Fresca -- a Life in the Making: A Biographer's Quest for a Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath [1 ed.] 9781782843573, 9781845198213

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Fresca A Life in the Making

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In memory of Fresca’s nieces and nephew, Sonya Allinson (–), Enid Allinson (–), Vanessa Allinson (–), Michael Allinson (–) and of my own father, John Michael Henry Franks (–).

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Fresca A Life in the Making A Biographer’s Quest for a Forgotten Bloomsbury Polymath

HELEN SOUTHWORTH

sussex A C A D E M I C P R E S S

Brighton • Portland • Toronto

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Copyright © Helen Southworth . The right of Helen Southworth to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act . ISBN 978-1-78284-357-3 (PDF)

First published in  by SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS PO Box  Eastbourne BN BP Distributed in North America by SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS ISBS Publisher Services  NE th Ave , Portland, OR , USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Southworth, Helen, author. Title: Fresca : a life in the making : a biographer’s quest for a forgotten Bloomsbury polymath / Helen Southworth. Description: Chicago : Sussex Academic Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN  | ISBN  (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Allinson, Francesca, –. | Women–England– Biography. | England–Intellectual life–th century. | Bloomsbury group. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary. Classification: LCC CT.A S  | DDC . [B] –dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/

Typeset and designed by Sussex Academic Press, Brighton & Eastbourne. Printed by TJ International, Padstow, Cornwall.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface and Acknowledgments

vii

List of Illustrations

xii

Prologue



Part One

A Childhood



Part Two

Coming of Age



Part Three

Judy Wogan



Part Four

Writer! Composer!



Part Five

Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War



Part Six

My Own Different Personal Life



Part Seven

No Remaining, No Place to Stay



Part Eight

Love Under The Shadow of Death



Coda



Notes



Index



v

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O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. O friendship, how piercing are your darts—there, there, again there. All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall keep to my dying day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waves, he went over me, his devastating presence—dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul. It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones. All semblances were rolled up. ‘You are not Byron; you are yourself.’ To be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange. (Passage marked by Enid Marx in her copy of Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves, Enid Marx Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum) And what [is she] thinking? All this life has somehow come together; there is a reason for it; a coherency in it, could one but seize it. The biographer answers the innumerable questions that we ask as we stand outside on the pavement looking in at the open window. Indeed there is nothing more interesting than to pick one’s way among these vast depositaries of facts, to make up the lives of men and women, to create their complex minds and households from the extraordinary abundance and litter and confusion of matter which lies strewn about. A thimble, a skull, a pair of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets are given us, and we have to create, to combine, to put these incongruous things together. There is, too, a quality in facts, an emotion which comes from knowing that men and women actually did and suffered these things, which only the greatest novelist could surpass. (Virginia Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book’) One must have chaos inside oneself to give birth to a dancing star. (Nietzsche quoted by Tippett from Michel Tournier’s The Wind Spirit, Those Twentieth Century Blues) If we have the courage and the freedom to write exactly what we think; if we escape a little from the common sitting room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other, but in relation to reality; and the sky too and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves; if we look past Milton’s bogey, for no human being should shut out the view; if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. (Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, my emphasis)

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A Tale of Research or Biography as Detection and Jigsaw ‘A thimble, a skull, a pair of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets’

I

N the ten-line foreword to her  Hogarth Press book, entitled A Childhood, Francesca Allinson describes her efforts to avoid ‘shut[ting]’ her protagonist, Charlotte, ‘too closely within the exact hours and places of her own experience’. This resistance to enclosure, to pinning down one’s subject, I found echoed in the lines marked by Fresca’s friend and the illustrator of A Childhood, designer Enid Marx, in her first edition of Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves () held at the Victoria and Albert Museum archives. The last sentence of the extract, used here as one of the book’s epigraphs, are the words of Bernard, the character most often linked to Woolf herself. They read: ‘O friendship . . . To be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange’. Although I have tried to find out as much information, in as much detail as possible, about Fresca, following Fresca’s and Marx’s lead, I have tried to maintain an openness to her story and to let myself consider how Fresca’s life and work intersected with that of her contemporaries. In her own prologue to A Childhood, Fresca warns that ‘if [Charlotte] strikes you as odd, have patience with her, for many of her contemporaries felt and acted very much as she did’. To borrow from Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, in many respects an author and a book seminal to this project and to Fresca’s life (Woolf ’s original lectures were presented at Cambridge University while Fresca was in her last year at Oxford University), rather than pin down Fresca I have tried to ‘let [the] line [of thought] dip into the stream’: ‘Thought—to call it by a prouder name than it deserved—had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until— you know the little tug—the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?’ Details of Fresca’s life came to me as items, as clues, ‘a thimble, a skull, a pair of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets’. Following Woolf ’s lead, I have ‘pick[ed] [my] way about among these vast depositaries of facts, [made] up the lives of men and women, [created] their complex minds and households from the extraordinary

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Preface and Acknowledgements abundance and litter and confusion of matter which lies strewn about’. I have structured Fresca’s story after the fashion of A. J. A. Symons’s  The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography, as a kind of detective story in terms of these items (books, photographs, wills, etc.) and where possible in terms of the order in which they presented themselves to me. In the absence of a single Fresca archive, I have built my own. My goal with this book has been to expose the biographical process, to show the project ‘in the making’, and, in this regard, I follow in the footsteps of and am indebted not only to the work of A. J. A. Symons, but A. S. Byatt, Janet Malcolm, Daniel Mendelsohn, Richard Holmes, Lisa Cohen, Hermione Lee, Alison Light, and Martha Hodes, among many others. This is a ‘biography-in-action’, to use Michael Holroyd’s helpful term for Richard Holmes’s work. To this end, I have included leads that did not pan out, that did not produce gold, as well as, of course, those that did, and details and anecdotes that pertain only peripherally to Fresca’s life story. Several readers of this manuscript advocated separate appendices for different characters, or several different books. Sybil Oldfield, for example, suggested a second book under the title I have adopted here for this preface: Biography as Detection and Jigsaw. While acknowledging and addressing as best I could readers’ concerns about losing the Fresca thread, I have opted to keep in many of the deviations, the rabbit holes, the spider’s webs, the roads not taken, and the dead ends. As Hermione Lee argues in the introduction to her collection of writings on biography, Virginia Woolf ’s Nose, quoting Henry James, biography, like death ‘smooths the folds’ of the person one loved. ‘The figure retained by the memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count; it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather than nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities.’ I want to show the folds of a life, ‘the swarm of possibilities’, and also the bumps one encounters on the quest to write the story of that life. In her recent Common People, Alison Light describes her own ‘reflection on the process [of researching the lives of her family]’ as a means to ‘let the texture breathe a little and to capture, if I could, something of the emotional see-saw which accompanies archive visits and historical discoveries’. My aim, further to Light’s, is to reveal how the frequently haphazard research process mirrors the emotional see-saw that is life, in the sense that breaks in the historical record are often reflections of breaks in the lives of an individual. Fresca: A Life in the Making captures the topsy-turvy quality of most of our lives, as well as showing how biography too can get turned upside down in the making, how a single remnant, story or image can throw everything into different relief. viii

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Preface and Acknowledgements This book incorporates traditional biographical research methods, such as on-site archival work, interviews, and standard library research. It also takes advantage of the many newer resources available via the Internet such as Wikipedia, Google Maps, Google Books and crowd-sourcing mechanisms. Beyond the fact that this is simply what the research landscape now looks like, some of these newer resources prove particularly useful for secondary or lesser known figures such as Fresca. Library catalogues, book sellers’ online inventories, and eBay are all wonderful sources of information, but it does mean that the research, like some of the images, is of varying quality and reliability, and that, as a result, there is occasionally a layered or secondhand quality to my findings.



Most compelling about Fresca’s story, and certainly the thing that drew me to her, is the extraordinary breadth of her experiences, her tenacity, her vitality, her engagement, and her conviction. On Fresca’s death Lady Margaret Hall principal Lynda Grier described Fresca in a letter to Margaret Lambert as ‘so full of life, the essence of it’. And she continued: ‘I think I always felt more alive when [Fresca] had paid me one of her all too infrequent visits. Last time she came it was to tell me about the wood, I suppose about . She was looking magnificent, and as usual I felt revived by the sight of her.’ I hope I have captured Fresca’s vitality in this book. Grier was not the only person whose life Fresca transformed. While Fresca’s story constitutes the backbone of this book, there are many, many different lives being lived here. Fresca’s life story is the story of several intersecting circles of intellectuals and of many diverse creative enterprises, some of whom and which have yet to be written about in any detail. This is a book about women and men who were ‘unconventional, multifariously creative, and on a quest for new ways of living and loving’, as Eleanor Breuning eloquently put it. It is about individuals whose refusal of categories often hampered their bid for celebrity or kept them in the background; these were people who worked together at a period, framed by two world wars, when collaboration and cooperation were perhaps even more necessary to creative production than they usually are. Just like Fresca, I have relied on and been shaped intellectually and emotionally by a vast number of people. While I take responsibility for all errors and inconsistencies in this book, I want to acknowledge that my work is indebted to many people’s hard work and expertise and it has been a pleasure to collaborate with so many different people on this project. If I have missed anyone here, they will find themselves in the book. I am indebted to Fresca’s family and friends, especially the late Sonya Allinson, but also the late Vanessa and Michael, and the next generation of ix

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Preface and Acknowledgements Allinsons, Tim, David, and Christine. Thanks also to Kit and Jean Martin who were the first to give me clues in my quest for Fresca and generously welcomed me into their home. Oliver Mahony, Archivist at Lady Margaret Hall, also provided invaluable information early in the process. Eleanor Breuning, Jill Lewis, Alan Powers, and Matthew Eve, as well as Verity Elston and her colleagues at Compton Verney provided help learning about Enid Marx and Margaret Lambert. Caitlin Adams, Charles Lillis, the Wogan-Brownes, and the late Beryl Mackay, daughter-in-law of Eleanor Elder, helped me build my picture of Judy Wogan and the Arts League of Service. In the field of music and Tippett studies, Alain Frogley, Thomas Schuttenhelm, Justin Vickers, Meirion Bowen, Nicolas Bell, David I. Clarke and the late John Amis gave invaluable advice. I’d also like to thank Danyel Gilgan who shared anything he could find related to Wilf Franks and Fresca and Virginia-Lee Webb and Christopher Weathersbee about Den Newton. My wonderful colleague and friend Mark Hussey read all of this and was immensely supportive. Beth Daugherty, Sibyl Oldfield and Elizabeth Raisanen also read big pieces and gave me lots of excellent feedback. Jude Cook provided invaluable advice on my proposal and Stephen Rogers has been hugely helpful throughout the project, even accompanying me on some of my first excursions. Oliver Soden, working on his own biography of Michael Tippett, read everything and was hugely generous with ideas and suggestions. Many other colleagues and friends helped in myriad ways: Claire Battershill, Nicola Wilson, Alice Staveley, Elizabeth Willson-Gordon, Mike Widner, Alina Oboza, Ida Thuv, Paul Peppis, Mark Whalan, Heidi Kaufman, Leah Pickup, Catherine Brindley, Ellen Mulligan, Michele Taylor, Richard Taylor, Theresa Koford, Richard York, Kristin Barker, Danielle Curran, Michele Gladieux, Christi Binstadt, Dan Schmitt, Susan Lowdermilk, Mira Geffner, Hilary Ross, Midna Ross, Chulita Southworth, Jackie Jones, Susie Harries, Alexandra Harris, Helen Smith, Trevor Bond, Stephen Barkway, Stuart Clarke, Catherine Hollis, Greg Thomas, Kelly Sultzbach, Rachel Bowlby, Christine Froula, Diane Gillespie, Emily Kopley, Melba Cuddy Keane and colleagues and students at the Honors College at the University of Oregon, especially Carol Giantonio, Henry Alley, Roxann Prazniak, Susanna Lim, Vera Keller, Joseph Fracchia, Tonya White, Rabea and Deborah Stueckeman and Monique Balbuena. Very special thanks to my lovely friend Emma Fenton and her family, Simon Hall, Leo and Charlie, and also to my mother, Susan Franks, my father, John Franks, who died sadly during the writing of this book, and my nephew Oliver Franks. Thanks to Elise Hansen for copyediting and immense gratitude to Tony Grahame for giving this book a chance. I am grateful to the Oregon Humanities x

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Preface and Acknowledgements Center and the Honors College at the University of Oregon for financial support. And finally un grand merci à Stanislas Meyerhoff, whose joy, optimism and extraordinarily open heart has given me the courage to finish this book. In the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: ‘on ne voit bien qu’avec le coeur.’

xi

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Prologue . . . .

From J. Howard Woolmer’s Checklist of the Hogarth Press. Young Michael Tippett. Dust jacket of A Childhood (Random House). Fresca at  (courtesy of Kit Martin; Allinson Estate).

   

Part One: A Childhood . Clara Barkow (courtesy of Kit Martin; Allinson Estate). . Adrian Allinson’s ‘Dorothy in the Yellow Coat’ (Allinson Estate). . Adrian Allinson’s ‘Scene from Le Jardin des Amoureux’ (V&A). . Adrian Allinson’s theatre poster (V&A). . Adrian Allinson’s costume design for a Flame. . Adrian Alinson at a Slade picnic in : Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth sit to Adrian’s right and Stanley Spencer to his immediate left. . John S. Currie’s Some Later Primitives and Madame Tisceron: left to right: Currie, Gertler, Nevinson, Wadsworth, Adrian and Madame Tisceron (). . Nina Hamnett by Roger Fry. . Jean Rhys. . Adrian Allinson’s portrait of Alan Odle (Harry Ransom Center). . Adrian Allinson’s portrait of Dorothy Richardson and Odle, undated (Beinecke). . Playbill for My Fair Lady starring Michael Allinson. . Adrian Allinson (Allinson Estate). . Adrian Allinson on the Penguin Classics Complete Saki cover (Penguin).

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    



       

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List of Illustrations . Anna Pulvermacher’s sketches (courtesy of Kit Martin; Allinson Estate). . Adrian Allinson’s ‘Allegories of the Arts’ (V&A). . Oil painting by Sonya Allinson (Allinson Estate). . Figurine by Molly Mitchell Smith. . Adrian Allinson’s ‘Café Royale’ (Allinson Estate). . Map of Spanish Place. . Façade of Allinson Spanish Place house (HS). . Heritage plaques at Spanish Place (HS). . Advertisement for A Book for Married Women, The Freewoman, . . Poster (Edinburgh University Special Collections). . From Allinson scrapbook. (courtesy of Kit Martin; Allinson Estate). . Enid Marx’s tray woodcut, A Childhood (Random House; Eleanor Breuning). . Winifred Stanhope (Edinburgh University Special Collections). . ‘Why Be Ill?’ poster (Edinburgh University Special Collections). . T.R. Allinson and Fresca (Allinson Estate).

              

Part Two: Coming of Age . Margaret Lambert’s Brown Book obituary for Fresca (courtesy of LMH). . Class photo  (courtesy of LMH). . Detail of Fresca (and possibly Barbara Frank) (courtesy of LMH). . Class photo  (courtesy of LMH). . Detail of Fresca (courtesy of LMH). . Class photo of  (courtesy of LMH). . Detail of Fresca (courtesy of LMH). . Photograph of Margaret Lambert (origin unknown) alongside LMH class photo detail. . Painting by Cycill Tomrley of Margaret Lambert (courtesy of Eleanor Breuning). . Hugh Allen, folk dancing . . Dorothy L. Sayers.

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          

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List of Illustrations . Ernest Walker (from the frontispiece of Margaret Deneke’s book). . Two photo strips of Fresca (Eleanor Breuning). . & . Photos of Bickerdike puppets (V&A). . Puppets on shelves at the V&A archives (V&A). . Fresca’s L’Amfiparnaso programme (courtesy of Eleanor Breuning). . Harro Siegel’s puppets. . Wilf Franks and Michael Tippett in Spain (courtesy of Caroline Ayerst).

      

Part Three: Judy Wogan . Eleanor Elder (Travelling Players). . Dust jacket for Elder’s Travelling Players designed by E. McKnight Kauffer. . Paul Nash’s ‘Wood on the Downs’,  (Tate Gallery). . Arts League of Service transport (from Travelling Players). . Judy Wogan (from Travelling Players). . Judy Wogan in ‘St Valentine’s Day’ (Madame Yevonde) (Caitlin Adams and V&A) . A young Judy Wogan (Caitlin Adams). . & . Martin’s Grove letter (courtesy of LMH). . Map of St Osyth (Crown copyright Ordnance survey). . The entrance to Martin’s Grove (Helen Southworth). . H.M. land registry map of Martin’s Grove (Ed Greig). . Old/Tan Cottage, St Osyth (Helen Southworth). .–. Arts League of Service post cards (Ivy Jacobs). . Grafton Theatre programme (Caitlin Adams). . Grafton Theatre programme (Caitlyn Adams). . John Amis (Helen Southworth). . Enid Marx’s seaside wood cut for Fresca’s A Childhood (courtesy of Eleanor Breuning). . Photograph of Jaywick. . Phillip Wilson Steer’s ‘The Beach at Walberswick’. . Judy Wogan.

                   

Part Four: Writer! Composer! . Fresca in the s (Eleanor Breuning, Sonya Allinson). xiv



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List of Illustrations . Alice Ritchie (Mon}ks House photograph albums, Houghton Library). . Marx’s London Underground textile design, s. . Cover of Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s Two Stories (Random House). . Older Enid Marx in her studio. . Younger Marx (Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives). . Times Literary Supplement advertisement for A Childhood. . Vegetarian News advertisement for A Childhood (Emily Kopley). . Marx’s copy of Mrs Daloway (sic) bound in paper of her own design (V&A). . Marx’s paper used for her copy of A Room of One’s Own (V&A). . Marx’s paper for The Common Reader (V&A). . Marx’s cover design for Woolf ’s Collected Essays (–) (Random House). . Marx’s woodcut for ‘Sunday’ chapter of Fresca’s A Childhood (Random House; Eleanor Breuning). . Intimate Opera. . Fresca sitting on car bonnet, ca. s (Sonya Allinson).

             

Part Five: Pacifism in the Face of the Second World War . . ., ., . ., . ., . . . .

Dick Sheppard. Bernard Archard ( Jim Belchamber). Moses Farm in the s (Robert Marriage). Photographs of Fresca’s East Grinstead addresses (courtesy of M.J. Leppard). Photographs of Kingsmead. Den Newton (Tate Gallery). Den Newton and Mary Lee Settle (from Settle’s book). Den with Settle and Chris (from Settle’s book).

