Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  To the horror of local residents, donations poured in from businesses and individuals, from members of the royal family, the City of London, the Rhodes Trust, the Nuffield Foundation and other benefactors. The London County Council served a compulsory purchase order on Mecklenburgh Square’s north side, and in June 1950 planning permission was granted – by Power’s friend Hugh Dalton, now Minister of Town and Country Planning – for the destruction of numbers 35 to 42 and the adaptation of the rest of the block for student accommodation. The plans caused a flurry of correspondence in the press, where the New Statesman gathered contributions under the heading ‘Death of a Square’. Articles described it as ‘a delightful little urban unit where famous people and humble families have been living side by side for 140 years’, and as ‘one of the finest examples of the architecture of its period that exists in Europe’, with houses notable for their ‘quiet dignity and scholarly character’. Some ten thousand families remained on the waiting list for housing in the borough of St Pancras, yet several longstanding residents, including R. H. Tawney, were evicted to make way for the expansion of London House, which was later renamed Goodenough College. Residents and non-residents alike mourned the transformation of the area from an affordable residential district into a campus populated by buildings ‘of a pompous and pretentious character, completely divorced from the way of life of those forced to reside in them’. As snow floated down through the broken roofs and settled in the long-abandoned drawing rooms, troops of construction workers arrived to rebuild Mecklenburgh Square, and a new chapter of its history began.

  *

  On a chilly afternoon in December, I leave the British Museum and wander through Bloomsbury towards Mecklenburgh Square. I’ve been in the museum’s basement examining its collection of admission records, delighted to find an archive in which all my subjects are represented. There, laid out on my desk in their plastic folders, are their applications for admittance to the Reading Room, their first announcements of themselves as scholars. There’s the neat square handwriting of Eileen Power, who in a gesture of resolve has crossed out ‘General Study’ and written ‘Historical Research’ under the heading of ‘Purpose’; there’s Hilda Doolittle, whose 1911 application encloses ‘recommendation from personal friend, Mr Ezra Pound’. There’s Virginia Woolf, writing from Gordon Square the year after she arrived in Bloomsbury, and Dorothy L. Sayers, who mentions that she hopes, in her new home, ‘to find time to begin a thesis for the Degree of D. Litt: “The Permanent Elements in Popular Heroic Fiction, with a special study of Modern Criminological Romance”’. Only Jane Harrison’s does not survive, but a supporting note in her hand, on paper headed with the 11 Mecklenburgh Street address, accompanies the application of Hope Mirrlees, made in 1927 (‘My object is to work at Russian and the early Romantic Movement’). A definitive line is scrawled under her name as Harrison signs an assurance that ‘in my opinion Miss Helen Hope Mirrlees is a fit and proper person to be admitted as a reader in the British Museum Reading Room’. Another door opens; another woman enters the old library, and looks up at the high ceiling, hoping that one day soon young women will see it as rightfully theirs.

  I walk down Great Russell Street, the golden tips of the museum railings glinting in the sunlight as I pass antiquarian bookshops, Korean pitstops and the offices of Faber & Faber. In Bloomsbury, streets narrate their own legend as you pass through them: plaques, monuments and faded signs hint at layers of history built up like grime on the facades of old houses. I cross the thoroughfare of Southampton Row, dodge down a tiny side street past a soot-blackened church and walk through Queen Square to Great Ormond Street, home to Lord Peter Wimsey’s policeman friend Charles Parker. As I reach Lamb’s Conduit Street, I can see the celebrity photos and rickety piano in Ciao Bella through the window-display of huge panettone bedecked with tinsel, and, beyond, the welcoming lamp of the Lamb pub, where Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath conducted early liaisons. Approaching the Woman of Samaria, still flanked by a construction site, I double-take at large billboards with triumphant illustrations of the finished building nestled within mock-ups of the present surroundings: a gleaming vision of the future where now there is empty space.

