Sins of the father

Memoirs about bad or dotty fathers — from J. R. Ackerley’s (and the brilliant companion piece by his secret half-sister, Diana Petre) to Lorna Sage’s to Blake Morrison’s — exert a special fascination. A small subdivision of the form are those accounts featuring not only a father who is mad, bad or dangerous to know, but a big house. Of these, the Mitfords’ father is probably the most exasperating and lovable. Last year’s Title Deeds by Lisa Campbell, whose father was Thane of Cawdor, was a notable addition. Miranda Seymour’s is the latest gem.

George FitzRoy Seymour was a pedant, a bully and a snob. He wrote unsolicited letters to duchesses, and boasted about being descended from Charles II. ‘He flinched as if pierced when a stranger failed to rhyme his name with the capital of Peru.’ The great love of his life was the House: Seymour justly uses a capital H throughout. This was Jacobean Thrumpton Hall in Nottinghamshire, the property of his aunt’s husband’s family, the Byrons (relations of the poet, of course).

George’s father was in the Foreign Office. A late addition to the family (he had an older brother and sister, barely mentioned in these pages), George was a delicate child; when his parents were posted to South America, their two-year-old son was considered too fragile to join them. His grandmother could not have him, since she was trying to obtain a barony for her young second husband, a project which occupied all her time and money. Apropos cash for peerages, it is interesting to note that in 1936 it cost her half a million pounds for the MP Sir Bertrand Falle to become Lord Portsea. It would seem that peerages, unlike property prices, have fallen well behind inflation.