THE DUKE WHO KILLED MY FATHER

Simon Blow tells how a legendary Duke of Westminster was the cause of his parent becoming an alcoholic

MY FATHER was a self-destructive alco- holic. I envied the stable fathers of my friends at school: they seemed to have life in order. I was saddened that my father was not like them. His drinking led frequently to violence, I had no comfortable platform from which to watch an unknown world opening before me. Every morning my father left the house I knew only the dread of his homecoming later. At a time when I should have been fed on tales for children, the earliest emotion I recognised was fear.

There was a reason for my father's self- destruction. He had an artist's talent, but he had no confidence. He was haunted by what had happened to his father, the archi- tect Detmar Blow. My grandfather's once meteoric reputation had ended in ruins. He had been accused of enriching himself whilst under the patronage of his friend, Bendor Westminster. The accusations were false and cruel, but because Bendor was a duke, and because our class system encourages ducal pandering, 'society' joined Bendor in destroying my grandfa- ther. Detmar lost his sanity, and my father was sent to sleep in his father's bed to stop him from throwing himself out of the win- dow. Their house was in Mayfair — oppo- site the Connaught Hotel — where all the beau monde passed.

Why did my grandfather, Ruskin's last disciple, allow himself to be befriended by such an unreliable figure as Bendor West- minster? Detmar had been taken up in his youth by the aristocratic and liberal-mind- ed Wyndham family at Clouds. This newly- built country house opened its doors to artists, men of letters and that aristocratic coterie of wits and thinkers, the Souls. George Wyndham, at one time Chief Sec- retary for Ireland, embraced Detmar's romantic socialism. `Detmar must go lec- turing like Ruskin,' he used to say.

George Wyndham was to marry Ben- dor's mother. It was with the Wyndhams that Detmar first met Bendor. But already my grandfather was becoming the sought- after architect, running neck and neck with Lutyens. Bendor's social life apart from Clouds was empty of intellectual stimulus, so he looked to Detmar to provide this for him. In no time, he was asking Detmar to build for him on his London estate.

At the end of the first world war, the Grosvenor estate was in trouble. Houses were lying empty, and the estate was bringing in insufficient income. Bendor begged Detmar to manage it for him. He had great admiration for what he referred to as 'his artist's vision'. It was not a posi- tion that Detmar wanted, but because of memories of Clouds and the Wyndhams — and because of his friendship with Bendor — he finally agreed. However, on account of my grandfather's dreamy and unworldly disposition, which was typical of an arts and crafts man, he failed to take account of the vipers' nest into which he was stepping.

The Grosvenor estate was jealously guarded by the Westminster family lawyers. Here was Detmar, an outsider, suddenly arriving to take up the supreme post. The lawyers resented the occasional gifts made by Bendor to Detmar. But Ben- dor needed Detmar badly — he was the only person he could talk to about not just the estate but his private life; and so Det- mar came to fulfil many more duties than simply that of estate manager.

The earnings might be feeding Detmar's family (he had four children) but architec- ture suffered as a consequence — there was to be no time for that. This was the sacrifice he had unwittingly made. And yet, whatever the economic conditions after the first world war, Detmar would still have got commissions: as one of the two names — `Detmar Lutyens' — that Maurice Baring had combined as the sig- nature on his imaginary letter from a British architect to Catherine the Great of Russia, Detmar would have survived.

But Detmar had committed himself to Bendor. However, his relationship with the duke was undermined by Bendor's 'I was knocked over in the rush for the seat, officer ' third wife, Loelia Ponsonby. Her hatred and jealousy of Detmar knew no bounds. Every day she poisoned Bendor against his closest friend. Then the lawyers, not dis- pleased by Loelia's calumny, made unproven accusation,' and Bendor, with the rich man's fear of oeing taken advan- tage of, turned. He lacked the courage to confront Detmar in person cold let the lawyers handle the matter. Meanwhile he informed his entourage and everyone else that Detmar had swindled him. Detmar's sanity cracked within days of hearing the accusation. In his absence, my grandmoth- er dealt with the situation as best she could. There was no court case, but Det- mar's children had to watch their father falling apart. After the many confidences he had kept for the duke, Detmar could not understand how his friend could so readily abandon him.

Within a few years of the desertion Det- mar was dead. And Bendor, once he had rid himself of Loelia, looked into the alleged misdeeds and saw that Detmar had done nothing wrong. He wanted to make amends to Detmar, but of course it was too late. There are similarities with Bendor's destruction of his brother-in-law Earl Beauchamp, whom he had chased from the ,country having disclosed his brother-in- law's homosexuality, and his destruction of Detmar Blow. In both cases, Bendor had destroyed not only a person but a family. The legacy of his cruel behaviour still lingers in my family. The children became destabilised, and the childhood that I spent with my father is horrific witness to this.

The story of my grandfather and Bendor continues to be misreported by snobbish biographers and those in awe of dukes. In the latter category there are many, and their stupidity is an irritant. I now know a little of what it must have been like for my father — who was pursuing the same career as his father — to have this cloud hanging over him.