  Guilford Street in 1940

  London, for all these writers, was both past and future: a place to encounter history, to observe characters, to be reminded at odd turns of their previous selves, and to forge new friendships. Walking past the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Bank of England and the Old Bailey, the places where ‘our fathers and brothers have spent their lives’, Woolf concluded that the city’s public face represents women’s exclusion, not their heritage: ‘though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes’. Now, London is beginning to tell a different history: in 2018, a statue of Millicent Fawcett took its place outside Parliament, while Woolf herself is commemorated by a bust in the garden of Tavistock Square. But the legacy of these women lives on not only in static objects, but also in future generations’ right to talk, walk and write freely, to live invigorating lives. And though London isn’t always a welcoming place for the marginalised – the lack of affordable housing and the tide of gentrification prices workers out of the centre and sweeps away history and communities – there are pockets of the city where we can still recall a radical past, even if its traces now lie hidden. Mecklenburgh Square is one of these.

  Today, Mecklenburgh Square is a hub for international students. The garden resounds with the noise of barbecues, tennis matches and children playing on the slides and in the sandpit: the flower beds bloom, though since the lawns’ excavation for air-raid shelters there are still corners where shrubs do not flourish. But at Goodenough College, one more hopeful reminder of the square’s past survives. Researchers have established, as far as possible, exactly where Virginia Woolf’s study at 37 Mecklenburgh Square would have sat within the modern building. Now, that room is given over each year to a woman student. She arrives in London, nervous or excited about what the city may offer her as she embarks on her new course of study. She crosses Mecklenburgh Square, climbs the stairs, turns the key in the door of her new home, and finds a book sitting on the desk, ready for her to turn the first page: A Room of One’s Own.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS FOR ARCHIVES REFERENCED

  AC — Papers of Arthur Clegg of the China Campaign Committee. Marx Memorial Library.

  Amherst — Aleksei and Seraphima Remizova-Dovgello Papers, Correspondence 1921–48. The Amherst Center for Russian Culture, Amherst College.

  Arkansas — John Gould Fletcher Collection. University of Arkansas. MS f63.

  Barnard — Dean’s Correspondence Folder, BC 05.01.

  Barnard Archives and Special Collections, Barnard College, Columbia University.

  BBC — Eileen Power contributor file. BBC Written Archives. A8573 910. RCONTI Power Eileen Talks 3 1936–40.

  Beinecke — H. D. Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS 24.

  Beinecke GP — George Plank Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS 28.

  Beinecke JGF — John Gould Fletcher Collection. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. YCAL MSS 467.

  Bodleian — Papers of A. J. Toynbee, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

  Bryn Mawr — H. D. and Bryher papers. Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library. M51.

  CUL — Papers of Eileen Power and Michael Postan, Cambridge University Library. MS Add 8961.

  Girton — Personal Papers of Eileen Power, Girton College, University of Cambridge. GCPP Power E.

  Glasgow — Dugald Sutherland MacColl Papers. University of Glasgow. MS MacColl H178.

  Houghton AL — Amy Lowell correspondence, 1883-1927. Houghton Library, Harvard University. MS Lowell 19.

  Houghton JC — John Cournos letters from vari
ous correspondents. Houghton Library, Harvard University. MS Eng 998.

  HRC Flint — Frank Stuart Flint Collection. Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas. MS-1423.

  HRC Sayers — Dorothy L. Sayers Collection. Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas. MS-3715.

  Jacques Doucet — Charles du Bos Papers. Jacques Doucet Literary Library, the Sorbonne, Paris. MS 38225.

  Kent State — Charles Clinch Bubb and the Clerk’s Press. Special Collections Publications, Kent State University Libraries.

  LSE — Eileen Power Staff File. London School of Economics.

  LSE Robbins — Lionel Robbins Staff File. London School of Economics.

  LSE Tawney — Tawney Vyvyan Collection. London School of Economics.

  Maryland — Papers of Hope Mirrlees. Archives and Manuscripts Department, University of Maryland Libraries. 74-26.

  Morris — Richard Aldington Collection. Morris Library, Southern Illinois University. 1/1/MSS 068.

  Newnham — Jane Harrison Papers, Newnham College, University of Cambridge.

  Newnham HM — Hope Mirrlees Papers, Newnham College, University of Cambridge.

  Sussex — Monks House Papers. University of Sussex Special Collections.

  Wheaton — Dorothy L. Sayers Papers, The Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College, Illinois.

