The second Viscount never spoke down to his sons and always wrote to them as equals, but the pressure he exerted on Edward would horrify a modern child psychologist. At the age of eleven the boy received weekly letters at prep-school telling him ‘You are to get a first class at History at Oxford and do all sorts of grand things.’ An only mildly critical Maths report would bring the admonition, ‘I want for my darling to do everything perfectly’ because, as he never tired of pointing out, ‘I long for you to do your best… that you may turn out the pride and happiness of our life – we have all had so much sorrow in the past that now everything seems to centre on you.’ If Edward became old before his time, and became rather serious, sensitive but ambitious, it was due to emotionally blackmailing letters such as that received on his twelfth birthday: ‘You do not know how precious you are in my eyes my own dearest child – my only little son left now that God has taken my other three to himself – all my hopes and joy are bound up in you… what should I do without you?’5
Edward Wood had a blameless Eton, where he concentrated on those sports which his disability allowed him, such as tennis, fives and bicycling. He also kept up a lively theological correspondence with his father. But it was at Christ Church, Oxford, that he blossomed and where he could indulge his appetite for country sports and High Church services. He joined the dining clubs Loder’s and the Bullingdon, got into slight debt, went beagling and generally did all the other things expected of wealthy and well-born undergraduates. Already, though, there were signs of wisdom beyond his years; an Oxford contemporary, Lord William Percy, remembered how, ‘On Mafeking night, each member of Loder’s drank a bottle of port to celebrate. Everyone got completely drunk, but Halifax immediately went out and tickled his throat to make himself sick, thus avoiding the worst effects. This was typical.’6 Through impressive management of his time combined with a capacity for hard work which never left him, Wood took a first in History and then won a Fellowship to All Souls. These merely whetted his father’s ambitions: ‘I am quite determined that you are to be Prime Minister and reunite England to the Holy See.’7
On going down from Oxford, Wood found himself wealthy. Dispersed for a generation amongst uncles and aunts, the family wealth tended to percolate back down to him. In 1904, an aunt left him both No. 88, Eaton Square, and Temple Newsam, the Jacobean palace outside Leeds known with good reason as ‘the Hampton Court of the North’. The year before, his father had also offered him Garrowby, the largest of the family estates. Wood decided to go on a Grand Tour of the Empire, secure in the knowledge that he had a fortune to return to in England.
He stayed with Lord Curzon at Calcutta, visited Benares, Agra, Ceylon and New Zealand, saw the Act of Federation in effect in Australia and met members of Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’ in South Africa. Finally, in 1907, he visited Canada, scene of the reforms of his Whig great-uncle, Lord Durham. On his return he took the most sensible course open to a man of conservative political instincts at that time and stayed well out of politics. The Liberals had won a landslide victory in 1906 and so Wood instead took up his Fellowship at All Souls. This putting off of the start of his parliamentary career showed a talent for felicitous political timing that was not to leave him. It was in the civilized and intellectually gifted atmosphere of All Souls that he wrote a life of his father’s hero, John Keble. Because of his desire to be objective, this turned out to be a well-researched and closely argued but excruciatingly dull book.
The political climate had sufficiently improved by the time John Keble was published in 1909 for Wood to decide to follow his grandfather into politics. The Whig Party was long since dead, its traditions ignored by the Liberal Party which had ingested it. Wood therefore, more for lack of an alternative than for any positive reason, decided to stand for the Conservatives. His ideological commitment to Conservatism was never strong, although he did inherit from his father a slightly whimsical belief in oligarchy.
Only two more ingredients were necessary for the career of a bright and successful young Tory politician: Wood required a wife and a safe seat, both of which came within four months of one another. In the eighty or so interviews I have conducted with her husband’s colleagues, friends, relations and servants, one constant rejoinder has been made: all agree that Lady Dorothy Onslow was in charm, friendliness, sympathy and kindness a paragon amongst women. She was the perfect wife and they proceeded to live that most infuriating thing for a modern biographer – model lives together. Her tremendous personality and wisdom proved invaluable to him. Although a constant source of strength, she never had, nor sought, any influence over policy. None of his great offices – the Viceroyalty of India, Foreign Secretaryship or the Ambassadorship to Washington – could have been accepted unless Lady Dorothy had been up to them. Capable men were regularly turned down for such posts because of an unsuitable wife. Lady Dorothy fulfilled a vital role in complementing her husband’s image of a sound family man who could always be trusted to do the decent thing.
