left £419,285 18s 9d to his three children on his death in 1917. Such a sum would be worth £14 million at the end of the century.
For two years Agnes May Beaumont-Thomas continued living with her company director husband in Campden Hill Gate. Then they leave London – perhaps to one of the properties he had been given in Gloucestershire, perhaps abroad (his first wife had been French and they had married in Paris). I can find no further trace of them. So Agnes May disappears from my story, like an alarming comet passing over the night sky.
*
But was there nothing more I could discover about the ramifications of this affaire? Suddenly I recalled the mysterious ‘Holroyd Settlement’ my father had mentioned in the account he wrote for me of his early years, and which still provided him in his old age with a couple of hundred pounds or so a year from the National Westminster Bank. This Settlement had occasionally been spoken of in hushed and hopeless whispers during my early years. I remember my mother telling me how she and my father took me, aged six or so, to the home of a famous lawyer, Sir Andrew Clark, who had been a friend of my Uncle Kenneth’s at university. He was reputed to be the cleverest barrister in England and was much disliked for his arrogance (he later gained fame for a brilliant investigation into the Ministry of Agriculture known as the Crichel Down Inquiry, and also for cutting off his daughter with exactly one shilling when she married an unacceptable man). My mother was terrified that I would smash one of the precariously-placed objects in his drawing-room as I wandered happily from table to table and my father appealed to him to release us from the iron grasp of our family Trust. I broke no china that afternoon, nor was the Trust Deed broken. My grandparents, my uncle, my aunt, everyone wanted it broken: and yet it could not be broken. The letter of the law was too strong. Somewhere in its legal depths, like treasure in a long-sunken wreck, lay the money we so desperately needed. It remained as if in a chest whose key is lost, its contents slowly disintegrating.
But what the origins of this complex affair were I never knew. At my request the National Westminster Bank now sent me the documents from its vaults and I could see what I had begun to suspect: that the ‘Holroyd Settlement’ was the legal arrangement made by my grandfather in 1927 after he left his family, together with a Supplemental Deed dated 27 May 1932 which reveals something of what happened over those five years. It is a ruinous story.
Two properties are identified in this Supplemental Deed. The first is Agnes May’s expensive love nest in Piccadilly, the lease of which did not expire until June 1946. The second is an oddly-crenellated, nineteenth-century town cottage with a small garden. It resembles a gate house to some grander building. Auckland Cottage, 91 Drayton Gardens, in unfashionable Fulham, is where my grandfather retired in April 1930. The rent on this house was £200 a year (equivalent to £6,000 in the late nineteen-nineties) and the lease did not expire until March 1944. These two properties Fraser handed over to Magor and Anderson, his trustees, in place of his Maidenhead house. They were to sell or sub-let them once he returned to Maidenhead so that his payments to his wife and children, promised in the principal deed, could be kept up. All his Rajmai Tea shares were now in other hands. A small design shows the details of these loans and overdrafts he had so far secured.
Amount owing
Name of Bank
No. of shares
£24,500
Mercantile Bank of India Ltd.
1,000 Transferred to the name of the Nominees of the Bank. 100 Collateral.
£8,000
National Bank of India Ltd.
227 Transferred to the name of the Nominees of the Bank. Guaranteed by Messrs. Geo. Williamson & Co.
£10,000
Major Holroyd
300 In Major Holroyd?s name.
(He owes Lloyd?s Bank for this amount.)
£5,000
Barclays Bank Ltd.
125 The amount of £5,000 is being
For two years Agnes May Beaumont-Thomas continued living with her company director husband in Campden Hill Gate. Then they leave London – perhaps to one of the properties he had been given in Gloucestershire, perhaps abroad (his first wife had been French and they had married in Paris). I can find no further trace of them. So Agnes May disappears from my story, like an alarming comet passing over the night sky.
*
But was there nothing more I could discover about the ramifications of this affaire? Suddenly I recalled the mysterious ‘Holroyd Settlement’ my father had mentioned in the account he wrote for me of his early years, and which still provided him in his old age with a couple of hundred pounds or so a year from the National Westminster Bank. This Settlement had occasionally been spoken of in hushed and hopeless whispers during my early years. I remember my mother telling me how she and my father took me, aged six or so, to the home of a famous lawyer, Sir Andrew Clark, who had been a friend of my Uncle Kenneth’s at university. He was reputed to be the cleverest barrister in England and was much disliked for his arrogance (he later gained fame for a brilliant investigation into the Ministry of Agriculture known as the Crichel Down Inquiry, and also for cutting off his daughter with exactly one shilling when she married an unacceptable man). My mother was terrified that I would smash one of the precariously-placed objects in his drawing-room as I wandered happily from table to table and my father appealed to him to release us from the iron grasp of our family Trust. I broke no china that afternoon, nor was the Trust Deed broken. My grandparents, my uncle, my aunt, everyone wanted it broken: and yet it could not be broken. The letter of the law was too strong. Somewhere in its legal depths, like treasure in a long-sunken wreck, lay the money we so desperately needed. It remained as if in a chest whose key is lost, its contents slowly disintegrating.
But what the origins of this complex affair were I never knew. At my request the National Westminster Bank now sent me the documents from its vaults and I could see what I had begun to suspect: that the ‘Holroyd Settlement’ was the legal arrangement made by my grandfather in 1927 after he left his family, together with a Supplemental Deed dated 27 May 1932 which reveals something of what happened over those five years. It is a ruinous story.
Two properties are identified in this Supplemental Deed. The first is Agnes May’s expensive love nest in Piccadilly, the lease of which did not expire until June 1946. The second is an oddly-crenellated, nineteenth-century town cottage with a small garden. It resembles a gate house to some grander building. Auckland Cottage, 91 Drayton Gardens, in unfashionable Fulham, is where my grandfather retired in April 1930. The rent on this house was £200 a year (equivalent to £6,000 in the late nineteen-nineties) and the lease did not expire until March 1944. These two properties Fraser handed over to Magor and Anderson, his trustees, in place of his Maidenhead house. They were to sell or sub-let them once he returned to Maidenhead so that his payments to his wife and children, promised in the principal deed, could be kept up. All his Rajmai Tea shares were now in other hands. A small design shows the details of these loans and overdrafts he had so far secured.
Amount owing
Name of Bank
No. of shares
£24,500
Mercantile Bank of India Ltd.
1,000 Transferred to the name of the Nominees of the Bank. 100 Collateral.
£8,000
National Bank of India Ltd.
227 Transferred to the name of the Nominees of the Bank. Guaranteed by Messrs. Geo. Williamson & Co.
£10,000
Major Holroyd
300 In Major Holroyd?s name.
(He owes Lloyd?s Bank for this amount.)
£5,000
Barclays Bank Ltd.
125 The amount of £5,000 is being
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