Asquith, Herbert Henry, 1^st Earl of Oxford and Asquith (1852–1928). Letters to Hilda Harrisson, 1915–1928. Over 360 autograph letters, totaling about 1500 pages, most on stationary (10 Downing Street, Walmer Castle, The Wharf, etc.) and signed variously “H.H.A," "H,” or "Σός". Condition generally fine with the exception of several dozen later letters torn in half (by Asquith – see below) and subsequently repaired with tape, some with later markings or notes in pencil by Asquith. [WITH]Asquith, Margot [Emma Alice Margaret] (1864–1945), Twelve (12) holograph letters to Hilda Harrisson, 1917–1933. [WITH] Bonham Carter, Violet (1887–1969), Four (4) holograph letters to Hilda Harrisson, 1927–1928. [WITH]Asquith, Herbert Henry. Instructions to executors, 1 p., 1924. [WITH] A snapshot photograph of Hilda Harrisson, n.d. Individually labeled and filed in four archival boxes, 2.0 linear feet.

André Cluysenaar, H. H. Asquith, 1919 (National Portrait Gallery)

“The editing of these letters has been of course a great blow to us and I fear to many others,” wrote Violet Bonham Carter, the daughter of the late Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, to a friend in 1933 (Koss 1985, 291). She was referring to a two-volume set of her father’s correspondence with Hilda Harrisson that was soon to hit the press under the title H.H.A.: Letters of the Earl of Oxford and Asquith to a friend (1933-34). Harrisson was the last in a string of young women with whom Asquith had enjoyed affairs that were striking less for their physicality than their emotional intensity. But she was the first whose name was revealed to the wider public. Asquith invoked Harrisson explicitly in his memoirs:

In 1915 I formed a new friendship to which I have ever since been greatly indebted. A young couple, Roland and Hilda Harrisson, took a farm in the neighbourhood of Easton Grey in Wilts, which had long been the home of my sister-in-law, Mrs. Graham Smith. Roland Harrisson was a professional soldier—a major in the Royal Artillery —and but for the War would have gone with his battery to India. He was mobilized and sent to the Front in France, where he fought, with occasional intervals of leave, until he was killed in action in the autumn of 1917. Both he and his wife came from Liverpool, where his father was a well-known surgeon, and his wife’s father a solicitor in good practice. Her maiden name was Hilda Grierson. My acquaintance with her ripened after the death of her husband when in the course of 1918-19 she came to live with her mother, Mrs. Grierson, at Boars Hill—only a few miles from Sutton Courtney: we became regular and intimate correspondents: and she has preserved a large number of my letters upon which she has allowed me to draw for the purpose of my narrative. They go back for ten years, and with the exception of what I have written to my wife they are the nearest approach to a diary of any record which I possess. In this and the following chapters I shall quote from them freely. (Asquith 1928, 2:156).

Asquith's correspondence with Harrison is rich with political gossip, family history, personal reflections, and literary opinions --  for over 90 years biographers and historians have drawn on Letters to a friend for insight into British politics and society during World War I and its aftermath. But that publication -- and Asquith's memoirs -- drew very selectively from the correspondence, which were long believed to be lost. Here they are in their entirety, unexpurgated.

Mr. Asquith and Mrs. Harrisson

Asquith was still involved with Venetia Stanley when he met Hilda Harrison (1888–1972) and her husband Roland in February 1915. Harrisson had served with Venetia's brother Oliver. (Asquith 1982, 430). He began to write her in June 1915, and while things started slowly, their relationship matured quickly. She would become, as Roy Jenkins notes, "the recipient of many of his confidences for the remainder of his life" (1966, 461). Following the script prepared by his anxious widow Lady Margot Asquith when she heard about Harrisson’s plans to publish his letters, Asquith's authorized biographers tried to prepare the ground:

