BULMER – On the 29th March, to Mr & Mrs E.F. Bulmer, Adams Hill, Hereford – a son
1. One of my earliest recollections is the completion of the nursery and nursery bathroom which were added onto Adam’s Hill just in time for Beck’s birth in March 1913. Plans for this addition had been set in motion just after the birth of Joan and Nancy at Christmas 1910, so that the planning and building must have taken the whole of 1911 and 1912. I also remember seeing and having explained to me Beck’s layette, a sort of two-decker wicker basket with legs and a handle, which held nappies, powder &c.
2. I remember him lying in his pram near the verandah, while Morris, the old gardener, was mowing the big lawn; a pony wearing leather overshoes pulled the mower, and a boy called Tommy Godfrey led the pony. It was pointed out to me by my sister Dodo that there were now three Tommies: Tommy Godfrey, Tommy the pony, and Tommy the baby. She said We must call the baby Thomas à Becket to distinguish him. The Thomas was dropped and Becket stuck.
3. He was christened (in Breinton Church, I believe) Oscar after our great uncle Oscar Passavant, brother of Granny Rittner, and Theodore after Theodore Llewellyn-Davies, a Cambridge friend of Dad’s, who killed himself accidentally by diving onto a hidden rock while bathing in a river in the Lake District. This accident is described in Volume 1 of Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography. Neither of these names were popular in the family, and efforts of Mother and Aunt Mildred to call him Theodore after the age of about eight were in vain.
4. Beck had a secure, happy childhood, playing in the garden with Joan, Nancy and myself, with seaside visits to Barmouth every year until 1918, when the uncomfortable war-time railway journey was thought to make Barmouth with three changes too difficult. So in 1918 and 1919 we went to Dawlish, Devon, which could be reached by direct train. In 1920 to 1923 we reverted to Barmouth, which we greatly preferred.
5. A terrible background was always present from 1914 to 1918. Our German connection was known and produced very hostile attitudes among some of our neighbours. My Mother had to resign from the local Red Cross Committee in 1914, and was ostracised by many of the ultra patriots. An immediate neighbour, Major Elliot, took back a small triangle of land the shady corner of which he had leased to us and in which our swing was; he used to shout at us children, and fire off a shot gun. We heard our parents say how different the realities of the war were from the newspaper accounts of it. When he was about four years old, Beck remarked "Is it always war?". We used to see our cousins Geoffrey and Howard come on leave in their uniforms; I remember the terrible staring look in Geoffrey’s eyes. In 1918 he committed suicide, and in July Howard was wounded, fortunately not seriously. We were well aware of the war even in our sheltered surroundings.
6. Apart from the poor food (Bertram used to shoot rooks and blackbirds for pies, and we gathered wool from barbed wire and hedges in the neighbouring fields) life went on comparatively normally. Until we were about eight years old, we had all our meals in the nursery, before 1916 under Amy Higgins and a series of nurse maids; after Amy (a warmhearted Somerset girl, whom we always kept in touch with) Tiddy took over, coming from the Zieglers. She was a short, stout, cheerful and very affectionate lady who came to the Rittner family at Liverpool in 1874, when my Mother was a baby of three months. She had a young man, but could not bear to leave the Rittners to marry him. She died at Adam’s Hill in September 1940, aged 86. She was the most unselfish person I have ever known.
7. After nursery tea we used to be dressed up to go down to the drawing room. Beck and I wore velvet suits with lace collars and cuffs (or in summer a frilly silk shirt and velvet trousers), white socks, black patent-leather shoes with buckles; Joan and Nancy usually wore white dresses, Joan with a blue ribbon in her hair, which was long, fair and brushed into ringlets, Nancy with a pink ribbon and a page-boy cut for her brown hair. We played games, or used circus dolls or other toys which were kept downstairs, or danced about while Mother played on the piano See me dance the polka, or The man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo. We also had an H.M.V. gramophone with a large horn, which played The Chocolate Soldier, and some songs of Caruso. If Dad was late home from the Works, as he very often was, he would come bounding up the stairs, two or three at a time, to see us in our baths or in our beds, and demonstrate pop kisses (a noise he could make like a champagne cork) or smoke rings with his pipe. On Sunday mornings we all four got into our parents’ double bed, where he told us impromptu stories.
8. From the ages of four to eight Beck did lessons at home with Joan and Nancy, and for the first year I was there as well. Our governess, Ruby Davies, was not a trained teacher and found difficulty in managing us. We felt she was petty, but she taught us our tables, the dates of the Kings and Queens, the counties, county capitals and rivers of England, the capes in order all round the English coast, and the political geography of pre-1914 Europe. We also read from the Bible, and she was very insistent that no book must ever be put down on top of it, out of respect for the Holy Book! I’m afraid we found her lessons dull, and were all very thankful when the time came to go to school.
