PART THREE
8
Philanthropy, politics and power
DURING THE SEPARATION PROCEEDINGS those close to Consuelo were worried about whether London society would accept her as an independent duchess, particularly when an indignant King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra made it clear that both Marlboroughs were persona non grata for the heinous offence of bringing their marital difficulties to public attention. Shared custody of the children was regarded as a concession in Consuelo’s favour, however, and Winston Churchill’s valiant efforts to protect her reputation by keeping the case from the courts proved successful.
London society rallied round both Duke and Duchess, refusing for the most part to take sides and accepting invitations from both. Although some of the Churchills remained hostile, the rift with Jennie Cornwallis-West never became widespread knowledge, and Consuelo was helped by the continuing support of the powerful Lady Londonderry, well aware of Charley’s record as a philanderer, and anxious to sweep the whole affair under the carpet. Consuelo’s popularity and widespread sympathy for her position also helped. In America, the public concurred with President Roosevelt’s private opinion that ‘the Duke of Marlborough [was] a cad’,1 and the press collectively decided that the Duchess was the victim of the story. Articles appeared denouncing heartless mothers and international marriages, and many people she had never met wrote to wish Consuelo well.
Nonetheless, Consuelo’s position as a separated woman in society was anomalous and difficult. She was a celebrated beauty and was only twenty-nine when the Marlboroughs parted. Great self-discipline was required, for the slightest hint of another scandal would have played into the Duke’s hands had he been minded to act vindictively and made her vulnerable to losing her children. As it was, she only had the care of her sons for six months each year, and for much of the time they were away at school.
After the separation, Winifred Fortescue, who met Consuelo as a star-struck seventeen-year-old when her father was Rector of Woodstock, came to London from Oxfordshire to train as an actress. The move, which was designed to ease the strain on her family’s finances, had come about at Consuelo’s suggestion, and Winifred lived in lodgings close by in Shepherd’s Market, partly so that Consuelo could keep an eye on her. She was a frequent visitor to Sunderland House and knew Consuelo felt isolated. ‘Her loneliness now tore my heart,’ Winifred Fortescue wrote in her autobiography. ‘She had everything in the world except the things that matter most. After she had kissed me farewell I hated to hear those little heels of hers clicking away from me across the marble floors into the dim desolation of that great French palace, fragrant with lilies and incense and lovely with antique brocades and priceless porcelain.’2 The Duchess needed an absorbing interest that would enhance rather than damage her reputation in the difficult period after the separation and she soon found one.
Consuelo had become involved in philanthropy beyond the confines of Blenheim and Woodstock long before separating from the Duke, and these activities gained momentum in the year before her marriage collapsed. From January 1906 she was to be seen accompanying Daisy of Pless to open a club for young men in Dulwich and returning the vote of thanks; selling needlework by women in Church Army homes; and presenting prizes to the London School of Medicine for Women – an event presided over by Mrs Garrett Anderson and Lady Frances Balfour, sister-in-law of Arthur Balfour, and leading campaigner for both suffrage and women’s education. At the prize-giving Consuelo remarked that the hospital and its supporters ‘had a justifiable source of pride in knowing that women were independent and able to contribute as freely as men to the general utility of the world’ and that ‘in the medical profession the services rendered by women were invaluable and scope for their activity was still limitless’,3 a strikingly feminist note for 1906 and one to which she would frequently return.
Consuelo now turned to serious philanthropy where she would focus more consistently on social problems she had already encountered, but where marriage to Sunny and his particular strand of conservatism had left limited room for independent manoeuvre. Her first ambitious undertaking after the separation was at the behest of the charismatic Prebendary Carlile, founder of the Church Army. She had already opened a labour depot run by the Church Army in 1905 and she invited Prebendary Carlile to Blenheim in June, where he signed ‘Church Army’ beside his name in the visitor’s book to make it clear that he was present in an official capacity rather than succumbing to the lures of society.
The Church Army had been formed in 1882 as an attempt to reconnect the Church of England with its working-class base by sending groups of working-class men and women to work as evangelists in the poorest districts of Westminster. Its image as an evangelistic movement was burnished by the Reverend Carlile himself who regularly led marching bands into the slums wearing his surplice and playing the trombone (causing at least one indigent – of whom George Bernard Shaw might have been proud – to enter a protest at ‘the insolent condescension of well-fed persons who intrude themselves in this way upon the sufferings of the very poor’4). Soon after its foundation, the Church Army also initiated a host of projects designed to tackle problems it found in the slums, such as homelessness, hunger, and alcoholism.
