This article, penned by Tom Sharpe, appeared in The Times on 17 July 1976.
The Pleydells and the Mansells were the epitome of the charming, amusing and high spirited upper classes in the 1920s and 1930s. Novelist Tom Sharpe has traced the life and times of their creator, William Mercer, who wrote under the pen name of Dornford Yates, and discovers the darker side of Berry and Co.
Year by year between the wars there appeared in the bookshops the Novels of Dornford Yates. The first, The Brother of Daphne, had appeared in 1914, a collection of stories which had previously been published in The Windsor Magazine. I have a first edition, in softback with illustrations, which a friend bought for me a few months ago for 5p. It is a great rarity. In 1920 Berry & Co came out and the same year The Courts of Idleness. It was followed in 1921 by Anthony Lyveden and in 1922 by Jonah & Co. And almost every year another Dornford Yates was published and greeted with critical praise.
The public took to Dornford Yates and to the imaginary world he created. His books sold by the thousands, the hundred thousands. They were witty, they were charming, they were unabashedly escapist and they had pace. Presently the Berry books had become a cult. The life portrayed in them seemed to be what every Englishman dreamt of living. It was idle, leisurely, comical, rich, tasteful and chivalrous. Above all it was a life in which values were clear-cut. The villains were obvious blackguards and the heroes spotless. They were also aristocratic, or, if not of noble birth, they were at least perfect gentlemen. And on the back of the dustjacket of each Dornford Yates book there was the same portrait. The face was that of the ideal Englishman with sleepy, slightly hooded eyes, high cheekbones, a straight nose and trim moustache, and neatly brushed hair. And the calm arrogance of that face was enormously reassuring. It was proof that Englishmen were the finest specimens of the human race that God, the Empire and the public school had ever produced. The portrait was like some nightwatchman calling out “1926 and All’s Well”. It was still there unchanged in 1936 and 1946 and by then there were families who had collected all the Dornford Yates books and had identified themselves with the Pleydells so completely that they could find a Berryism for every occasion.
I never succumbed so entirely to the spell. I was seventeen before I read Red in the Morning and became hooked on the Chandos stories. I read them all and then all the Berry books but even at 17 I found myself squirming with embarrassment at what Richard Usborne, in his excellent study Clubland Heroes, has called Dornford Yates’s “diamante prose”. Worse still were the passages where Jill or Jenny or some other child-like woman is at one with Nature. To quote Yates himself in another context these are “the slush that screams are made of”. And finally there was the blatant anti-semitism. I have been told that in his respect Yates was typical of his time. He may have been but by 1945 there were too many derogatory references to “Hebrews” for my stomach. So I skipped and concentrated on the car chases across France, the Carinthian castles which Chandos & Mansel enter at dead of night, the great wells they are trapped in, the caves in the Pyrenees, and in short the adventures.
Yates was a marvellous storyteller. Even now I can pick up one of his books and find myself reading on and on and, and this in spite of his mannered style and his appalling snobbery. I find myself torn between admiration for the craftsman and revulsion at the sickly sentimentality but I am not in the least surprised that Ward Lock, his publishers, have responded to public pressure and begun to reissue the Berry Books. The front covers show the Rolls-Royces that figure so largely in the stories and on the back there appears that impeccable face that so fascinated me as a boy. In those days I thought it was Berry. There is an unreal assurance about that face which made it impossible to believe that this was a portrait of anyone but a fictitious character. It was wrong. It is the portrait of Dornford Yates as he was in 1926, romanticized a little by the artist no doubt but still the man himself. It was this discovery that the author looked so much like the characters in his books that led me to find out more about him.
I knew already that Dornford Yates was the nom de plume of Cecil William Mercer, born in Walmer in 1885, that he had been to Harrow and Oxford, had been President of OUDS 1906–7, had become a barrister. During the Great War he had served in Egypt and Salonika and had risen to the rank of Captain. The dedication in B-Berry & I Look Back told me he was a cousin of Saki. In fact the dedications in his books are very informative, particularly in their alterations. I was unaware of this at the time but in Adele & Co I found “To the Villa Maryland, Pau, which, with its English garden, made me a home worth having for 17 years”. There are references to life in Pau in Jonah & Co and other Berry books. So in 1971 I went to Pau in search of the Villa Maryland, the Golf course on which the Pleydells had played, the English Club and the Casino.
