Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  But Power’s interest in China was personal as well as political. Her first visit there as a Kahn Fellow had set the course for her history work; it had also heralded a significant development in her private life. In 1921, during a walking tour in the Western Hills, she had spent a weekend at the home of Reginald Johnston, an eccentric Scottish civil servant, practising Confucian and philosopher, who had arrived in China on Christmas Day 1898, aged twenty-four, serving initially in Hong Kong, then at the British territory of Weihaiwei. In 1919, he was appointed tutor to thirteen-year-old Puyi, the last emperor of China. Since he had been forced to abdicate in 1912, aged six, after the Qing dynasty was overthrown, Puyi held no power outside the palace walls, but his courtly life in Beijing’s Forbidden City continued in traditional pomp; he dined every night in the height of luxury, and was attended wherever he went by a throng of deferential eunuchs. The Foreign Office encouraged Johnston to take the post, hoping that his influence would come in useful should the boy be restored to the throne, and instructed him to teach Puyi English and constitutional history, in order to prepare his charge for modern governance. But Johnston was reluctant to instil Western values in Puyi, preferring to shape a ruler who would guide China forward with respect for the traditions which might otherwise be lost in the ferment of revolution. Together they studied world history, philosophy and cinema alongside Chinese folklore, history and religion, while Johnston encouraged his student to write poetry, ride a bicycle and cut down on waste in the Forbidden City.

  Most British expatriates in China were missionaries and businessmen who kept themselves isolated from the Chinese; Johnston, though politically conservative, travelled the country, learned the language and immersed himself in Chinese art, literature and landscape. In 1920, having found a plot of land in the Western Hills, Johnston built Cherry Glen, a small oasis at the end of a rough mountain track bordered by fruit trees, with a panoramic vista of the valley below. There, he erected shrines to gods and poets in the winding paths, and built a temple where he slept in summer. Power was entranced by the solitude and spirituality of the place, and the life Johnston led there: she loved drinking rose-infused wine and scented tea from handleless cups on the veranda at twilight, waving to the children who crowded to watch Johnston at his work, and meeting the monks and scholars who came to discuss poetry or philosophy with their learned friend. Two years later, Johnston’s impression remained in her mind: ‘I remember him with pleasure,’ she wrote to Coulton, ‘because he was soaked in Chinese things & because he was so amusing & because he lent me a horse.’

  During her Kahn Fellowship, Power had written longingly to Margery of her determination to return to China and live there on ‘journalism and odd-jobs’; it was, she insisted, the one place to which she would ‘never be happy unless I can return’. In October 1929, Power did go back to China, now travelling as an established public intellectual with an international reputation. She had been invited to attend a conference in Kyoto organised by the Institute of Pacific Relations to discuss questions such as the economic position of Japan, the changing nature of rural life and the benefits of industrialisation. After the conference, she travelled through Manchuria with Arnold Toynbee, a fellow delegate, visiting the Great Wall, Peking, Shanghai and Nanjing. He was working on A Study of History, while she was researching the Europeans who had travelled to China under the Mongol Empire. At Christmas, she stayed for two weeks at Cherry Glen with Johnston, who was fifteen years her senior. Their relationship remains shadowy, scarcely attested in material form; letters and diaries shed tantalisingly little light on the events that led up to the end of the fortnight, when she and Johnston became engaged.

  There is no evidence to suggest that Power, now aged forty, had previously expressed any interest in marriage or children. We can only speculate whether the engagement was serious or merely experimental, its suddenness born of passion or a realisation of mutual convenience. In any case, thousands of miles from her usual intimates, Power confided her news to Toynbee. The next morning, a flustered Toynbee declared his own love for her, despite being married to Gilbert Murray’s daughter Rosalind and never before having shown any signs of romantic interest. Stunned, Power rebuffed him, and later wrote to offer a somewhat exasperated apology: ‘You gave me a sudden and violent shock, for which I was totally unprepared, and what really animated me was a frantic and quite irrational desire to stop you from putting into words what I didn’t want to hear.’

