Free Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare

Chatwin’s clients was explosive. Milward’s wife moved to Malvern to escape the pointed fingers, while the question occupying Edgbaston was whether his glamorously dressed daughters would continue to worship at Edgbaston Old Church. Bruce’s grandfather, who had just married into the family, felt a special kind of horror.
    “Now this has happened,” Leslie asked a relative of the convicted man, with whom he used to commute to Five Ways station, “would you mind if we didn’t travel in the same carriage?”
    But he could not avoid the scandal undermining his business. Through the Law and through his marriage, the Chatwins were associated with the Milward mess. At West Heath Road, Leslie kept his shame hidden. In 50 years, it was a subject concealed from his children and grandchildren, never to be mentioned. Leslie’s son Anthony learned of it first as a teenager, from a girlfriend. The story reached as far as Sheffield, where, 36 years later, it mortified Charles to discover the scandal was known to his in-laws. He refused ever to discuss his grandfather with his children. “That’s all from long ago,” he would say if Milward’s name came up. “His name was taboo,” wrote Bruce.
    The image of his great-grandfather loomed over Bruce Chatwin’s life. After Isobel died in 1953, he found Milward’s court suit and sword in a tin trunk, last used when the Duke of Marlborough became Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. “Dressed as a courtier, sword in hand, I dashed into the drawing room shouting ‘look what I’ve found!’ – and was told to ‘take those things off at once!”’ It was the one time Bruce saw his father angry.
    Milward’s disgrace became a Chatwin party piece. In 1962, at a dinner in Istanbul, Bruce used it to delight a daughter of the last Turkish Sultan, after which he noted with satisfaction in his journal: “All were very intrigued to hear of my great-grandfather . . .” Six years later, at a lunch with Kenneth Rose and two South American girls, he was at it again. Rose wrote in his diary: “Bruce tells us that his great-grandfather was a celebrated swindler, who cheated the then Duke of Marlborough out of many millions as his family solicitor. ‘He cheated old women out of their few pounds, too . . . ’ Bruce has tried to get his father to talk about the case, but cannot get a word out of him. He asks me to see what I can discover.”
    Rose at the time was working on the Churchill archives. Bruce responded enthusiastically to what he was able to uncover. “A real operator – £I08,595.I5.II is no mean sum. If only he hadn’t been found out!”
    Friends noticed that what appealed to Bruce was the idea of a conman ripping off a lot of toffs. “Every writer is a cut-purse,” he was fond of saying. “The art is to make one’s thefts as invisible as possible.” Theft, plagiarism, pick-pocketing, these were writers’ skills. The art critic Ted Lucie-Smith knew him from 1959. “Bruce was a great intellectual thief. He had no respect for intellectual property.”
    Another friend, Stella Wilkinson, says: “He did have a dodgy side, a tremendous lot of the street urchin in him. A quality that education can’t give you.”
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    Isobel Chatwin took consolation in a large family. She was one of ten children. Her sisters were models of rectitude, and married pillars of the church; her brothers rather the reverse. After “the surprise”, as it was referred to by the Milwards, they scattered.
    With the help of Philip Chatwin and an elderly aunt, Bruce unravelled their fates. Henry fled to South Africa where he became town clerk of Durban, dying of fever soon after. Geoffrey worked as a barrister in Cairo where his wife went “off it” and died by swallowing a small bit of chain. Bickerton, an engineer in the Broken Hill gold rush, “did a 100 things and nothing”. At 44, he enlisted in the Great War and was badly gassed, after which he lived “rather rakishly” in