Griselda C’s story

Daughter of a baronet, Griselda was a considerable part of the movement to collect and preserve British folk music, spearheaded by Cecil Sharp. While the women who are mostly remembered tend to be the collectors themselves – Lucy Broadwood, Maud Karpeles, Mary Neal, Kate Lee – as their work is filed in libraries and is therefore still visible, rather than those who gave more physical support. Griselda, as headmistress and founder of her own private school, was able to give space to early English Folk Dance Society and Folk Song Society activities and summer schools, and supported the movement and the songs and dances’ preservation that way. She was a believer in giving the knowledge and information that had been collected back to the people and sections of society that might have become detached from whence it came, and worked at a grassroots level to encourage everyone to know and experience folk songs and dances from the British Isles.

Griselda never really knew her mother, a daughter of East India Company civil servant Sir Thomas Metcalfe who died when she was two after giving birth to her youngest brother. She was second youngest in a family of 13 siblings – although her sister Pamela died at the age of 2 – and had two sisters who lived and nine brothers. Her eldest siblings had been born in Bengal, where her colonel father had been stationed, but the family returned to England in the early 1860s. They first lived at various different army bases, but by the time Griselda arrived in the later years of that decade they had been established in Herefordshire for many years.

As upper-class Victorian children, Griselda and her siblings had domestic servants, a nursemaid, and a governess at home until they reached the age of nine or so. Thereafter, they were sent away to school. The family’s boys appear to have gone to a school run by a vicar in Ashbocking, Suffolk, while the girls went to West Grinstead Lodge at Belstead, also in Suffolk.

It was here, while at school with her older sister Finetta, that Griselda would have learnt of her father’s death in 1882, at around the age of 12. The barony went to her older brother Guy, who at this point was out in India serving in the army, while it seems likely that Griselda continued at school, later moving to further study at Westfield College in Hampstead which was a women-only institution founded in 1882. Some of her brothers also went out to India with the army, while others took up professions in the church.

On leaving school, Griselda went to live with her brother Francis, who later became a reverend, but in the early part of his career he held a position of assistant second clerk in library of the British Museum. Her eldest sister Annie also lived with them, as did her youngest brother George. Neither Annie nor Griselda had to work, and the household had a servant, so it was likely that they were still comfortably off.

In 1894 Griselda married Dudley, who was both the son of a Lord and a prominent (if understated) member of the Royal Asiatic Society. An authority on the Malay language, he had spent considerable time in the Far East before marriage, and was also appointed a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, and published papers in both society’s journals. He was 20 years her senior.

They had three children together. A son, named Dudley, arrived a year after the marriage. Another son, Ambrose, followed four years later but sadly only lived for two weeks. And a daughter, also named Griselda, was born in 1901.

They settled in Aldeburgh, on the Suffolk coast, at around the time Elizabeth Garrett Anderson lived in the town, and employed a cook, a parlourmaid, and a lady’s nurse – which implies that Griselda’s health could be on the delicate side.

In 1906 they turned their residence into a private school for girls, with Griselda as headmistress. The fact that it was a private school meant that she, as a married woman, was able to hold the position and teach her pupils – had the school been run by a local education board she would have been subject to the marriage bar on female teachers.

The school was called Belstead House, named for the location of her former school, and was for girls “of breeding and means”. When the school began there were only seven pupils, but by the 1911 census this had grown to 17, and numbers continued to expand over the next decade. In 1911 there was one other teacher in addition to Griselda, and a full complement of domestic staff to look after the family and the pupils, who ranged in age from 11 to 16.

In 1911, her husband Dudley took a tumble from a pony and trap and broke his shoulder bone, which festered. and he died a week later. Griselda maintained the school, and together with her two children and house full of staff, continued to run it as a success. The reputation of the school was extremely good, and it attracted interest from many families who could afford the fees.

They took on adjoining premises to accommodate more pupils, building a gymnasium and a chapel, and even a domestic science laboratory – the subject during this period looked more at the actual science and technology of food and domestic chores, rather than teaching girls how to do them, and was a route into science for many young women.

Her son Dudley, who was educated elsewhere, went to fight in the first world war, and was able to come home afterwards. He married in 1926. Her daughter Griselda was educated at her mother’s school and went on to become an actress.

Griselda senior’s link to the British folk revival came through her friendship with Cecil Sharp himself. Her later obituary reports that she was a strong believer in the educational value of folk songs and dances, which aligned with Sharp’s own views. She incorporated folk songs and dances in the curriculum she taught at the school, encouraging those best at the art forms to go out into the communities just outside Aldeburgh to help local girls and young women form folk music groups and companies of their own. She was awarded one of the first two gold badges (the highest accolade) by the English Folk Dance Society – which later incorporated with the Folk Song Society in 1932 to form EFDSS – in 1922. The other recipient was Lady Mary Trefusis, who is commemorated with a hall named after her in London’s Cecil Sharp House, but no real mention of Griselda is evident on those premises today and even her gold badge names her as “Mrs Dudley Hervey” rather than using her own first name.

In addition, she also invited Cecil Sharp’s Summer Festival School to make use of the school buildings as their headquarters when the venture outgrew previous accommodation at Cheltenham College. This – the last summer school that Sharp ran himself – took place in 1923. Several hundred people attended, working on dances and songs, and Sharp gave lectures. Griselda kept a scrap book, containing photographs, programmes and correspondence about the event, which is now held by the University of California.

The revival and preservation spirit was so deeply embedded in the school’s philosophy that when Romanian pianist and composer Béla Bartók was invited to give a concert to the pupils in December 1923, he found that the girls were completely capable of learning and following Romanian folk dances without much bother.

In addition to the emphasis on the folk arts, Griselda’s school also focused on French, and actively prepared girls for university education. She was also keen to promote good living and bodily welfare to her pupils, which included establishing a “clean milk” dairy for the school’s use, and worked on matters of faith and spirituality across the whole school. She was local deputy commissioner for the girl guides too, and worked with young people across the Aldeburgh community as well as her pupils.

In the later 1920s, however, she was in poor health. She died at the school in 1929, in her early 60s, of heart failure. Her elder sister Finetta, who had married and spent considerable time in India, then came to run the school in her stead for a few years, maintaining the values that had been established and sustained under Griselda. The school building is now a holiday home for Aldeburgh’s thriving tourist trade.

