Amazing English Women: Role Models of the Past

When I was a young girl in the Fifties, we had a small school library and I eagerly devoured everything there was to read.  It ranged from children's favourite classics to books of geography, history and so on.  One book I was very fond of was about the English heroines, names that were then as familiar to us all as Britney Spears and Madonna are to today's kids.  But rather a different set of role models.  It contained stirring pictures of Grace Darling who helped to rescue the survivors from the wreck of the Forfarshire, Florence Nightingale holding aloft her lamp as she moved amongst the wounded at Scutari and Elizabeth Fry with the prisoners of Newgate, a place she helped to reform.

This book left a deep impression on me, one of awe and gratitude for these brave, strong minded women who defied the attitudes of their time when women were considered as a second class race without talent, voice, or much intelligence.  Any woman who dared to stand out and show herself to be an equal if not a superior to perceived male intellect was deemed unfeminine, brazen, unchristian, or accused of neglecting her family.  So it took some courage and conviction to stride out alone against the ideal of feminine sweetness, gentleness, vapidity and colourlessness much trumpeted in Coventry Patmore's famous poem 'The Angel in the House'.http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/novel_19c/thackeray/angel.html

Nowadays, despite a far less unbalanced attitude to women, we no longer hold up such historical figures of women in the past as role models.  In fact, few children even know who they are except in the vaguest manner, don't even spot their image on their £10 and £5 banknotes.  Most young people seldom even use banknotes, do they? - but wield their piece of plastic instead.  Role models now are pop stars, actors, sporting figures perhaps.  Some of these figures are worthy, especially the latter, but many are not and simply appeal to a youthful desire to be rich or simply to 'get on the telly.'  Few girls now want to be nurses or do good for those less fortunate than themselves.

Elizabeth Fry on the £5 banknote (to be replaced by Churchill)

So I hope to write a few lines now and then to remind us about these incredible women of the past.  Let's begin with my favourite:

Elizabeth Fry

Elizabeth Fry

 Elizabeth was born Elizabeth Gurney, her father a banker in Norwich and her mother part of the Barclays family.  Her mother died when she was twelve years old and as an older daughter, she had her hands full helping to raise the younger siblings.  She enjoyed a good life when young and admitted to loving dancing and riding in a scarlet habit!  However, at the age of 18 she attended a Quaker meeting and was deeply moved by the words of the American preacher, William Savery.  From then on she adopted the simple, unadorned Quaker dress.

In 1813 she married Joseph Fry another banker and also a Quaker and had eleven children by him. She managed her household duties perfectly well but always found time to visit the poor children in the school and workhouse at Islington.

Her real work began when she visited Newgate prison in the company of Sir Fowell Buxton's sister.  She was horrified by the overcrowded state of the prisons, the women and children living together in vile conditions of dirt and damp.   Some of the women had not even been tried in court but simply arrested and flung into these hell holes.  Elizabeth returned the next day with clothes and food and even stayed the night with them, inviting other members of the public to come and see for themselves what it was like in there.  The prisoners loved her and she gained their respect.  She eventually managed to set up schools for the children, appointing one of the inmates as a governess.  The women gained some self respect and began to see to their washing and cleaning and made efforts to improve themselves.  No one else was going to do it.  Matrons were installed in the prisons where before they had been overseen by men and one can only guess what that might mean.

Edith Sitwell reminds us in her article about Elizabeth Fry in the above wartime book that a 'destitute child of nine was committed to death for stealing four pennyworth of children's paints.  Eventually, after considerable delay, the sentence was commuted.  To what? Transportation to Botany Bay?' (English Women:  Edith Sitwell)

Les Miserables was fact not fiction. Here in Britain and also Europe and everywhere else in so called 'civilised' countries.  Mercy was an unknown quality.

Elizabeth's influence became great and she was supported by Queen Victoria.  Other monarchs admired her and even the Czar of Russia was influenced by her.  When he visited the debtor's prison, three old men threw themselves at his feet and begged for his mercy.  He told them that their considerable debts would be paid by him, an astonishing act of kindness in a harsh and stern regime. Mrs Fry visited Copenhagen and spoke to the monarchs there about slavery, the state of the prisons and persecution of various religious sects and was befriended by the Kind of Prussia who came to visit the prisons himself.  She founded a school for nurses that later inspired Florence Nightingale. These were just a few of the societies, libraries, schools and other institutions which this amazing and indefatigable womae set up. 

 She was said to be a warm and wonderful person who moved all to tears when she prayed with them. 

Prayer, she said, was always in her heart.  'Even in sleep I think the heart is lifted up.' And as she lay dying of a stroke in 1845 her last words were, 'Love, all love, my heart is filled with love for everyone.'

The seamen flew a flag at half mast for her passing, an honour reserved for royalty.  And thousands stood in silence at her burial.  A truly noble lady.

Echoes of the Great War

Echoes of the Great War

In August 1984,  Radio 4 ran a programme on an intriguing War diary kept by a rector called Dr Andrew Clark .  By a strange coincidence this was the name of my 'hero' in The Long Shadow, a story of World War One as it was experienced by the Allies in Salonika, Greece.  My husband was busy sorting out a load of old newspapers and copies of the Radio Times that he's kept all these years for various reasons of his own and this article caught my eye as he rifled through them  

The real Andrew Clark was a quiet scholarly rector in the peaceful village of Great Leighs in Essex.  He was born in 1856 in Dollar, Clackmannanshire.  As a young man he went on to Oxford and took a first class degree in Greats, returning to Scotland where he married and had children.  He eventually moved to Oxford where he became known as a skilled historian.  He left Oxford with some reluctance due to the fact that his wife hated university life and preferred the quiet of a rural backwater such as Great Leighs proved to be  He was a popular and successful rector there and well liked by his contemporaries.

Dr. Andrew Clark

When war was declared in August 1914, Clark decided that he would collect as much information as possible about the reactions and events that occurred to ordinary people as the war progressed.  No one dreamt it would last as long as it did or that one million British soldiers would not return home again.  Clark's historical background served him well and with meticulous care and a keen eye for observation he determined to note everything he heard or saw relating to the War, from air raids to billeting, and from health issues to news of fatalities.  He also collected letters, recorded rumours and conversations he overheard, compared them to the officially released news with all their edited propaganda and useless information.

