4. False Starts (1916–1924)
© Lucy Pollard, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0215.04
Margery wasted no time in beginning to look for work. In fact, although she wrote to Muz that she was in no particular hurry, there is a frenetic sense of urgency about her search that suggests she was using it as a desperate salve for the pain of her loss. On July 23, less than three weeks after Edward’s death, Katherine Courtauld wrote an open letter of recommendation: ‘I should think any work that she took up would be thoroughly well carried out […] I have formed a high opinion of her character & ability’. Had Edward died in peacetime, she would probably have given this time over to organising the funeral; instead she was applying for administrative work with the Agricultural Organisation Society, for which Aunt Theo’s husband, George Gibb (a lawyer turned railway manager),1 wrote her a reference:
I have known Mrs. Garrett Jones all her life, & can testify from personal knowledge to her having the highest character & great energy & capacity. She has quite exceptional power of mind & force of character. Her education at Girton & the keen interest & active part she has taken in many intellectual & social movements has given her an excellent & full equipment for any work of organisation or administration. I have not the slightest doubt that she would perform the duties of the post she is seeking with industry, efficiency, sense, & success.2
Nothing came of this, but Margery told Muz ‘I haven’t settled anything about work. I am leaving no stone unturned to find the right job, — & I expect I shall succeed’.3 She wondered about going back to the factory inspectorship, but thought that the hours would be too long and the pay poor. Bedford College was looking for a secretary to its council, which she felt would have suited her exactly, but someone else (‘a perfect dear of a girl who will be very good’) was appointed. And yet, at the same time as longing for activity to fill the void, she also needed peace and quiet: with the help of her cousin Roger she ‘warded the various sympathetic relations off more or less successfully’4 from herself and the children.
In the immediate aftermath of her loss, Margery felt strongly that there was no longer any point in her generation hoping or striving for personal happiness, but only in working to save future generations from ‘a repetition of this gigantic folly’.5 Consequently, when the opportunity for Margery to be at the core of the work for peace soon presented itself, she seized it: she was appointed the first secretary of the League of Nations Society, again likely through the influence of George Gibb.
The League of Nations Society had begun in 1915, in what one of its historians calls ‘progressive drawing-room circles’,6 but it began to flourish in the context of the expansion of anti-war literature after 1919, and the belief in the need for a way of preventing such a disaster from occurring again. Both intellectuals (for example Leonard Woolf and Gilbert Murray) and politicians (for example Aneurin Williams and Robert Cecil) were instrumental in bringing the Society to birth, but the research on which it was based had been done by Woolf under the auspices of the Fabian Society Research Department.7 Its purpose was to work for the foundation of a post-war League of Nations that would provide a mechanism for resolving international disputes without resorting to war, using the court of arbitration in the Hague (established in 1899) for matters of international law and the League’s own representative council for other matters. It was not specifically a pacifist organisation — though there was a strong pacifist element — but rather an internationalist one, and its founders insisted that when the League itself came into existence, it must include the defeated nations as well as the victorious ones. Although it has been suggested that there was a strong link with feminism, when the Society was founded its seventeen-person committee included only three women.8 To this body, Margery was appointed organising secretary, a post that she filled for about two years. During that time, the Society grew from its drawing-room origins into a something with greater heft, a development that owed a lot to the advocacy of President Woodrow Wilson from May 1916 onwards. On 14 May 1917, just after the entry of the US into the war, its profile was raised by a big public meeting, at which one of the prominent speakers was the South African statesman Jan Smuts.
Margery remained in post for just two years. In her old age, she recalled that she had resigned after a comparatively short stint because she was about to remarry, but this may not have been the whole story. While the range of beliefs in the Society might have added to its strength, there were deep fissures over the question of pacifism, indicated obliquely by Smuts in his speech when he referred to the intense desire among millions to see a better way than war:
And you see the result in a meeting like this, where you have not only gathered the dreamers and the idealists, the visionaries who are the salt of the earth, but also practical men, and even men of blood like myself.9
Eventually, in late 1918, the League of Nations Society and the League of Free Nations Association (which itself had only been inaugurated in September) amalgamated to form the League of Nations Union. A letter from George Gibb to Margery, dated 11 December 1918, implies that she was unhappy with the direction taken. He wrote that he was distressed to hear that she had resigned and felt that her influence would be much greater if she stayed: ‘Don’t do it […] Stick to it and quietly work for your opinions if they are right’. She was not to be swayed, however, and her forthcoming marriage to Dominick Spring Rice was surely a factor in her decision.