Among these relics of the interwar years I might find someone who could tell me if Berry & Co had really existed. I knew that Adele was modelled on his first wife, Bettine, “the American girl who did me the honour to become my wife”. That dedication was in my first edition of Jonah & Co. You will not find it in the new book. Mercer divorced Bettine in 1933 and remarried. His second wife, he always called Jill and his dedication to her is in And Berry Came Too. Anyway I went to Pau and I found the Villa Maryland in the Rue Foster. It was now a private nursing home. And I found the English Club on the steps which Berry had dropped the marmalade. I sat by the bandstand in the Place Royale and wondered at the changes that had turned the Club into the Spanish Consulate. I even visited the Casino and walked in the gardens where the Pleydells had strolled to the Palmarium. The choir of the Soviet Fleet were singing in the Casino theatre. Berry would not have approved. I went to the English Church which still had a congregation of 12 and I found on a commemorative plaque to those who had died in the Great War the name William Mansell. Jonathan’s brother? Or perhaps the great man himself.
And then I found Mr Carter of Old England, tailors and haberdashers, in the Place Royale. Mr Carter’s father had been Major Mercer’s executor when the Mercers left Pau and settled in Rhodesia but Mr Carter, Senior, had died the previous year and his son had known Mercer only slightly. He was, he said, a reserved and stand-offish man and not popular. Certainly Mr Carter seemed not to have liked him but if I wanted to visit The House That Berry Built it was now a guest house at Eaux Bonnes, 25 miles towards the Pyrenees and owned by a Madame Dufourcet. I went there and stayed three days. It is exactly as Dornford Yates described it in his novel. It stands on a steep hillside above Eaux Bonnes with shuttered windows and 98 steps leading up from the double garage to the front door but the most remarkable feature is the forty foot wall that rises to the terrace. That wall supports a concrete platform on which the front of the house rests and behind it the hillside has been hollowed out to allow the servants’ quarters at the back to stand on solid ground. From the terrace where I breakfasted under an awning I could look down at the little spa, with its hydrothermal baths and decayed casino, or up to the rocky snowlined peaks of the mountains.
It was on that terrace that I first glimpsed Jill and Boy. They were there in a photograph album which Mercer had collected while the house was being built and Madame Dufourcet had found it in the attic. Yates/Boy/Mercer stands beside Jill and in front of them is a terrier. What struck me was how thin Jill’s legs were. Madame Dufourcet explained that Madame had had polio and had found walking difficult. “The steps were not easy for her, you understand. It is a long climb from the garage to the house.” It is indeed and for the first time I felt uneasy. It seemed incomprehensible to me that a man should have built a house for his handicapped wife with 98 steps to the only entrance. But the house had a marvellous view and the marble floors and staircase, the oak-panelled walls and all the fittings had been done meticulously. So I thought no more about it until I returned to Pau, and spoke to Mr Carter again. I asked him about the first wife, Bettine and if there were any other people on whom Yates had modelled his characters. Mr Carter knew of none. Captain Mercer did not mix with many people. Then what about Bettine and the divorce? Mr Carter was more informative. She had an affair with a Frenchman and Major Mercer tackled him…. That was why he built the house at Eaux Bonnes with so many steps to the door. There were going to be no affairs for his second wife.
My feeling of uneasiness on the terrace returned. It was beginning to look as if there was a darker side to Dornford Yates than I had expected. And then just as I was about to leave Pau Mr Carter gave me all the correspondence between his father and Major Mercer from 1947 until the latter’s death in Umtali in 1960. I read the letters on my way back to England. From them I gained the impression of a lonely, bitter and eccentric man obsessed with the petty details concerning his property and possessions. In one letter he instructs Mr Carter to send him the six bottles of Angostura Bitters he had left at Eaux Bonnes; in another he asks about huckaback towels which are unobtainable in Africa; and in a third he asks Carter to find out who is giving money to the Moral Re-Armament Movement. There are constant references to the Capdevilles, his former servants, who had looked after Cockade, the house at Eaux Bonnes, when it was occupied by the Germans. With the French in general there is to be no reconciliation. And when Carter mentions English residents in Pau who have died, Mercer admits to having detested them. The Countess of Cork is the exception, but for the most part his comments are bitter. On the other hand he sends Carter a pound each year for Poppy Day and is punctilious in his business dealings. The negotiations for the sale of Cockade go on for years and finally the house which had cost £12,000 to build in 1938 is sold after his death for £4,000. Of Berry & Co there is no mention.
