Martin-Leake: Double VC

By Ann Clayton

Only three men have ever won a bar to the Victoria Cross; but only two lived to wear the medal and bar, the other, Noel Chavasse, being awarded his bar posthumously. Of the three, the third being Charles Upham of the New Zealand Military Forces, Arthur Martin - Leake and Chavasse were non-combatants, being members of the RAMC.Born in 1874, and brought up in comfortable circumstances in rural Hertfordshire, Martin -Leake trained as a doctor and spent much of his life working for an Indian railway company; but the urge to be where he felt he was most needed, coupled presumably with a thirst for adventure, though he himself would have been too modest to admit to either, took him first to South Africa during the Boer War, where he won his first VC, then to Albania during the Balkan War of 1912-13, where his presence must surely be classified as 'outside the call of duty', and finally to Flanders, where he won the bar to his VC.Surprisingly, this is the first biography of this most remarkable man, for which Ann Clayton has been given access to all the family papers. These include hundreds of his letters, but she has also unearthed eye-witness accounts of his bravery which, typically, he was at pains to gloss over. This is indeed a thrilling story of a life lived to the full by a man who sought little for himself, but having been blessed with a fortunate birthright, only wanted to repay the debt. Ann Clayton is also the author of the widely acclaimed Chavasse: Double VC, published in 1992.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jul 15, 1995
• ISBN: 9781473816244

Book preview

coverpage

MARTIN-LEAKE

Double VC

By the same author:

Chavasse: Double VC

MARTIN-LEAKE

DOUBLE VC

by

ANN CLAYTON

with a Foreword by

The Director General Army Medical Services

LEO COOPER

LONDON

First published in Great Britain in 1994 by

LEO COOPER

an imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

47 Church Street, Barnsley, South Yorks S70 2AS

Copyright © Ann Clayton, 1994

A CIP catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library

ISBN 0 85052 397 4

Typeset by CentraCet Limited, Cambridge

Printed by Redwood Books Ltd

Trowbridge, Wilts

FOR THE SERVICE AND SACRIFICE OF

ALL MEMBERS OF

THE ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS

PAST AND PRESENT.

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Contents

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  1.

An Illustrious Inheritance

  2.

‘Mammy Makes a Lovely Widow’

  3.

‘Ride Straight, Shoot Straight, and Keep Straight!’

  4.

‘Where Do All the Boers Come From?’

  5.

‘The Hat and Legging Brigade’

  6.

‘And Then He Refused Water’

  7.

‘The City of Dreadful Night’

  8.

‘Quite the Worst Country that I Have Ever Seen’

  9.

‘A Uniform Does Everything Now’

10.

‘A Very Gallant Fellow’

11.

‘The Germans Must Be Squashed’

12.

‘A Bally Awful Muddle’

13.

‘I Am No Soldier’

14.

‘War Is a Fearful Waste’

15.

‘A Simple Man’

Postscript

References

Index

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Maps

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1.

South Africa during the Boer Wars

2.

India

3.

The Balkans 1912–1919

4.

The Western Front 1914

5.

The Aisne, September 1914

6.

The Ypres Salient

7.

The Arras Sector – 1917

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Acknowledgements

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A book such as this depends greatly upon the goodwill and assistance of many people and institutions; without their freely-given co-operation the life of a man like Arthur Martin-Leake might easily have been obscured beyond recall. While the events that were considered newsworthy by his contemporaries were well-documented, the private side, indeed most of his seventy-nine years, were largely hidden from view – exactly as he would have wished, it must be said.

To two members of the Martin-Leake family I owe an enormous debt of gratitude. Arthur’s second cousin Hugh generously made available family papers and original drawings executed by Arthur, and with his wife Sybil, extended to me the kindest of hospitality in their home, readily answering my many questions. Another second cousin, Kenneth Martin-Leake, entertained me liberally too, and gave me unlimited access to the wonderful archive of family letters, photographs and other material of which he is the custodian.

