The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

by Diana Souhami

  The case that emerged in court was a mess. Subpoenaed for cross-examination by Sir George Lewis, Troubridge wrote denying that he had ever made any allegations about Radclyffe Hall. Whatever Fox-Pitt said, Troubridge did ‘mind it all coming out’. He was now an admiral and a knight. He had endured humiliation and the downgrading of his career over the escape of the Goeben. He did not want a part in a court drama of revelations about his wife’s lesbianism, syphilis and spiritualism.

  Sir John Fox-Pitt wriggled, equivocated and lied. He conducted – discursively – his own defence without witnesses or corroborating evidence. Had he sought it, wise counsel might have advised him to settle out of court. But he was son-in-law of the ninth Marquess of Queensberry, who had ruined Oscar Wilde. (Fox-Pitt married Queensberry’s daughter, Edith, in 1898.) There was family pride in victory over subverters of morality. But he was not adept at using the law. He had previously lost a lengthy suit about the patent of his invention of an incandescent lamp for street lighting. Nor had he much common sense.

  Had Fox-Pitt proved gross immorality against Radclyffe Hall for unnatural offences and unchastity with a spirit on plane three and an admiral’s wife, he might have added richness to the picture of women’s lives. In court he denied the words attributed to him and he denied slander. He claimed he had used the word immoral in a special sense. What he said he meant by immoral was that Radclyffe Hall’s paper was scientific rubbish, unworthy of the Society for Psychical Research and that its publication was harmful. Her paper, he said, produced a condition of mind which he considered immoral. He had not meant in any way to infer that her character was immoral.

  It was all bluff, bluster and backtrack. If ‘grossly immoral’ meant authoring twaddle, then few at the Society would escape the dock. The Lord Chief Justice struggled to keep his semantic grasp:

  You say that you used the word immoral only in relation to her work in the society … You deny that you used the language complained of as implying unnatural vice, unchastity, or sexual immorality. The plaintiff contends that you meant that. Whether you have used language calculated to imply it is a matter for the jury.

  Cross-examining Radclyffe Hall, Fox-Pitt dithered and obfuscated. He read out passages from her paper about Mabel on plane three, spirit horses and vibratory houses. He asked her whether Lady Troubridge had been under medical treatment for hysterical phobias and obsessions because of her ‘spirit experiences’. Radclyffe Hall denied it. Neurasthenia, she said, had a different cause.

  Fox-Pitt: What did you pay the medium?

  RH: A guinea a session.

  Fox-Pitt: What was the medium called?

  RH: Feda.

  The Lord Chief Justice: What is Feda?

  RH: When a woman goes into a trance she has a different and complex personality. I cannot say what Feda is.

  The Lord Chief Justice: Then Feda is Mrs Osborne Leonard in a trance?

  RH: Yes.

  Fox-Pitt: You consider the paper evidential?

  RH: Yes.

  Fox-Pitt: It gives evidence of a spirit world?

  RH: It purports to do so.

  Fox-Pitt: On page 355 there is continual reference to a spirit lady and Feda says: ‘She’s got a nice complexion, very nice. It isn’t a bit wrinkled, it’s very smooth. Before she passed on, her cheeks fell in a little bit.’ It says the lady’s complexion has improved.

  RH: Those are Feda’s words.

  Fox-Pitt: I learn too that MVA has learned to ride a horse.

  The Lord Chief Justice: I am groping at present. What is, or was, MVA?

  RH: It purports to be a communication from a person after her death.

  Fox-Pitt: Then Feda says MVA is so glad there are animals in the spirit world. She used to be afraid of horses but is not now.

  RH: I cannot tell you that.

  Fox-Pitt: Look at page 452. There are various quotations about a spirit having a bath.

  The Lord Chief Justice: How does a spirit bathe? I see later on that the lady has a private bathing pool in the spirit world. You must bear in mind that hearsay evidence is not admissible. (Laughter).

  Fox-Pitt: (to his Lordship) This is senseless stuff which many people who read it will think is the product of scientific minds. It is pure rubbish and only gives evidence of incipient dementia.

  The Lord Chief Justice: (with astonishment) But you allege against the plaintiff unchastity and sexual immorality.

  Fox-Pitt then wanted to refer to a dictionary to support his revised definition of the word immoral.

  The Lord Chief Justice: You do not mean by the word ‘immoral’ anything sexual?

  Fox-Pitt: No my lord and I will call evidence to prove it.

