Edith Cavell

by Diana Souhami

  Miss Gibson was small, wore long black dresses with a train, had a muslin bonnet that was always slipping out of place and seldom went outside the Cathedral precincts. She kept her Irish accent, had illegible handwriting, never stopped talking and was an insatiable drinker of tea. Her cats, to which she was devoted, were named Lord Mounteagle and Stumpy. She read omnivorously, remained interested in the fate of her girls after they left her school, and was always ready to help find them a job or a home. She ruled at Laurel Court in an unvarying manner and with the same curriculum year on year. She supervised the kitchen, the maids, the cooks, the girls. Her birthday on November 11 was celebrated each year with a tea party for the whole school. The school food was well cooked and served in silver dishes. Punishment was idiosyncratic. Naughty girls were shut in a cupboard or made to sit cross-legged on the floor with a newspaper over their face.

  If it was a family it stretched the definition, as Edith Cavell in her adult life was also to do. She was nineteen when she arrived there and nearly twenty when she left. It was hardly a world of coming-out balls, dances and heterosexual promise. There was scant chance of landing any sort of husband there, let alone one with class.

  In the summer of 1886 Edith Cavell went home to Swardeston. She gave her mother an album of drawings and watercolors done at Laurel Court: scenes of flowers and birds and picnicking girls. Miss Gibson carried on with Laurel Court for another forty-three years. After she died in 1928 the school closed.

  For Edith Cavell the end of school might have been a time for fun and romantic attachment. But there was little pursuit of romance in the Cavells’ social calendar. As ever, there was her father’s rule for her to justify her existence and make a contribution. He encouraged her to raise the funding for a Sunday school to be annexed to the vicarage. She wrote to the Bishop of Norwich, John Pelham, and asked for episcopal help. He agreed that if the village raised a certain amount, he would provide the rest. Edith painted greetings cards, her mother and sisters cut them to size and addressed envelopes. These were sold or sent out with a request for money for the enterprise. Sufficient funds were raised and within two years the Sunday school—a long hall attached to the back of the house—was built for the village children.

  In January 1887 the Reverend Cavell found a post of governess for her, as ever through Church connections. It was with the family of Charles Mears Powell, vicar of Steeple Bumpstead, a small Essex town.

  5

  THE ENGLISH GOVERNESS

  There were about 25,000 governesses in England in the second half of the nineteenth century. Etiquette manuals advised them and their employers on how to deal with each other. To be a governess meant living in an unfamiliar house with an unknown family in return for a pittance wage and board and lodging. The governess, though herself childless, acted as a quasi-mother. She must not, though, look like a lady or behave with the assertion of a real mother. Her domain was the schoolroom. She was expected to be primly dressed and to ask permission if she wanted to go out. In the evenings she ate with the children, after that she was on her own.

  To be a wife and mother was the essential role from which all departure was less. Upper-class girls set the standard with their debutante whirl of coming out, then marriage. “Spinster” and “old maid” were ugly words with connotations of being shriveled and undesirable in a way that “bachelor” was not. Governesses notoriously ended up as spinsters. Socially they had little opportunity for romance or even close friendship. The preferred age for them was around twenty-five and their careers were short-lived. A woman unmarried at thirty-five was on the shelf.

  To be a good governess was a quasi-religious vocation: chaste and self-effacing. The governess must give her energy to her charges but expect little in return. Apart from references, an interview and first impressions, none of the parties knew quite what they were letting themselves in for.

  The governess was not a respected figure. “A private governess has no existence, is not considered as a living and rational being except as connected with the wearisome duties she has to fulfil,” Charlotte Bronte wrote to a friend in 1839. The role was often disparaged in nineteenth-century literature: in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. In Jane Austen’s Emma Jane Fairfax likened the industry to the slave trade: “widely different certainly as to the guilt of those who carry it on; but as to the greater misery of the victims, I do not know where it lies.”

  Governesses were no more trained, protected or inspected than were midwives, or teachers in private schools. As and when the parents had other plans for their children the governess was dispensed with. None the less there were far more applicants than posts to be filled, such was the paucity of opportunity for women who needed to work.

