Ethel Mannin 1900-1984

Ethel Mannin was a popular British novelist, travel writer, political activist, socialist who was born in Battersea. She was of Irish descent. She is now one of the Notable Women of Lavender Hill. She was a prodigious author of over a 100 books! She inherited her socialist beliefs from her father.  She was described in The Socialist Review as ‘a successful author, activist and fighter for sexual liberation, has truly been hidden from history. She moved in the same circles as George Orwell, CLR James and other radicals in the 1930s, yet few have heard of her today.’……. an opponent of censorship, a champion of sexual liberation and of progressive child-centred education. http://socialistreview.org.uk/428/ethel-mannin-hidden-history

This working class self-educated woman born in 1900 was a lifelong political maverick, was a pacifist, an anarchist, and an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause was. She was twice married and had a sexual relationship with Yeats and Bertrand Russell who featured in Impressions  as Portrait of a First Class Mind. These affairs were between husbands and this time and her views came back to haunt her later.

I was amused that she was miffed at Isadora Duncan referring to herself as the ‘female Casanova of America’ stating that I have been called “a modern George Sand”(“but so much better looking, my dear”) but I have never gone about making a sort of slogan of it.

She appears in most photos with a severe hairstyle with a middle parting.

Ethel Edith Mannin  was the eldest of the three children of Robert Mannin, a postal worker and Edith Gray, a farmer’s daughter from Devon. Her father Bob worked in the Post Office. She wrote a piece about Lavender Hill on a Saturday night, when she was in a little wooden pushcart, in her first memoirs Confessions and Impressions written in 1930. This is the only book of hers that I have read so far.

She talked of the ‘flairs on the street stalls, red as fire against the night-dark sky…..The crowds were more dense too which was an added excitement… the yellow  glare of lights from the shop fronts, the warm smell of the people pressed close together , the bunches of walllflowers stacked on barrows, the pungent smell of oranges and the great glowing blaze of their colour, the bunches of grapes, white and black suspended like Japanese lanterns from the awnings, the white nakedness of the scrubbed celery heads gleaming wantonly in the flicker and shadow, the rhythmic rows of shining apples And the black shawled gipsy-looking women who sold these things and their rough men-folk and brass earrings in their ears… infinitely romantic….clutching string bags costers shouting prices, a din of traffic… myself safe being pushed through it all like a dexterously  manipulated ship on a dark sea, in my little chair on wheels.’

There was a lovely post office opposite the library on Lavender Hill which got demolished. Perhaps that is where Bob was a mail sorter. Her father was also a fan of John Burns MP and she writes about walking on Clapham Common with her Dad as a young girl and them meeting Burns with his son.

And coincidentally she also has a chapter on actors Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton – Portrait of a Strange Pair. She probably didn’t know that Elsa also grew up near Clapham Common in Leathwaite Road and was also aware of John Burns and seeing him when she walked along Clapham Common northside on her way to school. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2019/06/09/elsa-lanchester-hollywood-actress-and-notable-woman-of-lavender-hill/

When I read it I realised that she lived off Lavender Hill and not in Clapham as is usually stated  and discovered, with the help of Emma from the Heritage Library, that the family lived at 28 Garfield Road. It is a landlorded house now with red painted bricks and pvc windows and door. I’m sure it would have looked more elegant from the outside when the Mannin’s lived there. She wrote about ‘mounting the steep stairs of the old tall house into the small room with green cloth on the table and the canary covered up for the night and the kitchen range shining …a room mysterious with the blue-grey dimness of the turned-down gas.’

Soon after she was six she was sent to a private school in a small private house. ‘I was dreadfully unhappy and tormented here’  From there she went to a Board School, which was overcrowded, and the syllabus had little connection with real life she said. I suspect this could have been Wix’s Lane School. She failed to get a scholarship to secondary school.  She began writing stories and the first of these appeared in the Lady’s Companion in 1910.

In 1915 she won a scholarship to attend a commercial school and she  fell in love with one of her teachers who was a member of the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society. After leaving school she found employment as a typist for the advertising agency, Charles F. Higham Ltd and soon he promoted her to the post of copywriter. ‘

‘At sixteen I was writing advertisements, running two house-organs – business magazines – and when I was seventeen was publishing my own stories, articles, verses, in a monthly magazine which Higham bought and left to me to produce.” Her employer was to have a great influence on her career.

She began  a relationship with a New Zealand artist : “I was deeply religious until I was sixteen, and then the artist… who was my real education, put into my hands the essays of Robert Green Ingersoll and Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, together with a Rational Press Association Annual, and I became an agnostic’ He was a conscientious objector during the WWI and in 1917 he returned to New Zealand.

She became romantically involved with John  Porteous  who was the general manager at Highams. They married in 1919 and  soon after gave birth to her only child Jean.With a young baby to look after, she worked from home writing advertisements and editing journals. Mannin was a supporter of progressive education and sent her daughter to Summerhill School.

In 1929 Ethel and John Porteous separated and she bought  Oak Cottage 27 Burghley Road Wimbledon.I checked this house out on Zoopla at and the estimated price was  £4,157,000!! In a book by Lucy Pethridge on Servants on interiors Oak Cottage. ‘Inside it was not in the least cottagey. It was a riot of shiny lacquered blue, black and orange with a Egyptian runners on the wall, a print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on the fireplace and the cabinet gramophone painted in bright zigzags. Oak Cottage exemplified the new aesthetic of the twenties. ‘Modernity’ wrote Mannin ‘was cube shaped and jazz patterned’.

Paul Tanqueray photographed her. His work was often shown in The Tatler and The Sketch. This is Ethel in her back garden at Oak Cottage and reading to her daughter Jean.

Ethel with photographer Paul Tanqueray in her garden in Wimbledon

Ethel reading to Jean

The website Neglected Books have an appraisal of Ethel’ s memoirs. Of course, with such a prodigious output, it was bound to be uneven. She was lucky to have the connections she made with publishers and the competition today is so much greater to find a publisher. She knew that she would have no trouble getting her books published and so she kept writing them.

https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=3354  Confessions was one of her most successful and popular books, going into multiple printings and being reissued a few years later as an early Penguin paperback. Its success owed much to the novelty of Mannin’s scandalous confessions, such as falling in love with one of her female teachers, enduring the abuse of another (psychopathic) teacher who refused to let her pupils use the toilet and kept them hostage until they wet themselves and were duly punished, and having several affairs, including one with an unnamed man so distraught over their break-up that he committed suicide. Heady stuff for its time.

But, at the same time, Confessions and Impressions offers an early clue to the secret of Ethel Mannin’s success as a word producer and failure as a writer. After the war, Mannin seems to have latched onto a formula guaranteed to keep her production rate high.

Over the next decades, she would write and publish at a furious pace, producing 30 novels by 1952. The goal she set for herself early in her career of writing two books a year, one fiction and one nonfiction.

This website includes Ethel Mannin in a list of authors whose books won’t be pulped https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/latest-news/forgotten-writers-who-won-t-be-pulped-fiction-1-4048956

Ethel and her daughter Jean

Motherhood brought forth an interest in various facets of education and child-rearing, subjects about which she developed strong opinions and dealt with in several books. Her politics and views on schooling were progressive, and the ideas of A.S. Neill, the radical advocate of child-centered education

In 1931 she published Common Sense and the Child, a book about the educational theories of A. S. Neill. She argued that “all outside compulsion is wrong… inner compulsion is the only value”. She also suggested that “there is no such thing as the naughty child… there are only happy children and unhappy children.” She produced a novel, Linda Shawn (1932), on the subject of progressive education. Love’s Winnowing (1932) was her first openly politically novel

All of her books are in one way or another manifestations of her sympathy for the underdog, particularly the working classes. The various crises of the 1930s only served to heighten her sense of social justice. During these years, she joined the Independent Labour Party, which advocated taking a strong position against the growing threat of Fascism. She traveled to the Soviet Union in 1936, a visit she recorded in South to Samarkand, and the sharply critical observations of the Stalinist regime included in the work made her very unpopular in British Marxist and pro-USSR circles.

During the Spanish Civil War she helped American anarchist veteran Emma Goldman organize meetings in London to create public support for Spain’s anarcho-syndicalist factions. The novel, which centered on the triangular relationship between Goldman, her lover Alexander Berkman, and Berkman’s inamorata Emmy Eckstein , remains an important source on Goldman’s life and personality according to her entry in Women’s Encylopedia.  https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/mannin-ethel-1900-1984                She wrote The Blossoming Bough (1943), in which an Irishman goes to Paris and thence to the Spanish Civil War, remaining faithful to his actress-cousin Katherine O’Donal.

In 1938 she married the Quaker pacifist writer Reginald Reynolds. He was perhaps best known as a critic of British Imperialism in India, who collaborated with Gandhi and for his 1937 work The White Sahibs in India. For many years he was also New Statesman’s   weekly satirical poet.

He resigned from the Independent Labour Party (1939) over the issue of British policies toward the Arab population of British-occupied Palestine, and she soon followed. During the next decades, she would become deeply involved with issues relating to the rights of the Palestinian Arabs, eventually emerging as one of the most vocal and eloquent defenders of Palestinians at a time when most British intellectuals championed the Zionist-led cause of the Jewish population of Palestine.

Ending what she called “the bitter, dangerous 1930s” with a better understanding of politics, society and literature, she had far more respect for her working-class friends and acquaintances, whom she saw as “good comrades of the class struggle,” than for the “suede-shoed communists with Oxford accents and about as much knowledge of working class life and problems as they have of the word ‘Left.'”

In the years after 1945, Ethel  traveled around the globe for material for new books. She first spent time in Ireland and writing of Connemara Journal (1947). A stay in war-ravaged occupied Germany resulted in German Journey (1948), while a number of other books were based on visits to Brittany, Egypt, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Morocco, and Sweden.

Although her trips were usually brief, her sharp powers of observation often resulted in considerable insights in her travel books. Some of these insights also found their way into her fiction, as was the case in her 1956 novel The Living Lotus. Set in rural upper Burma (now Myanmar), the book has been described as a realistic work with not only entertainment value but also information about the Burmese.

Her 1944 book Bread and Roses: A Utopian Survey and Blue-Print has been described by historian Robert Graham as setting forth “an ecological vision in opposition to the prevailing and destructive  industrial organization of society”

In the 1960s, she became greatly interested in the Middle East. A long trip through Iraq and Kuwait in 1963 produced  A lance for the Arabs in 1963 and the novel, The Road to Beersheba  which she saw as a pro-Palestinian counter to Leon Uris’ huge pro-Israeli best-seller,  Exodus. She returned to Jordan in 1965, producing The Lovely Land (1965) (travelogue) and The Burning Bush (1965), also favoring the Palestinian cause.

Besides her Battersea connection I was also interested in her Irish sojourn in Connemara and how she came to be sometimes acclaimed as an Irish writer especially as she got included in the badge-of-honour of Irish banned books and authors. She claimed she inherited her father’s fair hair and Celtic imagination as he knew ‘all the lore and legend of the little people’. Mannin is an old Irish name and claim direct descent from King Brian Boru. Melough Castle is a ruined Mannin stronghold in east Galway and Ethel chose to settle and buy a cottage near Clifden a few miles from Mannin Bay.

Ethel Mannin, W B Yeats – and Wild Flights

Ethel lived near Clifden in the late 1930s and early 1940s. During those years she was also a regular visitor to Dublin, where she numbered Yeats, Maud Gonne and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington among her friends. Two of her most famous books are closely associated with the Clifden area: Connemara Journal (an account of her stay there);dedicated to Maude Gonne McBride and Late Have I Loved Thee (her best-selling novel, which is partly set there)was dedicated to her friend the late Isabel Foyle, of Foyle’s Hotel in Clifdenhttps://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/ethel-mannin-1.185991

She returned to Connemara, feeling ‘romantically and sentimentally in love with the country’, in Nov. 1945, when she bought the cottage, previously rented; spoke at public meetings against the Partition of Ireland – ‘the imperialist problem nearest home’ – and elected Chairman of West London Area of Anti-Partition Committee. She bought a 12-sailing boat called Kathleen in Connemara, June 1949.

Late Have I Loved Thee (1948) was popular in Ireland  because it is about Francis Sable who converts to Catholicism and joins the Jesuits in Milltown, Ireland, after his much-loved sister Cathyn Sable dies in a climbing accident; based on the story of Fr. John Sullivan, S.J., son of the last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland a convert, the novel was was said to be responsible for many vocations, and was adopted by the Women Writers’ Club (Sec. Dr. Lorna Reynolds); Ethel and her husband dined there with Earl of Wicklow, Sean MacBride, Kate O’Brien, Mrs. Isabel Foyle – the dedicatee of the novel who had prompted it with information about O’Sullivan – and Elizabeth Rivers.

A reviewer on Goodreads  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3529618-late-have-i-loved-thee  wrote: This has been on my shelf for years. When I read that it was Pope Francis’ favorite book, I knew I had to read it asap. A wonderful and inspiring read. I love conversion stories as they remind me that God love is greater than any shackles of sin. Reminds me of Brideshead! and another  A novel of conversion, written by a noncatholic anarchist. Loved it.

Ethel issued Every Man a Stranger (1949), a novel based on the life of William Joyce Lord Haw Haw,  who was born In Galway, for which Rivers refused the dedication saying that the theme turned her ‘sideways with distaste’

She wrote an illustrated  parody Comrade O Comrade – a forgotten satire of the British and Irish left set in the late 30s, which tells the story of a British communist’s quest to transform a Galway farmer Larry into a Marxist revolutionary. https://goodbyetwilight.wordpress.com/2018/10/11/comrade-o-comrade-a-forgotten-satire-of-the-british-and-irish-left/  but a reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald didn’t like it.https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/27901732/1007554

Her other Irish connection was her affair with WB Yeats in the thirties. Brenda Maddox, Yeats’s Ghosts: The Secret Life of W. B. Yeats  writes: ‘Ethel Mannin was a rationalist and skeptical, he mystical and credulous. Politics divided them too. She was left-wing, just short of being a Marxist, his leanings were firmly the other way. But that hardly mattered when, as a companion, she was brilliant, fun, and full of the salty talk that Yeats adored. She was not worried about his cultural baggage: “Yeats full of Brugundy and racy reminiscence was Yeats released from the Celtic Twilight and treading the antic hay with abundant zest.” / When their relationsihp became actively sexual is not known. [Norman] Haire had enlisted Ethel specifically to reassure Yeats about the success of the Steinach operation, and she had … dress[ed] as seductively as possible.’ (Privileged Spectator, London 1939, p.81; Maddox, p.281.)

 Mannin whom Yeats addressed as ‘Mother Goddess,’ telling her ‘You are doubly a woman, first because of yourself & secondly because of the Muses whereas I am but once a woman.’ from the book A foolish, Passionate Man: Margot Ruddock and Ethel Mannin by Joseph M Hasset.

Jonathan deBurca Butler wrote in the Irish Independent newspaper an article titled The Many Women of W B Yeats. Yeats had a Steinach operation, a type of vasectomy, which was said by its supporters to increase energy and sexual vigour in men. According to Yeats, the procedure worked and he claimed to go through what he called “a second puberty”. Shortly after the operation, Ethel Mannin, a 34-year-old writer and member of the World League for Sexual Reform, was called on to “test the operation’s efficacy”.

Roy Foster in an article Poetry of Women from Yeats: A Life; wrote: ” Affairs with people such as Bertrand Russell had left her with something of a reputation as an apostle of “free love”, which later came back to haunt her…. Crescendo, described as a “saga of sex”. A few years later her Women and the Revolution argued straightforwardly for free love, equal sexual rights and opportunities for men and women, instant divorce and abortion on demand. “https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-poetry-of-women-xn98xlwb0lp

She continued to live in her beloved home of Oak Cottage, Wimbledon, after the 1958 death of her husband. He died unexpectedly, on an Australian lecture tour. There are further incidents/people in her life like appearing in court as a character-witness for a robber, befriended by her husband and herself and visited in prison on previous occasions.

At the end of her writing career, when she was in her 70s, she moved to “Overhill”, Shaldon, Devonshire, in the 1960s – a house found for her Jean to be near.  In 1976, she published her last novel, The Late Miss Guthrie. The next year, she published her final book, a last volume of autobiography, Sunset over Dartmoor: A Final Chapter of Autobiography (1977). In this work, she addressed her many loyal readers as old friends and demonstrated the charm that had kept them faithful to her even when in some instances her opinions were by no means palatable to every reader.

Virginia Nicholson in Among the Bohemians wrote Ethel Mannin: ” didn’t resent the passing of youth, but she felt displaced in the post-War world of the 1950s… In old age her pleasures were correspondingly elderly – good wine, good books, and her roses. Her robust impatience with humbug remained vigorous however. She continued to travel, espoused Buddhism, and signed up to a variety of liberal causes. Passion, she felt, was for the young, but ‘the unending struggle against injustice and barbarism in the world’ was perennial. Neglected Books thought she did an ”  imitation of a Tory old fogey: “We who were young in the Twenties are intensely aware of the Seventie’s scene because we have no part in it–nor want any.”

Ethel died in Devon on December 5, 1984 in Teignmouth Hospital after she had a fall.

Ethel was a woman with so many facets and phases to her life politically and as a writer. Her earlier life which helped inform her political views, early motherhood, her lifestyle and affairs in her thirties, her anarchist phase, her marriage to a pacifist Quaker, her socialism, Spanish civil war, the travel after the war and all the time churning out books and it seemed to have become a way of life for her. So she could switch between her novels and travel books with the latter inspiring the former, reflecting the politically changing world around her and revised her own attitudes and campaigning accordingly.  She could write about her cat, children’s books, she could speak at meetings, join Reg in his work, writing magazine articles. She must have spent so much of her time at her typewriter in her study in Oak Cottage.

She has made an impact in many different fields as she aged and her interests changed which is why she is still of interest to younger people who are discovering her work and writing and blogging about her. From the PhD student discovering her parody Comrade O Comrade to  Peter Faulkner writing about Ethel Mannin and William Morris for The Morris Society.  http://www.morrissociety.org/JWMS/13.2Spring1999/SP99.13.2.Faulkner.pdf

There is the middle eastern scholar Ahmed Al Rawi writing his paper on the Post Colonial novels of Desmond Stewart (1924–81) and Ethel Mannin (1900–84) who are both unique among British fiction writers because they offered different portrayals of the post-colonial Arab world than what was mostly found in Western mainstream writings…. Mannin focused on the postcolonial era which followed the British occupation and was represented in the Palestinian national movements. and  offered a more complex and diverse view of the Arab world that was far different from many other stereotypical fictional depictions.

