One of the greatest joys of reading is how one book leads to another. Until I read My History by Antonia Fraser, I had never heard of The Pebbled Shore by Elizabeth Longford. Fraser’s memoir of her youth is great fun but I found myself fascinated by her stories of her mother, who was an enthusiastic if never successful political candidate, popular historian, and mother of eight. Thankfully, Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford (also known as Elizabeth Longford), had anticipated my fascination and thoughtfully published this memoir in 1986 when she was an energetic eighty-year old and I was just being born (I shall now think of it as a “Welcome to the World” present intended for me personally).
After opening the book with a little about her parents’ families and courtship, Longford chooses to introduce herself by describing briefly her entry into the world and, at more length, the state of women’s lives at the time. Born in London in August 1906, she came into a world where one in three working women was employed as a domestic servant but where the professional opportunities for educated women were growing rapidly. Careers in civil service were recommended as somewhere women could “’rise to the top’ (that is, become clerks)” and there were 378 women on the Medical Register in England. Among those women was Longford’s own mother, who had qualified as a doctor before her marriage but practiced only briefly. Longford’s father, also a doctor, had encouraged his wife to continue in their field, suggesting the role of medical inspector for schools and even setting aside a room in the house as a joint workroom, before his wife chose to focus on her family and home. But all around their Harley Street home (where her father had his practice) other families did have two professional parents so Longford saw from an early age that a combination of career and family was possible. It is clearly a lesson she took to heart.
After a relatively uneventful youth, Longford went to Oxford. Arriving at Oxford in the late 1920s, she was swept into a world of Bright Young Things and intellectual dynamism. She soaked in everything, seems to have known everyone, and has remarkably kind things to say even about awful people. The New York Times referred to her as “the Zuleika Dobson of her day, with undergraduates and even dons tumbling over one another to fall in love with her”, and it is not hard to imagine that her fresh good looks, intelligence, and enthusiasm for life would have been an irresistible combination. But for Longford the greatest passion of her university career seems to have been her introduction to socialism through friends like Hugh Gaitskell (whose encouraging note to her entertained me so much a while back). As school ends, she sets off full of good intentions to make her contribution to raising the nation’s poor by spending the summer tutoring at a Workers’ Educational Association summer camp.
But it was more than just high ideals that drew her to the WEA.
Frank Pakenham makes his first memorable appearance in June 1927, the night of a ball at Magdalen College:
About midnight, on my way back from the cloakroom to the dance floor, I was astonished to see a large sleeping figure draped over a garden chair in the middle of a wide canvas corridor. As I approached the figure on tiptoe I saw that it was wearing a “Bullingdon” uniform, the last word in social glamour: yellow waistcoat and navy blue tailcoat with white facings and brass buttons. The face was of monumental beauty, as if some Graeco-Roman statue – the Sleeping Student maybe – had been dressed up in modern clothes by some group of jokers. I stood for a moment admiring but puzzling. “What sort of girl”, I asked myself, “could have allowed such a magnificent partner to spend the best part of the night alone and asleep?” Years later I discovered that the girl had been Alice Buchan, daughter of John Buchan, the novelist. If the Buchan charm could not keep Frank Pakenham awake, it was clear that nothing and nobody ever would.
He drifts out of her life for a while but they are drawn together by their mutual passion for politics, though they were at different ends of the spectrum, and action. It is he who encourages her to tutor at the WEA camp, where he will also be working. From there, their courtship progresses naturally but turbulently. After some struggles to reconcile their political differences, they married in 1931. Evelyn Waugh, catty and snobbish as usual, referred to them the next year as the “poor Frank Pakenham who married beneath him and the Hon. Mrs P who married above herself” but the couple, like all sensible people, ignored him. Waugh would view them much more positively decades later once they had both converted to his beloved Catholicism.
With both spouses actively supporting different parties, the tensions that had almost prevented their marriage continued to make life difficult though, remarkably, their marriage remained harmonious. When Longford was standing for election, Frank decided it was presumably too much for both his work and social life to remain right-leaning. Longford’s tale of his resignation from the Carlton Club was delightful and one of my favourite passages from the book:
“My wife is a socialist candidate,” he told the club secretary in order to explain his resignation. The secretary blanched. At first he was speechless. Then he clasped Frank’s hand with a look of unutterable sympathy, as if his wife had committed a despicable crime. “If you are ever abroad and in trouble,” he managed to murmur, “don’t forget that the Carlton Club will never let you down.” The interview dissolved in a mist of unshed tears.
Frank would eventually change his political allegiances and become a not-terribly successful member of several Labour cabinets. Longford is a tad defensive of his less popular stances, both as a social reformer and politician, but I can only imagine how much flack they received over the years. An eccentric hereditary peer/Labour politician is surely the stuff of dreams for British tabloid newspapers.
The book is crammed with details from their very full lives as political candidates, social reformers, and parents to their eight children (an evenly balanced four girls and four boys). They had the most amazing energy and I felt incredibly lazy reading about all the things they attempted, lamenting my relative lack of ambition. But how wonderful to know there were such passionate people in the world, trying with every fibre of their being to make the world into a better place. They had not just passion but optimism, feeling that if they only tried hard enough and long enough they could make a difference.
Longford lived a long and fascinating life, full of ambition and action, and has the writing skills to do justice to it. Though four of her children would become writers (Antonia Fraser, Thomas Pakenham, Rachel Billington, and Judith Kazantzis), Longford proves more skilled and engaging than any of them, with a wonderfully breezy style and gift for anecdotes. She ends the book in the 1960s, just as she is embarking on a new career as a biographer and historian (her books on Queen Victoria, Wellington, and Wilfred Scawen Blunt are all still in print) and my only regret is that she never wrote a second volume of memoirs to cover the next phase of her life.
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