The Gallipoli campaign affected the subsequent lives of all who survived their time on the peninsula to one degree or another. Few members of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force, however, could have experienced wartime reversals of fortune as dramatic and strange as those that befell Private Leslie Wylde, of the small West Coast town of Runanga.
When he enlisted in August 1914, a month shy of his 21st birthday, Wylde noted his occupation as motor mechanic, but when he returned to New Zealand briefly in March 1919, his occupation was “gentleman”. In four short years, he saw active service, lost a leg and, in convalescence, was reborn as an officer from the colonies with a far more storied background.
Wylde’s earlier life was typical of a young Coaster: the family lived in various mining communities – his father was a mining and dredging engineer. There was school, cadets, amateur musical performances (he formed a small minstrel group), cycling and motor-cycle racing, Territorials, then work as a motor and cycle mechanic in the shop he ran with his father in Greymouth.
Signed up, Wylde landed in Gallipoli with the West Coast and Nelson contingents of the Canterbury Infantry Battalion late on the afternoon of April 25, 1915. He went into action that evening. He fought on the peninsula for the next three months until the August offensive, when, on the afternoon of August 7, gunshot or shrapnel tore into his back, chest and knee.
By the time he was admitted to hospital in Alexandria almost 10 days later, the wound had become infected, eventually leading to amputation of his right leg just above the knee. He was shipped out to England and the leg was reduced again – one of seven operations Wylde endured.
In 1916, he was convalescing and getting used to a prosthetic limb at the recovery hospital set up at Cliveden, the then-Astor estate in Buckinghamshire. It was here that Frankie Schuster came into his life.
The son of an extremely wealthy German-Jewish merchant banker and an English mother, the British-born, Eton-educated Schuster had at an early age decided to eschew commerce and devote his life, and his father’s money, to fostering music and the arts. Among the most prominent of those supported by Schuster were composers Edward Elgar and Gabriel Fauré, but his various homes played host to a rotating cast of famous artists, writers and musicians.
Hooded eyes
There are two versions of how Schuster and Wylde met. According to the story recounted years later by Wylde’s future wife, artist Wendela Boreel, they met when Schuster and his sister, Adela, were visiting the convalescent hospital.
Boreel said Schuster, then in his 60s, was first drawn to the bedside by the patient’s name, then by his hooded eyes, both of which reminded him of his old friend and neighbour, Oscar Wilde. Boreel, who had known Schuster for years and knew he was gay, was clear in her account that Wylde’s “manner and looks” were what attracted the older man to the younger.
The alternative version, the one mentioned in the family history of the Wyldes, was presumably provided by Wylde as a useful fiction for home consumption. In this version, Schuster’s son is a friend of Wylde’s, who tragically died beside him in the Gallipoli trenches. On reaching England, Wylde is informally adopted by his friend’s grieving parents. The plot hole here is that Schuster did not have any children.
Whatever the circumstances, Schuster offered the young soldier the hospitality of his nearby country residence, The Hut, at Bray on Thames, to continue his convalescence. By early May 1916, Wylde was ensconced at The Hut, a large 1820s house attended to by six staff, complete with a croquet lawn, tennis court and lawns running down to the Thames.
Wylde was described as Schuster’s young companion, or protégé. Known as “Anzie”, Wylde called his benefactor “Uncle”, “Unkie” or “Nunkie”. Schuster referred to Wylde as his nephew, showered him with gifts, and at some early stage decided to informally adopt him and make him an heir to his not-inconsiderable estate.
While still recovering at The Hut, Wylde disentangled himself from one army and joined another. The normal course of events would have seen him invalided home, but at his own request he was discharged from the NZ Army in England on March 19, 1917.
He obtained a commission as a 2nd lieutenant in the British Army the following day and left the next week to take up a position in the Chief Censor’s Office in Boulogne. After enduring months of problems with the stump of his leg, he returned to England in early 1918 and took up another desk job in Whitehall, which lasted until the end of the war.
Wylde sailed home early in 1919, via first-class cabins on ocean liners, rather than by troopship. A “welcome home” social was put on for him, his returned soldier brother Stan and other local veterans in the Druids’ Hall, Dunollie (near Runanga). At the end of May, Wylde sailed back to London and the generous Schuster’s beau monde circle. He would not return to New Zealand again.
Embellished record
“Anzie” Wylde let his newly acquired friends believe he was an officer, possibly even a captain, in the NZEF, when he had in fact ended his time with the rank of lance sergeant and was only ever a 2nd lieutenant in the British Army.
He also allowed the story to circulate that he’d grown up on a large farm in New Zealand – this fib was something of a cliché even then but served as a useful background to the lifestyle and entitlement of the position in society given to him by Schuster’s patronage and affection.
Not all of Schuster’s circle took to his new friend. Elgar, for one, was not impressed by Wylde’s appearance. He wrote to a friend, “Claude, Glyn Philpot, R Nichols, S Sassoon & myself were the party & of course the N. Zealander – reminds me of Macaulay’s N. Zealander sitting on the ruins not of London Bridge but of ‘The Hut’, and the Host!”