In my childhood I knew nothing of all this. I lived only in terror of the sudden lurching and unco-ordinated movements that meant my father was likely to shout, to strike out, or do both. There were no warn- ings of his alcoholic assaults. His victim was usually my mother. For a long while he attacked her when no one was around. There was bruising, and often there was blood, and often there were tears.

I could not understand this contradiction of aesthete and madman in my father. I did not think that someone who — like his father — drew with such delicacy and appreciated the merits of buildings could, at the same time, have possessed the insan- ity of a potential killer. But like the potion swallowed by Dr Jekyll to become Mr Hyde, the results were similar. Over the years, my parents were no longer the beau- tiful couple they had been when they mar- ried. Gradually friends noticed my father's weakness and the invitations dried up. Often my mother was asked to take him home as he collapsed incapable at parties and dinners, and after a while my parents didn't go out together any more. My moth- er carried my father's shame. My elder brother and myself ran to protect her. We lived in growing isolation in London. Our friends were Gladys, who cleaned the house, and my father's secretary — a very highly-strung upper-class young woman. Eventually both were to be witnesses of my father's violence.

Debts mounted and my father's cheques frequently bounced. I learnt to read the sign 'Refer to drawer' as the cheques were left abandoned on the breakfast table. Despite his alcoholic fury, my father, somehow, was designing and building houses in Chelsea; there must be a dozen that stand to this day. But the profits from those houses did not contribute towards our well-being. The money was spent in public houses and afternoon drinking clubs. Financial mess went hand in hand with his alcoholism. Well before I had gone to my preparatory school I knew that he was heavily in debt. My mother was still in love with him, and I watched her suffering as this love disinte- grated. Then, one day — perhaps I was seven — she dropped the many letters my father had once written to her into the fire. 'So much for that,' she said. Afterwards she began to change from the married society debutante into something closer to a Ten- nessee Williams heroine. She quoted lines from A Streetcar Named Desire. She took us to see A Star is Born, so that we might know what an alcoholic was. I fused James Mason with my father — which gave a bit of glam- our to the awful situation.

Normality was attempted when we stayed with our landed relations. To wipe out my father's instability, I pursued hunt- ing while my brother shot, but I couldn't integrate fully into my relations' lives. III had said, 'My father drinks and hits my mother to pieces,' there would have been an awkward silence. I had seen too much too soon. I felt cut off. I wanted the same peace as they had, where meals appeared on time and there was not the humiliation of returned cheques; I wanted their confi- dent introduction to life.

The stability I may have gained while staying with my relations was always short- lived — all too soon it was back to London and the smell of gin. We struggled not to be pulled downwards by my father, but we were. It was the almost daily drunkenness that made our house a prison. The only escape would be if my father were to kill himself, and not us. One day a gadget exploded in the kitchen, filling the room with steam. Through the mist I asked, 'Is Daddy dead?' My optimism was premature.

As an elder son, my father was in line to inherit the manor house and estate which his father had designed and assembled. That estate — which was William Morris's utopian dream made real — was my grandfather's socialist testament that Ben- dor could not touch. But the whole estate was passed by my grandmother to her unmarried younger son. We were aban- doned, with no provision made even for our education. My father cried at the desertion. That my mother should leave him had already been discussed, but now she stayed, hoping he would pull himself together and make his brother cede some of his security to us. But nothing changed — Mr Hyde remained as alive as ever — and there was no money anywhere. My mother turned to her family for rescue. A maternal uncle took over my education, and a maternal aunt my brother's. We were now dependent relations. The stress brought on an illness that was to kill my mother at 51.

The disinheritance of my father and his children meant that for some years we had no contact with his family. My mother, from a background where an eldest son automati- cally inherited, regretted most the damage to her children. His alcoholism had destroyed her and removed a stable home from my brother and myself. I was at my preparatory school when my mother finally left him. We left in secret, without him knowing, and the Sunday before I went home to pack up my toy animals. The divorce went through, undefended, on grounds of physical cruelty. My mother's family paid for the divorce. And, after that, there was just enough money for her to buy a small house in Chelsea. To make ends meet, she let our bedrooms dur- ing term-time.

When I look back at the press cuttings of my parents' wedding, I shudder. They were married at the high altar of St Paul's Cathe- dral on account of my father's connection with John Blow, the composer. As they come out of the cathedral, the police are holding back the crowds and a tabloid headline reads 'St Paul's stages a real romance for city workers'. The wedding went on the news. It was presented as a fairy tale. But for me, there was no fairy tale — ever.

The fall of my father became absolute. He died in Friern mental hospital of alco- holic dementia at 47. I visited him there and he told me how, as a young man, he had sketched the coat Napoleon wore at Waterloo; he was staying with the Bliicher family in Czechoslovakia. He did not com- pare his life then with his life now. He did not appear to register his fall; that was left to us. It was to take years for me to recover from it and, I suppose, because childhood is vital, I never have done. The destabilis- ing that had begun with Bendor took hap- piness from my childhood, and some laughter too. If a friend boasts about get- ting 'outrageously drunk', I can't laugh. The past is far too near.