7. War Again (1936–1945)
© Lucy Pollard, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0215.07
1936 was a turning point in Margery’s life. For about four years, she had been looking for a place in Suffolk, but nothing had been quite right. In the year that saw her divorce, her mother’s death and the consequent sale of Gower House, she wanted more than ever to leave London and return to her beloved county. A farmhouse (which she had had her eye on since 1932) in the tiny village of Iken, on the river Alde just below Snape — the site of the maltings built by her grandfather Newson Garrett — was at last available to rent from a local landowner, Bernard Greenwell. It was exactly what she wanted. She would never own it, but she was to live there for twenty years, and it became the place where her great gift for friendship and hospitality flowered. Douglas was to describe it in his diary as ‘a menagerie of friends & foreigners’ — an apt description if you ignore the slightly xenophobic tone. She welcomed people of all ages, nationalities and walks of life. Friends came back again and again. Sometimes they came and stayed; those who came as strangers often left as friends. Margery offered sanctuary to a large range of people in all sorts of circumstances, and if she could be autocratic, she was also immensely generous. Stephen’s friend, Anthony Gillingham, borrowing the house once with his family in the 1950s when Margery herself was away, described her in the visitors’ book as ‘a generous and loving despot’. Yet at the same time she was capable of giving her guests, especially young people, enormous freedom.
Margery did not sell the house in St Peter’s Square which continued to be let or lent to friends (often refugees from Germany or Austria). One of these was a young Berliner, Leni Nörpel, daughter of a trade union official, who came to study dressmaking in London, and remained a close friend even though she returned to Germany; later, she became a much-loved and wonderfully glamorous visitor for Margery’s grandchildren. In about 1930, Margery had taken Charles and Ronald on holiday to the Salzkammergut, where they had stayed in a baronial pile owned by Willy and Myra Gutmann. Here, they met Myra’s sister Bettina Bauer, a children’s book author and illustrator, who married the sculptor Georg Ehrlich that year. They also met the violinist Fritz Rothschild (no relation of the banking family) and his wife Tilde, for whose quartet Margery acted as London agent for a period. The Ehrlichs and the Rothschilds1 were Jewish and, after the Anschluss, Margery was able to offer them sanctuary while they established themselves in Britain. The friendship between Tilde and Margery lasted until Margery’s death.
Another person to whom she offered help was Anya Zisserman, born in Harbin in China in 1923 to an Austrian Jewish mother and a German father who had been a landowner in Russia. Her parents had escaped to China at the time of the Russian Revolution, but in 1936, Anya and her mother returned to Vienna. In the following year, Margery, a friend of a friend, escorted the teenage Anya from Vienna by train to Britain to spend a few weeks learning English. It was quite a journey, as the beautiful teenager attracted plenty of attention, including a proposal of marriage from an Egyptian fellow-passenger. Anya spent time with Cecil and Stephen, with whom she got on particularly well, both in St Peter’s Square and at Iken. In 1938, after the Anschluss, Margery sponsored Anya so that she could come to England permanently, later welcoming her mother as well. Anya’s first impressions of Margery were that she was an extraordinary mixture of upper class, Cambridge-educated Fabian who was ‘frightfully wah wah wah’ and yet ‘talked all the time about equality and labour’: ‘she was absolutely weird, I had never seen anything like it […] She had had a very chequered sexual career […] and she had lots of what she called “luvaahs”!’2 New to English society, Anya could not at first fathom its oddities: when she went to the cinema with Stephen and some of his Eton friends, the audience stood up to leave at the end, but when God Save the King was played, to her amazement all the boys promptly sat down again and started laughing. Anya’s mother and Margery did not get on well, but Anya herself became a friend for life of Margery and her children.3
Now settled at Iken, Margery and her family and friends took to Suffolk life with gusto. On one occasion, when Anthony and Stephen sailed down the river Alde in a Whitewing,4 they went aground on a shingle bank as they left the river mouth. Stephen told Anthony to jump out to refloat the boat, which happened so quickly that Anthony only just managed to grab on to the stern while he was towed into deeper water. Luckily, Margery had insisted he take a change of clothes. They anchored in the mouth of the river Stour and slept under the stars; as they sailed back up the Alde the following day, the wind dropped, and they arrived home in the small hours. Anthony expected Margery to be frantic with worry and full of recriminations, but she simply welcomed them with hot soup and an enquiry as to whether they had enjoyed themselves. Perhaps Stephen’s easy nature, in contrast to Charles’s more anxious one, helped to make such freedom possible.
Margery’s son Ronald described Iken Hall5 as ‘a slightly self-important 1850ish 3 storey block, built onto the west side of a much earlier, lower house. It was comfortable, if hard to keep warm when cold east winds blew’.6 It was large — seven bedrooms, a huge double reception room and much else. There were two staircases as well as a box room, cellar, attics and passages, making a three-dimensional jigsaw of a place that later gave great delight to the grandchildren. Water was pumped from a well, and until 1950, there was no mains electricity: the house was lit by oil lamps. The location was stunning,7 with common land covered in bracken sloping gently down north of the house to what is known as Iken Cliff (although it can hardly be said to deserve the name, being less than ten metres high at its highest point). A row of ancient oaks grew along the cliff top. The beach — sandy at high tide, when it was lovely for swimming, and muddy at low tide — was at that time almost private, except to those arriving by boat. There was a seventy-five-foot long wooden jetty extending from the beach into the river.
The Alde estuary, which is tidal from its mouth to Snape (the highest navigable point), widens out at Iken and then narrows again where a spur juts out into it. The medieval church of St Botolph stands as a landmark on this spur, with its Victorian old rectory beside it. Part of the wider area of the river, known as ‘the lagoon’, was a field that had been permanently flooded — the boundary walls still visible at low tide.
Iken Hall had an extensive garden with lovely mature trees (mainly beech and pine) and a range of outbuildings, including a large boat shed where Stephen could indulge his pleasure in building and repairing dinghies. Margery took to gardening with enthusiasm, following in Clara’s footsteps and with the help of Ronald’s horticultural expertise. They planted hundreds of daffodils round the lawn on the south side of the house, which multiplied over the years to make a wonderful display in spring. They also created a fruit cage on the river side of the house, and in 1938 or 1939, with a view to self-sufficiency, broke up an area of waste ground — sheltered on three sides by outbuildings, farm buildings and a high wall — to make a vegetable garden. The only thing that disturbed the peace, from the early 1950s, was the roar of United States Air Force jet-engined aircraft, based at Bentwaters airfield nearby, practising low flying over the river.
