MY PART OF THE JACOB FAMILY
by Rachel MacDonald

My great grandfather Major-General Herbert Jacob of the Indian Army was born in 1806. He married Mary Dunsterville, whose brother (?) was apparently the man Kipling based ‘Stalky and Co’ on. Herbert and Mary had nine children, of whom my grandfather, John Le Grand, was the youngest; he was born in 1858. I know nothing of his early life; he was born in India but probably the family returned to England on great great grandfather’s retirement. For some reason he bucked the family trend of going into the Indian Army and as a young man went off to Australia, where he met my grandmother, Felicite Rodriguez, who had also gone to Australia to teach French to the children of the Governor General. She had been born inf Santo Domingo, Haiti, of a Spanish father and a French mother. Whether they died young I don’t know but in Any event she was brought up in an Ursuline convent near Brussels before setting off to Australia, I think probably having a few years in France first, as they were both about 30 when they met in Sidney. After they married in 1891 I have many, many of their letters to each other between 1892 and 1900; they were separated frequently, firstly while grandfather was finding the land they wanted to buy, leaving Granny in Sydney with Felicite, and then after they were settled on the sheep farm station in New South Wales – ‘Mayfield’, Sweetbriar, Oberon; the nearest town was Bathurst, west of Sydney; often grandfather would be away buying things or just having a break while granny with the     aid of farmhands was manning the station. Their letters are so loving, they were obviously devoted to each other. They had four daughters: Esmie Marie Josephine in 1893, Doris Dunsterville in 1894, Maryon Rose Felicite in 1897 and Rita Florence Le Grand in 1901. They seem to have been happy and devoted family but tragedy struck in 1901 shortly after my mother was born. I don’t know how it started, I was always told my grandfather fell off his horse and was concussed, but I can find no reference to this in the letters. In any case he became mentally ill and was advised to return to England. I have a very moving letter from his best friend to Granny, advising him that they must all return to England as the barbaric lunacy laws of New South Wales would strip her of all their assets and assign him to a horrible place. I also have the receipts of the sales of everything on the farm, down to the smallest  tool, all written in beautiful copperplate writing by Messrs Clements & McCarthy, stock and station agents and auctioneers, Bathurst. Pages and pages of implements and other furniture all only amounted to £171. Most of which they seem to have paid direct to the Orient Steamship company for the family’s passage home, for my grandmother, 3 children and a baby - £96. I know that granny hated ships and how she managed on the long journey on the SS Omaya, for many weeks with 3 small children and a baby, feeling so ill and not knowing how she would find her beloved husband or what their future would hold, I just cannot imagine.

I don’t think she had ever been to England though I cannot be sure of this. Fortunately my grandfather’s family were very devout Christians and they welcomed her, this strange-to-them French lady with four children, and cared for them in Wells where great aunt Eveline and Rose certainly lived. For some years they must have been partly dependent on the Jacob family though I imagine my grandmother would have given French lessons. Anyway they all went to Wells Blue School; I have some exercise books, and all went on to further teaching. Esme was very artistic and attended an art school, Doris I am not sure about, Marjorie went to Horticultural College at Swanley and Rita to the Norland Institute of Nursing. As a child of 12 Rita had Rheumatic Fever, so the whole family was uprooted and moved to Margate for a year or more while she was in the Royal Seabathing Hospital. There is a letter from the Bishop of Bath and Wells accepting Granny into the Church of England (being a Roman Catholic) so that she could attend the Hospital Chapel for Communion.

Moving on, in the early 20s the two elder girls were married – Esme while on a painting holiday in Switzerland, fell for Xavier Kessler whom she met on a funicular railway while they were both ascending the mountain near Zermatt. They married and went at first to Rome where Xavier was in the hotel business and where Peter was born in 1925 and the for the rest of their lives to Lucern, Switzerland, where Doris was born in 1927. Esme and the children always came to England every Summer to spend time with Felicite and Marjorie and to have seaside holidays with Rita, Sam and us children. Doris Jacob married a very much older man called Arthur Weekley; they moved to Cranford which is now almost subsumed by London Airport. It has always been felt that she did this because having been brought up in straightened circumstances she longed for luxury, and this she certainly gained, all the furs, jewellery, and fine clothes she wanted, and was presented at Court, but no happiness, and tragically she died  at 28 of kidney disease. Marjorie never married, she took a gardening job in Italy and later an Italian lover – history doesn’t relate why they didn’t marry, but it was an enduring friendship and Roberto bought a house in Weybridge for Felicite and Marjorie in the 30s. He was an intellectual and friend of Mussolini as a young man, Mussolini being then much admired by the Italian intelligentsia. Marjorie also in the 1920s made beautiful lingerie, exquisitely embroidered with lace and had a successful small business. Felicite was a wonderful embroiderer too, I have much of her work and use it still.

