I have written previous posts on Thomas Baty (1869-1954), a gender radical who was born in Carlisle and who died in Japan. Baty was an international lawyer, a vegetarian, and an editor of the genderqueer journal, Urania. Writing books and articles under the female pseudonym, Irene Clyde, Baty campaigned against the binaries of biological sex, and of social gender conventions. Thomas Baty is an important non-binary pioneer in Cumbria’s LGBTQ heritage.
I was very pleased to find the informative article, Thomas Baty, gender critic, by Alice Millea, on the blog of the Bodleian Libraries. This article observes that Thomas Baty led a radically different life, with a queer identity, away from the official records of Baty’s Oxford and Cambridge university career and his qualifications in law. There are also images of documents relating to Thomas Baty, and a photo, from 1915-1920, which I have put at the top of this post, and of which I was previously unaware.
In this post I discuss the possible same sex relationship of May Morris, 1862–1938, the designer, craftswoman, and activist.
May Morris was born into the British arts and crafts movement, as a daughter of Jane and William Morris. Although the Morris family had homes in Kent, London, and famously, at Kelmscott Manor, in Oxfordshire, May Morris has a slight link with Cumbria.
George James Howard (1843-1911), later 9th Earl of Carlisle, and his wife, Rosalind Frances Howard, had their home at Naworth Castle, near Brampton, Cumberland. Jane Morris, May’s mother, was friends with Rosalind Howard, and in 1870, May and her sister Jenny (Jane) Morris, spent part of the summer at Naworth with the Howard family. George Howard was an important artist and patron in the area, and while the girls were visiting, he painted a portrait of them. He donated artwork to what is now Tullie House and some of his pictures may be seen there.
George Howard, Jenny & May Morris, 1870 (plate II) (Collected Letters of Jane Morris) Housed Society of Antiquaries London Collection
May Morris grew up to be a skilled embroidress and designer. She was a socialist and writer on the arts. In 1907, she founded the Women’s Guild of Arts, with Mary Elizabeth Turner, since the Art-Worker’s Guild did not admit women.
There are LGBTQ connections too. In the following paragraphs, I am drawing on the research by Simon Evans, Curatorial Assistant, at the National Library of Wales. After the deaths of her parents, and while her sister, Jenny, was living in care homes. May Morris lived alone during the war at Kelmscott Manor, near Lechlade, Oxfordshire. During this time, many women joined the Land Army which was formed in 1917. A woman called Mary Lobb, who came from a family in Cornwall with a farming background, already had experience driving a steam roller in Launceston. In 191, she joined the Land Army and came to work in Lechlade, on a farm belonging to Robert Hobbs. Mary Lobb and the others on the farm seem not to have got on. So Mary either left or was sacked.
Mary Lobb then came to work for May Morris, as a gardener at first. But then May Morris and Mary Lobb became companions. They spent the rest of their lives together, even taking a holiday to Iceland together. May and Mary did not always live together, but they often did, and Simon Evans notes postcard evidence referring to “our bedroom”. He also states that May and Mary could be seen together out and about in Kelmscott or Lechlade, or in horse and trap, and that this occasioned local gossip. May Morris died first, in1938, and Mary Lobb in 1939.
From a modern perspective, the two women’s relation looks to be a lesbian one, although they did not use that word themselves. They certainly lived as close companions. I believe that the information available to visitors to Kelmscott Manor is being updated to reflect the queer aspect, and to balance what was previouslyless sympathetic and sparser references to Mary Lobb’s part in May Morris’s life. For more detail, I recommend downloading Simon Evans’s excellent article which contains photographs and pictures.
Acknowledgements:
Simon Evans’s article is available as a PDF file below:
In this post, I discuss a curious mistake in a report in the Lakes Herald Newspaper, which is ironically relevant to Eliza Lynn Linton’s gender and sexual ambivalence.
I have written in previous posts about Eliza Lynn Linton, the author who was born in 1822 in Crosthwaite Vicarage, near Keswick, Cumberland. Her father, Reverend James Lynn, was vicar of Crosthwaite, and her mother, Charlotte Alicia Goodenough, was a daughter of a former bishop of Carlisle. Eliza Lynn Linton herself had a long writing career, and published books of LGBTQ interest today. She died of illness in 1898.
The Lakes Herald newspaper, which was published in Ambleside, Westmorland, noted Eliza Lynn Linton’s death, as would be expected for a famous locally born author. However due to error, typographical, or otherwise, what the paper actually printed on 22 July, 1898, was, “Mrs. E. Lynn Linton who was at that period the wife of Mr. E.L. Linton, the famous wood engraver, was just then becoming popular as a novelist…” In fact, Eliza Lynn Linton became the wife of Mr William James Linton, W.J. Linton, and this confusion of intitals makes it look as though Eliza Lynn was her own wife.
The writer in the Lakes Herald realised this mistake, and a week later, on 29 July, 1898, they explained, “In the hurriedly scribbled note of last week upon the late Mrs. Lynn Linton, there crept in a most egregious mistake which anyone might mark as a palpable clerical error – or else a freak of the “typo.” I made it appear the deceased authoress was the wife of E. Lynn Linton, though she was nothing of the kind. She was the second wife of Mr. William James Linton…”
Why is this intriguing? The strange gender ambiguity of the newspaper death notice, where Eliza Lynn Linton, by chance error, becomes both husband and wife, reminds us of her gender ambiguity as portrayed by her and perceived by others during her lifetime.
In my post on Eliza Lynn Linton’s novel of 1885, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, I discuss at length how she creates a largely autobiographical book by changing her sex to that of a man, Christopher Kirkland, and by changing the names and even the sex of some of the important characters. In the novel, Eliza Lynn Linton’s marriage to W.J. Linton becomes that of Christopher Kirkland to the female character, Esther Lambert. The attraction and disintegration of this relationship and the life of the household full of children by William James Linton’s first wife are all depicted.
Why Eliza Lynn Linton chose to cloak herself in a male persona can not be completely known. If by doing so, she hoped to disguise the autobiographical nature of the novel, then that was a failure. Both in contemporary reviews and in later criticism, her novel has been presumed to be largely autobiographical, and has been mined for information about her life.
In George Layard Soames’s biography of her, written not long after Lynn Linton’s death, he quotes Mrs Rosa Campbell Praed, who observed about Lynn Linton, “She was such a curious mixture too of the man and the woman.” (p.222)
It is a chance error, then, but also strangely fitting, that the Lakes Herald newspaper inadvertently described her as both husband and wife.
A still from a 1971 documentary on ATV, called The Important Thing Is Love
A selection of 1970s and 1980s documentary TV films of LGBTQ relevance.
When I was researching for this blog, I came across an excellent list of old documentary films of LGBTQ interest, courtesy of Will Noble on Londonist.com. These programmes were shown on British TV in the 1970s and the 1980s, and many are free to watch online on the British Film Institute player.
You can see the full Londonist list here. Here are a few that I have looked at and found very interesting:
An episode of “Speak for Yourself” from London Weekend Television in 1974, where the London group of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) made a film about their lives. Written by Jackie Forster and Roger Baker, it shows gay people chatting about themselves and attitudes in wider society, enjoying a boat trip on the Thames, and campaigning; there is also an interview with the programme presenter. The programme was originally screened at 11.20pm only in the London area. This is a sympathetic, well made and unpretentious film, which manages to convey a sense of solidarity and the flavour of the times. It is also fascinating to see people’s clothes and hairstyles!
Another film by the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, Lewisham, is David is Homosexual. This 1976 film was written by Wilfred Avery and filmed by David Belton. It follows the story of David, who initially unhappy and frustrated, joins the CHE, comes out to his family, and develops a rewarding life. The film shows other members of the group at meetings and later, the 1976 Gay Pride rally in Hyde Park. A compelling narration with a very human touch.
Heaven (Gay Life), London Weekend Television, 1980, explores gay life for men, with different scenes around a London nightclub called Heaven; the first part of the film looks at male to female drag and its early history, with interesting interviews by male drag artists. It also features remarks by a very young looking Alison Hennegan, at that time with Gay News.
The Important Thing is Love, a documentary from 1971, has a selection of people, lesbians and straight men, giving their opinions on lesbianism to camera. Some interesting contributions and an insight into attitudes of the late 1960s and 1970s.
These films, which are all free to watch, do concentrate on London. One documentary relevant to Cumbria, is the 1986 film made for Channel Four’s Six of Heart series, A Boy Called Mary. In this film, Kris Kirk, who was born in Carlisle in 1950 and who went on to be a music journalist, talks about his life and the gay scene. The film is not free to watch, though; it costs one pound to view.
There are other films of LGBTQ interest to be found by searching the Londonist list, and the British Film Institute itself. Of course, the language and approaches are of a piece with their time. Although I have put LGBTQ in the post title, this acronym does not appear in any of the films, and homosexuality and lesbianism are the common words used. I found some of these films fascinating, to see how people saw themselves and others in the 1970s and 1980s.
13th December 1977: Labour MP Maureen Colquhoun with the Gay Defence Committee protesting at Transport House over moves to unseat her from the constituency of Northampton North. (Photo by Wesley/Keystone/Getty Images) Photo embedded from https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2019/02/13/maureen-colquhoun/ I’ve tried to embed the Getty Images link directly, without success.
Maureen Colquhoun, 1928-2021, was a Labour politician, and the first openly lesbian MP, who pressed tirelessly for women’s rights, moving to Ambleside, Cumbria, in 1992.
Maureen Colquhoun, on the left of the photo, died this year, in February 2021, at the age of ninety two. In 1992, she, and her partner, Barbara Todd, moved to Ambleside, Cumbria, where they spent the latter part of their lives. Maureen Colquhoun became a councillor on Lakes parish council, and she was also a member of the Lake District National Park Authority. Involved in local issues, she sought, for example, speed limits on Lake Windermere and fewer low flying military exercises over the Lake District.
Maureen Colquhoun was born on 12 August, 1928, in Sussex. As the photograph above suggests, she went on to live an active political life. She joined the Labour party as a teenager, and then studied at the London School of Economics. She became a West Sussex councillor for the party, in Shoreham. During her time as a councillor here, she was blocked briefly by Conservatives from sitting on committees, and described as a “chatterbox”. Colquhoun was, in fact, the only woman member of the council authority at this time.
In 1974, Colquhoun was elected as the MP for Northampton North. She served as MP until losing her seat in the 1979 general election, following a deselection battle. During Colquhoun’s time as MP, she made her mark, raising issues, with which today, we have become more familiar. In 1975, she argued for the provision of a creche for female delegates at Labour party conferences. Colquhoun also asked the speaker in the House of Commons, George Thomas, to address her as Maureen Colquhoun or as Ms Colquhoun. Thomas agreed to pronounce the prefix in a way which would elide the distinction between Mrs and Miss. We are all familiar with the use of Ms as a title today, but it was rare in 1976, and the first time that such a request had been made in the House of Commons.
