Clearing up after great men: Granny Blackburn and the mess of post-imperial Britain
A bookcase, a mysterious proof copy, and a reckoning with colonial-era inheritances
This piece is based on a talk I gave at three Catalyst Club events, in Lewes, Shoreham and Brighton, in 2025.
My father grew up in the East Sussex village of Blackboys, where his father Sidney – better known as Dobbie – was the last in a long line of farmers. Their home Shawford was an antiquated farm cottage tucked away in a damp, wooded hollow. A stream meandered along the end of the back garden and disappeared under the lane. Were you to drop in a twig and chase it downstream, it would lead you down through a copse to a magical clearing – where, as your stick plopped into the millpond, you would look up and see it: Tickerage, a 17th-century iron mill that was now an enchanting house.
Almost nothing I’m about to share came from my dad; he hardly ever spoke of his home life, and when he did, it was only to remind us what a cruel bastard his father had been, and that we should count ourselves lucky to have a dad like him. Around Shawford there existed a great wall of silence.
I never knew Dobbie, my grandfather; he died in 1982, the year I was born. But his wife, my grandmother Billie, lived until I was 19. I knew her a little, though in hindsight, I wish I’d asked her more questions. She seemed different from the rest of our family, posher somehow: she pronounced years as “yurs”, and filled her home with books. That’s how this story really begins: Billie was determined that our family should inherit her most prized possession: a tall, glass-fronted bookcase full of old hardbacks.
When she died in 2001, her wishes were honoured, and when Dad carted the bookcase from his van into our sitting room, it looked oddly out of place. By then, I was an English literature student, but Billie’s books didn’t much interest me – except for one tatty, brown, conspicuously untitled spine. Curious, I plucked it from the shelf and found a label stuck to the front cover: The Gentle Savage by Richard Wyndham – neither title or name meant anything to me. But leafing through it, I noticed pencilled annotations in the margins, and I realised it was an editor’s proof copy.
Twenty years later, I’d all but forgotten the book when, in 2021, my partner and I watched Exterminate All the Brutes, a brilliant, devastating documentary about the genocidal roots of European colonialism. Its title comes from Heart of Darkness, a novella by Joseph Conrad, in which the central figure, a maverick ivory trader named Mr Kurtz is extracted from the Congo jungle, mad and dying, alongside a report he has written on the “suppression of savage customs”. It is neatly written except for the last page, on which he has scrawled: “exterminate all the brutes”.
That scrawl immediately brought to mind The Gentle Savage, with its scribbled annotations, still sitting undisturbed in Billie’s bookcase. The next time I visited Mum, I carefully took the fragile proof copy from the shelf and slipped it gently into my rucksack like an unexploded bomb. When I got home, I googled The Gentle Savage and was taken aback to find a plentiful supply of second-hand copies for sale on used book sites: four editions, published in 1936-1937, complete with Wyndham’s photos and paintings. I ordered a “good condition” hardback, and began to reckon with the implication of the abundant supply: it had clearly been a commercial success, even if no one was too keen to hang on to their copies today. But who was Richard Wyndham? As I researched, I began to discover a man of split identities: a blue-blooded aristocrat descended from the Earl of Egremont of Petworth House, and a louche bohemian better known as Dick.
When the book arrived I started reading it straight away and was surprised to find it engaging and mordantly funny, at least at first. It opens on New Year’s Day 1935, with Dick hungover and depressed, idly watching foam flit across the churning millstream at Tickerage. Southern Sudan pops into his head for a few reasons: he has a friend there, a colonial district commissioner; another friend, Sacheverell Sitwell, has just written about the Dinka tribe; and, even more dubiously, Dick recalls enjoying a golliwog adventure story as a boy. The decision is made: he’ll cash in some investments and book a flight.
When he arrives in Sudan, it’s as though he’s visiting a faraway part of the family estate – which in a sense of course he is. He gets drunk with colonial friends, shoots anything that moves, and admires the “typically British” justice system for its leniency – the detainee’s flogging is stopped after just 15 lashes. Soon bored by these distractions, he ups the stakes, purchasing two young girls as “models” for his painting. This is how he describes them:
“Aneege was a strapping Dinka girl, twelve to fourteen years old, with the large, soft eyes of a spaniel. She cost six cows, or approximately £4. Rafa, a Niam-Niam, was about the same age but very much cheaper.”
