Authors: Claudia Joseph
Kate (9 page)
The First World War had a devastating effect on the Lupton family, wiping out nearly an entire generation of men and plunging the whole family into mourning. Only three out of seven male cousins survived – Arthur’s son Arthur and Hugh’s sons Hugo and Athel – leaving the family businesses short of young men to follow in their fathers’ footsteps. But the war also had a great effect on the women of the family, as they were left to fend for themselves. Many hundreds of thousands of men were killed or maimed during the war, and it has been estimated that in the interwar years there were some two million ‘surplus women’ who could not hope to find a husband. The Lupton women were no different. Although olive was already married at the start of the war, her sister Anne died a spinster and the majority of her female cousins did not find husbands.
Robbed of the chance to find a husband, Anne also found it difficult to get work after the war, despite having dedicated herself to good causes. In 1914, she had become secretary to the Leeds General Hospital Committee, raising funds for men in military hospitals, and later she had worked on the local Pensions Committee, advising disabled soldiers. It was she who had persuaded her father to rent the house to them. But, despite having been presented to King George V and Queen Mary twice, in 1916 and 1918, and getting a mention for her war work in the
London Gazette
in 1920, her application for a post as Inspector of Local Committees was rejected because she was a woman. She later had to endure the ignominy of being rejected by the family firm because she was female.
Fran’s widow Dorothy, nicknamed Dort, was one of the more fortunate. Despite having a four-year-old daughter, Ruth, she soon managed to find herself a second husband, her late husband’s cousin Arthur. The couple married in 1919 and their son Tom was born the following year. They moved into a house on the edge of Chapel Allerton, and Arthur split his time between supervising the farm at Beechwood, where he had grown up, playing polo and hunting. On 14 December 1928, while riding with the Bramham Hunt, he was involved in a horrific accident. After failing to take a fence, his horse threw him and rolled on top of him, fracturing his pelvis. He died eleven months later, when his son Tom was only nine years old, leaving Dorothy a widow for the second time. Within a year, his father Arthur had died, his end hastened by grief.
Chapter 8
Noel Middleton and Olive Lupton
L
ying in bed after giving birth at her home, Fieldhead House, in the yorkshire village of Roundhay, Kate’s great-grandmother olive Middleton cradled her newborn son Peter and prayed for a new dawn.
Married for six years to solicitor Noel Middleton and approaching her fortieth birthday, the mother of three wanted to give her sons Christopher, four, Anthony, three, and now Peter the idyllic upbringing she had been denied. It was 3 September 1920 – two years after the end of the Great War – and olive had already suffered more pain than most people experience in a lifetime. Her mother Harriet had died when she was ten, leaving her in the care of a succession of housekeepers, nannies and governesses, and her brothers Fran, Maurice and Lionel had been killed in the war. Now she was watching with sadness as her father faded away before her eyes, overwhelmed with the grief of losing his wife and three sons. He died five months later, as much of a broken heart, it seems, as of any other cause, leaving his daughter a wealthy woman but a saddened one.
Despite being dealt such a terrible hand, olive was stoical about her experiences. After all, she was fortunate. Not only was she wealthy in her own right and married – quite a feat in those post-war days – but her husband Noel had returned from the battlefields of France, where he had worked as a driver for the Royal Army Service Corps.
The only other member of the family to have been so lucky was her cousin Hugo, a Wellington School and Trinity College alumnus, who had won a Military Cross for his service in France. On 17 July 1920, he married Joyce Ransome, the daughter of a family friend, Leeds University professor Cyril Ransome, who came from Far Headingley. Her brother Arthur would find fame a decade later when
Swallows and Amazons
, the first of his series of children’s novels, was published.
After the war, Noel gave up his partnership at solicitors W.H. Clarke, Middleton & Co. in South Parade, Leeds, to join olive’s family business, William Lupton & Co., as a cashier. Olive’s sister Anne, who was single, had hoped to fulfil her brothers’ role at the company but was rebuffed because she was a woman.