  Power refused to let these personal events distract her from her professional engagements, and her time with Johnston as a newly engaged couple was short-lived. In January 1930, she sailed alone from Shanghai to San Francisco, spending the journey cutting out paper dolls for a group of Chinese children and completing crosswords with a wisecracking British financier. From there she travelled to New York, to take up a post as visiting lecturer at Barnard College; she told Toynbee – who had written to apologise for the ‘irrational and most devastating association of ideas in my mind’ – that she was ‘dashing all over New York and Massachusetts and even down to Virginia talking to women’s colleges’ and had addressed the Federation of University Women at Rochester and the Medieval Academy in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was delighted to meet ‘everyone whose work I had ever known’. (She cheerfully informed the college’s dean, Virginia Gildersleeve, that in a month she hadn’t dined a single night at home.) Johnston, meanwhile, attended the ceremony in which Weihaiwei became the first British colony to be returned to China, reading out the agreement in Chinese and English as the Union Jack was lowered.

  At the end of November 1930, after thirty-two years in China, Johnston returned to London to take up a professorship at the School of Oriental Studies – though he took a house in Richmond, and Mecklenburgh Square remained Power’s private domain. That same month, Power wrote to Gildersleeve, thanking her for an invitation of a permanent professorship in New York. Power regretfully turned down the post (‘the difficulty is that I am also very fond of my work at the London School of Economics & have now got a wide circle of friends in London’). But she refused to ‘say no definitely’, asking whether she might reconsider the offer – a rare and prestigious opportunity – ‘say in a couple of years’ time’: ‘New work always interests me,’ wrote Power, ‘and it is possible that I might feel it easier to take the plunge then than I do now, and the professorship and the generous terms which you suggest are certainly very attractive.’ Her reluctance to close off this possible path may suggest an ambivalence about her future with Johnston, who himself was in constant touch with friends in China, intimating that his own presence in London might not be permanent.

  Their engagement was announced publicly in December. But by the summer, the arrangement appears to have been called off. (Johnston remained in London until 1937, when he retired peacefully to his own tiny Scottish island.) It’s not clear quite what caused this decision, but in July 1931, Power accepted the highly coveted post of chair of economic history at the LSE, awarded on the grounds of ‘her contributions by research to the advancement of social and economic history, her known powers as a teacher, her high standing as a social and economic historian’. To her satisfaction, her annual salary was raised to £1,000. She was only the second woman (after her former tutor Lilian Knowles) to be appointed to this position, and she took seriously her responsibility to serve as a role model to the next generation of scholars. Demands on her time, already substantial, only intensified. That December, she was invited to join the Committee of Experts on School Textbooks by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, a Paris-based organisation which aimed to promote exchange between scholars. The following year, she was called on to address the annual conference of the International Federation of University Women, a body with close links to the League of Nations, which served as a sort of travel agency for female scholars across the world: Power appreciated her ties to this community, and told the congregation that she could conceive of ‘no more powerful means
of binding nations together than by the infinite multiplication of these tiny invisible threads of personal contact and mutual understanding’. And in 1933, she received an honorary degree from the University of Manchester. It may be that she simply didn’t have the time or inclination to take on a domestic role that might compete with the position she had, at long last, achieved: a public scholar of recognised reputation.

