Kate (8 page)

On 20 May 1884, when olive was barely three years old, her grandfather Frank died of heart disease at the age of 70, the first of a series of deaths that would rip the heart out of the family, proving that even the wealthy could not guard against illness and disease in Victorian times. It was Frank who built up the family fortune, leaving his four sons wealthy enough to become leading members of the Establishment. He left a staggering £64,650 in his will – the equivalent of £32.6 million today – meaning that his family would be handsomely provided for.

After his death, Francis and Harriet went on to have another four children – Francis, known as Fran, in 1886, Maurice in 1887, Anne in 1888 and Lionel in 1892 – but Harriet’s immune system was low after giving birth to her fifth child and she caught influenza. She died at home at Rockland on 9 January 1892, leaving her distraught husband, paralysed with grief, having to care for five children under the age of ten. Two months later to the day, Francis’s mother Fanny died of diabetes and exhaustion. Francis had lost his wife and both his parents in the space of eight years and the joy went out of his life.

‘The birth of the youngest boy took place when a severe epidemic of influenza was at its worst,’ his nephew Charles Athelstane Lupton, known to the family as ‘Athel’, wrote later in a family history,
The Lupton Family in Leeds
.

The confinement was normal but Harriet was attacked by the infection and died a fortnight later. Frank never really recovered from the blow. He kept his grief entirely to himself. For many years he never talked about her to the children. He rarely took holidays. It was some 30 years before he would go abroad again. And we remember what a joy such holidays were to him in his young days. He devoted himself to the business and to civic work.

Devastated by his wife’s death, Francis threw himself into work and local politics. As well as running the family firm with his brother Arthur, he became a prominent figure in Leeds public life. Beginning as a Liberal Unionist, opposing Home Rule for Ireland, by 1895 he had gained a seat as a Conservative alderman, or councillor, a post he held for the next 21 years. It was during that time that he found his calling. As the first chairman of the Leeds Unhealthy Areas Committee, he cleared inner-city slums and replaced them with affordable homes.

He is also remembered as one of the ‘Big Five’ council members who negotiated with the workers during the 1913 strike by council labourers over wages. Athel Lupton recorded:

The attitude of the five great men was moderate and patient but they remained completely firm, and in two or three weeks the strike collapsed. There was no serious violence. Electricity and water were maintained throughout and there was always some gas available. Other large towns watched with keen interest the course of the strike in Leeds and the attitude of the Big Five. They showed their admiration and gratitude to Frank by the presentation of a vast silver tray and a ‘huge and abnormally ugly china flower pot on a china leg’.

Not content to limit himself to his council work, Francis was also a magistrate on the West Riding Bench, was involved with Cookridge Hospital and regularly attended Mill Hill Chapel, despite his deceased wife’s Anglican sympathies.

Yet despite being the eldest son, incredibly successful and philanthropic, Francis remained humble and unsure of himself, possibly as a result of his wife Harriet’s death. He remained close to his younger brothers – Arthur, with whom he ran the family business, Charles, who was head of the legal firm Dibb Lupton, and Hugh, who was chairman of Hathorn Davey & Co., a hydraulic engineering company – and would consult them regularly. Together, the tentacles of their influence reached across the city.

Arthur, who was pro-vice-chancellor of Leeds University, must particularly have been able to empathise with Francis’s loss, having himself been widowed four years earlier. His wife Harriot, who was a cousin of Beatrix Potter’s mother Helen, had died in childbirth in 1888, before her famous cousin published her first children’s book
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
. Charles, a renowned art collector, was treasurer and chairman of the General Infirmary and later, in 1915, became Lord Mayor. He left his extensive art collection to the city. Hugh was chairman of the Board of Guardians, an organisation that aimed to protect the poor and needy, served as a councillor for many years and became Mayor himself in 1926. ‘“I must consult my brothers” was his reaction to doubt,’ recalled Athel of his uncle Francis in his history. ‘His three brothers played a great part in his life.’

