Virago: ‘A feminist publisher of outstanding books for all readers: Since we began in 1973, our mission has been to champion women’s voices and bring them to the widest possible readership around the world. From fiction and politics to history and classic children’s stories, our writers continue to win acclaim, break new ground and enrich the lives of readers. More recently, as part of our commitment to an ever more inclusive feminism, we also publish and welcome submissions from writers of underrepresented genders.’

Meanwhile, ‘Persephone Books published its first title in the spring of 1999. Founder Nicola Beauman’s original concept was to re-print a handful of ‘lost’ or out-of-print books every year, most of them interwar novels by women.’

Virago has had a slightly complicated corporate history, moving in and out of larger organisations, and is now part of a much larger publishing group, Little, Brown, and thus owned by the French Hachette corporation. It was never only a re-publisher of older texts, and as its name suggests, was always designed to be an aggressive, competitive response to a male-dominated publishing industry. (Collins Dictionary defines Virago as a loud, aggressive or ill-tempered woman; a scold or a shrew!). The iconic Virago Modern Classic series, with its distinctive green spines, was born in 1978. Lennie Goodings, the Canadian-born Chair of Virago, has been with the business since 1978 through all its incarnations, and was the first publisher outside the USA of Maya Angelou, among other groundbreaking female writers.

Persephone Books, now based in Bath, is a much lower key organisation. Persephone was the daughter of Zeus and Demeter, kidnapped by the King of the Underworld, whose return to the surface every spring signalled the beginning of the season of growth. It was founded by Nicola Beauman in a basement in Clerkenwell, London, and its books are beautiful and utterly distinctive:

Persephone books are all grey because – well – we really like grey. It is calm but not boring, serious but not sombre. We also had a vision of a woman who comes home tired from work, and there is a book waiting for her, and it doesn't matter what it looks like because she knows she will enjoy it. Our books look beautiful because we believe that, whether they are on an office desk or hanging in a bag over the handles of a pram, it is important to take pleasure from how they look and feel.

I remember how proud I was in the 1980s to start a collection of Virago titles: Antonia White, Rosamund Lehmann, Winifred Holtby. Then in the 2000s I stumbled upon the Persephone bookshop in Clerkenwell and was entranced. They were slightly pricy, but so beautiful - I felt like the original kiddie in a sweetshop, so utterly spoiled for choice. From memory I rationed myself to just three, or was it four, one of which was the original volume, William: An Englishman, by Cicely Hamilton, and Harriet, by Elizabeth Jenkins, because my daughter, tiny at that time, is a Harriet. I wasn’t very brave in my selections, I had never heard of Dorothy Whipple, an early entrant to the catalogue, or Mollie Panter-Downes or RC Sherriff - I wish I had been more adventurous earlier, as these three authors alone have given me so much pleasure in recent years. I should explain that during lockdown I was awarded a small prize as part of my MA degree, and decided that there could be no nicer way to reward myself, and always be able to identify my prize on the bookshelf, than by investing it all in Persephone. I now have a full shelf, overflowing, and my children never have to ask what to get me for Christmas.

So I am enormously grateful to Carmen Calill, who founded Virago, and Nicola Beauman, recently awarded an OBE, for their vision and tenacity.

All of which is by way of an introduction to the two books I enjoyed last week, being Vera Brittain’s Testament of Friendship, (Virago) and Lettice Cooper’s The New House (Persephone). Very different books, the first being an affectionate and detailed biography of the writer, Winifred Holtby, and the second a light novel focusing on one day of upheaval for a middle class family in thinly-disguised Leeds. But on closer examination they have more in common than might meet the eye, and were published just a few years apart. They both say so much about life for women in the 1930s.

Brittain, Holtby and Cooper are all contemporaries, born in the 1890s and Oxford-educated. All practised their craft as writers by working as journalists: Cooper’s most famous novel, also published by Persephone, is National Provincial, which is based on the life of a young girl working as a journalist on a local paper. Published in 1938, it is the perfect companion piece to Holtby’s greatest novel, South Riding, published posthumously and guided through the press by Holtby’s best friend and literary executor, Vera Brittain. Lettice never married (surely a girl’s name whose time has come again?) and lived with her sister, writing some twenty novels - she and Holtby both wrote for the feminist magazine, Time and Tide, but while Holtby died tragically young, Cooper lived into her nineties, and was dearly loved by her niece-by-marriage, Jilly Cooper, who wrote the Preface to The New House in the Persephone edition.

But apart from their creators’ lives, and the timing of their publication at the end of the 1930s, what do these books have in common? Well, in their own way, they both deal with the position of the young woman in the inter-war period, and the extent to which they could be enabled to take control of their own destinies. Yes, by that time, an intelligent middle class woman would probably be well-educated and would have had the possibility of a university experience, as well as the vote - but then what? Most would marry, and abdicate responsibility for worrying about money, probably with a couple of well-planned children to fill their days. But even then, the hours could drag - the lucky families would still employ a cook and at least a maid, so how to pass the time? And of course, in the aftermath of the War, there were fewer eligible bachelors.

Winifred Holtby was blessed in one way - she never married, but she had a supportive mother, proud of her daughter’s career, and friends such as Vera to encourage her to write and get published. Vera and Winifred left Oxford in the early 1920s and took a flat together in London, determined to make careers for themselves. And they felt themselves, post-war, on the brink of an exciting new world:

Nothing is now left of those nineteen-twenties, with their exhilarating certainty that mankind could learn from experience in one or two decades…In Doughty Street we had few comforts and no luxuries except a tortoise called Adolphus, which died prematurely because we anxiously roused it and fed it when it should have been hibernating…Neither of us had ever known any pleasure quite equal to the joy of coming home at the end of the day after a series of separate varied experiences, and each recounting these incidents to each other over late biscuits and tea.

The fictional heroine of Cooper’s The New House is Rhoda, the only one of three children of a wealthy Leeds family who has not married, and hence has drawn the short straw of being the one left behind to look after an increasingly self-absorbed and selfish widowed mother. The novel opens on the day when the family house has been sold, to a developer who will knock it down and build an estate of smaller houses, and mother and daughter must move into more sensible accommodation. But Rhoda is frustrated, unhappy, bored - living the life that both Holtby and Brittain were only too aware that they had managed to dodge. How can she escape? Over the course of the day, Rhoda becomes tempted by the chance to move to London, to take over the job of her sister who is getting married, to start an independent life. If she can have any chance of achieving independence, it will depend on her mother being prepared to let her go. No spoilers here, but a lovely novel, and cleverly constructed, as the point of view moves around the family, to the unhappily married brother, to the maiden aunt that Rhoda fears to become, and to the mother, bereft of the husband who had sheltered her all her life.

Brittain’s biography of Holtby is lengthy and clearly written by a woman grieving for her friend and worried that she had taken her for granted, missed the signs of fatal disease. I did not know that Holtby had spent so long in South Africa and become so involved in racial politics. ‘She went out an eager uncritical girl, full of enthusiasms, a little sentimental; she returned a young woman, balanced, experienced, confident, mature….She went to preach the gospel of peace to white South Africa; she returned to plead, with passion and pertinacity, the cause of Black South Africa to an indifferent England.’

Vera and Winifred’s friendship was mutually sustaining; while Vera encouraged Winifred to write, Winifred enabled Vera to keep writing even after she had two children ‘not out of pure altruism, but because she knew that the integrity of the artist depends, if the artist happens to be a woman, upon fighting successfully against the tradition that domesticity must be the first preoccupation of a wife and mother.’

I particularly enjoyed this discussion of a pamphlet Holtby wrote in 1934 called Women in a Changing Civilisation. As Brittain writes:

No one knew better than she…the exasperating sense of guilt that assails the professional woman who continues her work when her household is suffering from some minor inconvenience which any of its members could put right if they chose.

I’ve certainly been there…

Finally, yesterday was a very strange day for me - I went back to see what has happened to my old school…and it is the most extraordinary and wonderful transformation.

In the heart of Sherborne, Dorset, stands the building that once housed Lord Digby’s School for Girls. It closed in 1992, a dozen years after I left, and stood empty and unused for some time. Since 2024, thanks to the extraordinary generosity and energy of a man called Michael Cannon, who sadly did not survive to see his vision completed, it now stands proud as The Sherborne, an arts centre and restaurant. Our hockey pitch and science blocks made way for new housing, but just look at what has been achieved on the main site. The house, built in the eighteenth century, was once the abode of the actor William Charles Macready: Dickens, Browning and Thackeray all stayed there, but its crowning glory were the murals that decorated the main staircase, painted by Sir James Thornhill and now restored to glorious technicolour. When I was there, they seemed to be several shades of greeny-grey:

Certainly this is not how I remember the canteen:

Or the loos:

The only room still noted for its original purpose was the Art Room, and I now learn that, before my time, the art mistress was Ruth Gervis, sister of Noel Streatfeild, whose books she illustrated.

There are new murals on the back staircase, painted by Quentin Blake

We only ate a snack lunch on the front terrace, but it was delicious. If you are passing through Dorset, I could not recommend it more highly.

It has come a long way since it was the home of My Miss Austen!

However, my book progresses: I am delighted to report that I have now managed to track down and talk to all of the surviving children of my Wives of Power, mostly in their seventies and eighties. And without fail, the delighted cry is ‘My mother? you want to write about my mum? That’s fantastic!’. So I am enormously grateful for their help and support.

Meanwhile, here is a revised version of a piece I published two years ago, for those who never read it (or have forgotten - after all, when I revisit one of my old pieces, they are often a complete surprise to me!)

What does Thomas Carlyle mean to you? If anything?

You may be a fan, you may even have read some of his books (early confession: I haven’t). But nearly 150 years since his death, the extraordinary impact of this man on Victorian society and culture has almost dissipated. You may know of him as the founder of the London Library, you may remember that he is the poor soul whose first manuscript of The French Revolution was used as a firelighter by John Stuart Mill’s maid. He survives in social media as a source of pithy epigrams such as:

‘The three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing, and the Protestant religion.’

‘The history of the world is but a biography of great men.’

‘Work is the grand cure for all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind,—honest work, which you intend getting done.’

Here is a remark quoted by friends of his and in his biography by a contemporary:

‘If Jesus Christ were to come today, people would not even crucify him. They would ask him to dinner, and hear what he had to say, and make fun of it’.

And one of my favourites, which seems to take on even more weight in this age of Tech-bros, AI and gazillionaires:

Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand,—one begins to be weary of all that. Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause:—it is the Gospel of Despair!

You may also have come across him in Phyllis Rose’s famous biographical study of five Victorian marriages, Parallel Lives - she coined the ‘crackpot curmudgeon’ phrase which I love.

Carlyle first truly penetrated my consciousness when I was researching the lives of the Macmillan brothers. Suffice it to say, they were HUGE fans. They first came across his writings in 1840, when they were young shop assistants working at Seeley’s bookstore in The Strand. The fact that he originated, as they did, in fairly humble circumstances in Scotland, born just sixty miles from their home town of Irvine, may have helped form a bond. We know that Sartor Resartus, one of Carlyle’s earliest and oddest works, became their favourite book. Daniel would read chunks of it to Alexander while he was dressing in the morning in their lodgings in Charterhouse Square: Alexander being the most junior of shop assistants had to get up early to open the shop.

In January 1840, shortly after Carlyle published his pamphlet on Chartism, the author wrote in a letter to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson of an unexpected visit he had received: ‘Many applications have been made to me here: none more touching to me than one, the day before yesterday, by a fine innocent-looking Scotch lad, in the name of himself and certain other Booksellers’ shopmen eastward in the City! I cannot get them out of my head. Poor fellows! they have nobody to say an honest word to them, in this articulate-speaking world, and they apply to me.’ And again that same week he wrote to his mother “The day before yesterday, an innocent blithe wise-looking Scotch lad called upon me with a humble petition, which in his blateness [shyness] he could hardly get uttered, That I would come eastward into “the City” (the trading part of London), and lecture on any or on all sorts of things to certain young Booksellers’ shopmen and others of the like, who were very anxious about it! The more I think of these poor fellows, I am the more struck with such a request. They have nobody to preach a rational syllable to them on any subject whatever; and they want to hear rational words! I have half a mind sometimes to break out tumultuously, and begin lecturing like a lion over the whole world. But it is better, I do [believe], to stay at home quietly and write.” When I first read this in Carlyle’s letters, I really wanted this ‘Scotch lad’ to have been Daniel Macmillan; it turned out that it wasn’t, but I did discover that he was at least one of the group of enthusiastic shopmen who had sent the messenger.

Carlyle kept popping up in the life story of Alexander Macmillan: eventually Alexander would be introduced to the great sage by David Masson, another Scot, who was the editor of Macmillan’s Magazine. Never one to miss an opportunity for networking, Alexander cultivated a friendship between Mrs Carlyle and his wife Caroline, inviting her to stay at his rather grand house in Tooting. Mrs Carlyle, it has to be said, always welcomed the chance to take a break from Thomas. The first visit in June 1865 was only a limited success; although Jane had enjoyed listening to Alexander singing Scotch songs, accompanied by the governess on the piano (Alexander would sing Scottish ballads at the drop of a hat, I fear), she was kept awake by the barking of the Macmillans’ dog. However when she returned a few days later, the dog was confined to the washhouse, and Alexander gave her a toddy of whisky. She slept much better…

Both Alexander and his editor, David Masson, were determined to commission some writing from Carlyle for the Magazine. Unfortunately, when it arrived, it was extremely controversial. In a publication known for being one of the most pro-North, anti-slavery titles in England during the American Civil War, Carlyle produced a very short piece, a dialogue, which characterised the dispute about emancipation in very unhappy terms, seeming to imply that it might be better to be a ‘slave for life’ in the South, than an unemployed worker in the North. Masson sat on it for a few months, but eventually it was published, to a storm of protest from some of Alexander’s closest Christian Socialist friends, including John Ludlow and FD Maurice. Ludlow wrote ‘It is a lie and the bad old man who wrote it knows it to be such’. Alexander’s reply is worth repeating:

My firm conviction that Thomas Carlyle is wrong in thinking that slavery and service from man to man for life are synonymous, does not render me unjust towards him. He is not a “bad old man” but a very noble and useful one, and even his wrong sayings have wisdom and significance in them which are wanting in the rabid vapid utterance of deepest truths.

The ‘rabid, vapid utterance’….Macmillan could coin a phrase when he wanted to, as well…

Finally, the Magazine had the ‘honour’ to print Carlyle’s final piece of political journalism, although again, it must have pained the very liberal Macmillan and his readers. ‘Shooting Niagara’, as the piece was called, was a diatribe against popular suffrage, at a time when electoral reform was extending the vote far more widely. Carlyle was not a fan of ‘the people’, and had no time for democracy: he was, to use Phyllis Rose’s phrasing again, a ‘romantic authoritarian.’ As he wrote, ‘Democracy means despair of finding any heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them.’ He thought that extending the vote to the masses was like going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The words hurt, but copies of the magazine flew off the shelves.

When I was researching my book, Literature for the People, I paid a visit to the Carlyles’ house in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, close to the river. On the wall I saw framed a testimonial to Carlyle, signed by all the great and the good of Victorian England, including, to my delight, Alexander Macmillan. One sunny day after the book came out, I was delighted to be invited back by the curator to talk to the volunteers who look after the house for the National Trust, about the Macmillans and their relationship with the Carlyles.

It rounded off what had been quite a Carlyle day, as I had spent the morning enjoying my newly purchased full membership of the London Library, working on my next project.

It was an excuse for me to think some more about Thomas and his wife Jane, a marriage which has been the subject of so many books, biographies and theories. It took Thomas many years to woo Jane. She was a very well-educated and attractive young woman, came from a better family, and was pursued by many men before she settled on Thomas. The truth is she was lured by the idea of being allowed to minister to the daily needs of a man of genius, delighted to be marrying ‘a scholar, a poet, a philosopher, a wise and noble man.’ However, the idealism faded in the harsh reality of a long childless marriage to a man who was permanently preoccupied and very ungrateful.

Jane was said by many to be the cleverest woman in London, and she made a comic turn of herself for public consumption as the heroic housewife in the service of exasperating genius. But her diaries told a very different story, of an increasingly embittered and jealous woman. She died suddenly in April 1866, and when Carlyle found and read these diaries he was horrified. A man who purported to understand so much about the world, had known nothing about his wife. He spent the rest of his life trying to put right what could obviously not be mended, writing his wife’s biography in the most effusive of terms.

Their marriage, as described in Carlyle’s Reminiscences and in his friend Froude’s biography, became a byword for unhappiness: the joke was repeated that the Carlyles married each other so that only two people would be unhappy, not four. Carlyle himself wrote ‘The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none’, and he was clearly unconscious of his own greatest fault: unkindness to his wife.

If the Carlyles lived today, Jane would probably have a funny diary column in The Spectator, and could write at length about her highly satisfactory divorce and her visits to various New Age health spas. And Thomas would be a Twitter-warrior, all over the internet venting his spleen when the MSM were too scared to publish him any more. I think Musk would have fitted right into Carlyle’s ‘great man of history’ theory, and the two of them would be re-tweeting each other constantly.

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So, how to sum up my relationship with Carlyle? I’m glad that his history of the French Revolution gave us Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities. I think a visit to Cheyne Row is always a delight. The London Library is wonderful. I’m quite happy that his words can inspire so many T-shirt slogans. I still don’t think I have the time or inclination to read any of his books. I am glad that by publishing even his ‘masterpieces of reaction’, Alexander Macmillan was able to demonstrate a laudable commitment to free speech. I do not approve of ‘cancel culture’ and all its works. But in terms of his politics, and in how he so badly misunderstood and mismanaged the most basic of human relationships, I hope that he can remain a figure of the past, and not an influence on the present.

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(Time and Tide, 25 November 1927)

Forgive me, subscribers, for I have sinned. It has been four weeks since my last post…

In my defence, I have been very busy in pursuit of my Wives of Power, (the deadline approaches, slowly) and very enjoyable it has been. The chase has taken me to the Churchill Archives in Cambridge (three times now!), to the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, to the Archives at Kew and the LSE, to a rather hot little room studying the Board minutes at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and tomorrow I will be back in the Bodleian in Oxford. And all because I want to do full justice to my twelve women and the extraordinary, pioneering lives they lived. Yes, they were married to famous, important, powerful men, MPs whose careers needed visible, public support in the constituency or in the gallery of the House of Commons. Yes they (mostly) had children to raise and households to manage. But neither of these responsibilities held these women back from living their own lives, building their own careers, fighting their own battles.

Why is what they did so important? Because they were swimming against a strong tide, the post-World War Two tide that wanted to sweep women back into the kitchen, to ensure that not only would there be enough jobs to go round for the men, but comfortable homes and sustaining meals for them to come back to in the evening.

It had happened after the First World War: in 1918, as the war ended, there were six million women in Britain in paid employment. Rapid demobilisation which sent the men home to reclaim their old positions put half a million women out of work within six months. The numbers of women registering for unemployment benefit only dropped when the authorities began to insist that a woman seeking work should be prepared to enter domestic service. Funnily enough, they weren’t keen.

Throughout the 1920s and 30s the trade unions were overwhelmingly protective of male rights; barriers to women working were erected around certain industries, and the introduction of the marriage bar in the civil service and teaching professions forced even more women back into the home. The civil service lost nearly five per cent of its female workforce every year just because they chose to marry. Many medical colleges stopped admitting women, or introduced a quota system, which extraordinarily continued into the 1960s. Sir George Barnes, a Labour MP, said ‘If I were an employer just now, I would have an enquiry made as to the condition in life of my women workers and I would weed out all those not dependent on their own work for means of living.’

By the time the Second World War came around, women had got smarter, and the jobs they were asked to do were more interesting, more challenging and carried more responsibility. Unmarried women, and married women with older children, were subject to conscription, either into the armed forces or into industry. By 1943, 46 per cent of all women aged between 14 and 59 were doing paid work. But just four years later, the number of married women in employment had shrunk to fewer than one in five. Yet again, they were being asked to make way for the men. This time, there was more resistance. Vera Brittain, the peace campaigner, would say that ‘my great object is to prove that work and maternity are not mutually exclusive’.

So how to persuade the vast majority of women, who were now better educated and more likely to practise family planning (and so spend less of their lives simply producing babies) that they should stay at home? One way is to make them feel too guilty to leave; the other is to modify their education so they are unable to compete. Enter two particularly powerful voices, in what Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, would call ‘a new and subtle form of anti-feminism’: Dr John Bowlby, and John Newsom.

John Bowlby was a Cambridge-educated British psycho-analyst who had been brought up in a large, wealthy family by a nanny, and sent away to boarding school when he was seven. During WW2 he spent a lot of time studying the behaviour of children who had been evacuated from London as well as some of the children of the Kindertransport: after the war, he was Deputy Director of the Tavistock Clinic, and from 1950, Mental Health Consultant to the World Health Organization. In 1951 he published a report for the WHO, Maternal Care and Mental Health, which analysed the psychological damage done to children who had been orphaned or abandoned during the war and effectively institutionalised. These were clearly a set of very unhappy but extreme cases. Nevertheless, the report concluded that, to quote from Wikipedia:

The infant and young child should experience a warm, intimate, and continuous relationship with his mother (or permanent mother substitute) in which both find satisfaction and enjoyment and that not to do so may have significant and irreversible mental health consequences.

That ‘the prolonged separation of a child from his mother during the first five years of life stands foremost among the causes of delinquent behaviour’ became accepted folklore across Britain…and of course fathers were completely absolved! Bowlby’s development of this theory and its linked concept, separation anxiety, was quickly recognised and adopted by politicians keen to guilt women into giving up their careers and staying at home with the children. It combined with a growing social concern about rising levels of juvenile delinquency. Of course, for most mothers, staying at home full time was an unaffordable luxury - if the family needed a second income to survive, then some form of childcare would be found, whether a creche or a grandparent. But for those couples who did not need a second income, there was great social pressure to stay at home and be a good mum. As Ruth Adam pointed out in A Woman’s Place, published in 1975 (and now re-published by Persephone Books):

The graduate mothers of the post-war era, who stayed dutifully by the baby’s side for fear of doing psychological damage, were probably the first highly-educated women in history expected to make themselves the body slaves of their own child, since any mother before them who had been in the financial group able to allow girls to become learned, had taken care to pay someone else to mind the baby.

But what to do about those troublesome women who thought that staying at home was a waste of their education? Along came another John, later Sir John Newsom, who thought that the answer to this was to change the educational curriculum of the girls. After all, if only one per cent of post WW2 girls were getting university places, what was the point in teaching all the other girls a lot of stuff they would never need?

