Daphne Grace Chaplin

Information from Christine Gould:

She had a lot of freedom as a child, was allowed to keep guinea pigs in a hutch in front of the house - in a road off Church Street, near Kensington Gardens. The family went to church in Church Street - she was strongly anti-catholic. Her mother was very friendly with Mrs Franklin, who was Jewish, and this was a bone of contention between her mother and her father, who considered Daphne was spending too much time with people who would not marry her. She seems to have been happy as a child.

She went to Ambleside (Charlotte Mason College) and got a teacher's certificate in about 1912/14. This would enable her to act as a governess. She met Cecil Gould at the University of London, fell in love with him and went on holiday in the Ardennes with an organised group just before the war. After they got married she went on teaching and he joined the army as an officer. When on a ship he wrote to her lamenting that they had not spent more time together. He was nursed at a hospital in Alexandria (Christine taught there after it became a classy school, the Eton of the Middle East). Then he was sent back to England and returned to the Middle East (Lawrence of Arabia country), and became a victim of the Turks. All that was found was his back-pack.

She would cry when she talked about her mother or husband - she felt very affectionate towards both of them. After the war......??

At some point she bought 70 Holland Road (her parents were at 2 Holland Villas Road) and made it a childrens' home. A tall narrow house with a small yard at the back. Christine was the first girl they had and was taken there at the age of two months.

Philip Ray-Jones says:

Aunty Daph had a Reliant three-wheeler with a bed in the back, and other strange little economical vehicles. In the mid-fifties she lived in the basement of Holland Villas Rd - a dark and dingy kitchen. The rest of the enormous house was let. She would like to have taken up flying.

Effie Ray-Jones said:

"She was quite a character. She married Cecil Gould who was killed in Palestine in the first World War, went out to America, sent back grapefruit etc. She had a bicycle with an engine on the back. She died of leukaemia aged about 82."

Alan Ray-Jones remembers:

"She had a laundry van with a bed in the back and on one occasion she came in it to see us at West Coombe Farm. I remember her as cheerful and energetic, an eccentric, a person with a very independent personality, speaking in an old-fashioned way but with a very modern attitude, not hampered by convention. For the 1891 Census, see the note on her father, Holroyd Chaplin. Hotel Monaco, Grand Canal, Venice
5th April 1903

Darlingest Mother,

Here we are, very comfortable. Phil and I were greatly in favour of Pension, instead of Garni, i.e. beds only, and at liberty to eat where we please, because Philip has no happy medium, and we knew by experience that it would mean a very irregular, not to say “feminine” style of feeding. As we stay a fortnight or so it was important.

We arrived last night at 7 p.m. It was most exciting feeling that we were in Venice, though having pictured something so very picturesque and unlike anything else in the way of dreamy unreality etc. it was just a trifle disappointing -- for instance, at the mouth of the station, are steps leading down to the Canal. At the bottom are crowds of gondolas, with crowds of "drivers", all wanting to press you into taking their assistance rather than anyone else's, and that has been the way all today; nothing but men wanting to make up your mind for you, wanting to settle your plans for you, but not to pay their own services, for you.

It is the same with the shop-owners. I suppose they are what would be called good salesmen and women. As it is they frighten you away so far that there is no chance of your being attracted by anything displayed. You cannot stop one second before a stall, or shop window, but someone is out upon you, trying to persuade you to buy something at the most expensive price for the kind. If you see something of the kind you want for one fr they will bother you with similar things at two and three frs.
The people one sees in the streets are (so far) the reverse of the acknowledged Italian type; many of them being ugly in their own way, and the preponderance quite plain in everyone's way -- you don't often see a good-looking child, poor or rich, like you do in Switzerland.

The outlook from the broad pavement bordering the Grand Canal presents a view rather like a big desolate harbour and the view down the Grand Canal itself is not particularly striking. But when you get close to, or past close underneath a fine building of which there are several (and in one of which palaces Dusé lives) then it is fine indeed, and makes one yearn to have lived 100 years ago or more, when such modern buildings and touches as now destroy some of the illusion, were not.

All the rich colours etc. that one hears so much of is probably meant only in connection with St. Marks -- which as far as I can judge yet, only having been here one day, is the only building which has colours on the outside, and therefore colours the town at all. The Piazza of St. Mark is lovely -- so large and beautifully paved in grey and ivory white stones, large slabs. All round, so that it is enclosed on three sides to all appearance -- are buildings with arches, so that you can walk along like an arcade. The pillars and sculptures on the faces of the buildings are lovely. At the end is St. Marks -- glittering with marble and mosaics. I cannot describe it architecturally -- you have probably seen heaps of representations, and I shall bring some sort of a one. At the far end, a short way from the Canal and in the Piazza are two columns, one with a statue of the Theodoric, and one of the Lion of St. Mark. The pigeons add a great deal to the beauty and grandeur of the Piazza. They are beautiful, incandescent with peacocky colours, all the same style of pigeon, and heaps of them. People feed them with maize, and they flock about. The hoardings with which they have enclosed the Campanile, and the parts its fall damaged, are of course a great pity, but not flagrantly noticeable.

Today we have spent in the Doge’s Palace, seeing the pictures -- enormous wall paintings i.e. covering large areas of wall, not very particular.

[No ending from Daphne, perhaps a page missing? On the first page a note added]:

Daphne will have told you everything. We are longing for letters from you. I wonder how Sister’s "opening" went off. Venice is lovely. Your loving child, Phil