The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  It is unnecessary to enlarge on the personal popularity of Melba here, or the almost passionate devotion which she inspired among her own countrymen on the various occasions when she revisited Australia. Her book of reminiscences, “Melodies and Memories” (1925), was disappointing, for it contained too little about her methods and experiences. She was generous in giving her services for good causes, and her work for War charities is remembered in the title conferred in 1918. She was then created DBE, and GBE in 1927.

  Dame Nellie Melba, GBE, operatic soprano, was born on May 19, 1859. She died on February 23, 1931, aged 71

  GERTRUDE JEKYLL

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  INNOVATIVE GARDEN DESIGNER WHO PAINTED LIVING PICTURES WITH GROWING PLANTS

  DECEMBER 10, 1932

  Miss Gertrude Jekyll died at her home at Godalming on Thursday evening, at the age of 89. She had been failing for some weeks and had felt the recent death of her brother, Sir Herbert Jekyll, very much. She was a great gardener, second only, if indeed she was second, to her friend William Robinson, of Gravetye. To these two, more than to any others, are due, not only the complete transformation of English horticultural method and design, but also that wide diffusion of knowledge and taste which has made us almost a nation of gardeners. Miss Jekyll was also a true artist with an exquisite sense of colour.

  She was born on November 29, 1843, at 2, Grafton Street, the fourth child and second daughter of Edward Jekyll, captain in the Grenadier Guards, and Julia, née Hammersley. In 1848 the family moved to Bramley House, Surrey, and there she developed a strong interest in botany and gardening, in horses and all country pursuits, and especially in painting. About 1861 she began to study in the art schools of South Kensington, and in 1866 she worked in Paris. Later the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Louvre, the Brera, and the galleries of Venice and Rome offered her invaluable opportunity and experience.

  A succession of German and French governesses of the early Victorian type left no more than a resentful impression on her independent mind and character. A brief incursion into boarding school life only deepened her sense of aloofness, and yet no one had a kinder heart, a more truly helpful and sympathetic spirit, a readier sense of humour and good comradeship. Not that her home circle was narrow, or wanting in intellectual or artistic opportunity. Her mother was a good musician, and Mendelssohn was a constant visitor at her London home. Leighton, Watts, and Poynter, among many others, gave help and encouragement to the young artist.

  An early acquaintance with Charles Newton, then Keeper of the Greek and Roman collections in the British Museum, led to a fruitful friendship with him and his wife, Mary Severn, with whom, in 1863, she visited Rhodes, Constantinople, and Athens and acquired a knowledge of Greek art. While in Italy she obtained practical instruction in several handicrafts, such as the use of gesso, watergilding, inlaying, repoussé work, and woodcarving. Indeed, there was little her skilful fingers could not bring to perfection, from a piece of finely wrought decorative silver down to the making of her gardening boots. She could toss an omelette and brew Turkish coffee or elderberry wine, compose a liqueur, or manufacture her own incomparable pot-pourri. Embroideries designed by herself, repairs to ancient church work so skilful that they amounted to creation, patchworks of intricate pattern, quilting of medieval fineness, shell pictures such as only a real artist could conceive, banner-making for philanthropic friends, village-inn signs for Surrey neighbours — all were achieved with equal skill and enjoyment.

  In 1871 Miss Jekyll formed an enduring friendship with Jacques Blumenthal and his wife, he a musician of distinction, she unusually gifted in all manner of minor arts. Their famous hospitalities in London and at their lovely chalet above Montreux brought her into happy relations with many artists, musicians, and social notabilities. Another inspiring friend of the seventies was Hercules Brabazon, who profoundly impressed a small circle in those days, but whose wide recognition only came after he had laid down his brush. He introduced Miss Jekyll to Mme Bodichon (Barbara Leigh Smith), a gifted painter, but better known in connexion with Girton College. Together they spent a happy winter in 1873-74 painting in Algiers and there making friends with the artist Frederick Walker.

