Instead of an obituary: James Waugh in the writings of his family.

As noted in a previous post, the Daily Telegraph dated 24 September 2022 announced the death on 12 September 2022 of James Waugh, age 76.  This appears to be the second son of Evelyn Waugh.  No other obituaries have been noted.  In their absence, the following memorial statement is offered based on the writings of James Waugh’s family members.

James Waugh is mentioned at least once in his father’s Diaries (2 July 1946, p. 655): “Home [from Spain] in comfort by air to find London almost as hot as Madrid.  A telegram awaiting me to say Laura was delivered of a son.”  There is no other indexed entry for James in the UK first edition of the Diaries, but then the index to that edition is notoriously inadequate.  There is no entry whatever for his youngest son, Michael Septimus.

In 1954, Evelyn wrote a letter to his daughter Margaret; “On Tuesday night your mother and I went to Mells for James’ first communion.  [James was 8 years old at the time.]  He looked very nice with a large white flower in his button-hole.  We had breakfast.  The little boy next to me, I could see from the corner of my eye, had a pile of loving letters from his brothers and sisters.  Not so poor James.  He came out to Mells for the day and cheated at Solitaire…”  The next day Evelyn Waugh and his wife went to London for his mother’s funeral. (Letter dated 13 December 1954, Letters, p. 434).

Two years later Evelyn mentions that he “left my son James [age 10] in charge of the Hollises to send with their son to Stonyhurst.” (Letter dated 26 September [1956] to Ann Fleming, Letters, p. 475.)  Stonyhurst is a Roman Catholic boarding school in the north of England.  Three years later, he wrote her (18 July 1959): “In choosing a school one consideration is paramount.  It must be either near friends or a civilized town. I have had to stop seeing my son James since sending him to Stoneyhurst [sic]. It is ghastly taking little boys (and girls) out from school.  A neighboring marble hall alleviates it a little” (Letters of Ann Fleming, p. 235).

In 1962, he wrote to Nancy Mitford that “Bloggs Baldwin…came here the other day & my son, James (age 16), said ‘At last I have met a P. G. Wodehouse character in the flesh.’” (Undated letter, received 22 August 1962, Letters, p. 592.)  On 7 January 1964 he wrote to Daphne Acton: “My son James (17) is also a thorn.  Won’t go into the church or the army, smokes cigarettes & can’t take his hands out of his pockets” (Letters, p. 617).  Later that year he wrote to Ann Fleming: “My dud son James [by then 18] has passed into Sandhurst so need not go to Australia” (Letters, p. 626).

James’ career from this point is a bit unclear.  In April 1966 he was at home with his younger brother Septimus when Evelyn died on 10 April.  They both cooperated in extracting Evelyn’s dead body from the downstairs lavatory where he had expired.  But since that was Easter weekend, they would be expected to be at home rather than at school or the Army.  He does seem to have served in the Army because Auberon writes in his autobiography that when their mother died at Combe Florey on 17 June 1975, James “then a soldier, had been staying with her in the wing.”

Auberon first mentions James in connection with comparing their boarding schools (Auberon at Downside and James at Stonyhurst).  Auberon notes that, like him, James had learned boxing at school but, unlike Auberon, James had won “a Blue at Oxford” (Auberon Waugh, Will This Do?, London: 1991, pp. 68, 210).  It is possible that James started college at Sandhurst (about age 19 in 1965-6) but transferred to Oxford (or he may have entered Oxford directly) and then served in the Army afterwards.  Army service was obligatory in those days and could be performed before or after college. There is a marriage recorded in October 1976 of  “James Waugh” to Rachel D’Abreu in Taunton.  They had one child.

Auberon also writes of James in connection with a meeting in September 1959 when their paths crossed at the Italian villa of their Uncle Auberon Herbert in Portofino.  James, then 13, was “the object of close cross-questioning by Auberon [Herbert] on the prevalence of homosexuality at Stonyhurst, the Jesuit college in Lancashire to which he had been sent.  James pretended not to know what it was, until eventually admitting ‘you get the occasional cases of vileness among the younger boys.’  This turn of phrase caused endless delight, and Auberon [Herbert] used it to his dying day, fifteen years later” (Idem, p. 122).

