A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  And she did not settle; instead she swamped any wish to do so in a positive mill-race of private visits and public professional obligations that lasted for the next three years, and from which she then again fled abroad. Several impulses prodded her into this compulsive activity: an increasing sense of social responsibility that made her attempt to alleviate a little of the suffering and hardship she had seen on her travels; a growing belief that Christianity was a force for good in the world and that its message could be most effectively spread through the work of medical missions; a personal conviction, verging on guilt, that she had not the moral strength, the charity of soul or the sweetness of temper that graced those whom she had so loved in the past. Compared with theirs, her life had been one of thoughtless self-gratification; she had much to atone for; her redemption, she felt, still had to be earned. This sentiment, a legacy of her upbringing, seems the mainspring of her diligence at this time and is clearly expressed in a letter written to a friend early in 1892: ‘Beloved memories, noble examples, stimulating words of those whom I have lost are always goading me onwards and upwards. I feel that I must make the best of myself, I must bear an active part in life, I must follow their examples to be worthy of ever meeting them again, which is my one personal hope. And thus with a ceaseless ache at my heart, and without a shadow of enjoyment in anything, I respond to every call to action, and my life though very sad is very full, and though I cannot enjoy I am intensely interested. For this I thank God.’

  The most immediate of the pressures upon her concerned the persecution of the Armenians and Syrians, of which she had had recent and dramatic experience. She did not forget what she had witnessed during that journey from Urmi to Trebizond – the ill-used Syrian peasants huddled together in caves for protection, the tales of kidnapping, rape and murder, the desolate farms from which the Kurds had plundered everything. The question was already a vexed one in political circles and Isabella increased the vexation by her two articles on ‘The Shadow of the Kurd’ that appeared in The Contemporary Review in mid-1891.

  Her account of what was going on is unhysterical, straightforward and resonant with truth. As she explained, her motives for visiting the disturbed regions were quite apolitical: she went simply to meet the Patriarch of the Syrian Church and ‘add certain alpine plants to my collection’. Before she went she knew little of the Nestorians and ‘shared a common prejudice’ against the Armenians, but what she saw had enraged her. The Kurds came down wolf-like on the village folds, mounted on fiery chargers, brandishing rifles and daggers; the peasants, riding aged asses, tried to defend themselves and their possessions with rusty matchlocks and pitchforks. None of the governments concerned made any effort to protect their Christian subjects: the peasants, Isabella explained, ‘know nothing of justice except that it may be bought and they are too poor to buy it’. And the condition of the Syrians, ‘squeezed between the rapacity and violence of the Kurds and the oppression of the Turkish officials’, must surely be ‘one of the most pitiable on earth’.

  The voice of Mrs Bishop was now of some account in the land. Even before the articles appeared, Isabella was invited to dine at John Murray’s to meet his friend, Mr Gladstone. ‘The great statesman took her down to dinner,’ Anna Stoddart says, ‘and questioned her keenly about the Kurdish atrocities amongst Nestorians and Armenians.’ Undoubtedly she answered him intelligently and meticulously in that slow gentle voice of hers. Then she said, ‘“And now Mr Gladstone, you have asked me a great many questions and I have done my best to answer them; may I venture to ask you one?” “Certainly,” he said. “Then what was the Nestorian heresy?” “Ah,” said he, laying down his knife and fork and wheeling round in his chair, “that is a matter in which I am profoundly interested.” And he entered on a long, learned and precise exposition of the heresy, quoting historians, Fathers of the Church, modern critics, without pause or failure of memory, and at the end of half an hour left her not only amazed at his vast and accurate knowledge, but conversant with the whole schism.’ In retrospect, it sounds a somewhat sombre occasion, but it is the only one recorded of Mrs Bishop’s dining with such a very eminent politician. And it is pleasant to imagine that Isabella later enlivened proceedings by telling Gladstone about the red and yellow deity on the relic-holder in Shergol that bore such ‘a striking resemblance’ to him.