Neither was she merely the political wife who stares adoringly up at her husband during interminable speeches and belaboured jokes. Her giant Garrowby housekeeping account books, kept between 1911 and 1939 and listing to the last farthing how much was paid to the poulterer, confectioner, fishmonger and so on, show her to be more than just a hostess. Her engagement diaries, detailing exactly which white lie she had told to whom to excuse herself from which social occasion, stand testament to her common sense. On other matters she could be remarkably candid: she openly admitted that her mother was born illegitimate, despite Burke’s Peerage generously attesting to the contrary. She had lived in New Zealand for a time when her father was Governor-General and had all the independent spirit of his family. Her sister-in-law used to get her way by feigning paralysis or throwing inkpots and once walked into a crowded diplomatic party stark naked. Her nephew kept a parrot in his bedroom and never went on a train without his pet snake.8 The family had provided three Speakers of the House of Commons and Dorothy inherited from her father a deep sense of noblesse oblige.
She had to show her mettle very soon after her wedding on 21 September 1909. The honeymoon was cut short so that her husband could take part in the general election campaign. As the heir of a local grandee, Wood had found no trouble in those more deferential times being selected as the Conservative candidate for the nearby seat of Ripon. Lady Dorothy’s friend, Blanche Lascelles (who later married George Lloyd), recorded in her diary how, when out canvassing in the biting cold of January 1910, they took it in turns to buy blue silk for the rosettes and chilblain-cream for their feet.9 Wood was elected with a 1,244 majority in a poll of 11,000, which, although it was reduced eleven months later to 874, was considered strong enough to dissuade anyone from standing against him again. A political career spanning half a century was thus based on only two contested elections.
This immensely tall, rather sad-eyed twenty-nine-year-old on the verge of his political career had had an early life rich with influences. The loss of his brothers, combined with a profound sense of Original Sin, had produced a tolerant, practical, slightly diffident man. Although intensely private, he cannot be described as shy. Truly shy people do not go into politics and Wood did not find speaking to large crowds more than normally harrowing. Anyhow, there was too much Yorkshire and his father in him for shyness. It is doubtful, however, whether he had much of a sense of humour. One biographer has detected ‘a lugubrious sense of irony’.10 His set-piece jokes were laborious and, although he enjoyed teasing and gossiping amongst close friends, he appears to have been responsible for virtually no bons mots or witty remarks. He tended to speak in an Establishment tongue which colleagues had no difficulty in understanding, despite his circumlocution. He once started a sentence, ‘I should have thought that one might say that it could be reasonably held that…’. For foreigners it was different. The Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko, complained that ‘he would express his thoughts in so ornate a way that few could understand him’.11
There is also the fact of his legendary stinginess. He had somehow contracted ‘a deep-seated abhorrence of everyday expenditure’, which stayed with him for the rest of his life.12 This was more than merely a case of being ‘Yorkshire tight’ and cannot exclusively be explained by his father’s prodigious expenditure on ecclesiastical campaigns and the building of secret passages at Garrowby. R. A. Butler recorded how at the Foreign Office, ‘one day a messenger brought in four biscuits and two cups of tea. Halifax pushed away two biscuits and said, “Mr Butler does not want these. Nor do I. Do not charge me.” ’13 There are many such examples of this sort of parsimonious behaviour. But these must be set against the great generosity he showed in 1925 when he sold Temple Newsam to the City of Leeds for less than he could have realized on the open market, and again in 1948 when he gave 164 paintings to the museum the City had opened there.
