Eileen Gray. Jennifer Goff

      2.3 Stephen Haweis, 1923, sepia tint photograph © Photo courtesy of the Marine Biological Laboratory Archives and the History of Marine Biological Laboratory website (history.archives.mbl.edu)

The Reverend was a little over five feet tall, crippled from childhood in one leg because of a pony riding accident, and of an ivory complexion (his grandmother was a native of the British Indian province of Baluchistan). Like Stephen, he became renowned for his small stature. He became a spellbinding preacher, wrote many popular religious books, and was in great demand as a public lecturer. His sermons drew admiring crowds for decades. Gray said to Haweis, ‘About your father I remember my mother and eldest sister (Ethel) eleven years older than me used to go on Sunday evenings (was it to Camberwell I can’t remember) to listen to your father preaching, immensely impressed and convinced of his importance’.³ Gray recalled ‘hearing people speak of him as a brilliant seductive person!’⁴ The Reverend was appointed Lowell Lecturer in Boston, Mass. in 1886 and went on lecture tours in America in 1893-94. When he was a curate, the Archbishop of Canterbury had regarded him as his protégé, but because of indiscreet behaviour he fell out of favour and was offered no preferment; though, prudently, nothing was done to put its outstanding preacher outside the boundaries of the Church.

      Stephen’s mother strove to repair the effect of her husband’s extravagances on their income by writing and illustrating a number of magazine articles and books for women on dress, deportment and decoration in the home, through which she gained an enviable reputation. Her magazine columns on interior decoration and fashion encouraged readers to reject Victorian fussiness in favour of the new ‘Art’ furniture. She also encouraged her readers to choose the best aspects of the Aesthetic Movement in their dress. Her books The Art of Beauty, 1878 and The Art of Decoration, 1881 were illustrated with Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic designs. She was also renowned for her literary adaptations, notably Chaucer for Children, 1877 where she retold Chaucer’s tales, making them suitable for Victorian readers. She was a very proud woman in that despite having to earn money she retained the status of a gentlewoman. Her assiduous work enabled her to pay for Stephen’s education at Westminster School and to send him to Peterhouse College, Cambridge.

Again like Gray, Haweis had to convince his family, especially his mother, to allow him to take up art lessons. He said, ‘Mother was against my taking up art unless I thought I was going to do really well. With support better than starvation I should have done far more and better, but everybody believed that I should have done well but I had only £63 to spend on my first year in Paris. My heart broke down through my father’s complete neglect and robbery of about a third of my inheritance’.⁵ His mother died in 1898, before he could take a degree, whereupon he decided not to continue at Cambridge as he wished to become a painter, and to that end he went to study in Paris in 1899. He never forgot his mother. His studio in Paris was described as being filled with family treasures, notably mementos of his mother. His cape was lined with the dress she wore when presented to Queen Victoria. He kept place cards from his mother’s dinner parties, inscribed with the names of important Londoners. He saved her clothing, her amber beads, sewing boxes full of tiny heirlooms, mother of pearl daisies wound with silk thread, miniature patchwork quilts, embroidered baby clothes, a copybook belonging to his great-great grandfather, an hourglass, a leather hood which adorned the family’s falcon, the plaster cast of the hand of his brother who had died in infancy and an Etruscan vase which contained the ashes of his mother’s dog.⁶

      2.4 James Maclaren Smith, Firenze, 1880s, black and white photograph © NMI

      2.5 Lonsdale Gray, Eileen, Thora and a friend Captain French in the French Alps, year unknown, black and white photograph © NMI

      Haweis’s father died early in 1901. He had greatly resented his son who, devoted to his mother, appears to have been a quiet, attractive, hard-working young man. He had a streak of stubbornness in his make-up, for his mother had once written, ‘Stephen has the Haweis temper’. His father had undoubtedly cheated Stephen of a substantial legacy, but his mother had left sufficient money to make him not entirely dependent on the sale of his work and, indeed, enough to enable him to travel.

Both Haweis and Gray were the children of broken marriages. Despite the Gray family’s position in society, Gray recalled her parents eating dinner in silence at either end of a very long table.⁷ Just as Haweis lost his mother in 1898 and his father in 1901, Gray lost her father, and she went to Territet in Switzerland to bury him, much grieved in late February 1900.

In June later that year she lost her brother Lonsdale who drank poisoned water while in South Africa. As Gray had doted on her father, Stephen adored his mother. However, unlike Haweis, Gray destroyed many of her family papers. Throughout their correspondence Gray and Haweis discussed such personal matters. On 5 June 1958 Gray wrote, ‘I was very interested in the letter talking about your father though you don’t say really in what way he was responsible for your unhappiness’. She continued, ‘My own childhood was probably as unhappy and worse in many ways than yours and the shaky hand is a consequence of years of sleepless nights and misery of many kinds but as Kipling used to say that’s another story’. Despite Haweis’s strained relationship with his father, Gray dryly comments towards the end of this letter: ‘Anyway you had a mother who loved you’. Gray had a terrible shake in her hand towards the end of her life. In another letter Gray says that the shake in her hand is due to her childhood. ‘It all comes from having been so frightened at night (for years) when I was a child and there is no cure for it’.⁸

The Haweis family quarrels continued through Haweis’s brother Lionel, who took the side of his father. The bitterness and feuding caused by his family remained with him throughout his life. In a poem written in 1960 Haweis wrote his own epitaph; ‘Who shall say what I might have said, killed by a father’s hate and heart, before I failed in love and art, when I lie dead’.⁹ It was through his niece René Chipman that the truth of what his father and brother did to Stephen was finally acknowledged. When Lionel died, Haweis wrote to his friend Jean Roosevelt saying of his family, ‘I think nobody has ever needed me and certainly nobody has ever needed my sister,

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