Family Tree

“By what then are the appetites restrained?”

…so pleads Herbert Beerbohm Tree as the High Priest petitioning virtue in False Gods, a cobwebby tragedy by Eugene Brieux set in the upper reaches of the Nile during the Middle Empire.

But this time-honored question of restraint is not one which genealogists of the family ‘Tree’ would recognize—certainly not if bound by moderation or bond of matrimony. For instance, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, priest though he portrayed, was appealing enough to be patriarch to three families across two continents, with a composite of ten children—seven of whom were illegitimate. Evidently he didn’t walk about dressed like an ancient Egyptian priest all the time.

TREE ROOTS

To fully appreciate this story one must go back to Beerbohm père, Julius, who came to Britain from Lithuania in 1830 and prospered as a corn merchant. Julius Beerbohm married an Englishwoman, Constantia Draper, with whom he fathered four children, Herbert being #2; Constantia died in her early thirties but, usefully, she had a sister who was seven years more youthful: Eliza Draper. So Julius married the sister, an accession that produced another five children. The baby of this batch was the brilliant writer and caricaturist Max Beerbohm. Consequently, Herbert and Max are somewhat more blood related than half-brothers of the same father, because their mothers were also sisters. Incidentally, marrying sisters was not only improper at the time in Britain, it was illegal¹ so the ceremony took place in Switzerland.

Herbert Beerbohm became a widely known actor/manager, but from whence the stage name “Tree” was transplanted is a bit of a mystery—beyond the word ‘baum’ and the regional ‘bohm’ being German for tree. More to our purpose is that he had very strong Wildean connections. After acting in lampoons of Wilde, he staged Wilde’s A Woman of No Importance (1893) at his highly-touted Haymarket Theatre, inaugurating the role of Lord Illingworth himself, along his wife also in the cast.

As already noted, Herbert was no slouch himself in the progeny stakes, and if his father had nine offshoots, Tree was destined to have ten.

Three of his children were legitimate girls of his only marriage to Helen Maud Holt, plus there were seven others born illegitimately including six boys, one of whom blossomed into the Academy Award winning film director Sir Carol Reed (The Third Man, Oliver!, &c.).

Oliver in Oliver

Like his father, Carol Reed had a thing for actresses, and he married two of them, one being the elder daughter of Freda Dudley Ward, who had been a mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales.

Continuing with the libertine line, Carol Reed was the uncle of hell-raising British actor Oliver Reed whom he typecast as the inebriate Bill Sikes in the Dickensian Oliver! (1968)—along with the artful Jack Wild (no relation). The two Olivers memorably contribute to our thematic lack of restraint with Twist singularly wanting more than anyone could have, and Reed repeatedly having more than anyone could want.

FINAL ACT

Within a year of his death at the age of sixty-four, Beerbohm Tree had his final, and possibly most disinherited, illegitimate son. Born while on tour in America to an English actress and dancer half his age, called Muriel Ridley: that son would be Paul Herbert Ridley-Tree.

Paul Herbert Ridley-Tree (1916—2005)

Paul Herbert Ridley-Tree became a multi-millionaire spare parts entrepreneur in the aircraft industry. During war-time. The word ‘profiteering’ is mentioned only once in his son’s self-published biography of him to explain that,” Father sold good parts at their fair market values. He was just lucky that there was a very big price markup…”²

Along the way, the opportunist Paul somehow also ‘acquired’ a title of unclaimed nobility—so it was as Lord and Lady Ridley-Tree that he and his American wife settled down to long lives of retirement and philanthropy in Santa Barbara supporting local museums and galleries. I am reliably informed that he owned a collection of the most indifferent nineteenth century French art that money could buy,³

NOT COMPARABLE MAX

So much for the Herbert branch which apparently held the family franchise on wanton ways, because half-brother Max Beerbohm was a circumspect observer of life betrothed to chastity. He wrote to his future wife, Florence, around the time of their engagement to confess:

Of course, as a man of inventive literary whimsy, Max might have been masquerading as a celibate heterosexual while secretly living the life of a celibate homosexual. We shall never know.

But he was undoubtedly a most celebrated Wildean, despite being ever on the fringe of decadence. I particularly like his satire of Wilde titled A Peep into the Past⁵ which was intended for the first number of The Yellow Book. It imagines Oscar in 1894 but as a former celebrity now living a life of quiet retirement in Tite Street. There is also Max’s short story The Happy Hypocrite (1896)⁶, a comic inversion of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—cleverly utilizing the magic of a mask rather than the mirror of a painting.

You can read more about Max and these publications in my recent articles MiniMax and The Spectator.

Sir Max Beerbohm by Sir Max Beerbohm
[Watercolour, 1923. National Portrait Gallery, 5107]

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© John Cooper, 2024.

With thanks to Mark Samuels Lasner.

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Footnotes:

1. Repealed in Britain by The Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act 1907. ↩︎
2. Paul Herbert Ridley-Tree, Reminiscences About the Life of a Philanthropic Spare Parts Entrepreneur in the Aircraft Industry (Xlibris US, 2017). ↩︎
3. Westmont Magazine: Lady Leslie Ridley-Tree.
   Remembering a Generous and Faithful Lady ↩︎
4. Letter, 1908. ↩︎
5. https://archive.org/details/peepintopast00beer/mode/2up ↩︎
6. https://archive.org/details/happyhypocritefa01beer/mode/2up ↩︎

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