From Army to Stage to Nunnery
CAPTAIN WILLIAM ELTON HOME (1881-1970), my step-father, was a skeptic, perhaps in reaction against his mother
founding her own religion, the Church of the Seven Candles.
None the less, he believed that he saw a grand piano fly round the drawing room during a spiritualist seance
at her house in Suffolk Square, Cheltenham.
Being the seventh child of a seventh child, William also believed that he had a sixth sense.
He gave up telling fortunes only after reading the palm of a vicar's wife so accurately that he precipitated a divorce.
William
was the son of Colonel Robert Home, Royal Engineers, and Elizabeth Georgiana, née Elton.
The Colonel was the son of Major-General Richard Home and grandson of the painter Robert Home, who studied under
Angelica Kauffmann, a founder member of the Royal Academy.
The artist's father was the eminent army surgeon Robert Boyne Home; his brother was Sir Everard Home FRS,
the first president of the Royal College of Surgeons; and his sister Anne married the great pioneer of surgery
James Hunter FRS.
William was educated at Cheltenham College and Sandhurst.
His father had told him to choose a career.
"I wish to become a surgeon, sir," said William.
"Leave the room and don't come back until you can talk sense," the colonel roared.
So William made the same choice as his father and brothers.
In 1900 he joined the Indian Army.
While serving with the Burma Military Police from 1904, he moved from station to station with his push-start motor-cycle,
an elephant (to carry his gramophone and the 25-volume Historians' History of the World), and his Burmese mistress.
William
became a Captain in 1911 with the 27th Punjabis, stationed on India's north-west
frontier, pictured above. He had immense respect for the subedars [warrant officers, mostly Sikhs, portrayed left] but the local tribesmen used him as a target for musket practice.
He was often greeted in the bazaar with a cheerful "Nearly shot you yesterday, sahib!"
On the brink of World War I, after drinking downstream from a dead camel, William was declared unfit for further service.
He
then went on the stage, his ramrod back serving well in military roles.
He was on Broadway as stage manager for Nikita Balieff's Russian revue troupe, La Chauve-Souris,
which took Paris, London, and New York by storm during the 1920s.
The show was a stage manager's nightmare, requiring split-second timing as the cast acted, danced and sang
in twenty or so sketches, each with different scenery.
Featured on the souvenir program cover (right) was the Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, appropriated by the Rockettes in 1933.
The company often toasted William in hopes that he would get drunk: they all passed out while he remained forever sober.
In 1931 William was appointed business manager of the Theatre Royal, Windsor, which was being changed back
from a cinema to a legitimate theatre.
It was soon found that he had muddled the accounts, so he was replaced.
While visiting Naples, the atheistic William was deeply impressed by seeing the annual miracle of
St. Gennaro's dried blood liquefy in its vial.
Back in England he applied to become a monk but was shocked to find that the abbot went foxhunting
and the brothers reeked of Chanel No. 5.
So he went instead to Stanbrook Abbey nunnery as a lay brother, doing chores for the enclosed sisters.
William had a long white beard, which occasionally caused the Abbess, Dame Laurentia McLachlan,
to mistake him for her great friend Bernard Shaw.
After eight years he had had enough and went to stay with a wealthy Catholic friend, Charles Markham.
Early during World War II William announced at breakfast "I can no longer accept the dogma of the immaculate
conception." Charles replied "Then you must leave or you will destroy my faith."
William contemplated homelessness, but within minutes the butler brought a silver salver on which was a letter from my mother Sheila
to her friend from the old days when both were on the stage.
She invited William to come and pump water in the house to which she had evacuated.
Probably to save me from a Nazi gas oven if the Germans invaded, my mother had found a place so far off the map that it was also off
the water supply, the electricity supply, the gas supply and the sewage system.
William arrived, and after a couple of years Sheila changed her name to his. At
the war's end they moved, not to vulgar Brighton, but to Hove actually. Their house was
only a semi-detached but they behaved as if they were in one of their childhood mansions:
every night they dressed for dinner.
A quarter of a century her senior, William doted on his child wife.
To please her he lived to be 94.
Two weeks after he was dead, she was too.
I disliked William for two reasons: all my girlfriends, like my mother, found him utterly charming; and he held to
the revolting prejudices of a past era, thinking that the people of India should be treated as children,
and finding it amusing that an army colleague used to go hunting in Tasmania
─ for natives.
When I was at Cheltenham College William's brother Jack used to invite me to tea.
He was known for stepping into the road to direct traffic with his walking stick, and for putting all his chairs
on the front lawn with invitations to sit and await the Second Coming of Christ.
© 2006 G. Harry McLaughlin.
Reproduction or transmission, in whole or in part, for other than personal use
is prohibited without advance permission from
Dr. G. H. McLaughlin.