Rita, my mother qualified as a Norland Nanny. In those days people who could afford nannies would only employ those who came from ‘good’ family backgrounds! I have her testimonial book which is glowing. She worked for the Fisher family; Kenneth Fisher was a beak at Eton with 4 children; she had a happy few years with them there and Kenneth then was made headmaster at Oundle in I think 1924, and my mother moved with them. Here she met Sam Squire, who was a bachelor housemaster of 46, my mother being 23. He fell for her at once but she was not sure about the age difference so she decided to go abroad for a year and think about it, taking a job with an English family in Alexandria, Egypt, where she had a wonderful time, she always said, riding fabulous Arab horses, sailing and not having an arduous job as there was only one child. But she did decide she wanted to marry Sam and came home.

They were married at Oundle Parish Church on April 6th 1926 and I was born the following January 1927. The school didn’t want to lose my father who was by all accounts a first rate teacher and housemaster so they built another boys house, and called it St Anthony’s House, and that is where our family lived for the next 18 years. My brother John Dunsterville was born in 1929 and my sister Rosemary Jane in 1934. We always had a nanny or a governess but they were wonderful parents. My mother was busy as a Housemaster’s wife, and the middle classes just did love nannies then...

I didn’t go to school till I was 10, either my contemporaries came to our house for lessons with our governess or we to them to share theirs some years. We also had music lessons from the music master, gym with the army sergeant who taught the boys gym ,maths lessons from another mother, French from another, so when I did go to school I was totally up to speed! My brother too was sent to prep school at 8, again the usual thing then. When the war broke out in 1939 I had just won a bursary to St Felix School at Southwold but they went off to Cornwall and my parents said that was too far, so they sent me to Hitchin Girls Grammar School where a friend of theirs was Headmistress. It was very good educationally but not a very satisfactory set up with only 20 boarders and 500 daygirls.

Late in 1939 my sister Rosemary became ill and my parents sent for a specialist from London whom they knew. In January 1940 he said she must come to his hospital in Hammersmith and they operated, but it was no good and she came home to die, nursed by my mother in our nursery, on February 19th 1940. I was away at school and was not told until after her funeral. I am sure that would not have been done nowadays. My parents were of course heart-broken and I’m not sure my mother ever got over it; Rosemary was just 6.