*****

A footnote should give more history of her daughter Griselda, who went on to be an actress as Grizelda Hervey. She appeared on stage in Ireland in 1923, and newspapers report her role as the Spirit of Kent in a pageant of 1931. Much of her renowned work was broadcast on the radio – for example the BBC broadcast a play called Congo Landing by Horton Giddy in 1935, which was an account of the adventures of Lady Susan (Grizelda) and Captain Smith (Stewart Rome) in the Cape Town Air Race. She was also in the cast of the first broadcast of the Forsyth Saga in 1945, when the BBC Home Service put on A Man of Property with Grizelda as Irene.

She also appeared in extremely early live broadcast television plays on the BBC. Two of these were The Royal Family of Broadway, and The Circle, both from 1939. Television at this time was broadcast live to anyone who had a set, and no recordings of these plays were ever kept. Later television work included one episode of The Wednesday Play in 1966. She also appears to have consistently worked in theatres.

In September of 1957 she married Clarence Napier Bruce, third baron Aberdare of Duffryn. In early October that year the couple were in Yugoslavia to attend a meeting of the International Olympic Committee at Sofia, and planned to drive home through the country as their honeymoon. Their car fell over a precipice near Risan, into water. Clarence drowned, leaving Grizelda a widow after being married for just one month, and she herself was injured in the fall. To the end of her days – she died in Hull in 1980 – she was styled Baroness Aberdare of Duffryn.

Ellen H’s story

Chippenham was built on the cloth trade, with many small-scale weavers having looms in their homes to produce material once the thread had been dyed. By the mid-1800s, however, mechanisation and larger scale industry had led to the establishment of a full cloth mill.

This mill, which offered carding, dyeing, spinning and weaving, sat on the banks of the River Avon where the Hygrade meat factory later sat, a site which is now new apartment housing along Westmead Lane.

This mill, owned by Pocock and Rawlings, was one of the biggest employers in Chippenham towards the latter half of the 19^th century, alongside the railway works, and the Nestle factory. By 1911 the workforce numbered around 130, the bulk of which were unmarried younger women. One of these women was Ellen, alongside at least four of her siblings.

Ellen’s father – Julius – was a weaver at the factory throughout the 19^th century, and married his wife Julia in 1871. There’s some discrepancy about where this took place – both St Andrew’s Church and the Wesleyan Methodists have a record of the marriage. They had nine children in all, of which Ellen was the fourth, born in the mid-1870s.

The family, while clearly non-conformist in religion – like much of Chippenham at the time – appeared to be unable to decide which branch of non-conformism suited them best. Ellen was baptised into the Primitive Methodist faith, as were her sisters Anne, Elizabeth and Frances. However, her brothers Frederick and Arthur, and her sister Florence were baptised into the Wesleyan Methodists, and her sister Emily was christened at the Tabernacle church.

Although their parents married from Blind Lane (now Gladstone Road), while they were young, Ellen and her siblings lived on Factory Lane, modernly known as Westmead Lane, while their father worked at the cloth mill at the end of the road. Their grandfather, a dyer, also worked at the mill and lived next door. As they grew up, Ellen’s siblings gradually went to work for the cloth mill themselves. One of them, Anne, died at the age of one, but the rest all grew up to bring in a wage to the family. They found work in the mill themselves, and the condensed milk factory, and the railway.

In the late 1880s, when Ellen was about 14, the family moved out of Factory Lane into new houses on Parliament Street. While today this street is part of Chippenham, at that time the houses were outside the town’s boundaries, administratively in Lowden, and it would have been quiet compared to Factory Lane. This would have been a desirable move for a large family.

Around about this time, Ellen left school and started work. Her first job was in the Nestle Condensed Milk Factory. It’s unknown exactly what she did in the factory, but younger workers often were general factory hands – fetching and carrying, and menial tasks – and would gain specific knowledge and skills as they worked.

In 1892, when Ellen was 18, her father died suddenly. He’d been conducting a service at the Primitive Methodist Church in Kington St Michael, and had walked home with Ellen’s next youngest sister Elizabeth. As they went past the Police Station in New Road Julius collapsed and died, aged 42. An inquest said he’d had a weak heart all his life. Ellen’s mother Julia was left a widow with several very young children, and the eldest children had to support the family.

One of the girls went to work as a domestic servant in Bristol, and one of the boys as a railway porter in London, but the rest of the siblings stayed local. Ellen and three of her sisters went to work in the cloth mill. Two of them became weavers, having almost certainly learnt the trade from their father, while Ellen became a harness mender.

A harness mender did not relate to horses used at the mill, and instead referred to the mechanisms that drove the weaving looms. These were called harnesses, and Ellen’s job would have been to maintain them. This was specialist work, and appears to have usually fallen to men, so Ellen’s technical skill set appears to have been unusual. Other women at the mill worked as weavers, wool carders, spinners, spoolers, cutters, wharpers, beaters, machinists and general hands.

The Waterford Cloth Mill, also known as Pocock and Rawlings, took on workers from around the age of 14. When a young man married he could expect to keep his job, as he needed this to support his family. However, young women were expected to give up their jobs at the mill when they married, as they then had the responsibilities of a household and family. Some did keep their jobs – in 1911 there were eight married women at the mill, as opposed to 60 unmarried women and two widows – but this was driven by economic circumstance rather than propriety.

Significantly, Ellen and several of her sisters did not marry, so kept their jobs and lived with their mother. This may have been driven by the need to keep their family household going in the face of the loss of income that their father’s early death caused, but also may be down to lack of opportunity or a wish to keep their jobs.

By 1911, Ellen was in her thirties and had been the harness mender for over ten years, while her sisters Louisa and Emily were weavers. Another sister, Florence, had died in 1909, and had worked at the mill as a cutter.

1915 saw a devastating fire which destroyed the Waterford Mill almost entirely. The five-storey main building, along with the rest of the outbuildings complex, was damaged beyond repair. This sounded the death knell for the textile industry in Chippenham, despite it continuing healthily in nearby towns like Trowbridge, as the factory was not rebuilt. Pocock and Rawlings did continue in some capacity until around 1930, but most of the workers lost their jobs. It’s unknown where Ellen worked after this, as employment records were sketchy and not in the public domain, but it’s possible that she continued with Pocock and Rawlings due to her skills. Other option would have been to go to Saxby and Farmer, and join the local women working in munitions there during the First World War. She may also have taken the same choice as her sister Emily, and returned to work at the Condensed Milk Factory.

