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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
When Tessa Blackstone moved in to 2 Gower Street, London, she was delighted to discover that a previous tenant had been Millicent Garrett Fawcett, the suffragist leader who dedicated her life to securing women's right to vote. But Tessa could not find a recent biography of this impressive woman, as the historical narrative favoured the militant suffragettes over the suffragists, who campaigned within the law and disapproved of violence. Some years later, Tessa resolved to fix the omission herself and began to uncover Millicent's life story. Growing up in a large family in Suffolk, Millicent and her sisters challenged Victorian views about the role of women in their pursuit of education, employment and enfranchisement. Getting married at twenty did not deter Millicent from becoming a writer and feminist campaigner. Her husband Henry Fawcett, a blind academic and Liberal politician, shared her views and encouraged her. She was devastated by his early death, but her grit and determination kept her going. Over many decades, she battled against indifference and prejudice and was successful in not only winning women the vote but also fighting for improvements in their educational opportunities and employment prospects. Brimming with charming anecdotes about Millicent's life from cradle to grave, this is the definitive biography of an extraordinary activist and campaigner who changed Britain's political landscape for ever.
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i “A must-read for anyone interested in the long road towards equality for women. Millicent Fawcett comes across as remarkable in her fight for a better deal for women on many fronts. Clever, determined and energetic, she was a feminist whose battles are still relevant today.”
Harriet Harman, chair of the Fawcett Society and former Leader of the House of Commons
“A lively and readable account of the rich and varied life of a leader whose gender shut her out of mainstream politics. Today, it seems extraordinary that until 1918, not only were women barred from being MPs – they could not even vote. Undaunted by the power and status of Prime Ministers, Millicent Fawcett led a fifty-year campaign to persuade them to change their minds, and Tessa Blackstone explores this fascinating story with verve.”
David Blunkett, former Home Secretary
“A must-read for anyone curious about a great feminist activist. Tessa Blackstone’s admiration and respect for Millicent Garrett Fawcett have resulted in an intimate, engaged biography, showing how one woman can change the world.”
Professor Joanna Bourke, Birkbeck, University of London
“Never forget how hard-fought women’s rights have been. This excellent biography is a reminder that all progress begins with a minority campaign regarded as eccentric at the time but which is only later seen as heroic.”
Polly Toynbee, journalist and authorii
“A wonderfully readable account of a seminal period in British protest history, when it was proved that it does not take violence to win an argument.”
Simon Jenkins, journalist and author
“No one is in a better position than Baroness Blackstone to revisit the life and work of Millicent Fawcett, Britain’s most famous fighter for women’s suffrage. This carefully and compassionately written biography reveals a woman who campaigned fiercely and tirelessly for a wide range of emancipatory causes for over half a century. Above all, the book brings Fawcett to life as a person enmeshed in a network of close and supportive family relationships, and as a key member of those social and political circles that helped to bring (and sometimes drag) Victorian society into the modern age.”
Ann Oakley, author of Forgotten Wives: HowWomen GetWrittenOutofHistory
“Tessa Blackstone’s fascinating biography of Millicent Fawcett is both scholarly and highly engaging. It provides an insight into not only the multifaceted life of this extraordinary campaigner for women’s rights but also the hugely talented and influential family of which she was part and the social and political times in which she played a leading role.”
Helene Hayman, former Lord Speaker
iii
Contents
Preface
When I was appointed to be the Master of Birkbeck College in the late 1980s, I did not realise at first that with the job came a ‘tied cottage’. The college leased from the University of London 2 Gower Street as a residence for the master. As soon as I could, I arranged to go and see it. I discovered a tall, white, stuccoed house at the south end of Gower Street, close to Bedford Square, with an English Heritage blue plaque on it reading:
Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), pioneer of women’s suffrage, lived and died here.
Nobody had told me that for forty-four years, the great campaigner for women to be able to vote had lived in the house which was about to become my home. I was delighted. For the next ten years, while I was the Master of Birkbeck, I told anyone who would listen what an honour it was to live in the place from which the campaign for women’s suffrage had been fought for four decades.
The house was on five floors, with a large basement that led into a garden at the back, and a ground floor, which I used for college viiidinners and seminars. I lived in the top two floors. However, my study was at the back on the first floor in a room with a beautiful painted ceiling, which I later discovered had been designed and painted by Millicent’s sister Agnes and her cousin Rhoda. I imagined that Millicent might well have worked there too. I looked for a recent biography to read more about her. None had been published since the 1930s and I was tempted to write one myself.
It was around this time that I also became aware that Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Britain’s first female doctor, was Millicent’s sister. I was curious about what had led these unusual sisters to be pioneers and campaigners for change, but many other commitments at that time prevented me from investigating their backgrounds. It was not until the unveiling of the statue of Millicent in Parliament Square in 2018, which marked the 100th anniversary of the first Act allowing some women to vote in general elections, that I thought again about writing her story. As I read about her life and her wider interests beyond women and suffrage, some of which I shared with her, such as higher education and the employment of women, I realised how much of what she had fought for beyond votes for women is still relevant today. But what triggered my interest in the first place was that for nearly ten years, I lived in what had been her home.