The blog Inspiring older readers says:  grab her books while you can and explore the world of one of literature’s great radicals. Ethel Mannin : novelist, travel writer and Socialist  http://www.letterpressproject.co.uk/inspiring-older-readers/2016-08-03/ethel-mannin-novelist-travel-writer-and-socialist

The  website Kate Sharpley Library on anarchy and anarchists have written about her as one of their own. Ethel Mannin the novelist in fact did a great deal of work for the anarchist movement, in particular during  the Spanish struggle, and continued to give us support during the war…The great quality in her novels was a zest for life. She owed a lot to her father, an old-time socialist who kept the faith.  https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/0zpcq4 as has Albert Meltzer https://libcom.org/library/on-ethel-mannin-albert-meltzer

The Neglected Books website in 2017 revised its view of her on reading No More Mimosa  “After writing a fairly disparaging piece about Ethel Mannin’s six volumes of memoirs two years ago, I wouldn’t have counted on finding her work on my reading list again”   https://neglectedbooks.com/?tag=ethel-mannin

When I am researching someone’s life or when I am writing and compiling a funeral tribute I find that I become quite intensely absorbed in these people’s lives. I also wonder if I would have liked them, if I would have got on with them or have been likely to have socialised with them. I think I would have been a bit intimidated by her but feel sure we could have nattered over a glass of wine. I am so pleased to have found another notable women of Lavender Hill and Battersea.

Confessions and Impressions (1930) Privileged Spectator (1939) Connemara Journal (1947) Brief Voices (1959) Young in the Twenties: A Chapter of Autobiography (1971) Sunset over Dartmoor: A Final Chapter of Autobiography (1977) Other works Martha (1923) Hunger of the Sea (1924) Sounding Brass (1925) Three New Love Stories (1925) Pilgrims (1927) Green Willows (1928) Crescendo, Being the Dark Odyssey of Gilbert Stroud (1929) Children of the Earth (1930) Song of the Bomber (1936) Ragged Banners (1931) Bruised Wings and Other Stories (1931) Common-sense and the Child (1931) Green Figs (1931) stories The Tinsel Eden and Other Stories (1931) All Experience (1932) Linda Shawn (1932) Love’s Winnowing (1932) Venetian Blinds (1933) Dryad (1933) stories Men Are Unwise (1934) Some Adventures With A School (1934) with Margaret Johnston Cactus (1935) Forever Wandering (1935) The Falconer’s Voice (1935) Forbidden Music (1935) South to Samarkand (1936) Spain and Us (with J.B. Priestley, Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, Francis Meynell, Louis Golding, T. F. Powys, J. Langdon-Davies, Catherine Carswell) (1936) The Pure Flame (1936) Sounding Brass (1937) Women Also Dream (1937) Common-Sense and the Adolescent (1937) Women and the Revolution (1938) Rose and Sylvie (1938) Darkness My Bride (1938) Julie: The story of a dance-hostess (1940) Rolling in the Dew (1940) Against Race-Hatred and for a Socialist Peace (with various authors 1940) Commonsense and Morality (1941) Red Rose: A Novel based on the Life of  Emma Goldman (1941) Captain Moonlight (1942) The Blossoming Bough (1942) Castles in the Street (1942) Proud Heaven (1943) No More Mimosa (1943) Bread and Roses: An Utopian Survey and Blue-Print (1944) Comrade O Comrade, or, Low-Down on the Left (1945) Lucifer and the Child (1945) Christianity or Chaos? (1946) Selected Stories (1946) The Dark Forest (1946) Why I Am Still a Pacifist  (1946). Bavarian Story (1948) German Journey (1948) Late Have I Loved Thee (1948) Every Man a Stranger (1949) Jungle Journey: 7000 Miles through India and Pakistan (1950) At Sundown the Tiger (1951) The Fields at Evening (1952) The Wild Swans and Other Tales Based on the Ancient Irish (1952) This Was a Man: Some Memories of Robert Mannin by His Daughter (1952) Lover under Another Name (1953) Moroccan Mosaic (1953) So Tiberius … (1954) Two Studies in Integrity: Gerald Griffin and the Rev. Francis Mahony (‘Father Prout’) (1954) Land of the Crested Lion: A Journey through Modern Burma (1955) The Living Lotus (1956) Pity the Innocent (1957) The Country of the Sea: Some Wanderings in Brittany (1957) Fragrance of Hyacinths (1958) Ann and Peter in Sweden (1959) The Blue-eyed Boy (1959) Ann and Peter in Japan (1960) The Flowery Sword: Travels in Japan (1960) Sabishisha (1961) Ann and Peter in Austria (1962) Curfew at Dawn (1962) With Will Adams Through Japan (1962) A Lance for the Arabs: A Middle East Journey (1963) The Road to Beersheba (Hutchinson, 1963). Aspects of Egypt: Some Travels in the United Arab Republic (1964) Rebels’ Ride. A Consideration of the Revolt of the Individual (1964) Report from Iraq (1964) Lovely Land: The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (1965) The Burning Bush (1965) Loneliness: A Study of the Human Condition (1966) The Night and Its Homing (1966) The Lady and the Mystic (1967) An American Journey (1967) Bitter Babylon (1968) England for a Change (1968) The Saga of Sammy-Cat (1969) Practitioners of Love. Some Aspects of the Human Phenomenon (1969) The Midnight Street (1969) England at Large (1970) Free Pass to Nowhere (1970) My Cat Sammy (1971) England My Adventure (1972) The Curious Adventure of Major Fosdick (1972) Mission to Beirut (1973) Stories from My Life (1973) An Italian Journey (1974) Kildoon (1974) The Late Miss Guthrie (1976)

 

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Catherine Gurney OBE 1848-1930 a Notable woman of Lavender Hill

Catherine Gurney was born on 19 June 1848, at Normanby House Lavender Hill Battersea, south London. Her parents were Joseph, who worked at the firm of William Brodie Gurney, shorthand writers to Parliament, and Harriet (nee Tritton). The Trittons were a banking family.

The Survey of London Batterse. ‘The house was occupied for many years by members of the Gurney family, ‘England’sgreat stenographic dynasty’. It was demolished in the 1880s and the site covered by Kathleen Road.’

The Gurneys were non-conformist. Their affluent and religious middle-class family was related to the  Gurney banking family of Norwich.  Most of her early life was spent in Wandsworth. Then when her father died the family moved to Notting Hill.

Her grandfather WB Gurney played a leading role in the abolition of slavery as did her great aunt Martha Gurney. The prison reformer Elizabeth Fry (née Gurney) was another relative.  Colin Salter https://www.colinsalter.co.uk/  writes about his Gurney predecessors in his blog Tall Tales from the Trees from which a lot of this information comes and the photographs and I am grateful to him. http://talltalesfromthetrees.blogspot.com/2012/03/catherine-gurney-obe-1848-1930-and-her.html

Mary Gurney was Catherine’s step-sister born in 1836. Mary was dedicated to girl;s education. She wrote a book ‘Are we to have education for out middle class girls? She was one of the co-founders of the Girls Public Day School Trust in 1871 for the establishment of schools open to all those girls whose educational needs were not covered by the education act of 1870. 38 schools were opened between 73 and 1901. She dedicated herself to these schools she helped establish till she died in 1917. She was a horsewoman, linguist extremely musical and gave lessons to her her young step-sisters including Catherine.

Mary Gurney step-sister to Catherine.

ée Gurney;

W B Gurney & Sons LLP (Gurney’s) was established in 1735 by Thomas Gurney and is one of the country’s longest surviving businesses. In 1737 Thomas was appointed shorthand writer to the court at the Old Bailey and in 1750. He published a book concerning his own version of shorthand. https://stenographylondon.co.uk/history.html

Thomas Gurney, his son and grandson worked extensively for Parliament on an ad hoc basis from the 1770s. In 1813 by resolution of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, Thomas’s grandson, William Brodie Gurney, was formally appointed Official Shorthand Writer to the Houses of Parliament. This title was retained by the senior partner of Gurney’s until the post was abolished in 2010. There is a a sample page written by Charles Dickens of the shorthand.

 

Joseph Gurney stenographer and Catherine’s father

 

Catherine challenged the social mores of that time which dictated that ‘a woman’s place was in the home’. The first indication of her drive and initiative came when, in the early 1870s, Catherine  first began a Bible Class at Wandsworth Prison.

lding part in the abolition of slavery.

A chance remark from one of the policemen who made safe her journey from Wandsworth back to her home in Notting Hill – “What? D’you think a police officer has a soul?” – led her to found the Christian Police Association in 1883 in her home initially.  To accommodate the Association she opened London’s first Police Institute at 1 Adelphi Terrace WC2  a drop-in centre for comfort and conversation. It served as headquarters and for members of the police force from the UK and overseas. It is still operating under the title CPA https://www.cpauk.net

(Neighbours included Richard D’Oyly Carte at 4 Adelphi Terrace and Charles Booth at no 9 compilied his Life and Labour, one of the earliest attempts to make a scientific investigation into the working and depressed classes of London.)  https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol18/pt2/pp103-108) . The building was demolished in 1936.

The Police Institute founded by Catherine at Adelphi Terrace WC2

In 1889 she helped an ailing officer find a place in a convalescent home, only to see him check out again when he found his neighbour in the next bed was a violent criminal whom he had put behind bars. She realised the need for a dedicated sanctuary for policemen recovering from injury or illness, and founded the Police Convalescent Seaside Home at Clarendon Villas, Hove West Brighton in 1890. Over 100 police officers were cared for there in its first year. The first three years of the rent was paid by a Miss Bell. https://www.stgeorgesharrogate.org/stg01gurney.htm

Police Convalescent Home 51 Clarendon Villas Hove

The need for this kind of care became so apparent that she initiated further fund raising and set up the Southern Police Convalescent Home and Orphanage in 1893.  Children were being sent to the south coast orphanage from as far away as Manchester in the north. The success of the home highlighted its shortcomings in the number of men it could offer accommodation to at any one time and so proposals were made for a purpose built Convalescent Seaside Home and work began on planning and fund raising in 1891. The new premises were located at 11 Portland Place Hove catering for 457 men and five children in its first year.

11 Portland Place Hove

The Southern Provincial Police Orphanage was relocated to Sutton temporarily before being opened up in Redhill in 1895 at Gatton Lodge London Road. This property was purchased and presented to the charity by Miss Bell. 735 children passed through from its founding in 1890 to 1939 and it finally closed in 1947 and its work was replaced by the Gurney Benevolent Fund becoming The Gurney Fund in 2014. The first child admitted to the northern orphanage was  Minnie Smith from Sunderland and she was followe by 643 children catered for before ir closed in 1956.

 

In 1897, while visiting Harrogate, Catherine negotiated the purchase of St George’s College building and grounds. She then built the Northern Police Convalescent Home. in 1901 within the grounds.

All these institutions were paid for through the personal fund-raising efforts of Catherine Gurney amongst her friends, family and other wealthy patrons in the north and south of England. Where funding fell short, she arranged loans on which she paid the interest herself.

In 1901 she had built in the grounds the Northern Police Convalescent Home now called The Police Treatment Centre.

She remained closely associated with them throughout her life. She was on hand to show him around when the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, opened a new chapel at the southern Home in 1923.

Catherine served as World’s Superintendent of Work among Policemen, and was the Honorary Secretary of the International Christian Police Association. The work which was started in her own home with six members, in 1893, became an International Association with branches in the United Kingdom, America, Australia, India, China, Japan and South Africa. https://christianpolice.org.uk/about/

The basis of the association was entirely nonsectarian and non-political, its object being the spiritual and temporal welfare of the police. It also aimed to establish institutes, convalescent homes and orphanages, and had a police temperance union connected with it. For twenty-one years, Catherine was a temperance worker. She recognised the connection between alcohol and violent crimes. The Gurney Fund continues her legacy by providing for the children of deceased or medically retired police officers..  http://policecharitiesuk.org/charities-list/for-families-loved-ones/the-gurney-fund/

Flint House Police Rehabilitation Centre in Goring-on-Thames opened in 1988 and is provided for 4000 police officers in 2013.  In 1996 a new Police Treatment Centre  Castlebrae was opened in Auchterarder in Perthshire.

 

Flint House Goring-on-Thames

Castlebrae Auchterarder Perthshire Police Treatment Centre

As one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Constabulary said of her, ‘The nursing profession have their Florence Nightingale but the Police Service has Catherine Gurney and we must never let them forget her.’

Catherine was made an OBE in 1930 shortly before her death.

Catherine died on 13th August and was buried at All Saints Church Cemetery Harrow Hill Harrogate near the two homes St George’s and St Andrew’s that she had originated.

 

Catherine Gurney funeral police cortege

This is in the chapel of the Southern Police Orphanage g

plaque by the Harrogate Civic Society in her memory was unveiled in 2012 at St Andrews Police Treatment Centre Harlow Moor Road Harrogate. Thousands of police officers have benefited from the convalescent homes, and continue to do so through the St George’s Trust. Attitudes to orphanages have changed, but the fatherless children of policemen are still cared for in Britain by the Gurney Fund.

 

So, I now have another addition to my roster of Notable Women of Lavender Hill and what an interesting and varied lot they are and all deserve commemoration. .ttps://christianpolice.org.uk/about/ome is derived from regular subscriptions from the Police Forces, donations, legacies and ihttp://policecharitiesuk.org/charities-list/for-families-loved-ones/the-gurney-fund/nvestment income and being registered charitable trusts,  operate according to the aims of the respective trust deeds, which is, to provide and distribute grants and assistance to needy orphan children for police orphans

Lady Battersea Constance de Rothschild

Obviously, when I discovered that there was a Lady Battersea I had to blog about her if she was interesting.  I think she is another women from the past who has been overlooked. Also she was another women whom it transpires was married to a man who preferred men. There were a lot more men and women who married although one, other or both were gay or bisexual, which went unacknowledged or tacitly accepted. It reminds me of another Battersea connected woman Elsa Lanchester who was married to Charles Laughton. One significant difference being that Lord Battersea was a very handsome man and she and her husband came from an upper class background. She was a wealthy Rothschild.

Constance Rothschild  later Lady Battersea was born in 1843 at 107 Piccadilly. She was known as Connie. She and her sister Anne were the daughters of Baron Anthony and Louise (née Montefiore) de Rothschild who were cousins. Her father belonged to one of the wealthiest and most distinguished Jewish banking families in England. The Rothschild’s enjoyed pre-eminence among the network of aristocratic cousins who ruled Anglo-Jewish society in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Niall Ferguson states in his History of the House of Rothschild that by the mid-19th century they regarded themselves as the nearest thing the European Jews had to a royal family and the equals of royalty.  Yet antisemitic feelings were prevalent in the upper echelons of society; particularly so among those closest to the Queen at court, where following the death of the Prince Albert in 1861 the Rothschilds became pointedly excluded.

Louisa de Rothschild mother of Constance Lady Battersea

Sir Anthony de Rothschild father of Constance Lady Battersea

This information on Constance Rothschild came from the Jewish Women’s Archive written by Linda Gordon Kuzmack.  https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rothschild-constance-lady-battersea Linda Gordon Kuzmack

Constance spent her earliest years in Paris with her family. In 1847, she moved back to London where she had been born on 29 April 1843. She enjoyed a thorough education, including drawing lessons, which was enlivened by sessions of whist with her father. https://guide-to-the-archive.rothschildarchive.org/rothschild-family-collection/depts/english-family-papers/constance-lady-battersea-nee-de-rothschild-1843-1931

Anne de Rothschild sister of Constance Lady Battersea

Constance’s mother Louise Lady Rothschild launched Anglo-Jewish women into organized philanthropy when she founded the first serious volunteer philanthropic organization of Jewish women in Victorian England. In so doing, she inspired many upper- and middle-class Anglo- Jewish women to emerge out of the home and into public life for the first time. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rothschild-lady-louise

So, with this influence Constance and her sister inherited their mother’s  strong sense of duty to the poor, a sense of confidence and an independent spirit as women to be part of elite English society. As girls they taught in the village schools surrounding their home and as young women at the Jews’ Free School for the poor in London. Together, the girls wrote a popular children’s book entitled The History and Literature of the Israelites, which was highly praised by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

 

Aston ClintonHouse was their opulent home.  https://houseandheritage.org/2018/06/11/aston-clinton-house/

In October 1902, The Sketch visited Aston Clinton House, to the south-east of the village of Aston Clinton in Buckinghamshire, thought to have been the most charming of the country houses belonging to various members of the Rothschild family and their immediate descendants. As one observer said: “This typically English homestead gains rather than loses by contrast with its stately neighbour, Waddesdon.”

Both Lady Battersea and her mother showed a practical interest in the welfare of their poorer neighbours. Anthony Hall, a building erected by Sir Anthony’s widow in memory to him, formed a centre not only for those in the neighbourhood, but also for the many practical philanthropists who met there at the invitation of Lord Battersea. The Aston Clinton Coffee Tavern was another familiar benefaction conferred on the village by the Rothschild family, and successful had been the Training Home for Girls, an institution that had solved locally ‘that difficult modern problem – the servant question’.

Both were keenly concerned in what was going on in the political, artistic, and philanthropic worlds. The Sketch painted a lavish portrayal. “They are among those whom the nation should delight to honour, for they have done all in their power to make happier and better the many large circles of human beings with whom they are brought in contact. Lady Battersea has the energy of her wonderful race, and she is ardently interested in all that affects the welfare of her own sex.”

When Lady de Rothschild died in 1910, Aston Clinton reverted to the Rothschild estate, but Lady Battersea and her sister, Annie Henrietta (1844-1926), remained in occupation until the First World War. It was given over to the Commanding Officer of the 21^st Infantry Division, then based on the Halton estate.

The Rothschild estate sold Aston Clinton for £15,000 in 1923 – a house with seven reception rooms, billiard room, ballroom, thirteen principal bedrooms and dressing rooms, seventeen secondary and servants’ bedrooms, four bathrooms and domestic offices. To commemorate the sale the Rothschilds placed a tablet in the wall of the portico recording that the family had owned Aston Clinton between 1853 until 1923, a period of 70 years.

The elite social circle of the Rothschild daughters, who were raised in a home where their parents entertained the leaders of English politics and society, was almost entirely Christian except for their cousins. These Christian visitors, combined with their mother’s discomfort with Judaism, influenced the sisters’ ambivalent attitude to Judaism as a religion. However, Constance never converted, but remained dedicated to Jews as a people, even though she and her sister Anne both married Christians, despite their parents’ acute unhappiness. Constance married Cyril Flower (1843–1907), later Lord Battersea, in 1877, while Anne married Eliot Yorke in 1873. Both marriages were childless.

