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Lord Berners

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Portrait of Lord Berners, by Rex Whistler, 1929

Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners[1] (18 September 1883 – 19 April 1950), also known as Gerald Tyrwhitt, was a British composer, novelist, painter, and aesthete. He was also known as Lord Berners.

Biography

[edit]

Early life and education

[edit]

Berners was born in Apley Hall, Stockton, Shropshire, in 1883, as Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt,[2] son of The Honorable Hugh Tyrwhitt (1856–1907) and his wife Julia Mary (1861–1931), daughter of William Orme Foster, Apley's owner.[3][4][page needed]

His father, a Royal Navy officer, was rarely home.[5][4][page needed] Berners was therefore mainly raised by his paternal grandmother, Harriet Tyrwhitt, 12th Baroness Berners who was extremely religious and self-righteous, and a mother whom Berners himself considered had little intellect and many prejudices.[6][4][page needed]

In 1890 Berners and his parents moved to Althrey[7] house near Wrexham. Berners was educated by the local curate.[7]

His mother, who was the daughter of a rich ironmaster, and had a strong interest in fox hunting,[8] in spite of her own artistic inclinations ignored her sons cultural and musical interests and instead focused on developing his masculinity, a trait Berners found to be inherently unnatural.[4][page needed]

Berners felt like a black sheep in his family, whom he considered completely uninterested in pursuing any cultural pursuits [9].

Berners later wrote, "My father was worldly, cynical, intolerant of any kind of inferiority, reserved and self-possessed. My mother was unworldly, naïve, impulsive and undecided, and in my father's presence she was always at her worst".[10]

Berners father became ill in 1906[7][11], and died in 1907[11] while being conveyed by the ship SS Caledonia to Port Said[11] and was buried at sea.[11]His widow remarried in 1908 to the colonel William Ward Bennitt.[11][4][page needed][12] Berners never got along with his step-father.

Berners was first educated at home by governesses and then enrolled at the boarding school Cheam School[11]. He then was admitted to Eton College in 1897. After his graduation he studied at Résenlieu France and Germany while attempting to pass the entry examination for the Foreign Office.[4][page needed] He twice failed the examination[11] but instead served as an honorary attache in Constantinople from 1909 to 1911 and at Rome until after succeeding to his peerage in 1918.[3]

Adult life

[edit]

In 1918, Berners became the 14th holder of the Berners Barony, after inheriting the title, property, and money from an uncle.[13][14] His inheritance included Faringdon House, in Faringdon, Berkshire, which he initially gave to his mother and her second husband; on their deaths in 1931 he moved into the house himself.[15] In 1932, Berners fell in love with Robert Heber-Percy, 28 years his junior, who became his companion and moved into Faringdon House.[16] Unexpectedly, Heber-Percy married a 21-year-old woman, Jennifer Fry, who had a baby nine months later. For a short time, she and the baby lived at Faringdon House with Heber-Percy and Berners.[17]

As well as being a talented musician, Berners was a skilled artist and writer. He appears in many books and biographies of the period, notably portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love.[18] He was a friend of the Mitford family and close to Diana Guinness, although Berners was politically apathetic and was deeply dismayed by the outbreak of the Second World War.[19]

Berners was notorious for his eccentricity,[20] dyeing pigeons at his house in Faringdon in vibrant colours and at one point entertaining Penelope Betjeman's horse Moti to tea.[13] The interior of the house was enlivened with joke books and notices, such as "Mangling Done Here". Patrick Leigh Fermor, who stayed as a guest, recalled:

"No dogs admitted" at the top of the stairs and "Prepare to meet thy God" painted inside a wardrobe. When people complimented him on his delicious peaches he would say "Yes, they are ham-fed". And he used to put Woolworth pearl necklaces round his dogs' necks [Berners had a dalmatian, Heber-Percy the retriever, Pansy Lamb] and when a guest, rather perturbed, ran up saying "Fido has lost his necklace", G said, "Oh dear, I'll have to get another out of the safe."[20]

Other visitors to Faringdon included Igor Stravinsky, Salvador Dalí, H. G. Wells, and Tom Driberg.[21]

His Rolls-Royce automobile contained a small clavichord keyboard which could be stored beneath the front seat. Near his house he had a 100-foot viewing tower, Faringdon Folly, constructed as a birthday present in 1935 for Heber-Percy,[21] a notice at the entrance reading: "Members of the Public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk".[22] Berners also drove around his estate wearing a pig's-head mask to frighten the locals.[6][18]

