The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  Amy Johnson sitting in her B A Eagle at the start of the King’s Cup Race in February 1936

  Her marriage took place in 1932, but in 1936 she resumed her maiden name for the purposes of her career, and in 1938 the marriage was dissolved.

  Miss Pauline Gower, Officer Commanding No. 5 Ferry Pilot School, writes:—

  “Miss Amy Johnson was known throughout the world for her many famous flights, but in her private life and as a person she was less well known. I had the privilege of meeting her first in 1930, and during the years that followed got to know her as a friend. Although I always appreciated her brilliance as a pilot, the attributes which went to make her character were to me more impressive than her wonderful feats in the world of aeronautics. Her physical courage as an aviator was undoubted, her moral courage, her large-heartedness and her sense of humour were only fully appreciated by her friends. In her private life Amy Johnson was unassuming and entirely lacking in conceit. It is inevitable that the name of someone as famous as she was should be coupled with many extravagant stories. Those who knew Amy Johnson intimately saw her as an ordinary human being, keen on her job, brilliantly successful but always accessible. After her spectacular flight, when the world was at her feet, she could spare the time to give encouragement, help, and advice to any who asked her. Many have been assisted, encouraged, and cheered by her.

  “When she joined the Air Transport Auxiliary she settled down to her new life with all the eagerness and enthusiasm of somebody who obviously had her heart in her work and was anxious to do a job for her country. The flying she was required to do was not spectacular, but it required steady application. Sometimes it was easy for one with her experience; at other times her skill stood her in good stead. Whatever the circumstances, however she was feeling, the job was done; and the conscientious manner in which she carried out her duties was an inspiration to all those who worked with her. Amy Johnson is not only a loss to aviation; those who knew her have lost the type of friend who cannot be replaced.”

  Amy Johnson, CBE, pioneer aviator, was born on July 1, 1903. She was killed in a flying accident on January 5, 1941, aged 37

  VIRGINIA WOOLF

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  INNOVATIVE BLOOMSBURY GROUP NOVELIST, ESSAYIST, AND CRITIC

  APRIL 3, 1941

  The death of Mrs Virginia Woolf, which must now be presumed, and is announced on another page, is a serious loss to English letters. As a novelist she showed a highly original form of sensitivity to mental impressions, the flux of which, in an intelligent mind, she managed to convey with remarkable force and beauty.

  Adeline Virginia Stephen was born at Hyde Park Gate, London, in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen (then editor of the Cornhill and later of the D.N.B.) by his second wife, Julia Prinsep Duckworth (a widow, born Jackson). She was related to the Darwins, the Maitlands, the Symondses, and the Stracheys; her godfather was James Russell Lowell; and the whole force of heredity and environment was deeply literary. Virginia was a delicate child, never able to stand the rough-and-tumble of a normal schooling. She was reared partly in London and partly in Cornwall, where she imbibed that love of the sea which so often appears in her titles and her novels. Her chief companion was her sister Vanessa (later to become Mrs Clive Bell, and a distinguished painter). Her home studies included the unrestricted use of Sir Leslie’s splendid library, and as she grew up she was able to enjoy the conversation of distinguished visitors like Hardy, Ruskin, Morley, and Gosse. She devoured Hakluyt’s “Voyages” at a very juvenile age, and early acquired a love of the whole Elizabethan period that never left her. Her mother died when she was 13 and her father in 1904, when she was 22.

  After Sir Leslie Stephen’s death Virginia, Vanessa, and two brothers set up house together at Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and as time went on the sisters, with Mr Clive Bell, the late Lytton Strachey, Mr T. S. Eliot, and some others, formed a group with which the name of that London district was associated, sometimes with ill-natured implications. But, so far as Virginia Woolf was concerned, she would have done honour to any district. She very soon displayed a keen and catholic critical sense which found expression in those brilliant and human articles written for The Times Literary Supplement, many of which are contained in her book, “The Common Reader.” In 1912 she married Mr Leonard Woolf, the critic and political writer, and went to live at Richmond, Surrey.

  The marriage led to much joint work, literary and in publishing; but Mrs Woolf’s private interests remained primarily artistic rather than political. Despite friendships with Mrs Fawcett, the Pankhursts, and Lady Constance Lytton, she took no active part in the movement for woman suffrage, though as she showed in “A Room of One’s Own,” she passionately sympathized with the movement to secure for women a proper place in the community’s life. It was not until she was 33 (in 1915) that she published her first novel, “The Voyage Out,” which was a recension of a manuscript dating back some nine years. It was an immature work, but very interesting prophetically, as can be seen by comparing it with “To the Lighthouse.” By this time Mr and Mrs Woolf had set up as publishers at Hogarth House, Richmond, calling their firm the Hogarth Press. The high level of the works published by this press is universally recognized. Among them are some of the best early works of Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, besides the works of Mrs Woolf herself. Later transferred to Bloomsbury, the Press acquired an additional reputation for the issue of books having a political trend to the Left.