Colquhoun introduced a private member’s bill to the house in 1975, the Balance of Sexes Bill. It proposed equal numbers of men and women for public appointments. In the order for the second reading of the bill, Colquhoun said, “My Bill is designed positively to discriminate for women…
shall merely draw the attention of the House today to some of the everyday bread-and-butter bodies that affect everybody’s lives. For example, the Sugar Board has five men and no women. The Agriculture Training Board has 27 men, no women. Is it to be said that the only rôle of the woman in agriculture is that of the farmer’s wife?
The Committee of Investigation for Great Britain has seven men, no women. I cannot think how Great Britain can be investigated without the help of women.”
You can read more here. The discussion of the time does not go into non binary gender or gender non-conforming issues, except insofar as it concerns the role of women in public life.
Colquhoun’s bill did not become law, but it pushed on the debate about equal opportunities in a pioneering way. Subsequent legislation and measures reflect the way that attitudes have shifted, and we do sometimes see positive discrimination today.
At this time, in 1975, Maureen Colquhoun met Barbara or Babs Todd, and the two women fell in love. Barbara Todd was co-editing the lesbian and bisexual women’s magazine, Sappho, which she and Jackie Forster, and other women had founded. This magazine was started in 1972, after the first British lesbian magazine, Arena Three had folded, and it continued until 1981.
Cover of Sappho from November 1976 showing ‘the three Botticelli beauties. Courtesy of Glasgow Women’s Library
Colquhoun left her husband, Keith, and moved in with Todd. Their housewarming party led to public exposure, in that Nigel Dempster revealed the women’s relationship in the Daily Mail newspaper, in 1976.
This, and other issues, led to Colquhoun being deselected as a candidate in 1977 by the Labour party, some of whom did not approve of her “obsession with trivialities such as women’s rights”. Colquhoun was later reinstated as a candidate, but lost her seat of Northampton North in the 1979 general election. Before Colquhoun left parliament, in 1979, she introduced a bill to decriminalise prostitution, the Protection of Prostitutes Bill. She brought fifty prostitutes into the committee room in the House of Commons for the first reading of the bill (LSE). This bill did not become law, although it was allowed a second reading. The issues which it raised are still very much debated today.
After leaving parliament, Maureen Colquhoun remained active, in the charity Gingerbread, as a research assistant, in the Secretaries and Assistants’ Council and becoming a councillor in Hackney, where she served from 1982-1990. In 1992, as I have mentioned, she and her partner, Barbara Todd, moved to Ambleside, Cumbria. Colquhoun and Todd married in 2015, and lived together until Barbara Todd died in February of 2020. Maureen Colquhoun, who died a year later has left a political legacy behind her.
Keswick Lake, for Rogers’s ‘Poems’ circa 1831-2 Joseph Mallord William Turner 1775-1851 Accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest 1856 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/D27698 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)
I mention in this post some potentially interesting websites and books for those readers of this blog who feel inspired to look into LGBTQ heritage and research themselves.
The Institute of Historical Research has a good reading list, on its History of Sexuality & LGBTQ Collections webpage. I particularly recommend the sections on LGBTQ General Works, Homosexuality and Same-Gender and relationships, Queer/Questioning, and LGBTQ+ Biographies. English Heritage, some of whose properties have LGBTQ connections, has an excellent LGBTQ History webpage, with links to articles to follow up. For example, Alison Oram has written a great, thought-provoking article on Experiments in Gender. Katie Burke has written an insightful article on Researching LGBTQ History, discussing terms and concepts. The English Heritage webpages are very well-illustrated, with pictures of people and places. TheNational Trust also has lots of LGBTQ content on its webpages. It too owns properties with LGBTQ associations. You can find more information here, and even a series of podcasts by Clare Balding.
Books on LGBTQ history can also be found. These include Alison Oram’s famous study, The Lesbian History Sourcebook : love and sex between women in Britain from 1780 to 1970, Routledge, 2001. I am not aware of a book specifically on Cumbria LGBTQ heritage. However, the diaries of the eighteenth century Anne Lister give a startling insight into some women’s lives in Yorkshire. There are several books relating to Anne Lister in Cumbrian public libraries, for example, The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister (1791-1840), Virago, 2020; Anne Choma, ed. Stella Merz, Gentleman Jack : the real Anne Lister; with a foreword by Sally Wainwright, BBC Books, 2019.
The publishing company, Pen & Sword, has produced some interesting relevant books. Charlotte Furness’s book,Unmarried Women of the Country Estate, Pen & Sword, 2020, includes a section on Anne Lister, as well as discussing other characterful women. Particularly relevant is Gill Rossini’s book,Same Sex Love 1700-1957: a history and research guide, Pen & Sword, 2017. This book contains an overview of LGBTQ history in England, from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. Chapters include “Changing Attitudes to Male Same-sex Relationships”, “Molly Houses”, “Romantic Friendships Between Victorian Women”, “The Medicalisation of Same-sex Desires”, “Case study: The Masked Ball of 1880 in Manchester”, and “The Beginnings of a Homosexual Social Network”. At the end of this very clearly written book, Rossini has a useful “A Research Guide to Same Sex Relationships”.
I hope that these resources give food for thought. I am sure that there are many more resources out there! Feel free to share some in the comments section.
Alison Oram. The Lesbian History Sourcebook : love and sex between women in Britain from 1780 to 1970. Routledge, 2001.
Anne Lister. The secret diaries of Miss Anne Lister (1791-1840). Virago, 2020. Carlisle public library 306.766 and Kendal public library 306.766 Ed. Stella Merz. Gentleman Jack : the real Anne Lister / Anne Choma ; with a foreword by Sally Wainwright. BBC Books, 2019 Carlisle public library 902 LIS and Workington public library 306.766 A list of books in Cumbria public libraries featuring Anne Lister, https://cumbria-libraries.org.uk/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?idx=&q=anne+lister&branch_group_limit=
Charlotte Furness. Unmarried Women of the Country Estate. Pen and Sword, 2020. Gill Rossini. Same Sex Love 1700-1957: a history and research guide. Pen & Sword, 2017.
I discuss in this post, the house of Brantwood, in Coniston, which is, most famously, the home of John Ruskin, but also a house which appears in the texture of some of Cumbria’s queer stories.
John Ruskin, 1819-1900, bought Brantwood in 1871. The house itself is situated overlooking Coniston Water, Cumbria, and may be reached by boat, as well as by road. Ruskin retained a home in London, but spent long periods in Brantwood in the Lake District. John Ruskin was a significant art critic, patron of the arts, and social thinker, influential during his lifetime, and after. He had early an interest in geology, and advocated greater naturalism in art and in his own pictures. Ruskin was a patron of Turner, and became a notable figure in Pre-Raphaelite circles. His personal life was troubled, both with relationships, and later, with illness.
Ruskin’s ideas about craft, mechanisation, and education for work people, sometimes intersecting with those of Thomas Carlyle, influenced Canon Rawnsley, who went on to co-found the National Trust, and also the proponent of the arts and crafts movement, William Morris. John Ruskin lived an active life, publishing and giving lectures, as well as foreign travels to sites of artistic importance. He left behind him many published works on artistic and social subjects, as well as interesting personal correspondence and diaries. Today, Brantwood is owned by the Brantwood Trust, and the house and its gardens are open to the public.
When I was investigating people who might have relevance to Cumbria’s LGBTQ heritage, I came across mentions of Brantwood several times. The first was in connection with the Victorian author, Eliza Lynn Linton, who had a rather queer life, and who wrote suggestively queer novels. Eliza Lynn, who grew up in Cumberland and then moved to London, married in 1858, William Linton, an engraver, and a social and political reformer. William James Linton bought the house of Brantwood in 1852, and moved into it, with his children and second partner, Emily. In Brantwood, Linton set up a private printing press and was joined there in 1854 by three young men who helped him print pamphlets, and his monthly magazine, espousing Republican principles, the English Republic. According to one of these men,
“I was also one of the three young men who went to Brantwood in the spring of 1854, to help with the mechanical portion of the publication of the English Republic. Here we printed not only that work, but also a Tyneside magazine called the Northern Tribune; but the scheme in which we were engaged was not financially successful, hence the English Republic ceased, the establishment was broken up, and the little community we had constituted had dispersed.” (W.E. Adams in Somes Layard, p90)
William James Linton, c.1858 in George Somes Layard. Mrs Lynn Linton. Methuen: London, 1901, p91
“Only an enthusiast would have thought of setting up a printing office in a remote quarter of the Lake District, miles away from the nearest railway station. Paper and other materials had to be carted over the Fells from Windermere to Brantwood, and the printed magazines had to be carted over the Fells from Brantwood to Windermere back again. Nor did the circulation of the English Republic warrant this inevitable addition to the cost of production. As a matter of fact, it never did pay at all. Mr. Linton had therefore to finance the establishment out of his own earnings as an engraver.” ((W.E. Adams in Somes Layard, pp91-2)
It was during this period that William Linton, while living with Emily at Brantwood, first met Eliza Lynn. She already had a reputation as a writer, and being a native of Cumberland, happened to be in Keswick. Eliza Lynn visited Brantwood and made friends with William and Emily. Eliza Lynn’s first impression of Brantwood is of the unkempt garden, where nature was allowed to flourish, and, given the reforming ideas of the household, where the children of the house were playing in gender neutral clothing:
“Playing in the neglected, untrimmed garden, where never tree nor bush was lopped nor pruned, and where the long grass of the lawn was starred with dandelions and daisies as better flowers than those which man could cultivate, was a troop of little children…all dressed exactly alike – in long blouses of that coarse blue flannel with which housemaids scrub the floors; and all had precisely the same kind of hats – the girls distinguished from the boys only by a somewhat broader band of faded ribbon.” (Eliza Lynn Linton, Somes Layard, p94)
Not long after, Emily died, and Eliza married William Linton, and took on responsibility for the seven children. Eliza Lynn Linton’s book, The Lake Country, 1864, was illustrated with engravings by her husband. William. In fact, their marriage did not last, due to incompatible habits, and they stopped living at Brantwood. In 1866, William Linton left with his children for America, and Eliza Lynn Linton stayed in England. The house of Brantwood was let, and, in 1871, it was bought by John Ruskin.
