Damian Collins - Charmed Life - The Phenomenal World of Philip Sassoon

At Oxford he also enjoyed the independence of having his own allowance to spend, and his own rooms to live in. He arranged for furniture from his parents’ Park Lane mansion to decorate his quarters at Christ Church, and once gave a seven-course dinner party with the food specially brought up by train in heated containers from a restaurant in London. Despite his father’s hope that Philip would start to mark out a future for himself in politics, he did not trouble the debaters at the Oxford Union Society, the training ground for generations of would-be leaders of nations. Although a confident performer in private company he remained a nervous public speaker and could not hope to compete with the Union’s leading lights, such as fellow Old Etonian Ronald Knox.

At Oxford, Philip’s circle of friends was drawn not from his own college, but mainly from his Old Etonian contemporaries at Balliol, men like Charles Lister, Patrick Shaw Stewart, Edward Horner and Julian Grenfell. Apart from Horner, they did not fit the mould of the traditional English gentleman, whose place and role in the world was certain. Lister had caused a stir at Eton by joining the Labour Party, a genuinely radical step in the eyes of early Edwardian society. He’d also participated actively in the school’s mission to the poor in Hackney Wick in the East End of London. Shaw Stewart was academically brilliant and very ambitious but, without any real family money, was required to make his own way in the world. He was fixed on making a fortune in the City, before embarking on his own career in public life. Grenfell was someone whom Philip had grown up with, even if they had not become particularly close. Philip and his family had been frequent guests at Taplow Court where Julian’s mother Lady Desborough, a close friend of Aline Sassoon, was a renowned hostess. Julian’s first London dinner party had been at the Sassoons’ home in Park Lane, the evening before the Oxford and Cambridge University Boat Race in 1907, and his younger brother Billy had been to stay at the Avenue de Marigny earlier that year.

Yet Philip and Julian were cut from very different cloth. Julian was 6 foot 2 and made for battle. His aesthetic interests lay in the pursuit of physical perfection through the training of his own body as an athlete and boxer. Lawrence Jones, a contemporary at Eton and Balliol, remembered that

There was something simple and primitive in [Julian] that was outraged by the perfection of well-bred luxury at Taplow … He felt that there was something artificial and unreal in [his mother’s] deft manipulation of a procession of week-end parties, lightly skimming the cream from the surface of life … Julian had a passion for red-blooded down-to-earthiness, for action and adventure, and, with youthful intolerance, fiercely resented the easy, cushioned existence of Edwardian society. 17

These emotions led to frequent arguments with his mother, and were also evident in his up-and-down relationship with Philip, whose own tastes were closer to Lady Desborough’s. Julian wrote a mocking letter to his mother from Oxford, faking a new interest in the more refined tastes she hoped he might develop:

I went and did a soshial [sic] last night to widen my circle of friends and my general horizon: the Bullingdon dinner – all the pin heads there! They are such good fellows!! and now I know what a miserable fool I’ve been shutting myself away from my fellow men, but thank God it is not too late! and I believe that last night I laid the foundations for some golden friendships which will blossom out and change and colour the whole of my life. Do you know a man called Philip Sassoon? 18

Julian kept an Australian stock whip, and once used it after a party in Philip’s luxurious rooms to chase him around Christ Church’s Tom Quad, cracking the whip to within inches of Sassoon’s head, crying out, ‘I see you, Pheeleep,’ mocking his French accent. Julian would also call out ‘I see you, Pheeleep’ if he spotted him in the Balliol Quad, causing Philip to scurry for the gatehouse or a nearby staircase entrance. Their friendship, which developed at Oxford, was largely based on their mutual interest in rigorous outdoor pursuits. Lawrence Jones remembered that they ‘both had a passion for beauty, as well as for getting things done’. 19Julian and Philip were complex personalities who defied preconceived ideas of their characters. Julian was the rough man who was also developing into an increasingly accomplished poet. Philip was the aesthete who jumped fences and muddy ditches in perfectly tailored buckskin breeches, and played opponents into the ground at tennis.

In July 1908, at the end of Philip’s first year at Oxford, he attended a large summer party at Taplow Court given by Lady Desborough, to mark the final appearance by Julian’s brother Billy in the Eton versus Harrow cricket match, with guests including the new Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and the Conservative leader, Arthur Balfour. Philip then departed to spend part of the vacation in Munich to improve his German. He lodged with a baron who provided rooms for young gentlemen, often those aspiring to work in the diplomatic service and looking to perfect their languages. Sassoon shared his quarters with John Lambton, who was just a few years older than him but already much the same as the rather staid Earl of Durham that he would become.

Lambton was friendly with the American novelist Gertrude Atherton, who was living in the city at the time, and Philip joined their group. There could not have been a greater contrast between the irrepressible Philip and the stolid Lambton. Gertrude remembered that Philip was ‘as active as Lambton was Lymphatic; he might indeed have been strung on electric wires, wanted to be doing something every minute … To sleep late was out of the question with that dynamo in his room at nine in the morning demanding to be taken somewhere.’ 20

Along with Gertrude’s niece Boradil Craig, they embarked on an energetic tour of the sights and treasures of Bavaria, including Ludwig II’s extraordinary Romanesque Revival castle of Neuschwanstein. Ludwig had created a romantic fantasy of pre-Raphaelite splendour high in the rugged hills above Hohenschwangau. It was inspired by the world of German knights, honour and sacrifice captured in the works of Richard Wagner, whom Ludwig worshipped. Philip Sassoon toured every corner of the castle, devouring in detail the architecture and decor, and admiring the personal artistic statement that Ludwig had made. Philip’s great-grandfather David had similarly built his own palace at Poona, and the young Sassoon would later fashion a new estate in Kent at Port Lympne, which would be his greatest creative legacy.

In the evenings the group would often attend Munich’s Feldherrnhalle opera house, and on one occasion Philip and Boradil danced in the open air in Ludwigstrasse, on a platform before a replica of Florence’s Loggia di Lanza. Gertrude recalled that Philip ‘in an excess of high spirits kicked off [Lambton’s] hat and played football with it [and] he was highly offended. Despite his lazy good nature he could be haughty and excessively dignified, and all his instinct of caste rose at the liberty. But Young Sassoon was irrepressible. Hauteur and aristocratic resentment made no impression on him.’ Gertrude thought Philip ‘a nice boy and an extremely brilliant one, the life of our parties’. 21

Philip returned to his studies at Oxford, working diligently if not with huge distinction, and graduated after four years with a second-class honours degree in Modern History, specializing in eighteenth-century European studies. He’d also signed up at Oxford, with his father’s encouragement, as a junior officer in the East Kent Yeomanry, which was the local reservist regiment for Edward’s parliamentary constituency of Hythe. Edward, always thinking of a future career for his son in public life, told Philip that such a move would be ‘useful in other ways later on’. 22