  In 1919 Mrs Woolf brought out a second novel, “Night and Day,” which was still by way of being ’prentice work, but with “Jacob’s Room” (1922) she became widely recognized as a novelist of subtle apprehensions and delicate reactions to life, with a method of her own and a finely wrought and musical style. Her subsequent novels, “Mrs Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” “Orlando,” and “The Waves,” rightly earned her an international reputation. These books broke away from the orderly narrative style of the traditional English novel, and are sometimes baffling to minds less agile than hers; but their subtle poetry and their power of inspiring intense mental excitement in imaginative minds are qualities which far outweigh occasional obscurity. The flux of perceptions and the inexorable movement of time were two of her chief themes; and if there is some truth in the criticism that her characters are little more than states of mind, it is also true that they are very highly individualized by the author’s remarkable power of observation. Above all, she had a perfect sense of form and of the unity — even if its expression were unattainable — underlying the whole strange process which we call human life. Mrs Woolf’s last book, published in 1940, was a profoundly interesting biography of Roger Fry.

  Virginia Woolf, writer, was born on January 25, 1882. She died on March 28, 1941, aged 59

  ELLEN WILKINSON

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  LABOUR MP, KNOWN AS “RED ELLEN”, WHO HEADED THE JARROW MARCH TO LONDON IN 1936

  FEBRUARY 7, 1947

  The Right Hon Miss Ellen Wilkinson, Minister of Education since 1945, and for many years a prominent personality among the middle generation of Labour Party politicians, died yesterday of a heart attack in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, where she had been ill with bronchitis. She was 55.

  Miss Wilkinson was indeed a politician, a woman of quick brain and shrewd administrative ability, adroit in debate, and tough and ambitious of temper, who knew how to exhibit to the best and liveliest advantage her Socialist convictions. It was not her red hair alone or her diminutive size that earned for her the familiar title of “Red Ellen” or “The Fiery Particle.” The extremism of her left-wing views was not seriously abated for some time after she left the Communist Party, but Parliament and time together worked upon her, and experience of office completed what they began, and brought her more closely into line with the body of Parliamentary Labour opinion.

  Ellen Cicely Wilkinson was born in Manchester on October 8, 1891, the third of the four children of a cotton operative. She went to an ele
mentary school, by scholarship to a secondary school, by scholarship again to Manchester University, where she took a MA degree. For a time she was a pupil teacher, but her earliest thoughts of a career were in the direction of writing and journalism, and journalism indeed entered largely into her political career. She joined the Independent Labour Party in 1912. Small — she was no more than five feet in height — violently red-haired, and immensely at her ease, she proved a confident and effective speaker. In 1913 she became an organizer of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, and then, after the outbreak of war (during which she maintained the characteristic ILP attitude), national organizer of the National Union of Distributive and Allied Workers.

  Her association with all sorts of extreme left-wing bodies during and immediately after the war of 1914-18 inevitably carried her into the Communist Party on its formation in 1920. “Red Ellen” — who visited Moscow in the following year as a British Communist representative — became widely known as an advocate of “direct action.” It was as the official Labour candidate, though she still retained her Communist Party membership, that she stood unsuccessfully for Ashton-under-Lyne at the 1923 election. It was as a Communist that she was elected to the Manchester City Council in the same year. But by the next year, when she was elected to Parliament for Middlesbrough East, she had severed her connexion with the Communist Party. She held Middlesbrough until 1931. In the Commons she was fluent, well provided with facts, sometimes aggressive, sometimes impassioned, but inclined to weaken the force of her argument by resort to the scoring of debating points. Outside she engaged in her trade union affairs and in a good deal of public speaking and journalism.

  Miss Wilkinson lost her seat in the election of 1931, was a bitter critic of Mr MacDonald and of the Baldwin administration, and came back to Parliament in 1935 as the member for Jarrow. She had in the meantime greatly widened her study of international affairs. The menace of Nazi Germany was not lost upon her, and visits to Germany in 1936 and to Spain in the following year sharpened her criticism of the policy of appeasement. In domestic politics she joined vigorously in the Opposition attack upon Government policy, or lack of policy, in regard to mass unemployment and the depressed areas, of which her own constituency was as tragic an instance as any. She headed the Jarrow marchers on their way to London in 1936, and three years afterwards produced a volume, “The Town that was Murdered,” in which she set forth in detail the history of Palmer’s shipyard and drew from Jarrow’s bitter experience after it had been closed an indictment of capitalism and a reasoned plea for a planned Socialist economy. In the previous year she had scored a notable personal success in Parliament in introducing a private member’s Bill on hire purchase, designed to terminate various flagrant abuses of the system, and in securing its enactment with support from every quarter in the House.

  At the outbreak of war in 1939 her attitude did not differ from that of the great majority of the Labour Party and of the country as a whole. When Mr Churchill became head of the Coalition Government she was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions, and, later in the year, one of the two Parliamentary Secretaries to Mr Herbert Morrison at the Ministry of Home Security. The inadequate and ill-provided shelter accommodation in London and other great cities at the start of the blitz roused her to a remarkable pitch of energy, which she maintained all through the prolonged phase of fire-watching and other civil defence precautions. It was apparently in deference to her own choice that she was appointed to the Ministry of Education, where the task devolved upon her of translating into practical effect the far-reaching changes embodied in the Education Act passed under the Coalition Government. The tragedy is that recurrent illness prevented her from achieving much of what she set out to do.