In Arthur’s home village of High Cross, the present owner of Marshalls, David Webster, made me most welcome, allowing me to explore the estate freely, and introducing me to many residents of the village who were themselves most informative on the subject of High Cross’s famous son. They included the Rev Hilary Sharman, Vicar of St John the Evangelist, Mrs de Ville, the late Mr ‘Bumps’ Wilkinson, Mrs Overton and Mrs Wilkinson. Similarly in the Essex village of Thorpe-le-Soken, the Vicar of St Michael’s Church, the Rev V. R. Harrod, made time to show me round the church and graveyard, where Arthur’s parents and younger brother sleep peacefully beneath the trees.

At Westminster, Arthur’s old school, the librarian and archivist John Field shared his wide knowledge of the school’s history with me, and allowed me to search the extensive archives; thanks are also due to Tony Money, Archivist at Radley College, Oxon, to Margaret Mardell, Recorder at Charterhouse, and to Julie Williams of University College London Medical School, for their keen interest in the project. Matthew Evans, a student of classics at the University of Oxford, kindly helped with a little Latin translation in Chapter 6.

Contacts made with a large number of libraries, museums and other institutions were unfailingly rewarded by unstinting help from their staffs. They included the Royal Engineers Museum, Chatham; the National Army Museum; the South African National Museum of Military History at Johannesburg; the Imperial War Museum; the Public Record Office at Kew; the Commonwealth War Graves Commission at Maidenhead and at Ypres; the General Medical Council; the British Red Cross; the Royal British Legion; the Royal Army Medical College at Millbank; the British Newspaper Library at Colindale. In particular I would like to thank the staffs at the Hertfordshire and Essex Record Offices for their prompt and patient assistance during the many days I spent there; the staff of the Liverpool John Moores University Library Service, particularly Pat Williams; and Peter Liddle, FRHistS, Keeper of the Liddle Collection at the University of Leeds. Others whose expertise was generously given were Lt Col Roy Eyeions of the Royal Army Medical Corps Museum at Aldershot; Shirley Dixon of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine; Major Tony Astle, Archivist of the Cheshire Regiment; Hedley Sutton of the British Library (Oriental and Indian Collections); Michael Bott, Keeper of Archives and Manuscripts in the University of Reading, and Derek Crook of the Liverpool Medical Institution.

Much helpful advice was given by individuals far more expert in the Boer War and Great War periods than I, particularly Lt Col Bob Wyatt MBE, TD, Editor of the Bulletin of the Military Historical Society; Lt Col J. D. Sainsbury TD, FSA, Chairman of the Hertfordshire Yeomanry Trust; Denis Pillinger, Custodian of the Lummis VC and GC files on behalf of the Military Historical Society, and Chris Kempton of the Victorian Military Society.

Among many fellow-members of the Western Front Association, the help of Ray Westlake with information and Graham Maddocks with the photographs was much valued; further help and encouragement came from Trevor Pidgeon, Paul Reed, Ron Clifton, Steve Wall and the late George Wall, Colin Kilgour, Adrian Clayton, John Bailey, Derek Heaney, David Ashwin, Robin Clay, Jim and Clarice Fallon, Derek Sheard, Col T. A. Cave CBE, and G. Kingsley Ward from Canada. I was also very grateful for the enthusiastic support given by Col J. Egan and Major A. J. Tanner of 208 General Hospital (v), RAMC Liverpool, and by Major S. B. Whitmore, MBE. The editorial skills of Tom Hartman were, once again, applied in a manner that could only serve to enhance the finished product, and his knowledge and sensitive approach were greatly appreciated by the author.

In spite of the huge amount of advice and help offered by the above-named and by others, it is, of course, entirely possible that errors remain; the responsibility for them is wholly mine.

As always, my gratitude for the patience and support shown by Peter, Diane and David goes without saying, but I’d like to say it anyway.