He also collected ephemera, recruitment posters, pasted and transcribed letters from soldiers in Flanders, Salonika and Italy that had been sent to villagers and commissioned the local schoolchildren to write essays with their impressions of any events that took place locally. For instance there was the occasion when 8,000 troops marched through the village on the way to war.  At the time the children would have been enormously thrilled and excited by such a spectacle in a quiet farming village like Great Leighs where life had been slow quiet and orderly for centuries.   He also wrote to his daughter in Scotland and gathered news from whatever sources he could find such as YMCA officials, travelling salesmen, wounded soldiers, men on leave and academic men in Oxford.

Dr Clark wrote up his diaries at night and noted events hour by hour until the 28th June 1918, when the war ended with the signing of the treaty of Versailles.  He had once been a curator at the Bodleian library and the librarian there encouraged Clark to send in his diaries as each one was compiled, foreseeing that these would have value one day as records of the period as seen from the ordinary lives of people who were not soldiers but nonetheless drawn perforce into what was in effect a 'people's war'.  There was not one, city, town, village or family in Britain that remained unaffected.  Even Great Leighs, a small village of 600 people, sent 72 men to war and 19 of these never returned.

These books lay forgotten in the Bodleian library for 70 years but were at last published as Echoes of the Great War in 1985, edited by Dr James Munson who also gave the talk on radio 4.

St Mary the Virgin, Great Leighs

Lyon Hall home of the Tritton family

My interest aroused, I recently made a visit to the village, Great Leighs.  It was always a spread out village, now bordered by a great deal of new housing.  The trees had grown and little remained of the wide empty country lanes of early last century.  However, we began with the church where the Rector held his services, St Mary the Virgin.  This attractive little church has an unusual tower.  In the graveyard we found many of the Tritton family who had lived at Great Leighs for years and still do live there at Lyon Hall opposite the church. 

Poor Dr Clark!  He had quite a walk from his own home at the Rectory to the church.  Imagine doing this in the dark of a snowy winter morning or early evening, hardly any heating allowed in the church because coal was rationed.  Yet, he seldom allowed himself to shirk his duty unless sick.

The Old Rectory

We found the Old Rectory, now looking very magnificent with wrought iron gates and sweeping driveway.  I suspect Andrew Clarke would have liked to see it looking as smart as this.  He struggled hard to keep up the work and the big garden during the war years when his groom/gardener, Charles Ward, was taken away to fight.  Charles had come to work for him as a lad of fifteen in 1909 and was responsible for the pony, drove the trap when required, looked after the paddock, kitchen garden, orchard and lawns, drains and various other jobs.  For this he got 16 shillings a week.  Dr Clark did his best to keep Charles at home with him because the young man was short in stature and did not have the required chest measurement.  Other village lads were at first rejected on such grounds and felt very upset.  They had thought it would be good to be paid to enlist and see Egypt, Malta, France or Germany.  It was still considered a splendid opportunity to see the world and get away from the village and the hard work of farming and labouring.

Dr Clark did his best to keep Charles Ward with him because the young man suffered badly from weakness of the chest and wet weather would send him to hospital at once. However, letters to the Recruitment Office were of no avail as they considered that if the young man could do all that work, he should manage army life.   Dr Clark, however,  knew he wouldn't be of much use to them on the Front and sure enough, young Ward was in hospital within a few weeks of joining up.  As soon as he was well, he was sent back to the front again.  He adored the Rector and wrote regularly with his news; simple, ordinary little letters of a country lad, but often quite touching.

Meanwhile the ageing Rector struggled with the upkeep of his home, his sick and dying wife, though he made no allusion to his private life in the diaries. He was also obliged to join a form of Home Guard as he was too old to go to war himself.  This meant walking around at night, patrolling the streets and lanes to ensure all light were out and no strangers hanging about.  Spy stories were constantly flying about and anyone vaguely foreign looking or odd was regarded with deep suspicion.  Zeppelins were often heard going close by and making bombing raids on nearby Chelmsford.

Some of the stories brought back by soldiers on leave were truly horrendous.  They put paid to the official bulletins which gave away little or nothing of the true state of affairs in order to keep up morale at home.  But the problem was that rumours then flew around, fuelled by gossip and were

often more alarming than the truth. 

Little by little old class systems were being swept away and even women were being called upon to work as all the able bodied men had to enlist.  The girls had as yet, a confused idea of identity and could at times dress in a rather comic fashion, unsure whether to look like a man or a woman.  Nothing like as elegant as in a BBC TV production, I'm afraid, where they all look pretty and smart!.  Andrew Clark describes a day when he saw some land girls walking through the village dressed in riding breeches, a long smock over these, an ordinary woman's hat atop their heads and a rattan cane in hand.  There was still a good deal of disapproval of girls who worked on the land or in factories and often from other women.  The wages, however, were high and many local girls went off to do factory work, spending the money as fast as they earned it and flaunting their 'wealth'.  But when the war ended and munitions factories closed down, wages also lowered with the resultant discontent and difficulty in re-adjustment for both men and women.

It was a strange period in human history and the diaries of Dr Andrew Clark have captured it in all its everyday detail full of moments of pathos, deep meaning and ridiculous trivia and gossip.

the End Way, Great Leighs

The Changing Vision of the Bronte Legend

Lately I had a fit of tidying and sorting my bookshelves and came across three little volumes called The Story of English Literature  published as Murray's Literature Series in 1908.  These were only a few of the original series intended for use at colleges and in schools.  (Children learned about real literature in those days.)  My three volumes spanned the Elizabethan era to the nineteenth century.