Wood had a genuine modesty and found it hard to lose his temper. His life until then had been a conventional and faultless progression along a well-trodden aristocratic career path. Hon. Edward Wood MP was, in January 1910, a patient, dispassionate and reserved man who was keen to find reason and logic in the world. He was about to enter the worst possible place for someone of that temperament – the pre-First World War House of Commons.
Source Notes
1: BIRTH, BOYHOOD, BEREAVEMENT(pp. 7–14)
1 The Times Literary Supplement, 1935
2 Talbot Papers
3 J. G. Lockhart, Viscount Halifax 1839–85, p. 168
4 Sir Charles Peake Diary, 16 January 1941
5 A2 278 1, 17 April 1893
6 Lord Birkenhead interview with Lord William Percy
7 A2 278 1
8 Lord Holderness’s memoir of his mother
9 Lady Lloyd Diary, January 1910
10 Interview with Alan Campbell Johnson
11 Andrei Gromyko, Memories, p. 125
12 Lord Birkenhead interview with General Bradshaw
13 R. A. Butler, The Art of Memory, p. 38
Available now
APPENDIX
THE BRITISH INFANTRY
ORDER OF BATTLE
BY BRIGADE & BATTALION,
1 JULY 1916
4th Army
(General Sir Henry Rawlinson )
III CORPS
(Lt.-Gen. Sir W.P. Pulteney)
8th Division (Regular Army)
(Maj.-Gen. H. Hudson)
23rd BRIGADE
2nd Desvonshire
2nd West Yorkshire
2nd Middlesex
2nd Scottish Rifles
25th BRIGADE
2nd Lincoln
2nd Royal Berkshire
1st Royal Irish Rifles
2nd Rifle Brigade
70th BRIGADE
11th Sherwood Foresters
8th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry
8th Yorkshire and Lancashire
9th Yorkshire and Lancashire
PIONEERS
22nd Durham Light Infantry
34th Division (New Army)
(Maj.-Gen. E.C. Ingouville-Williams)
101st BRIGADE
15th Royal Scots (1st Edinburgh City)
16th Royal Scots (2nd Edinburgh City)
10th Lincolnshire (Grimsby Chums)
11th Suffolk (Cambridge)
102nd (TYNESIDE SCOTTISH) BRIGADE
20th Northumberland Fusiliers (1st Tyneside Scottish)
21st Northumberland Fusiliers (2nd Tyneside Scottish)
22nd Northumberland Fusiliers (3rd Tyneside Scottish)
23rd Northumberland Fusiliers (4th Tyneside Scottish)
103rd (TYNESIDE IRISH) BRIGADE
24th Northumberland Fusiliers (1st Tyneside Irish)
25th Northumberland Fusiliers (2nd Tyneside Irish)
26th Northumberland Fusiliers (3rd Tyneside Irish)
27th Northumberland Fusiliers (4th Tyneside Irish)
PIONEERS
18th Northumberland Fusiliers
19th (Western) Division (New Army)
(Maj.-Gen. G.T.M. Bridges)
56th BRIGADE
7th King’s Own
7th East Lancashire
7th South Lancashire
7th Loyal North Lancashire
57th BRIGADE
10th Royal Warwickshire
8th Gloucestershire
10th Worcestershire
8th North Staffordshire
58th BRIGADE
9th Cheshire
9th Royal Welch Fusiliers
9th Welch
6th Wiltshire
PIONEERS
5th South Wales Borderers
VIII CORPS
(Lt.-Gen. Sir A.G. Hunter-Weston)
4th Division (Regular Army)
(Maj.-Gen. Hon. W. Lambton)
10th BRIGADE
1st Royal Irish Fusiliers
2nd Royal Dublin Fusiliers
2nd Seaforth Highlanders
1st Royal Warwickshire
11th BRIGADE
1st Somerset Light Infantry
1st East Lancashire
1st Hampshire
1st Rifle Brigade
12th BRIGADE
1st King’s Own
2nd Lancashire Fusiliers
2nd Duke of Wellington’s
2nd Essex
PIONEERS
21st West Yorkshire
29th Division (Regular Army)
(Maj.-Gen. H. de Beauvoir de Lisle)
86th BRIGADE
2nd Royal Fusiliers
1st Lancashire Fusiliers
16th Middlesex (Public Schools Battalion)