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  In the winter of 1937, reports reached Britain of the Japanese capture of Nanjing, and attendant atrocities: widespread looting and rape, and the dropping of aerial bombs indiscriminately on civilian territories. While the British government offered ineffectual concessions in a weak attempt to persuade Japan to withdraw its troops, anti-war councils and pacifist groups organised mass protests calling for action to uphold the Covenant of the League of Nations and to condemn Britain’s apparent accommodation of Japanese imperialism. Power was one of many academics who signed a telegram in solidarity with the Ministry of Education at Nanjing, expressing their horror at the destruction of schools and colleges there. That year, she was involved in the foundation of the China Campaign Committee, which headquartered on Bloomsbury’s Gower Street; its president was Lord Listowel (later a Labour peer), its chairman Dorothy L. Sayers’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, and the vice presidents included Power, Tawney and Laski. Its policy statement condemned Japan’s war on China as ‘a threat to world peace and the whole system of world security’, and urged Britain ‘to stand firm by the Chinese people, believing that theirs is a struggle for real democracy’. Power helped organise the dispatch of medical supplies by plane and ship, and lobbied for a boycott of Japanese goods. At Christmas 1938, the committee organised a protest at Selfridges on Oxford Street against the sale of silk, one of Japan’s major exports. That same year, Power contributed a whimsical essay about Cherry Glen to China: Body and Soul, a collection introduced by Gilbert Murray which also contained – among essays on symbolism, calligraphy, religion and narcotics – a piece by Roger Fry on Chinese art and architecture, and another by Harold Laski on China and democracy. The proceeds went to the relief of distress in China: a ‘stupendous tragedy,’ wrote Murray, ‘to which we must resolutely refuse to become accustomed if any humanity is to remain in the human race’.

  Eileen Power recognised that China’s problem was the world’s problem. She instantly saw that the Manchurian crisis was no private quarrel between far-off, uncivilised lands, but an act of imperial aggression, a militarist effort to stifle a nascent democracy, in direct contravention of the League of Nations and its cooperative vision for world peace. She saw, as too many others did not, that standing in solidarity with China’s democracy was an essential act of resistance against fascism. Power watched the outpouring of sympathy for the Spanish Republicans in 1937, when socialists across Europe united to oppose Franco and fight for liberty in a crisis many saw as an ominous prelude to a bigger war; students demonstrated in the streets, poets conscripted to fight with the International Brigade and crowds rallied around Picasso’s painting Guernica, which was exhibited at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in 1938. But the fact that the Chinese cause did not attract the same attention was, to Power, a failure of the expansive vision that she had spent the decades promulgating, and one for which the world would suffer. Neville Chamberlain had recently delivered a rousing speech in the House of Commons, denouncing Germany for its barbaric attempts to starve Europe into submission by cutting off supplies from overseas and attacking civilians. The first lady of China, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, wrote to the China Campaign Committee to point out that she had been broadcasting for years using the very same words and phrases to condemn the Japanese activities in China, and had been ignored. She blamed these double standards on a blinkered world view that prioritised European suffering and failed to understand that pain far away required a robust response not only because it could presage similar atrocity at home, but also for its own sake. It was a concrete example of real-world damage caused by the very attitudes and perspectives which Power had identified and sought to alter through her writing and her work for schools. And now it seemed to be too late.

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  Throughout the 1930s, world events made clear that the League of Nations policy of collective security was failing to deter aggressors. In 1934 the LNU held its famous Peace Ballot, polling Britain to assess support for the League; its results – that the country voted overwhelmingly in favour of continued membership of the League – were announced in an invigorating public rally. But the ballot was little more than an empty PR stunt. The LNU’s membership – which peaked in 1931 at over four hundred thousand registered subscribers – was fast declining in a country increasingly pessimistic that collective security could stand up to the capacities of those determined to undermine it. ‘War seems inevitable,’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary in 1935. That October, Italy invaded Ethiopia and subjected it to military occupation. In his essay ‘The Doctrine of Fascism’, Mussolini had made clear his disdain for the League, which Italy quit in 1937, dismissing the dream of international cooperation with his famous words ‘nothing outside the state’. In Germany, Hitler adopted compulsory military service and, in 1936, reoccupied the Rhineland, directly contravening the Treaty of Versailles and effectively declaring his intention to govern with force rather than negotiation. That year, H. G. Wells told a friend to ‘forget about the League of Nations … a blind alley, in which a vast wealth of hope and good intentions has been wasted’; it had, he argued, ‘almost as much reality in it as a vegetarian league of wolves’.