I put the letters away and looked at them only occasionally. There seemed to be no connexion between them and the author of the light, amusing and charming Berry books or the face on the dust-jacket. And then one evening I came across a remark in As Berry & I were Saying to the effect that This Publican was “The best thing I ever did.” I read This Publican. It is a very strange story of the breakdown of a marriage between David Bohun, a naive, but honest solicitor, and a scheming adventuress, Rowena Howard. That is not, in fact, her real name. She was born Elsie Baumer, the illegitimate daughter of an actress and “her school was the grimy kaleidoscope of provincial, theatrical life”. She acquires Rowena Howard’s identity by murdering her on a cross-channel ferry and taking her passport. It is an improbable story and a venomous one. Elsie Baumer is a murderess and blackmailing bitch and the honest Bohun whom on one occasion she calls “Willie” only escapes her clutches by discovering that she has been having an affair with a “Whitechapel Jew—of the filthiest type”, a dress-designer, whose name was O. Leta. As I read it I felt sure that Yates was telling the story of the breakdown of his own marriage to Bettine. Like Elsie Baumer, whose initials reversed are B.E., Bettine (nee Edwards) had been on the stage. Mercer first met her at a party given by the actor manager, Oscar Asche, at Christmas 1918 when she was appearing in Chu Chin Chow. From that moment I wanted to find out more about “the American girl who did me the honour to become my wife” and who had changed to the fictional murderess of This Publican. I tried Ward Lock, his publishers. but their records had been destroyed by bombing during the war and they could only put me in touch with Mr John Cousens of Rillington in Yorkshire who, like me, had set out on the trail of Dornford Yates. It was through Mr Cousens, to whom I am deeply indebted for his generosity, that the true picture began to emerge. Mr Cousens had corresponded with Bettine before her death in Lugano in 1973 and from her had obtained an account of her life with Mercer at Pau. From other people he had heard the story of the breakdown of their marriage. It is a tragic story of jealousy, possessiveness, harassment and cruelty, and is wholly out of character with the charming, generous Berry. Nobody I have spoken to and who knew them both has had a good word to say for Mercer or a bad one for Bettine. Even Bettine’s own description of Mercer in a letter to Mr Cousens is not without generosity:
“He had a very good mind and quite naturally, took responsibility and assumed authority. He was fond of luxury and display, was ambitious, self-reliant, proud and punctilious, domineering and possessive. His manner was stiff, formal and serious and he much disliked familiarity. He was a nature lover keen on dogs, horses and birds but he was not broadminded or tolerant and hence, very critical of his fellow men. He was not an irritable person but had a very hot temper which exploded so fiercely when he was annoyed that he frightened people. He had no interest at all in social life and avoided it as much as he could. The life he liked was working at his table with Nobby, the dog, lying beside him and with his wife, knitting or sewing, in an armchair by the fire, the only interruption of this being a drive into the surrounding country after lunch. As you see, he was a real recluse.”
In another letter she says that the Pleydell family existed only in his imagination and that his books were his refuge from real life. This very fair description of Mercer comes from the woman he had vilified in This Publican. Mr Cousens has proof of this supposition in a letter from Mercer’s secretary in which she says that he regarded it as his best book and admitted that Rowena was a similar character to his first wife. There are other convincing indications that this was so. This led us to the cause of the divorce and his subsequent loathing for Bettine. One source has it that Mercer was intensely jealous of her to the extent that he refused to allow her to sing in the hearing of anyone but himself and had the windows shut when she did sing. Bettine was being pestered by an enthusiastic suitor, a Frenchman with a reputation as a womanizer. She pleaded with Mercer to put a stop to this. Mercer refused and in desperation Bettine allowed the man to see her once when Mercer was in London in the hope that having satisfied his vanity he would leave her alone. This certainly fits in with the admissions she makes in the letters and notes below. But the question of “an affair” remains unsolved. What is certain is that Mercer’s possessiveness reached such proportions that he kept her virtually a prisoner in the Villa Maryland and refused to allow her to get out of the car in town so that friends had to come out of the Club to talk to her through the car window. Bettine’s sister has written:
“Mr Mercer was not liked. He was pompous, conceited, overbearing & domineering. Also cruel, unfair and malicious. He was consumed by ambition. My sister was very entertaining, talented and intelligent. She was very musical. I understand that my sister had many admirers as most attractive ladies. Finally Mr Mercer could no longer stand being Mrs Mercer’s husband . . . and got very unpleasant. Mrs Mercer at that point came to the United States to visit our Mother and me. She probably was over here three to four months. During that time a cable came from Mr Mercer that their son was in hospital for an eye operation in London. My sister immediately left for London. On her way to the hospital she was handed a subpoena by a man in the street”.