The second annual report of the League of Nations Society paid tribute to her industry:
Office staff. The Secretary of the Society is Mrs. Garrett Jones, who has been working for us since the beginning of 1917. She has given invaluable work in and out of the Office, and it is largely owing to her strenuous exertions that the Society has made such marked progress.10
An undated open letter from Aneurin Williams is a more personal testimony:
I have pleasure in certifying that Mrs. Garrett Jones acted as Secretary of the League of Nations Society for about two years, including the whole time of its first public activity until its amalgamation with another Society to form the League of Nations Union. It was the wish of all those who had worked closely with Mrs. Garrett Jones in the old Society that she should continue to hold an important post in the new Society. We greatly regretted that she did not see her way to do so. In her work for the League of Nations Society Mrs. Garrett Jones showed great zeal & intelligence: she had much organising to do & she did it well. She was head of our staff & had much responsibility & freedom of action. I regard her as a woman of remarkably [sic] energy, ability, knowledge & character, & have very great pleasure in recommending her for any similar position.
She had not yet found the cause that would create the opportunity for her life’s most important achievement but she did voluntary work for other organisations during the immediate post-war period. She was a member of the executive committee of the Irish Dominion League11 and, in the 1920s, acted as honorary treasurer of the Women’s Liberal Federation. However, she may well have become disillusioned with the Liberal Party — in particular its internal divisions over women’s suffrage, over Home Rule, and over the direction of the war (and particularly over the issue of conscription),12 as she had with the League of Nations Society. Aside from her concerns about work, Margery’s private life was also making insistent demands on her time and emotional energy. She had emerged from the war as a widow with two young sons. In four or five years, she had lost not only Edward on the Somme, but her infant daughter Isabel to meningitis and her much-loved brother Harry at Gallipoli. In 1919, she married Edward Dominick Spring Rice (always known as Dominick), and they set up house in Victoria Road, Kensington.
Margery had known Dominick since the days of her first marriage: his line of work was similar to Edward’s and he had also been on the fringes of the League of Nations Society as a member of its Press and Literature sub-committee. He came from an Anglo-Irish family, but had been born in London where his father, Stephen, worked. His mother, Julia, held strong suffragist views. According to a little anonymous booklet printed after her death:
An infuriated man once told her that if she persisted in her advocacy of Women’s Suffrage he would no longer open the door for her, to which she replied that if he did as he said, she would no longer pour out his tea.13
Dominick was also a friend of Margery’s in-laws: according to Martin Robertson (Edward’s nephew and, later, Margery’s son-in-law), Dominick was ‘expected’ to marry the youngest Jones daughter, Topsy, who consequently very much resented his marriage to Margery. This resulted in a coolness between Margery and her Jones in-laws, although, as things turned out, it was probably to Topsy’s benefit that she did not marry Dominick. The situation was fictionalised by Romer Wilson,14 a near contemporary of Margery’s at Girton, in her 1919 novel If All These Young Men — in which Margery is thinly disguised as Amaryllis, Topsy as Susan and Dominick as James.
Although she later stated as a principal motive for her marriage her sons’ need for a father, for the first few months15 Charles and Ronald (aged seven and four) were sent away to Stratford-Upon-Avon to stay with Margery’s old school mistress, who had a young grandson of a similar age, and, shortly afterwards, Charles went to school near Bristol. These arrangements suggest that she was aware from the beginning of her relationship with Dominick that there might be difficulties between him and his step-sons. Margery knew that Dominick was a heavy drinker, but was nonetheless strongly attracted to his charm and charisma, and, at the time of their marriage, she may already have known that she was pregnant again. Their son Stephen was born in early 1920, followed in 1921 by a daughter, Cecil.