Ellen’s mother Julia died in 1929, and whatever work Ellen was doing at this point she gave up to become the householder at Parliament Street. Her sister Emily lived with her, as did her sister Louisa on occasion.

Ellen died in 1948, aged 74. The house was then passed on to her sisters.

Mary Ann M’s story

One gender disparity of the Victorian age was that, if a landlady of a pub was married, the license for the premises was invariably held in her husband’s name – even if he held another job elsewhere and the day-to-day running of the pub was left to her. In an era where women not working was prized as an elite aim, the pub landlady and her daughters appeared exempt. Women were sometimes referred to as the “hostess” of the establishment, which gave them status in a place that was usually regarded as a men’s domain. Women did drink in pubs during this time period, as beer was often better than water at the time, but not in the bar, and were usually not the type of women to be considered “nice” by the bulk of society. In contrast, the landlady had prestige.

More stringent social mores around women and alcohol came in with the temperance movement, and the Defence Of the Realm Act (DORA) during World War One. Temperance largely being a women’s political issue in the absence of being able to vote, there were social restrictions and expectations that grew around older girls and women entering a pub – particularly alone, as it might be seen that they were hoping to be picked up – and women would only be found in the lounge or snug areas of pubs, or would buy alcohol in a jug through a hatch in the outside wall to take away and drink at home. DORA also brought in restrictions for when alcohol could be sold in on-licensed premises.

Mary Ann, her sister Emma and mother Mary were no exception to the women-run establishment rule of thumb. Her father, Charles, nominally ran a pub in the Wiltshire town of Melksham when she was born in the mid-1840s, and the family later moved to Chippenham to run the town’s Three Crowns Inn, located at the crux of a busy coaching thoroughfare between Bath and London. She was the youngest of three children, which was a low number for the time.

However, Mary Ann’s father died in the Spring of 1857, when she was only fourteen. Her mother Mary, who had almost certainly been running the pub either alone or jointly with her husband since the family arrived in the town, then took over the license and ran it with the help of Mary Ann and her sister Emma – five-ish years older. A child working and being in the sight of alcohol being sold was not a problem at the time, as legislation banning under 14s in pubs appears not to have been brought in until the Licensing Act of 1964, and in any case did not apply to children residing at the premises (this was repealed in 1994 and removed at the beginning of 1995).

The pub was run as a going concern, with occasional overnight visitors. They offered a full service of ales and food, and accommodation for horses too – they employed an ostler on their staff, and had their own stables. Mary Ann’s brother George went on to be a commercial clerk, married and lived in Surrey, while the two girls stayed in business with their mother.

The pub, in common with other public houses and hotels at that time, was occasionally the venue for coroners’ inquests as it was a public area with enough space to accommodate many people. This included a 76-year-old sawyer who died of heart disease in 1870, a suicide in 1875, a two-year-old girl from measles complications in 1876, and a man who froze to death in a snowstorm in 1881.

Her mother ran the pub with Mary Ann and Emma for 15 years after her husband’s death, before dying herself at the age of 66. Directly after their mother’s death, both Mary Ann and Emma applied to jointly take over the license of the pub together.

They ran it together for a couple of years, until they both got married – on the same day, at Chippenham’s parish church. Emma’s beau was Charles, a school master who came from Reading, and she went off to live with him in that area and then South Wales. Mary Ann’s husband was Jeffrey, a farmer from nearby Langley Burrell. Accordingly, he took over the license of the pub from Mary Ann, and moved into the premises to nominally run it himself.

However, this marriage did not last long. Two years later Jeffrey was dead at the age of 40, and Mary Ann took over the pub license again. Given she had lived in the pub, and worked the business, since early childhood, this must very much have been business as usual – but running a pub alone, without any family, must have been a big ask. From accounts, the pub was not attached to any town brewery, so also brewed its own ale on the premises, of which Mary Ann would have had charge.

In 1880, she married a widower – Wright – who had lost his wife Emma at about two years before Jeffrey had died. He duly took over the pub licence from Mary Ann, who probably still ran the pub in actuality. Wright had been a farmer, and earlier than that had been a butler at Rodbourne House. His daughter Frances witnessed the marriage, as did Mary Ann’s brother George. With less people running the pub, however, they employed a barmaid and a servant as well as an ostler.

Her sister Emma had a baby in 1881, and Mary Ann went to visit her – Wright now working at the pub meant that she had the freedom to leave the business. There were no children from either of her marriages. Again though, this marriage was short-lived. This time, it was Mary Ann who died. Three years into the marriage, in 1883, she managed to catch her foot in the skirt of her dress and fell down the pub stairs, hitting her head. She complained of a headache later on, and lost a grip on reality, never recovering. She was discovered to have ruptured a blood vessel in her head when she fell. She was 39, which may seem no age now but by the standards of the time was getting on a bit. The local paper said:

“Although scarcely in the prime of life, Mrs. Clarke has perhaps been in the public business for a much longer period than any other landlady in the town, and her very amiable and obliging manners had won her many friends.”

She was buried in Chippenham. Wright sold up the business just over a year later, when it was described as “doing a very good trade, with a capital Market Dinner”. The death of Mary Ann had meant that Wright felt he could not continue running the pub. He went to live with his widowed sister in Norfolk, and died there in the early 1890s.

Aileen F’s story

A school-marm has a particular historical resonance, and immediately conjures a vision of an older unmarried woman with a sour expression and a mortar board – but women of this tradition were often regarded as some of the very best and most beloved teachers, and this reputation could sometimes be traded upon to build an extensive career.

One of the very first Oxford female graduates, early 20^th century teacher Aileen was regarded as “formidable” and taught at various British and American institutions, then went on to found her own British-style Catholic boarding school in the eastern United States – complete with British values, cold dormitories and chilblains.

