Alexander Kay

Summary

Introduction

Once KM left New Zealand for England in July 1908, it was Alexander Kay, manager of the London branch of the Bank of New Zealand from 1910 to 1921, whom her father entrusted with her monthly allowance (which she frequently referred to as her ‘Kay money’), together with his request that Kay keep an eye on his wayward daughter and forward any information about her that he felt her father should know. Harold Beauchamp’s Reminiscences state:

Arrangements were made through the London manager of the Bank of New Zealand […] for a yearly allowance of £100, payable monthly in London. This was ample to make her secure against want, and I know that it did. Mr. Alexander Kay, the London manager […] acted as both father and trusted advisor.

Indeed, as Alpers notes, following KM’s arrival in London in August 1908, ‘Once a month she was entitled to visit Mr. Kay, at the Bank of New Zealand in Queen Victoria Street, to collect her £8 6s 8d (plus a wink or two, for he was man of the world).’According to Ida Baker, Kay occasionally overstepped the bounds of propriety in his initial dealings with KM, ‘extending his protection to an invitation to visit one of his private haunts, where he gave her a glass of sherry and chatted of his latest amatory adventures’. She then adds, however, that ‘He could not help himself and was basically a very kind man.’

Whenever she was abroad, KM’s monthly allowance was sent to her by Kay. Occasionally he would inform her that her father had raised her allowance, as KM explains here, in a letter to her father dated 6 March 1916:

He [Kay] wrote me today, telling me the good news . . ‘Extremely generous of your father’. He is awfully kind in sending on all my letters promptly and always with a cheering little note and a very large, powerful signature.

Not just her father’s ‘spy’, however, Kay would play an important role in KM’s adult life. He was nearly always reliable, and Mansfield at times used him as a poste restante, an occasional purveyor of family gossip and an avuncular shoulder to cry on, always believing him to be someone who could be counted on in times of distress or anxiety.