Writing Women's History

Casting off the corsets - a history of women's underwear

2011-11-29T10:56:00.000Z

Corsets, constipation and Oliver Cromwell - Dulcie Lewis's new short history of women's underwear is definitely educational...and frankly a little bit scary!

1. Ethical undies: The Victorians were so obsessed with underwear that they published books on the subject. According to The Ethics of Underwear (1889): 'Correct underclothing, under all circumstances, shows a nicely balanced mind, and a sense of the fitness of things, which some people can never acquire'.

2. Immovable bowels: Victorian women spent a lot of time on their chamber pots. Apparently, during the period many doctors thought that women were prone to constipation, as so many tightly-corsetted ladies sought medical help.

3. My red beret is going to Oxfam: 'Women of easy virtue were thought to advertise their availability by wearing a red hat'.

4. Knickers to the men: Underwear was once used to suggest sexual equality. In the 1890s, the young members of the Rational Dress Society donned 'masculine' tweed and wool knickerbockers to aid them in manly pursuits, like cycling and climbing mountains.

5. Witchcraft and eyeliner: Oliver Cromwell was apparently responsible for a bizarre piece of legislation entitled 'Vice of painting and wearing Patches and immodest Dresses of Women'. Part of this anti-beauty bill stated that any woman who used 'artificial teeth, iron stays, hoops or bolstered hips' to trap a man into marriage, could be tried as a witch and her marriage annulled.

Casting off the Corsets is published by Countryside Books

Blue by name...plaque proposed for London's first stripper

2011-11-28T17:40:00.000Z

Bombs might have been raining down on London, but that didn't stop Phyllis Dixey getting her kit off for a packed theatre of Tommies three times a day.

Phyllis has the dubious distinction of being the very first woman in England to perform a naked striptease. During the 1930s, nude shows were only legal if performers remained completely motionless. But, at the Tivoli Theatre, in unlikely Hull, variety singer Phyllis Dixey flouted the “If you move, it’s rude” rule and used ostrich feathers to tantalise her audience glimpses of her birthday suit during her 'Confessions Of A Fan Dancer' act, in November 1942.

This shocking peformance was swiftly investigated by the police, but everything was smoothed over when the Lord Chamberlain, then responsible for stage censorship, granted his approval. Phyllis went on to form a company of dancers and put on striptease shows at the Whitehall Theatre in Soho, throughout the early 40s.

English Heritage has raised eyebrows by announcing its plans to honour London’s ‘Queen of Striptease’ with a blue plaque. Net curtains have been set twitching along a quiet Surbiton street by the organisation's request to put up a plaque inscribed ‘Phyllis Dixey 1914 to 1964, Striptease Artiste lived here in flat number 15’. Some have suggested that she is more discreetly referred to as a ‘fan dancer’ or ‘burlesque performer’ instead.

Despite a brief foray in film (starring in Dual Alibi with Herbert Lom), Phyllis's post-war career floundered, and she found herself playing provincial theatres, under pressure to reveal increasing amounts of flesh. Her lowest point came when she was fined £5 for indecency after a show in Scunthorpe. Declared bankrupt and living out her retirement in obscurity, Phyllis died aged 50, in 1964.

Celebrating Shelagh Delaney

2011-11-23T13:05:00.005Z

Pioneering female playwright Shelagh Delaney died this week. A bright working class Lancashire lass born in 1939, Shelagh transformed herself from usherette to award-winning playwright at just 18.

After leaving school with a handful of O-Levels, there were few career options open to Shelagh, who spurned teaching and took on a series of dead end jobs, while she enjoyed going out dancing at the weekend.

She began writing her first play, A Taste of Honey, infuriated by a performance of Terence Rattigan's Variations on a Theme, which she felt showed "insensivity in the way Rattigan portrayed homosexuals".

Written in a fortnight, A Taste of Honey exploded on to the stage and quickly became considered the most performed play by a female playwright in post-war Britain. The play's teenage heroine Jo is dragged on midnight flits between dingy Salford bedsits by her feckless mother Helen, who is bent on marrying her flashy younger suitor (and concealing the fact that she's over 40).

Rita Tushingham as Jo
and Paul Danquah as Jimmy

Jo briefly finds happiness when she meets Jimmy, a black sailor, but he disappears, leaving her pregnant and homeless. The only functional relationship in the play is between Jo and Gordon, a young gay shop assistant, who she sets up home with.

The play was daring and controversial for its time, dealing with issues like race, homosexuality and teen pregnancy, but it was a great success. The rights to the 1961 film version, starring Rita Tushingham, earned Shelagh a whopping (for the time) £20,000, and her screenplay, co-writted with director Tony Richardson, won a BAFTA for best screenplay.

Shelagh never acheived quite the same splash with any of her other work, but she went on to write well-received screenplays for film and television, as well as radio plays, including a Ruth Ellis biopic, Dance with a Stranger (1895).

A Taste of Honey is one of my favourite films. Sharp, bitter, and funny - and one of Morrisey's main inspirations for The Smiths lyrics - it's well worth a watch!

Olive Schreiner's Letters Online

2011-11-08T09:20:00.007Z

A fantastic new project run by several UK universities has paid homage to the work of pioneering feminist writer Olive Schreiner (1855-1920).

South African-born Olive wrote daringly about big issues for the time - racism, women's education and agnoticism. Her novels, like The Story of an African Farm, were hugely popular, and her political writing provoked and inspired contemporaries.

Olive's 5,500 plus letters are now scattered throughout the world in over 40 locations, but the Olive Schreiner Letters Online project will make them all accessible at www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk from January 2012.

Researching Women of the Canals

2011-10-18T14:29:00.004+01:00

A guest post by the fabulous Sue Wilkes, author of the forthcoming book Tracing your Canal Ancestors

A canal boatwoman and child in the 1920s
Cassell’s Book of Knowledge (c.1924).
Nigel Wilkes collection

The narrow-boats of the Midlands canals were often crewed by families. ‘The boatman’s wife does the cooking, assists in steering, and takes a turn with the bigger children in walking along the canal bank driving the horse, mule or ass.’ (Factory and Workshops Act Commission, 1876.)

Not all canal families lived on the boats full-time. Inspector C.W. Hoare noticed that on the Bridgewater Canal: “Some women and children live on the boats all the year round, in fact they have no other home, whilst others lock up their houses and live in the boats for a week or fortnight at a time, according to the distances the boats have to carry their cargo”.

Because women helped to steer the boat, this took priority over their other work such as cooking meals or washing clothes, which had to be fitted in as time permitted.

A boatwoman told a reporter for the Birmingham Daily Mail in the 1870s that she couldn’t complain about canal-boat life when “you ‘as your ‘ealth” but that it was ‘bitter bad’ if any of the family were ill. Because they were on the move all the time, it was difficult for canal families to attend medical facilities or schools.

Canal boatwomen worked for long hours and were out in all weathers, so they were sensibly dressed. They wore a full-length skirt, a blouse, a pinafore to keep them clean and a shawl. Their bonnets were decorated with long, heavy frills to keep the sun off their heads and necks. When Queen Victoria died, boatwomen adopted black bonnets as a mark of respect, and this seems to have become ‘standard’ wear for some time among older women.

Narrowboat cabin interior, 1870s.
Drawing by Herbert Johnson,
Our Canal Population (London, 1879).
Author’s collection

During the world wars, there was a shortage of crews on the canals. In WWII, women like Margaret Cornish, Susan Woolfit and others who had never worked on the canals volunteered to become trainee boatwomen. The boaters nicknamed them ‘idle women’ because of the ‘I W’ (Inland Waterways) badges they wore.

By the 1950s, family-crewed boats were virtually a thing of the past, and their traditional way of life vanished.

Find out more about Sue's book!

History to Herstory

2011-09-22T15:31:00.000+01:00

This is a press release from the History to Herstory project from Huddersfield University (http://historytoherstory.hud.ac.uk). I've popped it on my blog, because I think it's an interesting site and worth checking out. Hope you'll take a look!

'The History to Herstory Project team would really appreciate your help in evaluating our new website, its learning resources and image catalogue.

The History to Herstory project celebrates Yorkshire women's lives from 1100 to the present day. The website contains a catalogue of archive documents and images, giving direct access to primary source material of photographs, letters, diaries and medical case-notes.

You can search on a wide range of themes covering Yorkshire women's history including: work, politics, correspondence, mental health, groups and associations, diaries, and war. The website contains documents and information relating to prominent Yorkshire women, such as the Brontes, Amy Johnson, Anne Lister and Lady Amabelle Yorke and also casebooks from the Wakefield Pauper Lunatic Asylum.

You can download free learning resources on the website, that may help your students to engage with the primary sources, and be a springboard for further research. Please take a look at the new version of the website here: http://historytoherstory.hud.ac.uk

We would really appreciate your feedback on the new and improved website. There are 10 very quick questions, the majority are multiple choice where you simply need to tick a box, and not all of the questions may be relevant to you. The survey should take no more than 3 minutes of your time -- but would be enormously helpful for us to evaluate the website and to continue to improve it.

To access the questionnaire, please click on the below link:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/SWPT363

The questionnaire will be available online until Thursday 29^th September.

Thank you for your time,

The History to Herstory Project Team'

Stitches from the soul: Elizabeth Parker's confession

2011-07-26T12:17:00.000+01:00

Elizabeth did not decorate her sampler with flowers or patterns; instead she recorded her emotional turmoil: “As I cannot write I put this down simply and freely as I might speak to a person to whose intimacy and tenderness I can fully intrust myself,” she began.

The sampler recounts her birth in 1813 to “poor but pious” parents – a labourer and a charity school teacher – with nine other children. At 13 she became a nurserymaid for Mr and Mrs F, then, against her parents’ wishes, a housemaid for Lieutenant G, who treated her “with cruelty too horrible to mention.” She claims that after she spurned his sexual advances, he threw her down a flight of stairs for “trying to avoid [his] wicked design.”

Concealing her trauma, Elizabeth found a more benevolent employer. But eventually her trauma surfaced and she had a nervous breakdown (“my reason was taken from me”) and attempted suicide (“I acknowledge being guilty of that great sin of self-destruction”). She creates a vivid image of her suicidal despair, longing to go into the woods alone and end her life.

In the final third of her sampler, Elizabeth prays for mercy from God to keep her “from evil thoughts” and “sin and misery”. Her confession covers half of the fabric and ends mid-way through a sentence “what will become of my soul” – the rest is blank cloth.

Elizabeth’s life did not end as abruptly as her sampler. She remained single and worked as a schoolteacher at Ashburnham Charity School. At some point during the 1850s, she moved into the Ashburnham almshouses, until her death at 76, on the 10th April 1889. Perhaps after venting her turbulent emotions in cross stitch Elizabeth kept the sampler as a reminder of her despair. I wonder how she would have felt if she had known that her private thoughts would one day be on public display?

Find out more about Elizabeth's sampler on the V&A website

A Harlot's Progress: a teen prostitute in the 1800s

2011-07-14T15:21:00.001+01:00

The Cautionary Tale of Elizabeth Kenning (c.1790–1829)

Elizabeth Kenning (also spelled Kenyon) had been paralysed for 13 years when she began a memoir charting her transformation from drink-addled prostitute to admired poetess.

Elizabeth’s soldier father was killed overseas soon after she was born, and her mother headed off to seek her fortune in London, leaving Elizabeth with her uncle in Chester. As a child, Elizabeth was "violent and independent...even to the extent of hysterical passion.” She skipped school, and stole, “sometimes…for the mere sake of pilfering.”

“From the seduced I became the seducer...”

When she left school, Elizabeth moved to work in Manchester, where wages were higher, and lodged with a girlfriend. Despite being barely in their teens, the pair blew their wages on “dances, the theatre and any other places of public resort,” where they enjoyed male attention, and sometimes partied “whole nights without any rest.”

Soon she had met her first lover, and flattered by “false promises” and presents, she accompanied him for clandestine walks. But he was after more than chaste strolls through the suburbs, and “young and unsuspecting” Elizabeth consented. “No sooner had I done wrong...I fancied that all who knew me could tell that I had deviated from the path of virtue,” she remembered.

Elizabeth urged her lover to marry her, “but he made a jest of it, telling me that marriage was nothing more than priest-craft.” She lived with him for a while, but “after he had accomplished his vile own purposes, he grew tired, began to neglect me and looked very cool.”

Seduced and abandoned, Elizabeth “grew very desperate and determined on revenge.” Instead of regretting her loss of virtue, “from the seduced I became the seducer.” She moved into a brothel, where she was entirely “initiated in the ways of infamy and vice” and began to “lay snares for defenceless youth.”

“Temptation presented itself”

Before long, Elizabeth's way of life took its toll on her. She was arrested, and one customer beat her up “without the least provocation,” breaking two of her ribs. She took laudanum for the pain and became addicted to it. Sick and weak, with a “shattered frame,” Elizabeth fled to Chester, only to find that her uncle was long dead. Too ashamed to seek help from friends, she travelled on to Liverpool.

There, “without a character and deprived of every means of subsistence,” she was forced back on the streets. Her nights became an endless round of dancing houses, drinking dens and “nurseries of vice”.

During this time, she was frequently in the city House of Correction, where another inmate offered to teach her “for one shilling, the art of picking pockets.” Elizabeth was out of control, “haunted and unhappy,” wishing herself a man, with a man's freedoms. Courageously, she moved to a new part of the city and found work as a seamstress.

However, one evening “temptation presented itself,” in the shape of a handsome young ex-lover. “I had a great partiality for him,” Elizabeth recalled. “He knew my fondness too well and took advantage of it…after having taken some liquor I was easily persuaded.” Elizabeth abandoned her new life and went to live with him. Once again, she was deserted, selling her clothes to buy alcohol, and contemplating suicide while she walked the streets.

One evening Elizabeth accosted a minister, but rather than buying her services, he spoke to her sincerely about religion. Deeply touched, Elizabeth started attending church, and with assistance from her congregation she was admitted into the Liverpool Female Penitentiary at Edgehill, in May 1813.

"Snatched from the dreadful pit of shame"

Liverpool Female Penitentiary, on Faulkner Street, in 1908

The penitentiary, one of many homes for fallen women established in the early 19th century, opened in 1809, with the aim to rehabilitate prostitutes to “a respectable station in society.”

It was a refuge for thousands of women – over 200 were admitted in 1823 alone – until its closure in 1921. Many inmates, like Elizabeth, lived there permanently. In 1825, Henry Smithers included the penitentiary in his book on Liverpool institutions, noting its “order, cleanliness and judicious regulation.”

The penitentiary was a haven for Elizabeth: “no licentious sound reached my ear, no human voice calling aloud for vengeance.” She worked in the laundry and got on well with the matrons and other inmates until her legs became paralysed. In May 1817, the Ladies Committee at the Penitentiary recorded: “EK having been 3 years in the house and being now quite helpless is allowed to continue on account of her exemplary conduct, which it is believed has a favourable influence on the minds of the other women.”

Incapacitated, Elizabeth still read the scriptures aloud and wrote religious poems, along the lines of:

“My former life, replete with grief and shame

With every folly, every crime had been

Till smiling mercy to my rescue came

And snatched me from the dreadful pit of shame.”

With her body slowly turning numb, Elizabeth could only use her left hand and mouth. Then she developed lock jaw, and had to have teeth extracted so she could be fed through the side of her mouth. Henry Smithers described Elizabeth's plight in 1824:

“When she became so paralysed...she thought that she could write and draw with her mouth...after much labour and great suffering, she at length succeeded, and, by drawing flowers, butterflies, and watch-papers, which have been purchased by visitors… To show me the manner in which she wrote, colours were brought to her: a brush was, with difficulty, placed between her teeth...and she wrote, in green paint, the three words “God is love.”

Elizabeth died on the 30th January 1829, aged 39. It's hard to say whether she really did write her own memoir - would she have had enough education to write in such an articulate way, or might the penitentiary have used the story of their tragic reformed poetess as a publicity stunt, writing 'for' her?

Elizabeth Kenning’s autobiography, Some account of the life of Elizabeth Kenning, chiefly drawn up by herself, is held at the British Library.
Henry Smithers’s account of Elizabeth is on Googlebooks: Liverpool, its commerce statistics and institutions; with a history of the cotton trade (Thomas Kaye, Liverpool: 1825).
Records of the Liverpool Female Penitentiary survive at Liverpool Record Office.

Memoirs of a female vagrant

2011-06-25T11:52:00.001+01:00

Mary Saxby (1738-1801):

The girl who ran away with the gypsies

Mary Saxby's autobiography, Memoirs of a Female Vagrant, was published after her death in 1806, and it is fascinating story of a rebellious 18th century woman.

Mary was born in London, in 1738. Her mother, Susanna died early, and her silk-weaver father John Howell joined the army, leaving Mary to be passed from 'one relation to another', never staying long, 'in consequence of my perverse temper'. Her father eventually returned with a 'serious' stepmother, much to Mary's displeasure, and before reaching her teens she ran away from home.

She lived on 'rotten apples, or cabbage stalks' and 'what the hedges afforded', while fending off 'wicked men' and tramping the countryside around Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, and Buckinghamshire. Soon, Mary was 'nearly perished with cold and hunger' and 'in a dismal plight', and would have died, if she had not found a protector, 'a poor travelling woman' with three daughters of her own.