She came from an Irish background – her father came from Waterford and her mother from Dublin – but her father’s employment as a railway clerk and then an accountant seems to indicate that their emigration to the London area was not directly from the labouring class in search of better work. Both parents arrived in Britain at some point before 1891, and while her father went straight into clerical work, her mother appears to have taught at a convent school in Edinburgh before they married.

Aileen was the middle child of five – two older brothers and one younger survived childhood, but her younger sister did not – and was born at the very tail end of the 19^th century. With a family home in Woolwich, all the children were well educated. From the ages of nine to 18, Aileen was boarding at St Mary’s Priory, a Benedictine foundation at Princethorpe, near Rugby in Warwickshire. The building here now forms part of the modern Princethorpe school. The mother superior at the institution was French, while the nuns came from all over the globe – Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Jamaica, India, and even Mexico. Aileen was one of 41 students being educated here in 1911, in a large community of nuns, and it may be that becoming a nun was her original plan.

Aileen at her teacher’s desk

However, her obvious intelligence led to further study. She joined the University of Oxford Society of Home Students in 1917 to further her studies. Although women were allowed to study at the university, due to their gender they were not allowed to be admitted to the university – in other words be given their degree – until 1921. Trinity College Dublin, which – as the whole of Ireland was part of the UK until this era – was considered on a par with Oxford and Cambridge admitted women to their degrees from 1904, but Cambridge did not follow suit until 1947. Aileen was housed at St Frideswide’s, a large hostel at Cherwell Edge, run by the Society of the Holy Child of Jesus along with many other young Catholic women. Aileen would have gone to Oxford expecting to just follow a course of lectures, but reforms in 1920 meant that she would qualify for her degree in English Language and Literature and be given it – and she received it, one of the first women to do so, in 1921. The Society of Home Students became St Anne’s College at Oxford in 1942.

As one of the first Oxford women graduates, this status opened doors for Aileen. While one of her older brothers went to work in China in 1919, having served in the navy in the First World War, was awarded Master of Foreign-Going Steamships in 1923, she got her first teaching job at Hays School, at Shaftesbury in Wiltshire, in 1921. After this, Aileen took up a teaching position in the United States and relocated there in 1923.

Arriving in New York in early autumn of that year, she became part of the staff of Marymount College in Tarrytown, located up the Hudson River about 25 miles north of the main city. This was founded as a boarding school by Mother Marie Joseph Butler in 1907, and educated Catholic girls. Aileen was 25, unmarried – as was required for a female teacher at that time – and her well-educated convent background would have been seen as an asset to the school. She remained at Marymount until the summer of 1925, when she returned home.

She arrived back in America the following autumn, and took up a teaching position at Foxcroft School in Virginia. This prestigious boarding and day school educated girls from well-connected families, and took pupils from the ages of around 13 to 18, preparing them for college. Aileen worked alongside founding headteacher Charlotte Haxall Noland, and the school famously educated Wallis Simpson.

She appears to have come home every summer, but in 1928 she stayed in the UK rather than heading back to America. She gained a position at the County School, a grammar school a world away from the boarding schools she’d previously worked in, in the Wiltshire town of Bradford on Avon. This school, where she taught English to 11-18 year olds, had many more male teachers than she would previously have worked with, and rather than being an exclusive boarding school for those who could afford it instead educated those children of the town who had passed an exam for entrance. The school later became Fitzmaurice Grammar School.

The County School, later Fitzmaurice Grammar, in Bradford on Avon

However, it seems this position did not suit her well. She wrote a letter of resignation in June 1929, saying that she had been offered another very good position in the United States, and “owing to family reasons I do not feel justified in refusing”. Exactly what her family situation was at this time is open to suggestion – both older brothers were happily settled in professions, her younger brother was also working as a school teacher, and her parents both appear healthy – but leave she did.

Exactly what the teaching position Aileen was offered in the US to tempt her back is unclear. The founder of Marymount College had founded a connected girls day school in Manhattan in 1926, so it is possible that a job here was offered, but it equally could have been any other school in the eastern US.

In 1930, with around ten years of teaching behind her, she established her own boarding school in the US. Foxhollow School was founded at Rhinebeck in Dutchess County in New York State, another part of the Hudson River Valley, but north of Tarrytown. The house she acquired had previously belonged to Tracy Dows, the son of a successful Manhattan grain merchant, who had commissioned the building in 1910 from architect Harrie T Lindeberg. The family had fallen on hard times during the Wall Street Crash, and Aileen was able to purchase the estate for her school.

Foxhollow Farm, the original home of Aileen’s school

Foxhollow School was a college preparatory school, so catered for girls in the final four years of American schooling. Aileen was known as a proper Brit, with values, accent and manners to match – which probably helped cement the exclusive and top-quality nature that went with the reputation of British-style boarding schools.

British schools, especially private (also called “public”) schools with boarding facilities, have always held an enviable international reputation as the best places to educate children. Elite families around the globe, especially those from countries in the former British empire, would package up their children on a ship and send them to school with a tuck box, and only see them again during the holidays. As did many British parents too. For (literary) examples of this phenomena see books by Angela Brazil, Charles Hamilton, or Enid Blyton.

A by-product of the esteem these schools were held in was that teachers associated with the British grammar and public school tradition could usually find themselves held in high renown if they took a position in a foreign school, and even values that we would today frown upon could be upheld if they came from the British Boarding School tradition. For example, Aileen’s pupils apparently complained of chilblains from the coldness of their dormitories, but were told that this was to be expected of a school of this character, and to buck up and suffer in silence as girls had done for decades previously.

When the first Jewish refugees from the Nazis started to arrive in the US in 1933, Aileen felt it was her moral duty to help them. She offered refugees temporary jobs at her school until they could find something better. She reportedly despised Nazis.

In 1939 Aileen chose to move her school from New York state to Massachusetts, but kept the original name – so Foxhollow School was resident at Holmwood, the former estate of the Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt family in Lennox. This was a much bigger property, with 47 rooms, so shows that the school was doing well and expanding. Vandebilt, who had died on the Lusitania in 1915, never actually lived in the house. His widow, Margaret, had bought it after his death, had it remodelled, and had lived there with two subsequent husbands.