       

Part Six: My Own Different Personal Life . Page from Fresca’s diary (British Library). . Fresca and her mother, Anna (Sonya Allinson). . Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein. xv

  

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List of Illustrations Part Seven: No Remaining, No Place to Stay . Entrance to Mill House (Helen Southworth).  . Drawing of Mill House by Erhlich (Kit Martin).  . Fresca skating at Virginia Water in Surrey with Cyril and Veronica from scrapbook at The Mill House (Kit Martin).  . & . ‘ impressions of the  wood-engravings for Francesca Allinson’s Nursery Rhymes’ on sale at Abbott and Holder.  . Cecil Sharp.  . Ralph Vaughan Williams ().  . Handwritten comments by Ralph Vaughan Williams (VWML).  . Transcription of handwritten comments by RVW (VWML).  . Transcription of handwritten comments by RVW (VWML).  Part Eight: Love Under the Shadow of Death . Constable’s ‘Dedham Vale’ . . John Nash’s lithograph of the River Stour, Early Summer, for Adrian Bell’s Men and the Fields. . Fresca’s death certificate (Kit Martin, The Mill House). . Clare Railway Station (Helen Southworth). . The River Stour (Helen Southworth). . St Osyth. . Post mortem (Addenbrooke’s Hospital). . Fresca’s unmarked burial site, The Mill House (Helen Southworth). . Marx’s fabrics, Thisbe (V&A). . Marx’s fabrics, Pyramus (V&A). . Waldo and Muriel Lanchester. . Lanchester puppets for L’Amfiparnaso. . Eleanor Elder, Judy Wogan, Elder’s sister (Caitlin Adams). . Sketch of Tippett by Karl Hawker, Christmas card for Cyril and Veronica Allinson (The Mill House). . Sidney Keyes. . Alun Lewis (Gweno Lewis). . Keyes with Milein Cosman.

xvi

                

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List of Illustrations Coda . . . . . .

Jacqueline Mesmaeker. Dedication page. Young Jacqueline. Petals. Clown. Fish.

     

For permission to reproduce all Allinson related material I am grateful to Tim, David and Christine Allinson. Acknowledgement to the Will Trustees of the Michael Tippett Estate and to the Michael Tippett Musical Foundation for permission to quote from the letters of Michael Tippett and other Tippett material. For permission to reproduce Douglas Newton materials, Virginia-Lee Webb and the Tate Gallery; for Enid Marx and Margaret Lambert related materials, Eleanor Breuning and the Victoria and Albert Museum; for Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Random House, University of Reading, Harcourt Brace and The Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf; for W.H. Auden, Faber and Faber and Curtis Brown; for Judy Wogan, Eleanor Elder and the Arts League of Service, Charles Lillis, John Wogan-Browne, Jeremy Jensen and the late Beryl Mackay; for Hazel Archard, Jim Belchamber; for Bryan Fisher, Ardan Fisher; for Wilf Franks, Danyel Gilgan; for David Ayerst, Caroline Ayerst; for Alun Lewis, Gweno Lewis; the Bodleian Library for Dorothy L. Sayers; Sheil Land Associates for Jean Rhys; the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust for Ralph Vaughan Williams; St Osyth map reproduced by kind permission of the Ordnance Survey. ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’ from The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume , –, edited by Andrew McNeillie. Text copyright c  by Quentin Bell and Angelica Garnett. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce copyright and other material, as detailed above. The publishers apologize for any errors or omissions in the list and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in the next edition or reprint of this book. The author has made substantive attempts to identify copyright owners and to obtain the necessary permission.

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Fresca_02_Prologue 10/04/2017 16:38 Page 1

Prologue M

Y quest for Fresca begins with a name on a list. The list is J. Howard Woolmer’s checklist of the books and pamphlets published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press between  and . I am fascinated by networks, and Woolmer’s list of  titles represents an opportunity to begin charting the routes via which unknown authors and their works have made it into the hallowed cultural sphere of Bloomsbury. Woolmer, a rare book dealer, has organized his checklist by year and within each year names appear alphabetically. ‘Francesca Allinson’ stands at the top of the list for  shoulder to shoulder with eminent Bloomsbury philosopher, atheist and pacifist Bertrand Russell.

 From J. Howard Woolmer’s Checklist of the Hogarth Press.

Strange bedfellows aren’t an unusual sight on the Hogarth Press list. Famous names sit side by side with names lost to obscurity. At the Hogarth Press, Freud, whose Beyond the Pleasure Principle appeared in its first English translation in , and T. S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land was published in its first English edition in , consort with long forgotten poets such as Ruth ManningSanders, author of Karn (), and Ena Limebeer, author of To a Proud Phantom (). These less recognizable names intrigue me. I want to know more about these writers whose literary lights glimmered momentarily and then faded. What 

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Prologue stories lie behind these names on Woolmer’s list? I have had some luck tracking down Birmingham Group writer John Hampson, author of two novels at the Press, a very successful murder mystery set in a Derbyshire pub called Saturday Night at the Greyhound in  and a slower-selling growing-up novel called O Providence in . I’ve visited Hampson’s nephew, Roger Hubank, a retired English professor and writer of books about mountains, at his Loughborough home and he has given me access to Hampson’s correspondence and his censored homosexual writings. I’ve also made efforts to learn about New Zealand novelist Anna D. Whyte, like Hampson twice published by the Woolfs. In Whyte’s case, I have contacted Bill Manhire, professor of English at Victoria University in Wellington, NZ, via email. Whyte, he tells me, has been overlooked. No birthdate for Whyte and dismissive reviews of her ‘ship-board romance/light novel’ about ‘English People in Florence’ mean that I may well now be, Manhire suggests, ‘the world expert on Anna Whyte’. After Woolmer’s bibliography, I take down from my bookshelf J. H. Willis’s  history of The Hogarth Press, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers. Willis’s work is quite comprehensive, but I find no mention at all of Allinson there. Francesca Allinson, like Anna D. Whyte, appears to be in the overlooked category. Who is she and how did she move into the Woolfs’ orbit? I order a copy of Allinson’s book online and turn to the Internet for clues.



The first name to come up in connection with Allinson is British composer Sir Michael Tippett (–). Tippett’s contemporaries Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears are familiar names to me, but I know less about Tippett although he is considered one of the great British composers of the twentieth century, among his best-known works A Child of Our Time (), the secular oratorio based on a Negro spiritual and the events that triggered the Kristallnacht pogrom of . I read theories later about how the longevity of Tippett’s career impacted his fame and questions of celebrity and obscurity become puzzles for me across the length of my search for Allinson. I learn that Tippett had ties with the peace movement, that he was jailed as a conscientious objector during World War II and that he subsequently became chair and then president of the Peace Pledge Union. Like Britten and Pears, I discover, Tippett was an open homosexual. I check out of the library Tippett’s Those Twentieth Century Blues, published in  and labeled an autobiography. Although the book is disjointed, I can now piece together a first topsy-turvy portrait of Allinson. What becomes immediately clear is the intensity of the professional and personal connection that Tippett shared with the woman I now come to know as ‘Fresca’. In Tippett’s pages I find a love story which has a beginning, a middle and a tragic end. 

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Prologue

 Young Michael Tippett.

In her first appearance in Those Twentieth Century Blues, Tippett refers to Fresca as ‘one of two women most crucial to my life’. Theirs is a dramatic first encounter. Tippett recounts how he met Fresca through his cousin Phyllis Kemp when Phyl was living in the Allinson family house in Christchurch Avenue, London, in approximately . Phyl was a student at University College London and she was one of a number of students the Allinsons took in. Fresca would have been  years old, Tippett . The connection is immediate, according to Tippett: ‘[T]here was Fresca with that huge goitre on her neck, from which she suffered so badly and for so long. Something happened between us.’ Revealing some first clues about Fresca’s heritage, Tippett says he stayed in  at a children’s home in Bavaria ‘started by a young couple, cousins of Fresca on her Berlin Jewish mother’s side’. Tippett refers next to a trip he and Fresca made to Germany in , at a moment when he ‘began to sense the importance of music-making and the theatre in communicating messages and ideas of significance, especially to the more deprived sections of the community’. The purpose of the trip, for Tippett, is to take a course in vocal music at Georg Goetsch’s Musikheim in Frankfurt an der Oder in preparation to run a Yorkshire work-camp for students and local people started by Rolf Gardiner, Alan Collingridge, Goetsch and Jim and Ruth Pennyman whose property is being used. Fresca’s German is better than Tippett’s and she helps him through choral recitation classes. They combine this trip to the Musikheim with walking in the Bavarian hills, over the Reisengebirge, ‘living rough and sleeping mostly in haybarns’, in so doing, says Tippett, ‘break[ing] free of a conventional type of existence’. From Frankfurt they travel on to Czechoslovakia, in part so that Fresca might pursue her love of puppets and her passion for baroque churches. After visiting Dresden, Tippett says, Fresca stays on in Germany with friends while he returns to England ‘and [they meet] up again in Boosbeck’. In a second mention of Fresca’s health, Tippett describes how walking in Germany presents 

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Prologue a challenge for the ‘frailer’ Fresca and he suggests that Fresca is also motivated to accompany him because she feels it will ‘draw [them] closer together’. Fresca comes up again in terms of the Boosbeck camp for out-of-work miners in East Cleveland, Yorkshire, for which the trip to Germany has prepared Tippett. Fresca plays Lucy, according to Tippett, in his production of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, alongside the local milkman as Macheath and a miner’s daughter as Polly. Tippett and Fresca have by this time become fellow travellers in their young lives and both see music as a social and political force for change. Tippett’s subsequent activities include the Morley College based South London Orchestra, an orchestra for unemployed cinema and theatre musicians and recently graduated music students. This association is the result in part, he says, of his encounter with London Labour Choral Union conductor Alan Bush, introduced to him by Fresca in the late s. Tippett also mentions at this point another person who has come to him via Fresca, an actress called Judy Wogan. But his collaboration with Wogan on a piece called Miners, the text of which she has written, didn’t, he feels, turn out well. Tippett’s descriptions of Fresca’s sexuality complicate my understanding of her relationship with him. Clearly Tippett and Fresca are very candid with each other. With both Fresca and another important female friend, Evelyn Maude, Tippett ‘talk[s] openly and frankly about [his] problems’. Suggesting a strong heterosexual side to Fresca, Tippett has her declaring that Eric Kennington’s portraits of airmen are ‘marvelous examples of the heroic and the bedworthy’; and he describes Fresca’s trip to New York, following a trip to Switzerland to have her goitre operated on, for ‘one of what she called her “rutting sessions,” with men who had to be foreign or Jewish’. Tippett identifies himself as the object of Fresca’s heterosexual desires: she dislikes it ‘when [Tippett] appear[s] feminine in relation to other men’. She even wants to have or to raise a child with Tippett, asking whether he’ll marry her and accept a child conceived with another man. Although Tippett refuses to raise another man’s child, ‘having children through artificial insemination by the husband’ is discussed, as is marriage with Fresca. Nevertheless, Tippett also identifies with Fresca because of what he characterizes in both of them as ‘turbulent homosexual sides’, although their ‘own relationship was one of great serenity … For a while, Fresca went to live with a lesbian actress, but in the long term found this produced tension. Eventually she left saying that she was bringing into her life a turbulence which might have disturbed her life as an accepting lesbian and as an actress.’ Tippett then says that he ‘realised for [himself ] it was the other way round: [he] accepted the turbulence as necessary for creative work’. Following this is a paragraph outlining the three main streams of Fresca’s professional career: first, ‘her interest in puppets, [which was allied to] her work 

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Prologue as a choral conductor—[including her direction] in Oxford [of ] a version of Orazio Vecchi’s madrigal comedy, L’Amfiparnasso, with puppets’; second, her career as a writer, ‘(hence her identification with Virginia Woolf )’ and her ‘autobiographical volume, A Childhood ’; and, third, ‘her [absorption] in folk-song and [the help she provided Tippett in finding] the right tunes for [his] Robert of Sicily’.



But, by far the largest piece of Tippett’s autobiography dedicated to Fresca covers the period just prior to and during World War II. It is included in a chapter titled ‘The Heart’s Assurance’, the name of a work that Tippett dedicated to Fresca and which was first performed in  at The Wigmore Hall in central London. The return to Fresca follows a long section on Tippett’s homosexuality, his relationship with Bauhaus-trained artist Wilf Franks in the s and his dream analysis, where Fresca’s appearances suggest that she remained a confidante to Tippett. In the ‘The Heart’s Assurance’ section, there is more about Fresca’s influence on Tippett’s professional life, including her introduction to Tippett of the work of English composer Henry Purcell (–), her funding of Tippett’s first recordings and also her provision of living space for Tippett at her Mornington Terrace house. Here Tippett explains his pacifist stance, outlining the events that led up to his three-month-long imprisonment. Fresca, too, I learn from Tippett, supports the rights of conscientious objectors with the purchase of ‘a plot of land near East Grinstead [in Sussex], large enough to run as a smallholding’. Here ‘conchies’ can do land work instead of military service. According to Tippett, Fresca lives in a flat in East Grinstead and makes frequent visits to Tippett in Oxted, about  miles away. Tippett records the demise of ‘Fresca’s commune’, caused in part, he says, in another cryptic reference to Fresca’s love life, because Fresca is ‘having an affair with an older man—a conchie in the First World War’. Tippett mentions Fresca’s health again: Fresca’s return to London from East Grinstead is interrupted due to ill health ‘(probably as a result of having left the goitre operation too late)’. She’s forced to ‘go and stay a halfinvalid with her brother Cyril Allinson and sister-in-law, near Streetly End in Cambridgeshire’. At this point, Tippett reproduces a series of letters from himself to Fresca. This first batch of letters, the earliest of which date from , the latest , organized in two chronological sequences, deal mostly with Tippett’s composition work and, after , his preparations for his stay in prison. The letters suggest intimacy. Tippett encourages Fresca in her work on folksong. He shows concern for Fresca’s health: he’s glad an ulcer has been ruled out; he’ll be ‘thankful when [Fresca] is properly well’; and he regrets to hear she’s ‘off to Addenbrooke’s [hospital in Cambridge]’. Revealing a reciprocal rela

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Prologue tionship, Tippett’s requests for Fresca’s support are myriad. He asks for help with his musical composition work and with money. Could Fresca housesit for him and run his Morley College choir should he be imprisoned? She’s the closest to himself that he can offer the choir. In one letter, dated , Tippett asks that Fresca accompany him to meet ‘[German conductor Walter] Goehr in the artist’s room & his wife, & Phyllis & the orchestra etc.’ in an official capacity, as ‘virtually wife—that’s to say something besides our joint selves, something public & professional’. In a kind of heterosexual masquerade, he asks that she not wear trousers, as she has told [mutual friend] Den Newton she plans to, but to come ‘in [her] proper dress [in which Fresca] always look[s] essentially feminine and good’. Fresca and Tippett also exchange gifts. A Raoul Dufy print and a painting by Fresca’s brother, painter Adrian Allinson, seem to have come to Tippett from Fresca. Interestingly in terms of a connection back to Fresca’s Hogarth Press book, Tippett mentions Virginia Woolf several times. Woolf appears to represent a shared language, a shared passion for Tippett and Fresca. Tippett writes to Fresca from Oxted on a Saturday in : ‘I think I must give you [a very early Christmas gift] “The Waves”’, ‘because it’s so much our own book in some curious intimate way. I’ll try to get it in London [en route to Cambridge from Oxted] on Thursday’. Later in this first series of letters, in an exchange dated ‘sat evening, ’, Tippett has just finished reading Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse: ‘such exquisite & mature art. I am not surprised the price was what it was for her.’ Woolf also makes a cryptic appearance in a scene involving Tippett’s and Fresca’s sexuality. After commenting that both had their ‘turbulent homosexual sides’, but confirming that ‘[their] own relationship was one of great serenity’, Tippett recalls an incident when they were walking arm in arm together ‘in a London square’. Tippett writes that when he said to Fresca ‘“you know we really belong to one another” […] she responded cryptically “You see that woman ahead of us. It’s Virginia Woolf.”’  Den [Douglas] Newton, described first as a conchie and a writer by Tippett in Those Twentieth Century Blues, is, at this point, an important link between Tippett and Fresca. Tippett comes to see Den at Fresca’s and Den takes provisions and reading material from Fresca to Tippett; Den relays information, such as Fresca’s plan to wear trousers to the concert. Other names that come up at this point are David Ayerst, John Layard, Jeffrey Mark, Karl Hawker and ‘Uncle Tom Eliot’. Tippett also makes another cryptic mention of Jude [sic] Wogan— he’s ‘glad to hear [her] voice on the ‘phone & what she said’. He ‘hope[s] it all comes out alright & a love based on the great quiet after the storm & not with admixture of hysteria any more’. Is Jude or Judy, I wonder, the lesbian lover to whom Tippett refers? 