  Her father’s death in 1876 at Wargrave Hill, Henley, led to the return of the family to West Surrey, and there Miss Jekyll settled with her mother in a house they built on Munstead Hill, above Godalming, in 1878. This soon became a meeting ground for a group of enthusiastic gardeners, amateur and professional, who helped her in the pursuit which henceforward was to be her main employment and delight. House decoration and furnishing, of which her most extensive work was done at Eaton Hall in 1882, had already for some years occupied and interested her, but these activities waned as her horticultural knowledge and taste developed.

  In 1882 Canon Hole, afterwards Dean of Rochester, for ever pre-eminent among rose growers, brought with him on a visit to Munstead House Mr William Robinson, who in his championship of hardy flowers versus the prevailing bedding-out system, found in Miss Jekyll an enthusiastic fellow-worker. Their activities were soon shared by a remarkable group of ardent amateurs, all busy re-discovering neglected plants and popularizing better ways of gardening. The disability of restricted sight, which had prevented Miss Jekyll from painting pictures with brushes, was by the law of compensation turned into an unexpected development of painting living pictures with growing plants. The late Mr Lathbury first induced her to write for his paper, the Guardian, and she expanded her articles into a book, “Wood and Garden,” published in 1899. This was followed in 1900 by “Home and Garden,” and in the ensuing years by other books on “Lilies,” “Wall and Water Gardens,” “Children’s Gardening,” “Colour Schemes for the Garden,” and “Flower Arrangements,” besides one entitled “Old West Surrey,” embodying recollections of bygone country ways, to be re-issued, with amplification, in 1925, under the title of “Old English Household Life.” All these books were copiously illustrated by photographs, taken and developed by Miss Jekyll’s own hand.

  From the beginning of 1900, when the Garden newspaper became the property of Country Life, Miss Jekyll undertook its co-editorship with Mr Ernest Cook, and only relinquished it after two and a half years owing to the strain on her eyesight. But her interest in garden schemes, her own horticultural work including the distribution through the trade of improved strains of some of her favourite flowers, the recapture of many sweet and almost vanished climbing roses and garden plants, and the planning and beautifying of gardens of all sorts and sizes, went on to the end of her life. From 1895, when her mother died, onwards, this work was carried out from her own home at Munstead Wood, where she made herself, with the help of Sir Edwin Lutyens, who had begun his professional career in her workshop in the early eighties, the home of her delight, surrounded by some 15 acres of typical Surrey woodland. In that year she was gratified to receive from the Royal Horticultural Society the Victoria Medal of Honour, just then instituted, and again in February, 1929, the Veitchian gold cup and 50 guineas prize. In later years she kept in touch by correspondence with her numerous clients and private friends, and with a widening circle at home and overseas, attracted by her writings. To her correspondents, enthusiastic, but often horticulturally inexperienced, she owed many a humorous twinkle and quiet chuckle. “Could you spare me some of those lovely flowers I saw in your garden last time I came; I think you called them Peacocks?” Some moments of hard thinking ensued, and a parcel of Narcissus Pallidus Praecox was presently dispatched with an informative postscript. “What is the aspect of the flower border you ask me to plan?” inquired Miss Jekyll of an enthusiastic correspondent, who baffled her by replying, “Most of the day it faces south-east, but due north all the morning.”

  In the House of Nature there are many mansions, inhabited by widely divergent spirits. Darwin and Wallace took continents and oceans as their laboratories wherein to study strange and living creations; Wordsworth and Tennyson, lifting their eyes to the hills and the sky, discours
ed of religion and philosophy. Gertrude Jekyll, to whom we now bid a grateful “Hail and Farewell,” sought ever for practical knowledge allied to beauty, and in that quest, whereby she may truly be said to have transfigured the gardens of England, she never grew old at heart or wearied in mind, was never discouraged by difficulty or defeated by failure, neither did she cease to share widely the fruits of her long and loving apprenticeship to Nature.