I sat down to read them knowing that many of the views and attitudes of 1908, a period of Edwardian history, would influence and colour these worthy commentaries on our gems of English Literature – nor was I wrong.  The writers and compilers of these volumes had the usual moralistic and religious tone of the time which now seems so outmoded.  So much research has since been done, many biographies written and meticulously researched with more detachment than was possible then, plus letters and other data have come to light.  We can now view the great ones with modern allowances for drug taking, romantic and sexual misadventures, political extravaganzas.  We can view things through psychological interpretations and deeper understanding of the flaws of human nature that go to colour and instil a man or woman with the genius of creativity.  We can wonder at their brilliance but not feel we must whitewash their character to suit the sensibilities of the times.  But is that really true?  Works once hailed as the best are coloured by a new sense of morality.  Rudyard Kipling has lost much of his one time popularity because he is now seen as a relic of the jingoistic, outmoded attitudes of the British Empire.  However, he still holds his own because stories like Kim and The Jungle Book are philosophic and great imaginative creations.

Tim Dalton and Zelah Clarke were for me the best interpreters of the story

This shift in attitude certainly applies to the work of the three Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne.  At the time that Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were published in 1846, the works were regarded with some astonishment and even much disfavour at first.  The unmistakable power of the novels was recognised and made them instant successes.  But they soon began to receive condemnation from the moral brigade who declared these stories were too outspoken. In one unkind review, Jane Eyre was reviled as 'if written by a woman it was one who for some reason had long forfeited the society of her sex.'  Women were meant to be 'the angel in the house,' quiet, decorous, unseen,  The boldness with which, for instance, Jane raises herself above her 'station' and dares to declare her love for Rochester, so much her social superior, was anaethema in those days.  You knew your place.  A governess declaring her love so passionately and boldly to her master!  How awful!  How unwomanly!  But Jane refuses to accept his superiority.  Where, after all, does it lie, she wonders?  His may be superiority of education, rank, sex but she is far superior to him morally and in the purity and innocence of her heart and mind.  And she is not afraid to declare it.

my very favourite Rochester, Tim Dalton

 Let us suppose the synopsis of Jane Eyre was to be sent to a modern publisher; they would surely refuse it outright.  The story now seems slightly ludicrous; the mad wife in the attic, the unlikely coincidence of Jane falling by chance amongst her unknown but loving cousins and being restored to her own rank and status.  Then there is the fire, the blinding of Rochester, all the melodrama and operatic tragedy of the ending.  Written thus, it sounds quite barmy.  But so great is the writing, the passion of feeling, the atmosphere and working up of the story to its climax that we are swept along with it and we believe it to be possible.  That's the Bronte genius.

I remember walking with my children along a darkening beach in Northumberland many years ago and telling them the story of Jane wandering and lost on the moors, begging for food and eating the scraps left for the pigs.  How apt a tale to tell, a picture to paint, in the deepening loaming, the empty loneliness of a windswept seashore with rain beginning to soak us as we walked home.  How we enjoyed being scared and thrilled by these scenes of Jane's life.

To me, this will be a favourite book of all times.  Charlotte put all her deepest feelings, pain and longings into this book.  Something in her practical Yorkshire nature never allowed her characters Jane or Lucy to have the man they loved; just as in real life she was unable to have her beloved master, Mr Heger.  Jane is allowed to have Rochester at last, though he has to be a cripple and dependent on her at first until at last she can say with triumph ... 'Reader I married him'.  Though this was not to be in Villette or The Professor.  Rochester arises from Charlotte's deepest, inner world; he is her animus figure, a figure she transposed onto Heger with his difficult but brilliant intellectual nature when she met the real man.  But the archetypal character she paints in Jane Eyre belongs to her youth, the heroes of her earlier childish works.  However, by the time she was to write Jane Eyre, she had already known real love and a real man and so Rochester becomes more than an archetype.  He is that but flavoured with real feeling now and this is what gives him such mysterious and compelling fascination.  Jane was Charlotte become a great deal more human and real because she had been scalded by real feeling and love by then. Her heart knew better.

So, modern attitudes?  We still have our critical standards but how they differ from Charlotte's Victorian ladies and gents!  I have heard a feminist writer declare that though she loved Jane Eyre when young (and to my mind untainted) having re-read it of late, decided that Rochester was a dreadful immoral bully and Jane a fool to put up with him.  Others would wonder why Jane agonised so much over becoming Rochester's mistress.  Who would care nowadays?  But, it is foolish for us to judge Jane Eyre's attitudes by modern standards of sexual equality and freedom.  We have to recall that in her day, Charlotte was being extremely bold and honest.  It was this honesty that caused the reviewer to say 'if this was written by a woman, she had no knowledge of her sex.'  Well, she did. And she wasn't afraid to admit that a woman could love and could declare that love with passion and feeling and not pretend to hide it, playing charm games and flirting as Genevra does in Villette.

My English Lit book was surprisingly admiring of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights saying it is 'an imperishable testimony to her genius.' It also recognised the strange, psychological power of the book, its force and darkness. 'It is not a beautiful story but a terrible one.'  People found then - and still to some extent find it difficult - to see that a young girl, brought up in a lonely Yorkshire parsonage could conceive such a peculiar forceful character as that of Heathcliffe.  But here again we speak of a dark animus figure within Emily Bronte, a woman who was known to have a tremendous strength of character and mind.  Emily, as far as we know, never fell in love with a real man.  She and her sister Anne continued with their Gondal games and writings into adult life, immersed always in this subterranean, unconscious world of their childhood full of its heroes and villains.  She wrote purely archetypal figures and images from within her soul untainted by the confusion and errors of normal human love encounters.  The loves and passions of her major characters are oddly sexless and unreal, in another world than the human one.  Only when we come to the growing feeling between the young Catherine Linton and Hindley Earnshaw do we approach a more natural human encounter and many of the minor characters are portraits drawn with real observation. 

In its day Wuthering Heights was acclaimed but not liked.  Now, of course, it is considered a work of great genius and the best of all the Bronte novels.

