EMD’s mother Betty had many names over her lifetime. She was christened Elizabeth Lydia Rosabelle Bonham and on her marriage to EMD’s father became Mrs Henry de la Pasture, the name under which she published her novels and plays. On her second marriage to Sir Hugh Clifford she became Lady Clifford. She seems to have generally been known as Betty, and it’s this name that I use for her throughout this website, not least because so many of EMD’s family members are called Elizabeth - as she was herself. This post is about Betty’s life; I deal with her writing career in a separate post.
Betty was born on 29 August 1866, in the British Consulate at Riva di Chiaia, in Naples. She was the first of four children born to her young parents: Edward William Bonham was 22, and his wife Anne Sarah Bage just 20. Three more siblings followed her at roughly yearly intervals: Evelyn (1867-1888), Walter Floyd (1869-1905) and Anita Constance (1870-1961), who would always be known as Constance. Betty’s mother would very sadly die, probably from complications of childbirth, shortly after Constance was born. Betty had spent her first four years in a sunny city, in a multigenerational home that was a busy place of work as well as part of the expatriate Anglophone society of Naples. By the 1860s, Naples was a popular tourist destination, especially for winter visitors, escaping the Northern European weather, and a place of strategic importance for British trade and security alike.
By 1871, Edward William had taken his young family to live in London. It seems likely that the children lived mostly in London for the rest of their childhood. The 1871 census has the family living at 36 Lansdowne Road, Kensington, and this seems to have been the family’s base for a few years. In 1872 Edward William married for the second time; his new wife, Henrietta Currie, would have two more children, Julia (1873-1963) and Mark (1880-1902) and would also accompany her husband on his consular postings to South America. We don’t know how Betty reacted to her new stepmother. Stepmothers feature in a couple of her novels, one unkind and favouring her own child over her stepchildren in The Man from America, one loving and devoted in Catherine’s Child. Her first six years, however, had seen substantial change and disruption. Some of this finds its way into her novel Catherine of Calais (1901):
[H]er young heart did ache with a sense of loneliness and hopelessness, which turned her thoughts sadly to the memory of the young mother who had died when she was five years old […] She had but an imperfect recollection of the sweet face that had once bent over her little cot, but may strangely trivial impressions of her earliest existence remained stamped on her memory. She remembered something of Naples, where her pretty mother had died; her father’s grief remained mingled with the picture of the blue Italian sky to which she was told her mother had flown, and which she had searched wonderingly for the vision of a distant white angel. She remembered a marble balcony through which she had peeped at a blue, sparkling sea; vine leaves on a stone pillar; the taste of ripe figs, and the scent of water-melons; the song of the peasants in the vineyards; a broken statue in an overgrown, wonderful garden; the insinuating smile of an orange-seller for whom she had a baby affection; the black-eyed washerwoman who brought a basket on her head to the open door; the ball with which she played upon a square roof - these trivial impressions were never effaced. (16)
By the 1881 census, all the children were either away at school or living in Penge with their grandfather, Edward Walter, now retired from the consular service. While the two boys Walter Floyd and Mark attended Charterhouse, like their father and grandfather, the girls were most likely educated at home. By 1883 Edward William Bonham had been posted to Boulogne as consul, so it would have been easier for the children to visit him there. Betty clearly knew northern France well, as the descriptions of it in her novel Catherine of Calais bear out. There seems to have been no question of a London season for Betty and her sisters. The post of consul was a respectable middle-class one, but probably not grand enough to warrant an ambitious debut in elite society – and consular salaries were generally quite low, so the cost may also have been prohibitive. Nevertheless, by 1887, Betty and her sister Evelyn had both married. Evelyn married a clergyman, Gerard Victor Sampson (1864-1928). Sadly, however - like her own mother - Evelyn died after the birth of her son, Evelyn Walter Edward Sampson (1888-1924), known as Edward. Oddly, Betty anticipates part of her nephew’s life story in The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square (1907); the heroine’s beloved brother dies abroad, leaving a French widow and child behind. Edward Sampson survived the First World War but did indeed leave a French wife and son at his death in 1924.