Holmwood, which Aileen’s school took over in 1939

Margaret Emerson, widow of Alfred Gwynne Vandebilt

As the school had continued to expand, Aileen looked at other nearby properties to take over, particularly as some of the classrooms and a stable suffered some fire damage in late 1941. Adjoining Holmwood was The Mount, which had originally belonged to writer Edith Wharton, which Aileen was able to buy for a reasonable price, and boarded girls in their junior and senior years of the high school system in the servants’ sleeping quarters in the attic and the first floor bedrooms. A chemistry lab was established in The Mount’s kitchen, and four older girls shared the room that had previously been Wharton’s bedroom – even with her original decorated panels in situ. On Sundays, senior girls were allowed to sit and read quietly in what had been Wharton’s private library.

The Mount, former home of Edith Wharton

The school also had extensive stables, based in the original buildings at The Mount estate. Riding was seen as an important part of school life at Foxhollow.

Pupils riding at Foxhollow

Aileen herself has been described as “formidable”, “charmingly British”, “strict and proper” and a “grande dame”. She was an established presence in local town life, and – despite living in America for most of her life – never gave up her British citizenship. She had a limousine and a chauffeur, and would send them to the airport to pick up visitors – including her younger brother when he came over to visit her.

The school girls were allowed to have dances with neighbouring boys’ schools, to socialise the pupils and teach them how dance. At one of these Aileen is supposed to have leaned over to a male chaperone from The Berkshire School, and asked him “can you tell me, is the word “fuck” still in common usage?”.

The school gradually lost a number of pupils as the image of British boarding school education faded, and eventually closed in 1976. Aileen had retired as headteacher in 1970, and had placed the school buildings on the National Register of Historic Places. The original Holmwood building was then used as an inn, and has now been converted into apartments. The Mount has been restored to the glory days of Edith Wharton’s era, and is now a visitor centre dedicated to her life and work.

Aileen had never married. Neither had two of her brothers. One brother did, but there do not appear to have been any children. She continued to live in Lenox, Massachusetts, until her death in 1981 in her early 80s. She left no survivors, but a considerable legacy.

Evelyn D’Alroy’s story

Actors from the early 20^th century are perhaps best remembered today if footage exists of them, as the popular Edwardian theatre was a fast moving world, and many young women would give up their stage career when they married – either through necessity of staying home with children or propriety within society. However, the silent film era, although exciting and great for career exposure, didn’t suit every actor at that time. Early films could be jerky, and stage actors who traded on delicacy of emotion would not be best suited to that medium, and similarly a singing voice and deft use of words and tones would not transfer well to the screen. Evelyn was one such actor, and she did not live long enough for the development of the talkies to bring her style to the screen.

As Evelyn D’Alroy she was much renowned, a beautiful touring actress who was written about in all the newspapers and even had a musical dog that she performed with. However, the exotic last name was a stage name, and she’d been born plain Evelyn Tegg – but kept her stage name even when she married.

Evelyn in 1910, from the National Portrait Gallery collection

Her father, William, was a veterinary surgeon – which probably accounts for Evelyn’s love of dogs – and lived in Hackney. Evelyn was the second child of three, with an older sister and a younger brother, and was born at the beginning of the 1880s in London. Vets would have earned relatively well at the time, as they would have been particularly important in keeping horses – the main mode of transport – fit and healthy. Her mother also came from a solid middle-class background, as the daughter of a military prison warden. Evelyn and her siblings grew up in Tottenham, London, and then Stamford Hill, and would have benefited from enforced elementary education.

However, she lost her father at the age of 12, and he only left the family a little to live on. Her mother took in boarders to make ends meet, and also taught singing – earning enough to keep a domestic servant – and probably influenced Evelyn’s acting and musical career.

She clearly was a violinist of some talent, appearing in various concerts alongside other musicians in the last couple of years of the 19^th century under her birth name. Evelyn D’Alroy appears to have come into being in the summer of 1899 as she took a part in a touring production of The Streets of London – an anglicised version of Dion Boucicault’s The Poor of New York, exploring the fortunes of a family facing the 1857 financial crisis. Although her debut was widely held to be in 1902, she was performing in this touring play and others throughout the end of 1899 and into the first couple of years of the 20^th century.

The official acting debut that is cited as hers was in “the provinces” (aka not London) in a farcical comedy called Why Smith Left Home in 1902, at around the age of 20. This play, by George Broadhurst, featured comic adventures of a man and his new bride – presumably Evelyn’s role. On her performance here, she was snapped up by theatre agent William Greet, and toured the country in various productions under his management. In the background, her older sister had married a fish salesman and started having children herself, while her younger brother had begun working. Her mother had also remarried, to the head of a wheel and machinery company, and set up home with her new husband in Twickenham – to where Evelyn returned when she was not touring. One of the theatres she is known to have played under this management was Southampton’s Grand Theatre, where she appeared in historical tragedy The Sign of The Cross from 1903 to 1904, although she had been in the play in the years before that. Newspapers of the time indicate that this production went to Durham, and Bristol’s Princes Theatre, Southport, Luton, Burnley and various other places. The newspapers were full of praise for her skills, if less so for the plays she was performing in. One wrote:

Miss Evelyn D’Alroy is a charming actress, and her gifts were really wasted in such a piece.

She also appears to have been managed by Ben Greet, brother of William, during this time too, which meant that she was consistently working.

Evelyn in 1913, from the National Portrait Gallery collection

Her London debut was reputedly as the Duchesse de Longueville in a period piece, The Bond of Ninon, at the Savoy Theatre in April of 1906. This play, written by Irish playwright Clotilda Graves, explored the history of Ninon (Anne) de l’Enclos (1620-1705), who intrigued many distinguished French men in the 17^th century. As a production it wasn’t well received by everyone, but Evelyn performed alongside celebrated actors of the day Henry Ainsley and Lena Ashwell, and well and truly launched a career of note.

Her first supposed proper recognition was the leading part in The Builders by Norah Keith at the Criterion Theatre in 1908, described by a paper of the time as a “women’s suffrage play”, although it seems to fall into the anti-suffrage thinking rather than the pro, which examines the relationship between Adrian White, K.C., one of the foremost legal forces of the day, and beautiful divorcee Mrs Cray – Evelyn’s role – whose undying gratitude Adrian has won by winning her divorce case for her and gaining her custody of her daughter. Together these two build an illicit relationship, which leads to the play’s title. A review said:

Miss D’Alroy… is an emotional actress of distinction and personal charm, whose opportunity has yet to come.