  The Lord Chief Justice: You are not suggesting that the relationship between the plaintiff and Lady Troubridge led to the separation between the Admiral and his wife?

  Fox-Pitt: Who suggested it?

  The Lord Chief Justice: Not a spirit in the other world.

  Miss Salter told the court that no one on the Society’s Committee who read and passed Radclyffe Hall’s and Lady Troubridge’s paper thought it immoral, subversive or improper. She said she had understood Fox-Pitt’s accusations to refer to ‘some perversion’ between the plaintiff and MVA. Cross-examined by him, she admitted she did not know that in the New English Dictionary, where many columns defined ‘moral’ and ‘immoral’, there was no reference to sexual relationship.

  Una, when questioned by Fox-Pitt, tried to pull rank and quash any lesbian implications. She appealed to the judge about Mabel:

  Una: If his Lordship would allow me I should like to say that in life she occupied a high social position and lived in perfect amity with her husband.

  The Lord Chief Justice: How does this affect the case?

  Sir E. Hume-Williams: There is an allegation made by the defendant that she was a person of low and immoral character.

  The Lord Chief Justice: Her high position in society would be no answer to the charge that has been made.

  Gerald Balfour, cross-examined by Fox-Pitt, was asked if he ‘accepted the meaning of the spirit hypothesis of a discarnate entity’. Balfour asked the Lord Chief Justice if he had to give his views. His Lordship replied that were he and the jury kept there ever so many days, they would not understand what he was talking about. He said he wanted to hurry matters along because not everyone had for ever to live.

  Cross-examined by Sir Ellis Hume-Williams, Fox-Pitt cracked. He garbled about a conspiracy against him to oust him from the Society. A conspiracy, he said was ‘a breathing together so that lies came out of their mouths’. He called this the ‘junta’. The Lord Chief Justice, a larky man, enjoyed the nonsense of it, but there was no way he could focus Fox-Pitt’s mind. He brought the case to a conclusion. The jury was confused. It found that Fox-Pitt had used the words ‘grossly immoral’, but thought that he had meant them to apply to Radclyffe Hall’s psychical research paper and not to ‘unnatural vice, unchastity, or sexual immorality’. She was awarded £500 damages with costs.

  ‘Home to a much relieved and happy evening’, Una wrote in her diary. Next day was Saturday and they stayed in bed late together and read the massive newspaper coverage of the case in The Times, the Daily Sketch, the Daily Mirror. ‘Wealthy spiritualist wins £500 damages in Slander Suit’; ‘Feda and MVA Lady Troubridge’s Dead Cousin’; ‘Lord Chief Puzzled’; ‘Laughter in Court’; ‘Strange Slander Suit’; ‘The Spirits of the Dead’, were some of the headlines. John and Una had tea with the Visettis, then went on to dinner with Gabrielle Enthoven and ‘Brother’ – Toupie Lowther. Una said she thought Toupie was a hermaphrodite. They played the gramophone and John and Brother danced.

  Fox-Pitt did not pay the £500. Radclyffe Hall had cleared her name in court, but at a price. Publicity was wide but cheap and sardonic. The press enjoyed the joke of it all, the sexual innuendo, the frolics of lesbians, the antics of the upper classes with time on their hands. They did not address Radclyffe Hall’s courage in bringing the sl
ander suit, or any wider issues of sexual politics. The Lord Chief Justice had tried to steer the court toward some sort of analysis of sexual morality. Fox-Pitt would have none of it, though his views were clear.

  He appealed against the verdict and a retrial was ordered. Sir George Lewis advised Radclyffe Hall to let things rest. ‘It was futile spending so much money and enduring more odious publicity when Fox-Pitt would never pay a penny.’ After several adjournments and the passing of time, the case withered away.

  Society now knew that Radclyffe Hall was a lesbian. In the mind of the establishment she stood convicted of sexual immorality, gross indecency, unchastity and the rest. Fox-Pitt and Troubridge were two more of the enemies she had made. They were the kind of enemy that lies in wait. She had more than tweaked the tiger’s tail. Within months a Conservative MP, Frederick Macquister, proposed that a clause ‘Acts of Gross Indecency by Females’ be added to the Criminal Law Amendment Act which so sensationally indicted Oscar Wilde. Macquister thought that female morals were declining and that lesbianism threatened the birth rate. His clause was passed by the House of Commons then debated in the House of Lords. Lord Birkenhead warned: ‘You are going to tell the whole world there is such an offence, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never dreamed of it. I think this is a very great mischief.’ The insult of silence on the matter was thought best. Existing laws could be tailored in order to indict.