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Prologue A section titled ‘The Price of Pacifism’ follows the first batch of Fresca’s letters, consisting of a description of Tippett’s H.M. Prison Wormwood Scrubs experience and the reproduction of several letters exchanged with Evelyn Maude, his correspondent while in prison. After a few pages of comments about the post-war period, Tippett veers back quite suddenly to Fresca with another series of letters prefaced with the statement: ‘During the war period, Fresca and I shared each other’s troubles, ambitions and dreams.’ The first few letters are out of order, then there is a series from May to July/October  and a couple from January,  and , , reproduced in chronological order. A  letter about a work in progress that would become Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage closes with ‘love to you both’. A  letter has Fresca in Cambridgeshire with Cyril and Veronica. A  letter that suggests both Fresca and Tippett are reading Edmund Wilson’s The Wound and the Bow, borrowed from the Times lending library, closes with ‘Please get well soon.’ On April , , Tippett is sorry ‘to see [Fresca] poorly again’, but on May  ‘relieved to hear [she’s] getting better again?’ Tippett mentions friends, including Newton, and looks forward to the time ‘when we can re-make our circle more permanently after the war; and that always seems to turn out in my mind as after your weakness passes’. Tippett asks Fresca for help with his Peace Pledge Union pamphlet (reproduced in Moving into Aquarius) and Fresca and he exchange reading materials, Plotinus for Turgenev. Again, in a letter dated June , Tippett mentions Virginia Woolf: he’s been reading her work and ‘as usual becoming so overcome by atmosphere as to lose sense of the here & now. It’s extraordinarily powerful stuff & feminine to a degree—in the best sense that is. Sometimes the artistry is uncanny.’ At this point Tippett reproduces a first letter from Fresca, dated ‘Invasion Day []’. It is an account of Fresca’s ‘waking dream’ followed by Tippett’s Jungian interpretation of the dream. In June , Tippett talks about Germany, fearing on the one hand, and wanting on the other, that ‘Germany [will] collapse’, that it ‘will be the scapegoat & will be dismembered & reduced to a colony of big business, with labour gangs snatched from Russia’. Suggesting an allegiance with Germany and things German, several letters are signed at this point in German, with herzlichkeit or warmly. At this time, Tippett briefly mentions Fresca’s poor health and discusses Fresca’s folk-song book: Tippett thinks ‘the new plan for chapter III excellent’ and he promises to pass on a recently purchased book, ‘Survey of Anglo-Saxon Art by [Thomas] Kendrick’ [Anglo-Saxon Art to A.D.  ()] which will provide inspiration. Tippett’s cottage is bombed in August . He moves in temporarily with friends in Sussex, then, once 

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Prologue back in his cottage, appeals to Fresca for provisions. Tippett refers to Fresca’s ‘Alexander technique training’, designed to improve posture and muscle strength. After the letter dated January , , the closing four pages of this chapter move quite suddenly to Fresca’s death. ‘The last years of the war were also Fresca’s last years,’ writes Tippett. Tippett and Fresca try to live together but the experiment fails because Tippett’s music gets in the way. Unable to cope with her ill health and with the war, Fresca escapes from under the watchful eye of her family and takes her own life by drowning in the River Stour. She is wearing a cross, originally a gift from Evelyn Maude to Tippett that he had ‘insensitively’ passed on to Fresca. Fresca leaves notes for Tippett and for Judy Wogan. With Tippett’s letter she includes a ‘photograph, taken during [their]  [likely actually ] tour of Germany and Czechoslovakia, of [Tippett] with a little child; and a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets open at No. LVII’. Tippett reproduces the Shakespeare sonnet and the suicide note in full. Tippett closes this chapter with a description of the piece he will dedicate to Fresca five years after her death. The Heart’s Assurance is a song cycle for high voice and piano, with music set to verse by two young poets, both of whom had died in World War II, Sidney Keyes at  and Alun Lewis at . Tippett says that ‘he widened [the work] to commemorate all those who lost their lives and loves in the brutality of battle’, as he feels that Fresca had in her way. I search Tippett’s autobiography unsuccessfully for a photograph of Fresca. I turn to Thomas Schuttenhelm’s edition of The Selected Letters of Michael Tippett which contains only letters written by Tippett. I do not find a picture of her there either. Suggesting that he too recognized Fresca’s importance, Schuttenhelm has placed Fresca fourth on the list of approximately twenty correspondents, preceded only by Adrian Boult, the BBC and Schott music publishers. Schuttenhelm’s selection of the letters to Fresca, larger than Tippett’s in Those Twentieth Century Blues, tells much the same story, although in greater detail. However, what the Selected Letters enables me to do that Those Twentieth Century Blues does not is to measure Tippett’s tone with Fresca against that used with other correspondents. The letters about Fresca to Den Newton are of particular interest. Was Fresca in love with Den and/or Den with Fresca? Details from Tippett’s letters to Den about what Fresca leaves catch my attention. Tippett tells Den that among Fresca’s papers is her unpublished folksong monograph that she hopes the two of them will complete. Tippett has ‘written to Veronica [Allinson, Francesca’s sister-in-law] about the MS and will go there to get it if necessary’. 

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Prologue Most of the pile of F’s private papers are my own letter[s?] and one of yours. Between her bit of diary (with dreams) and my dreams and letter and bits of other things there’s a curious chunk of ‘shadow’ biography, which I shall keep for a while at any rate before destroying—or leave somewhere safe for you to read or destroy one later day when I am also in the cold ground. Her inner life is just the chaotic febrile world of imagination which a poet has to inhabit at times for his sins. But a woman has greater difficulty to express it artistically as a personal satisfaction. What is a ‘shadow biography’? I find it defined as a kind of negative image, an unauthorized version of a life that contains the information censored from the official version. My map, actual and metaphorical, is considerably more detailed at this point. I’ve found Fresca at several London addresses. While the Mornington Terrace house has been destroyed — a fact confirmed by an interactive website called bombsight.org, which lists it as a ‘hit’ — I find two Christchurch Avenues in London: one in Brondesbury, the right one, and another not far off in Brent. Uncannily, I realize that my usual London base, the home of my college friend Emma Fenton, is just several streets away from the Brondesbury address. I have also found Fresca in East Grinstead and in Cambridgeshire. The Selected Letters of Michael Tippett provides a full address for the Mill House in Cambridgeshire, so I dispatch a letter enquiring about the missing manuscript of the folk-song monograph with the thought that English houses, especially nice ones, often remain in the family.



While I await a response to the Mill House letter, I receive Fresca’s A Childhood. The book represents my first material evidence, my first real piece of Fresca. On a first look, I am struck by the book’s resemblance to a child’s notebook. It looks like an exercise book creatively, but somewhat crudely, wrapped by a child in brown paper and made to look like a real book. In the cover’s whimsical repeat pattern of a child’s game of naughts and crosses, a blue crayon strikes through the winning line of crosses top left to lower right. The book’s title, author’s name and the name of the press are in a neat cursive, a child’s hand, black crayon shadowed with blue. The price,  s.  d. or seven shillings and sixpence, is set in a spiky circle on the spine. Confirming what I’ve learned from Woolmer’s Checklist of The Hogarth Press, A Childhood is a midsize hardback volume, with blue cloth boards; it comprises  pages. It is larger than some Hogarth Press books such as the Living Poets 

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Prologue

 Dust jacket of A Childhood (Random House).

or the various pamphlet series, but is nonetheless compact. I find no traces of ownership in my copy. The front fold of the dust jacket, down the side of which Enid Marx’s design repeats itself, holds the Press’s marketing blurb. The description of the book immediately complicates a reading of it, a caveat at odds with the more inviting cover. A Childhood, the blurb declares, is ‘[a] book by a new writer which it is not altogether easy to classify. It is either biographical fiction or fictional biography.’ The blurb then cites Fresca’s preface in full, a second warning against trying to find the author herself among its pages, while at the same time tempting one to do so: In the following pages, the seasons of one year pass and at the same time Charlotte grows from about nine to fourteen. I have left out all mention of her precise age; partly because it does not matter and partly because I have not wished to shut her in too closely within the exact hours and places of her own experience. Unavoidably, Charlotte is more like myself than anyone else: yet if she strikes you as odd, have patience with her, for many of her contemporaries felt and acted very much as she did. 

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Prologue Complicating further the status of the work as standard autobiography, Fresca’s preface asserts that five years are condensed into a single year, a means, she suggests, to avoid ‘shut[ting the protagonist] in’ in terms of time and place. The resistance to identification suggests unease. The key seems to reside in the last sentence, which sets the book up as at once personal and universal and its protagonist as at once eccentric and a common type. The front fold identifies the designer of the dust jacket and of the wood engravings that preface each chapter as ‘Miss Enid Marx’. The cover page sports The Hogarth Press logo, Vanessa Bell’s Omega Workshop-like version rather than E. McKnight Kauffer’s more modernist wolf ’s head/printing press device inaugurated in . It also includes the familiar details of publication that put Fresca in the orbit of the two better-known names that have led me to her: PUBLISHED BY LEONARD & VIRGINIA WOOLF AT THE HOGARTH PRESS,  TAVISTOCK SQUARE, LONDON, W.C.I, . The book has been printed in Letchworth, Hertfordshire, at the Garden City Press Ltd. All printing operations moved to the Garden City Press Ltd after  Mecklenburgh Square was bombed in . The Press operations had been transferred to Mecklenburgh Square from Tavistock Square in August  due to redevelopment plans. A table of contents follows the title page, listing seven simply titled chapters, ‘Illness’, ‘Sunday’, ‘The Forest’, ‘Seaside’, ‘More Seaside’, ‘Pity’ and ‘Preparations’. Last of all, taking me back to a name in Tippett’s Those Twentieth Century Blues, I find a dedication: TO JUDITH WOGAN.



A few weeks later, I receive a response to my letter to The Mill House. The sender of the folded airmail envelope is Kit Martin. Kit tells me that Cyril and Veronica Allinson are deceased and identifies himself as their heir. He mentions Fresca’s Hogarth Press book, her suicide and subsequent burial at The Mill House. He also informs me that Fresca was a student at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford and suggests I follow up with them. Among the items Kit gives me is a transcription of Fresca’s will, providing a treasure trove of information, an outline of Fresca’s life. Her legacies include an Essex wood, shares in a Sussex farm, a caravan, silver spoons, a typewriter, a Parker pen, a china crucifix, books and a recorder. As recent biographical work on Jane Austen by Paula Byrne and on now obscure writer and collector Mercedes de Acosta by Lisa Cohen suggests, objects owned by individuals, ‘[the] texture of things, [and the] life of objects’, tell us a great deal about our subjects. Fresca’s will is dated October , , six months prior to her suicide. Also included are handwritten or holograph instructions (unsigned) clearly recorded just before Fresca took her own life. 

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Prologue

 Fresca at 16 (courtesy of Kit Martin; Allinson Estate).

Along with the will, Kit provides my first photograph of Fresca. This photo of Fresca aged  makes a stark contrast to the will, taking me back to the beginning of Fresca’s life, whereas the will marks its end. ‘What story lay in between?’



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PART ONE

A Childhood A

LONG with Fresca’s will and photograph, Kit Martin provides a brief biog-

raphical sketch. I learn that Fresca was born Enid Ellen Pulvermacher Allinson on August , , at  Spanish Place in Central London. She is the youngest of five children alphabetically named: Alfred, Bertrand, Cyril, Dulcie, who dies as an infant, and Enid, Francesca’s birth name. Twelve years separate the oldest, Alfred, born , who will change his name to Adrian, from the youngest, Fresca, born . Kit also gives details about Fresca’s education. Educated by German and French governesses, at  Fresca goes first to University College London. After an interruption due to ill health, she returns to college in , aged , but this time to Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. Kit gives me the name of Fresca’s father—early whole foods, vegetarian and natural prescriptions guru Dr Thomas Richard Allinson, known as T. R. (–). Kit also includes a copy of Connoisseur magazine, which contains an article and a picture of brother Adrian skiing and a photograph of an unidentified woman on an Edwardian bicycle. The photo is in Cabinet Format, so named because the larger format portrait in its stout cardboard frame is designed to sit on a cabinet. I identify the bicycle as a  Model No.  Lady’s Special Premier with Leatherette Chaincase. At first I assume the woman with the bicycle is Fresca’s mother, but I later realize she is the Allinson family’s longtime German nanny and companion Clara Barkow, known as Tickie. Kit also provides a letter, dated , from Fresca’s niece Sonya Allinson who writes from  Clara Barkow (courtesy of Eavesham Road in Cheltenham, answering an Kit Martin; Allinson Estate). 

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Part One earlier enquiry about Fresca and discussing a plan to mark Fresca’s grave. Sonya’s existence suggests the possibility of living relatives—perhaps she had known Fresca—and one of the next letters I write is to her.



Sonya’s first letters move me forward. Her memories of Fresca and those of her older sisters, Enid and Vanessa, are those of children, although the older girls would have been approaching twenty (Sonya only sixteen) when Fresca died. People have told me that they did not take photographs during the war and I wonder how the devastating events of wartime impacted other acts of memory. What Sonya does tell me about Fresca suggests an energetic and creative life, but also one haunted by tragedy. Enid and Vanessa remember Fresca ‘making notes and collecting songs, material for her book’. They have memories of Fresca’s puppets, ‘a small puppet theatre in her room at the top of grandmother’s house at  Christchurch Ave’; the puppets are ‘hung on hooks in the basement’. Fresca was a favorite aunt to ‘E and V’, according to Sonya; they ‘recall bathing in the nude and setting fire to the grass in the sand dunes’ when holidaying with Fresca at Cley-next-the-Sea in Norfolk and Toozie (St Osyth) in Essex. Fresca is also Sonya’s ‘favorite relative, the others being so eccentric and alarming’. Sonya describes Fresca as ‘kind [and] considerate, [she] made one feel important—delightful company, gay (in the old sense of the word) and always concealing her sadness’. Among the tragedies in Fresca’s life, according to Sonya, ‘was that she had very little love for her mother, indeed some revulsion, always blaming her ill health on the fact that Granny was too old when she was born and had never been a strong, healthy woman’. She suggests a connection between Fresca’s A Childhood and her real life in this regard: ‘This comes into the book.’



Sonya’s first letter to Kit has emphasized the celebrity of Fresca’s oldest brother and her senior by twelve years, the artist Adrian Allinson, his dates –. I turn to Adrian as a possible means to get closer to Fresca. Kit provides Adrian’s  unsigned Times obituary, titled ‘MR ADRIAN ALLINSON: PAINTER DETACHED FROM FASHIONS’. The obituary celebrates Adrian as painter, pacifist and mountaineer. It sounds a note of eccentricity and non-conformism that will repeat itself time and time again in terms of all of the Allinsons: Mr Adrian Allinson, the artist, died yesterday at his studio in London. He was . His complete detachment from fashions in art may be indicated by saying that he exhibited impartially at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists and the London Group. In sympathy he was 

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A Childhood with the ‘advanced’ people, but he kept his head, so that his work passed muster with the champions of orthodoxy. The principle that Allinson stood for was formal organization of the picture, leaving the question of degree of realism in representation to follow. By natural bent he painted close to the appearance of things, but his conscious effort was to compose them in an orderly and rhythmical design. He shirked nothing in carrying out his aim and the combination of realism with decorative disposition gave to his work a peculiarly arresting quality. This was intensified by his preference for landscapes in the South of Europe, Majorca and North Africa, where things are seen clearly in a strong light. His characteristic defect was to seem too rational and calculating. As is not uncommon with highly intellectual painters, he seemed to have more freedom and impulse in watercolour than in oil. Adrian Paul Allinson was born in  and he was at first intended for medicine, so that his early training was scientific and his scientific habit of mind was evident in his work, in the unflinching acceptance of botanical character in decorative flower paintings, for example. Deciding to give up medicine for art Allinson studied at The Slade School, where he won a scholarship in his second year, and afterwards in Paris and Munich. His first professional occupation was as a designer for the stage. Between  and  he was scenic designer for the Beecham Opera Company, and the value of this experience in clarifying his ideas, as well as of his taste for music, could be seen in his later work. Without prejudice to his loyalty Allinson held pacifist opinions, and since he was as uncompromising and outspoken in conversation as he was in his art this led to an unhappy difference with the late William Marchant, director of the Goupil Gallery, who refused to exhibit his pictures. It speaks for the general recognition of Allinson’s integrity that the hostility to him soon died down. For a time he taught at the Westminster School of Art. Besides painting he practised various branches of applied art, including sculpture in glazed pottery, and he was latterly poster designer to British Railways (Southern Region). Allinson’s first appearance at the Royal Academy was with two Swiss landscapes and a portrait, and thereafter he was a regular exhibitor, as well as at the New English Art Club and the other societies already mentioned and in several European cities. He was, however, most closely associated with the London Group and took an active part in its policies and in organizing its exhibitions. In his youth Allinson, who was an athletic, bearded man, earnest in conversation, was an active mountaineer; and he was a member of the 

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Part One Alpine, British Universities and Kandahar Ski Clubs. He was married and had one son. I make quick progress digging up further information on Adrian, despite the fact that there is as yet no monograph focused on his work. To the facts provided by the Times obituary I add the following details: Adrian studied medicine at Middlesex Hospital and he organized a sculpture exhibition on the roof of Selfridges’ department store in . Looking online, I discover that the body of Adrian’s work is vast and varied. I find the biggest single collection at ‘Art UK’, a BBC site ‘which aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real’. Adrian’s work includes landscapes, mostly alpine and Mediterranean, portraits, wood cuts, poster art, cover art, ceramics, cartoons and illustrations of ballets for ballet historian Cyril Beaumont’s books, including many of Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe ballet company. (Pictured [left to right]: Adrian Allinson’s ‘Dorothy in the Yellow Coat’, ‘Scene from Le Jardin des Amoureux’, a theatre poster [Victoria & Albert] and costume design for a Flame [Victoria & Albert]). A second string to his bow, Adrian also works as a translator, from both French and German. He has translated several works by Anatole France and a biographical study and two essays by Belgian symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck (), among other things. I also find Adrian on the peripheries of the lives of several famous Slade Art School graduates, including Bloomsbury figures Mark Gertler and Dora Carrington, as well as Edward Wadsworth, Christopher [C.R.W.] Nevinson, and Stanley Spencer. Adrian appears in David Boyd Haycock’s recent book

 ‘Jardin des Amoureux,’ by Adrian Paul Allinson, UK, 1911 (V&A).  Adrian Allinson’s ‘Dorothy in the Yellow Coat’ (Allinson Estate).



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A Childhood

 Adrian Allinson’s costume design for a Flame in an unproduced ballet (V&A).

 Poster advertising George Bernard Shaw’s The Great Catherine at the Vaudeville Theatre, by Adrian Paul Allinson, UK, 1913 (V&A).

about The Slade School of Fine Art, A Crisis of Brilliance, and I find pictures of him there. In all of these, Adrian’s idiosyncratic personality stands out: first, at a Slade picnic in  where Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth sit to Adrian’s right and Stanley Spencer to his immediate left; and second, in John S. Currie’s Some Later Primitives and Madame Tisceron. (Left to right: Currie, Gertler, Nevinson, Wadsworth, Adrian and Madame Tisceron []).

 John S. Currie’s Some Later Primitives and Madame Tisceron: left to right: Currie, Gertler, Nevinson, Wadsworth, Adrian and Madame Tisceron (1910).  Adrian Allinson at a Slade picnic in 1912: Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth sit to Adrian’s right and Stanley Spencer to his immediate left.



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Part One Outside The Slade Adrian’s friends are equally eminent. They include composer Philip Heseltine (Peter Warlock) and writer Jean Rhys, both of whom he met at painter Augustus John’s Crabtree nightclub in the early part of the First World War. Rhys later describes her relationship with Adrian as a ‘semidemi love affair’. I find Adrian in one of Rhys’s short stories, entitled ‘Till September Petronella’. Rhys casts him as the awkward and unloved Marston, with ‘his long, white face and his pale-blue eyes’, opposite Heseltine’s more seductive Julian. Adrian responds, according to Lilian Pizzichini, by describing Rhys as beautiful, but also over-delicate and a wet blanket. Carole Angier explains that Adrian renamed Rhys Ella in his autobiography, which I have at this point yet to see.

 Nina Hamnett by Roger Fry.

 Jean Rhys.

 ‘Mr Watkins,’ portrait of Alan Odle, by Adrian Paul Allinson, UK, 1914 (HRC).

 Adrian Allinson’s portrait of Dorothy Richardson and Odle, undated (Beinecke).