  Her political involvement was not over. After the publication of the articles, she was invited to speak in a Committee Room of the House of Commons about what was already being called ‘The Armenian Question’ and would of course, become much more tragic and inflamed in the future. She spoke well, apparently, though in a state of extreme and almost incapacitating nervousness. Isabella never learned to bloom and cavort in the limelight, and demanding public occasions brought her much panic and little pleasure. As she wrote to the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society on a later occasion when he asked her to speak, ‘I cannot get over a diffidence which I feel about everything, and no amount of success relieves me from the fear of failure. I always do my best, but … am always thoroughly dissatisfied afterwards.’

  Still, she continued to do her dutiful best and it kept her from moping. ‘I am most thankful for all new interests out of myself, for I feel that without them my sorrowful solitude would be greater than I can bear’, she told Mrs Grainger Stewart, with whom she had recently stayed. The next major interest was the writing of her book, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan, in the preface of which she apologises for ‘the lack of vivacity’ due to ‘the heavy and abiding shadow’ cast by her sister’s and husband’s deaths. This lack, which is indisputable, made the task an irksome one. Many of her notes and letters had been stolen or lost in the Persian postal service and those that survived seemed without zest or even interest. ‘Persia is dull and ugly and my journey seems very flat and the tribes and their khans are as monotonous as Layard’s,’ she tells Ella, and, in a later mood of impatient depression about the book, she snaps, ‘I shall never publish my letters again, though some I believe prefer their petty details.’ Nor did she publish in letter-form again, though fortunately not all the ‘petty details’ are expunged as a result. In accordance with an agreement made with Sawyer, her accounts of their journeys together had to be vetted by the International Department of the Indian War Office, ‘a truly hampering arrangement’ and one which now seemed a heavy price to pay for the irascible Major’s company. She had several cordial meetings with him, though, and consulted him over the map of the Bakhtiari country, which gave no end of trouble. She had to ask the head of the Indian Government Survey about it and he told her the matter ‘was a delicate one’ – it might be strategically imprudent to indicate the route that Sawyer had surveyed for military intelligence. As she had already decided, when she and Sawyer sailed from Karachi under sealed orders, ‘Mystery is the joy of the Indian Government.’

  She escaped to Mull to finish the book and found that the island’s postal service was little more reliable than the Persian. Her correspondence to Murray about the map was mislaid and she explains, ‘The Post Office here is generally distrusted and the postmaster has been twice suspended. It is generally believed that a kettle is kept on the stove for the purpose of steaming open letters which may prove interesting! A common practice in West Highland offices.’ This letter of Isabella’s was sent from Mull, and it is surprising that it survived. Probably the postmaster’s interest in the maps of the Bakhtiari country had rapidly waned.

  In spite of the difficulties, the book was out before Christmas 1891, just about the time that Isabella gave a talk to the Tobermory Y.W.C.A. (which she had founded) on ‘Persian Manners and Customs’ illustrated by two members wearing costumes brought from Isfahan. And in spite of her fears the book was extolled by the critics, though with a hint of stay-at-home exasperation at the needless though shining endurance of those who went so far and did so much – particularly when they were ladies. But a lady, conceded Blackwood’s reviewer, apropos of Isabella’s book, ‘whose comfort is
secured by a little hot water and a pinch of tea is really better off than him to whom stronger stimulants and more extensive meals are necessary’. In fact, in the field of travel-literature, ‘it is the man who gets writer’s cramp and breaks down in health … while the woman, his contemporary, goes on serenely with a smile piling up volume after volume with the measured and sedate force of a conscientious day-labourer’. This was rather grudging, and Isabella undoubtedly preferred the critic who wrote that she ‘could not have served the cause of medical missions better than by her poignant descriptions of the crowds round her tent’ begging for the hakkim’s ministrations.