Liverpool, July 1994

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Abbreviations used in the text

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Foreword

by

Major General F. B. Mayes QHS MB BS FRCS

Director General Army Medical Services

The Royal Army Medical Corps proudly commemorates in its VC Room the twenty-nine members of the Army Medical Services who have, over the years, received the highest award for gallantry on the field of battle available to the British Army. Among these heroic men are two medical officers who achieved the rare distinction of being awarded a Bar to the Victoria Cross. They are Noel Chavasse and Arthur Martin-Leake.

The reader will discover in Arthur Martin-Leake a man of extreme modesty, who shunned publicity, but whose spirit of adventure and patriotic fervour took him to many parts of the world in the course of his career. Thus it was that, although a qualified doctor, he first saw uniformed service in the South African Wars as a Trooper in the Imperial Yeomanry. Soon transferring to medical employment, it was initially as a Civil Surgeon, which he interestingly recorded as being financially more attractive than a commission in the newly formed Royal Army Medical Corps. Arthur’s professional ambition was to become a Consultant Surgeon. It must have been deeply uspetting to him to have to eventually abandon this aim, as a consequence of a major injury sustained to his right hand in the final stages of this Campaign in which he won his first VC. Nevertheless it is clear that he continued to utilise his surgical skills to good effect whenever the opportunity presented.

Ann Clayton presents a meticulously researched and absorbing account of the life and times of this gallant man and his illustrious family, with particular emphasis on his participation in the South African Wars and the 1914–1918 War. It is an ideal companion volume to her earlier successful and equally fascinating publication Chavasse: Double VC.

MARTIN-LEAKE FAMILY TREE

CHAPTER ONE

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An Illustrious Inheritance

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The peace and quiet of the village of High Cross in Hertfordshire is disturbed nowadays by the constant sound of traffic along the fearsomely busy trunk road, the A10, that bisects the small community. Following the line of the old Roman road called Ermine Street, a continuous stream of cars and lorries heads north towards Cambridge and south towards London. But in the centre of High Cross, leading off westwards towards Sacombe, Marshalls Lane wends its way between high hedges; at a fork in the road a sign proclaims ‘Marshalls’, and the house of that name is just visible amongst the trees. Here on 4 April, 1874 – Easter Sunday – was born Dr Arthur Martin-Leake, Victoria Cross and Bar, and here, seventy-nine years later, he died. From Marshalls, like his five brothers, he set off to travel the world – to India, South Africa, the Balkans, France and Flanders. But Marshalls always called him back, and from Marshalls he made his final journey, across the A10 to the little country graveyard of the church of St John the Evangelist opposite, whose tower can be glimpsed above the green canopy. One thing is certain – for this quiet, solitary man, whose experience ranged from the bazaars of Calcutta to the trenches of the Great War, and from African safari to Balkan atrocities, there was nowhere else on earth that he ever really wanted to be but in the leafy Hertfordshire countryside around Marshalls, that for him epitomized ‘Home’.

Arthur Martin-Leake’s ancestry on both sides included some illustrious names. The double-barrelled surname itself was assumed in circumstances that established a precise date for the origins of his father’s side of the family. In the reign of Queen Anne, one Sir John Leake, who had built a career in the Navy, was elevated to the position of Commander-in-Chief of the Queen’s Fleet. He was wealthy enough to purchase estates at Beddington and Oxted, straddling the North Downs in Surrey, as well as having a substantial town house at Mile End, only a mile from the Thames at Stepney, and another at Greenwich. Sir John’s wife was Christian Hill, daughter of a sea captain, Richard Hill, and she bore Sir John six children. Only one, Richard, survived to adulthood, but he was a constant anxiety to his parents. Not only was he a ruthless and wilful Captain in the Queen’s Navy, commanding several men-of-war in such a flamboyant and headstrong way that his Rear-Admiral father was seriously embarrassed, but in affairs of the heart he would listen to no advice; his frantic father, widowed since 1709, was distraught; his sole surviving heir showed every sign of squandering the family’s assets in a most profligate manner.

