1 BEGINNINGS



Before he was Thom, William Guinneach Gunn, born in Gravesend on August 29, 1929, was Tom.1 “William” came from his paternal great-grandfather; “Guinneach,” the Gaelic form of “Gunn,” signifies “sharp, keen, fierce.”2 The summer of his birth was extraordinarily hot. A tomcat had sprayed inside the Gunns’ house, “so that my mother,” he wrote later, “always afterwards associated giving birth to me with the smell of cats.”3 He was never known as William. “I was Wm. Guinneach—but mother changed that,” he wrote, “& maybe it’s a bit characteristic that she did.”4

Thom knew his mother—Ann Charlotte Thomson—as Charlotte. Almost twenty-six when Thom was born, Charlotte, too, had experimented with names: at times she went by Annie, Nan, Nancy, Nanette, Ann, and Charlotte, each a new identity or a play on an old one. Restless, she was the fourth of seven sisters, and seems to have found it hard to feel like an individual among “the Thomson girls.” Charlotte was born in 1903: Barbara (1898), Margaret (1901), and Helen (1902) preceded her; Christina (1905), Mary (1907), and Catherine (1909) followed. They, too, played with names and nicknames: Barbara was Babs; Margaret, Peg; Mary, Mimi; Catherine, Kate—names that Thom would call his aunts well into adulthood. But Charlotte’s name never stuck.

“Much of what I consciously am has been formed by my mother’s family,” Thom reflected, “or by what I know about it, or perhaps I should say by a mythology of it.”5

The Thomsons were farmers from the northeast of Scotland. They were “a family of giants, 6ft. 3ins,” recalled one friend, “well-read and cultured.”6 Thom called them “solid Keir Hardie socialists … pacifists, anti-Catholics, anti-royalists and Nonconformists.”7 Thom’s grandfather, Alexander, moved with his widowed mother and six siblings from Echt, a crossroads village some twenty miles west of Aberdeen, to Kent’s Medway Valley in 1887. Alexander’s eldest brother, Charles, had seen “the fertile smiling land of Kent” for himself and was the driving force behind their passage south.8 Charles ran Gig Hill Farm, in Larkfield, and each of the younger Thomson brothers subsequently took on their own farms. In 1897, Alexander leased Covey Hall Farm9 in nearby Snodland. The following year, he married a local schoolteacher, Daisy Collings, whom he had met in the congregation of the West Malling Baptist Church.

So dominant were the Thomsons in his life that Thom “never saw much” of his paternal relatives and knew “little about them.”10 The Gunns were also of Scottish heritage. They had moved south earlier than the Thomsons and by the mid-nineteenth century had established a prosperous bakery in the heart of Gravesend.11 Herbert, Thom’s grandfather, chose not to continue the family business, however, and instead joined the mainstay of the Gravesend economy: shipbuilding. He rose from steam engine fitter to chief engineer of the Gordon, a War Office steamer stationed at the Royal Dockyard in Sheerness, and received two medals for service during the First World War.

Thom’s father, Herbert Smith Gunn, known as Bert, was born in April 1903. He was the youngest of three children, and the family lived in a small row house in Sheerness. With their father often at sea, Bert looked up to his older brother, Malcolm, for guidance. In a photograph from his schooldays, Bert looks confident, almost cocky, and sports a slight sneer. Like his father, Bert wanted to make his own way in the world. Leaving Gravesend County School at sixteen, Bert followed Malcolm into a new career that, thanks to the popular press, offered intelligent young people from the provinces more adventure and excitement than ever before: journalism. Every young reporter had the same dream: to make it to Fleet Street.

Charlotte and Bert grew up some fifteen miles apart in Kent, but both saw their futures far away from home. By the 1880s, industry had transformed Snodland from an agricultural village into “Cementopolis,” lined with yellow-gray row houses for workers at the quarries and paper factories.12 Charlotte was “tired of the familiar” and “wanted her life to be grand and interesting. She felt constricted by this ugly overgrown village.” She was bookish—the Thomsons “venerated education”—and reading had expanded her horizons beyond the Medway Valley. A nearby cousin lent her novels by Turgenev and Arnold Bennett; for a time, her favorite novel was The Mill on the Floss. In her late teens she conceived a passion for D. H. Lawrence, whose Brangwen sisters in The Rainbow and Women in Love she envied for their strength and feistiness. She even wrote a Lawrence-influenced novel, now lost, “in which the principal character,” she told Thom, “was called Raven Jean and gave didactic speeches.”13