  While the critics pronounced judgement, Isabella stayed on Mull through the wild dark rages of the Highland winter, pottering about in the draughty cottage and existing on a diet of dry toast, mutton hotch-potch and a glass of port wine daily in a belated attempt to melt a few pounds of her ‘too too solid flesh’. This unjust and apparently irreducible plumpness incidentally, allied to her short stature, offered little scope for the sartorial dramatics in which she might well have indulged had she been six inches taller and willowy. As it was, she confined herself to severe black silks for nearly all formal occasions, with an occasional blooming into oriental brocades, as at the party described by Marianne North; for the rest, she relaxed into a comfortable and unstudied eccentricity – a black ulster, warm serge petticoats and old jerseys. ‘Her costume,’ says Anna Stoddart, ‘shocked some of the good Tobermory people, and indeed it was adapted rather for convenience than beauty. A servant lassie, listening to her praises from her mistress, who descanted on the courage with which she overcame the difficulties of travelling amongst half-savage peoples, said scornfully, “It’s no wonder she gets through – no one would look at her.”’

  The islanders were glad of her presence nevertheless when, as the weather worsened, everyone went down with influenza or pleurisy and Isabella helped the overworked doctor; her little leather medicine-box was gaining as much reputation as among the Bakhtiaris, she told Ella. Gales bellowed, bringing down telegraph-poles and delaying the mail-boats; wan mists and snow ‘unsunned and sodden’ clung along the burns; black rains soused the hairy moors. When the weather was at its foul worst, Isabella habitually donned her rubber boots, an officer’s mackintosh and sou’wester and blundered out into it; ‘The Stormy Petrel’ people called her, knowing her preference for the drama of the wildest days. Gathered to a friend’s fireside, she compared rheumatic symptoms with old Mrs MacLachlan of Badarroch or talked gardening with the Allans of Aros House; she plied ‘Henrietta’s poor’ with beef jelly or chicken soup; she lectured to the Y.W.C.A. on such uplifting subjects as ‘Tit for Tat’, ‘Getting On’ and ‘Thrift’ – again thrift, it was a recurrent theme. The trouble with many of the islanders, in her view, was that they were notoriously unthrifty, and had little desire to ‘get on’. They were ‘charming’, but she confided to her mainland friends that they nearly all ‘suffered from brain-rust’, while some of the lower orders, with ‘their cunning, moral timidity and plausibility’ reminded her of ‘savages of rather a low type’. During the next winter, which she again spent on the island, she tried to organise cookery classes for the local women. ‘It has been awful work because the people are so dilatory and shilly-shally,’ she complained to Ella. It was the old story in fact – the poor and meek never quite managed to live up to the high standards she expected of them. In spite of all her endeavours, Isabella could not suffer fools gladly, as even her most devoted biographer admitted; she just had not the temperament to encourage every faltering step with sweet patience, win over every backslider with gentle persuasion and make charitable allowances for the unredeemably mediocre.

  Her talents were broader, more forceful than these; as a writer, she could enlighten and interest the minds of many; as a speaker, her influence was now considerable. During these years she used her abilities to further the work of medical missions and encourage sympathy and understanding for the parts of the world she had explored. In these causes, the figure of Mrs Bishop, short, undeniably plump, sheathed in black silk, with her calm intelligent face and gentle voice, became a familiar and respected one throughout the country. She spoke to the Moravian Mission about Tibet, to Church Congresses in Wakefield, Southampton, Glasgow, York, to Syrian Christians in Leeds, to the British Association and the Royal Scottish Geographical Society about the Bakhtiari.

  Isabella had been made a fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, and when the Royal Geographical Society in London agreed to admit members of other geographical socities it was faced with the proposition of admitting women members to its cloistered ranks. This caused a fine furore, as the Council of the R.G.S. first elected Isabella along with fourteen other ‘well-qualified ladies’ to be fellows and then faced a furious rearguard attack from its many misogynist members. The columns of The Times boiled with the debate and Admirals (who had spent years at sea escaping their wives) thumped the tables of the Council Chamber in protest against the flimsiest shadow of a petticoat rule. At a special General Meeting, the vote went against the admission of ladies, and an uneasy compromise was eventually reached whereby those female fellows already elected had special dispensation to remain, but no more of their weak sex were to be admitted. Isabella, who was in a strong position to enter the lists, remained publicly aloof from the controversy. The fact was that she did not have enough faith in or sympathy for the great majority of womankind to be any sort of suffragette. Though she must have realised that the educational, social and professional restrictions imposed upon her sex cramped and frustrated her own natural development, particularly during her earlier years, she seems always to have assumed that she was an inexplicable and not very laudable exception to the general rule, and that most women were neither deserving of nor particularly fitted for the greater freedoms allowed to men. So she confined her disgust to private correspondence. ‘I don’t care to take any steps in the matter as I never took any regarding admission. The fellowship as it stands at present is not worth making any trouble about. At the same time, the proposed act is a dastardly injustice to women.’

