The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Christopher Sykes Simon

      He taught him to ride – ‘this is t’thod generation Ah’ve taught ti’ride,’ he loved to boast, – and helped him look after his pride and joy, an ever-growing pack of fox terriers. He also contributed greatly to his education, sharing with him his great knowledge of nature and the countryside, and inspiring his imagination with tales of local folklore and legend, which gave him a strong sense of locality and of his origins.

      Grayson was like a rock to his charge. As a highly intelligent and sensitive child Mark could hardly have failed to be affected by the worsening relations between his parents, and when things got bad he always knew he could escape to the kennels or the stables. By the mid-1880s, Tatton was getting increasingly parsimonious and difficult, while Jessie had taken a lover, a young German Jew of her own age, Lucien de Hirsch, whom she had met some time in 1884, and with whom she had discovered a mutual fascination with the civilization of the Ancient Greeks. In a sizeable correspondence, she shared with him details of the tribulations she was forced to suffer at the hands of ‘the Alte Herr’, the old man, which was the nickname they gave Tatton: ‘that vile old Alte,’ she wrote in the summer of 1885, ‘has been simply too devilish – last night when I got back from hunting – very tired and very cold – he saluted me with the news that he had spent the afternoon going to the Bank and playing me some tricks, and after dinner, when I remonstrated with him and told him this kind of thing could not continue. He pulled my hair and kicked me, and told me if I had not such an ugly face, I might get someone to pay my bills instead of himself … I was afraid to hit him back because I am so much stronger I might hurt him.’20

      The times Jessie dreaded most were the trips abroad with Tatton, taken during the winter months, long journeys of three months or more which separated her from her son as well as her lover. ‘Je suis excessivement malheureuse,’ she wrote to Lucien from Paris on 4 November, en route to India, ‘de quitter mon enfant – qui est vraiment le seul être au monde excepté toi que je desire ardemment revoir.’21 On these trips Tatton would become obsessed about his health, exhibiting a hypochondria that often bordered on the edge of insanity. ‘We mounted on board our Wagon Lits’, she wrote, ‘and passed a singularly unpleasant night. He had a cabin all to himself, and my maid and I shared the next one. I took as I always do the top bed and was just going to sleep when the Alte roused us and everyone on the car with the news his bed was hard and uncomfortable. We made him alright, as we thought, and all went to sleep. In about 2 hours, tremendous knocking and cries of Help! Help! proceeded from Sir T’s cabin. It then appeared he had turned the bolt in his lock and could not get out. Such a performance – shrieks and cries – it was nearly an hour before we got his door open and then he was in a pitiable state.’22

      His extraordinary habits also drove Jessie to distraction. He had for example a mania about food. He would not eat at regular hours, forcing her to eat alone, while his own mealtimes were often erratic. Every two hours or so he would devour large quantities of half-raw mutton chops, accompanied by cold rice pudding, all prepared by his own personal cook and eaten in the privacy of his bedchamber. ‘He has also adopted an unpleasing habit,’ wrote Jessie, ‘of chewing the half-raw mutton, but not swallowing it, a process the witnessing of which is more curious than pleasant.’23 He took no exercise, and when not driving about in his carriage lay on his bed ‘in a sort of coma’.24 At night he would often call Jessie to his room as much as eight times, leaving her frazzled from lack of sleep.

      Of all his obsessive whims, however, the most worrying was his fixation that he was going to die. ‘The Alte is a sad trial,’ she wrote to Lucien on 20 December, from Spence’s Hotel in Calcutta. ‘About 2 this morning Gotherd and I were woken by loud shrieks and the words “I am dying, dying, dying (crescendo)”. We both jumped up thinking at least he had broken a blood vessel – We found absolutely nothing was the matter … We were nearly two hours trying to pacify him. He clutched us … and went on soliloquising to this effect, “Oh dear! I am dying, I shall never see Sledmere again, oh you wicked woman. Why don’t you cry? Some wives would be in hysterics – to see your poor husband dropping to pieces before your eyes – oh God have pity. Oh Jessie my bowels are gone, Oh Gotherd my stomach is quite decayed, my knees have given way, Oh Jessie Jessie – Oh Lord have mercy.”25 ‘This is not a bit exaggerated,’ she added, ‘quite the contrary’, concluding, ‘My darling, I think of you every day, I dream of you every night …’26

      In January 1887, Jessie was at Sledmere and beside herself with fury because of the latest of Tatton’s outrages. She loved to sit in the Library, which she had filled with palms and various potted plants. ‘I am very fond of them,’ she wrote to Lucien, ‘and when quite or so much alone there is a certain companionship in seeing them.’ The room being so large, however, and having eleven windows, it was only made habitable by having two fires lit in it. Having gone away for a few days, she had instructed the servants to keep a small fire burning in one of the grates until she returned. ‘After my departure,’ she wrote, ‘the Alte in one of his economical fits ordered no fires to be made till my return. The frost was terribly severe – the gardener knew nothing of the retrenchment of fuel and when he came three days later to look round the plants he found them all dead or dying from the cold.’27 Morale throughout the household appears to have been at a very low ebb. ‘The confusion here is dreadful, everyone is so cross, all the servants quite demoralized. Broadway leaves Monday – I am very sorry for him – The coachman cries all day – I can do nothing! Gotherd is in a fiendish temper – and the Alte is in his most worrying state.’28

      However snobbish and scheming Jessie’s mother may have been, she had a soft spot for her grandson, and was increasingly worried about the effect that both the general atmosphere at Sledmere, and his parents’ frequent absences abroad might be having on him. They were often away for months at a time, and she saw how he was left in a household with eleven female servants, and only three males, around whom he apparently ran rings: ‘if he remains for much longer surrounded by a pack of admiring servants,’ continued his grandmother, ‘and with no refined well-educated person to look after him … and check him if he is not civil in his manners, he will become completely unbearable … When he goes to Sledmere he is made the Toy and idol of the place and each servant indulges him as they please.’29 His burgeoning ego needed stemming, and she felt strongly that the way to achieve this was to engage a tutor for him. She made her feelings known to Jessie. ‘He is a charming child and most intelligent and precocious, which under the circumstances makes one tremble, for there is no doubt that he is now quite beyond the control of