Mary and the woman's youngest daughter went off alone, to sing ballads at ale-houses, feasts and fairs 'for a few pence and a little drink'. When the two girls met a gang of gipsy musicians, they joined their exotic-seeming camp. At first the gypsies 'behaved well' to the girls and Mary enjoyed her new carefree life. 'I soon fell into gross sin, in which state I continued more than a year,' she commented evasively.

Thomas Rowlandson, Arrest of a Woman at Night c.1800

But Mary became disillusioned with her wild life, and 'escaped' for 'honester employment in weeding corn' and picking hops in Kent. Compared with the thrills of gipsy life, hop-picking was dull stuff, and Mary was soon causing trouble. Shut in the local bridewell at Epping, after her release Mary fell back in with her gipsy boyfriend, who stole her clothes and kept her in a 'state of slavery'. This time Mary was rescued by a suitor from her hop-picking days, John Saxby, who fought the gipsy for her and carried her off “in triumph.”

John promised to marry her, but never quite managed to have the banns read. Mary panicked when she became pregnant, just after John had left for the army. Abandoned, Mary resurrected her old profession of ballad singing, but after her baby was born in Bedfordshire, she went off to find John. He told her, they would marry 'as soon as we had a convenient opportunity'. Mary bore two more children while she waited to become Mrs Saxby. 'I began to see the evil of living in this state,' she wrote, 'and insisted on separating if we were not married. He did not promise to be the best of husbands but he was not willing to part with me.' The couple were finally married in 1771, when Mary was 33.

Marriage didn't change the Saxbys' chaotic lifestyle. They had ten children altogether, six of whom died young. Travelling with other 'wicked companions', John started drinking and was sometimes violent; Mary gave as good as she got, describing herself as 'grossly addicted' to 'obscene jests, filthy ribaldry and profane swearing'. Things changed when Mary gave birth to twins at Bradwin, where a local woman lent her religious books.

With John ill from excessive drinking, they settled in a field. One night Mary left her youngest baby sleeping in their hut, and when John returned it was ablaze. He pulled the child out, but it died a few days later. Distraught with grief, Mary 'resolved to have a home for my children' and they rented a house in Stoney Stratford, where Mary turned to religion and started attending the local meeting house.

After years of boozing, John's health gave out. Before he died Mary tried to bring him to God 'yet he still persisted in swearing with death almost in his countenance'. Finally, she wore him down, so that 'he was almost continually engaged in prayer'. When he died in 1782 Mary was left a widow with five children to provide for, and she set up a small shop at Olney, in Buckinghamshire.

In her old age, Mary tramped around, tracts in hand, bent on converting convert sinners: 'Many refreshing seasons I have enjoyed with my Bible in my hand, as I walked from town to town', she enthused. Mary died on the 20th December 1801, aged 63, and is buried at Olney.

Find out more

Mary Saxby, Memoirs of a female vagrant, written by herself (London, Dunstable 1806) is available at the British Library.
Mary has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Guide to the history of vagrancy in London (1600-1800) from London Lives.

The infamous Colonel Barker

2011-05-15T10:44:00.000+01:00

"Married to a man-woman"

Valerie Arkell-Smith, aka 'Colonel Barker'

In 1929, readers of the Sunday Express devoured a shocking case of gender-bending along with their tea and toast. In 'My Story by the Man-Woman’s Wife', Elfrida Howard, from Littlehampton, West Sussex – “a pretty little woman...slim, and with a mass of auburn shingled hair” – revealed how she had unknowingly lived as the ‘wife’ of the infamous female transvestite, Colonel Barker.

Several years earlier, Elfrida Howard, then in her mid-twenties, had befriended a woman called Mrs Pierce Crouch, a newcomer to the area, who ran a farm with her husband. Mrs Crouch came into Elfrida’s father's chemist shop, and they struck up a friendship. After a few months, Mrs Crouch asked Elfrida to call her 'Bill', and confessed that she was “a man masquerading as a woman”.

Bill explained that his wife had run away and he was worried about their son’s future. Elfrida believed ‘Bill’ implicitly: “everything about her suggested that she was really a man. Her figure, manner, handwriting, interests – every conceivable thing was masculine.” Friendship soon turned to romance, and “polite, courteous and fascinating” Bill swept Elfrida off her feet, with trips to the theatre, and gifts of expensive jewellery. She saw him as “a marvellous cavalier – the kind that every girl dreams about.”

When one night Bill proposed, and Elfrida accepted unhesitatingly. Elfrida's parents were not quite as keen on the Colonel, who introduced himself as 'Mrs Crouch's twin brother'. Nevertheless, suited and booted 'Sir Victor Barker' and his fiancée were married at St Peters Church in Brighton, on the 14th of November 1923.

"A wife and no wife”

“During out married life I am prepared to take my oath that everything proceeded in an entirely normal way,” Elfrida claimed. “My honeymoon was a perfectly normal one.” Bill preferred to change his clothes in another room, but Elfrida took that for embarrassment about scars on his back and neck, which he said were shrapnel wounds. Besides, the dashing Bill was proving rather susceptible to women: “He never could see a woman without paying her compliments and saying pretty things to her. In every hotel we stayed at women had fallen in love with him and I was tired of hearing them tell me how attractive he was.”

They settled at Uckfield, where Bill gained a job as a farm manager, but soon he was off, touring with a theatre company under the stage name Ivor Gauntlett. Meanwhile, in late 1926, Elfrida received a letter telling her that he had met another woman, and would not be coming home. She “destroyed all his letters and burnt his photograph, thinking to have finished with him forever,” and returned to her parents' house.

But who was the mysterious Bill? Valerie Barker was born in Jersey, in 1895. She had a typical middle-class upbringing, growing up from a tom-boyish girl into a strapping woman, “nearly 6ft high and powerfully built.” In 1914, aged 19, Valerie volunteered to serve as a VAD, and four years later, married an Australian Officer, Harold Arkell-Smith. The marriage failed, and they divorced. The scars she tried to conceal from Elfrida may have been the results of domestic violence. Valerie moved in with Ernest Pearce-Crouch, another Australian, with whom she had two children. At some stage while living with Crouch in West Sussex, she started dressing like a man, and in 1923 left him for Elfrida Howard.

After leaving Elfrida, Valerie adopted the name of 'Colonel Leslie Barker', headed to London and joined the right-wing National Fascisti. She taught fencing and boxing to teenage recruits, and advised them to avoid getting mixed up with women. "I used to go out with the boys to Hyde Park," she recalled, "and we had many rows with the Reds." In 1927, the Daily Herald ran a piece entitled 'Fascist and his firearm' on Colonel Barker's arrest for possessing an unauthorised revolver, discovered during a raid on the National Fascisti headquarters.

During this period, the Colonel lived in an expensive flat in Park Lane with a woman and his nine-year-old son. He ran a restaurant, which failed, leaving him bankrupt. One of his neighbours said: “We all looked upon ‘him’ as a man who was the best type of Army officer.” The caretaker of the flats recalled how the Colonel enjoyed associating with other 'war heroes': "He tried to form a new branch of the Mons club and held the first dinner in his flat...he talked to them in language which was used by soldiers on active service and did it so realistically that nobody could have through he was anything other than a wartime soldier.”

By the time the police caught up with the Colonel - who had left a trail of debts behind him - he was working at the Regent Palace Hotel, in Piccadilly as a reception clerk. Calling himself 'Colonel Leslie Ivor Victor Gauntlett Bligh Barker', he was transported to Brixton prison, where he protested against being examined by the prison doctor, calling it "an indignity to which a man of his rank should not be subjected.” Finally, forced to confess the real reason, the Colonel was transferred to Holloway women's prison, refusing to give her real name.

The police tracked down Elfrida Howard, who swiftly unmasked the Colonel as her former ‘husband’ and Victor Barker/Valerie Arkell-Smith was sentenced to nine months imprisonment for making a false statement on a marriage certificate. After this disgrace, Valerie re-entered the world as Victor Barker, but he was forced into lower and less well paid jobs. He took on increasingly menial work, and served another prison sentence for petty theft in the mid-1930s.

Valerie Arkell-Smith died, all but forgotten in 1960, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Kessingland churchyard, near Lowestoft.

You can read the full story of Valerie Arkell-Smith's life in Colonel Barker's Monstrous Regiment: A Tale of Female Husbandry, by Rose Collis, (Virago, 2001).

Valerie Arkell-Smith also has her own Wikipedia entry and Oxford Dictionary of National Biography page

Smoking - for Ladies

2011-03-26T13:19:00.000Z

An (American?) newspaper feature, dated 1934. From Modern Mechanix

'Ladies encourage and imitate the habit, and, being always anxious to please, willingly learn to take a puff at the odorous weed themselves,' wrote Lady Violet Greville in 1892. 'With a cloud of smoke to console her, and the faint aroma of the Lady Nicotine she worships clinging to her golden hair and filling her thoughts with pleasant daydreams, the importance of dinner will sink into the background...'

Women were sampling snuff as early as 1715, when John Arbuckle (obviously not a snuff-fan) wrote 'With Snuff the beauteous Celia hides her face,/ And adds a foil to every obvious grace'.

In the late Victorian period, smoking was largely an urban trend among daring creative types, lady writers and art students, and was perceived as very modern. Upper middle class London women's clubs provided smoking rooms for their members. And Edith Vance, in a letter to the Daily Mail, in 1898, called for women smokers to band together in a 'League of Women Smokers'.

Soon special types of cigarette were being marketed for women - floral cigarettes, sweet cherry-tipped cigarettes, and a cigarette holder that could be cunningly attached to a muff.

Historian Penny Tinkler believes that smoking was fairly common among middle class as well as working women before the First World War. She cites the example of one woman, writing for the Mass Observation Project, who remembered how she was taught to smoke at 14, 'by a kitchen maid, under the table. My father was furious...one day I was smoking in the bathroom...He smelt the smoke and said, "You nasty, dirty little thing".'

During the two world wars, where troops were given cigarettes as part of their kit, women also adopted the habit. By 1948, three quarters of British men and 40% of women were thought to be smokers.

Today, early 20th century advertising featuring glamorous ladies puffing on a cigarette seems slightly immoral, corrupting and makes me feel like reaching for my cloche hat and furs and lighting up...

If you're interested in the history of female smokers, check out Penny Tinkler's book, Smoke Signals: Women, Smoking and Visual Culture in Britain (Berg, 2006)

How to write women's history...

2011-03-24T12:43:00.000Z

I've finally finished my book, and I'm waiting for the proof to plop through my letterbox. Hopefully it's fat and impressive-looking, but I'm sure that when I open it, I'll find a typo or twelve.

I prefer the nice safe research stage - collecting stacks of notes, and browsing through old volumes that threatened to come apart (and sometimes did!). I could still be sitting in the library scribbling; partly because I'm addicted to the cakes in the British Library cafe.

After a year of writing about women's history, and keeping this blog, I've come up with a couple of pieces of advice (or rather words of warning) for anyone out there who is thinking of starting to research or write about women in history.

Scandal comes from the most unlikely sources
I often found the juciest anecdotes between the pages of books with the dullest title, the kind that you sneakily cross off the reading list without bothering to order up, because they sound so excrutiatingly boring. Who knew that the worthy-sounding Work among the Fallen, as seen in the Prison Cell (Ward, Lock & CO, 1891) by the Reverend GP Merrick would be such a goldmine of information about 19th century methods of prostitution?

Play archive pick and mix
The National Archives Catalogue became my own personal search engine, while I was researching my book. I would type in topics associated with my research and order up random documents that sounded promising. Some turned out to be irrelevant or a bit boring, but I found a few fascinating cases, and used many of them in my book. Some of them I couldn't use, but explored futher in pieces for this blog, like the story of the improbable seductress/hoaxer Lady Haldon. I read original witness statements on the case of Frances Kidder, the last woman to be publicly hanged in Britain and was riveted by lurid newspaper interviews with the 'wife' of female transvestite Colonel Barker.

Embrace your inner 'raving feminist'
I often felt like I had to apologise for writing about just women's history or explain why I'd chosen a 'marginal' area of history. I had a few people ask me whether 'women's history existed at all - didn't women just sit by the fireside, cook, sew, and pop out the occasional baby for centuries? Err, no, or I'd have trouble writing 50,000 words about them.

While women are traditionally less well-documented in the archives, reflecting their narrower opportunities and involvement in public life, there are still plenty of ways to research how women lived in the past. And there are plenty of strong-minded women who went against prevailing social attitudes and got stuck into politics, medicine or crime anyway.

Happy Women's History Month!

History Carnival - January 2011

2010-12-30T11:47:00.094Z

This month's History Carnival has a women's history bias, but it is also heavily seasoned with other topics - from the history of the Ashes to celebrity quacks. Enjoy!

Bloggers behind the scenes at museums and archives

Wellcome Library blog - a day in the life of a historical picture researcher

The Stuff Curator - a new blog by a museum curator

British Pathe blog - footage discovered of 'The Red Woman of Paris' – the scandalous Madame Steinheil

Sporting life
Idle Historian - a little bit about the Ashes

A Welsh wizard
BBC Wales History blog - Elizabethan astrologer and rumoured magician, Dr John Dee

Exploring an ancient tomb
Zenobia Empress of the East - the secret language of Palmyra

Following in Mrs Gaskell's footsteps
Gaskell blog - an interview with Monica Fairview, an author who lives in Elizabeth Gaskell's former home

Student Loans - in 1906
Cat's Meat Shop - find out what the Edwardians thought about higher education

Myth and medicine
The Quack Doctor- a Victorian Celebrity Quack

The Chirurgeon's Apprentice - syphilis and ‘Syphilophobes’ in Early Modern England

Female monarchs
Philobiblon - the pre-Elizabethan female rulers of England

Victorian pawnbrokers
The Property Historian - property & pawnbrokers in Victorian society

The world of Edgar Allen Poe
World of Poe - a fascinating blog about this curious literary figure

HIstory in the headlines
Yesterday's Papers - American editorial cartoonists in 1900

Advertising for Love - looking for the perfect wife (in 1860s New York)

Mind your manners
The Artist's Progress - pick up the rudiments of what was considered 'genteel behaviour' in 1737

A Lady's Guide to Etiquette - bringing together 19th century advice for gentlewomen on everything from love to addressing lords

Re-examining a PreRaphaelite scandal
Virtual Victorian - Effie Gray's revenge on John Ruskin

A new history blog from Shire Publishing
Shire Histories - check out the company's new blog written by the lovely Emily Brand of The Artist's Progress blog

Let it snow
Orkney Library 'Get Dusty' - snow in the archives

In Pursuit of History - takes an irreverent look at ice fairs

And to round off with the obligatory historical Christmas bit...
Fragments - 17th century Christmas celebrations

The January History Carnival starts here!

2010-12-27T12:24:00.001Z

If you've just come across this blog, or you're a regular reader, then I hope you'll return on New Year's Day when I host the History Carnival a showcase of the best recent history blog posts, nominated by history-lovers all over the world.

To nominate a post (from any blog on a historical theme) for the Carnival, email me at writingwomenshistory@gmail.com or use the online form at: http://historycarnival.org/carnival-nomination-form

For more information about History Carnival, check out the website: http://historycarnival.org/

Tweets and blog mentions about this are very welcome!

Jen
x

Lady Austin’s camp boys: a night at a 1930s transvestite club

2010-12-25T17:51:00.040Z

Transvestites at the Eldorado nightclub, in Berlin c.1930
(from http://marshalljonfisher.wordpress.com/about-the-book/photographs)

One of my favourite things about working at the National Archives was being able to search the catalogue for random things and order up anything that sounded unusual or just bizarre. So, naturally when I discovered that there was a red silk transvestite pyjama suit, I ordered it right away. I went up to the safe room and it was wheeled out, and solemnly unveiled.

Although I was disappointed not to be able to try it on (and I definitely wanted to!) I did unearth the case files explaining the story of exactly how a transvestite pyjama suit came to be preserved for posterity...

Metropolitan police constables Jack Labbett and Henry Eric Chopping had drawn the short straw with their latest assignment. Two weeks before Christmas 1932, the two constables were going undercover to investigate rumours of 'obscene' dances at 27 Holland Park Avenue – posing as a gay couple.

Male homoseuxality was illegal at that time, and most Britons were suspicious if not openly hostile towards gay men. In 1916, The World newspaper warned its readers about the profusion of 'painted and perfumed travesties of men' who lounged about Piccadilly to 'openly leer at the passer-by'.

Labbett and Chopping started their investigation by watching a 'very effeminate man' to the Mitre pub, just across from number 27. Labbet reported later: 'His lips were rouged, eyebrows pencilled and his clothes scented. He smiled and rolled his eyes at PC Chopping, who smiled back...he approached us and said in a girlish voice "Are you going to the ‘Drag’ tonight?” The two policemen awkwardly attempted to flutter their eyelashes at their new friend, who took them to number 27.

“Don’t go and get too fruity yet!”

The two squirming coppers found themselves in a room with about 50 men, aged between 20 and 40. Half were 'Queenies' were dressed 'as women attired in evening dress', and the 'Kings' in 'lounge suits'. Couples were dancing, the Queenies fondling their Kings, 'placing their hands inside the trousers whilst their partners stroked their bottoms and breasts', wrote PC Labbet. 'Every so often the lights went out and during these periods of darkness squeals of delight could be heard...I saw both the Kings and Queenies place their tongues in each others' mouths and ears'.