Constance and Cyril Flower had met in 1864 through his friendship with her cousin, Leopold de Rothschild. He had been called to the bar and became a Liberal MP and was a patron of art and was widely referred to as “the most handsome man in the House of Commons”, was said he possessed a genius for friendship and was a great favourite of Gladstone[ who, in 1892, raised him to the peerage as Baron Battersea.

We don’t know if Constance was aware of Cyril’s sexual orientation when she married him when she was thirty four and had known him for many years before that. He was popular and had many friends. A close friend and possible lover was the psychical researcher Frederic Myers and  other friends included Henry James and Edward Burne –Jones. There are indications that Constance disapproved of some of his friends. (. Rothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power by Derek Wilson [15] and in her memoirs she cautiously comments that she had intuitively felt that “some of the very ardent and sudden likings he occasionally took to certain persons might lead to misplaced friendship”.

http://theesotericcuriosa.blogspot.com/2009/11/dandy-in-aspic-cyril-flower-lord.html

Rich, Handsome, Intelligent, Energetic, Politically Active, Enthusiastic Sportsman, Businessman, Art Lover, Ideal Victorian Gentleman

Cyril Flower was one of nine children born to Philip William Flower, of Furze Down, Streatham, Surrey, and his first wife, Mary, daughter of Jonathan Flower. His father was a prosperous East Indian merchant who had earlier established a successful merchant house in Sydney, Australia. Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, Cyril was called to the Bar, Inner Temple, in 1870 at the age of 27. This started him on the career of being an innovative and upcoming barrister.

During this time, Cyril’s best friend was Leopold de Rothschild from the famous banking family. It was through this connection that he met his future wife and Leopold’s cousin, Constance de Rothschild. Daughter to Sir Anthony de Rothschild, 1st bart, Constance was an heiress in her own right and was soon drawn to the mind and body of Cyril. It was not long before the marriage of the banker’s daughter and the man, whom many considered the handsomest of his day, occurred in 1877.

In 1880 he entered Parliament for Breconshire, a seat he held until 1885 when the constituency was abolished, and then represented Luton until 1892. It was also during that time he served as Whip to the Liberal Party. Additionally, he served briefly as a Junior Lord of the Treasury from February to July 1886 in the third Liberal administration of William Ewart Gladstone.

Receiving a peerage in 1892 Flower was raised to noble rank and conferred with the title, Baron Battersea, of Battersea in the County of London and of Overstrand in the County of Norfolk. Apart from his political career he was also a great collector and patron of art. He was a patron of James McNeill Whistler and was involved with the Pre-Raphaelite set commissioning many pieces from Edward Burne-Jones.

Here is the Battersea connection. In  the 1890s Cyril Flower began to acquire vacant land on the south side of Prince of Wales Drive Battersea  from the Commissioners for Development. His first first mansion block to be developed along Prince of Wales Drive was Overstrand Mansions, which was begun in 1893. In 1894, most of the other mansions blocks were begun by Cyril Flower: Cyril Mansions was started on 26 April, Norfolk Mansions was started on 27 October, and both Sidestrand Mansions (now Park Mansions) and Primrose Mansions in November. These blocks were under construction, by different builders, at much of the same time, and are of an architecture style inspired by the Arts and Craft Movement. The leases for these buildings were taken up with enthusiasm when built.

The names of these five mansion blocks were selected by Cyril Flower and Constance. Sidestrand Mansions (now Park Mansions), Norfolk Mansions and Overstrand Mansions were named after “Poppyland which was popularised by Clement Scott the theatre critic for The Daily Telegraph. This was the name he gave to the area of the Norfolk coast which included the village of Overstrand was a fashionable holiday destination during this time and this was where Constance and Cyril built their country home The Pleasaunce.https://family.rothschildarchive.org/estates/67-the-pleasaunce

(Another snippet from Survey of London.  In 1906, 69 Primrose Mansions was in the possession of Mrs Edith Karno, the estranged wife of comedy impresario Fred Karno. From here, with a number of Music Hall friends, she helped to run the first office of the Ladies Music Hall Guild—founded in September 1906 with Marie Lloyd as its President. Edith Karno was its first treasurer.)

The Pleasauce now Christian Endeavour Holiday Centre

Cyril Mansions was named after himself, and Primrose Mansions was named after  Constance’s cousin, Hannah, who was married to Archibald Primrose, Earl of Rosberry.  Rosebery Villa abuts Primrose Mansions on Alexandra Road. Another, interesting story as Lord Roseberry eventually became Prime Minister. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Primrose,_Countess_of_Rosebery

Hannah de Rothschild

 

After her marriage to Cyril Flower, Constance combined a lavish social life with charitable activities. The Rothschild daughters’ marriages and subsequent gilded lifestyle among the Christian aristocracy continued the process of isolating them from Judaism as a religion. Moreover, Constance felt Judaism regarded her as inferior because she was a woman. Disillusioned with Orthodoxy, Constance felt some sympathy for the new Liberal Judaism that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, but never joined the movement. She attended church services because she liked the spirit of public worship.

She became active in philanthropy, and in the temperance movement as she became aware of the need for temperance when her servants abused liquor and  joined the British Women’s Temperance Association in the 1890s and became a leader of temperance campaigns in London and the provinces. Constance was introduced to the women’s movement in 1881 by suffragist and temperance worker Fanny Morgan (whom she helped to undertake a political career that resulted in her election as mayor of Brecon).

Her reputation for social activism led her to become involved in the movement for reforms of English women’s prisons. She only encountered three Jewish female convicts during her visits to Aylesbury prison.

In 1885 she was jolted into struggling with the issue of white slavery by a an exposés of child prostitution and white slavery—trafficking in girls and women. The articles by journalist W. T. Stead’s also fanned prejudice against Jewish immigrants by accusing East European Jews of being the source of the traffic in prostitutes and of corrupting English girls and women. Also a crusade against the sweatshop system of employing immigrant garment workers fuelled further prejudice against Jews. Constance learnt that Jewish prostitutes believed that only Christian missions would give them food and lodging and that no Jew would help them.

The Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women JAPGW was composed of Jewish women closely connected to women’s temperance, suffrage and educational campaigns.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14725880701655011?scroll=top&needAccess=true&journalCode=cmjs20

They worked closely with feminist and inter-denominational anti-white slavery organizations. Founding the JAPGW launched these Anglo-Jewish women into organized English feminism and established the roots of an Anglo-Jewish woman’s movement seventeen years before the founding of the Union of Jewish Women.

She had to overcome the resistance of the organized Jewish community, which was reluctant to even admit there was Jewish prostitution in England. She also had to overcome English feminists’ resistance to accepting Jewish women.

Constance and her women’s committee handled the rescue, job training and provision of residential homes for women and girls and after World War I, after the partial winning of votes for women they  joined the male JAPGW representatives in the leadership of international rescue operations. She continued to lead the organization and to represent the JAPGW at international meetings through the early 1920s.

Her work in temperance, prison reform and white slavery had drawn her into the English woman’s movement by the 1890s. She was introduced to the National Union of Women Workers (NUWW) of Great Britain and Ireland (later the National Council of Women of Great Britain and Ireland), which became the umbrella organization for all women’s philanthropic groups in Great Britain.

She brought Jewish women into the Union, encouraging them partly for the opportunity the organization afforded middle-class women to become active outside the home, partly to help less fortunate women, and partly because she and others saw membership as a sign of social acceptance for Jews. Jewish women’s involvement ultimately helped to broaden the movement’s political base, thereby strengthening English feminism.

Lady Battersea by Albert de Belleroche

Lord Battersea died in 1907 aged 64 . He seems to have faded from political life by then.

Constance had some books published. You can read them here. https://archive.org/details/waifsstrays00batt/page/24

Reminiscences, Lady Battersea (Constance) de Rothschild Longmans, Green, 1871

A Buckingham Story of 1663, Baroness Constance Flower Battersea Watson and Hazell, 1875 – 107 pages,

 

 

Waddesdon Manor NT another Rothschild’s home has this letter on display from Constance to the mother of the bride about the wedding of  Connie’s cousin Jimmy to Dorothy Pinto https://waddesdon.org.uk/blog/family-letters-brilliant-affair/

Constance died in 1931 at The Pleasunce.

According to her obituary in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency khttps://www.jta.org/1931/11/24/archive/death-of-lady-battersea                                                                                            Lady Battersea was the friend of Queen Victoria, King Edward and Queen Alexandra, and eight Prime Ministers, including Disraeli and Gladstone, and was well known to many distinguished men and women, among them Thackeray and Lord Morley.

Here is a photo of her in Overstrand with her neighbour Lady Shackleton. https://www.northnorfolknews.co.uk/news/man-who-brought-einstein-and-carnivals-to-cromer-area-1-763453

Constance died at The Pleasaunce  on 22 November 1931, the anniversary of her marriage. She is undoubtedly another interesting woman associated with Battersea. I don’t know if she ever visited our Borough or the mansions in Prince of Wales Drive and the Park Town Estate that was bult by Lord Battersea but nevertheless I think her life is quite fascinating despite her privilege and her contribution to Jewish women’s involvement in social and political life is worthy of being remembered.

I don’t marry virgins.

I don’t marry virgins” is the phrase that got me into trouble with the Ministry of Justice and Humanists UK when it was quoted in an interview in the Wandsworth Guardian although it is The Sutton and Croydon Guardian online.

I was stating a fact when I said this because I was only conducting combined Naming and Wedding Ceremonies!!  I had become disenchanted with conducting weddings, partly because of the long lead in time, the palaver and expense of weddings fuelled by a very lucrative wedding industry. It is all so very commercial with the trappings of virginal white wedding dress, bridesmaids, groomsmen, photographers, flowers catering, archaic customs of the bride being ‘given away’ by her father etc.

This article by Jen Doll elucidates my attitude to modern weddings in her book:                Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest, Jen Doll details the travails of being a perennial invitee.https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=Jen+Doll+on+wedding+guest+fatigue

But even when I was conducting weddings as a Humanist celebrant I never knowingly married a couple who did not cohabit in a sexual relationship. This is because celebrants meet the couple to get to know them, their story, their relationship and family dynamics and to ascertain what was important to them in their ceremony. It was always apparent that the couple did live together in a sexual relationship. So, yet again, me saying that I didn’t marry virgins was a statement of fact.

Here is a piece on why I stopped conducting weddings and came of the Wedding Celebrants list.

I also believe that we should have divorce ceremonies. Her is a video of me explaining why.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqAkmjMpWlo

The young journalist Gráinne was Irish and we had a long chat. I was explaining how a Humanist wedding would differ from a religious one, especially Catholic ones. It was in this context that I suggested people having a humanist wedding would be most likely was quite pleased getting such coverage on the this issue.

The context of the feature was that Humanists UK were again pushing for Humanist weddings to be legally recognised and they asked celebrants to contact local media about the campaign. There is a typo of my name and slight errors. I  also did an interview for Wandsworth Radio on it.

                                                                                   Here is a link to the item wh.https://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/14920992.battersea-resident-urges-government-to-make-humanist-weddings-legally-binding/

• 22nd November 2016

Battersea resident urges Government to make Humanist weddings legally binding

By Grainne Cuffe

Battersea resident urges Government to make Humanist weddings legally binding

A Battersea woman is calling on the Government to make Humanist weddings legal in the UK.

Jeanne Rathbone is a Humanist celebrant, a person who performs secular celebracy services for weddings, funerals, child namings, coming of age ceremonies and other rituals.

Mrs Rathbone has been performing these non-religious weddings for 20 years and believes it is unjust that humanist weddings are still not legal in the UK, except for in Scotland.

The only legally recognised non-religious wedding ceremonies available to people in England, Northern Ireland and Wales must be performed in a registrar office.

Jeanne said: “I have written again to Jane Ellison our MP about Humanist celebrants being recognised as wedding registrars just as vicars, priest, Imams etc are.

“It’s been three years since the Marriage Act gave the Government powers to do so but nothing has happened.”

If Jeanne could go back in time before marriage came into law she admits she would have it so that everyone had a civil ceremony and then celebrated in whatever way they saw fit afterwards.

She also does not marry virgins, saying it would be “irrational” and not in line with the values of humanism that a couple that wanted to make such a huge commitment to each other had not slept together.

Humanism is a belief system that gives weight to the agency and value of human beings as opposed to higher powers and a Humanist wedding is a personalised, non-religious ceremony that can be performed anywhere and in whatever way the couple would prefer.

However, due to UK marriage laws, the couple must also have a ceremony in a registrar office to make the marriage legally binding.

There are hundreds of Humanist celebrants across the UK

Currently in the UK, religious weddings can take place in any registered religious building, such as churches, mosques, and premises belonging to Scientologists.

Humanist weddings have been legally recognised in Scotland since 2005 and in Ireland since 2013.

The Marriage Act gave the UK Government powers to legalise the ceremonies in 2013 but it was blocked in Parliament on the grounds that it was a “fringe” issue.

The British Humanist Association (BHA) described the move as “shameless”.

The BHA said: “Giving legal recognition to humanist marriages is a simple measure which adversely affects no one, has huge popular and political support, and would increase the number of people getting married each year.”

Humanist weddings surpassed the number of Church of Scotland weddings in 2016, which have halved in the last decade.

Ms Rathborn thinks it unlikely the Government will do anything about this as “they don’t think it will get them any votes”.

Here is the the complaint letter that I got from what was then the BHA now rebranded as Humanists UK. As a result I was summoned to appear in front of the complaints panel of the Quality Assurance Committee of Humanist Ceremonies and accused of bringing the BHA into disrepute.

I am sorry to say that the Ceremonies Department has received a complaint against you from the Public Affairs Department of the BHA. The complaint is in relation to an interview given by you in your capacity as a wedding celebrant to the Battersea Local Guardian, which appeared on 22 November 2016.

http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/local/14920992.Battersea_resident_urges_Government_to_make_Humanist_weddings_legally_binding/

The Public Affairs team say that civil servants in the marriage section at the Ministry of Justice informed them a few weeks ago that they and the Minister of Justice had seen the interview and that the conversation that followed made it clear that it had had the effect of undermining the reputation of our ceremonies.

The section they made specific reference to was “She also does not marry virgins, saying it would be “irrational” and not in line with the values of humanism that a couple that wanted to make such a huge commitment to each other had not slept together.”  

The Public Affairs team state that this remark is not only

I was so very annoyed, disappointed and angry!! This lead me to drop out of Humanist Ceremonies which is the network of Humanist Celebrants. Hence this blog.

The language of virginity is very gendered and usually referring to girls and women and  is heteronormative. Males do not have virginity tests.

virgin;a person who has never had sexual intercourse.

synonyms: maiden, unmarried girl, maid, vestal virgin, chaste woman, celibate;virgo intacta;literary vestal

Of course the discourse on sexual virginity is often in the context of religion and cultural attitudes and the focus is on women.

CHAT WITH SIS NOE; What is really a virgin?

Here is an American video of young women talking about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGQcVE7LRu8  and another interesting item http://theeverygirl.com/why-we-need-to-stop-using-the-word-virginity

This is misogynistic, racist nasty piece https://www.accralately.com/6-ways-she-is-virgin/

This recent Cosmopolitian piece is a remark by singer Miley Cyrus saying virginity is a social construct https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/celebs/a28368604/miley-cyrus-virginity-social-construct/

“How To Lose Your Virginity” uncovers the myths and misogyny surrounding a rite of passage that many obsesses about.

Here is the Humanist UK perspective; The pamphlet is in the Understanding Humanism for schools Humanist perspective: Sex, contraception, and STDs states:  Most humanists believe there is no particular moral virtue in preserving one’s virginity until one is married, although they recognise that we should not rush into sex until we feel we are ready. Many see nothing wrong with having sex with more than one person over the course of our lives.

Marriage & Morals (1929) p 111: “The triumph of Christian teaching is when a man and woman marry without either having had previous sexual experience. In a large proportion of cases where this occurs, the results are unfortunate.” 

M & M p 132: “I should not hold it desirable that either a man or a woman should enter upon the serious business of a marriage intended to lead to children without having had previous sexual experience.”  In Why I

not a Christian, p29: “The teaching of the Church has been , and still is, that virginity is best, …”  ( this is from 1930 essay ‘Has religion made useful contribution to civilisation?’

(Also from Why I am not…. p 117: “…it is unlikely that a person without previous sexual experience, whether man or woman, will be able to distinguish between mere physical attraction and the sort of congeniality that is necessary in order to make marriage a  success.”  (this from a 1936 essay ‘Our sexual ethics’)  

This is Rebecca Steinfeld and Charles Keidan who brought the campaign for Equal civil Parnerships to court and won arguing that the Civil Partnership Act 2004 is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights because it applied only to same-sex couples.  I am in the picture behind them on the left coming from the Royal Court of Justice. !!

I  am a supporter of Equal civil Parnerships. Indeed, I believe that they should replace marriage laws which means that I also believe that all couples should register their Civil Partnership and that no body,  religious or otherwise, should have any privileges as registrars.  For instance Scientologist are allowed to hold legal weddings in England. Supreme Court judges allow Scientology wedding.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2592376/Our-big-fat-Scientology-wedding-An-eternal-soul-called-Thetan-E-meters-scan-thoughts-granting-beingness-new-baby-Meet-British-couple-insist-NOT-cult.html

Louisa and Alessandro Calcioli, pictured with their daughter Ayla, married last month at the Scientology chapel in Blackfriars, London

Our big fat Scientology wedding: An eternal soul called a Thetan, ‘E-meters’ that scan  thoughts and ‘granting beingness’ to their new baby… Meet the British couple who insist they are NOT part of a cult. 

This is what we would do if we were starting from scratch rather than adapting and adding to marital legislation and institution. In the meantime, it is reasonable that Humanists UK be given parity with the religious to perform legal weddings! Humanists UK is a misnomer as Scotland already recognises Humanists as registrars and is, so far, still part of the UK. Remember that UK  stands for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland!!  

The Isle of Man recognises civil partnerships of heterosexual couples and on 14 Oct 2016  Adeline Cosson, 24, and Kieran Hodgson, 22, are the first couple to take advantage of new laws passed on the Isle of Man on 19 July. The new act means the Isle of Man is the only place where both gay and straight couples can enter into civil partnerships. 

A GAY couple from Liverpool made history by becoming the first in the UK to celebrate a civil partnership in a religious building in June 2012. Kieran Bohan and Warren Hartley signed the register at Ullet Road Unitarian Church on the day of their blessing.