Bloomsbury was her London home as well as mine, but her family home was in Aldeburgh, a small town on the Suffolk coast, and Millicent stayed connected to it throughout her life. I too became linked to Suffolk. In the early 1980s, I bought a small cottage in the village of Bures, near Sudbury, as a place to escape from London and to allow me to walk in the Stour Valley. Unlike Millicent, I was not born in Suffolk, but it has become more important to me than my childhood home in Hertfordshire.ix
My own childhood, growing up in a middle-class family in the Home Counties, had some similarities to Millicent’s. Independence was encouraged and the expectations of my parents for their daughters were only a little different to the expectations they had for their sons. I was pushed to do well at school and to take my education seriously, as well as being sent off for summer holidays away from my parents. In my teens in the 1950s, I became aware of my mother’s restlessness and frustration with the restrictions of marriage and motherhood on women’s opportunities, but I did not embrace the concept of feminism nor read any of the literature about it, yet I almost subconsciously became a feminist. I started to believe that there should be no barriers to women joining the professions, participating in politics and travelling the world. I knew nothing about the young Millicent Garrett, but had I done so, I would have identified strongly with her ambitions and applauded her for her determination to break down barriers and to promote the rights of women. The strength of her convictions and her persistence in pursuing her goals would have drawn me to her then, as it does now.
In writing this book, I have aimed to reach readers who know little about Millicent but might be inspired by her as I have been, as well as those interested in what it was in her family background, in her education and in her early marriage which propelled Milly, as she was known by her relations, into being a lifelong feminist campaigner. It is also the story of a long, slow, arduous campaign mounted against indifference and prejudice, which was ultimately successful in enfranchising women. Millicent’s life also demonstrates that it is possible to have a hinterland beyond politics and policy-making and to know how to enjoy life too. Although honourable, intelligent and astute, she sometimes made mistakes and x pursued causes which might have better been left alone, but she was all the more interesting because she was not always a paragon of virtue.
In 2028, the centenary of all women being able to vote will be held. The story I tell here will provide the context for a celebration, which should take place to remind us of what it took to secure this victory. Those who fought so hard for it should not be forgotten, so I hope this book will help to put Millicent Garrett Fawcett on the centre stage where she belongs.
Tessa Blackstone
September 2024
1
Family Life in Aldeburgh
In the early nineteenth century, the youngest sons of moderately successful, small manufacturers or tradesmen usually had to seek a living outside the family firm. Commonly, the eldest brother inherited a business which was not large enough to accommodate several others. Newson Garrett, born in 1812, was the third son of Richard Garrett, who owned a small works at Leiston in East Suffolk. It manufactured agricultural machinery and implements needed by farmers in East Anglia. Newson’s oldest brother, also called Richard, inherited the firm; his middle brother, Balls, had been apprenticed as an ironmonger; Newson had to seek his fortune elsewhere. He went to London. Unlike many others who had taken this route, he had a contact who might be able to help and guide him. In 1828, his brother Richard had married Elizabeth, the elder daughter of John Dunnell, who came from a family of Suffolk smallholders but had moved to London, where Dunnell prospered as an innkeeper, owning more than one inn as well as pawnbroking shops. Newson was welcomed by Dunnell at the Beehive Inn in Crawford Street in Marylebone, as his son-in-law’s brother and a Suffolk man.
2Although Newson had been to school and could read and write, he had not been a studious pupil, nor had he acquired any training after he left school. However, he did not lack ambition and was confident and enthusiastic about his various schemes and how he might earn his living. His ebullience and energy impressed Dunnell and endeared him to his younger daughter, Louisa. Newson was twenty-two years old, blue-eyed, fair-haired and unusually handsome. Louisa was twenty years old and, in spite of her gender, better educated than Newson, although where she acquired her neat hand- and letter-writing skills is not clear. She was very small and slight, probably less than five feet tall. Although shy, she was intelligent and resourceful and was drawn to a man brimming with ideas and determination. The pair fell in love and Newson was given Dunnell’s consent to marry Louisa.
So it was that two brothers married two sisters, six years apart, but at the same church, St Mary’s in Bryanston Place. Whereas the older of the two couples returned to Suffolk after their wedding, Newson and Louisa stayed in London. They settled in Whitechapel at 1 Commercial Road, where Dunnell owned a pawnbroker’s shop. Newson ran it for the next four years. To be a pawnbroker was not an especially auspicious beginning, but it provided a secure base for the young couple. There was plenty of business in a neighbourhood where poverty was rife. The poor brought their worldly goods in exchange for cash to keep them going for a few days until they could be redeemed. The shop’s site was close to the Thames and thieves often came up from the river to pawnshops to dispose of their swag, which they had stolen or smuggled.
Just under a year after their marriage, Louisa gave birth to her first child, a girl who they called Louisa too, although perhaps to distinguish her from her mother, she became known as Louie. 3Sixteen months later, in June 1836, she had a second daughter, who was christened Elizabeth at the great Hawksmoor church St George-in-the-East. Only seventeen months passed before a third child was born in November 1837. This time it was a boy, who they named Dunnell Newson. He lived for only six months, dying the following May. Louisa was consumed with grief and prayed that she could die too. She never forgot the enormity of her loss, despite the many children who were to follow. Perhaps she felt the loss so keenly because he was her firstborn son. However, it was not long before she had another son in 1839, simply reversing the names of the baby who had died to Newson Dunnell. By the time he was born and christened in another great church, St Martin-in-the-Fields, the family had moved.