Newsom’s theory got full expression in a book he published in 1948, The Education of Girls. In case you think that I am quoting some peculiar and distant offshoot of the patriarchy here, let me add that it was published by the well-respected house of Faber and Faber, and the foreword was contributed by RA Butler, recently Minster for Education, whose 1944 Education Act set the standard for secondary education in England through to the 1960s. Butler wrote, perhaps showing some nervousness:

Even though our girls may be taught to be good cooks and mothers, we cannot with our present limited manpower resources risk leaving undeveloped the mind of any girl who can serve her homeland as well as [Mr Newsom] would wish her to serve her home.

But Mr Newsom was having none of this. His thesis is to me absolutely jaw-dropping. Here are some extracts - was he being unnecessarily provocative, argumentative? Did he actually believe this stuff?

I have little patience with the woman who wants to leave husband and children to the care of paid labour while she herself seeks outside work because it is more intellectual. To my mind the ordering of the home, the bringing up of children, the bringing to the home the best possible help that modern achievements can provide, require not merely the greatest effort, but the most sustained effort of service, that infinite capacity for taking pains which amounts to genius.

and

It is also true, though it will be hotly denied, that in many girls’ grammar schools the more intellectually able pupils take a second foreign language while the less able are allowed to take domestic science, forgetful of Samuel Johnson’s dictum that ‘a man is better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife talks Greek.’ To those who argue that women have the right to learn two foreign languages, my reply is that just as much intelligence is required to attain high honours in the domestic arts, and that to produce an Homard a l’Americaine to perfection needs as much as with as to construe one of the more obscure passages of Berenice.

and

The future of women’s education lies not in attempting to iron out their differences from men, to reduce them to neuters, but to teach girls how to grow into women and to re-learn the graces which so many have forgotten in the past 30 years.

I could go on quoting passage after passage. He has a particularly low opinion of most girl school leavers:

[A girl leaving school] wants good money quickly…because money enables her to be self-supporting and to buy those clothes, cosmetics, ‘perms’, visits to the cinema and dance hall which are vital equipment in her primary task of securing her man.

Nor does he have much of an opinion of the girl who might want to study, as she is wasting her efforts:

the grammar school girl, if she has ever attempted domestic science, is far too busy doing her homework…to get down to such a sordid subject as boeuf bourguignonne or a crème caramel…It is an expensive business to become a doctor or an architect and only the outstandingly brilliant girl will get her post-school or even post-university training subsidised out of public funds. Many parents cannot afford to give their daughter these advantages and if there are boys of equal capacity in the family they have first call on its resources.

Newsom argued that the 99% of girls who would not be going to university should only be taught a more sophisticated form of domestic science, with some basic health and childcare thrown in, and enough knowledge of household budgeting to stop them being a nuisance to their poor husbands. And he was not alone in this, after all, the Ministry of Education had recently published Circular 117 which stated that ‘an incalculable sum of human happiness and efficiency depends upon the knowledge and skill applied to the running of the home and the upbringing of children.’

Newsom was an increasingly well-regarded educationalist. After this book, whose prescriptions luckily were never actually adopted by any British government, he went on to chair a very sensible commission in the early 1960s that recommended that far more resources should be expended on educating the children of the slums, and those with below average educational ability. Of course he could not have foreseen that the British economy of the 1950s and ‘60s would require a massive expansion of the workforce, such that it would no longer be economically feasible to exclude 99% of women from working. The sadness is that he also could not imagine how much our national business, cultural and social life would be enhanced and enriched by allowing men AND women to participate.

Of course, to be fair to Newsom (if I must), women were not particularly welcomed in the workplace. As late as 1971, a survey carried out by PEP, the economic thinktank, undertook a survey of women who had managed to reach senior positions.1 They noted that post-War there had been a significant expansion of what could be termed ‘women-friendly’ career opportunities in new booming industries such as advertising, marketing and even computing. But there were some areas, such as City finance, that were still completely male-dominated. PEP focused on the BBC, which although a Government quango, was more progressive than the Civil Service - equal pay, no marriage bar, senior women in very senior positions at its founding. One of the first five Governors in 1927 was a woman. In 1950, Mary Somerville became the first female Programme Controller. But still the bastions of power seemed impregnable, and the number of women in senior positions was, if anything, declining.

PEP discovered that only 5% of the top jobs were held by women - a statistic that cannot have been helped by the General Training Scheme, founded in 1954, which did not admit women until 1960. There were no women reporters on national news programmes - the British Public ‘couldn’t possibly trust a woman on politics.’ The PEP survey continues with direct quotes from BBC staff:

Men are considered to make good managers in more cases than women…Probably among the very senior staff there is a feeling that women are more emotional and more dangerous in high office…No film crew wants to be told what to do by a woman…I should hate working for a woman…

And this is probably my favourite, from ‘a former top BBC man’:

The General Training Scheme militates against women. We’re looking for future Director Generals - and that’s by definition a man.

(NB There has never been a female Director-General of the BBC)

Whatever Bowlby and Newsom and their disciples thought, the fact remains that throughout the 1950s and 60s the number of married women, mothers included, who entered the workforce and stayed in it continued to rise. By 1961, more than half of married women were working, up from only 18% in the years immediately after the war. They wanted the luxuries that money could buy - the second car, the foreign holiday, the labour-saving dishwasher. But they also wanted the dignity, independence and fulfilment that having one’s own pay cheque can bring.

The life of washing up dishes in little separate houses and being necessarily subordinate in everything to the wage-earning man is I think very destructive to the women and to any opinion they may influence. It is humiliating and narrowing and there is nothing to be said in its favour. (Amber Reeves)

The battle for equal pay and to end sex discrimination finally achieved concrete results under the Wilson Governments of the 1960s and 70s, but it still continues. When I worked in corporate finance in the City in the 1980s, I was kicked off the team advising a certain well-known housebuilding client because its larger than life Chief Executive ‘did not want any effing women on his account’. My bosses were perfectly happy to oblige him, despite my complaints.

The twelve women I am currently researching, the Wives of Power, built their careers in a society which did not value women’s contribution - did not pay them properly, discriminated against them in the workplace, did not give them the same educational opportunities, and subjected them to harassment and abuse in far too many environments. It makes their achievements all the more remarkable.

The bad news is that I haven’t written an original Substack post for over a month. And today will be a bit scrappy, but I hope amusing? When I first started Substack, I used it to share the bits of the Macmillan story that didn’t make the cut, but seemed to me worth highlighting. Today I am going to share two wonderful bits of history that sadly won’t make it into Wives of Power - but I hope you will enjoy them.

The first is extraordinarily topical - today’s headline is that the birthrate in Britain is falling dangerously low - soon there won’t be enough young people to keep me in my old age. Very scary. But it is not a new worry…in the 1930s, the powers that be were similarly concerned about a falling birthrate, attributed to the Depression and of course to the shortage of available husbands. Before they could get round to doing anything about it the war broke out - but as the dust cleared in 1944, fearing that the situation would surely have deteriorated further, a Royal Commission on Population was established. Led by an eminent economist, Sir Hubert Douglas Henderson, it examined biological, social and economic factors that might be causing the problem. It finally published its report in 1949, but nothing resulted, as of course by then Britain was experiencing a very healthy post-War Baby Boom! Which was a shame, as it was full of very sensible suggestions aimed at improving the lives of mothers.

In among all the eminent scientists and economists and statisticians, it was felt that there needed to be some ordinary common sense, preferably someone who knew a little about motherhood and families, and the person they picked was Peggy Jay, already developing a reputation as a formidable Labour politician, a London County Councillor, with two small boys already and twins on the way.

And in among her papers in the Churchill Archives in Cambridge is this wonderful document, a submission to the Commission from an extremely harrassed and unhappy mother.1 I want to share it with you:

A Woman’s Day, 25 September 1944

Since I have been asked to give an account of an average day, I think it well to give first some details of the family. My husband, an architect in peacetime, is a Flight Lieutenant, living at home. He leaves the house at 8.15am and returns at 7.35pm, with one free day one week and two the next. There are five children, three girls ages 12, 8 and 5 ½, and two boys 4 and ten months. The house is a large one, eight rooms on four floors. The only help I have is a daily ‘mother’s help’ from 9-6. If it were not for the assistance of relatives I should not be able to afford even this help as we have no resources other than my husband’s pay and allowances. I feel very strongly that if it is possible to organise help it should be at rates within the means of young parents with children.

An Average Day

5.45am Get up. Feed and dress baby and have cup of tea.

6.15 Dress myself and clear up

6.45 Get up 4 other children and start them dressing. The eldest dresses the 4 year old

7.15 Go downstairs and start breakfast

7.30 My husband does boiler and brings up coke and does fire in drawing room in winter.

7.30 12 year comes down and finishes breakfast while I finish getting the next three ready

7.45 Breakfast

8.15 Husband leaves. I get 8, 5 ½ and 4 ready for school and make six beds with help of 12 and 8

8.40 Eldest leaves for school

9am ‘Help’ arrives and takes 8, 5 ½ and 4 to school and does shopping

I put baby in pram and clear up nursery etc

9.30 Wash up breakfast and clear and sweep kitchen.

10.15-1pm Cook dinner for 4 to 7 people. The children come home for lunch except 12 year old, and the 8 and 5 ½ stay at school two days a week

Also either do drawing room, hall and stairs OR two children’s rooms on top floor OR basement and stairs OR Scrub kitchen floor OR washing clothes. ‘Help’ does nursery, our bedroom and bathroom and children’s washing, before fetching them from school at 12.30.

Ipm Lunch

2-3pm Wash up lunch and clear up kitchen which is a large one where we also have meals

3-4.15pm Finish housework not done in morning OR take baby to clinic OR by tube and bus for sunlight treatment

4.15pm Tea

5pm Rake and stoke boiler. Do odd jobs with children. Get baby’s pram ready and uncover beds – four children sleep in shelter, and the baby in pram and husband and myself in room adjoining in basement.

5.45-6.30 Put 5 ½ and 4 years to bed

5-6pm The ‘Help’ washes up tea and puts baby to bed.

6.30 Start 8 yrs old off to bed. Do ironing until 7pm

7pm Start supper

7.15pm 12 years has her supper

7.35 Husband comes home

7.50 Supper

8.30-9 Wash up supper and lay breakfast while my husband does shoes, boiler and brings up coke and does blackout

9-10pm Sit down and do mending, knitting, reading and writing letters etc

10pm Lift and change baby

11-11.15 In bed.

I think it is a wonderful social document. I had many thoughts while reading it, most of them involving sheer exhaustion, and huge gratitude to whoever invented central heating. It also made me feel that I was standing in the middle of one of my favourite children’s books, Peepo by Allan and Janet Ahlberg:

My second little nugget, this time of delight, was when I was reading Hansard, the Parliamentary document of record, to make sure I had my facts straight about another of my women subjects, Audrey Callaghan. Audrey, like Peggy Jay, was an extremely motivated and determined Labour councillor, a GLC alderman, and then from 1969 until 1982, the chair of Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. After she stepped down from this high profile role, she continued to be a very active fundraiser for the institution. In 1988 she spotted that the copyright on all royalties from JM Barrie’s work, Peter Pan, which he had gifted to GOSH, was due to expire. Her husband Jim, by this time Lord Callaghan in the House of Lords, proposed a private member’s amendment to the Copyright Bill then going through Parliament, which gave GOSH the right to these royalties in perpetuity. This right, the only one ever granted, exists to this day. Just three years after the legislation went through, Steven Spielberg released the film Hook and GOSH had its largest windfall ever:

The debate in the House of Lords is a complete joy, it is somehow comforting to know that everyone can have a sense of humour, and that even Lords were children once. I should explain that the only dissenting voice was Lord Willis, formerly known as Ted Willis, a famous scriptwriter, creator of Dixon of Dock Green, who was very worried about the precedent being set. Here are my edited highlights of the debate:

Lord Willis:

My Lords, many years ago in America, during the McCarthy regime, it was customary and in fact necessary for a speaker to get up and say, “I want to assure my audience that I hate Stalin, I hate Russia, I hate everything to do with Communism, but I do think that our rates are too high”. I have to say that I like the noble Lord, Lord Callaghan, but I think that his amendment is wrong. I looked at it in wonder when I read it. I thought to myself, “How great is the power of ex-Prime Ministers; the song is ended, but the memory lingers on”.

Nobody in this House or outside it can exceed me in my desire to help sick children or the hospital. But what are we proposing in this amendment? We are asking the theatre to subsidise the National Health Service. A theatre puts on a production of Peter Pan and the money goes to the stricken hospital at Great Ormond Street. Where are we going down that path? There are many very good children’s charities, and there are very many good authors who have left legacies in their will to particular charities. I do not think that it is any part of the theatre’s job to subsidise hospitals in any way. I think that it is totally wrong…

Lord Ardwick:

My Lords, before my noble friend sits down perhaps I may ask him a question which is rather more personal than we are used to in this Chamber. Was he one of those cynical little boys who during the performance of Peter Pan refused to clap and so proclaim his belief in fairies and would have allowed poor Tinkerbell to expire? That is what he is doing this afternoon.

Lord Willis:

My Lords, I must tell my noble friend that one of my greatest friends was Tinkerbell.

Lord Charteris of Amisfield:

My Lords, I rise to support the amendment not simply because Captain Hook was an Old Etonian—and he was!—but for a slightly more personal reason. I suspect that I and my brother, the noble Earl, Lord Wemyss, who is not present this afternoon, may be the only two members of your Lordships’ House who, in company with their grandfather and six other children, had two plays especially written for them to act in by James Barrie. Not only did he write the plays for us; he also rehearsed us personally. I can tell your Lordships that it was a most terrifying and awe-inspiring experience. However, in spite of being a frightening man, he was a great lover of children and I know from what I remember of him that if he had realised what was going to happen he would have been absolutely fascinated and delighted by it. It is for that reason that I hope your Lordships will support the amendment, which is extremely imaginative. It is right that the work of James Barrie, which has given so much pleasure to children for so many years, should continue to bring comfort to those who are in trouble.

Baroness Strange:

My Lords, J. M. Barrie once wrote that: “When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies”.

On that basis, if on no other, we must all believe in fairies. Fairies come in many guises, not only in tinsel dresses and with gauze wings. At all events they are little people who grant wishes and do good deeds around the world. We can do no greater good or give more lasting happiness than by accepting this amendment that has been put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Callaghan, so that the money from Peter Pan, J. M. Barrie’s own play about fairies, can go for ever to the sick children of the Great Ormond Street Hospital, and in future ensure that every time one of those children laughs more fairies are born to create more joy in the world.

The Debate eventually concluded with Lord Callaghan thanking the House for its support:

I am deeply grateful for what has been said. I suppose that the noble Lord, Lord Charteris, must be the only Member of this House who has the fortune, at this late stage, to have known Sir James Barrie personally.

Lord Hailsham of Saint Marylebone:

My Lords, I knew him quite well.

Lord Callaghan of Cardiff:

My Lords, I might have known that the former Lord Chancellor knew him well! Perhaps I had better be careful what I say. I am not sure that he has been produced in a play that has been written specially for him by Sir James Barrie. At least let us give that distinction to the noble Lord, Lord Charteris. It accounts for a great deal in his character that I have come to like and admire in the years since.

One final thought: I am currently reading Mary Swann, a novel by Carol Shields, written in 1993. It concerns a group of people, some academics, some not, who are picking over the literary bones of a lesser-known poet from an Ontario farmstead. Shields has her tongue firmly in her cheek - could Mary Swann, poet, ever have imagined that her very primitive scribblings would be pored over and analysed to death in this way. One of the characters, the rather unfortunate Morton Jimroy, is trying to create a biography of this woman, out of the few whisps of straw that survive. But I will end on this rather excellent line, which Shields calls ‘a rather endearing piece of professional exposition:

“The oxygen of the biographer is not, as some would think, speculation; it is the small careful proofs that he pins down and sits hard upon.”’

Today I am sharing two of my small careful proofs with you. I hope you enjoy them.

I love historical novels. I always have. I think some of my most memorable reading experiences as a child were stories of time shift, where ordinary children suddenly found themselves witnessing the past, walking among ghosts, watching historical events unfold around them. For an isolated child like me, with brother and sister both grown up and gone, these were wonderful revelations of where exciting companions might spring from, and different worlds that could be visited. I’m remembering Alison Uttley’s A Traveller in Time, LM Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe, and Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden. All of these featured children left alone and looking for company in a strange new location, with the added advantage that although the past was glimpsed, sometimes only in a dream, the real world could be easily regained if adventures became too frightening or intense.

Not all of the books I loved as a child had this timeslip effect: some were pure Victorian gothic: Joan Aiken’s The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, and Antonia Barber’s The Ghosts, made into a lovely, if rather scary film called The Amazing Mr Blunden.

And then I discovered Jean Plaidy in my teenage years, and suddenly I knew more about intrigue, sex and murder at the court of Catherine de Medici than any fourteen year old could need or should want. I lapped them up, the Medicis, the Borgias, the Tudor Series, and a particular favourite, The Goldsmith’s Wife, which was about Jane Shore, the mistress of Edward IV. I thought I had read most of Plaidy’s work, but a quick trip to Wikipedia today tells me that she must have been one of the most prolific novelists of all time and I barely scratched the surface. In a fifty year career, starting in 1941, she published over 190 novels using eight different pseudonyms. She wasn’t even called Jean Plaidy - her real name was Eleanor Alice Burford. Very recently I picked up Madame Serpent, the first of the Medici sequence, in a junk shop, but I’m too nervous to start reading it in case the magic has fled. Because, of course, since then I have discovered so many more masters and mistresses of the art.

Historical novels today, unlike spy stories, romances, thrillers or fantasy, can hold their heads high as a respected genre of literary fiction. Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies have been more than worthy Booker Prize winners, as was The Luminaries, by Eleanor Catton, which won in 2013.

I loved this book, with its clever plot, its hint of the supernatural, and its unusual structure. It is one of those creations where I am just blown away by the skill with which the writer has immersed me in a very specific time and place: it’s the Gold Rush in New Zealand in 1866. Like everyone else, I suppose, I read fiction to be taken out of myself, to appreciate the vast scope of human experience and to be shown a different life, and Catton has completely succeeded in this novel. I mention it because she was only in her twenties when she wrote it, and I think that even if I spent the next decade researching a particular period of history I would not be able to bring a tenth of the wealth of detail and authenticity that she does to the page. Hey-ho!

Historical fiction has been around almost as long as novels themselves. I’m no expert, but I imagine that the genre really took off with Sir Walter Scott in the 1820s, the Waverley novels and then Ivanhoe being publishing phenomena. Scott had cottoned on to the essential truth of the genre: that houses and fashions and politics may change, but people stay the same. He described this best in the opening chapter of Waverley: there are ‘passions common to men in all stages of society, and which have alike agitated the human heart, whether it throbbed under the steel corslet of the fifteenth century, the brocaded coat of the eighteenth, or the blue frock and white dimity waistcoat of the present day.’

The trick to great historical fiction is to get the mix right. Obviously the author has to avoid anachronisms: one of my favourite Tudor crimesolvers, Shardlake, would have found his life immeasurably improved by access to a mobile phone. Although I don’t think SG Maclean’s Damian Seeker could have improved on his beautiful black stallion for getting round the back streets of London. Dialogue, in particular, is tricky to get right, it has to sound authentic…but too much archaic language can put the reader off. When the Victorian cleric Charles Kingsley was creating the work that first made his fortune, Westward Ho!, he wanted it to be a convincing portrait of Elizabethan seafaring life. But his very wise publisher, Daniel Macmillan, cautioned him about overdoing the Gadzooks and Verilys: ‘The style is now getting a bore. The free march of your own style will be much more Elizabethan in manner and tone than any you can assume. We feel sure it will be a right brave and noble book, and do good to England…’

All of which brings me to the two novels I have read recently, both published in the last ten years. The first is an absolute behemoth of a book, Death and Mr Pickwick, by Stephen Jarvis.

800 pages of close-set type is not something to be undertaken lightly, and I had to tackle this book in two halves, with some light reading in between. Jarvis has an argument to make, which is that Charles Dickens was not the original creator of Mr Pickwick: that honour falls, in a closely-evidenced plot, to the artist and engraver Robert Seymour, who famously killed himself shortly after the first instalment of The Pickwick Papers was published. Dickens, and Chapman his publisher, had to scrabble around to find a replacement illustrator, and landed on Hablot Browne, otherwise known as Phiz, to go with Boz, Dickens’ pen name. I suspect if I were not so interested and emotionally involved in the world of Victorian publishing, I would not have been brave enough to pick this book up, but I am glad I persisted with it. Of course all the best and funniest lines belong to the Pickwickians themselves. The fact that the book is only text, so that Seymour’s illustrations have to be described in words, and put into context, as Dickens did for him, weakens Jarvis’ case for its originality. But it remains a fascinating study of fame and fortune.

So, last but by no means least, I give you Molly and the Captain by Anthony Quinn, published in 2022. This is a much easier read, and I absolutely fell for it. It comes in three parts, each roughly a hundred years apart, starting in 1785, and each in a different style. The first section is a journal written by a young woman called Laura Merrymount, one of two daughters of a famous Georgian portrait artist, very much in the mould of Gainsborough. You can see how cleverly the beautiful book cover gives you the hint…just look at those lovely eyes…

Laura and her sister have been famously captured by their father in a painting known as ‘Molly and the Captain’. In the first section, Laura discovers her father’s secrets and is forced to re-assess everything she thought she knew about her family life: it is a touching portrait of sisterly love, and of the power of forgiveness. And these themes, together with an exploration of artistic talent and of the sources of inspiration continue through the second and third sections, as we move in pursuit of Molly and the Captain, from the late Victorian artworld and auction houses of Chelsea, to the more complex worlds of art and culture in 1980s north London. Throughout the three intertwined stories run little coincidences and telltale signs, such as trips to Eastbourne a hundred years apart, accidents of near drownings, and houses two hundred years and two hundred yards away in Kentish Town. Reading this book, skimming through two centuries of London history, and watching the same truths about sisters, love and family play out, was to me the perfect example of Sir walter Scott’s insight, that there are passions common to all men, and all women, in all stages of society, and it just takes the talented author’s touch to bring them into the light.

Postscript: I have just read an interview from a year or two ago in the New Statesman with the bestselling historian Peter Frankopan, who says that the best piece of advice he has ever been given was that if you want to write good history, you should read lots of novels. No-one teaches early-career scholars how to write well - there is too much focus on methodology and footnotes. He says that he has learned a lot from novels over the years: I couldn’t agree more! Although I’m not sure he is talking about Alison Uttley…

I have become increasingly fascinated by the early life of a British Labour politician, Herbert Morrison, later Lord Morrison of Lambeth - curiously, because of what he did to launch the career of the formidable local politician, Peggy Jay. Now, of course, his name is back in the news, as he is the grandfather of the disgraced toady, Peter Mandelson - and comparing and contrasting their modus operandi is a salutary lesson in … well, let’s just call it, political ethics. What distinguished Morrison's early years in politics? ‘His adherence to constitutional procedures and his hatred of improper influence’. Oh, and not to forget his detestation of capitalist businessmen….

