Free Kate by Claudia Joseph Page A

his uncle Francis in his history. ‘His three brothers played a great part in his life.’
    In those days, it was not the done thing for a gentleman to look after his children, so Francis employed a Scottish Presbyterian nanny called Miss Cadell to look after Rockland and bring up his young family. Olive, who was the eldest, went to Roedean boarding school. Athel writes:
Miss Cadell was not really fitted for the care of children. Poor Frank seems to have left household affairs very much in her hands. And while no doubt she was well meaning and scrupulously honest in her dealings, she was soon the dominant figure in the house. It is recorded that on one occasion she had the house painted without any request to Frank for his permission. On another occasion she renewed the drawing room cretonnes [draperies] with her own lamentable choice. Frank paid the bills without complaint. Vanity in the young must be crushed. It appeared that Anne aged ten was afflicted with that vice; her hair was promptly cut short. It may certainly be claimed that in later years vanity was not a family failing. The boys perhaps suffered less regimentation than the girls as they were often away at school. But eventually things came to a crisis. Miss Cadell departed. The drawing room cretonnes were ripped off. And so ended an unfortunate episode.
    By this time, the three boys, Fran, Maurice and Lionel, had gone off to Rugby School, while olive had left Roedean and was old enough to become her father’s housekeeper, caring for him and her younger sister Anne. She must have been jealous of her brothers’ freedom as they went up to Trinity College, like their father before them. It was during his time at Cambridge that Maurice became something of a legend for his love of motor cars. He had a yellow steam car, which blew up and had to be towed back from Cambridge to Leeds by his friend Leonard Schuster, who owned a Rolls-Royce, a sight that apparently caused quite a sensation.
    After leaving university, Fran and Lionel joined the family firm, while Maurice became an apprentice engineer at Hathorn Davey in Hunslet, where his uncle Hugh was managing director. Fran and Maurice both moved back into the family home, where they were looked after by olive and five servants – a cook, waiting maid, housemaid, kitchen maid and sewing maid.
    Olive did not get her own freedom until 1914, when she married Noel Middleton and her sister Anne, by then 25 years old, took over the running of Rockland. That summer, their eldest brother, Fran, 28, was married to Dorothy Davison, the daughter of a mathematics master at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, who specialised in seismology. But war was looming and it would be the last time the large family would be together.
    When the Great War broke out, olive’s brothers Fran, Maurice and Lionel were all in the Territorial Army, along with two of their cousins, Michael, son of their uncle Arthur, and Hugo, son of their uncle Hugh. Fran and Maurice joined the Leeds Rifles. While Fran remained in England as the adjutant of a training brigade, Maurice became a captain in the 7th battalion of the West yorkshire Regiment, the Prince of Wales’ regiment, and was shipped to the support trenches in Belgium as part of the all-territorial 49th (1st West Riding) Infantry Division. He arrived on 19 April 1915, and died exactly two months later, at the age of only 28, one of 2,050 members of the Leeds Rifles to be killed on active service in France and Flanders during the war. He is buried at the Rue-Pétillon Military Cemetery in Fleurbaix, northern France.
    His letters to his family, which are published in The Next Generation , a sequel to The Lupton Family in Leeds , edited by Athel’s nephew Francis Lupton with contributions from various family members and local historians, seem strangely naive in retrospect. ‘I would not have missed coming out here for worlds,’ he wrote on 28 April. ‘We have done no actual fighting yet but only