'I acted as PC Chopping’s ‘Queenie’, wrote PC Labbett. 'I saw several men grab ‘Queenies’ saying, "Come here you bitch". He danced with one man named ‘Clary’ and then sat down with him while Clary explained that there were 'five real women present...all Lesbians'. Labbett soon regretted his disguise as a Queenie, when Clary started groping him: 'he tried to place one hand on my person and one at the rear...He then said "Have you traded tonight yet?" Panicking, trying not to blow his cover Labbett quickly boasted “Twice with my boyfriend,” pointing at PC Chopping, but Clary kept trying to entice Labbett into the bathroom or garden, slipping his tongue into the reluctant Chopping's mouth.

"I danced with a ‘Queenie’ known as ‘the Bitch’ and while dancing she (he) placed his hands inside my trousers"

Chopping was off having adventures of his own: 'I danced with a ‘Queenie’ known as ‘the Bitch’ and while dancing she (he) placed his hands inside my trousers. This I resented, saying “I have been with my own ‘Queenie”. This sort of nauseating conduct continued the whole evening...Small prizes were given at intervals for the best fancy dress and consisted of Scent Sprays, Fancy Soap, Powder Puffs'.

When the dance ended around one in the morning, several of the men 'tried to fondle and kiss' the PCs, asking to escort them home, but Labbett and Chopping slipped away and headed back to Notting Hill station to write their reports.

A week later Chopping and Labbett were back at number 27. The lecherous Clary was all over Labbett again: 'He placed his hand up my rear and between my legs and pressed me towards him'. Labbett escaped and started speaking to another man, who told him: "Other people would sympathise with us if they knew and knew we couldn’t help it". Meanwhile, Chopping danced with a Queenie who was 'dancing in a lustful manner the whole time, pressing his body close to mine. He said “Press your hand lower down. I have got a lovely bottom, haven’t I?” Chopping was saved by the entrance of their superior, Chief Inspector Smith and his team, who raided the party.

As the policemen barged through, they were shocked by the scene: 'Some of the couples had their lips together. Another man had his tongue in his partner’s mouth. One man had his legs in between his partner’s legs, and they were going through obscene contortions. They were feeling each other’s breasts and private parts and buttocks'. The officers searched the ballroom and hauled in two men caught with their pants down in the garden.

Smith's report reveals his awkwardness at being confronted with dozens of 'nancy boys':

'I then shouted out "I want Lady Austin"...Prisoner Salmon said "I am her Ladyship"...I read the warrant to him and cautioned him. He said "Surely only members of our own cult are here. What harm are we doing? You don’t understand our love"...I said to him "Why are these men dressed as women and half-naked?" He replied "They are Queenies tonight. We take it in turns. I was a Queenie last week". I said "What do you mean by members of our cult?" He said "Why Lady Austin’s camp boys of course. We all know each other".

Lady Austin told Smith, “we don’t run it for profit, only for love, but of course you don’t understand that...We don’t like women, a drag is a dance without women and give and take is between ourselves. Oh dear, this trouble would be obviated if they made our love legal”.

"You call us 'Nancies' and 'Bum boys', but before long our cult will be allowed"

And Lady Austin's boys didn't give themselves up without a fight. One said “We are sweethearts. I can’t see what you object to. We boys prefer to love each other.” Another complained: “The law can’t tell me what I shall do with myself and if this boy likes to be my love, then it’s only a matter for us both, not you”.

Mischievous James Dimmock annoyed police officers by calling them ‘dear’. “I told him the last word dear' was unnecessary. He said "It’s nice, we always speak to each other like that”. The officer pointed out a stain on the front of Dimmock’s trousers. “It’s only love drops,” Dimmock laughed.

Lady Austin mocked the obviously uncomfortable officers, asking of one, “Is that boy really a detective...Fancy that, he is too nice. I could love him and rub his Jimmy for him for hours”. Smith 'told him not to use such expressions and cautioned him,' but Lady Austin was in full flow: "You call us 'Nancies' and 'Bum boys', but before long our cult will be allowed in this country and we shall vindicate our patron saint, the glorious Oscar Wilde.”

Eventually the gaudily-dressed prisoners were led out, I'd like to think that they were still flirting with police officers and answering back, as they were shoved into the police van. Thirty-two of them were charged, and 27 received prison sentences of between three months and a year.

Lady Austin was convicted of: 'conspiring to debauch the minds and morals of such persons as should be induced or permitted to come to 27 Holland Park Avenue and there remain whoring, behaving in an obscene and disorderly manner and taking part in divers lewd, scandalous, bawdy and obscene practises'.

At the trial, one of the jurors, clearly confused by the situation, passed the judge a note: 'I have heard in evidence that prizes had been distributed. I have been given to understand that this is usually done after a parade of fancy dress'. While I couldn't find any mention of the pyjama suit, this note made me wonder if the suit had survived for a hapless police officer to model in court.

You can read about Rex v Austin Salmon by ordering the files CRIM 1/638 and CRIM 1/639 at The National Archives. The red silk pyjama suit is in series EXT 11/131, but it is safely stowed away in the strong room.

The 'Lady', the baby, and a spot of bigamy

2010-10-28T14:41:00.010+01:00

“One of the greatest hoaxers of the century”

In 1939, Lady Haldon announced that she had given birth to her recently deceased husband's child. The press besieged her home, hoping for a sighting of the new fifth Lord Haldon, but lurid stories emerged - 'Lady Haldon' was not what she seemed....

I came across the police file on 'Lady Haldon' at the National Archives. After searching census records and news reports of the case, I managed to piece together the strange story of one fraudulent lady, a shop-lifting baronet, and a stolen baby...

Florence Elizabeth, 'Lizzie', Summers, was at the centre of one of the most bizarre bigamy trials in history, but she was born into an ordinary West Midlands farming family in 1878. Lizzie was a “troublesome girl with no respect for the truth,” conning the local vicar to re-christen her 'Florence Marcia'. By the time she left home at 18, even her sister considered her a “dangerous woman." In 1897, her mother found Lizzie a job as a mother’s help 100 miles away in West Yorkshire.

Lizzie left within a couple of months, claiming that she had a new job as housekeeper to a widower in Surrey. Soon she wrote home to announce that she had also become his wife. In fact, Lizzie was living with gamekeeper Job Jacks, a widower with two children. Census records reveal that Jacks had lived ten miles away from the Summers farm, and in 1897, around the time that Lizzie ran away, Jacks’s wife, Mary Ann had died.

Four years later, the 1901 census shows 36-year-old Job Jacks, gamekeeper in Emberton Woods, Buckinghamshire with his 'wife' , 22-year-old Florence M Jacks. But Lizzie – or Florence Marcia as she now called herself – only married Jacks in 1907. They lived together for ten years, and had three children, but in 1914, the Summers heard that Lizzie had married again.

There is no marriage record or any evidence that Jacks had died. Lizzie's paper trail emerges again in 1917. Still "good-looking, slim and golden-haired” she picked up Canadian Royal Army Medical Corps, Captain Dr Arthur Ireland in the Strand. Born in Ontario, Ireland was regarded as a “valuable officer." He said that when they married, Lizzie – or 'Norah Marcia Florence Jacks', as she told him her name was – claimed to be a 23-year-old widow. She was 39.

The marriage was a failure. Arthur wrote to Lizzie in 1931, “We have never been happy, at least I have not.” Her sister thought that Lizzie “held Dr Ireland under her thumb” as he “would do anything for a bottle of whiskey.” They had one child, Joan, in 1918. Lizzie was now an accomplished con woman, as well as a bigamist. Betsy told the police: “she has defrauded many people during her career. In 1919 she bought three large houses in Nightingale Lane...incurred a debt of £400 to the Gas Light and Coke company and then disappeared leaving the tenants to pay.”

'Lady Haldon' at her 'husband's funeral

From babyfarming to husband-hunting

Florence Gibson, Lizzie’s former neighbour in Lowestoft, wrote to the police to tell them that around 1927 Lizzie had practised “the nefarious trade of Baby Farming.” Her police file includes a tantalisingly incomplete account from 1940 by Alys Herring, a 23-year-old hairdresser from County Durham, adopted by the Irelands around 1928, and abandoned aged 12, in 1930 at a Convent School in Cannes.

But Lizzie gave up babyfarming; she had bigger fish in sight - a baronet, no less! A friend of Lizzie’s, Mrs Brightman, an actress, married Lawrence Palk, the third Lord Haldon in 1930. Shortly afterwards she “was found dead under the cliffs at Brighton” and Lizzie comforted the grieving widower by trying “to induce [him] to marry her.” He declined and died soon after.

Meanwhile, the long-suffering Arthur Ireland wrote to Lizzie requesting a divorce. “I have come to the conclusion that life and happiness is impossible for us...It cannot upset you very much as you are always travelling and I am left on my own.” The Irelands never officially divorced, but in 1933, Lizzie met Joseph Allan Rickards, a Yorkshire insurance salesman. Rickards insured a car for 'Lady Norah Haldon, widow of the third Lord Haldon,' and then married her on the 24th April 1935. He was 31, she was fat and 55, with a “peculiar walk.”

Rickards travelled a lot, but often stayed with Lizzie at her home in Cheshire. In late 1935, Rickards hired a private detective who spotted Lizzie “and the man Ireland in a bedroom both in a state of partial undress.” In 1936 he divorced her, citing Arthur Ireland as co-respondent.

But 'Mrs Rickards,' soon found another husband, the charming Frederick George Hugh Clive Linwood. Linwood 41, ran the Mayfair Luncheon Club in Shepherd Market. They had plenty in common, for one thing they were both confidence tricksters. Linwood posed as ‘Lord Hugh Clive,’ although he may have once been a plate boy at the Carleton Club. They married at Caxton Hall, Westminster on the 24th April 1937 – the same day on which she had married Rickards two years before. Lizzie's name was recorded as “Rickards or Holdon [sic]” and Joan Ireland, Lizzie's 19-year-old daughter was one of the witnesses. Lizzie's sister, Betsy judged the marriage “not a success... her husband being a sodomite” and Lizzie had it annulled six months later, due to non-consummation.

Desperate measures...

The Haldon family were nobility – technically. Their family estates had long been sold and the third baronet lived in a tumbledown cottage in Devon and had allegedly slept on park benches. His son, the fourth Lord Haldon, also named Lawrence Palk, was little better off. In poor health and penniless he was imprisoned for petty theft. He had “no income except from...Public Assistance and his job as a packer at Selfridges.”

In early 1938, having jettisoned Linwood, Lizzie Ireland arrived in Lawrence Palk’s life. She wrote to him, signing herself ‘Lady Clive’ and offered him a weekly allowance, saying she wanted to assist him as she had known his father. Haldon eagerly accepted and Lizzie paid for his health care and a better flat. The police later found letters from Haldon, dated mid-June 1938, in Lizzie's flat, referring to his gratitude towards her.

Their relationship didn't blossom into romance– the most romantic line from his letters offers Lizzie “Bundles of hugs” – in any case Haldon was seriously ill. But when he died in August 1938, Lizzie, now claiming to be his widow, took charge, arranging for him to be buried near her home in Toft, Cheshire. She was pictured in the newspapers, a pudding-faced voluminous figure in black. Although Haldon's illness would have made it impossible for him to travel, Lizzie claimed they had eloped that July.

She told the Daily Mail that they had had a long romantic history with Lord Haldon. Originally, she said their engagement was “broken off because he was so dictatorial... eventually we made up our quarrel and in 1927...re-engaged. By this time he was in serious financial difficulties and as he had been sent to prison at Marylebone police court for fraud and theft it was I who broke off the engagement. But I soon realised that he...only stole because he was desperate.” She said that they married secretly “because it seemed odd for an elderly couple like us to marry so late in life.”

Headline 'The Mystery of Lady Clive' (Daily Mail 18th August 1938)

In September 1939, when war broke out Dr Ireland re-joined the RAMC and was sent to Palestine, but first he and Lizzie remarried on her 60th birthday, the 2nd October. But Lizzie wasn't satisfied with a real husband and an imaginary dead noble husband. In early 1939 she started approaching pregnant working class women with many children, like Mrs Wilkinson, enquiring about adopting their baby. One, Mrs Basford in Middlewitch, agreed and on the 13th March 1939 Lizzie collected Mrs Basford's three-week-old baby boy. The next day she had him baptised and announced to the press that she had given birth to the fifth Lord Haldon (also claiming she was 49). Arthur Ireland wrote to the local registrar stating that he was “present at the delivery, at least at the afterbirth.”

When the press started arriving, Lizzie returned the baby to a puzzled Mrs Basford and fled to London. Between babies, she carted around a plastic doll. If this wasn’t suspicious enough, an anonymous letter informed the police that Lizzie was "an adventuress and an imposter.” But the police didn't have enough evidence to arrest her and during the Blitz aging con women were hardly a priority.

On New Years Day 1940, Chief Inspector Bridger of Scotland Yard searched Lizzie's flat and questioned her. “Before Lord Haldon died I realised I was pregnant,” she told him “he was very worried because the religious ceremony had not taken place.” She painted herself as a “lady of independent means” saying that she had “lived for many years in the Riviera.” She showed Bridger a marriage document, a piece of writing paper embossed with the House of Lords crest, which said – in her handwriting – that she and Lord Haldon had married at the Royal Hotel, Edinburgh on the 13th June 1938. The Royal Hotel had no record of the marriage and Bridger discovered letters written to Lizzie by Lord Haldon, from London on the dates when she claimed they were in Scotland.

The next day Bridger interviewed Lizzie’s sister Betsy Gordon. Bridger now had a damning case and on the 12th November 1940, Lizzie Ireland and her live-in companion Isabella Blackett were tried at the Chester Assizes. Both were charged with conspiracy to enter false information in a Births register and Lizzie also for two counts of bigamy. She pleaded guilty to bigamy, but denied everything else.

"Uncontrollable vanity"

It was a lost cause. Even Lizzie’s defence didn't really try to exonerate her during the four day trial, attributing her lies to “uncontrollable vanity...when she became associated with someone with a title.” Although she wept while Bridger read her letters in court the jury failed to sympathise and found her guilty in just 40 minutes. Lizzie got three years and Arthur Ireland was also bound over for two years for £25 for conspiracy to put a false entry into a Births Register of Births, although his defence argued that he “had been dragged into the matter by his wife who was the mastermind.”

There is a record of an Elizabeth Ireland of the right age, dying in Surrey in December 1941 and a Florence M Ireland, aged 48, (around the age Lizzie claimed to be) in June 1941, but it is difficult to prove what happened to Lizzie. Perhaps after prison she found another husband - or another con. Either way, once she entered prison, ‘Lady Haldon’ disappeared.

Lady Haldon’s police case file is in the National Archives (MEPO 3/968) and there are many references to her in contemporary newspapers.

A visit to the Florence Nightingale Museum

2010-09-24T09:47:00.002+01:00

Florence Nightingale would have hated the idea of a museum dedicated to her memory; despising the “buzz-fuss” of celebrity, she returned incognito from the Crimea, as 'Miss Smith'. But even Florence would approve of the way that the new Florence Nightingale Museum uses Britain's most famous nurse the symbolic 'Lady with the Lamp' to celebrate the history of nursing.

The £1.4million museum, opened this May on London's busy South Bank, next to St Thomas' Hospital. It is one large space filled with various exhibitions and framed by a picture montage of nursing through the ages – images of Victorian nurses in enormous starched caps; trashy novel covers; posters, 'Life is full of little pricks'; and, most shocking for Florence's contemporaries, male nurses.

Browsing the collection, you begin to see why Florence was so publicity-shy. She was a sort of Victorian Cheryl Cole meets Susan Greenfield – a national sweetheart on a mission. And the Museum's exhibitions show that the Victorians' admiration wasn't limited to reading about her – they went mad for “Nightingalia”: prints of Florence, Staffordshire Florence figurines.

The Museum sets out to go beyond Florence's reputation and tell her story through her own words. Visitors press audio guide stethoscopes to spots throughout the exhibitions to hear extracts from her letters, which help bring the exhibitions to life.

While some sections, like the display on her love life, feel a bit gratuitous, others poignantly flesh out the severe stereotype: her austere black dress with a touch of white lace, her surgical equipment, and the writing case she used to write furious epistles while bedridden with Crimea fever. There are objects from her journeys around Egypt and Greece – a snakeskin, a headrest from an Arab sheik – picked up between trips to foreign hospitals. And then the items from her time in the Crimea – a shell belonging to a pet tortoise from one ward at Scutari hospital; the bracelet made from family members' hair that she wore all through the Crimea.

But the museum isn't just a collection of Florence's possessions. Some sections also pay homage to other early nurses, like the Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole who helped Crimean soldiers, and the nurses Florence employed in the Crimea, who are commemorated on an interactive register. There is also a case of cannon balls, long sharp bayonets and heavy swords, the weapons that had robbed Florence's soldiers in Scutari hospital of “at least one arm or leg.”

Offering a taste of the frustrating, blood-spattered life in early field hospitals, the Museum encourages visitors to find out more. I left the Florence Nightingale Museum full of questions about the Victorian women who sacrificed their time, their health, and chances of marriage, to care for others.

The Florence Nightingale Museum (2 Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7EW) is open every day from 10am – 5pm. Tickets cost £5.80 for adults and £4.80 for concessions. Find out from the Museum website, www.florence-nightingale.co.uk.

£10,000 for a young lady's virtue

2010-09-19T10:35:00.005+01:00

A young Victorian woman deserted by her fiancée might mope and take to her chaise longue, but she did have a weapon at hand. By sueing her fickle ex-lover for breach of promise she could embarrass him both socially, and financially...

