Hastings - The Red Earl The Extraordinary Life of the 16th Earl of Huntingdon

THE RED EARL

The Red Earl

The Extraordinary Life of the 16th Earl
of Huntingdon

Selina Hastings

First published in Great Britain 2014

Copyright Selina Hastings, 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the Publishers would be glad to hear from them.

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ISBN: ePub: 978-1-4081-8738-8

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To my sister,
Caroline Harriet Shackleton
with my love

By the time I came to know him, the extraordinary events of my fathers early life were long in the past. My mother was his second wife, and the two of them led a mutually agreeable existence in which only occasional reference was made to the colourful adventures that had taken place so many years ago. In most respects my father in middle age appeared a typical representative of his time and class, sober-suited, affable and courteous, clearly enjoying his mildly hedonistic way of life. Yet as I was to discover, when a young man he had defied centuries of tradition and consistently enraged his ultra-conservative parents. In his early twenties, without a word to his family, he had made a runaway marriage to a woman whom no decent, well-born Englishman would seriously consider for a wife. The two of them escaped to distant and exotic parts of the world, mixing with people whom my grandmother, very conscious of her aristocratic status, frankly described as scum.

An only son, heir to an ancient but under-funded earldom, my father had naturally been expected to restore the family fortunes by marrying well and settling down to a life mainly devoted to hunting. Instead he chose a career as an artist, and in his early twenties disappeared without warning, first to Australia, then to the South Seas. Here, he and his difficult, devoted wife led an idyllic existence on their paradisal island, until a bizarre accident forced them to leave the tropics for ever. In 1930, on their way back to England, they stopped in California where they were to spend nearly a year. During this period my father continued to paint while also enjoying an unusually varied social life, with Hollywood stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks on the one hand, and on the other a group of dissident intellectuals, Lincoln Steffens, Erskine Scott Wood and the distinguished poet Robinson Jeffers.

While in San Francisco for a few days my father saw in the paper a notice of an exhibition of paintings by the famous Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera. Overwhelmed by the work on show, he somehow engineered an introduction to Rivera himself, who, astonishingly, agreed to take him on as an assistant. For the next nearly four years my father lived and worked at close quarters with Rivera and with his wife, Frida Kahlo, first in San Francisco, then Detroit, and finally Mexico City. It was a friendship and an experience that remained central to his being, with Riveras artistic creed and communist philosophy profoundly influencing his thinking for the rest of his life. When eventually he returned home it was to be faced with fighting on all fronts: in Spain during the Civil War; in England with his parents, infuriated by their sons betrayal of his family and class; and lastly with his wife, who was determined to keep him locked into a marriage from which by now he was desperate to escape.

I am well aware that I am far from my fathers ideal biographer, politically obtuse and with only an elementary understanding of the visual arts. And yet his is a story that should be told. Looking back, it seems strange that in all the years I knew him my father so rarely talked about his past. My attempts long after his death to uncover his remarkable history have been frequently frustrating, but also revelatory. Mild-mannered and unfailingly polite, my father somehow succeeded in having his way in almost everything. I cant help feeling glad that he overturned hereditary expectation, and in place of the sporting Tory peer, straight out of Surtees, he evolved instead into this complex, mysterious figure almost impossible to pin down.

When my sister and I were small we saw very little of my father. I just remember him as an occasional presence, distant but benign, bestowing a vague smile and patting us on the head as we passed him on the stairs. I was born a month before the end of the war, my sister in June the following year, and our earliest childhood was spent in the country, in Dorset. We lived in a beautiful grey-stone house with a trout stream at the bottom of the garden, and our nursery world consisted of a nanny and nursery-maid and, at one remove, of my mother, inseparably attached to her three long-haired dachshunds, Brenda, Johnnie and Max. My father, who worked in London all week, came down only at weekends, and I have no memory of him during that period of my life.

Shortly before I turned five we moved to London, the reason being, as my mother told me later, that my father hated being away from her and found the commuting wearisome. But again there was little communal existence: my parents lived in an apartment in Albany, in Piccadilly, where children are not allowed, while we for a year or so were settled, with cook and nursery governess, in a small house with a garden on the outskirts of Richmond. Here we attended a little dame school run by two spinster sisters, Miss Lee and Miss Katie Lee, and my parents came down to see us most weekends. I can just recall my father at this stage, although the picture is indistinct: that of a tall, moustachioed figure in a dark suit, and, as before, amiable but remote. On one occasion he bent down to make some kindly remark and I looked up in bafflement: surrounded by women, I had never heard a man speak before and I was unable to understand a single word he said. Understandably, he was not encouraged to repeat the attempt, and it was some years before he and I became better acquainted.

In the early stages of growing up one accepts almost everything as normal, and I never questioned this detached and strangely formal relationship. It wasnt until I was well into my teens that I came to know my father a little, and indeed to love him dearly. I also began to discover just how extraordinary his early life had been. His career had followed an unusual trajectory; exotic, adventurous, and in emotional terms frequently explosive. In almost every respect it could have been designed to defy the rooted traditions of that line of unenquiring English aristocracy into which he had been born. As an only son, the heir to an earldom, his path had been clearly set out, but at almost every turn he had deliberately flouted expectation. Occasionally he would tell us part of his story, but it was a long time before I learnt to what extent his own early childhood had left him unaware of the normal conduits of affection between parent and child.