Podcast

Transcript

Three voices: male voiceover [MV]; Jackie Bird [JB]; Rob Mackean [RM]

[MV]
Love Scotland, brought to you from the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

[JB]
Tucked away in the North West Highlands on the banks of a loch lies Inverewe Garden. This is no ordinary garden. It’s sublimely beautiful, yes, but Inverewe is also a bucket list destination for those who love plants and want to see how the nearby Gulf Stream allows many of its species to defy the Scottish climate. It allows a tropical oasis to exist cheek by jowl to a traditional Highland landscape.

But today’s podcast isn’t about Inverewe Garden; it’s about the man who created it: Osgood Mackenzie. His horticultural legacy is well known, but today’s visitors to Inverewe may not be aware that, for a time, Osgood’s personal life overshadowed his garden paradise. That was when this man of high status, with an impeccable pedigree, became embroiled in a family court case, its bitter machinations widely covered in the newspapers of the day. That story is now a play which has been performed at the Edinburgh Fringe and at Inverewe.

It’s called The Curious Case of Osgood Mackenzie, written by Rob Mackean, who is my guest today. Welcome, Rob.

[RM]
Thank you, Jackie. Nice to be here.

[JB]
What’s the thinking behind the play’s name? The curious case of Osgood Mackenzie …

[RM]
So, the thinking behind it is that Osgood has been held up as this scion of Victorian society and he established these gardens. But when I started to learn a bit more about his background, both through his own book A Hundred Years in the Highlands but there was very little about him in the book. There was mention of a daughter, and in fact in one of the editions of the book I’ve read, his daughter did an extra chapter and an introduction. Clearly, he had a wife at some point because there’s a daughter, but he doesn't mention the wife at all and there’s absolutely nothing about her in the book.

And I then came across another book called Eighty Years in the Highlands by a lady called Pauline Butler, which filled in some of the background. And it turns out that Osgood did indeed have a wife. The marriage seemed to go off the rails fairly quickly. They did have a daughter and she became something of a weapon between him and his wife, and eventually he tried to divorce his wife twice because the divorce wasn’t allowed. So, he appealed it, and it wasn’t allowed on appeal either.

[JB]
So, that was your starting point. This book that he wrote was enough to set you on the trail. That was in 1921. He was aged about what, 78 then? Is that correct?

[RM]
Yes, 78-ish.

[JB]
And the book itself, it’s an autobiography of a sort. It’s a window into a privileged Highland life at the time. It deals with everything, from his forebears – it’s an odd book – to his first dog …

[RM]
And his first gun! Aged 9!

[JB]
He was obsessive with Highland pursuits, outdoor pursuits. It’s a page-turner if you are into how many fish he caught and their weight … but not really one to set the literary heather on fire. It’s not a people book – and we will get on to the absence, as you spoke about, of his wife – but who figures greatly is his mother. Tell us about Lady Mary.

[RM]
Yes. Lady Mary, she was a girl from London who married his father. She was his father’s second wife. His first wife died in childbirth after giving him two sons, so he married again. Mary Hanbury, who then became Lady Mary Mackenzie, and she came up to Gairloch from London society and had to become the wife of a Highland laird, which she took to with gusto, which included learning to speak Gaelic fluently and managing the estates and everything else.

Unfortunately, they had only been married for a short while when the strains of managing the estate and so on led him to, I think, have what we would call a nervous breakdown. Of course, it wasn’t called that then, and they ended up going off to France, with her pregnant, for a rest cure. He died within a year of Osgood being born, and Lady Mary was left with two Highland estates, two stepsons, one direct son – and she had to just pick it all up and go with it, because neither of her stepsons were in their majority. Kenneth Mackenzie wasn’t able to manage the estate so somebody had to do it, and she did.

[JB]
It seems that even from those early years, they had a very, very close bond – she became mother and father to Osgood.

[RM]
Yes. He had no significant male role model in his life directly because she did it all. Now, when he was very young, they were still in France. They employed a French accoucheuse is the French name – I guess we may well call her a wet nurse – and within a very short space of time, possibly as little as a day, Lady Mary heard Osgood gurning somewhere in the middle of the night. Got up, she came in and found the nursemaid sleeping and Osgood gurning in the way that babies do, and after I think a fairly brief discussion she sacked her on the spot and more or less said no woman would ever look after her baby again.

