At the end of last year I was sorting through a large box of correspondence dating from the 1930s and onwards. In amongst them was a handful of letters addressed to Bill Stewart who was my grandfather. They stood out due to the immaculate clarity of the handwriting and the fierce affection they displayed for my family, in particular Bob. They were all signed by an ‘Yvonne’ who lived in the red enclave of Highgate not too far from the cemetery where Karl Marx is buried. It turned out they were from Yvonne Kapp, not someone I had ever heard of, certainly my father had never told me about her even though he comes in for a great deal of flattery in them. I have to admit that, starting with the letters and then digging deeper, Kapp is someone I’ve become almost infatuated with during the course of my research and I am sad that I never met her. She lived an extraordinary life.
Dating from the early 1970s the overwhelming sense that these letters convey is of age and infirmity. Bill is getting over a serious illness, Yvonne is recovering from a fall, Bob is blind and installed in a care home. There is an acknowledgment of things slowly coming to end and of putting affairs in order. A deep love and attachment is clear though the odd resentment surfaces occasionally. The first, from April 1972 is innocuous enough.
Dear Bill,
Thank you so much for sending the snapshots & your nice letter. The snaps are wonderfully good & I wish Bob could enjoy them. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting Robin on that occasion; what a very nice chap he is.
Unfortunately, I can’t go to see Bob at present as, a fortnight ago, I fell & broke my ankle – both sides of it- & shan’t be able to put that foot to the ground for 6 to 8 weeks. It’s not too painful now, but I’m helplessly moored to the bed. Still, I send letters to Bob by the nice young woman whom we’ve laid on to attend him twice a week.
I’m enclosing the publisher’s announcement of my book which will be out on May 25th. Do ask for it at your local library- & get Robin to do the same at his if you can find the time.
With very best wishes,
Yours ever,
Yvonne.
I’m assuming the snaps were from Bob’s 95th birthday celebrations though try as I might I have not been able to find any copies of these photos so far. Robin is my father, always known by his middle name on his side of the family but as I never really knew any of them I only ever heard him called ‘Mike’ or ‘Michael’ or, of course, ‘Dad’. The book she refers to is the first part of her two volume biography of Eleanor Marx, described by Eric Hobsbawn as, “one of the few unquestionable masterpieces of 20th-century biography.” It’s certainly the work she is best known for, completed in her seventies after ten years researching and writing.
The second letter is dated New Year’s Day 1973- the year of Bob’s death. Things seem far more urgent. Bob is growing frailer and Kapp is urging Bill to make the journey from Colchester to London to see his father before it’s too late. Bill wasn’t in the best of health either. He died in 1978 when I was about four years old. I have few memories of him save for a lovely old man in stripy pyjamas in a hospital bed whose moustache was all tickly when I kissed him. Of a tiny, dark house full of treasures and of long night time drives back from Essex to Suffolk where I only now realise how my own father must have felt whilst leaving an ailing parent as I’ve now made so many similar journeys myself. I think I remember his funeral- a haze of adults’ knees, mumbling and, in my mind, a red flag draped over the coffin. That could just be my imagination. His decorative Indian elephant bell that I adored was given to me afterwards has been a constant companion in every move I’ve made since leaving home – always kept safe.
Dear Bill,
Forgive me for not having been able to answer your letter before. I came back from my “summer holiday” just before Xmas, since when I’ve visited Bob a couple of times, ln the first of which I read him your letter, of course. He was sorry to hear of your illnesses & does hope you are now fully recovered.
He himself is growing very frail, Bill, and I hope that you will make a trip to see him very soon. His courage is unimpaired & he never complains, but feel he has to make an effort to appear as cheerful as he always is when I am there & that underneath it, he feels very tired & rather sad. His muscular strength is reduced; he finds it difficult to move about even in the room & with help & as time passes, he loses his sense of direction in his total blindness. I have never known anyone as brave & as good as Bob, I love him, dearly as you know, but now I worry about him a good deal & I wish I could do more to help him in his lonely old age. Please go and see him when you can manage it.
Wishing you a happy New Year & with Bob’s love to you.
Yours ever,
Yvonne
The next letter was written in March 1974 around sixth months after Bob’s death and his funeral at Golders Green Crematorium. Kapp’s grief is still very raw and her anger at others failing to remember his birthday on the 16th February in commemoration is palpable. She refers to papers and photos that have gone missing and of course it’s impossible to tell what may have been lost but we do at least still have an album of cards and messages from his 90th birthday celebrations that she seems to think has gone forever. The striking thing about this letter for me is her description of Bob as, “the finest human being I have ever known” something she would reiterate when she came to write her memoirs at the close of the 1980s. The letter closes with some comments on the problems of completing the second volume of the Eleanor Marx biography and the difficulties on living on the proceeds of the first. I don’t think much has changed for writers in the almost fifty years since she made those comments.
Dear Bill,
Thankyou for your letter. I was glad to hear from you though sorry that your health is so bad & prevents you getting out and about.
