Clark paints a rollicking portrait of his father as an independent-minded, self-indulgent ‘roaring boy’. Attracted to women, he drank too much and delayed marriage until the age of thirty-five, when his choice fell upon Alice McArthur, a puritanical cousin who made it her unsuccessful mission to save him from his alcoholic excesses. Before she married, Alice had been living with her Quaker mother in Godalming, ‘so different to the rowdy boozy world of Clyde yacht racing’.8 ‘Two more different people than my father and mother can hardly be imagined. He was convivial, natural, totally unself-conscious; she was shy, inhibited, and prone to self-deception. They were united by two qualities, intelligence and a total absence of snobbery.’9
Clark’s father was a big man with a drooping moustache, who was burdened by no inhibitions and knew no boundaries. Clark was fond of his father but alarmed by him, and embarrassed by his drunkenness and bad behaviour. He found his mother by contrast cold and sharp, although he was aware that he had painted a particularly unfeeling portrait of her in his autobiography: ‘I have been worried that the allusions to her in Vol 1 were incomplete. Her life was ruined by being in the wrong box. At the end of her life she reverted to being a shrewd, frugal Quakerish lady, living in a bedsitter. That suited her much better than [the family’s Suffolk home] Sudbourne, and she became quite peaceful.’10 He claimed that she never held him as a child, which several photographs show to be untrue. She remains, however, a shadowy and rather mournful figure who only came into her own as a grandmother. Unfortunately, no letters survive from her until her son was eighteen – by which time she had belatedly discovered his genius.
‘Like so many remarkable men he was the only son of two entirely opposite and incompatible parents,’ Clark wrote in his obituary of Cyril Connolly, and he certainly saw himself in these terms.11 Yet despite everything, his parents made a successful marriage, and remained devoted to each other. Theirs was an extraordinarily peripatetic existence. The Edwardian era is often portrayed as an earthly paradise for the rich, and no doubt it was to those who welcomed an uninterrupted social life. The Clarks, however, had no social ambitions, and were too eccentric to belong with comfort to any fixed society. They adopted the conventional habit of the rich and moved from house to house, but for them it was a stratagem to avoid rather than to meet polite society. Alice Clark found herself mistress of a house in Grosvenor Square, a large rented house in Perthshire, an even larger house and estate in Suffolk, two yachts, and soon an additional house at Cap Martin in the south of France. Their life became a progress dictated by the sporting calendar, but to the young Clark ‘my home was Sudbourne Hall, about a mile from Orford in Suffolk’.12 One remarkable aspect of Clark’s childhood is how very well documented it was by good photographs. His father employed a professional photographer to take numerous pictures of all aspects of their life – Sudbourne Hall, the yachts, the shooting parties, and young Kenneth in many poses and costumes. All these are preserved at Saltwood, and suggest that Clark’s parents were not as indifferent as he maintained.
Named after his grandfather, Kenneth McKenzie Clark was born at 32 Grosvenor Square in London on 13 July 1903. He was delivered by Caesarean section, which in those days meant that he would remain an only child. A year later his father acquired the eleven-thousand-acre Sudbourne estate for £237,500, with a mortgage of £75,000.13 From what followed we may deduce that the purchase was made with his son in mind, and the expectation that the boy would grow up to enjoy the pleasures of a rich man’s sporting estate. This was in fact as far as Clark senior’s dynastic ambitions would ever go: Kenneth once came into his father’s study at Sudbourne and found two men in black coats and striped trousers offering Clark senior the chance to buy a peerage – one of them was the notorious Maundy Gregory, Lloyd George’s chief agent in the sale of honours – ‘Wouldn’t you like this little chap to succeed you?’ The response was ‘Go to hell,’ and the men drove off.14 This encounter also tells us that the Clarks were in all probability supporters of the Liberal Party.
Even by expansive Edwardian standards the Sudbourne estate was large; it included a model farm and several well-ordered villages. The house was elegant but rather stark, ‘one of Wyatt’s typical East Anglian jobs, a large square brick box, with a frigid, neo-classical interior’.15 It was built in 1784 for the first Marquess of Hertford, and had devolved on his colourful descendants, the triumvirate of art collectors who created the Wallace Collection. The eponymous Richard Wallace, the illegitimate Hertford heir, mainly used Sudbourne for its shooting, and on one occasion entertained the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, there. Clark senior bought the estate in 1904 for the shooting, but found the house cold and uncomfortable, and consequently ordered a makeover. He and Alice went abroad, and returned to their newly minted ‘Jacobethan’ interior in richly carved walnut, which was probably a more suitable setting for their furnishings and paintings. Young Kenneth thought it was all in very poor taste, although he found the renovations more friendly than Wyatt’s original interiors.
Clark’s parents had few connections with the local social life of the county set. One of these was the Suffolk Show, at which his father would show his pigs and his prize collection of Suffolk Punch draught horses. These beautiful animals had their own special stables at Sudbourne, and would be brought out every Sunday morning and paraded on the lawn in front of the house before trotting home ‘as complacent as Morris dancers’.16 The main stables at the side of the house were refitted to hold the collection of motor cars: a Rolls-Royce, two Delaunay-Bellevilles and a Panhard, ‘a quiet, insinuating electric car which had been intended for use in London’.
Clark senior was a well-intentioned if unconventional landlord, who built a cottage hospital in nearby Orford and allowed Coronation sports at the hall in 1911. His main preoccupation, however, was the pheasant shoot from October until the end of January; the Sudbourne shoot was one of very high numbers and low-flying birds. At first the young Clark enjoyed the shooting parties because they brought female visitors to the house, whom he would persuade to come to his bedroom for a beauty parade of their dresses, which he would judge with care and precision, evincing the first signs of the emerging aesthete. Then at the age of ten Clark had a gun placed into his hands, and we have the recollection of Phyllis Ellis, a young girl on the estate, that ‘Young Kenneth used to get very upset when all these birds were brought in – pheasants and ducks. They looked so beautiful in their winter plumage … He didn’t like shooting – which, of course, annoyed his father.’17 Sometimes as many as a thousand birds a day were shot, which sickened young Kenneth. He gave up shooting as early as he could – Phyllis tells us that after a time ‘he would never go out with the shooting parties’.18 Since this sport was the main point of Sudbourne, young Clark’s reaction was particularly distressing to his father, and this is the earliest external evidence that Kenneth was not going to be a conventional boy of his background. Apart from the shoot, Sudbourne boasted a private cricket pitch and a fourteen-hole golf course, complete with a professional. Clark’s father was too impatient to play a proper round of golf, but in his irresponsible way would encourage visitors to try to hit a ball over the house, causing the inevitable broken windows, which delighted him and pained his son. Phyllis Ellis reported that Alice Clark ‘when alone would play golf on the private 14-hole course with the gamekeeper’s wife’. She cuts a rather lonely figure.
One day when Clark was six his mother came to the nursery and caught his German governess scolding him. The governess was sent away the next morning and replaced by a Highland Scots woman, Miss Lamont, thereafter always known as ‘Lam’. Lam was the daughter of a minister from Skye, but was not at all dour; she was a great giggler, with a naughty sense of humour, and above all she was affectionate and full of unsentimental