In 1714, when Queen Anne died, Sir John Leake found less favour with the new government, and retired. By this time he was fifty-eight, and becoming increasingly concerned about the future of his estates and fortune. Sir John’s biographer, Stephen Martin-Leake, commented in 1750:

‘All this while he had a son, Richard, his only child, but unhappily of such a natural bad disposition, that he seems to have been born to afflict him. His grandfather cast his nativity at birth, and pronounced, he would be very vicious, very fortunate, and very unhappy: that he would get a great deal of money, but squander it all away and die young. I shall only observe that this prediction was fulfilled. For being made a captain in the Navy very young, in a few years he got more by prizes than his father did in his whole life. It was an unhappy circumstance that whilst Sir John was gaining never-fading laurels, his son was countermining his reputation by inglorious actions; and to finish, the man married disgracefully; so that his father was discomposed by his son’s repeated follies; who, by this time, having spent all, depended upon him for support.’¹

Richard’s ‘disgraceful marriage’ was the last straw for Sir John. The lady in question was one Martha Wells, whose fault seems to have been that she did not spring from the right sort of family. She did not provide her husband with an heir, and Sir John thus had no grandchild, not even an unsuitable one, by which to secure the family’s future. In an age when property and legitimate succession were of paramount concern to anyone in ‘Society’, it is easy to appreciate Sir John’s anguish.

He felt compelled to turn elsewhere in his search for someone to inherit his wealth and his name, and his choice fell upon his brother-in-law, Captain Stephen Martin. Here was a man after Sir John’s own heart – indeed, they had served together with the Fleet for many years, beginning with the fourteen-year-old Stephen’s first voyage on a ship commanded by Sir John in 1680. The older man protected Stephen and furthered his career, until he ultimately held the position of Flag-Captain to Sir John and became his closest confidant. He also had a son, who, though young, seemed already to have a promising future. Stephen knew very well the nature of Sir John’s problems with his son Richard, and it cannot have been totally unexpected when, in February, 1717, his patron informed him that he had changed his will. Sir John’s fortune was to be left to trustees for the use of Richard during his life; then, if he died without issue, everything was to go to Stephen. The will stated that this was ‘the most public Testimony I could give, and the most grateful means whereby I might convey to Posterity this Memorial of our Friendship.’²

In the event Richard died in March, 1720, at the age of thirty-eight. His father, commenting to Stephen Martin that ‘now we have but one son between us’, allowed Richard’s widow Martha to occupy the house at Mile End. Slowly his own health declined. His last request of his friend Stephen Martin was that he should assume the name of ‘Leake’. Sir John died in August, 1720, only five months after his son.

Stephen did what Sir John had wanted. By Royal Warrant dated 19 December, 1721, he joined the name of Leake to his own and the Martin-Leake ‘dynasty’ began. The Leake Arms were incorporated into his own.

Next, Stephen set about consolidating his inheritance, which was worth a total of £30, 000. He bought a country seat – Thorpe Hall near Clacton in Essex for £4, 200, and spent a further £1, 000 on repairs. Unfortunately he invested unwisely in what has become known as the South Sea Bubble, and when it burst towards the end of 1720 he lost £20, 000. He had some enormous family expenses too. For example, he persuaded Martha Leake to leave the Mile End House in 1722, paying her the sum of £450 in compensation. He had to pay two dowries of £1, 500 each for his daughters’ marriages; then, in 1723, his wife died and the funeral cost £400.

