The Elliotts were the backbone of empire; for generations, they had furnished the military officers, senior clerics, lawyers and colonial administrators who ensured that Britain continued to rule the waves, and much of the globe in between. One of Elliott’s grandfathers had been the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal; the other, a senior judge. Like many powerful English families, the Elliotts were also notable for their eccentricity. Nicholas’s Great-Uncle Edgar famously took a bet with another Indian Army officer that he could smoke his height in cheroots every day for three months, and smoked himself to death in two. Great-Aunt Blanche was said to have been ‘crossed in love’ at the age of twenty-six and thereafter took to her bed, where she remained for the next fifty years. Aunt Nancy firmly believed that Catholics were not fit to own pets since they did not believe animals had souls. The family also displayed a profound, but frequently fatal, fascination with mountain climbing. Nicholas’s uncle, the Reverend Julius Elliott, fell off the Matterhorn in 1869, shortly after meeting Gustave Flaubert, who declared him ‘the epitome of the English gentleman’. Eccentricity is one of those English traits that looks like frailty but masks a concealed strength; individuality disguised as oddity.
Towering over Nicholas’s childhood was his father Claude, a man of immovable Victorian principles and ferocious prejudices. Claude loathed music, which gave him indigestion, despised all forms of heating as ‘effete’, and believed that ‘when dealing with foreigners the best plan was to shout at them in English’. Before becoming headmaster of Eton, Claude Elliott had taught history at Cambridge University, despite an ingrained distrust of academics and an aversion to intellectual conversation. But the long university vacations gave him plenty of time for mountain climbing. He might have become the most celebrated climber of his generation, but for a broken kneecap injured by a fall in the Lake District, which prevented him from joining Mallory’s Everest expedition. A dominating figure, physically and psychologically, Claude was nicknamed ‘The Emperor’ by the boys at Eton. Nicholas regarded his father with awed reverence; in return, Claude alternately ignored or teased his only child, believing, like many fathers of his time and class, that displaying affection would make his son ‘soft’, and quite possibly homosexual. Nicholas grew up convinced that ‘Claude was highly embarrassed by my very existence’. His mother avoided all intimate topics of conversation, according to her only son, including ‘God, Disease and Below the Waist’.
The young Elliott was therefore brought up by a succession of nannies, and then shunted off to Durnford School in Dorset, a place with a tradition of brutality extreme even by the standards of British prep schools: every morning the boys were made to plunge naked into an unheated pool for the pleasure of the headmaster, whose wife liked to read improving literature out loud in the evenings with her legs stretched out over two small boys, while a third tickled the soles of her feet. There was no fresh fruit, no toilets with doors, no restraint on bullying, and no possibility of escape. Today, such an institution would be illegal; in 1925 it was considered ‘character-forming’. Elliott left his prep school with the conviction that ‘nothing as unpleasant could ever recur’, an ingrained contempt for authority, and a hardy sense of humour.
Eton seemed like a paradise after the ‘sheer hell’ of Durnford, and having his father as headmaster posed no particular problem for Nicholas, since Claude continued to pretend he wasn’t there. Highly intelligent, cheerful and lazy, the young Elliott did just enough work to get by. ‘The increased legibility of his handwriting only serves to reveal the inadequacy of his ability to spell,’ noted one report. He was elected to his first club, Pop, the Eton institution reserved for the most popular boys in the school. It was at Eton that Elliott discovered a talent for making friends. In later life he would look back on this as his most important skill, the foundation of his career.
Basil Fisher was Elliott’s first and closest friend. A glamorous figure with an impeccable academic and sporting record, Fisher was captain of the First XI, the chairman of Pop, and son of a bona-fide war hero, Basil senior having been killed by a Turkish sniper at Gaza in 1917. The two friends shared every meal, spent their holidays together, and occasionally slipped into the headmaster’s house, when Claude was at dinner, to play billiards. Photographs from the time show them arm in arm, beaming happily. Perhaps there was a sexual element to their relationship, but probably not. Hitherto, Elliott had loved only his nanny, ‘Ducky Bit’ (her real name is lost to history). He worshipped Basil Fisher.
In the autumn of 1935, the two friends went up to Cambridge. Naturally, Elliott went to Trinity, his father’s old college. On his first day at the university, he visited the writer and history don Robert Gittings, an acquaintance of his father, to ask a question that had been troubling him: ‘How hard should I work, and at what?’ Gittings was a shrewd judge of character. As Elliott remembered: ‘He strongly advised me to use my three years at Cambridge to enjoy myself in the interval before the next war’ – advice which Elliott followed to the letter. He played cricket, punted, drove around Cambridge in a Hillman Minx, and attended and gave some very good parties. He read a lot of spy novels. At weekends he went shooting, or to the races at Newmarket. Throughout the 1930s Cambridge boiled with ideological conflict: Hitler had taken power in 1933; the Spanish Civil War would erupt in the summer of 1936; extreme right and extreme left fought it out in university rooms and on the streets. But the fervid political atmosphere simply passed Elliott by. He was far too busy having fun. He seldom opened a book and emerged after three years with many friends and a third-class degree, a result he considered ‘a triumph over the examiners’.
Nicholas Elliott left Cambridge with every social and educational advantage, and absolutely no idea what he wanted to do. But beneath a complacent and conventional exterior, and the ‘languid, upper-class manner’ lay a more complex personality, an adventurer with a streak of subversion. Claude Elliott’s Victorian rigidity had instilled in his son a deep aversion to rules. ‘I could never be a good soldier because I am insufficiently amenable to discipline,’ he reflected. When told to do something, he tended to ‘obey not the order which he had actually been given by a superior, but rather the order which that superior would have given if he had known what he was talking about’. He was tough – the brutality of Durnford had seen to that – but also sensitive, bruised by a lonely childhood. Like many Englishmen, he concealed his shyness behind a defensive barrage of jokes. Another paternal legacy was the conviction that he was physically unattractive; Claude had once told him he was ‘plug ugly’, and he grew up believing it. Certainly Elliott was not classically handsome, with his gangly frame, thin face and thick-rimmed glasses, but he had poise, a barely concealed air of mischief, and a resolute cheerfulness that women were instantly drawn to. It took him many years to conclude that he ‘was no more or less odd to look at than a reasonable proportion of my fellow creatures’. Alongside a natural conservatism, he had inherited the family propensity for eccentricity. He was no snob. He could strike up a conversation with anyone, from any walk of life. He did not believe in God, or Marx, or capitalism; he had faith in King, country, class and club (White’s Club, in his case, the gentleman’s club in St James’s). But above all, he believed in friendship.