In his correspondence of 1871, Ruskin mentions his newly acquired house:
“The view from the house was finer than I expected, the house itself dilapidated and rather dismal.” (To Mrs Arthur Severn, 12 Sept, 1871, Letters, Vol 2, pp34-5)
“I’ve bought a small place here, with five acres of rock and moor, a streamlet, and I think on the whole the finest view I know in Cumberland or Lancashire, with the sunset visible over the same. The house – small, old, damp, and smoky-chimneyed – somebody must help me get to rights.” (To Charles Eliot Norton, 14 Sept, 1871, Letters, Vol 2, p35)
In addition to Eliza Lynn Linton’s links with Brantwood, I also came across the household of Miss Harriette Rigbye and Miss Frances Tolmie in connection with the house. I have discussed their arrangement in my talk on Partnerships and Relationships. I do not claim that this was a gay relationship; however, between 1874-1895, the women shared a household in an enduring arrangement, and Harriette Rigbye left Frances Tolmie a substantial bequest in her will. They were living at Thwaite Cottage, Coniston, where they met their neighbour, John Ruskin. As Ethel Bassin notes, the references to Harriette Rigbye are slight, but they make clear that Miss Rigbye, and probably by extension, Frances Tolmie was part of the Ruskin circle at Coniston.
Ruskin was friendly with the Miss Beevers of Thwaite, and the little distance from Brantwood allowed easy visiting. The Miss Beevers were friends of Miss Harriette Rigbye, and Ruskin includes his love to Harriette Rigbye in a letter to Miss Susan Beever and her sister, Mary. Ruskin’s diary mentions him taking a walk “through Miss Rigbye’s wood in quite lovely spring day”. (Diaries, p1103) Ruskin also writes to Miss Rigbye herself, and including a drawing of leaves. thanking her for a tree-peony. Interestingly, Ruskin does not appear to refer to Frances Tolmie anything like as much, if at all. Perhaps this is a question of status; Frances Tolmie was considered Harriette Rigbye’s companion, rather than the other way around. This circle of friends at Coniston, with the exception of John Ruskin himself, was quite feminine; it is likely that they saw each other very frequently, and they did correspond when they were out of the country.John Ruskin continued at Brantwood until the end of his life in 1900, as indeed, did Frances Tolmie and Harriette Rigbye at Thwaite Cottage, until 1894-5.
When researching for this project, I also came across the singer and musician, Mary Wakefield, 1853-1910, through the work of Sophie Fuller and Catherine Maxwell. Mary Wakefield, born in Kendal, was a very active amateur musician, who greatly encouraged local choirs. Maxwell and Fuller have written on the possibility of Mary Wakefield having same sex relationships. There is a link with Brantwood here too. Mary Wakefield and John Ruskin were introduced at a luncheon party in London in 1876 (Newmarch, Chp. V, p.55) Gradually during the later 1870s and in the 1880s, they became much better acquainted with each other, and developed a friendship of significance to them both.
Mary Wakefield and John Ruskin exchanged ideas on art, music, and nature. Wakefield would drive the thirty miles to Brantwood from her Westmorland home of Sedgwick, and Ruskin had paid a visit to Sedgwick, where he heard Mary Wakefield and her sister, Agnes singing. Wakefield referred to Ruskin’s views on music in her publications, and she also wrote an affectionate account of the house and gardens of Brantwood,”Brantwood, Coniston: John Ruskin’s Home”, for Murray’s Magazine, November, 1890. Ruskin had built a turret room at Brantwood, with a magnificent view of the scenery; Wakefield might well have felt at home there, as she herself occupied rooms in the tower in her family home of Sedgwick. (Newmarch Chapter V, p.58 and passim).
In this 1890 article, Wakefield describes in particular, her long-remembered first visit to Brantwood, the approach to the house, the courtesy of the host, the aesthetics of the interior, and the detail of the garden and surrounding countryside:
“you come quite suddenly upon a singularly peaceful-looking little nook, from whence opens out the short carriage-drive, under tall larches on one side, and a lovely mossy wall, covered with a profusion of ferns, on the other, bringing us to the door, and hearty welcome, which at Brantwood is always bestowed at the threshold” (quoted from Wakefield’s article in Newmarch, Chp. 5, p.62)
Interestingly, both William James Linton and John Ruskin favoured self-publishing. William Linton had a physical printing press in the establishment of Brantwood, where he printed his political pamphlets. Ruskin found Linton’s press in an outhouse, when he gained ownership of the house, and Ruskin’s biographer, Timothy Hilton, states that this spurred Ruskin towards self-publishing his own works (pp. 499-501) Self-publishing works of interest and importance to oneself was a feature of certain nineteenth century circles, and in this context, we may note William Morris, and the Kelmscott Press.
Here are pictures of William Linton and of John Ruskin, in their old age.
Brantwood, house and grounds, has formed a thread through the records of some of the people of interest to Cumbria’s LGBTQ past. This may be a meaningless coincidence. It does, however, give another way to consider a narrative of the property. In my view, it also reflects the likelihood that people who either lived in, or were on visiting terms with, this well-situated and substantial house, were those middle or upper middle class people who would leave records behind them. These records come in the form of letters, diaries, publications, photographs. This means in turn, that it is easier to identify queer elements in their lives.
George Somes Layard. Mrs Lynn Linton. Methuen: London, 1901
Eliza Lynn Linton. The Lake Country. London, 1864 https://archive.org/details/lakecountry00lintiala This is in the public libraries of Barrow-in-Furness, Carlisle, Kendal, Keswick, and Whitehaven.
Ethel Bassin. The Old Songs of Skye: Frances Tolmie and her circle. London: Routledge, 1977, Chp. 8
Timothy Hilton. John Ruskin. Yale University Press, 2002
Eds Joan Evans, John Howard Whitehouse. The Diaries of John Ruskin: 1874-1889. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959 I have been unable to consult this book properly, but the reference to Ruskin’s walk is on p.1103
Rosa Newmarch. Mary Wakefield, a memoir. Kendal: Atkinson & Pollitt, 1912. This is a memoir of Mary Wakefield, by her friend, the musicologist, Rosa Newmarch, is the key source for Wakefield’s life. You can download a pdf of this publication on The Mary Wakefield Westmorland Festival website. There is a reference copy in the Fred Barnes Collection in Barrow-in-Furness public library; in the Jackson library, in Carlisle public library; and in the reference collection in Kendal public library. See especially Chapter V Friendship with Ruskin.
There are many books on John Ruskin and Brantwood in Cumbria public libraries. For example, Ed Helen Viljoen. The Brantwood diary of John Ruskin: together with selected related letters and sketches of persons mentioned. Yale University Press, 1971 in the Jackson library, in Carlisle public library 1 F RUS Windermere public library L820 RUS
V0007233ER Hannah Snell, a woman who passed as a male soldier. Wood eng
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.ukhttp://wellcomeimages.org
Hannah Snell, a woman who passed as a male soldier. Wood engraving, 1750.
1750 Published: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
In this post, I discuss the eighteenth century female soldier, Hannah Snell, and the episode of her adventures which reportedly took place at Carlisle.
Hannah Snell was a real historical figure, although the adventures of her life sound remarkable. She was born in 1723, in Worcester. Her parents died when she was still quite young, and in 1740, as a young woman, she moved to Wapping in London, to stay with her sister and brother-in-law, Susanah or Susannah, and James Gray. She married a Dutch sailor, called James Summs in 1740, and became pregnant. However, before the baby was born, Hannah’s husband deserted her. Sadly, her infant daughter died after only a few months of life.
There is a little doubt about the precise dates, but not very long after, Hannah Snell borrowed a suit of clothes from her brother-in-law, and took his name of James Gray. As Hannah Snell puts it in her retrospective account,
“That she might execute her Designs with the better Grace, and the more Success, she boldly commenced a Man, at least in her Dress, and no doubt she had a Right to do so, since she had the real Soul of a Man in her Breast. Dismay’d at no Accidents, and giving a full Scope to the genuine Bent of her Heart, she put on a Suit of her Brother-in-Law, Mr. James Gray’s, Cloaths, assumed his Name, and set out” (The Female Soldier)
Her avowed aim was to find her husband, but it is possible that Snell had other motives too; she may have taken this bold step to change her situation. In her male clothing, Snell made her way to Portsmouth, enlisted with a regiment of marines, and disembarked in a ship for the East Indies. It seems that Snell worked on board the ship, like the other marines, and managed to preserve her new male identity. In fact, with her fellow marines, Snell saw military action on various occasions, including in battles in India, at Devakottai and Pondicherry. In her own account, Snell says that she fought bravely, and was wounded by multiple gun shots. Finally, Snell, sailed back to England in a ship called the Eltham, arriving in 1750.
Once back in England, Hannah Snell stayed again with her sister in Wapping. But she made a public discovery of her exploits in the marines while dressed as a man, and became something of a celebrity in the latter part of her life. She petitioned the Duke of Cumberland for a pension, because she had served in the army, revealed her sex to her former comrades, and had an account of her adventures published. For a while, she performed in London theatres, dressed in her male soldier’s clothes, with a gun, singing and demonstrating military drill. She seems to have persisted too in wearing male clothing, and a cockade in her hat. Sadly, Hannah Snell became ill towards the end of her life, perhaps with dementia, and she and died in Bethlem Hospital, London, in 1792.
Hannah Snell, after Wardell, altered from a portrait by Faber after FryeThe British Museum CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
I have roamed rather far from Cumbria in this post! But the local connection comes in the part of Hannah Snell’s story, before she sailed with the marines from Portsmouth. According to Snell’s own account, she first, on adopting men’s clothing and the name of James Gray, enlisted with General Guise’s regiment at Coventry and marched with it to Carlisle. This was around the time of the Jacobite risings of 1745. When in Carlisle, she recounts a most curious story of what happened to her. Her report is that her sergeant had a vicious design on a young woman in the town and enlisted Snell’s help, in her male soldier’s persona, in the matter. Instead of assisting her sergeant to seduce the woman, Snell warned the woman in question of the scheme. However, Sergeant Davis grew suspicious, and fancied that Snell, who had become friendly with the woman, was his male rival. Provoked by jealousy, Davis had Snell sentenced to receive six hundred lashes for neglect of duty. This kind of harsh flogging was typical of the brutal military discipline of the time.
Snell reports that she was tied to Carlisle castle gates, and received five hundred out of the six hundred lashes. She claims that she escaped detection as woman:
“Behold her suspected of supplanting the Serjeant of his Mistress, and the direful Effects his Jealousy occasioned, having her Arms extended, and fixed to the City Gates, and there receive the Number of five hundred severe Lashes”
and later,
“she marched to Carlisle, where she was Whipt for Neglect of Duty, being unjustly accused by Serjeant Davis, as is fully mentioned in the preceding Pages. The Method she used to prevent the Discovery of her Sex was this, according to her own Declaration: Her Breasts were then not so big by much as they are at present, her Arms being extended and fixed to the City Gates, her Breasts were drawn up, and consequently did not appear so large; and besides this, her Breast was to the Wall, and could not be discovered by any of her Comrades” (The Female Soldier)
There is some doubt today about whether this episode did indeed occur. Whilst, Hannah Snell really did, it seems, serve as a soldier, in men’s clothing, not necessarily every colourful story in her account may be true. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does not mention this episode in its life of Snell.
