Stephen’s mother strove to repair the effect of her husband’s extravagances on their income by writing and illustrating a number of magazine articles and books for women on dress, deportment and decoration in the home, through which she gained an enviable reputation. Her magazine columns on interior decoration and fashion encouraged readers to reject Victorian fussiness in favour of the new ‘Art’ furniture. She also encouraged her readers to choose the best aspects of the Aesthetic Movement in their dress. Her books The Art of Beauty, 1878 and The Art of Decoration, 1881 were illustrated with Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic designs. She was also renowned for her literary adaptations, notably Chaucer for Children, 1877 where she retold Chaucer’s tales, making them suitable for Victorian readers. She was a very proud woman in that despite having to earn money she retained the status of a gentlewoman. Her assiduous work enabled her to pay for Stephen’s education at Westminster School and to send him to Peterhouse College, Cambridge.
Again like Gray, Haweis had to convince his family, especially his mother, to allow him to take up art lessons. He said, ‘Mother was against my taking up art unless I thought I was going to do really well. With support better than starvation I should have done far more and better, but everybody believed that I should have done well but I had only £63 to spend on my first year in Paris. My heart broke down through my father’s complete neglect and robbery of about a third of my inheritance’.5 His mother died in 1898, before he could take a degree, whereupon he decided not to continue at Cambridge as he wished to become a painter, and to that end he went to study in Paris in 1899. He never forgot his mother. His studio in Paris was described as being filled with family treasures, notably mementos of his mother. His cape was lined with the dress she wore when presented to Queen Victoria. He kept place cards from his mother’s dinner parties, inscribed with the names of important Londoners. He saved her clothing, her amber beads, sewing boxes full of tiny heirlooms, mother of pearl daisies wound with silk thread, miniature patchwork quilts, embroidered baby clothes, a copybook belonging to his great-great grandfather, an hourglass, a leather hood which adorned the family’s falcon, the plaster cast of the hand of his brother who had died in infancy and an Etruscan vase which contained the ashes of his mother’s dog.6
2.4 James Maclaren Smith, Firenze, 1880s, black and white photograph © NMI
2.5 Lonsdale Gray, Eileen, Thora and a friend Captain French in the French Alps, year unknown, black and white photograph © NMI
Haweis’s father died early in 1901. He had greatly resented his son who, devoted to his mother, appears to have been a quiet, attractive, hard-working young man. He had a streak of stubbornness in his make-up, for his mother had once written, ‘Stephen has the Haweis temper’. His father had undoubtedly cheated Stephen of a substantial legacy, but his mother had left sufficient money to make him not entirely dependent on the sale of his work and, indeed, enough to enable him to travel.
Both Haweis and Gray were the children of broken marriages. Despite the Gray family’s position in society, Gray recalled her parents eating dinner in silence at either end of a very long table.7 Just as Haweis lost his mother in 1898 and his father in 1901, Gray lost her father, and she went to Territet in Switzerland to bury him, much grieved in late February 1900.
In June later that year she lost her brother Lonsdale who drank poisoned water while in South Africa. As Gray had doted on her father, Stephen adored his mother. However, unlike Haweis, Gray destroyed many of her family papers. Throughout their correspondence Gray and Haweis discussed such personal matters. On 5 June 1958 Gray wrote, ‘I was very interested in the letter talking about your father though you don’t say really in what way he was responsible for your unhappiness’. She continued, ‘My own childhood was probably as unhappy and worse in many ways than yours and the shaky hand is a consequence of years of sleepless nights and misery of many kinds but as Kipling used to say that’s another story’. Despite Haweis’s strained relationship with his father, Gray dryly comments towards the end of this letter: ‘Anyway you had a mother who loved you’. Gray had a terrible shake in her hand towards the end of her life. In another letter Gray says that the shake in her hand is due to her childhood. ‘It all comes from having been so frightened at night (for years) when I was a child and there is no cure for it’.8
The Haweis family quarrels continued through Haweis’s brother Lionel, who took the side of his father. The bitterness and feuding caused by his family remained with him throughout his life. In a poem written in 1960 Haweis wrote his own epitaph; ‘Who shall say what I might have said, killed by a father’s hate and heart, before I failed in love and art, when I lie dead’.9 It was through his niece René Chipman that the truth of what his father and brother did to Stephen was finally acknowledged. When Lionel died, Haweis wrote to his friend Jean Roosevelt saying of his family, ‘I think nobody has ever needed me and certainly nobody has ever needed my sister, so this grand and glorious family which began in about the twelfth century is passing out of the picture regretted by none and noticed by few’.10 John Ellis Roosevelt said, ‘We learned from Mrs Chipman and from reading through Hawys’ (sic) papers that he, Hawys, (sic) had come to the conclusion that his father was an S.O.B and a crook, with psychological and sexual problems to boot and that Hawys’ (sic) brother Lionel (Mrs Chipman’s father) was at best a dam (sic) fool’.11 In the last year of his life Chipman went through her father’s memorabilia and wrote to Stephen apologising to him for ‘my disbelief of you in the past’. Astonished and horrified at her father and grandfather’s behaviour she confessed to Stephen ‘so far I have wronged you’.12
Similarly Gray’s situation with her family became strained due to her sister Ethel’s marriage to Henry Tufnel Campbell. This man had an overwhelming influence on her mother. In her letters Gray describes equally complicated family stories. ‘My brother who was left all my grandfather’s money, as I told you he [Gray’s grandfather] was angry with my mother and left her nothing, which provoked feuds (my mother entirely under the influence of my brother-in-law who grabbed and ruled) in Ireland’.13 Gray’s grandfather Jeremiah Lonsdale Pounden died in 1887, leaving his estate to James Mclaren Stuart Gray, twentieth Lord Gray – who had become Lord Gray upon the death of his mother on 24 December 1918. However, on 6 May 1919 The Irish Times reported:
The death occurred at Brighton, after a short illness, of the right Hon. James McLaren Stuart Gray, Baron Gray. He succeeded his mother, Eveleen Baroness Gray, on her death in December 24 1918 and became the twentieth holder of the title. His sister, the Hon Ethel Eveleen, wife of Henry T Campbell Esq of 7 Collingwood Gardens, London SW and Brownswood Co Wexford, succeeds him to the title.14
Gray describes quite an uncomfortable situation amongst family members after this. ‘The shadow of that horrible atmosphere is still there as it seems to be with you it is undeniable that those are the years that mark one for life. My sister was very popular at school, she was a great flirt and