The Civil Partnerships, Marriages & Deaths (Registration Etc.) Act has received Royal Assent. It requires that civil partnerships be made available to mixed-sex as well as same-sex couples no later than 31st December 2019.

Back to my trial. There were four people on the panel when I went to the BHA offce at 39 Moreland Street  London EC1V 8BB which is in the basement of the building. It felt very strange and humiliating as well as surreal. Had these people no sense of humour with their dour expressions. It was so weird as I felt that the whole business should have been dealt with by the woman from the BHA Public Affairs Department who has since left the oganisation. Apparently, it was at a meeting with the Ministry of Justice when it was said, as an aside,  and not in the formal part of the meeting. She should should simply have said that it was my opinion and that I was not speaking on Humanists UK policy and left it at that. I don’t know if she made a commitment to have me severely dealt with as she offered er abject apology.

We do have free speech and differing ways of interpreting Humanism as a rational non-religious world view. I suspect that the civil servant was a fundamentalist religious person and I did wonder how it came to their attention as it is mainly an online newspaper.

She said; it was damaging to the credibility of our ceremonies, but that it also put them in the very awkward position of having to make clear to the Ministry of Justice that your perspective as represented in the article is not that of the BHA, and does not represent an aspect of the selection criteria of who is eligible for a humanist wedding.

Well if she made it clear that my perspective is not that of the BHA and ‘does not not represent an aspect of the selection criteria of who is eligible for a humanist wedding’ what is the problem then. Okay, she was caught on the hop but it was her job to deal with it.  And that should have been the end of it. But she, of course, went to Humanist Ceremonies and complained and they then responded by saying I was calling them into disrepute and commanded me to appear before their panel. I thought it ludicrous of them to pursue it. I had already stopped conducting weddings. There was not a lot they could do but to tell me off for ‘discriminating against virgins who might want a Humanist Wedding’ and not to speak about or give any interviews on Humanist Weddings without having it vetted by them.

It is quite evident that Humanists UK welcome couples where one or other or both of them are virgins and wish to have a Humanist Wedding.

Whenever I have told people about this they just laugh but it had an impact on me and my relationship with Humanist Ceremonies that caused me to drop out of being part of the network after twenty two years. It felt like a slap in the face and still does.

Notable Galway Women Walk

I will be leading a walk as part of Galway Heritage Week 2019 featuring fourteen Notable Galway Women on Sunday 25th August at 12.00 meeting at The Browne Doorway Eyre Square. For further info email jeanne.rathbone@gmail.com

This walk evolved from the blogs I had written on each of these inspiring Galway women. I wrote about these women of Galway as my response  to the two trite Galway Girl songs. I had objected to these two ditties as they were in the tradition of the male gaze songs about stereotype colleens which describe their appearance. One gave rise to Ireland’s annual beauty contest The Rose of Tralee which have been attended by the  Taoiseach sitting in the front row.

Who had an affair with philandering poet and sent him 12 sonnets when their affair ended?

Which of them spoke French, German, Italian and Irish?

Who became a ‘Lady Factory Inspector’ monitoring employment laws for women?

Who did President Ó Dálaigh stop his motorcade to chat to in Galway?

Who had an affair with Charlie Chaplain?

Who rode the bicycle given to her by Constance Markievicz?

The entry on the National Heritage Week website reads states;

Join Jeanne Rathbone to hear about a selection of 14 extraordinary women who have made telling contributions to the world of Arts, Science and Politics.

Sites visited will include those associated with Lady Gregory, Margaretta D’Arcy, Nora Barnacle and Clare Sheridan among others. Suitable clothing and footwear advised.

 

Do come and join us and if you can’t check out some of these great women of Galway and share with anyone that you think would be interested as all these women deserve to be acclaimed and more widely celebrated.

 

 

Margaretta D’Arcy

Rita Ann Higgins

Una Taaffe

Maureen Kenny

Siobhain McKenna

1 Margaretta D’Arcy political author and political activist near Brown Doorway,

2 Rita Ann Higgins at Richardson’s  pub where her poem is featured.

3 Una Taaffe Shop Street

4 Maureen Kenny Portwest High Street formerly Kenny’s bookshop

5 Siobháin McKenna stage and film actress An Taibhearc Middle Street

Garry Hynes

Colores Keane

Clare Sheridan

Mary Devonport O’Neill

6 Garry Hynes Theatre Director on Druid Lane

7 Dolores Keane Singer at The Quays

8 Clare Sheridan Sculptor at Spanish Arch

9 Mary Devonport O’Neill Poet and playwright Jury’s Hotel

10 Lady Augusta Gregory, playwright, Abbey Theatre founder 47  Dominick Street

Nora Barnacle

Alice Cashel

Alice Perry

Michelene Sheehy Skeffington

11 Nora Barnacle muse and wife of James Joyce at 8 Bowling Green

12 Alice Cashel Irish Nationalist and Councillor,  Courthouse

13 Ada English Psychiatrist Courthouse

14 Alice Perry Civil Engineer Courthouse

15 Michelene Sheehy Skeffington,  botanist and gender equality campaigner Courthouse

As you can see there is one added as we couldn’t walk past Taaffes without mentioning Una.

Here are a few queries to spark your interest.

 

 

1Margaretta D’Arcy Author, political Activist at the Browne Doorway Eyre Square  https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/07/14/margaretta-ddarcy-galway-woman/

2 Rita Ann Higgins Poet at Richardson’s  pub. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/rita-anne-higgins/

3 Una Taaffe Galway character shop Street https://thisisgalway.ie/are-you-there-una-stories-of-the-late-great-una-taaffe/ actress

4 Maureen Kenny Bookseller and cultural hostess Portwest High Street formerly Kenny’s bookshop https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/04/29/maureen-kenny-galway-bookseller-extraordinaire/

5 Siobhán McKenna renowned actress An Taibhearc Middle St  https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/siobhan-mckenna-renowned-actor-and-notable-galway-woman/

6 Garry Hynes Theatre Director Druid Lane https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2017/06/20/galway-women-part-2/

7 Dolores Keane Singer The Quays https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/08/12/dolores-keane-singer-notable-galway-woman/

8 Clare Sheridan Sculptor Spanish Arch https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/clare-sheridan-author-sculptor-and-notable-galway-woman/

9 Mary Devonport O’Neill Poet and playwright Jury’s Hotel https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2016/07/28/mary-devenport-oneill-poem-galway/

10 Lady Augusta Gregory (1852-1932) Dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager 47 Dominick St   now Galway Arts Centre  https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/lady-augusta-gregory-irish-literary-revival/

11 Nora Barnacle muse and wife of James Joyce Bowling Green https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/nora-barnacle/

12 Alice Cashel Irish Nationalist and Councillor The Courthouse  https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/alice-cashel/                                                                                                                                                                                   13 Ada English Psychiatrist and Nationalist  https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/07/20/ada-english-psychiatrist-galway-woman/                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 14  Alice Perry Civil Engineer     https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/2018/05/02/alice-perry-first-european-

15 Michelene Sheehy Skeffington,  botanist and gender equality campaigner https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/tag/michelene-sheehy-skeffington/

Elsa Lanchester Hollywood actress and Notable Woman of Lavender Hill

Elsa Lanchester 1902-1986 was Biddy Lanchester and Shamus Sullivan’s daughter.  Edith known as Biddy is one of my Notable Women of Lavender Hill and the family lived at 27 Leathwaite Road SW11. When Biddy declared in 1895, whilst living at Este Road Battersea, that she was going to live with Shamus she was kidnapped by her father, two brothers and a psychiatrist. This caused a debacle and the involvement of the Legitimation League. https://sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/category/edith-and-elsa-lanchester-mother-and-daughter/ Biddy never saw her father again but Elsa certainly had contact with them and visited her grandmother in Linfield Haywords Heath and her artistic aunt Mary. She seemed to quite like the Lanchester connection and acknowledged Fred the car designer and Harry the architect and planner of New Delhi.  http://www.lanchesterinteractive.org/learning-zone/lanchester-a-z/

After the furore of their not getting married but living together they set up home in Lewisham initially. Elsa didn’t think they had a happy relationship but stuck together because they weren’t married, implying that if they were married they might have divorced.

The family were living at 48 Farley Road Catford when Elsa was born and she was their second child. When Waldo her brother was born her mother had gone to stay with Eleanor Marx in her home in Sydenham. Waldo went on to become a puppeteer.

https://runner500.wordpress.com/2017/…/elsa-lanchester-catfords-bride-of-frankenstei…

A south east London website laments that in  “ Elsa Lanchester’s autobiography there is, sadly, little reference to the Lewisham life of one of ‘Hollywood’s most delightful comediennes and the wife of one of its greatest, and most tortured, actors’ (Charles Laughton).

Elsa spent most of her childhood in Battersea at 27 Leathwaite Road where the Lanchester

27 Leathwaite Road 2019 walk.

family finally settled when Elsa was six years old. Biddy and Shamus stayed there till he died in 1945. So, it was the home that Elsa would return to whilst she lived in various places around London and after she had moved to Hollywood with Charles Laughton.

The family moved six times around south London, in addition to Catford there were short-lived homes in Lewisham, Norwood and in Clapham in Cavendish Road and Rudloe Road before settling in 27 Leathwaite Battersea.  Part of the reason for these frequent movements was to try to prevent Elsa being vaccinated as her brother Waldo had reacted badly to his and Edith wanted to prevent government interference in the life of Elsa and also because of wrangles with landlords. Finally, the schools inspectors caught up with Biddy and so Elsa had to attend school.

Family life involved equal parts adventure and eviction. Biddy took on landlords with every loophole in dozens of bylaws, finding it “irresistible to get the better of the upper classes.”

Elsa and her brother Waldo

Elsa painted by her aunt Mary Lanchester

Biddy Lanchester

Shamus Sullivan

Waldo was attending a small socialist school on Clapham Common Northside.. They were living in Rudloe Road on the other side of the common at the time the LCC inspector visited. Elsa was aged six and Biddy wanted to continue to educate her at home. Despite Biddy waving her MA certificate certificate at the school’s inspector she had to attend school. She only lasted a week at the local primary school, from which she was exempted from morning prayers.

She was accepted as the only girl into Mr Frederick Kettle’s school in 1908. She loved her time there which she describes in her autobiography and they are very amusing. “ A Mr Hamilton taught mathematics in a very practical way ….cupboard full of instruments, telescopes, theodiolytes, and I was soon busy with logarithms and parabolas. First thing in the morning we read newspapers. We more or less chose the day’s work for ourselves and did as we like, as long as we did something. Madge, Kettle’s daughter taught them French.

As a London child she likened herself to a gutter rat and complained of being deprived of meat and God. She embarrassed her mother by asking her what men and women did to have babies which she knew already. Her mother gave ‘ a description in terms that a plumber would use to describe a diffucult job’ … ‘a secret satisfaction like the Mona Lisa seems to be feeling’.

THE PETTY GIRL, (AKA GIRL OF THE YEAR), ELSA LANCHESTER, 1950

She recalled reading the cuttings about her mothers kidnapping case, admitting that after a few years she’ found it rather glamorous to be a bastard.’ Commenting that Biddy was regarded as courageous by her comrades but Shamus didn’t get much credit. Although Elsa could see that he was firebrand.

Elsa tells leaving the Rudloe road flat. Biddy withheld the rent because the landlady wouldn’t do repairs. Biddy sent a report to the sanitary authorities. After six weeks the bailiffs came took some furniture and with the rent saved they went on holiday to Clacton on Sea for a simply splendid holiday and Shamus went back ahead of them and he secured the Leathwaite Road flat. The usual set up kitchen, front room and two small attic bedrooms but this one backed on to the common. And had a flat roof terrace. Another tenant had a big brass plate which Elsa polished for tuppence. Miss Valler Robes et Modes.

She danced in the Lower Town Hall aged 16 for the inauguration of the Battersea Labour Party Women’ Section at the request of Caroline Ganley who was asked to establish the Women’s Section by Charlotte Despard who gave her funds to do it. Obviously, the Lanchesters were well known in socialist circles in Battersea. Caroline described her as ‘elfin like’  in her memoirs.

Elsa said that wherever they lived they had ‘The Kitchen’.  The Kitchen was a meeting place for socialist comrades. All evening people drifted in and out, talking of meetings and rallies and thumping our table. The comrades usually ended up comparing socialism to Marxism  and communism. And it often got quite rowdy but by that time I had usually gone to bed. That big oblong table was well marked by the life of that kitchen. Besides table thumping there was eating, homework and shoe cleaning.

She mentions that poor Shamus craved meat and fish. It was agreed that he could occasionally have a half a pig’s head boiled with vinegar which was about all they could afford. Sometimes a bloater or two with the children ‘staring in wonderment that he could eat anything with eye’s in it’ and Biddy saying ‘Hope you’re enjoying your corpse’

Elsa recalled the Bovril ads she saw at Piccadilly Circus as she walked through the west end with her violin case to Dr Trotters school of Music Bovril puts beef into you’ and so she began ‘ to spend her penny a week on on Oxo or Bovril cubes’… cuting them into four chewing a quarter at a time.  They were delicious she said.

Sometimes she would go on her roller skates to school and she would pass the house pretty red brick house with a well kept square garden where an old gentleman sometimes leaned on the gate whom she knew was John Burns. In all the seven years she walked ,’no dirty old man ever stopped her for a chat’

She remembers distributing atheist leaflets of biblical quotes at the Sunday school at the end of their road.

They played cricket, football and rounders on the common with Mr Kettle joining in but discouraged from competing in sports and no exams.

They often went camping overnight in Surrey or Sussex staying on private land and having their meals at farmhouses and would wander into the fields and woods for picnics and recalled doing this on the 1911 census night going by bus and tram carrying their tarpaulin and blankets.

There were childhood memories of May Day rallies, sherbet fountains and singing The Internationale and the Lewisham written Red Flag by Jim McConnell an Irishman. There were trips to both the ballet, to see Pavlova’s Swan Lake as well as seeing the likes of George Robey, Marie Lloyd at Clapham Grand.

Elsa went to classes with Biddy in weaving, spinning and sandal making with  Raymond Duncan, brother of Isadora. Through him she ended up at Isadora Duncan’s dance school in Paris although there seemed to be little real talent for teaching from Duncan so little was learned other than to ‘become an autumn leaf’. There is a funny interview with her on the Dick Cavett Show talking about her time with Isadora https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wz1cBUBbLA

After returning from Paris as war was impending Elsa was sent to Kings Langley School. This was a ‘progressive’ co-ed establishment and she was to pay her way by teaching dance. Biddy was good at negotiating such arrangements. Elsa didn’t last there very long there.  Elsa began to make a living out of short-lived dancing assignments, including a week as a snake dancer in Edmonton.

After the war ended she worked for a charity teaching dancing called Happy Evenings, during her second summer of this she set up a school in Charlotte Street in central London.  She also used the premises to set up what was effectively an after-hours theatre club – the Cave of Harmony – which began to attract a famous clientele which included the likes of H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh who became a regular visitor. Elsa could be quite blunt and acerbic about her friends and acquaintances, She was quite cutting about Waugh – describing him as ‘not at all attractive looking….pink in patches as though he had a bad cold.’

Here is a BFI free film of the film https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-scarlet-woman-1924-online

 

Elsa with Evelyn Waugh in the Scarlet Woman

Elsa as the bearded lady with Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin with

Elsa with Harpo Marx

She began teaching dance in the Duncan style and gave classes to children and earned some welcome extra income for her household. She started the Children’s Theatre, and later the Cave of Harmony, a nightclub at which modern plays and cabaret turns were performed. She revived old Victorian songs and ballads, many of which she retained for her performances in another revue entitled Riverside Nights. There are recordings on you tube. The songs on this one are introduced by Charles. There are some great ones. Songs for a smoke filled room. https://gaming.youtube.com/channel/UCzl9nIuTrx1ZGj1BRapWNVA

She became sufficiently famous for Columbia to invite her into the recording studio to make 78 rpm discs of four of the numbers she sang in these revues: “Please Sell No More Drink to My Father” and “He Didn’t Oughter” were on one disc (recorded in 1926) and “Don’t Tell My Mother I’m Living in Sin” and “The Ladies Bar” were on the other (recorded 1930). ‘ Never go walking without your hat pin@  shows how things haven’t changed. Little Fred, Fiji Fanny,Catalog Woman, My New York Slip,The Yashmak Song, The Janitor’s Boy    Please do listen.

There is an article in Women’s history Review titled Elsa Lanchester and Bohemian London in the Early Twentieth Century which explores her world ‘before her marriage to the actor Charles Laughton in 1929 to investigate aspects of bohemian culture in the early twentieth century. It focuses on Lanchester’s artistic nightclub, the Cave of Harmony, on the edges of London’s West End. Bohemianism, modern dance and musical comedy opened up new identities and spaces for female self-exploration.’

Her cabaret and nightclub appearances led to more serious stage work and it was in a play by Arnold Bennett called Mr Prohack (1927) that Lanchester first met another member of the cast, Charles Laughton. They were married two years later. She began playing small  roles in British films, including the role of Anne of Cleves with Laughton in The Private Life of Henry V111 (1933) His success in American films resulted in the couple moving to Hollywood where Elsa played small film roles.

In 1938, Elsa published a book about her relationship with Laughton, Charles Laughton and I.

In March 1983, Elsa released an autobiography, entitled Elsa Lanchester Herself. In the book she alleges that she and Charles never had children because Laughton was homosexual. Her memoris have recently been reissued.

Her role as the title character in Bride of Frankenstein(1935) brought her recognition. https://www.paulfrasercollectibles.com/…/the-bride-of-frankenstein-looms-large-in-movi…

She played supporting roles through the 1940s and 1950s. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting actress for Come to the Stable (1949) and Witness for the Prosecution (1957), the last of twelve films in which she appeared with Laughton. Following Laughton’s death in 1962, Lanchester resumed her career with appearances in such Disney films as Mary Poppins (1964), That Darn Cat (1965) and Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968). The horror film Willard (1971) was highly successful, and one of her last roles was in Murder by Death (1976). I love the clip from Murder by Death and the gorgeous  Maggie Smith. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHadKz5umA4

Her list of films spans from 1925 silent movie to 1980.