He had experienced in his own family the problems caused by unsuitable marriages: his sister Hester had married ‘meanly and without the consent of her father’, and had been left one shilling in his will as punishment. This was not to be allowed to happen again. He decided to invest considerable effort in the future of his son Stephen, by negotiating a Treasury clerkship for him. But the post never materialized and Steven had to take the negotiator to court; it cost him £1, 200. In 1727 he managed to obtain an entry for young Stephen into the Heralds’ Office, but to do so he had to mortgage Thorpe Hall. Two years later his finances were so strained that he had to sell the estates at Beddington and Oxted for £4, 830. Finally, as he was coming home from a concert at Ludgate Hill, he lost his ‘great diamond ring’, worth £500. This was a great sadness, as it had been given to Sir John Leake by Prince George of Denmark, Queen Anne’s consort. The ring was never found. Stephen died in 1736 at the age of sixty-nine, considerably poorer than when he had come into Sir John’s fortune.

From now on at least one son, usually the eldest, in every generation of the direct Martin-Leake line was baptized Stephen, like Captain Martin’s first-born son. This Stephen caused his father no little satisfaction and pride, for he worked his way through the ranks of the College of Heralds and concluded his career as ‘Garter Principal King of Arms’, an appointment he held until his death. In keeping with his high office, he took part in the funeral of George II in 1760 and in the marriage and Coronation of George III in 1761. He was an avid writer and kept remarkable diaries and journals; his major work was a two-volume biography in 1750 of the family’s benefactor, Sir John Leake.³

Stephen Martin-Leake made an excellent marriage to Anne Powell and subsequently found positions for his own sons, John and Stephen, in the Heralds’ Office. Anne’s father was Fletcher Powell, and he it was who owned Marshalls, the house in Hertfordshire of which Arthur and his brothers were so fond in the twentieth century. Powell had lost a great deal of money in the South Sea Bubble and had been forced to sell his Welsh estate at Downton, New Radnor. He bought the small Marshalls estate from one Samuel Dighton. Stephen and Anne spent their married lives at Thorpe Hall and when Stephen died in 1773 he was buried in the chancel of the church of St Michael in the nearby village of Thorpe-le-Soken. Fletcher Powell was also buried there when he died a few months after his son-in-law. Following this double bereavement, Anne went to live at Marshalls, thus beginning a line of Martin-Leake owners that remained unbroken until 1973. For more than a century, however, the Martin-Leakes were always buried at Thorpe.

The Garter King’s second son John continued the line. He was Arthur Martin-Leake’s great-grandfather. He inherited yet another house, Wood-side, in Old Windsor, from a distant cousin, and spent his time between the three properties at Thorpe, Marshalls and Windsor. He too held high government office, being Chief Clerk to the Treasury and representing the King in Florida until the American War of Independence broke out in 1783. In 1811 he retired, with the magnificent pension of £2, 000, and ended his days at Marshalls, where he died in 1836 of whooping cough, at the great age of ninety-seven. Like his forebears, he was buried at Thorpe.

There was certainly no shortage of colourful characters in the Martin-Leake family. One of Arthur’s great-uncles, William, had a distinguished career in the Army and was present in Egypt when Napoleon’s forces were defeated in 1801. In September, 1802, in company with a Mr Hamilton, who was Private Secretary to Lord Elgin, William went to Greece and hired a small boat in which to transport the Elgin Marbles to Britain. Unfortunately the vessel was wrecked, though no lives were lost, but the Marbles had to be recovered from the seabed by local sponge divers. A ship from England was sent to complete the journey, and the Marbles were placed in the British Museum, where they remain a cause of contention between Britain and Greece. In 1804 William was sent as a trusted envoy to Nelson’s fleet in the Mediterranean and was received by him on board HMS Victory. For many years William lived in Greece, and expended much energy in defending Greek interests, in which he had a friend in Lord Byron, whom he met many times. When he died in 1859 his collection of 10, 000 coins, mostly Greek, was accepted by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