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A Childhood Through his friendship with painter Alan Odle, fellow St John’s Wood School of Art student and Café Royal drinker, Adrian also meets writer Dorothy Richardson, Odle’s wife, in about . Richardson describes Adrian as ‘always in difficulties with an endless succession of girlfriends’ and Odle’s biographer Martin Steenson suggests that it was the ‘lascivious Allinson’, not Odle, who seduced sculptor Nina Hamnett. Adrian and Richardson become lasting friends, Richardson editing his unpublished autobiography during a stay at her house in . (Pictured clockwise: Nina Hamnett by Roger Fry; Jean Rhys; Alan Odle [by APA]; Adrian’s portrait of Richardson and Odle, undated [Beinecke])



At this point I have run across several references to Michael Allinson, Adrian’s son and Sonya, Enid and Vanessa’s cousin. Searching online, I discover that Michael has become a Broadway actor, and I track him down via the New York social club the Players Club, of which he is the past president. Michael has been Rex Harrison’s understudy and has played Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady for many years on Broadway. He’s also had major roles in The Beaux’ Stratagem, Henry IV Part I, and The Importance of Being Earnest, in Shadowlands with Nigel Hawthorne, Oliver and An Ideal Husband. More recently, I note, Michael has had a small part, Sir David, in George Clooney’s film Syriana. Bruce of the Players Club calls Michael in Orange County, California, on my behalf and then calls me back with Michael’s number. Speak loudly, Bruce tells me. Michael (pictured here as Henry Higgins in ) has not lost his beautiful theatrical British accent. He is in his late eighties and he can’t remember very much about Fresca. Like Sonya, Michael affirms that Fresca was his favorite aunt. Sonya Allinson has told me that Michael ‘had his own room in Mornington Crescent (as did C & V [Cyril and Veronica] and, Tippett and perhaps others)’.  Playbill for My Fair Lady starring Michael Allinson.



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Part One Michael is planning a version of My Fair Lady for a local venue. He has found an Eliza and she is ‘tall and tolerably good-looking’. He has tried out a performance at the retirement home and, he tells me, ‘the old crones were up out of their wheel chairs clapping’. He coughs and then apologizes, he broke a rib the week before. Michael clearly wants to talk and I see why the charming Michael was so easily able to become the philanderer I later learn he was. Michael mentions that he has two sons. I find son Tim Allinson, an engineer living in Orange County, just south of Los Angeles, on the Internet. Tim gives me a copy of Adrian’s autobiography, held with Dorothy Richardson’s papers at the University of Tulsa (which I had seen mentioned by Jean Rhys’s biographers). He also provides another photograph of Adrian, uncanny in its resemblance to the -year-old Fresca. This image has somehow found its way onto the cover of the Penguin Classics Complete Saki resulting, Tim tells me, in some confusion.

 Adrian Allinson (Allinson Estate).

 Adrian Allinson on the Penguin Classics Complete Saki cover (Penguin).



Adrian’s autobiography, entitled A Painter’s Pilgrimage, proves invaluable in terms of understanding the Allinson upbringing. It represents a polished and detailed record, the result of Adrian’s efforts to ‘dress the body of [his own] book in the best suit of literary clothes it [was] in [his] power to cut’. He has ‘remodeled 

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A Childhood the style three times’ and, in a reference to Richardson’s editing, has sought ‘the advice of more expert tailors than [him]self at each fitting’. Like Fresca, Adrian has ties to the literary world, socially, but also in his capacity as a translator and an illustrator of covers of little magazines such as Coterie, and he likely writes with an eye to publication. In his introduction, Adrian explains that he had planned to write his memoirs once an old man, however a ‘sequence of sleepless nights brought about by the London Blitz’ has precipitated him into the project a lot sooner than he’d anticipated. Forced to move into the Gloucestershire countryside, deprived of his brushes and inspiration, Adrian has turned to writing. He writes from memory, he says, not having accumulated the diaries and letters necessary for a more anchored account; and this he sees as giving him greater freedom. Adrian gives the actual date of composition of the autobiography as April , ‘when the very existence of Britain seems to hang in the balance’. The central theme of the first pages of Adrian’s autobiography, in a section titled ‘PARENTAGE’, is the thoroughly non-conformist nature of the Allinson family. Adrian characterizes father T. R. Allinson and mother Anna Pulvermacher as ‘rather outside the general ruck of the class and time to which they belonged’. He acknowledges that he too was ‘cast from the same freakish mould’. He is considered ‘by popular standards [to be] a queer fish, a freak, one of those “artist fellows”, whom much may be forgiven, but who at the same time cannot be taken quite seriously’. Adrian provides a detailed description of his father’s upbringing. Adrian’s T. R. is the hero of an adventure story who strikes out on his own. Raised in Lancashire by ‘a wealthy and ardent Catholic’ stepfather, although ‘of yeoman stock’ himself, Tom dodges a career in the priesthood, opting instead for medicine and ‘the extremes of Atheism [sic]’. Rejected by his stepfather, Tom works first as a chemist’s assistant before going to the University of Edinburgh to study medicine (qualifying in ). Tom’s next stop is London, where he opens a practice in Islington and sets about challenging ‘the orthodox medical methods of the day’ with an investigation of ‘problems of Hygiene and Diet from a common sense angle’. T. R. experiments first on himself, developing what Adrian calls ‘Spartan habits, in which the exclusion of all flesh foods, stimulants and narcotics was the predominating feature’. Despite ‘an equable temperament, which made social intercourse with him easy and frictionless’, T. R.’s ‘fanaticism, combined with an utter disregard of public opinion, his open condemnation of the medicine bottle and the surgeon’s knife’ lead to accusations of ‘quackery’. An ‘unconventional’ dress code means he was considered a ‘crank as well’. Adrian describes the marriage of his parents as one of convenience: T. R. realizes that ‘a married doctor inspires more confidence than a bachelor’. 

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Part One According to Adrian, his father is motivated neither by love of a particular woman nor desire for family in selecting a wife. Finding that women who share his views on free thought and vegetarianism are few among the English middle classes, T. R. looks for a foreign wife. He chooses Anna Pulvermacher, identified by Adrian as the German friend of one of his patients and ‘born in Berlin of “liberal” Jewish parents’. Adrian’s first descriptions of his mother show her to have been a suitable choice for his father. Set on the profession of artist at the age of four, the headstrong Anna struggles through her father’s financial gains and losses on the stock market to achieve success as ‘a competent portrait painter’, her later work hung by the Royal Academy. Adrian describes his mother as a ‘a sound draughtsman [with an] unobtrusive technique and a sympathy for her sitters’. Her formal training, however, extends only to two years under the tutelage of ‘a fashionable portrait painter’. Confirming Anna’s gifts as a draughtsman, among items held by Kit Martin at the Mill House I find a sketchbook, dating from the s. Included is this sketch of Clara Barkow, the woman on the bicycle, whom I’d misidentified earlier on as Anna, and two figures at work, one sewing (or perhaps lacemaking), the other reading, likely Anna’s parents.

 Anna Pulvermacher’s sketches (courtesy of Kit Martin; Allinson Estate).

Anna’s dedication to art influences Adrian’s decision to become an artist, in particular his selection of The Slade, although it seems neither mother nor son knew much about the school before he went there. Anna had taken a few classes there herself, without however realizing the prestige of the school. Anna’s love of music also represents a ‘pleasurable memory’ for Adrian. 

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A Childhood However, despite these shared interests, mother and son do not see eye to eye. Adrian portrays Anna, rather cruelly, as rigid and sexless, characteristics that inevitably produce tension between Anna and her children: ‘There had been no flirtations or love affairs in her life and in any case she lacked the type of feminine looks and charm [allure] that attract easy attention from men. [. . . ] She was conscientious to a fault and dominated by a sense of duty, but showed a lack of humour and of attractive feminine foibles. In later years an aggressive dogmatism introduced an element of friction between her and her family.’ And in another short description, Adrian takes his critique a step further: Had mother been endowed with specifically feminine charms, those early days might have contained for me elements of ecstasy which fall to the lot of most children, illuminating childhood with unforgettable moments of glory. My memory records no such experiences; an ordered and controlled animal well-being devoid both of highlights or deep shadows fill the canvas. Consistent with both parents’ penchant for austerity, T. R.’s northern English thrift and Anna’s German immigrant background, and despite his mother’s artistic talents, the Pulvermacher Allinson home life, according to Adrian, is plain and restrained. The ‘shoddily furnished’ house accommodates ‘bamboo monstrosities, ill designed chiffoniers and overmantles’ not uncommon at this period for families of their rank, Adrian admits. The walls are ‘closely hung’ with Anna’s portraits ‘mainly versions of ourselves at all ages’, says Adrian, ‘which we did not find stimulating to our young imaginations’. Adrian speculates that his own preference for landscapes over portraits and his interest in ‘design and colour’, absent from his mother’s work, may have resulted from ‘this early surfeit of faces’. The children are occasionally treated to a theatre visit, albeit with cheap seats in the pit. The mantra at home is ‘Moderation in all things’ and the family motto ‘Live and let live.’ T. R. discourages ‘luxurious habits through an over generous distribution of pocket money’. Adrian admits that, in retrospect, he appreciates the lessons he has learned about respecting all animals (‘I am happy’, he says, ‘in the thought that no fish, bird or beast has died for my entertainment’), but he wishes that the ‘moderation’ principle had itself been applied with more moderation. ‘We grew up in an atmosphere of rationalism and philosophic nihilism. George Bernard Shaw was the family patron saint,’ writes Adrian. ‘His satire and devastating criticism of current cant and humbug were our mental food, so that all the tender fantasies and charming nonsense dear to children never came our way.’ 

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Part One Adrian’s account also brings perspective on the broader Allinson family. ‘Neither T. R. nor Anna had strong attachments, father having left Manchester as a young man and mother having emigrated from Germany.’ Adrian describes the ‘entire absence of close relatives’ on both sides, with the exception of ‘some cousins by marriage of his mothers’, in strong terms, as resulting in ‘emotional [. . .] starv[ation]’. Anna’s death certificate, which I find along with the sketch book at the Mill House, names niece Sofie Ehrlich of a York Street, Berlin (New Hampshire, US, or Germany), and cousins Mrs Rosy Myers and Mrs Nash; the census lists Esther Gershon as a ‘cousin’. Adrian mentions a visit to an aunt in Berlin when he was ; he also calls Broadway actress Lena Maitland ‘cousin’. Adrian explains that his father is so preoccupied with work that ‘there was little entertaining in our house’. T. R. finds the company he needs among his patients who ‘run to the tens of thousand [and are] drawn from every rank of life’. The few guests that do make it to the Allinson table are oddballs, according to Adrian. Among them is Louis de Rougemont, famous for his tall tales of experiences amid cannibals appearing in the Wide World Magazine, and champion woman cyclist and vegetarian Miss Simons. Perhaps explaining his presence at the Allinson table, de Rougemont had invented an unsuccessful meat substitute during World War I. Despite the negative portraits of Anna in particular, Adrian closes the first section of his autobiography with retrospective optimism about his upbringing. Adrian’s description confirms the source of the Allinson children’s unconventionality: ‘The general tenor of home life was one of advanced liberalism from which the usual Victorian taboos and smugness were entirely lacking. Father was a rebel whose refusal to kowtow to the conventions laid down by the British Medical Association had caused him to be crossed off the medical register. Far from handicapping him, this allowed him to pursue his chosen course.’ And he closes with: ‘Freedom in fact was the keynote of our upbringing and if I had been given a conscious choice of parents, I doubt I could have bettered the one made for me’ (my emphasis).



Adrian writes in his autobiography that it isn’t until his secondary school that he realizes his ‘race’ puts him at a disadvantage—and he appears to mean by ‘race’ his Germanness rather than his Jewishness. In one of only a handful of mentions of Jewishness in the autobiography, Adrian describes fellow Slade student painter Mark Gertler’s Jewishness as something foreign to himself and makes no reference to his own heritage. Adrian writes: ‘Born in Whitechapel, [Gertler] was sensitive of his origin and background but our friendship was inti

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A Childhood mate enough for me to be invited to his home. The East End was “terra incognita”; visits there seemed quite an adventure. The jostling crowds of Russian, Polish and Central European Jews had so transformed this corner of London that I felt I was going abroad but minus the expense and discomfort entailed.’ Jewishness has come up in Fresca’s A Childhood. In her second chapter, entitled ‘Sunday’, Fresca’s protagonist Charlotte’s friend Thea is Jewish. Again, here Jewishness is held at a remove. Perhaps heralded by Charlotte’s imaginary other, Lizzie Simpkins of chapter one, I wonder if red-headed, green-eyed impulsive Thea might be a second alter ego for Fresca/Charlotte. The lesson in this second chapter is justice and maybe Fresca feels that it is from the GermanJewish side of the family that she has acquired a sense of fairness. At the end of ‘Sunday’, the impulsive Thea ‘unable to endure an insufficiently final religion as well as her own violent temperament, is shortly to meet someone who would convert her to the Roman Catholic religion’. Supporting the idea that Thea is Fresca, Sonya tells me that Fresca converts to Catholicism as a teenager. In a letter (that comes to me later in the research process) to Miss Fletcher, tutor at Lady Margaret Hall, Fresca’s friend Margaret Lambert explains Fresca’s name change. She says that T. R. Allinson ‘being a strict rationalist of the Victorian stamp gave his children names alphabetically and had them registered, not baptized. When [Fresca] became a convert to Catholicism in her teens she took the baptismal name of Francesca and by that name all her friends knew her.’ Adrian’s Germanness appears to have represented a more significant issue than did his Jewishness. After election to the artists’ exhibiting society, the London Group in , Adrian’s affiliations with Germany, both his blood and his sympathies, result in his exclusion from an exhibition at the Goupil Galleries: ‘In the autumn of ’ when war fever seemed at its most virulent Marchant, the owner of the Goupil Galleries where our annual shows were held, sent an ultimatum to the Group.’ Marchant (–), London art dealer, son of a Bristol iron-founder, insists that ‘no enemy aliens, conscientious objectors or sympathizers with the enemy were permitted to exhibit in his galleries, and should the Group contain any of these, his walls would be closed down’. Adrian knows that ‘this shot was aimed mainly at [his] own head as [he] was reputed to embrace all three elements in one person’. Although ‘it was unanimously agreed [at a special meeting] that politics should be kept out of the domain of Art and the Group rejected Marchant’s terms’, no other gallery is available. Adrian withdraws his work ‘on condition that [the group] sever [their] connection with [Marchant] after its termination’. When World War I breaks out, Adrian is in Dieppe with artist Walter Sickert. Adrian explains his lack of concern for England and an objection to war, which would flower into conscientious objection, again with an oblique 

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Part One reference to the German blood running in his veins: ‘In England too, the warfever raged, but somehow I seemed immune; was there not enough British blood in my veins for me to catch it, or were there other reasons?’ He has been brought up, he says, ‘to consider the taking of life—whether animal or human—as a crime’. And, further, in terms of Germany, family ties complicate his support of the war: ‘The stay in Munich [with an aunt, as a boy] had tended to make me look upon Germans as a people much like ourselves, little variations of temperament and habits of life seemed all that differentiated the two peoples. Possibly the shallow judgment of youth, but it was mine and I clung to it. Today I still cling to it.’ I later discover that similar experiences motivated Fresca’s conscientious objection.



During World War I there is much anti-German sentiment in England. Prohibition includes a wartime ban on the sale of German-made products in shops and on German classical music. Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, in their The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain –, report that ‘[t]he popular Press continued to refer to the Germans as Huns even so late as ; nor was any faith given to the complaint of Germans during the Armistice period that they were starving—as many of them were’. The Allinson family’s Spanish Place home is just around the corner from the concert hall now called the Wigmore Hall. Given the family’s interest in music, it is likely they attended, or at least knew about, some of the early performances which featured ‘Artur Schnabel, at the age of , play[ing] a recital so successful that a second was hastily arranged []; composers Percy Grainger and SaintSaëns [. . .]; Melba and Caruso [singing]; [and] -year-old Thomas Beecham [giving] his first concert []’. Built by and originally named for German piano makers Bechstein, the building, which opened in May of  as a piano showroom with a -seat concert hall, just a year before Fresca’s birth, is seized as enemy property in  and sold to Debenhams at a drastically reduced price before reopening as Wigmore Hall in . The Pulvermacher Allinsons likely witness this seizure and sale with some trepidation. I find online parliamentary records in the form of an order for and an appeal against governess Clara Barkow’s deportation in  that provide evidence the family is indeed touched by Germanophobia, and possibly also anti-Semitism. GERMAN GOVERNESS. (REPATRIATION).

HC Deb  April  vol  cc-W W Colonel Josiah WEDGWOOD asked the Home Secretary whether it is intended to deport to Germany, 

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A Childhood against her wish and that of her employers, Miss Clara Barkow, aged fiftytwo, who has been in the employ of Dr. T. R. Allinson, of , Spanish Place, for the last twenty-five years as governess, etc., seeing that she has no relations or financial interests in Germany? §Mr. Edward SHORTT Repatriation has been postponed for the present, pending further consideration of the case. I learn from Sonya Allinson that Barkow (–) was not only governess to the Allinson children, but also T. R.’s secretary, Anna’s companion and ultimately housekeeper to Fresca. That Barkow’s repatriation was a real possibility is reflected in the fact that the size of the German population in England more than halved between  and . I also find an announcement of Bertrand Pulvermacher Allinson’s name change to Bertrand Pater Allinson in the London Gazette on May , . He is living at Christchurch Avenue. ‘I [. . .] a natural born British subject [. . .] give notice that by deed poll dated th April, , enrolled in the Central office of the Supreme Court, I formally and absolutely relinquished my second forename of Pulvermacher, and adopted the second forename of Pater.’ Most of the other name changes listed alongside Bertrand’s were clearly from the German: from Guggenheim to Gillingham, Franzke to Franks, Pfeiffer to Fifer, Paternheimer to Wheatley, Tautz to Tower. I later find Cyril’s notice also in the London Gazette, but a year earlier, January , . Cyril chooses the name of Thackeray’s young English hero, Pendennis. Kit Martin also has deed pole documents for Adrian who chooses to change his Pulvermacher to Paul, perhaps, I speculate given the moment and Adrian’s professional choices, in honour of painter Paul Gauguin (–) or maybe Paul Morel of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (). These are not the only name changes made by the Allinson children. Adrian’s grandson Tim asks me why I think Adrian changed his name from Alfred. Adrian means ‘dark’ in German, and in Greek it translates as ‘wealthy’; Paul means ‘small, humble’, and, like Francesca, which appropriately means ‘free’, it has a Catholic connection. Brother’s and sister’s choices bring to mind Dante’s Divine Comedy’s Paolo and Francesca. Paolo and Francesca were painted in  by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, himself both artist and poet, double like Francesca and Adrian. In choosing Adrian and Francesca, neither Alfred nor Enid upset the alphabetical sequence of names chosen by their father.