As for the co-respondent, I have it on good authority that Mercer himself travelled to Paris to be present when the writ alleging adultery was served on the man as he and his wife left church after a wedding. In any case he had planned his revenge on Bettine when he wrote her the following letter a month or so before the writs were served.
Villa Maryland,
Pau
7th June, 1932
My dear Bet,
I was glad to find your cable waiting for me when I got back yesterday and to know that you had arrived safely. I hope you have had the letters I sent you from the ship, but this may get to you before they do. In any event, there wasn’t much in them, I’m afraid. But I think this letter is going to be a great relief to you. We had very good weather almost all the time and I am very burned and awfully well—mentally as well as physically. I must say the cruise was the very thing I needed, and I am a man again. I do hope your voyage has done as much for you, though to tell you the truth, I believe my state was worse than yours. People were awfully nice to me on board, and though I don’t know that you would have found them very amusing, they were the sort of people that I can get on with which is what I needed so much. (I don’t know why I think of it here, but oughtn’t your pearls to be restrung? Do look out for that.) I was glad to see Madeira again and it was just as lovely, though they have built a great deal. I hope you found your Mother very well and that you are not too hot and uncomfortable. The servants tell me that it rained here every day since I went, except two, and the garden looks lovely. Isn’t it cruel? And I have a fire today because it is cold and threatening. Richard seems very well and happy from his letters and asks for a mouthorgan which I have sent him. And now I am going to pick up the reins again and drive as I should, for I am up on the box again with my feet planted and my back straight.
My dear, I have been so blind; but now I can see. Our dream crashed at last two years ago. It was fated, I suppose, that it should crash. Anyway, crash it did. And I fought like a madman—or spoiled child—for two years to mend what was unmendable. It is so clear now. Nothing could ever mend it, Bet. You’ve known that for ages, but you couldn’t find it in your heart to tell me. And at last I’ve found it out. Well, I’m over the jump at last, and on my feet again and sane in body and mind. We ought to have parted before, of course—long ago. That we didn’t, is my fault. I’m afraid you’ve had a bad time, and I’m very sorry. But I’ve got it straight now. Oh Bet, I’ve got so much to thank you for—ten such happy years. And I’m going to forget the last two or three and remember the others, as I know you will—always. Now I hope you’ll stay on in America and take some decent honest man—you’ll have so many suitors—who will make you really happy again. I want you to be happy so much, Bet. And of course I would do everything to make things easy for you to marry again. And even though I might have the custody of Richard I would always let you have him half the time—though he could not go to America just yet. You can understand that. If you don’t stay, I hope so much that you’ll live in Paris. For one thing only, I do not want him to spend his holidays in Paris again—it’s no place for him. And I do feel it isn’t the place for you, Bet. I’m only speaking as your good friend my dear. You can live so well in London on the money there is; but not in Paris alone, for there are address of real standing is absolutely essential for you. And London is so much cheaper now. Do think this well over, Bet. I will write to you again very soon. I know this letter will be a great relief to you, dear. And I know that you have tried to hang on all this time because you didn’t want to hurt me. But I’m all right now. I’ve come up at least and I am myself again and can look things square in the face, and they don’t hurt me any more.
We mustn’t meet again, my lambie; but mind you write to me sometimes and tell me how things are going and how you are. And if ever you are in trouble, Bet, you can always count on me. You know that, don’t you? And if ever you’re uncertain about anything and would like to hear what I think, mind you ask me, for I’ll tell you how I feel, as a friend—not as a husband.
I’m rather counting on having Richard for the first part of the holidays any way, and so am arranging to be in London for a day or so at the end of July. I want to take him to the oculist, you know. And now I must stop.
Once again, thank you, my lady. I wasn’t easy to live with, I see that now. But you gave me the finest ten years that a man could ever ask for; and that is something Fate cannot take from me—a memory for which I shall always be most grateful, of which I shall always be most proud.
God bless and keep you, Bet dear—always.
Bill
A month or so later she was summoned back to England by cable and the writ was served. At first Bettine was ready to contest the case and she had a defence but in her own words “when he started divorce proceedings, he sent me a message saying that if I let the case go through undefended he would pay me £500 a year” and that he would let her have access to their son. On the strength of these promises Bettine agreed but the £500 was reduced to £250 and in 1942 to £120. And for 20 years Bettine led a lonely life. She never married again and while she lived a sad and desperate life in London and France—Mercer threatened to cut off even the £10 a month if she went within 100 miles of Pau—he was writing This Publican in which she is portrayed as a murderess, a blackmailer and a cheat. As she wrote in one of her letters, “You see he is very hot on other people keeping their word but he apparently can do as he likes”.
