Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  ‘You need not’ – EP to William Beveridge, 26 July 1921. LSE.

  ‘I rather begrudge’ – EP to Amy Lowell, 1 March 1925. Houghton AL. Former students at Girton remembered Sunday-evening poetry readings in Power’s rooms, where she would read her favourite poem, Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’, and works by Browning, Brooke, Flecker, Ralph Hodgson and W. H. Davies.

  ‘I am extremely’ – EP to George Coulton, 30 January 1922. Girton.

  Tantalising fragments – See Maxine Berg, A Woman in History, p. 155. Robeson’s wife, Eslanda – who also starred in the film – studied at LSE in the 1930s, where they may have met Power.

  ‘I certainly feel’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 9 July 1912. Girton. Winifred Gaukroger, a former student, remembered most of the Girton dons as ‘very quaint old birds’ who wore ‘antiquated clothes – a dress with a high neck with buttons from the throat right down to the ground … Miss Power, the history don, is quite different from the rest … she wears lovely clothes and from the swish she makes evidently wears silk petticoats.’ Girton.

  The obituaries – R. H. Tawney, address at Golders Green crematorium, 12 August 1940, Girton; J. H. Clapham, ‘Eileen Power’, The Times, 13 August 1940; Charles Webster, ‘Eileen Power’, Economic Journal, vol. 50, December 1940; G. G. Coulton, ‘Memories of Eileen Power’, The Cambridge Review, vol. 52, 18 October 1940.

  her salary rose – When Knowles wrote a testimonial for Power in 1914, she insisted that ‘Miss Power is by far the best student that has come under my hands in my ten years at the school, & my men are many (& some of them getting their thousand a year now). I hope she will not get the fellowship because then Girton will not keep her & I want her as my colleague & later as my successor.’

  ‘because I can’t’ – EP to Lilian Knowles, 3 April 1921. LSE.

  ‘like the community’ – EP, ‘The Problem of the Friars’, The Nation and Athenaeum, 18 January 1928.

  ‘the virtues’ – JEH, ‘Homo Sum’, Alpha and Omega, p. 84.

  ‘is so anxious’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 6 January 1911. Girton.

  ‘a woman’s outlook’ – EP, ‘Women at Cambridge’, The Old Cambridge, 14 February 1920. In her essay ‘Are Women Human?’, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote of her annoyance at being so often asked for ‘the women’s point of view’ on detective fiction: ‘Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.’

  ‘extracting all’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 22 August 1910. Girton.

  ‘At her house’ – Judith Listowel, This I Have Seen, p. 48.

  ‘The Intractable Princess’ – Girton.

  ‘pirouetting in the’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 6 October 1911. Girton.

  ‘I feel stupid’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 8 August 1910. Girton.

  ‘quite in love’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 22 August 1910. Girton.

  ‘in order to’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 18 August 1910. Girton.

  ‘stumbling along’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 17 May 1911. Girton.

  ‘which divides’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 6 January 1911. Girton.

  ‘exasperating them’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 7 April 1910. Girton.

  ‘asserted that’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 7 February 1911. Girton.

  ‘living la vie Boheme’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 15 August 1910. Girton.

  ‘the most disreputable’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 26 March 1911. Girton.

  ‘feminists, radicals’ – idem.

  full-length published – Power’s first publication was the booklet The Paycockes of Coggeshall (Methuen, 1920), based on research at Paycocke’s House in Essex, a Tudor merchant’s home now owned by the National Trust.

  Alice Clark – For more on these women historians – many involved with Girton and the LSE, and also campaigners for the suffrage and the League of Nations – see Maxine Berg, ‘The First Women Historians: The LSE Connection’, pp. 308–29.

  ‘sounded to the’ – Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, p. 25.

  ‘preachers told them’ – EP, Medieval Women, p. 3.

  ‘the middle ages’ – EP, ‘English Domestic Letter Writers of the Middle Ages’. CUL.

  ‘Victorian relegation’ – She reviewed Richard Aldington’s translation of Les Quinze Joyes for the New Statesman, and accused him of ‘medieval misogyny’ because of his complacent remarks on ‘the inferior and dependent position of women in the Middle Ages’.

  ‘to speak of’ – EP, Medieval People, p. 18.

  ‘wildly socialistic’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 17 October 1910. Girton.