While Louisa’s hard work and skills as a homemaker had created a comfortable, warm and cosy home for her family, the junction of Commercial Road and Whitechapel High Street was far from salubrious. The noise of the iron-bound wheels of the drays carrying sugar from the West India Docks along the granite-paved roads was incessant. The raw sugar was boiled in the sooty buildings which surrounded the Garretts’ home; and the atmosphere was polluted by sulphurous smoke. There was nowhere outside to take the little children, no park where they could toddle and no trees where they could watch the wind rustle their branches. The move to a much larger pawnshop and silversmiths in Long Acre must have been a welcome opportunity to improve their circumstances. It was a big step up from Whitechapel. St James’s Park was within reach and St Martin’s Lane was far from the industrial slum of the Commercial Road. Instead of watching drays of raw sugar passing, they could observe carts from the country on the way to Covent Garden Market.
4Although Newson had moved to managing a larger enterprise by adding silversmith as well as pawnbroker after his name, he had plans for a business with more potential. Moreover, he was not a Londoner and did not want to settle there permanently. His wish was to return to his native Suffolk. After the birth in 1840 of another son, Edmund, Newson had a family of four children to support. The death of his father in 1837 had resulted in a small inheritance, though the bulk of his father’s estate had gone to his older brother and was needed for the works at Leiston to flourish. In addition, Newson had some savings and some money his wife had been given by her father. With these funds, he bought corn and coal warehouses at Snape, a few miles inland from Aldeburgh, a small town on the coast that he would have been familiar with when he grew up in nearby Leiston.
For a family of six, with all their possessions, the easiest way to travel to Aldeburgh from London in 1841 was to go by sea. The journey took them into the North Sea up the Suffolk coast, then a further six miles up the River Alde, anchoring at Slaughden Quay, where they were ferried ashore in open boats. They had still not reached their destination. The final part of their journey involved loading all their baggage and furniture into carts, climbing in themselves and trundling down a track from the harbour into Aldeburgh itself. According to the 1841 census, the population was 1,557. As such, Aldeburgh was little more than a large village. However, it was big enough to have two inns to accommodate tourists, especially those in ailing health who came to benefit from its pure sea air and its quiet environment. Those who could not get into one of the inns could rent rooms in as many as fifty houses offering lodgings. Many of Aldeburgh’s inhabitants made their living from fishing and were the Garretts not too tired from their long and arduous 5journey on a Suffolk hoy, they would have noticed fishermen’s boats and nets along the beach. They would have seen three windmills higher up above the town, a Martello tower and a small moot hall, which dated back to the Tudors. Much of the town’s housing was in two parallel streets which ran along the coast.
The family soon moved into a Georgian house, the Uplands, where, nearly a century earlier, the poet George Crabbe had served his apprenticeship as an apothecary. Their new home compared well with the houses of most of their neighbours and looked out onto the embattled square tower of the flint parish church of St Peter and St Paul. Initially, it was large enough to accommodate a growing family, with many eighteenth-century panelled rooms. The walled garden had mulberry, quince and medlar trees to supply the family with fruit for jam-making. After their arrival at the Uplands, Louisa’s pregnancies followed in rapid succession. Alice was born in 1842. Next came two more daughters, Agnes in 1845 and Millicent in 1847, and then a son, Samuel, in 1850. The size of the family, not untypical in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, no doubt put some pressure on Newson and Louisa to seek a bigger house with more space for eight children. Newson’s solution was to build a much larger, grander house on land that he purchased overlooking the town. To do so required business success to pay for the construction and then the maintenance of this bigger property.
The warehouses at Snape became the basis for a successful business transporting raw materials, mostly coal and corn, up and down the east coast between Newcastle and London. The boats did not return empty to Snape: they came back from London laden with coal and lime picked up on the journey along the Thames Estuary. Newson soon began to diversify. He established a boat-building yard at Snape to augment his fleet of sailing boats, later adding 6a fleet of barges. His lack of education and training was no impediment to his exploitation of new opportunities to broaden his business. He soon recognised that he could make more money from higher-value cargo. To do so, he built a maltings at Snape, turning barley into malt, for which there was a growing demand in the burgeoning brewing industry. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the consumption of beer had grown. More people could afford it and scientific improvements in brewing had improved both the supply and the quality of beer. Newson’s father-in-law was a publican and other members of his wider family made their living from beer. His older brother Richard had also diversified into brewing, owning a brewery in Camden Town. Since competing successfully with his brother was an important motivation in Newson’s entrepreneurial projects, never wanting to be outdone by him, Newson followed him into brewing in partnership with another established London brewer.