[JB]
And from that moment on, it seems they were inseparable. His mother toured Europe with him. She eventually bought him the tracts of land that were to become Inverewe. This was in 1864, when he was around 22. Let’s leap now to the age of 35. Osgood is 35 and he decides, or perhaps his mother decides, it’s time to get married, and that’s when the problems begin.

[RM]
Well, he gets married because the estates needed money, and the figure of £5,000 is mentioned somewhere. He had met Minna Moss on a couple of occasions and his mother found out when they would be in London; the Mosses would rent one of the big houses around Gairloch as a hunting place.

[JB]
So Minna Moss came from a family who were not short of a bob or two.

[RM]
Her father was a wealthy banker in Liverpool, yes.

[JB]
So, the Mackenzies had the Highland estate but not a lot of cash; Minna did. OK, continue with the story.

[RM]
Yes, her father was a baronet as well, which I think went down rather well with Lady Mary. And she had money, had even said that she could live in the Highlands. Her mother basically said, well, she’s going to be in London, I know when; so, you’re going to be in London too and you should go and call on her.

[JB]
So not exactly a love match here, are we? We’re not talking about a great love.

[RM]
No, it was not a marriage of passion, that’s for sure.

[JB]
Do we know what Minna thought of Osgood?

[RM]
The direct answer to that is no, we don’t. Nothing in her own words. We do, however, know that the first time he proposed, she refused because she believed his mother would live with them.

[JB]
How did they sort that out?

[RM]
Well, her father asked for reassurances from his mother that this would not be the case, so she wrote a letter to that effect, which Osgood took the second time he proposed … which clearly from subsequent events she had absolutely no intention of sticking by. But this was what it would take to get her son married to the money.

[JB]
Crikey. Didn’t Minna’s dad build a house for Lady Mary on the estate to encourage her perhaps to leave the family home?

[RM]
No, I think it was more that she went to live in another one of the houses on the estate called Kerrisdale. And it was more that, for whatever reason, it was decided that she needed her own residence. She couldn’t go and live with one of her stepsons. So, Osgood wanted to build her a house, which he borrowed the money from Minna’s father to build the house.

[JB]
Ah, that was it.

[RM]
It wasn’t that Sir Thomas Moss built it, but he ended up financing it.

[JB]
Clearly Minna was onto this. She knew their relationship could potentially be trouble. I also read that in the house, Gaelic was spoken almost exclusively, so that must have been a very, very difficult situation for Minna. Although no shrinking violet herself, not exactly welcoming if you can’t understand what everyone’s saying.

[RM]
Not at all. And when she was having her baby, she was under the influence of chloroform, which can disinhibit you. And she said ‘They speak in Gaelic. I know they’re talking about me. They just want to get the baby away from me’. So, you’re absolutely right. It reinforces the feeling of she’s just an outsider. She’s just come in; she’s good for the money, but she’s no good for anything else.

[JB]
They had a child, Mairi, and she was born in 1879. It was two years into the marriage. Things had already gone off the rails a bit. I think they realised that it wasn’t a happy one. When did that become obvious that the marriage was maybe going to end in scandal? That was divorce in those days.

[RM]
Not for some years. I think, from memory, Mairi was 4/5/6 … I mean, still very, very young. The signs were very firmly there though, because Minna was not well after the birth and she had to go for a rest down in Buxton as was prescribed by the doctor. Don’t know why Buxton, apart from the waters, but on the way back, Osgood went up to Scotland, came back, picked her up and took her back. And they stopped in Edinburgh where he consulted his lawyer as to his rights over the child, and it was established there that they were absolute under Scots law. It wasn’t quite the case in England at that stage, but under Scots law at that time, the father had absolute right. The mother had no rights.

[JB]
Is that when he started divorce proceedings?

[RM]
No, not for some time. He kept trying to bend Minna to his will. And a lot of this came from the subsequent court cases and verbatim reporting. There were letters between them as well, so it ended up that they were corresponding by letter.