When Bert started as a cub reporter at the Kent Messenger, he would have seen poems and articles written by “Nan Thomson.” The weekly Messenger was the county newspaper of Kent, with offices in Gravesend and Maidstone. It usually printed one poem per paper, gentle pastoral verse in rhyming couplets by local authors. Charlotte’s poems were more vigorous. Her first was a defense of the flapper:

I sing of you, O English Flapper,

You so oft and cruelly abused,

And so slanderously accused,

But when cold cynics loudly sneer,

You scarcely deign even to hear,

Shame to those liars and fools, O Flapper!14

She had cut her dark hair short, started calling herself Nanette, and acquired what would become a lifelong interest in fashion, but for Charlotte the flapper denoted new levels of independence and rights for women in the aftermath of the First World War. Her poem was aimed at detractors in the national press: a writer for The Manchester Guardian, for example, thought “one of the unfortunate consequences of the war” was that “large numbers of women … had contracted a taste for a spurious kind of independence which led them to seek occupation outside the home.”15 An occupation outside the home was exactly what Charlotte wanted.

A fortnight after her flapper poem, she wrote a parodic article for the Messenger about the kinds of farmers a young woman might encounter at Fair Day. “A new type creeps in among the ranks of the farmer,” she warned.

The son of his farmer-father is there. But his ideas differ from those of his sire. (He has fought in the war, probably.) He has been to an agricultural college, perhaps. He has very up-to-date scientific theories (and practices, too, we hope). […] “The old order changeth, yielding place to new,” and farmers fulfil themselves in many ways, obedient to the law of evolution. Behold our New Farmer!16

Having grown up on a farm, the last thing Charlotte wanted was to marry a farmer. She would watch as Barbara married a schoolteacher and Margaret a cement worker. Her teachers at Rochester Grammar wanted her to sit for a university scholarship, but Charlotte, impatient for life to begin, “was eager to escape into adulthood as soon as possible.”17

* * *

With her bobbed hair and dark, serious eyes, Charlotte would have made quite an impression on Bert when their paths crossed at the Messenger. She was feisty, could quote D. H. Lawrence, and had a sharp tongue and temper. Bert likely saw her as a challenge. He himself cut a dapper and confident figure, tearing off on his motorcycle between assignments. A photograph depicts him, boyish and suited, astride a motorcycle: Charlotte annotated it “Tom Mix” after the iconic star of early westerns.18 Bert was dashing and erudite. One future friend called him “that prince of good companions and [an] inveterate charmer.”19 Charlotte found him “attractive and ambitious … good-looking and light-hearted,” according to Thom, and “worldly in a way which contrasted with her family’s old-fashioned-ness.” Immediately smitten, Bert wrote her “page after page of love letters, addressing her as Nanetta.” Although Charlotte was “also courted by a local man of some wealth,” Thom reported, “there was never any doubt in her mind that she should marry for love.”20

By early 1925 they were engaged. Both would turn twenty-two that year. Their engagement became complicated when Bert accepted a three-year position as a junior reporter on The Straits Times, an English-language daily based in Singapore. The paper was nicknamed the “Thunderer of the East” for its strident criticism of the colonial administration.21 Its editor, A. W. Still, had a “forceful personality” and led a five-man editorial team.22 When Still addressed the Institute of Journalists in London in 1924, he encouraged young reporters “not to shirk opportunities for securing appointments abroad, because every year spent overseas added to their value, both as journalists and citizens. The creed of the new journalism was said to be ‘give the people what they want.’”23

Bert sailed for Singapore in May 1925. The voyage took three weeks, with stops at Port Said and Penang. In a photograph taken onboard the SS Patroclus, Bert does not look entirely at ease. He wears a white linen suit and sports a topee, a curved white sun helmet reminiscent of the kind “you see British soldiers wearing on the march in India in television films of Rudyard Kipling’s stories.”24 Arriving in the fierce, humid heat of Singapore, where the average temperature was eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit and it rained every other day, Bert was met by George Peet, a young English reporter who had made the same journey two years earlier. Peet thought Bert “a bit older” than him and found he had a “forceful character.”25

Of his stint at The Straits Times, Bert later told the American magazine Editor & Publisher he “didn’t like that very much.”26 Peet’s relief at having a new colleague to share the reportorial load soured within a fortnight. “The newcomer reported precisely one soccer match, and then withdrew to his boarding house, refusing to do any more work,” he recalled.