Apart from this great tragedy we did have a happy childhood. The school was a great community, we always had lots of friends to do things with and all the great facilities of the school, tennis courts, swimming pool, the school farm to bike to, and apart from that we could bike anywhere on our own all round the countryside in those days. I had a pony for some years, John was not so keen. Our father was always around in the holidays and would take us golfing, something that John was far better at than I. Life really was different then in that we never had to do any domestic chores, even my mother. She would go down to the kitchen and sit with Cook every morning for half an hour planning the meals, both the boys’ and ours. The housework was done by housemaids, my parents had a parlour maid for when they ate or entertained in the private part of the house, and we had a nursery maid to bring the meals upstairs for Nanny and us children, and clean the nursery floor which was the top floor of the house, day-nursery, night-nursery, my room and spare room – bathroom of course. I do remember that we were very cosseted in that if we had a cold we were put to bed for a few days, given special food-treats, and the family doctor would come round, sit on the bed and chat and then go downstairs and a have a sherry with my parents, he never seemed in a hurry! Holidays were spent at Southwold because Aunt Helen was headmistress of the prep school for St Felix which was a large building right on the sea (now flats) and we had the run of the building and mostly the beach. We always had the  Swiss cousins with us, and our older Stansfeld cousins were very good with us. It wasn’t ideal for my mother because Dad and Aunt Helen spent much time doing the Times X word together or discussing intellectual matters and my mother although very intelligent was not intellectual, and of course much younger. We did have one holiday in the Lake District in 1939 when Rosemary was bridesmaid to Neil and Lorna Fisher, I can just remember partly because as I was always car-sick, Nanny and I went on the train, big adventure. Of course, during the war we couldn’t go on holidays as there was no petrol and the Swiss cousins obviously couldn’t come. In fact their letters and ours were all censored, carefully with bits cut out of them if it was thought that information could be useful to the enemy! Our Jacob grandmother lived in a village nearby at that time because Aunt Marjorie’s war work was working at the censorship office in London as she spoke French and Italian. There was only a very little petrol for civilians and it was rationed so we bicycled everywhere or went by train. My father, who was then in his sixties, bicycled at least once a month from Oundle to Leicester to visit granny Squire, 35 miles each way. Food was rationed too; I never remember being hungry, but we all for instance had one egg a week! At boarding school I remember we had horrible “scrambled egg” made of dried eggs, and we only had butter or  jam on bread, never both. Fruit was just apple or anything else grown in England - no bananas. In 1944 at school we had to sleep downstairs in the corridors in deck chairs because of the flying bombs, Hitchin being fairly near to London; quite tough when we were doing our ‘A’ level exams at the time. No gap year then; in Autumn 1944 I started at Anstey College of Physical Education which was in Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, where the Principal was my aunt Marian Squire. Ironic as all I really wanted to do was dance but my parents felt that was too precarious a career. In the event dancing was the one thing I never taught (apart from running  Scottish reel clubs) as both schools I taught in had specialist dancing teachers. I don’t know why I wasn’t encouraged to go to University but then it was only really very scholarly “blue-stocking” girls who did. College was really an extension of boarding school; very strict timetables, no boyfriends in the houses, in college by 9-45 pm etc etc. Anyhow I gained my diploma in Physical Education in 1947. The only Distinction I gained was for my student lecture which had to be given to the whole college and staff on any subject. I chose the History of the English Inn and was awarded best lecture of the year prize!

Time to earn my living. The first post was at Heathfield, Ascot; a much less academic place than it is now, in fact the girls did not expect to have a career at all, most of them left to “come out”, in other words be presented at court, have a season of balls and parties and probably marry the first eligible man who asked them. Two of those that I remember were Mary and Frances Rocke who both Married at 17, Frances was to become mother of Princess Diana. Princess Alexandra I also taught, she was always a lovely child with no airs and graces. We were a young staff on the whole and it was a happy two years. I had the day off on Mondays and the local Ascot taxi would take me to the station where I would take the train to London and go to galleries or shop, he would meet me in the evening and take me home – all on a salary of £190 a year! We had to dress well, in fact on Saturday evenings we had to wear a long evening dress and sit at High Table in the girls dining room, probably to eat beans on toast, as there was still food rationing. There we had to don lace caps and  proceed into evening chapel (the French mistress being Roman Catholic never sang as she felt the C of E was really below her).

In 1949 I felt I really wanted to be in London and Heathfield’s sister school Queensgate needed a Games mistress, so I found myself a share of a flat in Chelsea Embankment (£2-50 a week) and moved there, where I was to have a happy six years, both in the job and in my free time, having several romances on the way and generally having fun, with lots of friends – I saw a lot of my Stansfeld cousins. I belonged to Chelsea Old Church and would do some visiting of old people for the vicar. My parents had meantime moved from Oundle to the village of Fotheringhay, bought a lovely old house and my mother was renovating it as a ‘Country Club’, really just a small hotel where she would take mainly Oundle parents visiting their sons at weekends. This was very successful, her great friend Vera Adams helped her with the cooking and the food was first rate, We English people were just beginning to appreciate good food after the end of rationing and people from London especially enjoyed the plates of real country food. I quite often came home to them at weekends to help to run the bar. My father, who after retiring took a job as a Classics Lecturer at Glasgow University, was there in the holidays and latterly all the time, but mainly stayed in his study making up Greek crosswords or meditating on Homer or Aristotle.