In an effort to gauge how close Fresca and Adrian were, I check Fresca’s will again, but find no mention of either Adrian or son Michael, despite the fact that 

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Part One both are still alive when Fresca dies. Fresca’s other siblings appear: Bertrand P. Allinson as B. P., and Cyril in his capacity as the will’s executor; nieces Enid, Vanessa and Sonya are all named. I go back to Tippett looking for mentions of Adrian. I find one reference to a painting and another to Adrian’s attendance of a concert in . Considering the possibility that Adrian links Fresca to the Woolfs and to the Hogarth Press due to his immersion in a Slade School of Art scene that is closely tied to Bloomsbury, I also consult Woolf ’s letters and diaries. I find just one mention of Adrian, an unfavorable one. In a letter of , Woolf tells her sister, painter Vanessa Bell, that she has been to an exhibition of the London Group and that she ‘couldn’t bear Allinson’. In part as a result of the age difference between the two, Adrian mentions Fresca only briefly in his autobiography. However, when she does appear, it is in terms of collaboration and, in the most important instance, in reference to what Adrian characterizes as the ‘astonishing resemblance’ between himself and his youngest sibling. In her first appearance in the autobiography, Fresca joins Adrian’s wife Joan in an effort to promote one of Adrian’s art shows. The two women don sandwich boards and parade up and down the streets of the East End. This stunt, Adrian admits, does not improve the attendance at his exhibition, but the newspapers pick up the story. In a second appearance, in an important section on music, Adrian expresses regret that he and Fresca didn’t see as much of each other as they might have. He describes them as similarly double in terms of their devotion to the arts, he art and music, she writing and music. Interestingly, for Adrian this double-ness represents both a positive and a negative: I sometimes think that if the advantages of a first-class musical education had been mine in childhood, as was the case with Francesca, a sister twelve years my junior, I might have devoted my life to this art. There has been only one reference to her in these pages, the discrepancy in our ages having prevented her playing the part in my life which her astonishing resemblance to me might otherwise have determined. Francesca is blessed, or if you will, cursed with the same many-sidedness with this difference, that is the second string to her bow is literature. Adrian’s comments about his and Fresca’s dedication to multiple art forms remind me of a folding screen by Adrian (–) that I have seen at the Victoria and Albert Museum website. ‘Allegories of the Arts’ depicts a musician composing, a painter at his easel, actors on stage and a writer at his desk. 

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A Childhood

 Adrian Allinson’s ‘Allegories of the Arts’ (V&A).

I wonder if Adrian was at home very much when Fresca was growing up. In his autobiography, Adrian mentions that while at The Slade, up through , when Fresca would have been , ‘[he] had [his] studio at the top of the parental mansion to which [he] could invite [his] friends at all hours of the day or night, and though pocket money was limited, it sufficed for the needs of the moment’. This suggests that Fresca might have come into contact with some of Adrian’s friends and fellow students. Did Fresca witness an episode in which Adrian burst into his father’s bedroom late at night seeking medical help after overdosing on absinthe and hashish? Was she aware that Adrian was sheltering for a time his friend John Currie’s mistress at the family home—an act of kindness on Adrian’s part which nonetheless horrified the housekeeper? Even if Fresca missed these incidents, Adrian’s selfdescribed dandyism and his bohemian lifestyle, as well as his stance as a conscientious objector beginning in World War I, must, I believe, have made an impression on her. Adrian is, in his own words, ‘a slender young man with sloping shoulders, rather above middle height; [his] face, abnormally long, of a high colour and decorated with side whiskers. The forehead is high and boy[ish] as are the cheekbones; and the sensuously curved lips are of so carmine a tint, that [he] was frequently but erroneously accused of applying lipsticks’. Adrian prefers ‘early Victorian dress, with a preference for check trousers, black jacket, a stock tie and frilled shirt’. ‘[A] shock of wavy brown hair complete[d] a picture that evoke[d] 

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Part One the epithet “Byronic.”’ His ‘passage through the London streets [was] punctuated by “raspberries”, titters or stares’. Although frequently and understandably ‘taken for a pervert’, Adrian’s ‘amours’, he asserts ‘[ran] along orthodox lines’. Despite the datedness of his dress, Adrian’s taste in transport ran to the ultra-modern and he was ‘almost inseparable from [his] motorcycle’. ‘Occasionally the half penny Press would publish a portrait of me with a caption to the effect that this sort of exterior was just permissible in peacetime but that we were now at war.’ Adrian emerges from The Slade with ideas about art and democracy that anticipate his younger sister’s commitment to social justice. Adrian espoused a more utilitarian view of art than his Slade professors, ideas which remind me of those which motivated Roger Fry to open his Omega Workshop in . Looking back, Adrian asserts that ‘The Slade concentrated too much upon the training of students for a career in “Fine” art.’ He says that ‘[he] would rather see a well-designed and executed fabric, chair or pot in a room than any number of indifferent pictures [and that he] prefer[s] a really good reproduction of a great painting on a wall to an original canvas of poor quality’. ‘It is the “how” rather than the “what” that matters in the artist’s contribution to life. In the last resort we are more moved by imperfection than by perfection, however humble the former or grandiose the latter.’ Along similar lines, in an article about economics and the theatre which appeared in The New Age in January , when Fresca was , Adrian argues that ‘a freedom of economic and social intercourse [such as that enjoyed by the Greeks] must exist in the life of the modern Anglo-Saxon democracy before we can hope for any renaissance of a vital stage art. The efforts of men like Barker, Shaw, Galsworthy and Craig, and of women like Miss [Annie] Horniman and Margaret Morris are almost of necessity doomed to failure and will remain so until the shackles, economic and social, which hinder the development of our democracy, are broken asunder.’ These same ideas about art and democracy will direct Adrian’s choices for a set of murals that he paints at cost for Fresca’s alma mater, Lady Margaret Hall, mentioned in the autobiography. Unfortunately, Lady Margaret Hall has no record of these murals. At this time I carried out two nine-foot mural decorations for Lady Margaret Hall, the women’s college in Oxford, of which my sister had been a graduate. As the college had recently been enlarged, and all available funds had been spent leaving nothing in reserve for ‘mere decoration’, I agreed to work for nothing on condition that at least my out-of-pocket expenses for materials should be guaranteed. So poor was L.M.H. that the women students were asked to subscribe a pound per head for this purpose! The 

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A Childhood Principal and her attendant dons visited my studio in a body to see what sort of work I did and discuss the scheme. The ladies were enthusiastic over what they saw and left me carte blanche as to subject and treatment. In theory, this seemed the ideal condition for work, but in practice it left me with the difficult problem of choosing an idea that would please both them and the students; I would rather have been nailed down to a specified subject. As the College could not afford to keep me in Oxford during the process of painting directly on to the walls, I had panels made and executed my designs in my London studio. The theme I chose for the decorations which were to cover two asymmetrical spaces in the Common Room of the College was ‘Leisure’ wherein the idle hours of rich and poor women were contrasted. The wealthy reveled in an idyllic Italian landscape while the poor were confined to the slums of a modern industrial city.



I visit Sonya and Vanessa Allinson for the first time in October . After purchasing flowers on Paddington Station platform I take the train out west through first an unattractive London suburb and then into the Cotswolds. Although I have traversed this portion of England before I’m not prepared for the ancient quality of the landscape and its beauty is a fitting prelude to the grace of the women I am about to meet. When I arrive at Sonya’s retirement home, Astell House, in Cheltenham, late in the day per Sonya’s request I find her apart from the rest of the residents, at the top of the house in a little sitting room of her own. While waiting, I sit in a common room and watch the other lady residents doze in front of a Clint Eastwood movie. The television issues American expletives and gunfire while the Queen and her corgis look down on us from a photo frame on the mantelpiece. The retirement home staff prepares us some tea and biscuits. Vanessa arrives late with more biscuits and chocolate rolls, having had trouble locating a taxi. Sonya is small and shy, Vanessa tall and attractive. These lovely women bear some of the eccentricities and artistic tendencies of their forebears. Sonya, like Uncle Adrian, is a painter trained at St Martin’s School of Art, honoured by the Royal Academy, a member of the Cheltenham Group of Artists and Free Painter and Sculptors (in London); she has an entry in Who’s Who in Art and Twentieth Century Painters and Sculptors by eminent art historian Frances Spalding. Vanessa worked in IT after graduating from Newnham, Cambridge, with a First in Mathematics. She is an accomplished racket sports player, a mountaineer and a rambler and an accomplished bridge player. It isn’t hard to imagine Sonya and Vanessa as little children playing on the beach with their Aunt Fresca. 

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Part One

 Oil painting by Sonya Allinson (Allinson Estate).

The reason for my visit is twofold: I want to share with Sonya and Vanessa what I’ve found regarding Fresca and perhaps spur more memories and I want to gather information about their father, Fresca’s brother, Bertrand Allinson. I know that he followed in their grandfather’s footsteps and became a naturopathic doctor and that he headed up the London Vegetarian Society (–). After older brother Adrian dropped out of medical school with just a year behind him, Bertrand picked up the family baton, the microscope. Bertrand ended up, following Adrian’s death, in a relationship with Adrian’s partner, ceramicist Molly Mitchell Smith (–). Pictured is one of Molly Mitchell Smith’s glazed earthenware figures, –, and Adrian’s ‘Café Royal –’: ‘[Nancy] Cunard is seated in the foreground opposite Alan Odle, her cropped fair hair in bold contrast to her dark suit; behind her on the left is seated [Iris] Tree with Horace de Vere Cole and Evan Morgan, while Dorelia John is to the right of centre conversing with Augustus John; the fourth woman on the far right is supposedly Allinson’s mistress, the ceramicist Molly Mitchell Smith.’

 Adrian Allinson’s ‘Café Royale’ (Allinson Estate).  Figurine by Molly Mitchell Smith.



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A Childhood Sonya and Vanessa speak briefly about their father and their Belgian mother, Marcelle. The two met, they tell me, at a New Year’s Eve amateur performance of Carmen when their father was serving as an assistant surgeon for the Red Cross in Lille, France, during World War I. Vanessa mentions a place in the countryside that their father bought without telling their mother and she remembers the chanterelles that grew there. Later Sonya explains that although they were mostly happy, her father had love affairs and ultimately left the family. Sonya believes that her mother never stopped loving her father despite his indiscretions. Sonya also tells me that Fresca tried to have Marcelle work on her excellent singing voice, but that her mother hadn’t followed through. I ask Sonya and Vanessa about Bertrand and Fresca’s relationship. They show me a copy of A Childhood that Fresca dedicated to Bertrand. It holds the playfully combative note ‘now we have one apiece’, a reference to Bertrand’s Poems, published ten years before Fresca’s book in  by Elkin Mathews & Marrot, Ltd (in Bloomsbury).



One of the items Sonya lets me take away with me after my visit to Cheltenham is a typed transcription of interviews that her uncle Cyril Allinson had recorded in  for a projected book about his life. Sonya’s letters accompanying her transcription of Cyril’s narrative outline the process niece and uncle devised to record his story. Cyril, at home in Cambridgeshire, speaks into a tape recorder and then sends the tapes to Sonya in Cheltenham. Sonya then types up Cyril’s narrative using, appropriately to the task, Adrian’s old typewriter. Sometimes Vanessa listens to Cyril’s voice along with Sonya, an experience they both enjoy because it feels like he is there with them in the room. Sonya then returns the typed transcripts to Cyril for correction. While the recordings began well, Sonya tells me, Cyril’s interest quickly petered out. The transcript extends to only  typed pages. Clearly eager to learn about her family history, Sonya closes her last set of typed instructions to Cyril with a handwritten PPS containing more questions she hopes will be answered ‘in due course!’ In contrast to the flamboyance of Adrian’s autobiography, Cyril’s account is unadorned, almost hesitant. Cyril’s is in all senses a more brick-and-mortar account of the Allinson childhood than Adrian’s. Despite its brevity, it provides useful maps and frameworks. Cyril’s account has a topographical quality that suggests networks and circuitry: a perspective guided by the electrician/radio technologist that he will become. In  Kit sends me a letter using Cyril’s letterhead, ‘left over from the s when Cyril had a job’ before he somewhat reluctantly ran the family flour mill. 

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Part One Cyril’s story takes place in the Spanish Place house where he is born on October , . T.R. Allinson purchased the centrally located house on ‘a turning out of Manchester Square which was part of a well-to-do residential neighbourhood in the angle between Oxford Street and Baker Street’ in  at about the same time he married Anna Pulvermacher. It would gain worldwide renown, Cyril asserts, ‘as the residence of one of the first nature cure doctors to practice in England’. The family stayed there, Cyril says, until  when his father died. Cyril himself left in September  to join the Navy as a wireless operator. Cyril sees  Spanish Place through the eyes of a child for whom the first house is a world unto itself. He recalls in detail the house’s layout, his mother’s fourth floor attic art studio, the parapet on which he put his first radio antenna, the staircases that climb to alcoves and the contents of the cupboards in those alcoves. He hears the clip-clop of the horses’ shoes and sees the lights of passing

 Map of Spanish Place.



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A Childhood cabs ‘wandering across the ceiling’ of his bedroom at night. Beyond the house, Cyril maps out the walks taken daily to equidistant Regent’s and Hyde Parks. He mentions the Wallace Collection, eighteenth and nineteenth century art collected by the first four Marquesses of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace, ‘the blank wall [of which] filled the whole of one side of Spanish Place’. The collection put in the reach of the Allinsons ‘paintings by artists such as Titian, Rembrandt, Hals (The Laughing Cavalier) and Velázquez [,] superb collections of eighteenth-century French paintings, porcelain, furniture and gold boxes, [. . .] splendid medieval and Renaissance objects, including Limoges enamels, maiolica, glass and bronzes, as well as the finest array of princely arms and armour in Britain, featuring both European and Oriental objects’.  However, Cyril admits, they rarely went there as children. Cyril describes in detail several other houses used by the Allinsons during the summer holidays, among these Prospect Cottage, ‘a small detached house which stood in its own grounds in Heston Hounslow (Middlesex)’. After Prospect Cottage was sold, according to Cyril, the family rented, from a man named Reed [Read], Elm Tree Farm in Wembley Park and then three different houses in Chorley Woods. Cyril also mentions  Wembley Drive, ‘which [the family] kept and used to move into for the summer til the beginning of the st World War.’ Cyril describes this as ‘a small semi-detached house’: ‘the private road [perhaps that leading from King Edward VII Park] going to the station [Wembley Park station] had been put up for sale with the land either side and bought by speculative builders’. Cyril remembers these summer places for the bumps and scratches he was prone to acquiring, and also the food. The figures peopling Cyril’s childhood landscape were mostly governesses and nannies, not family members: the beloved, if dwarfish Lilly Cotton; a fearsome French Catholic governess whose stories terrorized Cyril until, he says, the age of !; her successor, the much kinder Mademoiselle Parent; and the reliable and loyal German Tante Clarchon, Tickie, Clara Barkow (of the bicycle photo), from whom Cyril learnt German. Cyril’s first mention of his mother comes in terms of the shopping trips on which he accompanied her. On these outings, again presaging his future profession, he becomes fascinated with the machine used to send the cash and bill to the cash register and then to return the bill and change. Confirming Adrian’s characterization of his parents as thrifty, Cyril describes his mother’s preference for the less expensive Whitley’s in Westbourne over the more exclusive Fortnum & Masons. Cyril also describes Anna’s ‘at homes’, weekly Wednesday afternoons and a monthly musical evening at which Anna would play the piano. According to 

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Part One Cyril, Anna was a skilled pianist, and Cyril himself would on occasion be compelled to accompany her on his cello. Cyril lists Anna’s repertoire as including ‘Chopin, Schuman, Schubert, Scarlatti, Beethoven and others’ as well as ‘one or two other composers of lighter weight who would enjoy a brief vogue’. (Adrian, himself a talented pianist, added more modern names to this list, including Debussy and Ravel.) Cyril was not fond of these musical evenings in the course of which he’d be encouraged to kiss ‘massive ladies with armor plated bosoms’. He identifies these undesirable ladies as ‘relations’ or ‘friends of my mother whom she had met at some of the meetings of various kinds she attended’. Cyril mentions his father only in terms of his fame as a ‘nature cure doctor’ and his waiting room, which doubled as the family dining room. Fresca, his junior by a significant ten years, also appears only briefly: ‘I continued to have various governesses because my sister was born in about  and she had “Tante Clarchon” to teach her German and then successively had two French governesses and a real English governess as well.’ In the course of the interviews, Cyril describes his own education: a kindergarten in Avenue Road, St John’s Wood, followed by a William-Morrisinspired co-ed prep school in West Heath Drive in Hampstead where he is bullied (by the girls in particular!). He ends his narrative aged  or  as he launches into ‘electrical matters’. In a shed at the back of  Spanish Place, he experiments with ‘spark coils [and] geisler tubes filled with neon or argon or some such rare gas [. . .] which would light up in brilliant colours when the current was switched on’. Inspired by a Daily Mail article on the construction of a wireless receiver, Cyril builds his own, although a lack of pocket money means that he has to build all of its components from scratch. ‘I continued with my experimental work for many years and of course everything in those days was transmitted on Morse code, for this was long before the days of the wireless telephone.’



In October  I visit  Spanish Place, but I find the lower windows shuttered. Next door, Number , has been divided up into offices. Its occupants include a podiatrist named Ian Jones, a dental ceramicist, and the office of Robert Jacobs, Society for Complementary Medicine, a naturopath, who would have certainly been interested in T.R. The third and fourth floors appear to be residential. I try to get inside number , but am met with a stern rejection from the podiatrist’s secretary via the intercom. If I want to enter I’ll need the permission of the building’s owners. The rejection is seconded by an entering elderly patient (or maybe the podiatrist himself ) who, when I explained the podiatrist’s secretary’s response to my request, says ‘quite right’! 

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A Childhood

 Façade of Allinson Spanish Place house (HS).  Heritage plaques at Spanish Place (HS).