[JB]
In what way was he trying to bend her to his will?

[RM]
Oh, just saying that she was wilful and disobedient and not what was expected, and she was supposed to obey his commands without question, which just beggars belief nowadays. And, she had this curious idea that she came from a family with money and was clearly in many ways a very modern character. She wasn’t expecting to obey her husband’s every whim. That certainly wasn’t the model that she had grown up with, so she didn’t do it, and she kicked back.

[JB]
He had chosen the right woman in terms of her inheritance and in terms of the money that her family had, but the wrong woman because she had come from a privileged background herself and she wasn’t going to go quietly. She was going to fight him all the way. When did this go to court and how big a scandal was it? How widely was it covered in the newspapers?

[RM]
It was covered very widely. It was known as the Mackenzie case. I would say it came to a head where Osgood and his mother one morning took the child forcefully away from Minna, which ended up with bruising on her arms, which was well documented as part of the divorce proceedings. His brother Sir Kenneth witnessed the bruising and testified to that effect in court, at which point Minna left the house and never stayed under the same roof again.

[JB]
And her daughter was how old then, roughly?

[RM]
6. There were some years before the whole thing came to court.

[JB]
And did Osgood take Minna to court on grounds of her unreasonable behaviour?

[RM]
He tried to prove desertion. The grounds for divorce, then, were either desertion or adultery, and he couldn’t prove adultery but he could try to prove desertion because basically she had walked out and said right, that’s it, I’m done. I’m never staying under the same roof as you again.

He tried to do that, but with the extensive testimony from members of the family and lots of other people around it, the judges sided with Minna and refused the action for divorce. Divorce then was … effectively, the woman was regarded as legally dead, so all of her property went to her husband.

[JB]
Now we’ve spent a little bit of time talking about the relationship between Osgood and his mother, and this is something that the judges also commented on during the court case.

[RM]
Absolutely, absolutely. And it was mentioned in the judgement very specifically that Lady Mary was of an imperious temper. She was a dominating character. I love the phrase ‘imperious temper’. I imagine exactly what that was like. And they specifically said that had it not been for her influence over the marriage, it may well have been a perfectly happy and long-lasting marriage. But her love for her son went ‘beyond the normal’, very specifically was mentioned in the judges’ summing up.

[JB]
My goodness. Well, let’s take a quick break and when we come back, the curious case of Osgood Mackenzie becomes even curiouser.

[MV]
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[JB]
Welcome back. I’m with Rob Mackean and we are talking about the life and not-so-happy love life of Osgood Mackenzie. So, Rob, Osgood has tried to divorce his wife once on the grounds of desertion. That’s thrown out. He tries again on what grounds?

[RM]
So, he appealed. He appealed the original judgement because he thought it ridiculous. So, he went to court as he so often did and threw money at it, despite the fact that money was apparently relatively scarce, but there was always money for a court case. He appealed to the Court of Session and what came out of the appeal was actually something that was very important later on, because again, he was appealing and trying to divorce her on the grounds of desertion. But the judge summing up on the appeal said that not only was he not allowing the divorce, but he noted specifically that Minna had not sought a decree of separation, which would have basically given her own independent legal existence. But had she done so, it would have been granted.

[JB]
You can explain the relevance of that later. In the meantime, I’m concerned about Mairi. Young Mairi. Was she having any contact with her mother during the court case? Was she allowed any contact by Osgood and Lady Mary?

[RM]
She was allowed minimal contact: two hours, one day a week was mentioned at one point. There was an Act of Parliament which gave more rights to the mother during the time of this case, so she was able to go to court to establish more visiting rights, including Mairi spending August and September, periods in the summer holidays with her, but she was being schooled at home by Lady Mary. Eventually at the age of 12, Mairi wrote to Minna, her mother, to say I don’t want to see you anymore.

[JB]
What a terrible letter for a mother to receive.

[RM]
Must have been devastating, but she received the letter. Minna then met Mairi in person and heard it from her directly, so it wasn’t that it was dictated by somebody else. But given the imperious temper of Lady Mary and the sway on a 12-year-old that she might have, who is to know where that voice was actually coming from.