For many years from about 1948, those who arrived at Margery’s front door were greeted by a painted ship’s figurehead, made of wood, whom Margery named Annabel Slyboots Lee. The Slyboots, a sailing vessel of about 100 tons, had been washed ashore in Slaughden, at the southern end of the town of Aldeburgh, in about 1903. She had run aground on the Shipwash sands, and after her crew had been taken off, a gale drove the wreck on to the beach, where she broke up and was pillaged. Some remains were sold off at auction, including her figurehead, which was bought by a cousin by marriage of Margery’s. At an auction after this cousin’s death, Margery bought Annabel Slyboots Lee, had her repainted in bright colours (she had been painted grey to imitate stone) and set her up on the Iken Hall doorstep.8
In the spring of 1937, Margery was struck down with scarlet fever and had to go into Ipswich isolation hospital. Her live-in domestic help at the time was a woman with a young daughter. Ronald, who was staying in the house, remembered the difficulty of being left alone to get the child to bed, but history does not relate why this task fell to him. Perhaps the mother was also ill. However, this was only a blip: leaving London did not mean that Margery lessened her range of activities in any way. She remained active on the committee of the North Kensington clinic, writing articles and giving speeches.9 By early 1939, her book Working-Class Wives (with a statistical element contributed by Cecil), which amply demonstrates how broad her concern was for the health and well-being of young families in poverty, was ready for publication. She was always prepared to stand up for the importance of attending to the needs of deprived families, even when many people were putting the emphasis elsewhere. When the war came, with her pacifist tendencies still strong, she was determined that the work of the clinic did not deserve to suffer. In an article in the Eugenics Review10 in 1940, she wrote:
I can imagine no more evil a confusion of thought than to see in the problematical victim of an air raid a patient more worth treating than the present victim of tuberculosis or an underfed pregnant woman. One of the most dangerous and insidious effects of war is that the effort needed for its immediate prosecution is allowed to destroy what is most worth saving.11
In the late 1930s, and through World War II, there was concern about the falling population, leading to a Royal Commission on Population appointed in 1944, which carried out a sample family ‘census’ in January 1946. Birth control campaigners worried that this would have a negative impact on the clinic’s work, but Margery had always taken a broad view of what its remit should be, emphasising that it should help women to have wanted children as well as allowing them not to have unwanted ones. In a letter of 12 December 1938 to the Kensington Medical Officer of Health, she had written that she was ‘an unrepentant believer in voluntary parenthood’. The best thing a married couple could do was to bring up ‘as large a family as their health and resources allow’.
Much more controversial was the question of contraceptive advice to unmarried women. Margery, along with some of her colleagues (medical and non-medical), took a liberal view on this but had to tread carefully at a time when sexual activity outside marriage was widely frowned upon. In today’s more liberal atmosphere, at least in the UK, it is hard to remember that contraception itself was something of a taboo subject, let alone advice to the unmarried. Even in 1964, Elizabeth Draper12 was writing in The Times about the embarrassment and uncertainty still surrounding the subject. Pointing out that ignorance was widespread, and that those who sought advice often did so furtively, she urged the need for change in the medical profession, the churches, schools and universities. But only in 1967 did the Family Planning Association allow its clinics to give advice to the unmarried, and only in 1970 was the policy rolled out nationally. In the 1920s and 1930s, the situation was much worse. In 1938, Dr Joan Malleson13—who was in charge of the treatment of sexual difficulties at North Kensington for many years — referred a 14-year-old, pregnant after being raped by five off-duty British soldiers, to gynaecologist Aleck Bourne. He performed an abortion and then informed the police what he had done, in order to get clarification of the law: his subsequent trial and acquittal set an important precedent for such cases.
The innovative medical officer of health in Kensington, Dr James Fenton, had close ties with the clinic and may have been privately more sympathetic to Margery’s view than he was able to be in public. When invited to become a member of the clinic’s committee in 1936, he tentatively refused, stating in a letter to Margery that he thought it ‘unwise’ for someone in his position ‘to be actively associated with the [birth control] movement to the extent of being a member of your council’.14 Fenton felt that neither he nor the clinic could afford to antagonise members of the public, when the Council made a grant to the clinic ‘derived from contributions to the rates made by people with all shades of opinion’.15 In 1933, a disagreement had apparently arisen over the clinic’s Prospectus. The Prospectus itself does not survive, but Margery, as chair of the committee, wrote to Fenton:
I am asked to tell you […] that we fully understand your point with regard to the paragraph about unmarried women in our Prospectus. The committee wishes to point out that this paragraph is meant to apply only to teaching young women the principles of the care of their health, particularly with a view to their future task of bearing healthy children. I venture to think that if the prospectus is carefully read and if the context and wording of this specific paragraph are taken into account, it would not be possible for anyone to think of it as applying to Birth Control.16
In 1938, the question of advice to the unmarried came up again. On 25 November, Fenton wrote a letter to Margery that was intended to be a record of a conversation that they had had earlier in the day:
I asked whether you were giving any birth control advice to single women. You said it was against your usual practice but that it did happen occasionally when young women were on the verge of marriage and as a rule their mothers came with them. You were pretty clear in your own mind that these were the only cases but you undertook to look into it.
I asked if you would be good enough to consider whether you would give me an undertaking that you would discontinue entirely the practice of giving birth control advice to single women or whether you felt compelled to continue it. You offered to look into the cases carefully and let me have a report in due course.17
Two or three weeks later, Margery reported back: all the unmarried women who had been seen in the clinic had subsequently married. She also mentioned that no woman with an income of more than £5 per week was accepted as a patient — such women were referred to private doctors: income may seem to have nothing to do with morality, but there is an implication that perhaps better-off unmarried women might be more inclined to try to get access to contraception. The unmarried women who were accepted as patients, Margery continued, are ‘the type of young woman who has made up her mind that she does not want to have a child in the first year or two of marriage’, but official policy was to dissuade them from this. For herself, she wrote ‘I […] firmly believe that the power of deciding the number and the times of [children’s] birth is a direct and powerful stimulus to parenthood’.18 The words she used to Fenton were carefully chosen to reassure him of the clinic’s compliance: they do not necessarily express the whole truth of her own views.