The production of malt and beer were linked, but Newson branched out into another enterprise, having bought a brickyard. He built terraces in Aldeburgh, having designed them himself, so that he owned a number of houses as well as a dozen ships, which constituted half the ships in the port. His largest construction project was to double the size of the maltings at Snape in a little over ten years from the mid-1840s until 1856. He used the red bricks from his own brickyard. The Snape buildings became the largest construction for many miles and could be seen from a considerable distance across the flat Suffolk landscape. By 1850, he had also been appointed agent for Lloyds, carrying out the work associated with this role in his counting house. He was forceful, argumentative and driven. Anyone who stood in his way learnt quickly that he would not give up. After a quarrel with his brother, he did not speak to 7him again for many years despite the fact that Richard was married to his wife’s sister, and the sisters remained in touch with each other, as did the cousins.
The new property Newson built for himself and his family was named Alde House. It was no more than half a mile from their first home opposite the church and it looked over the town from the west. It had a large conservatory, many rooms and extensive grounds. Two more children were born there: Josephine in 1853 and George in 1854. Louisa had borne eleven children between 1835 and 1854, from the age of twenty-one until she was forty-one. Her tiny build did not seem to be a hindrance. Although there is no evidence that she was worn out by a family of this size, nor that she suffered ill health, she must have been tired at the end of each day by the sheer physical demands a family of this size made on her. She was deeply religious and sustained by her evangelical Christianity. She regularly read the Bible and Charles Spurgeon’s sermons, which were published every week. Though central to her life, she did not seem to have imposed her faith on her children in a forceful or relentless way. The family went to church together on Sundays and said grace at mealtimes like most middle-class Victorians. She and her husband, along with some of the children, are buried in the family plot in the churchyard. Inside the church, there is a large plaque commemorating Newson, placed there by his children after his death in 1893. The dedication says:
His Life from early Manhood was spent at Aldeburgh
Where for upwards of Half a Century
He took a Leading Part
In All that Concerned the Welfare of the Town.
GOD GAVE HIM LARGENESS OF HEART.
8Louisa, who outlived him by a decade, dying in 1903 at the age of eighty-nine, is not commemorated by a plaque in the church where she worshipped. ‘Largeness of heart’ would have been an apt description of her too. Moreover, much of the work Newson did both as a successful businessman and as a leading figure in the Aldeburgh community would have been impossible without her dedicated support and without her skills as the manager and organiser of a large household. She, like so many of her peers, received no formal recognition for what she did to assist her husband’s achievements, and we know far less about her than about him. However, when her daughter Millicent was a young married woman, she said of her mother that she would have made ‘a very capable organiser of a big business’. Gentle as Louisa was, it was also Millicent’s view that she was a stronger personality than the argumentative and assertive Newson. If she was publicly in his shadow, privately she was immensely influential and helped to defuse some of his conflicts with those who crossed him in the many projects he pursued as an important figure in Aldeburgh. At Christmas, she sent turkeys as presents to neighbours and friends. When Newson remonstrated that he had had a row with one of the people on her list, she told him it did not matter, she was sending the turkey anyway. This suggests that she could do what she thought was right without him necessarily preventing her. In her home, she was in charge of buying the provisions they needed and keeping careful accounts of what she spent. She wrote letters regularly to her children when they grew up and left home, as well as composing and writing letters for her husband. When her children were young, she taught them to read and write. When they were older, tutors were employed to teach her sons and a governess joined the household to teach her daughters.9
How she found the time to do everything she took on is not clear. There were both inside and outside servants, but it was Louisa’s responsibility to supervise them. There is also little evidence that the children were handed over completely to nannies and nursemaids, as happened so frequently in richer and more aristocratic families. Washing, dressing and feeding ten children with small gaps in age between them was no small task, even with the help of a nursemaid. Organising their time and teaching them, settling their quarrels and tending to them when they were ill would have been taxing too. She may have had some help from her elder daughters with the care of the younger children. There is some evidence of this in their late teens, when supporting her was perceived to be a role for them.
The census of 1851 shows that seven of their eight children were living with them, ranging from Louie aged sixteen years to four-month-old Samuel. Their oldest son was presumably away at school. A governess and just three servants are listed, none of whom were nursemaids. By the 1861 census, when the older children had left home or were away at school, the same governess is still a member of the household, along with a cook and three other servants, two of whom are described as housemaids. The outside servants such as the coachman, grooms and gardeners were not listed in the census as they did not live in, so we do not know how many there were. Also unlisted were those who worked under Louisa’s supervision in the family dairy, as they lived outside the household too.
Louisa was the centre of all that happened in the house. As well as ensuring that provisions were purchased, she oversaw the many activities which kept such a large family going. Everyday cooking and baking and bringing food to the table required planning. There was a dairy to run and a laundry to supervise, where masses of clothes and bed linen had to be washed and ironed. Garden 10produce had to be picked and transport arranged for the family on outings and visits in the neighbourhood and beyond. When money was short, as sometimes happened when one of Newson’s business ventures failed, Louisa had to cut back spending and run a more austere family regime until financial security was restored. Her children would have observed how important she was as a lynchpin in all that took place in the family. It may well have contributed to their feminism as they grew older. They must have perceived too the constraints on her life and, when they became adults, wanted something different for themselves.
A further complication for Louisa followed from the decision that the family should spend the winter months five miles away in Snape from the mid-1850s. A house was built at Snape Bridge to accommodate the family from late October to early May. During the winter, the process of turning the stored barley into malt took place. The malt was then shipped to London from Snape. While this happened, it was more convenient for Newson to be based in Snape, however inconvenienced his wife was by moving backwards and forwards. It is not clear for how long this division of the year between Aldeburgh and Snape lasted.