  Gertrude Jekyll, VMH, garden designer, artist and writer, was born on November 29, 1843. She died on December 8, 1932, aged 89

  MARIE CURIE

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  CHEMIST WHO WON THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR HER DISCOVERY OF RADIUM

  JULY 5, 1934

  Mme Curie had a worldwide reputation as the most distinguished woman investigator of our times. Her claim to fame rests primarily on her researches in connexion with the radioactive bodies and particularly for her discovery and separation of the new element radium which showed radiating properties to a marked degree. This was a discovery of the first importance, for it provided scientific men with a powerful source of radiation which has been instrumental in extending widely our knowledge not only of radioactivity but of the structure of atoms in general. Radium has also found an extensive application in hospitals for therapeutic purposes, and particularly for the treatment of cancerous growths by the action of the penetrating radiation emitted spontaneously from this element.

  Marie Sklodowska, as she was before her marriage, was born on November 7, 1867, at Warsaw, and received her education there. She early showed a deep interest in science, and went to Paris to attend lectures in the Sorbonne. She had small financial resources, and had to teach in schools to earn sufficient money to pay her expenses. In 1895 she married Pierre Curie, a young scientist of great promise, who had already made several notable discoveries in magnetism and in the physics of crystals. Mme Curie continued her scientific work in collaboration with her husband, but the direction of their work was changed as the result of the famous discovery of Henri Becquerel in 1896, who found that the element uranium showed the surprising property of emitting penetrating types of radiation, which blackened a photographic plate and discharged an electrified body.

  Mme Curie made further investigations of this remarkable property using the electric method as a method of analysis. She showed that the radioactivity of uranium was an atomic property, as it depended only on the amount of uranium present and was unaffected by the combination of uranium with other elements. She also observed the striking fact that the uranium minerals from which uranium was separated showed an activity four to five times the amount to be expected from the uranium present. She correctly concluded that there must be present in uranium minerals another substance or substances far more active than uranium. With great boldness she undertook the laborious work of the chemical examination of the radioactive mineral pitchblende, and discovered a new strongly active substance which she named polonium, after the country of her birth. Later she discovered another new element, allied in chemical properties to barium, which she happily named radium. This element is present in minerals only in about one part in 3,000,0000 compared with uranium, and shows radioactive properties more than a million times that of an equal weight of uranium. The Austrian Government presented Mme Curie with the radioactive residues necessary for the separation of radium in quantity, and she was in this way able to obtain sufficient material to determine the atomic weight and physical and chemical properties of the new element.

  The importance of this discovery was at once recognized by the scientific world. In 1903 the Davy Medal of the Royal Society was awarded jointly to Professor and Mme Curie, while in 1904 they shared a Nobel Prize with Henri Becquerel. After the death of Pierre Curie in a street accident in Paris in 1906 Mme Curie was awarded in 1911 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and isolation of the element radium. In 1906 she was appointed to a special Chair in the Sorbonne and was the first woman to obtain this distinction. Later a special Radium Institute, called the Pierre Curie Institute, was founded for investigations in radioactivity, and Mme Curie became the first director. She held this post at the time of her death.

  In the course of the last 20 years this institute has been an important centre of research, where students of many nationalities have carried out investigations under her supervision. Mme Curie was a clear and inspiring lecturer, and her classes at the Sorbonne were widely attended. Her scientific work was all of a high order. She was a careful and accurate experimenter, and showed marked power of critical judgment in interpreting scientific facts. She retained an enthusiastic interest in her science throughout her life, and was a regular attendant at international conferences, taking an active and valuable part in scientific discussions.

  She had a deep interest in the application of radium for therapeutic work both in France and abroad, and during the War actively helped in this work. She was twice invited to visit the United States and was received with acclamation, while the women of that country presented her with a gram of radium, to allow her to extend her researches. In 1922 she was appointed a member of the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations and took an active part in their deliberations.

  Mme Curie left two children. The elder, Irene, early showed marked scientific ability and married a co-worker in the Radium Institut, M. Joliot. It was a source of great satisfaction and pride to Mme Curie in her later years to follow the splendid researches made by her daughter and her husband, for they have made notable contributions to our knowledge of neutrons and transformations. During the present year, they observed that a number of elements became radioactive by bombardment with the a-particles from radium, and have thus opened up a new method for study of the transformation of the atoms of matter.

