Castles of Steel (17 page)

In 1884, at thirteen, David Beatty left this turbulent, complicated family behind and entered
Britannia.
His record as a cadet was mediocre; he left eighteenth in a class of thirty-three. When he was a midshipman, influence gained him a three-year appointment to
Alexandra,
flagship of the Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son and Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Unsurprisingly, Beatty’s interest outside the navy was riding and he often rode as a jockey on the racetrack and polo grounds at Malta, mounted on horses and ponies belonging to other officers. When he returned to England to take naval courses at Greenwich, his performance continued to be mediocre; the explanation perhaps had something to do with the fact that his cabin at Greenwich was filled with warmly inscribed photographs of London actresses. Thereafter, he served on the royal yacht, in the West Indies, and again in the Mediterranean, where he joined the battleship
Camperdown
a few months after she rammed and sank
Victoria
with Jellicoe on board.

In 1896, when Beatty was a twenty-five-year-old navy lieutenant of no particular distinction, he was sent to command a gunboat on the Upper Nile during Kitchener’s march to reconquer the Sudan. Here, in the first major turning point in his career, Beatty’s quick reflexes and instinctive bravery thrust him forward. When a shell struck his gunboat and came to rest unexploded, Beatty, under fire for the first time, calmly picked it up and threw it overboard. In the spring of 1898, Beatty commanded the shallow-draft gunboat
Fateh,
assigned to provide gunfire support for the army’s advance up the Nile. Following Kitchener’s famous victory at the Battle of Omdurman on September 2, Beatty and his gunboat carried the victorious general 400 miles farther up the Nile to Fashoda, where Britain, in the person of Kitchener, met France, represented by Captain Marchand. Beatty was praised by Kitchener—“I cannot speak too highly of this officer’s behavior”—and was awarded a DSO. More important to Beatty, at twenty-seven he was promoted to commander over the heads of 400 lieutenants senior to him. The usual time served as a lieutenant before promotion to commander was eleven or twelve years. Beatty had done it in six.

On returning from Egypt to England, Beatty had four months’ leave, which he devoted to foxhunting. It was in the country, on horseback, that he met a married American woman living in England, Ethel Tree, the only daughter of the enormously wealthy Chicago department-store owner Marshall Field. Riding sidesaddle, wearing a top hat and veil, slim and graceful with a long neck, high cheekbones, and dark hair, Ethel Tree was sophisticated, widely traveled, and, said Beatty’s nephew and biographer Charles Beatty, “free ranging in her affections.” Her fearless riding immediately appealed to Beatty, who noticed not only her beauty and horsemanship, but, being a second son with no inheritance whose naval pay amounted to a few hundred pounds a year, the money behind her. He quickly discovered that her marriage to Arthur Tree was unhappy and that she had a three-year-old son, Ronald. Despite her encumbrances, a strong attraction—perhaps more—sprang up between David and Ethel. For both, the relationship was risky. In Queen Victoria’s reign, a divorced woman could not be received in society; above all, no divorced person could be presented at court. As for Beatty, an officer known to be the lover of a married woman or who married a divorced woman exposed himself to social ostracism and placed his naval career in jeopardy. As it happened, these considerations became moot in April 1899, when Beatty was appointed commander of the battleship
Barfleur
on the China Station. To Ethel, this separation was shocking; no man she liked had ever walked away from her before.

Beatty was not with the international expedition sent to relieve the besieged legations in Peking, but he was ashore in China, having landed with 150 men from
Barfleur
to bolster the defense of the beleaguered river port of Tientsin. Nine days after landing, Beatty was wounded twice within twenty minutes, first in the left arm below the shoulder, and then in the left wrist. He emerged from a local hospital with his arm in a sling and was ordered home for surgery to preserve the use of his arm. After the campaign, Beatty was one of four navy commanders who fought in China raised to the rank of captain. He was twenty-nine. The average age for promotion to captain was forty-two, and he had been promoted over the heads of 218 other Royal Navy commanders.