Whether these intriguing events about the Carlisle barracks are not or now, they offer us food for thought, as indeed, do many other parts of Snell’s life. We have cross dressing: Snell seemed to feel at home in men’s clothing, having “the real Soul of a Man in her Breast”. We also have the rather queer reference to Snell in her male disguise being the sergeant’s rival for a local woman: “this young Woman, who took great delight in her Company; and seldom a Day passed but they were together, having cultivated an Intimacy and Friendship with each other ” (The Female Soldier).
Then again, this is not explicit, and indeed, the whole episode may be fiction. We must remember too, that Snell married three times in her life. So, what is going on here?
Snell’s own account of her life certainly fits in with eighteenth century literary tastes, with entertaining first person accounts, sometimes picaresque, containing adventures and even gender disguise. Daniel Defoe’s novels, Moll Flanders, 1722, and Roxana, 1724, are examples. Many fictional tales were written claiming to be true, and true stories were sometimes related like fiction. Readers were sophisticated and knew this. If you would like to read it, and see the Carlisle episode for yourself, it may be found here.
Acknowledgements:
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, entry on Hannah Snell https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/25975 This can be viewed via the number on a Cumbria public library card.
Matthew Stephens. The Secret Life of a Female Marine, 1723-1792. London: Ship Street Press, 1997 I have been unable to consult this book, but it gives a recent detailed discussion of Hannah Snell’s life.
The Proposal 1942 Kurt Schwitters 1887-1948 Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to Tate 2007 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T12398
This post is a modified version of an online talk which I gave on 8 December, 2020, as part of my series of four online talks on Cumbria’s LGBTQ+ heritage. In it, I discuss the difference between how LGBT relationships could be expressed today and in the past, using twentieth and nineteenth century examples to show the elusivity of past LGBt relationships, and the perplexities of language and of categorisation.
Partnerships and Relationships
This is the third talk in my series of four, on Cumbria’s LGBTQ+ heritage and language through the ages. Over the past year, I have been researching Cumbria’s queer heritage, under the auspices of PiNC, Pride in North Cumbria, and with the generous support of the Heritage Lottery fund; I’m very grateful to both of them for their help and support.
In this project, I have been looking at LGBT elements of the past, and particularly, about the language used to describe them, and how that has changed over time. In my first introductory talk, I discussed some of the overarching issues of LGBTQ+ research into heritage and language; in my second talk, I considered the subject of crime, from the criminalisation of homosexuality in the past, to modern ideas of hate crime against LGBT people. Today, I would like to focus on the subject of partnerships and relationships.
First, I shall consider some reporting of modern day same sex partnerships in Cumbria. Then I shall travel back back in time, considering how circumstances used to be different; and how, therefore, the language which people used about LGBT relationships necessarily reflected this. Finally, I shall concentrate on a few cases from the past in more detail, to explore how relationships have been expressed and presented, or hidden from view. This illustrates the limits of what was possible at the time, and it illustrates the limits of our understanding too!
Beginning in modern times, it is only recently in England that same sex couples have had the right to marry, or to form civil partnerships, which give the legal, and consequently, the social recognitions, which heterosexual couples have enjoyed. In England, same sex couples have been able to form civil partnerships from 2005, and they have been able legally to marry from 2014. So these are very recent developments indeed. The first same sex weddings have taken place in Cumbria from 2014 onwards, and these were reported positively in the press.
A little further back in time, in 2005, same sex couples were able, in Cumbria, as in the rest of England, to enter into same sex civil partnerships. The Cumberland and Westmorland Herald tells us, in December, 2005, that two couples entered into same sex civil partnerships, at ceremonies in Penrith registry office. This was as soon as the law making this possible came into force. The story is a positive one, and begins, “Two couples made legal history in Penrith on Wednesday”. According to the paper, a spokesperson for Cumbria County Council explained at the time that there was strong interest in same sex civil ceremonies, with twenty already more being planned.
The Times and Star local newspaper picks up on these developments too. In its coverage, on 8 December, 2005, it explains that even by early December, 17 same sex couples had booked civil partnerships. This story quotes another Cumbria County council spokesperson who said that, “the authority wanted to ‘celebrate’ diversity and ensure everyone is treated with equality, tolerance and respect.” Interestingly, this news report also reports dissentient voices. So, the support for same sex couples taking up civil partnerships was not unalloyed. It’s worth remembering that this was fifteen years ago.
More recently, in 2017, the Westmorland Gazette, in March, 2017, reports on the first place of worship to perform a same sex marriage in Kendal, which was a Unitarian chapel. It begins, “A Kendal chapel has performed a landmark ceremony, becoming the first place of worship in the town to wed a same-sex couple”. In the newspaper’s own words, “However, despite the liberal approach to same-sex marriage that the Unitarians have taken, controversy still surrounds the issue within the Church of England.” Then, people with varying views on same sex marriage are quoted, and the paper ends with a positive note.
It seems from all this, that although not everyone agrees with them, same sex civil partnerships and weddings have been positively received and taken up in the county. Public reports of these events were written in respectful language.
However, as you can see, these are all contemporary developments. For most of history, in Cumbria, as in the rest of England, up to the 2000s, same sex relationships could not be expressed in legal form, and they were subject to very different degrees of social acceptability. You might find reactions ranging from social taboo and prohibition, to tacit or discreet acceptance by close acquaintances. The precise period at which people lived is one very important factor, although other factors might also be important, such as people’s sex or their social standing. So, without legal recognition, and usually without proper social recognition, how did people in same sex relationships in the past manage their relationships, and what issues of language were involved? As I mentioned in my first talk, we need to look at the language of friendship, in particular whether it was close or lifelong. We can look at the strength of feeling which people expressed, and we can look too at other evidence such as household sharing arrangements.
Let’s go back to the earlier twentieth century, and to the novelist, Hugh Walpole. Walpole spent much of his life in Cumberland. From 1924, his home was at Brackenburn, by Derwentwater, near Keswick. Although he kept up his London flat, he lived in his Lake District home, and with him, would normally be his companion, Harold Cheevers.
Hugh Walpole is acknowledged now to be gay, and this lifelong companionship with Cheevers, is now publically regarded as a same sex relationship. There was no way of legally formulating the relationship at the time. Indeed, Harold Cheevers already had a wife and family. Homosexuality was still then illegal. But the men were constant companions. Cheevers was employed by Walpole as his chauffeur. The words, chauffeur, or even friend, don’t convey the full depth of their companionship. A drawing by Stephen Bone in 1933 of the men enjoying a domestic evening as they sit over a game of chess, shows the sort of cosy intimacy which they shared.
Hugh Walpole’s biographer, Rupert Hart-Davis, makes much use of Walpole’s diaries in his biography of the novelist. An entry from Walpole’s diary from 1904 gives us insight into the kind of language that Walpole would use. I quote: “Meanwhile I still wait for the ideal friend…I’d give a lot for the real right man.” (1952, p.32) This is a revealing and private note.
On Tuesday 3 June, 1941, the Penrith Observer on page two reports the death of Hugh Walpole, which happened on the preceding Sunday, and it provides a respectful obituary for this distinguished local author. The language of the obituary is telltale here, both for what it does say, and for what it leaves out. The formal, ungossipy tone is what we might expect from such a source at such a time. We find out that, quote, “Sir Hugh made his home, and delighted to call it his home and to be known as a Cumbrian nearly twenty years ago, and wrote his books there in a library of about 15000 books…There he wrote his Lakeland saga, the Rogue Herries series”. The obituary also describes him as a prolific worker, critic and a kind friend. It stays very quiet about his private life, and this is what we have about his family networks, quote: “Sir Hugh was the son of a former Bishop of Edinburgh, and was a bachelor.” Later, “He is survived by his brother, Mr. Robin Walpole…and his sister, Dr. Dorothea Walpole”.
A marital relationship, with a woman, would have been recognised. There is no suggestion that Walpole is also survived by a male companion. In fact, Harold Cheevers is not mentioned at all in this article. Interestingly, the Penrith Observer also prints a photograph of Hugh Walpole in the grounds of Brackenburn, in which he stands alongside a male friend. It is possible that the male friend is Harold Cheevers; the caption doesn’t say who the friend is, and this needs proper picture identification.
Now, I’m going to consider the possible relationships of ladies from the nineteenth century. I believe that these cases will show potentially how invisible lesbian and female bisexual relationships in the past can be, and illustrate the subtle language around them.
First, I would like to introduce a lady whom I have written about in my blog, and that is the musician, Mary Wakefield. In what follows, I draw particularly on the work of Catherine Maxwell and of Sophie Fuller. I’m taking much of my information here from a biography of her, by her friend, the musicologist, Rosa Newmarch. Mary Wakefield lived 1853-1910, and she was born in Kendal, to a comfortably off family. Later, the Wakefield family moved a little outside Kendal to a specially built home at Sedgwick House; the house is a fine Victorian neo-Gothic building which may be seen today. Mary Wakefield herself lived a rich and full life. She was a talented singer, and enjoyed a long performing career. It was respectable for middle class women of that time to perform as amateurs, rather than as professionals, and this she did. Mary Wakefield also instructed choirs and took a great interest in amateur choral music in civic society. She was the originator and founder of the Competition Musical Festivals, a singing competition for choirs, which was first held on the tennis court at Sedgwick in 1885. This developed into the modern Mary Wakefield Westmorland Festival, a biennial event still held in Kendal, with the exception of this year, of course.
Mary Wakefield gives us a very interesting example of how tantalising, intriguing, and tricky a process it can be to identify same sex relationships in the archives. Throughout her life, she formed close friendships with women. Significantly, not only did she never marry, but she chose to spend the latter part of her life living with a female companion: first, with the writer, Valentine Munro Ferguson, and after Munro Ferguson’s death, with Stella Lockhart Hamilton.
Yet, the language used in the sources of her contemporaries is subtle. We won’t find the words, lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, partner or the term, same sex, at this period. Lesbian relationships no doubt happened, but could not be respectably acknowledged as such. Although lesbianism was never made illegal, the only legal form of union was heterosexual marriage, and lesbianism by whatever name was rarely openly claimed as an identity label. Lesbianism just wasn’t something which you could mention in polite company.
It is clear that there are tender bonds of friendship between Mary Wakefield and other women – but do these amount to what we would nowadays call a LGBT relationship? With acknowledgements to the researcher, Jane Traies, for this phrase, we could ask, “What does a lesbian relationship look like?”