Betty’s husband was Henry de la Pasture, twenty-five years her senior and Catholic; they were married on 29 October 1887, at Our Lady of Victories in Kensington. How did Betty and Henry meet? Violet Powell suggests that Henry might have been in Boulogne dealing with matters relating to the de la Pastures’ French property at nearby Montreuil, and that they met at the Consulate (Powell 3). This certainly seems like the most probable option; Henry had been living in Yorkshire with his brother Gerard in the early 1880s , and it seems unlikely that they would have met in London. Betty’s grandfather had died in 1886, which means her only likely home was with her father in France. There is a romanticised account of a meeting in Catherine of Calais between Betty’s heroine Catherine and the older, noble-looking man who will become her husband. Catherine glimpses him arriving in Calais, and is instantly attracted:
The face which had attracted her on the steamer, outlined itself very strongly on her imagination, which was augmented by the silence and darkness. The clear-cut profile of a man past middle-age, with closely-curling iron-grey hair, and a very finely shaped head. The outline was so unusually and classically correct, the features so handsome, and the figure and bearing of the owner so distinguished, that the attention of a less romantic person than Catherine might easily have been arrested. Her start was from genuine artistic pleasure, the succeeding blush from the sudden terrified consciousness which followed a direct and severe look from the object of her simple admiration.
Since Sir Philip Adelstane turns out to be a rather disappointing husband, with little of substance under his noble appearance, we have to hope that the novel is not faithfully autobiographical.
Having met, why did they marry? Henry, at forty-six, had been living in the orbit of his older brother for most of his life. They had travelled to New Zealand together to farm, with some success; returning to England, they were wealthy enough to live on their own means. Perhaps Henry seemed quite glamorous; he is reportedly handsome in one newspaper article, and looks it in the only photo I have seen of him (reproduced in Powell’s biography). He was an amateur singer and performer, had travelled extensively, and had a romantic French background. His Catholicism might have been a draw, too; I haven’t yet been able to find out when Betty converted, but if it was before her marriage, Henry would have seemed like an even better bet. Perhaps more importantly, marriage was undoubtedly the only career she had been prepared for. The age gap would have been less noteworthy in the nineteenth century, even though Henry was a few years older than her own father; perhaps spending a lot of her childhood with her grandfather made Henry seem quite young in comparison.
It's not clear where the newlywed de la Pastures spent the first years of their marriage, but by 1889 they were living at 6 Walsingham Terrace, on the Hove seafront in Sussex. They stayed there for about five years, and both Betty’s daughters were born there. Did Betty like the social life of Brighton? Part of Deborah of Tod’s is set there, although mainly to give Deborah’s husband opportunities to misbehave and (later) to convalesce; Deborah’s time there is a rather melancholy one. By 1895, Betty’s literary career was becoming established; she had published two novels, was writing plays for amateur productions, and acting herself in charity performances. The de la Pastures began to split their time between London and the country, with their first recorded London address in De Vere Gardens, Kensington: not far from her childhood home at Lansdowne Road, but rather grander, opposite Kensington Gardens. From 1895 to around 1900 they also spent part of their time at East Butterleigh House in Devon. By the late 1890s Betty’s writing career and social progress were making considerable strides. She and Henry started regularly to spend time at Ugbrooke Park, the rather grand home of home of aristocratic Catholics Lord and Lady Clifford who had a fully-equipped amateur theatre in their home. Betty wrote plays for their annual New Year performances and both she and Henry acted in them. In 1896, her father Edward William died in Corfu, where he was Consul, at the early age of 51. He was her daughters’ only living grandparent and - even though they still had a proliferation of aunts, uncles and cousins - a key link to the Bonham family background had been lost.
On 11 May 1897, presumably safely out of mourning, Betty was presented to Queen Victoria at a drawing room. Henry’s niece Mary, now Lady Mowbray and Stourton, took Betty to this significant social event. Later that year Betty and Henry gave the wedding party for her sister Constance’s marriage to Francis Phillips. By 1900 their country address was Llandogo Priory in South Wales, and in 1905 they started using 62 Chester Square as their London home, a very grand address indeed. It’s probably unfair to paint Betty as a social climber (and she has harsh words for social climbers in some of her novels) but her life through the 1890s and early 1900s definitely gives a sense of a woman building her social networks. She published a novel every eighteen months or so, had a successful play in the West End and made friends with other authors like W. S. Gilbert, who lived near her London home at Chester Square and may have advised her on the writing of her plays (Powell 10). Her books were reviewed in the national press, and the social columns reported on her activities. Peter’s Mother, her most successful play, was performed at Sandringham at the request of Edward VII in 1906; Henry and Betty both attended a reception at Buckingham Palace on 1 March 1907 (Powell 8).