Louisa’s organisational skills allowed Newson time and space to pursue a public role as a leading figure in Aldeburgh on top of his commercial activities. He was public-spirited and wanted the community to flourish. It was easy to obtain a formal position in the borough, which had not been affected by the local government reform in the 1830s and therefore the Aldeburgh Corporation remained a self-elected group of men. Newson paid a fee of £5 to purchase his election as a burgess. His feuds were many and public. He was impatient and forceful in his determination to get his own way. One of his main antagonists was the rector of Aldeburgh, who 11was also the bailiff and capital burgess. During especially heated battles with him, Newson blocked his own family from attending the church on a Sunday and sent them down the hill to the Dissenters’ Union Chapel instead. This amused the children, as they were treated with deference in this humbler place of worship.
A number of Newson Garrett’s commercial initiatives had both direct and indirect benefits for the town and its citizens. He was an innovator and a progressive. Millicent, many years later, said of her father, ‘Everything new appealed to him. He welcomed railways with both hands, though they destroyed his carrying trade at Aldeburgh.’ In 1859, he insisted that the East Suffolk railway opened a branch line from Saxmundham, a few miles to the north-west, to Snape. His brother and greatest rival, Richard, promoted another branch line to Aldeburgh from Woodbridge. A railway station in the town opened it up to visitors and helped the development of the tourist trade. The terraces Newson built provided lodgings for visitors, who wanted to benefit from the sea air. In the mid-1850s, with two or three other local landowners, Newson formed the Aldeburgh Gas Light Company; and in 1870, the Aldeburgh Waterworks Company Ltd. His vision was to modernise living conditions, greatly improving the quality of life of both residents and visitors. In the 1880s, he formed the Aldeburgh Land Company Ltd, an umbrella body which promoted both the acquisitions of leases and the purchase of land and buildings. His immediate family and other relatives became shareholders in all these companies. Embracing change and believing in the benefits it could bring was a feature in the Garrett sisters’ lives as they grew up. It was later manifested in various ways when they campaigned for reforms.
In spite of the town’s expansion and its more diverse economy, which accompanied the growth, fishing remained central to 12Aldeburgh’s economic activity. Fishing was a dangerous occupation on an exposed North Sea coast, subject to sudden storms when boats could be overturned or driven onto the rocks. A lookout in the form of a slender tower stood on the edge of the beach to spot vessels in danger, and the lives of the fishermen received some protection from the lifeboat which went out into rough seas to rescue those in danger of drowning. The coastguard’s gun would bring the crew running from their various occupations to launch the lifeboat. Newson was the local chairman of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) and there are records of him personally taking part in rescues when he went into the water waist-deep to be part of the human chain along a rope that was formed to rescue the shipwrecked fishermen one by one. According to Millicent, he received ‘official thanks from the RNLI engrossed on vellum’ for what he had done. He was prepared to risk his life for the seamen with whom he formed a close bond.
He loved the sea and wanted to pass this on to his children by taking them out in his boats. An anecdote is told about one of the family’s dogs retching on one of these outings, as the boat lurched from one side to the other in the swell. Newson had always said that seasickness was an affectation. Millicent quotes him as saying, ‘God rest my soul, look at that poor thing; then it is not an affectation after all.’ Millicent also tells a story about being taken out on the lifeboat itself. After the gun had been fired for a practice run, she went down to the beach holding her father’s hand. When invited to join the crew on the boat, her father said he could not as he had his small daughter with him. The sailor replied, ‘Little miss would like to come too, Sir.’ So they set off together, putting on cork jackets to help them stay afloat if they capsized. Though they did not fall into the water, the sea broke over them soaking Milly. 13This is an early example of how Newson exposed his children to adventure rather than pampering them and protecting them from possibly risky experiences.
The little seaside town in which the Garrett children grew up might justly be described as a backwater. Despite this, their lives were enriched by the freedom they were given to explore their environment and to engage with life in the town and its surroundings. Newson loved horses and either rode them or drove them to go from place to place. As soon as they were old enough, the children were put onto the backs of Shetland ponies and taught to ride. Newson then proudly took them out as a family on horseback, giving them the opportunity to become confident in the saddle and to explore more distant areas that could not be reached easily on foot. In the winter, they learnt to skate and raced along the salt marshes. In the summer, they went sailing on the sea, although there is no record of them learning to swim in the sea or even in the River Alde. Along with physical activities, which must have contributed to their good health and their energy, the children also got to know the local people with whom they were free to talk and to acquire an understanding of how they lived.