[Asquith] discovered a need for some receptive and sympathetic female intelligence, outside the circle of his family, to which he could communicate as a matter of routine the spontaneous overflow of thought, or humour, of fancy or of emotion. A whole succession of women friends responded to this need — Venetia Stanley and latterly Mrs. Harrisson may be cited as examples, and his letters to them furnish some equivalent for the diaries which he had kept spasmodically in the 1890’s and discontinued later. The same hyperbolical language, the same license of dispraise and more rarely of eulogy as have been noticed above mingle in these communications with flights of playful imagination and a mass of literary gossip. (Spender & Asquith 1932, I: 255)

To a large extent, this sleight worked – reviews of Letters to a friend focused on the content not on the context (see e.g. London Times 1933). Nevertheless some were scandalized. The candor and intimacy of the correspondence came as a surprise, and the publication caused a furor among those “to whom this side of Asquith’s nature was a complete revelation” (Bennett 1985, 252). “Margot was terribly distressed at the effect they produced,” noted one of her friends (Belloc Lowndes 1971, 131). Questions of morality aside, some readers intimated, the relationship surely distracted Asquith from holding together his coalition government in the early years of World War I, from addressing the Easter Rising more judiciously, from defending his political position as David Lloyd George and his allies toppled him, and from serving effectively as Labour leader during the long unwinding of his career and his party. Roy Jenkins would later come to his defense. Asquith's "vast  epistolary  output ... was  both  a  solace  and a  relaxation, interfering  with  his  duties  no  more  than  did  Lloyd  George’s  hymn-singing or  Churchill’s  late-night  conversation" (1966, 258). But contemporary readers were not convinced. Reflecting on military policy, the Saturday Review remarked that the ministry during World War I was “on the whole … not unsuccessful, although Mr. Asquith was too fond of smoking cigars and of writing letters to Mrs. Harrisson” (A.A.B. 1934, 338).

Ottoline Morrell, Hilda Harrisson at Garsington, mid-1920s (National Portrait Gallery)

Mrs. Harrisson and "the little harem"

In the postwar era, Asquith’s letters to other members of what Lady Margot called his “little harem” have come to light.  Mrs. Harrisson’s immediate predecessor, Venetia Stanley, in particular, has excited wide interest, inspiring several monographs expressing varying degrees of voyeuristic schadenfreude, a play by Ben Brown and a novel by Robert Harris. Less sensationally minded biographers and historians have also drawn extensively on Asquith’s letters to Harrisson as a rich source not only for his own life but also for his candid insights into his contemporaries. But Asquith’s relationship with Mrs. Harrisson has not drawn nearly the same amount of attention as his relationship with Ms. Stanley.

There are several reasons for this. First, whereas Stanley is always described in terms of youth -- “half his age,” “young enough to be his daughter,” “35 years his junior,” etc. -- Mrs. Harrisson is given the respect due to married women and invariably described in terms of age -- “a war widow.” However, Hilda Harrisson (1888–1972) was in fact a year younger than Venetia Stanley (1887–1948) so the age gap was actually wider by a small margin. Asquith did not bounce from Stanley to an older woman; he remained comfortably within gradient. Further, the reverential status of widowhood was not bestowed upon Harrisson until two years into her relationship with Asquith; one suspects that he introduced her as a widow (to his daughter-in-law, for example – see C. Asquith 1968, 417) in order to disguise his motivations as charitable rather than concupiscent.

Hilda Harrisson, H. H. Asquith, 1924. (Frontispiece to Letters to a friend, vol. I)

Harrisson doubtless appeared older than Stanley not only because she had a husband and a child but also because unlike her immediate predecessor in horizontal office, she had a life beyond fashionable society. Trained at the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford, she was an accomplished artist, exhibiting at such venues as the Goupil Gallery (London), Walker Art Gallery (Liverpool), the New English Art Club, and the Chenil Gallery. At Sandlands, her house in Boars Hill, she hosted such creative spirits as Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Robert Bridges, John Masefield, Robert Graves, Gilbert Murray, and Frank Dobson, whom she arranged to execute a bust of Asquith (now at the Tate). According to Lady Ottoline Morrell, the painter Gilbert Spencer was another of Harrisson’s lovers, frustrated at having to play second fiddle to Asquith (Seymour 1993, 321, 359). Paul Nash painted some of his celebrated late pictures at Sandlands. In the early 1930s Harrisson organized the Oxford City Film Society. Her drawings of women during World War II are held at the Imperial War Museum.

