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Beatrix: From Royal Court to Cookstove

by Rodney H. Pain

281 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #03-0851; ISBN 1-4120-0482-9; US$26.50, C$29.95, EUR21.50, £15.00

This story paints a vivid picture of upper class Victorian life in England as well as the life of immigrants in North America during the Depression. More importantly, it is a testament to the power of character and values.

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about the book      about the author      sample excerpt      catalogue info

About the Book Beatrix is the biography of a woman born into wealth and privilege in Victorian England. Her upbringing and presentation at the court of King Edward VII prepared her for a life vastly different from the one she ultimately had. Challenged by financial disaster, two world wars, immigration and loss of social position, Beatrix found inner strength and ultimately held her family together as they redefined themselves and rebuilt their lives in the United States.

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About the Author Rodney Pain, one of Beatrix's three children, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and grew up in England and the United States. He studied medieval history at Stanford University, and later qualified as a dentist, practicing in San Francisco. He moved to Canada in the early 1970s, and turned his hand to many crafts, including house construction, blacksmithing, boat building, sculpting, gardening, cooking and writing. He now lives on Vancouver Island.

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Sample Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

O to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England-now!

-Robert Browning, 1812-1889

London was hushed when Beatrix was born. Straw was strewn from cross street to cross street to quiet the noise of horse traffic. That was the way it was done, if your family had money.

One week later, on June 18, 1884, the little Minchin baby, her parents, godparents, the priest, family and friends gathered by the font in Edgewater Gate Church. The white-gloved ladies could not touch anything because London in the 1800s was very sooty. The ladies' prayer books, bound in white kid leather with white kid slipcases, was carried by a footman or maid.

Scents of heliotrope, lilies of the valley, lavender and violets wafted luxuriously through the granite chamber of the church.

The men wore afternoon dress-cutaway tails and spats-and carried an aura of eau-de-Cologne, dabbed on white handkerchiefs stuffed in their cuffs. Their hats, walking sticks and umbrellas were left by the front door. Dean Farrah of Durham Cathedral was as resplendent as the ladies, with lawn linen sprouting, almost gushing, from his collar and cuffs. He wore gaiters, buttoned up the side, and his hat brim was suspended from the rim by four chaste little strings, a sartorial gesture of unknown provenance.

The nanny handed the Minchin baby, dressed in a long white embroidered christening robe, to her mother. As the great copper lid of the font was pushed aside, the ritual of the High Church of England commenced:
"Grant to this child the inward grace While we the outward sign impart..."
As the holy water was poured from a small cruet onto the baby's head, she started to cry. Her father, James, remarked:
"Only a week in this world and she's complaining!" Her mother retorted:
"What would you say if they poured cold water on your head?"
James marked his wife's contentious tone.

After a reading from the Gospel of Saint Mark and recitation of the Lord's Prayer, the new godparents, relatives and friends raggedly intoned the child's name, "Beatrix Mary" and all renounced "the Devil and all his works, covetous desires and carnal desires in Beatrix's name." They answered tentatively and unevenly, being more certain of Beatrix's name than the renunciation of the Devil. Dean Farrah, in good conscience, added in pulpit tones, "We do renounce them all." With further exhortations, they baptized Beatrix Mary and crossed her forehead with holy oil. Beatrix's christening, as her birth, rang a high social note, reveled in by her mother, Mary Dickson Minchin.

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In 1852, James Innes Minchin had marked Mary McLeod, seeing her beauty across the wide street from the balcony of his club in Madras. As she drove by in her father's carriage, he was smitten and resolved to his companion:
"I'll marry that girl."
As a junior official in the Honourable East India Company, James was a promising suitor and, with the blessing and permission of her father, James married the beautiful Mary. She kept his company through twenty-five years of Indian heat, hundreds of miles of travel by palanquin, horseback, carriage, rickshaw, and train. From Bombay to Calcutta, from Madras to Darjeeling, from the coast to the Himalayas, she followed his postings, with the children and their whole entourage-amahs, cooks, punka pullers and curry grinders. She started as a young bride, beloved by James. The climate, the diseases, the postings, seven pregnancies, and the wretchedness of losing three children exhausted her. She died in 1879, in Madras, India, where she had been born.

That was the cruel India, rich-beyond-dreaming India, falling-down-poor India, a country which made you, broke you, killed you, or launched you into glorious battle, giving you a rich career of opportunity and responsibilities. It was India that made a Queen an Empress, and gave a country an empire. It also gave a short, vivid and elaborate life to Mary McLeod. James mourned her. He mourned her as an Englishman did, hiding his grief.