East Suffolk was a relatively poor part of East Anglia and there were few members of the gentry in the town with whom the children could mix. The Garretts were well known for several generations for the success of the iron works at Leiston, which Newson’s brother Richard expanded with the manufacture of more advanced machinery which improved agricultural productivity. However, Newson was a self-made man who acquired his wealth through his own drive and inventiveness. As such, in the class-conscious era of mid-Victorian Britain, he was not likely to socialise with the two or three families Millicent identified as belonging to the ‘aristocracy’. 14She described them as being ‘aloof from people of the town’ and not making ‘the smallest impression on our lives’, probably in part because they were often absent as they also had properties elsewhere. In her memoirs, she identifies one or two individuals who became family friends, such as Percy Metcalf and his wife. He was a shipbuilder from Tyneside who was contracted by her father to build some ships at Snape. She singles him out because of his passion for music, ‘It was he who introduced us to the great world of music – Bach, Mozart and Handel.’ This friendship led to the Garrett sisters’ lifelong love of classical music.
There was no barrier put up by their parents to the Garrett children making friendly contacts with fishermen and their families, with men who worked for Newson and their wives and with local characters such as Bob Wilson, the old seaman who sat in the tower as a ‘look-out man’. These men and women entertained and amused them. The children’s lives were not restricted by snobbery. They acquired an understanding of how people struggled to survive on low incomes, of their punishing long hours and of the strength of body and mind they needed in the unrelenting demands of their arduous jobs.
Millicent is the best source on these contacts as she describes them in the first two chapters of her memoir. There is no reference to the housemaids who worked for her mother, but she describes with warmth and admiration a couple who spent many years in her parents’ service. Barham was the carriage driver, groom and gardener who also looked after the pigs and turned them into bacon. On Sundays, Barham’s only day of rest, he walked three miles there and back to a Dissenters’ chapel where he worshipped. In spite of her devout mother, religion never featured much in Millicent’s later life, so her best explanation for this was that he was an out-and-out 15outdoor man who loved the walk through gorse and heather with the sea shining in the distance. The Garrett children also walked and rode through this landscape and, like music, walking was one of the pleasures they enjoyed throughout their lives.
Millicent’s book includes a long anecdote about Barham which reveals another aspect of the sisters’ lives. One of Barham’s tasks was to drive the children in the family carriage when they were visiting somewhere too far away to walk. On one occasion, he took Agnes and Millicent to a ball in Saxmundham, eight miles from Aldeburgh. On the way back, the carriage overturned when the horses wandered off the road and went up a bank. Barham guarded the carriage and its contents, but the girls had no other option than to walk two miles home at night in their satin slippers. Their father was appalled. He accused Barham of being drunk or having fallen asleep, which he indignantly denied. Newson was unconvinced and unforgiving, so Barham was sacked. Within a few days, however, he was back in his job after an intervention from Mrs Barham, who persuaded him to admit he was asleep. The sisters were delighted and none the worse for their long walk at night.
Mrs Barham ran their mother’s dairy. Millicent described her as remarkable. She and her sisters visited her often so that they could enjoy conversations with her and the amusing anecdotes she recounted. She claimed they never left the company of Mrs Barham without coming back with something worth remembering. Millicent recognised that although uneducated, Mrs Barham was clever, with many skills as well as a command over those she was close to, including her husband. Amongst her other achievements was designing and making elaborate quilts in silk. She gave one to all six of the Garrett sisters. Relationships with women like Mrs Barham influenced them and developed their high regard for working-class 16women. They were later able to empathise with them in ways most middle-class Victorian women found difficult. In Jo Manton’s biography of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, she suggests that from these relationships Elizabeth learnt an ‘unaffected simplicity which she kept all through her life’.
Invitations to balls appeared to be part of the girls’ social life, where they were able to meet the other young people from families who could afford to entertain in this way. Thus, in spite of their large family and its closeness, they were not confined to interacting with their siblings alone. They mixed more widely and in the absence of their parents.
The girls were also exposed to the rough and tumble of local small-town politics by their father, who talked openly about both friends and foes. When he went out to visit a new house that was being built, he sometimes took one of his daughters with him. He clearly enjoyed their company and was as likely to invite one of them to join him as his sons. Elizabeth accompanied him in an open dog cart when he travelled to markets in the region to buy corn and barley. After women were given the vote in local elections, Newson sent his daughters, who were still living at home, to canvass female voters. By then, he had changed his allegiance from Conservative to Liberal, embracing more progressive values. Although there is little evidence that he was involved in national politics, he read the newspapers and followed events such as the Crimean War. Milly remembers holding his hand while he tried to persuade the leaders of the beachmen in Aldeburgh to volunteer for the navy. Although only six years old, she listened to and absorbed the argument about it. A couple of years later, Newson came into breakfast waving a newspaper, calling to his children, ‘Heads up and shoulders down, Sebastopol is taken.’17
His daughters were no more confined to the nursery than his sons. They were encouraged to be active and they were free to roam. What kind of diet they had is not clear, but under Louisa’s careful management of the kitchen and the dairy and produce from the gardens and orchards, it is likely that they were well-fed. The physical exercise they took in the bracing weather along the Suffolk coast contributed to their good health. In old age, Elizabeth was to say that in seventy years, she had never suffered from a headache.