Herbert Morrison was born on 3 January 1888 in Brixton, South London. His father was a police constable, his mother had been a housemaid, both were East End Cockneys by origin. He was blind in one eye all his life, the result of an infection caused by careless midwifery, but he often said that his one good eye served him well. He was probably less happy about it though, while being bullied and teased at school - he left aged fourteen and embarked upon a series of dead-end jobs, as a delivery boy, a shop assistant, a telegraph typist, only happy when reading in his own time. The turning point came after a visit to a phrenologist who felt his skull and told him he was wasting his intellect, and should start to read the stuff that mattered - history, politics, economics. This fired his imagination:

I began to wonder how the conditions I saw around me in London could be improved. Questions of bad housing, high rents and inadequate education took on a real meaning for me. The thrill of learning seized me - one of the greatest joys I had ever known.

In 1906, at the age of eighteen, he joined firstly the Independent Labour Party (the ILP), and then the Social Democratic Federation, and began an experiment in public speaking, standing on a barrel on a Pimlico street corner, haranguing the passers-by with extracts from the Communist Manifesto. In 1907 his mother died and his father, becoming an alcoholic and always a staunch Tory, threw him out. From now on, Morrison would have to stand on his own two feet. The following year he was given his first official position - as the Press Secretary (unpaid) of the Brixton Discussion Forum. He celebrated by buying himself a bowler hat (it made him appear older). London in these years was awash with radical groups, too often fighting among themselves. The Popular Front of Judea springs to mind.

Morrison quickly came to the conclusion that the only way to change things was to get access to Parliament. He rejoined the ILP, but continued to develop his skills as a street orator, showing off a ready street wit and often surviving physical attack by dint of sheer good temper. He tried joining a trade union, but that would not satisfy his ambition, or answer his need for action. There is no doubt that although later in life he disputed this, he was ambitious, but more for what he could achieve for others than for himself. By 1910 he had been elected chair of the Brixton ILP, and turned it into one of the most vibrant and successful political cells in London. He organised public debates, attracting powerful names such as George Bernard Shaw, Hilaire Belloc, GK Chesterton and Ramsay MacDonald which generated much needed campaign funds. And, crucially, he bought himself a typewriter.

I saw that the fight for socialism depended less on street corner rabble-rousing, (though that had its uses) and dramatic isolated action, than on the slow but steady construction of an organisation devoted to running a planned programme of propaganda, social work and organisation.'

Morrison became fascinated by the mechanics of local politics and the power of the London borough authorities. He attended as many council meetings as he could and typed up reports which he sold to local newspapers - slowly developing a vision of a London controlled by Labour, and dedicating every waking hour to working for it. In 1912 he stood as a candidate in the local Vauxhall elections, organising the campaign on behalf of the other Labour candidates, producing proper election material including photographs (hiding his bad eye) - and although he lost, and badly, he learnt so much.

In the autumn of 1912 he was taken on as a circulation traveller for the Daily Citizen, a new Labour-supporting newspaper, but by 1915 it had failed and he was again out of a job. When conscription arrived, Morrison registered as a conscientious objector and was sent to work as a market gardener in Letchworth Garden City. Here was a community of idealistic socialists, and as a teetotal vegetarian, Herbert fitted right in. He met the woman, Margaret, who became his first wife, although it was not a happy marriage: Margaret was simply not interested in politics, and when after the War he took her back to live in the East End of London she became deeply unhappy. The birth of their only child Mary, Mandelson’s mother, was difficult: there would be no more children.

In 1914, the many and various socialist factions in London were finally persuaded to unite and form the London Labour Party (LLP) - a mixed bag of trade unionists, Fabians, ILP members, Co-ops, Women’s Leagues and Labour Representation Committee members. The following year Herbert Morrison was appointed its salaried Secretary, initially working out of an office in Bermondsey, commuting from Letchworth. From these small beginnings, ‘Morrison was to create the most powerful local political organisation ever to exist in the country.’1

He began by launching a monthly circular, setting out the party’s goals: that Londoners should have control of their own electricity supply, of housing, education and transport, rather than any capitalist corporations. The first signs of the impact he was having came with the 1919 local elections - Labour won 572 seats across the boroughs and held the majority on 12 out of 28 councils. It was an extraordinary testimony to Morrison’s focus and organisational skills. He was rewarded the following year with election to Labour’s ruling body, the National Executive Committee (NEC), and with his appointment for a year as Mayor of Hackney. He was beginning to be a recognisable public figure, dressed in ill-fitting brown tweed suits bought from the Co-op, and a bright red tie, accused of living off nut cutlets and ginger pop. He was not the only Radical to adopt vegetarianism, but he was probably the first to combine it with actual political power.

His rise through the ranks of London politicians now became swift and smooth - elected to London County Council in 1922, then MP for South Hackney in 1923. In 1925 he became the leader of the Labour opposition on the Council. As someone wrote ‘The story of the rise of Labour in London is an epic in itself. And it is largely the story of the rise and growth of Herbert Morrison.’ It would take him all the way into national government, to the Cabinet, to the position of Home Secretary and Deputy leader of the Labour Party. Throughout he was steadfastly honest, a stickler for constitutional behaviour, utterly opposed to anything smacking of corruption or ‘pork belly politics’ and focused on winning and keeping power. He imposed fierce party discipline, he went out of his way, often courting unpopularity, to improve the calibre of candidates, and he made it clear that no-one should ever promise what could not be delivered. ‘Elections keep us busy and out of mischief.’ By 1929, Labour had won the majority of London’s MPs.

London County Council in the 1920s and 30s covered nearly 120 square miles and over 4 million people: far and away the largest urban conurbation in Britain, one of the largest in the world. And yet, all of the suburbs that had grown up since the development of the railways and underground network since the 1880s were outside the catchment area, and would stay so until the creation of the GLC in 1973. Its remit included education, housing, drains, the fire brigade, parks and the tram network.

The national stage called: in 1923 he was elected MP for South Hackney, a seat he would represent on and off right through to 1945. ‘Parliament is a funny place’ he said ‘and the more I see of it, the more I admire Hackney Borough Council.’ It took him a while to find his feet, deciding that the object of the House of Commons ‘was not to get things done, it was to prevent things being done.’ But when Labour came to power in 1929, Morrison entered the Cabinet as Minister for Transport - at the age of 41, he was the youngest there. This was his reward for his contribution to the General Election success - as Chair of the NEC he had driven the publicity campaign and helped draft the manifesto. When things fell apart for Labour in 1931, Morrison did not follow MacDonald into the National Government, becoming increasingly suspicious of the dangers of ‘hobnobbing’ with the upper classes. ‘The Labour Leader must remain the captain of his soul - and his soul must remain a proletarian soul’.

To many commentators, Morrison had certainly not lost his proletarian soul - he had started drinking whisky, he had become portly, he dressed badly, sporting plus-fours and knitted jumpers under his suit, he ‘ate his peas with a knife’, was mean with money, and to cap it all, had badly-fitting teeth. Beatrice Webb said he was ‘the plain man, and very plain at that.’ He would not have been so successful in the age of television, I suspect. But he never let up his pace of working: a reporter said that trying to interview him was like trying to drink a glass of beer in an express train - you managed the odd mouthful. But despite his disappointment with MacDonald, he was not averse to a little bit of high life. Supping port with an admiring AL Rowse in the Common Room at All Souls, Oxford, he remarked ‘This is the life. I want to ensure that everyone has the chance to take part in it.’

From 1934 until he joined the Government of Winston Churchill in 1940, he was the Leader of London County Council. His achievements there are staggering. In 1934, Labour had recovered from the disasters of the 1931 Election enough to win 51% of the London council vote, and a majority of 16. By 1937 this would rise to 30. He set to, putting into action many of his long-held ambitions to improve life for the average Londoner: he was always careful to ensure that his policies were as popular with the lower middle-classes as with the workers. He criticised his predecessors, calling them Mr Dilly, Mr Dally and Mr Can’t, whose motto was ‘Something Saved and Nothing Done.’ Now the watchword was ‘Don’t tell me why I can’t, tell me how I can’.

The LCC became a beacon of efficient and progressive government. He appointed women to chair committees to ‘shake them up.’ He pushed through the construction of the new Waterloo Bridge, he began the smartening up of the South Bank. Local authorities were given grants to buy up land and create a ‘green belt’ around the City. Slums were cleared, housing built, hospitals improved, schools opened, teachers recruited. Children were given more milk, there were more school health inspections. He was said to be the man who had done more to change the face of the City than anyone since Sir Christopher Wren.

In the last couple of years at the LCC, Herbert Morrison the pacifist found himself concerned with preparations for war. Money that might have gone further on social problems was ploughed into civil defence. The Morrison shelter was developed: a steel table with mesh sides that a family could hide under - Herbert had made it clear that expecting everyone to be able to dig an Anderson shelter in their garden was no solution to bombing. His considerable planning skills are in evidence in the evacuation of children from London - over 600,000 left London for safety in just three days from 1 September 1939.

The rest of Morrison’s career is better known - Home Secretary from 1940-45, Deputy Prime Minister from 1945-51, and a final less successful year as Foreign Secretary in 1951. In 1955 he stood for leader of the Party when Attlee retired, but was overwhelmingly defeated by Hugh Gaitskell - a victim of the rise of the more intellectual democratic socialists, the next generation. Perhaps he joins the long list of ‘the best Prime Ministers we never had’. He was always a very different politician - not an intellectual, not a trade unionist, but a man who never forgot his roots, and whose contribution to the infrastructure and resilience, social and economic, of London as it came out of the Great Depression, may well have contributed to the victory of 1945.

On a much more individual note, I want to remember him as the man who encouraged Peggy Jay to enter politics, and to stand as a Labour candidate for the LCC in 1937. She was by no means the only woman whose career he supported. A small thing, maybe, but from small things, many strong trees can grow.

Just look at the costumes that the English Touring Opera produced:

To be honest, the costumes carried the production through a second half that could have been shorter by a couple of comic songs and no-one would have cared. But spare a moment to consider WS Gilbert’s extraordinary skewering of society in his lyrics. The couple in blue and gold in this photograph are the Duke and Duchess of Plaza-Toro

In enterprise of martial kind,
 When there was any fighting, 
He led his regiment from behind, 
 He found it less exciting.
But when away his regiment ran
 His place was at the fore, O-
That celebrated,
  Cultivated,
  Underrated
  Nobleman
The Duke of Plaza-Toro

The Duke and Duchess have sadly fallen on hard times, as some Dukes do (mentioning no names…), but luckily he and his wife have found a way to live - by selling their names and faces to the highest bidder. Who does this remind you of, so lately in the news:

Foundation-stone laying
I find very paying:
It adds a large sum to my takings.
At charity dinners
The best of speech-spinners,
I get ten per cent of the takings.
I present any lady
Whose conduct is shady
Or smacking of doubtful propriety,
When Virtue would quash her,
I take and whitewash her,
And launch her in first rate society!

A little bit of history: Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) and William Schwenk Gilbert (1836-1911) dominated the world of English comic opera from the 1870s until the 1890s. They were brought together, nurtured and cultivated by an impresario, Richard D’Oyly-Carte, who built the Savoy Theatre on the Strand in 1881 to showcase their works. Fun fact: the theatre came first - it was the financial success of the Savoy Theatre, and the Savoy Operas that were produced there, particularly The Mikado, which funded the construction of the Savoy Hotel and led to the creation of an international luxury hotel brand. The duo’s first truly popular hit, on an international stage, was HMS Pinafore (1878), followed by The Pirates of Penzance, Patience (mocking the aesthetic movement of Oscar Wilde, Swinburne and Rossetti), The Mikado (poking fun at British bureaucracy, but coasting on the back of a wave of enthusiasm for all things Japanese), and to my mind the most glorious of them all, with the least ridiculous plot and a score worthy of Puccini, The Yeomen of the Guard.

If you want to know more about the pair, their impresario and their very particular cast, I can recommend the Mike Leigh film, Topsy-Turvy, which deals with the struggles between the two men.

Sullivan believed his talent was being wasted in comedy and dreamed of writing the ‘great oratorio’ or the ‘grand opera’. Sadly, his one serious opera, Ivanhoe, has seldom been revived. He is also known for writing the tune for the hymn Onward, Christian Soldiers, and a favourite of the Victorian parlour concert, The Lost Chord. Sullivan died in 1900 at the age of fifty-eight, his memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens is inscribed with lines from Yeomen of the Guard:

Is Life a boon? If so it must befall, that Death whene’er it call, Must call too soon

Gilbert died in 1911 of a heart attack while trying to rescue a young girl from drowning.

There is something magical which happens when the right composer finds the right lyricist, you don’t need me to name them all, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rice and Lloyd-Webber, but Gilbert and Sullivan stand proudly at the head of this phenomenon. Their partnership ended over something silly: a quarrel over who should pay for the carpets in the Savoy Theatre, but it may be that their collaboration had peaked with The Yeomen. Although they were reunited briefly for a couple more shows in the 1890s, those particular works have not survived the test of time.

As evidence of the extraordinary charm and longevity of their main body of work, the fact is that it is still greatly enjoyed by audiences, and not only in the English-Speaking world, one hundred and fifty years later. The International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival takes place annually in Buxton, Derbyshire; this very week if you happen to be in Vienna, you could take in a performance of Die Piraten von Penzance (I understand the songs are sung in English but the dialogue is translated into German. It is hard to imagine how one could render into another language Gilbert’s quite extraordinary lyrics.)

When a felon's not engaged in his employment
Or maturing his felonious little plans
His capacity for innocent enjoyment
Is just as great as any honest man's

The list of amateur G&S societies in the UK begins in Abbots Langley and ends with the Woodley Players - a list of over 100 names, including nine university groups and the wittily-named Cat-like Tread in Edinburgh. This is not an exhaustive survey, for many other Am-Dram groups might attempt a G&S production now and then. We performed Trial by Jury and The Mikado at my state school in the 1970s.

Some of Gilbert’s lyrics have been enshrined in common language: ‘Short, sharp, shock’; ‘let the punishment fit the crime’, ‘a policeman’s lot’ et cetera, et cetera. Furthermore, much of their work has entered our culture through affectionate references in other works - it features heavily in the award-winning film Chariots of Fire, where Harold Abrams has a romance with the soprano playing Yum-Yum in The Mikado, and in one of my favourite scenes in West Wing, when CJ, Toby, Sam and Josh give the unhappy Ainsley Hayes the proper welcome to the team that she deserves. Please give it a watch:

There have been films: in 1983, after a successful run on Broadway, Kevin Kline starred as the Pirate King in a film of The Pirates of Penzance which also featured Linda Ronstadt and Angela Lansbury. You can buy a complete box set of the operas on DVD, all filmed in 1982, introduced by Douglas Fairbanks Junior, and with guest appearances from the likes of Joel Grey, Keith Michell, Vincent Price and Frankie Howerd. To be honest, they need a refresh…

I think for many fans, including myself, there is so much nostalgia and affection linked to early memories. My father was a huge fan, so I went to many productions as a child, and listened to scratchy old recordings. When he was young, he had lived in Surrey, and the Croydon Light Operatic Club put on three productions a year. My father would always say he first saw his brother-in-law Cyril when the latter was playing Dick Deadeye in Pinafore. I’ve been combing old newspaper archives, I wish I could find a review!

When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an Attorney's firm.
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle on the big front door,
    I polished up that handle so carefullee
   That now I am the Ruler of the Queen's Navee!

The Victorian audience would have got this joke: the man who founded the chain of bookshops and stationers, WH Smith, a man who had never been to sea, had just been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty.

Let me finish with a closer look at my favourite, The Yeomen of the Guard. Most of Gilbert’s plots revolve, rather ludicrously, around hidden identity - usually a boy spirited away as a baby and brought up as a pirate, a gondolier, a lowly sailor. In The Yeomen, the swap which will drive the plot is effected to enable Colonel Fairfax to escape from the Tower of London, where he has been falsely imprisoned by an unscrupulous relative who wants to get his hands on Fairfax’s estate. Whereas the other operas end with happiness all round, as the hero’s true identity is revealed, allowing him to marry his chosen bride, The Yeomen of the Guard has a much more troubling ending. Yes, Fairfax, once truly free, can marry Elsie, the woman he has fallen in love with. But when the opera began, Elsie was engaged to be married to Jack Point, a jester with a band of strolling players. As the happy couple and their friends leave the stage, Jack Point is left alone, and collapses, dying of a broken heart. If well done, this is a truly affecting finale.

I have a song to sing, O!
What is your song, O?
It is sung with the ring
Of the songs maids sing
Who love with a love life-long, O!
It's the song of a merry maid, nestling near,
Who loved her lord - but who dropped a tear
At the moan of the merryman, moping mum
Whose soul was sad and whose glance was glum
Who sipped no sup, and who craved no crumb,
As he sighed for the love of a ladye!

Back in the glory days of the BBC’s Play for Today series, Colin Welland and Michael Apted used the plot of Yeomen as the starting point for a very good play, Jack Point. Based around an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan society’s production of Yeomen, it follows the damage caused by a young tenor who usurps the role of Point from the old hand who has always played the part, with similarly affecting consequences. You can find the whole play on YouTube and it is well worth the hunt.

When I plan my appearance on Desert Island Discs (don’t we all?!), the one track I absolutely know will feature is the finale to Act One of The Yeomen of the Guard. If you are not convinced that at times Sullivan wrote operatic melodies worthy of Puccini et al, you really need to give this a listen. It builds slowly, as Fairfax, secretly released from jail and disguised as Leonard Meryll, son of the Sergeant of the Guard, makes his first appearance. What Phoebe, the Sergeant’s daughter, does not know is that while Fairfax was still a prisoner he contracted a marriage, both blindfolded, with Elsie, one of the travelling players, in order to cheat his scheming relative of the inheritance. A little harmless flirtation between Phoebe and Fairfax is curtailed when, as Meryll, Fairfax is sent to bring the prisoner from the cell for execution and of course, finds it empty (keep up…!). Outrage, disbelief and fury grips the Tower warders, the chorus, and of course, poor Elsie, now married to a man she has never seen, and Point, whose beloved is no longer free. If you have a spare quarter of an hour, have a listen, I promise you won’t regret it. Just listen to the bell that tolls the prisoner’s doom…:

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The novel in question is Honourable Estate, published by Victor Gollancz in 1936. Set between the 1890s and 1930, it tells the story of two families whose fates will intertwine, the Rutherstons and the Alleyndenes, and it can be read as a fairly straightforward social chronicle culminating in a marriage plot. But that is greatly to underplay what Brittain was achieving here - a genuinely gripping account of what it was like to be a woman in England in the two decades either side of the catastrophe of World War One, and how rapidly life was changing over that time.

Vera Brittain is not generally remembered as a novelist, but as the mother of politician Shirley Williams, as the friend of author Winifred Holtby, and of course as the writer of three autobiographical works, by far the most famous and readable of which is Testament of Youth. Dramatised on the BBC in the 1970s, it broke most teenage girls’ hearts, as poor Vera, so naively happy to have won a place at Oxford and feeling life was her oyster, loses in turn a fiancé, then a dearly loved brother, and then two of her greatest friends. A feature film version was released in 2014 to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the War, introducing a whole new generation to this tragic tale of how the conflict broke so many women and ruined so many lives.

Testament of Youth was published in 1933, and Vera must have realised she had so much more to say, to put her own female experience into context: she started work on Honourable Estate within the year. In 1935 she lost her best friend Winifred Holtby to Bright’s Disease, and took on the task of editing and guiding Holtby’s greatest achievement, South Riding, through the press. The workload of publishing both these novels in one year, 1936, would have daunted many writers. They form an interesting pair - South Riding is a masterpiece and was recognised as such when it came out, winning the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Honourable Estate is, I would say, a worthy companion piece and well worth a look today, for its ability to hammer home how much the women’s movement achieved over the early years of the twentieth century, and perhaps how much more there still was to do. Moulding this into a work of fiction was a tricky task, and for the most part, Brittain pulls it off with flying colours.

The book falls neatly into three sections. The first concerns the Rutherston family - a portrait of a deeply unhappy marriage. Janet was only nineteen when she unwisely accepted a proposal from an older man, Thomas Rutherston, a Church of England vicar, with very set views on morality, and on the place of women within the home. Terrified by his physical demands, and nearly dying giving birth to her son Denis, Janet seeks to carve out as much freedom as was possible within a typical Victorian household. She is drawn into the suffrage movement, a cause of great fury and embarrassment to Thomas, and eventually manages to get away, by which time her health is ruined and she dies tragically young. Her only chance of happiness is the romantic friendship she strikes up with Gertrude Ellison Campbell, a woman who will become a famous and wealthy playwright, but whose jealousy of Janet’s passion for women’s politics will drive a fatal wedge between the pair.

Part Two takes us into the heart of the Potteries, into the wealthy middle-class Alleyndene family, and their only daughter Ruth. This surely is a set up that Brittain knew intimately, mirroring her own youth. Like the Brittains, Ruth’s family is surprised by her desire to study at Oxford, but prepared to be supportive. But when her brother Richard is killed at Gallipoli, she abandons her studies to become a nurse in France. Here she meets a young American officer, Eugene, but their romance is, of course, doomed: this is Vera’s experience of the War, that falling in love just leads inevitably to grief and disaster.

Part Three brings the two families’ stories together: in the aftermath of the War, Ruth, like Vera, has become an active worker for peace, working with the Quakers among the refugees in Eastern Europe. Here she meets Denis Rutherston, and determined to form a new sort of partnership, they marry. The novel ends optimistically in 1930: Ruth has been elected as an MP for her family’s constituency in the Potteries, much to her surviving brother Norman’s disgust. Women finally have the vote on the same terms as men, and Ruth hopes that this change in the body politic will lead to a more tolerant, peaceful world. The fact that Brittain was writing this in 1936, as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini were rebuilding their armies and flexing their muscles across Europe, just makes the final chapters more moving:

After all, Ruth thought, let the cynics say what they will, we have gone forward. Human nature does change in the values to which it subscribes, the cruelties and wrongs it’s prepared to tolerate. In my own time, short as it has been, this has happened. No age, I suppose, will ever see the whole of salvation, but every age sees a part of it - even this tragic and burdened age with its black night of calamity and its Lenten aftermath of sorrow and loss…Hatred and cruelty and perhaps even war will come again, in my children’s time and the time of their children…But with every generation we know them better for what they are. We know more clearly what we should withstand and how we should build.