This was the kind of family adventure story with which Arthur grew up. His grandfather, Stephen Ralph, born in 1782 (the youngest son of John) continued the tradition of roving the world and becoming involved in somewhat hazardous undertakings. In 1815, at the age of thirty-three, he was in Paris when it was occupied by the Allies after the defeat of Napoleon. He described what he saw, in the same manner that Arthur and his brothers almost a century later would recount what happened on their travels:

‘The streets are filled with officers and soldiers dressed in the uniforms of nearly all the nations of Europe… the whole city appears like one great Fair, in which the gaity [sic] of the Parisians vies with the splendour of the allied monarchs and of their armies and attendants. On the Boulevards are the stiff, formal Austrian Guards surrounding the quarters of their Emperor and looking more like machines than men; the numerous savage tribes in the service of the Emperor of Russia are seen in small parties in different parts of the city; the handsome, well-grown boys which form the Prussian Army are wandering about all the public places evidently longing for plunder and mischief, and relying more in their General, who is willing to encourage them in it, than in their king. The English are lounging hautily [sic] about the streets, holding in contempt their allies as well as their enemies and offending them both by pretending out of pure love of justice and mercy to take the part of the latter against the former; in the meantime the French are everywhere obsequious and polite, dissembling their indignation and putting the best face they can upon their unfortunate situation.’⁴

After forty-nine years with the Treasury, Stephen Ralph retired on a pension of £1, 200; this was equal to his most recent salary. He inherited Thorpe Hall and Marshalls in 1862 when his brother John died without a male heir. During John’s time at Thorpe Hall his eighteen-year-old niece Jessie fell from a window and was killed. Here was another tragi/romantic episode to thrill and perhaps frighten Arthur and his siblings. But Stephen Ralph only enjoyed his inheritance for a short time, dying in London in 1865. He was buried in the prestigious Victorian cemetery at Kensal Green. He left three sons and three daughters; the second son, Stephen, was Arthur’s father.

Born in 1826, Stephen was educated at the Blackheath Proprietary School, then at King’s College, London and St John’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1848. He then decided to follow a career in the law, and was a student at the Middle Temple for five years before being called to the Bar in January, 1853. He practised on the ‘Home Circuit’ for a time, but was subject to a great deal of nervous strain, finding that for long periods he lacked energy and enthusiasm for his work. He lived at Maitland Park Terrace in Hampstead, but he was a studious and sensitive man and much preferred the countryside to town life; fortunately his wife shared this view, and before his father’s death they were formally established at Marshalls, High Cross, Hertfordshire.

On 24 September, 1859, at Leckhampton Parish Church, Gloucestershire, Stephen had married Miss Isabel Plunkett. He was thirty-three years old, his bride was twenty-four. They were already related, in that they had a common maternal grandfather. Isabel’s father was William Plunkett, Barrister-at-Law, of Lincoln’s Inn but with strong Gloucestershire connections, but as he had died in 1844 there is little possibility that the bridegroom knew the bride’s father professionally. At the time Isabel and Stephen met the Plunkett family was reeling under a terrible blow, the eldest son Captain John Plunkett having been killed in the Indian Mutiny of 1857–8. The sepoys (native Indian soldiers) of his regiment, the 6th Bengal Native Infantry, mutinied, and ‘he, together with other officers of the Regiment, was foully murdered’.⁵

By 1865, when the couple had taken up residence at Marshalls, Stephen decided to abandon his legal career and concentrate on running the family estates and on writing legal texts. He published two works, The Law of Property in Land and The Law of Contracts, but the administration of Thorpe Hall and Marshalls, as well as his growing family, took up most of his time and energy. It seems also that he was developing a measure of hypochondria, taking the greatest of care with his health and discussing every symptom with anyone who would listen; he certainly worried constantly about his income and investments, but did find time to serve as a Justice of the Peace for Hertfordshire, as Treasurer of the Friendly Societies of High Cross and of the neighbouring village of Colliers End, and as Chairman of the Highway Board for Hadham, a few miles away.