The Edwardian years brought professional success and personal losses. Her youngest brother Mark died in 1902, at only 22. Her other brother, Walter Floyd Bonham, served in the Boer War and survived it to enter the diplomatic service as Military Attaché in Paris – a step up from the consular careers of his father and grandfather – but sadly died in France in 1904 of a haemorrhage (George 20). Betty wrote out her grief for her brother in the novel The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square (1907). But the most significant loss was surely that of her husband Henry in 1908. At sixty-seven, he was not old in years, but contemporary accounts suggest he had been frail for some time. Bafflingly, she insisted her daughters, newly out in society, continue with their social round, despite being in mourning. This seems like an example of a person clinging to a previous plan in their grief, unable to deal with changes to the prescribed routine. Unsurprisingly, they did not attract meaningful suitors under these circumstances.
Constance, her youngest sister, married Algernon Thynne, and their house at Penstowe near Bude in Cornwall seems to have been a refuge for the de la Pasture daughters. They were probably with Constance in 1910 when Betty married her second husband, Sir Hugh Clifford (my source for Sir Hugh is Harry A. Gailey’s biography, Clifford, Imperial Proconsul (Rex Collings, 1982)). A member of the Clifford family she already knew from Ugbrooke, a widower with three children, Sir Hugh was a colonial administrator who had served in South-East Asia. His wife had died in Trinidad after a carriage accident in 1906. Betty and Hugh married by special licence on 10 September 1910, without informing their families, in the crypt of Westminster Cathedral. The news was in the Times later that day, so we can only hope that a more personal communication reached her daughters before they read about their mother’s marriage in the paper. According to Hugh’s biographer, the marriage was held privately to avoid the normal celebrations of a marriage, as the couple felt them inappropriate given that it was a second marriage for both of them. Sir Hugh was a dynamic, intelligent man, with a complex attitude to the project of empire, even though its administration was his life’s work. A polyglot, he acquired new languages with ease and built good relationships with local elites and rulers in the countries he governed. He had some fairly typical racist attitudes, but also challenged racial inequalities, insisting on improved pay for the African clerks who worked for him on the Gold Coast. He believed in European cultural supremacy, that Britain (or at least Europe) should govern the world, but opposed the extractive capitalist colonialism of men like Cecil Rhodes. He was also a published author of memoirs and novels, and connected to the literary world; the novelist Joseph Conrad was a close friend.
It’s easy to see Hugh and Betty as an excellent match; both literary, celebrated in their field, and Catholic. As the wife of a colonial governor, Betty would have social status - her new title was Lady Clifford - and a great deal of work to do. Betty travelled with Hugh to Ceylon and West Africa for his postings, despite the various risks. She seems to have developed excellent relationships with her stepchildren; her stepdaughter remembers her fondly to Harry Gailey, and there is a touching letter from his son Hugh Gilbert, addressing her as “Mum”, from the battlefront of the First World War, where he would die in 1916. Her literary output dried up after a few years of marriage. Gailey puts this down to her not being inclined ‘to seek the limelight’ (Gailey 70-1), which seems like it might be a misreading of her character, but she may simply have been too busy. She had all the social responsibilities of the Governor’s wife, as well as supporting her husband, and organized events – pageants, displays, parties – to raise funds for the Red Cross during the war. For this charitable work, she was awarded the CBE in 1918. Marriage to Hugh also, indirectly, allowed Betty to fulfil her aim of getting a daughter married. In 1919 EMD married Paul Dashwood, who she had met because he had travelled to England on the same ship as the Cliffords. Paul was a fan of her daughter’s novels; Betty made the introduction with results that probably made her happy.