Cartoons from QuillCards.com

In August 1890 Miss Gladys Knowles, the 21-year-old granddaughter of a baronet, was up on court. Gladys, who lived with her widowed mother in Fulham, was suing her fiancée, 69-year-old Leslie Fraser Duncan, for breach of promise, and claiming £25,000 in damages.

The concept of 'breach of promise' might have been a hangover from medieval law, but over 1000 cases came to court between 1850 and 1900. Also, if the claimant successfully proved their case, they could receive high damages. The law remained in force until 1969.

Back to the unfortunate Miss Knowles She had met Leslie Fraser Duncan while calling ("more for fun than anything else," she later claimed) at the offices of Matrimonial News. Duncan, the "well-preserved and good-looking" editor pounced upon the attractive young lady. At first he may have wanted to charge Gladys his usual £1 fee to 'match' her with a gentleman, followed by another £10 after her marriage. Duncan claimed to have arranged 40,000 marriages in 40 years - all "people in high life".

A 'Lady correspondent' for the Pall Mall Gazette visited the Matrimonial News offices in the same year:
"The place where marriages are made in the Strand is ill-lighted with two dust-encrusted windows...The matrimonial agent and editor himself...is an old man and met me with a conventional smile and a greeting in a falsetto voice. He had a thick drooping moustache and a long grey-white beard. The top of his head was bald, but thick white locks clustered round the base of his head...Gold-rimmed spectacles over which he peered, were on the top of his nose...

...After the introduction, Mr Duncan brought forth from his ledger a fine array of persons, of whom he said 'I have always a lot on my books...Four thousand of 'em all ready to marry! My men always marry; always. I married a clergyman of seventy-three a little while ago. He came here in a hurry, and said 'Find me a young wife. I don't want any money with her...I always say to my lady clients, 'Don't marry a young man, and don't marry a man at all without money. Don't marry a young man. A young man will spend your money and beat you.' Then he looked over his gold-rimmed spectacles, and said 'You won't have a parson, then?'

But Duncan swiflty decided that Gladys, who was "of attractive appearance," was too pretty for a parson. He joked that he would have married her himself if he had been younger than '62' and later called on her in Fulham, bragging about the Kensington houses he owned, and his various business ventures.

After several weeks of this, Duncan declared that he was 'madly in love' and asked her mother for Gladys's hand in marriage. He produced a marriage license and persuaded Gladys's mother to allowed her to vist his house without a chaperone. After all Duncan was well past middle age, hardly a threat to a young lady's virtue. On the way there, he presented Gladys with a diamond ring.

Everything seemed perfect - a typical Victorian romance with youth and beauty sacrificed to (grand)fatherly fortune. But Gladys was in for a shock. That night, eager to preserve her maidenly modesty she carefully locked her bedroom door and retired. A few hours later, she woke to find Duncan looming over the bed. She later told the court "he took hold of her hand and tried to struggle with her. She screamed. She did not recollect anything else, except that when she came to herself Mr Duncan was still there." Gladys wanted to leave then and there, but Duncan persuaded her to stay, it would be humiliating in front of the servants, and in any case they would be married the next day.

In the morning, he had 'mislaid' the marriage license, but there was no need for her to worry, they would wed tomorrow in London. The day passed with excuse after excuse, and in the evening Duncan booked them into a hotel, into one room. Gladys hid in the bathroom, threatening through the door that if Duncan "dared to come near" her "she would scream the house down."

By now Mrs Knowles was suspicious - her daughter had spent three nights, alone with a man, and was not yet married. She arrived in the offices at Matrimonial News, and accused him of eloping with Gladys. "People had been talking," he had to fix on a date, she told him. He did - in July, again, broken, and another in October passed by. What the Knowles ladies didn't know was that Duncan could not have married Gladys even if he had wanted to. He had only recently married the Hon Charlotte Bateman-Hanbury, a widow in her sixties, that June.

The game was up. Duncan said that he would settle £1,500 a year on Gladys, but admitted that he would not marry her, in fact he was in some financial difficulties after a large tax bill... A heartbroken Gladys wrote to him, pleading that she would be just as happy to be his wife and be poor, she would even go out to work.

Having lost her reputation, all there was for Gladys to do was take Duncan to court and sue for breach of promise. Duncan didn't turn up to the trial at the Lewes assizes, and in his absence it was easy for Gladys's lawyer to present him as "an artful seducer of great experience," who had knowingly corrupted an innocent girl. During the trial it was revealed that Duncan had been married four times already, and was rumoured to have also fathered seven illegitimate children with six different women. "As to his age, he was represented at the beginning to be sixty-three, and after a great deal of fighting he became seventy-seven," the defence quipped.

The jury were advised "to compensate the plaintiff for what she had lost." They took just ten minutes to convict Duncan and award Gladys £10,000 damages. After hearing the verdict Duncan fled to France, and when he eventually returned was sent to prison for six months. Gladys eventually received a reduced sum of £6,500.

The Pall Mall Gazette concluded: "if marriages are made in Heaven, St Peter has a very odd deputy in the proprietor of the Matrimonial News."

Read the original news report of the case online at Papers Past.

Discover more about breach of promise cases in Ginger S Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class and Gender in Victorian England (1995).

Diary of a Victorian debutante

2010-09-12T15:02:00.000+01:00

“I consider it every girl's duty to marry £80,000 a year,” wrote Alice Catherine Miles, aged 17, during her first season in society. Alice's diary records her mission to find a suitable husband and the dresses, parties and pile of "handsome young millionaires...at my feet” along the way, in 1868.

It was Alice's very first ball. At her side was her debonair cousin, Augustus. Each time a gentleman approached them, Augustus whispered a quick summary of their social standing and bank balance:

“'Beauty Campbell, Captain, Guards, splendid place in the North, £20,000 a year.'

-Captain Campbell-

-Miss Miles.
It was very difficult not to laugh with the individual standing unconsciously opposite you.”

Alice's father was waiting to inherit a baronetcy; in the meantime the Miles were - if not impoverished - certainly not as well-heeled as most of their social circle, residing in Paris to save money and staying with friends during the London Season. Launched into society at 17, Alice had no huge dowry to attract suitors. Being a celebrated beauty, with “paragraphs respecting my fair face and beautiful toilette inserted in more newspapers than I should care to count,” did not guarrantee her a rich suitor. One of Alice's friends "unblushingly asserted that she'd marry the Devil himself, if he'd £10,000 a year” and became "engaged to an old Essex bumpkin between 45 and 50, owner of a fine unencumbered property and £12,000 a year.”

At a country house party at Kelham Hall, Notthinghamshire Alice stared down the marriageable competition: “there is Mrs Verschoyle; a very pretty brunette of two and thirty...Miss Castor who I met in London, forty and painfully plain, familiarly known as the Camel. Miss Ogle, commonly called 'The Ghoul'...who cannot be more repulsive looking – she says she's twenty-three, if so I am very sorry for her...there's a rather pretty little heiress Miss Harriet Ives Wright...who I suspect will put us all in the shade from the mere fact of her possessing £4,000 a year."

But Alice wasn't short of admirers. Her diary often mocks the less than dashing Sir Samuel Hayes: “The way he stood motionless and stared at my hair was something fine to see. He was so struck dumb with admiration that he could not even bring out a compliment. An occasional 'Oh my God' was the only vent it found in words.” But canny Alice would not seriously consider someone with "only £4,000 a year...there would be no interested side in any proceedings and he is not sufficiently good looking to render interesting, and a flirtation devoid of either of these indispensible elements does not at all enter into my plan of action.”

Alice's debutante life consisted of rising late (“most of us don't summon resolution enough to get up much before ten-thirty”); then an afternoon stroll or ride in the park (constantly chaperoned); a round of formal calls and five o'clock tea of “coffee, strawberries and cream, peaches, grapes, cakes, and all sorts of other little delicacies.” The big event of the day was dinner at 8-9pm, which was preceeded by hours of preparing an elaborate dress and hairstyle. At one country house party Alice spent nearly three hours creating her 'look': “I entered the drawing room purposely late, just before dinner: a cloud of white tarlatane, wings of the same on my shoulders, festooned and trimmed everywhere with trailing ivy sprigs, interespersed with clusters of scarlet rose-berries...in my hair.”

An 1860s summer ball.

After picking at a dinner of several courses, the evening might lead to drawing room card games, gossip and flirtation, attending a concert or perhaps a ball. Debs often danced until dawn - under the eagle-eye of their chaperones - fuelled by champagne and a cold supper of “chicken pâté de fois gras, jellies and fruit." Alice lost herself in dancing: “Oh the divine Valse we had, quicker, faster, not waiting for a moment's breath, but on, on until the room spun round, everything seemed unreal and we felt nothing but the melody till at last imperceptibly the music died away.”

By early 1869 some of the glitter had worn off the party for Alice. Her hectic life told on her and she was treated for exhaustion by a doctor who “shook his head, talked about overexcitement, gave me some very nasty medicine and departed.” She had seen through the marriage market, where the most attractive heiress was invariably the richest. “I have been fairest among the fair, spoiled and smiled on for my beauty, for two seasons now...the idea's a fallacy. I've found out the vanity and weariness of it all, understand its hollowness and insincerity at eighteen."

Alice saw through the drawing room ritual

Alice did not even contemplate making her own way in the world. She was a talented, witty writer, yet she argued: “What is money and a name to a woman when compared to her fortune? To make a book really interesting you must described daring passions no man would care that his wife should have experienced...” Later in life she wrote essays on 'Constancy' 'Dram Drinking' 'Beauty and the Beast' under a male pseudonym.

But Alice soon found her own 'old bumpkin': George Duppa, beautified considerably by a massive fortune from New Zealand sheep farming. And a mere 33 years older than Alice. They married in December 1870 and went to live in Hollingbourne, Kent. The marriage was not a great success. Alice kicked George in the night, pretending it was in her sleep until he started sleeping in another room. She spent her days doing dreary charity work: Jan 2nd 1875 “Read to Mrs Jenner, gave her a rabbit. Poor old dear, she is always so grateful for the small mercies in the shape of my august presence. To Mrs Atkins I gave the lovely quilt I made last night as she had the most awful cough.”

Bored by country life, Alice made frequent visits to London and a certain dashing Major Gerald Ames. She had at least one child by Ames while still married to George Duppa. Poor George realised that she was being unfaithful: “I gradually dropped her...I never kissed her or took her into dinner...we continued to have meals together. I did not do anything to set the servants speculating.” He began divorce proceedings in 1887, and terrified of the scandal, Alice attempted suicide with chloroform and laudanum.

But Duppa's death in early 1888 reprieved Alice from being cast out of society, and she married Gerald Ames a respectable year later. She died in 1926, aged 76, “a shadowy reclusive figure...who bred dogs.”

Bristol Record Office holds Alice's original diaries, which were discovered in the 1980s among the Duppa family papers in Hollingbourne, Kent.

Alice's diaries were edited by Maggy Parsons and published as Every Girl's Duty: The Diary of a Victorian Debutante (Andre Deutsch, 1992).

Legally dead: entering a lunatic asylum in 1907

2010-09-06T15:07:00.000+01:00

When 59-year-old teacher Marcia Hamilcar was suffering from exhaustion and overwork in December 1907, her unsympathetic sisters had her committed to a private asylum. Marcia soon feared that she had become "legally dead”...

Denbigh asylum - now derelict (photo from www.flickr.com/photos/andregovia)

"As we reached an underground passage a heavy door was opened, and using language such as had never before had been addressed to me; the attendants literally tossed me from the blanket on to floor of a dark cell, where I lay for some time unable to move and in a state of semi-consciousness from fright and exhaustion. I think the extreme cold that hideous cell awoke me to a sense of my terrible position.

It was a bitter February night, although when I awoke it could not have been more than half-past five or six p.m. An icy wind from a long, narrow grating, high up near the ceiling, smote my head, and pierced my unclothed and, save for my nightdress, uncovered body...here was I, a woman of fifty-nine years, when practically dying, thrown – with or without the doctor’s knowledge – into an icy cell, with no bed and no means of procuring warmth, yet I knew that if I was in a private asylum I should have to pay dearly for this abominable treatment.

Indignation gave me strength to look around me, and I found that I was lying on the floor, on which were two mattresses, one covered with American cloth, the other with linen ticking. Neither was in a sanitary condition, and a feeling of sickness came over me as I bent down to them. In one corner – the cell was octagon-shaped – was a heap of something, which on examination proved to be two old-fashioned quilted bed-covers, or counterpanes and in the opposite corner was a pillow stuffed with chaff and uncovered.

I drew the unsavoury quilts over me in a vain attempt to obtain some warmth, and rested my head on the uncovered dirty pillows, but no warmth resulted. Rigours of cold shook my emaciated body, and hearing sounds in the corridor I called as loudly as I could for help. Dragging myself into an upright position, I managed to reach the window and found that a bath-room adjoined my cell. An attendant was laughing at me, and hugely enjoying my distress. A patient was in the bath, and the room was lighted by a jet of gas that dazzled me after the darkness.

“Take me out of this horrid place and give me a bed. I am dying of cold!” I exclaimed, as well as I could for cold and terror.

“A nice room, isn’t it?” said the nurse. “I hope you like it.” With that she closed the shutter, and darkness again surrounded me.

...The sole furniture of the cell consisted of the articles I have named, and I satisfied myself that this was so by groping round the walls and these I found were covered with American leather, and painted cream. On them former occupants had drawn with what materials I do not know, but the drawings were all brown in colour, grotesque heads of men, women, and animals. These brought to my mind the Bastille...

The door only was padded, and that but slightly so; as far as protection from injury was concerned, the cell was a farce...At intervals the piece of wood in the bathroom that covered the glass in the wall fo teh cell was opened and a mocking face would appear, and I would again beseech to be removed or to be given a blanket.

“What you’ve got is good enough for the likes o’ you, and if you don’t be quiet and hold your row I’ll come in and make you,” or something to that effect, was all the answer I got...

There came upon me the remembrance that when once a man or woman got into an asylum they rarely came out again. I had never heard of anyone who had come out. Had my sisters got me here to keep me for the rest of my life?...But I told myself I would not stay in an asylum, I would get out.

Marcia Hamilcar, Legally Dead: experiences during Seventeen Weeks Detention in a Private Asylum (John Ouseley; London, 1910).

Till sale us do part: a history of wife-selling

2010-08-30T14:35:00.038+01:00

Until divorce was readily available, hundreds of men bought and sold their wives – for as little as one pound and a Newfoundland dog. Jen Newby separates fact from fiction...

‘Selling a wife to the highest bidder’ (an engraving from Popular Past Times, London (1816).

One hundred years ago, unwanted wives were still being sold at market. A husband would bring his wife with a rope halter round her neck, shouting out his intention to sell her. The woman would then be auctioned in the same way as cattle – even by her weight. Between 1780 and 1850, over 300 such sales were reported in the newspapers and there were very likely many other unreported cases.

Until the First World War, divorce was open to just a privileged few. Dissolving a marriage in the ecclesiastical courts allowed couples to separate, but not re-marry. An Act of Parliament was the only real escape, but these were ruinously expensive. Just 317 Acts were passed between 1700 and 1858, when it finally became possible to seek a divorce through the law courts. By 1860, there were around 150 divorces per year, but working class people were excluded by the enormous legal fees involved and the shame that divorce could bring upon the family.

Wife sales were by no means a commonplace divorce alternative. They were exotic enough to be presented as oddities by the press. As a result dozens of lurid accounts can be found in 18th and 19th century British newspapers. Thomas Hardy famously used newspaper reports of wife-selling Until divorce was readily available, hundreds of men bought and sold their wives – for as little as one pound and a Newfoundland dog.

This image is from Bristol wife-selling article at Bristolfamilyhistory.co.uk

“Glad to get rid of his frail rib”

Wife selling was a kind of folk custom, allowing quarrelling couples to unofficially separate. News reports were naturally highly critical, but they also presented the sales as amusing anecdotes, a titillating glimpse for readers of a chaotic working class world:

“Rodney Hall, a labouring man of idle and dissolute habits...led his wife into the town with a halter round her body...he led her twice round the market, where he was met by a man named Barlow, of the same class of life, who purchased her for eighteenpence and a quart of ale.”

To the modern eye, Rodney Hall’s behaviour at Stafford market in 1832 might seem brutal or misogynistic – even insane. But Rodney wasn’t a madman; he wasn’t performing a bizarre stunt and he certainly wasn’t alone in selling his wife at market. In many cases a wife was “sold” to her lover for a nominal amount. At Burntwood, George Hitchinson sold his wife, Elizabeth, for 2s 6d to his neighbour, Thomas Snape, in 1837. A local newspaper reported that Hitchinson “was glad to get rid of his frail rib, who, it seems, had been living with Snape three years.”

Another couple from Knottingley had been married for 23 years when the wife “became acquainted with a lusty Irish hawker” and her husband sold her to him at the marketplace in 1827. The wife wore a bonnet “decorated with blue ribbons for the occasion.”

Many ordinary people believed that wife selling had legal weight. When Mr Brooks was arrested for trying to auction his wife, at Plymouth in 1822, he protested that “there was nothing below board in it." The local newspaper reported:

“Mr Brooks said that he had advertised it publicly three successive market-days...They had not lived together for a long time; she had had children by other men...and a man was willing to give him twenty pounds for her – three pounds down, and the other seventeen at Christmas.”