  After the trial, John was ill for a fortnight. Though she liked to appear invincible, she coped badly with stress. Phoebe Hoare wrote that her husband Oliver now forbade her to have anything to do with John. John stayed in bed with Una, who read aloud Ben Hur, Treasure Island and Jekyll and Hyde. On 17 December Una cropped her beloved’s golden hair and made her more of a man. Ladye had liked the softer look, but Ladye had had her day. Christmas brought ‘evidential proof’ of John’s commitment to Una. She said Una could be buried on one of the shelves in the Highgate mausoleum alongside herself and Ladye. ‘I feel I can never be really unhappy again’, Una wrote in her diary. She went to mass and thanked God that such love and a roof over her head were infinitely assured.

  RADCLYFFE HALL

  13

  Octopi

  Chip Chase, large, castellated, with turrets and mock battlements, was a snook cocked at Troubridge. Una’s daily diary entries began ‘John and I’, the order of merit as understood by both. ‘Were we comfortable!’ she wrote. Comfort mattered greatly to them. It coloured their vision of paradise. Within months they created what seemed a settled home. They had a maid, a cook, three house servants, two gardeners and a full-time secretary. The antique oak furniture was polished daily with beeswax and turpentine, there were flowers in all the rooms in thick glass vases, log fires burned.

  Servants came and went with terrible rapidity. A bilious attack or a burned pudding and they were out within the hour. As one secretary put it, ‘Miss Hall had a fiendish temper which was exacerbated by Lady Troubridge, everyone except Lady Troubridge it seemed being in the wrong.’ Both had a sharp eye for specks of dust on the Cromwellian clock or the Dole cupboard and a sharp tongue for the housemaid. Tradespeople had to meet exacting standards too. ‘It behoved everyone to keep in with the couple as they were good customers and generous!’

  John and Una’s bedrooms interconnected. They got into each other’s beds for reading aloud at night, morning breakfast and the rest, but they slept alone. ‘Why in the name of wonder should anyone in any conceivable circumstances wish for a bedfellow’, Una wrote. ‘Nothing has ever led me to believe that comfortable repose can really be achieved with one’s head pillowed upon another’s breast or with someone else’s head riding upon one’s bosom.’ And John said that not since she was twenty had she ‘wanted to spend a whole night of sleep with a woman’.

  Her study was on the ground floor. French windows led to the garden. Files and books, meticulously ordered, lined the walls. She worked at an oak refectory table, on which was a globe of the world, a silver mounted horse’s hoof and her seal ‘La Verité Me Guide’. In a corner was a shrine to Ladye of a candlelit madonna and burning incense. On the wall was a large crucifix, and a fox’s head on an oak shield. By the woodburning fire was John’s leather smoking chair and antique pipe rack.

  In this cloistered, club lounge setting she started a novel: ‘Writing, it was like a heavenly balm, it was like the flowing out of deep waters, it was like the lifting of a load from the spirit, it brought with it a sense of relief, of assuagement.’ Its unfortunate title was Octopi, its theme a lesbian daughter, denied life by a manipulative mother.

  A perception of Mother the Tentacled Monster was rooted in Radclyffe Hall’s psyche. Mrs Visetti was the archetype, but cameos glimpsed the world over confirmed the prejudice: the daughter of a clergyman’s wife ‘withering on the stem’ in the Grand Hotel, Tamaris, an elderly daughter fussing over her invalid mother in the Cottage Hotel in Lynton in Devon. Radclyffe Hall construed these relationships as ‘unmarried daughters who are unpaid servants and the old people sucking the life out of them like octopi’.

  Mrs Ogden, chief octopus in her novel, uses tentacles of sickness and loneliness to bind Joan her daughter to her. She uses too tentacles of sexual possession, for her husband disgusts her. ‘Joan’s strong young arms would comfort and soothe and her firm lips grope until they found her mother’s; and Mrs Ogden would feel mean and ashamed but guiltily happy as if a lover held her.’

  The Ogdens live in a stifling house in Seabourne, a one-horse town. Their lives are circumscribed by lack of money, fear of sex and fear of life. Elizabeth Rodney, hired to teach Joan, is a ‘new woman’, educated and independent, like the Modern Miss Thompson of Radclyffe Hall’s unpublished suffragette story. She and Joan fall in love and want to live together, Joan as a doctor, Elizabeth as a teacher. Mrs Ogden’s tentacles slither round them. Do you love me, she asks her daughter, who wants to reply, ‘I don’t love you, I don’t want to touch you, I dislike the feel of you – I dislike above all else the feel of you.’