When in the next paragraph he describes Rafa’s body as “sublime”, I dreaded what was coming. Sure enough, a few pages later he recounts a “regrettable scene” with Rafa where he forced her against her will to strip naked. There was a double shock in reading this: the violation of the girl, but also Wyndham’s willingness to admit to it so as to titillate his audience. If he deemed the assault of a minor acceptable for public consumption, what was the true extent of what had gone on? Earlier, he had described how another colonial Englishman named Jameson had bought a 12-year-old Sudanese wife, recounting the chilling detail of their wedding night, how the young bride “had lain quite still, picking the plaster off the wall”.
I assumed I’d never find out what really happened to Rafa; that the contempt in her eyes looking up at Wyndham as he took her photo told me everything I needed to know. But then I found an autobiography by Dick’s friend Peter Quennell, published decades later, with this revelation about The Gentle Savage:
“Dick was reluctant to inform his readers that he had acquired a native ‘wife’ or mistress… so presents Rafa as merely the artist’s model; and a description of her way of making love - or, rather, suffering the act of love he attributed to an old official called Jameson.”
I began to feel a bit sick. Part of me wanted to dismiss The Gentle Savage as “of its time”, viewing Dick Wyndham as the product of his class and era. But I couldn’t. The book’s being thrust back into my attention by Exterminate All the Brutes – the haunting resonance of Kurtz’s scrawl – felt too insistent, too fateful. And with Billie’s name inscribed inside the front cover of the proof copy, how could I distance myself from it? Horrifying as it was, this book was my inheritance.
Wyndham’s racism is extreme: he explicitly claims that the Sudanese he encounters cannot feel pain or pleasure, nor anticipate or remember – reducing them to less than animals. My first impulse is to say this shocks me. But that would be too easy a way to disown it. Instead, I have to listen to its echoes: I remembered how casually racist my father had been when I got into long-distance running in my early-20s. He took perverse pleasure in ‘othering’ East African runners as “spear-chuckers” – and my discomfort only seemed to feed his enjoyment.
A line from the documentary stuck in my mind: “It’s not knowledge we lack but the courage to understand what we know”. It takes courage to confront what we have inherited, the contents of our bookcases. What had this book meant to Billie, and how had she acquired the proof copy? The only relatives who might know were my cousin Debbie and my aunt Shirley, the last living connection to Shawford. So, last Christmas I paid them a visit.
They told me that Billie’s mother, my great-grandmother, had worked as housekeeper for Dick Wyndham at Tickerage Mill. Aunt Shirley remembered Granny Blackburn, and vaguely recalled the rich man from across the lane. She seemed nonplussed at my interest but humoured me by digging out a battered, mouse-nibbled sketchbook containing rough drafts by Wyndham over which she, as a horse-mad young girl, had pasted clippings from equestrian magazines. I remembered now that my dad had mentioned Granny Blackburn once or twice, but only to recall how he’d hid under the table to escape her kisses. Who was this affectionate grandmother, how had she ended up in domestic service at Tickerage? And what had life been like for her living under Dick Wyndham’s roof?
As Debbie brought out a big box of old keepsakes, we began piecing together Elsie Blackburn’s life. Born Elsie Sewell in 1887, she grew up in Bexhill, where her father ran the Devonshire hotel. In 1909 a dramatic house fire in Bexhill made headlines: a young lodger saved two women from the flames. Left homeless by the blaze, the hero gratefully accepted lodgings at the Sewell family’s hotel. That man was Jo Blackburn, my great-grandfather.
Elsie and Jo married the following year, in 1910 – a pivotal year in many ways. Virginia Woolf famously wrote that “on or around December 1910, human character changed”. Less known is that earlier that year, Woolf had donned blackface to hoax her way aboard HMS Dreadnought. Imperial certainties were crumbling as the world entered a state of flux. Three years later, April 1914, as Britain teetered on the brink of war, Elsie and Jo welcomed their first child, my grandmother Billie.
Strangely, when I asked my family about Jo Blackburn, no one knew anything about him – as if he’d vanished without a trace. Aunt Shirley shrugged and said: “All I know is, he went off to the Gold Coast”. What could that mean? Emigration to Australia? No – but where? We knew Jo had served in WW1, as Debbie had a postcard he’d sent home from East Africa. We also knew he’d survived, returning home to Bexhill in 1919.