While appearing in this play she also had the role of the heroine, Lady Lulu Devas, in After the Opera at the Empire Theatre. This was originally a French work, which had been translated into an English setting.

The discrepancy in accounts of Evelyn’s career details may lie in who she married. In the spring of 1908, about six months before The Builders hit the stage, Evelyn married theatre critic and journalist (Thomas) Malcolm Watson, a Scot who was about 25 years her senior. They appear to have met during 1905, when she appeared in his play Two Men and A Maid as the character Molly Price, which was playing at the Opera House in Northampton. She made a hit in this role.

Malcolm, as a regular critic, was in a good position to edit his wife’s rise to fame in official sources, and probably did so. They had no children together, but did have several pet dogs. She also relaxed by going motoring and playing golf.

By the end of 1908 she had been taken into the Lewis Waller Players and regularly worked at London’s Lyric Theatre. Roles here included Iduna de Solatierra in Ronald MacDonald’s The Chief of Staff, Lucy Allerton in Somerset Maugham’s The Explorer, Sadie Adams in Conan Doyle’s The Fires of Fate, and Anne of Austria in a revival of The Three Musketeers. Her husband, an accomplished writer who dabbled in writing drama as well as criticism, wrote a playlette for her to perform – Sanctuary – in 1909, to be performed at Christmas in the Empire theatre alongside other variety acts.

In September 1909 she was taken on by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty’s Theatre, indicating that her star was very much in the ascendency. Parts here included Yaouma in the Ancient Egyptian-set Fake Gods (translated from Brieux’s La Foi), which ran for 69 performances, and Lady Benedetta Mount-michael in The O’Flynn – Justin Huntley McCarthy’s 17^th century-set play based on Irish events around King James II and William of Orange.

She also played the muse character Bettina Brentano in a biopic called Beethoven, Sport in Ben Jonson’s Vision of Delight, and Shakespearian characters Ophelia, Portia and Oberon. Hamlet’s Ophelia was reputedly her favourite role to play. Later she went to the St James Theatre under Sir George Alexander, with roles including the Chinese Princess in Turandot in January 1913 (this was Max Reinhardt’s Berlin production, brought to London and translated from the Vollmoeller version of Gozzi’s original play of 1762 by Jethro Bithell, and not the later Puccini opera), and Pamela Townshend in Louis Evan Shipman’s D’Arcy of the Guards.

Evelyn as Turandot, in the 1913 production. From the National Portrait Gallery collection.

She played Mary Shrawardine in The Crucible (not the Arthur Miller version, but an earlier play by MPs Edward Hemmerd and Francis Neilson where a brother begs his sister to become a millionaire’s mistress) at the Comedy Theatre, and Brenda Carlyon in Raleigh and Hamilton’s The Hope at Drury Lane in September 1911.

Evelyn as Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Her early music training came into play in her later career too, drawing on her mother’s singing teaching that she must have benefited from during her teenage years, as she was known to have an excellent soprano voice. She appeared in Oscar Strauss’ operetta The Chocolate Soldier, playing Nadina Popoff – a role that required a great deal of singing – at the Lyric Theatre in 1910-11. The original was in German, itself a reworking of George Bernard Shaw’s 1894 play Arms and The Man, but it was translated into English for a Broadway production in 1909. Evelyn also sang the leading role of Princess Yolande in Love and Laughter, another Strauss operetta, at the Lyric theatre in 1913. Her reported “bubbly personality” worked well in musical comedy, and these operettas reputedly gained her more fans.

In addition to acting in long-running productions, she appeared in some one-off shows, probably variety-act based. Music made an appearance in these too, as one newspaper reported:

Miss D’Alroy was a great dog lover. One of her pets, a cute little Airedale, was taught by his mistress to sit at the piano and make “music” with his paws. He was also accused of “singing” to his own accompaniment.

During 1914 to 1915 she went back on the road with the Louis Waller Players, performing in touring productions around various different provincial theatres. Two of these productions were Dion Clayton Calthrop’s The Other Side of Love, and a play called Monsieur Beaucaire – set in 18^th century Bath.

Many of Evelyn’s roles were in productions that were later put onto the silver screen, or reworked into other formats, for example The Chocolate Soldier was adapted as a silent film in 1915, but that technology was in its infancy when Evelyn was performing.

Sadly, she did not live into an era where her acting would have been appreciated in a cinema. In the April of 1915 her touring production with the Lewis Waller Players reached Sheffield, but she was taken ill suddenly with appendicitis. She was operated on at the hospital, and her appendix removed, and taken to a nursing home to recover. Her husband went to Sheffield to be with her, but she developed pleurisy and pneumonia and died three days later. She was just 33 years old. Two or three hundred people came to her funeral, including various theatre luminaries of the time.

Evelyn in 1913, from the National Portrait Gallery collection

“How do you find your stories?”

I was asked recently how I manage to find all these interesting stories about women of the past who haven’t been profiled before.

The short answer is because they are out there. Another short answer is because I look with a different lens, and don’t assume that because there’s nothing written there’s nothing there. Yet another short answer is that they’re happy accidents.

A longer, more considered, answer would be that I am – and always have been – extremely curious about people’s lives and what drives people and makes them tick. I worked as a journalist for many years, and therefore like to dig deep to find a story. Combined with an all-consuming drive to prove that women’s history is so much more than just suffrage and a fight for equal rights, and you’ve got the right conditions for turning up real and interesting stories.

However, I’m sure that my questioner wanted actual details about how I found people rather than technical musings on the drive behind the project, so let’s explain a bit further about how I’ve found people…

If you’ve been to one of my talks, you’ll have heard all about serial criminal Mary Ann Fairlie, as we build her story together through newspaper reports and other documents. Mary was found in the prison records for Gloucestershire, when she’d been arrested for breaking a window while drunk and assaulting a police constable. I happened upon her because I was in those records researching someone in a friend’s maternal genealogy line, she was on the next page (adjacent to a man who’d been had up for “interfering sexually with a sheep”) and I wondered what sort of woman would beat up a police officer in the 1890s and looked her up. And what a tale she had.