  Edith Cavell was twenty-two when she arrived in the Reverend Powell’s household in 1887. Her upbringing had been one of service and compliance, of putting the needs of others before her own. She was conscientious, kind, reliable and had acquired some sort of teaching skills at Laurel Court. But unlike Miss Gibson, as a governess she had no authority to express her personality and views, nor did she have the companionship of girls her own age. It was an isolating occupation. She was transplanted, aged twenty-two, into an unfamiliar household and she was homesick. At home as the eldest daughter she had looked after her siblings; now she was quasi-parent to an unrelated brood. The arrangement was a short-term convenience and the expense to her employers minimal.

  Charles Mears Powell was a strict man. Edith Cavell’s duties were heavy, for his wife was frail. His four children, three girls and a boy as in her own family, were in her care. She had to accommodate their disparate ages—Kathleen was eleven, Constance eight, Mabel seven and John six—and oblige the vicar and his wife. He employed a cook and housekeeper but Edith Cavell was to feed and clothe the children, set their lessons, mark their copybooks, teach them English, French and music and organize their playtime. She took them for walks and supervised their summer holidays at Clacton-on-Sea. Church duties became her responsibility too, because of Mrs. Powell’s frailties. She arranged the flowers for services and did whatever the vicar asked.

  The Reverend Powell had followed a similar path to Edith’s father. He trained for the clergy in London, worked as a curate at All Soul’s church in Langham Place, Marylebone, married when he was thirty-five—his wife Margaret was born in Ireland, as was he—then went to Steeple Bumpstead to live the life of a village curate and raise his family there. He had no private money and the vicarage was for his use only for as long as he was curate there.

  Steeple Bumpstead, though larger than Swardeston, had the same structure of the manor house, church and laborers’ cottages. The local inn was called “The Fox” rather than “The Dog,” the neighbors were cattle dealers rather than agricultural laborers, the landscape was less lush than Norfolk, but the slow tenor of the days was similar. Edith Cavell had a room at the top of the house with a view of the garden and fields. She earned £10 a year but on such a wage could not hope to save. She drew strength from her religion, had a scrupulous honesty, a practiced reserve and had long learned not to complain. But it was a dead-end job. To be a governess in a rural vicarage was not an occupation to test her, except in terms of patience. She stuck it for a year then went home to Swardeston in the summer of 1888. Four years after she left Steeple Bumpstead the Reverend Powell died of appendicitis—two weeks before Christmas in 1893. He left £203. 12 s. 7d. His widow and children then moved to Twickenham.

  6

  A GERMAN SUMMER

  In the summer when Edith Cavell left the Powells she traveled to Germany. She went in a party with her parents and brother and a girlfriend, Alice Burne, who was chaperoning a widow, Mrs. Pigott. It was the year Queen Victoria’s eldest grandson Wilhelm became the ninth King of Prussia and the third Emperor of Germany. There was a sense of alliance between the two countries. For the Reverend Cavell it was a chance to show his family the Germany he had known as
a theology student. For Edith it was a chance to shake off the dullness of being a governess in a rural vicarage, see different landscapes, use her French and learn some German.

  The party traveled by train and ferry. Edith took her watercolors and sketchbook. They went first to the old town of Kreuznach on the River Nahe, a tributary of the Rhine. She sketched the fifteenth-century timber houses built, to save them from flooding, high on the pillars of the river’s bridge; beat Alice Burne at tennis, and with her visited the house where Dr. Faustus was said to have lived and taught, and St. Paul’s church where Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen in 1843.

  On Saturday July 28 she and Alice went on ahead of the rest of the party by train to Frankfurt. She described this display of independence as “a great lark.” They stayed at the Englische Hof hotel, had tea there and took a tram to the Palmgarten to see its glasshouses, rockery with waterfalls, cactus garden and plants from all over the world. They went to a concert in the Garden, sat at a table in the balcony and “were nearly overpowered” by the cigar smokers, then left early to avoid the rush and were back at the hotel by ten.

