This thickening of the professional arteries, the slow but inexorable process of assimilation, might well have been inevitable, but by the time that Scott wrote this last letter, ‘choice’ had largely been removed. There had always been an assumption within the family that John Scott had been living off interest since his retirement, but in the autumn of 1894, while his son was still in Vulcan, it emerged that for the last twelve years he had been running down his capital and that they were virtually bankrupt. ‘On the 23rd October,’ Hannah Scott recorded with an almost preternatural calm, ‘a crushing blow came of heavy losses. At once we decided to let our house and hope that some occupation will come that will please my dear husband and bring him comfort in the loss of his old house. On November 12th our dear Rose commenced work at Nottingham Hospital, under three weeks after the loss. The others all anxious to be up and doing are only restrained by the occupation at home in getting things in order for letting the furnished house. From Con comes a fine manly reliable letter offering help … Truly sorrow has many compensations and with God’s help we shall yet if He wills it return to our old home.’
They only returned, in fact, to let Outlands permanently, and all it meant in terms of respectability, security and position was gone. It would be impossible to guess from the tone here what this must have meant to Hannah Scott, but for a woman of her age and gentle snobberies, it was as if she had gone to sleep in the cosy, familiar world of some West Country Cranford, and woke within the harsh landscape of a Gissing novel, staring at the prospects of rented rooms, poverty, ostracism, trade and working daughters.
But if there seemed nothing for Hannah Scott except humiliation, for the girls – poised on the brink of a new century with new expectations, aspirations, possibilities – there was at least the chance of a different and more expansive world. Within weeks Rose had begun a career in nursing that would take her to the Gold Coast, and the others soon followed her from home, the ebullient Ettie to a theatre school at Margate and briefly onto the stage with Irene Vanbrugh’s touring company, and Grace and, eventually, Kate into the dingier dressmaking business.
Of all the children it was probably Archie who suffered most, being forced to abandon the Royal Artillery for a post in Nigeria as secretary to the governor, but from the start it was Con who carried the emotional burden of the disaster. For a few months in 1895 the family rented a Devonshire farmhouse, and it was there, in Barrie’s account, that the metamorphosis from ‘Old Mooney’ to ‘head of the family’ was completed. ‘He never seems to have shown a gayer front than when the troubles fell,’ Barrie wrote in his inimitable mix of family lore and hagiography. ‘Not only must there be no “Old Mooney” in him, but it must be driven out of everyone. His concerts, in which he took a leading part, became celebrated in the district; deputations called at the farm to beg for another, and once in these words, “Wull ’ee gie we a concert over our way when the comic young gentleman be here along?”’
If there is again as much Barrie as Scott in this, the family collapse does provide the first real insight into the qualities that distinguished the mature man. In his later years he could talk about ‘duty’ and ‘patriotism’ with the best of them, but whether it was to ship, colleagues, service or country, Scott’s sense of loyalty and duty was always rooted in real obligations, affections, ties and responsibilities. And at the heart of this nexus of relations was his family, and above all his mother. There is a species of family feeling that is little more than an enlarged and clannish selfishness, but as with his ambition there was nothing narrow or ‘laager-like’ in Scott’s devotion, only a generous and unpossessive openness to their sorrows, happiness and opportunities.
In her memoir of her brother Con, Grace described his facility for appearing to be absorbed in the person he was talking to, but his letters to his family reveal a much profounder and more genuine empathy than that remark suggests. It is one of those aspects of personality that is always going to elude definition, but there seems to have always been something almost Keatsian in Scott’s capacity for submerging his own identity and ‘absorbing’ himself – Grace’s word – in the fragile, anxious interior lives of a mother, brother or sister.
As his subsequent career in the Antarctic – and in particular his response to human or animal suffering – would underline, the barriers between ‘self’ and ‘other’ would never be very firmly established for Scott, and never was this more true than when his family needed him. There was nothing he actually ‘did’ for them during their troubles that Archie or Ettie did not match, but in terms of understanding and explaining, and interpreting one to another, he was central to their recovery.
With his mother, in particular, he needed all his tact and sympathy to nudge and cajole her into accepting the different world the Scotts found themselves in with financial failure. Some time towards the end of 1895 or 1896 John Scott secured a job as manager of a Somerset brewery, and while it brought a house and some financial stability, the descent back into trade left Hannah Scott more rawly exposed than ever to the indignities of her position. There can have been no escaping it, either, because even the transition from the rich Devon landscape to the mean, straggling village of Holcombe offered a Hardyesque mirror to their fortunes. Under the fields around the old perpendicular church of St Andrew’s lay buried the ancient pre-plague village, but it was the great mass of the Holcombe Brewery that dominated the new village, with its miserably ugly church, its Wesleyan chapel, its vestiges of the old coal industry and its brewery employees, defining the physical and social perimeters of the Scott family’s decline.
There had been nothing in the bourgeois, provincial, Godfearing, servant-padded world in which Hannah Scott had lived the first sixty years of her life to prepare her for this, and nothing her son would not do to protect her from it. In his memoir of Scott, Barrie spoke feelingly of his hardships at this time, but whatever the humiliations of tarnished braid or a threadbare uniform for a naval officer of Scott’s stamp, he felt the family’s poverty more keenly for his mother than himself. ‘I hate to think that you did not go and see her before she left,’ he wrote to her at Holcombe after Ettie had left for the stage. ‘I hate to think I had not the forethought of writing to urge you to go – that you should have studied economy in such a matter makes me feel very bitter – Promise you won’t do it again – but you really shan’t, for when she comes back I am determined you shall go and see her act and shall yourself see the life and some of your many unknown admirers (who have seen your picture only). I can’t forgive my own want of forethought in not writing about it … I have another great fear about you dear, which is that you don’t get any society. – I do hope people will come & call – you don’t speak of any as yet. I rather feel that people round you are not inclined that way and that you are having rather a slow time – But I suppose time only can correct this and the gradual appreciation of how nice you really are.’
For all Scott’s chivalry, there was nothing emasculating in his devotion to his mother, and while she always remained at the centre of his loyalties, that never stopped him fighting his sisters’ corners when they needed him. ‘Dear Mother,’ he wrote in the same letter to Holcombe, ‘I am afraid that you must be grieving over Ettie’s absence very much, but think dear what it means to her. What prospects of independence and the pleasure of really living, working & doing.’
‘My Own Dearest Mother,’ he wrote in the same vein, this time of Kate and Grace’s new lives as working women, ‘You cannot think how delightful it was to find you all in such good health and spirits. The prospect for the future seems brighter than it has been for years and above all things I rejoice to see that you are beginning to appreciate that by this honest hard work the girls are anything but sufferers. The difference in them since they have been about, meeting all manner of people and relying on themselves, is so very plain to me. Just the same sort of difference that Ettie felt and valued so much. They have gained in a hundred points, not to mention appearance and smartness. I honestly think we shall some day be grateful to fortune for lifting us out of the “sleepy hollow” of the old Plymouth life. Personally, I cannot express the difference I see in the girls since their London experiences.’
For a few brief months in the mid-1890s it must have seemed that he was right, and home on leave at Christmas 1896, the two brothers took up where they had