New Information: Lady Frances Ryder, Jack Mitchell, and Dr. Harold J. Penny

Hello, everyone! My, it's wonderful to have something to write about George Mills again—even if it won't be about George directly!

I'm delighted! And when it rains, it tends to pour—well, at least here in sub-tropical Florida—and I awakened this morning to find not one, but two Mills-related items in my mailbox. The first regards the home of George's widowed mother, Edith, and spinster sisters, Agnes and Violet, during the Great Depression, when the Mills women lived at 21 Cadogan Gardens, S.W. [left].

During that time, and during the Second World War, a boarder at the home, specifically in "21B," was Lady Frances Ryder. In a previous post we discovered that she did, indeed, live with the Mills during the war, and facilitated the Isles Dominion Hospitality Scheme from her flat with the help of Miss Celia Macdonald.

Reader Roger Kelly writes:

In Who Is George Mills I see you are -like me- puzzled by Lady Ryder and what went on at Cadogan Gardens. It was a club, and used as a postal address and meeting place for people of no fixed address. Close to the heart of the British establishment, there were filing clerks behind the scenes: think of the first ten minutes of "A Matter of Life and Death" -"Stairway to Heaven" to you.

Lady Ryder's organisation comes up in an online biography I'm writing of an overseas student [Jack Mitchell, right] in England towards the end of 1935.

See it on my website here
www.kosmoid.net/technology/jackmitchell

best wishes
Roger
near Edinburgh



Thank you so much, Roger!

While the Mills women are not mentioned on that web page, we find there must have been quite a bit going on. The hospitality scheme is clarified here at the well-researched website:

November 1935

Social efforts to engage new Rhodes scholars continued to target Winston. Jack also would be drawn into the net by the end of the year. It started with an invitation to meet Miss Macdonald of the Isles at Rhodes House on Friday 1st. It was an informal dance evening making things go with a swing and about 30 Rhodes Scholars were there of all nationalities –a high proportion Americans - with a good number of quite nice English and Danish girls. Miss Macdonald of the Isles, whose very name helped to cast a spell, announced that a social week was being arranged in London for Rhodes Scholars and others in the second week of December, and there would be a chance to stay with different people in the Christmas break too. Very kind, but as Jack says, these people arrange the “scheme” in much the same way as others as well-to-do go “slumming”.

Miss Macdonald ran Lady Ryder’s Empire hospitality scheme for English-speaking officers, Rhodes scholars and other eligible students from the dominions and overseas. At the scheme’s headquarters in 21B Cadogan Gardens, Sloane Square, London, tea was dispensed and dances were held. Card indexes were kept of 1600 or so potentially lonely visitors who might be helped each year, and of appropriate households prepared to provide a home, friendship and the prospect of some suitable female company for weekends, vacations, leave, study and convalescence. Girls of good family could be drafted to serve as live-in help for host households while the young overseas guests came to stay. It all seemed very well organised. The recipients were duly grateful if sometimes a little amused by all the thoughtfulness for their moral and physical welfare. In the war years ahead Miss Macdonald’s pastoral work would be extended to Czechoslovak, Polish, Norwegian, Dutch and French free forces officers and to the airmen who would find themselves stationed in the hundreds of airfields scattered around the country.


Later in this wonderfully thorough biography, we find:

Hospitality ahead

Saturday evening [7 December 1935] was set for Miss Macdonald’s big At Home at 21B Cadogan Gardens. Among the throng with Winston –and missing Jack– were Eric Haslam, his friend Hoon of Victoria, Gibson a friend of Wood, Porus, Rossiter of Merton, Norman Davis again, Lionel Cooper of Capetown, McPherson, Stewart of Canada, and more ad infinitum. Among the girls were Miss Lovegrove of Canada and Miss Dinah Nathan of Wellington NZ.