In those days, it was not the done thing for a gentleman to look after his children, so Francis employed a Scottish Presbyterian nanny called Miss Cadell to look after Rockland and bring up his young family. Olive, who was the eldest, went to Roedean boarding school. Athel writes:

Miss Cadell was not really fitted for the care of children. Poor Frank seems to have left household affairs very much in her hands. And while no doubt she was well meaning and scrupulously honest in her dealings, she was soon the dominant figure in the house. It is recorded that on one occasion she had the house painted without any request to Frank for his permission. On another occasion she renewed the drawing room cretonnes [draperies] with her own lamentable choice. Frank paid the bills without complaint. Vanity in the young must be crushed. It appeared that Anne aged ten was afflicted with that vice; her hair was promptly cut short. It may certainly be claimed that in later years vanity was not a family failing. The boys perhaps suffered less regimentation than the girls as they were often away at school. But eventually things came to a crisis. Miss Cadell departed. The drawing room cretonnes were ripped off. And so ended an unfortunate episode.

By this time, the three boys, Fran, Maurice and Lionel, had gone off to Rugby School, while olive had left Roedean and was old enough to become her father’s housekeeper, caring for him and her younger sister Anne. She must have been jealous of her brothers’ freedom as they went up to Trinity College, like their father before them. It was during his time at Cambridge that Maurice became something of a legend for his love of motor cars. He had a yellow steam car, which blew up and had to be towed back from Cambridge to Leeds by his friend Leonard Schuster, who owned a Rolls-Royce, a sight that apparently caused quite a sensation.

After leaving university, Fran and Lionel joined the family firm, while Maurice became an apprentice engineer at Hathorn Davey in Hunslet, where his uncle Hugh was managing director. Fran and Maurice both moved back into the family home, where they were looked after by olive and five servants – a cook, waiting maid, housemaid, kitchen maid and sewing maid.

Olive did not get her own freedom until 1914, when she married Noel Middleton and her sister Anne, by then 25 years old, took over the running of Rockland. That summer, their eldest brother, Fran, 28, was married to Dorothy Davison, the daughter of a mathematics master at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, who specialised in seismology. But war was looming and it would be the last time the large family would be together.

When the Great War broke out, olive’s brothers Fran, Maurice and Lionel were all in the Territorial Army, along with two of their cousins, Michael, son of their uncle Arthur, and Hugo, son of their uncle Hugh. Fran and Maurice joined the Leeds Rifles. While Fran remained in England as the adjutant of a training brigade, Maurice became a captain in the 7th battalion of the West yorkshire Regiment, the Prince of Wales’ regiment, and was shipped to the support trenches in Belgium as part of the all-territorial 49th (1st West Riding) Infantry Division. He arrived on 19 April 1915, and died exactly two months later, at the age of only 28, one of 2,050 members of the Leeds Rifles to be killed on active service in France and Flanders during the war. He is buried at the Rue-Pétillon Military Cemetery in Fleurbaix, northern France.

His letters to his family, which are published in
The Next Generation
, a sequel to
The Lupton Family in Leeds
, edited by Athel’s nephew Francis Lupton with contributions from various family members and local historians, seem strangely naive in retrospect. ‘I would not have missed coming out here for worlds,’ he wrote on 28 April. ‘We have done no actual fighting yet but only moved about at very short notice, which is great fun.’ ‘I am sitting in a little mud and wood shelter for all the world like playing Indians,’ he said the following day. ‘Now and then we hear an occasional rifle crack or a shell going over like a wild duck, but not aimed at us, at least I don’t think so.’

Gradually, though, Maurice became more aware of the dangers. On 6 June, he wrote:

Into trenches for six days. I am going to try fitting the field glasses sent by Father onto a periscope so as to see more details of the German trench line because one cannot point a telescope directly at them. They are sometimes extraordinarily quick at picking off little things like periscopes.

And on 15 June:

one afternoon the Germans suddenly started shelling our end of the trench with shrapnel. By sheer mischance, one of these shells did not burst in the air but hit a sand bag wall against which our billet policeman was standing and cut off his leg a little below the knee. He was a tremendously strong chap and chloroform did not seem to have any effect on him, at least not for ages, but sadly he died the next day. All the other deaths we have had in the company have been practically instantaneous, shot through the head while firing over the parapet.

Four days later, he himself was killed.