Beatty returned to England a hero, and Ethel Tree moved quickly to reengage his attention. When he first left for China, they had exchanged letters, but during his two years in the Far East, rumors reached him that she was constantly being seen in the company of another man, although she remained married to Tree. Nevertheless, when he arrived in Portsmouth, he received a letter and telegram from her suggesting that they resume their relationship. His first response was to air his grievances: “Some months ago all letters from you ceased absolutely and entirely. And letters came from other people telling me that you and ‘X’ were never seen apart and continually in each other’s pockets and this by people who did not even know what you are to me so what was I to think? . . . I am not easy going and have an awful temper and I landed from China with my heart full of rage and swore I did not care if I ever saw you again.” Then he about-faced and accepted her offer: “So great is the joy at seeing you, to me, the sweetest creature on God’s earth, but you admit you are an awful flirt. . . . Unfortunately I shall go on loving you to the bitter end, and now if this operation does not go right what use to you is a one-armed individual?”

The operation to restore full use of his left arm took place in September 1900. It was mostly successful, but Beatty was left with two permanently crippled fingers. Meanwhile, Ethel had forced her husband to file for divorce in America. “Dear Arthur,” she wrote him, “I have thought over your suggestion that we should live together again and I can never consent to it. There is no use discussing our differences. I shall never live with you again. Yours truly, Ethel F. Tree.” To speed the action, she accepted the charge of desertion, thereby losing custody of her child. On May 12, 1901, the divorce was granted. Ethel’s son Ronald Tree later condemned his “wilful and beautiful mother” for deserting him and his father, and said that the “divorce crushed my father’s spirit . . . he dropped out of the world.”

[In 1914, when her former husband was dying at the age of fifty-two, Ethel, who had not seen her son Ronald for ten years, sent a woman to the hospital to tell the sixteen-year-old boy, “Your mother has sent me to take you away.” Appalled, Ronald sent the messenger away and returned to his father’s bedside. Arthur Tree died the next day.]

Ten days after the divorce, David and Ethel were married in the London registrar’s office. Beatty was thirty; she was twenty-seven.

No one knows how much this couple knew about each other before they married. Beatty had been given a glimpse, but he could not have fully recognized the nature of his new wife. Keenly aware of the power of her beauty and wealth to attract men, accustomed to their constant, devoted attention, she always acted as she pleased and expected to get what she wanted. Beatty’s nephew, on the other hand, is certain that Ethel never knew about her husband’s illegitimacy; had she known, he says, the fact would have placed a formidable weapon in her hands. Even so, their wedding marked the start of a long battle between Ethel and the navy, with Beatty struggling in the middle. She resented the separations that were part of service life and refused to be left behind like an ordinary navy wife when her husband went to sea. What he saw as attention to duty, she saw as deliberate neglect and selfish dismissal of her needs. Recrimination was constant. A pattern evolved: first a storm of rage, then tears, then, on both sides, an orgy of apology. Beatty’s affection for his wife was greater than hers for him, which equipped her with the greater power to hurt. In his constant effort to placate her, his letters became pleading, pitiable, sometimes almost childish.

At first, these problems were submerged in the early joys of marriage, aided by the fact that David remained ashore. Two years passed between his being wounded in China and an Admiralty medical board passing him as fit for duty at sea. During these years, he learned to live as she preferred him: a gay, extravagant man of fashion in hunting circles and London society, posing next to his wife. Nevertheless, the reckoning came; once certified fit for sea duty, he was posted to three years in the Mediterranean Fleet. At first he tried to confront his wife’s anger. She was staying at the Bristol Hotel in Paris when he wrote, “You have done a great deal of grumbling in your letters of late. Of course you have been brought up differently and like all American wives do not understand why their husbands should be anywhere else but with them.” Then, succumbing to his own ambition, he turned to her for help, making a distasteful appeal that she use her charms to help him advance his career. “My darling Tata,” he wrote,

I had hoped that by going to Dunrobin you would have made a friend of the old Duke and that therefore in the future, should I ever require any outside assistance, he would be more likely to take an interest in someone he knew than someone he knew little about, and therefore might be of the utmost assistance to me. One has to think of these things when one lives a public life and if one wants to get on and not throw a chance away and no one can afford to let slip opportunities of making friends with those who can assist you.