• The Scarlet Woman: An Ecclesiastical Melodrama (1925 short) as Beatrice de Carolle
• One of the Best (1927) as Kitty
• The Constant Nymph (1928) as Lady
• The Tonic (1928 short) as Elsa
• Daydreams (1928 short) as Elsa / Heroine in Dream Sequence
• Blue Bottles (1928 short) as Elsa
• Mr Smith Wakes Up (1929 short)
• Comets (1930) as Herself
• Ashes (1930 short) as Girl
• The Love Habit (1931) as Mathilde
• The Officers’ Mess (1931) as Cora Melville
• The Stronger Sex (1931) as Thompson
• Potiphar’s Wife (1931) as Therese
• The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) as Anne of Cleves, the Fourth Wife
• The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) as Maid (uncredited)
• David Copperfield (1935) as Clickett
• Naughty Marietta (1935) as Madame d’Annard
• Bride of Frankenstein (1935) as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley / The Monster’s Mate
• The Ghost Goes West (1935) as Miss Shepperton
• Rembrandt (1936) as Hendrickje Stoffels
• Miss Bracegirdle Does Her Duty (1936 unreleased short) as Millicent Bracegirdle
• Vessel of Wrath (1938) as Martha Jones
• Ladies in Retirement (1941) as Emily Creed
• Son of Fury: The Story of Benjamin Blake (1942) as Bristol Isabel
• Tales of Manhattan (1942) as Elsa (Mrs Charles) Smith
• Forever and a Day (1943) as Mamie
• Thumbs Up (1943) as Emma Finch
• Lassie Come Home (1943) as Mrs. Carraclough
• Passport to Destiny (1944) as Ella Muggins
• The Spiral Staircase (1945) as Mrs. Oates
• The Razor’s Edge (1946) as Miss Keith
• Northwest Outpost (1947) as Princess “Tanya” Tatiana
• The Bishop’s Wife (1947) as Matilda
• The Big Clock (1948) as Louise Patterson
• The Secret Garden (1949) as Martha
• Come to the Stable (1949) as Amelia Potts
• The Inspector General (1949) as Maria
• Buccaneer’s Girl (1949) as Mme. Brizar
• Mystery Street (1950) as Mrs. Smerrling
• The Petty Girl (1950) as Dr. Crutcher
• Frenchie (1950) as Countess
• Dreamboat (1952) as Dr. Mathilda Coffey
• Les Misérables (1952) as Madame Magloire
• Androcles and the Lion (1952) as Megaera
• The Girls of Pleasure Island (1953) as Thelma
• Hell’s Half Acre (1954) as Lida O’Reilly
• 3 Ring Circus (1954) as the Bearded Lady
• The Glass Slipper (1955) as Widow Sonder
• Alice in Wonderland (1955 TV movie) as the Red Queen
• Witness for the Prosecution (1957) as Miss Plimsoll
• Bell, Book and Candle (1958) as Aunt Queenie Holroyd
• The Flood (1962 TV movie) as Noah’s Wife (voice)
• Honeymoon Hotel (1964) as Chambermaid
• Mary Poppins (1964) as Katie Nanna
• Pajama Party (1964) as Aunt Wendy
• The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1965) as Dr. Agnes Dabree
• That Darn Cat! (1965) as Mrs. MacDougall
• Easy Come, Easy Go (1967) as Madame Neherina
• Blackbeard’s Ghost (1968) as Emily Stowecroft
• Rascal (1969) as Mrs. Satterfield
• Me, Natalie (1969) as Miss Dennison
• In Name Only (1969 TV movie) as Gertrude Caruso
• Willard (1971) as Henrietta Stiles
• Terror in the Wax Museum (1973) as Julia Hawthorn
• Arnold (1973) as Hester
• Murder by Death (1976) as Jessica Marbles
• Where’s Poppa? (1979 TV movie) as Momma Hocheiser
• Die Laughing (1980) as Sophie (final film role)

Here is a clip from a TV interview where she is talking about Charles. She was a funny clever woman as you can see from this clip.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcG0bnbF4Ec .

and this is a clip of her and Charles singing Baby its Cold Outside https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ5UIuAa0eM

Here is Elsa Woman of a thousand faces. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-rPoykzY-8&t=4s

Elsa died in California on December 1986 aged 84, at the The Motion Picture Hospital from pneumonia having suffered from two strokes.

There is still a lot of interest in Elsa for various reasons. Her Bride of Frankenstein has given her status as a cult siren. There are many blogs about her and her place in horror and monster film history. James Whale the director was British and Elsa and him had worked together in England. (One interesting fact for me is the actor English Ernest Thesiger who played Dr Septimus Pretorius in the film it transpires was the best man of Victor Duval of the suffragist family who lived in Lavender Sweep which is opposite Leathwaite Road on the other side of Battersea Rise. The amazing Duval family feature in my Notable Women  walk. Victor married Una Dugdale in January 1912 http://ernestthesiger.org/Ernest_Thesiger/Chronology.html)

Elsa with Ernest Thesiger playing Dr Septimus Pretorius

Here is a giphy of Elsa the Bride https://giphy.com/gifs/film-horror-universal-monsters-G9kX29PErZ6ww?utm_source

Elsa as Cult Siren http://cultsirens.com/lanchester/lanchester.htm Believe it or not, without Elsa Lanchester, there probably would not be any Cult Sirens website. In fact, it’s not exaggeration to claim that her immortal role in Bride of Frankenstein can easily make her the ultimate Siren in history, considering that this unique character may be the ultimate female role in a horror movie. Nothing less!

Elsa and LGBT history defying heteronormativity.       Tom Blunt, a young  producer and host of numerous entertainments in New York City, including a film-inspired variety show called “Meet The Lady” for the 92nd Street Y which was a show about Elsa. He has written for sites such as The Awl and New York Magazine; his crackpot cinematic theories have been cited in The Guardian and IFC News. http://tomblunt.com/2018/03/the-bride-is-back-elsas-book-in-stores-april-1/

One of the reasons I felt compelled to go to all this trouble was the significance of Elsa’s book to LGBTQ history. The closeted life of her husband Charles Laughton also became her own, as she stuck by him for decades and kept his secrets — even despite what we’d categorize today as Laughton’s intense emotional abuse.

I contacted him about my walk Notable Women of Lavender Hill which includes Elsa because he has been instrumental in getting her autobiography reprinted by  Chicago Review Press.   I sent him photos of the motley crew from my walk in front of the house they lived in for many years 27 Leathwaite Road.

http://www.signature-reads.com/2018/04/elsa-lanchester-book-exposes-a-closeted-marriage/

In his article he writes about her witty and candid autobiography written long after Charles had died which now resonates with readers and LGBT commentators about their marriage.

Back then, she was the lesser half of a Hollywood power-couple, migrating from England to the US with Laughton in the early ’30s, where he became an Oscar-winning wunderkind. Elsa snapped up character roles, often in her husband’s movies, toiling in his shadow as he became further renowned as a master-thespian, teacher, and even director (“The Night of the Hunter” remains a classic). The quirkiness of their relationship was considered by fans and friends alike as proof that these two offbeat intellectuals were made for each other – but it also served as a smokescreen for the secret they ended up keeping together for over thirty years.

Even today, over thirty years later, women are finding that unless they speak up immediately, their motives in remaining silent will forever cast doubt on their honesty. Keeping silent seemingly revokes their right to complain.

In 1983, long after her husband’s death, Elsa finally broke her silence. Her memoir, Elsa Lanchester Herself, included a detailed, unflinching personal account of their arrangement, from unfortunate way she first learned of Laughton’s homosexuality (when he was busted for soliciting a male prostitute, early in their marriage) to the grief and resentment that gradually accumulated between them, fully permeating even their final moments.  http://www.signature-reads.com/2018/04/elsa-lanchester-book-exposes-a-closeted-marriage/

Tom Blunt was persistent in getting Elsa’s biography republished.

Tom Blunt was instrumental in finally getting Elsa’s biography reissued by Chicago Review Press   http://tomblunt.com/2013/08/help-us-reprint-elsa-lanchesters-memoir/

Elsa has also been acknowledged by LGBT activists as been so significant for her involvement with The Turnabout Theatre. http://www.polarimagazine.com/features/forman-brown-elsa-lanchester-turnabout-theatre/

Turnabout Theatre opened in 1941 and quickly proved itself to be an unusual Hollywood hot spot, its audiences remaining loyal until it closed in 1956. The queerest, dearest, and cleverest “satirical revue” of its time (and perhaps of any time), it was founded by songwriter Forman Brown, puppet-maker Harry Burnett, and manager Roddy Brandon. The three gay men were known as The Yale Puppeteers and lived together as a family for most of their seventy-year career. Turnabout Theatre was one end marionette show and the other end live acts, and its name referred to its reversible streetcar seats and how the audience would “turn about” between acts. The theatre’s star attraction was Elsa Lanchester in an eccentric cabaret mode…….This is the love on which the Turnabout Theatre was built, a love as powerful and enduring and unusual for its time as the love shared by Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton. No wonder Forman and Lanchester were so synchronized artistically. It was Charles himself who once told Elsa how she and Forman together made a true “artistic marriage of talents.

Elsa and Charles were friends neighbours of Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy on Adelaide Drive in Santa Monica, California. Christopher was one of the readers at Charles Laughton’s funeral.

Elsa in silent films I found this scholarly treatise on Elsa in British silent films from a film conference in Bologna in 2010. However Odd—Elsa Lanchester! While both seem willing to parodize themselves, embracing ugliness, their eccentrism simultaneously provides something of an ironic commentary on the ideal feminine “types” presented by Hollywood and Hollywood’s commodification of particular notions of feminine beauty.

The proposed paper will discuss the role of Elsa Lanchester in British silent cinema, notably in the short films The Scarlet Woman (1924), The Tonic, Bluebottles and Daydreams (1929) and the feature film, The Constant Nymph (1928), starring Mabel Poulton as the classic child/woman of British literature and British 1920s cinema. Lanchester’s gawky angularity seems to have prompted her casting in character parts, rather than as a leading lady in the 1920s and 1930s.

A specific comparison will be made with the “exaggerated,” non-naturalistic style of Aleksandra Khokhlova – notably in Lev Kuleshov’s 1924 The Extraordinary Adventues of Mr West — and the critical appraisal of her work in Eisenstein’s essay, “However Odd! — Khokhlova.” I shall suggest that both artistes, excluded from conventional casting regimes, provide performances which are not simply comedic, but which create a space in which irony (and even satire) — following Linda Hutcheon — is allowed “to happen.”

The paper will build on work on Lanchester already published in “Elsa Lanchester and Chaplinism,” in Crossing the Pond (2002), British Cinema: A Critical History (2005) and on the WSBC website.

I hope that there will be some sort of show about Elsa locally something similar to what Tom Blunt devised with readings, sketches, interviews, her song recordings and clips. I’ll see what we can do! These are photos of my ersatz plaque commemorating Elsa and Biddy taken on a sunny day in April and the view from the back windows of her home onto Clapham Common.

Elsa who was born in 1912 is still so relevant in many different ways today. She feels so contemporary.  She is usually described as coming from a Bohemian family, started to work as a dancer, singer actress in theatre, cabaret, TV and film and has made an impact on cinema, performance and in defying heteronormativity.  https://www.popmatters.com/elsa-lanchester-herself-2614904290.html

Elsa and Biddy are in a queue for Battersea Society commemorative plaques on 27 Leathwaite Road. Of the 16 English Heritage plaques in Battersea there are none to women. I started my Notable Women of Lavender Hill walks in 2018 the centenary of some women getting the vote now there are three plaues commemorative plaques to Caroline Ganley 1879-1966 MP, JP,  councillor and co-operator at 5 Thirsk Road, Charlotte Despard 1844-1939 socialist, suffragette and Sinn Feiner at 177 Lavender Hill and Pamela Hansford Johnson 1912-1981 novelist and critic at 53 Battersea Rise now Farrago restaurant. There are two more in the offing with English Heritage application for Marie Spartali Pre-raphelite artist, The Shrubbery Lavender Gardens and Deaconess Isabella Gilmore on 113 Clapham Common Northside – still a long way to go before we have a gender balance. So, I will continue the tours and the endeavour to have these inspiring women remembered.

I have been asked to suggest names of woman for streets/apartment blocks by Garrett at Wandsworth Council and been told that developers in Nine Elms near the US embassy are considering a Lanchester Way after Biddy and Elsa. It’s a start in commemorating  these two trailblazing women from Battersea. My friend Joan has pointed out that her BFI membership card features Elsa as Bride of Frankenstein.

For a woman born in 1912 she is still so relevant in the history of film and LGBT culture and for the range of friends and acquaintances from artistic, theatrical and political life in London and Hollywood. Battersea should be proud of her.  Having read so much about her I feel, like many biographers, that  I would loved to have met her.  It is because of where I live that I have been ensconced in the lives of women like Elsa who lived very nearby and I feel compelled to write about them and to remember them as pioneers and some I would love to have been their friends!

Elsa should be appreciated, celebrated and definitely deserves to have an English Heritage commemorative plaque on 27 Leathwaite  Road SW11 and please readers do share this with anyone you think will appreciate our Elsa from Battersea.

 

 

 

 

 

Duval suffrage family of Lavender Sweep

This is the Duval family who lived at 97 Lavender Sweep when this was taken. They have the same sized back garden as we do.

I only recently discovered that Elsie Duval was born here as the usual address for the family was given as 37 Park Road which was renamed Elsynge Road. Elsie is sat at the front. I only found out when the suggestions for the next Wandsworth green plaque had her on the short list. She was born in 1892 and I checked the electoral register in Battersea Heritage library and found Ernest Duval, her father,  was listed but, of course, it did not include his wife Emily who went on to become an active suffragette and Battersea Councillor in 1919.

Ernest and Emily Duval who together with their children were keen suffragists. Elsie  joined the Women’s Social & Political Union in 1907, the year after her mother. Unlike her mother, however, she did not leave the organisation to join the Women’s Freedom League when the Pankhursts changed the constitution, but the mother and daughter did work together for three years in the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement which Victor Diederichs Duval (1885–1945), Elsie’s brother, founded. Norah, Barbara and Winifred were the other two daughters who were also suffragettes. Their father Ernest was a member and regular speaker for The Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage.

 

The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A reference Guide 1866-1928 By Elizabeth Crawford has entries on Emily, Elsie and her husband Hugh Franklin, Victor and his wife Una formerly Dugdale and Rise Up Women by Diane Atkinson.

With Elsi and Hugh and Victor and Emily it was very much suffragist familes inter marrying. I will give separate accounts of Emily, Elsie and Hugh and Victor and Una.

Suffragette Emily Hayes Duval, a prisoner at Holloway Prison in London, in prison uniform and sewing mail bags, circa 1908. (Photo by Popperfoto/Getty Images)

Emily Duval 1861-1924 had joined the WSPU in 1906 but left for the Women’s Freedom League and became Chair of the Battersea Branch. I assume that she was, at that stage influenced by Charlotte Despard and loyal to her local suffrage activists who also left the WSPU to join the WFL which had Charlotte as it’s President. By the spring of 1909 Emily had served two prison sentences for her part in WFL protests. In October 1908 Emily and her seventeen year old daughter Barbara were arrested when Muriel Matters chained herself to the grille in the House of Commons. Emily paid her fine and Barbara was released after promising to refrain from further militancy until  she was twenty-one. Mrs Duval was accused in court of being ‘a lady agitator who was bringing up her daughter to be a lady agitator’ In February 1909 she served six weeks in Holloway, almost all in the hospital wing suffering from acute neuritus.

She rejoined the WSPU in 1911 thus ending her four year membership of the WFL because she thought they were not militant enough and wnet on to break windows at the Local Government Board and was sent to bprison for two weeks and Victor was sentenced to five weeks at Pentonville prison at the same time. Four members of the Duval family went on a deputation to Parliament Emily, Elsie, Barbara and Victor.. This was after the tenth ‘Women’s Parliament’ was called to Caxton Hall which was wherethey left from at the start of each Parliament when the WSPU would march to the House of commons and try to deliver a petition to the Prime Minister.

When Emily was sentenced to six months, in Winston Green Prison for breaking two windows in Regent Street, she told the magistrate that she had been ‘brutally knocked about and thrown on her back’.  She referred to the large numbers of young women who were driven into prostitution by poverty , she addressed the court ‘I should like to say that I shattered the glass because I wish the government to come to their senses, and money can replace broken glass, but it cannot replace the innocence of girls who are outraged daily…. I am prepared to die for Votes for Women ‘ Four months into her sentence Emily went on hunger strike and was force-fed over a two week period.

 

Emily gave an account of being force -fed in a statement she dictated at Birmingham WSPU office. In the hospital wing the doctor had listened to her heart and begged her to take the feeding cup rather than been fed by the nasal tube, but she told him that hse would rather have her head cut off than do such a thing. They covered her with towels and held her head back and the tube was pushed up her nose,’which was most agonising – my nerves seemed to prick all the passages of my nose and some in my throat . I did not know  how to breathe , I did not struggle or flinch, just gripped the wardresses’ hand very tight’  When they finished feeding her and she got her breath back , she told them ‘Mr McKenna deserves shooting.’  The next morning the prison doctor urged her to eat bt Emily refused and was force-fed once again. The tube was forced down her throat which was ‘agonising’, it seemed as though I was being suffocated. I could not breath it was simply horrible’. She was helped back to her cell where her throat bled and she vomited’all over the place’. She was force-fed several more times and released on 25th June before her sentence was complete and went  to  a nursing home to convalesce. (From her statement 30th June 1912 which is in a private collection.)

Emily Duval was elected Battersea Councillor  in 1919 along with Caroline Ganley who became MP in 1945 and Mrs Jessie Hockley who was secretary of the Battersea Railway Women’s League. Emily died in 1924. It was so sad that three of her daughter did not live to vote as they died in the awful influenza epidemic.

 There is not much information on Norah Duval but she too was imprisoned.                  On 1 March 1912, Mrs Duval was arrested again along with her daughter Norah, this time for smashing windows in Regent Street.  Norah, was sentenced to four months imprisonment at the Newington Sessions on 13 March 1912, for window smashing. She told the court, ‘I wish to say that what I did I did entirely on my own responsibility, and not, as the jury would infer, as the dupe of others. I did it because I want the same political tights as my brothers enjoy today. When asked by the judge whether she would be willing to give up breaking the law, Norah Duval replied, ‘No, certainly not. It is the only thing we can do. We cannot get redress in any other way’

We also know that she stayed with the Rutters in Leeds Frank Rutter was a an art critic and and founder member of the Men’s League for and the MPU. Their home became a sanctuary for for suffragettes to recuperate from hunger striking. There is an occasion when a baker delivery van drew up outside their home and Norah was disguised as the delivery boy while the driver dressed as a man was Leonora Cohen who then walked out of the house as the delivery boy to be driven off. Leonora continued to evade recapture by continuing to dress as a boy or as an old women becoming the Elusive Pimpernel.