The Lady Ryder Scheme’s hospitality continued through the week with a Sunday trip to Hampton Court Palace, a personal tour of Sir Christopher. Wren’s Old Court House [right] and afternoon tea with its owner Norman E. Lamplugh, dinner with the Holding family in Kensington, on Monday a coach tour from Cadogan Gardens to be shown round the vast HMV record factory at Hayes, then to hosts Mr and Mrs Powell in Earls Court with Gunther Motz, Miss Hearn from Canada and Miss Lewis from Australia. Afterwards all were invited to a magnificent Ball given by the Goldmiths Company where Winston spent time with Motz, Miss Johnson from England and Miss de Charme from Paris. Tuesday took them to Twickenham for the varsity rugby match where Oxford’s kiwi captain Malcolm Cooper excelled against Cambridge; in the evening to a studio performance at the Gate Theatre by Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies. Wednesday was set for lunch in Kensington with the family of Sir John Gilmour the recent Home Secretary and dinner in the City with the Grocers Company where the speakers were Jack’s old friend Lord Bledisloe and Miss Macdonald of the Isles. Thursday’s trip from Cadogan Gardens was to Hatfield House with a personal tour conducted by the tough old Marchioness of Salisbury. On Friday the academic aspirants were dispersed to their hosts in the country for the weekend. And Jack could join in for a break at last after his busy week in the Lab.


The context in which we discover this information is through the life of John Wesley “Jack” Mitchell, FRS, (1913-2007), an outstanding international scientist from New Zealand whose work in chemistry and physics examined the properties of materials and extended the possibilities of high speed photography [left].

It turns out that Lady Ryder's scheme encompassed far more than simply caring for servicemen (and presumably women) during the war, and it seems natural to think that, with Ryder hosting teas and large parties—note that a "throng" of international personalities on that "Saturday night" mentioned above—the Mills family must have been involved quite closely with the scheme and attendant at parties and dances, and perhaps even the scheme's outings.

This fits well with what we know about the Mills sisters: Posh, even a bit snobbish, and socially comfortable with a wide range of individuals from many different walks of life and diverse nationalities, especially peerage. One look at the list of croquet players they played with and against while situated at their retirement home in Budleigh Salterton attests to that!


Speaking of croquet, an Australian player by the name of Dr. Harold J. Penny took to the lawns against the Mills family (including George), and he was the subject of the second message I received this morning, this one from Dr. Robert Likeman:

Harry,

Here is a brief bio of Harold Penny from my forthcoming book. It may help to fill in some of the blanks in your blog.

Kind regards,
Robert

1. PENNY, Harold John, Captain (1888-1968). MB BS Adel 1913. Penny was born in Semaphore SA, the youngest son of Charles James Penny, a teller in the Bank of Adelaide, and his wife Emma Stephens. He was educated at St Peter’s College and Adelaide University. He rowed for the University in 1911 and again in 1912. After graduation he completed his residency at Adelaide Hospital and the Children’s Hospital. During the former term, he made the papers three times for treating patients with gunshot wounds. He was commissioned in the RAMC in March 1915, and sailed for England on the RMS Mongolia. The first thing that he did on arrival in England was to get married, to Winifred Annie Lake from Bristol. Penny was promoted Captain in March 1916. He returned to Australia after the war, and set up practice in Nailsworth SA, but evidently Winifred did not care for Australia, and the couple returned to England. They were divorced in 1925 on the grounds of Winifred’s adultery with a dentist, Frederick Rowat. The same year Penny married a vicar’s daughter from Harrow-on-the Hill, Mary Violet Ridsdale (1901-1974). They returned to Nailsworth, but in 1928 announced their intention of moving to Western Australia. It is uncertain how long they remained there, but before 1938 they had returned to England to settle at Tunstall, Staffs. Penny was a world class player of croquet. He died in Bournemouth in 1968.


Dr Robert Likeman


Thank you, Dr. Likeman!