Sales could be cruel affairs. In 1797, the Times reported that a butcher tethered his wife like a cow in Smithfield Market with “a halter about her neck, and one about her waist tying her to a railing.” After the auction, the husband would hand over his wife to the highest bidder, with the toll ticket as proof of ‘ownership’. The going rate was anything from a pint of beer (Selby in 1862) to 25 guineas. One impecunious buyer in a Rochdale wife sale, had to pawn his Bible before he could claim his bargain bride.

Sales were sometimes spur of the moment. In 1897, a party of shoemakers on a drinking spree at Irthlingborough, having spent all their money, sold one of their wives to another customer at the pub for two shillings. At Belper, in 1873, a woman put herself up for auction with her husband’s effects, as he had fled his creditors – and her – to America. Apparently no one bid for her.

A report of wife selling in Honiton, 1828, where Henry Broom auctioned his wife “enumerating her various qualifications” before a hostile crowd. But, as the Morning Chronicle reports, the crowd turned on Broom and he had to defend himself with “brick bats” severely injuring a bystander. All the time the crowd would be observing and commenting on the transaction. When Joseph Thompson sold his wife, Mary Anne – at Carlisle in 1832 – to Harry Mears for one pound and a Newfoundland dog, the crowd approved, “huzzaing and cheering” after the new couple.

Meanwhile Thompson “coolly took the straw halter off his old wife and put it on his new dog.” Not all crowds were so complacent. After a Bury sale in 1870, neighbours “burnt in effigy both the buyer and the person sold.” Henry Broom of Honiton faced another hostile crowd after he sold his wife in 1828: “spectators, upwards of 1,000 in number…assailed him with hisses,” and he had to throw brick bats at the crowd to escape.

Selling a Wife (1812–1814), by Thomas Rowlandson.

“A toast to the bargain bride!”

After the sale, the new ‘owner’ might treat his purchase and her former husband to a drink at a local inn. One man from Merthyr Tydfil sold his wife to a workmate for three guineas and 10 shillings worth of beer in 1863, but his wife reportedly “exhibited few symptoms of either shame or sorrow, and drank her share of the beer.”

Some wife sales ended unhappy marriages. “Long Jemmy” from Butterworth, sold his wife at Rochdale market because he caught her “holding matches to his nostrils for the purpose of suffocating him.” Others were performed for more practical reasons. When Mr and Mrs Marshall, from Wombleton, married, he was 64 and she just 19. Sixteen years later, in 1855, finally “feeling the infirmities of age” at 80, Marshall sold his wife to Mr Webster, of Oswaldkirk, for 2s 6d.

Occasionally husbands regretted a sale. In 1766, a Southwark carpenter, Mr Higginson, sold his wife and then a few days later demanded her back. However Mrs Higginson refused to return. “A sale was a sale,” she said, “and not a joke.” After persuasion failed, Higginson reportedly hung himself.

The origins of wife sales may come from the tradition where a prospective husband paid his new wife’s father. Having paid for his wife, if he wanted rid of her the husband would negotiate a price with a buyer and sell her on.

“Add her to my bill!”: The Duke who bought an inn chambermaid

Even the aristocracy were involved. The second Duke of Chandos, Henry Brydges, bought his second wife. Brydges was a prominent member of the aristocracy; a Grand Master of the Freemasons, an MP – and an impulsive character. George II reportedly called him “a hot-headed, passionate, half-witted coxcomb.” After stopping to dine at the Pelican Inn, Newbury, on the way to London, Brydges apparently discovered the ostler, Jeffries ill-treating his wife, Anne Wells, the chambermaid. The Duke must have been captivated by Anne’s charms, because he bought her from Jeffries for half a crown and, even more surprisingly, he took the transaction seriously.

He married her when they arrived in London at Mr Keith’s Chapel, Mayfair on Christmas Day 1744. The chapel was famous as a venue for clandestine marriages, until legislation effectively banned them a few years later. Brydges’s contemporaries were apparently unimpressed by the chambermaid turned-Duchess. Lord Orrey remarked: “of her person and character, people speak variously, but all agree that both are very bad.” Anne lived with Brydges for 15 years and they had a daughter, Augusta Ann.

The Gentleman's Magazine reported that on her death bed Ann "had her whole household assembled, told them her history, and drew from it a touching moral of reliance on Providence; as from the most wretched situation, she had been suddenly raised to one of the greatest prosperity...and then dismissed them with gifts; dying almost in the very act." After Anne’s death in 1759, Brydges remained single until he died in 1771.

Illustrated Police News 1870

Marital casualties of war

The Napoleonic wars may have contributed to the frequency of wife-sales in the early 19th century. When the wars finally ended in 1815, some disbanded soldiers – who had been away for months or even years – found that their wives had taken new “husbands” in their absence. A wife sale, where the second husband “purchased” the wife for a nominal sum of a few pence, was one way out of this mess. “In the manufacturing districts in 1815 and 1816 hardly a market day passed without such sales, month after month. The authorities shut their eyes and the people were confirmed in the perfect legality of the proceedings,” reported Notes and Queries in 1863.

One ingenious wife from Bewcastle, Cumberland, used the war to punish the husband who intended to sell her in 1810:

“Not being able to find a purchaser...she persuaded him to proceed to Newcastle...this modern Delilah laid her plan so well that, immediately on his arrival, a press-gang conveyed him on board a frigate preparing to get under weigh for a long cruise.”

But the authorities could not turn a blind eye forever. Victorian news reports of wife selling sound more and more outraged – “most disgusting”; “a vulgar error”; “such depraved conduct in the lower order of people.” A Staffordshire newspaper, complained in 1801 that: “The usual delicate ceremony of tying a rope round the woman’s neck was dispensed with; but...a rope might very properly reward the persons concerned in this disgraceful violation of morality.”

There were more frequent prosecutions for wife selling after 1800, which may have hastened the custom’s demise. The prospect of a month’s hard labour might have made a nagging wife’s tongue seem sweeter. Husbands or wives who participated in a sale and then re-married could be charged with bigamy or having “feloniously intermarried.”

Another worry for the husband of a bought wife, was how to dispose of her after death did part them. When Henry Frise’s purchased helpmeet, Anne, died before him the local parson refused to enter her on the register of deaths because they were not properly married. Henry, had to sneak Anne’s corpse across to another parish.

Wife sales were not unknown in the 20th century – as late as 1928 a man from Blackwood, Monmouthshire, confessed to magistrates that he had sold his wife for one pound. WH Lowe Watson wrote to the Times in 1932:

“In the summer of 1912 the belt of my motor-cycle broke between Eynsham and Witney, a few yards from a gypsy caravan. I had begun to mend the belt, when a woman and a man came from behind the caravan with a yellow dog. The man tried to sell me a basket. I refused. He then offered me a carved walking stick, or, for a couple of shillings, his dog. Again I refused. This seemed to anger the man, and dragging the woman forward he shouted, ‘if you won’t buy any other thing perhaps you will buy my wife. You can keep her for half a crown.’ And he pushed her at me. She was attractive, although quite dirty, and apparently quite willing to leave him. But I had mended the belt and was already late for an appointment at Barford. So I thanked them both and rode on.”

Finally, in 2008 one man tried to revive the old custom. Paul Osborn, from Bletchley, tried to sell his wife, Sharon, on eBay as revenge after she allegedly had an affair. Modern buyers were rather more generous than their predecessors and bids for Sharon reached £500,100.

Find out more...

Wife selling took place all over the country. Because sales were illegal it can be hard to find much about them. The best place to start looking are in local newspapers. Searching the British Library digital newspaper archive, at , for example, brings up 300 references to
the practice.

If the seller was prosecuted, then their may be entries in Quarter Session and other court records at county record offices. Marriages should, appear in parish registers. Again these can be found at county record offices. The best index is at www.familysearch.org.

S Baring Gould, Old Country Life (1890)
Bridget Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-century England (1994)
SP Menefee Wives for Sale (1981)
Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987(1990)

There is also an unusually detailed wikipedia entry on wife-selling.

(This article was originally published in Ancestors magazine, February 2010)

Daily life in a Victorian women's prison

2010-08-26T14:18:00.001+01:00

Aylesbury Prison, 1901...

“The cells are of ample size, and are lighted by long narrow windows covered with iron gauze. Bare and empty as they look, they are not actually uncomfortable. The furniture consists of an iron bedstead, a wooden shelf, and a stool.

The bedding is a coir mattress and pillow, sheets, three blankets and a rug. The necessities for the toilet, a tin plate and a pint measure for their meals, and a card of the prison regulations complete the contents. No looking glasses are allowed.

Aylesbury prison c.1900

The prison day begins early, for at six o'clock the great bell rings for the convicts to rise. At a quarter to seven breakfast is served, and about ten minutes earlier the officers go round, and begin to unlock the cell doors that the women may come out and receive their rations – three quarters of a pint of cocoa with bread. They return to their cells, where they take their breakfast, after which they make their beds and clean out their rooms until towards eight o'clock, when it is time to go to chapel...

...at 8.30 the labour of the day begins. The women are marched off in detachments to the workrooms or back to their cells...The hardest labour is the laundry work and perhaps the twine making; and the women employed at these have extra rations, namely, lunch of bread and cheese.

Silent exercise in the prison yard

At different times during the morning, they exercise in the prison yard...always keeping the same distance, and no word being spoken. Twelve o'clock is the dinner hour...all meals being taken in the cells...Four times a week they have meat; mutton twice and beef twice; on other days they have soup or suet pudding, and always bread and potatoes...at half-past one the various companies march back to the work rooms.

They exercise again during the afternoon, returning to their various occupations until five o'clock, when they go to their cells for supper, which consists of tea and bread. Very little work is done after this. At 6.45 all labour ceases for the day, and on entering their cells the doors are finally locked on them for the night. They have this time to themselves, and most of them spend it in reading.

Precisely at eight the lights go out."

This is an extract from 'The Life of a Woman Convict' by MF Johnston, Fortnightly Review 75 (1901).

“Give little, give seldom and above all, grudgingly” - Victorian Sex Tips

2010-08-22T14:24:00.005+01:00

“At best revolting and at worst painful,” shuddered vicar’s wife, Ruth Smythers (who may or may not be entirely fictional), as she penned Sex Tips For Husbands & Wives. Mrs Smythers' advice to newly married women facing “the terrible experience of sex,” has been recently republished. Tips tested on poor Reverend Smythers include:

The wise bride will permit two brief sexual experiences weekly - and as time goes by she should make every effort to reduce this frequency.
Give little, give seldom and above all give grudgingly. Otherwise what could have been a proper marriage could become an orgy of sexual lust.
Men obtain a major portion of sexual satisfaction from peaceful exhaustion immediately after the act. Thus the wife must ensure that there is no peace for him. Otherwise he might be encouraged to try again.
Many women find it useful to have thick cotton nightgowns for themselves and pyjamas for their husbands - they need not be removed during the act.
Lie still as bodily motion could be interpreted as sexual excitement by the optimistic husband.
When it cannot be prevented, sex should be practised in total darkness.
Remain absolutely silent while he is huffing and puffing away - and never under any circumstances grunt or groan while the act is in progress.
By the tenth anniversary many wives have achieved the ultimate goal of terminating sexual contact. Social pressure will hold the husband in the home.

Sex Tips For Husbands and Wives from 1894 has been reprinted and is available on Amazon. I doubt that it is genuine, but it amused me!

A trip to the Victorian underworld

2010-08-19T21:09:00.001+01:00

We know all about the lives of upper and middle class women from novels, films and television adaptations. But what about the women who lived on the edges of society, the invisible criminal class?

“As the hum of life ceases and the shops darken, and the gaudy gin palaces thrust out ragged crowds...huddle together the homeless and the destitute. The only living things that haunt the streets are the wretched Magdalenes, who stand shivering in their finery, waiting to catch the drunkard as he goes shouting homewards. On the doorstep crouches some shoeless child whose day’s begging has not brought it enough to purchase a night’s lodging...As the streets grow blue with the coming light...then come sauntering forth the unwashed poor to hunt each dust heap.”
(Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 1862).

From 1849 to 1862 journalist Henry Mayhew and his assistants interviewed the underclass - prostitutes, beggars, pickpockets, opium addicts and thieves. He published his findings as a serial. For just one penny, comfortable citizens could read about the mire and muck of abject poverty and shiver before their well-stoked fires. This other dark world of slums seething with vermin and disease, lay just feet away from wide prosperous streets.

Because they were so densely packed with bodies, slums were profitable for landlords and so rarely cleared by the authorities. Twenty, thirty, perhaps more people would squeeze into one lodging house room, sleeping on straw or dirty rags, with rats scuttling over them in the night. In factory towns, the wealthy moved further away from the city centre and the billowing chimneys while the workers were crammed nto warrens of dilapidated homes – cramped partitioned dwellngs and new houses squeezed into the gaps.

Orange Court, London (1860s) by Gustave Doré

The only alternative to poverty on the streets was the workhouse. The 1834 Poor Law removed people from society if they couldn’t earn their own living, by refusing them financial relief outside the workhouse. It was supposed to raise wages, by removing the cheap labour of those subsidised by parish relief.

But in practise the workhouse was a hellish experience and once you entered it was difficult to leave. Husbands and wives, parents and children were separated and forbidden to speak to one another and could only receive visitors in front of the matron.

The healthy were lodged alongside the syphilitic, lunatic and diseased. To leave the workhouse a pauper had to give notice of their intention and if they stayed in the neighbourhood without a visible occupation, they could be sent to prison for vagrancy.

The welfare of the paupers depended on workhouse staff. In 1846 paupers at the Andover workhouse in Hampshire were discovered to be starving so severely that they sucked the marrow from the bones they were supposed to grind for fertiliser. The Master, Colin M’Dougal, had pocketed money meant to be spent on their food. A sexually transmitted disease epidemic among female occupants in one West London workhouse was caused by a porter who raped his charges.

Although eighty percent of the prison population in the 1850s were male, there were just ove 3,000 women at any time. A quarter of criminal offences were committed by women, most involving embezzlement, thieving, receiving stolen goods, forgery and keeping brothels. In prison women had three meals a day and were treated more lightly than men, who were forced to complete pointless tasks, like running on treadmills or turning a crank handle. Female felons were seen as rehabilitating, described as “the many who are good and the few who are bad” by the Director of Prisons.

After 1853 transportation was restricted to sentences over 14 years. Until then many women pleaded guilty in the hope that they would be transported and according to one hopeful inmate, gain “all but absolute freedom.” In the colonies they were free to begin their lives afresh, even to marry.

Conversely the conditions of ‘honest’ work were often far worse – and less sanitary – than imprisonment. At slop-shops, named for their poor tailoring and the undrained sewage outside the shops, women and children on starvation wages sewed clothes for middle class customers. They were “sewing at once with double thread/A shroud as well as a shirt,” as Thomas Hood’s popular ‘Song of a Shirt’ went. The workers lived on the premises and the ‘sweaters’ (the owners) charged them more for board and lodging than they could earn, making them effectively slaves.

Slopshops: "sewing a shroud as well as a shirt"

Henry Mayhew ventured into one London slopshop and found: “Fourteen people are at work in a room nine feet square. There is a coke fire, and seven or eight gas jets are burning. Ventilation there is none. Hollow-eyed, gaunt-visaged men and women are toiling in various ways. Some have a sewing machine, others are doing handwork. The poor wretches have been at work since six o’clock in the morning. They will go on probably till midnight.”

Taking in sewing or laundry was hard work and brought in a fraction of the money that prostitution could earn. “The sewing trade is the ruin of the young girls that take to it - the prices are not sufficient to keep them, and the consequence is, they fly to the streets to make out their living. Most of the workers are young girls and there is scarcely one of them virtuous. At first they are very meek and modest in their deportment, but after a little time they get connected with the others and led away,” said one slopshop worker interviewed by Mayhew. Little wonder that many women turned to more extreme methods to escape poverty...

Find out more about the Victorian underworld:
Henry Mayhew, The London Underworld in the Victorian Period: v. 1: Authentic First-person Accounts by Beggars, Thieves and Prostitutes (adapted from the original 2005)
London Labour and the London Poor (Wordsworth Classics, 2008)

Kellow Chesney, The Victorian Underworld (1972)
James O'Neil, Crime City: Manchester's Victorian Underworld (2008)

How to flirt like a Victorian

2010-08-15T17:42:00.001+01:00

In 1892 Lady Beatrice Violet Greville published The Gentlewoman in Society, a how-to guide for aspiring socialites. She included an entire chapter on 'Flirting', with plenty of tips for young ladies eager to snare their man...

“All women require in love one of three things - amusement, sympathy, or adoration. Flirtation combines the three and, when sagely conducted, is fraught with no evil consequences.”

1. The Society flirt is a war horse: “Society flirtations are rarely guileless. The Society girl's ears are open, her eyes are keen. She has noted the affairs of her elders; she longs for a flirtation of her own, as the war horse sniffs the scent of battle from afar; but she has no foolish visions of its eternity.”

2. Know your setting: “All sorts of surroundings suit all sorts of girls. The London beauty is miserable out of the glare of wax candles and the hum of the city streets: her complexion does not stand early rising, and her feet are especially suited for dainty high-heeled shoes. Her appearance is regal in the ballroom, but she looks uncomfortable and dowdy when the rain has taken the curl out of her fringe...a country girl who looks rosy and common and underbred in London appears charmingly neat and fresh in the studied simplicity of a tailor gown or the dainty adjuncts of a frilled, pink cotton skirt."