Hugh’s health was precarious. His biographer notes periods of serious illness as a young man, and both Cliffords suffered from malaria while in West Africa; Betty contracted yellow fever in 1913, and had to return to England for medical care, and came home for treatment for appendicitis in 1924. After a visit to Africa, the then Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) suggested to the Colonial Office that Sir Hugh was exhausted, and should be allowed a complete rest before his next posting. The Cliffords got their leave, and lunched with George V and Queen Mary while in England in 1925. Their next posting was to Ceylon, in 1925. Hugh had always been a rather combative man, getting into disagreements with the Colonial Office over policy and procedure, arguing with businessmen in the press, but he became increasingly eccentric in Ceylon and in his final posting in Malaysia. Anecdotes suggesting he appeared naked at a garden party, or arrived at the Colonial Office in a sarong, pepper accounts of this time (my source for these stories is Valerie Pakenham’s The Noonday Sun: Edwardians in the Tropics (Methuen, 1985), p42). By 1929, he had been persuaded to retire; Betty’s health was given publicly as the reason. The Cliffords returned home, taking a house in Torquay. But Hugh’s mental health needed professional care, and he lived the last twelve years of his life in the Priory clinic in Roehampton.
This is a sad, diminished end to the lives of Betty and Hugh both. In Torquay, she was close enough for EMD and her family to visit her from Croyle. Later, she would live with her younger daugter Yoé in London, at 17 Morpeth Mansions on Morpeth Terrace near Victoria Station in London. This address wouldn’t have been as smart as nearby Chester Square, but its position opposite Westminster Cathedral, where she had married Hugh and could attend services, might have been a draw. Hugh Clifford died in 1941, never having regained sufficient mental health to return home. Betty’s health was declining as EMD became ill, and she was too unwell to attend her daughter’s funeral in 1943. She died in 1945, at Toat House in Pulborough, West Sussex; this may have been a nursing home, as her death certificate mentions that she suffered from dementia. She remained well-known enough to merit an obituary in the Times and left an estate of over £16,000.
The adjective that recurs in other people’s writing about Betty is charm. Her granddaughter Rosamond Dashwood remembers her as “lively, witty and irreverent” (McCullen 1); Harry Gailey, who never met her but seems to have fallen under her spell, calls her “charming, gracious [and] supremely talented” (70); her obituarists mention her charm repeatedly. Charm is a slightly dubious quality, not necessarily underpinned by kindness or love, and useful in getting people to do what you want. I wonder if what they call charm is what we might call soft power now; much of Betty’s biography sees her living a dynamic life, getting her books published, her plays produced, networking, making two successful marriages, living in half-a-dozen different countries, energetically pursuing her charity work.
What was Betty like as a mother? By EMD’s own account, she was “emotionally loving, terribly possessive” (Powell 14). Again and again in EMD’s novels, mothers and daughters do battle over the daughter’s search for agency and self-determination. EMD’s mother-characters can be controlling and charming, like Joanna Vivian in The War-workers (1918), controlling and cruel, like the awful Lady Marlowe in Thank Heaven Fasting (1932), and controlling but loving, like Mrs Ingram in the same novel. Betty could be witty at her daughters’ expense and as fellow writers Betty and EMD seem to have had an uneasy relationship with each others’ work and success.
I wonder if Betty found it hard to reconcile all the parts of her character. She was a successful author, celebrated in London literary circles; connected with the social elite, especially through her charitable concerts and performances; a mother and wife with a large house to manage in the country and a London home too; and a sister to her surviving siblings. Her husband’s health declined after 1900 and he would have required her care. She lived in an era where bourgeois women’s roles were often circumscribed and limited to to marriage, motherhood or social success; writing was one of the few careers open to women of her class, and she certainly took advantage of that opportunity. Her literary output and other activities indicate a driven woman who was determined to make the best of her circumstances and improve the prospects of her daughters. Unfortunately – and possibly due to her experience of losing her mother – she had a limited range of views on how this might be achieved, and her daughters could only disappoint her in that respect. In Harry Gailey’s book there is a photograph of her on official duties with Hugh, smartly dressed, beaming with delight as she holds a sheaf of exotic flowers. Perhaps this phase of her life gave her the status and occupation that truly satisfied her.
The cover image shows Betty on the terrace at Llandogo Priory, and looks like it’s probably from the early Edwardian period, judging from her clothes.