Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. Paul Preston
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daughters, Gabriel, was also to work with Franco’s medical services during the Spanish Civil War; the other, Laura, was to be the second wife of the novelist Evelyn Waugh. At the end of 1915, Tommy was posted back to Egypt and Margot was able to live with him there until in May 1916, they returned to England. She was by then pregnant once more. In November 1916, Tommy got himself transferred to the Royal Welsh Fusiliers in order to serve in France. Two days after he left, Priscilla was born in London on 15 November 1916. The real sequence of events undermines Vilallonga’s accusation that her father was Prince Alfonso de Orléans Borbón.8 Margot and Tommy would have two further daughters, Gaenor, born on 2 June 1919 and Rosemary on 28 October 1922.
In later life, when she had become addicted to drama and excitement, Pip would attribute her taste for adventure to having been born during an air raid; more likely it was inherited from her parents. According to her brother, when she was a toddler, the family called her ‘Chatterbox’. Ensconced in her high chair, she would chunter away irrespective of anyone listening or understanding. As a child, she used her Welsh name of Esyllt (the equivalent of Iseult or Isolde). However, she quickly became irritated when people twisted this to Ethel, so she switched to Priscilla, which in turn became reduced to Pip. Her mother remembered how useful she always made herself with her younger sisters: Rosemary was a rascal, ‘Pip alone could manage her with loving ease.’ Pip was an affectionate child, always desperate to please and to be liked – and thus hurt by the coldness of her parents. Gaenor recalled that Pip was ‘a very pretty girl with golden curls and blue eyes, and bitterly resented the disappearance of the curls and her entry into the comparative drabness of schoolroom life’. She was brought up in the splendour of Seaford House in Belgrave Square until she was nine, attending a London day school – Queen’s College in Harley Street. While still a child in London, she suffered a distressing riding accident in Rotten Row in Hyde Park. She was thrown from her horse and when her foot was caught in a stirrup she was dragged some distance. She was nervous about riding for a while but, according to her sister, ‘she grew up to become an extremely brave horsewoman, and to show courage in all sorts of difficult and dangerous situations’.9
Withal, it was a privileged existence. Margot was concerned that her children be independent and resourceful which was difficult given the legions of servants whose job it was to make life easy for the family. With a great imaginative leap, considering her own station in life, Margot supposed that ‘some, if not all, of the girls might have to cope and ‘‘manage’’ in later life’. To create a contrast with the world of housemaids who cleared up books and toys and grooms who saddled and rubbed down horses and ponies, a little house was built at Chirk called the Lake Hut. There, the girls made do on their own, cooking, washing-up, and looking after themselves. Pip took to this very well. When their parents took the children on trips on their sixty-foot motor launch, Etheldreda, Pip and Gaenor would do the cooking. In her mother’s recollection, ‘when it was rough it was Pip who managed to produce food for us all. She was gallant and highly efficient at ten and twelve years old.’ Holidays at Brownsea were enlivened by days camping at nearby Furzy Island. Indeed, Chirk, Brownsea and Furzy provided the basis of blissful fun for the children. They had considerable independence to wander the fields, the woods and streams. When they were required for meals, if Margot was present, she would unleash the power of her soprano in Brünnhilde’s call from Die Walküre and they would come scampering home.10
All in all, there were idyllic elements but there remains a question mark about the impact on the children of the lengthy separations from both Margot and Tommy. The Scott-Ellis girls saw relatively little of their parents, particularly of their father. When they did, emotional warmth was in short supply. Tommy and Margot were, according to their son, incapable of showing emotion. They both seemed totally remote, capable of impersonal kindness but not of understanding. Pip’s cousin Charmian van Raalte, who was brought up with the Scott-Ellis girls, having been abandoned by her own mother, recalled that ‘neither Tommy nor Margot ever showed a grain of affection to any of the children’. Indeed, when Thomas Howard de Walden returned from France, where he had fought in the mass slaughter of Passchendaele, he was dourly taciturn, in shock from the shelling and the butchery. In his own description, part of him had died in the war and the part that survived was ‘no more than a husk, living out a life that he finds infinitely wearisome’.11 However, on the rare occasions when their parents did acknowledge the existence of the children, they seemed, fleetingly, to have fun together. Lord Howard de Walden had a burning interest in the theatre as well as being a musician of some talent. At Chirk, he would often delight guests with his playing in the music room. He wrote the libretto for three operas by Joseph Holbrooke. He ran the Haymarket Theatre for several years. He often organised theatrical events involving his children and their friends, writing six plays for them. With professionally produced costumes and scenery, these were exciting enterprises. In one, a part was taken by Brian Johnston, later famous as a broadcaster. Moreover, baskets of costumes from old productions at the Haymarket, with armour and helmets, ended up in the family home, swelled the dressing-up basket and transformed many childhood games.
Although he seemed always to have more of a bond with Pip, Tommy did not, in general, have much time for girls. He once wrote of his granddaughters: ‘The girls are alright but they are girls and there is no more to be said about that.’ He rarely spoke to his daughters and Pip was the only one not to regard him as a complete stranger. His conversation was too erudite and dismissive, his interests too varied. When in England, Tommy and Margot had an astonishing array of friends and acquaintances that included G. K. Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, George Bernard Shaw, Diaghilev, Augustus John, Jacob Epstein, Thomas Beecham, Rudyard Kipling, Cole Porter, Ivor Novello, Alicia Markova, Arturo Toscanini, Richard Tauber, James Barrie, P. G. Wodehouse, Arthur Rubinstein and Somerset Maugham. He was President of the London Symphony Orchestra. In Wales, he was an especially generous patron of the arts and was made a Bard at the Eisteddfod. With his wife, he shared a passion for opera and they had their own box at Covent Garden.12
Tommy was a major expert in medieval weaponry and heraldry about which he wrote a number of important reference works. He even had his own suit of armour made in order to assess the difficulty of swordplay. On one occasion, the painter Augustus John, while staying at Chirk Castle, was quite taken aback to find his host reading The Times, dressed in a suit of armour. The reason for this eccentricity was that Lord Howard de Walden wished to ascertain how easily an armour-clad man could get up from a prostrate position. To avoid spending hours helplessly trapped on the floor, he was awaiting a companion before beginning the experiment. Tommy was deeply interested in falconry and regularly went hawking. He had farming interests in East Africa including a coffee farm in Kenya and he was often away for long periods on safari. In 1926, however, he took Pip with him for several months. Her bravery during brushes with wild animals in Kenya reinforced his pride in her. She would later describe to Gaenor her terror on the walk in the dark to the outside lavatory. On another occasion, he took her on a lengthy sailing trip to the north of Scotland. In contrast, Margot got on less well with Pip because, as her sister recalled, they were so alike in their energy, practicality and impetuousness that they irritated each other.13
While Margot and Tommy enjoyed the London season or were travelling abroad, Pip, Bronwen, Elizabeth and Gaenor spent much of their childhood in the grandeur of Chirk Castle. Chirk had been an old border castle on Offa’s Dyke. There, they were educated by a series of governesses, usually two at a time. The life in the castle fed Pip’s taste for adventure. An ancient castle full of armour and swords and shields inspired games of make-believe involving knights and dragons, fairies and damsels in distress. The fact of having ponies and vast tracts of Welsh hillside on which to roam also encouraged her imagination. The governesses were easily typecast as ogres and giants. These different women each had to stand in for the girls’ frequently absent mother whose social commitments were extraordinarily time-consuming. Moreover, their regular replacement added an element of insecurity into Pip’s early life. At least she had avoided the worst childhood wounds of