Let’s look at Mary Wakefield’s friendships in more detail. This is a case where all the cumulative details are suggestive. For much of what follows, I am drawing on the work of Catherine Maxwell, who has written an extremely good article on Mary Wakefield and Vernon Lee. In the 1880s, Mary Wakefield was keeping close company with Marion Terry, who was an actress, and sister of the famous actress, Ellen Terry. This was so much the case that another friend of Wakefield’s, Vernon Lee, commented on how regularly Marion Terry and Mary Wakefield were seen in each other’s company. According to Rosa Newmarch’s biography of Wakefield, Marion Terry would visit Sedgwick, the Wakefield family home, and Wakefield and Marion Terry would go on long pony and cart rides together. On one such ride, the two women together unbuilt one of the long stone walls stretching across the countryside, as a shortcut, to allow passage for their tired horse. Apparently, they did not stay to rebuild the wall! Clearly, the women enjoyed adventure and fun together. Of course, there is nothing remarkable in itself about two women being particularly good friends or inseparable companions. Like Mary Wakefield, Marion Terry never married, and very little is known about Marion Terry’s private life. This evidence by itself is in no way conclusive, but it is as well to be open to the possibility that they had a relationship.
Vernon Lee, who commented on their constant appearance together, is herself an intriguing friend for Mary Wakefield to have. This is because Vernon Lee had deep emotional attachments with women, particularly with Mary Robinson, and with Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. These relationships appear to have been very significant to her. Vernon Lee and Anstruther-Thomson lived together for years.
As Catherine Maxwell notes, Vernon Lee visited Mary Wakefield at Wakefield’s family home of Sedgwick, Kendal, in the summer of 1886. The women spent a lot of time together, also taking invigorating outdoor excursions with long pony and cart rides. One such trip was spread over two days. Vernon Lee has left us in her letters some marvellous descriptions of Wakefield on her home territory in the Lake District. The two women enjoyed a more private time too. In one of Vernon Lee’s letters to her mother, Lee writes of her stay, “In the evenings Miss W., no matter how much driving she had done, sang like a seraph, or we smoked in a little sitting room she has at the top of the house, where she sits by the fire barefoot with only a nightgown on & an old plush dressing gown.” (Maxwell, p.966; Letters, ed.Irene Cooper Willis, p.229)
This gives us a delightful intimate glimpse into an informal Mary Wakefield, relaxing at home in the evenings, and shows the pleasant familiarity of the two women, host and guest. Vernon Lee, clearly enjoyed her stay at Sedgwick. Did the women have a flirtation or a relationship? They may or may not! We know that for a little while, especially in 1886, that the two women became really quite friendly; we know Vernon Lee does appear to have had relationships with other women, and we know that Wakefield enjoyed the close companionship of women and never married. Yet, this is not secure evidence of lesbianism.
Yet another female friend and visitor to Mary Wakefield’s home, and again, a lady who never married, was the composer, Maude Valérie White. In Friends and Memories, 1914, Maude Valérie White reminisces, quote, “I certainly spent some of the pleasantest hours of my life in the tower situated at the top of the house. Mary’s ‘den’ was in this tower, and a more attractive, a more fascinating little room I have never seen.” If you are interested in Mary Wakefield’s home, you can see a picture on my blog of her tower-room at Sedgwick.
Sophie Fuller, in her article, ‘Devoted Attention”: Looking for Lesbian Musicians in Fin-de-Siècle Britain’, builds up a case for thinking of Mary Wakefield and Maude Valérie White as queer. They were close friends; they performed music togther; and according to Newmarch, Maude Valérie White had her own room for visiting, in the tower at Sedgwick. Maude Valérie White also had “close friendships” with women and men whom we could nowadays describe as lesbian, bisexual, or homosexual, and Fuller describes Mary Wakefield’s friendships with women as “intense”. (Fuller, p.89)
After a busy and energetic career, Mary Wakefield finally settled down to a quieter life. In 1895, she moved into a house called Nutwood, at Grange-over-Sands, Lancashire. What her biographer, Rosa Newmarch tells us about her house sharing arrangements is very important here. Newmarch was a well-informed friend of Wakefield’s and her biography was published in 1912, two years after Wakefield’s death, so she was close to her subject.
I quote from Newmarch: “she [Mary Wakefield] welcomed the idea of sharing the house with a companion who was in every respect congenial to her.” This companion was Miss Valentine Munro Ferguson, with whom she shared her home for just over two years, until Valentine Munro Ferguson died after illness in 1897. Newmarch tells us, “It is needless to touch upon a sorrow to which, even ten years later, Mary Wakefield could hardly endure to allude.”
This is clear evidence that the two women must have been very attached to one another, and that Mary Wakefield felt her loss very deeply.
Newmarch uses the words, friend, and companion, and she explains the emotional presence and domestic companionship which her friends had. Companionship in this case, was based on a position of equality; it was not the arrangement of lady employer and lady employee. Due to different social mores from today, Newmarch certainly cannot say partner, or relationship, nor can she be more explicit. I’m inclined to place a high value on Newmarch’s carefully chosen words, and I do believe that it is entirely possible that Mary Wakefield and Valentine Munro Ferguson had a relationship.
Some years after Munro Ferguson’s death, Mary Wakefield met a new companion – Miss Stella Hamilton, who lived in nearby Windermere. In Rosa Newmarch’s words again, Mary Wakefield met “a new friend and helper…At first Miss Hamilton would come to her on short visits, which gradually became of longer duration, until finally she divided her life fairly evenly between her home and Nutwood, and learnt to help Mary Wakefield better than anyone else could do.” (p.113)
This arrangement between the women lasted until Mary Wakefield’s death in 1910. During their time together, they spent a lot of time landscaping Mary’s garden. Stella also took photographs to accompany Mary’s book on the local area. Cartmel Priory and Stetches of North Lonsdale, 1909. Many of the photos in Rosa Newmarch’s biography, are taken by Stella Hamilton, and include some of the Nutwood garden.
At times, it may seem prurient to wonder about all these women, and what types of friendship or relationship they did or didn’t have. You may perhaps think that in heaping up instances like this about Mary Wakefield, it is tantamount to arguing that with so much smoke, there must have been fire! What we do know, is that these women chose to share a household together, without men, so it is a homosocial choice. We can say that safely. And further, because women and their sexuality have historically been perceived differently to that of men, women were sometimes able to live together like this without shame or harassment. This is a double-edged state of affairs, of course. It can also mean that relationships between women, where they existed, can be invisible in the sources, or only subtly detected.
I’m now going to turn to two different women who lived together in Cumbria at the end of the nineteenth century. I want to be cautious here, more cautious than in the case of Mary Wakefield. Is this a different type of scenario? The women are Frances Tolmie and Harriet Rigbye. Frances Tolmie was born on the Isle of Skye, in 1840. She became a great student and collector of Gaelic folk song. After a varied life, spent partly in the Highlands, with periods also in Edinburgh, and at Newnham, Cambridge, she came to live with Miss Harriet Rigbye at Coniston, in the Lake District. Their house became Thwaite Cottage, which was not far from John Ruskin and his home of Brantwood.The Rigbye and Tolmie household were on a friendly footing with Ruskin, as can be seen from letters between Ruskin and Rigbye and Ruskin’s diary entries.
Harriet Rigbye was older than Frances Tolmie; she was born in 1812, in Berwick-on-Tweed, Northumberland. Her mother was Mary Russell and her father was Major Rigby in the Lancashire Militia. (Bassin, p.67) I don’t know a great deal about her, but she was a woman of independent means. In the 1871 census, under rank, occupation, or profession, she describes herself as “Gentlewoman and landowner”; in the 1881 census, , she has “Land, Houses, & Dividends”; and in the 1891 census as “Living on my own means”.
There is an advertisement for the National Society for Women’s Suffrage in two editions of “The Examiner” newspaper, in January, 1871. The committee members for different areas are listed, and under Carlisle, there is a “Miss Harriet Rigbye” on the committee. This may very well be the same lady! It is a distinctive spelling Of Rigbye with an e at the end of the name. Mary Wakefield and Valentine Munro Ferguson also supported women’s suffrage.
I’m drawing now on a very useful chapter of book called, The Old Songs of Skye: Frances Tolmie and Her Circle, By Ethel Bassin, 1977 and 2015. Bassin writes:
“Miss Rigbye was over sixty when Frances Tolmie went to visit her. A cultured woman of private means, she found her chief interest in landscape painting, mostly in water-colour. Some of her pictures are still to be found in the house in Dunvegan, belonging to the present generation of Miss Tolmie’s relatives. She lived, however, not at Low Bank Ground but on the opposite side of the lake at Thwaite cottage, and that during the summer months only. Every winter she left for Italy or the south of France, sometimes visiting Switzerland, where one of her sisters was married in Lausanne.
For twenty years she was accompanied in this migratory life by Miss Tolmie”.
This is clearly a very enduring companionship. William Lamb, in a publication called 120 Years of The Gesto Collection, describes it thus: Frances Tolmie “spent twenty years, from 1874-1895 as a governess for an elderly woman, Miss Harriet Rigbye, in Coniston, England. She [Tolmie] describes this time period in her Reminiscences as follows: ‘a deep slumber fell on my spirit. I lived in a dream, a wonderland of beauty and kindness’ “.
In the 1881 census, Frances Tolmie, who by this time is living with Harriet Rigbye, is described as “Assistant”. In the 1891 census, Harriet Rigbye is noted as the Head of household, and Frances Tolmie as “Visitor”. I am going to quote more of what Ethel Bassin’s book says about their relationship:
“Her position with Miss Rigbye may well have been the envy of many. Governessing was usually the only occupation open at that time to a young woman of good family. The life that Miss Rigbye offered her was an accidental piece of good fortune. Her duties appear to have been entirely social; in any case she was quite undomesticated. The life with Miss Rigbye, always in rooms, whether at home or abroad, left her entirely free of domestic obligations – which suited her admirably. It has been said of ‘Aunt Fanny’ that it is doubtful whether in all her life she ‘ever as much as dusted the drawing room’…All that was asked was that she should be ‘in attendance’ rather after the manner of a lady-in-waiting in more exalted circles.
She thus became Miss Rigbye’s lifetime companion. It was a simple friendly arrangement and remained so because she received no salary. All expenses were paid and she had the opportunity of foreign travel that would scarcely otherwise have come her way.” (Chp. 8)
Miss Harriet Rigbye died in 1894, and in 1895, Frances Tolmie moved to Oban, where her sister was living. What is notable, is that Harriet Rigbye made Frances her main heir, leaving her a bequest of £4000. This was a significant amount of money at the time, and would have ensured Frances’s financial well-being for the rest of her life.