  PROLOGUE

  ‘three whistling’ – John Lehmann, I Am My Brother, pp. 80–1. The following scene is described in detail in this book, from which all quotations here are taken.

  A warden – Report by Incident Officer Richard Hudson. Holborn Record Office, A/01209/2.

  ‘a great pile’ – Anne Olivier Bell (ed.), The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 10 September 1940.

  ‘rubble where’ – VW, diary 20 October 1940.

  ‘a great mass’ – VW, diary 22 October 1940.

  IN THE SQUARE

  ‘one of the few’ – VW, ‘London Revisited’, Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 1916.

  ‘London is’ – T. S. Eliot to his mother, 20 May 1917. Haughton and Eliot (eds), The Letters of T. S. Eliot.

  ‘dark, bristling heart’ – D. H. Lawrence, Aaron’s Rod, p. 69.

  ‘how to go on’ – VW, diary 28 August 1939.

  blue plaque – It gives her dates in the square, inaccurately, as 1917–18.

  illustrious roster – Mecklenburgh Square has had so many fascinating residents over its history that several books could be written taking in any combination of them. The Victorian journalist George Augustus Sala – a friend of Dickens and Thackeray, whose house at number 46 boasted a hall ceiling painted with a gold-bordered mural representing Cupid and Psyche – considered Mecklenburgh Square an ideal home: ‘one of the oldest and greenest of full-bottom-wigged squares in front, and a shilling cab fare to one’s offices and one’s club’. The Muslim reformer Sir Syed Ahmed Khan is commemorated today by a blue plaque at number 21; the publisher John Maxwell lived at number 26 with his children and their stepmother, the novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon, author of Lady Audley’s Secret. The artist Ben Nicholson was born in the square, while the poet laureate John Masefield lived in Mecklenburgh Square during the 1930s, as did Graham Greene in 1938; there he wrote his books The Confidential Agent and The Power and the Glory, and had an affair with Dorothy Glover (his landlady’s daughter), conducted on the Bloomsbury rooftops while they patrolled on fire-watching duty. In August 1940, Natasha Litvin and Stephen Spender’s relationship began after a party on Lansdowne Place: they went for a walk in the Mecklenburgh Square garden before sojourning to an Italian restaurant to talk ‘politics and music’ into the night.

  There are four women whose stories I would have especially liked to include in the book, but eventually decided against – partly for a lack of information, and partly to keep the focus on writers. Hilda Martindale lived at 20 Mecklenburgh Square for many years, overlapping with Eileen Power: a student at Royal Holloway College, in 1901 she became one of Britain’s first female Home Office factory inspectors. She was made an OBE in 1918 for her work in the civil service, on the treatment of children and on equal pay for women workers. Helena Normanton, the first woman to practise as a barrister in England, lived at 22 Mecklenburgh Square from 1920 to 1928. In 1918, she applied to the Middle Temple, but was refused; within a few hours of the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act in December 1919, she reapplied, marching to the Temple from Mecklenburgh Square to claim her rightful place. She campaigned for reform to divorce laws, wrote detective novels and was the first married woman in Britain to be issued a passport under her maiden name. Though her personal papers were all destroyed, a biography, written by Judith Bourne, was recently published.

  Lorna Wishart was the youngest of the eight Garman siblings; she married the publisher Ernest Wishart when she was just sixteen, and later became the lover of the poet Laurie Lee. Their affair was interrupted in 1937 by the outbreak of civil war in Spain, where Lee went to fight: she sent him pound notes soaked in Chanel No. 5, and was waiting at Victoria station when he returned in February 1938. They spent the rest of the year in a flat at 35 Mecklenburgh Square – Lorna’s children living with a nanny in St John’s Wood – but the period was difficult, and in later years Lee would often use ‘Mecklenburgh’ as a synonym for ‘miserable’. Lorna returned to her husband in November, and later left him for Lucian Freud.