9. Beck in the nursery, as later, was a most affectionate and good-tempered child. If he was upset he would not make a scene, but simply retire into a corner or under a bed, and then one of us would follow him to find out what was the matter. With the four of us less than four years apart in age, there were naturally tensions at times, but mostly between Joan and Nancy. Joan was stronger physically, though not constitutionally, Nancy was more brainy. Joan feared that Beck would catch her up in size, but he didn’t until it was too late to matter; I feared that Nancy would catch me up, and she came within half an inch at one stage. But mostly we were very happy together; we had a piano in the nursery and were given lessons on it from the age of four; we gardened and climbed trees, we built houses out of branches and mud bricks, we dug pits, we watched the hens and their chicks, the cow being milked, and drank milk warm and frothy from the udder, we saw the pigs being fed, heard them resisting slaughter, watched their carcases being cut up. We spent long hours at the Works watching the apples and pears brought in, ground, pressed, the pomace dried, the juice filtered, the casks being made and repaired, the blacksmiths’ shop, the bottles being filled, labelled and packed, the horses and carts, the trucks and engines in the railway sidings, the laboratories, as well as buildings being erected and cellars being excavated. We knew many of the work-people and were taken to visit them in their houses, we went to the Whettons farm, and after the war was over Dad took us to all parts of the countryside. We knew the nearer part from walking and cycling.
10. We met other children at dancing classes, which were held at private houses with suitable rooms, at parties (which were not as frequent as we would have liked), and at dances which were held at the Shirehall, the Town Hall and the Booth Ball, e.g. The All Age Ball.
11. Beck started school at the Cathedral Prep under Miss Gamlen (Gambelina) who had been governess to our Longmeadow cousins, and was not only a wonderful teacher herself, but had found three excellent assistant teachers, Miss Allen (who was my governess for two years in 1913 to 1915), Else Phillips and Else Clay. All of these dedicated ladies became lifelong friends of Beck and myself. They built up a very happy atmosphere at the school, and neither Beck nor I could remember any bullying there at all. As the school was in the precincts of the Cathedral, we came to know every inch of that building and its surroundings. Joan and Nancy were at the High School for Girls and with Beck were driven to school by our chauffeur; I felt this was highly unfair, as I had always been made to walk or bicycle!
12. In September 1923, just before Beck went to a boarding prep school (Bengeo School, Hertford), Dodo had a serious illness (probably tuberculosis of the brain) which led to complete insanity from which, in spite of some hopeful signs occasionally, she never recovered. She was looked after in a separate house (in the Cotswolds) by two devoted girls of her own age. We younger children never saw her again and she died in June 1926. For nearly three years the worry which this distressing affair caused to our parents and to Bertram inevitably affected us.
13. To obtain some relief and relaxation my father took us in the spring of 1925, with Miss Gamlen in charge of us, to Lucerne, Stresa and Lausanne. This was Beck’s first trip abroad (he was twelve) and to avoid his getting over-excited at school, he was not told about it until the Easter term was over. In 1922 three of our German relations had been to stay at Adams Hill (Aunt Ida Neher, Margaret and Helen Passavant). On this holiday we met some of the Passavants in Switzerland, and saw what continental family life was like.
14. I had been very unhappy at Bengeo, but fortunately for Beck the master and the two boys who were chiefly responsible for this unhappiness had all left, and he was reasonably contented there; the teaching of Greek, Latin, Maths and English was good, and the mistress who taught French had an excellent accent and method, which was of great help to both of us. But we felt marooned and imprisoned most of the time, and disliked the loss of liberty and privacy and the absence of family affection. (There was one master of whom we were very fond, the Rev. H.S. Coles, who was stout, genial and unorthodox and an excellent teacher).
15. In May 1927 Beck joined me at Shrewsbury and it is at this point that his letters begin. We were both much happier at Shrewsbury in spite of the narrow and conventional outlook of most of the boys. The reasons for this were: the nearness and similarity of the country to Herefordshire; the greater freedom to go for walks and take a boat up the river; the fine characters of many of the masters, and their interest in us because they had taught or known our father. Beck quickly became a recognised character known to the whole school of 420 boys and 40 masters.
16. His chief spare time interest at Bengeo had been gardening. Part of the ground was divided into about sixteen small plots. Three boys shared a plot and a prize was given to the boys who produced the best show of flowers in the summer term. Beck’s team under his guidance won the prize at least twice. At Shrewsbury his interests were carpentry and music; he made among other things an oak display case with a hinged glass lid, which is still used to display old books and documents in Hereford Cathedral. He sang in the choir and in the house vocal quartette, he learnt to play the viola in the school orchestra. He coxed the house rowing four in the bumping races and spent half-holidays sculling up the river with friends.
17. About 1926, when Dad was Mayor of Hereford for the second time, he took us to see the gas and electricity works belonging to Hereford City Council, and more exciting still to a coal mine at Treharris, South Wales, belonging to the Ocean Colliery Co., in which Beck’s godfather Sir Harry Webb had a large interest. This was a time of severe industrial depression and of great poverty and distress in South Wales; many of the children were barefoot. But the men lucky enough to be working in this pit, which led to a 6ft seam, had comfortable warm working conditions and appeared happy. They used pit ponies to haul the coal from face to pit bottom, and they sang Welsh part-songs in their lunch break.
18. The years 1927 to 1932 were in most respects the happiest in our life as a family. Our parents were active and in good health and very hospitable to all their friends and ours. During the summer holidays young German relations, notably Hertha Kundt, Bettina and Arnold von Schaffer, Manella Kielennsegg and Marguerite Grunelius, came to stay for long periods; Kingsmen of many generations, the Wedds, Sheppard, Lowes Dickinson, Hugh Meredith, Patrick Wilkinson; from Oxford Canon Streeter, later Provost of the Queen’s College, in fact all sorts of interesting men and women whose conversation helped to widen our outlook. Dad took us on many interesting holidays: Northern Italy in 1927, Greece and Turkey in 1929 and 1931. Then in January 1933, while I was in Greece, Hitler came to power, and the international outlook became more depressing with every successive year.