  ‘the obscure lives’ – EP, Medieval People, p. 18. DLS to C. S. Lewis, 26 January 1949: ‘Does one ever quite get over one’s surprise at finding that medieval people were just like people today? That their disputes and quarrels and arguments only need translating out of that extraordinary dialectical style to become exactly the sort of problems that worry you and me? One knows they were real people – why does one keep on forgetting it?’

  ‘if less spectacular’ – EP, Medieval People, p. vii.

  ‘We still praise’ – ibid., p. 19.

  ‘dew-dabblers’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 22 July 1911. Girton.

  Rockefeller Foundation – Hugh Dalton, Call Back Yesterday, p. 109.

  cages of chimps – Stephen Kresge and Leif Wenar (eds), Hayek on Hayek: An Autobiographical Dialogue, p. 82.

  converted army huts – Lionel Robbins, Autobiography of an Economist, p. 69.

  almost three thousand students – Ralf Dahrendorf, LSE, p. 153.

  ‘circle of rebellious’ – Beatrice Webb, diary 20 March 1918.

  Charles Webster – Webster was a member of the Honorary Powers – a ‘most select society’ for men who ‘must be able to recognise the Power idea of a joke at sight’; and who ‘must at no time have proposed to any of the Power sisters, such proposal constituting an implied slight upon the Honorary surname’.

  ‘hotbed of communist teaching’ – 1934 letter to the Telegraph from Sir Ernest Graham-Little, quoted in Ralf Dahrendorf, LSE, p. 280.

  ‘often chafed’ – EP to George Coulton, 20 March 1921. Girton.

  chocolate creams – VW, diary 6 January 1940.

  ‘I like people’ – EP to Helen Cam, 6 January 1938. Girton.

  ‘cabbage wallpapers’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 22 August 1910. Girton.

  ‘scores of books’ – J. H. Clapham, The Times, 13 August 1940.

  ‘I never realised’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 6 November 1910. Girton.

  ‘admired and much-loved’ – EP to George Coulton, 5 September 1923. Girton.

  ‘I’ve lent’ – EP to Michael Postan, 25 June (no year given). Girton.

  ‘any woman’ – Papers of Dorothy Marshall. Girton.

  ‘a scholar’ – Beatrice Webb, diary 8 December 1935.

  ‘an idealist’ – VW, diary 11 November 1917.

  ‘to abolish all’ – R. H. Tawney, The Choice Before the Labour Party, p. 6.

  ‘the study, not of’ – R. H. Tawney, ‘The Study of Economic History’, lecture at LSE, 12 October 1932, in J. M. Winter (ed.), History and Society: Essays by R. H. Tawney.

  ‘The main business’ – EP, ‘On Medieval History as Social Study’, inaugural lecture delivered at LSE, 18 January 1933. CUL.

  ‘all those Bloomsberries’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 24 September 1914. Girton.

  ‘hankered after’ – LSE Tawney. In the same text, Jeanette goes on to describe 44 Mecklenburgh Square in some detail: ‘To our delighted surprise the three lower floors of a house in one of [Bloomsbury’s] squares was offered to us at a figure within our competence … By some good chance, sunrises exist in very fact in this square; a path has been left through the house-tops for the golden rays. Here in the very heart of the metropolis is a silence so complete as to be audible. There is an atmosphere of past and present that endears the square to the sensitive and imaginative. Internally these dignified edifices
have been submitted to much drastic treatment. Externally, their purity of line and colour remain. None of these houses are now possessed of their own stables. Where the stables stood, there is now a garage or a shop. The old-fashioned indoor water-closet without outside ventilation, in the form of a cupboard on the top of the stairs, remains to date the primitive civilisation of a hundred and fifty years ago, when one water closet was deemed adequate for a large family, and when there was no bathroom. The stairs are made of that beautiful grey stone, which when polished and left bare, makes an admirable foil for the red of Persian handiwork. The treads are half the height of modern stairs, and the steps twice as wide. It is therefore possible for a long-footed man to go downstairs without turning his foot sideways, or shooting down the stairs. Inaudibly he can go up and down these stairs, for they neither creak nor groan. The handrail is of pure mahogany, polished by years of palm rubbings. You grasp it with affection just for the pleasure of a rare sensation. There are charming leaded lights above the second hall door, which give a “cachet” of mystery to the house, like successive courts in eastern homes give an air of reserve and strength to the citadel. You are ever intrigued as to what lies beyond. The perfect parlour-maid (where is she?) would close the inner door silently when the front door bell rings. Thus would she protect the inner shrine of the hall from the common gaze, and the inrush of the icy blast, which alas! too often pervades London’s squares.’