I found these two women in the first instance, by searching on Cascat, the online Cumbria Archive Service catalogue. Bearing in mind advice from the archivist, Anna Kisby, on looking for historical lesbians, I searched Cascat on the word, companion, in in the hope of finding what might have been same sex relationships. The record which I found is a statutory declaration by Frances Tolmie, spinster, of 26 Alexander Place, Oban, Argyle, that she was a companion of the late Harriet Susan Rigbye, spinster, of Thwaite Cottage, Monk Coniston.
What do we make of all this language, of informal employment, of companionship, and of friendship? Certainly, at this period, a niche existed among the well to do, for lady companions. It is both a social and a practical way to share a household. Although, governess is the word we apply usually to an older lady who looks after younger ladies, when it was Frances Tolmie herself who was considerably the younger woman. Would the ladies actually have chosen different words and terms had these been possible? That’s a counterfactual question.
The language of employment certainly doesn’t cover this adequately, but does the language of practical living arrangements, or of friendship? There are many friends who don’t share a household for twenty years. I don’t believe, though, that it would be right to add romantic or sexual interpretations without clearer evidence. Against that, we should note how enduring the ladies’ companionship was. It lasted for two decades; and, indeed, the ladies always accompanied one another, whether at home or abroad. In the month after Harriet Rigbye’s death, Frances Tolmie took to her bed, ill, apparently with a bad cold; her sister travelled down from Oban to tend to her. Finally, we have the substantial bequest, provided for by Miss Rigbye for her lifetime companion, Frances Tolmie. Again, as with Mary Wakefield, this is a homosocial relationship, where women choose to share a household without men.
At this point, I feel that it is more pertinent to raise questions, than to provide answers. What constitutes a relationship? Does a relationship need to be physical, to be defined as such? Do we evaluate traditional marriages in the same way? Does the language available to us merely reflect our behaviour, or does it even prompt and guide it? What about ceremonies – do they formalise what we want and feel, or do they suggest to us that we define ourselves in one way, rather than in another?
I am reminded here of seeing some years ago an interview with Peter Tatchell, in which he explained his concept of a “significant other”. This might be anybody, from a sexual partner, to a relative to a good friend, with whom a person has a strong relationship and who could be nominated as their next of kin or heir.
We began the talk by looking at modern day same sex partnerships. As we have moved back through time, we have seen that with the status of heterosexual marriage as a defining bond, other kinds of relationship are expressed in subtleties of language and circumstance. I hope that this has given you a glimpse into how elusive relationships of the past can be. Thank you very much.
Sophie Fuller, ‘ Devoted Attention”: Looking for Lesbian Musicians in Fin-de-Siècle Britain’, in Sophie Fuller, and Lloyd Whitesell. Queer Episodes in Music and Modern Identity. Urbana; [Great Britain]: U of Illinois, 2002
Catherine Maxwell. Sappho, Mary Wakefield, and Vernon Lee’s ‘a Wicked Voice’.” The Modern Language Review 102.4 (2007): 960-74. Available free by registering with JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20467544
http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk › files › PDFs › Angus_Matheson_1 Contains information on Frances Tolmie; NB, this link begins a PDF download.
The Examiner, Saturday 7 January, 1871, p.26 The Examiner, Saturday 14 January, 1871, p.23 National Society for Women’s Suffrage committee members, listing a Miss Harriet Rigbye
On the Eden, Cumberland Peter De Wint 1784-1849 Bequeathed by John Henderson 1879 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N03493 Acknowledgments for the title of my post to an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford entitled Beyond the Binary.
This post is a modified version of an online talk which I gave on 10 December, 2020, as part of my series of four online talks on Cumbria’s LGBTQ+ heritage. In it, I discuss different aspects of “beyond the binary” with reference to Cumbria. This includes all sorts of aspects of appearance and behaviour, which are not constrained by conventional gender and sexual binary norms, male and female.
This is the fourth and final talk in my series on Cumbria’s LGBTQ+ heritage and language through the ages Over the past year, I have been researching Cumbria’s LGBTQ heritage, under the auspices of PiNC, Pride in North Cumbria, and with the generous support of the Heritage Lottery fund; I’m very grateful to both of them for their help and support.
In my previous talks, I have introduced ideas about LGBT research, and explored the topics of crime, and of partnerships and relationships. Today, I want to speak about “beyond the binary”. I originally saw “beyond the binary” as the title of an excellent exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. It strikes me as an intriguing and productive phrase, so with due acknowledgements, I’m using it today.
But what does “beyond the binary” mean? This is an inclusive phrase, which refers to people or to aspects of appearance and behaviour, which are not constrained by conventional gender and sexual binary norms, male and female. In a sense, this could include being gay or bisexual, because having a same sex relationship used widely to be seen as doing something which was the prerogative of only one sex. Beyond the binary may also include, intersex, transgender and transsexual, asexual, cross dressing, people who experience fluid gender and sexuality. So potentially, it contains all sorts of queer elements.
Today, the acronyms LGBT and LGBTQ signal such diversity and inclusiveness. We also have visual signs, notably the use of the rainbow flag. This flag appears at Pride events up and down the country. Contemporary newspaper reports on events like Cumbria pride usually feature this flag. Newspapers may also use modern, nuanced language. The News & Star, a local paper, in its report on Cumbria Pride last year referred to, quote, “the full range of sexual and gender identities”. (30 Sept, 2019). The word, “range” here, itself, suggests that the world is not necessarily divided into two clearcut camps, but that there may be variety. Today also, we have words with particular meanings, words such as, questioning, transsexual, and transitioning. The Oxford English dictionary gives specific sex change meanings of transition from the 1980s. In the past we might find expressions such as change of sex. Another modern expression is genderfluid, which again enters the language from the 1980s.
We can’t look for all the words which we use today and hope to find them in the past, nor, necessarily, can we always find exact correlates for these words. We may encounter different past concepts about biological sex, cross dressing, gender crossing and sexual preference. These ideas were not themselves fixed and stable, but have changed over time. It can be a challenge for us today to disentangle different threads of gender, identity, biological sex, dressing, and sexuality, if indeed, that is possible. But we can find much richness of material.
To begin, I shall discuss instances of cross dressing, gender crossing, and intersex in Cumbrian newspapers of the past. I shall bring up questions of language and concept as I do so. Then, I shall look more closely at two intriguing figures in Cumbria’s LGBTQ heritage, Eliza Lynn Linton, and Thomas Baty, about whom it is very worth thinking, in terms of beyond the binary.
Various reasons have been mooted as to why people have cross dressed. Women may have been motivated by more than one consideration. One reason for a woman to adopt male clothing might have been to gain access to male occupations. You often find cross dressed women as sailors or navvies or in other heavily dominated male gender roles. A women may have wanted to disguise herself, perhaps because she had run away from home, or even because of crime. Others again may have wanted relationships with other women, and have chosen this means of male disguise as the most socially acceptable. Lesbian and bisexual relationships, while not actually illegal, received no legal recognition, and scant social recognition. Alternatively, a woman might have felt more comfortable dressing as a man as a means of personal expression, perhaps even as a means of gender expression.
Numerous instances of women dressing as men have been reported in old Cumbrian newspapers. Although these generally took place outside the county, people taking the papers, or hearing the gossip, would find out about the possibility of this. I shall consider a few of these cases to illustrate the mix of circumstances and potential motives involved, and also the language in which they are reported.
The Wigton Advertiser, Wigton, Cumberland, reports on 13 April, 1912, in a story entitled, “Dressed as a Man”, that an Adelaide Dallamore, in Chiswick, London, had been charged with, “masquerading in male attire”. The newspaper is picking up on the language of the court here. Not only had she done this, but she had been living with another young woman, and they had been passing has man and wife. According to the court, “the two young women were very fond of each other, and the parents parted them. But the accused thought that the best plan would be for her to dress as a man and live with her friend, so that no young man should come forward and keep them apart.”
Dallamore had appeared first appeared in court wearing male clothing, and with short cut hair; she had been working as a plumber’s mate in a male persona. On her second appearance, she was dressed in what the newspaper called, “woman’s attire”. She had promised to go home and live like as a girl, and was bound over to keep the peace.
So, we have here, male employment, a plumber’s mate. We also have women living together. It is hard here clearly to separate possible lesbianism from transgender issues. We would not expect the word, lesbian, at this early date, and the word, “friend” is used for Dallamore’s companion. It is also too early, really, for transgender to appear in print – we might think of that from the 1970s, and the Oxford English dictionary gives a 1956 reference for transexual, in the sense in which we use it today. Indeed, the Wigton Advertiser sticks to binary descriptions, noting the clear difference between male and female clothing, and presenting the male clothing as a kind of disguise for the female biological sex. Note the word, “masquerading”, one which was common at the time. This itself denotes a false appearance.
It is not clear to me, though, that cross dressing was illegal in England, per se. Another Cumbrian newspaper, the English Lakes Visitor, tells an interesting story on 6 August, 1904, under the headline, “A Women’s Freak”. A person called Catherine Coombes/Charlie Wilson had been discharged for drunkenness by a Westminster magistrate. The magistrate “remarked that he was aware of nothing in law to prevent a female adopting male attire”. Coombes or Wilson had worked in a male occupation, as a painter for years. They had also married and lived with two different women, one for four years, and one for twenty two years. Finally, they had turned to the workhouse after old age and injury. Coombes/Wilson had expressed that they were, “very uncomfortable in female attire, and she took her discharge in the male clothing in which she was admitted.” Note the newspaper title, in which the biological sex of the person is made salient and also the use of the word, “freak”, which here means a personal caprice, a strange whim, an irrational idiosyncracy. An earlier story, also from the English Lakes Visitor and about the same person, from 9 October, 1897, describes Catherine Coombes/Charlie Wilson as, “the masquerader”. Again, clothing and gender presentation are seen to be incompatible with biological sex, and biological sex is seen to express a person’s true identity, whatever their experience may be. We can note also the potential mixture of motives from employment to relationships with women, to personal gender expression.
On 9 March, 1869, the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald prints a story about a so-called female groom and burglar. This is a very interesting case, potentially combining all sorts of motives. A young woman in Kent, calling herself Mary Field at the time of the story, had worn male clothes for five or six years, after running away from her previous situation. Indeed, she had had something of a male career, working in occupations from hop picking to potboy in an inn, to stable boy and under-groom, also waiting at table, in livery. She passed successfully as a male servant, and, as the paper reports, and I quote, “this she did without arousing the slightest suspicion as to her sex, not even [from] the young girl of the neighbourhood to whom she was paying her attentions”.