I notice that Number  holds several blue heritage plaques, one for Frederick Marryat, novelist, –, and another for George Grossmith ( Jr.) –. It seems likely due to George Grossmith’s age that the Pulvermacher Allinsons might have overlapped with the Grossmiths, who must have represented colourful neighbours for the more austerely raised Allinsons. Grossmith was the son of Gilbert and Sullivan actor, also George Grossmith. On Wikipedia, I learn that Grossmith was ‘a British actor, theatre producer and manager, director, playwright and songwriter, best remembered for his work in and with Edwardian musical comedies’. He brought ‘“cabaret” and “revues” to the London stage’. Grossmith’s wife was ‘burlesque and musical comedy actress Gertrude Elizabeth “Cissie” Rudge (–), whose stage name was Adelaide Astor, [and] one of five actress Rudge Sisters’. The Grossmiths had three children, similar in age to the Pulvermacher Allinson children: Ena Sylvia Victoria (–), who will become a stage and film actress; George (–c.), who’ll go into theatre management, and Rosa Mary (–). The  census online confirms that the Grossmiths are indeed living at  Spanish Place alongside the Allinsons. In , George is , Gertrude , 

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Part One George , Rosa  and they have four servants in their employ. On the other side of the Allinsons, at  Spanish Place, I find Helen Annette Clark, , a widow of private means born in Clapham, Reginald Lidden Alderson, a visitor, single, , solicitor, civil servant, Holdenby, Northampton, and four servants. The  census shows ten people living at  Spanish Place and it gives me a sense of the kind of infrastructure Anna and T.R. needed to run the household. The following family members are listed: Thom.Richard Allinson, head, , married, Physician and Surgeon, [possibly employs  or ‘own account’ (that is, ‘neither employing others or working for oneself ’], working at home, born Lancashire, Manchester, of British nationality; Anna Pulvermacher Allinson, wife, , married for  years,  children born,  still living,  who has died, no personal occupation, born Germany, of German nationality; Alfred P. ditto Allinson, son, , single, art student, born Middlesex, London, British; Bertrand P. ditto Allinson, son, , single, medical student, born Middlesex, London, British; Enid P. ditto Allinson, daughter, , born Middlesex, London, British. I assume Cyril is at boarding school. The Allinsons employ four servants: Harriet Wilby, servant, , single, cook, born Middlesex, Tottenham, British; Florence I. Smith, servant, , single, between maid, Middlesex, Leyton, British; Alice Pimmey [?], servant, , single, housemaid, Bucks, Ley Hill, British; Vergés Jeanne, governess [crossed out in red,] servant [added,] , single, French governess, France, French. Also residing with the Allinsons in  is a young man named Hayden Mostyn Kendrick, listed as a ‘visitor, , single, law student, Staffordshire, Wolverhampton’. I learn from a school record online that Kendrick was born June , . He went to Wolverhampton Grammar School in  and in  went on to Wellington College, Salop [Shropshire], later Wrekin College. He must have met Adrian at the school. The online record informs me that Kendrick was admitted as a solicitor of the supreme court in  and in December  became a member of H. Hayden Kendrick & Son, of 

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A Childhood Wolverhampton. He joined up in September , as Private, th Battalion South Staffordshire Regt., and was gazetted nd Lieutenant, in the same battalion and regiment in March . After becoming attached to the Royal Flying Corps in July , Kendrick served in France. He was killed in an aeroplane accident on September , . I delve further back into the Allinsons’ history at Spanish Place using census data. In , at  Spanish Place, I find Thomas, Anna, Lillian Cotton (companion), Esther Gershon (cousin, , born London), Cyril, age , and Marguerite Dyer (servant). Alfred is listed as at school, a pupil at Wycliffe College, age . I find Bertrand (Bertie), age , at Sutton Lane Prospect Cottage with Clara Barkow, , servant/governess (something illegible), German, and Harriet Wilby, age , general servant. In , six years after the purchase of the house and therefore the first census data for the house and T.R. and Anna as a couple, I find at  Spanish Place, T.R. Allinson, Hannah (sic) Pulvermacher Allinson, Alfred Pulvermacher Allinson, Edith Schooling, cook, dom. serv., from Essex [from Orsett, daughter of a bootmaker], Florence Lane [?], housemaid, from Northampton and Elise Gottfardt [?], nurse, Germany. Census data also allows me to follow Anna and T.R. further back into the past. Tippett has mentioned Fresca’s mother’s German Jewish side of the family in his Those Twentieth Century Blues: he and Fresca had visited her German cousins who ran a children’s home near Markdorf. From Kit comes further details of Fresca’s mother, Anna Pulvermacher ‘born in Berlin of “liberal” Jewish parents’; and Adrian’s autobiography had confirmed the fact that Anna was a Berliner by birth. According to Kit, Anna was the great-niece of Ernestine Rose (–), a Polish-born US feminist and free-thinker. She had studied portrait painting in Berlin and was known as a ‘Bluestocking’. I find Anna in the census of  living at  City Road in Islington, east of Kings Cross. (It’s now JS Polishing, antiques, French polishing.) She was born in , in Germany; she is  and works as an ‘artist’. Her father, David Pulvermacher, , a ‘Furrier Employing  Girls’, was born in Germany in ; her mother, Janette, , no occupation, was also born in Germany in . A German servant is also listed: Anna Glosse; Age: ; Estimated Birth Year: about . This information provided parameters for the date at which Anna’s family left Germany: after , but before . Paul Emden documents the growth in numbers of Jews in England giving dates which suggest Anna’s family came to England before a larger migration. ‘In , the year of Queen Victoria’s accession, there were about , Jews in England. The influx only assumed larger dimension after  when life was made impossible for them in the Russian Empire, of which Poland (as far as it was not Germany) was a part. So 

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Part One the number of Jews in England increased to , in , and , in .’ In , as he writes, ‘there are now [. . .] not more than , Jews living in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, [with a general population of ,, ratio of Jews is ., although in London the percentage is ., behind Leeds, .  and Manchester ..]’. The earliest trace I find of T.R., also via census data, is as a ‘boarder’ with another family in Hulme, age . Clearly, as Adrian’s autobiography confirms, both Anna and T.R. have moved up in the world when they take up residence in Spanish Place. The census data, in terms of household size, suggests a rapid upward trajectory.



The Dictionary of National Biography’s (DNB) entry for T.R. Allinson complements Adrian’s account of his father and the census data I have gathered. Its focus on commercial activities reveals T.R.’s entrepreneurial spirit and his success despite his reputation as a ‘quack’ and a ‘crank’. T.R. Allinson established a highly successful medical practice in the family’s Spanish Place house in . He was struck off the Medical Register in the s by the medical board for ‘conflict of interest’, for denouncing his fellow doctors as ‘poisoners’—he advocated health without medicine— and for advertising his products. He purchased a stonegrinding flour mill in Bethnal Green and founded the Natural Food Company in – (Allinson’s bread is still made today). He wrote many books on what he called ‘hygienic medicine’ and on diet; he condemned smoking and linked it to cancer; and he advocated exercise. T.R.’s books include A System of Hygienic Medicine (), Medical Essays (), How to Avoid Vaccination (), Diet and Digestion () and Advantages of Wholemeal Bread (). In  T.R. was accused of sending indecent material through the post, a birth-control pamphlet under the title A Book for Married Women (). He won the indecency case on appeal. T.R. died of tuberculosis on November , , aged , having been ill with chronic bronchitis for two years. Significantly, this is the year of the first Fresca photograph (prefacing this chapter) and also the year the family left Spanish Place. He was cremated at Golders Green, on December , . The Dictionary of National Biography gives Allinson’s wealth at death: , s. d. I find an advertisement for A Book for Married Women in the Freewoman of , and others in the New Freewoman of  and the New Age of , under the title Book for Ladies. The book, I learn, treats marriage, pregnancy and menopause; one chapter deals with ‘mishaps and how to avoid them’, perhaps a cryptic reference to contraception for women. The advertisement closes with: ‘Some may think too much is told: such can scarcely be the case, for knowledge is power and the means of attaining happiness.’ 

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A Childhood

 Advertisement for A Book for Married Women, The Freewoman, 1911.

Other T.R.-related materials include an autobiographical essay entitled ‘The Way I Live My Life’, recently republished as part of a commemorative collection by Allinson’s Bread. These accounts reveal T. R’s almost tyrannous discipline, a mania which must have proved daunting to his children. T.R. gives his height at  foot  inches and his weight at a wiry  stone,  lbs. He has ‘a fair complexion’, ‘a sandy beard’, ‘a good head of hair, brushed back over my head, but not parted’: ‘[m]y health’, he boasts, ‘is phenomenally good, but that is because I take care of it and live by rule. My spirits are always cheerful, and I have enough energy in me for two or three people.’ He has been a vegetarian since  (he married in ). He abstains from all kinds of alcohol and would like to make everyone a teetotaller, not via a ‘temperance lecture’ or an ‘Act of Parliament’, but by teaching people how to live properly. He no longer uses tobacco and has given up tea and coffee: ‘[t]ea’, he reports, ‘made me tremble, gave me brilliant but false ideas and confused both speech and writing; coffee gave me wind and colic and took my memory away for four hours.’ He also rarely uses salt, pepper and other spices as they too ‘are in some degree injurious’. He rises between  and  a.m., washes, rubs his body until he ‘gets it into a glow’; he washes his hair only once every three weeks and walks for half an hour before breakfast ‘no matter how cold, wet or foggy’. He eats three meals a day, at  a.m.,  p.m. and  p.m. Breakfast and tea are the same (brown bread, fruit, cocoa, with the possible addition at teatime of beetroot, celery or boiled or fried onions) and dinner ‘varies [only] a little’. To promote mental activity, he eats bread and fruit for dinner and two or three times a week he has a plain cooked dinner composed of a vegetable soup, milk pudding or stewed fruit. ‘On this simple diet, which will not cost a shilling a day, I work fourteen hours out of the twenty-four, am bright and merry 

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Part One at the end of the day, and have uninterrupted good health.’ He walks between eight and twelve miles per day and on Sundays sixteen miles. He keeps the windows open winter and summer, night and day, and keeps his rooms as light as possible. He describes his boots as ‘broad at the toes’, ‘not tight fitting’, with low heels and thick soles. His wardrobe choices are dictated solely by the elements. He abominates ‘the tall hat’ but he wears it ‘when making professional calls’.  Extracts from other pieces in the pamphlet round out T.R.’s vision and give further clues about his child-rearing techniques. While T.R. believes in regimentation, it becomes clear that he also advocated a freedom for children and women that likely set him apart from the majority of Victorian patriarchs. Among T.R.’s harsher ideas is that breathing through the mouth is a mistake. He advises gumming a piece of stamp paper over one’s mouth at night until one has learnt to breathe through one’s nose. T.R. blames tobacco for pimples and blackheads, deafness, nervousness, and shortness. ‘Excessive hard work before sixteen, early sexual excitement, bad air and dark rooms, must be avoided. Grain foods, such as wholemeal bread [of which Allinson had his own version; pictured here in a  advertisement] or porridge, oatmeal, barley, or maize, must be eaten daily; nuts and fruit must also be used. Daily exercise and all the pure air possible are aids. If these conditions are obeyed, tall persons will be numerous, and small ones few.’ One must eat ‘proper food, in proper quantity, at stated intervals, keep up proper combustion by pure air and exercise, and see [one’s] excretory organs are in good condition’.  ‘To miss a meal occasionally,’ he argues, ‘does more good than a feast.’

 Poster (Edinburgh University Special Collections).



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A Childhood On the more liberal side, T.R. advises ‘escaping the city’ ‘from Saturday to Monday’, if possible. He recommends swimming as ‘a tonic’: ‘the sun and air on the naked skin is very invigorating.’ He advises ‘young ladies’ to take up tennis or to persuade ‘their brother, or someone else’s brother, to take them for a run on the tandem tricycle’. This last piece of advice recalls the photo of Clara Barkow and her Ladies Special Premier. He believes children need holidays in the countryside ‘where [they] can have plenty of fresh milk, fruit and vegetables, and can be out in the open air all day long, dirty themselves as much as they please, and put on their old clothes and tear them without being scolded’. ‘This,’ he asserts, ‘is the true pleasure of children.’ ‘The longer children are out in the open air the better for them’, according to T.R. He advises parents to let their children ‘be out in all weathers’, for ‘wind will give colour to their cheeks, the sun will tan them, and the rain will not harm them’. ‘Frost,’ he says, ‘makes them run about to keep warm, and the cold weather invigorates them. Let the children run about and be as noisy as they like; if you have some place for them separate from yourselves, turn them into it, and let them enjoy themselves to their heart’s content.’ T.R. is similarly ahead of his time in terms of women’s liberation. He objects strenuously to corsets, asserting that ‘Nature cannot be improved by art.’ ‘If women want to compete with men on an equal footing, they must throw aside these things. I desire to see woman man’s equal, able to hold her own, and not merely his slave. The more one considers, the more one will find that corsets have a great deal of ill health to answer for, as they cramp the figure and the mind, and help to make woman man’s toy, instead of his equal and helpmate.’ He reveals that fortunately Mrs Allinson had given up wearing a corset before they met. In a personal moment, he adds: ‘Mrs Allinson is neater about the waist than most women, and the lines of her figure are natural and graceful, yet she wears no corsets.’ I discover that two biographers are working on T.R. Allinson. Chris Lloyd responds to a few queries explaining that he has recently retired and plans to get back into the project. For now, he writes, ‘the right notes have not yet been unearthed from a room that I can only describe as a jungle’! Among published work I find an article by Christopher Scott about Allinson’s treatment of Gandhi and indeed Gandhi’s biography confirms he was among T.R.’s patients. Allinson also appears to have owned Vanity Fair magazine (a print of T.R., with the caption ‘wholemeal bread’, which appeared in the Vanity Fair supplement, is dated October , ). T.R. purchased the magazine from Frank Harris in ; it was absorbed by Hearth and Home in February, . I also find at the Gutenberg Project T. R. Allinson’s 1915 vegetarian cookbook, Dr. Allinson’s Cookery Book Comprising Many Valuable Vegetarian Recipes. The cook

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Part One book contains an address: 210 Cambridge Road, London, E. It includes an introduction penned by Anna, the only instance of Anna’s voice I find, except for her will and her sketchbook. Contrary to Adrian’s portrait of the family regimen, Anna’s account appears to acknowledge the desire for pleasure in terms of her efforts to provide recipes for ‘tasty meals for vegetarians’.

A WEEK’S MENU I have written the following menus to help those who are beginning vegetarianism. When first starting, most housewives do not know what to provide, and this is a source of anxiety. I occasionally meet some who have been vegetarians a long time, but confess that they do not know how to provide a nice meal. They usually eat the plainest foods, because they know of no tasty dishes. When visitors come, we like to provide tempting dishes for them, and show them that appetising meals can be prepared without the carcasses of animals. I only give seven menus, that is, one for each day of the week; but our dishes can be so varied that we can have a different menu daily for weeks without any repetition. The recipes here written give a fair idea to start with. Instead of always using butter beans, or haricot beans, as directed in one of these menus, lentils or split peas can be substituted. I have not included macaroni cheese in these menus, because this dish is so generally known; it can be introduced into any vegetarian dinner. I have allowed three courses at the dinner, but they are really not necessary. I give them to make the menus more complete. A substantial soup and a pudding, or a savoury with vegetables and sauce and a pudding, are sufficient for a good meal. In our own household we rarely have more than two courses, and often only one course. This article will be of assistance to all those who are wishing to try a healthful and humane diet, and to those meat-eaters who wish to provide tasty meals for vegetarian friends. Anna P. Allinson. , Spanish Place, Manchester Square, London, W.

A sample menu includes tomato soup, vegetable pie with a short crust made with Allinson’s wholemeal and a golden syrup pudding, also using Allinson’s wholemeal. Among pages from an album sent by Vanessa Allinson to Tim Allinson, I find a small picture of Anna. Anna died of heart failure and senile decay on July , , aged .



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A Childhood

 From Allinson scrapbook. (Allinson Estate).



Having built a detailed picture of the Allinson family home, I go back to Fresca’s hesitantly titled A Childhood. What can I find there that matches what I’ve learned from Adrian and Cyril, and also from T.R., Sonya and Michael? How much of Fresca’s book is autobiographical and how much is fictional? What kind of book is Fresca trying to write? The voice recorded in Fresca’s book is that of a precocious, imaginative child. However, from time to time, I detect an intensity that betrays the adult’s voice behind this story. To what degree, I wonder, was Fresca’s book an exercise in rewriting childhood? What informed these twists that Fresca gave her growingup experience? The book becomes a puzzle for me, a challenge to unravel. A Childhood seems to open the way to a discovery of the details of adulthood. What led to this version of events? Fresca’s stories of growing up are simple ones. In chapter one, Charlotte feigns illness to get attention from her mother and then actually falls ill with 

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Part One the measles; we meet Charlotte’s nanny, Frilly, and Charlotte’s naughty alter ego, Lizzie Simpkins. Along with Frilly, Charlotte uses Lizzie as a scapegoat for Charlotte’s bad behavior. When Charlotte has had enough of a tantrum she slips back into her Charlotte persona and bemoans, along with Frilly, the atrocious behavior of the recently exited Lizzie. In chapter two, Charlotte debates freewill with Jewish classmate, green-eyed, red-headed Thea. The two girls are caught missing class; the headmistress reprimands them, but is nonetheless impressed by the weighty topic of their conversation. In chapter three, Charlotte and brother Cedric visit Uncle Robert, an unmarried veterinarian with a passion for German music. While in his care, Charlotte and Cedric explore haunted houses and visit a depressed mining town. Chapters four and five take place at the seaside, where Charlotte ‘falls in love’ for the first time with a circus performer, and Charlotte’s pampered cousin falls ill with a life-threatening illness and then recovers. In chapter six, Charlotte learns about poverty via encounters first with a man receiving alms from her father and second with a homeless woman on the street; and in the closing chapter, seven, she and brother Cedric gather holly in preparation for Christmas. The places of protagonist Charlotte’s world are the familiar ones: the childhood home, school, the country house of Uncle Robert, ‘an ivy-clad cottage of melancholy friendliness on the outskirts of the forest’, and the seaside. The book, however, gives only brief clues about the actual geography of Allinson’s childhood. Beyond London, the names of places are fictional and locations are vague: Charlotte’s family takes holidays in Woldingwick and Uncle Robert lives in ‘the country’. The framework of Fresca’s account largely matches both Cyril’s and Adrian’s in terms of the household, its composition and its class. In terms of family, Fresca has reduced her three brothers to one for Charlotte—this likely due to the fact that a difference in age means that Fresca’s childhood took place without the older brothers, just as Adrian’s took place mostly without Fresca. Fresca has clearly based Cedric on Cyril, this signaled specifically by Cedric’s interest in electricity and his experiments that involve, as they often do, the unwilling participation of a little sister. Lining up the portraits of mother and father proves complicated. In A Childhood, Charlotte’s father, although mostly absent, is a kind figure, as he is for Adrian and Cyril. Adrian’s T.R. is preoccupied, but he has ‘a fluffy beard that tickled when you kissed him and benevolent eyes’. When Charlotte is ill, her father gives her ‘golden pennies’. Charlotte and Cedric admire their father; they opt for his atheism over their mother’s agnosticism. He is clearly intellectually very important to the children. 