Fenton’s uneasiness about who was treated by the clinic continued. Reporting in 1939 on a meeting between his staff and the clinic staff, he was anxious to make sure that the clinic’s patients were the ‘lowest strata of North Kensington women, that is the very debilitated ones with large families’ rather than the ‘better type of working class young women’. He remained concerned about the possible reputational damage of advice being given to the unmarried, although the outbreak of war was to change his perspective to some extent. In 1940, when there was some unease about the falling birth rate, he was writing that he understood that in wartime the country needed more births.19 To her credit, Margery, who tended to be outspoken and was not over-endowed with tact, managed mostly to keep her temper, though sometimes her irritation shows. Around this time, when there was an influx of Czech refugees asking for advice, Margery wrote to the superintendent of the clinic, Stella Wylson: ‘I am sure that even our most squeamish subscribers and Borough Councils do not want to flood the country with illegitimate English-born children who will be a burden on their rates!’20 The sarcasm was surely intended, but one cannot avoid the feeling that there is an element of xenophobia in Margery too.
In April 1940, she told Fenton that the clinic had decided to give advice to single women who were about to be married ‘as we believe that a young married couple may have excellent reasons for wishing to postpone for a year or two the birth of their first child’. To be eligible, they had to have an income of less than £3 per week. She also pointed out the obvious — that they could not prove that a woman was about to be married, nor could they prove that someone was already married, except by asking them to show a marriage certificate which was not North Kensington practice (although it was the case in some clinics). She recognised that young women with husbands serving in the forces might well wish to take up work outside the home, and she raised the spectre of abortion:
We all agree with you that the country was never in greater need of more babies […] you are aware that I, for one, believe in large families[, but a woman without contraceptive knowledge] is often driven to a desperate and terrible remedy which may permanently impair her efficiency as a mother.21
In the pre-war period, she was also offering a safe haven to friends and refugees at Iken as well as in London: on 21 August 1937, Ronald wrote to his aunt Hilda ‘Our international colony is flourishing. We have scored so far 2 Austrians, a White Russian and 3 Germans’. From July to December of that year, Roger Gibb’s wife, Lorna, and their small daughter, Rachel, were also living with Margery while Roger was away. The 1939 Register records a couple called Josef and Emma Crusser living at Iken; he is described as ‘Refugee seeking work (sheet metal worker)’ and she as ‘house worker’.
In the autumn of 1939, just as war was declared, both the Spring Rice children went up to Cambridge to study maths — Stephen to King’s College and Cecil to Girton. Ronald, who tended towards pacifism, was in the event able to stay in civilian jobs throughout the war (since agriculture was a reserved occupation) but, at this time, he was struggling to find work. He had become involved with a pharmacist called Mary Jacoby, a relationship which caused both Margery and his Jones aunts serious concerns: they did not think Ronald was happy, and Margery and Mary clearly disliked each other from the start. Gil22 tried to be tactful, writing to Margery that there was nothing to be done ‘except to avoid making it more acute by arousing Ronald’s opposition & chivalry as her protector against a wicked world of relations’,23 but such tact did not come naturally to Margery, and although she seems to have tried, she was only intermittently successful. On 6 April 1938, after a visit to Iken, Mary had written:
I should have written to you before, but the attitude you took towards me — of which, I think, you were quite well aware — makes it extraordinarily difficult to know what to say to you.
On 26 September 1939, Hilda wrote to Margery, thanking her for having her to stay (and promising to send strawberry runners — they shared their love of gardening):
I enjoyed every minute of it except the deplorable Mary who I have awful quakes about. I much admired the way you were dealing with the situation & I hope your tact & forbearance will be rewarded by her failing to hook Ronald — it would be a disaster.
Ronald had been looking for a way out, since he had fallen in love with someone else,24 but Mary was pregnant and had put pressure on him to marry her (in Margery’s view she had deliberately allowed herself to become pregnant for that purpose, but there is no evidence that this was the case). The marriage took place in Sutton Coldfield in October, with Margery and Mary’s father Henry as witnesses. In November, Ronald’s aunt Petica saw them both in Cambridge:
I feel utterly miserable about it as I think that poor Ronald is terribly unhappy & I cannot see that there is any chance of his life with Mary J being anything but a failure […] she has an injured tragedy queen attitude I think towards him & he is clearly exasperated by anything she says & does […] Naturally M. J. was showing off for my benefit though there was one moment when I felt her to be utterly genuine when she admired my foxfur in a longing way which made me feel she had always been starved of all the things she wanted & that really clothes & a good time were what she was pining for poor girl!.25
It may well have been a totally unsuitable match, but one can only feel sorry for this poor young woman with such a weight of opposition against her.
The crisis came in November 1939, as tragic as it was unexpected. Margery wrote to Douglas on the eleventh asking him, in effect, if she could buy Mary off. Margery’s anger and distress jump off the page:
I would also ask you to remember that none of my sons has had the benefit of the shadow of a father. My devotion to them and theirs to me, I am convinced of. But till someone has tried to do the work of both father and mother to a family of four children, they have not the ghost of an idea of the difficulties and dangers.
Douglas, as always, tried to calm her down, and proposed that once Mary had paid a planned visit to Iken he should talk to Ronald and draw up a deed of separation. He stressed that Margery must not, on any account, offer Mary money. Mary came to Iken on 17 November for a few days as arranged; on 22 November, she stayed in bed until late afternoon before she, Margery and Lorna went to the cinema in the nearby town of Leiston. When they arrived home, around ten o’clock in the evening, Margery and Mary went for a walk down by the river — an odd thing to do on a November night — but according to Margery’s written account, Mary had been sleeping badly and Margery thought a stroll in the fresh air would help. It was a fine, dry, moonlit night. At some point, Margery went to check whether her dinghies were securely tied up, suggesting Mary sit on the jetty to wait for her. Reading between the lines, one wonders whether they had had a row and needed to cool off. There is some confusion about the timing of what happened next: Margery registered a splash but ‘did not associate it with a person falling in the water’.26 Hearing a voice, she called Mary but became alarmed when there was no reply. She walked out to the end of the jetty to shine a torch into the water, but could see nothing, so she climbed down and saw something floating down the river. High tide that night was at around 10 pm, so the tide would have been on the turn, which perhaps explains why such an object had not already been carried away out of sight. Margery was a strong swimmer: she jumped into the river, caught what turned out to be Mary, got her head out of the water and dragged her, at first struggling and then limp, on to the beach twenty to thirty yards downstream of the jetty.