When olive gave birth to her and Noel’s fourth child, a daughter Margaret, known as Moggy, on 29 June 1923, the couple’s happiness was complete. Together, they created a carefree family home. Fairfield – a substantial Edwardian villa at 12 Park Avenue, an exclusive tree-lined street in the suburb of oakwood by Roundhay Park – was full of voices and laughter. Gentle and kind, with a relaxed temperament, olive was a natural mother, and the children thrived in their surroundings. They had a governess, who taught them with their second cousin Francis, the eldest son of Hugo Lupton and Joyce Ransome. In
The Next Generation
, Francis remembered:
When I reached school age, my mother taught me for a while, but I later shared a governess with my cousins, Peter and Margaret Middleton. They lived at oakwood, some three miles away, and I clearly remember that I used to start out each morning with a lift on a horse-drawn milk float which took me for a mile or so along the way, while my mother caught me up on a bicycle.
Noel, who had a keen interest in music, was chairman of the Northern Philharmonic orchestra and organised many musical soirées in Leeds between the wars. He was also interested in photography and shared with his wife a love of painting.
The whole family used to gather at Beechwood, the Lupton family’s old seat, where olive’s father Francis had been brought up with his brothers Arthur, Charles and Hugh, and which was now home to Arthur’s daughters Elinor and Bessie, two spinster sisters.
The family spent a lot of time outdoors in the countryside and summer holidays were spent camping in the Lake District or staying in their holiday house in Kettlewell, one of the prettiest villages in the yorkshire Dales, which overlooks the Wharfedale Valley to the north of Skipton.
It was while they were in the Lake District during the summer of 1936 that olive was taken to hospital with peritonitis, a blood infection, after her appendix burst. There were complications and, on 27 September, at the age of 55, she died, ripping the heart out of the family. She left £52,031 in trust for her children. It was a fortune in those days, but the money could not make up for the loss to the Middleton siblings. Peter was only 16 years old when his mother died and Margaret was barely a teenager. Yet another generation of Lupton children was left to make their way in the world without a mother. Olive’s sister Anne, who was seven years younger than her and the only one of her brothers and sisters still alive, became a shoulder for Noel to lean on and a good friend to the children.
After the First World War, following the deaths of her father and three brothers, Anne, unmarried and with no ties, had decided to go travelling, visiting Asia and South America. Her adventures enthralled her nieces and nephews. When she returned to England, she set up home at 7 Mallord Street, Chelsea, with Enid Moberly Bell, an equally inspiring and inexhaustible woman, who was not only a prolific author but also the founder and first headmistress of Lady Margaret School in Fulham and a vice chairwoman of the Lyceum Club for female writers and artists. It was in Mallord Street that Anne found out about the death of her sister.
In those days, Chelsea was not an exclusive, well-heeled haven for investment bankers and celebrities but a quarter of London inhabited by artists, writers and poets. One of the women’s neighbours was the artist Augustus John, who commissioned the Dutch architect Robert van t’Hoff to design a cottage for him at No. 28 after a chance encounter in a pub. The painter Cecil Hunt, whose wife was a leading figure in the suffrage movement, resided in Mallord House, and author A.A. Milne, a former journalist and assistant editor at
Punch
, who created the children’s stories about Winnie the Pooh for his son Christopher, lived at No. 13, a red-brick house with a wrought-iron fence and leaded windows.
Anne fitted well into the progressive, bohemian milieu of Mallord Street. She had inherited her father’s social conscience and worked on improving housing conditions in Fulham, for which she was awarded an MBE. She was also involved in the creation of the Quarry Hill estate in inner-city Leeds, which opened in 1938 as the country’s largest municipal housing scheme, to replace the back-to-back housing of the Victorian era, a cause that had been close to her father’s heart. The new flats became iconic and were modern and well equipped, with solid-fuel ranges, electric lighting and state-of-the-art refuse collection, but the buildings were demolished in 1978 because of structural defects.