He was subject throughout his life to periods of depression which became more pronounced during the Second World War, when he had a nervous breakdown. He lived in lodgings for a period in Oxford where his friend Maurice Bowra got him a job cataloguing books. Following the production of his last ballet Les Sirènes (1946) he lost his eyesight.[19]

Death and epitaph

[edit]

He died in 1950 aged 66 at Faringdon House, bequeathing his estate to Robert Heber-Percy,[13] who lived there until his own death in 1987.[23] His ashes are buried in the lawn near the house.[24]

Berners wrote his own epitaph, which appears on his gravestone:

Here lies Lord Berners
One of the learners
His great love of learning
May earn him a burning
But, Praise the Lord!
He seldom was bored.

Music

[edit]

Berners' early music, written during his period at the British embassy in Rome during World War I, was avant-garde in style. These are mostly songs (in English, French and German) and piano pieces, many written using his original name, Gerald Tyrwhitt. Later pieces were composed in a more accessible style, such as the Trois morceaux, Fantaisie espagnole (1919), Fugue in C minor (1924), and several ballets, including The Triumph of Neptune (1926) (based on a story by Sacheverell Sitwell) and Luna Park, commissioned for a C. B. Cochran London revue in 1930.[25] His final three ballets, A Wedding Bouquet, Cupid and Psyche and Les Sirènes, were all written in collaboration with his friends Frederick Ashton (as choreographer) and Constant Lambert (as music director).[26]

Berners was also friendly with William Walton. Walton dedicated Belshazzar's Feast to Berners, and Lambert arranged a Caprice péruvien for orchestra, from Lord Berners' opera Le carrosse du St Sacrement. There are also scores for two films: The Halfway House (1943) and Nicholas Nickleby (1947), for which Ealing's music director, Ernest Irving, provided the orchestrations.[26]

Berners himself once said that he would have been a better composer if he had accepted fewer lunch invitations. However, English composer Gavin Bryars, quoted in Peter Dickinson's biography of Berners, disagrees saying: "If he had spent more time on his music he could have become a duller composer".[6] Dinah Birch, reviewing The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, a biography of Berners written by Robert's granddaughter, Sofka Zinovieff, concurs saying: "Had he committed himself to composition as his life's work, perhaps his legacy would have been more substantial. But his music might have been less innovative, for its amateur quality – 'amateur in the best sense', as Stravinsky insisted – is inseparable from its distinctive flair".[18]

Berners was the subject of BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week programmes in December 2014.[27]

Literature

[edit]

Berners wrote four autobiographical works and some novels, mostly of a humorous nature. All were published and some went into translations. His autobiographies First Childhood (1934), A Distant Prospect (1945), The Château de Résenlieu (published posthumously)[28] and Dresden are both witty and affectionate.[according to whom?]

Berners obtained some notoriety for his roman à clef The Girls of Radcliff Hall (punning on the name of the famous lesbian writer), initially published privately under the pseudonym "Adela Quebec",[29] in which he depicts himself and his circle of friends, such as Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel, as members of a girls' school. This frivolous satire, which was privately published and distributed, had a modish success in the 1930s. The original edition is rare; rumour has it that Beaton was responsible for gathering most of the already scarce copies of the book and destroying them.[30] However, the book was reprinted in 2000 with the help of Dorothy Lygon.[31]

His other novels, including Romance of a Nose, Count Omega and The Camel are a mixture of whimsy and gentle satire.

Bibliography

[edit]

Fiction

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  • 1936 – The Camel
  • 1937 – The Girls of Radcliff Hall
  • 1941 – Far From the Madding War
  • 1941 – Count Omega
  • 1941 – Percy Wallingford and Mr. Pidger
  • 1941 – The Romance of a Nose

[See Collected Tales and Fantasies, New York, 1999]

Non-fiction

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  • 1934 – First Childhood
  • 1945 – A Distant Prospect
  • 2000 - The Chateau de Resenlieu
  • 2008 - Dresden

Legacy

[edit]

In January 2016, he was played by actor Christopher Godwin in episode 3 of the BBC Radio 4 drama What England Owes.[32]

See also

[edit]