Alexander Waugh also writes of his Uncle James in his book Fathers and Sons (London: 2004).  Alexander grew up at Combe Florey and must have known James fairly well given that they seem to have lived near each other.  James is first mentioned by Alexander as one of the readers of the service at the 2001 funeral of Auberon, Alexander’s father, in an Anglican church near Combe Florey (p. 7).  Alexander writes, “Evelyn never showed the slightest interest in James, his second son.  The two youngest children were grouped together in Evelyn’s mind as ‘the boys’, but with Septimus always preferred. ‘Your brother James is home dull as ditchwater; your brother Septimus, bright as a button.’”

Alexander continues: “James was intelligent in mind and able with his hands but, like his mother, he was fundamentally lazy, unambitious, unrealistic and undemonstrative. Evelyn bullied him.  ‘And now,’ he would say to assembled guests after dinner, ‘and now my son James will tell us an amusing story.’  Poor James would leave the table in tears.  At best Evelyn found James ‘quaint’ and expected him, without conviction or interest, to follow the usual path of an English gentleman’s younger son by entering the army or the Church.  He had no expectation of him as a writer, believing him devoid of literary taste. ‘James is reading P. G. Wodehouse with great seriousness, “Don’t you find it funny, James?”  “I think the book is meant to be serious, Papa.”  The book was Carry on Jeeves.’  Later, in despair of James’s literary curiosity, he bribed him to read one of his own books.  James chose The Loved One, Evelyn’s shortest novel, and sat for a while sighing over the first page in the drawing room.  When Laura announced she needed help topping and tailing beans in the kitchen, James, not usually keen on that sort of thing, leaped to his feet and forgot all about the book” (pp. 325-6).

At another point, Alexander mentions Evelyn’s pairing James with Harriet (“Hatty”), his youngest daughter, as “backward.”  When they took an interest in raising rabbits, Evelyn “was at first enthusiastic but after a while began to see in Hatty’s and James’s uninhibited enthusiasm only further indication of their mental derangement.  Hatty’s favorite, Gabriel, and another called Raphael fell to the myxomatosis virus in December 1958, but James had cunningly taken a pair to school which, despite masculine names—Michael and Harvey—succeeded in breeding together a whole new generation.  Back at Combe Florey in the Christmas holidays Evelyn complained that the rabbits were not entering enough into the spirit of the season and gave them each a goblet of vodka to perk them up.  They expired of alcohol poisoning on New Year’s Eve” (p. 374).

Waugh’s biographers do not spend much time on James.  To Martin Stannard he remained a “mystery” and Christopher Sykes and Douglas Patey merely include him among a list of the children.  Selina Hastings (p. 580) manages a paragraph dedicated to James, recounting several of the anecdotes described above and adding that “James had a stutter, of which his father made cruel fun.  Evelyn decided that he had no sense of humour, and as a remedial exercise insisted he tell a new joke every day.  In desperation James bought a collection of a thousand and one American jokes, and stammered through each day’s installment at lunchtime, while his father sat stoney-faced, refusing to laugh.”

The most recent biographer, Philip Eade, after describing several of the foregoing incidents and recollections, wrote this: “…despite such ordeals, James remembers his childhood as extremely free and on the whole ‘very happy’, and he cheerfully confesses to have been left with no sense of maltreatment.  The youngest three were always ‘less privileged’, he recalls ‘but we were part of a tribe so it did not seem to matter’.”  This is based on an interview of James Waugh by Philip Eade in February 2016 (Philip Eade, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited, New York: 2016, pp. 290, 369, n. 12).

UPDATE (13 August 2024): Mark McGinness kindly provided the information regarding James’ wife and family as it appears in Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons.