tuffets?’

When somebody proposed a picture of him with the little Miss Muffets, a photographer and reporter were summoned. Our stools were arranged round the chair in which the old man had been carefully seated and we were told to look at the birdie. I actually have a memory of the magnesium flashes making me blink. The photographic session finished, our family details taken by the reporter - we were the sweet little daughters of H.A. Warburton Esq. of Grangefell Hall, Lancashire - the old man was helped to his feet and led through the French windows to the terrace. On a lovely summer’s day some twenty-four thousand people had turned up for the annual Hawarden fête and the roar that greeted the old man’s appearance on the terrace shook the very heavens.

It made me certain of His identity and I piped up, ‘That is God, isn’t it?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ said my sister Vicky who was ever precocious, ‘It’s Mr Gladstone.’

My remark, clearly heard by the local reporter, made the headlines, not only in British press but throughout the world. How the Chester Chronicle which published the story, must have blessed my presence at that year’s Hawarden fête!

In flouncy frocks, white socks and ankle-strap shoes we were a winsome trio, and the photograph of the four times Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and the Little Miss Muffets, revered old age and tender innocence, appealed to late Victorian sentiment. The popularity of the picture, swiftly printed as a postcard that sold hundreds of thousands of copies - Mr Gladstone was never averse to publicity - produced innumerable requests for us to appear in tasteful advertisements. The maternal Partington grandmother with whom we, alas, lived had been less than enthusiastic about the post cards and was appalled by anything so vulgar as advertising. Mummy had not yet summoned the courage to defy her, though having us christened with the popular diminutives Matty, Vicky and Ellie was, I now appreciate, a bold gesture.

For some time our infrequent forays into the great big world were greeted with the cries of ‘Do look, it’s them Miss Muffets! Aren’t they bonny little lasses!’, but then we faded from public memory.

2.

To say nothing nothing happened in the following thirteen years is as ludicrous as the communiqué All Quiet on the Western Front (which Erich Maria Remarque used as the title for his great Great War novel.) Just as something was always happening in the trenches - somebody being shot by a sniper, sent into No Man’s Land on a useless stunt , collapsing in the mud - the same was true of life at Grangefell. It was merely of no interest to the outside world. Actually that’s not entirely true, either. When ours became the first house in north Lancashire to have electric lighting, courtesy of an enormous generator installed in one of the barns, people travelled for miles to gawp at the illuminations.

It was Daddy who had the electricity installed. Whenever he briefly returned home it was with detailed plans for improvements to his property. Having discussed them with his estate manager and occasionally with his wife, he then took off for his next destination, leaving them to implement the schemes. Vicky and I, if not Matty, enjoyed the chaos and the end results were worthwhile. When the boiler that fed the central heating was activated it made a noise reminiscent of a stampede of buffaloes, but the system helped keep us warm. The telephone was installed with difficulty and at colossal expense so that Daddy could keep in touch with his stockbroker during his sojourns at home. Otherwise its usefulness was limited, as few families possessed this new-fangled instrument. The indoor pool , left in a mess after our unknown paternal grandfather, Sir Eustace Partington, squandered his inheritance, was completed to Daddy’s specifications. I blessed him for that because I loved swimming. What made the renovated Grangefell estate extra special was the transformation of the mini-jungle into one of the great gardens of England. It put the work done on the house into the shade and such was the status of the head gardener he was always addressed as Mister Armitage.

Of the three of us Matty grew up to have the most perfect features but the good fairies omitted to bless her with charm or what became known as sex-appeal, and from her earliest days she collected facts and figures assiduously which didn’t help people to appreciate her beauty. Nobody could fail to notice Vicky’s peaches-and cream complexion and mass of corn-gold hair, while her personality drew people to her as moths to a candle or as flies to the summertime strips of gummed paper that hung in Grangefell’s kitchen. When Vicky bestowed her favours you basked in a roseate glow but her boredom threshold was ever low, her moods as changeable as the English weather, and the cat-like gaze that later transfixed so many admirers was a product of myopia. Having good eyesight myself, I was probably the first person to realise she couldn’t see clearly. I have since wondered whether the acute myopia contributed to my favourite sister’s cavalier approach to life.