  ‘mental disease’ – R. H. Tawney, Equality, p. 198.

  ‘a compost-heap’ – ‘Profile: R. H. Tawney’, Observer, 25 January 1953.

  ‘he really is’ – EP to William Beveridge, 3 March 1931. LSE.

  ‘you are continually’ – EP to Michael Postan, 29 January (no year given). Girton.

  regular fixtures – Attendees included Frederick Brown, Robert Fraser, Richard Greaves, Arthur Creech Jones, John Parker, Leonard Woolf, Barbara Wootton. See Postan in W. T. Rodgers (ed.), Hugh Gaitskell; Brian Brivati, Hugh Gaitskell; and Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems.

  these informal – Some of the group’s findings formed contributions to the books New Trends in Socialism (1935) and War and Democracy (1938), edited by George Catlin, and Evan Durbin’s book The Politics of Democratic Socialism (1940).

  ‘Why are you’ – Vera Brittain, Testament of Friendship, p. 132.

  ‘an international authority’ – Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 134.

  ‘The parallel’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 7 July 1917. Girton.

  ‘the greatest ideal’ – Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, p. 24.

  ‘The hope’ – H. G. Wells to the Chairman of the National Conference on War Aims, 26 December 1917.

  ‘The only way’ – EP, A Bibliography for School Teachers of History, p. 9.

  The Victorian certainty – See Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation, 1919–1939.

  ‘If the League’ – EP, A Bibliography for School Teachers of History, p. 9.

  ‘no less imperative’ – EP, Notes on ‘A League of Nations’. CUL.

  ‘the teaching of’ – H. G. Wells, ‘World Peace’, The Listener, 17 July 1929.

  ‘so as to widen’ – EP, ‘The Teaching of History and World Peace’, in F. S. Marvin (ed.), The Evolution of World Peace, p. 180.

  ‘is one of the most powerful’ – Unpublished essay, ‘The Approach to Political and Economic Problems in Schools’. Quoted in Maxine Berg, A Woman in History, p. 223.

  ‘active desire’ – ‘Formation of the Schools Broadcasting Council’ pamphlet. BBC.

  ‘It is fun’ – Hilda Matheson to H. G. Wells, 14 June 1929. BBC.

  an impassioned address – H. G. Wells, ‘World Peace’, The Listener, 17 July 1929.

  Beryl – Beryl Power was a speaker and organiser for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies; aged twenty-two she was addressing huge outdoor meetings in Hyde Park with Millicent Fawcett. During the war she became a factory inspector, and later a permanent civil servant in the Ministry of Labour. In 1926 she won a scholarship to spend a year travelling in the United States studying the enforcement of labour laws for women and children. She served as a member of the Royal Commission on Labour in India between 1929 and 1931; she became the second of the Power sisters to meet Mahatma Gandhi. During the Second World War she worked in the Ministry of Food, then advised on welfare policy in China as part of the Bangkokbased UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Far East. She was closely involved with the Institute of Race Relations: like her sisters, she believed that ‘the urgent problem of the relations of the different races and nations of the world holds the key to the future pattern of our shrinking, tumultuous and highly dangerous world’.

  a cigarette card – ‘I keep it in my purse because it’s very useful when Eileen and Beryl are given fresh academic and civic honours, I just take it out in their presence and look at it quietly and significantly, to remind them of what real fame is.’

  ‘one of the most effective’ – Letter to Rhoda Power, December 1934. BBC.

  ‘some definite lessons’ – EP to Mary Somerville, 27 January 1936. BBC.

  she and Rhoda – Guy Fletcher, ‘World History’, Radio Times, 21 June 1933. ‘Two women, sisters, both dark with grey eyes; each with a streak of Puck in her, although in Eileen, as becomes a Professor, it is more restrained … It is their job, through book and travel, to interview the ghosts of Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, of some medieval monk in Picardy, some Roman sentinel listening for the Barbarian in the fearful dark; to recreate dead men, to uncover buried cities. And their interviews, their research, their imagination, or the fruits of all three, are called World History, to which Schools listen, and everyone who has left school who can.’

