Edward Brittain Advises Vera on Her New Direction; Cynthia Asquith on the Pemberton Billing Case

Four days ago, Edward Brittain began a letter to his sister Vera.

Italy, 30 May 1918

If the war goes on much longer nobody will go back to Oxford in spite of the concessions; I often think I am too old now to go back. I am getting terribly bored with what we are doing just now —

It broke off there–but, happily, not for good. It seems that Brittain was stricken with a fever, mid-sentence.

3rd June 1918

— however I am now in hospital and oddly enough not so bored as before because it is rather a relief to be down in the foothills again and not to have anything to do for a change. It is just a form of PUO [pyrexia of unknown origin] which everybody is having just now but fortunately not all at quite the same time. I shall be back again in a few days…

After this update he turns his attention to his sister’s quandary: having once again left her V.A.D. post to care for their mother, she is beginning to feel that she must do something else.

I never know what you are going to decide on next but still I quite agree with your new point of view; it is better not to go to Oxford at all than to go and have a rotten time feeling that it was a mistake. After all Experience is a great form of instruction and it is not to be had to the same extent as now in ordinary times, whereas the full advantage of Oxford could only be had in those ordinary times.

Edward’s advice seems to lean toward Vera rejoining the nursing corps, in the hopes that her experience and evident competence will override what will seem, from her official record, like inconstancy.

I should have thought you could have got out again to No 24 quite soon by getting the matron there to ask the 1st London to send you out to her as soon as you joined them, just in the same way as I could probably get Hudson to ask for me if I had to go home for a wound or anything after I was alright again. However I don’t suppose they will keep you at home in any case when you do rejoin because you have now got so much more experience than the average individual…

This seems rather strangely sanguine for a young man with several years’ experience of military bureaucracy…

I rather think leave has been reopened while I have been away which is hopeful but of course I am about 20th on the list.

With much love

Your affectionate

Edward^[1]

Our only other writer for today also seems to have ended her tenure as a V.A.D. rather suddenly, but in her case it was after only a few weeks and, apparently, as planned. But Cynthia Asquith is not reporting directly on the war, now. Instead, a much more intimate report on one of the fouler outgrowths of the political frustration and inchoate anger that the war has generated.

Monday, 3rd June

…I lunched at Cavendish Square—to my disappointment Mr Asquith wasn’t there but Margot, Sir Charles Russell, Sir Edward Henry, and Lord Stamfordham. Of course the Billing trial was discussed—poor Margot greatly incensed, but fairly rational I thought.

This is Margot Asquith, the (second) wife of Cynthia’s husband’s father, who has been publicly accused of being a sort of mystical lesbian avant garde aristocratic saboteur. It would be a funnier story if it weren’t true (the fact of the accusations–not Asquith’s treachery!) and if Maud Allan had not fallen into Pemberton Billing’s trap by suing him for libel. Libel is difficult to prove even without a hysterical wartime atmosphere, and Allan–unfortunately for her chances of winning a court and media battle–actually was a lesbian and therefore morally at fault in the common public opinion.

Cynthia Asquith’s diary goes on, sympathetic to her step-mother-in-law, but well aware of how poorly she (Margot) understands the political maneuverings or the extent to which Pemberton Billing’s hysterical accusations will find favor with angry traditionalists. The idea of a Black Book which might–just might!–really exist, and which might have any name in it is a stroke of reprehensible genius, allowing a ridiculous charge be spread by gossip and paranoia when mere repetitive trumpeting will have only a limited effect.

Lord Stamfordham said he understood the whole of the Royal Household were in the ‘Book’. To my horror. Sir Charles said there was no chance of a conviction against Billing. It is monstrous that these maniacs should be vindicated in the eyes of the public. What an Alice in Wonderland cast!

Lord Stamfordham is correct, as Cynthia Asquith seems to realize. But what an injustice to Alice in Wonderland! This is a different sort of grotesque, repetitive and shocking largely in the same way, namely a sort of out-of-control spitefulness. It includes not only Pemberton Billing, who straddles the line between a cynical hypocrite opportunist manipulator and madman, but also his primary sidekick Harold Spencer, who was certainly insane, and their part-time ally Lord Alfred Douglas, the one-time lover of Wilde who has become an unhinged persecutor of all who stood by Wilde after Douglas destroyed him.

Cynthia wouldn’t have known Pemberton Billing or Spencer, but Douglas is part of the same small world, and she has stories:

Billing, Father Vaughan, Marie Corelli, Lord Alfred Douglas, etc. Sir Charles considered Lord Alfred might well be at the bottom of a great deal of it. Why that lunatic is at large, Heaven only knows! Sir Charles was in the old Oscar Wilde-Lord Queensberry case and says that, ever since, Lord Alfred rings him up on the telephone about once a week and pours a torrent of filthy language into the receiver. He once let his house to a respectable old lady who was much upset by this custom. Sir Charles naturally urged Margot to make no effort to force herself into the box: Billing would, of course, ask if it were true she had a German governess in the house after the war, and if Sir Ernest Cassel stayed with her, and all kinds of irrelevant questions—just as he would ask Mrs Keppel about her relations with King Edward.

This description of Margot Asquith is touching–which is to say depressing. Another way in which war (or, rather, the lies that war breeds) worm into every odd corner of life, spreading misery.

Margot screamed out about the whole odious system of espionage under Lloyd George. How far it is true, or whether she has a bee in her bonnet on the subject, I don’t know. She says there is always a secretary in the Square to watch her comings and goings, and that when she entertains the blinded soldiers from St Dunstan’s and helps them into their taxis, a photograph is taken and published under the heading, ‘Mrs Asquith says goodbye to her pacifist friends.’ Poor Margot, her indiscretions so are naive, so childlike, that they ought in themselves to furnish a certificate of innocence. Where there is so much smoke there couldn’t be fire. She told us what I had never heard, that the woman who swore to having seen her at Fortnum and Mason’s sending a parcel to a German prisoner—and then retracted, saying she must have mistaken Dardanelles for Donnington Hall—was the present Lady Curzon, then Mrs Duggan. There has been an article in the Vigilante accusing the wives of Cabinet ministers of lesbianism.

The worst of this is that this will all work. That is, homophobia, packaged neatly with anger directed at the upper classes and flavored with antisemitism where convenient, will fan the flames of a completely spurious fire (to redirect Asquith’s metaphor). Many people who have suffered in the war–people who wonder why it has gone on for four years and claimed so many of their sons–are more than willing to entertain tales about Asquith-connected aristocratic depravities.^[2]