This is a guest post by theatre critic and researcher Julia Rank. In this article, the term ‘gypsy’ is only used when quoting directly from Lady Eleanor Smith’s work.
‘I was born dead’ is the ominous first sentence of Lady Eleanor Smith’s 1939 memoir Life’s a Circus. The doctors at the scene of her birth pronounced her dead without checking for any signs of life and threw themselves into attempting to save her mother. The midwife, with nothing to lose, had the bright idea of massaging the newborn with gin and slapping her repeatedly until she elicited a wail. Mother and daughter both survived and Lady Eleanor grew up to become a Bright Young Thing, journalist, publicist and novelist, with a particular devotion to the circus and scenes from Romani life.
Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945) was the daughter of Conservative MP Frederick Edward Smith, ennobled as Earl of Birkenhead when appointed Lord Chancellor in 1919, and Margaret Eleanor Furneux (a granddaughter of Joseph Severn, painter and friend of John Keats). The young Eleanor enjoyed a privileged upbringing with ponies, dancing classes and Christmases spent at Blenheim Palace (her father was one of Winston Churchill’s closest friends). Despite growing up in the heart of the establishment, she was drawn to Romani culture from an early age, teaching herself the language and making the serendipitous discovery that her paternal great-grandmother was a Romani woman named Bathsheba (apparently the Lord Chancellor was proud of his ‘romantic’ origins rather than trying to conceal them, while at the same time exaggerating the humbleness of his middle-class Birkenhead upbringing).
Like her contemporary Nancy Mitford, Smith’s formal education was centred around learning to speak French. A happy experience at Queen’s Gate School, South Kensington, alongside lifelong friends and fellow Bright Young Things Allanah Harper and Zita Jungmann, was not to last. She was sent to boarding school but ran away, after which she completed her education with an extended stay with an aristocratic Belgian family who lived at the Museum of the Congo outside Brussels. On her return to England, she refused to ‘come out’ as a debutante as was expected for a young lady of her background and decided instead to pursue a career in journalism.
Through her social connections, Smith landed a role writing a twice-weekly ‘Women’s Gossip’ column for an evening paper but disliked “publicising a loathsome clique of nitwits”. She then worked as cinema critic, which she found more convivial. Highlights included introducing Katharine Hepburn and Elisabeth Bergner to British audiences(and being introduced to Hitler’s policies by the Austrian-Jewish Bergner).
A stint travelling with a circus as a publicist provided ample research opportunities for Smith’s first novel Red Wagon (1930). Red Wagon is far from culturally sensitive. Nevertheless, it stands up as a gripping yarn even today.
Inspired by Victorian showman ‘Lord’ George Sanger, “one of the finest types of English circus man”, the novel tells the life story of self-made and (mostly) benevolent circus dictator Joe Prince in flashback form. In the novel’s present day, the circus is no longer the national institution it was in previous decades nor is Joe Prince quite the “roistering king of the road, a plutocrat among nomads” he once was. One of his daughters has settled in suburbia and the other, to her father’s disapproval, wants to showcase her equestrian skills for cinema.
The action then flashes back to the 1860s when Joe is five years old and his acrobat mother is killed in a fire during an American tour. After a period of fostering by a Thénardier-esque clown, he’s sent to a Dickensian orphanage. He escapes in his teens, joins a circus, works his way up through the ranks and eventually sets up his own circus, always living by the mantra ‘Circus first’.
According to the Scotsman, ‘The book stands as a challenge to all those who doubt woman’s ability to write a ‘straight’ tale unmarked with the stamp of ‘feminine’ psychology’”. The novel features a male protagonist who isn’t prone to self-reflection and who pulls himself up by his bootstraps. Joe Prince is defined by his relationship with the circus and its nomadic life rather than by his romantic relationships. The novel is ‘romantic’ in terms of its setting rather than its love story.
A life-changing romance does occur, but it’s near the end and is one-sided. It’s hard not to be creeped out the way in which Joe, in middle age, marries the much younger Romani princess Sheba (surely named for Smith’s ancestor Bathsheba), the daughter of Starlina, his first crush. Sheba, who is “bought from her people for the sum of fifteen pounds”, can’t settle into the role of circus chatelaine and eventually abandons her husband and daughters to return to her community.