He told me he was engaged to a girl in England and had been assured in London that his salary would be enough to get married in Singapore, but he had immediately discovered that he could not hope to do that during his first three years. So, he declared, the conditions of employment had been misrepresented, and he was entitled to break his legal agreement with the Straits Times.27

Bert and Charlotte had likely planned to marry and settle in Singapore, at least for the duration of Bert’s contract.28 Charlotte would have welcomed the adventure. Either Bert genuinely believed he had been misled or realized within days of his arrival that he had made a mistake. The “extraordinary position” continued for a week “until it was ended by the management shipping him back Home.” The Straits Times “denied that there had been any misrepresentation,” Peet recalled, “but the alternative would have been to let him become a destitute European beachcomber in Singapore, and a British firm could not afford to let that happen.” By early August, Bert was back in London. The “fiasco” lasted ten weeks: three in Singapore, seven at sea.29

Six weeks later, on September 12, 1925, Bert and Charlotte married at the Kensington Register Office. A photograph taken on the wedding day shows a boyishly young Bert, beaming, with an arm around Charlotte, who offers a wry smile (plate 2). Charlotte stayed temporarily in Kensington Palace Mansions, a block of short-term furnished apartments overlooking Hyde Park, to qualify for residency in the borough. Thom was told “their marriage was kept secret for a time” but had “no idea why.”30

* * *

By the time William Guinneach Gunn was born, in August 1929, Bert had made it to Fleet Street as a subeditor on the Evening News, then the most popular evening paper in London. The young family took up residence in Gravesend, living in a detached late nineteenth-century house on the outskirts of town, some twenty-five miles from London. Seventy-eight Old Road East had a sprawling garden that backed onto an orchard. Beyond that, the chalky North Downs rolled to Snodland and the River Medway. Thom’s scrapbooks and Charlotte’s albums are full of photographs taken in the garden of Old Road East. Both parents delight in their son: Bert, whom the infant Thom called “Wa Wa,” helps pull a toy shopping trolley across the grass; Charlotte proudly shows off her wriggling son to the camera. Thom was a chubby baby. Within a year he had grown a mop of dark hair, like his mother’s, and was tottering around the garden in striped shirts and leather sandals.

Having suffered an earlier miscarriage, Charlotte was somewhat anxious about her pregnancy.31 When Thom was born, happiness mingled with relief. A strong bond developed between mother and son, born of Charlotte’s protectiveness. In his early years, Thom was happy and boisterous, and enjoyed playing outside. Charlotte delighted in his energy. Her life by now was mostly domestic: on her marriage certificate she gave “no profession,” which suggests her journalism career ended with marriage to Bert. “She stopped writing,” Thom later wrote, “though for a few years she continued to do the occasional column.”32 She directed her vigor toward Thom and nourished his early intellectual and emotional life. Moreover, she seemed to delight in domesticity—a surprise, perhaps, given her longing for adventure and what her life might have looked like in Singapore.

Meanwhile, Bert commuted by train to Carmelite House, the Evening News office just off Fleet Street. As a subeditor on an evening paper, Bert started early and finished late: the final edition was put to bed around 6:00 p.m. Fleet Street culture was intoxicating for young, ambitious journalists like Bert, and he likely drank with colleagues most nights. The Harrow, on nearby Whitefriars Street, was the Evening News pub. Charlotte spent many long evenings alone with Thom. “Newspaper wives are much to be pitied,” wrote Bert’s future friend and boss Arthur Christiansen. “They are in many ways more lonely and frustrated than the wives of sailors. A sailor’s wife at least knows when her husband’s ship is in port, but a newspaperman’s wife rarely has any idea where her husband is.”33

Charlotte gave birth to her second son, Dougal Alexander, who would be known as Ander, in Gravesend in April 1932. Thom was not there: he had gone to Higham to stay with Aunt Barbara and Uncle Godfrey.34 Thom’s earliest memory came from that visit, when Barbara and Godfrey took him to a forge. “It was all very puzzling, the fire, the sparks,” he wrote later, “& I think certain worry that maybe the horse was being hurt.”35 Thom, almost three, returned to Gravesend to find a baby brother. To mark Ander’s birth, Charlotte began a new photograph album and wrote in the front: “Tom Gunn. Hys [sic] album and later pictures of Tom’s Baby.”36 Thom continued to be his mother’s favorite. “She put a lot of effort into Thom and rather ignored me,” Ander remarked, reflecting on their childhood, “because she wanted Thom to be all sorts of things.”37