Newson and Louisa were temperamentally different and they each got on with their daily lives independently, but they were devoted to each other. What they shared was great energy and the determination to succeed in their separate spheres. Their children’s environment, and perhaps their genes too, would have disposed them to be persistent and determined and to have the ability to work hard for long hours without being totally drained of energy. The children were also shaped by the model of a deeply happy marriage, which they were able to replicate in their own lives. They observed their mother’s orderliness, sense of duty, calmness and morality; and their father’s inventiveness and refusal to take no for an answer. It was an inheritance to be envied and one which three of the daughters used to great advantage. Their childhood environment, with so many siblings, meant that they learnt to defend themselves and to speak out to be heard. Most of the education they received in their early years was informal, but their intelligence and their native wit compensated for the limitations of their schooling. When they eventually went to boarding school in their teens, their willingness to learn and their ambition was apparent.18
2
Education at Home and at School
The Garretts, like many middle-class parents in mid-Victorian Britain, found it a challenge to find ways to provide educational opportunities for their daughters. Tutors were hired to teach the sons before they were sent off to board at boys’ public schools, which were being founded from the middle of the nineteenth century. For girls, the solution in most cases was to find a governess. They were women drawn from the unfortunate circumstances of genteel poverty combined with few or no prospects of marriage. They needed a home and they moved in with the strangers who hired them. They were tolerated but rarely appreciated. Their skills as teachers were usually limited, as they had inadequate preparation for the all-purpose educators they were expected to be. They had little or no privacy and rare opportunities for broadening their own experience or for making friends outside the families with whom they lived. They had little leisure and no one to share it with other than the children they tried to befriend as well as to teach.
Amelia Edgeworth was a typical example. Poor and pious, she was hired by the Garretts in 1846 initially to teach Louie and 20Elizabeth, aged eleven and a half and ten. By then, Louisa also had four younger children and a fifth was born the following year, so she had little time to give further lessons to the older children. Where Miss Edgeworth came from and how she was recruited is not recorded, but it would have been easy for the family to find and to hire her. The supply of potential governesses easily exceeded the demand. In 1851, there were approximately 25,000 of them. When posts were advertised, there were sometimes several hundred applicants. Most young women stayed at home until they married if their families could afford to support them. If they could not, there were few alternatives to becoming a governess. Higher education for women did not exist and the professions were closed to them. Even school teaching was an unlikely option, as there were so few schools before the 1870 Education Act, which established elementary education, and attendance at school was not compulsory until 1880.
Few young women became governesses because they positively wanted this role. It was forced on them because they had no alternative; more often than not it was a joyless existence but one from which it was rarely possible to escape. Amelia Edgeworth’s experience was typical. She slept in a curtained bed in the same room as Louie and Elizabeth, undressing at night and dressing in the morning behind the curtains. Presumably, she found some way of washing, although access to a bath was unlikely. She had her meals with the family and was never able to escape for a holiday. Her routine consisted of spending all morning in the school room, then taking the same walk along the road towards Leiston for a mile, then going back for a mile each afternoon. She was self-effacing and servile and it appears from Elizabeth’s comments that her lessons were as dull as her life. At the dining table, she strove 21to agree with everything Louisa said, on one occasion provoking an irritable response from Newson, ‘Miss Edgeworth, you just said the opposite a minute ago.’ She replied that the last time she spoke was before she had had ‘the pleasure of hearing dear Mrs Garrett’s opinion’.
The main content of Miss Edgeworth’s lessons was drawn from a book entitled HistoricalandMiscellaneousQuestionsfortheUseofYoungPeople, from which she took a new section each day. It is easy to criticise these governesses, although it is also unfair. They had virtually no teaching materials and few other sources from which to draw on and usually no training whatsoever on how to teach. Unsurprisingly, her instruction was not going to engage a girl as high-spirited and intelligent as Elizabeth, who made the lessons more entertaining by finding ways to trip up Miss Edgeworth. She encouraged her gentler, older sister to do the same. They asked Miss Edgeworth questions she could not answer and poked fun at her when she failed. Like other children of this age whose teachers lacked the skills and the personality to motivate them and were unable to provide material to interest them, they took pleasure in humiliating her.
Attempts were made by the girls’ parents to reason with them; and when that failed, to punish them. They were of no avail. The school room was a battleground and the war needed to be ended. Some Victorian parents might have decided that as the girls were by then thirteen and nearly fifteen, their formal education could come to an end. The Garretts took a different view. Just as their younger brothers were sent away to school, so should the girls continue their education. Newson had acquired enough money to afford to give his daughters a secondary education away from home and, unlike many wealthy fathers, he was determined to use his 22wealth to do so. How he selected the school they eventually went to is not clear, nor can we be sure that Louisa played an equal part in choosing the school. We do know that he began with a choice that was quickly regretted. Louie, not with Elizabeth but with her cousin Betsy Marion Garrett, who was a similar age, was sent to a school in Hampstead. It was an appalling experience. There was not enough to eat and a hamper of good food sent from Suffolk was confiscated; the accommodation was wholly inadequate and the teaching was of poor quality. Fortunately, their grandfather (Louisa’s father) visited them and was shocked by what he saw. They were removed indefinitely after only four months there.