Some of the English in India kept their traditions for generations; they spoke of England as "home," though Britain for them was a mirage of a mirage. Though he was born in Madras, James Innes was a man of two lands. India called him and at the same time England called with its stag hunts, the "Old Queen's" levees and roasted chestnuts on the Mall. His family called too, though they would treat him as though he had been born in Devon, not Madras.

He decided to close up his Indian life with its pomp, office and prestige. He packed his dress clothes-the formal Diplomatic Corps uniform embroidered with gold oak leaves, his straight sword, and gold-trimmed, cocked hat for court visits. His house in Madras and his racehorses were sold; he resigned his club memberships, said goodbyes and set sail for Britain, as he had many times before. This time the trip was three weeks on a fast P&O liner round the Cape of Good Hope, faster by far than his first time when the Indiaman took six weeks to sail to London.

James wanted to see his family and start a new life in London society, near the Queen he had served from such a distance for more than three decades. At 59, he did not feel old. He was slender and bearded, a retired civil servant, sportsman and gentleman athlete. At home, family tradition was strong. They would welcome him and call him a widower. He would call himself a bachelor.

As he steamed to England, memories of other trips home came to his mind. How miserable he had been when he had to leave his parents to go off to school. He had wondered what the boys and the schoolmasters would think of him. Would they see him as a tanned boy or an Indian? Would anyone speak Hindustani? Would they expect him to speak Latin?

His mind flitted back and forth through the years with his young wife, Mary McLeod, remembering elaborate picnics in fitted wicker hampers served by turbaned servants, suppers with Mary in England during the long leave, and the Derby with his old friend, Lord Bentink.

He thought of his blackguard preacher brother who scandalized him from the pulpit, abetted by another black clad brother-in-law preacher who likewise disreputed James' freethinking. For all their conventional piety, these two relatives could not alleviate poor Mary's distress when she lost their babies, all buried there in India.

Why did these images so bewilder him who was accustomed to making clearheaded, important, quick decisions? The visions gave no satisfaction. He sighed and turned into the saloon bar on the main deck of the liner.

What would he have? Would it a gin and it, pink gin with quinine water? No, he no longer needed quinine for malaria. No, this drink would be a toast, a toast to past experiences and a toast to a hoped for augury.
"Johnny Walker, please, with water."
He'd take his cue from jaunty Johnny, pictured on the label in day-time finery-a stylish beaver hat, coat cut high at the front, tails flipping almost to the knee, cream coloured skin-tight riding britches, jockey boots with revers just below the knee, loose top and yellow facings. What style!

"Yes indeed, almost my shadow, 'Johnny Walker, born in 1820, still going strong!' It is a better motto than the Minchin family's Regarde la Mort. I never liked that. After all, Johnny is just five years older than I am and I'm still going strong."
Chuckling, he returned to his whiskey.

During his career he had relished year-long leaves in England, where his brothers and sisters lived. He had reveled in London and the greenness of English countryside, the plays, libraries, newspapers, the European chess masters and restaurants. England was home, even for an Anglo -Indian. He had worked himself through an arduous career and had his fill of India, though it had provided him with prestige and position.

"I put in 39 years of intense effort. My first assignment as a green eighteen-year-old apprentice designated to run a cholera-ridden province, sink or swim. Then to another province, which had run out of water. My early days with the Honourable East India Company were nothing but challenges -diseases, man-killing tigers, politics, famine, and those early days of solitude. Then the Mutiny! If it hadn't been for that amah-I should remember her name-who carried our son through the sewer tunnel to save him from the mutineers..."

By huge good luck James was assigned to a distant posting during the Mutiny, to an area with a hundred square miles of jungle, with more tigers than people, and too much solitude and time on his hands. During the years of enforced solitude James spent a year translating Dante's Divine Comedy into English verse. He then laid it aside until he might find an English editor.

"I survived everything-the assignments and the long, gradual climb to ministerial level. Now I'm leaving it, leaving Mary and our three infants buried there. How will it be different in England? Will I follow horse racing and gambling? Will I need a stable of polo ponies with a crew of staff jockeys? Should I take up writing again, and poetry? Should I take up Society, and perhaps seek out the title I turned down, perhaps a belated career playing chess, with all the concentration that it entails? How many of the perquisites of office had become habits?"

The crowded images jostled and gave no hint the future.