  Next day, Sunday, after breakfast Jack Cavell went sightseeing with them while Mrs. Cavell attended church. Jack was fifteen. Alice Burne described him as a shrimp. They went to see what was called “the great boast of Frankfurt,” Ariadne on the Panther, a neoclassical sculpture by Johann Dannecker. A banker and philanthropist, Moritz von Beth-mann, whose family’s wealth was on a par with the Rothschilds, had built a special museum for it in the grounds of his villa. The museum did not open until eleven so they had to wander around for a couple of hours, then Jack was refused entry because he was underage. In the afternoon they again walked in the Palmgarten, then Edith and Jack went back to the hotel and Anne went with Mrs. Pigott to the Opera House to hear Wagner’s Tannhäuser. It was “grand and elevating to the last degree,” she told Edith.

  The following day she and Edith went together to the Romerberg in Frankfurt’s old town and visited the Kaiser Saal where Roman emperors had been crowned, then in the afternoon they all moved on by train to Heidelberg, the Reverend Cavell’s old university town. They had reservations at the Hotel Schreider where ten years earlier Mark Twain had stayed.

  It poured with rain and they got soaking wet walking to the Heilige Geist Kirche, a fifteenth-century church for both Protestants and Catholics. The Reverend Cavell arrived in a bad mood from Kreuznach. He was particularly intolerant of smoking and had had a horrid journey in a smoky carriage. After supper they played dominoes in the hotel’s music room then went to bed early.

  On Tuesday July 31, 1888 the party took a carriage up to Heidelberg’s romantic ruined castle, eight hundred years old, buried in green woods high above the river Neckar, admired by Goethe and Mark Twain and painted by Turner. They walked among its wooded terraces, ragged towers covered in vines and flowers, and arched and cavernous rooms like “toothless mouths,” as Mark Twain said. They climbed higher to the Molkenkur for views of the castle and the city, then walked down to the hotel for dinner at midday and to relax in the garden. Then the Cavells left for the town of St. Goar in the Rhine Gorge and Anne Burne and Mrs. Pigott went back to Kreuznach.

  For a month the Cavells stayed at St. Goar, a month of mountain walks, swimming in the Rhine, tennis and sightseeing. St. Goar, a sixth-century saint, had brought Christian teaching to the central Rhine. The town named after him was set between mountains that rose either side of the river. As at Heidelberg there was a medieval castle with ramparts, bastions and casements, painted by Dürer in the sixteenth century and by Turner three hundred years later.

  That summer of 1888 was Edith Cavell’s introduction to Europe, its time-honored familial, cultural and religious connections to England, its centuries of civilized living. It made her resolve to find work abroad and a wider horizon for herself. She supposed such work would have to be as a governess, for that seemed the only opportunity and the only training she had. Marriage was not her expectation, nor that of her family. Of the four of them only her younger sister Lilian was to marry and have children.

  Back in Swardeston she was reluctant again to append herself to someone else’s family as a live-in governess. She was happier at home. To pay her way she worked as a day governess, teaching the small children of John Henry Gurney at Keswick Hall and Hugh Gurney Barclay at Colney Hall. The Gurneys and Barclays were banking families, interrelated and hugely rich. Their manor houses, only a few miles outside Swardeston, already had staff of footmen, a housekeeper, lady’s maids, cooks, scullery maids, a nurse and butler. Again she got the work not through an agency or from advertisements in the Norwich library or The Times, but because of her father’s status as the vicar. The Gurney children, Agatha, Cicely and Margaret, were eight, six and five. At Colney Hall six miles away she looked after two of the Barclay sons, Terence who was seven and Evelyn who was five. She liked children, was a kind, imaginative teacher, and she went home at the end of the day, but she was marking time. The work was not a challenge of the sort she wanted.

  In 1889, a year when dockers went on strike in England for better employment conditions, Adolf Hitler was born, and the suicide or murder of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria and his mistress led to Archduke Franz Ferdinand becoming heir to the Austrian throne, Edith Cavell again took a temporary post as a live-in governess—at Hylands House, near Chelmsford. It was the home of the Pryor family. Arthur Pryor, known as the Squire, owned Truman’s Brewery. She was governess briefly to three of his grandchildren: Elizabeth, John and Katherine. The house, a neoclassical villa, was set in 574 acres of parkland landscaped by the eighteenth-century garden designer Humphry Repton, who designed the gardens at Woburn Abbey and Longleat.