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A Childhood It is in regards to the mother that the two accounts diverge. In contrast to Adrian’s dogmatic mother, Charlotte’s mother, named Sally, is gentle: [Charlotte’s mother ‘encircled [her] with her love, and everybody showered presents on [her]’.]. This warmer portrait, I conjecture, perhaps results from the fact that Anna was still living when Fresca published A Childhood, but has died before Adrian sets pen to paper. The fact that Anna wanted a daughter, as Adrian noted, also seems relevant. The loss of her fourth child and first daughter Dulcie at age two must have been devastating. (Dulcie’s death took place at the Heston house, according to Adrian, perhaps in Anna’s absence). Anna must have been all the more pleased when Fresca arrived and this might account for Fresca’s more positive memory of her mother. However, even considering this, it seems hard to believe that Fresca and Adrian are talking about the same person when they portray their mother. However, despite the generally more positive picture of the mother figure, Fresca’s portrait registers tensions similar to those described by Adrian. Fresca portrays a mother cowed by a domineering husband: ‘My mother, who had to interpret everyday events to him, feel them aloud, as it were, and then assist him to make them his own, always had to help him over his children.’ Her father, though ‘a good deal the older of the two [. . .] continually needed to be mothered’. Without the competition of brothers, Charlotte appears to command much attention, but the love bestowed on her during her illness turns out to be unusual. When it appears Charlotte is on the mend, father takes back mother’s attentions insisting that she accompany him to a series of lectures that he regrets having agreed to deliver. The narrative shifts from fantasy to reality. ‘Ours was not one of those households where everything revolved around the children’: father’s visits to the nursery are counted as ‘an honour’. The mother’s distractedness due to the father’s petulance forces Charlotte to seek solace with her nurse (as did Cyril). ‘My mother’s continuous giving way to my wishes and will had become irksome: the softness relaxed me, the willing became burdensome. Frilly’s authority had taken that burden away, and by substituting her will for mine, she set me at greater rest. I was glad of the astringent.’ But what really sets the various stories of childhood apart, however, are the epiphanies. While Fresca’s book is structured around revelations, any such high points are almost completely absent from either Cyril’s or Adrian’s accounts of childhood. I keep returning to one passage from Adrian’s autobiography: ‘Had mother been endowed with specifically feminine charms,’ he writes, ‘those early days might have contained for me elements of ecstasy which fall to the lot of most children, illuminating childhood with unforgettable moments of glory. My memory records no such experiences; an ordered and controlled animal well-being devoid both of highlights or deep shadows fill the canvas.’ Those same ‘unforget

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Part One table moments of glory’ so glaringly absent from Adrian’s childhood illuminate Fresca’s.



Fresca’s illness is missing from all of the accounts of childhood. I am unclear when Fresca’s thyroid problem began, but Tippett notes her goitre on their first encounter at the Allinson home when Fresca was in her early twenties. At this point, I learn later, she is on hiatus from her undergraduate studies due to the illness, suggesting that it was ongoing and relatively serious. I scrutinize the photo of Fresca at . I think I see a dark shadow at her throat. Based on Tippett’s description of Fresca’s illness, I deduce that Fresca suffered from hyperthyroidism or an overactive thyroid. Thyroid hormone controls the pace of the metabolic rate and an excess of thyroid hormone speeds up bodily functions. Symptoms include: ‘nervousness, irritability, increased perspiration, heart racing, hand tremors, anxiety, difficulty sleeping, thinning of the skin, fine brittle hair, and muscular weakness—especially in the upper arms and thighs. More frequent bowel movements may occur, but diarrhea is uncommon. Weight loss, sometimes significant, may occur despite a good appetite (though  of people with a hyperactive thyroid experience weight gain), vomiting may occur, and, for women, menstrual flow may lighten and menstrual periods may occur less often’. Illness is the leading item in A Childhood. It’s the title of the first chapter, which is accompanied by Enid Marx’s tray woodcut, Fresca’s favorite. However, Charlotte has a bad bout of measles, not Fresca’s longer-term thyroid problem. Why this de-escalation?

 Enid Marx’s tray woodcut, A Childhood (Random House; Eleanor Breuning).

What stands out is Charlotte’s ability to manipulate her illness and Fresca’s efforts to capture the poetry of the sick room. Fresca describes illness with an intensity only available to someone who has had firsthand experience. I pull out 

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A Childhood Virginia Woolf ’s ‘On Being Ill’, first published in the Criterion magazine in  and then in pamphlet form with the Hogarth Press in . In the essay, Woolf speculates at length about literature’s failure to address physical illness. Writers, Woolf argues, focus on recording the torments of the mind and the soul, but they tend to ignore ‘this monster, the body’. [L]iterature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane— smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama there is no record [. . .] Those great wars which it wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. At the heart of Woolf ’s essay full of tangents is the voice of a person very familiar with the challenges of a disease that hampers physical as well as mental activity. ‘On Being Ill’ is an insider’s description of pain, most clearly seen when Woolf continues to argue that the reason for literature’s neglect of the body is not difficult to deduce, for ‘[t]o look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the rapture of transcendentalism.’ In her ‘Illness’ chapter, Fresca’s protagonist, Charlotte, describes herself as ‘a remarkably strong little girl’.  After feigning illness in order to get attention from her mother and the housekeeper-nanny Frilly, whose rheumatism martyrdom has inspired Charlotte with the idea that ill people command respect, Charlotte actually contracts measles. Although debilitating, being ill becomes an adventure for the child. Charlotte revels in her three days of delirium. From the child’s perspective it’s ‘equivalent to suffering shipwreck or meeting highwaymen’. She ‘savoured to the full a world that had shifted its centre’: ‘I could not help noticing that I had 

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Part One turned into the most important member of the household.’ Every time Charlotte wakes, she finds herself in ‘a strange country, as unfamiliar as if [she]’d traveled a thousand miles before reaching it, and yet peculiar in its strangeness, inasmuch as it bore a superficial resemblance to my most ordinary surroundings’. So tired that she is unable to lift her head, Charlotte’s world narrows to the borders of her bed, and she loses perspective on even her most intimate possessions: ‘a mist, a turning of wheels and a throb of fire came between them and me’. ‘I floated down a dark stream while remaining in the same place, watched my certainties melt from the grasp of many years’ experience and be swallowed into an ever-deepening gulf.’ Nights terrify the child: ‘[t]ime after time I threw off woolly thicknesses of nightmare, struggled out of a pit of sleep, with the conviction that it must be day, only to realize that I was lost within a sixmonths’ arctic night that enclosed me within prisoner darkness.’ Illness returns in Fresca’s A Childhood in the form of dark-haired, delicate cousin Libby’s diphtheria, and I wonder if perhaps it is here that we have the better reflection of Fresca’s own battle with ill health. Libby is ‘delicate’.  She is ‘subject to chills and fevers, had to wear shawls beneath her reefer coat, could never go bareheaded, and suffered interminable examinations for wet feet’. When brother Hal asks if Libby is very ill, his mother responds (in a way which perhaps reflects T. R.’s philosophy about physical health and Fresca’s disagreement with it): ‘“No one is very ill unless they let themselves go,” answered Scuttles illogically, but in accordance with her iron will and refusal to be daunted by illness.’



When Cyril Allinson died, Kit Martin sent T.R.’s effects to Edinburgh University, his alma mater. I visit the collection in June . It consists of a record of T.R.’s professional career, mostly his publications and newspaper cuttings, kept in large scrapbooks. Several cuttings contain pictures and testimony regarding so-called ‘Allinsonian children’. Pictured here is Winifred Stanhope, Allinsonian child, in Children’s Realm in August .  Winifred Stanhope (Edinburgh University Special Collections).



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A Childhood The caption for this picture reads: Winifred Stanhope, the subject of the accompanying photograph, is three years and three months old, and has been brought up entirely upon Vegetarian lines; or perhaps, to be strictly correct, we should say Allinsonian lines, for the brown bread champion has been the only medical adviser, and the medical column of the Weekly Times has been the only vade mecum. The first solid food given was wholemeal bread, and since then ‘Allinson’s food,’ green vegetables, potatoes, rice, or other similar and simple foods. At the present time she is a thoroughly healthy, romping, bouncing girl, whose ruddy complexion and curls are the envy and the attraction of all. The exuberance of her spirits and her healthy appetite, for even the plainest foods, are the only difficulties which have to be kept in check. With the exception of an occasional cold, she has so far never had any serious illness. One scrapbook contains copies of T. R.’s advice column in the Weekly Times and Echo. Each week he addresses a different ailment. I search for thyroid, but find nothing. Among T.R. Allinson’s papers I come across a large poster, an advertisement for T. R.’s Weekly Times and Echo column, emblazoned with the words ‘WHY BE ILL?’ and I am reminded of Scuttles’s comments. I wonder how this challenge must have sounded to Fresca afflicted as she was with an illness that was out of her control and also so visible. Did T. R.’s unorthodox ideas hamper Fresca’s recovery? Among the papers, I find just one mention of T.R.’s own family ():

 ‘Why Be Ill?’ poster (Edinburgh University Special Collections).



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Part One [T.R. Allinson] is no practiser of what he does not preach, and the robust health of himself and his family is a living testimony to the value of his methods. The boys are all sturdy specimens. The eldest son, Alfred, is twenty-one years of age, and an artist. The second son, Bertram, twenty years old, is a medical student at the University College, London. The third son, Cyril, is nearly sixteen and still at school. The youngest is Enid [Fresca], a pretty girl of nine, with light brown ringlets falling abut her happy face. Much later, Sonya sends me this photograph of father and daughter. It is testament to a warm and intimate relationship.

 T.R. Allinson and Fresca (Allinson Estate).



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PART TWO

Coming of Age O

Kit Martin’s advice, I contact Lady Margaret Hall archivist Oliver Mahony. Mahony searches the college’s alumni magazine The Brown Book and quickly comes up with an obituary for Fresca, signed ‘M.L’. Mahony suggests a few names, contemporaries of Fresca, as possible author, but, using Fresca’s will, I translate ‘M.L.’ to ‘Margaret Lambert’. Less fragmented than Tippett’s account, Lambert’s biographical sketch shows Fresca’s life as it grew out of her time at Oxford. The obituary provides details about Fresca’s education, her musical scholarship, her writings, published and unpublished, and introduces a place called Martin’s Grove. N

IN MEMORIAM FRANCESCA ALLINSON August th, –April th,  The death of Francesca Allinson, at the early age of , is a loss not only to her immense circle of friends, but also to all interested in English music. Daughter of the famous Dr Allinson, and on her mother’s side half German-Jewish, she was gifted with rare sensibility in all the arts, but especially music and literature, and endowed with so vivid and attractive a personality that few who knew her, however slightly, can fail to remember her. The ill health which was to haunt her all her life and to impede the full development of her talents, interrupted her studies at University College London. Her loss was our gain, for when she was able to resume them, she came up to L.M.H., in , rather later and much more travelled, cultured and mature in judgement than are most undergraduates. Her exceptional gifts soon showed themselves. She trained an excellent a capella choir, predominantly under

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Part Two graduate, and developed a remarkable ability for making all sorts and conditions of people sing. Her Oxford Choir ranged over a wide field, from early Italian polyphonic music, Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Vecchi (L’Amphiparnasso complete with puppets was specially successful) to ultra-modern German composers. She kept up this choir for several years after going down in , indeed until another bout of illness, and thereby opened up quite new musical horizons to many generations of undergraduates. All her life she continued this interest in choirs and formed them of all sorts of people— working men, children. In musical scholarship Purcell was her biggest field. The Purcell editions of the Nagel Archives (the German publishing firm) were entirely her work, though the German editor was reluctant to admit this; characteristically she troubled little to have omissions of her name rectified. Her edition of the Fantasies is likely to remain the finest obtainable until such time as the Purcell Society’s own volume may appear. During her last years, in spite of increasing illness, she succeeded in almost completing a critical monograph on English and Irish folk-songs. She noticed that a particular kind of tune appearing frequently in those collected by Cecil Sharp is rarely to be found in the big earlier collections. By analyzing and tracing back large numbers of them she concluded that they must be of Irish provenance and only recent arrivals in England. Michael Tippett, the composer, hopes to be able shortly to complete this work for publication, not only for the interest of the argument, but for the large number of lovely tunes collected in it. Besides her musical studies in  she published a semi-autobiographical novel, A Childhood, with the Hogarth Press. Written with great charm, and a literary skill the more pervasive for its extreme unobtrusiveness, this book attracted little attention at the time, being overshadowed by the rising menace of events abroad. It is hoped, as paper supplies permit, to publish a posthumous volume of short stories she wrote during this war. In so short a space it is not possible to do justice to her manifold interests, endless generosity and the wit, charm, and gaiety she retained to the end. One thing may be singled out. She was greatly interested in trees and afforestation and, prompted by Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, has bequeathed a small wood in Essex, Martin’s Grove, near Colchester, to L.M.H.



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Coming of Age

 Margaret Lambert’s Brown Book obituary for Fresca (courtesy of LMH).

Lambert gives precise dates for Fresca’s birth and death, August , , and April , . And Fresca comes to life in Lambert’s description: her ‘vivid and attractive personality’, her ‘immense circle of friends’, her ‘manifold interests, endless generosity [. . .] wit, charm and gaiety’. Lambert also gives a sense of the longevity of Fresca’s illness. Fresca is forced to suspend her education after her first year at University College London. The obituary also provides parameters for Fresca’s stay in Oxford, which begins in  and extends beyond her graduation in . In published University Exam Results at JSTOR I find Enid E. Allinson graduating from LMH in English Literature and Language with a Class II degree. Poet W. H. Auden graduates the same year, also in English (from Christ Church), with a Class III. Further records supplied by Mahony show Fresca matriculated in London in June , confirming Lambert’s record, in ‘Eng., Math, Lat, Eng. Hist., and French’. I contact University College London and King’s, but neither has records of Fresca’s attendance. Tippett scholar, Oliver Soden, has better luck than I and later discovers via records from UCL that Fresca was in fact educated at Leinster House School for Girls near Hyde Park, as well as Tr[inity] Col[lege], and that she was also privately tutored. The day school appears to have been run privately by Theosophists, the Misses Manville: it ‘aimed at 

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Part Two “preparing girls of good social standing for a definite purpose in life” and had more self-regulation by the girls than other Theosophical schools.’ An advertisement for the school promised ‘[g]reat attention to outdoor exercise and sports.’ At Oxford, Fresca is exempted from Responsions in , perhaps due to the fact that she had matriculated in London; the London year, I speculate, might have been an Oxford preparatory course. I look at Fresca’s graduating class and find Milicent Bagot graduating alongside Fresca. Bagot, an expert on international communism, will become the first woman appointed to a senior rank in MI. According to her Guardian obituary, she is the likely ‘model for the admirably robust and outspoken Connie Sachs, the unforgettable, larger than life “Moscow watcher” in John le Carré’s novels, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People’.



In , Lady Margaret Hall is an all-women’s college of approximately  students (up from  in ). Principal Lynda Grier doubles the number of students at LMH between  and . She’s able to do so in part due to a first new housing block named for Eleanor Lodge in  and then a second named Deneke Hall, built with an endowment from American patron E. S. Harkness in . LMH opened its doors, the first women’s college at Oxford alongside Somerville, in  with Elizabeth Wordsworth, great-niece of the poet, at its helm and just nine students in her care. Among LMH’s first students is Gertrude Bell (–), variously described as ‘traveller, archaeologist, and diplomatist’, and ‘spy, Arabist, linguist, author, poet, photographer and legendary mountaineer’. In the early twenties efforts are made to secure funding for Oxford’s endowment-less women’s colleges. Women are not admitted to degrees at Oxford University until  and, even then, women are still not entirely welcome at the university. Giving a sense of where women stand at Oxford at this time, the Daily Herald reports on June , , that ‘Oxford to-day decided, by  votes to , to limit the number of women in residence at the University’. LMH is to have a limit of , Somerville, , St Hugh’s , and St Hilda’s . Margery Fry, then principal at Somerville, the Herald reports, protests: ‘women were sick of the women’s question and the disabilities of their sex, and they felt bound to resist this encroachment on their autonomy, and the privileges they had already been given.’ Women, she insists, don’t need their own party in the University: ‘[t]hey wanted to be treated, not as women, but as human beings.’ Fry reports that one undergraduate had said his objection to women came from the fact that ‘women were such beastly swotters and raised the standards of 

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Coming of Age examination’; others complained about the changes women brought to social life at Oxford. When Fresca arrives at LMH in , Lynda Grier is a few years into her term as Principal, having replaced Henrietta Jex-Blake, who served from –. Progressive in her ideas, Grier, a Newnham Cambridge graduate, has ‘organized classes for welfare workers and a course of training in social subjects’ while filling in for a professor of economics at Leeds University on his military service. In Judy Batson’s Her Oxford, I find a description of Grier: she is ‘friendly and approachable, but decidedly plain’, a stark contrast to her ‘reserved and aloof, but decidedly elegant’ predecessor, Jex-Blake. Grier takes this into account: ‘“I know I am outsize and ugly and formidable to look at, and that could be very off-putting and even terrifying to the young and nervous. So I have always felt that I really ought to take even more trouble than most people to be affable and friendly.”’ LMH tutors at the time include History tutor Mary Coate, English literature tutor Janet Spens, a Scot who specializes in Elizabethan literature, and German tutor Helena Deneke. How, I wonder, did Fresca end up at LMH? Adrian portrays his enrollment at The Slade as an accident; Anna had taken a few classes at The Slade, and so she sent her son there without, however, either mother or son having any sense about the prestige of the place. I wonder if a patient of T. R.’s might have recommended LMH. When Vera Brittain considers Oxford in , a family friend suggests she apply to LMH because it is the ‘politest of the four Oxford women’s colleges’ and it ‘wore [. . .] “a school for the daughters of gentleman” air’. Perhaps the same is true in  and LMH’s conservatism suits the upwardly mobile T. R. and Anna. Brittain for her part opts for Somerville. She meets not with the ‘socially safe Head of Lady Margaret Hall [. . .] but the scholarly and intimidating Principal of Somerville’. Fresca does send Charlotte to school in A Childhood. In the chapter entitled ‘Sunday’, Charlotte says that ‘for [her], school was little more than an indeterminate pause in [her] real life at home, extremely important while it lasted and then forgotten. But to [friend] Thea it meant an opportunity to enjoy the sensations of rebellion, to champion right against wrong, and to do both of these with full dramatic flourish.’ When Thea and Charlotte are caught missing class to discuss religion on the school rooftop, the more liberal than expected headmistress indulges them by encouraging them to continue their discussion rather than punishing them. I learn from Ruth Adam’s A Woman’s Place – that changes in secondary education at the time greatly improve women’s chances of going on to university. There is a general masculinization of the curriculum at women’s secondary schools in the s designed to prepare girls for places now available, 

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Part Two although still in short supply, at the university. According to Adam, the newly enfranchised single women running grammar schools, perhaps Charlotte’s headmistress among them, promote this change.