Of the Jones family, Margery’s sister-in-law, Gil, particularly struggled with her distress at the marriage. She was determined that contact with Charles and Ronald — who having lost their father might need their Jones relations more than previously — should not be compromised. In a letter to her sister Hilda, Gil wrote of how she had ‘implored’ their brother Willie and his wife, who were ‘very much longing’ to ask that Charles and Ronald go to live with them, to hold back and to avoid quarrelling with Margery at all costs. In the same letter, she continued in a more emollient manner:
as Margee does seem to intend to have the children after six months with her, they think it might be better to leave it alone & avoid quarrelling. I am of course not encouraging them to offer, because I don’t consider it a good plan & anyway M. would not accept I believe.16
In another letter to Hilda written a few days later, Gil asked:
Can you manage to adopt a philosophical attitude about Margee? I hope you can. I have quite made up my mind that it is no use feeling tragic over it & that one may as well, within limits[,] give back some of the blows that are aimed. I am being much more restrained than I like, as I could so easily give very great pain but I have so much personal feeling for Margee — & I am too much affected by knowing that I could never have abused her to Edward — to let myself go really — but what I think is — Charles & Ronald can’t be suppressed or done away with — they won’t have an ideal life or childhood — but most people don’t and they wouldn’t have, even if Edward had lived. If Margee is an Elise (to use the name merely as an abbreviation)17 it is better for the children not to be with her. Other arrangements of a comparatively satisfactory nature will be made such as Mrs. Garrett, or Kate,18 having them at Aldeburgh, and ‘visits’ to Margee & to us I hope — anyway they won’t be cut off from us.19
She went on to say that she had written to Margery but had received an answer from Dominick: it is a great pity that his letter has not survived, as it might have thrown some light on these complicated interactions.
Whatever the reaction of other people to the marriage, it ran into problems almost from the start. In the statement Margery wrote for the court ten years later, after she had obtained a judicial separation and was thinking of applying for custody of the two children of her second marriage, who had been made wards of court, she wrote that she had wanted a father for her sons, and that she had known that Dominick drank too much but had hoped to be able to change him. That statement has to be read in context — she was justifying her own conduct throughout the course of the marriage — but there is no reason to doubt that she genuinely thought it would be a good thing to give her sons a father figure, or that at the time, even if she had hesitations, she was in love with Dominick and hoped he would make a good husband.
Dominick himself is something of an enigma, partly perhaps because he was deliberately obfuscatory about his life. He was born in 1891 (although this was one of the things he made a mystery of, possibly because he did not want to admit to being younger than Margery) to an Anglo-Irish family: his mother was a Fitzgerald from Valencia Island off the south west coast of Ireland, and his father came from Limerick. His father’s brother was Cecil Spring Rice, a distinguished diplomat who was British ambassador to Washington from 1912–1918. Dominick’s father, Stephen, worked in the Treasury in London. Stephen died (possibly from alcohol-related causes)20 when his son was eleven, and when Dominick himself had just had an operation for appendicitis — perhaps these circumstances help to explain his neuroses. His mother Julia was a dominating personality and, according to Margery’s 1929 statement, his relationship with her was always tense and difficult. Dominick was educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, where he studied Classics and, though he did not do particularly well academically, was intelligent, charming and witty. His father, grandfather and great uncle had all been members of the Cambridge Apostles,21 but Dominick appears not to have been elected to this elite society. After Cambridge came jobs in the City of London, where he worked for the Morning Post, the Alexander Discount Company and, subsequently, for Grace Brothers, bankers. He wrote articles about employment and was honorary secretary of the Political Economy Club. An article in an issue of the Financial News22 describes him as having a look of humorous contemplation as well as a physical and mental agility that might surprise a casual observer of his (fairly solid) build. Both the twinkle in his eye and the solidity of his build are evident in a series of photographs of him by the Lafayette Studio, now in the National Portrait Gallery in London (see Figure 13).23