I must say I was rather surprised that, of all people who swilled and guzzled at Bob’s birthday parties year after year, I was the only one, apparently, to remember them with gratitude- or remember him on that occasion, only five months since he has gone. I still miss him very much. Though the last 3-4 months were painful to go through, I would not have foregone my weekly visits to him for anything on earth. Indeed, during the period when he was first moved to the Nursing Home, I went twice a week so that he should not feel too unfamiliar in new surroundings. Bill Brooks- and his family too- was wonderful to the very end & so thoughtful & considerate of Bob’s wellbeing.
It is horrid that his photographs disappeared. For a long time at Fenstauton Avenue, he had them with many other photos & papers of interest at the top of his cupboard & I often asked him whether I shouldn’t take them away to keep them safely: all his 90th birthday greetings cards in a folder & a mass of other stuff. But as long as he was entirely clear in his mind, he wanted them left there. Then, as you know, he was moved to the Home at a rather critical stage when he was rather confused, & I never saw any of those papers again. But I am not very much surprised. After all, if members of his loving family could steal from a blind man a new suit he had only worn 3 or 4 times, on the grounds that he had told them to take a suit – he meant the old one- for “jumble”, then nothing can surprise one.
However, these things – papers, photos, clothes- are not important. It is Bob, the man, the finest human being I have ever known, who remains in one’s loving memory & nothing can add to that or subtract from what he has left behind in one’s heart or what he gave us all in his lifetime.
I am getting on with Vol 2 of Eleanor, but it is a slow task as I’m not so young myself. However, it will be finished before the year is out – quite a long time before, I hope, as it is going quite well. – & in the meantime, the more people you can encourage to read Vol 1 the better, as it is quite a hard struggle to live & work on the proceeds. (Not even a Phase 3 for writers!) At least each time that a library (or anyone) buys a copy – never mind how often it is lent out- I get 45p.
Take care of yourself & when you write to Robin, give him my kind regards. I took to him very much when we met at those famous (forgotten) birthday parties & you have a fine lad there.
With love to you,
Yvonne.
In the final letter I have, the grief remains The target of her anger is Bob’s daughter Nan, who I mentioned in the previous post ‘Prison Rhymes’. Since 1956, while the rest of the family had maintained their commitment to communism, she had travelled further and further away from them politically. The reasons for this are not surprising. In the early 1940s her first husband, a Russian apparatchik and the father of her son Gregory, was shot in one of Stalin’s purges. Nan and her baby son, my dad’s cousin, managed to escape the USSR but almost inexplicably the details of her husband’s fate were unclear and she remained a member of the Communist Party. Everything came out years later in 1956 after the ‘secret speech’ where Khrushchev admitted Stalin’s crimes. The trauma this caused within the family, often overheard by MI5 on tapped phones and bugged offices is the current focus of my research. By 1978, Nan has done the unthinkable. She has become a member of the Conservative Party and Yvonne Kapp is furious.
Dear Bill,
Thank you for your letter and sending me one from the Millers. I was so glad to hear from you and Robin and to know that he is settled in such a pleasant place. One day I shall try to visit him there.
I wish you yourself were feeling stronger and in better health.
The news of Nan’s preposterous move had reached me before you wrote. I’ve heard a few sick jokes in my time but Nan as a member of the Tory party is about the sickest. I’m glad that, whatever your parents suffered at her hands one way and another, they did not live to see this.
It was sad going to Peter Kerrigan’s funeral just before Xmas. What a terrible year the last one was. So many dear friends departed. I suppose that at my age it’s inevitable, but that doesn’t ease the sorrow. Let’s hope that 1978 will have less sadness to record.
Anyway, I wish you all the best for 1978 and – herewith returning the Millers’ kind letter- send you my love,
Yours always,
Yvonne.
1978 was the year my grandfather died. Kapp, born in same year as him lived to the age of 96 – the exact same age Bob was when he died. She passed away on June 22nd 1999. Eric Hobsbawm wrote an admiring obituary in The Guardian in which he described her as “self-reliant, tough, faithful, ladylike and quietly proud to the end” before adding, “She had good reason to be.”
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Clearly, the almost forty year friendship between Yvonne Kapp and Bob Stewart was a profound and important one. It began in 1934 when she was housing refugees who, a year into Hitler’s seizure of power, were already fleeing Nazi Germany for London. One such refugee, as with many in the same position, seemed particularly damaged and traumatised and was proving difficult to cope with. He was arranging for suspicious packages to be sent to her address, ranting about the prospect of being expelled from the German Communist Party, demanding money and threatening suicide. Kapp, at this point an active communist, didn’t know what to do and was frightened his death was potentially on her hands. Someone suggested she should go and see Bob for advice at the party’s headquarters in King Street, Covent Garden. He listened patiently and helped her work out the best course action to take. In her memoir, Time Will Tell, she outlines the “permanent legacy” of this situation.