She tried artificial respiration, of which she had no experience, calling out all the while in the unlikely hope that somebody would hear. Eventually, she returned to the house, where Lorna rang for the doctor, Dr Robin Acheson, who arrived at about 11.15 and confirmed that Mary was dead. In his witness statement to the coroner, Acheson explained that he had seen Mary two days earlier and found she was very anaemic, which could have made her dizzy and caused her to lose her balance when she was standing on the jetty. By the time he arrived, the water at the far end of the jetty was nearly five feet deep (it would have been six at the height of the tide). The jetty, which was licensed by the Board of Trade, was in good condition, though according to the police constable who arrived after Acheson ‘the planking whips considerably’. Mary had been wearing shoes with medium heels, and there were no signs of violence on the body. The constable took statements: according to Margery’s, Mary was anxious about Ronald’s lack of a job, but was otherwise cheerful. She had no financial worries, was looking forward to the baby, and had not threatened suicide; Lorna’s statement described Margery and Mary as being on good terms. The constable returned to Iken beach the following day to inspect the jetty by daylight and found a piece of recently broken wood hanging by a nail on the end. The coroner’s verdict at the inquest held on 24 November was accidental death from shock and drowning.27
In addition to the tragedy of this event, it is an uncomfortable story. The statements are certainly economical with the truth and leave a number of unanswered questions; although it is possible that relations between Mary and Margery had improved over the five days that Mary had been at Iken, was her death simply an awful accident? Was it suicide? Or was Mary trying to give Margery a fright? As there were no witnesses, we will never know. At that time, the coroner would have been unwilling to return a verdict of suicide if he could avoid it, since it was still a crime in UK law. One or two of Margery’s friends subsequently joked that maybe Margery had pushed Mary — this demonstrates that her friends viewed her as someone unafraid to act, and unafraid of what people thought of her, but it seems highly unlikely that she would actually have done such a thing. If they really thought it might have been the case, they probably would not have joked about it. Perhaps the most uncomfortable element is that, of course, for Ronald, it was undoubtedly a release from an unhappy marriage. However it is looked at, it must have been a traumatic experience for all of those involved. On 25 November, the day after the inquest, Petica, whose house in Bateman Street in Cambridge was like a second home to Stephen and Cecil, wrote to Cecil at Girton:
Margie rang up at lunchtime as she wanted you & Stephen to know that everything was over & that the Jacobys were there & behaving admirably. She said she was terribly tired but quite all right.
Lorna’s entry in the Iken visitors’ book a couple of weeks later — ‘Five unforgettable months’ — is an understatement!
***
Both Stephen and Cecil were restless and unhappy in the autumn of 1939. In Stephen’s case, it was because he felt unable to pursue his education when the country was at war, knowing that he had nautical skills that could be of use, not to mention his natural sense of adventure. Before he had been at university for more than a few weeks, he had joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and, by the beginning of December, had accepted a convoy job. He soon decided to go into submarines (joking to family and friends that that way he would avoid the seasickness from which he suffered severely); promoted rapidly, he was already training at the navy’s submarine school in the autumn of 1940 when he and Cecil attended Dominick’s funeral. He served for a few months on the submarine Ursula, operating out of Malta and Gibraltar, and then on P615 on exercises in Scotland. From May 1942, he was second in command of P48, a newly-built submarine, first in trials in Scotland where one of his girlfriends recalled a party on the submarine when it was in Holy Loch, and then with the tenth flotilla, based in Malta. Stephen’s zest for life made him many friends and the camaraderie of navy life suited him. He enjoyed submarines because there was no room for shirkers — everyone had to pull their weight. At the same time, not surprisingly when he was so young himself, he struggled with the man-management aspect of his job and he did not think highly of P48’s captain, though he did not mention this to his immediate family.
At the same time as Stephen was going through the process of joining up, Cecil applied from Cambridge to the Women’s Royal Naval Service. Petica, who did not agree with this decision, and who had not had the benefit of a university education herself, wrote to her with admirable restraint:
I absolutely understand your feelings about not coming back [to Cambridge] to go on, all though [sic] I do actually feel that people should if possible finish their education but it must be a matter for each to decide & if ever there was a person I should trust to know what it was best for herself I think it would be you.28
Cecil thought that she had been offered a job in the Women’s Royal Naval Service but, for reasons that are unclear, this did not materialise; she later told her children that the authorities had taken the same view as Petica, sending her back to Cambridge to finish her education.
As for Margery, early in the war she became involved, along with any members of the family or friends who happened to be around,29 in cleaning up and equipping some empty cottages in the village to house women and children evacuated from London because of the prospect of air raids. This scheme did not last long, not only because the expected raids did not happen, but also because the Londoners tended to loathe the isolation and quiet of Iken and could not wait to get back to the city. In August 1940, Margery lost her old friend Eileen Power, who died suddenly aged only fifty-one. In February 1941, an even more awful blow fell, landing particularly heavily on Stephen and Cecil — Petica was killed on fire-watching duties when a bomb exploded in Cambridge. She was in her fifties and left behind her husband, Donald Robertson, and two sons. She had been a pacifist until the outbreak of war in 1939, when she felt there was no alternative but to fight Fascism, so had become an Air Raid Warden. Another warden observed what happened from further down the street: Petica had seen a light from a badly fixed blackout, and was hurrying to deal with it, probably all the faster because she could hear a plane. The aircraft may have been over the Midlands but the pilot had evidently been unable to launch his bombs there so, having seen the same light that Petica had seen, decided to launch them over Cambridge to make it easier to get his damaged plane back across the North Sea. Petica went to deal with the bomb that fell near her, but it exploded in her face, killing her instantly. She had been close to both Stephen and Cecil: ‘I dote on them both’, she had written to Margery during their first term in Cambridge. On the morning after her death, Cecil found a pencilled note in her pigeon hole at Girton that read ‘Prof. Robertson rang up to say that Mrs Robertson was killed by a bomb last night instantaneous’. It seems a particularly brutal way of breaking bad news.