  The many friends of Mme Curie of all nations, and the scientific world as a whole, will greatly lament the removal of one who was held in such great honour for her splendid discoveries in science, and one who by strength of character and personality left a deep impression on all those who met her.

  Marie Curie, physicist and chemist, was born on November 7, 1867. She died on July 4, 1934, aged 66

  AMELIA EARHART

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  THE FIRST WOMAN AVIATOR TO CROSS THE ATLANTIC

  JULY 20, 1937

  Hope has now been officially abandoned that Miss Earhart (Mrs G. P. Putnam) can have survived her last adventurous flight, after being missing for over a fortnight. Miss Earhart left Miami, Florida, on June 1 to fly round the world from west to east, with Captain Fred Noonan as navigator. Her machine was a Lockheed Electra, which was called the “Flying Laboratory” from its equipment of instruments and experimental apparatus. She arrived at Dumdum aerodrome, Calcutta, from Karachi on June 17, having covered about 15,000 miles, more than half her journey, at an average of 900 miles a day. From that point she had been working along the British air mail route. She arrived at Port Darwin on June 28, and started at 10am on July 2 from Lae, New Guinea, for Howland Island on the most hazardous part of her flight. Although signals for help are reported to have been received from her, she was never seen again, and prolonged searches by sea and air have failed to discover any traces of her machine.

  Miss Earhart first became famous in June, 1928, when she crossed the Atlantic as a passenger, but afterwards, in 1932, she made a solo flight from Newfoundland to Ireland. In each case she was the first woman to accomplish the feat — if sitting in an aeroplane as a passenger can be called a feat. She was, however, a pilot of more than average ability, and at a time when sensational flights were constantly being made to advertise the name of the pilot, her modesty and her refusal to use her fame for commercial purposes made her very popular. In this she resembled Colonel Lindbergh, whom she was also supposed to resemble in features. In America she was popularly known as “Lady Lindy.”

  Amelia Earhart came from Atchison, Kansas, where she was born on July 24, 1898. During the War she served with the Canadian Red Cross, and afterwards
entered Columbia University. She then learnt to fly, but her occupation in life was social welfare work among children in Boston. She was 30 years of age when she made her first crossing of the Atlantic by air. Mrs F. E. Guest, wife of the former Secretary of State for Air, and herself an American by birth, financed the flight to the extent of £8,000, and intended to fly in the machine herself. Finally she was persuaded to give her place to Miss Earhart. The machine was a Fokker with three 200-hp Wright Whirlwind engines, and was a twin-float seaplane. In the previous year, 1927, which had seen the greatest number of Atlantic flights, the successes of Lindbergh, Chamberlin, Byrd, and Brock, and also a regrettable number of fatal accidents, the three-engined Fokker had never failed its passengers on an ocean flight. The fitting of floats for wheels was an additional safeguard, and the machine also carried wireless. There were three on board — Commander Wilmer Stultz, the pilot, Mr Gordon, the mechanic, and Miss Earhart. The machine was named “Friendship.” She left Newfoundland on June 17, 1928, and 21 hours later came down in Burry Port harbour in South Wales.

  Not much was heard of Miss Earhart for a couple of years, but on April 8, 1931, she set up an autogiro altitude record, by reaching a height of about 19,000ft in a machine of that type with a 300-hp engine. She was also credited with two other aeroplane records for carrying certain weights at certain speeds.

  It was not until after her marriage, on February 7, 1931, to Mr G. P. Putnam, of the famous publishing house, that she was able to gratify her ambition of flying the Atlantic as a solo pilot, and being the first woman to do so. She was quite frank about her feelings. She did not profess that the flight would do any good to anyone or anything. “I did it really for fun,” she said, “not to set up any records or anything like that.” This time she chose a fast single-engined aeroplane, a Lockheed Vega with Pratt and Whitney 420-hp Wasp engine.