Elsie Duval 1892-1919 was the most active suffragette of Emily’s daughters.  There is more information on Elsie available as she fell in love with and married Hugh Franklin who was very active in the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement which he had joined on 22 Feb 1910 which had been founded by Victor Duval who was Elsie’s brother

Elsie and Hugh’s archive which is part of the National Archive is kept at the Women’s Library at the LSE .                                https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/b0d30b35-bf00-4430-b0bf-57b8b77e6b4e

Hugh was the fourth of six siblings and had three brothers and two sisters Alice, Hugh, Helen and Ellis, along with their mother, turned from the Liberal Party tradition of the family and took the path set by Caroline’s sister Henrietta who had set up the Jewish League for Women’s Suffrage.

Alice, a staunch socialist, would later become a leader of the Townwomen’s Guild  ; Helen became forewoman at the Royal Arsenal, where she was forced to resign for supporting female workers and attempting to form a trade union, and Ellis became vice-principal of the Working Men’s College. Through Ellis, Hugh was also the uncle of the famous crystallographer Roasalind Franklin.

Hugh Frankin, the son of Arthur Franklin, the senior partner in a banking firm, was born in 1889. His mother, Caroline Franklin, was a member of the National Union of Suffrage Societies  He was educated at  Clifton College and in 1908 went to Caius College to study engineering. After hearing the Pankhursts at the Queen’s Hall he become committed to the cause of  women’s suffrage and joined Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage.

The paper written by June Marion Balshaw gives an account of political couples and chapter six is about Elsie and Hugh and their families.

CHAPTER SIX.     More than just ‘a sporting couple’: the militancy of Elsie Duval and Hugh Franklin                                                                                                                       https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/5796/3/June%20Marion%20Balshaw%201998%20-%20redacted.pdf

This chapter will consider the political partnership of Elsie Duval and Hugh Franklin who were both involved in the suffrage campaigns of the early twentieth century and yet the level and extent of their commitment has not been acknowledged in subsequent histories and accounts of suffrage.’ I will first examine their individual activities and motivation for becoming involved in the suffrage campaign and the ways in which this both created and reinforced their continuing separate identities. I shall also consider the extremities of their actions, the ways inwhich they were represented and how this subsequently affected both their personal and political activities. By taking this approach, a good insight is provided into the changing nature of the relationship between the WSPU and the MPU as militancy escalated as well as enabling a discussion of suffrage and judaism to be included .Finally, I shall explore the impact of suffrage on Hugh Franklin’s political and personal life after Elsie Duval’s premature death. Hugh Franklin and Elsie Duval were born in 1889 and 1892 respectively, making them among the younger supporters of votes for women. They were both arrested several times between 1910 and 1913 and Hugh Franklin was imprisoned on three occasions whilst Elsie Duval experienced Holloway prison twice.

Their militant activities were extreme and included alleged arson attacks on a house, a railway station and a train.  They met through Victor Duval, Elsie’s brother, and although they did not many until 1915, their romantic involvement had begun several years earlier.3 Nevertheless, throughout the period of suffrage militancy they continued to conduct their militant activities separately, creating very distinct identities and effectively put the personal side of their relationship ‘on hold’  choosing instead to focus on their individual political endeavours. In this sense,their commitment to the cause cannot be questioned but why they chose to function in this way warrants further discussion.There are a number of factors that determined their political activity which also reveal the complexities of being involved in the suffrage movement at this time. Membership of the MPU and the WSPU was segregated by gender and, as ‘will be seen, the evolving nature of the relationship between these two organisations and their policies would not have enabled Hugh Franklin and Elsie Duval to function as a political partnership in the same way as the Pethick-Lawrences. As relative ‘late-corners’ to the cause, not least because of their ages,their introduction to the suffrage campaigns was influenced, and to an extent dictated by, family alliances

Elsie Duval was arrested on the 23 Nov 1911 for obstructing the police. After this event, she was officially accepted by the Women’s Social & Political Union (WSPU) as a militant protest volunteer. Whilst on remand, Elsie had her “state of mind inquired into” writing “They have got it into their heads that I am sixteen years of age. You know I refuse to give my age.”

On 27 Jun 1912, Elsie was arrested for smashing a Clapham Post Office window. Subsequently she was remanded for one week in custody ‘for the state of her mind to be enquired into’, and then sentenced to one month in the third division at Holloway, during which time she was forcibly fed nine times before being released on the 3 Aug 1912. She was arrested again in Apr 1913 for loitering with intent (with Phyllis Brady) and was again sent to prison for a month. She was forcibly fed during both remand and whilst serving her sentence, being seriously ill throughout and often resisting strenuously. Her prison diary for this year refers to ‘pain at the heart’ after one of these incidents.

 

She was released under the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health) Act, 1913, (commonly known as the ‘Cat and Mouse’ Act) which allowed for prisoners to return to prison on recovery. Duval was the first prisoner released from Holloway under the Act and the second to be released (Hugh Franklin was the first) from any prison. During her last imprisonment (according to Hugh Franklin’s biographical notes) a charge was being prepared for burning Lady White’s house at Egham, with ‘Phyllis Brady’, (Olive Beamish) for which the latter received five years’ imprisonment. Duval  also burnt Sanderstead station and other places, before her arrest, together with ‘Phyllis Brady’.

At the time of the attack, no-one was arrested. However, on the 12th April 1913 Phyllis Brady (real name Olive Beamish) and Millicent Dean (Elsie Duval) were approached by a police officer whilst walking in Croydon at 1.45am. They were both carrying leather travelling cases and claimed they were returning from holiday. They were followed by the policeman and decided to drop their cases and run but were caught and arrested for being found with inflammable material with the intention of committing a felony. According to some sources, both women had been responsible for burning Sanderstead station and other unnamed targets. They were also suspected of the burning of Trevethan house, and a case was being built against them.

 

However, they were not charged for this offence but instead were remanded in custody and then sentenced to 6 weeks imprisonment in Holloway jail. Both went on hunger strike and were forcibly fed. While they were in prison ‘The Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913’ came into force. Commonly known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, this allowed prisoners who were in danger of dying to be released and then taken back into prison shortly after when they had recovered a little. Elsie and Olive were the first prisoners to have been released under the act on the 28th April 1913. Both absconded after they had been released and did not return to prison.

Churchill was Home Secretary and he was widely blamed for the police excesses on display. Hugh was angered by what he had seen, began to follow Churchill to heckle him at public meetings. On the train back from a meeting in Bristol,  Hugh met Churchill and set on him with a dog whip , shouting “Take this, you cur, for the treatment of the suffragists!”

The attack was widely reported, even reaching the headlines of The Times and for the Franklin family, it was a great embarrassment. He was imprisoned for six weeks and dismissed as Sir Nathan’s secretary. In March 1911, he was sentenced for another month for throwing rocks at Churchill’s house. Hugh took part in the hunger strikes that were then being waged by the suffragettes, and was force-fed repeatedly during his imprisonment. The force feeding turned him into an activist for penal reform.

Elsie and Hugh left for France to avoid the re-imprisonment that her terms of temporary release had demanded. She spent several months working as ‘Eveline Dukes’ in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland armed with false testimonials provided by friends.

In Europe, Elsie went under the alias Eveline Dukes and had many fake references allowing her to get employed in various different countries. Using the several character references she had, all provided by people who knew her such as her brother Victor- who  she got a job in Germany as a governess for 10 months. She then spent three months in Brussels learning  French and doing office work, followed by two months in Switzerland. At first she believed she may have been able to travel with Hugh but actress and fellow suffragist Winifred Mayo warned against this. In March 1914, during her time abroad, she received a letter from Jessie Kenney writing under the alias C. Burrows which said: ‘Miss Pankhurst thinks it would be better for you to stay where you are for the time being and until you get stronger’. But when World War One began in 1914 Elsie and Hugh returned to the UK after a general amnesty was granted to the suffragettes. After this she became active in the war work of the WSPU.

She and Hugh Franklin were finally married in a Jewish ceremony at the London Synagogue in Sep 1915. She had converted to Judaism. Nevertheless, his father disinherited him for marrying out of the Jewish faith and never saw him again. His mother attended the wedding. Elsie had asked Emmeline Pankhurst to be one of their witnesses but she wasn’t well enough at that time.  Two years later, she joined the Pankhursts’ Women’s Party.

Sadly Elsie died on the 1 Jan 1919 of heart failure, a victim of the influenza epidemic. She had, undoubtedly, been weakened by her treatment in prison when she was force-fed.

Victor Duval

Victor Duval 1885-1945 had been the secretary of the Clapham League of the Young Liberals. He resigned from it after seeing a woman thrown out of one of John Burn’s meetings- the one time socialist of Battersea was now very much seen as a renegade once he joined the Liberal Government, especially by our suffragette Charlotte Despard.

In 1909 Victor helped Marion Dunlop to stencil her petition on the walls of St Stephen’s Hall in the House of Commons and in October 1910 he had co-founded the MPU

The Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement was based at number 13 Buckingham Street. The MPU had been founded at a meeting held at the Eustace Miles Restaurant (just the other side of the Strand) in 1910. One of the founders – and the hon. organising secretary of the MPU – was Victor Duval. The premises were also, I think, the offices of his family firm, Duval & Co. Victor’s mother, Emily Duval, had been one of those who transferred allegiance from the WSPU to the WFL and would doubtless have been a regular visitor to number 18 on the other side of the street. https://womanandhersphere.com/tag/mens-political-union-for-womens-enfranchisement/

https://mitchellsgenderblog.wordpress.com/2018/01/18/victor-diederichs-duval-one-mans-appeal/

Duval’s book ‘An Appeal to Men’, criticises the ongoing reliance on politics as a driver for change, his reasoning being due to the ineffectiveness of the “fourteen Woman Suffrage Bills…introduced into Parliament since 1870. This saw Duval respond by provoking an urgency for radical action, with his ‘Men’s Political Union for Women’s Suffrage’ personifying this aim, being described as ‘The national bastion for male militancy

http://www.naomipaxton.co.uk/blog/suffragette-extras-up-the-men   I liked the descrition of their role in the WSPU 1911 Christmas Fair, where they ran the ‘Fun of the Fair’ section of the event that included a Roundabout, Hoopla, and a Shooting Gallery. This Shooting Gallery was run jointly with the Croydon branch of the WSPU and was advertised as where “Suffragists and Anti-Suffragists alike can try their skill with an air-gun” so that participants “will realise that muscular force is not the basis of all Government or even of all fights… but that skill and determination have to be taken into account.” The entertainments also included Suffrage Shies, a Suffrage Punch and Judy show written by Inez Bensusan, a member of the Actresses’ Franchise League.

Victor was was imprisoned for a week for a disturbance after he addressed Lloyd George outside City Temple. Heserved on the committee of the International Women’s Franchise Clubs. He published two pamphlets the other was ‘Why I went to prison’. H espent two years of the war in Salonika serving with the Royal Engineers. He rejoined the Liberal Party and stood unsuccessfuly at three elections.

 

 

Una Dugdale, suffragette and marriage reformer, was educated at College before studying in Hanover and Paris. Una was a debutante daughter of Commander Edward Stratford Dugdale and his wife, who were supporters of the suffrage movement. Una was educated at Cheltenham Ladies College, and later in Hanover and Paris where she studied singing She was niece of  Arthur Peel 1st Viscount Peel, Speaker of the House of Commons. Apparently, her parents household had five servants and they had a holiday home near Aberdeen. Her sisters Daisy and Joan were  also active suffragettes. Joan wrote a play 10 Clowning Street. http://www.naomipaxton.co.uk/blog/suffragette-extras-up-the-men

In 1907, after hearing Christabel Pankhurst speak in Hyde Park, Una joined the Women’s Social and Political Union. Una worked alongside Emmeline Pankhurst to campaign for women’s rights and the vote in Scotland as she accompanied her on her Scottish tours.

Love honour but not obey potrait by Ethel Wrighty

Una addressing a crowd at the Newcastle by-election 1908

She was part of confrontational direct actions undertaken by suffragettes and, in 1909, was arrested and imprisoned for a month following her involvement in the raid on the House of Commons. Una was the co-founder and treasurer of the Suffragette Fellowships. I found this wonderful BBC radio recording Of Una Duval. Please do listen. http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/suffragettes/8305.shtml

Una and Daisy Dugdale

Una met Victor when he acted as best man at Frank Rutter’s  wedding on 13 January, 1912,  at the Savoy Chapel. She scandalised society by refusing to include the word obey in her vows. She saw marriage as an equal partnership,She was advised that if she did not, the marriage would not be legal. However, at the wedding, she did not repeat obey after the clergyman spoke. He said that he hoped there would be an amended form of the service created. Her father accompanies her down the aisle but did not ‘hand her over’ to her husband to be. Christabel Pankhurst, Constance Lytton and the Pethick-Lawrences attended dressed in WSPU colours. The Mirror ran the headline, ‘The Bride Who would Not Promise to Obey.’

I found newspaper references to it in international newspapers like the Chicago Examiner and the New York Herald Jan 13th 1912. I discovered – the joys of the internet- that Victor’s best man was an actor called Ernest Thesiger http://ernestthesiger.org/Ernest_Thesiger/Chronology.html (I also found out that Ernest that he was an expert embroiderer and written a book on it.  https://www.britishpathe.com/video/ernest-thesiger-expert-embroiderer and that he was Dr Septimus Pretorius in The Bride of Frankenstein withour own Notable Woman of Lavender Hill Elsa Lanchester)

It was so good to discover that the Duval famous suffrage family and their extended families lived down the road and thrilled to find the photo of them in their backyard. I had known about them but then just had to blog an account of them as they were now going to be included in my Notable Women of Lavender Hill walk.

Notable Women of Lavender Hill walk led by Jeanne Rathbone on Sunday 26^th May 2019 at 12.00 at Battersea Town Hall/Arts Centre. It is part of the Wandsworth Heritage Festival contribution for the Battersea Society.  Jeanie Nassau Senior 1828-1877, first woman civil servant, Charlotte Despard 1844-1939 suffragette, socialist and Sinn Feiner, at 177 Lavender Hill, Olive Morris Black activist,  Caroline Ganley CBE MP 1945-1951 lived at  5 Thirsk Road , Deaconess Isabella Gilmore 1842-1923, 113 Clapham Common Northside, Marie Spartali 1844-1927 Pre-Raphaelite artist lived at The Shrubbery Lavender Gardens, Laura Barker 1819-1905 composer Lavender Sweep House, Emily and Elsa Duval Suffragettes  97 Lavender Sweep Biddy 1871-1966 socialist/feminist and Elsa Lanchester, 1902-1986 Hollywood actress – The Bride of Frankenstein – who lived at 27 Leathwaite Road, Violet Piercy first British female marathon runner 21 Leathwaithe Road  Penelope Fitzgerald 1916-2000 author and booker prize winner for Offshore 1979 lived at 25 Almeric Road  and Pamela Hansford Johnson CBE 1912-1971 novelist lived at 53 Battersea Rise, Farrago restaurant. jeanne.rathbone@gmail.com

Yes, I will, in due course, be applying for an English Heritage plaque given the dearth of  English Heritage plaques commemorating women. There are sixteen EH/LCC plaues in Battersea but none to women. Now there are three plaques of my Notable Women Caroline Ganley CBE MP 1945-51 at 5 Thirsk Road, Charlotte Despard 1844-1939 socialist, suffragette and Irish nationalist on 177 Lavender Hill Labour Party HQ since 1923 and funded by her and Pamela Hansford Johnson novelist and critic at 53 Battersea Rise.

Violet Piercy Marathon runner and Notable Woman of Lavender Hill

Violet Piercy female marathon record setting runner is an addition to my roster of Notable Women of Lavender Hill walk. Violet Stewart Louisa Piercy lived, in the early thirties at 21 Leathwaite Road which overlooks Clapham Common. Derrick Johnson of the Clapham Society brought her to my attention when he came on the first walk I led  and I promised I would include her along with the motley of significant women who lived in this area around Lavender Hill. It starts at Battersea Arts Centre and finishes at 53 Battersea Rise. There are now 15 women included in this walk. https://wordpress.com/page/sheelanagigcomedienne.wordpress.com/12081

Of the sixteen EH/LCC blue plaques in Battersea none commemorate women. Since I started these walks we now have three plaques – one to Caroline Ganley CBE MP 1945-1951 at 5 Thirsk Road, Charlotte Despard socialist, suffragette and Irish nationalist on 177 Lavender Hill and Pamela Hansford Johnson novelist and critic at 53 Battersea Rise.

Between the two world wars, Violet Piercy  became the very first woman to run a marathon – a feat not repeated by anyone of her sex for almost 40 years! Women were excluded from the Olympics when Violet was running.

Violet is recognised by the International Association of Athletics Federation was an as having set the first women’s world’s best in the  marathon on 3 October 1926 with a time of 3:40:22. She was reported to have run unofficially and her mark was set on the Polytechnic Marathon course between Windsor and London and finishing at Battersea Town Hall. However, the Association of Road Running Statisticians includes Violet but notes Marie Louise Ledru of France  as the first woman to run a marathon According to the ARRS, Ledru ran 5:40 at the Tour de Paris Marathon held on 29 September 1918. According to the IAAF, Violet Piercy’s mark stood 37 years until Merry Lepper’s  3:37:07 performance at the Western Hemisphere Marathon on 16 December 1963.

Violet Stewart Louisa Piercy was born at 15 Clarendon Road, Croydon, on Christmas Eve, 1889, the daughter of a property owner who died before she was born. She attended Old Palace of John Whitgift School and in 1911 was living in Croydon with her widowed mother.

Here is a link to the silent Pathe clip from 1927 http://www.britishpathe.com/video/camera-interviews-the-runner/query/Violet

Before we look at Violet’s story we need to bear in mind that before the 1980s, there were no women’s distance races in the Olympics. http://www.marathonguide.com/history/olympicmarathons/chapter25.cfm

In the Moscow Games, the longest race for women was the 1,500 meters, which had been instituted in 1972. Women had been excluded from track and field competition altogether until 1928, when the longest race was the 800 meters. Despite a world record by winner Lina Radke of Germany, many of the competitors had not properly prepared for the race and several collapsed in exhaustion. This led Olympic organizers to consider the race too strenuous for women. The president of the IOC, Count Henri Baillet-Latour, even suggested the elimination of all women’s competition from the Games. Such a drastic move was not taken, but until 1960, when the 800 meters reappeared, no race over 200 meters was contested by women in the Olympics.

