Pearls heroesfor
It was an exquisitely simple idea: In 1918 the Mail founder’s wife appealed for women to donate pearls from their necklaces to raise money for wounded troops. As a new book reveals, the response of a grieving nation was overwhelming by Rachel Trethewey
WHENEVER word arrived that a convoy of wounded soldiers was coming into the military hospital the Duchess of Westminster had set up in Le Touquet, she and her friends raced to change into full evening dress, complete with diamond tiaras — even if it was early in the morning.
Dressed for a ball, the Duchess and her companions would stand at the entrance to greet the men and take their names. Adding to the party atmosphere, they played uplifting music on the gramophone. The contrast between the elegant women and the mud- caked patients lying on stretchers was a surreal sight, but it did what the Duchess had intended and cheered up the men.
‘We thought we were going to Hell and now it seems we are in Heaven,’ said one Great War soldier who found himself in the Duchess’s haven on the French coast.
Other blue-blooded women set up convalescent hospitals for injured men returning from the Front in grand stately homes in the British countryside, and at some of the smartest addresses in London. Wanting their patients to have the best of everything, one arranged for Harrods to do the catering at her establishment. Another provided chestnut-cream cakes from a top patisserie, and sherry for elevenses.
Beneath the superficial frivolity, these benefactresses took their work seriously, conscientiously caring for the sick and helping many wounded soldiers survive.
But few can claim to have made quite such a difference as the woman behind a remarkable appeal launched in the spring of 1918.
At that point, Britain’s prospects of winning the war had never looked bleaker. Russia’s withdrawal after the Bolshevik Revolution meant the Germans were able to concentrate their best troops on the Western Front, where the British army, after the casualties of the previous year, was dangerously under-strength.
Countless mothers, wives and girlfriends who had waved off their loved ones who went to fight for king and country would never see them return. AMONG those who had suffered was Mary Northcliffe, the wife of Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, who founded the Daily Mail. Known to her friends as Molly, Lady Northcliffe had not lost a son in the war; the great sadness in her life was that she was childless. But she and her husband had four nephews in particular who were like sons to them, and all were killed in action.
There was no room for hysteria in that stoical age. But Britain’s women did feel a powerful need to remember their loss with pride — and Molly Northcliffe came up with the perfect plan.
She would ask each of them to give a pearl from their precious necklaces and use them to form a new string, which would be sold to support the British Red Cross in caring for the war wounded.
It proved to be one of the most successful fundraising campaigns of World War I — and this month the British Red Cross is marking the appeal’s centenary by once again asking people across the UK to give an item of jewellery to support its life-saving work around the world.
The items donated will be auctioned by Christie’s, just as the pearls were from the original campaign — the story of which has never before been told in full.
As I explain in a new book drawing on the diaries and letters of the women who donated in 1918, no jewel could have been better chosen, because pearls had been symbolically linked to mourning for thousands of years. In Greek mythology, it was believed they were formed from teardrops of the gods falling into oysters.
Among the first women to give a pearl was Queen Alexandra, the Queen Mother. During the reign of her late husband, King Edward VII, she had inadvertently sparked a fashion for pearl chokers by wearing one to conceal a scar on her neck.
She made her gift to the appeal despite the presence of Edward VII’s long-term mistress, Alice Keppel, on the organising committee. The latter was something of an expert on jewellery, having received a priceless collection of love tokens from the King.
Also lending their names to the cause were nine duchesses, 27 countesses and dozens of viscountesses. Among them was Mary Charteris, Countess of Wemyss, who had lost two sons in the conflict — Yvo, 19, and Hugo, 32.
In 1932, Mary would write a book to make sure her sons were never forgotten, describing how Yvo was so boyish-looking his men teased him that he was too young to be at the Front. But although youthful in spirit, he was wise enough to know he might not return.
She described poignantly the last time she had been with him at Stanway, the family’s country seat in the Cotswolds. They went for an evening stroll and as they passed the time-weathered golden stone gatehouse, church and tithe barn, he turned to look repeatedly from side to side as though he was saying farewell to each twig on every tree at his beloved home. OTHER pearls were given in gratitude for lives saved, including an extraordinary donation from Noël Leslie, Countess of Rothes, whose husband Lord Rothes was wounded while fighting in France in 1916.
The pearl she gave was from a necklace she had worn as a passenger aboard the Titanic. Awoken by the crash as the ship hit an iceberg on that fateful night in 1912, she had got dressed, thrown on her warmest fur coat and her pearls and taken a swig of brandy before clambering into a lifeboat. She explained to the sailor in charge of the craft that her husband owned a yacht so she knew how to take a tiller and row.
For the rest of that freezing night on the Atlantic she did just that, working away valiantly at the oars and leading other passengers in morale-boosting hymns until they reached the safety of the rescue ship RMS Carpathia.
Another donation, from Violet Manners, Duchess of Rutland, proved highly controversial. Because her eldest son had died two decades earlier in an accident, she was determined not to lose her second son John — and had done everything in her power to keep him from going to the Front.
First she had persuaded her beautiful youngest daughter Diana, then in her early 20s, to seduce a married man who was 16 years her senior, but who had the ear of Sir John French, the Commander-in-Chief of the Western Front.
Although Diana found the squat, swarthy man repulsive in every way, she accepted his advances. As her mother had hoped, this sacrifice secured John a safer job as French’s aide- de- camp. When he refused to accept it, determined to do his bit like all his friends, she persuaded the family doctor to tell the Army he had a heart problem — entirely untrue — so that he was declared unfit for active service.
