My next step was to find out more about these two gentlemen. Whilst Lionel Hereford was no doubt Rose’s employer and landlord, I was struck that he shared such a bond with a man named Ihlee, which phonetically put him within the rifle sights of my quest.
Rudolph Ihlee was clearly the more distinguished and celebrated artist, so I was likely to find more detail about him than Lionel. So I was very keen to see what was in the recently published biography.
The book ‘Rudolph Ihlee – The Road to Collioure’ was written by James Trollope – a descendant of Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, and cousin of modern author Joanna Trollope. I wondered how much of the book would cover the period before their French adventure, and what I might learn of Drayton Gardens.
Of course, with such an esoteric subject, there was little to no chance of finding the book in a local library, or in any of the online lending apps. Published in 2022, a secondhand copy was not an option. There was no alternative but to order the book from England, and wait patiently for its arrival.
Or was there..? It occurred to me that whilst a book about Ihlee’s life might skip over the involvement of Lionel Hereford, the author must have done research, and may have turned up something about Ihlee’s group of friends at the Slade School, and how they passed their time, that might not have made it to the book. My mental picture of my unknown grandfather was morphing from a wax-moustached Victorian villain, to a bohemian ‘Bright Young Thing’ artist practising free love on impressionable young girls.
Instead of waiting for the book to arrive, I decided to contact Trollope through his publisher. In my email, I recounted the family story of my Dad’s birth, and the link I had found to Lionel Hereford, and asked him some specific questions.
Q. Do you know much about the circle of friends Edgar and Rudolf mixed with at the Slade ? Was there anybody in this group that might fit the profile of the prominent Jew named Algernon ?
Q. Did your research find anything about Rose, the maidservant in the house, and anything about an illegitimate child ?
Q. Given my mother’s suggestion that the gentleman was named ‘Ely or Eli or something like that’, do you give any credence to the thought that perhaps Rudolf Ihlee is this person ? Do you know of anything that might suggest so ?
I received a very generous response from James.
Ihlee probably moved into the house with his friend Lionel (and Rose) after his divorce began in July 1918, around three months before Dad was conceived. And Hereford was a dwarf, which might tally with the ‘small man with the posh car’ who came to Whittlesey to try and remove the baby.
Apart from that, James couldn’t offer anything substantive to corroborate the story, just some very interesting historical colour. I guessed there would be nothing further to discover in the book, or he would have mentioned it. But I still anticipated at least some more pieces of the jigsaw to come to light when I got my hands on the book.
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