Interestingly, the news reports we read involving Dr. Penny were, indeed, regarding gunshot wounds, a subject in which he obviously became an expert. It would then be wholly natural that he would have been highly desirable as a medical officer during the war.

Dr. Likeman is Director of Health for the Australian Army and the author of Gallipoli Doctors: The Australian Doctors At War Series, Volume 1 (First Edition 2010, Slouch Hat Publications, McCrae, Victoria), and I presume Penny's biography will be found in Volume 2. Dr. Likeman (LtCol, CSM) is the author of several other books on Australian Military History that can be found at the Slouch Hat Publications website. Volume 1 was awarded a Silver Medal in the New York Independent Publishers Awards earlier this year.


(Oh—and just an aside regarding the film A Matter of Life and Death (Stairway to Heaven in the U.S.): It starred David Niven, whose mother, Etta, coincidentally was dying in a nursing home in Kensington along with Revd. Barton R. V. Mills, father of George Mills, when the Mills family patriarch passed away in 1932!)


It really is wonderful to be writing about the life and times of George Mills once again! Should you have any information, theories, details, ideas, suppositions, hypotheses, or just want to discuss George or his family and friends, please let me know at the e-mail address, far above, to the right.

Many thanks!

A Closer Look at 1932, David Niven's Mother, and the Family of George Mills

Today I'm learning a lesson: There is no such thing as a small bit of information.

Thinking I'd sit down and fire off a short posting regarding yesterday's study of wills and probate, I find myself knee deep, once again, in information. Perhaps all of it is not George Mills-related, but some of it's quite interesting. At least to me. And other aspects of it are very pertinent to questions we've often asked here...

The probate record for the Revd. Barton Reginald Vaughan Mills contains this excerpt: "clerk died 21 January 1932 at 5 Collingham-gardens South Kensington Middlesex"

This was the first indication that we've had that, when Revd. Mills passed away "suddenly," he was not at home with his family at 24 Hans-road in Chelsea.

I thought, "Well, I'll go to Google Maps, take a virtual snapshot of 5 Collingham Gardens [above, left], and see if I can find out who he might've been visiting when he expired. I'll punch it up in a short post this morning and be done!"

The address 5, Collingham Gardens has an interesting history. The terraced freehold recently sold, on 29 January 2010, for £8,900,000 to Michaelis Boyd Associates of 108 Palace Gardens Terrace, London, who applied in December 2010 to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for "the provision of rooflight on the second floor roof and alteration of 3 rear basement windows to french doors."

The building now houses Alphaco, a British waste-to-energy company, dealing in "Waste tires, Waste tyres, Scrap tyres, Scrap tires."

It also is the home of Collingham Gardens Child and Family Unit, an NHS psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents [right], apparently one of the few facilities providing inclusive "in-patient child psychiatric care for learning disabled children."

Here's a brief description of the 1883-1884 construction of 5 Collingham-gardens from 'The work of Ernest George and Peto in Harrington and Collingham Gardens', Survey of London: volume 42: Kensington Square to Earl's Court (1986), pp. 184-195:

"No. 5 is much the larger house [than No. 4], partly because of an extra low wing (which has now lost its stepped gable) to the north. Here too the plan and some features survive, showing that the levels were split, with the drawing-room this time at the back on the half-landing. The wooden residence by March 1886, was the fourth Earl of Wilton, who fitted one of the rooms up as an organ-saloon replete with model organ and patent hydraulic engines. The house and its fittings were reputed to have cost him upwards of £25,000."

No. 4 could have been your residence at the time on these terms: "The price of a long lease here was £8,000, or it could be rented for £600 a year." No. 5 being "much" larger, can we assume the original price tag was "much" greater than those figures?

There are images of the interior, circa 1886-1888 and photographed by H. Bedford Lemere, to be found at: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/brief-doc.html?embedded=&start=1&view=table&query=5+collingham+gardens+brompton

By 1889, however, the Earl of Wilton no longer resided at 5 Collingham Gardens. On 22 March 1889, Mr. Robert Duncombe Shafto, a rich, former M.P. for North Durham died in his "London residence" at that address according to the Monthly chronicle of north country lore and legend, volume 3, 1889.