Mary Field had come to people’s attention because of burglaries in which she had stolen cheques. She was sentenced to seven days’ imprisonment with hard labour. In her box were found male attire and a false beard and curls. The newspaper says that, “She gave no motive whatever for donning male attire.” We see here that possible disguise, or gender expression or attraction to women might be at work.
These instances of female cross dressing occurred at a period of more restricted occupation for women than today, and also at a time preceding established lesbian or bisexual or transgender identity. In printing these stories from around the country, and occasionally from abroad, the editors of the local newspapers would hope most probably for diverting content; readers would be expected to recognise the aberrance of such episodes, and might be entertained. However, readers would also know that such things could and did occur.
Now, let us turn to something closer to home. There are local newspaper reports from 1890, relating a tale of a mysterious visitor or so-called “mysterious customer”, in Carlisle. The Carlisle Patriot, the West Cumberland Times, and the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald, all pick this up. On 7 June, 1890, the Cumberland & Westmorland Herald reports that, and I quote, “On Saturday morning last there arrived at Carlisle Railway Station by one of the trains from the south what appeared to be a tall and somewhat fashionably attired lady, but whose demeanour was of so masculine a character that one of the station officials suspected her to be a man dressed in women’s clothes. Information was given to Mr. Mackay, the Chief Constable, and it was deemed advisable to watch the movements of the mysterious visitor”.
This person went shopping in Carlisle. They bought a pair of gold earrings, and a lady’s hat and jacket. Then they visited the county hotel, before continuing to Edinburgh that day. There, their movements were also traced, and after further adventures, they changed into male attire. The Cumberland Herald prints part of the ensuing Scotsman report.This contains the terms, “queer customer”, and the “masquerader”. It is hard to fathom in terms of personal motives, what exactly is going on here. One thing is clear, though: a man dressed and trying to pass as a woman, alighting at Carlisle railway station, is thought suspicious in itself, and worthy to be reported to the police.
As you can see from all these past instances, clothing had a strong gender identification people, and was even socially policed. One cross dressing woman whom I came across, from 31 January, 1913, Lilian Cowley, of Bayswater, as reported in the Lakes Herald, was challenged as to whether she had been at a ball. This would have provided an acceptable excuse.
It’s worth thinking about some open questions at this point – I’m going to leave them all for you to think about. What sort of freedoms did we have in the past, and what today, in our dress and appearance? What about perceived gender crossing? Are freedoms and constraints the same for everyone, or is there a difference, depending on sex or on another factor? Does wearing make up, or wearing clothes, which are perceived to be gender related, mean that people necessarily wish to change their gender presentation? Or does it mean something else?
We are used to people being able to change their appearance, both today and historically, in certain contexts. These include for work, and in performance and entertainment and unusual social contexts. Some people like to dress up when celebrating Pride events, wearing outfits or decor which they wouldn’t ordinarily wear. What happens, nowadays and in the past, if we dress differently outside of these contexts?
I am going to give a couple of examples, where cross dressing in the past seems to be allowed and safely defined by the social mores of the time. The Maryport Advertiser for the 1st December, 1900 carries a report on Mrs Bandmann-Palmer, a noted actress. She is a “talented lady”, who is to take to the stage in December, in Whitehaven, to play the male role of Hamlet. The report is actually entitled, “The Lady Hamlet”. The reporter, with the press name, Marguerite, emphasises that it is the challenge of portraying “the personality of the moody Dane”, not the emulation of the male sex, which appeals to the actress. I quote, “She is not desirous of masquerading in men’s clothes.” Mrs Bandmann-Palmer’s cross dressing, and her endeavour to walk, talk, and think like a man, has been safely contained within the world of theatre – it is not going to spill out, and endanger her gender presentation in everyday life.
Another example of what I regard as safely contained cross dressing, comes in the form of carnivalesque, where traditionally, things are turned upside down for a short period. In the town of Alston, Cumberland, there were celebrations, as there were across the country, in June, 1902, to mark the end of the Anglo-Boer war in South Africa.
The Cumberland and Westmorland Herald for 2 June, 1902, tells us that peace was celebrated by putting up bunting, by sounding the church bell and the factory buzzer. A local band played, and a torchlit procession took place. To add to the overall effect of gaiety and rejoicing, “A band of young men with faces blackened masqueraded the town in female and other garments.”
This is very different from the sort of altered gender presentation in everyday life, which caused trouble for the people whom we have looked at above. In the case of men presenting themselves as women in the past, there was a risk that their appearance could be linked to homosexuality, whether that was the case or not. Homosexuality was illegal, and this could cause problems with the law. That was the case for men wearing drag in Manchester in 1880, and for the London cross dressers, Ernest ‘Stella’ Boulton and Frederick ‘Fanny’ Park, in 1870.
It is important too, to remember that being intersex can not easily be constrained into binary definitions of male and female. Being intersex means having male and female physical sex characteristics, and variations which go beyond a simple binary definition. I believe that there is discussion about how many people this includes, but you might think, for example, of one person in fifteen hundred. Intersex is a modern, twentieth century word, and in the past, you often find that the word which is used is hermaphrodite. In the past, also, you may find that being intersex has been kept a secret, or that people have had surgery to assign them to one sex or another, without their consent.
There was some awareness of intersex in the past. The Cumberland Pacquet, and Ware’s Whitehaven Advertiser, for 1 August, 1826, carries in its list of deaths, information from the Blackburn Mail. I will quote exactly what the newspaper says: “On Wednesday, the 19th ult. [July] aged 26, James Clough, of Blackburn. This person was of that class of beings styled Hermaphrodite, and though usually following the avocation of a man, such as a porter, ostler, &c.; he generally appeared in women’s clothes, with the exception of wearing a common man’s hat. – Blackburn Mail.”
We can see here that the newspapers use the language of gender identity, and that names, even occupation, and clothing, have strong binary gender connotations. Genderlessness does not seem to be possible. But the newspapers recognise this person in their own right too.
At the time of the instances of cross dressing and gender presentation which I have mentioned, it was not possible, physically to change the body as part of gender reassignment. It was not possible to get legal recognition for gender reassignment either. This became more accessible over the twentieth century, and especially, in England, at the end of the nineteen nineties, and in the early 2000s. When researching this talk, I came across several contemporary positive news stories about transsexuality and sex changes in Cumbria the recent 2000s.
As we can see, when looking for LGBT people in the past, we may have to look for women in men’s apparel, men in women’s apparel, or situations where people are pursuing courses then thought to be only open to the opposite sex.
For the remainder of my talk, I would like to introduce two historical people from Cumbria who raise all sorts of interesting thoughts about non binary gender and sexuality. The first is Eliza Lynn Linton, the Victorian journalist and novelist, and the second is Thomas Baty, also known as Irene Clyde, a lawyer and gender radical. I have already written about both of these figures, but it is well worth saying something them in a beyond the binary context.
Eliza Lynn Linton is not so very well known as a writer today. However, she was well known in her lifetime and she enjoyed a long writing career in fiction and journalism. You can buy her novels today as modern reprints. She lived 1822 -1898. She was born in Crosthwaite Vicarage, Keswick, Cumberland, where her father was vicar. Her mother sadly died when Eliza was young, so Eliza struggled up herself, reading, and eventually moving away to London to forge a career as a writer.
She is of interest to us today, as part of Cumbria’s LGBT heritage, because of her ambiguity about her gender and sexuality – it is hard to disentangle these strands in her case. While she was outwardly feminine, and even condemned those women who did not conform to her own ideas of femininity, Eliza Lynn Linton did some very conventionally unfeminine things. She developed an independent career and held sturdy views. In particular, she had a liaison with a neighbour who was a married woman, when she herself was still a young woman and living at home in Cumberland.
Her friend and biographer, George Somes Layard, found this incident embarrassing when he came to write his book. Mrs. Lynn Linton, her life, letters and opinions was published in 1901. However, rather than suppressing the information, Somes Layard did record it, saying, “The incident must as far as possible be cleared of its unnatural atmosphere. It is sufficiently bizarre without any eccentric additions.” (MLL, Chp. 4, p. 41)
Eliza Lynn Linton herself delineates such an episode, in her cross dressed autobiographical novel, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland. There the lady is called Adeline Dalrymple, and Eliza Lynn Linton describes at significant length the physical effects which this lady have on the hero, that is on Eliza herself.
Somes Layard quotes from Lynn Linton’s autobiography, believing it to reflect Eliza’s life, and attempts to pass it off as a crush, calling it an “infatuation”. (MLL, Chp. 4, p. 41).
This is interesting enough in itself, but Eliza Lynn Linton also incorporated characters who experience same sex attraction into one of her novels, called The Rebel of the Family, 1880.
I am grateful to the work of Deborah Meem in particular for the following observations. Meem has edited the novel, and written an excellent article on Eliza Lynn Linton. The heroine, Perdita Winstanley, becomes involved in women’s rights circles. She meets two women called Bell Blount and Constance or Connie Tracey. These female characters are living together, and Bell actually calls Connie her “wife”. This is a very significant inclusion for a novel published in 1880. The novel gives a wider portrayal, albeit not exactly flattering, of women who can’t yet be openly called lesbians, but who, in their behaviour and sometimes in their dress, leave no doubt as to their preferences for women. The heroine is pursued by one woman who has a “flourish of masculinity”, and whose mannerisms reveal her as a “handsome hybrid”. Hybrid suggests a mixture of male and female, and we may think of this character in lesbian or even in early transgender terms.
As I mentioned, Lynn Linton wrote her autobiography, but she disguised it as a novel, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, in 1885; and she reversed the sex of some, though not all of the characters, including herself. So, she features as the male protagonist, Christopher Kirkland. I acknowledge Deborah Meem and Kate Holterhoff’s very useful introduction.
The novel was widely reviewed at the time, as a kind of transvestite autobiography, an autobiography in drag, neither properly fictional nor thoroughly autobiographical. Why did its author seek to tell the story of her life through a male persona? True, it does allow her to present her ambition and strong opinions in ways which are more acceptable to the age, because they are uttered by a man. But, sometimes it seems that Eliza Lynn Linton, though not precisely comfortable in a male guise, has been drawn to describing herself in a masculine way. Contemporaries alluded to this too. In his biography of her, her friend, Layard Somes, says:
It is curious to find that even thus early in her life she was looked upon by her father and others rather in the light of a naughty boy than a weak and defenceless little girl, naughty or otherwise. That one felt her in after life, with all her sweet womanliness to have so much of the man in her was probably due to the same alloy in her composition. Indeed, alluding to this, she has more than once said with something of gravity, that when she was born, a boy was due in the family, and it was only the top coating that had miscarried.