In 1918–1919, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, Dominick went as financial advisor with the British delegation to North Russia led by Ernest Harvey. Francis Lindley, another member of the delegation, records in his memoirs that Harvey had a difficult time negotiating with the Russians, and ‘it was well for him that Spring Rice, sent to help him by the Treasury, had to go home early in the negotiations. A break-down in health had taken the inconvenient form of openly expressed contempt for all foreigners’.24 Presumably ‘a break-down in health’ is a euphemism for being drunk, although he did suffer from severe asthma and had not fought in the war for that reason. It is possible that he also had back problems: the Abergavenny Chronicle of 20 August 1915 records that Dominick and his cousin Lord Monteagle had been in a rail crash on the Irish Mail from Euston, in which Dominick suffered spinal injuries. After this incident, Dominick wrote two letters to James Strachey from Northampton General Hospital: in the second of them (postmarked 29 August), he says he is getting on slowly and hopes to be moved to London in a week or so, ‘when also I hope to be able to totter about a bit’.25
Dominick was a fantasist. He told his son the improbable tale that during the Russian Revolution, he had enabled the ballerina Tamara Karsavina to escape by forging a passport for her and fixing a passage in a destroyer; and that he had once been to a fancy dress ball in the Albert Hall, had seen a rather lonely-looking girl whom he had asked to dance, and discovered that she was Karsavina. The chronology of these two events (or non-events) is unclear, though it is possible that there is a grain of truth in Dominick’s account. In her memoirs, Karsavina writes:
The British Embassy [in St Petersburg] had left in February [1918]. I had to stay behind. Unexpected difficulties arose with our passports — it was the time of the British landing in the North. When we had almost despaired of ever getting out of Russia, my husband [H. J. Bruce] was called to the telephone. A woman’s voice told him that a permit to leave would be sent round to him. She rang off quickly, and he never knew who his good fairy was’.26
Karsavina had been in London before the war, and could conceivably have met Dominick then.
Both Margery and Dominick enjoyed telling stories to impress. One of Margery’s grandsons remembers her telling him when he was a small boy that she had been at a party in Dublin at which the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins was a fellow guest; when the authorities came searching for Collins, he managed to escape over the rooftops. The origin of this story may lie in the rumour attached to Glendalough House in County Wicklow, where Erskine Childers’ family lived, that Collins had once escaped from pursuers via the priest’s hole in the house. The Childers and the Spring Rice families knew each other, and Dominick certainly stayed in the house: it is perfectly possible that Collins had such an escape, but, if he did, whether Dominick — or Margery — was there is an open question.
One of the difficulties with getting a sense of what Dominick was actually like is that much of what we know about him is filtered through Margery’s statement to the court in 1929, after their judicial separation — a statement that was the product of extreme distress and bitterness on her part. When later she gave this statement to their daughter Cecil to read, Cecil was astonished — having assumed that Margery was entirely in the right and Dominick entirely in the wrong — to find herself for the first time sympathizing with her father, of whom she had been frightened, and understanding how difficult marriage to Margery must have been.
There is one other source from which we have impressions of Dominick, the diary of the novelist Stella Benson,27 who had been introduced to Margery by Brooks Henderson (a reader for the Macmillan Press in New York) during the war. Benson recorded her first impression of the two of them before their marriage:
[Margery] talked a lot about ‘yearnest’ people with mockery but she is rather yearnest herself, I think, not so very much sense of humour. She is sec. of the League of Nations Society, rather a clever talker. A Mr Dominic Spring Rice (heavenly name) seemed to be a sort of tame cat of hers, or rather say tame terrier, quite an amusing young man, with a startling cynical memory for unexpected things like the thirty nine articles, & LCC byelaws.
Just after Cecil’s birth, Benson records going to dinner with Dominick and Margery:
[Dominick] seemed nervous and yet also a little frightening, he states things with such accuracy and firmness that your objections shrivel away and you feel so sure that he would scorn [them?] that you lose confidence in them.
