A House Through The Ages, S2, Ep7: ‘The Wedding of the Year!’

In today’s episode of our Benfleet Hall house history series, we follow the lives of the six children of Richard Haswell Holman (Episode 6) who survived childhood. If you haven’t managed to keep up with the story so far, you can catch up here. With thanks to Clive for his ongoing research…

Before the outbreak of WW1, Keith and Lennox Holman looked set to follow their father’s footsteps in the marine insurance business, Geoffrey studied at the Royal Military College and graduated as a Second Lieutenant in the King’s (Shropshire Light Infantry) Regiment in 1913, and Adrian seemed to be the scholarly one, as he studied at New College, Oxford. Fast cars were an attraction: Lennox took part in a motor race at Brooklands in 1908, and was fined for dangerous driving in 1909, while Geoffrey was fined for speeding on a motorbike in 1911. In 1912 it was time to settle down: Keith and Lennox both married – Keith to Annie Lovatt (born 1889) and Lennox to Lily Arthur (born 1893). Victoria and Josephine were still at school.

In 1914 everything changed. Keith, who had been transferred as Captain to the Wessex Divisional Company (Headquarters), Wessex Divisional Transport and Supply Column in 1912, was promoted in 1914 to major in the Royal Army Service Corps. In 1915 Lennox was appointed Second Lieutenant in the North Staffordshire Regiment, while Adrian became a Second Lieutenant (on probation) in the Royal Field Artillery. The Western Front took its toll: Geoffrey was killed in action in 1915 and Lennox was hospitalised in 1916 with ‘debility’ after taking part in the attack on Gommecourt; in 1917 he was transferred to the Royal Army Service Corps. Adrian’s appointment was confirmed in 1916, and in 1918 he was awarded the Military Cross for his service in the Royal Field Artillery. Keith was mentioned in dispatches in 1919. On the Home Front, Josephine announced her engagement to Eric Lauder Caldwell-Smith (born 1892, and a surgeon in the Royal Navy) in 1918; they married at St John the Evangelist’s in Putney in January 1919.

After the War, Lennox and Lily lived in Streatham with their son Geoffrey (born in 1917 and named for his uncle); their first child, a girl, had died perinatally in 1913. They were still at the same address in 1934, when Lennox was practising as a master consulting engineer. Keith went back to business as a shipbroker; he and Annie moved out to the village of Upton Lovell in Wiltshire. They appear to have had no children, but took an active, if sometimes controversial, part in village life. In 1922 Victoria married her cousin Richard Boyce Holman, born 1896, a son of Francis Holman, whom we met briefly in the previous episode. He had fought in the Middlesex Regiment in the War, but had been injured by a gunshot wound to the jaw. Their marriage did not last, and in 1928 Richard married Laura Mabel Gertrude Bettome-Higgins. I cannot tell whether Victoria and Richard had any children. Josephine and Eric had four: Pamela (1919), Jean (1922), Gavin (1924) and Mary (1929), all born in the Chelsea district. In 1925, when he was Executor of RHH’s will, Eric was recorded as living in Cliveden Place, off Sloane Square. He had managed to combine his medical and marine interests by becoming a Medical Examiner for the Mercantile Marine Department of the Board of Trade.

I have kept Adrian’s life and career until last, because he seems to me to be the most interesting of the family.

Sir Adrian Holman, bromide print, 1954, by Walter Stoneman. Image Credit: National Portrait Gallery, NPG x168384

He joined the Diplomatic Service in 1920 and had a long, varied and successful career until he retired in 1954. I shall set out an outline of his career before looking at how his personal life fitted in, and how he was affected by world events. So here goes:

1920: appointed Third Secretary and posted to Brussels,
1923: promoted to Second Secretary,
1924: transferred to Rome,
1926: transferred to Paris,
1931: transferred to Pekin; promoted to First Secretary,
1935-36: Secretary-General to the Second London Naval Disarmament Conference,
1936: appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG, irreverently known as the “Call Me God” order) for his services to the Conference,
1938: Head of Chancery, Berlin,
1939: The Hague, Holland,
1940: Acting Counsellor, Bagdad,
1942: Counsellor, Teheran,
1944: Minister and Chargé d’Affaires, Paris,
1946: British Political Representative, Bucharest,
1947: Minister, Bucharest,
1949: Minister Plenipotentiary to Cuba, Havana,
1950: Ambassador to Cuba, Havana,
1954: retired, appointed Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE) in the New Year’s Honours.

In Paris he met the Hon. Anne Tyrrell, the only surviving child of Sir William Tyrrell, the British Ambassador from 1928 to 1934. Although only in her early 20s, she was acting as her father’s hostess at the Embassy because her mother had been injured in a car accident. She was responsible for organising balls and other social events. In 1929 their engagement was announced, but in September Anne lost her engagement ring somewhere in the West End of London. It was valued at £500 (over £20k in today’s money), and a reward of £50 was offered for its return, of which I can find no record. They were married on 30 April 1930 in Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, reputedly the first ‘official’ wedding of a British subject at the cathedral since the marriage of Mary Queen of Scots and the Dauphin of France in 1558.

Notre Dame de Paris, c. 1930. Image Credit: State Library Victoria, Public Domain

Because Adrian was not a Roman Catholic, there were in fact three ceremonies: a civil ceremony on the previous day, the major ceremony in the body of the cathedral, followed by a small one in the sacristy. There were hundreds of guests, and it was widely reported in the press. It was even filmed for Pathé News under the title ‘The Wedding of the Year!’. They took their honeymoon in Morocco. Despite all this, by 1931 Anne had applied to the Pope for an annulment, and a divorce went through in the following year. Anne continued to act as her father’s hostess at the British embassy. Anne married Captain Jack Crawshay, a military attaché, on 25 April 1934.

Adrian then seems to have been involved in many of the key historical events of the mid-20th century. He arrived in Pekin around the time when Japan invaded Manchuria, and stayed until recalled to London to work for the Second London Naval Disarmament Conference, which ran from December 1935 to March 1936. The ensuing treaty was signed by the USA, France, UK, and most Commonwealth countries, but not by Italy or Japan. It was largely unsuccessful, partly because of the many get-out clauses. His next posting (in 1938) was to Berlin, which he had to leave in 1939. He was in The Hague when Germany invaded Holland on 10 May 1940, so he had to move on again. Somehow he found time to marry Adelina Elizabeth (Betty) Fox in London on 17 May. She had been born in Liverpool in 1907, and had married Basil Holmsdale Allfrey at St Margaret’s Westminster in 1929, but they had divorced by 1939. Adrian was in the Middle East from 1940 to 1942, where it was important to counter Axis influence, establish a supply route to Russia, and secure supplies of oil. 1944 saw the liberation of Paris; Adrian was the first diplomat back into the British Embassy, and sent the first telegram from there to the Foreign Office in London since 1940. The war over, he was sent to another hot-spot, Bucharest, and was there when the Socialist Party took over in 1947. Finally, he finished his term as Ambassador to Cuba just as the Cuban Revolution was breaking out in late 1953.

Inevitably, the story ends with a series of deaths. Eric died in Wimbledon in 1959, while Josephine survived him by over 30 years, dying in Bournemouth in 1992 at the age of 93. Victoria did not marry again, and died in Paddington in 1961. Keith and Lennox died in 1970 within a few months of each other (just as they had married within a few months of each other), and survived by Annie (died in 1971) and Lily (died in 1980). Sir Adrian died in 1974 at his home of Bohunt Manor near Liphook, Hampshire, but the matriarch of them all was Adelina, who lived until 2005, dying at the age of 98. All in all, they were a long-lived family, but with fairly few descendants.