Stephen regarded himself as particularly fortunate in his choice of Isabel Plunkett as his wife. From the day they were married she devoted herself to taking care of him and doing her utmost to relieve the burden of worry which at times threatened to overwhelm him. A small, quiet woman, with a somewhat sharp, birdlike face, she was deceptively strong when it came to running her household or bringing up her family. The epithet she applied to her quiet bespectacled husband was ‘my Lovey-Dovey’; as the children grew up they always called her ‘Mammy’, but referred to their father as ‘The Dovey’. Her servants and her children were never in any doubt about who was in control at home, and they developed a respect for her that lasted until her death at the age of eighty-eight.

During the first twenty years of her married life Isabel was fully occupied in bearing and rearing her eight children. Stephen was born in 1861 and Georgiana in 1863, both in London. The remaining six children were all born at Marshalls: William (1865), Richard (1867), Francis (1869), Isabel (1871), Arthur (1874) and Theodore (1878).

The Marshalls estate has a history going back at least to 1337, when it was acquired by Robert Marshall (Le Mareschal) from Elizabeth de Burgh, Lady of the Manor of Standon. The house first consisted of a Saxon hall about thirty-five feet long; traces of it were discovered when Arthur’s father was making alterations in 1878. When Fletcher Powell purchased it in May, 1735, there were two Marshalls tenements – one to be occupied by the new owner; the other, the farm portion of the group of buildings that huddled together on the site, was always let to a tenant farmer.⁶ By the mid-nineteenth century Marshalls was at the centre of the social and econmic life of High Cross. Situated two hundred yards or so from the main thoroughfare, the house and estate were of crucial importance to the local economy. Its 259 acres brought in several hundred pounds each year in rent and provided employment for many of the local people; the total population of the village was less than 700.

Stephen’s duties as a ‘gentleman’ involved overseeing the tenancies and tied cottages, and hiring and firing workers. In 1878, when Theodore Edward, his eighth and last child, was born, he decided that the house really could not provide satisfactory accommodation for his sizeable young family. Building works were put in train, separating ‘Marshalls Farm’ from the main house by moving it to the other side of the lane and constructing a new farmhouse and farm buildings. The water supply was improved. The old well near the front door was disused and covered over, though it still stands today, in a picturesque corner of the garden, and a new well was dug. A brick wall was built to surround the garden. The cost of all these improvements was almost £2, 500.⁷

Now Isabel was involved in running a substantial country house. It had four reception rooms on the ground floor and six bedrooms above; of necessity, numerous servants from the village were engaged, some resident and some coming in daily. The gardens were correspondingly extensive, with lawns and shrubberies, a paddock for the children’s ponies and later their hunters, an ornamental lake on which the children could play in an old rowing skiff, and a walled vegetable garden from which, Stephen hoped, the harvesting of fruit and vegetables might allow the household to be largely self-sufficient.

Social life was limited, but typical of the Victorian landed gentry. Frequent visits were paid to neighbouring families of similar social standing, the nearest being the Giles-Pullers at Youngsbury, less than a mile distant at the other side of the village. Their country house was set in parkland that was so captivating that Capability Brown himself had declared it to be ‘incapable of improvement.’⁸ A few miles away towards Stevenage was Bengeo Hall, seat of the Gosselin family, who were distantly related to the Martin-Leakes. Longer visits were made to Isabel’s sister Rose and her husband Colonel Harrison Trent-Stoughton at Owlpen, Gloucestershire. The most flamboyant member of Isabel’s family was undoubtedly her sister Frances, who was married first to Charles Crespigny, and after his death to John Russell Reynolds, Physician in Ordinary to Queen Victoria. Everyone recognized that Aunt Frances was an awful snob; when Russell Reynolds was created a Baronet in 1895 she became a ‘Lady’ too. Her influence on young Arthur’s future was to be significant.

His ownership of Thorpe Hall gave Arthur’s father constant cause for concern. It was in the Essex village of Thorpe-le-Soken, on the