Before 1972, women had been barred from the most famous marathon outside the Olympics – Boston. That rule did not keep women from running, though. In 1966, Roberta Gibb hid behind a bush at the start of the Boston Marathon, sneaking into the field and finishing the race in an unofficial time of 3:21:25. She was the first woman known to complete the arduous Boston course. Gibb had been inspired to run by the return of her race entry with a note saying that women were not physically capable of running a marathon.

On August 31,1971 Adrienne Beames of Australia became the first women to run a sub-three-hour marathon, smashing that barrier with a time of 2:46:30.On October 28, 1973, the first all women’s marathon was held in Waldniel, West Germany.The first women’s marathon officially sanctioned by the IAAF was the Tokyo International, held in November of 1979. IAAF officially recommended to the IOC that a women’s marathon be included in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Lost in the headlines about the end of amateurism at the Olympics and the selection of Seoul and Calgary for the 1988 Games was the fact that women had finally won the right to compete in an Olympic Marathon.

1984 – Joan Benoit. Almost a century after Melpomene was denied the opportunity to run in the first modern Olympics’ marathon, Joan Benoit, USA, won the gold in the field of 50 women from 28 nations who competed in the first Women’s Olympic Marathon.  (Summer Olympics in LA.)

Now back to Violets story.  I got most information from the piece written by Derrick Johnson which appeared in the South London Press. https://claphamsociety.com/Articles/article22-a-fast-lady.html and from Rob Hadgraft   http://clappedoutrunner.blogspot.com/2015/08/violet-and-paula-englands-gift-to.html

It seems Violet had a number of natural talents ahead of her time, one of which was a gift for public relations. Over a period of around 12 years she gained much publicity for her various runs and became well known across the land and beyond. She was widely regarded as an eccentric and feisty character.

When she got started the maximum distance for a women’s race was set at 1,000 metres. This was ludicrous according to Violet. Aged 31 she boldly marched down to the London Olympiades club and signed up as a member – although still had to do her training alone. To demonstrate to the world that women could be good at sport and endurance events, she decided to run a solo marathon along the Windsor to London route.

This appeared in the South London Press in 1934 and spelt her name with an extra e.

To the amazement of onlookers, she set off at 4.20pm on Saturday 2^nd October 1926 from near Windsor Castle. She made good steady progress early on, reaching Hounslow well before 6. After this suburban traffic slowed her down and she finally finished outside Battersea Town Hall around 8pm. Her time was recorded at 3 hrs 40 mins.

She told reporters: “I did it because I wanted to show the Americans what we can do and to prove Englishwomen are some good after all!”  Presumably this was a reference to the recent efforts of Americans Gertrude Ederle and Amelia Corson, who had stunned the people of Britain and France by successfully swimming the Channel.

Although cross-Channel swimming became popular in subsequent years, women’s distance running certainly didn’t. The reaction to Violet’s great feat was mixed. The Westminster Gazette wrote: “It must be hoped that no other girl will be so foolish as to imitate her.” All Sports Weekly were equally firm: “The marathon should be cut out by the women.”

Violet scoffed at all this and appeared on BBC radio telling listeners that doing athletics would help produce a race of women “capable of and suited to motherhood” because the sport was based on rhythm, co-ordinated movement and clean living.

There is a quirky Pathe video entitled Mary had a little lamb from 1930. https://www.britishpathe.com/video/mary-had-a-little-lamb-1

Thirty-seven years after Violet’s pioneering first marathon Dale Greig representing Scotland was the second British woman to take the plunge and chalked up a time of 3:27:45. There is no record of whether Merry Lepper or Dale Grieg had  heard of Violet Piercy and nobody in the media was able (or interested enough) to track down Violet to ask her about the women who followed in her footsteps at long last.

In the next few years Violet claimed a series of records for road running but as this was new for a woman and she had no competitors she was able to do this with fairly modest performances. She also finished her runs at locations where she would get maximum publicity. In 1933 she completed a third solo run from Windsor past thousands of cheering spectators and finishing on the stage of the Shepherds Bush Empire. Two years later she ran five and a quarter miles from the Whittington Stone in Highgate and up the 311 steps to the top of the Monument in 43 minutes 2 seconds. ‘I did it to prove that a woman’s stamina can be just as remarkable as a man’s’ she told the South London Press (2 April, 1935).

It was not until 13 June 1936, with the connivance of the organisers of the Polytechnic Harriers race from Windsor to Stamford Bridge, and setting off ahead of the male runners, that Violet completed a run over the official distance of 26 miles 385 yards (42.195 km). Her finishing time of 4 hours 30 minutes is extremely modest by today’s standards but her record lasted until 1964. She was also 46 years old and as she said: ‘I only wanted to prove that women could stick the distance’.

The 1939-45 War seems to have ended her running career and she quickly sank into obscurity.  Little is known of her life after 1938 except that electoral registers show a woman of her name living in lodgings in Battersea and Wandsworth up to 1958. Apparently, she was involved in a court case when she was a medical secretary for a Dr Coplans of Leathwaite Road and they had a disagreement which ended up in court.

Violet was a symbol of female strength between 1926 and 1938 as the first British female long-distance runner. She ran long distances “to prove that a woman’s stamina can be just as remarkable as a man’s,” (South London Press, 2 April 1935), and is now often credited as the inspirational figure behind modern female long-distance runners.

However, it very sad that recent evidence suggests that an elderly woman of no fixed address who died in a London hospital in April 1972 was the once-famous Violet Piercy. She had suffered a brain haemorrhage, hypertension and chronic kidney-related infection. The death certificate mistakenly gave her surname as Pearson, which ruled out any chance of her being immediately recognised as the former celebrity runner.

Violet languished in obscurity for something like 70 years but recent developments have changed all that  . . . . there’s now a clip of her running on-line at the British Pathe archive, she has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the novelist Peter Lovesey has written at length about her in Track Stats magazine.https://www.nuts.org.uk/trackstats/piercy.htm

However, there is no doubt that Violet set a trend which is still with us as so many women are found running especially on Clapham Common when I go for my regularly walkies.

21 Leathwaite Road

Violet Piercy female marathon icon,  one time neighbour of the Lanchester family on Leathwaite Road, I will happily include you on my walk of the inspiring Female Lavender Hill mob.  So, Violet Piercy we salute you as you join the other inspiring Women of Lavender Hill!

Olive Morris black activist

Since I started my Notabale Women of Lavender walks I discovered this vibrant young black activist was said to have lived on Lavender Hill when she first came over from Jamaica to join her parents in 1962 aged 9. However, I since ascertained through the Metroploitian arhives that the Morris family lived at 7 Milford Street which was demolished and was off the Wandsworth Road. I am including Olive in my Notable Women of Lavender Hill walk as she attended Lavender Hill Girls School. I have spoken with her nephew Ferron Morris.

It was not unusual for the Windrush generation for parents to come ahead leaving the children with grandparents till they could sort out accommodation and jobs. I knew the name from Olive Morris House 18 Brixton Hill which is Lambeth’s Customer Service Centre. There one can make inquiries about benefits, council tax, rents and repairs, housing , school admission documents, Freedom Pass and parking permits.  It was remodelled in 2009 when the revamped building was renamed the Civic Centre but Olive’s name was reinstated. There is currently some controversy about its future.  http://www.brixtonbuzz.com/2019/02/brixtons-olive-morris-house-negotiations-hit-the-buffers/

Olive was an amazing fiery activist from her teens and packed so much into her short life.  She died tragically young in 1979 aged 27. I went to see the Olive Morris Archive at the Minet Library in Camberwell. Seeing the photos, letters flyers and papers etc forty years on, inevitably, makes one think what she might have done and what role would she have played in British political life.

The main sources I have used for details of Olive’s life come from the Remembering Olive Collective, thanks to the wonderful work of artist Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre and Liz Obi, who was another young activist and friend of Olive’s. They established the Remembering Olive Collective. In 2009 ROC launched the Olive Morris Collection at Lambeth Archives. https://rememberolivemorris.wordpress.com/ and Beverley Bryan, Stella. Dadzie, and Susanne Scafe, eds., The heart of the race: black women’s lives in Britain (1985), included an entry on Olive and Beverley also attended Lavender Hill School.

The Olive Morris Collection at the Minet Library contains some great photos from photographer Neil Kenlock as well as Olive’s own photos and memorabilia which includes her passport. The collection consists of contributions from her friend Liz and Mike McColgan her partner.  This was launched in October 2009

There is also and item by Dr Angelina Osborn for the Fawcett Society.     https://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/blog/black-history-month-power-olive-morris,   rememberolivemorris

http://brixtonpound.org/showmemoney

Olive was born on 26 June 1952 in Harewood, St Catherine’s, Jamaica, the daughter of Vincent Nathaniel Morris and his wife, Doris, née Moseley. When she was nine years old, she and her brother, Basil, left their maternal grandmother and joined her mother and father in Battersea in 1962 but not on Lavender Hill as is erroneosly repeated on internet items on her. They lived nearby just of Wandsworth Road. There were four further siblings. Olive’s father became a forklift operator and her mother was a factory shop steward.

Olive attended Heathbrook Primary School and then Lavender Hill Girls’ Secondary School which was close by to where the lived. She finished her secondary education at Tulse Hill Secondary School. She was obviously a very able pupil but she experienced all the inequalities and injustices of the British education system. She left at sixteen with no qualifications, but undeterred, she went on to college to study ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels while at the same time holding down a full-time job. She studied at the London College of Printing.

I lived at 108A Lavender Hill (one-time home of John Burns MP) briefly at this time with my sister and her husband in 64/65. In the seventies I was a Labour Governor of the school and became aware of how these girls were not been properly served by the education system. I can but wonder if I ever passed Olive in the street as she walked to school.

The late 1960s and 1970s were a particularly challenging time for Britain’s post-war African, African-Caribbean, and Asian communities. There was increased tension between police and the black community (epitomized by the ‘sus’ laws, that is, the laws allowing police officers to stop and search people on mere suspicion that they intended to commit a crime), and attacks by fascist groups such as the National Front, as well as discrimination in housing and employment.

Olive became a tireless organizer and fighter against racism, and also sexism and other forms of oppression. In an early example of her political activism she intervened in the arrest of a Nigerian diplomat Mr Clement Gowalk for a parking offence in Brixton in 1969. Olive came upon the scene when Mr Gowalk had already been taken away but intervened when her friends who protested .  She was physically assaulted and racially abused by the police and arrested, along with six other people, fined £10, and given a three-month suspended sentence for two years. The charges comprised assault on the police, threatening behaviour, and possession of dangerous weapons.

Olive’s account of this is quite shocking to read about the treatment, brutality and abusive racist and misogynist language used by the police against a teenager. The vulgarity, misogyny, and physical violence turned into a full-fledged sexual assault. Olive’s account was printed in ”Black Panther News Service in May 1970 and analysed in this article by Anne-Marie Angelo ‘Any name that has power’. https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/dspace/handle/10161/7264

“They all made me take off my jumper and my bra in front of them to show I was a girl.” After Morris disrobed, “The one with the truncheon said, ‘Now prove you are a real woman.’ He pointed at the truncheon in front of me and said, ‘Look it’s the right colour and the right size for you. Black cunt!’  Olive who, “was crying because I was in terrible pain,” asked to see a doctor. A police doctor appeared and told Olive that she was bruised and gave her two pills to take.

It seems extraordinary that a police doctor could accept this clear evidence of the assault of a teenage girl and then walk away and leave her with those who had assaulted her knowing that she was going to be charged. Olive said they  “continued arguing about my sex. Another said I should strip and get on the table and give them a little demo.”  At the end of this harrowing episode of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, Olive remembered, “My particulars were taken and I was charged with assaulting a policeman. I was then told to plead guilty when the case was called; and I was let out through the back way of the station at about 6 o’clock”.

Downtrodden but not defeated, Olive  found her way to nearby King’s College Hospital where she obtained treatment for her injuries. As she received treatment at King’s College that night, Black Panther photographer Neil Kenlock headed to the hospital where he took a photograph of Olive which provided evidence of her tenacity. She saved the photograph, scrawling a note on the back: “Taken at about 10 PM on 15 Nov 69 after the police had beating me up (at Kings College Hospital.)

As the newspaper later reports on Olive’s sentencing, “During the melee Miss Morris kicked a police officer and hit him on the jaw.” Olive’s handwriting on the reverse of the photo tells a different story, not related in the newspaper account: “Taken at about 10pm on 15th Nov 69 after the police had beaten me up.”  I think I know which version we believe.

This awful experience of the police and their racist, misogynistic, bigoted attitudes and sheer brutality surely propelled Olive into action in fighting racism and injustice. She seemed to become fearless in confronting the police.

Olive after the police assault.

In the early 170s she became a member of the youth section of the Black Panther movement (later the Black Workers movement), along with others such as Linton Kwesi Johnson, Clovis Reid, and Farrukh Dhondy.

Olive with American Black Panther visitors

Olive as a young Black Panther at 38 Shakespeare Road

From the Heart of the Race:  ‘ it was here that she began to develop the political ideology which would determine her future actions. She gave a total commitment to the organisation’s work and development, and participated in nearly all of the battles which formed part of the community’s everyday life. She was in tune with the needs of the people, and always showed herself willing to take the initiative and act’…  She became well known in the community for her willingness to help other Black people who were facing difficulties, whether with the schools, the police, housing, social security officials or the courts – whatever the issue, she was never too busy to offer support. For Olive, it was not just a case of doing things for those who couldn’t do it for themselves: it was her way of involving people in the struggle, showing by her own example the will to resist and to challenge.”

But teenage Olive was also curious about the world and she liked fashion. She loved jewellery, especially bangles. Ana Laura said : Of the many things that Liz had to say about Olive, there were two that stood out for me. The first was Liz description of Olive, and how she always visualised her whenever she thought of her: silver bangles on her arms and forever riding her bike. The second had to do with what Liz had learned from Olive: never to be afraid of anything.

Olive liked fashion

This lovely photo of Olive and her friend Liz Obi taken by Neil Kenlock

She was  interested in traveling as she was an internationalist. She visited Germany in 1971. In August 1972 she and her friend, Liz Obi, planned to visit the American Black Panther leader, Eldridge Cleaver, who was in exile in Algeria, but they became stranded in Morocco. There is an account of this trip in the archives.

The Brixton Black Women’s Group was started by Olive Morris and other women who had been active in the Black Panther Movement. The Group was formed to address the specific issues faced by Black women, and to offer advice and support to those in difficulties. It originally operated from Olive and Liz’s squat at 65 Railton Road. With the years, the BWG developed and transformed into the Black Women Centre, relocating its premises to Stockwell Green.

Gail Lewis talks about the the group and the similarities and differences with mainly white feminist groups, especially the wider focus of  poverty, racism, housing, education suss laws etc  http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/sisterhood/clips/activism/consciousness-raising/143112.html

Olive as a young Black Panther at 38 Shakespeare Road

Olive with American Black Panther visitors

Olive along with Liz Obi played a major role in the squatting movement in Brixton which is why we now have the iconic photo of her climbing back in after eviction in the squatters handbook from that time.

She squatted at 121 Railton Road, Brixton, with Liz in 1973. The squat became an organizing centre for community groups such as Black People against State Harassment as well as housing Sabaar Bookshop, which was one of the first black community bookshops. 121 Railton Road remained a social centre and a hub for the squatting movement until it was closed in 1999.

OLIVE MORRIS, SQUATTERS’ HANDBOOKhttps://boroughphotos.org/lambeth/olive-morris-squatters-handbook/

The 1979 Squatters’ Handbook published by the Advisory Service for Squatters with chapters on law, moving in and eviction. The cover shows the black community activist Olive Morris scaling a building. Olive actively campaigned for squatting and opened the 121 Railton Road squat in 1973 with Liz Obi, which later became the Sabaar Bookshop and an anarchist centre in the 1980s.

There is an account of the squatting movement and a section on Brixton.

https://en.squat.net/2014/05/20/squatting-in-england-heritage-prospects/

Despite living side by side and having cordial relations, Black and White squatters did not organise themselves together. Liz Obi remembers that when they squatted 121 Railton Road, some white squatters came to help them turn on the gas and the electricity. During evictions some women from the “White Women Center” also came to show support, but that was as far as the relationship went. Black activists at the time were focused on the many specific issues affecting the Black community (police violence, discrimination in education and workplace, etc). The absence of joint activity might explain why in most accounts of the Brixton squatting movement written in later years, there are no references to the early Black squats of the 1970s.

In July 1974 Morris returned to Jamaica for six weeks.

The following year she began a degree in economics and social science at Manchester University.

Heart of the Race :In 1975, she went to Manchester University to study for a social science degree. This in itself was an important step for Olive, who believed in education for the people. For her, going to university was not a status symbol, but an example to many young Black people of how to fight and win against a system which tries to push us to the bottom of the education pile and force us to compete against each other.
Unlike many students, Olive did not separate her work at the university from the struggles which were being waged in the rest of the community. In her work with the Manchester Black Women’s Co-operative and the Black Women’s Mutual Aid Group, which she helped to set up, she participated fully in the black community’s battles in Moss Side. Committed to furthering education rights for Black people, she campaigned with Black mothers for better schooling for their children and helped to set up a supplementary school and a Black bookshop in the area. Because she was an internationalist, she also worked at the university within the National Co-ordinating Committee of Overseas Students. She provided an essential link between international, community and women’s organisations, drawing the parallels between our experiences here and in the Third World.

She visited Italy and Northern Ireland in 1976. In 1977 she visited China and wrote a piece entitled ‘A sister’s visit to China’ which explored the role of China in anti-imperialist struggles. It was published in Speak Out!, the Brixton Black Women’s Group newsletter.

The Heart of the Race ”  In 1978, Olive visited China. The trip was of great significance to her, for she saw China as one of the countries which Third World peoples could learn a lot from, and which could serve as a model for us in self-help and self-reliance. The lessons she learn there were shared with everyone she worked with on her return. Sharing knowledge was always her practice.
Olive had always identified the relationships between the struggles of people in the Third World and those of the white working class. She recognised that it was a fight which had to be won through the contribution of both groups, and that we would need to work together if we were to bring about any meaningful changes. It was this awareness which was her greatest contribution to the political development of those she worked with.”

In 1978 she, along with Stella Dadzie and other women, founded the Organization of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD). OWAAD held its first conference at the Abeng centre on Gresham Road in Brixton, a centre that Olive had helped to establish along with Elaine Holness and other members of the community.

