Uncle Eddie

Many years ago, when I was working at the Stanford library, I came across in the stacks a book which must have been a British memoir from the early to mid 20th C. I didn't read the whole book, but I browsed through its photo section, and found afterwards that one particular photo had stuck in my memory.

It showed a distinguished-looking elderly gentleman at the beach surrounded by a gaggle of children, and it looked like this:



What struck me as memorable about the photo was that the elderly gentleman was named in the caption as "Uncle Eddie," and that he was further identified as Lord Dunsany. The fantasy author. Whose given name was Edward, yes.

The idea of the author of weird and ethereal stories being found at the beach with children and called Uncle Eddie tickled my fancy. But it was a retrospective tickle. I hadn't copied the photo or taken note of the book's title when I saw it, and when I went back to the part of the stacks where I'd seen it, I couldn't find it again. Figuring that Dunsany's avuncular status was probably genealogical rather than honorary, I made a cursory flip through his family tree for likely younger relatives, but I must not have looked very hard or I would surely have tripped across his wife's niece by marriage, Elizabeth Longford, the historical biographer.

It wasn't until decades later, just a couple months ago, that my search was answered when I came across this post by Doug Anderson describing Elizabeth Longford's memoir The Pebbled Shore, with its account of how she knew Lord Dunsany as Uncle Eddie. I knew this must be the right book, fetched it from the San Francisco public library when I was next there (this is the book I inadvertently left by my seat after watching the opera about Steve Jobs), and that's where the above photo was scanned from.

This time I read the book. Longford had an interesting life. As a student at Oxford in the 1920s she was the Zuleika Dobson of her day, a comparison made at the time, fascinating male undergraduates and young dons alike, many of whom impulsively proposed marriage to her. These were men who'd become notable in later life, and if you, fellow American reader, haven't heard of Hugh Gaitskell or Maurice Bowra, I have. But she turned them all down, until, a few years later, for reasons not clearly explained, she decided to accept one of them, the tall and gawky Frank Pakenham.

Frank was a scion of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, and his mother's sister was Lady Dunsany, so that's how Uncle Eddie came in to the picture. Of the children in the photo, three are Elizabeth and Frank's offspring; the other two are family friends.

Married to Frank, Elizabeth became involved in his passion of left-wing politics, and they both ran (unsuccessfully) as Labour candidates for Parliament. Eventually Frank inherited the title of Lord Longford, under which he became known for his crusades against pornography and for paroling long-term prisoners. Meanwhile, Elizabeth started writing professionally via journalism, and moving into books when she started researching one about Joe Chamberlain, the arch-imperialist of Victorian Britain. Who was her great-uncle. Incidentally, she claims that Joe's son Neville (the future prime minister, yes) was another one who impulsively proposed marriage to her, though I kind of doubt that, as he married someone else when Elizabeth was four years old. So maybe we should take some of this with a pillar of salt.*

*Am I misremembering this? Was it Elizabeth's mother he proposed to instead? That's more chronologically possible.