Sources

[edit]
  • Amory, Mark (3 June 1999). Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (New ed.). Pimlico. ISBN 978-0712665780.
  • Berners, Lord Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson (1942). First Childhood. Constable & Co Ltd. ASIN B002S9ZE5C.
  • Dickinson, Peter (18 September 2008). Lord Berners: Composer, Writer, Painter (Annotated ed.). Boydell Press. ISBN 978-1843833925.
  • Jones, Bryony (2 January 2003). The Music of Lord Berners (1883–1950): The Versatile Peer (Illustrated ed.). Ashgate Publishing Ltd. ISBN 978-0754608523.
  • Lyon Clark, Beverly (11 January 2001). Regendering the school story: Sassy sissies and tattling tomboys. Routledge. ISBN 978-0415928915.
  • Tamagne, Florence (1 November 2005). History of Homosexuality in Europe Between the Wars, Vol. I & II Combined. Algora Publishing. ISBN 978-0875863566.
  • Zinovieff, Sofka (16 October 2014). The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother And Me. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 978-0224096591.

References

[edit]
  1. ↑ Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson at the National Portrait Gallery
  2. ↑ The surname became Tyrwhitt-Wilson by royal licence in 1919, after he had acceded to the Berners barony and baronetcy (Amory, ch. VI)
  3. 1 2 The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 59. Oxford University Press. 2004. p. 540. ISBN 0-19-861409-8.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Dickinson, Peter (2008). Lord Berners: Composer, Writer, Painter. Boydell & Brewer Ltd. ISBN 978-1-84383-392-5.
  5. ↑ Jones (2003), p. 1.
  6. 1 2 3 Thompson, Damian (20 September 2008). "Review: Lord Berners by Peter Dickinson". The Daily Telegraph. London. Retrieved 14 October 2014.
  7. 1 2 3 Jones, Bryony (4 June 2019). The Music of Lord Berners (1883-1950): The Versatile Peer: The Versatile Peer. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-351-75977-9.
  8. ↑ Furbank, P.N. (21 May 1998). "Lord Fitzcricket". London Review of Books. 20 (10). London: 32. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
  9. ↑ Zinovieff, Sofka (31 March 2015). The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me: An Aristocratic Family, a High-Society Scandal, and an Extraordinary Legacy. Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-233896-9.
  10. ↑ Berners (1942), Chapter 'My Parents'.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Leith, Sam (4 October 2012). Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric. Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-28728-4.
  12. ↑ Zinovieff, Sofka (31 March 2015). The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me: An Aristocratic Family, a High-Society Scandal, and an Extraordinary Legacy. Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-233896-9.
  13. 1 2 3 Cecil, Mirabel (18 October 2014). "My mad gay grandfather and me". The Spectator. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
  14. ↑ Jones (2003), p. 2.
  15. ↑ Seymour, Miranda (24 April 2015). "'The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me', by Sofka Zinovieff". The New York Times. New York. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
  16. ↑ Cecil, Mirabel (18 October 2014). "My mad gay grandfather and me". The Spectator. Retrieved 12 November 2017.
  17. ↑ Cooke, Rachel (19 October 2014). "The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me review – a family saga with all the trimmings". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 November 2017.
  18. 1 2 3 Birch, Dinah (11 October 2014). "Composer, novelist, poet, painter and hedonistic host – the real Lord Merlin and his glamorous, desperate world". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
  19. 1 2 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 59. p. 542.
  20. 1 2 Amory (1999).
  21. 1 2 Cooke, Rachel (19 October 2014). "The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me review – a family saga with all the trimmings". The Observer. London. Retrieved 28 January 2016.
  22. ↑ Wilkes, Roger. "Cultured country house". Telegraph.co.uk. Archived from the original on 2 May 2013. Retrieved 2 July 2013.
  23. ↑ Zinovieff (2014).
  24. ↑ "Oops – we can't find that page".
  25. ↑ Luna Park, Chester Music
  26. 1 2 Lane, Philip. Notes to Naxos CD 8.555223 Archived 4 October 2021 at the Wayback Machine (2021)
  27. ↑ "Radio 3 Composer of the Week". BBC Online. 5 December 2014. Retrieved 26 January 2016.
  28. ↑ Jones (2003), p. 3.
  29. ↑ Amory 1999; Jones 2003, pp. 9, 101, 143; Lyon Clark 2001, p. 143.
  30. ↑ Tamagne (2005), p. 124.
  31. ↑ "Lady Dorothy Heber Percy". 17 November 2001. Retrieved 24 September 2017 – via www.telegraph.co.uk.
  32. ↑ "Radio 4 Afternoon Drama: What England Owes". BBC Online. Retrieved 26 January 2016.
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