Beverley Bryan

Stella Dadzie

Suzanne Scafe

This article from the Guardian in 2014 which sets out the experiences of women from the West Indies includes Olive. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/06/black-women-in-britain-from-the-romans-to-the-windrush

Olive graduated in 1978 and returned to Brixton, working in the juvenile department of the Brixton Community Law Centre where she was involved in the campaign to scrap the ‘sus’ laws. She lived at 2 Talma Road, Brixton. She was also a burgeoning writer and co-wrote a piece on the Anti-Nazi League with her partner, Mike McColgan. ‘Has the Anti-Nazi League got it right on racism?’ was published in a flyer for the Brixton Ad-Hoc Committee against Police Repression in 1978 and criticized the strategy of focusing on fighting fascism, while largely ignoring the impact of institutionalized racism: the role of the police, the education system, and so on.

Beverely Bryan :“Olive and I went to the same school. Even then she had that streak in her – in school, they would have called it rebelliousness or disruptiveness, but it was really a fearlessness about challenging injustice at whatever level. This made others very weary of her, she was so obviously a fighter. I saw her once confronting a policeman – it might have been when she was evicted. She went at him like a whirlwind and cussed him to heaven. And this policeman looked really taken aback, he didn’t know how to deal with someone who had no fear of him. He was meant to represent the big arm of the law. But because she was angry and she knew he was in the wrong, she didn’t hesitate.

She would take anybody on like that, even people in organisations if she thought that someone needed to expose their hypocrisy for mounting slogans and living a lie. Because of that, a lot of them saw her as a pain in the neck and she was too! She’d fight them physically, if it was necessary. If you moved with Olive, you couldn’t be a weak heart. She gave a lot of support to so many sisters though, when they came under pressure from the brothers at meeting or wherever. She was a real example, You didn’t see it then, of course, but that fearlessness of hers, and that genuine commitment she showed to the work she did made her stand out, made her special.

Olive became ill during a trip to Spain in 1978. On her return to London, she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and underwent treatment which was unsuccessful. She died on 12 July 1979 at St Thomas’s Hospital, Lambeth, and was buried in Streatham Vale cemetery. She was survived by her partner, Mike McColga. Her premature death was a shock to her friends, family, and political colleagues.

Olive’s grave Streatham Park Cemetery

Family and friends gather for a memorial in July 2008

Olive Morris on the Brixton Pound

http://brixtonpound.org/blog/2015/06/25/olive-morris/     Several people asked how Olive Morris came to feature on the first edition Brixton Pound note. The reason for this is very simple. When we began designing the currency back in 2009 we asked lots of people from Brixton who they thought should go on the notes. We had a stall at the Lambeth Country Show and on online voting poll. Olive’s name kept coming up.

As we looked into it more, it seemed Olive Morris was a brilliant choice to be the first person to go on a Brixton Pound. She was an activist – campaigning on many social justice issues including racism, unemployment, police violence and squatters rights. She was also a member of the British Black Panthers and a socialist and she supported anti-colonial struggles internationally. 

Money and power are at the heart of many of the issues that Olive campaigned on. Just take a look at our national currency, sterling, and look at the images that are chosen and the symbols they represent. If you go to the British Museum you can also see notes issued by the British Government in the British Colonies and they look very similar to the notes that we still use today.

The Brixton Pound deliberately chose images and symbols that break tradition with this colonialist past. Olive Morris was a disrupter and we are proud to put her image on the first issue of the notes in the place that is usually reserved for the Queen. We hope this may encourage more people to look at the inequalities sustained and perpetuated by our current financial system and challenge them, just as Olive Morris did. 

Since putting Olive Morris on the Brixton Pound we have had many people come and talk to us who remember Olive. They have told us a bit about her and her life. We hope that, alongside organisations like the Remembering Olive Collective, we can help keep her legacy alive.

Let us spread the word about the inspiring black activist Olive Morris who came to live in Battersea as a nine year old then as an activist in Brixton and at university in Manchester but whose legacy is global.

There was a Black Power Women of Brixton Walk Sun Mar 10 2019 which included Olive info@blackhistorywalks.co.ukBlack people in Britain fought for civil/equal rights as hard as their American counterparts. The role of women in this struggle has been severely marginalised. This walk will show the life, times, and activities of numerous African/Caribbean women in Brixton. From the 1950’s to the 1980’s Black women supported and led the anti-racist fight in housing, education, employment, media and politics. The walk covered:

This article appeared in the South London Press in August 30th 2019. Toby , the editor, had said he would over time include some of the Notable Women of Lavender Hill and most of this is from my blog on her. There is one error resulting from mis-transcription which states that Olive lived at 108a Lavender Hill. She didn’t but I did!  However, it’s great   that Olive’s memory continues for new generations.

My Notable Women of Lavender Hill walk on Sunday 26th May 2019 included Olive.  This walk is one of the Battersea Society contributions to the Wandsworth Heritage Festival 2019.There were no blue plaques to any of these women last year when I started these walks and now there are three.

Clare Sheridan

Clare Consuela Sheridan ( 1885 -!970) has had the most varied, exotic and colourful life of these Notable Galway Women.  She came from a well-connected cosmopolitan family.  She was a sculptor, a writer, a restless nomad who wrote about her adventures, had relationships with intriguing men and she endured tragedy – with the death of her adored husband and two of her three children died before her. She had fascinating friends which reflected her cosmopolitan background of Anglo-Irish American parentage. Her godmother was Consuela Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough

Through her bust sculptures and journalistic assignments she was intimate with a variety of people including Irish Nationalists like Michael Collins, British politicians and aristocrats, the Mountbattens, Lady Diana Cooper, Vita Sackville-West and Vivien Leigh,  Charlie  Chaplin and the Russian revolutionaries. Through her cousin Winston Churchill she made useful connections as sculpture and writer and her biography Cousin Clare  was written by the fascinating Galway based biographer Anita Leslie of Oranmore Castle who was also a cousin and is probably  most definitive book on this remarkable life and she was a regular visitor there especially during her Galway years in the late forties.  She lived in many exotic places and her her life seemed to be in phases. She came to live in Galway in 1947-1954, converted to Catholicism and devoted her skills to religious carvings. We visited Oranmore Castle in August 2017 whilst staying in Oranmore with my sister Ida. We met Leonie King who takes guides people around her fabulous and atmospheric home which is her castle. Leonie is the daughter of Anita Leslie. This blog is by Olivia King https://www.the-pool.com/people/women-we-love/2017/37/olivia-king-my-gran-the-nazi-fighter

 

 

She was born Clare Frewen in 1885, the only daughter among the children of the talented and wealthy three Jerome sisters. She had two brothers Hugh and Oswald whom she called Peter in her memoirs.  The Jerome’s were a prominent New York family and her grandfather Leonard Jerome was nicknamed ‘the King of Wall Street’.  Her father, Moreton Frewen (1853-1924), of Innishannon House in Cork led a peripatetic life, moving from England to America, then to Ireland and finally back to England again. He was was apparently he was a  charming if financially incompetent adventurer known for reckless financial and political schemes and was briefly  MP for Cork as an Independent  ‘Home Ruler’.  Nevertheless their house was burnt down in 1921. Michael Collins apologised to her for this when she interviewed him! Her father’s restlessness  was echoed in Clare’s  own life, which was spent constantly on the move.

Even in 2017 the Mail on Sunday can splash headlines about her in their style  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4502608/Winston-Churchill-s-cousin-seductress-SOVIET-SPY.html

She bedded Trotsky, was molested by Mussolini, got spurned by Hitler and ran off with Charlie Chaplin: How Churchill’s cousin Clare Sheridan was a seductress… and Soviet spy

 

 

Clare by Emil Fuchs

Wilfred Sheridan

Clare was sent to the Convent of the Assumption in Auteuil, in Paris but when she announced to her family that she wished to convert to Catholicism she was removed and sent briefly to a finishing school in Darmstadt in Germany where she went to the opera twice a week and played ping-pong with German officers. A maid was sent to Darmstadt to fetch her home, and further attempts at conventional schooling were abandoned.

Clare went to balls at Dublin Castle and years later in her memoirs Naked Truth  she amusingly described her first season at Dublin Castle with Lord Dudley masquerading as the King. She was then brought to London and dressed at some expense when she attended balls and parties and fell in love with a young stockbroker named Wilfred Sheridan when she was 17.                                                                            http://spartacus-educational.com/Wilfred_Sheridan.htm     She told her cousin Anita: “in Wilfred’s company she felt herself utterly natural, sparkling and gay” But her father disapproved as they wanted her to marry someone richer. Wilfred lent her books, including the works of his great grandfather Richard Brinsley Sheridan. She returned to Cork and commenced her first attempts at writing with a play called l’Ingénue.

This article by Peter Murray in Irish Arts review recounts incidents from her memoir Nude Veritas. https://www.irishartsreview.com/restless-spirit/

On one occasion her and her mother left Malta where Peter’s ship was based and went to  Cannes penniless when she found a fiver that cousin Jack Churchill had given her for Christmas and then Clare was given fifty ponds by an old friend of her father’s which he stuffed into her shoe despite being told not to take money from men only books! Her mother cried but they kept the money. They went to Monte Carlo, Clare gambled, and won. The following year she relates her stay in Sweden with the Princess Margaret.  She also went to Capri, where she stayed in a house owned by Swedish psychiatrist Axel Munthe. She attributed to Munthe her initial introduction to Bolshevism.

Meanwhile, Clare’s family had moved from Cork to England, her mother buying Brede Place, a 14th-century ruin on Edward Frewen’s estate in Sussex. Henry James was just four miles away, at Rye. Clare became friends with James, and also with the novelist George Moore. She began to write articles and a novel, showing chapters to both James and Moore. Moore described it as ‘charming’ and a ‘dear little book.’ In response, Clare flung the manuscript across the room, danced on it, kicked it, and finally put a match to it.

Brede Place

He advised her to gain independence from her mother through marriage, and so on her return to England in 1910 she and Wilfred became engaged. He was said to be the best-looking man in England. At the wedding she refused to say the word ‘obey’, and the Canon was shocked by the irreverence of bride and groom. Clare settled in Sussex with Wilfred, where they had two children, Margaret and Elizabeth. However in 1914 Elizabeth died in infancy. Clare became friendly with Mary Watts, widow of artist George Frederick Watts, who ran a nearby pottery and who encouraged her to sculpt a memorial to her deceased daughter. She enrolled in the modelling section of the Guildford Technical School, bringing the half completed clay memorial with her.

 

 

Clare and Margaret and Richard

The following year, her son Richard was born, but a few days later her Wilfred was killed at the Battle of Loos. He was probably the love of her life. They had parted only a few weeks earlier when they were staying at Frampton Court, his parental home where they hoped Dick would be born as heir.          http://www.dorsetlife.co.uk/2011/11/the-curse-of-frampton/  ‘She stood there watching him walk away – so light of step, sunburned and handsome. Once he turned to wave. Then he was gone.” She was heart broken.. She was given the letter written by her beloved Wilfred which was found in his pocket. : “You will only read this if I am dead, and remember that as you read it I shall be by your side. Remember that all over England are broken hearts and ruined lives, remember that one splendid woman, such as you are, refusing to weep, and hugging her soul with pride at a soldier’s death, will consciously or unconsciously stiffen up and bring comfort to these… God keep you and help you and bring my little Margaret up happily. I can leave you nothing, darling, except the memory of years, and you know what our life together has been. Surely if perfection is attained we have attained it.”

Frampton Court Dorset the home of the Sheridans.

Stricken by this second loss, and the deaths of other close friends in WWI, Clare resolved to devote her life to sculpture. She produced various types of images, but it was her portrait heads that made her reputation. She became a successful society artist. Among her sitters were HG Wells, Arnold Bennett, Gladys Cooper and Diana Manners at this time as well as Churchill.

She had been pursued by suitors Lord Birkenhead,and Alexander Thynne, son of the Marquis of Bath who was also killed in the War and  Seymour Egerton who was the  6th Earl of Wilton, asked the widowed Clare to marry.

Then she decided to travel to Russia where she succeeded in getting Lenin and Trotsky to sit for her. She had become in onvolved with Lev Kaminev which is chronicled in Mayfair to Moscow  . https://archive.org/stream/mayfairtomoscowc00sher/mayfairtomoscowc00sher_djvu.txt

 

 

Clare’s Lenin

Clare’s Trotsky

Clare’s Kamenev

This infuriated Churchill who was very anti-Bolshevik and it caused the first of the ‘scandals’ that would keep her name buzzing on the world’s press wires for the next 30 years. Her life from this point on reads like the improbable plot to a novel – full of sex, tragedy and espionage, played out against a backcloth of bright young things and international power-brokers taking in America.

 

 

Clare, Charlie and Dick

She set forth in search of dangerous adventures, interesting men and artistic fulfilment. She travelled most of the world and met people like Gandhi, Primo De Rivera, Gorky, H.G. Wells, Kemel Ataturk, Mussolini, Marconi, Rudyard Kipling etc. Clare had affairs with some of these while others sat for her while she worked on their portrait. She was a very good journalist and interviewed many world leaders including Michael Collins. She was the only journalist to get into the occupied Four Courts in Dublin and interview Rory O’Connor. She spent time in America and it was here she became entangled with Charlie Chaplain.

In 1925, she moved to Algeria  where it was noted by M15 that “she appeared to be comfortably off and debt-free for the first time in 10 years”. She built a house on the edge of the Sahara at Biskra. In 1937, her beloved son Dick died of appendicitis at Constantine in Algeria. Clare took a large oak tree from the family home, Brede Place, in Sussex and carved it into his memorial. Carving in wood seems to have given her a fresh artistic direction. She  went on a pilgrimage to Montana and Canada, staying with the Black Foot tribe on the Blood Reserve. Many of the objects she collected during her visit are kept at Hastings Museum. http://www.thekeep.info/clare-sheridan-a-woman-ahead-of-her-time/

 

 

With Oswald heading to Russia

Our Lady at Brede

Clare carving a melon

The account of her dealings with Mussolini are chilling – his “nostrils flaring-head down like an angry bull.” Mussolini commented: “You will not leave till dawn, and then you will be broken in”. Anita Leslie continued: “He must seduce her. Sketch-book and clay flew to the ceiling, slaps, punches, wrestling, gasping cries of amazement (on both sides) filled the room. Clare couldn’t believe it true. Neither could Mussolini – she was taller than he, but he was stronger…. He blocked the way to the main door, but grabbing her handbag she made for the side exit. He got there before her and there was, according to her own account, a veritable hand-to-hand struggle for the key. Clare managed to snatch it and open the door. It took a long time, she said. But eventually she managed to wedge it open with her foot. Mussolini threw his whole heavy weight against the door to close it and caught her elbow in the process. Her screams of pain halted him. Purple in the face he stood back for a moment and she was able to wrench herself from his grasp.”

 

 

Spanish Arch House before the cinema

Spanish Arch House with Palace Cinema behind

Spanish Arch House

She made homes for herself in many strange and exotic places. She came to Galway in 1947 and lived in the house beside the Spanish Arch which later became the first museum of the city.  The Palace Arthouse Cinema behind it has only opened in 2018.

She was by now doing a lot of carving in wood as well as stone. She spent a lot of time working in the grounds of Oranmore Castle, the home of her cousin Anita Leslie and Anita’s husband, Bill King. She got the castle mason to rough out big blocks of stone, which she could then hew into form. Clare was a well-known figure in Galway ‘floating around in her violet shaded tweed cloaks of ecclesiastical design’. These cloaks were made by her good friend Cis O’Máille of O’Máille’s Shop in Dominick Street, who regularly entertained Clare to Sunday lunch.  Clare got on well with Claddagh fisherwomen who brought her baskets of fish when the boats came in. She was a regular visitor to the Poor Clares, and also to Kennys Bookshop.

 

 

O’Maille’s shop in Domonick Street where the Aran swaeters were first sold S

Kenny’s was a mecca for bibliophiles

Poor Clares convent

Clare was still strong enough to carve, not only in wood but in stone, but she was very disappointed at the dearth of orders from the Church for her carvings. She had high hopes that the Bishop might buy the Madonna and Child for his new cathedral. She was not impressed when she saw the mosaics of JFK and Padraic Pearse, and she railed against the poor taste of those who had the power to spend. She offered the statue to a convent guest-house, but it was pointed out to her that as the Holy Child wore no trousers, some people might be offended. Her retort was “The renaissance did not consider underwear necessary, why should you”?

 

 

Crucifix by Clare Salthill Church

She has a crucifix in Salthill Church and a Madonna and Child on top of the Spanish Arch. By October 1st, 1952, she had sold Spanish Arch House and “so comes to an end another five year span on which the pattern of my life is so inadvertently composed ….. one five year span after another”.  She lived in a guest house run by the Franciscan Convent Hope Castle at Castleblayney before moving to  Allington Castle in Kent where she carved, from bog oak, a celebrated Madonna now at Brede.

The Spartacus piece on Clare is Interesting   http://spartacus-educational.com/Clare_Sheridan.htm

Belmont it looks rather sumptuously renovated. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/buy/the-life-of-sex-scandal-and-tragedy-lived-by-winston-churchills/

From 1956 she lived at Belmont House, Hastings not far from the High Street from where she wrote To the Four Winds in 1957 which was updating her memories.  By this time, her scandalous days were a thing of the past and she lived here until her death in 1970. Clare Sheridan died in 1970 Parnham House Beaminster Dorset aged 84 years and is buried in the churchyard of St George’s, Brede.

Clare’s life is just so intriguing. She had the advantage of her class privilege and her  connections but she carved out her own life and was a liberated woman who did her own thing despite the tragedies of losing her beloved husband when she was so young and her two children Elizabeth and Dick. Her earlier life when she packed in travel, living in wonderful houses, her many lovers, relationships with friends and relatives like Churchill, writing memoirs, articles, interviews and travel chronicles, bringing up children, meeting fascinating people, making friends and all the while sculpting till her contemplative religious life in her latter years.  Her writings are so absorbing and easy to read and I love checking out photos and images.  I am so glad to be able to include her in this assembly of memorable Galway women.

• Russian Portraits (Cape, 1921); published in the U.S as Mayfair to Moscow: Clare Sheridan’s Diary (1921)
• My American Diary (New York, Boni and Liveright, 1922)
• In Many Places (Cape, 1923)
• West to East (1923)
• Stella Defiant (Duckworth, 1923)
• Across Europe with Satanella (Dodd, Mead and Company, 1925)
• The Thirteenth (Duckworth, 1925)
• A Turkish Kaleidoscope (Duckworth, 1926)
• Nuda Veritas (Butterworth, 1927); published in the US as Naked Truth (New York, Harper & Brothers, 1928)
• Green Amber (1929)
• The Substitute Bride (1931)
• Arab Interlude (1936)
• Redskin Interlude (1938)
• Without End (1939)
• My Crowded Sanctuary (Methuen, 1945)
• To the Four Winds (1957)