Hilda Harrisson, Woman Bus Conductor, 1942 (Imperial War Museum)

Lady Margot’s biographer Daphne Bennett established the standard gloss when she wrote that Asquith’s romance with Harrisson “was an affair of his old age and was in a much lower key”; Stanley she asserts was a “far more serious affair” (Bennett, 252n, 253). Naomi Levine echoes this opinion; "Venetia Stanley was a lover; Hilda Harrisson a friend" (Levine, 714). But these assertions are untenable. Asquith was 60 when he started his dalliance with 25-year-old Stanley in 1912, and 63 when he took up with 27-year-old Harrisson in 1915, and by all accounts still randy as a goat. His period of celibacy lasted only one month: he bid adieu to Stanley on 12 May 1915 and launched his first salvo towards Harrisson on 13 June. Bennett and Levine support their opinions with a creatively inverted reading of a memorandum Lady Margot wrote to her husband’s biographer in 1932 in response to the news that his correspondence was to be published. Margot’s discussion of Harrisson was twice as long as that of Stanley, a move that Bennett suggests was intended to deceive:

In Margot’s memorandum both Venetia and Sylvia Henley are mentioned (it was impossible to pretend to Spender that they did not exist), but only lightly and in passing, preliminary to a lengthy discussion of the Hilda Harrisson friendship. The proportionate allocation of space tells its own tale: something had to be said, because of Desmond MacCarthy’s book, but even at that late date Margot was anxious to suppress knowledge of the first and far more serious affair [i.e. with Venetia Stanley] as far as possible. (Bennett, 252-53)

Actually, Margot devoted more space to discussing Asquith’s romance with Harrisson because that was indeed the more serious affair. After all, Stanley lasted only three years (1912–1915); Harrisson lasted 13, until his death (1915–1928). Margot's contrast of her husband's "deep affection" for Venetia with his "lasting affection" for Hilda is quite accurate, even if one regards the term "affection" as a euphemism for more intense ardors. We agree with Robert Harris’s estimation that the suggestion that there was no sexual dimension to Asquith's romance with Stanley “strains credulity” (Harris, 448), but at least it did not produce issue. In contrast, Margot may have heard the persistent rumors that her husband was the father of Mrs. Harrisson’s daughter, Anne (1916–2017). The girl, who called the Prime Minister “Uncle Henry,” and whose education was funded by his munificence, would go on to become a correspondent for the BBC World Service under her married name of Anne Symonds. (Her granddaughter, incidentally, would marry Boris Johnson.) Historians and novelists have read romantic significance in the fact that Asquith's last excursion from the Wharf in October 1927 included a visit to Venetia Stanley. What they neglect to mention is that he was traveling in the company of Hilda Harrisson (see Jenkins 1966, 518).

New York Times, 13 June 1928

Although Asquith had seven children of his own, he bequeathed more than one quarter of his estate to Harrisson – £2500 (or $12,500, as reported by American newspapers), the equivalent of about £200,000 in today’s values. Marie Belloc Lowndes suggests that the bequest was out of gratitude for her lending him the letters for his memoirs (Belloc Lowndes 1971, 131), but clearly this is poppycock. Daphne Bennett reports that because Asquith’s largess exceeded his resources, Margot was honour-bound to pay most of her husband’s remaining legacies out of pocket (Bennett, 364-65). 

Now, what could be more serious than that?