When it comes to Anne Bronte, my book dismisses her in a brief paragraph.  According to this writer, her two books Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 'ought probably never to have been published.  Their only interest lies in the contribution which they make to the fuller story of this remarkable family'.  Poor Anne to be thus dismissed!  Her works have now risen in status and though lacking the peculiar passion of her elder sisters' works are, in fact, the most down to earth and realistic of all the Bronte writings, holding up to view the life led by a governess who was a servant and yet not quite a servant, a person of genteel background but no real position in a household.  In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, she explores with feeling and much common sense the predicament of a married woman in her times when, no matter how she might be abused and used by a drunken, lout of a husband, she and all she had was considered as his property and he could claim her and her child back if he wished.  Thus Anne, of all the Bronte girls, was an early champion for women's rights and is seen as such nowadays.  Anne's books are the more true to life because of all the girls, Anne it was who went and became a governess, put up with many difficulties in the family with whom she lived, had to keep an eye on their unruly brother Branwell.  She also loved greatly and lost the man she loved to illness. Anne knew real life. 

When these English Lit books were compiled, much reliance was placed on the biography written by Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Bronte.  But Mrs Gaskell is now known to have written this book in an attempt to make Charlotte's passion and temperament more acceptable to Victorian sensibilities; thus the dwelling on their supposedly hard and flinty father and the terrible life spent amongst the graveyards of the poor, miserable village of Haworth.  We now know Patrick Bronte was a well read, highly intelligent, good man, not especially aware of his children but few Victorian men were.  The child rearing was left to the women and the Brontes lost their mother young and were brought up by a preachy old aunt and a couple of servants. But this gave the youngsters great freedom and Patrick never prevented them from reading what they liked or discussing what they liked.  He allowed them to flourish in their own unique manner. 

How will we view the Brontes in another 100 years?  Who knows! 

The Strange Failure of the Battle of Crete Relived

A very detailed and detached documentary film was shown locally this morning on The Battle of Crete in WW2.  This was of interest to me because my parents were involved in the evacuation of British troops to Crete during April 1941 and fled from Crete to Alexandria.

Operation Mercury

Alex Cairns, my father

My mother was a Greek living in Athens and met my father, who was then serving in the Royal Air Force in Signals.  They had a whirlwind romance and married in Athens.  After the wedding, my father was obliged to leave and join his unit while my mother, now a British civilian followed on as best she could.
 They were re-united on Crete and my father, despite his lowly rank, was allowed to leave with my mother when she was evacuated along with some officers and taken to Alexandria where an aunt of hers lived.  They had pity on the newly weds and so he was allowed to sit at mother's feet on the Sutherland sea plane that took them away!

It seems the RAF were not much use in defending Crete as most of the planes had been taken off the island and sent to Alexandria due to the constant German bombing which was already taking place in preparation for the air assault.   Thus the air force was evacuated quite quickly, leaving behind them all their possessions.  We lost some beautiful photographs of my mother (at the time an admired young actress and singer in Greece) and pictures of other important family members, as well as other papers and family possessions that were in my father's kit bag.
However, more importantly, they escaped safely to Egypt and later on I was born in Cairo.  Thus does Fate work.

with my mother, Diana, in Egypt

falling from the sky

dead parachutist

Operation Mercury was the German name for the invasion of Crete by airborne troops, a crack division of  testosterone filled Hitler Youth who had been trained into a brilliant force.  The idea was a daring one and the only airborne invasion ever made.  However, it went badly wrong because surprisingly the parachutes were poorly made.  And even more damaging, the supplies were sent down separately by parachute, and so the men were armed with a pistol and little else.  They made easy targets for the New Zealand troops defending the airfields.  Aiming for the legs so that they would catch the falling parachutists in heart or head, the Allied soldiers made short work of the invading force.  But what shocked the Germans even more was the passionate reaction of the Cretan civilians who issued forth from their villages and fields armed with anything they could find, bill hooks, scythes, walking sticks, clubs, old muskets from the Turkish wars.  Sadly the brutal reprisals, once the Germans captured the island were heavy, a whole region wiped out in retaliation.

General Freyberg

It seems with hindsight that the British with the help of the Australians, New Zealanders and Greeks could have won this battle but communication was almost nil and, as ever, many mistakes made.  Churchill's insistence on using veterans of WW1 like General Freyberg was certainly one mistake.  Freyberg was indeed a hero in that war but what he had witnessed then made his attitude cautious about sending in troops as cannon fodder.  Thus he may have held back when it was necessary to push forward.  But hindsight is full of blame for mistakes made in the heat and confusion and uncertainty of battle.

The saddest part of all this for me was the suffering of the Cretan population during the years of occupation.  They put up great resistance from the mountains but whole villages were wiped out, men women and children. Many of these villages have never recovered from these terrible times. These people are amongst the bravest and the help of the Greek soldiers in holding the enemy while the British army was hurriedly evacuated at last has been little recognised.  The Cretans, as well as the brave Maltese, should also have been awarded the George Cross for bravery in my opinion.

Thessaloniki: An Experience at the American College (Anatolia)

Life never ceases to have surprises.  Thanks goodness.  Mind you, no one wants unpleasant surprises and I've had a few of those as well of late.  But the invitation from the lovely American College in Thessaloniki earlier this year was a wonderful honour and I went there the last week in May to join a most interesting workshop organised by Maria Kyriakidou, the Assistant Principal.  It was called Art, Aesthetics and Power and there were nine speakers including myself.  Topics included several discussions on famous photographers such as Fred Boissonas, a Swiss pioneer of photography, Leni Riefenstahl and her film Olympia which she produced for Hitler's 1936 Nazi version of the Olympic Games, and Edward S. Curtis who photographed Native American  people.

Sioux maiden by Edward S Curtis

By this time the indigenous Americans were safely corralled in reservations and these pictures were staged to make it seem the Indians were still in their former free state.  All the same they are works of art and capture a time long lost. 

Greek village house by Fred Boissonas

Leni Reifenstahl

Other topics covered aspects of gender such as the importance of Mary Magdalene whom the Church denigrated as the repentant harlot and the story of Esmeray, a Kurdish transvestite from Kars.  The last talk was based on interviews and research made in Cyprus on gay, and transgender Cypriot people and 'normal' attitudes towards them.   Some other beautiful photographs of Thessaloniki and its architectural changes in the late 19th - early 20th century due to war, earthquake, fire also formed a most interesting discussion.