The dislike may have been mutual – poet Siegfried Sassoon describes an evening the same year in which Wylde had a musical chamber pot placed in Elgar’s bedroom and listened in amusement with other guests downstairs after Elgar retired for the night.
Over the next five years, he and Schuster lived the good life: there was travelling in Western Europe in a new Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, staying at the best hotels and attending operas and concerts. Back in England, there were more concerts as well as rounds of parties, private recitals and musical soirées at The Hut and Schuster’s London town house in Old Queen St, Westminster. Schuster’s connections saw Wylde become a member of establishment clubs like White’s and the Reform Club.
Sassoon was a frequent guest at Bray and became Wylde’s friend and occasional chronicler of this second act of his life. The second act also included marriage: in 1924, Wylde married Boreel, who had painted his portrait at Schuster’s request.
Schuster professed to be happy about the match and enthusiastically planned the occasion. It was a society wedding in a Chelsea church, attended by various peers and members of the diplomatic community, and reported on at some length in the Times. Coverage back in New Zealand added that among the guests were General Sir Ian Hamilton and General Sir AJ Godley, former commanders of the Allied Mediterranean Expeditionary Force and the NZEF respectively, who presumably did not turn up at the wedding of every NCO who’d served at Gallipoli. No one from Wylde’s West Coast family was noted as attending, although a Kiwi aunt and uncle did visit Wylde the following year.
The Wyldes moved into a large extension to The Hut that Schuster had built for them. At Wylde’s suggestion, the whole house was renamed “The Long White Cloud”. The couple settled down into a life of leisured domesticity at Bray, shared initially with Schuster.
While the war might have taken the boy out of the Coast, there is evidence that Anzie was still at heart Leslie Wylde from Runanga. Sassoon’s diary entries attest to Wylde’s continued interest in motors. Sassoon came to believe his friend was becoming obsessed with cars (he enjoyed tinkering with them and taught Sassoon to drive), racing, and the stock market, although he also noted his unfailing good nature and cheerfulness.
The household expanded with the arrival of a son, James Paxton de Eglesfield Wylde, in July 1927. The baby was christened in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. Paxton and Eglesfield were old Wylde family names; the “de” was an affectation.
Schuster died unexpectedly in December 1927. Apart from a generous bequest to Elgar and large bequests to his family, his will left Wylde his cars and motor accessories, a Steinway piano and the remainder of the estate. There was no mention of the house at Bray, but it is likely this had already been gifted to Wylde at the time of his wedding. Elgar thawed enough to write a note to Wylde thanking him for the happiness he had brought to his friend in his later years.
The couple divided their time between summers in England and regular winter stays on the Côte d’Azur, in Cannes or Antibes, where they had a yacht moored. On the Riviera, Boreel, who had a growing reputation as an artist, painted or etched while Wylde sailed, their arrivals and departures noted by the international press.
Trauma catches up
However, by the mid-1930s cracks were appearing: Wylde had episodes of heavy drinking, brought on, Boreel believed, by his depression over no longer being able to ride a horse. Another friend, poet Robert Nichols, thought Wylde had been traumatised by his wartime experiences but would not seek professional help. They also lived on the edge financially, increasingly funding their lifestyle by debt.
Wylde’s life ended abruptly in Folkestone in May 1935, most likely on his way back from France. He was 41. The certifying doctor did not think a postmortem necessary: the immediate causes of death recorded are suggestive of alcohol poisoning. In the column for rank or profession, the death register says, “Of The Long White Cloud, Bray, Berkshire. Of independent means.”
Years later, Boreel said simply that he died “largely as a result of his war wounds”.
Sassoon was shocked by Wylde’s death. In 1941, he wrote two brief character studies of friends who had significantly influenced him: one was fellow author Thomas Hardy, the other was Anzie – Leslie Wylde from Runanga.
Thanks to Schuster’s friendship and wealth, he had avoided the fate of thousands of “limbies” who had been dropped uncere-moniously back into civilian life at the end of the Great War. But his new life did not protect him from the eventual descent into depression and binge-drinking that was the lot of so many veterans far less fortunate.
After Wylde’s death, Boreel lived mostly in France. Her reputation as an artist continued to grow: her work hangs in Te Papa and institutions internationally and her portrait of Sassoon is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. James Wylde studied at Cambridge and Montpellier universities, gaining a doctorate in chemistry and physics and marrying another scientist, Renee Lachazette, in 1958. Boreel died in 1985; James in France in 1997.
The Hut/The Long White Cloud was sold: a future owner was the family of the young Stirling Moss and the cottage addition Schuster added on for the Wyldes was later lived in by Sylvia Anderson, wife of Thunderbirds creator Gerry and model for the character of Lady Penelope. Today, the estate is part of a hotel complex. The remaining parts of the original Hut, in which Elgar composed and Wylde recuperated from his war wounds, form one of the private residences on offer, now known simply, if annoyingly, as “Long White Cloud”.
After 100 years, the estate still offers a retreat on the banks of the Thames for those who have the money.
Rangiora archivist Chris Adam became interested in Leslie Wylde’s story when reading a biography of Siegfried Sassoon and coming across references to “Long White Cloud”. He welcomes further information on Wylde: adamchris3@gmail.com