3. Remember that flirtation is an empty spoon: “...the essence of flirting is froth; and those who look to find genuine sustenance in it wil come away disappointed, for, as has been well said, 'flirtation is a spoon with nothing in it'."

4. Avoid the male flirt, they always marry a dull cousin: “the male flirt...makes the girls' hearts beat with anticipation, raises hopes he never intends to gratify, and 'carries on' as the saying is, with different girls, season after season, until suddenly, to everyone's astonishment, he throws the handkerchief to the unlikeliest of all – a girl he has met for a week in a country house – a simple village maiden who has never been to London, - the cousin he has flirted with and jilted in the long ago.”

Wearing enormous pink flowers will not fail to attract attention

5. Expect 'silly things' from your beloved :“if by chance he should be really touched, he will make an abject fool of himself, will do silly things in sober earnest, will wait hours for a glimpse of his beloved, will stoop to the most humiliating attisude, will fawn, and pose and cringe, and generally make himself ridiculous."

6. A practise engagement makes perfect: “The most unsophisticated girl learns something after an engagement of three months; and the void created when it has been broken off - the want of adoration, of the hundred and one attentions and trifles that prove the ardour of a man – naturally impels her promptly to try her luck again...this time with a better chance of success,”

7. Don't expect presents: “Englishmen...do not realise the pleasure given to a woman by the little attentions she may accept..the hot house flowers sent anonymously...the spray which exactly matches the gown she is to wear - the huge bouquet which arriving at the last moment fills all her sisters' hearts with envy. An Englishman thinks he has done all that is necessary if he makes himself agreeable to his lady love and plainly shows his preference.”

8. Never underestimate male reserve: “It is the greatest mistake to assume that it is the girls who are shy. They may pretend to be, but in reality they are audacious to the verge of rashness. It is the boy who is diffident, who longs to declare is love, but dare not.”

9. A good flirt is a woman of the world: “To be an adept at flirting requires...the knowledge of mankind of a diplomat, the savoir faire of a courtier, the tact of a sovereign, the discretion of a priest, and the charm of a woman.”

10. Beware becoming a 'professional flirt': “there are some professional flirts, who have absolutely exhausted all sensation, who have reduced flirtation to a study, who know exactly when to look, and how to look, who convey in a glance a depth of affection they have never even realised, who play with a man as a cat with a mouse...living enigmas, female Machiavellians,for whom no man is a match.”

Lady Beatrice Violet (seen here at a family wedding) is the woman in white with the large hat on the far left. Pic from www.dursleyglos.org.uk.

Extracts from Lady Beatrice Violet Greville, The Gentlewoman in Society (Henry and Co., 1892).

Mary Ann Cotton - the Black widow poisoner

2010-08-08T10:19:00.000+01:00

Mary Ann Cotton poisoned three husbands, her mother, and a dozen of her own children with arsenic

In the mid-19th century half of the population died before they reached 20 and three quarters before 40. Life insurance was big business. People paid a penny a week to life insurance companies to ensure that their relatives received a large enough sum to give them for a decent burial. But the temptation of that pay-out - the equivalent of several months wages - led some Victorian women to help their relatives reach that decent burial a little early.

Arsenic was easily available in fly paper or soap from the local chemist and it caused sickness and diarrhea, the same symptoms as gastric fever. The ‘Black Widows of Liverpool,’ a syndicate of working class women led by sisters Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins, poisoned family members for life insurance money in the 1880s.

But the most prolific killer was Mary Ann Cotton from County Durham. Born in a poor mining village in 1832, Mary Ann’s father died after falling down a mine shaft when she was eight. At 20 she married a local collier, William Mowbray and had eight children. Seven of the children and William had died, apparently from gastric fever (which has similar symptoms to arsenic poisoning) by January 1865.

Photograph from www.maryanncotton.co.uk

Mary Ann collected William’s £35 life insurance (equivalent to six months wages) and sent her remaining child, Isabella, to live with her mother. She moved to Sunderland to work at the Infirmary, and married one of her patients, George Ward, eight months after Joseph’s death. Ward was dead by October 1866, after a long illness involving paralysis and intestinal problems.

Mary Ann then became a housekeeper to James Robinson, a widower. Robinson’s baby died of gastric fever soon after Mary Ann moved in and he must have sought comfort from his housekeeper because she soon became pregnant. Meanwhile, Mary Ann briefly returned home to ‘nurse’ her sick mother, who died after experiencing stomach pains. Mary Ann’s surviving daughter, Isabella, quickly followed her, as did another two of James’ children in April 1867. A grieving Robinson married Mary Ann and they had a daughter, Mary Isabella that November, but the baby died from – you guessed it – stomach pains in March 1868.

Suspicious of the high mortality rate in his household, James discovered that she had stolen £50 from him and forced his children to pawn household valuables. He threw her out, narrowly avoiding an early grave. Though destitute, Mary Ann still managed to find another husband. Her friend Margaret Cotton introduced her to her brother, Frederick, a widowed miner with two sons. After Margaret died from a mysterious stomach problem Mary Ann married Frederick, bigamously as she was still married to Robinson.

Their son Robert was born in 1871, but his father soon went the same way as his predecessors. Again Mary Ann collected the handsome insurance pay out and became a nurse to John Quick-Manning, a customs officer recovering from smallpox. She seems to have been over-zealous in her duties, as she became pregnant by him with her twelfth child. Surplus to requirements and fully insured, Frederick’s two sons joined their father in March 1872, but their deaths finally proved Mary Ann’s undoing.

When asked to nurse a sick woman, by Thomas Riley, a parish official who also happened to be the assistant coroner, Mary Ann asked if Frederick’s surviving son, Charles, might go into the workhouse. When Riley said that she would have to accompany him she said that he was sickly and would soon “go like all the rest of the Cottons.” Riley was shocked when five days later, the seemingly healthy Charles died. He went to the police and an inquest was held. The jury returned a verdict of natural causes and Mary Ann protested that Riley had made the accusations because she had rejected his sexual advances.

But the local newspapers soon discovered that Mary Ann had moved around northern England, losing three husbands, a friend, her mother, and a dozen children to ‘stomach fevers’ along the way. No one had cottoned on to the connection between Mrs Mowbray, Mrs Ward, Mrs Robinson and Mrs Cotton before. Charles’ body tested positive for arsenic. Mary was charged with murder, although the trial was delayed until she gave birth to Quick-Manning’s child in March 1873.

Former execution site at Durham County gaol

At the trial Mary Ann claimed that Charles had sickened after inhaling the arsenic contained in the green dye in the wallpaper of the Cotton home. But the huge stack of corpses in her past made a guilty verdict inevitable. Mary Ann was hanged at Durham County gaol on 24 March, 1873, and died a slow choking death, as the hangman misjudged the drop. Two sons, Robert and John, survived her.

A century later nothern school children still chanted:

"Mary Ann Cotton

She's dead and she's rotten

She lies in her bed

With her eyes wide open

Sing, sing!

Oh what can I sing?

Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string

Where, where?

Up in the air

Selling black pudding a penny a pair."

The Victorians on holiday: Oh! They did like to be (nude) beside the seaside

2010-08-07T11:10:00.000+01:00

Reverend Francis Kilvert was outraged. The Rector of Langley Burrell was taking his holidays on the Isle of Wight when he discovered his favourite past-time, nude paddling, had been banned. His reverence grumbled to his diary in August 1874: “at Shanklin one has to adopt the detestable custom of bathing in drawers. If ladies don’t like to see men naked why don’t they keep away from the sight?”

The Victorians invented the seaside holiday, seaside decorum – and seaside debauchery. Even Queen Victoria was an enthusiastic paddler and promenade-stroller, although she swam in the privacy of a bathing machine. In her diary on the 30th July 1847 she wrote: “Drove down to the beach with my maid and I went into the bathing machine, where I undressed and bathed in the sea (for the first time in my life). I thought it delightful until I put my head under water.”

Queen Victorian and Reverend Kilvert weren’t the only ones stripping off at the seaside. Eighteenth-century seaside holidays were health cures for the upper classes. During the season from October to March visitors rode horses – not donkeys – on the beach and no one ventured into the chilly sea. But things changed once the 1833 Factory Act gave workers eight half days holiday a year.

Thanks to the new railway system, thousands of ordinary people could reach the seaside. In 1820 it took six hours to travel from London to Brighton, by 1862 only two. Newly-accessible resort towns sprang up along Britain’s coastline. At Southport, Llandudno, Margate, Weymouth, Torquay, Dover or Ilfracombe factory workers and clerks escaped smoky cities to cavort by the sea.

The working classes flocked to the seaside resorts, much to the chagrin of the upper classes. Suddenly Cockney accents and the cries of street sellers could be heard among more ‘refined’ tones at formerly exclusive places, like Brighton. The new working class trippers were lampooned by comics like the 1884 cartoon, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday, mocked these ‘work-shy’ holiday makers. Lazy schemer, Ally Sloper, goes to great lengths to avoid his landlord, his wife and anything approaching hard work.

By the end of the 19th century the fashionable set had fled abroad, but they were quickly replaced by ordinary families. Mr Punch at the Seaside (1910), lampooned the middle-classes who went to the seaside only to spend all their time with acquaintences from home. “These Joneses and Browns cordially detest each other in London, and are not even on speaking terms; yet such is the depressing effect of ‘perfect quiet’ that, as soon as they meet at Shrimpington-super-Mare, they rush into each other’s arms with a wild sense of relief!”

Winifred and Ethel were dying to get their bikinis on

Seaside towns were completely transformed by the influx of visitors. In 1812 Morecambe was just a tiny hamlet with a smattering of houses, but by 1880 the population had rocketed to 16,859. In newly-fashionable coastal towns pleasure palaces sprang up to entertain the masses. Music-halls, winter gardens, exhibitions, variety shows, zoos, opera houses, theatres, aquariums and even lagoons with Venetian gondolas. Street musicians, Punch and Judy shows, acrobats, ice cream carts, travelling photographers and pedlars all touted for business along the sands.

Among the pleasure-going crowds some Victorian holidaymakers abandoned decorum entirely. If you adhered to the marks of respectability - attending church and refraining from bathing on a Sunday - you could take advantage of seaside freedoms. Single men, safely out of sight of their families, could spend their days at beach front telescopes ogling women slipping into the sea from bathing machines and their nights visiting ladies of easy virtue, with no acquaintances to spot them and spread gossip.

Around three hundred prostitutes walked Brighton’s streets, piers and pebble beach. Working class men and women made open sexual advances while frolicking on the beach, driving prim middle class matrons into the safety of their bathing machines. The naughty seaside postcard was born, but the Victorians didn’t go as far as sporting ‘Kiss me quick’ hats. Even the Reverend Kilvert was not immune to the charms of a bathing beauty. “One beautiful girl stood entirely naked in the sand...a supple slender waist, the gentle dawn and tender swell of the bosom and above all the soft exquisite curves of the rosy dimpled bottom,” he dribbled in his diary.

Despite this atmosphere of flirtation and frolics women kept every inch of pale flesh under wraps. They preserved lily white complexions beneath enormous parasols and up-to-the-chin bathing suits. Earlier in the Victorian period women wore flannel sack-like costumes, but by 1860s ‘Bloomer suits,’ thigh length jackets worn over blouses, were in fashion. To descend into the sea with maximum modesty, women used bathing machines. These contraptions were beach huts on wheels. Horses dragged down to the sea with the occupants wobbling about inside, trying to slip on their voluminous bathing costumes.

Until well into the 1900s, ladies would not be seen paddling or walking on the beach in their bathing costumes. In contrast, until the 1850s men, like Reverend Kilvert enjoyed swimming naked, although later they were restricted to certain parts of the beach. This was still insufficient for some visitors.

“Hundreds of men and women may be seen in the water – the men stark naked"

One 1866 letter writer to the Scarborough Gazette, protested that “hundreds of men and women may be seen in the water – the men stark naked and the women so loosely and insufficiently clad that for all purposes of decency they might as well have been naked too.” If they chose to wear them, men could sport red and white striped bathing suits with drawstrings at the waist and, later, knitted one piece jersey suits. Reverend Kilvert had to reluctantly don his trunks.

The real Becky Sharp - female swindler, Eliza Frances Robertson

2010-08-04T19:21:00.001+01:00

Spinning stories of wealthy relatives dying like flies, Eliza Frances Robertson (c.1771-1804) swindled her way to a life of luxury on credit and became the model for Thackeray's Becky Sharp in his 1848 novel Vanity Fair.

Eliza Frances Robertson was born in 1771 in South London. Her father was a soap-maker often on the wrong side of the law, but Eliza received a good education, attending a day school, before working as a governess and later opening her own school from home. She had an “engaging,” “elegant” and “gentle” manner, which compensated for her “remarkably ordinary” appearance, “much marked by smallpox.”

An indecent proposal?

When her father was arrested for debt Eliza was forced to seek work. In her memoirs (which should be taken with a large pinch of salt) she describes how, seeing her plight, an ex-pupil's father “had the insolence and cruelty to offer me 200l a year and a neat furnished house...to be rid at times of a troublesome wife,” she wrote. Instead she claims that she became a governess to a noble Scottish family and had a doomed romance with the soldier son.

What happens next in the memoir is is rather more likely. She worked at a “very respectable seminary at Tottenham” and gained enough experience to be taken on at Miss Charlotte Sharpe's boarding school at Crooms Hill near Blackheath in 1795. The two women “became attached to each other” and lived in “tranquillity” for several years.

Great expectations - the heiress of Faskally

But in autumn 1800 Eliza announced that her mother had died, leaving her Faskally, an estate in Scotland. She excitedly described her “Gothic mansion,” commissioning a surveyor to design improvements “there a Ruined Abbey built – here a Lawn extended – and here a grotto.” On the expectation of money from the estate Eliza rented a house in the Paragon, one of the smartest streets in Blackheath and ordered new furniture from Mr Oakley of Bond Street, who “gave the tone to everything.”

She spent lavishly, buying a coach decorated with coronets, huge mirrors, a sumptuous bed “and every other article suitably magnificent”- all on credit, the tradesmen believing that they would be paid when she gained her inheritance. A lawyer later remarked: “the disease of credulity was epidemic, and scarcely any one about Greenwich escaped.”

The Paragon, Blackheath

Within weeks Eliza informed neighbours that her grandmother had died, leaving £94,000. She boasted of family connections with the Secretary of State and George Washington, showing off “a model of a dead child in wax” as “her sister Lady Paget's child.” But the respectable citizens of Blackheath found “something very mysterious in her friends dying in the extraordinary manner they did.” Rumour spread that Miss Robertson's mind - let alone her bank balance - was unsound. One by one creditors brought her bills, totalling around £15,000.

Eliza fled to Huntingdon while her creditors auctioned off her possessions. By now she was infamous and as “a swindler and everything that was vile” Eliza was seen as unfeminine. Londoners speculated that she and Charlotte dressed in men's clothes and had a sexual relationship.

The game was finally up. Hunted down by a gang of creditors Eliza was tossed into Huntingdon county gaol, where her cell was soon “thronged with spectators” gawping at the female swindler. She composed plaintive poems: “Our plate, books, and china all fall'n to waste...Betray'd by my hopes.”

An unnatural woman in men's clothes?

Undaunted Eliza hired a lawyer to search Scotland for her inheritance. To her chagrin instead of wealth he found a “wicked woman...[who] said she was my mother.” Everything finally fell apart at Maidstone court when Charlotte took the stand, “under much personal embarrassment” and admitted that she was "surprised and hurt” by Eliza's lies. Even Eliza's defence gossiped about her having “dressed in men's clothes.”

Eliza's debts were “so numerous and enormous,” that she was confined indefinitely to the Fleet prison. At first Charlotte shared her confinement and Eliza feverishly scribbled a vitriolic memoir to defy her enemies: “They say my mother is a laundress. I wish they would employ her, to wash their fingers clean.” It sold out and she made 50 guineas from a second edition.

Eliza joined the debtors of the Fleet prison, who cry "Pray remember poor debtors!" in this 18th century print

After sharing Eliza's imprisonment for 18 months Charlotte finally quarrelled with her and departed. She published a "calumnious pamphlet” about her former friend and Eliza responded with Destiny, a novel where the trusting protagonist Cordelia loses her fortune to a duplicitous friend who deserts Cordelia when she can no longer buy her “silk stockings, gipsey hats and other such unnecessary articles.”

Eliza never admitted her crime, blaming the tradesmen for overspending, as they “supposed I had plenty of money, and it was no consequence how much unnecessary expense they put me to...they were the swindlers.” But she did make one equivocal comment: “I had not intentionally injured any person.” She ended her days mocked, and disparaged, a curious tale in the back of the newspapers. Eliza died after three years in prison in June 1805, aged 33. Her funeral in St Bride's Churchyard was attended by her (very much alive) parents.

All of Eliza's books are available from the British Library:

Dividends of Immense Value and My Claim on Others Evidenced by Indisputable Authorities (London, 1801). Available online at www.archive.org
The Life and Memoirs of Miss Roberts of Blackheath (1802).
Who are the Swindlers? A Query (London, 1801).
Destiny (W Burton: London, 1804). Anonymous ed., Consolatory Verses of the Late Eliza Frances Robertson with some account of the life and character of the author (London, 1808).

History Girl - An interview with Claire Jones, Editor of HerStoria magazine

2010-08-03T12:03:00.001+01:00

"If you are to do a proper history of Europe before the last five minutes, it is a history of white males because they were the power players, and to pretend anything else is to falsify." So said David Starkey last year, around the same time that Claire Jones launched HerStoria, a magazine celebrating a female perspective on history.