By 1902-1903, the address appears in the Royal Blue Book: Fashionable Directory and Parliamentary Guide as the residence of merchant banker John Conrad im Thurn, of J. C. im Thurn & Sons, merchants, 1, East India-avenue, EC.

And in 1938, Beryl Dallen (née Umney), wife of Deryck N. Dallen of Hartley Manor Farm, gave birth to a baby girl at 5 Collingham-gardens.

The above news, found in the 1938 periodical Chemist and druggist: The newsweekly for pharmacy, volume 128, indicates that perhaps the locale was no longer an upper-crust luxury abode at that time.

In fact, according to the website Lost Hospitals of London, 1947 would see the Metropolitan Ear Nose and Throat Hospital purchase "two freehold houses, 4-5 Collingham Gardens, SW5, which were converted to a 45-bedded hospital and Nurses Home."

But converted from what? The birth of baby girl Cherry V. Dallen at 5 Collingham Gardens in 1938 was probably not due to a visitor suddenly giving birth in the drawing room of a stately home. And that 1938 birth date is fairly close to the date of our interest: 21 January 1932, and why Revd. Barton R. V. Mills was at that address on that day when he suddenly died.

A clue to what became of 5 Collingham Gardens between being the residence of the moneyed J. C. im Thurn at the century's turn, and its sale to the Metropolitan Ear Nose and Throat Hospital in post-war 1947, was found in the strangest of places!

In 2003's Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven by Graham Lord, we find this reference to Niven's mother on page 48: "In 1932 [Niven] was in Aldershot on a physical training course when Uncle Tommy telephoned to say that Etta was dying in a nursing home in South Kensington. He rushed up to London and was stunned to see how wasted she was by her cancer, but it was too late to say goodbye. Following an operation, peritonitis complications set in, she did not recognise him and she died on 12 November at 5 Collingham Gardens with her beloved husband at her bedside. She was only 52."

So, we know now that Barton Mills had been committed to a nursing home at 5 Collingham Gardens, about a mile southwest of his home at 24 Hans-road. Obviously not in the best of health, the death of Revd. Mills on 21 January of that very same year was apparently still unexpected.

Interestingly, on the heels of yesterday's examination of wills, probates, and bequests, there's also this snippet from Niven's biography: "She left an astonishingly large estate of £14 169 3s. 9d. net, the equivalent in modern terms of about $950,000 [obviously valued against the RPI]... three times as much as she had inherited from William Niven sixteen years previously. This huge increase in wealth was not caused by inflation, which was nil between 1916 and 1932, nor probably by clever investment, since the British stock market index fell fifty-five per cent between 1919 and 1931 as it was battered by the Great Depression. The only explanation is that Etta left her inheritance from William Niven untouched to grow for sixteen years in some high earning account... Niv's claims that she was desperately poor were quite untrue."

This additional bit of information is instructive for our purposes.

Revd. and Mrs. Barton Mills inherited £22565 8s. 9d., from Edith Mills's father, Sir George Dalhousie Ramsay, with whom they lived at the time of his death in 1920.

At the time of Barton's passing in 1932, his "effects" were valued at £17007 11s. 7d.—a greater legacy than that of Niven's mother, Lady Henriette "Etta" Comyn-Platt—but less than Sir George had previously bequeathed to them upon his passing in 1920.

Etta's legacy was worth "three times" its original value in 1916, meaning she had likely been left less than £5000. It's value had trebled by 1932 despite economic troubles in the intervening years.