Old Thessaloniki

My own talk was on my first  book The Long Shadow which was mainly set in Salonika in World War One. Ypres, the Somme, Passchendale and all the other haunting names of the Western Front are well known events, lived over again and again in films and documentaries.  We conjure up pictures of slithering mud, cold trenches and other harrowing scenes of Western battle zones.  But who knows much about Macedonia and the freezing Vardar winds, the barren but beautiful mountains, the treacherous ravines and raging summer heat filled with malarial mosquitoes?  The troops entrenched in Salonika behind barbed wire barricades called it The Birdcage, hence the title of the talk The Barbed Wire Birdcage.  The Long Shadow is a novel that explores the events of the Salonika Campaign through the imaginary diary of a Red Cross nurse with true as well as fictitious events based on letters, diaries, magazines and books of that period.  We see Salonika as a fascinating, multicultural city described through the eyes of doctors, nurses and ordinary Tommies, many of whom laid down their lives there. 

Talking about the Struma Front

It has been a most enjoyable experience.  Thank you all at ACT for inviting me there.

Elgar's Last Love

Elgar's Last Love

Sir Edward Elgar

There can be nothing closer to a heavenly sound, a world known only in distant dreams and visions, than the slow, exquisite diatonic melody that opens the first part of Elgar's First Symphony. The sound is stately yet haunting; as Elgar would himself say, 'broad, noble, chivalrous.'  His wife Alice called it the 'great and beautiful tune.'  It is more than that; listening to the sombre depth of the woodwind and the haunting long drawn out sigh of the violins and violas sends shivers through me.   It's another world, another land which beckons and awaits one . . . somewhere.  I could listen to it again and again.  He has been called the greatest composer of the symphony there is and I agree with this judgement   It's no surprise to know that this long awaited symphony, played for the first time by the Halle Orchestra in Manchester and four days later in London, met with such rapturous applause. Elgar was called back again and again; the audience would not let him go with many standing up on their chairs in order to see him.

The 'great and beautiful tune' began while he tinkled idly on the piano.  His wife suddenly exclaimed.  'I like that tune' and from then on it remained in Elgar's head for a long time before at last becoming the opening passage of his symphony.  Nor did the symphony itself come with ease.  It seemed to waver always somewhere in the back of his psyche and the opening theme may be said to be his 'soul' sound, held there since a young boy sitting in the reeds by Severn side and heard music flowing through the river, the trees, the air . . .

In an interview Elgar once said, 'my idea is that there is music in the air, music all around, the world is full of it. . . and you simply ...simply...simply...take as much of it as you require.'

Elgar and Alice Roberts

Like all creative men, the 'puer' type, Elgar needed a strong, mother figure in his life to sort out all the practicalities while he could dream, compose, conduct, weave his glorious melodies. I's a great and natural arrangement , one which he found through a staunch, loyal wife.  Alice Roberts met Elgar when he was teaching the piano at Malvern.  He was twenty nine, always a significant age in human life.  She was just turning thirty eight and the daughter of a Major General, a social class way above that of the piano tuner's son.  These foolish social complexities mattered in those days.  However, Alice felt convinced of Elgar's genius and they married despite the disapproval of many, including her parents who refused to attend the wedding.  She ended her life as Lady Elgar so that must have proved her point.

In many important ways, it is Alice we have to thank for Elgar's music.  She was a keen poetess but abandoned her own interests in order to urge and encourage her husband  in his own pursuits.  As she once said, 'The care of a genius is enough of a life work for any woman'. Without her strong and dominant nature, he might never have brought his attention fully to work on longer, deeper compositions; part of him seemed always to want to escape and dream, cycle endlessly around the lovely Worcestershire countryside, gaze from his window at the rolling hills.  So true of the creative type!  The actual production of the work is the hardest part of all and often seems like giving birth, as if something is born but parts from within one's soul, never to return.  The unborn is always full of possibilities, once born it is in some ways already dead.

Like so many creative people, he seldom made much money and had to produce a variety of songs and small pieces to earn their keep.  This is a sad reflection on our modern age which pays much to the mediocre but doesn't foster the talents of the great.  'All about the money' . . . as Elgar would have said despairingly.

Elgar sought for his anima, his soul figure in a variety of women and he in turn was extremely attractive to them. Alice was the rock, the mainstay, the mother figure, but such men need a passionate romantic interest to fire their creativity.  This inner figure is like the mate of the creative spirit, rather than the mate of the body, belonging within the psyche rather than in prosaic outer life.  Projected onto a real woman, it can stir the creative impulses and produce the wonderful 'child'.  There might or might not be physical mating as well.  In a way, that is unimportant, in fact it might even destroy the illusion, the romance.  It is a spiritual quest, the quest of the Troubador. 

Alice Stuart Wortley

Like Dickens, Elgar had a first love when he was a young man.  This girl broke their engagement and left for New Zealand.  How different things might have been if he had made this more ordinary, provincial marriage rather than meeting the strong minded Alice Roberts!  Would his genius have flowered then, one wonders? Elgar was later to meet another Alice, daughter of Millais the Pre Raphaelite painter.  He formed a lifelong romantic friendship with Alice Stuart Wortley and though he, his wife and her husband were all friends, the couple did meet up clandestinely on occasions.  Elgar called this Alice 'Windflower' and dedicated his Violin Concerto to her.  He was fond of putting the sounds of his friends into music as we see in Enigma variations. There is no doubt that the relationship with 'Windflower' was very special to him for many years and Elgar alludes to summer evenings full of romance in some of his letters.

When his wife Alice died in 1920 Elgar was devastated and ceased to write any more after this. 'All I have done was owing to her and I am at present a sad and broken man.'  He wrote to a friend after her funeral. He had lost his driving force in the shape of this strong and supportive woman and he mourned her.  The energy of composition seemed to go with her but it was also his sense of the change in the world since the horrors of the First World War.  He knew nothing would ever be the same again and his music was no longer appreciated by the younger generation who saw him as part of the old regime that had created the war.  George Bernard Shaw deplored the fact that Elgar's music was being neglected and the Shaw festivals were created at Malvern to honour it and also Shaw's plays. Nowadays, Elgar is once more appreciated as a great composer and belongs especially to Worcestershire and the beauty of the great rivers and the rolling Malvern Hills which Elgar loved so much.  He is everywhere here in Worcestershire, his music flows about one as one walks the hills, soft echoing, rolling melodies, gentle as the scenery about one, full of space, light and yet tinged with sadness.

