Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit

CHAPTER TWO

You're Only a Silly Gurl!

One morning, not long after the death of their father, Dorothy and Scamp were summoned to their mother's bedroom. Still wearing her dressing gown, Cissie knelt on the floor in front of them - an uncharacteristic gesture of intimacy - and holding out her arms, declared, 'I'm going to marry Lion. We're going to live at Sandbeck for ever!' Lion was their nickname for the Earl of Scarbrough (the family name was Lumley), who had been a familiar figure in their lives for as long as they could remember. He often visited them at Leybourne, and they in turn would stay regularly at Sandbeck in the West Riding of Yorkshire, one of his ancestral seats. However, in her memoirs Dorothy wrote that her father never accompanied them on the Yorkshire visits. 'He always sailed on his yacht, Minerva,' she wrote. This hints at something that my grandmother would never have written, but is gossip that has descended down the generations: for some years, before the death of her husband, Cissie had been having an affair with the Earl. The Ashtons would have become friends of the bachelor earl (known as Dandy by his friends) through their yachting life - Scarbrough was a keen sailor and a member of the Royal Yacht Club, and in a family album, there are photographs of them all together on the deck of the Minerva. Given his solitary, introspective nature, Bob may not have minded. But if he knew his wife had been unfaithful to him, could this have aggravated the alcoholism that undoubtedly he suffered from, and was the primary cause of his death? Aside from the vast inheritance that then passed to Cissie - the probate value of Ashton's estate was in today's money over sixteen-and-a-half million pounds, and the bulk of it went to Cissie - there was also an insurance policy that paid out today's equivalent of a million-and-a-half pounds. Cissie was now herself a great catch.

Despite the fact that Dorothy liked Lion, and would become very fond of him, she cried when she heard the news that they were going to live somewhere else, and a sense of utter desolation descended upon her when they drove through the gates of Leybourne Grange for the last time. She seems to have suffered some kind of mental and physical breakdown, and this at only nine years old. Her mother had taken a small house as a staging post before moving after her marriage to live at Sandbeck, but all that Dorothy remembered from those days was being ill in bed with a high fever, visited by recurrent nightmares of being suffocated. 'It was as if great swellings, purple coloured, swelled and swelled up all about and around me.'20 When she was recuperating, her mother came into her room, and laughingly said to the nurse, 'It's a good thing she's better . . . we don't want to lose her too!' Dorothy found her mother's sense of humour disconcerting, and determined to get well at once, but this traumatic passage in her life left her with a stammer which lasted for many years.

The society newspapers gushed over the news of the forthcoming nuptials, one describing Mrs Ashton as 'one of the most picturesque and beautiful figures of the London season'.21 She was acclaimed for her 'Titian-red' hair, 'every lock of it her own', and her beautiful white skin. Her great wealth inherited from Ashton was widely commented on, and attention drawn to the 'marvellous jewels' given to her by her late husband, including priceless emeralds and pearls. Cissie was certainly able to deliver to her new husband an extraordinary dowry, which would have been, at the very least, a welcome replenishing of the Lumley coffers. When Scarbrough inherited the title from his father in 1884, the family estates were in a bad financial state, and he was forced to let Sandbeck for several years.22 Cissie's granddaughter, Lady [Ursula, née James] Westbury is in no doubt - 'her money certainly saved the Lumleys'.

The wedding took place in early April 1899, in Christ Church, Piccadilly, the bride dressed in pale grey crêpe de Chine, the colour of the outfit assuredly a nod towards her recent widow's weeds. Even so, there was disapproval in some quarters that the nuptials were taking place so soon after the death of the bride's first husband. Her outfit may have been relatively restrained but Cissie still managed to show off some of the diamonds and pearls. Dorothy was dressed in a white coat, trimmed with fur, and a white felt hat, with her brother Scamp carrying their mother's train. After the reception at 21 Park Lane, again part of Cissie's Ashton dowry, the newly-weds hastened to Sandbeck for their honeymoon, where they received a warm welcome from all those who worked in the house and on the estate. The children followed soon after, bringing with them a retinue of pets, including Dorothy's pony Nobbie, and their Newfoundland dog, Gyp. From the start, Lion asked gently that they call him Daddy, and their fondness for him ensured they were happy to do this. Soon a whole bevy of new aunts came into Scamp and Dorothy's lives: 'subdued ladies, who spoke in thin, rather low voices', Dorothy remembered. They all had titles, from birth and marriage, and they were steeped in the prejudices and dictums of the mid-Victorian era. They were a very different species from the Dunn-Gardner aunts. Cissie had three sisters, mention of whom crops up regularly in family letters, and even my father's generation talked about the 'aunts'.

