Preface and Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without the collections of family letters and papers preserved by Anna Mercer, Sam Garrett-Jones, Camilla Garrett-Jones, Robert Robertson, Sebastian Garrett and Stephen Robertson. I am immensely grateful to them for keeping so much, for all the family knowledge they have so generously shared, for the suggestions they have made and the mistakes they have corrected. Many of the photographs have been provided by Sam Garrett-Jones and Robert Robertson. I am also particularly grateful to Margaret Young for sharing her huge knowledge of the Garrett family.
Many other people have helped me with this project: I want to thank Jane Abraham, Brian Boulton, John Charlton, Jane Darke, Marlene Baldwin Davis, Sylvia Dunkley, Emma Ellis, Rachel Forbes, Constantine Gras, Jeremy Greenwood, Heather Holden-Brown, Barney Hopkinson, Matt Jolly, Ben Johnston, Pamela King, Nina Lambert, Sonia Lambert, Stephen Mael, Marcos Magariños, Julian Minns, Dominick Robertson, Matthew Robertson, Stephen Robertson, Thomas Robertson, Catherine Sandbrook, Sally Schweitzer, Sarah Slinn, Charlie Spring Rice, Tom Stevens, Hew Stevenson, Alison Stuart-Klein, Karen Taylor, the late Michael Wheeler-Booth, Joane Whitmore and Richard Wilson. The librarians and archivists of the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Girton College Cambridge, the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, the Suffolk Record Office, the Britten-Pears Library, the Wellcome Collection, the Church of England Children’s Society, Leeds University Brotherton Library, the Law Society Library, Pembroke College Cambridge, King’s College Cambridge, the Imperial War Museum and the Royal Voluntary Service have been unfailingly helpful.
I am also enormously indebted to my editors at Open Book Publishers for their friendly professionalism.
I am extremely grateful to the Old Girtonians Fund for their financial support for the publication of this book
I would also like to thank my husband; my sons and their partners; and other members of my family for their support and encouragement, and for reading and commenting on sections of the book at various stages.
The family trees (which are simplified) were made by Stephen Robertson. The battle area map was made by Brian Boulton.
I have to confess a personal interest: I am one of Spring Rice’s grandchildren. Writing this book has taken me on a sometimes-uncomfortable journey from child’s-eye view to biographer’s view. It is a journey that began, I think, over sixty years ago — long before I ever thought of writing about it. When I was eleven, my grandmother wanted to take me to a big society wedding at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields Church in London, followed by a reception in the House of Commons. She also suggested a shopping trip on the morning of the wedding. My mother tried, without being at all specific, to persuade me to forego the shopping, but I was adamant that I wanted to spend the whole day with my grandmother. It was only the experience of my grandmother complaining about every item she looked at, to my great embarrassment, that made me realise what my mother’s unspoken message had been: how difficult my grandmother could sometimes be. On the other hand, I cannot imagine a more wonderful grandmother. Despite all her failings, in her public life she was, as one of her North Kensington clinic colleagues said, ‘far in advance of the rest of us & far in advance of [her own] time’.1 As her biographer, I have tried both to be dispassionate and to do justice to her great strengths; but in the end, leaving aside my faults and hers, what I am left with is still my childhood love and admiration for her — love and admiration that are, in Seamus Heaney’s words, ‘something else the tide won’t wash away’.2
Any mistakes are my own.
Lucy Pollard
Suffolk, 2020