Three years after olive’s death, the family faced another challenge, the outbreak of the Second World War, and another generation of Luptons went off to fight for their country. It was on Peter Middleton’s 19th birthday, 3 September 1939, that war was declared. While his older brother Christopher joined the Royal Artillery and Anthony went into the army, Peter joined the RAF. He got his wings at RAF Cranwell, an experience he shares with Prince William.
It was another anxious time for Noel, who had seen his wife’s family almost wiped out by the First World War, but ultimately a kinder one, as the family celebrated a marriage, a birth and political honour.
On 6 December 1941, the family was reunited at Christ Church, Chelsea, when Christopher, by then a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, got married to Dorothy Martin, the daughter of a builder, who was three years older than him. His aunt Anne signed the marriage certificate in his mother’s place. Once again, she was holding the family together, keeping her home in Chelsea open for friends and relatives passing through London. She was eventually driven out by the bombing and set up home in a rented house in Midhurst, Kent, where she continued to get involved in war relief work.
A year later, on 18 November 1942, the family celebrated again when Jessie Kitson, great-niece of the 1st Baron Airedale, who had been a close friend of Peter Middleton’s great-grandfather William, became the first female Lord Mayor of Leeds. She was a lifelong friend of Arthur Lupton’s daughter and Anne’s cousin Elinor, who once joked that she and Jessie were ‘the two worst-dressed ladies in Leeds’. The family were delighted that Elinor, a Cambridge graduate in classics who lived in the family home, Beechwood, became her Lady Mayoress.
Then, in 1943, Noel became a grandfather for the first time when his daughter-in-law Dorothy gave birth to Philippa. The first member of the Middleton family to be born outside Leeds, she arrived into the world at the Fulmer Chase Maternity Hospital in Berkshire, where many wives of junior officers gave birth.
Despite being a leading centre for manufacturing, Leeds survived the war largely unscathed. Local legend had it that the thick black smoke produced by the city’s industries prevented enemy planes from spotting their targets. Nevertheless, some 70 people were killed during attacks, the worst of which happened in March 1941, when the town hall, the station, the Quarry Hill estate and Leeds City Museum were all bombed, the museum suffering the loss of an ancient Egyptian mummy. Meanwhile, Waddingtons, the local board game and playing card manufacturers, rose to the challenge by supplying British servicemen held in prisoner of war camps in Germany with games in which they had secreted maps to aid them in their attempts at escaping.
None of the Middleton brothers was killed during the war, and the family must have breathed a huge sigh of relief when the end came. In Leeds, thousands danced in the streets, clambering up on top of the lions in front of the town hall to celebrate VE Day. On 13 May 1945 there was a victory parade through the town, attended by thousands despite the pouring rain.
The end of the war spelled the beginning for a new generation of Middletons as they celebrated their new-found freedom. Both Kate’s grandfather Peter and his brother Anthony fell in love in those heady post-war days, with two ravishing sisters.
Peter, who became a civilian pilot after being demobbed, was the first brother to take the plunge, getting married at the respectable age of 26. He tied the knot with Valerie Glassborow, 22, the daughter of bank manager Frederick Glassborow, on 7 December 1946 at the Norman parish church in Adel, the oldest church in Leeds. The marriage proved the foundation for another love affair, between Peter’s older brother Anthony, a 29-year-old cloth manufacturer, and Valerie’s sister Mary, 23. They got married on 5 April the following year at the parish church of St John in Moor Allerton, cementing the warm relationship between the two families.
Sadly, Noel did not live long enough to walk his youngest daughter Margaret down the aisle when she wed musician James Barton eight years later. He died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 72 on 2 July 1951, leaving in his will the equivalent of £1.3 million, which was split between his four children. Kate’s grandfather Peter, who was 30 when his father died, also inherited a bronze bust by Jacob Epstein, an oil painting by local artist George Graham and a picture of himself by Edward Neatby, an accomplished Leeds-born painter of landscapes and portraits.
Noel’s sister-in-law Anne, who had played such a major role in his children’s lives, outlived him by 16 years, but after the death of Enid Moberly Bell in 1966 she seemed to wilt. Crippled by arthritis, she died the following year of leukaemia and tuberculosis, contracted during the First World War. She was 79.