Eventually Ethel followed him to Malta, where the Mediterranean Fleet was based, and there, in 1905, their first son, David, was born. Their relationship seemed close; when he was with her, he indulged her whims; when he was away, they wrote or telegraphed every day. He always wanted more. “Well, love, you might be a little more communicative,” he wrote to her. “It’s only twopence a word. Give me a shilling’s worth and say how the weather is. It brightens me up.” Most of his letters pleaded for signs of attention and affection; he asked endless questions about her feelings and activities. Her letters to him were less frequent, less intimate, more gossipy, and filled with tart, derogatory opinions of the navy and navy people. Professionally, he always did well: he commanded the cruisers
Juno, Arrogant,
and
Suffolk;
he was a strict, forceful, efficient captain, not overly popular, but his ships routinely won prizes in weapons competitions. Among his fellow captains and other officers, however, his youth and wealth stirred jealousy; and Ethel’s behavior sometimes caused embarrassment. She never completely lost her Chicago accent, and her habit of shouting for her husband in a piercing voice—“J-aaack!”(her nickname for him)—grated on English ears. Once when Beatty drove
Suffolk
too hard returning to Malta, thereby damaging her engines, there were rumors of disciplinary action. A story passed around the fleet that Ethel had said, “What? Court Martial my David? I’ll buy them a new ship.” She never gave up urging him to leave the navy. Even in 1905, while she was making an effort to please him, she wrote, “I have thought for a long time that your abilities where you are, are wasted. I am sure you would succeed in another trade and would, I am sure, satisfy your ambition quite as much, if not more, and our life would certainly be much happier. Sometimes I feel as if I really could not stand the strain of these terrible partings very much more.”

As the years went by, Beatty struggled to balance his ambition and the burden of his unusual marriage. He had made an almost Faustian bargain: Ethel’s wealth had brought him mansions in London, halls in Leicestershire and Scotland for shooting, and a private yacht. She helped his career by enabling him to enter higher political and social circles—although still not the court circle—but she often reduced him to private despair. Shane Leslie, a Beatty biographer, who knew both Beattys well, wrote that she was “beautiful, opulent, ambitious and unhinged by her hereditary fortune and by an insane streak. She brought him many gifts; great beauty, a passionate and jealous love, sons, wealth, houses, and a personality he could not conquer, for against him was arrayed a distraught spirit which brought their home life to utter misery.” Beatty told Leslie that he was “the most unhappy man in the world”: “I have paid terribly for my millions,” he said.

At the end of 1905, he returned to London, where, to Ethel’s delight, he settled down for three years as Naval Adviser to the Army Council. In December 1908, he went back to sea as captain of the predreadnought battleship
Queen,
in the Atlantic Fleet, which was commanded by Prince Louis of Battenberg. In his letters to Ethel, he attempted to please her by belittling the officers around him: “We have eight admirals and there is not one among them, unless it be Prince Louis (who is lazy and has other disadvantages) who impresses one that he is capable of great effort.” Ethel was scarcely interested. The Atlantic Fleet was based at Gibraltar, a socially barren place. When the fleet spent Christmas week in that harbor, she did not come to join him. Instead, chagrined by his absence, she began seeing other men. These relationships, she insisted, were innocent: “As you know, ‘Lion’ and I were a great deal together and I became very fond of him . . . although not the way I care for you, dear. I honestly say I like the companionship of other men but that is because most women bore me.” In reply, Beatty blamed himself: “I felt as if I was an ogre dragging you to some fearful place that you dreaded. You see, dear, your happiness is the one thing I have to live for and if only you are happy and contented, so am I. But I fear I am making a hash of it somehow.” Nevertheless, he went on, “If you have come to the decision that you want to go your own way without interference from me, as apparently is the fashion nowadays, would it not be fairer to say so? I have many faults. No one can see them more than you. Won’t you in kindness point out where I fail and in what I upset you, as it would appear I do at times?”

His marriage wobbled, but Beatty’s career continued to prosper and by the end of 1909, he had reached the top of the list of captains. But because of the periods spent ashore, first when he was recovering from wounds and later when he served on the Army Council, he had not served the time at sea required for promotion to admiral. Jacky Fisher intervened and, on his recommendation, an exception was made. On January 1, 1910, by a special Order in Council, David Beatty became, at thirty-eight, the youngest British admiral since Nelson. “Rear Admiral Beatty,”
The Times
pointed out, “will not only be the youngest officer on the flag list, but will be younger than over ninety percent of the officers now on the captains’ list.”