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The Trials of Radclyffe Hall
Diana Souhami
TO SHEILA
I have felt awkward about what to call Radclyffe Hall. Christened Marguerite, she preferred to be known as John. Neither seemed quite right and Radclyffe Hall sounds like a residential college. I have slipped from one name to another with attempted nonchalance.
Radclyffe Hall was dyslexic. In quotation from her manuscripts and letters I have kept her idiosyncratic spelling.
To avoid cluttering the text with footnotes sources of quoted material are given at the end of the book by page number and opening phrase. These notes start on page 384.
CONTENTS
Private Matters
MARGUERITE
1 The Fifth Commandment
2 Sing, little silent birdie, sing
3 Come in kid
4 The pearl necklace she gave me
5 Sporks, poggers and poons
JOHN
6 John and Ladye
7 If I can fix something for Ladye
8 Roads with no signposts
9 Chenille caterpillars
TWONNIE
10 The eternal triangle
11 A very grave slander
12 A grossly immoral woman
RADCLYFFE HALL
13 Octopi
14 Octopi and chains
15 How to treat a genius
16 Books about ourselves
STEPHEN GORDON
17 Something of the acorn about her
18 She kissed her full on the lips
THE TRIAL OF RADCLYFFE HALL
19 Aspects of sexual inversion
20 Depraved practice
21 Sapphism and censorship
22 A serious psychological subject
23 I have read the book
24 Depress! Repress! Suppress!
25 The freedom of human beings
THE MASTER OF THE HOUSE
26 An awful shock
27 Just Rye
28 Give us a kiss
SAME HEART
29 The intolerable load
30 A trois
31 How long O Lord, how long
32 His name was Father Martin but she called him Henry
OUR THREE SELVES
33 An empty fiction
34 Never mind Una
35 The rain pours down, the icy wind howls
36 At the Wayside
37 John’s Calvary
MY JOHN, MY JOHNNIE
38 Mine for ever
39 He is my occupation
Image Gallery
Books and Notes
Index
About the Author
PRIVATE MATTERS
In January 1998 the British government released into the public domain papers about the ban, seventy years earlier, of Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness. My book was in manuscript but I was keen to see this new material. Radclyffe Hall and her solicitor Harold Rubinstein had kept all notes, letters and transcripts about the trial, but I wanted to find out what the law makers and enforcers had written in private to each other.
At the Public Record Office London I saw this new release. More pieces of the jigsaw fitted into place. The quality of bigotry of Stanley Baldwin’s government was there in memoranda. It surprised me to see that this bigotry was endorsed by the post-war Attlee government too. Many files though were empty and marked ‘retained by the Home Office’. I phoned their Record Management Services and asked why. I was told the material was sensitive, that it was not in the public interest for it to be released and that to do so would impede national security.
In an incredulous letter I explained that it was important to me to see these papers. ‘Even if they add detail’, I said, ‘as I suspect they do, to evidence of homophobia and manipulation of the law by that particular administration, is it in the public interest, at this stage, for such details to be withheld?’ The Department replied that it would look again at the extracts. Two months later I received a letter. The material was being retained ‘in the interests of national security’. The matter, I was told, would be reviewed in 2007.
I suspected these private memoranda would inspire scorn. All the evidence I had, showed that the Home Secretary of the time Sir William Joynson-Hicks, the Lord Chancellor Lord Hailsham, the Director of Public Prosecutions Sir Archibald Bodkin, his deputy Sir George Stephenson, the Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron, the Attorney General Sir Thomas Inskip, were determined to secure a conviction and ban this book. They manipulated the law to this end and to avoid any process that might serve the interests of the defendants.
Lesbianism was not to be mentioned. The subject was inadmissible. Radclyffe Hall referred to a ‘conspiracy of silence’. It is taking a long time to break this silence. I wrote to the current Home Secretary Jack Straw, to the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, to my constituency Member of Parliament Karen Buck. I asked them to help me get sight of these papers. I am indebted to them, to James Cornford, to Andrew Ecclestone at the Campaign for Freedom of Information and to Anya Palmer at the Stonewall lobby for gay and lesbian rights.
