[In the following essay, Sieveking reminisces about his friendship with Marsh.]

It was in April, 1915, that I saw Eddie Marsh for the first time. Some months earlier, at the age of eighteen, I had joined the Artists' Rifles as a private, for no better reason than that every young man I knew was doing the same thing. I was nearly six feet six high, and had the mind of a fairly bright child of twelve.

I shared a small round tent with eleven other men. One was a painter named Paul Nash, with whom I became great friends. Before long I realized that I was inconveniently tall for the trenches, and I applied for a commission in the flying branch of the Navy. However, the Admiralty would not commission me until the War Office had released me, and the War Office would not release me until the Admiralty had commissioned me. This depressing stalemate was suddenly ended by the intervention of Private Nash. He gave me an introduction to a friend of his called Eddie Marsh, who was Private Secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.

On a sunny day towards the end of April, 1915, I presented myself at the Admiralty, and clumped selfconsciously into a magnificent room with a high window overlooking the Guards' Parade. I clicked the heels of my muddy marching boots, saluted, and stood stiffly to attention. I had never, until two days earlier, heard of Eddie Marsh. I saw a dapper man of about forty, in an elegant grey suit, with a grey silk tie of a slightly lighter shade. He held himself upright, making quick movements like a bird. And when he spoke, it was with a bird's voice. The pitch was high, and very slightly nasal. When he was excited or amused, he twittered like a bird. His eyes were bright, and his bushy eyebrows swept upward into points, like a genial Mephistopheles. His ears, I noticed, were the only ears I had ever seen, except my own, which were perfectly flat, having no curl on the outward edge.

But the thing that caught my attention most was his monocle. He used it to punctuate and emphasize what he said. It was indeed part of his conversation. He used to screw it into his eye at a certain point, and then later, with great effect, open his eye very wide and allow it to drop on to his waistcoat at the end of its black cord.

‘So you are Paul's friend,’ he said, smiling at me.

‘Yes, sir,’ I replied in a parade-ground voice.

‘Well, you seem to be in an impasse’; he made a little bright gesture: ‘We must see what we can do.’

‘Thank you, sir!’ said Private Sieveking.

Eddie gave his head a rapid sideways tilt: ‘I think that Paul excuses us from the formality of “sir”’ he chirped, and let his monocle fall, thus abolishing ‘sir’ for good.

Somewhat shyly I stood myself at ease, and then ‘easy.’ In spite of his cheerful, almost gay, manner, there was a something—a shadow every now and then in his eyes, the reason for which I understood before long. He had just heard of the death, on active service, of his dearest friend, Rupert Brooke.

Looking back, I have always felt that, on that day in April, 1915, Eddie was already looking for someone to fill the place in his life left suddenly empty by the loss of Rupert Brooke, and that he greeted each new man he came across hopefully. If so, he was, in my case, disappointed. It was years before he met Christopher Hassall, the young poet who to a great degree was able to take Rupert's place.

But whatever was in Eddie's mind that afternoon, we went out for a stroll in the sunshine and, taking my arm, he began to tell me about Rupert Brooke. Round and round the Guards' Parade we walked, Eddie reciting first one poem and then another in his own unforgettable, unforgotten way. He had a ‘Period’ voice, with those beautifully articulated late Victorian and Edwardian cadences, and special pronunciations and emphases of certain words, never heard today except from very old gentlemen. It is a manner of speech that has almost entirely passed away. His friend Neville Lytton had it to perfection; and another of his friends, Bertrand Russell, has it too. It is not in the least degree affected. It is a perfect expression of distinguished personality, most delightful to listen to.

‘Ah God! to see the branches stir
Across the moon at Grantchester!
To smell the thrilling-sweet and rotten
Unforgettable, unforgotten
River smell, and hear the breeze
Sobbing in the little trees. …’

Eddie's voice quivered slightly; he paused and looked away across St James's Park; and there was a silence. Then, after a great business with the monocle, he resumed, and did not show any emotion until nearly at the end. The bird-like voice had in it a fierce, almost harsh overtone when he came to:

‘Deep meadows, yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? … Oh, yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?’

Less than a fortnight later, Asquith made the cardinal error of requiring Winston Churchill to resign his office as First Lord of the Admiralty. During his last few days Churchill must have signed scores of papers of all kinds, many of worldwide importance. But one was of greater significance than all the rest—to me. I like to think that his very last act before leaving the Admiralty on his last day was to sign that shimmering, that miraculous document: the memorandum which gave a commission as Flight Sub-Lieutenant R. N. to Private L. de G. Sieveking.

When a famous man dies, all manner of people come forward and tell what they remember of him. Some knew him when he was eight, some when he was eighty, and some in the years between. He himself has probably written an autobiography. All are essential if a truly stereoscopic portrait-in-the-round is to be created. In looking at a man, no two angles are quite the same, and every individual ‘shot’ adds a fraction to the portrait.

