The Story of the Letters: Kay Hill & Michael Joseph

Katharine Hill (1905-2005) was very much of her time.  A young woman who grew up in a professional middle-class family and among the Teesside ironmasters and gentry, after the First World War she loved racing about the countryside in her friends' fast cars, astonishing the locals when they appeared at village hops and danced the Charleston.  She was married all in lace at St George's, Hanover Square to a kind and gentle, and also wealthy, friend of her brother.  And then she became the classic character of the time – a "Bolter".  

In 1937 she ran away (literally) from her husband and child to join a local racehorse trainer.  She left behind the world of racing cars, parties and going to London to have her hair done, and took up life near Thirsk at a racing stable and farm, breeding poultry and Siamese cats.  

Of an intensely romantic nature, she had a deep love of history and a great facility for writing.  Her stories and anecdotes of the past are vivid and fluent – though they can't quite be relied upon for accuracy.  

She never expected monogamy from herself or the racehorse trainer, and indeed they parted in the end and she lived in a caravan on his farm until her mother's death left her enough money to buy a cottage.  Her last years were spent contentedly at Omega Barns Retirement Home where the many dogs and horses made her very happy until her death at the age of 100, outliving her contemporaries in spite of smoking heavily for some 80 years.

During the Second World War, Katharine began a love affair with the publisher Michael Joseph (1897-1958) and at some point, writing in the third person, she wrote an account of their time together.  The photocopy which I found among her papers is apparently still unfinished and the whereabouts of the original are unknown, but all the same the draft story has such charm and is so redolent of its time that I thought it deserved a place here.  

Katharine, who was my great-aunt, on her death left Michael Joseph's letters to a novelist friend.  "Many letters are lost.  Some fell to bits with being carried about," she wrote.  She wanted her friend to use the letters in some way and for the story to be known, but the copyright in the letters remains with Michael Joseph's family until 70 years after his death and that time has not yet come.  In the meantime, and in case the letters are never made public, here is Kay's story. 

The Story of the Letters: Kay and Michael

A few days before Xmas 1943, Kay's Siamese cat died.  She had nursed it day and night and went down, exhausted, with influenza.  

On Xmas day, in bed with a temperature, she unwrapped a Xmas parcel which revealed a book Charles by Michael Joseph [1].  The sight of it was unbearable.  Seizing a pen & with temperature soaring, she wrote in her grief and rage to Michael Joseph.  "I did not know whether to read your book or throw it unread into a furnace."

He replied and when, in calmer mood, she wrote to thank him he sent her a parcel of books including Eleanor Farjeon's Golden Coney [2].

She returned the books and to her amazement got another letter.  So it started & so it went on.

They found themselves falling in love by letter and before they ever met were writing ardent love letters.  The war came to an end and with it the terrible fact emerged that they could meet and so bring about either the destruction of something rare and sweet or its fulfilment.

He was living in Richard Llewellyn's[3] flat in Upper Brook St when in London.  His secretary managed to find the impossible, a room in a London hotel nearby.  (No guests allowed to stay for more than 3 days, such was the scarcity of accommodation among the bombed houses.)

All the way to King's Cross at every stop Kay's impulse was to leap from the train and go back.  She had deliberately described herself as less attractive than most men had found her.  She was to be wearing a slate blue suit and to be carrying a rawhide suitcase.

In fact she had bought some clothing coupons and was wearing a tawny Donegal suit and carrying a brown suitcase.

They were to meet "at the bookstall" at King's Cross.

Michael Joseph by Howard Coster,
1938, NPG x1943

Kay stood there and saw him.  She was petrified, unable to move.  He did not recognize her and went round and round the bookstall searching.  She then went to the taxi queue, as instructed to do if he did not turn up) and there he saw her and pounced.

They went to Upper Brook St for lunch, then to her hotel where she changed and bathed.  From there they dined at the Café Anglais and that night she never returned to her hotel to sleep.  She managed to get her room booked for a further 3 days although she used it only for changing and resting in.

They wrote to each other until they met again and after they had met for the last time, before his last marriage, up to the day of his death.

They met in all for 15 days out of their lives.  "You always call it fifteen nights," he said.

They decided that marriage was not for them even when both were free.  Kay thought herself "unmarriageable" without maternal instinct, especially for step children, and loathed the housewife role.  He needed all these things in a wife – but not a mistress.  He was incapable of fidelity.  So, on the whole, was she.  He had a feminine, cruel streak, in spite of war service and a fondness for sport including amateur boxing, and considerable toughness of character and appearance.  She had a masculine streak with not a vestige of maternal instinct or domesticity.  They met on both levels.