Lionel set off with his Royal Field Artillery unit around the same time as his brother and had made his way to the front, riding in cattle trucks and marching on foot, when he found out that his brother had died. He wrote to his sister Anne:

I like your letters about Maurice. They make me feel much happier. I thought at first that it was an absolute waste him being killed so soon, before he had done anything really good in life but it is lovely to think that he is really having a nice time now.

He survived the Battle of Loos at the end of August and returned home for a week on leave, but he was wounded on 1 December and sent to a London hospital to recuperate. He then travelled to Rockland for Christmas, where he found his family in mixed spirits – mourning the death of Maurice but celebrating the birth of olive and Noel’s first child, a son Christopher, who was born on Christmas Eve that year.

Lionel returned to the front in April and was killed on 16 July 1916 at the Battle of the Somme. He was just 24 years old and had been mentioned twice in dispatches. He is buried at Bouzincourt Communal Cemetery.

Olive’s husband Noel was stationed at Bulford Camp on Salisbury Plain when he heard about Lionel’s death. He had spent the early part of the war as chief administrator of the Leeds Special Constabulary’s Motor Transport Section – responsible for traffic control during air raids – and had had to seek the permission of the chief constable to enlist. He joined the Royal Army Service Corps in November 1915, when his wife olive was eight months pregnant with their first child, and became a private in the officer Training Corps. He was on a temporary commission as second lieutenant with the 152nd siege battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, when Lionel died. A month later, on 31 August 1916, he was sent to France, where he worked as a driver, supporting the front-line troops at the Somme. Olive must have been terrified that he would never return. Two of her three brothers had already died and she was all alone, coping with an eight-month-old baby.

Noel was later attached to 406 Company’s transport depot, where drivers were assigned to deliver munitions to the front, move artillery or transport men and equipment, and to 611 Company. His personnel file records his conduct as ‘very good’ and his driving as ‘competent’. He may well have been one of the 1,400 lorry drivers with 406 Company’s siege park at Poperinghe, near ypres, who were delivering 1,000 tons of ammunition to the front each night under heavy shellfire. Their commanding officer, Major A. Cowan, remarked: ‘The new gas masks are very effective but it is not possible to drive at night without lights with them on and in some cases the drivers removed their masks too soon with fatal results.’ He could also have been among the 85 officers and 2,933 men of 611 Company who supplied ammunition to 41 siege batteries and 11 heavy artillery groups at the Arras front, working with extreme difficulty because of the poor conditions – the terrible roads and badly maintained lorries – around the Somme.

Fortunately, Noel survived the war, being released on 5 June 1919 with the rank of lieutenant and officially demobbed on 5 october. His third brother-in-law, Fran, was not so lucky. Fran was still in England when he found out about the deaths of his younger brothers, so he must have felt a certain amount of trepidation when he went out to France in January 1917 with the Leeds Rifles to serve with the all-territorial 62nd (2nd West Riding) Infantry Division. He had been married for less than three years and his daughter Ruth had just started toddling when he was posted as missing after just six weeks. He was buried in Bucquoy, not far from Arras. The eldest of the three brothers, he was still only thirty when he died.

Already a widower, the death of his three sons proved too much for Francis Lupton to bear. Even the birth of his third grandchild – olive’s second son Anthony – on 27 April 1917 failed to stem his grief. He let Rockland to the Pensions Committee at a token fee of one pound per year for use as a home for the orphans of soldiers and sailors, and, with his daughter Anne, took a smaller house in Lidgett Park Road on the outskirts of the village. He later moved to another house, Low Gables, across the fields from Hawkhills, the grand house once owned by William Middleton, but he found it hard to settle down.

He died of chronic kidney failure at Low Gables on 5 February 1921, at the age of 72, and was buried four days later at St John’s Church, Roundhay, where he had got married and where his wife was buried. He left a sum equivalent to almost £10 million today in trust to his two daughters and their descendants, making olive Middleton a very wealthy woman. At his funeral, the minister said that Francis was ‘a member of a family which for generations has been associated with the commercial, municipal, educational and religious life of Leeds’ and that he brought ‘sunshine to the fetid slum . . . it was largely due to him that men, women and children can now all live in surroundings essential to health and decency . . . We, his fellow worshippers, honour him for his simplicity, his sincerity, his integrity – for himself.’