Claire Jones is not a Starkey fan. For her a history of white males is “a myopic, partial, very dull history.” She set up HerStoria because she wanted to provide an alternative to current history magazines “which seem to concentrate mostly on male-oriented subjects like great men, battles and political history.”

“History taught in schools also tends to be political, military and economic history, which is typically told from a male viewpoint, with the addition of ‘special women’ like Boudica or the suffragettes,” Claire argues. “Looking at history from women’s view is like a kaleidoscope, everything changes and even accepted historical periods and categories can come into question.”

Claire Jones is challenging traditional masculine readings of history

Armed with a doctorate in women’s history and a career in freelance writing, Claire was perfectly qualified to redress that balance. “I grew up in a very ‘traditional’ family when it came to gender roles, and with two brothers, this made me a bit of a rebel. When I went to university to study philosophy the course included not one woman thinker – and that made me think!”

“There’s no doubt that setting up HerStoria in the current economic climate has been a challenge.” said Claire. “We are only available by subscription, and from a few independent booksellers.” But the magazine has been welcomed by women all over the world – especially as the magazine is now available for subscription online. With a range of articles on eclectic topics – from a history of glamour to pre-anaesthetic surgery – a women’s history walk through a different location, news and review, the magazine is a provocative, informative read.

Claire’s heroines are Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, a 17th century writer and the first woman elected to the Royal Society and Josephine Butler, who campaigned against the Contagious Diseases Acts. But her main research interest is the second half of the 19th century. “Then the movement to improve women’s position in society – legal reform, access to higher education and suffrage – really got off the ground. Eminent scientists and medical men stated that women’s brains were less evolved than men’s and couldn’t cope with advanced education or even the vote.” Some went as far as arguing that if women had access to a university education they would “have a nervous breakdown, become infertile or ‘adapt’ to their environment by developing hairy legs and a moustache.”

Although people often complain that history isn’t relevant to modern schoolchildren, Claire argues that women’s history at least has real modern counterpoints. “It is humbling to find that women were writing about the same issues over one hundred years ago, things that we are still debating today - marriage, women’s sexuality, independence and motherhood.”

Women’s historians find it difficult to get hold of material. Documents may be under a husband or male relative’s name, if they exist at all. “Sources on women may be there, but they remain hidden and spread about numerous places,” says Claire. But there is a thriving community of historians dedicated to women’s history – and Claire is determined to use HerStoria as a platform for new projects. Recent issues have featured research on Turkish baths, female doctors, 18th century conduct manuals, medieval witchcraft trials as soap opera and the history of female football fans.

And HerStoria looks set to get better and better. “We have some of the UK’s leading historians of women contributing to HerStoria in the coming year,”

Visit www.herstoria.com for more information. Subscriptions start from £16.95 (UK) or £14.95 for the digital edition and there is a free digital copy available to download.

Discover women’s history
The HerStoria website has a great resource for anyone interested in women’s history. Discover web, is an open-access resource, containing biographies and essays on issues in women’s history. Claire aims to extend this to a “trustworthy mini-encyclopaedia of women’s history” Articles are very different to those published in the magazine, but all are written by specialists. “We like to include surprising subjects, for example one of our latest additions is ‘Women car designers and designing cars for women’ by Dr Nina Baker, a researcher at the University of Strathclyde.”
Check it out at: www.herstoria.com/discover

Dope girl - a New York opium den in the 1900s

2010-08-01T14:45:00.001+01:00

Sheltered diplomat's wife Lady Susan Townley was horrified to discover a young English girl in a New York opium den in the early 1900s. She noted down the melodramatic scene that ensued in her memoirs...

The titilating image of a lady drug addict...

The reality - a New York opium den

“During one of our visits to New York...we visited the opium dens – foul, ill-smelling places with groups of Chinese lying about smoking the fatal pipe...In bunks, ranged round the walls like berths in a ship's cabin, lay others, already sleeping off the effects of the noxious drug...Upstairs was a much sadder sight for here young girls and women were being initiated into the mysteries of the drug habit.

...On a Chinese k'ang (that Chinese brick platform, with a fire under it, on which the Chinese make their bed) lay a woman half-dressed, with a tray by her side on which was spread all the paraphernalia of the opium-smoker. The room reeked of the smell. The woman's hair fell about her shoulders.

As we entered, she staggered to her feet, and with a terrifying volley of curses inquired what we had come for...“Are you one of that psalm-singing lot?” she yelled at me. “Get out of this. I've no use for you.”

“No,” I said, “I'm not here to preach to you...”...I talked on, longing to help, not knowing what to say! The poor thing looked at me in a dazed sort of way. Her anger had passed...she sank down on the bed convulsed with sobs.

“Oh my mother, my mother,” she moaned. “If I thought that she knew what had happened to me, I would kill myself.”

And then, little by little, she told me her pitiful story. She had come to New York as an emigrant, seeking work. She had been young, pretty, full of the joy of life, and she had found work as a clerk in a bank. But the manager had cast his evil eye on her. For a time he had treated her as a plaything, but tired of her and turned her on the streets.

“What was I to do?” she moaned. “I had no friends; I was ruined, disgraced and did not know where to turn. Then a Chinaman came along. He saw me in the street, crying. He said, 'Come with me and I will teach you to forget.” I have been here ever since, and here I will remain until I die. At least he was kind to me and gave me a roof over my head when the other turned me out – and I have got the opium! I know it won't be long, but I want no other home now.”

I had at last to come out of that room and close the door on that piteous wreck..."

This passage is an extract from Lady Susan Townley's memoirs, 'Indiscretions' of Lady Susan (1922). Read it online.

Read more about the history of women's involvement in drugs in Marek Kohn's Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground (2003).

An English Governess in Egypt

2010-07-31T12:51:00.001+01:00

Little is known about Englishwoman Emmeline Lott, other than the facts published in her 1865 memoirs, The English Governess in Egypt. In 1863 she gained a post as governess to the son of Ismail Pacha the Viceroy of Egypt.

Miss Lott was initially excited about her exotic new life within the Viceroy's Harem, but she was quickly disillusioned.

Of meeting the Harem women, she wrote: “I failed to discover the slightest trace of loveliness in any of them. On the contrary, most of their countenances were pale as ashes, exceedingly disagreeable; fat and globular in figure; in short, so rotund that they gave me the idea of large full moons...as hideous and hag-like as the witches in the opening scene of Macbeth...Their hair and their finger-nails were dyed red with henna; many of them looked like old hags...They had been favourites in their youth.”

Some of her views, which would now be considered extremely racist, did not help her to settle in. She eyed the “disgusting looking negresses with low foreheads, sure sign of cunning, malice, deceit, and treachery.”

A Cairo harem c.1870

Dejected by the absence of her favourite tipples – pale ale and claret – and her bare lodgings, Miss Lott was glad to meet her charge, the Grand Pacha Ibrahim, “a happy, round-faced cherub.” But he was not as cherubic as he seemed, commanding his governess to play at banking, and charging her extortionate interest. At times he could be wilful, even violent:

“...one of the female slaves, whom I afterwards found was his half-sister...offended him. He immediately seized hold of her by both her arms, pinched them most violently, and like a Tiger bit them until he drew blood, after which he put his fingers into the poor little creature's mouth, and tore both sides of it until the blood streamed down her chin like water.” On another occasion a slave was chattering loudly, so “the Prince took up a shovel, full of burning charcoal, and flung it into the poor creature's face.”

Miss Lott despised “the filthy manners, barbarous customs, and disgusting habits of all around me,” which were compounded by the mosquitoes and insects, the heat. Even worse, in her view, she was not treated with proper respect, rather as the servant she was – forced to give fashion shows to the Prince's mother, who laughed at her bonnets, and endured “the mortification of having the German laundry-maid as my companion.” She began writing a diary, which became a “catalogue of annoyances.”

She also felt the ill effects of dining on “dry bead and a little pigeon or mutton” (as she found the Arab food “nauseous”) and living in the Harem, where most of the women smoked large quantities of tobacco and opium. Finally, suffering from a “frightful melancholy,” Miss Lott feared for her sanity.

She tried to take solace in educating the little Prince, but this was a constant battle with Harem authorities: “Sometimes I received orders from the Grand Eunuch, which were issued at the caprice of HH the Princess Espouse...to take the Grand Pacha out walking at six o'clock in the morning...And when once the little Prince was in the gardens, it was exceedingly difficult to get him to return. His will was law...”

A few women in the Hareem were concerned that Miss Lott might be transferred to the Viceroy's bed, and they watched her “with the closest interest...lest HH the Viceroy should bestow upon me...attention too marked.”

The European glamorous view of an Egyptian Harem, by French photographer Hippolyte Arnoux c.1880. Source.

She also observed them with a critical eye: “A most erroneous impression has been drawn by authors as to the manner in which the inmates of the Harems pass their social life. It is certainly true that the greater portion of the day is spent in doubling themselves up on divans....generally [in] dirty, filthy, crumpled muslin dresses...smoking their Tchibouks or cigarettes, and drinking coffee à la Turque, as dark as porter...

...their Highnesses were about and stirring as early as four o'clock in the morning...At the dawn of the day the Princesses partook of coffee and smoked cigarettes; then they remained quite motionless, apparently in a dreamy state...About seven o'clock they received a visit from the Grand Eunuch...The morning toilette began by the slaves bringing into the Grand Pacha's room several small pans, not deeper than soup plates....They only combed their hair (which was full of vermin) once a week, on Thursdays."

After breakfast “Khanum Kaleouns, 'pipes', into which are placed small pills of opium...were handed to them, and each Princess retired to her own apartment.” In the afternoons and evenings they might walk in the gardens or play dominoes. Miss Lott heartily disapproved of the custom of story-telling “the most lascivious tales about women and their immoralities” while “munching away at bonbons, fruit, and most luscious sweetmeats, and smoking cigarettes.”

Finally after less than two years, sick with a “nervous fever” and “troubled” in mind, Miss Lott was close to breakdown and she was forced to resign her post.

Miss Lott's fortunes improved when she returned to England and penned several books about her experiences. The New York Times commented snippily in 1867, “It seems to us that [Miss Lott] has brought home much that is utterly worthless and a great deal that is particularly nasty...the quality known as 'delicacy' has little place is Mrs Lott's composition....Harem life is not a subject about which ordinary readers want to know much.” Happily for Miss Lott, the Times were quite wrong – in fact her books were bestsellers.

There are plenty of reprinted copies of Emmeline Lott's The English Governess in Egypt: Harem Life in Egypt and Constantinople (London, 1865) available on amazon.

Margaret Hervey has written an interesting piece about Ellen Chennells, another English governess to an Egyptian royal at the Guild of Hypatia blog.

Arsenic Century

2010-07-29T22:44:00.015+01:00

While James C Whorton's The Arsenic Century, will leave you feeling slightly queasy it's a fascinating introduction to the history of poison in Victorian England...

Practically everything the Victorians touched was laced with arsenic. If they weren’t accidentally consuming the white powder, easily mistaken for sugar or flour, they were pasting arsenical green wallpaper in their drawing rooms; decking themselves in literally ‘killing’ green fabrics and devouring food adulterated with the poison.

Arsenic Century is a gripping read, moving easily from scientific explanations of arsenic detection to stomach-churning descriptions of arsenic poisonings. Whorton reveals that the true danger of arsenic wasn’t in the hands of poisoners – with only 98 trials for criminal poisoning in the 1840s at the height of the arsenic scare – but greedy manufacturers slipping the poison into ordinary household objects.

Debutantes in green were quite literally 'killingly' beautiful

Although there was clear evidence of the dangers of arsenic there were over 100 million square miles of arsenical wallpaper in British homes by 1858. Young ladies would scrub their faces with Dr Simms Arsenic Complexion Wafers, devour green jellies and then don green crinoline frocks, which contained up to 1000 grains of arsenic. Far worse off than the middle classes killing themselves with luxury green products, were the poor artificial flower makers who suffered terrible health problems from working with – you guessed it – green dyes.

Arsenical food adulteration was a silent killer. Sugar, flour, and beer were all laced with small doses of arsenic, the manufacturers often failing to realise the danger. When one manufacturer experimented with arsenic, 13 babies to died in agony. Their mothers dusted them with violet baby powder containing the poison.

Arsenic can be inhaled or absorbed through the skin and just one hundredth of an ounce is enough to kill. Victorian chemists sold a “penn'orth an ounce” as rat poison – enough to poison 50 people and innumerable rats. While French chemists added dye to their arsenic, the British were slower to catch on. Between 837 and 1839 alone there were 506 accidental arsenic poisonings in England and Wales. One illiterate servant, who dosed a child from a bottle labelled ‘arsenic’ mistaking it for sulphur. Thankfully this also worked the other way: in 1849 a Nottingham tailor thought he had dosed himself with arsenic, only for the doctor hastily pumping his stomach to find flour in place of the deadly powder.

Arsenic has been largely abandoned as a murder weapon and it doesn’t give an added kick to pints of beer or sherbert dips any more. But there are still odd cases of arsenic poisoning – the last one in Britain was in 1992 when Zoora Shah from Bradford poisoned her violent husband and as recently as 2007 a Californian woman was convicted of using arsenic to kill her husband for insurance money.

James C Whorton, The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was Poisoned at Home, Work, and Play (OUP, 2010).

White Slavery in early 20th century America

2010-07-29T22:31:00.107+01:00

I've been informed by Brett from the excellent Photo Sleuth blog that the page is from Fighting the Trade in Young Girls or War on the White Slave Trade (1909) by Ernest A. Bell. Bell focuses on cautionary tales (which use heavily melodramatic language) of American 'white slavery'.

A preview of the book is available on googlebooks and there is also a full version at archive.org.

In this extract, Bell explains how the white slavers operate:

"The systematic traffic in girls from American homes is carried on by male parasites, who live lives of luxury from their gains from this work as procurers and panders. Women are also used to beguile other women...These infamous creatures sometimes go as agents for books, gramophones, or machines...Victims are looked for in railroad depots, and trains are watched for young women travelling alone. General deliveries in post offices are watched where young women call for letters.

Recruiting stations are found in dance halls, in the cities, and amusement parts with drinking places are attachments. Ice cream parlours and fruit stores sometimes serve as spiders' webs for entanglement.

The villanous men engaged in this work assume the guise of friends and sometimes will even talk to parents about getting fine jobs for their girls...Sometimes the procurer professes to have fallen in love and marries his victim and then sells her in the market...

After girls are caught in the net and drawn into a vile resort various plans are made to complete their ruin and hold them in absolute bondage. Their street clothes are taken away, they are not allowed to write letters to their friends, and some are confined under lock and key.

Their owners keep them in debt for clothes, charged for at exorbitant prices, their wages often paid to the parasite who has claims upon them and often these ties of debt and vice so fasten the bonds of slavery that they become broken and desperate. All of these things and many more unprintable details of these cases have been made matter of court record and show that this systematic traffic in American girls is not a fiction..."

Some of their victims, noted by Bell: Helen Chambers, sent to her ruin by drink and a two week absinthe bender; Kitty Schay, whose fondness for dances halls proved her undoing; Estelle Ramon, whose ambitious mother encouraged her to marry an 'artist' (in fact a slaver) rather than a nice steady local admirer.

And Daisy, dying at 19 "after one year of sinful indulgence and one year of lingering death"...?

"We found her one day in March in the venereal ward at Cook County Hospital. She was unconscious, and it was five weeks before she could tell us her story. One of those great blue eyes was sightless. One hand was crippled. Her lower limbs were paralyzed. She was dying - dying of the horrible, loathsome, putrefying disease of the life of shame...the work of but one year of this life...

During that miserable year of sin, she was ill, but recovered sufficiently to resume the service of lust. Then came the break and the long weary months she lay helpless in the resort amidst the revellings of her stronger companions and their consorts...

About two years ago Daisy was left an orphan under peculiarly sad conditions. She resented the solicitude of an only sister - tho' her senior - and as neither was a Christian, the friction grew into a quarrel...

She entered the employ of a man whose family and business standing gave her reason to believe that she could trust him...Then in an hour of need when she was in search of a new place, he directed her to No. --- West Madison Street. He did not take her in, lest he be charged with selling her as a white slave, but left her on the brink of ruin to take the plunge alone...

[There is no mention of what happened next and the scene shifts back to Daisy dying raddled with disease but penitent in the poorhouse].

Her love for Jesus grew so strong that one desire possessed her - that she might live to warn girls of the sure end of the evil way and win them to Christ..."Tell the girls for me always to confide in and obey their mothers," was her common message."

'Daisy' died on 2nd September 1909 in Cook County Poor House.

Heroes & Heroines exhibition

2010-07-29T20:19:00.001+01:00

"Fashion from film" on now at Leeds City Museum

Sequins, gold braiding, flounces and folds, intricate patterns, clever corsetry - all worn by the biggest stars, and all on display now at the Leeds City Museum Heroes & Heroines Exhibition.

The costumes sourced by curators span hundreds of years of sartorial history. There are carefully recreated Elizabethan ruffs, Georgian gowns and daring 1920s designs. Many of the pieces are on loan from the actors who once wore them and most are usually hidden away in private collections or wardrobe departments.

All of the outfits are impressive. Displayed on headless tailors dummies, a discreet caption notes the film and star, but the clothes speak for themselves. Keira Knightley's girly 18th century floral print morning gown from The Duchess stands alongside a sumptuous red evening dress worn by Madonna in Evita.