Before he married again he wrote and asked her up to London.  She refused, without knowing, but sensing, what was to happen; considering it to be a typical instance of his "feminine" side.  To betray his future wife and cause his mistress to suffer 

Soon after he wrote a tender and loving letter telling her he was to marry.

She was seriously glad for his sake, glad too that their love affair had never tailed off into indifference, glad for a clean break.  She told him so, and parted.

A fortnight after his marriage he wrote, to her staggered surprise, and said that the honeymoon had been much less boring than he'd feared and he looked forward to happiness.  They went on writing but never met again.

Kay woke up one morning dreaming happily, half asleep, of the absurd meeting at King's Cross, which she had not thought of for years.  Still smiling, and with eyes, half closed, she leaned out of bed and switched on the BBC news.  A voice announced "the sudden death of Michael Joseph".  His last letter still unanswered.

Kay Hill at harvest time
c1950s

Notes

[1] Michael Joseph (1897-1958) was a few years older than Kay.  Charles was about the life and death of his Siamese cat and is now only available second hand.  It is described on this Pet Histories blog  here 

  

[2] Michael Joseph published Golden Coney – a novel by Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965) about a cat – in 1943

[3]  The best known work by Richard Llewellyn (1906-83) is his novel How Green was my Valley (1939), which was made in 1941 into a Hollywood movie directed by John Ford

 

The Bathurst Charity School in Hutton Rudby

The connection between Hutton Rudby and the Bathursts began in the first half of the 17th century with the founder of the family fortunes, Dr John Bathurst.  

Dr John Bathurst (d 1659)

By the time he died in 1659, the eminent physician Dr John Bathurst [left] was a very wealthy man, whose estates were said to have been worth £2,000 a year.  The date of his birth is unclear [1].  According to the Dictionary of National Biography, he was born in Sussex and came of a Kentish family.  A reviewer of a history of Richmond and Swaledale in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal [2] in 1979 described him as "one of the most famous of the Old Boys of Richmond Grammar School".

On 27 January 1636 (recorded as 1635 at the time, when the calendar was still in the Old Style) he married Elizabeth Willance at Marske in Swaledale.  Elizabeth and her sisters were the heiresses of their father Brian Willance of Clints Hall and shared his estates between them.  As a result, by his marriage Dr John Bathurst became the owner of Clints, a few miles from Richmond.  

Little is known of Elizabeth's father but her great-uncle, the draper Robert Willance, is one of Richmond's celebrities.  He was nearly killed when his young horse spooked and sprang down the cliff at Whitcliffe Scar, killing itself and breaking its rider's leg.  Famously, Willance saved his own life by cutting open the dead horse's belly and putting his broken leg into the carcass to keep himself warm and alive until help finally came.  His leg had to be amputated, and is said to have been buried in Richmond churchyard where its owner joined it years later.  Willance marked the spot on Whitcliffe Scar – Willance's Leap, as it is known – with a stone in thanksgiving for his preservation from death.  

In 1644, in the early days of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, Dr John Bathurst was in practice at York where he successfully treated young Christopher Wandesford from Kirklington near Bedale who had been left in a pitiable state from the trauma of his father's death and funeral in Dublin.  Christopher was from a Royalist family;  Dr Bathurst's most celebrated patient was Oliver Cromwell himself.  

In 1656 Dr John Bathurst represented Richmond in the parliament reluctantly called by Cromwell (the Second Protectorate Parliament) and in 1659 when Oliver's son Richard Cromwell called the Third Protectorate Parliament, Dr Bathurst again represented Richmond.

He made his Will on 23 April 1659, the day after that parliament was dissolved and he died three days later.  

His family would benefit for the next hundred years from the fortune he had accumulated and the investments he had made.  Above all, they drew their wealth from the Arkengarthdale lead mines, where the well-known CB Inn is named after his descendant Charles Bathurst.  He had taken a lease on the mines in about 1650 and by 1656 he had bought the whole of the dale and the mining rights from the Crown.  

At his death he owned property in Swaledale, Richmond, London and Cleveland, including the manors and estates of Skutterskelfe and the nearby hamlets of Thoraldby and Braworth.  In his Will he established a charity in Richmond to maintain two poor scholars at Cambridge and to put out every year a poor boy as an apprentice, and among his charitable legacies he left a rent charge of twenty shillings on his manors to be paid by the churchwardens of Hutton Rudby to the poor on 20 December every year [3].