Bob who had been a joiner and a cabinetmaker in Dundee, was a foundation member of the British Communist Party in 1920. He and his wife, Meg, became honoured guests in my house shortly after that first meeting and we spent many Sundays visiting them. With Meg’s death in the early 1950s and his advancing age- for he was over sixty when I first put my head round his door- his life took a melancholy turn, not made happier by retirement and the gradual onset of blindness, so that I visited him as often as I could and he would come to us on Christmas Day. At one point I took him to see an ophthalmologist who told him that his eyes had done their work and there was no cure for his failing sight.
He was always resolutely cheerful and uncomplaining, put on so brave an air of being in good spirits, took so lively an interest in what was happening in the world and, though unable to read newspapers, held so clear-headed a view of events as they unfolded (including, in 1968, when he was over ninety, telling young people- in their sixties – that the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russian tanks, was a terrible mistake), that it was an education to be in his company and a privilege to be his friend. As his strong body lost some of its resilience, and to his blindness were added other infirmities, the Party arranged at considerable expense for him to live in a kindly if rather slapdash home for old people. There I went to see him every week during his last years and did so almost to the end though, as ill luck would have it, when he died at the age of ninety-six in 1973, I was away on holiday.
Bob, the wisest of men and also the most generous and great hearted, was the first person I had ever known who was truly good, all through. I could not have had a better teacher. His was the permanent legacy my shifty lodger left me.
(pp185-6 Yvonne Kapp, Time Will Tell, Verso 2003)
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One of the things that I most admire about this friendship is the unexpectedness of it all. Bob was working class Dundee bred joiner who had endured great poverty and left school at twelve. Kapp on the other hand was the privileged bohemian, bisexual daughter of wealthy upper class German Jewish immigrants twenty six years his junior. Reading her memoir the 1920s were a particularly heady time for her. While Bob was organising for worldwide revolution and heading off to Moscow as a representative on the Comintern, she made an early marriage to the artist Peter Kapp; headed off on a walking tour of Europe; wrote scandalous novels under the pseudonym Yvonne Cloud and dived head first into the artistic and literary world of London. In her afterword to Time Will Tell, Charmian Brinson notes:
…there is much about Yvonne’s life that reflects the intellectual, cultural and political climate of the age in which she lived, with Bloomsbury (in the shape of her friend Quentin Bell) juxtaposed with Harry Pollitt or, on an international plane, with Helene Weigel (for some years, Yvonne advised Weigel on English translations of Brecht). Figures as diverse as Rebecca West, Noel Coward, Frances and Vera Meynell, Max Beerbohm, Clifford Allen, John Collier, Melanie Klein, Nancy Cunard, CK Ogden, Rudolf Olden, John Strachey, Paul Robeson, John Heartfield, Kate O’Brien, Herbert Morrison, Jack Tanner, Jocelyn Brooke and Ilya Ehrenburg people these pages.
(p291 Time Will Tell – Charmian Brinson- Afterword-Reflections on Yvonne Kapp)
While I would love more gossip on Noel Coward who regularly came to the Kapp’s for post performance suppers after The Vortex at the Comedy Theatre, my favourite anecdote in Kapp’s memoir involves the future star of Bride of Frankenstein Elsa Lanchester and her husband and fellow screen legend Charles Laughton. The Kapps met Lanchester through joining the 1917 Club and through The Cave of Harmony- a cabaret Elsa ran and performed at. Yvonne and Elsa became close for a number or years but Kapp is scathing in her assessment of Laughton.
In that same year of 1929 Elsa Lanchester married Charles Laughton. She told me he was wonderful but, though prepared to believe her, i found that he seemed to quench her fiery spirit and mocking wit. An adoring wife, she kept the best of herself – like the choicest morsel of food and the heart of the lettuce- for Charles. He, to my irritation, could not so much order a cup of tea without playing the part of a man ordering a cup of tea.
(p86 Yvonne Kaapp, Time Will Tell, Verso)
She goes on to dismiss Laughton as a “great ham” and laments seeing less and less of Elsa until she became a “virtual stranger” who avoided former friends due to her troubled personal life.
As the 1920s gave way to the 1930s Yvonne Kapp became more and more political and her life changed direction. As Hobsbawm notes in his obituary of her:
Hitler and the Nazi tyranny in Germany turned her into a communist and this gave sense and stability to her life. Through her work with refugees it also brought her together with the former member of the Bertolt Brecht collective, Margaret Mynatt, the later inspirer and editor of the English tradition on of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, with whom she shared her life until Margaret’s death in 1977.
(Eric Hobsbawm – Yvonne Kapp, The Guardian 28th June 1999)
The first volume of the Eleanor Marx biography, Family Life was dedicated to Margaret Mynatt. When it came out in 1976, the second volume, The Crowded Years, was dedicated to the memory of Bob.
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POSTSCRIPT: In learning more about Yvonne Kapp, I found the work of Alison Light, Charmian Brinson and Sally Alexander to be essential. Also, Yvonne Kapp’s Eleanor Marx and Time Will Tell are both published by Verso who, at the present time always seem to have a sale on so it’s worth heading over to http://www.versobooks.com to pick up a bargain.
Alan Stewart
Breaking the Fetters 