Not all of the book works: while I am happy to enjoy the unconventional courtship between long-suffering, infinitely patient Denis and grieving Ruth (surely this must bear some resemblance to Brittain’s own marriage to George Caitlin), I am not sure I believe that two people ever spoke to each other like this:

I agree with you entirely, said Denis, To my mind the pitiless condemnation of sex-offences illustrates exactly that self-indulgent evasion of fundamentals which society’s capable of at its worst…A war such as the last is infinitely more destructive of biological processes than the sex-aberrations of a few persons whose psychological make-up isn’t quite that of the herd.

It’s quite a mouthful. There are times when Brittain is not content to let an idea lie, but insists on picking it up and hammering the reader’s head with it. The novel is written from just three narrative voices, Janet, Ruth and Denis, so the deeply disturbing scenes from the front line of battle have to come through long letters written to Ruth, again it’s a clumsy device. But there are scenes that I found very moving; the surprising revelation concerning Richard’s death in battle, and particularly Ruth’s encounter after the War with Eugene’s American fiancée. I enjoyed the reconstruction of the public meeting at which Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin announces the imminent extension of the suffrage to all women, and the very touching revelation that when Mrs Pankhurst died, the jockey whose horse had collided fatally with Emily Wilding Davison was one of the mourners who followed the coffin. I hope it is true. There are walk-on parts for real personalities such as Eleanor Rathbone, and Winifred Holtby gets a mention.

There is a great deal of optimism in the book, some of which, particularly this month, this year, seems sadly misplaced. Ruth addresses a women’s meeting in the Potteries during the election with these words:

Remember, the movement against war and the movement for better human conditions are bound up together, and the modern women’s movement is concerned with both. If only the women who now have votes on the same terms as men could realise what the abolition of war would mean to the wives and mothers still enslaved by intolerable living conditions, the end of poverty and injustice would be in sight. If only they would work for peace as their predecessors worked for their own liberation, we should have no more of the monstrous folly which throws away a nation’s resources on the destruction of mankind.

Sadly, (checks notes), it’s mostly the men who are still in charge.

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Twenty years after Brittain published this novel, she authored a significant work of non-fiction, dedicated to her daughter Shirley. Lady Into Woman was published in 1953. The dedication itself is lovely:

You have been free from the implanted sense of inferiority that handicaps so many women by undermining the self-confidence which is the basis of all achievement, both masculine and feminine. You were deeply desired as a daughter…your mother grew up with that eager generation of young feminists who were the first to inherit the freedom won by women for women.

The book is a survey of women’s achievements across many fields, exploring changes in legislation and in social behaviour, in sexual behaviour, education and careers. Many of the themes Brittain explored in Honourable Estate are taken out, brushed down and supported with statistics. For a researcher into women’s lives post WW2, it is an invaluable source of information and attitudes. She quotes from many great female writers, not forgetting Holtby, of course. But let me finish this piece with some of Brittain’s incurable optimism and belief in progress: a quote she takes from Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm:

If you have enjoyed this piece, please press the Like button, or Share it. It will help it reach more readers. If you would like to know more about South Riding and Winifred Holtby, I have written about her here:

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When my children were little, I would take them every year to the local Literature Festival, and they would sit happily cross-legged on the floor listening as their favourite authors enthralled them with tales of adventure, and enthused them with the love of the written word. It seems to have borne fruit, this immersion in the world of the pen, as one of my daughters is now a literary agent and the other a freelance journalist, (and, of course, in my fifties I began to write, as well). One of the sessions we always remembered, and would laugh about, was led by the delicious Caroline Lawrence, author of The Roman Mysteries. She recounted her life as an author, sitting in her pyjamas, drinking hot chocolate, and taking herself off on lovely holidays to places like Rome and Naples, and describing them as (please picture her drawing finger quotes in the air) “research”. And now I am an author, writing serious biography, but I also can enjoy some “research”, particularly taking time out from the archives to read novels from the period in question. At the moment I am immersed in the 1960’s campaign to reform the Abortion laws, so of course it was the perfect excuse to revisit two classics of the time - Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone, and Lynn Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room.

Reading these two books one after the other was an absolute delight, but also fascinating in how much they had in common, how well they have stood the test of time, and the extraordinary picture they paint of London in the 1960s, with its squalor butting up against its cheap glamour, its restlessness, and its slow metamorphosis into a society we would recognise today, liberal and multi-cultural. Some of it is shocking - there is no disguising the racial prejudices and the anti-semitism which was rife among all classes, let alone the appalling sexism and the persecution of the unmarried mother. But it was a society on the turn, and these two novels, written just four years apart, were clarion calls for a better, more generous and more forgiving way of life. Within the next decade, the 1967 Abortion Act and the introduction of the Pill on the NHS would completely transform the choices available to young women as depicted in these works.

My room was five flights up in one of those gone-to-seed houses in Fulham, all dark brown wallpaper inside and peeling paint outside. On every second landing was a chipped sink with one tap and an old ink-written notice which said ‘Don’t Leave Tap Driping’. The landing lights were the sort that go out before you can reach the next one. There were a couple of prostitutes in the basement; the landlady had been quite open about them.

Jane Graham, the heroine of The L-Shaped Room, has fled to the one of the cheapest and nastiest boarding houses she can find in London, after her father throws her out of her home, appalled by the news that she is pregnant.

One wall, the partition, was bare; along the other ran some rudimentary cooking facilities, consisting of a wash-basin-cum-sink with a tin draining board and a small cupboard with a top just large enough to hold a gas stove, about a foot square, with a grill and two small elements. Under the window, with its dirty-looking brown curtains, was a small kitchen table scarred with ancient cigarette burns.

This is post-war London with its chronic housing shortages, with its yellow-brown decor and its yellow-brown smogs, the cigarette smoke, the bottles of gin, the seedy nightclubs, the prostitutes leaving cards in telephone boxes, the gas meters and the bedbugs.

Rosamund Stacey, Jane’s counterpart in The Millstone, is in much luckier circumstances, living in a rather lovely flat in a mansion block near Marylebone High Street. She has free run of it as her parents, proud Fabian socialists, have gone to live in Africa, helping to set up a new university. Jane and Rosamund have much in common; they are both ‘nice’ middle-class girls in their twenties, both have careers - Jane, having tried her hand as an actress, has a responsible job in the Publicity department of a posh London hotel, while Rosamund is completing her doctorate on Elizabethan poetry and has a glittering academic career ahead of her. Importantly for the plot, neither of them has a steady boyfriend: in fact, both have fallen pregnant as the result of their one and only experience of sex, the careless and unsatisfying one-night stand which no-one wants to believe can end in pregnancy but which, as these books warn, just might. To the novel-reading youngsters of the 1960s the message was clear - this does not just happen to silly working class girls…this could be you.

For both girls, the realisation that they are pregnant is an appalling, nightmarish situation. Neither have family to fall back on - Jane’s mother had died in childbirth and her relationship with her father is as distant and uncommunicative as one might expect between a war veteran civil servant and a disappointing daughter - and that’s before her pregnancy. Both girls flirt with the idea of termination, with only the haziest of ideas of how to go about it. Jane’s downstairs neighbour Mavis recommends gin: ‘Of course you have to drink lots of it - “lots and lots, no tiny tots” as they say.’ Rosamund also buys a bottle of gin and plans to combine it with the legendary hot bath, but in an amusing scene two of her rackety London pals turn up and before she can stop them the gin is half gone, and there is no hot water anyway. One of the constant miseries of both girls’ lives is the lack of reliable bath water - London in the 1960s had not really got the hang of plumbing.

Jane actually manages to get an appointment with a doctor in Wimpole Street who wants to charge her 100 guineas (around £3,000 in today’s money) and as she has no hope of raising that, she determines to go through with the pregnancy. Both novels deal with the predicament in which any woman wishing to terminate a pregnancy would find herself - before the 1967 Act, a doctor could only escape prosecution if he had been convinced that the patient’s mental or physical health would suffer irreparable damage if the pregnancy continued - as one of Rosamund’s friends puts it:

I made myself look as neurotic as I possibly could…By the end of my recital I felt so sorry for myself I nearly burst into tears. He too seemed moved, and I thought I was well away, but when I finished he said he was very sorry but in my case he was afraid that he couldn’t possibly recommend termination of the pregnancy. He said I was too sensitive and impressionable and conscientious, and that in cases like mine termination was far more likely to lead to a breakdown than going full term.

The novels follow both girls through their pregnancies, and the same theme runs throughout - the shame they are told they should feel for bringing an illegitimate child into the world, the shadow that will blight the child’s life. As the doctor says to Jane

Don’t make the mistake of imagining the word bastard doesn’t carry a sting anymore. There aren’t many illegitimate children in this world who haven’t, some time or other, thought unkindly of their mothers.

You will notice that no-one mentions the fathers.

The unsympathetic and often brutal callousness of the National Health Service is also on show - the later scenes when Rosamund’s baby Octavia is in hospital and the Sister won’t allow her to visit are harrowing and deeply moving in turn. For both of these girls, actually producing a baby, and falling in love with it, is completely life-changing, as they realise that the personal pride and even obstinacy which they thought would see them through has to give way before the needs of their offspring. Both plan to set off down the path of motherhood bravely and alone, but in both novels, they soon realise that they need help and emotional support, and that more people than they had imagined are ready to give it. They are books about love, friendship and forgiveness and ultimately both are remarkably upbeat and optimistic. I loved them both.

The L-Shaped Room was made into a film in 1962, directed by Bryan Forbes.

Leslie Caron, Tom Bell and Brock Peters star in The L-Shaped Room in 1962. In the novel, the angry young man/love interest is a Jewish character, Toby Cohen, but Forbes swapped this out for a Yorkshireman, played by Bell, perhaps meant to remind the audience of the fashionable new wave novelists, Stan Barstow, Alan Sillitoe. The African in the next-door bedsit, John, was played by Brock Peters - you may recognise him as Tom Robinson in the film of To Kill a Mockingbird, made the same year. Reid Banks was the first to admit that her racial stereotyping of Toby and John would not have survived today’s editing. But the racist language that both men endure in the novel is a shocking reminder of a less-welcoming post-War London.

The Millstone was also made into a film in 1969, A Touch of Love. Rosamund was played by the American actress Sandy Dennis, her flatmate Lydia was Eleanor Bron, and sweetest of all, the object of her secret passion, gay George, was a young Ian McKellen. If you can find it, do watch it - I think Dennis’s performance when she needs to see her baby is award-worthy, in particular.

The L-Shaped Room was Lynn Reid Banks’ first novel - she went on to have a long and succesful career, perhaps better known for her children’s books, The Indian in the Cupboard series. The Millstone was Drabble’s third published title, and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, cementing her fame as one of the great novelists of twentieth century Britain. Both books created a storm, with their frankdescriptions of extra-marital sex, and for their honest depiction of the literal pains of childbirth and motherhood. Nevertheless they are important social history, and I am sure smoothed the way for many more conversations in polite company about the parlous state of family planning in the 1960s and the need for reform. Above all, they are great reads.

I have written about the campaign to change the law here:

In the 1980s I worked in the City (yes I am that old) and commuted everyday on the tube from Kew - and because I didn’t have arms long enough to hold out and read the obligatory FT, I read my way through the Victorian classics, thick paperbacks that would happily help me fill a forty minute journey twice a day. Trollope, Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell …I fell in love with them all, and wondered why I had given up studying EngLit so early (aged 16, in case you asked).

My ten years in London banking seemed to be one long decade of City scandals - aren’t they all? - Polly Peck, Guinness, Blue Arrow (my own particular misery as it affected my place of work and many people I held dear), Barings, The Mirror Group - and they all had an easily identifiable villain: Asil Nadir, who fled to Cyprus; Ernest Saunders, who achieved early release by pleading dementia, from which he subsequently recovered (!); Nick Leeson, a Watford ‘wideboy’; and the greatest crook of them all, Robert Maxwell.

The newspapers loved to thrill their readers with tales of fraud, conspiracy, theft, shady backroom deals, circles of intrigue, and the overwhelming stink of greed. And what the journalists particularly seemed to love was the trope of the man who had risen without trace to perpetrate these terrible deeds - although they all appeared at first glance to be ‘City scandals’, none of these crooks were, on closer inspection, ‘one of us’. Thank goodness for that. The fact that they had all sat on, or been supervised by, Boards packed with well-respected, well-connected, and well-paid City gents in the shape of non-executives, with blue-chip lawyers and accountants to advise them, could all be glossed over - the highly convenient ‘one bad apple’ theory of corporate governance.

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I think these scandals made my reading of the Victorian novel more vivid. Trollope’s masterpiece, The Way We Live Now, would not be even half the book it is without the towering villain, Melmotte. Who, having read it, can forget Little Dorrit’s sinister Mr Merdle, and even Middlemarch has its corrupt, hypocritical banker, Bulstrode. What a coincidence: these are also all outsiders, mysterious men who have come from nowhere, but by the time they force their way into the novels, are so powerful and apparently so wealthy that Society had completely lost its mind, or power of judgement, and the fawning and pandering behaviour of stupid, greedy people fills us with horror. When disaster overtakes these liars and tricksters, it is all-encompassing, and their overthrow pulls down the good and the bad with them. The innocent suffer along with the idiots.

(The quotes below may seem long, but as they are both written by supreme masters of the English language, bear with me!)

Mr. Melmotte had made his wealth in France. He no doubt had had enormous dealings in other countries, as to which stories were told which must surely have been exaggerated. It was said that he had made a railway across Russia, that he provisioned the Southern army in the American civil war, that he had supplied Austria with arms, and had at one time bought up all the iron in England. He could make or mar any company by buying or selling stock, and could make money dear or cheap as he pleased. All this was said of him in his praise — but it was also said that he was regarded in Paris as the most gigantic swindler that had ever lived; that he had made that City too hot to hold him; that he had endeavoured to establish himself in Vienna, but had been warned away by the police; and that he had at length found that British freedom would alone allow him to enjoy, without persecution, the fruits of his industry. He was now established privately in Grosvenor Square and officially in Abchurch Lane; and it was known to all the world that a Royal Prince, a Cabinet Minister, and the very cream of duchesses were going to his wife’s ball. All this had been done within twelve months. (Trollope: The Way We Live Now)

THE famous name of Merdle became, every day, more famous in the land. Nobody knew that the Merdle of such high renown had ever done any good to any one, alive or dead, or to any earthly thing; nobody knew that he had any capacity or utterance of any sort in him, which had ever thrown, for any creature, the feeblest farthing-candle ray of light on any path of duty or diversion, pain or pleasure, toil or rest, fact or fancy, among the multiplicity of paths in the labyrinth trodden by the sons of Adam; nobody had the smallest reason for supposing the clay of which this object of worship was made, to be other than the commonest clay, with as clogged a wick smouldering inside of it as ever kept an image of humanity from tumbling to pieces. All people knew (or thought they knew) that he had made himself immensely rich; and, for that reason alone, prostrated themselves before him, more degradedly and less excusably than the darkest savage creeps out of his hole in the ground to propitiate, in some log or reptile, the Deity of his benighted soul. (Dickens: Little Dorrit)

Their very names seem filled with horror - Merdle looking very much related to a French expletive, and Melmotte probably derived from Melmoth The Wanderer, a Gothic novel of the 1820s about a man who has sold his soul to the Devil.

And of course, once these giants have fallen, there is no-one who will admit to having admired or even liked them in the first place:

He had sprung from nothing, by no natural growth or process that any one could account for; he had been, after all, a low, ignorant fellow; he had been a down-looking man, and no one had ever been able to catch his eye; he had been taken up by all sorts of people, in quite an unaccountable manner; he had never had any money of his own, his ventures had been utterly reckless, and his expenditure had been most enormous…Mr. Merdle was found out from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, the moment he was found out in his pocket.

In 2001 the BBC filmed The Way We Live Now, and there was no doubt on whom the actor David Suchet was basing his powerful portrayal of Melmotte. It was only ten years since Maxwell had been found floating near his luxury yacht, and his business empire had collapsed around his sons’ ears, a tissue of lies and an appalling misuse of other people’s money. Accident or suicide? we will never know. In fiction, Melmotte’s end, drinking prussic acid, was brutal, and no-one would mourn his loss, not even his petrified and miserable wife and daughter. Merdle killed himself with his daughter-in-law’s penknife in the Turkish baths. Only Bulstrode escapes death, although he and his poor wife have to leave Middlemarch, with their tails between their legs. Eliot’s genius was for working out huge themes on a small canvas, and her villain and his punishment are trimmed to fit. But of the three, Bulstrode is the one, the pillar of his church, that we see connive at a man’s death.

For many years I wondered who Trollope, Dickens and Eliot had in mind when they created these extraordinary characters - that Victorian business life must have been equally dominated by mysterious shysters, conmen and frauds. Little Dorrit was published in 1857, Middlemarch and The Way We Live Now 1871 and 1875 respectively - three villainous bankers in less than twenty years. It is likely that the original Mr Merdle (the first of the three to be put down on paper - although I am not suggesting that Trollope and Eliot copied) was one William Strahan, convicted of embezzlement at his family-owned bank in 1855. However, although he was tried and found guilty, he was seen to be so much part of the Establishment that his original sentence of deportation was commuted and he was released after just three years, spending the rest of his life in comfort in Sidmouth and Italy.

There was another significant banking crisis in 1865, when Overend, Gurney & Co collapsed owing the equivalent of £1 billion in today’s money. For forty years it had been the biggest discount house in the world (effectively providing banking services to retail institutions) and was under the control of the well-respected Quaker, Samuel Gurney. But after his death in 1856, the remaining Directors, who thought they knew better, massively over-expanded, buying long term investments such as railways shares, which turned out to be highly risky, and left them with a liquidity crisis (does this sound familiar? if only bankers ever learnt from history…). They attempted to shore up the balance sheet by issuing shares to the general public, but the bank still failed and the Bank of England refused to step in. The Directors were tried for issuing a fraudulent prospectus, but presumably they looked so much like ‘The Establishment’, rather than ‘one bad apple’ of dubious foreign extraction, that as Wikipedia says ‘the Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn said that they were guilty only of "grave error" rather than criminal behaviour, and the jury acquitted them.’ So neither of these well-known cases provides either the sinister parvenu, or the grisly end, of the novels.

It is a well-known fact that the human brain is hardwired to find someone to blame, a scapegoat.1 Apparently, when things go well, our brains are happy to accept that it was probably a fluke. When things go badly, our brain tells us that it happened on purpose and looks for the culprit. And of course, we hope that the villain will be as little like ourselves as possible. If the wrongdoer does look like us - maybe went to the same school, is a member of the same club - we bend over backwards to find excuses or cover it all up, blaming the system, the regulator etc. In fiction, the author can create a truly evil villain, and dole out suitable punishment, and it will be very satisfying to the reader. No plutocrats were harmed in the making of this story. So when financial journalists wanted to write about twentieth century banking scandals, they reached for the stereotypes created by the great novelists: mysterious men who had clawed or wormed their way into positions of power and wealth, and who could be brought crashing down, leaving the closed ranks of bankers and corporate suits unscathed. And nothing changes, and more financial disasters happen, and more innocent people suffer.

Somewhere along the way, Nelly Erichsen became friends with one particular member of this Cambridge connection, a woman a few years older than herself, but also like herself, smart, well-educated and independent. So this week I have decided to dedicate my Substack to Miss Fanny Johnson, a pioneering headmistress and suffragist whose life tells us so much about the issues facing the Victorian spinster. Fanny dedicated herself to the causes of women’s education and women’s rights, a pioneer struggling on behalf of the women who would come after, to secure for them access to opportunities that she herself had never been offered.

The relationships between the Johnson and Macmillan families were complex and longstanding, with their origins in a Cambridge bookshop. Fanny’s grandfather William Johnson had a similar life story to Alexander Macmillan – he was the son of a baker, but despite starting his working life as a groom, he educated himself to the point when at the age of thirty, already a noted classical scholar, he acquired Llandaff House School, in Regent Street, Cambridge. The school thrived under his ownership and this house was the Johnson family home for the next eighty years. At some stage Nelly Erichsen made a painting of the house, and the painting is still in the possession of one of the descendants. The garden backed onto the grounds of Downing College, and parts of the house dated back to the 17^th century.

Fanny’s father William Farthing Johnson was the third of William’s four children. The children inherited their father’s intellect and love of learning – William Farthing studied at Corpus Christi College but as a Baptist was not able to gain his Cambridge BA until 1856, when the University Act opened most degrees to non-conformists. Meanwhile he gained a BA from the University of London, which did not discriminate against dissenters. He succeeded his father as headmaster of Llandaff House School in 1851 and became a notable Cambridge figure, serving as a Justice of the Peace for many years. He was the first president of the Cambridge YMCA, and a deacon at his Baptist chapel for forty-five years. When the Macmillan brothers first arrived in Cambridge in 1843 they were enthusiastic members of the Baptist church.

Fanny’s maternal grandfather, Augustine Gutteridge Brimley, married in succession two sisters and had four children – George, Caroline, Harriet and Fanny. His second daughter Harriet married William Farthing Johnson in 1851. She was a great lover of literature, and acted as matron and teacher at Llandaff House. Meanwhile in the same year her sister Caroline married their brother George’s closest friend, Alexander Macmillan. Thus the Johnson children, including Fanny, were first cousins to the Macmillan children.

Fanny Eliza Johnson was born to William Farthing Johnson and Harriet on 30 November 1855, the third of eight children. She seems, like Nelly, to have been educated at home, although her brothers and some of her sisters were sent away to school, but the house where she lived was a centre of academic and literary pursuit in Cambridge. When she was sixteen, the hostel for girl students which was to become Newnham College was set up very close to their house. All the Johnson family were keen supporters of emancipation and educational rights for women. Fanny’s first employment as a teacher was at Nottingham High School in 1877 at a salary of £100 per annum, then in 1881 she moved to Croydon School. Her youngest sister Alice went up to Newnham in 1878 and gained first class honours in Natural Sciences in 1881 – the first year women were allowed to sit the Tripos exams and have their results formally recognized (although it would be many years before they were granted degrees!).

In 1888 Fanny was appointed headmistress of Bolton High School for Girls. The establishment had opened in 1877, backed by local subscriptions, and had already seen several changes of headmistress. When Fanny arrived there were some fifty girls and three assistant teachers, plus four visiting teachers. Fanny kept an excellent log of events at the school, and set about reforming the syllabus, introducing more poetry and reading lessons in the lower school, as well as more practical science lessons.

In her second year, she exploited her family contacts at Macmillans to obtain a present for the school library of sixty-eight volumes of stories, poetry, biography and travel writing. Miss Johnson played piano for the girls, performed in school dramas and organised school trips. But she also believed in training the girls to be ‘useful, serviceable women’ and pupils spent time making toys and clothes for the local infirmaries and children’s homes. A kindergarten was established and she drew up plans to raise the numbers to a hundred, including encouraging girls to stay on until they were eighteen. Fanny was conscious that the position of women in society was changing: ‘Every girl should look forward to the possibility that she may have to earn her own living.’ No girl could be certain of marriage, she said, and ‘even marriage does not always mean being provided for without exertion.’ Wise words.