A diary she kept in 1935 tells of her misery:
May 8th
I am going to start this diary because I have been accused of so many things that I haven’t done and have found it so difficult and even impossible at times to prove that I haven’t done them that I think perhaps if I have a detailed record of facts it may help me in future. Bill has behaved so despicably. He has trapped me without scruple so that he has everything and no blame at all and has seen to it that for £500 a year I shoulder all the blame and am entirely in his power. I suppose it is very weak kneed of me not to find a job of some kind and be independent of him, but I should not be the least surprised if that is not his object in his incessant persecution of me so that he doesn’t even have to do that. And if I did do it, how could I help Richard? I should have even less than I have now for even with training it is hard to even get a job and nearly impossible to make a living and without it what chance have I? If I could only find someone who would help me. At times I feel so desperate. I have done nothing to be at the mercy of a cruel hypocrite like Bill. God knows I broke myself down trying to make him happy and this is what I get for it. I read this and wonder if I am whining, but I know I am not because I know and he knows in the bottom of himself that the only reason I ever deceived him was because of his own unbending and suspicious attitude towards my pleadings. And now he is doing the same thing to Richard. Crushing him and driving him and shutting him up if he says anything he does not want to hear. Heaven knows, I want Richard to have the best advantages, but certainly not at the price of his health or sanity. He is so easily shut up. In fact it is so hard to know what he is feeling that the thought of Bill’s way of dealing with him, fills me with fear. What does he know or care about a sensitive nature? The only thing in him that can be touched is his sex and his pride. Otherwise he doesn’t know the feeling of liking someone and wanting to cooperate and be on good terms with people, and as for other people’s feelings, he enjoys hurting them and sending them off “with a flea in their ear”, as he puts it, unless they treat him as though he were the Almighty himself. I should have been warned years ago when he thrashed one of the servants and then went into court as the nervous cringing “village idiot”. And at other times when his pompous bluff has failed and he has crawled out, ignominiously afraid.
The thrashing mentioned in this note refers to an incident in Pau when a servant left a curtain open so that the sun fell on a painting Mercer particularly valued. The servant brought a summons against Mercer who went into court and apparently pleaded his war record as “un brave Capitaine Anglais” whose nerves had been shattered by the war and on those grounds he was acquitted. Since he had seen service only in Cairo and Salonika this seems a doubtful defence, but in any case his treatment of Bettine destroys his claim to be any sort of gentleman. And after all, this is what the Berry books are all about, chivalry, kindness, duty, honour and charm. Mercer failed on all counts and the ideals he extolled in his novels he ignored in reality. In the 1950s while Bettine lived in “reduced circumstances” in Lugano, Dornford Yates was still writing. By now in As Berry & I were Saying, and in B-Berry & I Look Back he has the family discussing his own books and reminiscing on the good old days when gentlemen were gentlemen and servants knew their place. He is an ardent advocate of hanging and flogging even if this means executing the occasional innocent and he would have the insane painlessly despatched. P. G. Wodehouse once told me he thought Mercer was mad. At the time I thought he was wrong. Now I am less sure.
In his will he left orders for “Mr Woodward, Jeweller of Umtali, to deal with my picture clock as follows, namely he shall remove the clock from the picture, sever the gongs, dismantle the clock and destroy the parts to the satisfaction of my Executors.” His orders were carried out. I have since learnt that he would stand in front of this picture, that of a church with a tower in which there was a real clock, and discuss his problems with it. It is understandable that he should want it destroyed at his death. The picture knew too much. And in his will he left £100 to Bettine who couldn’t imagine why. He left nothing to his son. To him Bettine wrote in 1959: “You did not ask him to bring you into the world and he was not thinking of anyone but himself when he did, I can assure you of that. In fact that is his great trouble, he is never thinking of anyone but himself. He is quite incapable of loving someone in the true sense of the word. He wants someone near him because he doesn’t like being alone any more than anyone else but he wants even more. He wants some sort of reflected interest or reflected advantage from the person and unless he gets it he has no real interest in them.”
If by the time he came to die Dornford Yates had proved himself a blackguard rather than a gentleman, the woman he had so often called “My Lady” still deserved the accolade.