The Tennyson Touch

In October 1976 I made my way to Golders Green in north London to call on Sir Charles Tennyson, grandson of the famous poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria’s reign.

My mother, Alexandra Hasluck, had recently spent some years completing a book about the letters of Lady Audrey Tennyson, the wife of Hallam Tennyson, eldest son and biographer of the famous poet. Audrey’s husband served as Governor of South Australia and a few years later went on to serve as Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia from 1902 to 1904. My mother’s book, which was about to be published by the National Library in Canberra, was called Audrey Tennyson’s Vice-Regal Days, for that was the story reflected in Audrey’s letters to her mother in England.

In the course of editing these letters, my mother had been corresponding at some length with Sir Charles Tennyson as the book gradually assumed its final form. Naturally, in fulfilling my mother’s wish that I should call on Sir Charles while I was in London, I had prepared for such a meeting by reading his autobiography, Stars and Markets, a story of particular interest to me for Sir Charles was not only a lawyer but a writer enriched by some fascinating literary connections.

Charles Tennyson was born in 1879. His father was the younger son of the famous poet but died unexpectedly on his way home from India at a comparatively early age. A few years later Charles’s mother married the lawyer and well-known literary essayist Augustine Birrell, whose collection of pieces about law and literature, Obiter Dicta, was widely respected. This led to Charles being brought up in two households—in the home of his grandfather on the Isle of Wight, where the poet had lived for many years, and with his stepfather Birrell’s family in London.

Charles was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, before attending Lincoln’s Inn as an avenue to practising as a barrister. After a while, tiring of the legal round, he served in the Colonial Office for a time before going on to become secretary to the Dunlop Rubber Company. This led to an appointment as Chairman of the Board of Trade Utility Furniture Committee. By now, he was also something of a literary man, having published 140 reviews and miscellaneous essays.

When the family archives came under his control after the death of his uncle (Hallam, Lord Tennyson) Charles published a biography of his grandfather, Alfred Tennyson,in 1949. Of the seventy further items added to Sir Charles’s bibliography in the course of his later life many were concerned with the Tennyson family. Not surprisingly, then, he was the person my mother turned to in the course of editing Audrey Tennyson’s letters about her vice-regal days.

Sir Charles was now ninety-seven years of age. When I was ushered into his presence, I found him sitting upright in a chair by the window, a rug across his knees, well protected from any chills by a sturdy cardigan, fully alert, greeting me with a kindly smile.

Inevitably, we began by talking about my mother’s forthcoming book and about Audrey Tennyson’s life in the aftermath of her vice-regal days in Australia.

It seems that she and her husband Hallam returned to the Isle of Wight. In the early years of the Great War, after her son Harold was killed in action, she threw herself into work as commandant of a Red Cross hospital. She died of pneumonia in 1916, survived by two sons and her husband, who remarried a few years later.

Our conversation moved on to some other more personal events and recollections. Sir Charles confirmed, with a friendly chuckle, that he left the law early on, believing that a life in the Colonial Office would be more interesting. But not so, he decided eventually. He went on to the business world, the Dunlop company and so forth, but literature was always in the background, moving to centre stage from time to time. Cricket was important too. He once saw the great English batsman W.G. Grace in action. In his prime, Grace was a commanding figure in the cricket world, hence the many anecdotes. As on the occasion when Grace was bowled first ball, so the story goes, but refused to leave the crease. When the bowler protested, Grace stood his ground, waved his bat at the crowd around the oval, and said fiercely: “They’ve come to see me bat, lad, not to see you bowl.”

Our get-together ended on that anecdotal and possibly apocryphal note, accompanied by a promise on my part to convey his good wishes to my mother. He assented to this with an assurance that he was looking forward to reading her book.

A little later, while filling in time before meeting a friend from the literary world in London, a friend with a legal background like myself, I returned to one of the passages in Sir Charles Tennyson’s autobiography, Stars and Markets, of particular interest to me. In this passage he sets out an insightful description of the legal world as it was when he started out in the early years of the twentieth century, a description that still sounds persuasive in contemporary times: 

The law is a hard master and may, if served too long and too exclusively, prove sterilizing, but it supplies the only training in logic, which, so far as I know, exists in our country, and supplies it in a form where failure brings its own practical retribution. It teaches one to pursue relentlessly the chain of cause and effect, to distinguish the real point and avoid being side-tracked by the irrelevant. It teaches one to write and think clearly and to express oneself lucidly both orally and in writing, gives one the power of picking up a case quickly, however complex it may be, and if one succeeds in getting briefs in court, to speak with confidence and to put what one has to say in the form which will best appeal to one’s audience, whether that be a bored and perhaps crotchety judge or a jury of one’s fellow citizens. The law also gives one a wide view of humanity and its operations, whether in society, commerce, industry or administration, and within limits, a living view of history, however confusing in its mass of details. Although I only practised as a barrister for a few years I have always been glad of the experience and of the study which preceded it.

When my friend arrived, I couldn’t help mentioning my recent memorable encounter with Sir Charles Tennyson. I could still scarcely believe that in this small way I had tapped into Victorian and Edwardian times as though they were still happening, and had ended up chatting about leading personalities such as Augustine Birrell, W.G. Grace and Alfred Tennyson himself, as though they were still alive. And all of this in a companionable tone from a fascinating storyteller in his ninety-eighth year. As the Poet Laureate put it in “Ulysses”, in some of his best-remembered lines:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are.

Nicholas Hasluck’s latest book is Print and Prize (Connor Court). In the March issue he wrote an account of his travels while chairing the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.