She in turn led me to two other women. One of the newspaper reports mentioned that she’d beaten up a female prison warden, “Mrs M Redding” in 1883, and I wondered about women becoming prison wardens at that time – so tried to find her. I found a child in the area called Maud Redding, who was far too young to have been the warden, but discovered that she and many of her siblings had been born in India – so had a look at why that had happened, and what the reality of that was for her mother Helena. And then I discovered the great tragedy at the heart of Helena’s family. Later on I did find the female prison warden – Marion – and she turned out to have come through the workhouse system.

Marion wasn’t a matron of a workhouse though, and through that I wondered what background might lead someone to take that role on, and what the duties were. So I duly looked up the various matrons (and masters – they were usually a married couple) of my local workhouse in Chippenham, Wiltshire, and happened across Martha who held that role for nearly 30 years. In one of the newspaper articles I used to research her, I came across a mention of a “crippled” woman giving birth to triplets while in that workhouse – Rosanna – so researched her too.

Public buildings in Chippenham have been a source of lots of women in the project, mostly as I am surrounded by the places that they lived and worked and can’t help but wonder who lived there. I’ve done research into one of the local primary schools, and looked at several teachers from there – Ruby (who was divorced in 1930) and Marion (who was part of a new epoch in art teaching in the 1920s alongside Robin Tanner, but didn’t get any credit for it) – as well as teachers and university lecturers from elsewhere. I’ve also researched the chain of barkeepers at a couple of local pubs, and have looked for the most interesting landladies from those lists – as invariably it was the husband who officially held the alcohol sale license but his wife ran the pub, so Lilian and Sarah are a couple of stories from that haul. I also went and looked up the woman who gave a set of almshouses to the town – Elizabeth – because I realised I walked past regularly and saw her name but knew nothing about her and why she gave the properties to the town – and in a local history book found a reference to Priscilla, wife of a local industrialist, whose husband was given endless credit for having produced a cricket team of sons but the woman who carried and birthed them was barely mentioned.

Marion Young, teacher of Chippenham, who was part of a new epoch in art teaching in the 1930s

On another tack, sometimes I hit upon an important part of women’s history that is barely talked about in personal terms, and try to find someone to help me illustrate it. For example, the unfairness in standards for divorce law between men and women in the mid-19^th century, which is often generalised, didn’t really have a face to it so I found Diana by going through the UK Civil Divorce Records and her political connections came to light later. Female anti-suffragists boggle my brain, so I researched Gwladys to try to find out what drove her (actual conviction, economic necessity or familial revenge – you decide). The profession of a monthly nurse went out with the ark, and no-one these days knows what one did (she came into a woman’s home after the birth of a baby to do her chores and feed her other children), so I looked up Elizabeth. Ballet’s association with prostitution turned up Susannah. Abortion and what you did with an unwanted pregnancy – before the advent of Levonelle or mifepristone and misoprostol – is another issue that I wanted to highlight. I had one credit left on the British Newspaper Archive before having to top them up, so searched “Wiltshire abortion” and found the tale of Harriet and Mary Ann.

Gwladys Gladstone Solomon, later Cowper

Other women I turn up in books – Amy Bell, the first UK female stockbroker – came from Jane Duffus’ book The Women Who Built Bristol, while Hannah Young I found in a BBC book to accompany a series on the Victorian kitchen, and turned up more than gas cookery when I discovered her husband had taken her name when they married, and she recommended do-it-yourself enemas.

Amy Bell, first UK female stockbroker

Enquiries also turn up interesting stories. A friend’s father suggested that I look for a nun, which turned up both Sister Josephine and Mother Superior Amy, and in turn a penitent woman – Cecelia – who was being reformed in a convent, because I wondered what she’d done to earn her place there. An enquiry from the Women’s Engineering Society’s centenary project turned up the wonderful Maysie – actress-cum-socialite-cum-pilot-cum-engineer – and in turn also Lillian Haskins, wife of the director of civil aviation in the 1930s.

And then there’s just plain curiosity that a stray record brings on: what on earth did a woman called Hephzibah get up to? Running a home for fallen women, it appears. And how did a white woman born in Sierra Leone end up in Victorian Chippenham? (Annie’s dad was a missionary in Freetown at the time of her birth).

Then the final part of the answer is YOU, gentle reader. I am genuinely interested in what your grandmother (and your mother, and your maiden aunt, and your second cousin three times removed) got up to, because oral history is the dog’s bollocks and adds so much more colour and life to women’s stories than bare records and salacious newspaper reports ever could. So please, #tellmeaboutyourgranny, ask your great aunt what she did in the war, write down your mother’s experiences for posterity, and tell your daughters just what women’s history is all about – more than just suffrage and women’s lib: it’s endless housework and varicose veins, back street abortions and fiddling with a knitting needle, doing a great amount of your husband’s work and never getting the credit for it, balancing books but never being called an accountant, not being able to marry and keep a job you love, swearing in front of a police station in order to be arrested and therefore get a bed for the night, being stoic when your infant dies of an illness we could easily prevent now, finding a way to keep an income when your husband dies, and many many more things besides.

So that’s how I find my stories, and populate my project. It’s for you, and it’s for everyone. Help me to find more.

Elise G’s story

Imagine being intelligent enough and working hard enough to achieve a doctorate in mathematics, in an era where women were only just allowed to earn them, and then being denied the title by some foreign men because you were a) from a different country and they weren’t sure they recognised the institution you earned your qualification in, and b) a married woman. This happened to Elise – a well deserving holder of a PhD, but referred to as Mrs (despite a divorce) when she found work as a maths teacher.

The second daughter of a Czechoslovakian lawyer, Elise was born at the turn of the 20^th century in Most, a Bohemian city in the northern part of what is now the Czech Republic. The region was German-speaking – Most’s German name is Brüx – and Elise grew up speaking that language. Her family was Jewish, well-educated and quite well-to-do.

During the first world war, when the situation for Jews in that area was good, she and her sister Kathe attended high school in their home town, with Elise showing a particular aptitude for mathematics. She went on to study at the local college at 16, graduating in 1923, and then went on to the University of Vienna for four further years – gaining a distinction in maths – and achieving a doctorate in 1928. At the time, women were only admitted to doctorates in certain subjects at the University of Vienna. Somewhere along the way she’d met and married Ernst, a junior lawyer in her father’s office, in about 1924 and gave birth to a daughter around 1928. However, the marriage did not work out and ended in divorce.