  In the spring of 1936, amid the light relief of the rumours swirling around King Edward VIII’s affair with the American divorcee Wallace Simpson, debate intensified among pacifists on the efficacy of the League approach. The Peace Pledge Union – founded by the Anglican clergyman and former army chaplain Dick Sheppard as a humanitarian rejection of militarism – gathered one hundred and twenty thousand members in its first year of existence, all pledging to renounce war. But many others began to turn towards reluctantly supporting war as the only way to stand up to fascism and achieve peace in the long term. The chancellor of the exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, accelerated Britain’s rearmament with a military expansion programme that would treble the country’s expenditure over the next four years. Yet after becoming prime minister in May 1937, Chamberlain remained hesitant to commit to war, instead attempting diplomacy with dramatic eleventh-hour flights to the continent for meetings with Hitler and Mussolini. On 12 March 1938, German troops crossed into Austria. In September, Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement, allowing Nazi Germany to dismember Czechoslovakia. That year air-raid practices began in every large city in Britain, while volunteers began to be conscripted for the war that now seemed certain.

  Power was shocked at Chamberlain’s concessions to Hitler, and his refusal to denounce the violence being perpetrated on Jews in Germany. She joined an anti-appeasement movement and signed a letter in the Manchester Guardian entitled ‘A Manifesto by Leading Educationalists’, calling for states to surrender their arms and establish a settlement to ‘lay the foundations of lasting peace’. Over the summer of 1938, Power found herself compulsively reading books about the fall of the Roman Empire, struck by discomfiting parallels with the present. She dropped all her teaching to write a lecture, ‘The Eve of the Dark Ages: a tract for the times’, delivered to the Cambridge History Club in November. Her handwritten draft has ‘Munich’ pencilled over its title. In the lecture, Power portrayed Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries AD – a time, she suggested, when ‘the lights were going out all over Europe’ – as a melting pot of cultures, directly refuting the Nazis’ promotion of themselves as a ‘new world empire’ in Rome’s image. Her focus, characteristically, was on the human suffering of this period. ‘Why did they not realise the magnitude of the disaster that was befalling them?’ she asked, conjuring an image of Romans complacent in the superiority of their way of life, blithely dismissing the danger of invasion between games o
f tennis and siestas and baths. With the advantage of hindsight, she argued, it’s easy to criticise those who simply couldn’t believe that their culture would ever disappear. Taking Gaul as a case study, she isolated two points of blame, both resonating with her contemporary concerns: first, the ‘policy of appeasement’ which allowed the Goths a sphere of influence within Europe; second, the flawed education system. ‘The things they learned in their schools,’ she argued, ‘had no relation to the things that were going on in the world outside and bred in them the fatal illusion that tomorrow would be as yesterday, that everything was the same, whereas everything was different.’ It will have been clear to her audience that this lecture on ancient history was really Power’s manifesto for the present.

  Power saw her hopes of international unity fading away in favour of the nationalist, militarist fervour she knew as a force for destruction across time and place. But she kept working, determined to communicate history’s lessons to future generations if not to her own. While others, including Wells, had given up on it, she continued to believe in the League of Nations, and attended its 1939 assembly in Geneva, where delegates mingled with detectives hired to guard the event from protesters. That January, she also became the first woman to deliver the prestigious Ford Lectures at Oxford, an annual series given by a distinguished scholar to huge audiences. Her subject, the wool trade in English medieval history, represented the culmination of decades of work on international economic history. She began by eviscerating the view of the Middle Ages in Western Europe as a period of small, self-contained communities, positing it instead as a time of ‘large-scale international trade’. Hers was not the usual patriotic story of English domination of the wool trade, but one of trade routes, migration, cooperation, told in her characteristically lucid style, with emphasis on personality and feeling. For Eileen Power, the greatest horror of war lay in its negation of personal bonds: its infringement on private freedoms and its disdain for the human values of empathy and tolerance. As a historian, she wanted to mobilise against fascism and nationalism, and to affirm, through her writing, the value of a cultural tradition that transcends borders and rejects parochialism. The Ford Lectures, delivered as the world waited for war, were her rallying call to the future.