Bennett and other historians have based their conclusions on the relative gravity of the two amours by comparing two very different sources – Asquith’s holograph letters to Stanley and Asquith’s published letters to Harrisson. This is not so much a case of comparing apples to oranges as it is of comparing an apple to half an apple: the published correspondence was heavily redacted. The editor Desmond MacCarthy, a denizen of Bloomsbury and a friend of the family, opened the volumes with a caveat that has been breezily disregarded ever since:

When the literary executors of the late Lord Oxford granted to the owner of these letters permission to publish them, they stipulated that they should be edited by someone of their own appointing: and they handed to me the task—knowing that my great admiration for Lord Oxford would make me interested in it, and relying on me to remove any passage from the letters which might give pain to private people. …  I trust I have not failed in this, the most important of my obligations. But … how can an editor … be sure that some enormity has not escaped him. If by chance it has, in my case there is even less excuse, for both the publishers and the recipient of these letters have shown, while preparing them for the press, that they have an even stricter sense than I of what might possibly give offence. (Asquith 1933-34, I: vii).

Asquith Unexpurgated

Even a cursory comparison of MacCarthy's edition and the original letters swiftly reveals how much was cut. There are many letters and fragments here that appear neither in Letters to a Friend nor in Asquith's Memories and Reflections, and of those letters that were published, most were bowdlerized to one degree or another. Most commonly excised for the books were the protestations of love and longing that suffuse the original correspondence. To take a typical example, a published letter of 27 April 1920 omits the final sentence (here, like the unpublished material to follow, in bold):

But for you I should have been tempted to almost desperate things. Slandered and back-bitten by unscrupulous enemies, and scolded and goaded by well-meaning and ill-judging friends, your sanity and unfailing understanding and incomparable sweetness, and perfect companionship, have been, and are my salvation. So you can understand how and why I cling to you, my best beloved. (I: 137)

A passage cut from the published edition of Asquith's letter of 26 April 1923

If biographers have underestimated Hilda Harrisson's significance it is because the published correspondence censored every expression of Asquith’s stronger passions:

I am alone here to-day and it seems most unnatural that I should not be fetching you from the Hill for lunch and golf (it is a good golfing day) & then to stay the night. (I: 95)

Υπαγκάλισμα [embraceable one] -- it was sad to part from you but we had some delicious hours together, and we shall have more next week. 

How I missed you my own sweet playfellow!

The editors of Letters to a Friend excised not only erotic passages but also language that might prove embarrassing to contemporaries; George V, for example:

I had a longish talk with the King, who was quite up in the stirrups, and not over-fond of Pres[isden]t Wilson. I said the war had brought a slump in Emperors which neither he nor I could have foreseen four years ago: Russia murdered, Austria a fugitive, and Germany on the verge of abdication. He agreed, and said these were not good days for monarchies! I interchanged a little badinage with the younger Mary, but on the whole it was a very boring evening. (I: 80)

Churchill expounds a facetious housing property while Asquith suggests he rename Chartwell, his new property in Kent, after the book whose royalties funded its purchase -- "The World Crisis," 26 April 1923

Asquith loved gossip and his opinions could be biting. Maurice Baring is “a delightful indecipherable creature in his way [who] has a lot of rather ineffectual gifts.” His ex-lover, Venetia Stanley, belongs (along with Lord Beaverbrook, Diana Manners, Simon Lovat and others), “to that rather rotten social gang . . . who lead a futile & devastating life.” To give cover to a rendezvous with Harrission he considers without enthusiasm Major Horace Crawfurd. “I shall invite him here with you as his fellow-guest. Can Christian magnanimity go further?” Disparaging a former friend for whom a decade earlier he had recommended a knighthood, he writes, “It is characteristic of our régime that [Sir George] Riddell, a particularly low class newspaper proprietor, should be made a Peer.” The letters also fill in certain blanks. For example, the subject of a racy anecdote related in Letters to a Friend (I: 99-100) in which an eager but ignorant lover tries to find a location in Jerusalem to consummate an assignation is here revealed to be Matthew "Scatters" Wilson

