Ann Judge has asked me to record more extracts from my great-uncle Antony’s letters for the excellent Herts Memories website – www.hertsmemories.org.uk. It is a little strange for me to be exclaiming aloud for the microphone how much I enjoy boarding school and boxing – neither of which has ever held much appeal for me! – But I have enjoyed the challenge finding of Antony’s voice in his extraordinarily touching and expressive letters to his parents. His love of home, family and of Knebworth has been easier to me to capture – and I imagine his voice, if not his Edwardian accent, was not so very different from mine.
Antony was my grandmother Hermione’s elder brother, one of the “lost boys” generation immortalised in J.M. Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’. He, like his best friend Nico Llewelyn Davies’s elder brothers, was lost to us at an early age, although not in the First World War for which he was too young, but in a flying accident whilst flying in formation at a Hendon air show. He had already led a remarkable life, a ski champion in the early days of Alpine sports and M.P. for Hitchin by the age of 28. J.M. Barrie wrote of him: “Few on the whole have had such a happy life, and it could not have been as happy without his jolly miseries, which were as entrancing as all the rest of him. Perhaps his laugh was his richest part. However grim the mood, it was sure to be caught out by his laugh. I have never heard a more glorious laugh in man or boy; it overfilled him: I think he laughed last in his last moment, or one prefers to believe his laugh accompanies him still.” [Antony: A Record of Youth (1935)]
Henry Lytton Cobbold
www.knebworthhouse.com