  Almost nothing is known about Nancy Morris, who lived at 44 Mecklenburgh Square in the 1930s, but the glimpses of her in the historical record could hardly be more intriguing. She was sister of the painter Cedric Morris, and spent the 1920s in artistic circles in Paris and London. The Bloomsbury chronicler Frances Partridge recalled Nancy’s famous parties; one, held at Knole, Vita Sackville-West’s country estate, had a hermaphrodite theme, whereby the women wore tuxes while the men strained under the weight of pearl necklaces. At another – perhaps in the square – ‘about a hundred people stood close together in a stuffy basement, shouting, bellowing rather, into each other’s open mouths, and sometimes twining their arms vaguely about one or two necks at once … a crowd of truculent Lesbians stood by the fireplace, occasionally trying their biceps or carrying each other round the room’. John Mortimer, who met Nancy in the 1940s, recalled a woman who always wore sunglasses and drank champagne; crop-headed, dressed in tweed suits and the cast-offs of the Soho restaurateur Marcel Boulestin, who left her his wardrobe in his will. From 1930 she was in a relationship with Alix Strachey, the wife of Lytton’s cousin James, who was one of the first psychoanalysts to practise in England and Sigmund Freud’s first English translator. ‘I hope,’ wrote Alix to Eddy Sackville-West, ‘you will like her when you meet her, because I have become very fond of her. But she is absolutely uncultured & will remain so, I think … And she loves dogs. I even sometimes think she can’t distinguish between them and human beings – except that she prefers them.’

  ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’ – W. R. Greg, The National Review, April 1862.

  ‘Good God’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 26 December 1911. Girton.

  ‘sacred place’ – John Ruskin, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, in Sesame and Lilies, p. 86.

  ‘deeply depressing’ – JEH, ‘Scientiae Sacra Fames’, Alpha and Omega, p. 125.

  ‘new beginning’ – Vanessa Bell, Sketches in Pen and Ink, p. 98.

  ‘everything was’ – VW, ‘Old Bloomsbury’, Moments of Being, p. 47.

  ‘Now we are’ – VW to Violet Dickinson, 29 June 1906. Nicolson and Trautmann (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf.

  ‘respectable mummified humbug’ – VW, diary 23 October 1918.

  ‘think one’s own’ – VW, ‘Leslie Stephen’, Selected Essays, p. 114.

  ‘passed like’ – VW, ‘Reminiscences’, Moments of Being, p. 4.

  ‘to be 29’ – VW to Vanessa Bell, 8 June 1911.

  ‘The room is’ – VW, ‘Professions for Women’, Selected Essays, pp. 144–5.

  ‘that Godless Institution’ – Quotation attributed to Thomas Ar
nold.

  ‘a thought’ – VW, A Room of One’s Own, p. 28.

  ‘having for its’ – The Times, 24 August 1894.

  ‘lived in squares’ – A remark attributed to Dorothy Parker.

  ‘aesthetically speaking’ – C. L. R. James, Letters from London, pp. 20, 52.

  Australian students – Among those who chronicled their time in London are Nancy Phelan (The Swift Foot of Time: An Australian in England), Nina Murdoch (Seventh Heaven) and Louise Mack (An Australian Girl in London): ‘A Boarding-House in Bloomsbury! To some people, no doubt, these words are provocative of horror and dismay. To us they mean freedom, life, novelty, fascination, everything that makes the days worth living.’

  ‘learned people’ – Paul Cohen-Portheim, The Spirit of London, p. 29.

  ‘Bloomsbury appears’ – Mulk Raj Anand, Conversations in Bloomsbury, p. 5.

  the Duke of Bedford – For Bloomsbury’s history see Rosemary Ashton, Victorian Bloomsbury, and Matthew Ingleby, Novel Grounds.

  ‘remote and half-discovered’ – In Peregrine Bunce (1842) the satirist Theodore Hook described Mecklenburgh Square as ‘the bleakest and most inhospitable-looking of squares, in whose road the grass grows all the year around, and where a carriage, or even a pedestrian, is seldom seen … this deserted, melancholy square, whose inhabitants, we should imagine, never cracked a joke in their lives.’ And in Thackeray’s 1897 story ‘The Bedford Row Conspiracy’, the address connotes a distinct shabbiness: an upper-class woman’s family threatens to cut her off when they hear she is engaged to a young man of Mecklenburgh Square, to which they refer in outrage as ‘Mucklebury Square’.