Maude was a talented harpist, and apparently played for years in an orchestra in Vienna, though strangely under an assumed name, which might be due to the Townshend scandal effect. She travelled all over Europe, carrying her harp on her back. Violet started out as a singer, performing at La Scala Opera House in Milan, but later she decided to become an artist, and she studied in Paris, where she lived in the Quartier Latin. She knew both Rodin and Degas, the latter offering her any of his sketches she would care to take. The tale does not reveal why she refused this offer, though perhaps she did not wish to be seen to be taking advantage of such a friendship, or be in his debt in any way. Flora, widowed in 1896, devoted herself to bringing up her only child Robin. As for the grand aunts, I think that my grandmother felt that these ladies rather disapproved of her, though Constance Lumley, married to Scarbrough's brother Colonel Osbert Lumley, was an exception. 'You must call me Connie, not Aunt Constance,' she told the little girl, who was touched and grateful for this informality and kindness. She was less keen on her new family electing to call her 'Dottie', a name she already disliked, but unfortunately it stuck with her for the rest of her life.

Scarcely had the children had time to get used to their new lives when the Second Boer War broke out and Scarbrough joined the Imperial Yeomanry, to fight for King and Country. For his wife there was little contest between duty to husband or children: she went to live in the Cape for a year and a half. Dottie was left in the hands of a 'thin tall governess from Luxembourg', and during term time Scamp was away at boarding school. But Cissie's long, controlling arm reached back over the seas, instructing the governess to give her daughter four or five hours' extra tuition a day, which to Dottie must have felt like a punitive measure. The governess earned her charge's eternal gratitude by ignoring the instructions from the Cape when her pupil became hysterical, almost ill, reciting the day's lessons while sleepwalking.

When Scarbrough returned unscathed from the war, having been mentioned in Dispatches, for some time afterwards Cissie insisted on having a service every morning in the small private chapel, as a thanksgiving for her husband's safe return. My grandmother described the scene, set in the 'really hideous Victorian chapel', when the entire household were forced to attend. 'In order of precedence: the butler, the housekeeper, the head housemaid, the six footmen, the groom of the chambers (whose sole duty was to attend to the writing tables in the house), the coachman, complete with wife, the grooms, the gardeners, and so on.' She goes on to point out that 'everyone knew their jobs and place', and she included her parents in that, 'His Lordship' attending to his County and Estate duties, and her mother to her household responsibilities, though she claims that her mother hated 'duty', being by 'nature a Bohemian'. The curious anecdote she deploys to illustrate this is that Lady Scarbrough would visit any estate workers who were sick, 'carrying, as always, a cherry stick with a spud at the end', which she would use to tap on the stones or path, calling out, 'I'm coming to see you, but there's no great hurry.'23 Raw potatoes were said to ward off germs.

At Christmas there was the Servants' Ball, where the dancing would begin when Lord and Lady Scarbrough took to the floor with, respectively, the housekeeper and the butler, Dottie partnered the Groom of the Chambers, and Scamp chose 'the prettiest housemaid he could find'. My grandmother reckoned that neither party enjoyed this tradition, and the staff were relieved when the family left the Ball and the revelry could begin.

Like many stately homes, Sandbeck had its ghost stories, and one of the servants, 'an old and drunken housekeeper', delighted in regaling the little girl with the gruesome details of a serving maid who had been incarcerated and starved to death by...