|
Like
a number of other Americans, Garland chose to settle in Warwickshire
at the turn of the century and initially rented Ashorne Hill House.
He married Margaret Williams, daughter of Frank Williams of Barford,
at St. Peter's Church in the village in 1903. He wasted little time
in immersing himself in the social life of upper-class county society
and possibly encouraged by members of the Warwickshire Hunt, he
joined the Leamington Tennis Court Club in 1901. The widely held
view took hold that Garland built his tennis court at Moreton Morrell
because he had been blackballed from the Leamington Club or had
at least suffered from anti-American feeling. This popular story
has been debunked by Charles Wade in his 1997 "History of the Leamington
Tennis Court Club" in which he asserts that "this seems most unlikely
as wealthy Americans were welcomed into and married into British
Society at the time." Although two Americans, one of whom was from
the distinguished Van Allen family, were blackballed in 1898, Wade
argues that as Garland represented Leamington and Moreton Morrell
on the newly-formed Committee of the Tennis, Rackets and Fives Association
in 1907, it was unlikely that he was a persona non grata at the
Leamington Club. Sadly, truth does occasionally get in the way of
a good story.
Charles Garland supported several local sporting activities including
polo, cricket, football and in particular hunting and racing. On
the land he purchased in Moreton Morrell in 1903, while works started
on the building of Moreton Hall, he also built a polo ground and
pavilion and hosted many matches before the outbreak of war in 1914.
The Stratford Herald of April 5th 1907 records that on Bank Holiday
Monday the local football final "took place between Stockton and
Tachbrook for the Garland Cup and attracted upwards of two thousand
persons." Not surprisingly, the gate was considered "an excellent
one, the proceeds being devoted in aid of the local Nursing Association."
The play was "spirited" and was won by Stockton by three goals to
nil. At the end of the match, Garland presented the Cup and complimented
the players on their skill. No doubt he felt that having presented
a Cup and allowed the game to be played on his pitch, he was entitled
to express "his regret that so much bad language had been used by
some of the spectators, and that if such language were used another
year he should not allow the match to be played on his ground. He
loved to encourage all good sport, but he would not tolerate disgraceful
conduct by a few of the spectators".
A true
Anglophile should adopt a love of cricket, and Charles Garland became
an aficionado of the game. He created a cricket ground and must
have been one of very few Americans to have employed his own cricket
professional. The Moreton Morrell Cricket Club Dinner was held in
the polo pavilion in 1907, at which he presented the five best players
with a cricket bat each. Garland proposed "success to the Club"
and expressed his hope that they would win the Cup next season.
He told the assembled company that "he had engaged Mr. Birch to
coach the team and he hoped that they would turn up to practice
every night and also learn to field well." Without question, such
a hope nowadays would receive a cacophony of derision!
Moreton
Hall was completed in 1909 after he had built a polo pavilion, laid
out a cricket field and built a real tennis court. According to
his obituary in the Stratford Herald, "his estate at Moreton Morrell
was reputed to have cost him half a million of money". He gave up
his American nationality and became a naturalized Englishman in
1914. Both he and his brother-in-law, a fellow American Robert Emmet
who lived at nearby Moreton Paddox, raised and trained troops of
yeomen at their expense, but some technicality prevented the Government
taking advantage of the "fine set of fellows who were drilled at
Moreton Morrell", so unlike Emmet, who joined the Warwickshire Regiment,
Garland aimed higher. Keen as ever to improve his social standing,
he made use of his considerable equestrian skills to join the prestigious
2nd Lifeguards, a division of the Household Cavalry, as a temporary
2nd Lieutenant on 5th January 1915. He is believed to have been
invalided out of the army due to the heart condition which only
six years later was to claim his life. Although military records
suggest he remained in action until 1919, it is almost certain that
he returned to "Blighty" without seeing any action; a likely outcome
as the majority of the 2nd Lifeguards were wiped out at the Battle
of Ypres in 1915.
At
the end of the War, despite having spent much of his fortune at
Moreton Morrell, he concentrated his energies on another of his
properties, Scaltback Stud at Newmarket, where for much of his remaining
years, he indulged in his abiding passion of the "turf". As early
as 1906, his racehorse "Oatlands" had come sixth in the Grand National
with a starting price of 100-6 and in 1920, "Somme Kiss", a horse
described by the Bloodstock Breeders' Review as "a horse of fine
physique" and bought for 3000 guineas, won the Newmarket Stakes
and ran second to Gainsborough in the 2000 guineas.
Increasingly,
Garland divided his loyalties between Scaltback and his London house
in Mayfair's Grosvenor Street. In 1920, he sold the Moreton Estate
because of the punitive rates of tax levied on him in the U.S and
in his adopted country where he opined, he was paying 17 shillings
in the pound.
Charles
Garland died of a heart attack on June 10th 1921 at the early age
of forty six. Details of his will were recorded in the Times of
August 16th 1921 when his estate was valued at £347,357, and the
will began, perhaps reflecting his order of priorities, with the
direction that "his favourite horse Beware, should not be worked
but turned out to grass and a comfortable home provided." The next
provision concerned property to be left in trust to his three daughters
and their issue with the proviso that "should any daughter marry
under 20 without the consent of her guardian, she shall, for the
purpose of his will, be deemed to have predeceased him without issue".
His three daughters, Elizabeth, Anne and Jean, not surprisingly,
waited a while before committing to marriage! Elizabeth and Anne
married once but Jean was married four times to: Arthur Smith-Bingham,
Sir Robert Throckmorton 11th Baronet, Greville Baylis and Ronald
Calvert 3rd Baron Ashcombe. She and her sister Elizabeth were tragically
killed in a plane crash over France on March 5th 1973.
A bequest
of £50,000 was left in his will to an adopted son born in Leamington
in 1900, who was educated by Garland at Eastbourne College in 1917-18.
After his departure to Lincoln College, Oxford, Garland donated
£100 to the school's War Memorial Fund.
Garland
was a generous benefactor and a most popular addition to the local
Warwickshire scene. Among his many recorded benevolent gestures
were a donation of £1000 to the newly-formed diocese of Coventry
and a gift of land in Moreton Morrell for use as a Church of England
school for "the education only of the labouring, manufacturing and
other poorer class in the parish" and a school house for the school
master. He even presented a £5 prize and a Challenge Cup for the
local villages' Horticultural Society.
Charles
Garland successfully spent his family's wealth on levering himself
into the upper echelons of English society and became a quasi-English
country squire boasting a mansion described as "one of the wonders
of Warwickshire". He became a British citizen and dutifully took
to his heart the Church of England and became a Church Warden at
the Church of the Holy Cross in the village. He was a philanthropist
and patron of many intrinsically English sporting, educational,
religious, military and social organizations. Research has shown
that he certainly lived his life to the full socially and overall
left a considerable mark on his adopted patch of Warwickshire.
But
for our purposes, his real achievement has to be the construction
of Moreton Morrell Tennis Court in 1905.
Andrew
Hamilton
|