Carice Elgar

Elgar cut off his relationships with many of his previous lady admirers and friends apart from 'Windflower' with whom he kept up a distant friendship, passion long gone.  His only child, Carice, grew closer to him now whereas in her youth she had been sent away to boarding shcools and generally kept out of her father's way so as not to disturb him.  He seemed to feel his time was over, a lonely, unhappy man.  His energies turned to the pursuits of a country gentleman with dogs, horse-racing and walks.  But at the same time, he no longer seemed interested in convention, freer to be himself, one of the joys of old age.

The programme in which Elgar noted their first meeting

Thus he was open and like fallow ground when the momentous story of November 1st 1931 unfolded.  Momentous for him and for a young violinist in the orchestra he was conducting that day.  The date became a part of their private story, a sudden and amazing meeting of soul mates. The name of the violinist was Vera Rebecca Hockman, a sweet natured, gentle, warm, Jewish girl.  She already had a hero worship for the great composer and felt she knew him through his music as if already a part of his soul.  She was thrilled to be among the first violins when Elgar was asked to conduct 'Dream of Gerontius' at the Croydon Triennial Festival. As she played she realised he kept looking at her over and over again and afterwards asked to be introduced to her.  They swiftly struck up a deep loving friendship.  Vera accompanied him often as he couldn't bear to part with her company.  She was a married woman with a daughter but she and her husband had separated long before but nonetheless, conventions required that they kept their unusual (and likely to be misunderstood) friendship fairly low key in the eyes of others. Elgar may have considered marriage but his own daughter Carice was alarmed by the idea although she had no personal animosity towards Vera.  In fact they became very good friends and Carice really enjoyed the other girl's company, a fact she often noted in her diary.  Vera was one of those happy people who brought joy and peace to others.

Vera Hockman 

Elgar said that Vera made him so happy and his great regret was there was so little time due to the vast age difference. He had been a sad and troubled man all his life but this warm, accepting, tender woman was able to give him this joy in his old age and remained with him till he died in 1934.  The feeling she created in him at last brought him out of his creative lethargy and he began to compose the Third Symphony, dedicating one of its movements to VH.  He said that she was 'my mother, my child, my lover and my friend.' 

How wonderful a tribute for any woman.   How I envy her!

The Third Symphony sadly remained unfinished, a 'great tragedy' as T.H.  Lawrence put it. Perhaps in another world, Elgar and Vera may meet and the symphony finish there.  It's a nice thought. 

Living with Charles Dickens for a week of my life



My erudite hairdresser lent me his box set of BBC productions of Charles Dickens works recently and together with my husband, I enjoyed watching Our Mutual Friend, Martin Chuzzlewit and Tale of Two Cities brought brilliantly to life on the screen.  How Dickens would have enjoyed these renderings!  He so loved to bring his work to life through plays and readings - the cinema and televison would have appealed to him greatly. We had neither of us read the first two stories and forgotten how moving the last one was. Inspired by this, my husband dug out a huge tome from his personal library, a biography by Peter Ackroyd published in 1990. When I say a huge tome, I mean it: 1195 pages long (with notes etc) which took me over a week to read and I'm usually a fast reader.

During this time I lived and breathed Charles Dickens. I couldn't put the tome down - though there are times when this mammoth of a book was filled with far too much repetitive detail plus strange little meanderings from Ackroyd's own psyche, which are hopefully edited out in the abridged version. All the same, through this overwhelming density, detail and some truly beautiful and evocative writing, I entered into the strange and complicated emotions of the great man and even felt a certain understanding and identity with some of his longings and complexes. I began to dream about him and Ackroyd himself confessed he had done the same, in fact the biographer felt as if the spirit of Dickens hovered at his shoulder at times.

Peter Ackroyd analyses with care and insight the manner in which each book was written at key periods of Dickens life. He took a view of the work from a psychological and spiritual understanding.  Seeing life through similiar eyes myself, this appealed to me far more than a dry, scholastic rendering would have done. We followed the way the sub personalities in Dickens own nature and character became woven into his work and Ackroyd pointed out how in each book the repeated themes and feelings of those complexes haunted the great man.  These inner themes and landscapes of our childhood haunt every one of us all our life, taking us along the path of destiny often unwillingly and in directions that may seem at times obscure but they are rooted in early fantasies and fascinations.  A genius like Dickens was able to convert his memories and feelings through his vivid imagination and powers of observation into these brilliant, strange stories - where most of us would simply batten down the hatches on our private fears and neuroses and try to get on with life. Or else go mad. The stories became deeper and darker as Dickens progressed in his life yet he never lost his ironic sense of humour and ability to create odd yet funny characters such as the inimitable Sarah Gamp.  All the same, he was gripped by his 'possessions' of spirit and his own daughter remarked that if he had not died young (aged 58) he would have gone mad.


the mercifully abridged version

Dickens lifeline moved from middle class beginnings to extreme poverty.  His father, though always in work, was feckless with money and never able to manage a household which, like so many Victorian households, became increasingly filled with children. In the end John Dickens was taken to Marshalsea, the debtors' prison and the family scattered. This disgrace affected Dickens deeply. At the tender age of twelve without further schooling, Dickens was found a position at Warren's Blacking, a manufacturer of boot blacking at Hungerford Stairs near the Thames. Thus he managed to keep himself and give a little to support the family. He loathed the work, loathed the fact that people watched the boys at work as they passed the window. He was ever sensitive to people's opinions and had a sense of his own dignity from an early age.  Here he made friends with a young lad called Bob Fagin whose name was later used to portray the evil character in Oliver Twist.  The boy himself was a harmless person yet became twisted into something evil, shaped by the misery and depression of Dickens's life at that period.  Stories of unhappy young boys abound in much of his work.

