Euphemia Isabella Skinner

Cultured, eccentric, energetic, sophisticated, beautiful, intelligent. From autobiographical notes by Edward Holroyd Pearce (Lord Pearce) 1989:

"My grandmother's family had been gentlefolk for many generations but not people of any social importance. He [my grandfather] had married at a young age a beautiful girl from a large family who had grown up with his own large family (an intimacy that produced three marriages between the various children). Her name was Miss Euphemia Isabella Skinner. The family got their name from the Skinner to King Ethelbert, who ran off with the King's daughter. The intrepid couple went to Normandy to escape the royal wrath and lived as humble Skinners at Falaise. The roving eye of Count Robert perceived the possibilities of their beautiful daughter and she became the mother of the Conqueror. When the Conqueror came to England in 1066, her brother, Sir Robert Skynnere, came too. My grandmother's pedigree always moved me to enthusiasm because it had many strange and exciting people in it. Canute and Hardicanute were in it on her mother's side. St. Louis of France was there through his daughter's marriage to an English peer; and there was the turbulent knight William de Tracey who murdered Thomas a Beckett. There too was the ill fated Chief Justice Montagu who was persuaded to write out Edward VI's will in favour of Lady Jane Grey and suffered for that indiscretion under Mary. And there were many other famous names to fire my imagination. Robert Bruce of course came into it because her grandfather, (a general who fought at Waterloo) when stationed as a handsome young officer in Edinburgh had won the heart of a Laird's daughter of the Macleans of Ardgour.

My grandmother, like her brothers and sisters, had physical beauty, vivid intelligence, enormous courage and a strong capacity for disregarding all known social rules. While her husband lived she had, mingled with her love, a Victorian awe of him that kept her more or less within the bounds of convention, but after his death she cast aside the shackles. She had a pleasant gift of composition and occasionally her verses or articles were printed in the Spectator. She was full to the brim with Shakespeare. At times in her old age her memory was erratic, and she would claim the authorship of things that had in fact been written by Shakespeare. But as she also sometimes attributed to Shakespeare poems that she had written herself, she kept the scales fairly even.

When she was ninety I confided to her some problem that was worrying me. Whereat she declaimed in a strong deep voice
'Nay, never falter. No great deeds are done
By falterers who ask for certainty.
No good is certain; but the steadfast mind,
The undivided will to seek the good,
'Tis these compel the elements, and wring
A human music from the indifferent air.
Say that we fail?
We nurse the bright traditions of our race
And leave our spirit in some other breast'.

I : (much impressed):
'That's jolly good. Who wrote it?'
She: 'Why, Miss Elliott, of course'
I (irreverently): 'What, our George?'
She (petulantly):
'No, no, of course not, I mean the Miss Elliott who was governess to the Montgomery Kassingbirds'

She then roved on to some other subject, and I never found out who the governess Miss Elliott was, whether she ever did write poetry, and whether in fact she ever existed. Just recently I discovered from John Betjeman at the club that the lines were written by George Eliot.

I feel sure that she was not pulling my leg since that definitely was not her kind of joke. This sort of thing made my grandmother's conversation very intriguing. As she lived to the age of 93 and saw (quite undismayed) the beginning of the world war, she was an important person in my life and she was always a source of mingled pride, affection and apprehension to her grandchildren. She took to her bed at the age of seventy and ran the house from there as her mother had done after sustaining a carriage accident in early middle age. She only rose to sally forth to tea with cronies of her youth or go the rounds of those who still held 'studio Sunday' before sending-in day at the Royal Academy, or to hold her 'at homes' on the first Sunday of the month for the dwindling ranks of her contemporaries."

"For some part of every holiday we used to stay with our grandparents in London. They lived in a handsome house and everything was much more stylish than at our home. Every morning my grandmother drove her horse 'Tommy' round London with us in the 'Tommy-cart'. When motor omnibuses started to beset the London streets she still continued her daily drives. She had been used to horses all her life and she cared nothing for the traffic. Generally she would have some friend with her and my sister and I would sit perched on the hard back-seat with our backs to the driver while 'Laddie' the spotted Dalmatian dog galloped along just below us. We would pay flying visits to her various friends round Kensington, South Kensinton, Putney or Barnes, or do domestic errands to shops or the like.
We saw the tarmac ribbon of the road unfurling just beneath our feet and stretching into the distance. We watched the many coloured buses as we trotted past them. We gazed at the passers-by and speculated on their lives and characters, all to the accompaniment of the merry clatter of the horse's hoofs. It was lovely to sit snug in a big rug in winter with the cold air on one's cheeks, or to feel the warm winds of summer and taste the hot smell of the tar. Sometimes my grandmother (who was then over 60) would take us to the public baths and swim about in the deep end, towing us to the side again and again as we continually slid down the water-shoot.

In 1914 when war came my grandmother was convinced that Tommy would be requisitioned for the front and maltreated. So she drove off in the Tommy-cart to Scotland. He and it were never seen again. What exactly happened is not known since she later gave various irreconcilable accounts of the matter.

