Lord Berners

Biography

Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners (18 September 1883 – 19 April 1950), also known as Gerald Tyrwhitt, was a British composer, novelist, painter, and aesthete. He was also known as Lord Berners.

Early life and education

Berners was born in Apley Hall, Stockton, Shropshire, in 1883, as Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt, son of The Honorable Hugh Tyrwhitt (1856–1907) and his wife Julia Mary (1861–1931), daughter of William Orme Foster, Apley's owner.
His father, a Royal Navy officer, was rarely home. Berners was therefore mainly raised by his paternal grandmother, Harriet Tyrwhitt, 12th Baroness Berners who was extremely religious and self-righteous, and a mother whom Berners himself considered had little intellect and many prejudices.
In 1890 Berners and his parents moved to Althrey house near Wrexham. Berners was educated by the local curate.
His mother, who was the daughter of a rich ironmaster, and had a strong interest in fox hunting, in spite of her own artistic inclinations ignored her son's cultural and musical interests and instead focused on developing his masculinity, a trait Berners found to be inherently unnatural.
Berners felt like a black sheep in his family, whom he considered completely uninterested in pursuing any cultural pursuits.
Berners later wrote, "My father was worldly, cynical, intolerant of any kind of inferiority, reserved and self-possessed. My mother was unworldly, naïve, impulsive and undecided, and in my father's presence she was always at her worst".
Berners' father became ill in 1906, and died in 1907 while being conveyed by the ship SS Caledonia to Port Said and was buried at sea. His widow remarried in 1908 to the colonel William Ward Bennitt. Berners never got along with his step-father.
Berners was first educated at home by governesses and then enrolled at the boarding school Cheam School. He then was admitted to Eton College in 1897. After his graduation he studied at Résenlieu France and Germany while attempting to pass the entry examination for the Foreign Office. He twice failed the examination but instead served as an honorary attache in Constantinople from 1909 to 1911 and at Rome until after succeeding to his peerage in 1918.

Adult life

In 1918, Berners became the 14th holder of the Berners Barony, after inheriting the title, property, and money from an uncle. His inheritance included Faringdon House, in Faringdon, Berkshire, which he initially gave to his mother and her second husband; on their deaths in 1931 he moved into the house himself. In 1932, Berners fell in love with Robert Heber-Percy, 28 years his junior, who became his companion and moved into Faringdon House. Unexpectedly, Heber-Percy married a 21-year-old woman, Jennifer Fry, who had a baby nine months later. For a short time, she and the baby lived at Faringdon House with Heber-Percy and Berners.
As well as being a talented musician, Berners was a skilled artist and writer. He appears in many books and biographies of the period, notably portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. He was a friend of the Mitford family and close to Diana Guinness, although Berners was politically apathetic and was deeply dismayed by the outbreak of the Second World War.
Berners was notorious for his eccentricity, dyeing pigeons at his house in Faringdon in vibrant colours and at one point entertaining Penelope Betjeman's horse Moti to tea. The interior of the house was enlivened with joke books and notices, such as "Mangling Done Here". Patrick Leigh Fermor, who stayed as a guest, recalled:

"No dogs admitted" at the top of the stairs and "Prepare to meet thy God" painted inside a wardrobe. When people complimented him on his delicious peaches he would say "Yes, they are ham-fed". And he used to put Woolworth pearl necklaces round his dogs' necks [Berners had a dalmatian, Heber-Percy the retriever, Pansy Lamb] and when a guest, rather perturbed, ran up saying "Fido has lost his necklace", G said, "Oh dear, I'll have to get another out of the safe."