As his trombone-enhanced performances suggest, Prebendary Carlile had a certain flair for publicity. ‘I have always found that money spent in advertising comes back in the collection,’5 he once said. (He was the first to introduce the cinematograph into a parish church and his sermons often featured sporting analogies, causing one old lady to remark: ‘Since my old man has been coming to this show church, he don’t go no more to the music hall.’6) Prebendary Carlile also had a talent for harnessing the power of celebrity. Although he castigated extravagance and luxury – or perhaps because he did – he was extremely good at winning the support of members of the English aristocracy with a conscience. By 1907 he knew Consuelo well enough to enlist her help with a project that he knew would appeal to her in her own difficult position. It was for prisoners’ wives – powerless women rendered helpless by marriage, ‘punished for the guilt of others’ as Consuelo wrote later, which was ‘essentially unfair’.7
The project she directed for Prebendary Carlile was designed to empower prisoners’ wives by giving them financial independence. It was part of Carlile’s genius that he not only appealed to Consuelo for her money and celebrity value, but to her executive competence, developed by running large households for over a decade. The Church Army project involved her in buying and equipping a centre in two adjoining houses in Endsleigh Street, providing them with laundries and sewing-rooms, and establishing a crèche where children could be looked after while their mothers earned a living wage. It was a venture of much greater complexity than any of her previous philanthropic undertakings, and it proved that she had a talent for organisation. When the centre opened at the end of May 1907, The Times made it clear that she had been in charge.
The centre also provided a swift education in reality for an inexperienced duchess drawn into the day-to-day running of such an establishment for the first time. Part of its purpose was to help first offenders into work when they emerged from prison and at least one felon talked Consuelo into giving him some tools which he promptly used to go burgling again. This was bad enough, but Consuelo was startled to be told off in no uncertain terms by his wife – who thought that she should be allowed continued use of the facilities – that the Duchess had been as good as accessory to the crime by naively acceding to his wishes. As part of her work for the Church Army, Consuelo was asked to provide religious leadership. ‘At Prebendary Carlile’s request, I closed our day’s work with prayer, and I can still feel the emotional tension with which those sorrow-laden souls filled our simple service, “We like the Duchess to read to us,” they said, “but she always makes us cry.” For me there was comfort in feeling that for once their tears were not bitter.’8
It is easy to scoff at such class-bound sentimentality, to write off such e
ngagement with the poor as emotional therapy for an unhappy aristocrat, or to dismiss this kind of involvement as motivated by Consuelo’s need to re-establish her social position after a much-discussed marital breakdown. But even though there may be a grain of truth in such assertions, it would be wrong to stigmatise serious philanthropy in this way. In recent years, historians have re-examined nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century female philanthropy and come to see it as an important factor both in an extension of female power in general and the campaign for the vote in particular. ‘Women have traditionally used these activities to wield power in societies intent upon rendering them powerless,’ writes Kathleen D. McCarthy. ‘Unlike men, who enjoyed a host of political, commercial, and social options in their pursuit of meaningful careers, women most often turned to non-profit institutions and reform associations as their primary points of access to public roles. In this process, they forged parallel power structures to those used by men, creating a growing array of opportunities for their sisters and themselves.’9 This was partly because philanthropic work was not always as easy as the Lady Bountiful image suggests: to work, often unwelcome, in inner-city slums required courage and resilience. More important, philanthropy has also been reinterpreted by historians as an important social force, closely linked with both the history of social welfare provision and the emergence of feminism, in that it provided women with a route into the public sphere.10
In the first instance, women were able to use philanthropy as an entry point into public life without agitating conservative elements because it was seen as an extension of their role as wives and mothers and, in the case of rich or aristocratic women, as part of their traditional role. Motivation for taking on philanthropic duties ranged from traditional expectations, an escape from boredom, a sense of duty, to religious impulses – the historian Frank Prochaska suggests that Christianity was often a crucial factor in propelling women into this kind of work, and to this extent Consuelo’s involvement with the Church Army was characteristic.
Whatever their reasons for taking up philanthropy, however, some women then discovered that they rapidly had to develop professional skills such as public speaking in order to be effective. This in turn changed the way that women’s capabilities were perceived. Such changes came about only gradually, touched off by women determined to get their message across and willing to test convention by addressing charity meetings, social science congresses, and trades union gatherings. ‘By such actions they broke down the prejudice against women speakers and made it easier for the less forthright to express themselves in public without fear of obloquy. By enlarging the scope of women’s activities, charitable work also modified the way in which people interpreted the possibilities inherent in the female character.’11
As important, late-nineteenth-century women involved in serious charitable work found it took them to the heart of topical issues. Philanthropy was central to the Victorian approach to the problems of industrialisation. It was regarded as crucial to the fabric of society, a reliable and wholesome remedy for social ills and the principal conduit for the redistribution of wealth. This meant that in entering philanthropic roles women were part of a key expression of Victorian social values and found themselves at the centre of Victorian – and Edwardian – debates about social policy. One consequence of this – and this was soon true of Consuelo – was that it was often a short step from executive involvement in philanthropy to involvement in issues that many liberals and progressives increasingly regarded as political – such as the care of the elderly, child welfare, family poverty and exploitation of female workers. It was then a very short step to women becoming intensely frustrated at being unable to influence social policy in these areas because they were denied the vote.