The area by the Thames, the stinking, polluted sewer that the river had become by this time, impressed itself deeply on his young, sensitive and imaginative mind. He worked in

'a crazy tumbledown old house abutting on the river and over run with rats. Its wainscoted rooms and its rotten floors and staircase and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times and the dirt and the decay of the place rise up vividly before me ...'

thus wrote Dickens  - and the image of these dirty, decaying places haunted him all his life. He always had a secret horror and fascination for them (as I think we all have.) But he actually experienced them. This London was the shadowy side of the respectable, decorous middle-class Victorian homes that knew nothing of this world of immense poverty, misery and squalor, disease and crime that was on their very doorsteps. Refined people moved round the city in coaches, spent time in drawing rooms and genteel company. Wisely no doubt they kept away from such downtrodden areas. It took a Dickens, a young lad forced to move around this hidden London, obliged for a while to earn his living and visit his father in prison, to show the world the horrors, the squalor and terrible lives of the poor in what was then the greatest city and Empire in the world..



Catherine Dickens nee Hogarth

I wrote in my last blog about Patrick Leigh Fermor and how he had a Faustian side to his nature. By some synchronicity I was now drawn to Dickens who manifested a similar Faustian nature, though even more so than Fermor. The immortal story of Faust records a man driven all his life by a demonic inner restlessness, almost a madness, a need to travel and be on the move as if fleeing from something within himself that gave him no peace. This lack of peace was often due to a constant search for the ideal woman.  In Faust's case it was the fabled, mythical Helen of Troy. Thus he made a pact with the Devil, bartered the peace of his soul in order to gain this ideal woman without understanding that her image was something within his own psyche and thus could never be truly found in a real person. In so doing, he abandoned the real, human woman who  genuinely loved him, leaving her in despair.

Just so with Dickens. He married Catherine Hogarth when still a very young man. He seemed then to long for some sort of mother figure and she appears to have been an earthy, cheerful enough woman, slow, pretty and quiet, devoted to him, a ballast to his more flamboyant nature. However, after their marriage, he seemed to care more for her sister Mary who had been about fourteen at the time of their union. She came later to join them and help a sickly Catherine with her first child. Mary became his constant companion, she whose opinion he sought and company he enjoyed. Sadly however, she died quite suddenly at the age of seventeen from heart failure, died in Dickens's arms. His grief knew no bounds. He was prostrated by the most powerful sense of loss he was ever to experience, a loss that according to Ackroyd was almost hysteria. Mary seems to have since become the template for all the beautiful, sweet, gentle virginal girls in his stories and they crop up in almost every tale in some guise or another. Dutiful tender daughters, loving friends, sisters, children or young women who die young. After Mary's loss, Georgina, another sister moved in and she also remained in the Dickens's household to help her sister as the children kept coming.  She also was more regarded by her brother-in-law than poor slow, passive, depressed Catherine.

Catherine put on weight after all the pregnancies (they had eight children in all) and suffered badly from post natal depression. Dickens was always kind and dutiful to her but he was patently unhappy and unsatisifed in hsi marriage. He was constantly attempting to escape the home, constantly yearning for some unattainable love. This may well hark back to a loss of innocent childhood, a sense of betrayal by his mother and sister who he felt had abandoned him. During his forties, (the dear old mid life crisis which affect so many of us in this angst ridden way)  he put his wife away after 22 years of marriage and refused to see her or speak to her after this and wrote villifying letters about her in order to convince the world he had good reason to do so.  Most of his children sided and chose to remain with their infinitely more interesting, richer and famous father and mainly ignored their banished mother.  They were from thenceforward  looked after by their aunt Georgina instead. Poor Catherine kept all his more loving letters of older times, read all his books, went to all his plays, often sobbing so bitterly that she had to be taken home.  She remained loving till she died.



Ellen Ternan

Meanwhile Dickens met a young actress of eighteen called Ellen Ternan for whom he conceived a passionate attraction that obsessed him till he died.  He explores this in Our Mutual Friend and we see just how madly this love  gripped him through the character of Bradley Headstone, who pursues the young, angelic and beautiful Lizzie Hexam.   Dickens adored this young woman and took great care of her.  Not unsuprisingly, rumours abounded over this strange relationship.  Modern opinion is cynical and in turn obessed about sex.  It is hard to conceive that this may have been platonic, a love of something ideal and out of reach.  This is the view that Ackroyd puts forward and I am inclined to agree that it is possible.  Astonishing as it may seem to modern minds, there are relationships of this kind between certain types of men and women.  And Dickens was no ordinary man, he was  very strange, odd, different . . . a sign of the genius at the best of times.  They live life to a different drumbeat to the common man. Would his daughters have accepted Ellen and remained friends with her after his death if they suspected their father was having relations with her? He wanted his love to remain pure, his beloved to be holy in his eyes like Dante's Beatrice.  But like Faust, he rejected the flesh and blood woman who was his devoted wife.  He was, still haunted by the lost virginal sweeterness of his Mary and found her in Ellen.


Ellen later in life

But despite having found the love of his life, Dickens was deeply depressed at the peculiarly unsatisfying nature of the relationship. He could not live with the girl, soicety forbade it, he was still married and he didn't wish to ruin the young girl's reputation. It had to be kept secret and hidden. So he was never truly happy. So, like Faust, he sold his soul and remained constantly driven by some mad restlessness and inner anxiety that forced him to work even while he was ill. He had prodigious energies and continued with the readings around the country and even famously visited America and did a long and exhausting reading tour there. He had tremendous dramatic qualities and loved the stage as much as writing. Apparently he could literally mesmerise an audience and loved the power he had to move them with his readings in which he portrayed his characters with different voices, gestures and actions of his fluid face and body. Grown men were reduced to tears, women shrieked and sobbed. He loved their adoration, their applause. It energised his spirit but destroyed his body in the end. Yet he carried on with his writing, commencing the DrThe Mystery of Edwin Drood just before his death, a dark murder story that remained unfinished.