Apart from herself, Vicky’s abiding passion was horses. To see her clad in a black hacking jacket and skirt, cream silk stock and smart black bowler, her golden hair caught in a bun, to watch her ride off side-saddle, were sights to behold. Despite, or perhaps because of, her myopia she was a fearless horsewoman. Not a talent I shared. Having been badly thrown by one pony and put on another that bolted, I eventually learned to ride but generally avoided those four-legged creatures. Physically I took after my mother, slim, fairly tall, with chestnut hair and hazel eyes. As for my character, well, I leave that for others to judge.

Places like Grangefell were then almost as remote as the Antarctic but for several reasons we Warburtons led a peculiarly isolated existence, no stream of visitors, no huntin’ and shootin’ parties for us. For a start we were Protestant and Liberal, whereas most of our land-owning neighbours were recusant Catholic and Tory, and when at home Daddy had no interest in the local gentry. Then there was the problem of great-aunt Polly Partington who lived with us and, in the local vernacular, had several screws loose. On her better days she was an anxious, fidgety figure, flitting hither and thither making clucking noises. On her bad days she roamed through the house wailing like a banshee and had to be shut in her room, which didn’t stop the wailing. Mummy said, ‘Your great-aunt cannot help herself. She was dropped on her head when she was a baby.’

‘Where from?’ enquired Vicky, ‘The top of Mount Everest?’ And was spanked for her impertinence, a frequent occurrence that had no noticeable effect.

The chief reason for our social isolation was undoubtedly grandma Partington. I don’t know what she was like before Fate struck so many cruel blows - the deaths of her beloved, dissolute husband Sir Eustace, from syphilis I later gathered, and all three of her sons - but the woman I knew enjoyed exercising power, locating people’s weaknesses and turning the knife in them. Most people were terrified of her but occasionally she met her match. Head gardener Mister Armitage told her to boogger off when she tried to issue instructions to him! One good thing she did was to teach us French (the daughter of a diplomat she’d been brought up in Paris.) Grandma may have done this to keep up her own command of the language - I never gave her the benefit of selfless motives - but we always spoke French at meals. Her constant admonitions - ‘Do not slouch. You resemble a sack of potatoes’, ‘Sit up straight. You are not a corkscrew’, ‘Stop fidgeting like a bluebottle’, ‘Geese gobble their food. Well-bred children do not’, ‘Speak clearly when spoken to’ - gave us exemplary deportment and manners, and incisive voices.

Perhaps what made the neighbouring gentry finally decide the Warburtons were beyond the pale was when Vicky turned down the invitation to join the local hunt. She was sorry, she said, but she couldn’t possibly because she felt sorry for the fox.

Oddly, it was grandma who provided us with more freedom than most children of our class enjoyed. Trapped between her draconian regime and Vicky’s tantrums, governesses came and went with alarming rapidity. Grandma also suffered from what I now appreciate were migraines and when they struck she retired to her bedroom. Left to our own devices, indoors we had the swimming pool and unrestricted access to the Hall’s splendid library. (In her teens Vicky found an illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra and was very put out when I failed to be similarly fascinated.) Outside, as long as we kept clear of Mister Armitage’s territory, we had the run of the extensive grounds. And we we had a few friends of our own age, notably Geoffrey Isherwood.

The catastrophes that led his father to Grangefell included his young wife dying when Geoffrey was born and the family’s capital being wiped out in a stock market crash. That was when Daddy willingly came to the rescue, engaging his Rugby school friend as estate manager. A more loyal and efficient one he could not have found. Known to us as Uncle Jack he lived in The Lodge that guarded the Hall’s entrance gates. Having moved his infant son Geoffrey into The Lodge, he hired a buxom young widow named Mabel Walmsley as their housekeeper. Years later I learned that Mabel had provided her employer with comforts other than house-keeping so why, after a decent period of mourning, didn’t they marry and have the babies she who loved children must have longed for? It was, I now assume, a question of class. Jack Isherwood hailed from a cadet branch of a notable Cheshire family, whereas Mabel Walmsley came from the back streets of Atherton. Her misfortune was to have married a miner killed in a south Lancashire pit disaster. Or was it a misfortune? She almost certainly had a happier life in the comfort of The Lodge as an unacknowledged mistress than as a miner’s wife in Atherton’s bleak streets.