After the petering out of her first wartime project, Margery undertook a much bigger and more successful one: under the auspices of the Waifs and Strays Society (later the Church of England Children’s Society), she set up a residential nursery for a dozen or so under-fives who were evacuated from London during the Blitz. The reason she gave for doing this is that it justified staying on in such a big house, and that it enabled her to avoid ‘maddening little village activities’ and gossip (she always liked a broad canvas). She obtained permission for the nursery from the Ministry of Health30 in the early summer of 1941, but permission was withdrawn after the ministry consulted with the regional military authorities. However, Margery was not to be daunted. According to a report produced by the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS), probably for circulation to WVS branches (which has all the signs of being written by Margery herself, although she speaks of herself in the third person):
Mrs Spring Rice however returned to the attack, and as a result of various interviews and explanations of the peculiar immunity of that particular tract of country[,] cut off as it is from the sea and from all military objectives[,] she finally got her way in the matter.31
She achieved something of a triumph when, in July 1942, most of the village (together with the neighbouring village of Sudbourne) was evacuated to create a battle training area32 to be used for tank training in preparation for the Normandy landings, and since Iken Hall was right on the edge of the designated area, she managed to persuade the authorities to allow her and her nursery to remain.33 On 12 October 1942, she wrote to Charles with characteristic chutzpah that she was ‘getting the army under control’.
In all, about one hundred and twenty such nurseries were established over the course of the war, although the greatest number functioning at any one time was ninety-eight. Some house-owners simply allowed their properties to be used, taking no part in the running of the nurseries; others actively helped to a greater or lesser extent.34
The first Iken children, four pairs of siblings chosen by the society, arrived in October 1941, and over the next two and a half years, a total of fourteen children (mostly under six) spent time at Iken. Margery did the catering and organising herself, with the help of a succession of staff mostly chosen and employed by the Waifs and Strays Society. She was much helped by a young woman called Heather Masterman,35 who came as a probationer nurse from the beginning of 1941 until August 1942, and again during the summer vacation in 1943, when she was training at Homerton College, Cambridge. Margery was nothing if not versatile: when she lost her nursery teacher, she was quite prepared to take that role on herself if it was easier to find a cook than a teacher. She also raised funds to support several of the children who were too old to be eligible under the official scheme. The WVS report mentioned above is designed to publicise the needs of the nursery, in terms of both staff and equipment; it was not always easy to find staff who could work happily with Margery and in such an isolated place:
This is a reserved occupation and should make the strongest appeal to young women who want to combine war work of the greatest importance with a training which will be invaluable to them in later life.
There was a shortage of clothes and toys for the children: ‘Magnificent parcels’ were received from the Waifs and Strays, from the Women’s Voluntary Service and from a working party in the local town of Southwold but there was still a great need for such items as warm pants for the boys, and indoor and outdoor games. Margery had received a consignment of chamber pots (presumably made of enamelled tin) but found them too small so she had the handles sawn off and the bowls converted into ‘little washing basins, which have been set into specially constructed tables’. If they were small for chamber pots, they must have been tiny wash basins! Voluntary school took place in the mornings. The children slept in two large bedrooms, with a member of staff always on duty through the night. Visitors were welcome, but were asked to give prior notice, ‘so that a cake may be specially baked’. At Christmas that year, seven parents or relatives of nursery children turned up to visit, five of them to stay in the house, with the result that Margery found herself cooking for twenty-four people.
It must be remembered that the nursery was being run in a house where, of course, there was not only no fridge and no washing machine,36 but all heating was by open fires, cooking was on a solid fuel stove, water was pumped from a well, and there was no electricity so lighting was by oil lamps. The amount of work involved was enormous— the oil lamps alone required frequent cleaning, refilling and wick trimming and replacing. Some of the vegetables were harvested from the garden or the surrounding countryside: one person who was a nursery child remembers nettle soup.
A couple of months after the arrival of the first group of children in the nursery, on 29 December 1941, Margery wrote to Paula that in the period since her own children had been small ‘I had learned a great deal more about life, and knew far better than I did […] what young children need for their own security and stability’. It is undoubtedly true that she gave her nursery charges an immense amount of loving kindness as well as good food, fresh air and stimulation.
Margery was given a petrol allowance for journeys to Ipswich, Saxmundham and Aldeburgh, but in the summer of 1944 (by which time the nursery had closed), the authorities caught up with her for a breach of her conditions. She was away in Oxford when (in Cecil’s words) ‘Temporary Acting Unpaid Detective Inspector Short of the Chelmsford Police turned up’ at Iken, having been misinformed that Margery was driving over to see him. Cecil invited him to lunch, and he won the heart of her nine-month old daughter, going away ‘swearing that he would do all in his power to let you off lightly’.37 A report in the Essex Chronicle of 6 October 1944 explains all: Margery had been stopped by police at Margaretting, in Essex, on the way to London on 23 May with two women and a child (possibly the last nursery child) as passengers. Summoned before the magistrates, she told them that she had tried to get the three on to a train first at her local station of Wickham Market, and then at Ipswich, without success: ‘The stationmaster would not allow the carriage doors to be opened, because the people jammed inside the train would have fallen out’. She was in a dilemma, and decided to make the journey by car. ‘The Chairman said the bench realised the predicament the defendant was in, but there had been a breach of the regulations, and the fine would be £2.’
Many of the archives concerning residential war nurseries appear to have been lost. However, one remaining piece of documentary evidence is a letter dated 24 January 1943, from an official of the Ministry of Health to an unknown recipient, in response to a suggestion from Margery that other households should be actively recruited to run nurseries like hers. The writer is discouraging, on the grounds that it is difficult to find people ‘so accommodating as Mrs. Spring-Rice’:
For example, some want only girls of 18 months, others boys who can walk, others won’t have anything but orphans, others will only take the children of service men, and a number think how nice it would be to have four cot babies and break out into loud lamentations when they discover that a single nursery nurse cannot cope with the work!