A week before my book went to press I was allowed to see the contentious papers. I was pleased to amend my text. I now include details of how the Home Secretary issued warrants to the Post Office requiring them to intercept mail addressed to the book’s Paris publisher, of how he squashed opposition from the fair-minded Chairman of the Board of Customs Sir Francis Floud, and of how the Director of Public Prosecutions schemed to indict the London publisher Jonathan Cape and the book’s distributor Leopold Hill.
This saga apart, I am full of thanks for help given me over access to source material. I am grateful to Alessandro Rossi-Lemeni, son of the opera singer Nicola Rossi-Lemeni. In his basement in Rome were two trunks containing Una Troubridge’s diaries from 1931 to 1943, autobiographical pieces by Radclyffe Hall, her lecture notes, and fragments of unpublished manuscripts.
In the autumn of 1996 I worked on these papers in a Rome hotel in a room with a terrace that looked out over the roofs of the old city. Future researchers will have formal access to them. They have now been shipped to the Harry Ransom Research Center at the University of Texas. They form an important addition to their Radclyffe Hall collection. The Center already held her letters to Evguenia Souline with whom she fell in love in 1934, and all papers concerned with the American trial of The Well of Loneliness. My thanks to the librarians there and in particular to Pat Fox.
Alessandro Rossi-Lemeni also enabled me to retrieve 140 more of Una’s diaries lost from view for the last fifteen years in a house in Kent. They date from 1943 and are crucial to understanding the events surrounding the death of Radclyffe Hall. These diaries too will soon go to Texas.
In her will Una appointed Horatio Lovat Dickson, a director of the Macmillan publishing house, as her literary executor. He wrote a biography of Radclyffe Hall in 1975 then gave the research papers he had inherited to the Canadian National Archive, Ottawa. These include more of Una’s diaries, her other writings, Radclyffe Hall’s personal and business letters and much relating to the English trial of The Well of Loneliness. The executorship has passed to Horatio Lovat Dickson’s son Jonathan. I am grateful to him and to his agent A. M. Heath & Co. Ltd. for their help and for permission to quote from copyright material.
Cara Lancaster, great-granddaughter of Mabel Batten, Radclyffe Hall’s first love, has inherited her diaries, letters and papers. She kindly let me study these and use quotation fro
m them.
My thanks to Joan Slater and Monica Still. They have amassed an impressive archive over the past decade. Their knowledge of the life and works of Radclyffe Hall is huge. They organised a memorial fund to restore and maintain her catacomb vault at Highgate Cemetery. She now has an oak coffin, and candles light her private altar. Joan has written an as yet unpublished biography of her. She generously let me make use of her research papers.
In the long haul of writing I have depended on the encouragement and editorial inspiration of Rebecca Wilson, publishing director at Weidenfeld. My thanks to her and to my agent Georgina Capel for her support, advice and flair.
All thanks too to my friend Naomi Narod. She always expects my books to be bestsellers and casts them for stage and screen with in my view remarkable perspicacity.
MARGUERITE
1
The Fifth Commandment
On a summer day in 1884 a blue-eyed four-year-old with ash blonde hair walked with her English nurse in the old cemetery in West Philadelphia near her grandmother’s house. It was quiet there, the day was clear, she could smell boxwood, pine and new-mown grass. She walked on a gravel path littered with tiny shells, which she stopped to collect. There were high trees to her right, an avenue ahead and, to her left, bare grass, mounds of earth and new graves.
A small group wearing black came towards her across the grass. A woman among them, tall with a long veil and gloves, seemed to stare at her. Two of the men carried between them a white wooden box. The group stopped by a freshly dug hole beside which was a mound of earth. They lowered the box into the hole and a man began shovelling in earth. At the sound of the earth hitting the box, the woman jerked back. The movement made the girl think of her mechanical bear on its green baize stand at home in London. The woman bent over the hole in the ground then raised her face and screamed. She seemed to scream at the sky, the trees, the man shovelling earth and the little girl out with her nurse.