Above all, Fanny believed in raising the girls’ academic aspirations and ambitions. She put her girls forward for the Cambridge Senior local examinations, and within the year the first pupil would win a place at Newnham College. Plans were developed for much larger new school premises – which were officially opened in May 1891, by Mrs Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Fawcett was the sister of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first female to qualify as a doctor in England, the widow of Professor Henry Fawcett at Cambridge and the leader of the National Union of Women Suffrage Societies. She was also a close friend of Alexander Macmillan, her husband’s publisher. In 1868 Millicent had written an influential article for Macmillan’s Magazine on the importance of higher education for women, which had publicised the campaign to found Newnham College. The service at the Bolton High School opening ceremony was conducted by Canon Atkinson from North Yorkshire, presumably known to Fanny through her links with the Macmillans.

In her address to the girls and their parents, Miss Johnson chose to highlight the value of Arts and Crafts. ‘The importance of hand and eye training, even for those who have not to depend on clever hands for the means of livelihood, is becoming more and more recognized by the leaders of education’ and she robustly defended two recent school trips to the Autumn Exhibition of Pictures in Manchester and to the Printing Office of the Bolton Evening News. She also thanked the Trustees for a newly established Leaving Scholarship of £35 for two or three years to a pupil of seventeen or more who wished to go to university.

Mrs Fawcett was a famous figure for those who followed the cause of women’s rights, and would have been especially well-known to the girls at Bolton School as the mother of the celebrated Philippa Fawcett. In the summer of 1890, Philippa, a student at Newnham College, had sat the University of Cambridge mathematics examination and had beaten the Senior Wrangler - the best male undergraduate of the year - with a mark 13per cent higher than his. The winner of the title of Senior Wrangler was always well-publicised in the British press, so this marked a massive triumph for those who supported the cause of education for women, at a time when many were arguing that women could never compete with men. A Newnham College student recorded in her diary: ‘The great event of the year was Philippa Garrett Fawcett’s achievement in the Mathematical Tripos. For the first time a woman has been placed above the Senior Wrangler. The excitement in the Senate House when the lists were read was unparalleled. The deafening cheers of the throng of undergraduates redoubled as Miss Fawcett left the Senate House by the side of the Principal. On her arrival at the College she was enthusiastically greeted by a crowd of fellow-students, and carried in triumph into Clough Hall. Flowers, letters, and telegrams poured in upon her throughout the day. The College was profusely decorated with flags. In the evening the whole College dined in Clough Hall. After dinner toasts were proposed: the healths drunk were those of the Principal, Miss Fawcett, her Coach (Mr Hobson) and Senior and Junior Optimes. At 9.30 p.m. the College gardens were illuminated, and a bonfire was lighted on the hockey-ground, round which Miss Fawcett was three times carried amid shouts of triumph and strains of “For she’s a jolly good fellow.”

Fanny Johnson had been in the University Senate House when the results were announced and on her return to Bolton had described the scene to the excited and inspired pupils. Then she and a number of the girls had written to Philippa with personal congratulations.

Running Bolton High School was not without logistical difficulty: and twice Fanny drafted in her young nieces and cousins to fill teaching gaps – first Edith, the daughter of her brother Henry and then Janet Bowes, daughter of Robert and great-niece of Alexander Macmillan, came to Bolton to teach. However at the beginning of the autumn term 1893, after five years in Bolton, Fanny fell ill and was unable to return to work. She was succeeded by a Miss Dymond, with a degree from Newnham, who would remain at the school until 1919.

The school magazine of 1894 reported that Fanny was better and travelling in Italy. In the autumn of 1894 she returned to school to give a lantern slide lecture to the Old Girls on her Travels, complete with photographs and sketches. Did she encourage Nelly to visit Italy as well? Perhaps they went together? In the 1901 census she was recorded as living in Chelsea, London with her brothers Rex and Augustine, not far from Nelly’s studios. In the census she was described as an author and, impressively, as ‘head of the household’. In 1902 Llandaff House in Cambridge was sold and Rex married. Fanny went back to Cambridge and moved to 1 Millington Road, to live with her brother William and her sister Alice – named Ramsay House after their grandfather’s birthplace. William, who was an extremely well-respected mathematician and philosopher, was widowed in 1904, and Fanny and Alice looked after his two small boys.

Fanny spent her time writing and working for good causes, with a particular interest in German literature, as well as adapting dramatic scenes from history as school play scripts. In the 1920s her pageant plays were published by Bowes and Bowes. She remained active politically, with controversial views on equality that she was happy to express in print: a letter to ‘The Freewoman’ magazine in 1911 included the great line ‘Might not the advice to go home and mind the baby sometimes be applied to fathers?’ This enthusiasm brought responsibility as she was appointed press secretary of the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association from 1912 and remained actively involved, keeping its presence alive in the press throughout the war. The CWSA had over 500 members. She was also active in the Labour Party and the Women’s International League.

There is a glimpse of Fanny in the memoirs of Frances Partridge, a member of the Bloomsbury group, who studied Logic at Cambridge just after the First World War under Fanny’s brother William. Frances thought that William (Willy, as he was known) had a brilliant mind and knew that he had been an influence on John Maynard Keynes. She describes him as very shy but affectionate, and a born teacher. He invited his students to join him at home for musical tea parties, and Frances was allowed to turn the pages for him while ‘his tall gaunt sister Fanny stands listening with a plate of cucumber sandwiches in her hand.’1 Fanny died in 1943 at the grand old age of 87.

Fanny also appeared in Nelly Erichsen: A Hidden Life as the friend taking tea in Nelly’s Chelsea studios when George Bernard Shaw comes to call. He describes the incident in a letter to a mutual friend, Bertha Newcombe:

When I got there, lo! A chaperon, a sly little woman who was drawing N on millboard. N’s introduction clearly meant ‘I am sorry to disappoint your evident hope of finding me alone’ but I have no intention of trusting you to that extent.’ Naturally our constraint was fearful. Presently the little woman began to smile slyly as she surveyed us with confidential good nature. She hurried up the tea, and then, before we could intervene, nodded at us in a ‘I know you want to get rid of me way’; snatched up her things and deserted her hostess, leaving us in the most miserable confusion.

You can read what happened next here, but who else has noticed Shaw’s unpleasant remarks about ‘a little woman’ - Partridge remembers her, many years later, as tall, if gaunt:

Fanny’s sister Alice Johnson (1860-1940)is also worth remembering: she was a prominent figure in British psychical research, acting as paid organising secretary to The Society of Psychical Research in London from 1903 to 1916, research officer from 1908 to 1916, and editor of The Proceedings. Her background was in biology, she attended Newnham College Cambridge, being one of the first two recipients in 1882 of the Bathurst Studentships, founded for the encouragement of advanced work in natural sciences, and she subsequently worked as a demonstrator at the Balfour Laboratory. At that time the Vice-Principal of Newnham was Eleanor Sidgwick, a keen scientist and educationalist, and sister of Arthur Balfour, later Prime Minister. Alice became Eleanor’s private secretary, and was thus introduced to the world of psychical research. She participated in experimental sittings with mediums including the American Leonora Piper, and collaborated on several key texts in the area. She predeceased her sister Fanny by just three years, dying at the age of 80.

Nelly Erichsen, Bertha Newcombe, Fanny and Alice Johnson: there are so many women who never married, left no families to remember them, and who have disappeared with so little trace, but who lived remarkable, brave and independent lives. Nobody said it better than George Eliot:

‘that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

It is a long time since I read an Anita Brookner novel, so last week I picked up Visitors, her offering from 1997, with curiosity and anticipation. Would the magic still be there? The front cover blurb said ‘Anita Brookner is a modern Jane Austen.’ Well, yes, if Jane Austen had written very sad novels about lonely women growing old. It’s not what I remember Jane for.

To be fair to Miss Brookner, this was not the best week for me to be reading her work. It’s a very wet and depressing January, the news from outside just seems to get worse and worse, and I am struggling with my second stupid cold of the year, combined with the regular New Year weight gain and the anticipation of a nasty trip to the dentist. Suffice to say I am feeling my age. However, I think Anita was too when she wrote this.

Dorothea May, Thea to her [very few] friends and relations, is a widow in her early seventies, who has lived alone in her ground floor flat in Fulham since the death of her husband fifteen years ago. Her life seems to have become set in aspic: her only dealings with the outside world are the regular weekend visits to Kitty and Molly, her husband’s cousins, living a comfortable existence with their husbands in Hampstead. So much of this seemed very familiar ground to me, from my recollections of the novels I read thirty years ago or more. Brookner’s characters mostly seem to occupy well-upholstered flats in north-west London, the quarter so densely populated with refugees who fled Europe in the 1930s and 40s. This was Anita’s life as well, the only child of a secular Jewish family, originally from Poland, although her first home was Herne Hill in South London. Of course, Brookner had a very successful professional life, more so than any of her characters that I can remember. She was the first female Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University in the late 1960s, and until she retired in 1988 she was a Reader at the Courtauld Institute of Fine Art. She never married.

In Visitors, the dull but cosy life of Kitty, Molly and Thea is rocked when, unexpectedly, Kitty’s granddaughter Ann arrives from America, pregnant, with her fiancé David and his friend Steve. These three young people have to be accommodated, and a wedding arranged. Thea is strong-armed into giving up her spare room to Steve. The novel progresses - the three older women learn a little about themselves and a lot about this younger generation, most of it not to their taste. The wedding happens, the threesome leave, and life resumes. There are none of those cathartic moments of revelation which I remember so vividly from the Booker Prize-winning Hotel Du Lac, or from my personal favourite, Look At Me.

This is a novel about ageing, and about facing the certainty of death. So it was NOT what I should have picked up this rather difficult week. Indeed, one particular morning I found myself so close to tears reading it that I had to put it away. Who remembers Joey in Friends, putting Little Women in the icebox because he couldn’t cope with the death of Beth? I felt very sympathetic to him that morning. Brookner is ruthless about what it means to age:

The body would betray her; the body was therefore taboo, glanced at without amenity in the bath, and ignored once it was covered. It still functioned, more or less, although there were now pills to hand in both bedroom and bathroom. It was almost a comfort to her to know that there was no-one intimate enough to share the stoicism and distaste with which she endured herself.

And here she is, describing a woman in her eighties:

She wore a well-preserved hat of coq feathers, at least forty years out of date, and a dress of printed silk, the bodice of which, tactfully draped, could not quite conceal her completely flat chest. In contrast to her shrivelled body her hands were massive, the knuckles swollen by arthritis. Several fine rings were buried in the interstices.

Oh dear. Although I do quite admire the determination with which this elderly woman demands her share of the champagne and caviare on offer.

Thea May is experiencing what is so often discussed in print these days: the fading into invisibility of the older woman. Before her marriage she had worked in an office:

Those were the halcyon days of office work, before secretaries were known as personal assistants, with computer skills and an awareness of unfair restrictions, before hurt feelings led to industrial tribunals, before a compliment was perceived as sexual harassment, days when girls were free, outside of office hours, to enjoy their money and their liberty.

A touch of misplaced nostalgia here, I feel.

Then Thea met Henry, married him, travelled with him, fashioned a place, slightly uncomfortably, within his family, nursed him through his illness, and buried him. The arrival of Ann, David and Steve, so obviously contemptuous of her complacency, her static lifestyle, challenges her. Could she have done more? ‘Young people are aware of endless possibilities, either in this world or the next…When you get old you realise how limited those possibilities really were, and you regret the fact that you made so little of them’.

How much of this is Anita Brookner speaking for herself or for what she recognised in other women of her generation? She was approaching seventy when she wrote the novel, an impeccably dressed, beautifully poised woman with a string of successful books and prizes burnishing an already illustrious career in the art world. A woman who had re-invented herself, publishing her first novel at the age of fifty-three. Nevertheless, apparent success in the material world is of little comfort in the wee small hours. This novel is a heart-breaking exploration of what haunts so many people as they approach their final years, particularly those for whom achievements were few and far between. It is a recognition of the courage that is needed to continue, as if unaware of the one certainty in life…

Courage to live alone, yes, and to die alone when the time came; courage to meet the empty day formally dressed and scented; courage to confront long endless Sundays, sustained only by a diet of newspapers and walks round the garden, the latter curtailed in case she was observed by idlers at their windows.

It is a bleak picture. So I am not recommending Brookner to anyone feeling a bit sad! But I still was drawn in by her immaculate prose, every word finely judged and placed. By her little glimpses of the pleasures still to be had in life… ‘the carton of minestrone, an onion tart, some salad leaves, a wedge of Dolcelatte and six fine peaches’. I will be revisiting some of the other well-thumbed Brookner volumes on my shelf, hoping to find something slightly more upbeat than Visitors. And I am going to leave you with one of my favourite poems, a different take on growing old, and one that contains much to aspire to.

New Fruit, by Ann Drysdale

In the last knockings of the evening sun
Eve drinks Calvados. Elsewhere in her life
She has played muse and mistress, bitch and wife.
Now all that gunpoint gamesmanship is done.
She loves the garden at this time of day.
Raising her third glass up to God, she grins;
If this is her come-uppance for her sins
It's worth a little angst along the way.
A fourth. Again the cork's slow squeaky kiss.
If, as the liquor tempts her to believe,
The Lord has one more Adam up His sleeve
He's going to have to take her as she is - 
Out in the garden in a dressing-gown
Breathing old apples as the sun goes down.

First of all, some exciting news…I have a publisher for my ramblings and musings on some wonderful Labour women from the 1960s - and a book to write. So my posts may be less frequent over the next few months, but I will still be here, liking and following and commenting on all my Substack friends, and hopefully bringing you all some news from the front line when time allows. I have to hand in the manuscript before the end of the year, and will be keeping my diary clear for publication in September 2027. Special thanks of course to The History Press, publishers of so many wonderful books, particularly about women…they even have a special page on their website!

This week’s post is another in a series about the wives of Labour politicians of the 1960s and 70s, Susan Crosland, wife of Tony. Susan was an extremely talented journalist, a well-known feature writer in The Sunday Times for many years. She also wrote a biography of her husband, which I have been re-reading this week. Walking the dog this morning and thinking about it, I realised that what I most wanted to share with you today is not her career, or any impact she may or may not have had on Labour politics in the 1960s. This is a love story, pure and simple, and her book is one of the most intimate portraits of a marriage that I have read, so I am sharing it with you. Be prepared to be moved.

Charles Anthony Raven Crosland was born in 1918, the child of two devout Plymouth Brethren, the same sect that Edmund Gosse wrote so bitterly about in his masterpiece Father and Son. The Crosland family lived in Golders Green, Tony’s father was a high-ranking civil servant, and they were by no means as severe as the Gosses. Yet it had an impact on the young man’s life, if only by sparking the desire to rebel, but perhaps also by breeding in him an intellect prepared to question, and to be suspicious of conformity. In his later life as a politician, no-one could ever accuse Tony Crosland of following the pack. Tony went from Highgate School to Trinity College, Oxford, where he read Classics and joined the Labour Club, coinciding with Denis Healey (at that stage a fervent Communist) and Roy Jenkins, with whom Tony formed a deep and affectionate relationship, which would later descend into jealousy and acrimony.

Remarkably, Susan’s biography of her husband completely disregards the relationship between these two young men, although it is clear from the letters I have read in the Jenkins archive that their relationship had a romantic angle, and may even have been sexual. In A Life at the Centre, Roy Jenkins’ autobiography, he describes Crosland as ‘the most exciting friend of my life’. Crosland, whose own father had died, became very close to Arthur and Hattie Jenkins, Roy’s parents, and as he wrote to Hattie ‘The proof of our friendship was that during the whole period neither of us had any relations at all with members of the opposite sex - we were too wrapped up in our own two interwoven lives.’

Tony was twenty-one when War broke out, and signed up for the Royal Welsh Fusiliers as soon as he finished his exams in 1940. He had a distinguished war record, joining the Parachute Brigade and fighting up through Italy into France in 1943/4. In 1945 he returned to Oxford, took a First in Politics, Philosophy and Economics and became an academic, until in 1950 he was elected as MP for South Gloucestershire. His time in the Commons was short-lived: he lost his seat in 1955 and settled down to write the book for which he is most famous among Labour theorists, The Future of Socialism, published to great acclaim in 1956. Around this time he was introduced, at a party, to a young American woman, Susan Catling.

Susan Barnes Watson was born in Baltimore, Pennsylvania in January 1927, the daughter of a family which claimed it could trace ancestry back to the Mayflower. Her father was a journalist, later the Editor of The Baltimore Sun. Susan went to Vassar College in New York State, and got a job teaching at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She married another journalist, Patrick Catling when she was twenty-two and they started a family, producing two daughters, Sheila and Ellen-Craig. In 1956 Patrick was posted to London and Susan, with their flat in Knightsbridge, an expense account, plenty of free time and a live-in mother’s help to keep an eye on the children, began to enjoy a new sort of life - studying in the British Library Reading Room by day, partying in Chelsea with the smart set in the evenings.

Susan was the first to admit she had never heard of either Tony Crosland or The Future of Socialism until the day they met. At the time Tony was finalising a divorce from his first brief marriage, living in a flat in The Boltons, Chelsea, and known as a philanderer and a drinker, unpredictable but totally charming.

Unusually tall, broad-shouldered, to me he looked raffish and was compelling at the same time. I’d never seen irises so pale; I was fascinated by their contrast with the nearly black hair. 19 The Boltons was an oasis. I could scarcely credit it. I still can scarcely credit what happened to my life…He opened my eyes to all manner of concepts, attitudes I’d never analysed, aspects of human nature, pleasure, needs I hadn’t realised before. A whole new education began.

Susan writes that, although no saint, Tony was not interested in adultery: I assume that their sexual affair really only began after Patrick had asked Susan for a divorce in 1960. The couple had been growing apart for some time, and he told his wife he wanted to be free to marry the jazz singer Peggy Lee. Peggy does not seem to have shared this ambition, but eventually the divorce came through in 1964. Tony and Susan may not have been sleeping together, but the intellectual and physical attraction was overwhelming. Within a year of their meeting, he said to her ‘I’m putting my promiscuity aside until you leave England…I want to make the most of this.’

Meanwhile Crosland’s political career was taking off again. In 1959 he was adopted as the Labour candidate for Grimsby, the unfortunately-named fishing port in Lincolnshire. One of their mutual girlfriends, Joanna Kilmartin, suggested to Susan that it might be fun to support him in the General Election campaign, so the two women, neither of whom, we can assume, had ever been anywhere like Grimsby in their lives, set off up north in a yellow convertible sportscar. Naturally the local Labour Party agent was appalled, they were so obviously the Chelsea set, with their chiffon scarves floating. ‘Don’t you go anywhere near that car’, she warned Tony. And when the campaign van he was being driven in broke down, and the yellow convertible was the only option, the agent made Susan and Joanna get out. Crosland won, but only by the narrowest of margins.

In 1960, Susan, now a single mother, got a job writing features at the Sunday Express. When the divorce came through, Susan dyed her hair pink: Tony proposed but she turned him down. All too complicated. She had her own life, two children in local schools; Tony was still racketing around in The Boltons. They tried a separation - but after five days of that Tony called, and said he was coming round for an answer ‘I don’t like these unilateral decisions’.

Susan married Tony Crosland at Chelsea Register Office in February 1964. The witnesses were the two widows of Tony’s closest political mentors, Ruth Dalton and Dora Gaitskell. She had offered to let him keep his flat in The Boltons for when he needed to escape - but he only did it once, discovering that a solitary bottle of vermouth in an unheated flat was very unattractive compared to a night with his beautiful, funny American wife and her two lovely daughters. She had also allowed him to negotiate a certain level of sexual freedom - it was the swinging sixties, after all. But she seems pretty certain in her book that he never took advantage of it. Of course, within nine months of their marriage there was a General Election, his majority in Grimsby rose from 101 votes to over 4,000, and from then until the Government fell in 1970 Crosland had a succession of increasingly important political roles, notably as Secretary of State for Education and then President of the Board of Trade. He certainly appreciated the stability of a peaceful home life as he navigated the perilous deeps of the Wilson years.

On their marriage, Susan gave up her job at the right-wing Express, but was quickly taken on by The Sunday Times, where her long-form interviews, often taking several months of work, became a regular feature. The following paragraph is taken from her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, written by a close friend of the couple, David Lipsey:

She soon came under the benevolent wing of Harold Evans, the editor of the Sunday Times, using her seductive negotiating skills to achieve remuneration which kept her and her husband in reasonable comfort. Like her second husband Susan Crosland was an impossibly glamorous figure, which could blind people to the fact that she was also, in her own right, an outstanding journalist. She was one of the early practitioners of a genre that later became almost a cliché, the personality profile. Her Sunday Times profiles included a number of sensations and near-sensations: Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, following the scandal that saw him tried but acquitted for the attempted murder of Norman Scott; Jack Jones, the trade union leader; Lord Hailsham, who nearly became Tory leader; and Kenneth Tynan, the enfant terrible of theatre criticism. Her technique where possible was to quote the trenchant judgements of others to express what she herself thought, giving the appearance of journalistic detachment while at the same time being deadly accurate as to a person’s true character. As with her husband, the glitter of her public persona disguised much hard work. She would research her subjects in immense detail, not just through cuttings but through interviewing their friends (and enemies). Her writing, too, was painstaking, though Tony Crosland was to complain that she always showed her work to him ‘one draft too soon’ .

It was clear to everyone that the marriage was extraordinarily successful, in the way that second marriages can be - both parties knowing what is at stake, being more tolerant, and perhaps having made a better choice than first time around. According to observers, Tony became ‘uxorious, unhappy when away from his wife for long on official business.’ On the wall of his study hung the portrait of Susan he had commissioned - ‘me, standing, wearing high-heeled sandals only.’ Whatever time of day he got back from the office, what he most wanted to do was to talk to Susan. If it was going to be late, she would set an alarm and try to get some sleep, so that she could be awake when he came upstairs.

‘What’s been happening?’ meant my gossip came first while he began to unwind over a drink in his study. Anything good, bad, sad in the children’s day. How my interview had gone. Family news. What else had I done, thought, felt? Once, long before, I’d expressed surprise at his insatiable curiosity about what I did. ‘Never understood the male attitude that your day isn’t at least as interesting as mine,’ he said. If morbidity or depression invaded me, he showed me the way to dispel it…He wanted to tell me about a new concept, or St James’s park at lunchtime…He might ask me to have a look at a passage in a speech if, after redrafting it, he still wasn’t happy…This time of day we had to ourselves was important.