All of this was very likely true but one can imagine Margery’s scornful reaction to such wringing of hands. In July 1941 she had written three articles for the Times Educational Supplement about the needs of young children which were highly critical of the government’s actions in this field. The articles showed that she was indeed more alert to the emotional needs of working-class children than she had been to those of her own. Douglas expressed his admiration for what she was doing in his diary in 1943:
M. is still carrying on with her Govt. War Nursery, with a dozen evacuee children under 5, and with the battle-practice zone only 20 yards from her front gate! R[onald]38 & I saw the children who were, mostly, attractive little souls, and obviously enormously improved by their residence at Iken, in body, soul and mind; it was tragic to think they are destined — mostly — to return to dirty (often verminous) ignorant homes.
Whether he had any evidence for the latter statement is unknown.
One child, who arrived at Iken aged six in the spring of 1942 and stayed for several months,39 has provided some vivid memories of nursery life (she also returned for holidays after the war). She recalls her fascination with the soldiers she chatted to over the fence when the battle area was established, how she watched the tanks roaring over the fields and the bullets that whizzed across the roofs of the farm buildings. As she remembers it, she spent most of her time running wild, climbing trees and mudlarking rather than having any lessons, although Margery did read aloud to the children a great deal. She also remembers the children dressing up as ‘red Indians’ for some kind of entertainment. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were frequent visitors — usually met with a roar of welcome from Margery; one highlight was when they were all taken out to a high tea of poached eggs on toast in a hotel in Aldeburgh by the two musicians.40 Another striking image is of a posse of ‘Bohemians’, including visitors like the eccentric and wild-haired Ursula Nettleship as well as Margery’s son Ronald, bathing naked in the freezing river.
This family may not have been typical of the nursery children and it is unclear how the connection with Margery was first made. The youngest of the three children was an ‘official’ evacuee, sponsored by the Waifs and Strays, but the two older ones were over five when they arrived and therefore not eligible. On 10 November 1942, Margery wrote to the Waifs and Strays Society ‘as I showed in my financial statement, I have raised a private fund for Harry, as well as for the other over fives’. The three were the youngest of eight siblings: their mother was descended from Scottish landed gentry, but had fallen on hard times. Her husband, a doctor, had died in early 1941 in the middle of the Blitz in London, but she managed with extraordinary resourcefulness to provide for her children. In her diary of the war years, she records her first impressions of Margery as ‘well born, untidy and tweedy […] I took an immediate liking to her’.41 In the spring of 1943 she came to spend the weekend at Iken:
Harry and Sandy so well it was lovely to see them. Having taken my most ancient clothes and no stockings at all I was dragged off to a cocktail party given by the officers of the district so had to go in a tweed skirt and bare legs […] I feel quite happy about Harry & Sandy being there, they could not be in better hands.
Two other children who joined the nursery for much of the time were Charles and Paula’s, Susan, born in 1936 and Maurice (known as Toby in his childhood) born in 1938. Charles was deeply involved in political activities, but struggled to get work because of his lack of qualifications, and did not always hold down jobs when he did get them. Cracks in the marriage began to show early on. Paula’s background is obscure; she had been brought up by a foster mother and may not have had much of a role model for parenting. Charles, of course, had lost his father when he was very young and also lacked examples of good parenting. Money worries did not help, nor the fact that Maurice had a series of health problems. Margery offered them a home at Iken, but her critical attitude was not easy to live with; they needed, but at the same time understandably resented, her help. Paula may have been afraid of her and Charles had, since childhood, found it difficult to move out of the shadow of her personality. For some months in 1939–1940, the family lived in a cottage owned by Gil and Hilda in Upper Basildon in Berkshire, the village where the two aunts also lived together. However, some kind of crisis occurred: in late March 1940,42 Charles wrote to Margery ‘We must park the children on you absolutely at once’, and by the summer of that year, Susan and Toby were largely living at Iken, where they stayed on and off until April 1942. Paula seems to have moved house frequently, sometimes with Charles and sometimes on her own, sometimes taking the children with her and sometimes leaving them at Iken for months on end without visiting. She missed the children while they were away from her, but thought it would be difficult to have them with her whilst she was employed in various jobs. Margery also found reasons not to send them back, writing to Charles that she would find it ‘devastating and irreparable’ to lose them.
Paula’s foster mother in Switzerland, Rita Banderet, in spite of describing Paula as having an ‘unbalanced, helpless character’, wondered why Margery did not employ her to help in the nursery. Although such an idea seems to have been suggested to Paula, she declined, saying with justification that it would be too hard to watch Margery making all the rules about the children. The situation was complicated by the fact that, by now, there was someone else in Paula’s life, as there would soon be in Charles’s. In the summer of 1940, having been called up, he was expecting to be sent to a malarial field unit, possibly in India, Egypt or the Sudan. Before he left (for Egypt via South Africa in the event, and subsequently Lebanon) in March 1941, he offered Paula a divorce which she rejected. She also rejected the suggestion that she and the children could go to the US to stay with relatives.
In the autumn of 1942, Malta, where Stephen was serving, was suffering constant air-raids and both the civilian and the military population were enduring food shortages. Stephen, however, found plenty of opportunities to enjoy himself, from dinghy sailing (he even acquired his own dinghy) to singing and playing the clarinet, which he had taught himself. He was one of a group of RNVR officers who were expecting to be sent on their ‘perisher’ course, which would lead to getting their own commands.43 To their mutual pleasure, his time in Malta overlapped with that of Anthony Gillingham, who was serving in the Fleet Air Arm, and also briefly with that of Christopher Ellis, who had joined the navy. For all three of them, their time on the island was hugely enhanced by the presence of the hospitable Price family, a retired naval officer with a Russian wife and a beautiful teenage daughter under whose spell they all successively fell.