Consolation for such ontological terrors was not on offer to Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall from her mother whom she feared and despised: ‘Always my mother. Violent and brainless. A fool but a terribly crafty and cruel fool for whom life had early become a distorting mirror in which she saw only her own reflection.’
In two unpublished autobiographical pieces, Forebears and Infancy and Michael West, in letters and in fictional allusion in her novels, she defined her mother as grasping, violent and capricious. ‘I cannot,’ she said, ‘keep the fifth commandment.’ Home for a child, she averred, should be a refuge, a place of affection and kindness. Hers was ‘bereft of security’ and haunted by the feeling that something was wrong. ‘I pity those whose memories of home have been rendered intolerable as have mine. They and I have lost a great sweetness in life.’
The mother of her fantasy was religious and peaceful. ‘A woman one would long to protect while coming to in turn for protection.’ The mother she had, Mary Jane Hall, ‘late Sager formerly Diehl’, was attracted and attractive to rakish men and had startling mood swings. She gave birth on 12 August 1880 to a daughter she had tried to abort, whom she never liked and to whom the acutest insult she could fling was, ‘You are like your father.’ Not an ounce of the child’s blood, she said, came from her. The girl was Radclyffe through and through. Her hands, nose, temper and perversity were the curse of the father, the devil incarnate.
This birth took place in England in a house called Sunny Lawn at Westcliff, Bournemouth. ‘Sunny Lawn’ God Help Us, Radclyffe Hall wrote:
A night of physical passion and then me, born solely of bodily desire, of animal impulse and nothing more. For I cannot believe those parents of mine could ever have known the love of the spirit. Nor did I bring peace into that distracted home by drawing their warring natures together. Quite the contrary. At the time of my birth a deadly quarrel was raging.
She learned of this quarrel from her mother. Her parents parted for ever a month after her birth. Her father, Radclyffe Radclyffe-Hall, known familiarly as Rat, the man whom she so resembled, whose blood alone flowed in her veins, was, so she heard, a degenerate who beat and abused his wife, chased her round the house with a pistol, had sex with the servants and threw a joint of cold lamb at the cook.
Mary Jane Sager met him in Southport, Lancashire in 1878. She was travelling with his cousin, James Reade, who had settled in New Orleans when he married her aunt. He had gone to America from Congleton, Cheshire, where his family owned silk mills. He was in Southport visiting family and recovering from a back injury – he had been thrown and kicked by a horse.
Mary Jane had an aspirational regard for the English gentry. She was twenty-seven, widowed and dissatisfied at living with her mother in Philadelphia. In her teens she had run off with and married a young Englishman, Wallace Sager, who died of yellow fever. The Halls, their cousins and uncles the Reades, Martins and Russells, were conservative gentry who had ladies for wives. ‘They believed in God, upheld the Crown and supported the Church of England.’ They were clergymen, factory owners, teachers, doctors. Portraits showing their sidewhiskers, stiff clothes and solemn thoughts hung on the library walls of Derwent, a greystone estate with an elm park in Torquay, Devon.
Rat’s father, Charles Radclyffe-Hall, was President of the British Medical Association and a physician at the Western Hospital for Consumption. He was author of Torquay in its Medical Aspects and Is Torquay Relaxing? He founded a charitable sanatorium there for the treatment of ‘reduced gentlewomen with affected chests’. His career was lucrative, his business acumen shrewd, his nature cautious and thorough and his wife rich in her own right. Esther Westhead when he married her in 1847 was, at thirty-six, a widow with three children – a son and two daughters.
Radclyffe was the only child of her second marriage. He studied law at Oxford but did not qualify. He had a large allowance and no desire to work. He collected mandolins, wrote songs, did magician’s tricks, took photographs of the New Forest and waves crashing on rocks and painted landscapes his daughter when adult judged ‘too appalling for words’. He hunted, kept horses, and dogs whose names were in the Kennel Club books – French poodles were his favourite breed. He liked travel, owned a yacht and never stayed in one place long.