Three years’ older than me, secure in the warmth of his father’s and Mabel Walmsley’s affection, Geoffrey was a nice looking, good-tempered, eminently sensible little boy, who became my very best friend. Even grandma Partimgton approved of him. When, aged eleven, he went to Preston Grammar School, lodging with friends in the town during the week, returning to Grangefell at weekends, I was surprised how much I missed trotting down to The Lodge to tell him this, that or the other but I stored up the news for the weekends. Dismay filled me when two years later I learned that he’d passed the common entrance examination for Rugby.

‘Why are you leaving Preston Grammar? I thought you liked it there.’

Geoffrey said he did but his father was, as I knew, an old boy so he supposed he had to follow suit. Off he went to Rugby which he took in his usual stride. I was subsequently r surprised to learn it was my father, rather than a wealthy Isherwood relation, who paid the school fees his own father could not afford.

We also played with the Brownfoot children, though I doubt Mummy, certainly not grandma, knew about them. It started when Miss Broughton was our governess. In fine weather, part of her task as decreed by grandma was to teach us about the estate’s flora and fauna, but she tended to take a book with her, sit down and let us wander, and the Brownfoot cottage was in the grounds, rather than down the road in the village. It was Uncle Jack who engaged Jedediah Brownfoot as chief shepherd - the north Lancashire fells are sheep country - and another excellent choice he proved to be.

Matty, Vicky and I were intrigued by the disorganised household and by its matriarch. Née Pauline O’Flaherty, Mrs Brownfoot was, as her name indicates, of Irish origin, as loquacious as her husband was taciturn. Life for her was an uncomplicated affair ordained by the One True Faith and she constantly bewailed the fact that we were heathens, praying that the Good Lord would forgive our parents’ trespasses and let us into heaven by the back door. Vicky who wouldn’t have dreamed of entering anywhere by the back door said, ‘Can you imagine going to a Heaven filled with Irish Catholics!’

When the family moved into the cottage there were four children, Danny, Bernadette, Patrick and Conor but with the annual arrival of a new baby they became corporately known to us as the Brownfeet. Matty lavished her concern on the whole tribe, unloading her advice by the cart-load, typically undismayed when it failed to be implemented. The recipient, not she, was the loser. Patrick was devoted to Vicky, Danny was my friend. From an early age he helped his father and he told me about sheep’s suicidal tendencies - ‘If they can find a spike to impale themselves on, or a rill to drown themselves in, Miss Ellie, they will’ - and the sort of gory stories children love to hear about sheep stuck in snow drifts having their eyes pecked out by crows. You will note that our friendship did not extend to the Brownfeet addressing us without the prefix Miss.

From time to time we visited Whalley Range, then a leafy district of south Manchester, where grandpa Warburton lived. Having scarcely known her own father, Mummy became very fond of the old boy who, unusually for a male of his generation, enjoyed the company of women and children. I was his favourite which made a change, as Vicky was most people’s. While it is not axiomatic to like or love the people who like or love you, in return I doted on him. Manchester has a reputation as the rainiest of England’s rainy cities but my memories are of sun-filled afternoons sitting by grandpa’s side in the shade of the magnificent trees after which his mansion The Beeches had been named. I loved listening to him talk in a deliberately broad Lancashire accent - he was actually a very clever man with a wide range of interest outside the cotton trade in which he’d made his fortune by patenting a refinement to the self-acting mule - particularly about his late wife Lizzie. The antithesis of the demure, obedient Victorian spouse, on one legendary occasion she emptied a bowl of cold soup over grandpa’s head when he yet again turned up late for dinner. Sadly, she died aged forty while nursing cholera victims in Manchester, and he mourned her for the rest of his long life. Although I never knew her, I like to think I inherited some of my spirit from grandma Lizzie.

The stories I most enjoyed were about grandpa’s friendship with Charles Dickens. He claimed that the character of Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times grew out of ‘Me telling Mister Dickens, he was oft in Manchester in them days, tha knows, about a sanctimonious old ‘umbug ah knew when ah was nobbut a lad, who were allus prating on about facts. Facts, get your facts straight, boy, and you can’t go wrong. ’

When I told Vicky this story she exclaimed, ‘Matty must be descended from him!’ Thereafter our older sister was known to us as Miss Gradgrind.