In India he had been British Resident to Travancore, the Old Queen's personal emissary and plenipotentiary to a maharajah who was responsible to him. And as a representative of the British Raj, he had to look princely, even when he wore black broadcloth and a cocked hat amidst their jeweled tunics and turbans. How much of that would he want, or need? His puritan, Roundhead forbearers despised luxury, pride and pomp.
"If necessary I can live at the club, with the Mahrattee cook preparing the curries for me."

He would need some thrills to liven his retirement. His pension of 1,000 pounds a year was not extravagant, but would provide a very comfortable life with the 30,000 pounds he had saved, despite the money spent on horse- breeding and racing.

He allowed himself one boast: he had won The Governor's Cup, the top achievement for a horse breeder in India. He relished the prospect of displaying the trophy on his sideboard.

He would miss riding such fine horseflesh, particularly The Queen of the Night, his traveling mare. His sais used to bring her to his tent before supper, and the horse would nuzzle through the door hangings for a lump of sugar or a flap of native bread. But, he allowed, he wouldn't miss the mounted Sepoy guard that, in late years, shadowed him whenever he appeared in public.
"Damned nuisance, all that clatter, stamping and shouting of orders, and no way of getting round it. It was so much a part of it all!"

He felt himself a very modern man in every sense of the word, living on the cusp of the most modern time. He was ready. He was going home to pick up the thread of the times, with the advantages of money and prestige earned in India.

~~~~~~

James bought an estate in Devon, near his daughter Alice, who was known as "Dolly" to her family. He joined his daughter on the local stag hunts, taking part in breakneck meets. He enjoyed the high life of the big and the rich, yachting with his son-in-law, Henry Dumas, a member of the Royal Yacht Club. The Royal Yacht Squadron was in the Solent, not far from Devon by fast train. He joined the London Chess Club and a gambling club.

One day, the eye that could spot a stag in a thicket across a wide field spotted Mary Dickson, as plump and sleek as a partridge, half his age and with lovely brown hair. She had the right quartering on her crest. Her family, Dicksons of Scotland, were landed gentry with regimental connections and Ind Coop brewers, and were, according to James' solicitors, to Minchin standards. In the atmosphere of the stag hunt, their acquaintance matured to an attachment, and progressed to an engagement. James took Mary Dickson to hunt breakfasts and the hunt dinners with the cream of Devonian huntsmen and their families. He found she was happiest when he invited her to official banquets in London where she could wear clothes to match his court uniform. She was charming and made sure she did not seem dazzled.

The courtship was not protracted or overblown, although the strict protocol of middle-aged courtship with a mature single woman was followed. Their train trips from Devon to London included at least one of Mary Dickson's close women friends. James and Mary were married quietly in Devon, James with the heat of India still in his body and Mary with the need to make a showing after so long as a spinster. She had heard the whispered gossip "she almost missed the train!" A decorous honeymoon in Italy preceded their installation at 8 Westbourne Gardens, Park Place, London, reasonably fashionable, not far from the Churchill residence. Mary Dickson wished silently for more.

The selfish union of an aging father and a fervid, older woman was not promising. In 1882, Violet was born. Not long after, in 1884, London church bells rang and straw muffled the street noise for the birth of Beatrix. She was sturdy, rachitic and plain. Her birth was hard because her large head and shoulders tore her mother. Mary Dickson blamed Beatrix, and transferred this feeling into hateful acts through much of Beatrix's young life.

James very much wanted to please his new wife. Before Violet was christened, he told his wife:
"Mary, I want you to name this our first child, our joy, born so long after all the rest of my children."

But Violet? James kept his council. It could have been worse; it could have been a virtue, such as Prudence. After all, his younger brother John William and his wife, Julia had six children-Humphrey, then Violet, Lily, Rose, Ivy and Primrose. James deplored this sentimental Victorian bathos, naming children after a row of flowers. When their second child was born, he said, "This child is mine to name. She will be named Beatrix after the heroine of huge drama."

That year, James published his translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, which he had translated into English verse years before, during the Mutiny.

"What an accomplishment! To have another daughter, Beatrix, and publish the Divine Comedy simultaneously."

With the arrogance of a young author, James noted in the introduction to his translation that the vernacular pronunciation Beatriss was anathema to him, an error he cured by writing Beatrix.

"Proper names must be pronounced in Italian to keep the harmony of the verse. Beatrice must be pronounced with four syllables, 'Beatreechee', unless it is spelled 'Beatrix'."

So Beatrix's private war with her mother and pretty sister, Violet was established. As a plain child, Beatrix needed the help of a society-wise mother to launch her with the style befitting the child of prestigious parents. She would need help and guidance to negotiate the social shoals of her future....

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Catalogue Information

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