Stephen and his family knew that the odds on a submariner’s survival were low: Anthony recorded Margery’s great and understandable distress at his choice of that branch of the navy; Stephen, aware of the strain on his family, wrote to Anthony’s wife Brenda of the need to insulate feelings from facts. When he was stationed in Barrow-on-Furness early in 1942, where submarines were built, waiting for P48 to be fitted out, he made friends with a young Anglican clergyman, Stephan Hopkinson. Stephan recorded in his memoirs:
Sometimes officers, waiting for their ships to be commissioned, stayed with us at the Vicarage. One of them was Stephen Spring-Rice. He was a Cambridge mathematician by background, now second in command of a ‘coastal class’ submarine. There had been ten subs with him, he told me, in Valetta Harbour; eight of them were already lost. He worked therefore on the principle that every patrol would be his last, and a safe return would be an unexpected bonus. ‘But it’s occurred to me’, he said, ‘that it would be sensible to marry some nice girl. It’s a pity that the marriage pension to a widow should be wasted’. ‘But she might actually love you’ I suggested. ‘I know’ he said, ‘ that’s the drawback to the idea.’ He didn’t marry — and he didn’t come back’.44
Submarine P48 was declared missing in early January 1943; in fact, it had been depth charged by Italian destroyers on Christmas day 1942 and probably lies somewhere off the coast of Tunisia. Margery continued for months to worry about what kind of death Stephen might have had to suffer: when she asked Dominick’s widow Peggy, a doctor, what it would have been like to have died of oxygen starvation, Peggy did her best to reassure her, and one can only hope that this was not just out of kindness. Condolence letters cannot give a rounded picture of a person’s character, since inevitably they concentrate on the good qualities, but those that Margery received after Stephen’s death make it clear that not only was he deeply loved by many people,45 but also that he had managed to pack a huge amount of activity into his twenty two years. And as Cecil wrote, ‘something is left’. She expressed the sense many people had that Stephen was something special: ‘I almost feel that if Stephen were one of my children I should hardly notice the others’.46
In the third week of January, Margery’s brothers Douglas and Ronald went over to Iken to see her. ‘M. was — of course — admirably brave;’ Douglas wrote in his diary:
for half an hour after we arrived she talked to us of things in general without giving a sign of her grief. After lunch we walked down to the river & along the wall to Iken Church, and the sight of the river, the boats’ moorings etc. were for a moment too much for her; as she said ‘every turn of the channel & ripple of the water reminded her of him’. He was a brilliant, attractive boy and would have made his mark in the world, though not (I think) without giving his family and friends some heartaches.
Cecil had fallen in love with Petica’s son Martin, ten years older than her, and married him in September 1942, soon after leaving Cambridge.47 Margery, although she got on extremely well with Martin later, was at first quite ambivalent about the engagement: she never found it easy to accept her children’s choice of partners. Cecil became pregnant just about the time of Stephen’s death: the coming grandchild was perhaps a small consolation to Margery, who mainly dealt with her grief by working harder than ever to look after her evacuees. But she was to find Christmas a hard time for many years after Stephen’s death. Since coming down from Cambridge, Cecil had been working at the Registrar General’s office, but her job could only be kept open for her if she agreed to take a maximum of three months’ maternity leave — which she was not prepared to do. Martin was in the War Office before being sent to Athens and Cairo for intelligence work, while Cecil went to Iken and so was able to provide another pair of hands to work in the nursery. The baby, a girl, was born in September. Although Margery had said — perhaps because of Stephen’s death — that she hoped it would be a boy, she doted on her new granddaughter.
In the last two years of the war, Charles and Paula’s marriage became increasingly fragile, neither of them able to commit either to staying in it or to leaving it. Charles was upset to be turned down for the Army Education Corps, though what he really wanted was a political career. After his demobilisation in 1945, he and Paula lived an on-again off-again marriage while he looked for work that would suit him and underwent some therapy. But in 1947, he fell in love with Daphne Lindner, whom he was to marry in 1951. In early 1952, Paula and the children sailed to Canada with her friend Bill Langford, in a move that turned out to be permanent.48 It was a great sadness to Margery to be more or less permanently separated from these two grandchildren.
After the nursery came to an end, Margery pondered various other schemes (she thought about adopting two of the nursery children, and considered running a home for the young children of service personnel), but none of these came to fruition. In fact, by the end of the war, she was physically and emotionally exhausted and wondered whether she could cope with another winter in the isolation of Iken. She was also worried about being able to stay in the house as her landlord tried to evict her at various times, or to persuade her to leave, in order to sell. She investigated the possibility of buying either the old school house or the old rectory at Iken (Benjamin Britten also considered the latter at some stage), possibly with some land that Ronald might farm. Eventually, however, Iken Hall and some of the surrounding farm land was sold to another local farmer, Mann, with Margery as a sitting tenant. As she recovered from the stresses of the war and her work in the nursery, her natural buoyancy returned. As her sister-in-law Frieda had written to her on 27 November 1939, after the drowning of Mary Jacoby:
Douglas always speaks of you when your troubles come as ‘My dear old war-horse of a sister’, and like a tried war-horse your wounds heal and you go forth to battle again to bring home once more some wounded warrior.
1 Always referred to by Margery as ‘the Rothschildren’. Fritz was not a very good violinist, but as a pioneer of authentic performance, he is unjustly neglected. The quartet was also innovatory in initiating the practice of making recordings with one part missing, so that amateur players could play along with them.
2 Anya Berger, unpublished memoir.
3 Anya’s family (she had four brothers) were separated for many years, with her father in China and her mother in Vienna, but the parents were eventually reunited in Britain. After Anya’s marriage to Stephen Bostock (which produced two children) broke up she lived for many years with the artist Peter de Francia, and subsequently with John Berger, with whom she had two more children. Anya was a gifted linguist and translator.
4 A class of 23’ sloops based on the river Alde/Ore.
5 ‘Hall’ is a title given to many substantial but not grand East Anglian houses.
6 Ronald Garrett Jones, Memoirs, 1995. The house Margery lived in no longer stands: it was burnt to the ground (possibly in the late 1950s or early 1960s, though there are differing accounts, but certainly after Margery had left).
7 One of the few disadvantages of its situation so close to the river was the prevalence of mosquitoes.
8 She was repainted in 1952 by Anya Zisserman’s then partner Peter de Francia. Margery eventually gave the figurehead to her GP Dr John Stevens and his wife: she is still cherished in that family, but has moved indoors.