A special computerised changing room booth allows you to 'try on' outfits by lifting up a card, which transmits a silk confection or debonair jacket on to your image on a screen.

I felt hungry just looking at Nicole Kidman's impossibly corseted (or is she really that thin?) dress from Portrait Of A Lady. Cate Blanchett's equally wasp-waisted dancing dress used in Elizabeth, a lovely soft green and coral pink, was the most eye-catching.

Jane Austen fans can feast their eyes on Mr Darcy and Miss Bennet in the shape of Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle's Pride And Prejudice outfits from the BBC adaptation. Emma Thompson's Sense And Sensibility ball dress is a surprisingly frivolous-looking lilac.

And there are plenty of riding boots and gold buttoned coats for the gentlemen to admire. There's one of Johnny Depp's elegant outfits from The Libertine. A slightly grubby set of clothes worn by Daniel Craig in the Second World War outlaw film, Defiance are on show, as well as his more dashing highwayman costume from Moll Flanders.

My personal favourite is a stunning light blue embroidered coat with multi-coloured panels, from the BBC 90s TV series, The House Of Eliott, and worn by Beatrice (Stella Gonet). I was longing to slip it on and run away with it!

The exhibition will run from 23rd July 2010 to 9th January 2011.

See Leeds City Museum website for more details. The museum is free and exhibition tickets are at the bargain price of £2.50 and £1.50 for concessions.

How to be a Victorian Country Gentlewoman

2010-07-18T13:25:00.004+01:00

Six suggestions for "ladies who have been brought up in a town, but who from circumstances have been induced to reside in the country," from Mrs Loudon, The Lady's Country Companion or, How to Enjoy a Country Life Rationally (1845).

1. Go for walks: "You enjoy in the country the inestimable advantage of being able to procure as much fresh air as you like...you will probably find the beauty of the scenery quite sufficient to interest you; but after a time, as your walks must all necessarily partake of the same character you will want a little variety, and you must make sources of interest...a mole caught and hanging in a trap...a rather small bird with a dead mouse in its beak...a bit of stone that appears composed of various particles.”

2. Polish your badminton skills: "If you do not like battledore and shuttlecock, perhaps you may billiards...Archery is a favourite amusement with ladies in the country, as few exercises display an elegant form to more advantage.”

3. Decorate: Try out "plain white muslin over the silk of the piano and the chiffonier, to save them from the flies" or procure "a few cabinet pictures, which should be characterised by delicacy and beauty."

4. Patronise the poor: "keep up as much as possible the kindly feeling which existed in olden time between the lords of the soil and its cultivators...call frequently on your poorer neighbours...with the ostensible appearance of employing them in some little work, and in reality to see how best you can be serviceable....make enquiries into what your poor neighbours have for dinner...get the daughters taught the best way of cooking food suitable to their rank in life."

Caption reads: "I suppose, like me, you have your troubles?"
"Oh yes mum; just like you."

5. Enjoy a leisurely afternoon...on the swing? “A swing is a very useful adjunct to the amusements of the country, as many grown-up people are as fond of swinging as children.”

6. Take up sketching: "an amusement in which a lady can, without any impropriety indulge.”

Polish your country house manners with Thomas Hill's amusing Essential Handbook of Victorian Etiquette.

Girls of the Woolwich Dusthole

2010-07-17T10:07:00.009+01:00

“There is scarcely a lower class of girls to be found than a girls of the Woolwich 'Dusthole'. The women living and following their dreadful business in this neighbourhood are so degraded that even abandoned men will refuse to accompany them home.

Soldiers are forbidden to enter the place, or to go down the street, on pain of twenty-five days' imprisonment; pickets are stationed at either end to prevent this.

One public house is shut up three or four times a day sometimes for fear of losing the licence through the terrible brawls which take place within. A policeman never goes down this street alone at night – one having died not long ago from injuries received there – but our two [Salvation Army] lasses go unharmed and loved at all hours, spending every other night always upon the streets.

The girls sink to the 'Dusthole' after coming down several grades. There is but one on record who came there with beautiful clothes, and this poor girl, when last seen by the officers, was a pauper in the workhouse infirmary in a wretched condition.

The lowest class of all is the girls who stand at the pier head – these sell themselves literally for a crust of bread and sleep in the streets.”

William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way out (1890) p.55.

Woolwich 'Dusthole' consisted of what is now Woolwich High Street and the area around the station. Although the local authorities had named the surrounding streets after illustrious admirals, due to their proximity to the Dockyard, only the very poorest as well as tramps, criminals prostitutes and dock labourers crammed into the lodging houses and tumble down houses in the area.

Victorian London life - in colour

2010-07-15T11:18:00.002+01:00

I love the London Library. Browsing through the shelves especially in the S. section, which has hundreds of bizarre categories on anything you can think of (S.Embalming, S.Etiquette, S.Devil Worship).

One of my favourite recent finds was Charles Hindley's The true history of Tom and Jerry, or, The day and night scenes of life in London, from the start to the finish (1888) which has these amazing coloured drawings by Cruickshank. I had to take it home and scan it!

Click on the image to see the larger version.

A fancy dress ball East End-style...

Living it up in the gin shop...

And vomiting it out on the pavement later...

The text reads "Life's a jest all things show it" - routes to destruction through "billiards and wine, gaming, dissipation, vice, seduction, poverty, folly, idleness".

There are lots of copies of books with Cruickshank illustrations available on amazon, like an 1867 edition of Dickens' Sketches by Boz illustrative of every-day life and every-day people.

Brenda Dean Paul - 1920s "society drug addict"

2010-07-11T16:05:00.006+01:00

Although Brenda Dean Paul became a famous drug addict, her background was anything but squalid. Born in 1907, her mother was a Belgian pianist and her father, Sir Aubrey Dean Paul. As a teenager she haunted the theatre to “strain her eyes at the leading stars.”

In 1924 she landed a role in a theatre company touring “filthy little” towns where she shouted down jeers and cat-calls. But when her chance came in 1927 Brenda blew her film test in Berlin, because she was more interested in “the intriguing, highly coloured underworld.”

Bright Young Thing?

Back in London she joined the infamous 'Bright Young Thing' set and rubbed sequinned shoulders with Evelyn Waugh and Cecil Beaton at “massed drinking orgies,” never going to bed “before four or five in the morning.” But when she became seriously after an abortion or miscarriage, Brenda grew dependent on morphine, using it as “a barrage between herself and reality, mentally and physically.”

“One of the most discussed young women in London”

Brenda's morphine-medicated hold on reality was growing thin. In February 1931 she made her first court appearance charged with bouncing a cheque. During the next two decades she was in and out of the courts, receiving sentences of up to six months in prison for: possession of dangerous drugs; obtaining goods on false pretences (buying goods on other people's accounts several times); incurring debt by fraud (refusing to pay taxi drivers). Soon she was “one of the most discussed young women in London.”

In 1932 she was at her lowest ebb. As Prisoner 54086 in Holloway she developed bulimia, dropping to five stone. Over the next few years she was in and out of nursing homes and her doctor told the police that she would never be completely cured.

“I want to become an actress, perhaps a great actress”

By 1935 Brenda somehow managed to go stop taking drugs – and her ghost-written memoirs, My First Life, were published, concluding with her ambition to “become an actress, perhaps a great actress.” Sadly, the closest Brenda came to the stage was tottering to Boots the Chemist in Coventry Street, where hertame doctor supplied her with “Cocain Hydrochloride...large quantities of Tincture of Opium...[and] Heroin".

As Brenda's behaviour became increasingly bizarre, she started using false names (Penelope Page, Isolla Hampton, Penelope Paul, J. Beard) “because I am treated as a cross between an imbecile and a crook if I use my own name.” In 1939 she was evicted from her flat because she “walked about naked” and “answered the door in the nude.” In court for buying goods on other people's account in 1940, she wore “a black balaclava helmet,” and protested that she was unable to get work because she “dressed in trousers.”

“there is nothing smart, sensational or clever in the habit...it is not even fashionable"

Partying with artists, tottering about London on high heels, clutching a lapdog, Brenda was notorious. Although she claimed to have worked “as a waitress in a club....a confidential maid to a lady and later a store saleswoman” Brenda's real professional was drug addict.

In the mid-1950s, young artist Michael Wishart watched her sitting in a restaurant, taking a syringe of heroin from her handbag and filling it “from a vase of flowers on the table.” In 1951 she bragged to a reporter that she was cured and preparing to open her own addiction clinic: “there is nothing smart, sensational or clever in the habit and this it is not even fashionable now.”

But she hadn't recovered. In 1952 her former flatmate wrote to the police to tell them that Brenda “augmented her income by allowing sadists to whip her” and had tried to make him take cocaine. Raddled with addiction but still beautiful, “mummified...in her prime,” Brenda finally achieved her ambitions to act when she played the lead in Ronald Firbank's play The Princess Zoubaroff.

“One of the sweetest people you could ever have known”

By the late 50s Brenda was a celebrity in the drug world, receiving “a string of...queer callers at her flat and allegedly “creating addicts” and consuming a “fantastic” amount of cocaine. In 1957 she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in Rome “intoxicated and suffering from neuropsychic depression” with a parcel of cocaine in her possession. The parcel wrapping paper is still in her file at The National Archives.

The police must have been relieved to finally close Brenda's large file when she died in London on 26 July 1959 of natural causes. She was 52. A friend from her Bright Young Thing Days told the newspapers, “She really was one of the sweetest people you could ever have known.”

The National Archives holds a fat Metropolitan Police file on Brenda Dean Paul in series MEPO 3/2579.

Frances Kidder – The last woman to hang in public

2010-07-11T15:56:00.078+01:00

Just before noon on 2 April 1868, executioner William Calcraft went into the condemned woman’s cell at Maidstone prison, accompanied by the prison chaplain. Calcraft swiftly pinioned her, winding a strap around her arms and her body, then binding her wrists. The prison officers marched the woman across the prison yard and outside the main gate, where she was confronted with a crowd of between three and four thousand people – and the gallows.

Only the year before Frances Kidder might have been in another crowd outside the gaol, watching 29-year-old Ann Lawrence swing from the same gallows. Mad with jealousy over her lover’s affairs, Lawrence from Tunbridge Wells, had slashed her four-year-old son’s throat with a bill hook and hacked off two of her lover’s fingers before he fled.

Now reporters scribbled notes, as Frances trembled on the scaffold. The Standard reported: “Before the cap was put over her face she turned...smiled and the last words she uttered were ‘Lord Jesus, forgive me!’" Other papers claimed that Frances “went into hysterics and had to be supported on to the drop by two warders.” The noose was placed around her neck and Frances' body hurtled through the trap door.

Calcraft, an old fashioned executioner, used the short drop method, where prisoners were slowly strangled by the rope. Frances dangled, kicking and choking “before life was extinct.” She was 25, mother to a three-year-old girl.

Barely two months later Parliament passed the Capital Punishment within Prisons Bill, which would have spared her.

Maidstone prison

Frances was born in 1843 to a farming family in New Romney, Kent. She was “of good character” before she met William Kidder, a Hythe greengrocer and became pregnant with his child. She gave birth to their daughter Emma in 1865 just before they married. At some point she discovered that William already had an illegitimate daughter, Louisa, whose mother Eliza Staples, had lived with William as his "housekeeper" and had died a couple of years earlier. Louisa seems to have been a personable child. According to her uncle, she was “very sprightly.” But Frances did not take to her and Louisa told her uncle that Frances hit her, often appearing with “black eyes and [a] bruised body.”

In July 1867 Frances fell from a cart while helping William with his potato dealing. William told the court: “she was in a fit for about four hours and she has been strange in her head ever since.” Whatever the state of her health within a few weeks Frances’s resentment of her step-daughter had taken a sinister turn.

On 24 August 1867 Frances took Louisa and Emma to visit her parents in New Romney. Frances was “low spirited” and ate little, complaining to a neighbour: “I mean to get rid of that bitch Kidder’s child. I hate the sight of her because she is always making mischief...I do not like other people’s bastards.”

The next day Frances’s parents and sister were out of the house, and Frances took Louisa out for a walk. A passerby noticed the pair walking together, Louisa “very shabbily dressed...two or three yards behind” Frances. When Frances and Louisa failed to return home, the family searched for her. A few hours later Frances stumbled into the house, her clothes “very wet and dirty." She refused to say where Louisa was, hitting William and swearing at him. Fearing the worst they called the local constable.

Eventually Frances revealed where Louisa was. Aspinall described what he found: “It was a clear star lit night and we were furnished with lamps. There was a very heavy dew on the grass. Someone noticed something white in the ditch...I threw my light in that directions...it was the body. She was lying on her back, her head was under the water.”

Louisa had drowned in just one foot of water in the ditch below Cobb’s Bridge, in the Romney Marsh. There were no marks on her body. Frances was taken before the magistrates and remanded in custody to appear at the Kent Spring Assizes at Maidstone. She protested her innocence, claiming "the child tumbled into the ditch and she went in after her.” At Maidstone prison, the chaplain, Reverend Frazer spent a great deal of time with her and helped her to read the Bible.

After Frances's execution, women were execution inside the prison walls. Margaret Waters’s death is depicted in the Illustrated Police News on 15th October 1870.

Finally on 12 March 1868 Frances was tried at the Maidstone Assizes. William Kidder had understandably refused to pay for her defence, so a court-appointed barrister defended her. He argued that some of the witnesses had exaggerated in light of Louisa’s death and the lack of marks on Louisa’s body. Frances stuck to the explanation that “two horses frightened us into a ditch...I went in after her and tried to get her out.” But after brief deliberation, the jury found her guilty.

Although sympathetic locals petitioned the Home Secretary, Frances’s fate was sealed and she was sentenced to be publicly executed. Awaiting her fate Frances had “has fits of ill-temper,” and was “very sullen,” telling people she was “ill-used.”

William eventually visited her, but as he was now living with her 17-year-old sister, Adelaide it was not an easy reconciliation. Frances "taunted" William and "became dreadfully excited. Her shrieks were painful to hear.” Afterwards William headed to “a public house near the goal, with the prisoner’s own child, joking with the people about within view of the scaffold, upon which the life of his wretched wife was within a few hours to be sacrificed.”

Despite the scandal William stayed on in Hythe. The 1881 census shows that he was living with 16-year-old Emma at 1 Prospect Place. In 1891 Emma married and ten years later, at 74, William was living alone, still working as a greengrocer. He died in 1908.

This piece was researched from contemporary newspaper reports and the original depositions used in Frances’s case, which in series ASSI 36/14 at The National Archives.

Cooking for the working woman - 1930s style

2010-07-11T15:55:00.004+01:00

I came across this fabulously retro 30s cookbook in the library:
Mrs. Allen on cooking-menus-service.

1) A business woman can rustle up a breakfast of "fruit, fried tomatoes and bacon, toast, coffee" in half an hour. "Paper dishes and doilies help out - so does electrical equipment."

2) If you're too busy get the kids in the kitchen. "It's never too soon to begin to train the little home partners," says Ida.

3) Get creative. Who doesn't love a "jellied vegetable salad, with lemon baskets filled with whipped cream mayonaise"?

4) Long lunches are for sissies - office cafeterias should be about as comfortable as a battery chicken shed.

5) Christmas dinner should be served in a maid's costume

6) "French pastries any woman can make."

7) Frozen salads are...a good thing?

8) Working mothers don't have time to make packed lunches. "When 'mother' steps aside the school has to step in."

9) But every mother should be able to make a birthday cake (giving your child a massive knife is optional).

Who was Ida?
Ida Bailey Allen (1885-1973) was the American Delia of the 1920s and 30s. She was a 'name' with a magazine, columns, books, and radio cooking show (The National Radio Homemaker’s Club), as media savvy as an modern day celeb chef. She allowed companies like Pillsbury Flour, Sunshine Biscuits and Coca Cola to use her name. One in three American households were said to own a copy of one of her books.

British Pathe movies

2010-07-11T10:34:00.001+01:00

I recently discovered the amazing (and free) British Pathe online film archive. From public information films (I wish they screened 'Don't Deprive Others More Worthy of Bus Seats' on my commute) to bizarre slices of social history - boxing female 'amazons' in the 1920s to university rag week 1940s-style.

If you missed out on 60s Bohemian dances the first time round you can attend the 'Bohemian Special’ held on Sat 7 May 1960 at the Tollington Park Dance Club, North London, in Bohemian Dancers (1960).

Teenage couples sip bottles of orangeade and jive sedately – girls wear sunglasses, top hats and trilbys, petticoats and frilly bloomers; boys in suits and winkle-pickers. One girl has a large heart-shaped patch on the seat of her trousers with “Stuck On You” scrawled on a picture of Elvis Presley.

"Bohemian dancing it's called, and these kids start dressing up where the 'teds' and 'weirdies' left off” drawls the commentator. “The idea is to look like nothing on earth - even if it means looking like a nightmare.”

Other favourites include: sartorial snippets like Ship Fashions (1961) where models in outlandish beehives and evening dresses stroll around the SS Oriana.

And just like the wave of home movies posted on Youtube, there’s the downright weird. In Cookie Dolls (1961), Vina, a young Nottinghamshire housewife shows off her hobby - making cookie dolls of stars like Brigitte Bardot, Princess Margaret and Elvis. "Vina manages to do all this in what little spare time she has between running the home and bringing up three youngsters,” says the voice-over.

Check these and hundreds more out at www.britishpathe.com.