As I watched the first part of All Change at Longleat, the embarrassingly gripping BBC series about the warring eccentrics who inhabit that amazing Wiltshire house, something kept nagging at me: hadn’t I once read a book by a member of the family of the Marquess of Bath?
After a while, it came to me. Daphne Fielding, bright young thing and the late mother of the marquess, was a writer: the author of, among other surprising volumes, a short biography of Iris Tree, The Rainbow Picnic (1974). I still can’t remember how I discovered this lovely little book, but I do know what must have drawn me to it. Dedicated to my beloved Diana Cooper, it begins: “Iris Tree was the most truly Bohemian person I have ever known…”
Tree (1897-1968), the daughter of the actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, was a poet, actor and artist’s model. Painted by Modigliani, Augustus John and several Bloomsburies, her bobbed hair was immortalised to stunning effect by Jacob Epstein in 1915; later, she also had a cameo in Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
Fielding’s account of her extraordinary life is deeply personal. This isn’t only because the two were friends. Fielding understood what it meant to scandalise society: having disobeyed their parents by marrying secretly in 1926, she and the marquess were divorced in 1953.
Neither Fielding nor Tree were the most talented members of their super-glamorous set, but they shared a certain indomitability and wit. “There is no news,” wrote Tree to her friend Rupert Hart-Davis (I can’t give you a date for this, alas: Fielding wasn’t much of a one for the particulars), “except that the Albert Memorial fell on my left foot and completely spoilt my shoe.”
If this sort of thing is your cup of tea – I’m afraid it is mine – The Rainbow Picnic is yours for a song on the secondhand book sites.