It is interesting that actually in the house, in the current Inverewe House, there is a book inscribed from Minna to her daughter, to her ‘little T’ – she used to call her Thyo, which was her middle name, and she was forbidden from doing that. That is just about the only present, gift, anything that can be found from Minna to her daughter. It was pretty sudden, pretty severe that her daughter didn’t want to see her anymore.

[JB]
And do we know what the relationship was like between Mairi and her father at that time?

[RM]
It seems to have been very good. They seem to have been close. It was the relationship of a girl with her father, as far as one can tell, and subsequently, Mairi wrote forewords to A hundred years and she took on her father’s work when he died in 1921, of developing the garden and maintaining it and so on.

[JB]
Well, the book that you mentioned by Osgood is dedicated to Mairi, and the inscription I have here, it says ‘To my daughter who loves the Gairloch, who keeps our simple Highland ways, and for whose strong, unchanging love I am forever grateful’. These were different times. Part of me as a parent myself was saying, why didn’t you, as you got older, as you began to understand what had happened, did you try to make contact with your mother? Did she?

[RM]
There’s no evidence of that. There are rumours that her mother came to her wedding. Mairi married Robert Hanbury. The Hanbury name has come up previously, so she married a cousin as her first marriage. There are rumours that her mother appeared at the back of the church and then went away again. But no, there’s no evidence of any direct contact.

[JB]
How sad. And then there is another twist in the tale: Minna died in 1909. How old was she?

[RM]
In 1909 she would have been 57.

[JB]
OK. And Mairi would have been about 30 then, so she was an adult. Osgood then made a very strange decision.

[RM]
Yes. Because they were still married, when her Will was published, he found that there was no provision in it for either Mairi or him. So, he followed the money and decided to challenge her Will in court on the basis that he was still her husband and under Scots law at that time, and in fact under the Married Women’s Property Act, he had rights. He had rights as her husband, even though they had been separated for so long, so he went to court again.

Luckily, of course, her executives were fairly well funded because she had also inherited her brother’s share of her father’s estate. Her brother died of typhoid in the 1890s and left his estate to Minna, so there was plenty of money there. There was plenty of money to defend. It eventually went on to the courts, and this is the point at which the judge’s comments from the House of Lords appeal on the divorce case become really important. Because they looked at the marriage contract that was drawn up. They looked at the Married Women’s Property Act, but they also looked at that previous judgement and said that because the judge then had said, had she asked for a decree of separation, it would have been granted. There were no grounds for regarding her property as being under Scots law. She was resident in England, domiciled in England, therefore English law applied. There wasn’t any property in Scotland for Osgood to have any claim over.

[JB]
So, Osgood failed again.

[RM]
Yet again, and I have given Minna a line that’s gone down very well in every performance of this play so far, which is ‘so even in death I win … again’. And the audience seem to love that! So yes, she did. Absolutely, absolutely. But of course, this was also the influence of his mother, in my view, reaching out in true melodrama fashion from beyond the grave. Her influence on Osgood extended way beyond her death, to the point where he thought, oh, I’ll just go for some more money to help run the estate.

JB]
You mentioned earlier that there’s no real evidence of any relationship between Mairi and her mother. And going even further than that, we haven’t been able to find any photographs of Minna at all. It’s like she’s been airbrushed from history.

[RM]
Indeed. And of course, given the times, photography was developing. You would have thought that somewhere between the 1870s and 1909 there would have been at least one picture. So, there are still avenues to explore in this. There’s still mysteries to solve.

[JB]
Was this just the case of a young English socialite making a bad choice in marriage, who had different expectations of where she was going to live and the life she was going to lead? Or was it clearly a domineering husband with an interfering mother who orchestrated the marriage and then who helped make sure that it was never going to survive? What’s your view?