The next school was chosen with more care. The Boarding School for Ladies was one of a number of small private schools in Blackheath. It had thirty-seven pupils, according to the 1851 census. It was owned and run by the Misses Browning, who were the step-aunts of the poet Robert Browning. Another of their relatives was Samuel Browning, who was a minister at a chapel in Framlingham in Suffolk, and the owner of a small day school for boys. He may have recommended the Blackheath school to Newson Garrett. By whatever means Newson alighted on it, it was to change the course of his daughters’ lives, probably more through the other pupils they met there than through what they were taught. In 1851, about half the pupils came from London, the rest from far and wide across the country. The girls with whom the Garrett sisters became friends were from middle-class families with money from the successful businesses they owned. Louie and Elizabeth were invited to stay with them in the holidays and after they had left the school. These invitations gave them the chance to broaden their experience beyond their home in Suffolk.
Miss Louisa Browning, their headmistress, was eccentric but 23amiable. More important, she was convinced that the education of girls should not be confined to accomplishments but should embrace a curriculum, in which they would learn to read widely and to write well. Modern languages were deemed to be important and pupils were required to speak French all the time, although it is doubtful whether that could be effectively imposed outside the classroom. They were introduced to German and Italian literature as well as to French writing. What the Garrett parents made of this is not known. We do know that when visiting the school to decide on whether to select it, Newson made only one request after the extras on the curriculum had been described. He said they would take them all but insisted that his daughters should be able to have another extra: a hot bath once a week. However surprised she was by this unusual request since few houses had baths at the time, Miss Browning organised a washtub in front of the kitchen range on Saturday nights where the girls could wash in hot water, screened by a towel horse. They became known as the ‘bathing Garretts’.
It is unlikely that Louie and Elizabeth had read many of the classics before attending school. Their father would have had little inclination to read them; their mother little time; and their governess too little imagination to include them in the school room. In Blackheath, by contrast, they read widely and learnt to enjoy books. In her biography of Elizabeth, Jo Manton said she read poetry as well as prose, including ‘not only the fashionable Tennyson but Wordsworth, Milton and Coleridge as well. She read Gibbon and Motley for pleasure, and for relaxation Trollope, Thackeray or her favourite, George Eliot.’ This focus not only established the habit of reading, which was to remain an important part of the sisters’ lives, it also taught them how to write with confidence and clarity. It was an invaluable skill in the campaigns they pursued later.24
Their parents must have been satisfied with the school for they sent Alice, Agnes and Millicent there when they reached their teens. Only Josephine, the youngest daughter, was not exposed to the little Blackheath school. Had she been sent there too, perhaps she might have made her mark in some sphere or other, but unlike her older sisters, she failed to do so. Millicent formed a close bond with Agnes, just as Elizabeth did with Louie. Each pair of sisters had the advantage of their sibling’s company at school. This must have lessened homesickness and the misery so many children suffered when sent to boarding school away from the familiar companionship and comfort of their own homes. How Alice fared is not known, but she went alone as her two older siblings nearest in age to her were boys.
The sisters’ later views about their schooling were not identical. Millicent said Louisa Browning ruled her school with a rod of iron but said she was a born teacher who was appreciated by her pupils for her ‘thoroughness and her method’. The iron rod cannot have been as harsh as it might sound, for she describes Miss Browning’s eccentricities with amusement and affection. For example, Miss Browning thought it beneath the school’s intellectual aspirations to teach needlework. She thought it should be taught at home. If she saw a girl with a needle in her hand, she would exclaim dismissively, ‘A guinea a stitch, my dear, a guinea a stitch!’ Millicent also describes her rather bizarre taste in clothes, mixing ‘scarlet, purple, green and yellow on her ample person’. Elizabeth was more critical. According to her daughter, Elizabeth said that she remembered the stupidity of the teachers there with shudders. With hindsight, she was disappointed that she was taught no science and little, if any, mathematics. In saying so, she failed to reflect on the unlikelihood of being able to find female teachers who had any knowledge of 25these subjects. Given the contempt she had for her governess, it is a little surprising that she was not more generous about at least some of the teaching she had at school. While the rules about speaking French all the time were probably irritating and would have compromised the quality of conversations the girls might have had on intellectual issues, at least it gave Elizabeth enough knowledge of the language to live in Paris and study medicine there in her twenties.
One of the school’s greatest gifts to her, and indeed to Louie too, were the friendships they were able to make with other girls. There would have been time to get to know other pupils outside the classroom. The only obligatory form of exercise in girls’ schools at the time was to go out for walks. Dartmouth Row, where the school was located, was a pleasant road with large houses that accommodated other small boarding schools. While walking in a crocodile could not have matched the freedom of exploring the coast and the fields inland around Aldeburgh, the girls found that Blackheath was an attractive suburban village with its own open space and was close to the Royal Park of Greenwich. If they walked as far as the park, they would have been able to look down onto Sir Christopher Wren’s superb master plan for the Royal Naval Hospital and Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House. Beyond there was the Thames, crowded with vessels taking people and goods in and out of London. It was a pleasing environment to share with their fellow pupils, amongst whom two sets of sisters became lasting friends. The Smith girls were the daughters of a well-off businessman who ran a large drapers’ shop and lived in central London but had a country house in Acton, where Louie went to stay. Jane, Sophie and Annie Crow came from Gateshead, where their father owned a chemical factory manufacturing alkali. Both sisters travelled north to stay at 26Unsworth Hall, the Crow’s house outside Gateshead. These visits had a momentous effect on the sisters, as will emerge later.