Still, with all her masculinity, it was one of the delightful contradictions of her nature that she insisted upon her womanliness.” (p.21)
Meem and Holterhoff raise in their introduction to the novel, the idea of “fluid identity”, and pose the question, “Did Linton live her life on the transgender spectrum rather than or in addition to the lesbian spectrum?” (pp.8-9)
This is clearly a question which cannot admit of a secure answer, but whether for her early presentation in fiction of women who seek same sex relationships or for her own ambivalent gender presentation, Eliza Lynn Linton does deserve to be remembered more widely in connection with Cumbria’s queer heritage.
I know want to turn to a fascinating figure who is part of Cumbria’s LGBTQ+ heritage, and that is Thomas Baty. He lived 1869-1954, was born in Carlisle to a local family. His mother came originally from Penrith and his father was a cabinet maker in Fisher Street, Carlisle. Thomas Baty before continuing to Oxford and Cambridge, and becoming an expert in international law. It was in his legal capacity, that he sailed to Japan in 1916. He had been appointed legal advisor to the foreign office of the Japanese government.
When Baty went on his voyage, his mother and sister – his father had died by this time – went with him, as did items from their house. They settled in Japan, and spent the rest of their lives there. All three are buried in a cemetery in Tokyo.
As well as holding his official post as legal advisor to the Japanese govermnet, Thomas Baty was very active in quite unorthodox ways. I am grateful to Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai, Sonja Tiernan, Mary McAuliffe, Emily Hamer, and Karen Steele for what follows, and there are acknowledgments below, and in my previous posts.
As Ingram and Patai explain in a key article, “Fantasy and Identity: The double Life of a Victorian Sexual Radical”, Thomas Baty had a “double life” as a “sexual radical”. He published radical books under a female pseudonym, Irene Clyde. These books were broadly feminist. They also strongly advocated doing away with gender differences and ignoring biological sex distinctions altogether.
Baty’s radicalism began before he left England for Japan. In 1909, as Irene Clyde, he published a novel, Beatrice the Sixteenth. This is a Utopian story, which allows him to unfold his ideas about the perfect society. The heroine, Mary Hatherley, discovers a mysterious country, Armeria, whose inhabitants have given up gender distinctions. Baty inconsistently presents his characters with female and genderless pronouns. The society’s inhabitants are vegetarian, as was Baty himself. The heroine decides to spend the rest of her life there, rather than return home, and forms a partnership, or conjux, with one of the Armerians. (Hamer). Because of the inconsistent pronouns in the novel, this could even be interpreted as a lesbian relationship. (Hamer) Whatever the relationship is, it is certainly not heterosexual. The novel contains pioneering ideas remarkable for its time, although it did not sell well.
In 1912, Baty established the “Aëthnic Union”. This was a society which was intended to ignore differences of biological sex, and the gender expectations which flowed from them. He claimed that sex distinctions created barriers for people.
In 1934, as Irene Clyde, he published a book of essays, entitled Eve’s Sour Apples. This is a radical, and spiritual discussion of the relations between the sexes. Chapter headings comprise “The essence of sex: domination”; “How it comes.”; “How it must go”; “What is progress?”
However, it is especially for the radical periodical, Urania, that Thomas Baty deserves to be known. I was alerted to the connection between Thomas Baty and Urania by the LGBT+ Within and Beyond exhibition at the museum of Lakeland Life, Kendal.
Urania was published several times a year between 1916 and 1940, and it was sent to perhaps 250 worldwide subscribers. The editors themselves paid for printing and distributing the journal around the world over the years. The team behind Urania included Thomas Baty/Irene Clyde and colleagues, like Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper, Dorothy Cornish, and Jessey Wade. Esther Roper and Eva Gore-Booth were social reformers; they also had a long lesbian relationship, only terminated by death, and the two women were ultimately buried in the same grave. Dorothy Helen Cornish supported alternative education, and Jessey Wade campaigned for animal welfare and vegetarianism. Thomas Baty had become part of a radical, reforming circle.
Urania was a journal for Uranians. Uranian is a term which is not in use in LGBTQ+ communities today, but it was in circulation in the early twentieth century. “Uranian”, was chiefly introduced in English through the writings of Edward Carpenter, a man who campaigned especially for reform around homosexuality. Uranian and the word, Urnings, come originally from late nineteenth German sexology, and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.
Reforming currents of thought at this time were am intriguing mixture of ideas about homosexuality, inversion, and transgender, interfolded in a way in which they are not so much today.
Urania advocated the end of dualities of gender distinctions and of biological sex differences. Its motto was, There are no ‘men’ or ‘women’ in Urania.” The editors believed that, as Eva Gore-Booth put it, sex was an accident. If anything was beyond the binary, then Urania definitely was! Editorials, articles, book reviews, and reprinted articles from newspapers and periodicals around the world all advanced this view. Topics covered included positive references to Sappho, same sex romantic relationships, cross dressing, women who were not confined by gender expectations, who excelled in athletics or science, and men who were not confined by their gender expectations, who excelled in female areas like knitting. (Hamer)
Even the body itself could be considered mutable. The journal noted cases from the natural world of hermaphroditism, such as with oysters and plants. And Urania recorded instances of human intersex, and early sex change and gender reassignment. As Melanie Taylor notes, it printed in 1934, a story of an apparently spontaneous human sex change, that of Margaret Hutchison. And in 1931, it reported the story of Lili Elbe, a Danish painter, who had sex reassignment surgery and had her name legally changed. (Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener) In 1936, Urania printed the case of a Czech athlete, Zdenka Koubkova, who underwent medical gender re-assignment to become male, and called, Zdeněk Koubek. (Tiernan). Urania and its editors supported the entire dismantling of conventional gender and sexual distinctions.
In addition to all these cutting edge activities, Thomas Baty incorporated the reforms which he believed in into his own life. He was a vegetarian, and dressed himself sometimes in an unconventional way.
As Peter Oblas notes, Hugh Keenleyside, a Canadian diplomat in Japan, who knew Thomas Baty, reminisces that:
“Like most people, Dr. Baty had his emotional quirks. He was an active transvestite; even when having guests for he would sometimes appear in a flowing and low-necked gown.” (Keenleyside, p. 331)
So, Thomas Baty, born and brought up in Carlisle, may be regarded as a transgender pioneer, a genderqueer radical, and an important person in Cumbria’s LGBTQ+ heritage.
I hope that you can see that “beyond the binary” is a fascinating topic. It incorporates all sorts of elements from same sex relationships, to cross dressing, to transsexual issues. Although we don’t find the same language in the past as we do today, words such as masquerading and Uranian have their own rich history. Local newspapers did carry stories of queer interest, even if they were not exactly labelled as such; and Cumbrian figures such as Eliza Lynn Linton, and Thomas Baty, give us much food for thought. The past is more various than we might think.
That concludes my final talk in the series. I have very much enjoyed doing these, and I am grateful to all of you for listening, whether you have followed the whole series, or are looking in today. Thank you very much.
The Oxford English Dictionary. Entries are viewable through the number on a Cumbria public library card.
George Somes Layard. Mrs. Lynn Linton, her life, letters and opinions. London: Methuen, 1901 https://archive.org/details/mrslynnlintonher00layarich/page/n8/mode/2up There are copies of this biography in the public libraries of, Barrow-in-Furness: Reference section, LC309EC/LIN Carlisle: Reserve stock and in the Jackson Library: B 9 Keswick: C920 LIN Whitehaven 52 LIN
Ed. Deborah T. Meem. Eliza Lynn Linton. The Rebel of the Family. Peterborough, Ont. ; Orchard Park, NY : Broadview Press, 2002 The Rebel of the Family. 3 Vols, Chatto & Windus: London, 1880
The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, Richard Bentley, 1885 The first edition of this novel is in Carlisle public library: RS CUMBRIA; Jackson Library: 1 F LIN Eds Deborah T. Meem and Kate Holterhoff. The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, Brighton : Victorian Secrets, 2011 Kendal public library: LOCALFIC
Deborah T. Meem. “Eliza Lynn Linton and the Rise of Lesbian Consciousness”, in Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1 April 1997, Vol.7(4), pp.537-560 Available free by registering with JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3704160
Irene Clyde. Beatrice the Sixteenth. London, 1909
Irene Clyde. Eve’s Sour Apples. London: Eric Partridge Ltd. at the Scholartis Press, 1934
Emily Hamer. Britannia’s Glory: A History of Twentieth Century Lesbians. London: Bloomsbury, 2016 This discusses Thomas Baty, Irene Clyde, Beatrice the Sixteenth, and “Urania” on pp.67-73
Angela Ingram and Daphne Patai. Rediscovering Forgotten Radicals: British Women Writers, 1889-1939. Chapel Hill ; London: University of North Carolina Press, 1993
Peter Oblas. “Britain’s First Traitor of the Pacific War: Employment and Obsession”, New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 7, 2 (December, 2005): 109-133 Available online here: http://www.asia-studies.com/2nzjas72.html
Hugh L. Keenleyside. Memoirs of Hugh L. Keenleyside, Vol. 1, Hammer the Golden Day. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1981-1982, pp. 330-331
Alison Oram. ” ‘Sex is an Accident’: Feminism, Science and the Radical Sexual Theory of Urania, 1915 —1940″, pp.219-27, in Eds Lucy Bland and Laura Doan. Sexology in Culture : labelling bodies and desires. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998
Karen Steele, “A Case Study of Urania (1916-1940)” in Ed. Catherine Clay. Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018
Melanie Taylor. D.Phil thesis. “Changing Subjects: Transgender Consciousness and the 1920s”. University of York, July, 2000. Available online: https://core.ac.uk/reader/42604822
Eds Sonja Tiernan and Mary McAuliffe. Sapphists and Sexologists; Histories of Sexualities, Vol. 2. Newcastle upon Tyne : Cambridge Scholars, 2009 This discusses “Urania” in chapter 5.
Sonja Tierman. ” ‘No Measures of Emancipation or Equality Will Suffice’: Eva Gore-Booth’s Revolutionary Feminism in the Journal Urania“. In Eds Sarah O’Connor and Christopher C. Shepard. Women, Social and Cultural Change in Twentieth Century Ireland: Dissenting Voices? Newcastle : Cambridge Scholars Pub., 2008
Sonja Tiernan. ” ‘Engagements Dissolved’: Eva Gore-Booth, Urania, and the Radical Challenge to Marriage”, chapter seven, in Eds Mary McAuliffe and Sonja Tiernan, Tribades, Tommies and Transgressives: Histories of Sexualities Volume I. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008, pp. 128-44
Sonja Tiernan. Eva Gore-Booth: an image of such politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012 Tiernan discusses the Aëthnic Union established by Thomas Baty; its newsletter, the Phoenix, and its supporters; she also discusses in detail Eva Gore-Booth’s phrase, “sex is an accident” in chapter 11.
LGBT+ Language and Archives 