After qualifying for her doctorate, and gaining the first part of a teaching diploma, she spent eight years as visiting lecturer at the University of Prague, and then moved to be the Statistical Expert at the Institute of Market Research in Vienna. Her father died in 1931, but her mother continued to live in Most. By this point, the situation for Jews in this part of Europe was getting dangerous. Her daughter, then around 10, was excluded from her school in Vienna on the basis of her Jewish background, so she and Elise returned to Prague. Her daughter managed to escape in January 1939 as part of the Kindertransport with the help of the Barbican Mission to the Jews, based in London’s East End, who saved around 100 children in the nine months up to the outbreak of World War II. The idea of the mission was that the Jewish children should convert to Christianity, which did not particularly bother Elise or her ex-husband as – though Jewish by birth – they were agnostic. Elise was able to follow her two months later, on a domestic permit – presumably with the idea of being able to care for her – but left her mother and ex-husband behind. Her sister had married and moved to Chile with her husband, which may have been considered as another avenue of escape, but ultimately the domestic permit provide Elise with the means to leave.

England at the time was not a particularly cosmopolitan place. Many people had not been abroad – the country was decades away from package holidays – and much of the news from the area that Elise came from centred on Hitler and the activities of the Nazi party, so even rescued Czech Jews could be viewed with suspicion. In addition, Elise’s doctorate came from a non-British university, so many might doubt the rigour of that education as it was “different” to that which they had experienced.

Therefore, Elise had to find work in England as and where she could. With the help of people within the Barbican Mission for the Jews she began working as a chamber maid, then a cook and a governess, and the 1939 register – taken a few weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War – has her performing domestic duties for a female accountant in London, though the register acknowledges that she is a statistics expert, and she probably helped the accountant as well as doing the cleaning. But on this form her doctorate is not acknowledged. Her daughter lived separately, with the mission in a home in the Brockley area, and Elise’s access to her was restricted.

In January of 1940, with many of the male teachers starting to be taken into the forces as the war got underway, there were starting to be shortages in teaching staff in many schools. She managed to gain a position as temporary science mistress at Thorn Bank school in Malvern-Wells, Worcestershire. This was a small private school for girls, which did not have a great deal of funds for equipment. Elise taught here on her wits and vast knowledge, as her only scientific equipment was pieces of litmus paper. However, the stability of this job meant that her daughter was returned to her care, and they lived together in Malvern-Wells and later in Carlisle where Elise held a mathematics teaching position for a year from September of 1940 that was slightly better than the previous post but not by much.

From here, she had an interview with the head of a town grammar school in Wiltshire on the railway station platform at Derby with a view to replacing his head of maths who was serving in the RAF, and got the job. Whereas the governors of that school were not particularly worldly at that time, the head teacher was young and a Quaker, part of the Rowntree chocolate manufacturing family of York, and as part of the company business had even been abroad. He recognised that a doctorate from the University of Vienna was equal to one from a British university, and persuaded the governors to take on Elise – though in a nod to their reservations she was still referred to as Mrs and not as Doctor. They may also have had reservations as the previous replacement was also a German Jewish refugee and had been interned in an Enemy Alien camp for a few months in 1940, and they may have feared losing Elise to this fate too – although it was only the men who were interred in the end.

Elise became the senior maths teacher of the school, in Bradford on Avon, and her daughter enrolled too. She was well liked by staff and pupils alike, and respected by all. Her heavy accent apparently was difficult to understand at first, but many students found her lessons inspirational. She was paid on the standard scale, with slight deductions for being in a temporary position and technically an alien, but was awarded a special payment for her exceptional qualifications – which they still weren’t formally recognising – in 1943.

During this period, both her mother and ex-husband – who had not been able to escape the Nazi regime – were placed by the Third Reich. Communication would have been non-existent, so she probably would not have known of their fate until after the war. Her mother was sent to the Theresienstadt Jewish ghetto, with other Czech Jews, which eventually became a labour camp. She was then sent on to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chambers sometime in either 1943 or 1944. Ernst, Elise’s ex-husband, was sent to the ghetto at Łódź, Poland, where he died of starvation in 1943. Her teaching position, and life in the UK, must have included hope that her family and friends had somehow survived.

Elise, left, with other grammar school staff in 1944

Elise remained at the grammar school in Bradford on Avon until the end of the school year in 1945, when – the war having ended in May, at least in Europe – it was expected that the head of maths would return from RAF duty and take his place again at the school. In practice, this did not happen until 1946, and another German refugee was employed until then. The job did belong to the original head of maths, but it is fair to say that Elise was far better qualified for the role than he was.

She moved to be maths teacher at the Greenford County School, in Middlesex, and her daughter moved with her. After a few years here she was able to make the switch back into working in higher education in London, although an exact institution remains elusive. She was active in both the English and German language fields of maths, and here reclaimed the title of Dr again as it was finally recognised.

Her daughter lived with her in Wembley until her marriage in the late 1950s, after which she appears to have lived alone. She visited her sister Kathe in Chile in the late 1950s and early 60s. After Kathe’s husband’s death in the early 1970s Kathe went back to Germany and lived in Munich, so Elise had a ready made base there when she travelled for work. She eventually had two grandsons.

She also continued her research while working in higher education. There is a picture of her attending the Edinburgh Mathematical Society Colloquium in St Andrews, Scotland, in 1976. She is also mentioned as a member of the Austrian Mathematics Association by the International Mathematical News published in Vienna in 1977. By this point she was living in Latymer Court in Hammersmith, built in 1934 and described at that time as the largest single luxury block of flats in Europe.

In 1978 she was awarded a Golden Doctorate from the University of Vienna, an accolade given to those who have reached 50 years since their original doctorate and are still continuing to research and push the boundaries of their subject. She still did not stop there – in 1983, at the age of 80, she delivered a paper in Germany on “The practical treatment of stress concentrations and singularities within the finite element displacement algorithms”, and there is mention of her having delivered lectures for the Open University.

She died in 1991, aged 88, and was buried close to home in London.