T. E. Lawrence lunches with Asquith, 1920

Asquith spent much of his last decade in Oxfordshire in the company that Aldous Huxley lampooned in Crome Yellow (1921), and the pages of these letters are peopled with news of family and friends, including many in Ottoline Morrell's circle -- socialites, artists, and Oxford professors including John Maynard Keynes, Gilbert Murray, and Arnold Toynbee. If Asquith flourished his political power to impress Venetia Stanley, who was born to a wealth and position that far exceeded his humble origins, then he paraded his intellectual accomplishments to dazzle Hilda Harrisson, whose middle-class background he surely recognized in his own. The focus on literary topics that serves as a continuous theme in the correspondence may be understood as a mode of seduction specially tailored to match the circumstance; similarly, the Greek phrases that pepper the letters -- Asquith addressed Harrisson as ποθεινοτάτή (beloved) and signed his letters Σός (your own), sometimes including Latin and Italian words in Greek transliteration (for example: Σέμπρε ἰνσίεμε, always together): Don Juan as Oxford don.

Asquith analyzes the political climate, 17 November 1922

There is of course also ample political news -- about the war, its casualties (which included his son, her husband, and others in their circle), the machinations of Lloyd George and Lord Beaverbrook (“Ll[oyd] G[eorge] is called in Paris ‘ignorant, menteur, et léger.’”), the Irish question ("I am not at all sanguine"), his campaigns for Parliament and much else. Churchill, Montagu, McKenna and other close associates in the Liberal Party surface regularly in these pages, which include reports from the field. “I am writing from my place on the front bench while Hamar Greenwood is shouting & hammering at the box on the table, his reply to my attack on the Reprisals,” he wrote during a meeting of Parliament in 1921. Asquith wrote Harrisson after his last night in Downing Street. "I saw that I could not go on without dishonour or impotence, or both; and nothing could have been worse for the country and the war."

After Asquith

Photograph of Hilda Harrisson in this archive, kept by Asquith and returned to her by Margot

Included with Asquith’s correspondence are ten letters to Harrisson from Margot Asquith and four from their daughter Violet Bonham Carter, all rather creditable, given the complex web of relations. “You and I have a unique bond,” Margot wrote in January 1928 as Asquith was dying. “We both love him.” Later, returning a photograph of Harrisson that her husband had kept, Margot remarks on her equipoise. “I am proud of my relations with you through all these years & glad that we loved one-another.” When she expresses anger, it is not at Harrisson but at her stepdaughter, Violet "who has never felt a twinge for anything but her own concerns." Judging from these letters, Violet, who was a year older than her father's mistress, appears to have had a very friendly association with Harrisson, inviting her to lunch and commiserating over the embarrassing stories that broke once the terms of Asquith's will was revealed in June 1928. "These Press-men are the most terrible hell-hounds."

Asquith borrowed his letters to Harrisson while compiling his Memories and Reflections (1928), and some bear his markings. Several are torn and pieced together with tape. In a diary entry from 22 October 1935, one of Margot Asquith’s friends related the circumstances:

When Mrs Harrisson lent Asquith the letters for the purpose of his memoirs, after making notes, he began tearing them up. Margot stopped him, exclaiming: “Don’t do that! She probably values your letters very much.” If this story is true, how very much she must have regretted having stopped him in his work of destruction. (Belloc Lowndes 1971, 131-32)

According to Tony Benn’s mother, Harrisson offered to sell the letters to Margot Asquith “for a large sum” (Stansgate 1992, 62). Judging from the correspondence from Margot to Harrisson here, that would seem to be very out of character. She did, however, shop them around. Anthony Powell tried to secure the letters for Duckworth, taking Harrisson out for dinner at the Savoy Grill. “She looked the part in every respect,” he recalled, “reddish hair; evasive manner; air of carrying within her bosom all sorts of state secrets.” (Powell 1978, 79). 

Powell's snark aside, the letters did contain state secrets of sorts, making an enormous splash much to the surprise of Asquith’s intimates, who were long accustomed to his candor and his peccadillos. The editor Desmond MacCarthy was like many in their circle -- “He was so close a friend both of Asquith and of Margot that what amazed and shocked those who did not know them, made no impression on MacCarthy at all” (Belloc Lowndes 1971, 132). The irony of course is that once Asquith’s uncensored correspondence with Venetia Stanley came to light, the figure of Hilda Harrisson faded away completely, whatever was once scandalous in her relationship with the Prime Minister mooted by the historical utility of his opinions and revelations.