A few days later, Benson went there again, to tea: ‘Everybody there was a considerable talker I guess and we all burbled at once but Mr Spring Rice won’. He had a fund of stories, odd and witty but maybe not accurate. Some weeks later, Benson, Dominick and another friend went to a dance (perhaps Margery was not going out yet, although Cecil was two months old by this time):
D. Spring Rice dances violently with obvious delight — in fact, although he was almost at times speechless with asthma his obvious delight in everything was conspicuous far and wide. He runs and slides and jumps through windows and quivers with energy all the time. Indeed that is his form of party manners, an eager ebullience which I thought very engaging if he was really feeling so bad as I should have felt with that amount of asthma […] I got appallingly tired and was specially speechless with D. Spring Rice because I think one has to be in great spirits to keep up with him, and though happy I was certainly tired.
A big cause of friction in the marriage was Dominick’s need to play sexual games involving elaborate fantasies of pretending, in which one partner had to play a subordinate part, for example one being a servant and the other an employer. Although in the statement Margery describes herself as being a reluctant participant in these games, it seems entirely possible that she enjoyed them at first, until other issues destroyed any pleasure. She had a great sense of fun and certainly, later in life, she described for her grandchildren with amusement and gusto some of the games they played outside the bedroom: for example, they would hire an expensive car and Margery would put on a chauffeur’s cap to drive it while Dominick sat in the back; or, when invited to a dinner party, they would agree some unlikely words that they would try to make their respective neighbours at table say, comparing scores afterwards. But in a darker vein, Dominick drew up a code of punishments that he inflicted on Margery for minor infringements of rules, such as forgetting to wind the clocks, and this was reinforced by the purchase of a pair of handcuffs and a cane. Sometimes, she was shut up in a cupboard for an extended period. The system worked both ways: Dominick insisted on being punished as well as inflicting punishment. One has to conclude that he was a sadomasochist.
Other sources of conflict between Margery and Dominick were children, money and drink. The sons of Margery’s first marriage were, from the beginning, a cause of problems for her marriage with Dominick, and one can only feel that they must have suffered badly not simply because their step-father resented and bullied them, but because of the way Margery herself behaved and her extraordinary obtuseness about her children’s emotional lives. To send the children away for the first few months of the new marriage was hardly a recipe for their emotional adjustment to their new circumstances. In the long-term, while Ronald coped robustly with this awful beginning, Charles was more damaged by it. Such small compensations as the model railway set up by Dominick in the garden at Victoria Road, which Ronald at least loved, cannot have weighed much in the emotional balance. There were rows from early on, caused by Dominick’s bullying of the children and by his attempts to prevent Margery from having contact with her mother and brothers, which also inevitably had an impact on the children’s relationship with their grandparents. When they reached their teenage years, both Charles and Ronald were sent to Rugby School, which offered bursaries for the sons of officers killed in the war. Again, Ronald, though not positively happy there, was able to cope much better than Charles.
In the middle of her marriage going sour, Margery lost her beloved father. In April 1923, when Leonard Woolf, whom Margery probably knew from her time in the League of Nations Society, was about to return from a trip to Paris, he recorded:
On the station at Paris I suddenly heard ‘Mr Woolf, I dont [sic] suppose you remember me’, looked round, & saw Mrs Dominic [sic] Spring-Rice, ex Mrs Garrett Jones, ex Miss Garrett. I had a long talk with her on the boat. At Newhaven I bought The Times, opened it, & the first thing that caught my eye was that her father had died yesterday. She certainly did not know. Ought I to have broken the news? At any rate, I didnt [sic].28
Aged seventy-two, having been retired from his legal practice for just a couple of years, Sam had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage. Margery had always been closer to him than to Clara and his sudden death must have shocked and grieved her deeply. What had seemed like a time of new beginnings had perhaps come to seem more like a time of endings.
1 Gibb had been general manager of the North Eastern Railway and managing director of the Underground Electric Railway Company of London.
2 George Gibb, testimonial for Margery Spring Rice, 24 July 1916.
3 Margery Spring Rice, letter to Mary Jones, 25 July 1916.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid. This constituted another cause of tension between Margery and Clara, who had written to Margery while Edward was in France that the only essential in life was love.