  Hylands, an extravagance of marble, gold and chandeliers, had a grand staircase, a banqueting room, a gilded drawing room, a library, a 300-foot conservatory, stables, farms, a boathouse, a private church. Not much notice was taken of Edith Cavell. Her domain was the schoolroom. She was only the governess, the specter at the feast. She was unhappy there and the Pryor family vaguely remembered her as uncommunicative, but nothing more.

  The next year her youngest sister Lilian, who was twenty, followed her lead and went to Miss Gibson’s school for girls at Laurel Court as a trainee teacher. She stayed a year. Miss Gibson heard how Edith wanted to work abroad. She recommended her as governess to Paul François, a Brussels lawyer whom she knew through the Catholic Church. He had four children. The family lived at 154 avenue Louise, a rich residential part of the city. It was an opportunity for Edith Cavell to live abroad, perfect her French and work in a city that seemed as safe and civilized as Norwich. She left Swardeston in the spring of 1890, though throughout her life it remained the place she viewed as home.

  7

  THE BELGIAN GOVERNESS

  Edith Cavell was twenty-five when she went to Brussels. She stayed with the François family for nearly five years. Affluent and bourgeois, they liked the cachet of having an English governess. They too had three girls and a boy: Marguerite was thirteen, George twelve, Hélène eight and Evelyn three. Neither Paul François nor his wife spoke English. Edith was to converse in French with them and the servants—they employed full staff—but to speak only English to the children.

  All was new. Her employers were intelligent, rich and kind. Brussels was a beautiful, historic city; the house was grand. Avenue Louise, Brussels’s equivalent to Paris’s Champs-Elysées, was wide, straight, two kilometers long and lined each side with double rows of horse chestnut trees. There were paths under these trees for pedestrians and horse riders. Along the middle of the avenue went the horse-drawn carriages. Built in 1847 and named after King Leopold II’s eldest daughter Louise-Marie, it led to the city’s central park, the Bois de la Cambre—sixty acres of woodland, fields, boating ponds and paths.

  It was a grand setting. The family was inclusive and appreciative of her. She ate with them, went on holidays with them and got on well with the François children who in adu
lt life remembered her as a kind, imaginative teacher. But again her domain was the nursery and the schoolroom, and again she was a quasi-parent. She taught the younger children to read and write, walked the elder ones to school in the mornings and collected them in the evenings. She kept them all occupied so that their parents were free to do other things. She took them on long walks and taught them the English names of flowers and how to draw and paint in watercolors. She taught them to cook simple meals and stage schoolroom plays to which their parents were invited. She got them to read aloud from Strand magazine, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and from Louisa Alcott’s Little Women. She introduced them to Dickens, Wordsworth, Tennyson and Longfellow and to a book which impressed her when it was published in 1880, Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward: a hugely popular virtuous period piece, it was the story of a young clergyman who loses his faith but devotes his life to helping the poor in the slums of London’s East End.

  Edith Cavell as a governess in Brussels in the early 1890s

  Perhaps she wanted to make a point, for there was no imperative of service in the François household, no pre-dinner hurrying round with helpings for the poor, as on the Sundays of her childhood. Life’s principal domain was social. A menu card decorated by her for one of their family dinner parties detailed an eleven-course affair of oysters, fillet of sole, saddle of lamb, truffles and paté.

  In her teaching, though, she imbued the François children with her strict moral view. “It was an intelligent way of bringing up children,” Hélène said of her in adult life. The family dogs were in Edith’s care and she wrote and illustrated a booklet about their proper care. She took much of the information from a book called Popular Dog-Keeping by J. Maxtee. “A dog,” she wrote, “soon reciprocates little kindnesses and instinctively takes upon himself the duty of protector.” She described how a kennel could be made from an old 18-gallon beer cask, painted green, set on a stand and lined with sawdust and wood shavings. If the weather was very hot, she wrote, a sack should be put over the kennel’s top. Food and water dishes must be cleaned after each meal and uneaten food not allowed to stand from one meal to another. Breakfast should be biscuits, dry and broken small. For the day’s main meal the biscuits should be soaked for an hour or two, drained then mixed with pieces of lean cooked meat and covered with broth. The second meal should be boiled oatmeal mixed with milk or gravy. The dog should have green vegetables at least once a week, be brushed regularly, but never just after a meal, and not roughly but “with the lay of the coat, commencing with the shoulders and fore legs and finishing with the back, loins and hind quarters.”