It turned out to be yet another link to Empire, as it seems his war experience left Jo Blackburn hungry for overseas adventure, glimpsing a future in Britain’s African colonies. We know this because eventually we found Jo’s name on ships’ passenger lists, tracing his travels to and from colonial mining operations in West Africa, including the Gold Coast (now Ghana). In May 1919, only weeks after getting home from the war, he set sail – spending most of the next few years in Africa, while Elsie was left in England raising two young daughters alone. The Empire on which the sun never set was casting a long shadow over what by now was a marriage in name only.
Census records show Elsie still in the family home near Rye until 1924, but by 1925 she has moved to Telham Stores in Battle – presumably working as a shopkeeper to make ends meet. By the 1930s, approaching middle age, her life becomes more unsettled: she moves several times, possibly looking for work. By now, Billie has married my grandfather and settled at Shawford Farm. I suspect it’s Billie who tells Elsie about the housekeeper job at Tickerage – and in 1939 she takes up the position.
Dick Wyndham’s journey to Tickerage could not have been more different, except in one respect: his life too had been blown apart by WWI. He was just 18 when he went off to war, and in May 1915 was shot in the head near Ypres – the bullet knocked him out but miraculously he survived. Two years later he earned the MC for retrieving a fallen comrade under fire in Salonika in Greece. While this heroism no doubt bolstered his buccaneering image, the trauma lingered – 18 years later, in Sudan, he was still having gruesome nightmares.
The war had claimed his elder brother and four of his cousins, leaving Dick as one of the few surviving sons – and heir to the vast family estate, Clouds House in Wiltshire. Gaining a fortune amid such loss must have felt profoundly bittersweet. As one of his aunts’ biographers put it: “The war had brought an end to the Wyndhams’ way of life as conclusively and briskly as shutting the covers of an old hardback book”.
With death duties soaring, and England changing hands, Dick had no sentimental attachment to Clouds. He dismissed the servants, rented out the house, and began flogging its contents. Nothing was spared, and in 1927 the new tenants watched on agog as unknown men tramped in to wrestle off the wall the huge John Singer Sargent painting of Dick’s three aunts. Dick sold it to the Metropolitan Museum in NYC for £20,000 - equivalent to £1m today. That same year, he bought Tickerage Mill, launching a high-octane spending spree that wouldn’t stop until he was broke.
Having survived the horrors of war, Dick was – as his half-brother Francis Wyndham wrote many years later:
“doggedly determined to have a good time at last. His money was spent on racing cars, aeroplanes, a famous wine cellar, a collection of ‘modern’ pictures and a series of difficult, exquisite girls. He enjoyed among his contemporaries a comfortable reputation for privileged Bohemianism, scandalising some by his licentious behaviour and distressing others by his ‘arty’ inclinations.”
The gatherings held at Tickerage became legendary, with a guest-list that read like a who’s who of literary and artistic 1930s England: Cyril Connolly, Stephen Spender, the Sitwells, Dylan Thomas and many others. Connolly, who was one of Dick’s closest friends, loved staying at Tickerage despite being aware that all was not well with Dick. He wrote:
“The mill where I sometimes stay provides another cure for Angst; the red lane through the Spanish chestnut wood, the apple trees on the lawn, the bees in the roof, the geese on the pond, the black sun-lit marsh marigolds, the wood-fire crackling in the low bedroom, the creak of the cellar-door and the recurrent monotonies of the silver-whispering weir - what could be more womb-like or reassuring? Yet always the anxious owner is flying from it as from the scene of a crime.”
Dick seems endlessly chasing, and chased by, a desire that cannot be tamed. There are many hints that he is more attracted to men than women, though outwardly he allows no chink in his hetero alpha male image. He is often hateful towards women, though it’s downplayed whenever written about. When Dick chases Connolly’s secretary Sonia into the mill pond, Connolly makes light of it, quoting Sonia: “It isn’t his trying to rape me that I mind, but that he doesn’t seem to realise what Cyril stands for.” In her 1993 biography of the Wyndhams, Caroline Dakers writes that “Dick’s physical relationships with women were rarely satisfactory; he required the assistance of whips. handcuffs and ropes to restrain his partners,” though she airily adds that: “His women friends did not seem to be overly upset: while he might insist on the occasional beating, Dick was also a generous host, cultured and witty.”