On January 13, 1953, the death was announced of Sir Edward Marsh, K.C.V.O., C.B., C.M.G. It sounded merely as though one more elderly gentleman who had survived from the Edwardian era had ceased to breathe. But a number of people were able to pull aside the pompous disguise that was trying to merge him indistinguishably among the vast and ever-growing company of honoured mediocrities. For to them it was ‘Eddie’ who had died—Eddie, whose highly developed individuality stands out against the background of twentieth-century England, lit by a serenely mellow and entirely personal spotlight. …

He had a gift for friendship with people of all sexes, and of all ages. And though he was eighty when he died, two years ago, there are plenty of people still alive, many of them quite young, who have their own unique memories of him.

This is not the place for anything except my own personal memories of Eddie. But I feel I ought to give a few of the bare facts of his life. He was born in 1872. His father was Howard Marsh, Professor of Surgery at Cambridge. One of his great grandfathers was Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister who, in 1812, was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons. Parliament voted £50,000 as compensation to his family, and a little of this trickled down to Eddie, who used it to help the young artists and poets among whom he had so many friends.

When Eddie left Westminster and went up with a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, he met and became friends with many people, among whom were Maurice Baring and Bertrand Russell. He entered the Civil Service in the year I was born, 1896. Four years later, in 1900, he became Assistant Private Secretary to Joseph Chamberlain. In 1905 he became Winston Churchill's Private Secretary, and he remained with him until the middle of 1915, going with him to the Duchy of Lancaster Office after the resignation from the Admiralty. This only lasted a few weeks until Churchill joined his regiment at the front.

I have before me, as I write, a letter from Eddie dated November 17, 1915, from his bachelor chambers at 5, Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn, in which he says:

‘… The P.M. is taking me on as an extra Private Secretary, which I consider as falling as nearly as possible on my feet, after the shock of breaking my 10 years association with Winston. …’

In the next letter he says:

‘… Winston is back for a few weeks' leave. He's been having very narrow escapes, but is extremely fit and loves his regiment. I believe he's very popular. …’

Eddie had three worlds: his professional Whitehall world; the world of artists, poets, and stage people; and Society with a capital S, now vanished. But one thing at a time. An incluctable fact is that, during the best years of his life he was always a private secretary. To Joseph Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Asquith, the Duke of Devonshire, J. H. Thomas, Malcolm Macdonald. And being a secretary, however exalted, does something to you. You have to subject your personality to that of your master. It becomes second nature to you to think, not as yourself, but as your master's secretary; during professional hours at any rate, to react to people and events, not entirely as yourself, but as a loyal, and often admiring, secretary.

I hadn't realized this until I read Eddie's quasi-autobiography, A Number of People. It was published in 1939, but I didn't read it until just after his death. I was startled. I had always wondered what must have been Eddie's feelings on becoming secretary to Asquith, who had forced his beloved Winston to resign. But this book gave me an entirely new view of him.

I seemed to sense again a subtle flavour that I had tasted in, for example, the book on Bernard Shaw, written by his secretary, Miss Patch, just after Shaw's death. But with a difference. Eddie had an immense diversity of other fields beyond his professional life, out into which he burst, full of vigour and zest, the moment the duties of Whitehall had been done for the day.

But even in these other circles he sometimes seemed not altogether to have cast off the life-long habit of service to another's personality. Perhaps this accounted a little for his extreme modesty, his almost excessive tact, his willed blindness to faults in other people.

But nothing could repress his enthusiastic appreciation of the good things of life, his humour, and his kindness of heart. He enjoyed good talk, wit, good food, the company of beautiful women, and clever women. And in 1911 he began to buy, with the little money at his disposal, the work of young painters whom his discriminating taste told him were worth encouraging.

One day in the summer of 1915 I got some leave and went, for the first of many times, to stay with Eddie at Gray's Inn. I didn't know anything at all about modern painting, and had never seen the house of a collector. I climbed the stairs to his front door on the second floor—or was it the third?—and was let in by his faithful housekeeper, Mrs Elgy.

I looked round the hall, and through the open doorway of a room. Everywhere, from floor to ceiling, were paintings. As I followed her down a passage into the room where Eddie was awaiting me, I was overwhelmed with shyness. During luncheon the monocle flashed and glinted as the urbane, graceful phrases pleasantly chirruped out after each other in the air above the delicious food. After luncheon he took me round his collection.

He had an odd little mannerism of leaving sentences unfinished, which came into play on occasions when special kindness, extra tact were necessary; when, in fact, he wanted to conceal the other person's shortcomings from him. This was emphatically one of those occasions. We went from room to room, every wall completely covered, doors hung with paintings, paintings leaning against chairs.

He murmured: ‘This little Sickert. … you like it? … I've always thought it rather …’

And a moment later: ‘Stanley Spencer. I bought it at the Carfax Gallery. Do you think I was wrong?’ and then, letting his monocle fall, ‘I thought it rather gay, and … Mhm …’

But the height of eloquent omission was reached when we peeped into Mrs Elgy's bedroom. This too was completely hung with paintings but she had hung her dresses over some of them. Eddie pursed his lips in vexation.

