Robert Aickman and Meum Stewart

Meum Stewart from a 1921 Cigarette Card

 

Robert Aickman’s March 1946 article on the playwright Clifford Bax in The Nineteenth Century and After resulted in an invitation to dinner. When Aickman presented himself, however, Bax was ill and in his stead Bax had arranged for Meum Stewart,

 

. . . to take me out and entertain me . . . not very long before that time, Meum Stewart had been customarily referred to by much of the popular press as ‘The most beautiful woman in London’.

 

Aickman remembered Stewart as ‘not only the most beautiful but also the sweetest and most sensitive of women.’

 

Having later introduced Aickman to Bax, Meum apparently tele­phoned Aickman, seeking sympathy. He asked her out to lunch where she explained that although Bax had been attached to her for years, he had fallen in love with someone else.

 

Meum’s real name was Dorothy Lindsell-Stewart and she had been an artists’ model when she met Jacob Epstein (c.1916), with whom she had a child, although she was still married. By the time Aickman met her, she had enjoyed a slightly lack-lustre career in theatre and cabaret. She was twenty years younger than Bax, and twenty older than Aickman.

 

 

Meum Stewart by Bassano Ltd, 1919

Aickman’s sympathy led to their friendship, and he was asked to Meum’s eccentric ‘M Days’. These began at half past nine on a Sunday morning and took place at her impressive house at 5 Oak Hill Park, Hampstead. A man in livery admitted guests, and after signing the visitors’ book (which boasted ‘glittery signatures’), one went in to breakfast, which was of ‘the eighteenth-century type, with chops, steaks, and devilled drum­sticks’ rather than the usual post-war rations. The house was,

 

. . . decorated with paintings, drawings, and sculptures of Meum. They were the work of the most famous artists from all over Europe . . .

 

Conversation at breakfast would be dazzling, and afterwards the party moved into the garden where very intellectual games were played, many of them devised or discovered by Bax. Aickman says he was always the least eminent person present, and the youngest. He was at a loss to understand what was happening. However, he later surmised that the intention of M Days, which broke up in the early afternoon, was to enable guests to find, ‘a kindred spirit with whom to depart for an afternoon and evening of solace, joy, and inspiration’.

 

When Meum Stewart died in 1957, Aickman inherited her books and four drawings of her by Epstein, which he hung on his walls. He says that Meum’s solicitors forwarded a letter from her,

 

. . . to the effect that I had always meant more to her than I had seemed to realise.

 

 

Meum Stewart’s bookplate

 

 

Robert Aickman: An Attempted Biography, by R.B. Russell, Tartarus Press, 2022

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Heather Smith, and Artellus, Ltd.

All photos, unless otherwise stated, are copyright Estate of Robert Aickman/British Library/R.B. Russell, and are not to be reproduced without permission and acknowledgement.