The Mills family had taken almost £23000, and in four fewer years than Lady Comyn-Platt, diminished it to roughly £17000. And this does not take into consideration the residue of any 'effects' from the inheritance that Barton Mills had received upon the passing of his father, Arthur Mills, M.P., in 1898, which may have approached £10000. Afterwards, he spurned a secure living as vicar of Bude Haven, Cornwall and took the family and his career as a cleric to London. Mills then worked from 1901-1908 as an assistant chaplain at the Queen's Chapel at the Savoy, a position which probably paid little, but also would have helped them 'pay the bills' through the 20th century's first decade.

During that time in London, Mills also published a book of sermons, a book entitled Marks of the Church, and several works on the writings of St. Bernard that are still valuable resources to theologians today, as well as having served as a military chaplain during the First World War.

Figuring at least some small income from those ventures, it seems the Mills family was far from impoverished during the decades preceding Barton's death, as evidenced by the seven servants and governess listed in the household by enumerators of the 1911 UK census.

In fact, it seems the Mills family pretty much lived a life of ease on money and 'effects' they'd inherited at various times, further evidence being provided by Barton's probate listing of his son as "George Ramsay Acland Mills, gentleman."

Other men listed among the names on the very same page of probate documents are described as "foreman," "baker," and "engine driver." There's no reason George wouldn't have been listed as a "schoolmaster" if he'd, indeed, been employed in 1932.

Apparently, Mills was at the very least 'between positions' as a schoolmaster at the time of his father's death, probably at home, being a gentleman and tapping out the manuscript for his first book, 1933's Meredith and Co.

Thoughts on this have already been explored, and George's financial situation would have been augmented, along with that of his wife, Vera Louise, upon the death of his mother-in-law, Evelyn Amy Hart Beauclerk, in 1933. Although the executor of Beauclerk's will was Westminster Bank Ltd., it seems highly probable that some of her effects, totaling £9235 19s. 9.d, found their way down to her daughter, Vera, and son-in-law, George, gentleman.

Two things:

● Were George and Vera living with Evelyn Beauclerk or Barton Mills in 1932-1933? There are no telephone listings for the couple, so unless they were rooming with someone else or living in a hotel, they would have been secure with one London family or the other.

● And, given the firm financial footing the Mills family finds itself in, circa 1898-1920, why does the autobiography of Lady Dorothy Mills cry poverty during her courtship and marriage to Barton Mills's elder son, Capt. Arthur Frederick Hobart Mills of the D.C.L.I., George's half-brother by Barton's first marriage?

In 1914, Captain Mills is sent off to the war in France, but according to his autobiographical book, With My Regiment: From the Aisne to La Bassée [Lippincott: Philadelphia, 1916] written under the pseudonym "Platoon Commander", before departing he first "went up to London to my rooms to collect a few things."

His father lived in a 20-room abode at 12 Cranley Gardens, S.W., the likely location of those "rooms."

So Revd. Mills had room in his home for son Arthur, even if no money in his wallet for the newlywed couple after his nuptials to the above-mentioned and apparently disowned Dorothy Rachel Melissa Walpole in 1916. If Capt. Mills couldn't afford to support his wife on an infantry captain's wage, he certainly wasn't renting unlived-in "rooms" in London as well as a bed at a boarding at a house near his barracks on the Thames!

Of course, to believe that cry of poverty is to accept only the word of Lady Dorothy, who wrote her autobiography in 1929 after creating the persona of being a completely independent and modern woman, whose success was due in no part to the help of any man, be he father, lover, or husband. Her self-made, 'rags-to-riches' persona was as much what she was marketing as her stories, and if it appeared at all that she'd ever been well-cared-for as an adult by either husband Arthur or her in-laws, the Mills, it would certainly have taken much of the lustre off of her heroically feminist backstory.

Nevertheless, just one address in the probate record of Barton Mills has led to much additional knowledge of our George Mills—his career, his family, and his prospects, circa 1932. And the writing of this post turned out to be no 'quickie'!

As always, if you have anything that you can add, please don't hesitate to contact me—and thank you in advance!