6 Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c. 1918–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 2, https://doi.org/10.7765/9781847794284
7 Janet M. Manson, ‘Leonard Woolf as an Architect of the League of Nations’, South Carolina Review, 39/2 (2007), 1–13.
8 Mary Macarthur (married name Anderson) of the Women’s Trade Union League, and two women listed only by their husbands’ names, Mrs Richard Cross and Mrs A.W. Claremont. There was one female Vice-President (out of seventeen), Mrs Walter Rea.
9 A League of Nations: Report of a Meeting Held at Westminster Central Hall, 14 May 1917, p. 5, in a collection of pamphlets entitled Publications of the League of Nations Society, the League of Nations Union, and the League of Free Nations Association/League of Nations Society [and others], bound together in the British Library with no publication details.
10 League of Nations Society, Second Annual Report, March, 1917–March 1918, as Approved at the Annual Meeting, June 14, 1918 (London: League of Nations Society, 1918), p. 14.
11 Margery was, as Edward had been, in favour of Home Rule for Ireland. The Irish Dominion League advocated dominion status for Ireland and opposed partition; the chair of the London committee was Thomas Spring Rice, second baron Monteagle, a cousin of Margery’s second husband Dominick, and the father of the Irish nationalist gun-runner Mary Spring Rice. With Molly Childers, Mary brought guns from Germany to Ireland in the Childers yacht Asgard.
12 As the Labour Party rose, the Liberal Party declined from the glory days of its landslide victory in 1906. Some women got the vote in 1918: householders, wives of householders, owners of property with an annual rent of £5 and graduates of British universities.
13 J. S. R.: Sketch of a Background ([n.p.]: privately printed, [n.d.]), p. 7.
14 Pen name of Florence Roma Muir Wilson.
15 When Julia moved out, it was to a house just round the corner, where she remained until 1935, when she married again; her new husband was her first husband’s cousin, Francis Spring Rice, who was also her sister’s widower; she went to live with him in Limerick and died in 1936.
16 Lilian Jones, Letter to Margery Spring Rice, 12 August 1919.
17 Mary Ross’s sister Elise Blake and her husband Dr Morgan Dix Blake had gone bankrupt and were much disapproved of by the rest of the family.
18 Margery’s sister-in-law, wife of Ronald.
19 Lilian Jones, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 17 August 1919.
20 This is what Dominick told Stella Benson. Stella Benson, Diary, 13 July 1929.
21 Several members of the Bloomsbury group, on the fringes of which Dominick lurked, belonged to this highly selective intellectual society.
22 ‘Men of Mark: Dominick Spring Rice’, Financial News (8 April 1931), p. 3.
23 These photographs have a history that Dominick might have appreciated: the negatives were in a collection that was rescued from a skip in 1968 and stored at Pinewood Film Studios. When they were rediscovered in 1988, Pinewood offered them to the Victoria & Albert Museum. About 30,000 were kept by the V&A and the remaining 50,000 handed on to the National Portrait Gallery.
24 Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, Leeds Russian Archive MS 1372/2 [Francis Lindley’s Memoir]. After early 1918, there was no British ambassador in Russia. The North Russian Mission arrived in Murmansk in June 1918, with the aim of taking charge of British interests in Russia. Dominick’s name is only mentioned once in the official report: when Lindley left Murmansk, Dominick remained there to ‘assist General Poole in dealing with any developments that might occur’. D. Cameron Watt and D. C. B. Lieven, eds, ‘Report on the Work of the British Mission to North Russia from June 1918 to 31st March 1919’, in British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, Part 2, From the First to the Second World War. Series A, The Soviet Union, 1917–39, vol. 1 (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), p. 158.
25 London, British Library, Add. MS 60699, ff. 56–73 comprise Dominick’s letters to Strachey.
26 Tamara Karsavina, Theatre Street: The Reminiscences of Tamara Karsavina (London: Dance Books, 1981), pp. 331–32.
27 Cambridge, Cambridge University Library, Add. MS 6762-6802 [Diaries of Stella Benson]. There are some brief but vivid glimpses of Benson in Winifred Holtby, Letters to a Friend (London: Collins, 1937), pp. 291–92, 345, 366–67, 454.
28 Leonard Woolf, ‘Letter to Virginia Woolf, 24 April 1923,’ in Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. by Frederic Spotts (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), p. 227.