1st Royal Dublin Fusiliers
87th BRIGADE
2nd South Wales Borderers
1st Kings Own Scottish Borderers
1st Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers
1st Border
88th BRIGADE
1st Essex
1st Newfoundland
4th Worcestershire
2nd Hampshire
PIONEERS
1/2nd Monmouths
31st Division (New Army)
(Maj.-Gen. R. Wanless O’Gowan)
92nd BRIGADE
10th East Yorkshire (Hull Commercials)
11th East Yorkshire (Hull Tradesmen)
12th East Yorkshire (Hull Sportsmen)
13th East Yorkshire (T’Others)
93rd BRIGADE
15th West Yorkshire (Leeds Pals)
16th West Yorkshire (1st Bradford Pals)
18th West Yorkshire (2nd Bradford Pals)
18th Durham Light Infantry (Durham Pals)
94th BRIGADE
11th East Lancashire (Accrington Pals)
12th Yorkshire and Lancashire (Sheffield City Battalion)
13th Yorkshire and Lancashire (1st Barnsley Pals)
14th Yorkshire and Lancashire (1st Barnsley Pals)
PIONEERS
12th King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry (Halifax Pals)
48th (South Midland) Division (Territorials)
(Maj.-Gen. R. Fanshaw)
143th BRIGADE
1/5th Royal Warwickshire
1/6th Royal Warwickshire
1/7th Royal Warwickshire
1/8th Royal Warwickshire
144th BRIGADE
1/4th Gloucestershire
1/6th Gloucestershire
1/7th Worcestershire
1/8th Worcestershire
145th BRIGADE
1/5th Gloucestershire
1/4th Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry
1st Buckinghamshire
1/4th Royal Berkshire
PIONEERS
1/5th Royal Sussex
X CORPS
(Lt.-Gen. Sir T. L. N. Morland)
32nd Division (New Army)
(Maj.-Gen. W.H. Rycroft)
14th BRIGADE
19th Lancashire Fusiliers (3rd Salford Pals)
1st Dorset
2nd Manchester
15th Highland Light Infantry
(Glasgow Tramways)
96th BRIGADE
16th Northumberland Fusiliers (Newcastle Commercials)
2nd Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers
15th Lancashire Fusiliers (1st Salford Pals)
16th Lancashire Fusiliers (2nd Salford Pals)
97th BRIGADE
11th Border (The Lonsdales)
2nd King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry
16th Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Boys’ Brigade)
17th Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Commercials)
PIONEERS
17th Northumberland Fusiliers (Newcastle Railway Pals)
36th (Ulster) Division (New Army)
(Maj.-Gen. O.S.W. Nugent)
107th BRIGADE
8th Royal Irish Rifles (East Belfast)
9th Royal Irish Rifles (West Belfast)
10th Royal Irish Rifles (South Belfast)
15th Royal Irish Rifles (North Belfast)
108th BRIGADE
11th Royal Irish Rifles (South Antrim)
12th Royal Irish Rifles (Central Antrim)
13th Royal Irish Rifles (County Down)
9th Royal Irish Fusiliers (County Armagh, Monaghan and Cavan)
109th BRIGADE
9th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (County Tyrone)
10th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (County Derry)
11th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers (Donegal and Fermanagh)
14th Royal Irish Rifles (Belfast Young Citizens)
PIONEERS
16th Royal Irish Rifles (2nd County Down)
49th (West Riding) Division (Territorials)
(Maj.-Gen. E.M. Perceval)
146th BRIGADE
1/5th West Yorkshire
1/6th West Yorkshire
1/7th West Yorkshire
1/8th West Yorkshire
147th BRIGADE
1/4th Duke of Wellington’s
1/5th Duke of Wellington’s
1/6th Duke of Wellington’s
1/7th Duke of Wellington’s
148th BRIGADE
1/4th Yorkshire and Lancashire
1/5th Yorkshire and Lancashire