  Probably the aspect of the affair that most offended her personally was the utterly irrational attitude of Curzon, with whom she had been on friendly terms, so she thought, since their meeting on the Tigris. He had given her practical advice with her book and an excellent review of it, but then, at the height of the silly controversy, he announced his violent opposition to the admission of women to the Royal Geographical Society on the somewhat irrelevant grounds that ‘Their sex and training render them equally unfitted for exploration, and the genus of professional female globetrotters with which America has lately familiarised us is one of the horrors of the latter end of the nineteenth century.’ Curzon’s own book on Persia did not appear until several months after Isabella’s, because of a certain amount of political hocus-pocus. Soon after his return, Curzon had been appointed by Lord Salisbury to the Under-Secretaryship for India, a post he much coveted. In his newly-elevated state, however, it was considered that the strictures he had made on the Shah’s administration in the first draft of his book were too harsh. He and Salisbury corresponded on the matter, Curzon protesting that everything he had written was quite true, to which the Prime Minister replied, in a masterly example of political double-think, ‘But your plea on behalf of your utterances that they are all true is quite inadmissible. That is precisely the circumstance that will make them intolerable to the Shah.’ The book, with the offending passages duly toned down, eventually appeared and was hailed as a standard work in many quarters. But several thought it was extremely hard going – ‘nearly seven pounds weight of solid print’, moaned one critic; and another, irritated by Curzon’s customary tone of effortless superiority, commented, ‘Mr Curzon seems to be under the impression that he has discovered Persia and that having discovered it he now, in some mysterious way, owns it.’ Comments like that perhaps gave Isabella some satisfaction, although she was not malicious a
nd did not harbour grudges.

  She hadn’t time to, for one thing, as she rushed from one speaking engagement to another, her most noted achievement in this field being the address she gave to the Gleaners’ Union in Exeter Hall, London in November 1893 on ‘Heathen Claims and Christian Duty’. Quotations from the speech are interesting because they show Isabella’s definite change in attitude towards evangelism. She described herself as ‘A traveller who had been made a convert to missions not by missionary successes, but by seeing in four and a half years of Asiatic travel the desperate needs of the un-Christianised world. There was a time when I was altogether indifferent to missions, and would have avoided a mission-station rather than have visited it. But the awful pressing claim of the un-Christianised nations, which I have seen, had taught me that the work of their conversion to Christ is one to which one would gladly give influence and whatever else God has given to one.’ The broad tolerance and uncritical detachment of the sound journalist unhappily fled when she addressed such assemblies: Buddhism and Mohammedanism were both ‘corrupt’; the Asian continent ‘is the scene of barbarities, tortures, brutal punishments, oppression, oflicial corruption which is worst under Mohammedan rule’; the whole un-Christian world, devoid of the ‘sanctities of home’, of righteousness, temperance and knowledge of the judgement to come, rolled pitifully in the heathen dark.

  Her plea was for dedication to the service of mankind, to those who were ill and suffering. ‘Throughout the East,’ she concluded, ‘sickness is believed to be the work of demons. The sick person at once becomes an object of loathing and terror, is put out of the house, is taken to an outhouse, is poorly fed and rarely visited, or the astrologers or priests or medicine men and wizards assemble, beating big drums and gongs, blowing horns and making the most fearful noises. They light fires and dance around them with their unholy incantations. They beat the sick person with clubs to drive out the demon. They lay him before a roasting fire till his skin is blistered and then throw him into cold water. They stuff the nostrils of the dying with aromatic mixtures, or mud, and in some regions they carry the chronic sufferer to a mountain-top, placing barley-balls and water beside him and leave him to die alone….’ It was strong, persuasive stuff, much of it was true and it went down well.