Susan supported him through two separate terms of political office - the 1960s, and again from 1974. This second term saw his career reach the pinnacle of Foreign Secretary, a role which brought increasing strain. It has also to be said that Tony’s individualistic take on socialism made him at different times a hate figure for the Left of the Party, and a great disappointment to the Jenkins social democratic, pro-European faction. He ploughed his own furrow, with Susan always his greatest admirer and supporter. She was not ambitious for herself, often openly joking about the disadvantages of his political career - when his first Cabinet post got him an official driver, she said that at least it gave her sole use of their Sunbeam sports car during the week. When in the 1970s there was a possibility that the Exchequer might come his way, which would have meant moving the family into 11 Downing Street, she told him ‘I don’t want you not to be Chancellor. I just wish it could be postponed for a couple of years.’

The couple scraped together the money to buy a house in Notting Hill, and later, in the 1970s, they also acquired an old mill in Adderbury, near Banbury. That is where Tony was on the Sunday morning in February 1977 when he suffered the massive stroke that killed him. He was only fifty-eight. Susan survived him for thirty-three years, but never remarried. Her biography of him, published in 1982, is agreed to be a wonderful portrait of what it was like to be married to a politician. She makes a good case that a partner’s memory will always be more reliable than the subject’s: ‘Politicians have notoriously bad memories: not so much because they want to adjust the past as because of the continuing surges of activity and emotion and the insecurity endemic to their profession: one moment they are on a pinnacle, the next moment on the ash heap, sometimes rising from the ashes, toppled again.’

Tony Crosland inspires mixed reactions as a politician - to some he is the demon who destroyed the grammar school system in England, to others he is still an inspirational philosopher of the soft or centre Left - quoted just last week by Wes Streeting as one of his ‘lodestars’. When Tony died, the Grimsby agents asked Susan to take his seat, but she declined, saying she lacked either the stamina or temperament. Also, she was finding it hard to leave the house. Austin Mitchell stood as the candidate on the same day that Labour was completely wiped out at Ashfield, but held Grimsby for Labour by the slimmest of majorities. I am going to end this piece the way Susan ends her book. The Times’ leader writer said the by-election result made no sense:

‘Crosland, for all his qualities, was not likely to have been truly accepted by the mass of Grimsby voters as one of their own.’ ‘Sod the patronising buggers’, said one of the by-election workers…He flung The Times to the floor. ‘It’s people like the fancy-pants boys who wrote that - who think they’re so bloody superior - who couldn’t understand Tony. My God it was a pleasure to watch him put them down.’ He started to cry. That being unmanly, he left the crowded office and went down the narrow steep stairs to the door which leads outside.

A great politician. A great journalist. A great love story.

Most photographs and quotations taken from Susan Crosland’s Tony Crosland.

Everyone told me that I would love One Fine Day, Mollie Panter-Downes’ most famous novel, and how right you all were! It is a glorious celebration of how it felt to be English in 1946, even though people had died, rationing persisted, and the long-established class structures of British society were being shaken as never before.

The day promised to be hot.

Thus opens this simple narrative, one day in the life of the Marshall family, who live in a pretty English village, Wealding, on the Sussex Downs, within easy reach of the sea. Stephen Marshall had fought in the War but now is home, rebuilding his career as ‘something in the City’, catching the 8.47 train with all the other bowler-hatted commuters. We do not hear anything more about his time in service: we know that for his little daughter Victoria, living alone with her mother and spending time with other single-parent families had been fun, free from the usual routines. And we see a single image of his safe return, his wife Laura meeting him at the station and bursting into tears: ‘the spectacle of one more soldier and one more weeping woman.’ But now, in 1946, the initial euphoria of the victory is over, and life seems harder than ever, with new strains tearing at the fabric of their marriage.

The story is mostly told from Laura’s point of view, as she sees Victoria off on the bus to school, and clears up the breakfast things, waiting for the arrival of the rather comical charlady, Mrs Prout. Even the combined efforts of Mrs Prout and Laura are failing to keep up with a house in slow decline. Stephen misses the presence of Ethel and Violet, the pretty little parlourmaids in their neat uniforms whisking away the tea things, long gone to work in an armament factory, and never planning any return to domestic service. For this is a principal message of the book: nothing will ever be again as it was before the War for the genteel, wealthy middle-classes - the sources of their financial comfort are as threatened as the British Empire they had helped to build, the staff who made their lives so easy have vanished - some to better ways of earning a living, some, like the Marshalls’ gardener, ‘dead in Holland.’

Laura passes the morning travelling by bus into the little town of Bridbury brandishing her ration books, queueing up for the limited supplies in the shops. Rationing would continue in Britain for a decade after the War ended, and in some cases becoming even more restricted - bread was rationed for the first time in 1946. If Laura doesn’t get there until after 11 in the morning, she will find very slim pickings remaining, as if a host of locusts had swept through the town.

This deprivation was slowly wearing Laura down.

Eating had become just that - biting and swallowing. She had never been a greedy woman, but toothsome ghosts of food kept on floating back from the past…some delicious little rum-flavoured cakes which she and Stephen had eaten somewhere abroad on their honeymoon.

Rationing of sweets seemed particularly cruel; Laura’s father ‘hid his sweet ration in a tin in the brown snuggery, retired and ate with private greed behind The Times after lunch.’ This sentence made me smile - I thought of the legends of my dear grandfather, who could never decide whether to divide his ration into 30 days to last the month, or to buy something delicious and eat it all in one glorious feast. My poor grandmother, so the legend goes, was so fed up with finding her ration had been appropriated, that she took to buying liquorice Pontefract Cakes, as the only sweets Herbert did not like. Sadly, so the story goes, she did not like them very much either.

Back at home, Laura sets out on her bicycle on a double mission: to see if she can find another gardener, and to rescue her dog Stuffy, who has run off to join the gypsy pack on the nearby hill. Her first port of call is the ramshackle cottage belonging to the disreputable, scandalous Porter family. Laura has lost track of all the offspring of Mrs Porter, who in her own way had had a very good war, constantly wooed by passing soldiers, to the apparent lack of any interest from Mr Porter. ‘Between bouts in the bracken, Mrs Porter always had a child in her arms, and she loved them all…she enjoyed life, she took what came.’ One of her daughters had joined the WAAF, but returned pregnant by a (married) Polish airman. Her eldest son George comes to the door to talk to Laura - a glorious specimen of young manhood, as Laura notices, but he hardly notices her. Here Panter-Downes shows herself well aware of the invisibility of the older woman, so often remarked on in today’s journalism:

He looked at her amiably, as though she were a nice sofa. That must be the penalty of grey hair…Young men looked at you as though you were a nice sofa, an article of furniture which they would never be desirous of acquiring.

Failing to tempt George into gardening, Laura sets off again, passing the gates of the manor house, lived in for generations by the Cranmer family, but now too expensive a proposition for any family - Mrs Prout has heard that it is to be handed over to ‘The National Trussed.’ Laura visits for tea, watching the family packing up, gazing at the family portraits lining the walls, soon to be dismantled:

The same strong family face repeated itself again and again along the faded red damask walls, blue-eyed, straight-nosed, blooming with the physical beauty that comes from generations of little thinking and much strenuous outdoor exercise.

Such a perfect description of so many old English minor aristocratic families.

During the War, as a perfect example of that enforced communality across the classes, the Cranmer women had hosted circles of village women of all classes sewing and knitting for the troops.

There was something soothing about it, Laura always felt, as though they were repeating some classic pattern which went on recurring for ever in different fancy dresses, the group of women sitting sewing round the lady of the house while their men were at the wars, fighting the Trojans or the Turks or the Nazis. Men must fight and women must sew - of course in this war women had fought too. They had flown aeroplanes, they had been bombed on gun sites, they had struggled in the dreadful equality of icy water among drowning men…There was something soothing about it, the ritual gesture which said, While you destroy, we build up, we stitch and fold quietly in the inner courtyard which is the true centre of the house.

The story ends with Laura recovering Stuffy, shedding tears of relief that the war is over as she and her dog tramp up the hill to get a last view of the sea, before she returns home vowing to start life anew: ‘She had had to lose a dog and climb a hill, a year later, to realise what it would have meant if England had lost.’

So far, so very simple. Nothing happens. Panter-Downes has created for Laura a little odyssey, from country village to country town, from fecund farmworkers’ cottages to the rundown, sterile home of the landed gentry whose days are numbered. What makes this book so powerful, and still so popular eighty years later?

The answer, surely, is the author’s prose. Her descriptions of the countryside are delicious, fragrant, full of ‘flower-and-hedgelore’ rarely found today outside the specialist text:

In spring, dog violets spilled small blue lakes in the bleached grass, followed later by the pink and white restharrow, clean as sprigged chintz, and the great golden candlesticks of mulleins. Up here, on the empty hill-top, something said I am England, I will remain…I will stand when you are dust.

and

The county was tumbled out before her like the contents of a lady’s workbox, spools of green and silver and pale yellow, ribbed squares of brown stuff, a thread of crimson, a stab of silver, a round polished gleam of mother of pearl.

It is beautiful writing.

Panter-Downes can also make me laugh, and Laura’s conversations with her permanently disappointed mother, pining for the Raj in retirement in a small Cornish village are timeless: why on earth had Laura married disappointing Stephen (in trade?) when she had Philip Drayton KC at her feet? and look where it had got her: ‘You spend the entire day doing the work of an unpaid domestic servant. When I think of how you were brought up…’

But I want to leave you with one perfect sentence, that stopped me in my tracks. I would give a great deal to write prose like this:

The yellow roses in the bowl shed half a rose in a sudden soft, fat slump on the polished wood.

For another piece about the impact on the classes of WW2, try:

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Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight - an upper-middle-class family in full plumage…On June 15, 1886, about four of the afternoon, the observer who chanced to be present at the house of old Jolyon Forsyte in Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest efflorescence of the Forsytes.

Thus begins one of the great English novels of the twentieth century - a work which won its author, John Galsworthy, both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. There are nine Forsyte novels in all, released as three separate trilogies - most Galsworthy fans know the first trilogy well, have a nodding acquaintance with the second, and may have lapsed altogether by the third. But that really does not matter as there is more than enough plot, personality and passion in the first three novels to have powered two well-loved television adaptations, and now a five hour, two-part play at the Swan Theatre in Stratford. It’s almost certainly sold out, but if you can beg, borrow or steal a ticket, you are in for a Christmas treat of the very highest order.

The production at The Swan, a transfer from the Park Theatre in London (2024), is an object lesson in the dictum ‘Less is More’. There is no set, as such - occasionally someone brings a chair onto the stage, but otherwise shifts of scene are indicated simply by the swishing of full height crimson plush curtains masking a wooden gallery at the back of the stage. The cast is limited, with some actors swapping roles between scenes. If I had any criticism, it would only be that Irene should have been dressed more beautifully. Anyone who has seen the television productions will remember Nyree Dawn Porter, and later Gina McKee, in their full glory.

The story has been greatly simplified - told in flashback by Soames’ daughter Fleur, trying to understand the family secrets that will ruin her own life. Extraneous characters and plot have been jettisoned (Winifred and that charming bounder Dartie do not appear at all) to allow complete focus on the love pentangle of Soames, Irene, Bosinney, June and Jolyon.

There is no doubt in this version as to who is the villain of the piece. Joseph Millson joins a distinguished line behind Eric Porter and Damian Lewis as a thoroughly smug, unpleasant and ultimately violent Soames, a husband whose casual coercive control will rapidly descend into sexual violence. At times, the audience comes close to a pantomime ‘hiss’ at his stage exits. I seem to remember that the audience of the twenty-six part adaptation from the 1960s were rather more ambivalent. Not everyone was a fan of Irene as played by Nyree Dawn Porter; in fact I seem to remember that my mother was definitely in the ‘poor Soames’ camp. This morning I have been scouring the pages of the novel to see how Galsworthy actually dealt with the rape scene, and discovered that we see it only through Soames’ troubled recollection of

…a certain night on which Soames at last asserted his rights and acted like a man…Had he been right to yield to his overmastering hunger of the night before and break down the resistance which he had suffered now too long from this woman who was his lawful and solemnly constituted helpmate? He was strangely haunted by the recollection of her face…of her terrible smothered sobbing, the like of which he had never heard, and still seemed to hear; and he was still haunted by the odd, intolerable feeling of remorse and shame he had felt, as he stood looking at her by the flame of the single candle, before slinking away.

John Galsworthy, the author of this fine piece, was born in 1867 into a family very like the Forsytes - pillars of upper-middle class respectability, professionals and lawyers. However, like the young Jolyon of the trilogy, and despite his Harrow and Oxford education, he found he could not settle for a career in the law and from the age of thirty made his living as a published author and prolific playwright. Of all his works, only the Forsyte Saga seems to have survived, but it is clear to me from studying his own romantic history, that he would not have been on the same side as Soames. In 1895 he began a love affair with Ada, the wife of his cousin Arthur. It took ten years, the death of his father (from whom the affair had to be concealed) and the eventual agreement of cousin Arthur to divorce Ada, before the couple could marry. The marriage, with no children, lasted happily until his death in 1933.

Throughout his life Galsworthy supported many fine and worthy causes: workers’ rights, animal welfare, prison reform, pacifism, women’s issues and freedom of speech. From 1921 until his death he was the Founding President of PEN International, promoting friendship and free speech between authors across the world. So keen was he not be seen as part of the Establishment, with all that implied, that he turned down a knighthood, and when his name was printed with the title in the press in error, he demanded a correction.

The adaptation by the BBC in 1967 gripped the nation - for fifty minutes every Sunday night, over twenty-six weeks, the viewing public sat by its television set, entranced. The clergy complained of falling attendance at evensong. It placed the dilemma of the unhappily married woman front and centre of the national consciousness, at a time when the Divorce Laws were still stacked pretty firmly against a woman who found herself trapped in an unhappy marriage. It may, or may not, have been a complete coincidence that at the same time that the series was transmitted, the Labour Government was putting in motion a complete overhaul of the divorce laws, via a Royal Commission, which would result in the 1969 Divorce Reform Act. Divorce numbers had been on the rise steadily since the 1930s, and considerably in the aftermath of the Second World War. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937 had introduced new grounds for divorce including desertion, insanity and cruelty. It was no longer the social stigma it had once been. Was it also a coincidence that of the twelve women I will be writing about in my next book, Wives of Power, five had been through divorces themselves in the 1930s - and were now married to senior Labour Cabinet members? Being party to a divorce was no longer a career-ending scandal.

The 1969 Act reformed the law on divorce in England and Wales by enabling couples to divorce after they had been separated for two years if they both desired a divorce, or five years if only one wanted a divorce. Crucially, it introduced the concept of the irretrievable breakdown of a marriage: people could end marriages that had "irretrievably broken down" and neither partner had to prove "fault". It received royal assent on 22 October 1969 and became law on 1 January 1971. John Galsworthy would have heartily approved. His only comment might have been, why on earth did it take so long?

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Some of the writers are well-known - there is a Rose Macaulay and an Elizabeth von Arnim, but I have also loved a couple by women completely unknown to me - Eleanor Scott, May Sinclair. They deserve every page of their re-publication (although I wish more glue had been used - my copy of War Among Ladies completely fell apart.) The volumes all begin with a little introduction and a chronology of the decade in which they are set, and a short Afterword by the Series Consultant, an academic called Simon Thomas - also the author of ‘the middlebrow blog’ Stuck in a Book. This is where I discovered what I was. I looked up ‘middebrow’, it’s a very unattractive word, and found the following ‘enjoyable and well-crafted, but not necessarily challenging the boundaries of art.’ Well, thank heavens for that, I say. There is quite enough challenging stuff going on in the world outside, leave me alone with my Earl Grey tea and my middlebrow taste. And, as I hope to show you, middlebrow might not attack the ‘boundaries of art’ but it certainly is not afraid to tackle difficult issues or to challenge society’s codes and expectations.

Of the four books I highlighted in the photograph, Chatterton Square by EH Young was certainly my favourite, so I will save it for last.

The earliest of the four is May Sinclair’s The Tree of Heaven, written during the First World War and published in 1917. Sinclair was politically active, a campaigner for the vote, and also increasingly interested in psychology and spiritualism. The novel focuses on the Harrison family, living in a large house on Hampstead Heath, and traces their history from the turn of the century and the Boer War, through the rise of Liberalism and the suffragettes, into the horrors of the War. If you enjoyed Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others, you will enjoy this.

My Husband Simon is by Mollie Panter-Downes, whom I should certainly have come across before, so prolific a writer was she. Her first novel was published when she was just seventeen, her post-war novel One Fine Day is still acknowledged as a classic, and she was also well known for her fortnightly ‘Letter from London’ in the New Yorker throughout the war. Simon was published in 1931 and tells the surprisingly frank tale of Nevis Falconer, a young novelist, who married Simon hastily in the grip of sexual passion but finds herself trapped in an increasingly stifling relationship which is blocking her creativity. Along comes Marcus, her American publisher, tempting her with an alternative way of life across the Atlantic. We know from the opening line the choice she will make, presumably shocking to a 1930s audience. Nevis is always surprisingly frank:

My friends were nearly all men, which made things a bit difficult. I did not like women, taken as a sex. I had tried, but their chatter about servants and babies and insides nearly drove me crazy. I saw all my own meannesses of soul reflected in them; the streaks of pretty femininity that would always make my writing lack the vigour, the clarity and impersonal detachment of a man’s writing.

The 1930s saw women on the cusp of a new way of life, seeing new possibilities for a fulfilling life which did not depend on fathers and husbands for protection and support. Suddenly there were women novelists everywhere, writing their own kind of literature, prepared to be honest about love, sex, and the relationships between men and women. Not so many starry-eyed romances which ended at the altar with visions of living happily ever after. These women were prepared to write about the life of the spinster, the life of the unhappily married woman, the life of the under-appreciated and frustrated mother. Their female readers lapped it up.

Not all of this new wave of literature for women was about sex and marriage. Eleanor Scott published War Among Ladies in 1928, and it is a terrific read. Set in the common room of a girls’ school, the plot is driven by an appalling injustice that Scott, the Principal of an Oxford teacher training college, was only too aware of. Teachers were required by their employers to pay substantial contributions out of their wages into a pension fund. It sounds like a good idea: except that the pension could only be drawn by teachers who had retired at the expected end of their career. Any teacher who wanted to resign early, or who was dismissed as incompetent, lost their money and would have nothing to live on. This is the crisis facing one member of staff at Besley High School: Miss Cullen has lost control of her class, and through her failures at exam time the whole school is threatened with closure. Cullen cannot afford to resign, even though she detests the job and all her colleagues - and they have no means to push her out. It’s war in the staffroom, and into this conflict steps the naive, newly qualified Miss Kennedy:

There is something appalling in this warfare, silent, secret and unrelenting, that is waged by polite women with smiling faces and gentle manners, against one another. When you realise it, it takes your breath and leaves you horrified by its stealth and its malignity…Everyone was on the edge of collapse. Fear, fury, anxiety, helpless despair, gnawed at all the unfortunate women who, with calm faces and tormented hearts, went on their placid way, instructing the unconscious girls in the elements of what is mistakenly called education.

I wrote the other week about Emily Young, and have embarked on a thorough read of all the novels I can find. I have to say that Celia, published in 1937, was a bit of a let down - an unnecessarily complex story of three marriages. Celia is married to Gerald, an unsuccessful architect, but nurtures a secret passion for her friend’s brother Richard, who was wounded in the war. Her sister May is married to Stephen, but he does not seem to be very happy either. Meanwhile their brother John keeps the family draper’s shop, but his wife Julia has never got past the snobbery and disgrace she feels for having married into trade. It’s not a bad book, just … not Young at her best. So I picked up Chatterton Square, her last novel, published in the aftermath of the Second World War, with some misgivings. Suppose she really had lost the plot?

I need not have worried. It’s an utter triumph. Again set in Upper Radstowe, (otherwise known as Clifton, the Bristol suburb, of Young’s own early married life), it concerns two families living in adjoining houses on the square in question - the Blacketts and the Frasers. The Blacketts are new arrivals, he’s a successful businessman and is proud of the address to which his success has brought him, his wife Bertha, and his three daughters Flora, Rhoda and Mary. The Frasers are long-established in the Square - Rosamund is bringing up a family of five after her husband Fergus has left her and moved to France. Slowly Young unpeels the secrets of the two houses: Herbert Blackett is a ridiculous,conceited and controlling man, and Bertha has learnt to despise him. Rosamund Fraser is falling in love with Piers Lindsay, Bertha’s cousin, badly scarred by the War and working as a market gardener. Agnes Spanner, who never married, lodges with Rosamund and observes the trials and tribulations of the young people as they come of age. All of this is set in the summer of 1938, and the Munich Crisis becomes the overwhelming driver of the plot.

Young writes so beautifully and with such insight into all her characters and the trials they face. Poor Miss Spanner, in her forties, whose life was ruined by her squint and by her unpleasant parents, who has learned to escape into the world of books, now has the vicarious pleasure of watching her adored Rosamund’s children growing up, but finds modern life a bit of a challenge:

It was still something of an adventure for Miss Spanner to have a meal in a restaurant. Nothing would have induced her to go alone into a place where there were men as waiters; she knew what they would think of her and how they would treat her and she had not the special kind of courage which could combat them, but in a teashop, where there were home-made cakes and young ladies in cretonne overalls, she was comparatively at ease when she had defied and conquered a slight feeling of guilt.

Her bullying parents had believed there was no reason to leave home for anything: the only time Agnes had briefly escaped, she had returned to find a cross-stich embroidery of the motto that ‘home-keeping hearts were happiest’, hung over her bed. She had turned it to the wall every night. It is these little glimpses that Young gives us that say so much. Herbert Blackett likes to sleep with the bed against the wall - but he sleeps on the outside edge, so that Bertha has to ‘suffer the absurd indignity of clambering over his recumbent figure’ to get out. With no money, no work and three children, Bertha is as trapped in her marriage as she is against the wall.

The coming of the Munich Crisis brings a crisis of its own to the Square, as Miss Spanner leads the protests and shame felt at the scandal of Appeasement, while Herbert Blackett trusts to Mr Chamberlain to keep them all safe. The author Emily Young and her lover Ralph Henderson had no children of their own to worry about in 1938, but working in a boys’ public school, looking at the fresh youthful faces every day against the backdrop of the 1914-18 Roll of Honour, must have been hard to bear. Nevertheless, for Rosamund, the terror of what her boys might go through is balanced against her shame at what was happening in Europe. She tries to explain to her children what the First World War had meant, why it had been fought:

‘It has been blotted out as though we ought to be ashamed of it. Ashamed of it! Of a lot of other things but not of that. Yet your generation, how I don’t know, has been very subtly inoculated with the idea that we were in the wrong and those villains over there have posed and been accepted as the injured party ever since… We’ve gulled ourselves and been gulled for the last twenty years. Too lazy, too tired, to bother or foresee. And nearly all the best men gone, the ones who knew what they were fighting for and would have lived for it. ..You all seem to think we were fighting for something we had no right to. It’s true that at the end we were fighting for our existence…but at the beginning it was for an ideal of decency and good faith.