He wore expensive clothes and diamond studs in his cuffs. Women took up his time. ‘I regret to say that his love affairs were seldom in accord with his social position.’ He offended his father by a foray into acting under the alias Hubert Vane and a fling in Torquay with a local fisherman’s daughter.
He and Mary Jane Sager married at St Andrew’s parish church, Southport, on 2 July 1878 within months of meeting. The ceremony was to legitimize the birth of their first daughter, Florence Maude. Walter Begley, a friend from Radclyffe’s student days, a large, shambling clergyman with nervous mannerisms, officiated. The wedding breakfast was held in a hotel. Mary Jane’s mother stayed in Philadelphia. The Halls from Torquay and the Reades from Congleton deplored the speed of the alliance, the irregularity of the reception, the uncouthness of Americans, the fisherman’s daughter, the scandalous Hubert Vane. In his wedding speech Rat said, ‘You’ve heard of the glorious stars and stripes, well I’ve married one of the stars may I never deserve the stripes.’
He called himself a painter and wore a green velvet coat, check trousers and a silk bow tie. He sailed with his wife to Philadelphia to meet his in-laws. This honeymoon was not a success: ‘They quarrelled in private and they quarrelled before friends in public, they quarrelled before the negro servants, they quarrelled from the moment they opened their eyes. Their scenes were crude, disgraceful and noisy.’
A year later, in 1879, Radclyffe’s father died, leaving him a trust income of £90,000. Domestic chaos and divorce were not considerations in Charles Radclyffe-Hall’s will. It was a document of propriety with family loyalty and indissolubility at its root. By the terms of it at Radclyffe’s death the family capital would pass in turn to his children.
But Radclyffe’s marriage was a disaster. It did not so much fail as im
plode. When Marguerite was born the doctor was unavailable, the nurse was at the chemist and Rat was in bed with the maid. ‘When I was born my father was being blatantly and crudely unfaithful. The details were too base to record.’ The maid, Elizabeth Sarah Farmer, was ordered from the house by Mary Jane. She moved to London and gave birth to another of Rat’s daughters the following year. She registered the child as Mary Ratcliffe Farmer, left blank the box ‘Name of Father’ and took in needlework to supplement the £200 a year he gave her.
Three weeks after Marguerite’s birth Florence, her legitimate baby sister, died. She too had had wide-set blue eyes and ash blonde hair. For the last eight days of her life she also had infected gums, diarrhoea and convulsions. Mary Jane said she died ‘by reason of her father’s sins’ – that she had inherited syphilis from him. Rat left Sunny Lawn never to return.
Mary Jane became hysterical. It was seven weeks before she registered her second daughter’s birth. She gave the father’s occupation as Gentleman, left blank the box ‘Name of Child’, then started court proceedings. She claimed that a month into the marriage her husband used violent and abusive language, beat her and in September 1880, with one daughter dying and another newborn, deserted her. Through counsel Radclyffe denied the charges. He said her temper was so violent, her personality so unstable, it was necessary physically to restrain her.
Mary Jane was granted judicial separation, custody of the child and substantial maintenance. But socially her life was bleak. She had an unwanted child and no house of her own. The Halls accused her of provoking her husband and would have nothing to do with her. There was nothing for her in Philadelphia, Sunny Lawn was a house of horrors, she knew no one in London, and English society viewed her as American, gold-digging and vulgar.
In a gesture of respectability she had her daughter christened in a Protestant church. ‘My mother had me christened Marguerite. She could not have chosen a more inappropriate name. I detested it.’ A Mrs Baldrey, who lived in Bournemouth in a big house with a pine-tree drive, was godmother. She gave Marguerite a prayer book with an ivory cover and a Bible with a silver gilt clasp.
The Trials of Radclyffe Hall Page 1