I was eleven when grandpa Warburton died, hardly unexpectedly as he was nearly ninety, but I cried for days. As was the custom we were taken to see him lying in an open coffin at The Beeches. Vicky had hysterics but the tranquillity of his face, the impression of his having fallen into a peaceful sleep, made me unafraid of death, a useful attribute in the years that lay ahead. Needless to say he had a grand funeral, the streets lined with mourners, women dabbing their eyes, men doffing their hats, as the horse-drawn carriages proceeded slowly to Southern Cemetery. Vicky enjoyed that.

Perhaps induced by the trauma of grandpa’s death soon afterwards my periods started, an event I recorded thus in my diary: The Curse Came Upon Me!!! But it wasn’t like the Lady of Shalott’s!!! Nor was it the bewildering shock so many girls of my generation experienced. Mummy, bless her, explained what would happen before it did, if not why, but her explanation did not prevent Vicky screaming the house down when she discovered blood staining her best silk knickers. Matty and I accepted the process as part of growing up.

My first diary, a blue leather, gilt-edged affair with a lock and key, was a ninth birthday present. On its first page I wrote in a bold hand: Top Secret! This Diary Belongs to Ellie Warburton, Grangefell Hall, Grangfell-by-Bowland, Lancashire, England, Europe, the World. The habit of writing up the day’s events and anything else of that seemed important has proved very useful in assembling these memoirs.

3.

I’ve reached 1909, the year that that changed our lives.

The previous autumn, aged eighteen, Matty had put her hair up, that Victorian/Edwardian farewell to childhood, and gone to stay at The Beeches which grandpa had bequeathed to his only daughter, our Aunty Florence. Among other public spirited enterprises she was an Executive Committee member of the Ancoats Settlement in one of Manchester’s worst slum areas. Helping at the Settlement stimulated Matty’s interest in public hygiene. Early in 1909, accompanied by Aunty Florence, she went down to London for an interview at Bedford College for Women. After completing a written test she was informed that with her father’s permission she could start the course this autumn. Whether Aunty Florence twisted Daddy’s arm - he disliked his brothers but was fond of his sister - I would not know but he gave his permission and forked out the money for Matty’s fees and lodgings in London. In September 1909 we waved our sister off as the Euston-bound train steamed out of Preston station. The previous year we’d waved Geoffrey Isherwood off to Edinburgh University, to fulfill his long-held ambition to study medicine and become a doctor, but he and I kept in touch with weekly letters.

The two departures increased Vicky’s restlessness and she demanded to know why she couldn’t go to London. Briefly at home Daddy enquired, ‘To do what?’ ‘To enjoy myself’, Vicky replied, ‘and to meet interesting people. There aren’t any up here.’ When he said she could wait until she was eighteen and then he would see, Vicky asked if Daddy’s chauffeur Horrocks could teach her to drive. I wanted to cry out, ‘She can’t see clearly’, but kept quiet.

Daddy’s reactions were, as you may have gathered, less than predictable. After a few seconds’ reflection he said, ‘Learn to drive? Yes, why not? The Rover, mind you, not the Rolls-Royce, and providing you do exactly as instructed, miss.’

Daddy had known Henry Royce from the days when he manufactured electrical cranes in Manchester, before he developed his own motor car and teamed up with the Hon. Charles Rolls. The previous year Daddy had bought one of the famed Silver Ghost models at a cost of £950 (for the chassis alone) when many annual wages were less than £150. The four cylinder Rover 16/20 he regarded as his run-around, though with most of his running around done overseas nobody was quite clear why he needed one.

I needn’t have worried about Vicky’s myopia because after Horrocks had taken her out a couple of times he said he was sorry but unless she wore spectacles he couldn’t teach her. She duly went to an optician’s in Preston but hated wearing glasses and having acquired basic driving skills lost interest. I hung around while she was having her lessons and Horrocks enquired if I would like to learn, too? Enthusiastically, I nodded.