  ‘it is, as you know’ – EP to Mary Somerville, 29 March 1936. BBC. In June 1936, the BBC informed her that they had cut a phrase from her lecture as ‘we rather felt that the missionary societies might object to this kind of statement’. Power replied: ‘I note that you have cut my phrase about the quarrels of the missionaries in the 18th C. As you know, it was this which resulted in the shutting of China to the West and I strongly deprecate these attempts of the BBC to tamper with the presentation of history in order to save the susceptibilities of a class of its listeners. I am, in point of fact, extremely careful to be fair in these matters, and I had therefore deliberately mentioned later in the talk, that “the missionaries brought schools and hospitals, where the Chinese could learn western learning and be healed by western science”. I have now cut out this reference to the good side of missionary history in China, as I am not allowed to mention its bad side.’

  ‘the common contribution’ – EP to Mary Somerville, 27 January 1936. BBC.

  ‘serious attack’ – See Susan Howson, Lionel Robbins, pp. 236–8.

  a percentage of – This was 1 per cent for lecturers, 2 per cent for readers, 3 per cent for professors. Among the refugee scholars helped by LSE during the 1930s were Gustav Mayer, Moritz Bonn, Jacob Marschak and Otto Kahn-Freund. From November 1938, the Co-ordinating Committee for Refugees headquartered at Margaret Layton’s home at 5 Mecklenburgh Square – an independent organisation dedicated to helping Central European refugees, finding them work and housing, and lobbying the government.

  ‘If we want’ – Albert Einstein, speech 3 October 1933, published as ‘Science and Civilisation’ in Essays in Humanism.

  ‘If, in the case’ – Spectator, 5 March 1932.

  Muslim countries – See her article ‘The Indian Moslems and the Turkish Nationalists’, The Challenge, 8 December 1922: ‘In the world of politics today, grave as are the other political questions left by the war – the reparations question, the resuscitation of dying Austria, the policy to be pursued towards Bolshevik Russia – none is graver than this problem of the relation between the Western powers and Islam, for if it be not settled on terms which are honourable to both, the age of the Jehad and the Crusades may come again.’

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nbsp; ‘an adequate account’ – EP to Mary Somerville, 2 January 1936. BBC.

  ‘merely as a’ – EP, ‘The Story of Half Mankind’, The Challenge, 20 September 1922.

  ‘Yellow Peril’ – For an evocative portrait of London’s Chinese communities – and of the racism they faced, particularly in finding Bloomsbury lodgings – see Lao She’s 1929 novel Mr Ma and Son.

  ‘East is East’ – Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Ballad of East and West’ (1889).

  twice in the 1920s – Robert A. Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism, p. 52.

  ‘White girls hypnotised’ – Evening News front page, 6 October 1920.

  Reginald Johnston – See Shiona Airlie, Scottish Mandarin. Life at Puyi’s court is dramatised in the Oscar-winning 1987 film The Last Emperor, where Johnston is portrayed by Peter O’Toole.

  ‘I remember him’ – EP to George Coulton, 23 December 1922. Girton.

  ‘journalism and odd-jobs’ – EP to Margery Garrett, 31 July 1921. Girton.

  ‘You gave me’ – EP to Arnold Toynbee, 23 February 1930. He told his wife, Rosalind, who remained sanguine: ‘I don’t think she would have been a better wife for you than me, though she would have been quite a good one.’ Bodleian.

  ‘everyone whose work’ – EP to Virginia Gildersleeve, 6 August 1930. Barnard.

  ‘the difficulty is’ – EP to Virginia Gildersleeve, 28 November 1930. Barnard.

  School Textbooks – In 1932, Power invited Charles Webster to join her in a project to launch an international committee to revise school textbooks: ‘I think most of the work will be done in the basement of 20 Mecklenburgh Square!’

  ‘no more powerful’ – Speech to the Sixth International Conference of the International Federation of University Women, 1932, quoted in Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex?, p. 171.

  ‘a threat to’ – China Campaign Committee Circulars and Bulletins. AC.

  a whimsical essay – EP, ‘The Haunted Valley’, first published in The Raven, 1 May 1922. ‘The hills bend over it, curving their beautiful abundant bodies to shelter the solitary scholar, escaped from the man-built walls of the city to their protection and their peace.’