While Violet’s actions were consid--
ered outrageous by many, she felt she had simply fought to protect her son. Other mothers, she reasoned, did nothing — and what did they get for their bravery? Mary Charteris’s losses answer that question. At the end of her book, she listed the 25 men in her circle who died. All but two were under 30.
Of course, it was not only the aristocracy who sustained such losses, and soon the Pearl Appeal reached far beyond the drawing rooms of Mayfair, catching the imagination of women from all walks of life. Many were inspired by stories like those of champion tennis player Anthony Wilding, four- times winner of both the men’s singles and doubles titles at Wimbledon.
A tall blond New Zealander, he had film star looks which are said to have delayed play at Wimbledon in 1913 — female fans who’d fainted at the sight of their idol had to be laid out to recover next to the court roller. Wilding personified the godlike young men who lived life to the full before going to war.
Believing it was his duty to fight for the motherland, he signed up soon after the call came for volunteers. In 1915 he was killed in the Battle of Aubers ridge, near Neuve Chapelle in France. They found his remains in a trench. Amid the wreckage was his gold cigarette case — a souvenir of his tennis triumphs on the riviera only the year before.
But it was his pearl scarf pin that his sweetheart donated to the appeal, in memory of arguably the greatest of the great sportsmen who lost their lives in the war.
Those who did not have such treasures were urged to donate collectively. One pearl came ‘from a few ladies in County Galway’, and another from an airship crew.
Some wealthy women who had not suffered personal losses donated to show their solidarity with those who had. One was Ada Bey, a butler’s daughter who had married a rich industrialist in the West Yorkshire town of Otley, but never forgot her working-class roots.
Her donation was in memory of the 187 men listed on Otley’s war memorial — many of whom had worked in her husband’s factory.
Further south, in the peaceful Hampshire countryside, Alice Shrubb, wife of the mayor of Lymington, sent her pearl for the airmen at rAF Beaulieu, a nearby training base for pilots.
Knowing their life expectancy was short, these men in their late teens and early 20s made sure they had plenty of fun. They invited lorryloads of girls up from the neighbouring villages of east Boldre and Pilley, and danced with them to piano and fiddle music.
Sadly this merriment belied a tragic reality. With aviation then in its infancy and crashes common, well over 20 trainees lost their lives at Beaulieu during the war and 19 of them were buried in the churchyard at east Boldre. Alice Shrubb’s gift of a pearl commemorated all their brief but spirited lives.
Thanks to dedicated provincial women like her, the pearl appeal spread across the whole country. In the counties it was headed by the high sheriffs’ wives, and in the cities by women like Birmingham’s lady mayoress Mrs Brooks, who announced in the local newspaper that she was ‘at home’ at the Council House to receive pearls.
Those given ranged in value from one worth just a few shillings, sent from a country vicarage, to a pearl of great price from a stately home.
Plenty came with accompanying messages. The feelings of many bereaved mothers were summed up by edith Fielden of Twickenham, whose 19- year- old son Granville was killed at the Battle of Ypres in April 1915. ‘It is not a perfect pearl, but it is the only one I have,’ she wrote. ‘I send it in memory of a pearl beyond all price already given, my only son.’
There were hundreds more messages ‘in memory of my beloved son’, and the fact that many of the fallen were fresh-faced youths just out of school was emphasised in one gift from ‘a mother and sister in memory of two boys’.
By October 1918, the appeal had garnered nearly 4,000 pearls, enough to make not one but 41 necklaces. As it had begun when Britain was threatened with defeat, Lady Northcliffe and her committee thought it fitting it should end as the country was on the point of victory.
In those last weeks, it was decided every necklace should have a clasp to hold the pearls together. Nearly 50 rubies were donated for this. A Mrs Hewitt sent one in memory of her husband, rifleman F. J. Hewitt, with the message: ‘More precious than rubies to his wife.’
Five came from Frances Parker, sister of Lord Kitchener. He was Secretary of State for War until the fateful day in 1916 when he, his staff and 643 sailors on HMS Hampshire were drowned after its holing by a German mine off the Orkneys.
The rubies were accompanied by three pearls, ‘one for Ferby, one for little Marion and one from little Pet evie’, all the names of family pets.
As this suggested, the Kitchener family were devoted to animals. The Field Marshal himself was fond of the gun dogs he named Aim, Fire, Bang, Miss and Damn, and his family were determined the tender side of the heroic figure should be remembered.
Once the pearls had been made up into necklaces, Lady Northcliffe’s committee faced the problem of what to do with them. One option was to offer them as prizes in a national raffle.
This would be egalitarian and lucrative, raising large amounts of money for the red Cross at a time when it was sorely needed. But attempts to get a special exemption to the prevailing anti-gambling laws through Parliament were blocked by a powerful lobby supported by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
eventually, it was decided an auction of the pearls should be held at Christie’s on December 19, little more than a month after the signing of the Armistice. The preview was one of the first post-war acts of remembrance, attracting crowds which queued out into the street. BEHIND each exhibit was an emotive tale, and none more so than the three pearls donated by a Lilian Kekewich of east Grinstead, Sussex. each stood for one of the sons she had lost in the war.
Like the other donors, Mrs Kekewich could at least comfort herself that her gift was not in vain. The sale raised £94,044 overall — £5 million at today’s values. To put this achievement into perspective, it cost £9,585 (£500,000 today) to run all the red Cross convalescent homes in France and Belgium from October 1918 to December 1919.
As for the pearls themselves, many of their 21st-century owners may not know the poignant history of the strands they wear.
If so, it’s intriguing to think they might even find their way back to the British red Cross today as part of the new auction. Their beauty is a reminder that, then as now, whatever barbarism exists in the world, the strength of the human spirit will not be overcome.