The Rover had three forward gears plus reverse and you double-declutched which entailed putting the lever in and out of neutral before you got into gear. But it did not have a governor, the old method of curtailing the engine speed which only too often, as I learned when driving other models, caused you to stall, but was controlled by the accelerator pedal. There was a complicated ignition system but if the engine was very cold or the car had been standing for a long period you still had to crank it, by means of a handle inserted at the base of the radiator which you turned until it fired. Not the easiest of tasks, as I later learned on freezing mornings in Flanders’ Fields. At times I despaired of ever being able to drive but Horrocks was an excellent instructor and the day eventually came when, with him in the front passenger seat, I manoeuvred the Rover down to the gates and along the road to the village without clashing gears or stalling the engine. (There was no age restriction and you didn’t have to pass a driving test until 1935).

How proud I was when Horrocks said, ‘You’re going to be a really good driver, Miss Ellie.’

By chance I’d acquired a skill that was to alter my life.

4.

Despite the freedom to roam, a member of staff normally knew where we were but all our house- keeper Mrs Howarth could tell me when, on a late autumn morning in 1909 I asked after Vicky, was that she had breakfasted early and housemaid Tilly had seen her walking away sensibly dressed. Call it prescience, or our sisterly bond, but I was worried. There was nobody I could consult. Mummy had finally found the courage to stand up to her mother and do what she wanted which was to fight for women’s rights. She was away on a Women’s Freedom League (WFL) suffrage tour, Geoffrey was miles away in Edinburgh and to nobody’s regret grandma was spending an increasing amount of time in her room. Not that I would have asked her advice, though she had a soft spot for Vicky.

In the middle of the morning Daddy rang. As most of the staff treated the telephone as if it were a rabid dog that would leap up and bite them, I took the call. In the process of planning a new tulip garden, chauffeured by Horrocks in the Rolls-Royce, he had gone to Holland. Would I kindly tell my mother they were on their way home, their anticipated arrival time in Grangefell late afternoon. When I said, actually Mummy wasn’t here, impatiently my father said, ‘Inform Mrs Howarth then.’

His call made me more apprehensive about Vicky’s whereabouts but what prompted me to don a tam o’shanter, thick woollen coat and scarf - it was a sunny day but a keen wind was blowing down from the moors - and walk across the courtyard to the garage I can’t say. On peering inside my worst fears were realised. There was no sign of the Rover, it had to be Vicky who had taken the car and for the door to be shut there had to be an accomplice because she would have left it open. Dear God, I prayed, please let Vicky and whoever she’s with return from wherever they’ve gone before Daddy gets back.

Just before noon it was Mummy who turned up unexpectedly. Her bespattered coat was not the reason for her shaken state - women’s suffrage speakers were accustomed to having garbage thrown at them - but she waited until the staff had clucked around her, she’d washed and changed and was drinking a strong cup of tea, before recounting her story. Yesterday they had driven the WFL horse-drawn caravan into supposedly sedate Southport. As pre-arranged they’d parked in friendly livery stables and proceeded to hold a meeting on the promenade, only to be assailed by a mob shouting ‘Let’s chuck `em in the sea’ (a difficult feat in Southport where you need binoculars to see the sea). With the assistance of local suffragists they’d managed to escape to the livery stables but the mob had followed them.

‘It was frightening, Ellie. A pack of the yahoos stayed outside the gates until well past midnight, baying and howling like wild beasts. This morning all was quiet but we decided we needed a break before continuing with the tour. On our way out of the town we called at the police station to complain that no attempt had been made to avert a breach of the peace. Do you know what the sergeant on duty said? Women like you deserve all you get!’

I made suitably outraged noises. It was only after Tilly had announced that lunch was served and we were walking towards the dining room that Mummy asked, `Where’s Vicky?’ I said I didn’t know but the Rover had gone.

‘What do you mean? The Rover’s gone?’

‘It isn’t in the garage. According to Mrs Howarth Vicky went out early this morning. And Daddy’s due back this afternoon. He telephoned earlier.’

Angrily Mummy asked why I hadn’t told her. Because you wanted to talk about your adventures in Southport and I was hoping Vicky would return soon. The staff were immediately summoned and like me berated for keeping silent about my sister’s absence which I considered unfair, though I realised Mummy’s ire came from an anxiety as deep as mine, not least about Daddy’s imminent return. The servants were despatched to seek information. In mid-afternoon Mrs Brownfoot appeared at the Hall with her daughter Bernadette in tow. Kneading her