Of course Young is writing with hindsight: with more knowledge of the evils of Nazism than most folk had in 1938, and with a glorious victory behind her. But the passion that Rosamund and Miss Spanner feel reminds me of Louis Macneice’s Autumn Journal, written in 1938:

So Thursday came and Oxford went to the polls

And made its coward vote and the streets resounded

To the triumphant cheers of the lost souls -

The profiteers, the dunderheads, the smarties.

Some people did indeed feel that passionately at the time.

The novel ends with Mr Chamberlain waving his little piece of paper, but Miss Spanner is not convinced by any of it, as she explains to Rosamund:

‘Nobody but an idiot can suppose the trouble’s stopped. This is only the beginning and we’ll get another chance.’

‘And refuse to take it’

‘I’m not so sure’ Miss Spanner said slowly. ‘I can’t believe we’ve gone rotten altogether. And if we take it we’ll save the whole world or go down in glory.’

These ‘middlebrow’ novels may not be the most intellectually challenging books you ever read. You may need to re-read a paragraph or two, to make sure you followed the plot or got the joke. Unlike some more highbrow work, you won’t wonder at the end of it if you got the point at all. (Sorry, just me?) But you will be gripped by the recognition that these are real people, and even if they were living one hundred years ago we can sympathise with their problems and recognise our own foibles and dilemmas - in the little things, such as how to handle a stroppy teenager or a self-obsessed husband, but also in the big things. The difficulties in handling the threats of a rapacious warmonger are certainly not confined to the 1930s, and much of Chatterton Square would strike chords with readers in Europe today. I think we can all join in Miss Spanner’s horror:

‘Half the world, more than half, is behaving as though it’s perfectly reasonable to grab anything you fancy. And the greed won’t stop there. You’ll see. Why should it? But the victim hasn’t consented yet to being carved up. Queer, isn’t it? Selfish. You think he’d be grateful for being allowed to keep a little bit of his own body…Why need we be prepared when we can appease the wolves by throwing other people at them?’

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Have you spotted this beautifully produced book, Comrades in Art, by Andy Friend? Pearl Binder, Elwyn’s wife, features throughout. Next year at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne there will be a major exhibition spotlighting her work, among others from this group of radical inter-war artists.

Elwyn and Polly could not have sprung from less auspicious backgrounds. Elwyn, born in Llanelli in 1909, was the youngest son of a steelworker, a chapel-goer and trade unionist, and was brought up speaking Welsh at home. Polly was born in 1904, the daughter of a Russo-Jewish immigrant, Morris Binderofski, who took British citizenship in 1911 and anglicised his surname to Binder. Morris worked as a master-tailor in Manchester and married a local girl, Janet Jacobs. They named their youngest daughter Pearl, but she chose to be known as Polly.

Of the two of them, Elwyn won the education sweepstake: from Lakefield Elementary School in Llanelli he passed the entrance scholarship to the County Intermediate School, where the headmaster, an Oxford graduate from Jesus College, encouraged him to join the Debating Society, to take his Higher Certificate and to study History at University College, Aberystwyth. From there he won a scholarship to Cambridge, sadly worth only £60 per annum towards a cost reckoned to be £250: his two older brothers and his sister funded the rest themselves out of their hard-earned pay packets. By 1930 Elwyn had become President of the Cambridge Union (I have read that he was the first state school President, but I cannot prove that - however I do know that his college tutor paid for the white tie and tails he required). With a stellar academic career behind him he was called to the Bar.

Polly’s education was a lot less glamorous. Coming from the back streets of Salford, she took a job clerking in a textile mill, but won a scholarship that enabled her to take evening classes at Manchester School of Art. Her abilities as an artist, and her fascination with textiles and fashion, would stay with her throughout her life. Her sketches, cartoons almost, were quirky, individualistic, and perfect for graphic reproduction. She moved to London at the age of twenty-one to earn her bread as a commercial artist and lithographer, and was briefly married to the anthropologist Jack Driberg, brother of the more famous Tom.

The early 1930s saw Polly and Elwyn both in London, struggling to earn a living in the Depression: Elwyn supplemented his meagre legal earnings with journalism and tutoring. He shared a flat in Mecklenburgh Square, where he lived next door to Richard Tawney, and then moved to Hampstead sharing with Richmond Postgate, brother to Raymond Postgate and Margaret Cole, pillars of the Fabian Society. (I have attached links to my previous posts on these people! Elwyn seems to be following my Substack subjects around!) By 1934 Jones was an active Fabian Socialist, and began to use his legal training in the increasingly murky waters of European politics - he went with Naomi Mitchison to Vienna to work on behalf of the prisoners locked up for being members of the Social Democratic party (SDP) - there were nine thousand people in custody, and Elwyn developed quite a reputation as the protector of the imprisoned.

Polly, meanwhile, was fiercely committed to even more radical politics, flirting with joining the Communist Party, while working on illustrations of conditions in the East End of London, including for Thomas Burke’s book, The Real East End (1932). She was living in Spread Eagle Yard in Whitechapel, and working on her own illustrated book of London lives, Odd Jobs. In July 1933 she visited Russia, taking with her a portfolio of her drawings: the rumour going round London was that the Soviets were happily employing commercial artists on propaganda missions and Polly needed the work. She arrived with a rucksack, a mackintosh, her portfolio and a little money, on a two week tourist visa: ‘Russia was to me a completely unknown continent…the best remedy for wishful thinking was to go to see for oneself.’ Of course, she must also have been aware that she was visiting her father’s homeland.

On her return, Polly was invited to address a gathering of young socialist artists in a flat rented by Misha Black: this was the foundation of The Artists’ International Association, described by Andy Friend as ‘one of the boldest and most imaginative artistic developments in England during the twentieth century’. By 1935 this had morphed into a specifically anti-fascist, popular front movement: ‘The AIA stands for unity of artists against Fascism and War and the Suppression of Culture.’ In November of that year an exhibition was curated featuring work by the artists involved (the membership had grown to over a thousand) and was sent touring factory canteens and provincial libraries around the country. Polly’s involvement in the anti-Fascist movement gathered pace when that same year she attended the ‘First International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture’, held in Paris, alongside EM Forster, Aldous Huxley and Andre Gide. A few weeks later, at a party to celebrate the launch of her book, Odd Jobs, she was introduced to the well-regarded and politically-active lawyer, Elwyn Jones. Polly filed for a divorce from her estranged husband, Driberg, and the couple were married in October 1937.

Polly took a job in advertising, and then went to work for the BBC at Alexandra Palace, preparing talks for broadcast on the newly launched television network. Their first child, Josephine, was born in January 1938, but Polly continued to work, hiring a live-in housekeeper and a live-in nurse. She was probably the first heavily pregnant woman to appear on British TV. Their flat in the Goldsmiths Building over looking the Temple and Oliver Goldsmith’s grave was increasingly crowded - and in January 1939 they rented a large run-down house in Hounslow.

We pushed open a handsome but creaking wrought iron gate and walked towards the front door of the house. The tangled lawn was matted with dead leaves and covered with white frost. I dug in my walking stick and lifted the frozen crust. Underneath were clusters of snowdrops in bloom. That decided us. We took the house.

Before long, the household would increase further when the couple took in Margit, a teenager from Germany, rescued under the KinderTransport scheme. In 1939, Elwyn joined up, and by 1940 he was in Kent.

Early in September 1940 my troop was stationed in Manston Aerodrome, just a few miles out of Dover. The German Panzer army was on the French coast just across the Channel. One beautiful moonlit night I was summoned to report at once to the RAF Station Commander. I chugged across the aerodrome on my power-driven pushbike. He informed me that … weather conditions for an air and seaborne invasion were perfect and that my troops should be ready for action an hour before sunrise.

‘How long can your guns fire?’, he asked me.

‘To the last round, Sir.’

‘And how long will that be?’

‘Seventy-five seconds, Sir’. I explained that I only had 150 rounds for each of my three Bofors guns and that they fired 120 rounds a minute.

‘Where do you get your reinforcements from?’, he asked me.

‘Dover Castle’

‘Do you realise that the Nazi paratroops are going to drop between here and Dover?’

‘I mentioned this to a brigadier, when he came round recently,’ I explained; ‘but he said it was none of my business.’

Extract from In My Time, the autobiography of Lord Elwyn-Jones.

Some five years after this incident, when Major Elwyn Jones was a prosecutor at the Nuremberg war trials, he was shown Adolf Hitler’s signed orders for the invasion of Britain in August 1940. The first paragraph included the words ‘Although the British military situation is hopeless, they show not the least sign of being prepared to compromise.’

Polly was pregnant again, but still working. She wrote to Elwyn every day:

17 Sept ‘I’ve been in London all day today. A bomb hit the Langham Hotel so the BBC is a bit disorganised. However I did my piece all right…then to Middlesex Hospital where the doctor informed me that Daniel is all in the wrong position…there was a raid just before we were leaving and I went to the hospital basement and had a bit of a nap on the mattress there.’

18 Sept ‘The fourth siren today just sounded. Poor Poppet will get celery-coloured from living so much below ground level.

In 1941, Jones was appointed Staff Captain in the Department of Army Legal Services. By 1943 he was on his way to North Africa, sharing cabins with Peter Ustinov. Polly wrote that she had made a lovely Christmas tree in the hall, decorated with paper stars. ‘We’ve had carol singers every night this week, the children made gingerbread men in the kitchen…I waited for hours in a queue today for Christmas pork and beef.’ In February 1944 Polly was working for the Ministry of Information and had bought some hens. Her annual Valentine’s card message to Elwyn included a poem, the last verse of which read ‘Listen to the Joneses pray/Lay you devils, lay! lay! LAY!/On omelettes we hope to dine/So please to be our valentine.’

In June 1944 Elwyn was delighted to find that his name had been added to the list for candidate selection in Plaistow, a strong Labour seat, but also one of the worst blitzed areas of London, with nearly a thousand people dead and fourteen thousand houses destroyed. The spirit of the Blitz was alive and well, however: he was told the story of the old woman rescued from her completely destroyed house clutching an unopened bottle of whisky. When a fireman suggested that this might be a good time to open it, she replied ‘Not bloody likely, I’m keeping it for a real emergency.’

Elwyn Jones was elected in the Labour landslide, and would remain the MP for Plaistow and then West Ham until 1974, when he joined the Lords as Lord Chancellor. However he was absent for much of the first year, working as one of four junior Counsels for the Prosecution in Nuremberg. Polly continued to work as an author and artist, visiting Russia as a journalist in 1952. After a bad experience flying back from Germany at the end of the war, she tended to avoid planes, often joining Elwyn on his numerous legal trips abroad by cargo ship, where she filled her time blissfully in writing and drawing.

Elwyn Jones’ career as a barrister led to his appointment as Attorney General in the first Wilson Government of 1964, in which position he was Counsel to the Enquiry into the Aberfan Disaster, as well as Torrey Canyon(the oil tanker) and Ronan Point (the tower block). He was also chief prosecutor in the Moors Murder trial. The list of groundbreaking legislation passed under his aegis in the 1960s is too long for this Substack. Polly continued to write and to illustrate books, including the charming Chi Ming stories, written by her daughter Josephine and read on Jackanory by Judi Dench.

However, by the 1970s, much of Polly’s energies were consumed by a very unusual cause; the plight of the Pearly Kings and Queens. These colourful individuals are a traditional London philanthropic group of working-class men and women, known for their elaborate outfits decorated with mother-of-pearl buttons. They raise money for charities by holding events and appearing at public functions, a tradition that dates back to Victorian times and was formalized by Henry Croft in the late 1870s. By the 1970s there was a danger that the tradition would die out. To Polly with her passion for textiles, costumes, and the customs of the East End, this was clearly a cause worth pursuing, and she did so forcefully, using every trick at her fingertips, including writing about them:

and including them in public events. In 1976, Polly arranged for Rosie Springfield, Pearly Queen of Stoke Newington, to visit Washington to take part in the Bicentennial celebrations, where she entertained an audience with Cockney music hall songs.

I feel that this Substack has hardly begun to cover the extraordinary, energetic and purposeful lives pursued by Elwyn and Polly Jones, there is so much more to say, archives to explore, and I have only just started. But I wanted to share some of this with you. Here, to finish, is an extract from a letter Polly wrote to her husband in 1940 after he had finished twenty-four hours’ leave:

Yesterday was one of the happiest days for years, first waking up in bed with you, to find we were both alive and had had several precious hours of sleep into the bargain, then seeing my husband busily pottering blissfully about, sitting in his own armchair and picking his own apple trees and playing with his Poppet, then my rather successful dinner (even if the dumplings were a bit indigestful) and you buying me sugared almonds and fetching me home in the siren.

Such loving sentiments, such a happy couple in the midst of so much horror. A partnership that sustained them both, and made them both the stronger. Elwyn Jones’ career was extraordinary, but it is quite clear reading his memoir that his wife was throughout an inspiration and a joy.

Elwyn Jones died on 4 December 1989, Polly died just seven weeks later. Elwyn is buried in the City of London Cemetery, in the heart of the East End they both cherished and served all their adult lives. his tombstone bears the Welsh phrase Gwna Orua - Do Your Best. A good motto to live by. Polly, who had become a Quaker in the 1950s, is buried in a Friends’ cemetery.

Sources: In My Life, by Lord Elwyn-Jones, and Comrades in Art: Artists Against Fascism 1933-1943 by Andy Friend

In 1934, Allen Lane, a publisher working for the well-established firm of The Bodley Head, conceived an idea for a range of well-produced, high quality paperback books, to be sold at affordable prices at busy locations such as railway stations. He was impressed by the launch in Germany two years earlier of Albatross Books, and adopted many of the same design ideas – a standard size, not too big, a cover with smart, clean typography but no illustration, colour-coded for type of book – as well as an idea for a name, and in 1935 Penguin Books was born. Enormous care had to be taken in the selection of the launch titles – and Lane picked ten novels, all reprints, chosen for immediate appeal. He needed the books to fly off the shelves: and they did. Among his ten novels were works by Agatha Christie, Ernest Hemingway, Compton Mackenzie, Andre Maurois, and, last alphabetically on the list but not least, ‘William’, by EH Young.

William is an extraordinarily good novel, and quite deserved its place on Allen Lane’s list. It is as readable today as it ever was, for if its plot seems dated, its underlying subject - the impact on a family of the sexual transgressions of one of its members - is as relevant now as it was in the 1920s, when it was written. There may not be the same public reaction today to a marriage breaking down as there was in the years between the wars, but the ripples within the home can be just as damaging, just as revealing. Of course, if ever an author spent time observing the impact on a family of infidelity, it will be EH Young, whose private life was just as unconventional as that of the characters in her novels.

Emily Hilda Young was born in Whitley Bay, Northumberland in 1880, one of seven children, the daughter of a prosperous shipbroker. She went to school initially in Gateshead and later at Penrhos College, a Methodist boarding school in Colwyn Bay, North Wales. By 1900 the family had relocated to Sutton, Surrey, and in 1902 she married John Arthur Helton Daniell, a solicitor, and moved with him to the fashionable neighbourhood of Clifton, in his home town of Bristol. There she developed an interest in classical and modern philosophy, became a supporter of the women’s suffrage movement, took up mountaineering and, most importantly, started writing novels. Her first, A Corn of Wheat, was published in 1910.

This is an aerial view of Clifton, a smart suburb of Bristol, high on the hill above the Avon Gorge, looking towards the Clifton Suspension Bridge. On one side of the river, above the busy port city, stand the grand houses, the leafy avenues, the parks, and a prestigious public school. Down below, hidden in this photograph, lie the docks and all the little businesses that support them. Across the bridge one can see the woods, meadows and pastures of rural Somerset. EH Young fell in love with Clifton, with its elegant terraces, its alleyways and cobbles, its view of the docks, the presence of the river flowing to the sea, and the surrounding countryside. In her novels she calls it Upper Radstowe, and the bridge is The Bridge - but the area has a personality that infiltrates all her novels - her characters cross the bridge to escape their difficulties; they enjoy the peace of the countryside, they take a steamboat ride, they walk home up the hill from the docks to the elegant terraces above, they watch the trees turn from spring blossom to autumn gold. I can think of several series of novels that all take place in the same setting, but Young is almost Hardy-esque in the way that the location plays a role in her stories.

It was not just Clifton that Emily fell in love with: at some point in the early years of her marriage she began an affair with Ralph Bushill Henderson - a married man, another keen mountaineer, a schoolteacher and a friend of her husband. Ralph, the son of a distinguished Baptist minister, was born in Coventry in 1880, and studied maths at New College, Oxford where he took a First. From 1901-1910 he taught maths at Bristol Grammar School, and in 1911 moved with his wife Beatrice to take up a post teaching maths and science at Rugby School.

If the move to Rugby might have been designed to end the affair, we have ample evidence that it was unsuccessful. The lovers continued to share a passion for climbing, even as Emily’s career as a novelist was taking off. On 14 August 1915, Emily Daniell, as she is still remembered in climbing circles, led Henderson and two other men on a pioneering route up the Idwal Slabs in northern Snowdonia. Previously thought impregnable, Henderson later testified to his lover’s “remarkable qualities of balance, speed, and leadership, and to her sound judgment of rock and route”. Originally christened “Minerva” in honour of feminine endeavour, the route is now better known as “Hope”. Young was a founder member of the women climbers’ Pinnacle Club in 1921. However, she climbed less frequently as her literary career flourished.

When the First World War broke out in 1914, both Emily’s husband John and her lover Ralph joined the same branch of the Royal Artillery Regiment, the Royal Garrison Artillery. Emily, who had no children to worry about, went to work, first as a stable groom and then in a munitions factory. Her husband John was killed on 1 July 1917 during preparations for the Third Battle of Ypres. Her lover Ralph served with great distinction, mentioned in despatches in 1916, and ended the war in France as Acting Lieutenant-Colonel.

In 1919, Ralph was appointed headmaster of Alleyn’s, a prestigious boys’ day school in Dulwich. Emily followed her lover and his wife to London, renting a flat in the same building, and taking up a post as school librarian at Alleyn’s. Throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, the telephone directory shows the threesome sharing accommodation: in Christchurch Road, Tulse Hill, when they are all at the same address, in 1925 in a house called Gosforth, College Road, and in 1939 the married couple are at 87 Sydenham Hill, and Emily is at 87a. Emily was known to the world as the widowed Mrs Daniell, and one can only assume that Mrs Henderson was prepared to accept this extremely shocking, unconventional state of affairs. In retirement, Henderson separated from his wife and Young moved with him to Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire. They never married but lived together in Wiltshire until Emily died from lung cancer in 1949. Among her other novels, I can recommend Miss Mole, republished not that long ago by Virago.

All of which brings us back to William, Young’s most commercially successful novel, which established her reputation as a great writer. First published in 1925, it sold nearly 70,000 copies and was reprinted 20 times before 1948. William and Kate Nesbitt are a wealthy couple living in one of the grander houses in Radstowe with their youngest, unmarried daughter Janet. They have three other daughters, all married, two (Mabel and Dora) to Radstowe businessmen, and one, Lydia, to a solicitor living in London. They also have a son, Walter - also married, living with his wife Violet in a flat nearby. Neither Lydia nor Walter have any children, and this is perhaps the only cloud in Mrs Nesbitt’s sky when the story opens - as she is a proud and mostly enthusiastic grandmother.

William Nesbitt has made his money in shipping - packet steamers that ply their trade in the Bristol Channel. He had begun life as a sailor, and still walks with ‘a slight and never-to-be-lost roll in is gait.’ We know that he is a romantic - the poems that he wrote for his wife are still hidden in her jewellery box. Their marriage of forty years is a strong and happy one. Young writes that to William, the sea ‘was like the presence of a woman, still beautiful, whom he loved no longer with desire but with knowledge, understanding and satisfaction. He breathed more deeply and happily because of it.’ That sentiment also stands for his marriage to Kate, ‘stout but comely’. And we know that much as he loves all his children, he adores Lydia. ‘He understood her sins and her sorrows.’

Meanwhile Kate’s whole life revolves around her children, but of course they have grown and left her behind. ‘She had given birth to five bodies and she would always be a stranger to their souls.’ She had not made the same fuss of her children growing up as her daughters did of theirs, probably because at the time she was also supporting William in his efforts to build a business, but now their concerns were her whole life. Yet, in case you should find all this a little too sentimental, I love Young’s ability to write honestly about motherhood - Kate is only too quick to spot the flaws in her children’s characters, and to criticise the choices they were making ‘She was hurt by her own capacity for finding fault in her children.’ She loves her grandchildren, because ‘they had not had time to develop unattractive qualities.’ Her eldest daughter Mabel has married John, a self-righteous deacon from the local chapel, who owns a successful timber business, and yet Mabel ‘preferred grievances to possessions’. Walter’s wife Violet also worries Kate: ‘the excessive powdering of her face vaguely suggested impropriety.’ Lydia has gone off to live in a damp, unattractive London flat, and Kate thinks she ‘should spend more time on her house. Why doesn’t she polish her furniture?’

Of course, it rapidly becomes clear why Lydia is not polishing her furniture. She has become bored with her marriage, and runs away with Henry Wyatt, a penniless poet. Kate’s world explodes! How will she ever hold up her head in Radstowe society again? Mabel and her husband are shocked to the core, Dora’s pompous husband Herbert declares that henceforth Lydia will be barred from the family, in case she contaminates his children. But William, lovely, kind William holds his ground, in such a well-written scene. Kate has summoned the family to a meeting, William arrives late:

He saw his family as a pack of hounds and Lydia as their quarry… As he entered the drawing-room where the lights were on but the curtains undrawn, the talking ceased. Mrs Nesbitt sat, with the effect of someone on a platform, in the high-backed chair which she usually avoided: her face was flushed, her lips compressed, and Mabel, with her hat at a still sharper angle, was sitting sympathetically near. Her hands were restless, her expression bitter but somehow satisfied, and now and then she glanced at John and jerked her chin as if to say ‘I told you so.’…John, who was planted firmly in his chair, had assumed the attitude acquired at stormy deacons’ meetings, the forbearance of a Christian… ‘You have all heard the news?’ [William] asked sharply, and a succession of bowed heads and sibilant monosyllables assured him of their knowledge. ‘Very well. I have this to say. I will not have my daughter’s actions criticized in my presence. Keep your condemnations and your speculations to yourselves. I’ll have none of them. Lydia’s affairs are her own,’

Mabel looked at John and John spoke. ‘Pardon me, Mr Nesbitt, but we are all members of one great community and we have the right - it is our duty - we are morally bound - to take a line.’

‘Take it,’ William Nesbitt said. ‘Take it. It’s a harmless amusement, but not in this house please.’