When the Earl's Court exhibition was first held she promised for our birthday presents to take us on every side show. She kept the promise. I always regarded her as equal to anything; but I felt a pang of apprehension and regret when the wiggle-woggle, a dreadfully bumpy contrivance for self torture, caused her wide Edwardian hat to fly spinning from her head and her grey hair shook around her face.
She contrived to give a conspiratorial air about nothing in particular. My grandfather liked things to be done with decorum. She loved indecorum. If by chance the maid had brought one porridge plate too few and you were late for breakfast she would be delighted to put your porridge on a used plate just in time before you entered the door, saying to the others with a dramatic whisper in her deep voice 'n'en parlez pas', which infallibly reached your ears and made you aware that something was going on to your detriment. For some unknown reason she always used the French tongue for conspiracy. We were all reasonably good at French, and her whispered pronunciation, though fluent, was not sufficiently Gallic to make it at all hard to follow. So the use of the French tongue concealed nothing and revealed that dirty work was afoot. When we caught a murmur of 'prenez garde' as we came into the room, we set our wits on the stretch; and many eyed Argus had nothing on us for the next few hours, or at least until we had wormed the secret out of our more soft hearted and confiding mother.

Her possessions were tucked away in complete confusion in odd drawers. At Christmas she wasted the wildest lottery. Sometimes she would give most handsome and generous presents with casual largesse; sometimes with enormous patter and sales talk she would give one a much wrapped up thing that was old, useless and unattractive. On these occasions my mother would tactfully during the day tell her that unfortunately we were not old enough to appreciate the present. She would then with rather frosty condescension withdraw the unappreciated article and replace it by something more reasonable.

At Christmas there was always a real family gathering. We four were the only grandchildren but there were five uncles and aunts. Like all grow-ups, no doubt, they felt that we children improved the fun at Christmas and they were kindness itself. They even listened with apparent enthusiasm to our recitations and charades. All the old Christmas ritual was there. My decorous bearded grandfather opened up with genial jollity that was reminiscent of old Mr. Warden at Dingley Dell and my grandmother was even more gracious, smiling and commanding than usual. The large drawing room, with chandelier and attractive wall lights, with fine antique furniture, and closely hung pictures, was the perfect room for Christmas decorations and festivities. There was plenty of space for charades with a back stage entrance from the conservatory that adjoined it. My grandmother of course was good at guessing with her quick intelligence and intuition. This enabled her to do a good many conspiratorial asides telling the word secretly but visibly to my aunts and uncles before the act was anywhere near completion; and furtive echoes of her deep voice were heard, 'Ne dites pas encore', 'laissez finir', 'N'en parlez pas', and the like. My grandfather would sit generally contented and patriarchal, gazing round proudly at his pictures of which was a connoisseur and puffing at his pipe, with an Olympian enjoyment of the frivolous antics of his family.

My grandmother was, as one might have expected, an ardent suffragette. She had been one of the pioneers of women's bicycling, women's clubs and other feminine activities. But for my grandfather she would have been a militant, as were some of their relatives. I felt rather male about this and disapproved of it; but I was badly worsted in argument. And I felt very humbled when we attended a sufragette rally in the park in the tommy-cart which was adorned with purple and green favours.

They used to have Shakespeare readings" in their drawing room, since they were both keen Shakespearians. Various friends would come to them. My grandmother always dressed up in sweeping Edwardian clothes and looked very beautiful. Her rich clear voice as she rose to the height of some Shakespearian crisis must have been audible, I used to think, at the other end of Kensington. My sister and I were sometimes privileged to 'stay up' and listen (or even take a small part) while the performers read some play with a booming gusto and dramatic enthusiasm that modem self-consciousness would never tolerate."

Uncle Jack (JAC Pearce):

He remembered in 2003 that she had Turner mezzotints all round her drawing room. Frank Short was a friend of her husband's, and had worked on Turner mezzotints.

Christine Myers says:

She had a leg brace which she threw off the day before her wedding and never wore again. She was a good customer of Barkers and John Barker himself would greet her when she got out of her carriage. She spent a lot of money on hats. She walked down Holland Villas Rd with one foot in the gutter (not comme il faut) picking up lumps of coal and putting it in her bag - she was not conformist and she was frugal.

She went swimming the day before Daphne was born, probably on holiday in Margate - Holroyd was probably in North Africa on a donkey. He retired at forty so probably they did not have much money. They enjoyed Shakespeare readings together but normally spent holidays apart. He was a lawyer.

Philip Ray-Jones says:

She had a radio in bed (memorable because it was such a new invention) at No 2 Holland Park Villas. She went to bed when she was 60 and vowed never to get out again. We buried her ashes at Carbis Bay in our garden under a pear tree by the back door - she was about 94 when she died.

Alan Ray-Jones writes:

We called her 'Dear,' and were very much in awe of her - at least I was. I remember only a palatial bedroom, a very large bed and a very important very old lady in itl, apparently not in the least ill and very much in command. By the time she died I was nine but I saw her only rarely, probably at Christmas when we made the long journey by train to London from our home near St Ives, Cornwall. My mother's scrapbook has in it a blue envelope with a poem signed E I C scribbled on it and dated May 9th 1922. It seems unlikely that the subject was my mother, who by then was 23 years old, but it could have been my Uncle Jack, who was ten:

"Patter patter little feet
Making music quaint and sweet
In the garden up the stair
Patter patter everywhere

Ripple ripple little voice
How you make my heart rejoice
Bringing sunshine where you come
Life and hope to everyone

Chatter chatter patter patter
With a never ending clatter
Round the garden, down the stair,
Love and laughter everywhere."


END

From Calendar of wills at FRC:

CHAPLIN, Euphemia Isabella of 2 Holland Villas Road, Kensington, London, widow died 10 September 1939 at Sunnyside Ralphsride Bracknell Berkshire Amdinistration London 5 February to Irene Kate Pearce (wife of John William Ernest Pearce). Effects £4,133 16s