  Elizabeth waits. Each time Joan is at the point of breaking free, mother strikes. ‘I think it is a sin to let yourself get drained dry by anyone’, Elizabeth says as Joan disintegrates. ‘As quickly as you cut through one tentacle another shot out and fixed on to you.’

  In an article written years later for an American magazine, Radclyffe Hall claimed high intentions in writing about Joan Ogden and her kind:

  They wither away for want of self expression and encouragement, because they are too refined, too sensitive, too unselfish, or too timid, or perhaps too noble, to make a stand in defence of their rights as human beings.

  … I came to the resolution that I would try to bring their grievances out into the light of day; a difficult task, perhaps a presumptuous task, but I felt that it had to be done and that I was the person to do it … I knew that I was throwing down the gauntlet but in a way this made the book all the easier to write, because I was fighting for others and not for myself.

  She liked to remind ‘her public’, as she and Una came to call them, that she spoke for an underclass and was doing God’s work. But the strength of the book was that it was about herself, her precarious identity, her black view of mothers, her alienation from men, her desire to find a compensatory replacement for Mrs Visetti, whom she loathed.

  All the imagery in the book is of snares. Joan Ogden’s feelings for her mother ‘eat into her flesh’. Only with Elizabeth Rodney might she ‘break once and for all the chains’. Men are no more than a narrative device. Mr Ogden cheats Joan out of her inheritance then dies to further the plot. Joan and Elizabeth are wooed by emotionally inconsequential brothers: Richard and Lawrence Benson. Elizabeth waits ten years for Joan, then marries Lawrence and goes with him to South Africa. She lives in splendour and kills her dream of life with Joan by ‘being busy and hard and quite unlike her real self’. Richard waits twenty years for Joan only to hear her say:

  ‘I’m not a woman who could ever have m
arried. I’ve never been what you’d call in love with a man in my life … Only one creature could ever have saved me and I let her go while I was still young.’

  ‘Do you mean Elizabeth?’ he asked sharply.

  She nodded. ‘Yes she could have saved me but I let her go.’

  ‘God!’ he exclaimed angrily …

  In pencil on loose-leafed paper Radclyffe Hall produced misspelt, unpunctuated prose. Without expectations from a publisher or agent, she worked in a sporadic way. She put aside her manuscript because of dog shows, trips to London, visits from Mr Cobden the tailor to fit her brocade smoking jacket, driving lessons from Toupie Lowther in John’s new car, Blue Bird.

  Ladye’s ghost was the main distraction. Next to John’s study was an office for psychical research ‘where the secretary had her habitat’. There was, said Una, ‘plenty of work needing close application; reports that must be so adequate and so accurate that they did not return to us from Sir Oliver; regular sittings with Mrs Osborne Leonard; visits to and from members including a young woman liable without warning to become one of two other personalities.’

  The Society, embarrassed by the spooks and lesbians court case, prevaricated about accepting Radclyffe Hall on its council. She threatened more adverse publicity unless they acted fast. They duly elected her, so Fox-Pitt resigned. She and Una then went for a ‘members only’ week to Fishers Hill near Woking with Gerald Balfour and Mrs Sidgwick. It was a token appearance. Radclyffe Hall found other members’ psychical communications entirely dull. She was more interested in a meeting with the composer Ethel Smyth and her dog Pan on the golf links. (‘I wonder why it is so much easier for me, and I believe for a great many English women, to love my own sex passionately rather than yours?’ Ethel Smyth wrote to her friend Henry Brewster in 1892.) She went to tea with John and Una, then dinner.

  Una invited her mother to Chip Chase. It was an invitation calculated to discomfort. Una now had a lifestyle which Minna could only envy. House guests for Una had the status of intruders. She wished to be alone with John. Jane Randolph, once wooed and conquered by Marguerite, braved their daunting exclusivity for a weekend in autumn 1920. Now Jane Caruth and widowed for a second time, she found no chink of space for herself. Una remarked with satisfaction on her heavy jowls, upholstered clothes, her ‘cranky, prim and hyper-critical strictures’. Jane Caruth deplored the metamorphosis of Marguerite into John. She disliked her short hair, pipe smoking and Una. ‘Great relief getting rid of Jane Caruth’, Una wrote in her diary.