Imagining my great-grandmother serving at these debauched gatherings, and cleaning up afterwards, I long to be a fly on the wall - the sights she must have seen - but then I think about how, or if, she was actually seen. In the written history of Dick’s time at Tickerage, Elsie is all but erased, as if the housework were done by invisible hands – except for one brief, jarring exception. In the published diaries of Dick’s daughter Joan, a 23rd June 1940 entry describes 19-year-old Joan arriving unannounced at Tickerage. “No one seemed to be around,” she writes, “so we crept up into the house, and tore upstairs before the petrified housekeeper could stop us.” That’s it – Elsie’s only appearance, unnamed and reduced to one awful adjective: petrified.
In my alternative version, Elsie is far from petrified. She has survived too much to be rattled by a snooty brat. She rolls her eyes and gets on with her work – there are far bigger things to worry about. Britain is at war again, and Dick’s mental health is unravelling. His drinking spirals, and in 1942 he is admitted to a London clinic. Elsie stays on at Tickerage, though Dick is rarely there. I like to think this lightens the load and gives her the run of the place. This isn’t pure speculation either – because we found one very special piece of evidence.
On that visit to cousin Debbie, she saved the best for last. As the evening drew to a close, she said she had one more thing to show us – went back to her special drawer and produced a battered old book. As I leafed through it, we soon realised it was Elsie’s autograph book, beginning with entries from 1903, when she was 15 or 16. With eyes popping from our heads, we learnt that her encounters with famous, glamorous guests had begun long before Tickerage – some 35 years earlier.
Many of the autographs had been gathered at the Devonshire Hotel, which Elsie’s brothers had taken on after their father’s death. But it’s not only autographs. The early pages of her book are filled with paintings, poems and inscriptions from glitzy visitors, Edwardian artists and performers – the likes of child prodigy Max Darewski and actress Zena Dare. There’s a pause in entries around 1908 – coinciding with Elsie’s courtship with Joe Blackburn – and then a flurry of flirtatious messages from soldiers billeted at the hotel in 1917-1918.
A longer gap follows – Elsie is raising her daughters while Jo is away in Africa. But amazingly in 1945, now in her late-50s, still living at Tickerage, Elsie brings out the autograph book one last time. Dick Wyndham is away in London and the house is on loan to his friend, the art patron Peter Watson, who is hosting his young lover and protege, the 22-year-old artist John Craxton. He adds the below drawing to Elsie’s book, dedicating it to her with the message: “All best wishes always & memories of food in bed. John Craxton. Feb 1945”.
The war is ending, and Elsie has a new grandchild on the way: Billie gives birth to my father in May 1945. Those with the means to do so will soon be free to travel again. Young John Craxton takes off for Greece, while Dick Wyndham, now nearly 50 – finally sober but still chasing extremes – lands a plum job as special correspondent for Ian Fleming’s foreign news service. But history is overtaking him: three years later, on 19 May 1948, in Jerusalem reporting on a conflict ignited by Britain’s retreat from its colonial mandate just four days earlier, he is killed in a hail of bullets from an Israeli machine gun.
All this history, the mess left by colonialism in the Middle East, Sudan and beyond, remains disastrously unresolved. What’s kept me engrossed is the interplay between historical and personal narratives: from the bookcase to The Gentle Savage, Wyndham, Elsie, Billie, my dad, me, all our lives shaped by world-historical forces we can scarcely perceive, let alone grasp, at the time. It falls to those who come after us to try to make sense, if not make amends.
Wyndham may see himself as playboy-creator of his own dick-first world (pun intended), but really it was the world writing him all along. His whole life can be read as a manic, evasive response to the ruptures of WW1, the fracturing of Empire, and the slipping from power of his once all-powerful class. For Elsie too, the war changes everything irrevocably: she loses her husband to an Empire in its last throes, and takes refuge at Tickerage, a temporary haven of dissipating wealth, the last gasps of a decadent age.
And what about all of us, three or four generations on, alive in 2025? What world-historical currents are shaping our lives, sweeping us along even as we convince ourselves we are masters of our own destiny?
Great to have the chance to read this, a few months after the talk and very soon after watching Remains of the Day on the TV! It's a witness to lives of people just working to get by, lives which collide with the powerful and their exploitation of the powerless. Yet the powerful may be complex as well as exploitative. And their behaviour was permitted, enshrined even. Perhaps we don't actually have to look too hard to see today's similarities among our rich and powerful...
Fascinating, David. Thank you.