[RM]
It wasn’t just a bad choice. Lots of people have made bad choices in the past. And ok, you make a bad choice. But actually, they can learn to live with their partner because they just do. That’s the choice they made. There was far more to it than this. And Minna said several times, through the divorce courts and letters and things, I am not going to be second fiddle to your mother.Can you say you’ve cleaved to your wife as you cleaved to your mother. Can you say that you obey your wife’s every command as you obey your mother’s? So no, it wasn’t just a slightly bad decision and a bit of buyer’s remorse. There was something far deeper going on.

[JB]
I think one of the most unsettling things you’ve said is his visit to the lawyer, long before anything overt happened in the marriage to indicate that things were not going well. That he was preparing for a fight and he just wanted to make sure and he bided his time, which is not nice.

[RM]
No, no. Well, the other thing which we didn’t touch on is when they were first married, within a couple of weeks his draft Will arrived. His mother drafted his Will; and in the Will, Minna was expressly not left any part of Inverewe House. She was given £800. That was it.

[JB]
Within a few weeks of marriage?

[RM]
Within a few weeks of marriage, yes. And his mother did not attend the wedding. She was too ill apparently. Even at that stage, his mother was, like, great, got the money? Fine. Cut her out. She’s not going to have a normal inheritance of property if you die. Oh no, I’m going to get my house back.

[JB]
This is such a sad tale of a family breakdown. But it’s also a sort of social narrative of its time, isn’t it? Of the lives of the upper classes and the subjugation of women in family law.

[RM]
Yes, absolutely. But the fact that it wasn’t static, it was developing. And of course, through that time, through the late 19th and into the early 20th centuries, Osgood would have seen the beginnings of the suffragette movement and makes no reference to it at all in his book of course.

[JB]
Mairi went on to take over at Inverewe and to continue her father’s legacy. So, there was a warm and loving relationship between them despite all that had gone on when perhaps she was a child and far too young to know?

[RM]
Yes, yes indeed.

[JB]
What about people who might argue that we should not be retelling a rather unsavoury episode in the private life of a man long dead who can’t answer back?

[RM]
Yes, that is one point of view, absolutely. The feedback has actually been really interesting because we have had a couple of family members from the Mackenzie line because Osgood himself or Mairi didn’t have any surviving children. She did have two children who died in infancy.The family have their own archives and we’ve had a couple of people saying, ‘actually this is something we don’t talk about in the family enough. It’s a thing that we don’t know how to deal with’.

To me, exploration of something that went on – I have a number of strong women in my life: my mother, my wife, my daughter – and it was thinking, how would they have reacted in that situation? It was an interesting … it’s not judging; it’s not preachy as a play, but it does illustrate the inherent contradictions of many, many things in Victorian times. This ability to say, ‘I killed this, I killed that, I killed hundreds of things. I don’t understand why all the wildlife’s disappearing’. Which he pretty much says in his book, alongside the fact that elsewhere, like in Dickson’s book, there’s a chapter on botany where it basically says, here’s where all the rare plants are. Please don’t go and pick them, because there won’t be any left for anybody else.

It’s all of these contradictions. But that is part of the era and I think yes, it would be very easy to say he can’t answer back; there’s no justice in this. We have so many contradictions in our own times. I think it would be far too easy to look at it through that lens and say yeah, we’re perfect. And no, they weren’t. And in many ways, there was this other side to him, which is it took him decades to build the garden and that requires a love for the plants and the ability to nurture them and develop them and plan out and think very long term and so on. And he could do that with plants, but he couldn’t do it with these very close personal relationships.

[JB]
Osgood McKenzie, as colourful as the garden he created. Rob Mackean, thank you very much indeed for sharing that story with us.

[RM]
Thank you.

[JB]
The curious case of Osgood Mackenzie, who may have had a difficult period in his personal life but, as Rob says, his horticultural legacy lives on at Inverewe Garden. And you can find out all about Inverewe, including the garden’s opening times, on the Trust website at nts.org.uk

It is a spectacular location and well worth a visit. And that’s all from this edition of Love Scotland. Until next time, goodbye.

[MV]
Love Scotland is brought to you by Think and Demus Productions on behalf of the National Trust for Scotland; presented by Jackie Bird.

For show notes and more information, go to nts.org.uk and don’t forget to like, subscribe, review and share.