The depiction of Romani characters is the most troubling aspect of the novel. ‘Gajo’ (non-Romani) circus folk and Romanis are not allies. “Joe, in common with most circus children,” Smith writes, “had been brought up to despise and hate this dark race […] sometimes they attached themselves to circuses and brought disgrace to any show”. Despite Smith’s personal identification with Romani people and Joe’s coming to admire them, her Romani characters are strongly ‘othered.’ Sheba and the other Romani in the book are described as ‘wild’, witch-like,’ ‘savage’, ‘brazen’, ‘tawny’ etc. The circus itself is also described in disruptive terms, as something that allows ‘the English to take their pleasure not sadly, but almost savagely, with a boisterous brutality that would endure long into the night.” Smith feared that “It will be a dreadful day when the circus decides to become social” (but noted that she had never personally seen a mistreated circus animal).
Vita Sackville-West, writing for Common Cause, hailed Red Wagon as “a brilliantly successful first novel” and Oliver Wray of The Graphic commented, ”‘I have not read so satisfying a novel since Mr Priestley’s The Good Companions.” The Yorkshire Post found Joe Prince “a most human and likable creature… a real relief after the fantastic figures of most novelists who have touched his kind.” Of course, Smith’s title and her father’s fame may have had some influence on the praise it received. Lord Birkenhead was appalled to learn that his daughter was writing a novel and assumed it would only be published because of who he was – but he eventually changed his tune and gave her a ruby and diamond brooch representing the red wagon shortly before his death later the same year.
Alongside the positive literary reviews, Red Wagon was the subject of a minor cause celebre. The book was banned by Glasgow public libraries when an elderly councillor proclaimed that the 28-year-old Smith “knows too much for her age” and should have “shown more reticence” in her handling of the “love incidents”. I would hazard a guess that this complaint refers to the scene in a seedy Montmatre hotel room in which Joe loses his virginity to Rose, a worldly American equestrienne: ‘He wanted her and would apparently take her without wasting any time on preliminary dalliance. He pulled her on to his knee, burying his face in the daffodil shower of her hair, kissing her wildly, roughly, madly, holding her so tight that he hurt her and she cried for mercy’. Publisher Victor Gollancz responded, “I have had many funny experiences during seven years of publishing, but this is much the funniest.” He quipped that the real reason for controversy was the title, with ‘Red’ suggesting political sympathies at odds with those of Glasgow council. Which seems unlikely: Gollancz was himself a socialist but Smith was her father’s daughter politically. The novel went into its fourth printing despite the Glaswegian objections.
Joe Prince may have disliked the cinema, but the epic scope and flamboyant setting of Red Wagon made it ideal for filmic treatment. In 1933, it was adapted by Elstree’s British International Studios, directed by the Austrian-born Paul L. Stein and starring the American actor Charles Bickford (who went on to be a three-time Oscar nominee for Best Supporting Actor) as Joe. It was an ambitious production by British standards of the time, running 50% longer than average — 107 minutes long as opposed to the usual70 minutes.
As the author of the source material, Smith felt that she was regarded ‘the lowest form of animal life” on the film set. But she also acknowledged that novelists were not suited to adapting their own work for screen and that specialist scenario writers were required. Feeding an appetite for melodrama with exotic settings, several of her subsequent novels were turned into film, including Ballerina (The Men in Her Life), Tzigane (Gypsy) and Caravan, starring actors such as Loretta Young, Chili Bouchier and Stewart Granger.
Smith cultivated a fey, uncanny image of herself in the press and in her memoir. Life’s a Circus related childhood encounters with a ghost dog called Gyp and grisly tales told by a nanny who attended the last public hanging in Britain. In the 1930s, she lived in a flat off the King’s Road with a black cat named Satan (despite the fact she was a Roman Catholic – probably a reference to her 1932 short story collection Satan’s Circus). She conjures up images of an aristocratic, urban version of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s heroine Lolly Willowes. She died at the age of 42 after a long illness and her most enduring work is probably her Regency-era novel The Man in Grey, albeit mostly by virtue of the Gainsborough Studios’ film adaptation starring James Mason and Margaret Lockwood.
Despite its entertainment value, it’s difficult to imagine Red Wagon being reissued. Unsurprisingly, Smith’s oeuvre wasn’t included in Elizabeth Macneal’s recent list of favourite circus novels for the Guardian. However, her short story ‘Candlelight’ is included in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird anthology Queens of the Abyss: Lost Stories from the Women of the Weird. As a glimpse inside the imagination of an unusual aristocratic bohemian, it’s left me sufficiently intrigued to try Eleanor Smith’s Gothic short fiction.
Julia Rank is a London-based theatre critic, historical researcher and academic proofreader. Her favourite things include theatrical fiction, interwar chorus girls, and the American baritone and film star Gordon MacRae. For more information, visit her website, julia-writes.com.