Between 1907 and the end of 1908, partly as a result of emancipation from the Duke’s conservatism, and partly as a result of her growing experience as a philanthropist, Consuelo’s interest in social welfare problems, the position of women and politics developed rapidly. Her project in Endsleigh Street opened her eyes to the problems faced by women who lacked the training to do work of their own. In an article written in 1908, Consuelo argued strongly in favour of the advantages for women of lobbying for change in alliance with men through the trades union movement and was critical of working-class women who refused to engage: ‘It still remains a problem how to induce women to fight for their rights,’ she wrote. ‘The writer herself has visited Clubs in the East End of London, composed of girls working in factories, where they earned a miserable pittance and worked from eight to twelve hours a day. When she tried to impress on them that these were not fit conditions for their acceptance, and that their Club should become a cooperative union to resist unjust terms, instead of being merely a social centre, they smiled hopelessly as if at some wild but yet pleasant fancy and returned to the dreary monotony of things as they were and would to them remain.’12
By April 1908 Consuelo was taking such a keen interest in working-class problems that she was forced to defend herself against accusations of having become a socialist, telling reporters at the dockside in New York: ‘I am not a Socialist … Of course I do not mean by that that I do not want to do all that I can for those who are unfortunate … but that does not make me a Socialist. I have never expressed such views, and I cannot understand where they get such ideas about me.’13 Given her support at that time for women fighting for their rights through the trades union movement, the mistake was perhaps understandable, but Consuelo was not and never would be a socialist. Away from her staunchly Tory husband, she was now freely endorsing ‘New Liberal’ thinking, a political position expressed cogently by cousin Winston Churchill in 1906, two years after he crossed the floor to join the Liberal Party: ‘No man can be a collectivist alone or an individualist alone … No view of society can be complete which does not comprise within its scope both collective organisation and individual incentive. The very growing complications of civilisation create for us new services which have to be undertaken by the state.’14
Consuelo would have concurred with this wholeheartedly. As her exposure to social welfare problems increased, she soon came to think that the state had an important role in welfare reform, and that some problems of industrialisation were too great to be solved by the individual alone. Consuelo agreed with T. H. Green, a key writer on New Liberalism, that the state had a role in regulating individual behaviour particularly in relation to child health. Her own experience, even at Blenheim, probably would have left her unsurprised at the findings of Seebohm Rowntree and Charles Booth that about 30 per cent of Britain’s town dwellers lived in poverty, and that among agricultural workers it was even worse. She strongly supported the Liberal government’s programme of social reforms, led by David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill – especially the children’s acts which provided free school meals and medical inspections, the introduction of the old age pension and the National Insurance Act of 1911. At the same time she shared New Liberal views that individual effort and initiative were important, that the distinction between deserving and undeserving poor should remain, and that wherever possible, social welfare services should be paid for by voluntary effort rather than the state.
The philosophy of New Liberalism had emerged from England’s new professional middle classes. Consuelo was unusual in possessing great wealth and finding the key tenets of New Liberalism appealing, though she was certainly not unique. By 1908 she was arguing publicly that it was the task of plutocrats to distribute their own wealth in a socially useful manner. Far from being a socialist, however, she believed that a widespread sense of social responsibility on the part of the rich, in conjunction with a political programme of social welfare reform, was the best way of drawing the sting of socialism which, like many of her wealth and class, she regarded as an evil. These were certainly not the views of a radical hothead, but they had moved on some way from those of the Consuelo who had gently teased Millicent Sutherland during the trip to Russia in 1902 by callin
g her the ‘Democratic Duchess’. Such opinions also set Consuelo at a great distance from the opulent fantasy of Alva’s Gilded Age palaces and the Duke’s belief that poverty was a question of individual responsibility and that the poor should know their place.
Consuelo’s serious interest in philanthropy both enabled her to continue participating in public life and stood her in good stead in English society. The New York Times printed rumours of a ‘boycott’ by society after the separation, but there is no evidence of this at all. It also printed a front-page story that she had ‘returned’ to society by November 1908.15 In her memoirs, Consuelo thought that the breakthrough in attitudes towards her had come about a year after the separation (around 1908) when the beau monde turned out in force for a glittering reception at Sunderland House to hear the violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler. Fragments from a diary kept by Consuelo in 1908 talk of her being placed beside the new prime minister, Herbert Asquith at dinner, and of six parties in one day and three balls on one night.16
Once again it was the Duke who appears to have suffered more from feelings of exclusion. Understandably he felt the pain of expulsion from royal circles more keenly than Consuelo, and at the end of 1908 he was the one whom friends changed plans to support. Daisy of Pless wanted her brother George and sister-in-law Jennie Cornwallis-West to stay on with her in Furstenstein for Christmas, but they felt they had to go back to England ‘as “Sonny” Marlborough is a bit low, Jennie says’. One reason for his depression was that ‘his mother and sister go to Consuelo’s London house and help her at her charity meetings and so on. Jennie says: “Of course they do as she has all the money”,’ an explanation which Princess Daisy trenchantly observed was nonsense.17 Consuelo did not, of course, have ‘all the money’ since the Duke’s part of the Vanderbilt marriage settlement was unaffected by the separation.
Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt Page 32