Although Bert’s parents lived only a short distance away on Old Road West, it was the Thomsons who most frequently visited Charlotte and helped with the children. If Bert felt overwhelmed by the Thomsons, Charlotte felt less than welcomed by the Gunns. Annotating one photograph of her parents-in-law, she wrote: “Mrs Gunn with her best Pussy face & H. G. senior looking So Pleased.”38 There was likely snobbery on both sides. Herbert Gunn might not have approved of his son marrying a farmer’s daughter. On the other hand, the Thomsons’ reverence for education lent them a certain intellectual superiority—“The tenant farmer’s daughters acted like aristocrats,” Thom mused—and they likely looked down on the merchant class. Charlotte realized early in their marriage that Bert only read newspapers and detective stories and that the Gunns were not literary. From Bert’s parents’ house she rescued from destruction an ornate family Bible in which the Gunns’ births and deaths had been recorded since the early nineteenth century.39 She was not religious—“Mother taught us that religion was a lot of foolishness,” Thom summarized40—but appreciated the literary value of biblical stories.

With Bert in London most of the time, Charlotte welcomed some family company. Thom’s “lively young aunts” Mary and Catherine, both in their early twenties, were frequent visitors.41 Charlotte was closest to Christina, “the Beauty of the family, like the character in David Copperfield.” With her lover George Beldam, a former cricketer and pioneer of sports photography, Christina had been witness to the Gunns’ marriage in Kensington. Beldam, from a wealthy engineering family, was almost forty years older than Christina. She began working as a nurse for Beldam’s family in the mid-1920s and would return to Covey Hall with expensive new possessions—“crocodile-skin suitcases and the like”—that she could never have afforded.42 A prolonged affair led to marriage and three children. The Beldams became regular visitors to Old Road East. Thom and Ander saw lots of their Beldam cousins, Josie and the twins, George and Goldie. “Auntie Nan,” as the cousins called her, kept many photographs of the two families together at Rhodendale, the Beldam estate near Farnham, or their seaside estate, Kirklands, at Selsey Bill.43 The children delighted in the company and surroundings; the adults less so. Bert Gunn was jealous of Beldam’s “splendidly self-indulgent mode of living,” Thom recalled, while Beldam was jealous of Gunn’s “vigor and self-earned success.”44

But Thom’s favorite visitor to Old Road East was his grandfather. Alexander Thomson was well over six feet tall, but “quiet and gentle.”45 Like his brothers, Alexander sported a large, bristly mustache. To drink coffee, he used a mustache cup: its interior ledge—with a half-moon-shaped opening to allow the passage of liquid—enabled him to keep his mustache dry.46 Alexander visited on Thom’s third birthday: a photograph shows Thom wriggling on his grandfather’s lap, as Alexander looks at the camera with wise, kind eyes. Another photograph depicts them standing side by side: Alexander is so tall he has to lean to reach Thom’s outstretched hand (plate 3). Thom saw his grandfather’s size in moral terms. “A good man—the good man in my memories, perhaps,” he wrote later, “and if a little distant that added to the purity of his goodness.”47 Alexander was introspective: later, Thom thought him the model of “Thomson melancholia,” a condition that also affected Charlotte.48 Alexander’s melancholia was likely due to the death of his wife, Daisy, from breast cancer in 1920. Charlotte was sixteen when her mother died. Thom met neither of his grandmothers: Bert’s mother, Alice, died in November 1928.

Thom relished visiting the Thomsons in Snodland. “‘We’re going down to Covey to see the Girls,’ Mother would say.”49 “Though I was born in Gravesend and have lived in cities most of my life, it seemed natural to think of Covey Hall as my source,” he later wrote.

Many of those brightly colored memories most people have from their childhood are for me of that house with nothing behind it but yard, farm buildings & orchard before you reached the fields; of Christmas parties and summer picnics on hills smelling almost rank with thyme; of long walks to pick blackberries and cowslips; of the orchard of variegated fruits and bushes & apples from Golden Knobs at the beginning of the summer and Blenheims at the end.50


Copyright © 2024 by Michael Nott