Lydia’s desertion of her husband rebounds across the whole family. The youngest daughter, Janet, decides to branch out on her own, much to her mother’s disgust:

‘She wants to go away and be trained as a social worker, one of those women who go to factories and interfere with the girls.’

Dora realises that her husband is an insufferable prig:

‘The fiction in this case,’ Dora elaborated, ‘is that one’s husband is always right.’ Mrs Nesbitt, with disapproval on her face, could still think bitterly, that her own husband was often wrong, but where she triumphed was in never saying so.

Throughout it all, it is William who refuses to blame his daughter, or be anything other than loving to her. ‘He trembled for her and was proud of her courage.’ As he says ‘The sanctity of marriage is an unholy thing. It’s not fair, it’s cruel, it’s a prison. If marriage remains holy, it’s a piece of good fortune; if it doesn’t, who dare say the parties to it are wicked.’ Very wise words, and perhaps a surprising sentiment for a respectable businessman and pillar of society in the 1920s.

The life chosen by Ralph Henderson and Emily was fraught with danger. They had both been brought up in strict non-conformist households; now they were breaking every code, social, moral and religious. Any hint of scandal would have made it impossible for Ralph to hold down his career as a headmaster at a public school. A divorce, similarly, would have finished him. Emily seems to have had the good fortune that her family did not turn on her for her improper behaviour. The scandal never leaked out. I think that she wrote this novel as a tribute to the love and support she had received - certainly from one member of her family. Emily Young’s father was a shipbroker who did well in business, having started life as a merchant seaman. He died a very wealthy man in 1923, just two years before this novel was published. He named his daughter Emily as one of his three executors. His name was William.

Of course I had heard of the writer Rose Macaulay. That first line from her last and most famous novel, The Towers of Trebizond, has featured in so many general knowledge quizzes, particularly those with a literary bent. ‘“Take my camel, dear”, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.’ It fits nicely between ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ and ‘The past is a foreign country…’. Yet somehow, intriguing though it was, it had never tempted me in. Travelogues are not my thing, and, to my shame, I had never heard of the city of Trebizond, on the shores of the Black Sea. So I have come very late to this author, and to this classic, and by way of several other Macaulay novels, all of which I have enjoyed in the last few weeks: Non-Combatants and Others (1916), Dangerous Ages (1921), Told by an Idiot (1923) and Crewe Train (1926). All very good in their way, dealing firstly with the lives of women during and immediately after World War One, then in Told by an Idiot offering a brisk canter through English intellectual life from the 1880s to the 1920s in the guise of a lightly-plotted family saga.

Crewe Train is a slight but amusing work, which tells the story of Denham Dobie, a young woman left to run wild by her renegade clergyman father in Andorra, who, on being orphaned, is brought back to be rehabilitated into Society against her inclination. Once married and pregnant, she is eventually tamed and introduced to the life of the perfect upper class wife, marooned in Great Missenden, while her husband commutes to town. Her mother-in-law suggests the way to fill her days: 9.30-45, see the servants; 9.45-10, do the flowers; 10-11, read the papers, write letters; 11-1, serious reading; 1-1.30, lunch; 1.30-2.30, lie down; 2.30-4 exercise or gardening; 4-5 tea and see friends…and so on for all eternity. Quite a life.

It had become clear to me that religion, and particularly the impact on English society of the Anglican Church, was something that fascinated the author. The father in Told by an Idiot changes his professed religion as often as other men change their cars1 - C of E, Roman Catholic, theosophy, spiritualism - he tries them all. In Crewe Train, Denham Dobie’s father was an Anglican priest who had fled his congregation because of his ‘doubts’. All of which led me nicely into one of the principal concerns of Rose’s novel from thirty years later, The Towers of Trebizond. But to really understand what inspired this extraordinary book, I needed to know a little more about Rose herself. And what a heartbreaking story it is.

Rose was born in 1881 in Rugby, where her father was a Classics master at Rugby School. She was one of six children, with two brothers and three sisters, descended from the same Macaulay family that gave the world Zachary Macaulay, the abolitionist, and Thomas Babington Macaulay, the historian. After a couple of years when the family lived a relaxed, enjoyable time in a village called Varrazze, on the Italian coast, she received her formal education at Oxford High School and then Somerville College, Oxford, where she read history. She started to write fiction in her early twenties; her first novel, Abbots Verney, set in a quiet English village in the 1800s, was published in 1906, around the time that the family moved to live near Cambridge and Rose became close friends with Rupert Brooke. The First World War and its terrible tragic losses galvanised Rose and she became a fervent pacifist and a devout church-goer. Her novel, Non-Combatants and Others, published during the War, is fascinating as an anti-war polemic, written from the point of view of the women left behind in London, helpless to understand or cope with what their men were going through. Her account of their lives in the trenches would have been very shocking to her readership at the time, and formed part of the shift in public opinion.

Initially Rose volunteered as a nurse, and then in the Land Army, but proved pretty hopeless at both roles. She finally found her niche working in the Ministry of Information, as secretary to the man she would love for the rest of her life.

Gerald O’Donovan, born in Ireland in 1871, had started adult life as a Catholic priest, but by 1910 he had left the priesthood, married and moved to London where he had some success as a novelist, and then worked as a reader for the publishers William Collins. He and Rose began an affair that would last until his death (from illness) in 1942. At the time it began, Rose was profoundly religious, but her guilt at their adultery caused her to fall out with her sisters and to leave the Church she loved.

Adultery. What a strangely old-fashioned and odd word - something only adults can do? The affair between Rose and Gerald was kept secret from the world, known only to the closest of friends and family, until it was revealed after Rose’s death, when a collection of her many confessional letters to an Anglican priest was published. Perhaps what is even more surprising is the extent to which Rose became part of the O’Donovan family, visiting regularly for Sunday lunch, and becoming an honorary aunt to his three children. I am not quite clear what his wife Beryl’s attitude was to this arrangement. The two lovers often travelled abroad together, but apparently O’Donovan told his children that they must keep his whereabouts secret, as he was a target for the Roman Catholic church.

There are hints of autobiography in many of Rose’s novels - Denham’s carefree life in Andorra reflects Rose’s time in Varrazze; Imogen’s desire to join the Navy in Told by an Idiot mirrors a time in Rose’s youth, and in the same novel her aunt Rome Garden falls in love with a married man, but is not aware of his status until it is too late. Is this what happened to Rose? In the ten years after O’Donovan died, Rose found it too hard to write fiction, perhaps her own sadness kept intruding into the plot. But her final novel, The Towers of Trebizond, is for me the perfect response to the situation in which Rose found herself: the reflections of a woman torn between the two things she loves most: God, and her married lover. In the ensuing battle, as the narrator, Laurie, puts it ‘The Church met its Waterloo, when I took up with adultery.’

The plot of Towers is remarkable simple - Laurie is accompanying her aunt Dot, otherwise known as Mrs Dorothea ffoulkes-Corbett, and a High Church Anglican Priest, Father Chantry-Pigg, on a mission to Turkey. It is the 1950s, the height of the Cold War, on the eve of the Suez Crisis. During their travels, they will have comical adventures involving ludicrous spies, belligerent Turkish border guards, the aftermath of the Burgess and Maclean defection and the Billy Graham evangelical mission. Dot and the priest will mysteriously disappear over the border into Soviet Russia and be detained there for several months, leaving Laurie to travel alone around the eastern shores of the Black Sea, usually on the back of Aunt Dot’s camel, a rather splendid white single-humped creature. It ‘tossed its head and its white ostrich plumes waved, and it pawed the ground and sometimes cried Ha ha like a war horse and sometimes it would canter along roaring, either from excitement, pleasure, annoyance or love, and I never discovered which it was.’ Laurie’s happiest hours are when she manages to rendez-vous with her lover, Vere, who is coincidentally (?) touring the Black Sea aboard a Press Lord’s motor launch.

Some of Macaulay’s writing is very, very funny, such as Laurie’s dispute with the Syrian consul who confiscates her passport, or her struggles to tame and educate Suliman, the ape she brings back to England, whom she is able to teach to paint, to play chess, even to drive her car - with disastrous consequences. Sometimes it is painful to think that this book was written seventy years ago, as Laurie and her companions discuss the difficulties between the Israelis and the Palestinians, or the disputes over the education and dress of Muslim women in Turkey.

Yet throughout the book, increasingly revealed to us, there is this insistent, beautiful, heartbreaking thread of Laurie’s love affair, and her guilt. Does this make the book of historical interest only, as morality has moved so far and so fast since the 1950s and the Church of England has lost its grip on our consciences? I would deny this: surely we can all recognise the truth of the sentences I quote below, haven’t many of us felt, or suffered, in exactly this way at some point of our lives, irrespective of any religious beliefs - especially the last one:

Love ‘was the great force and drove like a hurricane, shattering everything in its way, no one had a chance against it, the only thing was to go with it, because it always won.’

Infidelity, as Laurie sees it, is ‘a meanness and a stealing, a taking away from someone what should be theirs, a great selfishness, and surrounded and guarded by lies lest it should be found out. And out of this meanness and this selfishness and this lying, flow love and joy and peace, beyond anything that can be imagined’.

‘I did not really want to be saved from my sins, not for the time being, it would make things too difficult and too sad.’

Yet Father Chantry-Pigg berates Laurie for her refusal to repent: ‘And when it ends, what then? Shall you come back, when it is taken out of your hands and it will cost you nothing? When you will have nothing to offer to God but a burnt-out fire and a fag-end?…Offer now what will cost you a great deal, and you’ll be enriched beyond anything you can imagine.’

As the book ends, the situation has indeed been taken out of Laurie’s hands, and one of the saddest lines of all is ‘I live now in two hells, for I have lost God and live also without love, or without the love I want, and I cannot get used to that either.’

I am fascinated to read that poor Princess Margaret, pining after married royal equerry Peter Townsend, once quoted this as her favourite novel. But if infidelity, love and guilt drive the power of this novel, Macaulay is also fascinated by the role institutionalised religion plays in society, and the fate of the Christian church:

…which grew so far, almost at once, from anything that can have been intended, and became so blood-stained and persecuting and cruel and war-like and made small and trivial things so important and tried to exclude everything not done in a certain way and by certain people and stamped out heresies with such cruelty and rage. And this failure of the Christian Church, of every branch of it in every country, is one of the saddest things that has happened in all the world.

Crikey.

We can surely recognise the truth of this, and remember the horrors that men have imposed on each other for centuries in the name of religion, as they continue to do, and yet Macaulay knew that somehow we are still drawn towards the Church, whether for its architecture, its music, its traditions. As Philip Larkin had written in his poem Churchgoing in 1954:

A serious house on serious earth it is,

In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,

Are recognised, and robed as destinies.

And that much never can be obsolete,

Since someone will forever be surprising

A hunger in himself to be more serious,

And gravitating with it to this ground,

Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,

If only that so many dead lie round.

For Rose, I think that Trebizond, that ancient City, holy once to Christians and Muslims alike, represented that dream of all mankind, to find their way back into true religious belief and the hope of life eternal. She describes:

A vision of Trebizond, not Trebizond as I had seen it, but the Trebizond of the world’s dreams, of my own dreams, shining towers and domes, shimmering on the far horizon…a walled and gated city, magic and mystical, standing beyond my reach.

and as the book ends:

Still the towers of Trebizond, the fabled city, shimmer on a far horizon, gated and walled and held in a luminous enchantment.

Macaulay was received back into the Anglican Church in the 1950s, but even then did not seem capable of forgiving herself for the affair. She wrote to her friend, a priest, ‘It’s not a question of forgiveness, but of irrevocable damage done.’ How sad.

Her love affair, and its sad end with the death of Gerald, are also remembered in what is one of the most affecting short stories I have ever read. Miss Anstruther’s Letters, written in 1942, concerns the aftermath of the Blitz, when a woman realises that in the fire she has lost all her lover’s letters, irreplaceable because the man has died. When Rose wrote this story, Gerald was dying, and she had indeed been bombed out of her flat, and had failed to take these letters with her.

So she would cry and cry, till tears blunted at last for the time the sharp edge of grief, leaving only a dull lassitude, an end of being. Sometimes she would take out and look at the charred corner of paper which was now all she had of her love; all that was legible of it was a line and a half of close small writing…It had been written twenty-one years ago and it said ‘leave it at that. I know now that you don’t care twopence; if you did you would’…The words, each time she looked at them, seemed to darken and obliterate a little more of the twenty years that had followed them, the years of … all they had had together…Oh my darling, I did care twopence, I did.

Rose Macaulay died in 1958, just a year after The Towers of Trebizond won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Literature, and just a few months after she was created a Dame of the British Empire.

In 2003, the writer Jan Morris wrote an introduction to The Towers of Trebizond and I will quote her last paragraph, as it reflects my own thoughts perfectly. I could not say it better myself.

Rose Macaulay died two years after its publication. I never met her, and these perhaps impertinent interpretations of her masterpiece are entirely my own, but I suppose anyway that, like most lasting works of literature, its meanings are as transcendentally elusive as Trebizond itself.

For the last several weeks I have been listening to Miss Marjoribanks (pronounced Marchbanks, as is emphasised in the novel), one of the last of the seven Carlingford novels written by the prolific Victorian author, Mrs Oliphant. Readers will know that I am a great fan of Mrs Oliphant as a person, and of some of her novels. I certainly can’t pretend to be an expert. My favourite, well worth a visit, is Hester.

Margaret Oliphant, a widow left with three children and very little money by the early death of her rather useless husband, knew only too well the difficulties facing women in Victorian Britain. Her husband died when she was just thirty-one and from then on she had to support herself, her two sons (her only daughter died in 1864) and the son of her alcoholic brother, by her writing. She put all of them through Eton, for which they were eternally ungrateful, and even more tragically she lived to bury them all, dying alone in 1897.

Hester is a novel about a woman in business - not Hester, the pretty young girl of the title, but Catherine Vernon, who has rescued the family banking concern from ruin once in her life, and now has to rise to the occasion again. Miss Marjoribanks, written in 1865 for serialisation in Blackwood’s Magazine, has as its heroine Lucilla Marjoribanks, just nineteen years old when we meet her.

I have looked at all the book covers of the various editions of Miss Marjoribanks, some of which I have included below - but none of them seemed to me to do her justice. Some, as you will see, are hysterically funny. So I have randomly chosen this beautiful painting of a young Victorian girl to capture what I know of Lucilla. She is quite an extraordinary literary creation. Queenie Leavis, the renowned literary critic, was a huge fan of Lucilla. She described her as the link between Emma Woodhouse and Dorothea Brooke, which is quite a proposition.

I can certainly see the resemblance of Mrs Oliphant’s creation to Emma. Lucilla, when we first meet her, is the only child of a prosperous family doctor living in one of the smartest houses in Carlingford, the small rural town in England which Mrs Oliphant chose to create and people for her series of novels, perhaps in imitation of Trollope’s Barchester novels. Lucilla is undoubtedly pretty, but is also exceedingly clever and very self-assured. She has returned from a spell in a European finishing school, a couple of years on from the death of her mother, and determined, as she constantly reminds us, ‘to be a comfort to her poor dear Papa’. It has to be said that her Papa is not particularly in favour of the scheme, having rather enjoyed a bachelor existence of excellent dinners with his male friends every Thursday night and otherwise living in peace with his books and his pipe. Lucilla ‘a woman of very active mind and great energies’, has other plans, and within a short space has supervised a significant redecoration of the house and has instituted Thursday night ‘at homes’, over which despite her very young age, she will preside. In no time at all, Lucilla has become the Queen Bee of the town.

If I am to be perfectly frank, there are times when one feels like one is wading through treacle in this three volume novel. The pressure on Mrs Oliphant to write monthly episodes of the length required by Blackwoods, and presumably to make enough money to live on in the process, leads to a tendency to repetition and, dare I say, unnecessary padding, particularly in the early chapters before the author gets into her stride and before we begin to appreciate what a clever creation Lucilla really is. The first half of the novel has a plot which revolves around a hidden identity - the town’s favourite gentleman, Mr Cavendish, known for his looks, his wealth, and his ability to flirt, has a secret in his past which, if revealed, would be so shocking to Victorian sensibilities as to finish him forever in Carlingford society. It is up to Lucilla not only to uncover this secret, but with the greatest of tact and delicacy to steer the poor man back into calmer waters. All of this, Mrs Oliphant relates with her tongue firmly in her cheek. We are allowed to be amused by Lucilla’s efforts, and the fact that she takes herself far too seriously, just as we can smile with Jane Austen at her creation Miss Woodhouse. However, Lucilla would never aspire to Dorothea Brooke’s intellectual or spiritual interests. I do not think Lucilla ever reads a book.

It is in listening to the principal plot in the second half of the novel, set ten years later, that my ears pricked up, and I felt the need for some more of my ‘super-sleuthing’. Let me set the scene. Lucilla is now pushing thirty, and is still unmarried. In fact, unlike most Victorian fictional heroines, she has managed to avoid ever having to deal with a marriage proposal, so firm has she been in her determination ‘to be a comfort to her poor dear Papa.’ She has spent her time profitably, as she believes, in various schemes for the improvement of life in the town, although not always with the results, or the gratitude, that she might have expected. As Mrs Oliphant knew only too well:

In the course of organising society Miss Marjoribanks, like all other benefactors of their kind, had many sacrifices to make, and had to undergo the mortification of finding out that many of her most able efforts turned to other people’s profit and went directly against herself.

In the second stage of her progress Miss Marjoribanks found herself, with a great responsibility upon her shoulders, with nearly the entire social organisation of Carlingford depending upon her; and, at the same time, with her means of providing for the wants of her subjects sensibly diminished, and her confidence in the resources of the future impaired to an equal degree. One thing was sure, that she had taken the work upon her shoulders, and that she was not the woman to draw back, whatever the difficulties might be. She did not bate a jot of her courage, though the early buoyancy of hope had departed, never to return. …with her diminished hopes and increased experience and unabated courage, no doubt Miss Marjoribanks presented a still nobler and more imposing aspect to everybody who had an eye for moral grandeur, though it would be difficult to tell how many of such worthy spectators existed in Grange Lane.

Lucilla would admit that life had become rather stale, and that she was looking for her next adventure, when lo and behold, the death of the elderly Member for Carlingford means that a by-election is required, and Lucilla, for whom previously politics had held no interest, becomes the driving force behind the candidature of a recent arrival in the town, a wealthy businessman called Mr Ashburton. We never get to discover Mr Ashburton’s politics, even though this election is being held in the 1860s, when Disraeli and Gladstone were electrifying party politics, and Reform, both social and electoral, is in the air. For Lucilla has very strong views on what Carlingford is interested in:

“I would not pay the least attention to Tories or Whigs, or anything of the sort. For my part I don’t see any difference. All that has to be said about it is simply that you are the right man. Papa might object to one thing and the Colonel might object to another, and then if Sir John, as you say, is of quite another way of thinking⁠—But you are the man for Carlingford all the same; and none of them can say a word against that,”

Lucilla takes charge of Mr Ashburton, becomes the prime mover in his campaign, plans out his strategies and introduces him to the (remarkably small) local electorate. But what is her principal contribution?

“Tell me just one thing, Mr. Ashburton, before anyone comes. There is one thing that is really important, and must be fixed upon. If we were to make any mistake, you know⁠—”

“What?” said the candidate eagerly⁠—“about Reform? I have expressed myself very clearly⁠—”

Lucilla smiled compassionately, and with the gentlest tolerance, at this wild suggestion. “I was not thinking of Reform,” she said, with that meekness which people assume when it is of no use being impatient. “I was thinking what your colours were to be. I would not have anything to do with the old colours, for my part⁠—they would be as bad as opinions, you know. You may laugh, but I am quite in earnest,”

“Blue and yellow are the old colours,” said Lucilla thoughtfully, “and you are the new man, you know, and we must not meddle with these antiquated things. Do you think this would do?” As she spoke she took up a handful of ribbons which were lying by, and put them up to her face with an air of serious deliberation which once more disturbed Mr. Ashburton’s gravity.

“If they are your colours they shall be mine,” he said, with a sense of patronage and protection which was very delightful;…she threw all the younger portion of Grange Lane, which was acquainted with Mr. Ashburton, and looked forward eagerly to a little excitement, and liked the idea of wearing a violet-and-green cockade, into a flutter of excitement.

VIOLET AND GREEN! and later in the same chapter ‘Lucilla wore her knot of green and violet ribbons on her white dress.’ Green, violet and white???? Now, what does that remind you of?

I have done my research. The colours that were chosen for the suffrage movement in Britain were picked by that great campaigner, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. She chose ‘purple for loyalty and dignity, white for purity, and green for hope.’. But it’s a very particular combination.

I choose to believe that somewhere along the line, Emmeline had been a fan of Miss Marjoribanks and her rather daring venture into politics. Mrs Oliphant may never have campaigned for women’s rights, but in her novels she made her position only too clear. Women’s brains and talents were being left to rot in domestic duties all over the country, and the situation would have to change. Here is a longer excerpt from the novel which makes her point perfectly obvious:

[Lucilla] had come to an age at which she might have gone into Parliament herself had there been no disqualification of sex, and when it was almost a necessity for her to make some use of her social influence. Miss Marjoribanks had her own ideas in respect to charity, and never went upon ladies’ committees, nor took any further share than what was proper and necessary in parish work; and when a woman has an active mind, and still does not care for parish work, it is a little hard for her to find a “sphere.” And Lucilla, though she said nothing about a sphere, was still more or less in that condition of mind which has been so often and so fully described to the British public⁠—when the ripe female intelligence, not having the natural resource of a nursery and a husband to manage, turns inwards, and begins to “make a protest” against the existing order of society, and to call the world to account for giving it no due occupation⁠—and to consume itself. She was not the woman to make protests, nor claim for herself the doubtful honours of a false position; but she felt all the same that at her age she had outlived the occupations that were sufficient for her youth. To be sure, there were still the dinners to attend to, a branch of human affairs worthy of the weightiest consideration, and she had a house of her own, as much as if she had been half a dozen times married; but still there are instincts which go even beyond dinners, and Lucilla had become conscious that her capabilities were greater than her work. She was a Power in Carlingford, and she knew it; but still there is little good in the existence of a Power unless it can be made use of for some worthy end….parish work was not much in her way, and for a woman who feels that she is a Power, there are so few other outlets. She was a little disheartened as she thought it all over. Gleams of possibility, it is true, crossed her mind, such as that of marrying the member for Carlingford, for instance, and thus beginning a new and more important career; but she was too experienced a woman not to be aware by this time, that possibilities which did not depend upon herself alone had better not be calculated upon.

Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence was born in 1867, she will have grown up surrounded by the novels of Mrs Oliphant, who was such a bestseller, particularly among educated women, in the 1880s and 1890s. I doubt I will ever be able to prove my point, but surely it is a strange coincidence.

Meanwhile, please can publishers do a little better with their cover illustrations?