Other visitors to Faringdon included Igor Stravinsky, Salvador Dalí, H. G. Wells, and Tom Driberg.
His Rolls-Royce automobile contained a small clavichord keyboard which could be stored beneath the front seat. Near his house he had a 100-foot viewing tower, Faringdon Folly, constructed as a birthday present in 1935 for Heber-Percy, a notice at the entrance reading: "Members of the Public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk". Berners also drove around his estate wearing a pig's-head mask to frighten the locals.
He was subject throughout his life to periods of depression which became more pronounced during the Second World War, when he had a nervous breakdown. He lived in lodgings for a period in Oxford where his friend Maurice Bowra got him a job cataloguing books. Following the production of his last ballet Les Sirènes (1946) he lost his eyesight.

Death and epitaph

He died in 1950 aged 66 at Faringdon House, bequeathing his estate to Robert Heber-Percy, who lived there until his own death in 1987. His ashes are buried in the lawn near the house.
Berners wrote his own epitaph, which appears on his gravestone:

Here lies Lord Berners
One of the learners
His great love of learning
May earn him a burning
But, Praise the Lord!
He seldom was bored.

Music

Berners' early music, written during his period at the British embassy in Rome during World War I, was avant-garde in style. These are mostly songs (in English, French and German) and piano pieces, many written using his original name, Gerald Tyrwhitt. Later pieces were composed in a more accessible style, such as the Trois morceaux, Fantaisie espagnole (1919), Fugue in C minor (1924), and several ballets, including The Triumph of Neptune (1926) (based on a story by Sacheverell Sitwell) and Luna Park, commissioned for a C. B. Cochran London revue in 1930. His final three ballets, A Wedding Bouquet, Cupid and Psyche and Les Sirènes, were all written in collaboration with his friends Frederick Ashton (as choreographer) and Constant Lambert (as music director).
Berners was also friendly with William Walton. Walton dedicated Belshazzar's Feast to Berners, and Lambert arranged a Caprice péruvien for orchestra, from Lord Berners' opera Le carrosse du St Sacrement. There are also scores for two films: The Halfway House (1943) and Nicholas Nickleby (1947), for which Ealing's music director, Ernest Irving, provided the orchestrations.
Berners himself once said that he would have been a better composer if he had accepted fewer lunch invitations. However, English composer Gavin Bryars, quoted in Peter Dickinson's biography of Berners, disagrees saying: "If he had spent more time on his music he could have become a duller composer". Dinah Birch, reviewing The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, a biography of Berners written by Robert's granddaughter, Sofka Zinovieff, concurs saying: "Had he committed himself to composition as his life's work, perhaps his legacy would have been more substantial. But his music might have been less innovative, for its amateur quality – 'amateur in the best sense', as Stravinsky insisted – is inseparable from its distinctive flair".
Berners was the subject of BBC Radio 3's Composer of the Week programmes in December 2014.

Literature

Berners wrote four autobiographical works and some novels, mostly of a humorous nature. All were published and some went into translations. His autobiographies First Childhood (1934), A Distant Prospect (1945), The Château de Résenlieu (published posthumously) and Dresden are both witty and affectionate.
Berners obtained some notoriety for his roman à clef The Girls of Radcliff Hall (punning on the name of the famous lesbian writer), initially published privately under the pseudonym "Adela Quebec", in which he depicts himself and his circle of friends, such as Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel, as members of a girls' school. This frivolous satire, which was privately published and distributed, had a modish success in the 1930s. The original edition is rare; rumour has it that Beaton was responsible for gathering most of the already scarce copies of the book and destroying them. However, the book was reprinted in 2000 with the help of Dorothy Lygon.
His other novels, including Romance of a Nose, Count Omega and The Camel are a mixture of whimsy and gentle satire.

Fiction

1936 – The Camel
1937 – The Girls of Radcliff Hall
1941 – Far From the Madding War
1941 – Count Omega
1941 – Percy Wallingford and Mr. Pidger
1941 – The Romance of a Nose
[See Collected Tales and Fantasies, New York, 1999]

Non-fiction

1934 – First Childhood
1945 – A Distant Prospect
2000 - The Chateau de Resenlieu
2008 - Dresden

Legacy

In January 2016, he was played by actor Christopher Godwin in episode 3 of the BBC Radio 4 drama What England Owes.