9 In 1941, Margery’s daughter described hearing a lecture of hers to the National Union of Students on ‘“Sex education” not, as she endeavoured unsuccessfully to make the audience believe, to be confused with “sex”’. Cecil Spring Rice, letter to Stephen Spring Rice, 3 May 1941.
10 Many of those involved in the birth control movement were members of the British Eugenics Society between the wars. Eugenics was academically respectable, with doctors, scientists, writers and politicians among the members of the Society, and the subject did not have the bad connotations that it inevitably and justly acquired after its association with the Nazis; it was seen as being positive rather than negative. Even before World War II, however, there was a division between those who accepted the influence of environment on a person’s physical and mental state, and were therefore open to the potential benefits of welfare programmes, and those who did not. But, of course, the fundamental objection to the idea of eugenics is that it allows someone other than the potential parents to decide who is ‘fit’ to reproduce.
11 Margery Spring Rice, ‘The Health of Working Women’, p. 53.
12 Elizabeth Draper, ‘Birth Control in the Modern World’, The Times (26 February 1964). See also Draper, Birth Control in the Modern World.
13 Malleson and Helena Wright have been described as ‘[making] birth control both respectable and available’: Evans, Freedom to Choose, p. 145. In 1950, Malleson was appointed head of the contraceptive clinic at University College Hospital in London, the first such unit in a British teaching hospital. Her own marriage to the actor Miles Malleson had been unconventional.
14 Wellcome Collection, SA/FPA/NK87, James Fenton, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 8 April 1936.
15 Ibid., James Fenton, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 25 November 1938.
16 Ibid., James Fenton, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 8 May 1933.
17 Ibid., James Fenton, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 25 November 1938.
18 Ibid., Margery Spring Rice, letter to James Fenton, 12 December 1938.
19 Ibid., report of meeting between James Fenton’s staff and clinic staff; and James Fenton, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 6 March 1940.
20 Ibid., Margery Spring Rice, letter to Stella Wylson, 27 February [1940].
21 Ibid., Margery Spring Rice, letter to James Fenton, 26 April 1940.
22 The coolness between Margery and her Jones in-laws had reverted to its old friendliness.
23 Lilian Jones, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 4 December 1938.
24 In a twist that sounds more like a novel than real life, his new love was Mary Hope Rokeling, daughter of Dick Mitchison’s lover Tish.
25 Petica Robertson, letter to Margery Spring Rice, November 1939. Mary came from a professional background: her father was an electrical engineer.
26 Margery had been completely deaf in one ear since her youth and found it difficult to identify the direction of sounds.
27 The coroner’s report is in the Suffolk Record Office (EC1/2/17/121, A348/5/2/37).
28 Petica Robertson, letter to Cecil Spring Rice, 19 June 1940.
29 In the 1939 Register (29 September 1939), thirteen people are recorded as staying in the house, including several members of the Gibb family, three (probably) of Margery’s children, and three servants (there are three closed records, i.e. redacted names of people under a certain age, who could still be alive, so it is impossible to be exact).
30 The Ministry of Health delegated the running of the scheme to the Waifs and Strays Society, which selected the children, employed most of the staff, and oversaw the accounts. It was funded by the American Junior Red Cross, together with the WVS and the Ministry. Some funds also came from Canada.
31 Royal Voluntary Service Archive and Heritage Collection, Iken Hall War Nursery Report. Iken may have been comparatively safe, but Aldeburgh a few miles down the river was not: an air raid in December 1942 killed twelve and injured thirty. The Hospital in Aldeburgh High Street was badly hit, but according to Douglas’s diary some patients were moved to Gower House close by for safety. Even at Iken, in July 1940 Margery, Miss Best and the children (presumably Charles’s children Susan and Maurice), the only occupants at the time, were sleeping in the cellar to avoid having to move if there were alarms. In October 1944, a doodle-bug hit Snape, luckily without causing any casualties.
32 This was a triangular area of land the borders of which were the Tunstall to Iken road and the river Alde on the north, the river Alde on the east, and a line from just north of Orford back to the Tunstall/Iken/Snape crossroads on the south west. A guard post was set up at the crossroads, preventing access to Sudbourne and Orford. Although the battle training area has been written about, the continued existence of the nursery seems to have been wiped from the record.
33 Two or three other families remained in Iken throughout the war, in the cottages near the river, on the Snape side of Iken Hall. The story in Margery’s family was that when the battle area was established, she simply refused to follow orders to move: it seems unlikely that she could have done that — but when, in 2019, the author met an ex-resident of Iken village, her first reaction to the name ‘Margery Spring Rice’ was ‘Oh I remember her, she refused to move when the battle area was formed’.
34 Mildred de M. Rudolf, Everybody’s Children: The Story of the Church of England Children’s Society, 1921–48 (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), p. 152.
35 In the late 1920s, Margery had been in contact with Lucy Masterman, widow of the Liberal politician Charles Masterman, first to ask her whether she would be interested in being Parliamentary Secretary for the Women’s National Liberal Federation, and subsequently in connection with Masterman and her children renting the cottage in Bledlow Ridge. I have been unable to find out whether Heather was any relation, but it seems quite likely.
36 At this date, only a tiny proportion of households had refrigerators or washing machines.
37 Cecil Spring Rice, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 7 June 1944.
38 Margery’s brother.
39 Her two younger brothers followed her to Iken in June 1942 and stayed on until September 1943.
40 For Margery’s connection with Britten and Pears, and with Ursula Nettleship, see the next chapter.
41 Eglantine Grey, unpublished diary; Joane Whitmore, private communication.
42 Charles Garrett Jones, letter to Margery Spring Rice, undated.
43 See Edward Young, One of Our Submarines (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952).
44 Stephan Hopkinson, Encounters ([n.p.]: privately printed, [n.d.]).
45 Four children were named after him in the next few years, including Cecil’s eldest son, born in 1946.
46 Cecil Spring Rice, letters to Margery Spring Rice, undated and 14 January 1943.
47 Margery gave them 15 St Peter’s Square as a wedding present, though they did not live there until after the war.
48 The passenger list for the Empress of France, sailing 26 March 1952, wrongly records Paula’s date of birth as 1894 instead of 1913. Bill was probably a Canadian serviceman, but nothing else is known about him: the relationship did not last long.