At the end of this week of reading, I went to a concert given by the Malvern Festival Chorus who sang the lyrical Brahm's Requiem. On my return, I finished the last few pages of Ackroyd's book with the moving account of Dickens's last days on this earth. That seemed a fitting thing. Afterwards, I felt such grief as if I knew him so well that there was a strong sense of mourning; it was as if he had only just passed away.

'At five to six his breathing suddenly diminished and he began to sob. Fifteen minutes later he heaved a deep sigh, a tear rose to his right eye and trickled down his cheek. He was dead. Charles Dickens had left the world.'

Like Faust, he drove himself to his death through the fiery obssessions and yearnings and restlessness of his nature.

Charles Dickens was indeed the spirit of his Age, the word 'Dickensian' conjuring up a definite image as much as 'Victorian' does. Though he himself actually belonged to an earlier, freer, rougher Georgian age in spirit . . . for we all belong to the time of our youthful beginnings . . . and it is that age which haunts his works as he relived his childhood, his complexities and longings for a perfect world. He wanted a Utopian perfect  world - yet decoured by a fascination that drove him to portray so vividly the depths that underpin the brightest scenes within it. There will it seems always be a Heaven and Hell.

An Amazing Adventurer - Patrick Leigh Fermor

the new book by Artemis Cooper

There is almost something Faustian in the fever of travel, the exploring and questing spirit of the late Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor. He was one of those people seized by a fiery restlessness that never deserted him to his last breath and among many astonishing feats, his most remarkable was the journey he began in December 1933 at the age of eighteen when he set off on a walk starting at the Hook of Holland and making his way across a pre-war Europe to Constantinople. (Istanbul of today) His curiosity enveloped and absorbed people, languages, customs, music and dance with a detached observation that belongs to the 'outsider' personality, the watcher of life. Yet, at the same time, he was able to wholeheartedly throw himself into whatever and whoever he met with a sense of full participation and innocence. He was fearless, full of fun, adventurousness, reckless; a Peter Pan who never quite grew up to take on a 'sensible grown-up job'. In other words a puer aeternus figure who managed to find a Wendy or two in his travels to help mother him and keep him afloat financially so that he could devote himself to his travel writings, his adventures and escapades.


Yet amongst all this movement and excitement and adventure, there was also an inner yearning for some kind of peace. He was frequently drawn to the life of monasteries where he would sojourn for a brief while to enjoy a spell of calm. At first he resisted the quiet and orderliness of such places with the restlessness of an impetuous young man who must be always on the go, always proving himself to himself (and perhaps his father who was always a judgemental shadowy distant figure for him) but after a while Patrick came to realise that there was some point to the life of prayer, quiet and slow orderly ritual. But it was impossible for a temperament such as his to sustain this for long and he would hitch his rucksack on his back and be off again.

Sir Patrick Michael Leigh Fermor DSO, OBE - or Paddy as he was known to rich and poor alike - was born on 11th February 1915 in London. His father, Sir Lewis Leigh Fermor came from humble origins, born into lower middle class family of six born in Peckham, but rose high in the Indian Civil Service and gained a name for himself in scientific work. Though his parents and elder sister lived in India, Patrick was boarded out as youngster and grew up in the countryside. Meeting his mother and sister again at the age of four was a meeting with strangers for him and he hated to leave the adoptive parents who had been so kind and warm and loving.

While at school, Patrick was hopeless at sports, schoolwork and study in general. He was however a great and voracious reader and had a tremendous flair for languages. He was sent from one school to another in an effort to 'make something of him' but all failed and his fondness for the eternal feminine led him to expulsion from one school for canoodling with the local grocer's daughter. Paddy was always a magnet for the ladies. His looks were almost godlike, a real Apollo, fair, handsome, well built, tall and full of charm and sweetness of nature that won him many friends and the entry to houses, chateaux, castles, mansions, monasteries, gypsy tents or mud huts. His nature was never British...at least not the under emphatic Britishness of the era in which he was born. He had far more of the dash of the continental, the flair, charm, colour and drama that appealed to the European mentality.

Patrick in Greece

With no inclination to go to University and without qualifications, his only ambition was to become a poet and a writer. Thus he conceived the idea of becoming a wandering scholar and began the epic journey which later in life was to be written down from his vivid memories as travel books such as A Time of Gifts and Between The Woods and The Water as well as many other great books which have come to be considered as classics in that genre.



Princess Balasha Cantacuzene



For four years, he became the lover of a mature, beautiful Hungarian countess, Balasha, who painted his portrait and introduced him to many fascinating people. He left to join the war that was now brewing in Europe and she sadly let him go, knowing nothing would ever be the same again. Her own lands and possessions were seized by the communists when they moved across Eastern Europe and when Paddy met her briefly after the war, she was very ill and living in poverty. Told to pack a case and nothing more when evicted from her beautiful home, Balasha managed to grab a green covered diary Paddy had left behind when he left. She presented this to him when they met and he kept it like an amulet till his death.

As always, Paddy was not easily able to fit into the conventional role of a soldier during the war. His talents were used instead by appointing him to the SOE and he ended up in Crete working with the Cretan Resistance. His greatest exploit during the war was the kidnapping of the German General Kreipe on Crete. This exploit was later made into a film starring Dirk Bogarde as Paddy called Ill met by Moonlight

The Greeks took Paddy to their heart and he and his wife, Joan, made a home at Kardamyli in Mani in the Southern Peloponnese. A friend visited him there when he was in his nineties, still amazingly fit despite smoking 80-100 cigarettes a day!

'Young man' said Patrick, 'go and fetch that bottle of ouzo and we'll have a little drink.' My friend expected a glass or two but they finished the bottle between them and Patrick none the worse for wear. However, in the end he suffered from throat cancer and returned to his Worcestershire home to die, dining with friends the last evening, then dying peacefully the next day. An extraordinary round journey yet, like all travellers one that ended back home for...'it's oh, so nice to come home' as the song says.

Artemis Cooper's new book on his life is a beautifully written and inclusive biography and well worth reading.  I was left full of admiration for this amazing man who lived his life to the full and like all extraordinary people, fitted everywhere and nowhere and was deep down rather a lonely and depressed man.  It's the fate of the great.  The price paid by the driven Faustian man who can find no real peace in his heart..