In 1956 I thought I would like a change of direction so went off to Spain in July to help my cousin Lorna Jacob to open up a small hotel in Torremolinos, then a beautiful little fishing village on the coast of Andalusia. Just before leaving I had met Alex Macdonald who had been staying at my mother’s hotel for almost a year, but going home every weekend to see his son Roddy. I liked him immediately but he had other ‘fish to fry’ and I was going off to Spain anyway. When I returned in the autumn, uncertain of what I was going to do next I spent the autumn helping my mother. Alex then began courting me seriously, but so did David Oliver whom I had met in Spain and who had proposed within a week. It was a weird time. I loved them both in different ways so I was alternatively sad or happy, sometimes  distraught at the decision I had to make, but eventually I decided that David was more suitable, being my age and never having been married and no children. So in January 1957 on my 30th birthday I got engaged to David and went off with him to Lisbon where he had just been sent by the Bank of London and South America, having been for some years in Columbia. Within weeks I found I was missing Alex terribly and I broke it off and came home, feeling dreadful for David. Meanwhile Alex had written every single day long letters to me at Fotheringhay, which my mother had kept. Curiously she had been on his side all along in spite of the stigma of divorce (which had been 12 years earlier). We met up in London and got engaged immediately and married two months later in Chelsea Old Church on July 20th 1957. Our honeymoon was in the Channel Islands, one week on Herm, the other on Sark, both beautiful.  The we settled in to our own first home in Barkston Gardens, London, which the agents called South Kensington, but which was a 1 minute walk from Earls Court tube station . Alex’s office was then in Belgravia, in Grosvenor Place, but no sooner had he got settled when they bought a place in Englefield Green and he had to commute outwards. Our first son James Murray was born on September 14th 1958 at Princess Beatrice Hospital, and christened at Chelsea Old Church in December. When he was a year old we started looking for houses near Englefield Green and only the third one we looked at was Burnside at Ascot. I remember vividly standing on the lawn with my mother and Jamie aged 15 months, to view it and her saying ‘But it’s far too big Darling, you’ll need staff!’ Within a month of moving in I knew I was pregnant again, and though I didn’t know for another six months that it was twins within a year we were already 6 in the family including Roddy, who was mostly with us and had thus already almost filled the house! Victoria and Jonathan were born on December 13th 1960 and to my mother’s horror I was sent home on the fourth day in the snow! It was a very, very busy few years then but also very happy, and even happier when we were joined by William Alexander on August 9th 1966. Thus was our family complete – for that generation anyway.

To return to the Jacob girls. Esme lived to the great age of 93, Alex and I and Victoria went to her 90th birthday in Lucerne, a lovely occasion. Marjorie, after Granny died in 1952, had herself a house built in Sussex and made a beautiful garden there over many years. In old age she became forgetful and could not safely be on her own any more, so Alex and I brought her to Burnside where we had spare rooms, Rita having decided to marry again – more of that later – and we hope she had a happy four last years with us, eventually having to be cared for in a nearby house.

Rita meanwhile gave up the hotel in 1958 and she and Sammy moved into a cottage in Fotheringhay. Sammy died in 1962 and after a while she was asked to house-keep (with her own cottage) for an old friend, James Menzies Wilson. When she was 69 she had two proposals of marriage. She decided to marry James and this they did on her 70th birthday and had four very happy years before James died very suddenly in his armchair. Rita moved South and lived in a large flat in Old Windsor, which had been renovated by the Windsor Rotovarians, the chairman of which Prince Philip she entertained to teas. She was very energetic still in her mid 70s and even dug up part of the garden to grow vegetables for our family. She went to Polo every Sunday, gave parties and went to them, always looked smart and loved being with our children. Sadly she died in 1978, after a stroke, but she would not have enjoyed being old and inactive in any way.

So that was my part of the Jacob family   gone, though I am still in touch with Doris Erni, Esme’s daughter, who is married to Hans Erni, the Swiss painter, soon to celebrate his 100 birthday.

Our family has produced James, a London theatre director, who also directs in New York and Berlin, Victoria who is a London florist and does many weddings independently, Jonathan, who is a banker with a degree in music, having been an ex-Balliol organ scholar, and William, who has his own television production company.

© Rachel MacDonald 2007