  Active and resilient of temperament, Miss Wilkinson did not at any time spare her energies. The busy life of a member of Parliament between the wars matched her inclinations; the authority of a Minister during and after the second world war sustained her confidence. In the course of her career, during which she visited many parts of Europe, she suffered various physical mishaps and endured several bouts of illness, but always, in the homely phrase, she came up smiling. Her oddly picturesque person and shrewd debating style will be missed in the Commons, at Labour Party gatherings, and in the political life of the country as a whole.

  Ellen Wilkinson, politician and campaigner, was born on October 8, 1891. She died of a heart attack on February 6, 1947, aged 55

  MARIA MONTESSORI

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  EDUCATOR WHOSE METHOD PREDICATES THAT THE BEST EDUCATION IS PROVIDED BY LEARNING FOR ONESELF

  MAY 7, 1952

  Dr Maria Montessori, who evolved the Montessori educational system, died at Noordwijk, Holland, last night, aged 81.

  An Italian, she was for many years an important influence on the trend of educational practice. Her aims and technique have at times been travestied and misunderstood, yet she forced educationists everywhere to take stock of their ideas and was a powerful agency in the broadening of curricula and the humanization of instructional method. Moreover, her work has very wide social and philosophical implications.

  Born at Chiaravalle, Ancona, on August 31, 1870, Maria was the only daughter of Cavaliere Alessandro Montessori. She entered the University of Rome as a medical student and was the first Italian woman to win the degree of M.D. She then became an instructor in the psychiatric clinic of her university, taking a special interest in pedagogical anthropology and the training of the mentally deficient child. The methods which she found the most congenial basis of experiment were those which Edouard Séguin had begun to apply some 50 years earlier in France. She rapidly came to the conclusion that for the cure of mental deficients the pedagogical approach was more important than the medical; and from her practical work at the clinic on these lines was to grow up the whole structure of her wider educational method. In 1898 she was appointed directress of the Scuola Ortofrenica in Rome. After due training she put several eight-year-old defectives in for the State examination in reading and writing. They not only passed, but gave better results than the normal children.

  At last, early in 1907, came the great opportunity which enabled her to elaborate and test her method on a large scale. The Roman slum district of San Lorenzo had become a byword for filth, insanitary housing, overcrowding, and misery. The Istituto Romano di Beni Stabili now took it in hand and attached to each block a Casa dei Bambini, a kind of crèche. Dr Montessori was put in charge. She set out to discover whether principles that had worked so well with defectives would be equally efficacious with normal children. The infants went ahead by leaps and bounds under her system of free discipline. The Montessori method was established, and in 1909 its author issued her Metodo della Pedagogia Scientifica. A further two or three years of experimentation followed, and in 1912 she published her Autoeducazione nelle Scuole Elementari. In the previous year the method had been widely introduced into the Swiss state schools, and began to be employed in other schools, not only in Italy but in England, America, and elsewhere. At the Fielden Demonstration School, controlled by the University of Manchester, notable results were obtained with children aged from four to six.

  In subsequent years many societies and institutions were founded for the study and exposition of the method, and Dr Montessori travelled widely, observing, lecturing, and demonstrating. A research institute was founded at Barcelona in 1917. In 1919 she gave the first of her London training courses, which were afterwards repeated biennially, under the aegis of the British Montessori Society. A teachers’ training college was opened in Italy in 1928 and a year later a similar college began operations in London. From 1931 onwards annual congresses have been held. Besides controlling these various bodies and presiding over congresses, Dr Montessori acted from 1922 as Government inspector of schools in Italy. In 1923 she was awarded the honorary degree of D.Litt. by the University of Durham. Her books have been translated into many languages.

  Her me
thod is empirical, being built up on the observed results of actual teaching rather than conceived as a philosophical entity and imposed from above. Its two main principles are non-interference with the child’s freedom and individuality and the use of sensory training in the earliest stages of education. Her claims to originality lie in the application of sensory training to normal children, in the working out of a systematic scheme, stage by stage, and in the provision of a set of didactic materials for handwork.

  She believed that the best kind of education is provided by learning for oneself; and from this it follows that the teacher is a guide and observer, strongly adjured not to impose her personality on the pupils. In the Case dei Bambini work for its own sake was never imposed. Toys and common objects were provided, and it was left to the child to decide what his occupation should be. Ordinary household tasks like brushing, washing, and darning played a large part in the training. Discipline arose naturally out of the teacher’s personality and the spontaneous interest of the children in what they were doing. Rewards and punishments were utterly abolished, and there was no insistence on remaining quiet and still.

  Legitimate criticisms of Dr Montessori’s method are that it tends to over-stress the manual side of education at the expense of the intellectual, that it gives insufficient scope to the natural imaginative faculty, and that its empiricism has not been confirmed by a philosophically coherent body of theory. There can, however, be no doubt as to the high status of this great woman in the line of educational reformers. The final judgment on the system may well be based not so much on the degree to which it has won integral acceptance in the schools as on the measure wherein its principles have been assimilated into the general consciousness of the race.