‘I do wish …’ he said.

We inspected the lavatory and the bathroom. And their walls too were covered with pictures.

But I, like the couple in the poem, ‘said nothing all the time.’

It was in the theatre that Eddie really blossomed out with all his exuberant zest. The discrimination which enabled him to pick out at their beginnings painters like Paul Nash and Duncan Grant, who have since become world famous, deserted him in the theatre. At First Nights he was like a schoolboy. He revelled in it all. Two remarks, heard one evening before the curtain went up, describe him exactly.

James Agate: ‘Now then, Eddie, you can't be enjoying it already!’

Arnold Bennett: ‘Eddie is a m-miserable fellow. He enj-j-joys everything!’

One night he took me and the girl I was in love with at the time to the first night of a show in which Ivor Novello had written some of the songs. We walked down the Strand to the theatre, and Eddie sang us a new song that had taken his fancy.

‘K-k-k-katie, K-k-k-katie!

‘You're the only g-g-g-girl that I adore!’

His stylish, fin-de-siècle pronunciation of the word ‘adore’ is quite impossible to render in print.

We were in a box provided by Ivor. Just before the curtain went up, Eddie leaned towards us and whispered: ‘If you don't like it, don't say anything.’ He could not bear to hear criticism of any of his friends. But his letters often contained anecdotes such as the following. At a First Night, ‘Frank Curzon … came round in front, in hopes of hearing praise from the audience. The only thing he heard was a woman saying to another “Well, dear, you would come!” …’

It was not only young painters that he loved to encourage, but young poets also. His anthologies which appeared between 1911 and 1922 under the title Georgian Poetry contain many names now famous, such as Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, and D. H. Lawrence. He was vexed when I told him years later of a verse of Brooke's in a letter to another private secretary at Number Ten, in which the phrase occurred:

‘Oh, I have eaten haggis meringue’

‘And strange ambiguous bun. …’

It should, he felt, have been included in the Memoir.

This same private secretary, when I was having tea one day at Number Ten in the secretaries' room, told me how someone had once asked Eddie what he'd done with a certain document:

‘I am certain I put it in the War Office out tray,’ he replied seriously. ‘I remember the gesture.’

Eddie reminded one of those charmingly urbane figures who used to throng Holland House in its great days. In some ways like a character from Proust's densely populated pages, he knew ‘everyone’ in Edwardian Society—and out of it. Every week-end he stayed at one or other of the great country houses that existed in those days. As a universally welcome guest, a patron of the arts, and as a writer of entertaining letters, he was in a way like Horace Walpole. A difference was that he was not a rich man with utter freedom to develop his own personality.

He loved the society of young people of all sexes, and nothing made him happier than when he was able to encourage and help them in practical ways. Many of his young friends were gifted in one way or another, but I had absolutely nothing to recommend me to his friendly notice. Above all, I had no social gift.

Yet he used to take me to dine with the Winston Churchills, in—was it?—Eccleston Square; and with Lady Randolph Churchill, where we were waited on by female footmen in pale blue tail coats. I hope I was not as much of an embarrassment to Eddie as I was to myself as I sat at the tables of the mighty, bursting with physical health, very tall, in appearance somewhat like a young horse, bright crimson in the face, a picture of agonized shyness in my sparkling new naval uniform. I was a sort of male version of the proverbial ‘dumb blonde.’ The only explanation of Eddie's continued friendship then, and during the years that followed, was his pure generosity of heart, and his unfailing loyalty when once his friendship had been given. …

I have sometimes wondered about Eddie and sex. He was nearly forty-three when I met him, and it seemed to have no place in his life. But I fancy that he must once have been ‘a bit of a lad’ in an elegant and rather correct way. The only positive clue I have is contained in one of his letters to me:

‘… I do envy you your new-found power of enjoying your past. I haven't got it a bit. So long as I'm on the same page in the book, I love thinking back the earlier lines of it, but once the leaf is turned the previous pages bore me a little, partly because I'm ashamed, both of what I was, and of having changed, (which is a bit inconsistent!) …’

How should one interpret that?

There is much more I could write about Eddie, but I will conclude with an odd little incident that took place on what he said was the happiest evening of his life.

On March 17, 1937, a group of Eddie's friends gave him a banquet to celebrate his knighthood. Winston Churchill was in the chair. When all the speeches were over everyone began to stroll about. Emboldened by wine, I went and sat down for a moment beside Mr Churchill, and told him that, though I was a Liberal as he had once been, what I looked forward to more than anything else was his becoming Prime Minister.

Mr Churchill smiled, patted me on the arm in a fatherly way, and replied:

‘You never will, my dear boy. It's too late. They don't want me. I shall never be Prime Minister.’

And Eddie, who came up at that moment, leaned over us with monocle flashing, and murmured Asquith's often-quoted admonition: ‘Wait and see!’