particularly annoying young woman called Joan Adeney Easdale, who seemed determined to write a biography of Mrs Beeton, with or without his approval. In the many letters Beeton fired off to producers and editors in the mid 1930s urging them to have nothing to do with Miss Easdale’s work, he always returns to the fact that it is his parents’ ‘private family life’ (the underlining is his) that he is determined to protect from the impertinent and uncomprehending gaze of strangers.
With Miss Easdale’s cautionary example in mind, Mayson Beeton dealt particularly firmly with the steady stream of lady writers who contacted him in the wake of the 1936 Daily Mail article asking for his blessing on their intention to put together a biography of his mother. To correspondents such as Winifred Valentine (Mrs), Mrs Sheriff Holt, and Mary Stollard (Miss), Beeton wrote back stiffly, discouraging any hope that he might be about to turn his precious cache of material over to them. If they wished to publish a short biographical article on Mrs Beeton in the Woman’s Magazine or the Lady or the Nursing Times he would not stop them, but he asked that they submit a proof to him first. Quite sensibly they did not, which meant that Beeton was then able to work himself up into a delicious frenzy when their chatty, anodyne pieces finally appeared. ‘Full of Inaccuracies!’ is scrawled across the top of pieces that, notwithstanding his contempt, have been pasted onto stiff card and carefully dated for posterity.
To those male, and on the whole better known, authors who wrote sounding Beeton out about the possibility of taking on his mother’s biography, he tended to use a more gentlemanly tone. Responding to the professional biographer Osbert Burdett who had made contact in April 1936, Beeton explained that he was planning to do the job himself. In addition he told Burdett what he does not seem to have told any of his lady correspondents, that he was going to be using a collaborator. Although Beeton had started his working life in magazine journalism, by the age of 35 he had shifted permanently into management. It was years since he had done any writing and the Daily Mail piece had proved an arduous task. In any case, he was now 70 years old and needed someone to do the footslogging in the central London libraries that was increasingly beyond him.
What Beeton needed above all was someone who could be relied upon to be discreet. There were things in his parents’ story that he was determined should not be put before the public, and he had to be certain that the person he worked with understood this. The chosen candidate also needed to realize that a key purpose of this ‘memoir’ was to rescue Samuel Beeton’s professional legacy from the long shadow cast over it by his wife’s flukish achievement. Which is why Sir Mayson’s choice of collaborator fell upon a young man who was actually related to him through his paternal, that is Beeton, line. Harford Montgomery Hyde was a 30-year-old barrister and professional writer whose great aunt had been married to Samuel Beeton’s second cousin and whom Sir Mayson had known since he was a boy. Hyde had already published a couple of books since leaving Oxford where, like Beeton, he had been at Magdalen. But, most important of all, he had a reputation for a tenacious yet discreet approach to research: ‘Montgomery the Mole’ would become his nickname in wartime intelligence ‘because I had the reputation of burrowing away among historical documents and discovering other people’s secrets’.
Through the late 1930s Hyde went on ‘prospecting operations’ for Sir Mayson, wading through administrative and legal records in Guildhall and Chancery to see if he could uncover any official information to supplement the family documents stored by Beeton in a series of japanned boxes at High Lands. No start, however, seems to have been made on the actual writing of the book and, just when things might really have got going, the war changed everything. Hyde went to the US where he worked in counter-espionage, and Beeton shifted his focus from family matters to national ones. The last war had been his finest hour, with his work for the Finance Department of the Ministry of Munitions partly responsible for netting him a knighthood in 1920. That sort of active public role may have been beyond him now, but Beeton was still determined to be useful. It was his fond hope that, should London be flattened by German bombs, his vast archive of antiquarian maps and topographical prints could provide the basis for the capital’s rebuilding. Thus, much of Beeton’s energy in 1941 was spent arranging with Lord Reith to have his collection transferred to the Ministry of Works and Buildings, now temporarily housed in the relative safety of Oxfordshire. Letters Beeton wrote at this time make it clear that he was still fully intending to write his parents’ ‘memoir’. However when Lady Beeton died two years later after fifty years of happy marriage, the old man found himself emotionally winded and suddenly frail. For the first time in his life he was ready to consider passing over the custodianship of his parents’ reviving reputation to someone else.
Beeton’s utterly misguided choice fell upon a young female writer called Nancy Spain. Spain was to become famous in the 1950s as one of Britain’s first media personalities, writing punchy opinion pieces for middle-brow papers, appearing on the Home Service’s My Word and hamming it up on the TV quiz show What’s My Line? where she sat alongside Lady Isobel Barnet and Gilbert Harding. Spain, a flamboyantly butch lesbian in an era that did not care to enquire too deeply into such matters, became an instantly recognizable crop-haired, trouser-wearing figure in middle Britain’s landscape, until at the age of 46 she died in a plane crash on the way to the Grand National with her female lover. All this was in the future, though, when, in 1945, Mayson Beeton asked the recently discharged WRNS officer down to High Lands. Spain had already had some success with her first book, a chatty recollection of her wartime navy service called Thank You Nelson. More significantly, as far as Beeton was concerned, she had a blood connection with the family, although this time on his mother’s side. Spain’s grandmother, the recently deceased Lucy Smiles, had been one of Isabella Beeton’s favourite half-sisters.
Given that one of the driving forces of Mayson Beeton’s biographical ambitions had been to rescue his father’s reputation from the slow drip of innuendo that had originated from his mother’s family over the previous eighty years, it does seem odd that he should have blithely handed over the project to a Dorling descendant at this late stage. Even Spain was surprised, declaring later in her autobiography, ‘to this day I don’t know why he had picked me out of all the world.’ Perhaps a certain amount of contact between the Dorlings and the Beetons since the end of the Great War had made him believe that the rift was finally healed. Maybe Lucy Smiles’ gently anodyne contributions to The Times and the Star in 1932 recalling her lovely elder half-sister and dynamic brother-in-law reassured him that this particular vertical line of his mother’s family was benign to the Beetons. Perhaps Spain, at 28, seemed so young to the old man that it was impossible to believe that she would want to carry on a feud that had started nearly a century previously. Her mother had been at Roedean with Mayson Beeton’s daughters and she herself had followed them there. Give or take her penchant for flannel trousers, she looked and sounded like one of the family. So Spain was duly invited to ‘run down’ to High Lands, and work her way through Mayson Beeton’s collection of his parents’ love letters, Isabella’s diaries, and other ephemera which were now bulked out by all the articles that had appeared on Mrs Beeton over the previous ten years.
What Beeton had missed entirely was that the wildly ambitious Spain was looking to make a splash. And since she was also an incorrigible spendthrift, she needed to make money too (not for nothing was her 1956 autobiography titled Why I’m Not A Millionaire). Spain was far less of a scholar than Hyde, and her writing on Mrs Beeton is spattered with factual errors. An early essay which she wrote for the Saturday Book in 1945 in order to raise some much needed cash manages to get not only Isabella’s death date wrong, but also the birth of her last child, and these kinds of basic errors went uncorrected into the book. Yet if Spain was sloppy over detail, she had a sharp nose for where the real drama of the Beeton story lay. Armed with a rich store of information from her late grandmother and a sole surviving great-aunt, she set about writing an account that managed to suggest, without exactly saying so, that Mrs Beeton’s home life was not quite the model of well-regulated domesticity that the nation fondly imagined.
In the circumstances it was probably lucky that Sir Mayson died before Spain’s book appeared. The reaction of his three daughters to their second cousin’s
