Blogetty Blog 5: A Fine Romance.

This week’s episode relates the romantic details of a highly unusual love story. How many girls select their future husband at the age of seven?

My Scottish maternal grandfather Colonel Herbert Brander CB spent his entire career in the Indian Army with the 32nd Sikh Pioneers, rising to be its Commandant. (His adventurous story is told in my book “Waziristan to Tibet” which is available from Barnes & Noble.) He married Aileen Rattigan, the Irish daughter of Sir Henry Rattigan, one of the foremost lawyers in India. My aunt Doris Constantia, always known as Biddy, the elder of their two daughters was born in London in 1900 on a visit for the purpose, and my mother Aileen Isabel arrived two years later in Lahore, capital of the Punjab.

The family lived in the regimental barracks where excitement ruled in 1907 to celebrate the Regiment’s 50th anniversary of its founding. Special parades and concerts by the regimental band were held to honor its proud traditions and its widespread campaigns. Full dress uniforms including magnificent turbans were provided for all native ranks and the Governor of the Province took the salute.

It happened that my uncle to be, Joe Lucas, was on a world tour with one of Biddy and Aileen’s uncles, Cyril Rattigan, who had become close friends with Joe and my father when they were all at Trinity College Cambridge together. (My father, Geoff Lucas, told me I was named after his best friend “Cyril Rat”.)

Cyril took the opportunity to attend the regimental celebration and introduce Joe to his family and the Branders. In what would prove to be a life changing meeting Biddy fell instantly in love with Joe: a coup de foudre that would determine the course of their lives. Joe was a good-looking young man of 22, charming, sophisticated, dashing and completely unaware of the devotion he had inspired. What 22 year-old traveler, excited to be in an environment as colorful and different as India, would conceive himself Prince Charming in the eyes of a child? At the end of their visit Biddy announced to Aileen, “When I grow up, I’m going to marry Joe!” Aileen laughed and said, “Don’t be silly. He’s old!” Biddy, however was a young lady of considerable determination.

1911 was the next big year for the girls because their father retired from the army and moved them back to England to rent a house called Mill Meads on the Warnham Court estate, which was owned by my grandfather Charles James Lucas, and shared with his sons Joe and Geoff. How did Colonel Brander come to choose Warnham for his retirement rather than a home in his native Scotland? In fact the choice was almost certainly not his own but contrived by Biddy and her uncle Cyril who knew that Mill Meads was vacant. I can imagine Cyril Rat’s amusement at the confidence placed in him by his precocious niece as she confessed her determination to marry Joe: no doubt he was fond of her and loath to disappoint her unlikely ambition.

Externally Mill Meads was somehow ugly under its strangely angular transverse gable roofs: but the interior was commodious and its garden pleasant. On a quiet site on Pondtail Road it was set on the fringe of several fields running downhill to a very large artificial pond created to drive a mill, still extant and filled with ancient wooden machinery long disused. A path beyond these ‘meads’ – water meadows – led to a boathouse harboring two or more flat-bottomed punts. At a point along the water’s edge a painted sign hung from an old chestnut tree, reading: “Percy Bysshe Shelley sat on this bench to write his poetry.” That seems perfectly possible for it was an idyllic viewpoint and the Shelley family lived close to Warnham village. The bench was long gone when I read the sign but the aura created by the inscription was a powerful one. Perhaps Biddy sat on the seat to indulge her daydreams.

For the next three years life proceeded uneventfully until everyone’s life was disrupted by the four-year travail of World War 1. The three friends – Joe, Geoff and Cyril – all joined the Army and were posted in different directions. My grandfather re-enlisted in the British Army and was given command of a training battalion of the West Yorks Regiment so his family went with him to Tyneside. A disastrous development for Biddy: she must have been heartbroken and worried sick about Joe’s survival until she learned that both Lucas brothers had returned home safely. Her fine romance had not reached a summary conclusion at the hands of the dreaded Kaiser.

In later life Biddy wrote a memoir, but it reveals little about the war years beyond the fact that towards their end she got a job as a secretary in the Air Ministry, and was thrilled to be in uniform and serving the war effort. There is no word about Joe or Mill Meads after 1917. By then the Brander family was living in London where the sisters had a gay life of parties and dances.

Then Biddy says, “I met Joe again when I was 22 at my grandmother’s house in Cornwall Gardens”. (Lady Evelyn Rattigan was an extremely eccentric widow – much loved by her Brander grand-daughters). That was 1919 … but nothing develops between Joe and Biddy for another three years when Biddy informed Aileen that Joe had proposed and she had accepted. Apparently my mother laughed and said, “I never thought you would do it!’

Finally in 1923, after a 19 year avowed pursuit, Biddy realized her dream to marry Joe in Warnham village Church. It was a day of great celebration for both families, the tenants and employees of the Warnham Estate, and the entire local community who came out to celebrate the marriage of the ‘young squire’. Many an extra pint was drawn at the ‘Sussex Arms’ and the ‘Dog and Bacon’, and many a cork drawn at Warnham Court. The whole extraordinary event was recorded on film and can be watched by clicking the video link below.

https://screenarchive.brighton.ac.uk/detail/4902

Talk about the constancy of Love’s Young Dream: Biddy surely earns some kind of prize for single-minded persistence.

Perhaps stranger still – one year later my mother (right in bridesmaids group abaove) married Geoff Lucas . It was a quieter event without Biddy’s 400 guests or wedding dress, because the happy pair insisted that no fuss be made. They actually walked together to and from the Church. So – we have two only sisters married to two only brothers! And all ending up living happily in my grandfather’s house together! What kind of odds would you offer against that?

 “It was a lovely life”, Biddy wrote in her memoir. “We went to London quite a lot and stayed with friends and did theatres and dances. We had parties at Warnham, cricket and tennis in summer and shooting in winter. We often sat down 15-20 people for dinner at 8 o’clock, five courses and everyone in evening dress. Breakfast choices were fish, eggs, kidneys and cold ham, lunch at 1 o’clock was three courses, and tea at 4.30 – sandwiches, iced cakes and two large cakes, one fruit and one plain. I can’t imagine how we ate it all.”

Sadly things did not turn out as well for Biddy’s co-conspirator. In 1914 Cyril Rat was commissioned in the Royal Fusiliers, the same regiment as Joe. Most unluckily Captain Rattigan was killed in the last two days of the Battle of the Somme. He is buried in Thiepval Memorial Cemetery in Normandy which commemorates the battle which raged July 1st – November 18th 1916. Entirely inconclusive and futile it was one of the bloodiest in human history. At its end the French and British Armies had advanced ten miles and a total of over one million combatants had been killed or wounded.

*****

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