Whereas Asquith’s original correspondence with Stanley was made available to Roy Jenkins and Martin Gilbert in the 1960s and was published in full in 1982, the same has not been true of his original letters to Harrisson. Her (their?) daughter Anne Symonds had a typescript copy that she allowed Kenneth Rose (biographer of King George V) and the Brocks (editors of the Stanley letters) to consult but she herself believed the originals to be lost (see Rose 1984, 410; Asquith 1983, xiii; Symonds 1972). The letters later resurfaced and were sold through Sotheby’s (sale of 22 July 1985, lot 369), where they ended up in the private collection of the publisher (and occasional presidential candidate) Stephen Forbes. Once the archive is finally made available to researchers, it will surely warrant a new, unexpurgated edition of the correspondence.

And perhaps another novel from Robert Harris?

Selected References

A.A.B. [Adolf A. Berle?] (1935). Wanted a Superman, Saturday Review, v. 157, n. 4092 (31 March 1935), p. 338.

Ashcroft, Michael (2022). First Lady: intrigue at the court of Carrie and Boris Johnson. Np: Biteback Publishing.

“Asquith left $12,500 for friend's children,” New York Times, 13 July 1928, p.  11.

“Asquith leaves £2500 to lady friend,” Sunday Times (New South Wales), 29 Jul 1928, p. 13.

Asquith, Cynthia (1968). Diaries, 1915-1918. London : Hutchinson.

Asquith, H. H. (1928). Memories and reflections, 1852–1927, 2 vols. Boston: Little, Brown.

-----  (1933-34). H.H.A.: Letters of the Earl of Oxford and Asquith to a friend, ed. Desmond MacCarthy. 2 vols. London: Geoffrey Bles.

----- (1982). Letters to Venetia Stanley, ed. Michael and Eleanor Brock. Oxford: University Press.

Belloc Lowndes, Marie (1971). Diaries and letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. London: Chatto & Windus

Bennett, Daphne (1985). Margot: a life of the Countess of Oxford and Asquith. New York: Franklin Watts.

Brown, Ben (2010). The Promise. London: Faber & Faber.

Buczacki, Stefan. (2016) My darling Mr. Asquith: the extraordinary life and times of Venetia Stanley. Cato & Clarke.

de Courcy, Anne (2014). Margot at war: love and betrayal in Downing Street, 1912–1916. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Dolman, Bernard, ed. (1927) Who’s who in art. London: Art Trade Press.

Farr, Martin (2008). Reginald McKenna: financier among statesmen, 1863–1916. London: Routledge.

“The film societies,” Cinema quarterly, vol. 1, n. 4 (Summer 1933), 244-45.

Harris, Robert (2024). Precipice: a novel. New York: HarperCollins.

Jenkins, Roy (1978). Asquith, revised edition. London: Collins.

Johnson, J. and A. Greutzner, eds. (1976) The dictionary of British artists, 1880-1940. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club.

Koss, Stephen E. 1976. Asquith. London: Allen Lane.

Levine, Naomi (1991). Politics, Religion and Love: the story of H. H. Asquith, Venetia Stanley and Edwin Montagu. New York: New York University Press.

Neale, Bobbie (2012) Conspiracy of secrets. London: John Blake.

Popplewell, Oliver (2014). The Prime Minister and his mistress. Raleigh, US: Lulu Press.

Powell, Anthony (1978). Messengers of day. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Rose, Kenneth (1984). King George V. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

Seymour, Miranda. (1993) Ottoline Morrell: life on the grand scale. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993.

Spender, John A. and Cyril Asquith (1932). Life of Herbert Henry Asquith, Lord Oxford and Asquith, 2 vols. London: Hutchinson & Co.

Symonds, Anne (1972). Asquith’s letters, London Times, 7 February 1972, p. 13

----- (2017). [Obituary]. The Telegraph, 6 March. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2017/03/06/anne-symonds-broadcaster-obituary/