For an intellectually curious young woman like Fresca, ’s Oxford is an exciting place to be. Tom Driberg, journalist, politician and churchman, a student at Christ Church between  and , invites as speakers Laura Riding, Edith Sitwell (‘Realm of New Poetry’), and, via Sitwell, Gertrude Stein ( ‘Composition as Explanation’) and Oxford University English Club secretary Aubrey Herbert brings Virginia Woolf. On May , , Woolf speaks at St. Hugh’s College ‘on poetry and fiction’; this is the same month that her To the Lighthouse was published. St. Hugh’s is a women’s college founded a little after LMH in , also by Elizabeth Wordsworth. I picture Fresca in the audience at Woolf ’s talk, perhaps a member of the newly founded Oxford University English Club. Woolf ’s report on her Oxford trip to her sister Vanessa Bell gives a sense of the students of Fresca’s generation. Woolf ’s comments capture, as does her lecture, the challenges faced by this generation of interwar students: ‘[The students] are young’ Woolf tells Bell: They are callow; they know nothing about either—They sit on the floor and ask innocent questions about Joyce—They are years behind the Cambridge young, it seemed to me;. . . But they have their charm—. . . We went on to somebodies rooms, and there they sat on the floor, and said what a master they thought Roger Fry; and were Bell and Grant able to make a living by decorations; and was Tom Eliot happy with his wife. They’re oddly under our thumb, at the moment—at least this particular group. I turn to the published version of Woolf ’s St Hugh’s lecture, entitled ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, in which Woolf predicts a ‘democratization’ of art, a subject that one imagines must have appealed to Fresca’s cohort. Woolf opens by suggesting one look to the present and the future in terms of writing and not always to the past, as critics have generally done. She recognizes that the results will be speculative, but at a time when things are in such flux the temptation to speculate, she says, is great: ‘we are not fast anchored where we are; things are moving round us; we are moving ourselves.’ Woolf argues that modern writers are struggling to ‘force the form they use to contain a meaning which is strange to it’. Poetry, she says, is no longer 

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Coming of Age adequate: ‘Poetry is not lending her services to us nearly as freely as she did to [our fathers] [. . .] the lyric cry of ecstasy or despair which is so intense, so personal and so limited, is not enough.’ And Woolf paints a portrait of modern life as so complex and conflicted that it defies a poetry which is no better able to capture or envelop it than, as she beautifully describes it, ‘a rose leaf ’ would ‘the rugged immensity of a rock’. The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is ,,, years; that human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful yet repulsive; that one’s fellow creatures are adorable but disgusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet some control must exist— it is in this atmosphere of doubt and conflict that writers have to create, and the fine fabric of a lyric is no more fitted to contain this point of view than a rose leaf to envelop the rugged immensity of a rock. How, she asks, has this ‘attitude which is full of contrast and collision’ been expressed in the past: ‘an attitude which seems to demand the conflict of one character upon another, and at the same time to stand in need of some general shaping power’? Her answer is the ‘poetic drama of the Elizabethan age’—the one form, unfortunately, that seems ‘dead beyond all possibility of resurrection today. Woolf turns then to consider different ‘attitude[s] to life’—describing different people, then different writers. Some people and some writers are unhappy with everything, others are happy, but consumed by trivial things . . . ‘But there are others who seem by nature and by circumstance so placed that they can use their faculties freely upon important things [. . .] They seem to have an attitude to life, a position which allows them to move their limbs freely; a view which, though made up of all sorts of different things, falls into the right perspective for their purposes.’ For the Elizabethan dramatists, says Woolf, things were made easier by circumstances: the public wanted drama, not books, towns were small, isolated from each other, and even the educated were ignorant: ‘all made it natural for the Elizabethan imagination to fill itself with lions and unicorns, dukes and duchesses, violence and mystery.’ Shakespeare’s plays, Woolf asserts, ‘are the perfect elastic envelope of his thought.’ ‘Without a hitch he turns from philosophy to a drunken brawl; from love songs to an argument; from simple merriment to profound speculation.’ But the modern poetic playwright has not been able to do this. He, by contrast, is ‘afraid [. . .], forced [. . .] selfconscious’. ‘[Modern poetic playwrights] lay their scene in the past because they 

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Part Two are afraid of the present. They are aware that if they tried to express the thoughts, the visions, the sympathies and antipathies which are actually turning and tumbling in the brain in the year of grace  the poetic decencies would be violated.’ Why have we come to this? Why can’t the writer of today ‘pour his mind straight into the old channels of English poetry?’ Woolf explains this by describing a world in which people have become separated from each other— the private house has meant that there is ‘no violence’, no wars among individuals, no duelling. But, at the same time, if we take people out of their private spaces, we find that the individual is more open than he was ‘and this very freedom and curiosity are perhaps the cause of what appears to be his most marked characteristic—the strange way in which things that have no apparent connection are associated in his mind. Feelings which used to come simple and separate do so no longer. Beauty is part ugliness; amusement part disgust; pleasure part pain. Emotions which used to enter the mind whole are now broken on the threshold.’ And the ‘candour’ and ‘honesty’ that comes with this has had a positive effect on modern writing (in Butler’s and Shaw’s hands writing has ‘awoke[n]; [. . .] sat up; [. . .] sneezed’.) But poetry has been hard put to make this transition—so used she is to being ‘on the side of beauty’: ‘she has never been used for the common purposes of life. Prose has taken all of the dirty work on to her own shoulders; has answered letters, paid bills, written articles, made speeches, served the needs of business men, shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers, peasants.’ Woolf asks if poetry can ever do this and suggests that maybe it is the job of prose to take up the challenge. Woolf goes on to speculate on the future of prose: she believes it will be put to purposes it has never yet been put. ‘That cannibal, the novel, which has devoured so many forms of art will by then have devoured even more.’ We’ll need new names for these new constructions, if we can even find them. Perhaps the most strange among them ‘will be written in prose, but in prose which has many of the characteristics of poetry. It will have something of the exaltation of poetry, but much of the ordinariness of prose. It will be dramatic, and yet not a play. It will be read, not acted.’ What we call it doesn’t matter; what is important is that ‘this book [. . .] may serve to express some of those feelings which seem at the moment to be balked by poetry pure and simple and to find the drama equally inhospitable to them’. She then goes into greater detail: ‘it will stand further back from life’; ‘[i]t will give, as poetry does, the outline rather than the detail’; it won’t barrage us with facts; ‘it will have little kinship with the sociological novel or the novel of environment. With these limitations it will express the feelings and ideas of the characters closely and vividly, but from a different angle.’ This new form will include not only ‘people’s relations to 

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Coming of Age each other and their activities together’, as the novel has done, but also ‘the relation of the mind to general ideas and its soliloquy in solitude.’ It will bring to the novel form ‘ideas, [. . .] dreams, [. . .] imaginations, [. . .] poetry’. And here she offers more praise to Shakespeare. This new type of novel will treat ‘the relations of man to Nature, to fate; his imagination; his dreams. But it will also give the sneer, the contrast, the question, the closeness and complexity of life. It will take the mould of that queer conglomeration of incongruous things—the modern mind.’ In this sense the ‘democratic art of prose’, with its ‘freedom’, ‘fearlessness’ and ‘flexibility’, will be indispensable: ‘so humble that it can go anywhere’, ‘infinitely patient’, ‘humbly acquisitive’. ‘It can lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard.’ In this context, Woolf praises Proust and Dostoevsky. But, she asks again ‘can prose [actually] say the simple things which are so tremendous’ when it has ‘dispensed with the incantation and the mystery, with rhyme and metre’? She concludes that neither Charlotte Brontë in Villette nor Meredith in Richard Feverel managed to mix prose and poetry successfully— ‘the purple patch’, felt too much like a patch. Sterne, in Tristram Shandy, has done it. ‘It is a book full of poetry, but we never notice it’—‘there is no jerk, no jolt.’ Woolf acknowledges that Sterne has had to leave some of the tools of prose and poetry on one side or the other of the narrow bridge of art, but nevertheless his work seems to best approximate for her the potential of this new form. Woolf closes the essay with a last question: can this new prose form be dramatic? Because it will not be a play—‘[a] prose play is too rigid, too limited, too emphatic’ a form. ‘[The playwright] cannot compress into dialogue all the comment, all the analysis, all the richness that he wants to give’—the creator of this new form will have ‘to bring to bear upon his tumultuous and contradictory emotions the generalising and simplifying power of a strict and logical imagination’. ‘Instead of enumerating details he will mould blocks.’ ‘And then,’ she continues, looking far into the (almost unimaginable) future: one can imagine that he will have extended the scope of his interest so as to dramatise some of those influences which play so large a part in life, yet have so far escaped the novelist—the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect on us of the shape of the trees or the play of colour, the emotions bred in us by crowds, the obscure terrors and hatreds which come so irrationally in certain places or from certain people, the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine. Every moment is the centre and meeting 

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Part Two place of an extraordinary number of perceptions which have not yet been expressed. Life is always and inevitably much richer than we who try to express it. What stands out for me is Woolf ’s characterization of the present and the future as in profound transition, ‘every moment’ a beautiful chaos crisscrossed by yet to be expressed emotions. How did Woolf ’s talk impact the young minds of her listeners? How did these ideas shape Fresca’s writing?



A year after her appearance in Oxford, during Fresca’s last year as a student at LMH, Virginia Woolf lectures again, this time at Cambridge, first at Newnham, at the invitation of the Newnham Arts Society, and second at Girton, for Q. D. Leavis’s literary society ODTAA or One Damn Thing After Another, named for John Masefield’s novel. Woolf ’s book based on those lectures, A Room of One’s Own, is published the following year, in . A Room will become one of the best-known descriptions of both men’s and women’s Oxbridge colleges in the s; in its published form it will represent a rallying cry for many subsequent generations of women. Lambert has identified it in her obituary as inspiration for Fresca’s wood purchase. While transcripts of the lectures no longer exist (just manuscript versions of the book), student E. E. Phare’s account of the Newnham talk reveals that Woolf actually made a pitch, one which perhaps Fresca heard loud and clear, for the Hogarth Press: ‘“Now that women are writing (and Mrs Woolf exhorted her audience to write novels and send them to be considered by the Hogarth Press) they should not try to adapt themselves to prevailing literary standards, which are likely to be masculine, but make others of their own; they should remake the language, so that it becomes a more fluid thing and capable of delicate usage.”’ Although recent research suggests that Woolf did in fact attend some university classes, at the King’s College London women’s college (where Fresca began her university career), the role she assumes in A Room is that of an outsider to university life, which she certainly is to Oxbridge. In , aged , Woolf ’s sense of college life is inevitably mediated. Her contacts at Oxbridge at the time are the dons, among them Jane Harrison, who makes a brief appearance in A Room, dead by this point, and Pernel Strachey, sister of Lytton, at Newnham. Woolf ’s contact with Oxbridge students comes via her nephew Julian Bell and also in the shape of some of the workers and writers at the Hogarth Press. Again, Woolf ’s report of her visit in her diary is telling. Cambridge’s female students appear ‘[s]tarved but valiant [. . .]. Intelligent eager, poor; & destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals.’ But Woolf is optimistic: ‘Why should all 

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Coming of Age the splendour, all the luxury of life be lavished on the Julians & the Francises, & none on the Phares & the Thomases? [. . .] I fancy sometimes the world changes. I think I see reason spreading.’ Woolf is clearly stimulated by the visit, but she detects a lack of respect among her young listeners. ‘I get such a sense of tingling & vitality from an evenings talk like that; one’s angularities & obscurities are smoothed & lit. How little one counts, I think: how little anyone counts; how fast & furious & masterly life is; & how all these thousands are swimming for dear life. I felt elderly & mature. And nobody respected me. They were very eager, egotistical, or rather not much impressed by age & repute. Very little reverence or that sort of thing about.’ Woolf ’s sense of a lack of respect is confirmed by a number of undergraduate responses to her lectures. Poet Kathleen Raine (–) is among the Cambridge attendees at Woolf ’s Girton lecture. Raine recalls that ‘[i]n the fairyland of the Girton reception-room [. . .] the members of the Literary Society were gathered for coffee, after Hall; young Eton-cropped hair gleaming, Chinese shawls spread like the plumage of butterflies.’ Raine is awed by Woolf and Sackville-West, calling them ‘two of the most beautiful women’ she has ever seen: ‘I saw their beauty and their fame entirely removed from the context of what is usually called “real” life, as if they had descended like goddesses from Olympus, to reascend when at the end of the evening they vanished from our sight.’ Raine admits, however, that she has not read any of Woolf ’s novels previous to her visit, and that ‘a few months before had not even heard of her’. It is with ‘surprise’ that she learns ‘for the first time’ that the problems of a ‘woman writer’ were supposed to be different from the problems of a man who writes; that ‘the problem is not one of writing but of living in such a way as to be able to write’. Woolf ’s ‘claims [were] far beyond [Raine’s]: a room and a small unearned income were, to [Raine], luxuries unimaginable’. Muriel Bradbrook (–), at Girton between  and , concludes that ‘[Woolf ’s] Cambridge was not ours.’ A few years later, when reviewing the published version of the lecture and several earlier novels, including Mrs Dalloway, in the first issue of Bloomsbury critic F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny (May ), Bradbrook criticizes Woolf for the ‘ingenuous[ness]’ of her heroines: ‘[t]heir tact and sensitiveness are preserved’, she writes, ‘in an intellectual vacuum.’ She goes on to say that ‘[t]he camouflage in A Room of One’s Own serves the same purpose as this nervous particularizing: it prevents Mrs Woolf from committing the indelicacy of putting a case or the possibility of her being accused of waving any kind of banner. The arguments are clearly serious and personal and yet are dramatized and surrounded by all sorts of disguises to avoid an appearance of argument.’ Similarly, now little-known, but recently rediscovered, novelist Olive Moore (–ca.) finds Woolf ’s charge too muted: 

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Part Two ‘If creative achievement were a matter of a room of one’s own, then since the first dawn in which the first woman was pushed to safety in the first cave, she should have been the world’s creative artist.’ She adds: ‘At no time in the world’s history has woman been without a room of her own. But it has always been the kitchen. Then write on the kitchen table! Paint on the kitchen walls! Draw on the kitchen floor! Carve into shape the pastry and the butter! And so she would have had it been essential to her nature.’ And when Lyn Lloyd Irvine (–) reviews A Room for the Nation & Athenaeum in , she recommends a less strident criticism of men: ‘One wonders if the scorn of the male, powerful as it can be, is the whole explanation of this modesty and this unwritten book. If women had poured out a similar scorn upon the male sex for an equal number of centuries, would they have found intelligent men turned into parrots at the end? And though man in bulk has despised and thwarted the intelligence of woman, there have been individual men in all ages ready to treat individual women as their equals in intelligence.’ Things are clearly changing. Other prominent women writers of Fresca’s age include: Rosamund Lehmann, born  into a family whose achievements in the arts matched those of Fresca’s family; Stella Gibbons, born in  in London, like Fresca the daughter of a doctor; and Stevie Smith, born , single throughout her life, and a sufferer, again, like Fresca, of depression and mental illness. Lehmann was at Girton from  until , Gibbons and Smith terminated their secondary education at North London Collegiate School, the highly successful independent day school for girls. Despite these criticisms, it is hard to imagine that the students are not roused by Woolf ’s ideas and especially her closing injunction. And I imagine Fresca would have listened intently were she there. Woolf tells her audience to ‘possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream’ . . . ‘to live more than other people in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not’ . . . ‘to remember your responsibilities, to be higher, more spiritual, [to remember] how much depends upon you, and what an influence you can exert upon the future’ . . . to ‘be oneself [… to] Think of things in themselves.’ She urges them to ‘escape a little from the common sitting-room and see human beings not always in their relation to each other but in relation to reality; and the sky too, and the trees or whatever it may be in themselves’. For, Woolf concludes, ‘if we face the fact, for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation is to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. 

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Coming of Age Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born.’



I visit Lady Margaret Hall in October . Stephen Rogers joins me and we squeeze into Archivist Oliver Mahony’s tiny office, piled so high with books and papers one can barely get in and out. Among the items Mahony shows us are several group photographs dating from ,  and . Can I identify Fresca? I scrutinize the photographs for Fresca’s face and am able to make two positive identifications and a possible third. In the photo of , Fresca sits in the front row, arms wrapped neatly around her knees, smiling. Two years later, in the  photo, I find a different Fresca. Defiantly flouting convention, Fresca turns sideways and triumphantly throws back her head. These photographs confirm for me the transformative nature of Fresca’s time at LMH. In the  photo Fresca is in the front row, ninth from the left.

 Class photo 1926 (courtesy of LMH).

 Detail of Fresca (and possibly Barbara Franks) (courtesy of LMH).



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Part Two In the second, taken in, I think Fresca is in the centre,  rows back from the principal, Miss Grier.

 Class photo 1927 (courtesy of LMH).

 Detail of Fresca (courtesy of LMH).

And in the LMH group photograph for , Fresca stands out clearly in the third row back, seventh from the right.

 Class photo of 1928 (courtesy of LMH).

 Detail of Fresca (courtesy of LMH).



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Coming of Age



In Vera Brittain’s The Women at Oxford (), accessed online, I find the name of Fresca’s friend and obituary writer, Margaret Lambert, on a list of prominent s students. Brittain’s list is useful as it highlights the kinds of professions which are still unusual for women at this time: The Lady Margaret Hall Register between  and  contains the names of Mary Guillan Smieton (later Dame), the eminent Civil Servant who rose to be Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of Education in ; Gertrude Eileen Trevelyan, the short-lived first woman (she died in ) actually to win the Newdigate Prize [Rachel Burton, the daughter of a Canon of Christ Church, surreptitiously entered for this prize and ‘won’ it in the eighteen-thirties]; Rosalie Glynn Grylls, afterwards Lady Mander and the author of books on eighteenth-century writers; Margaret Rawlings, later a well-known actress, who stayed only for a year; Elizabeth Harman, the elegant and vital converse of the ‘typical’ blue-stocking, who married Lord Pakenham, fought two Parliamentary elections, and brought up a family of eight children; the Hon. Margaret Lambert, a member of the B.B.C.’s European Division during the Second World War, C. V. Wedgwood, the future distinguished historian; and Nicolette Mary Binyon (Mrs Gray), the daughter of the poet Laurence Binyon, who became a writer on art and archaeology and organized the first international exhibition of abstract art shown in England. Niece Sonya Allinson has outlined for me Fresca’s interwar period relationship with Lambert and her friend Enid Marx, or Lamb and Marco. Sonya ‘believe[s] Lamb had aristocratic connections’ and remembers her ‘beautiful old house in the country with a large garden’: ‘we all went to visit and there are photos of us all in the garden’, these now lost, it seems. Sonya has last seen Lamb and Marco when they came to the private viewing of her own first exhibition in London in , likely invited by her father Bertrand. They are living at this point, she recalls, ‘in a flat in Apsley House, St John’s Wood, though about to move because of rising rent’. The peerage online confirms Lambert’s pedigree: Hon. Dr. Margaret Barbara Lambert was born in . She was the daughter of George Lambert, 1st Viscount Lambert and Barbara Stavers.

She died on  January . She graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.). She graduated from London School of Economics, with a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.). She was with 

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Part Two the European Service, BBC between  and . She was assistant editor with British Documents For Policy between  and . She was a Lecturer of Modern History between  and  at University College South West. She was British Editor-in-Chief of captured archives with the German Foreign Minister in . She was a Lecturer of Modern History between  and  at St. Andrews, Scotland. She was invested as a Companion, Order of St. Michael and St. George (C.M.G.) in . Next I find Lambert’s  obituary in The Independent. Beyond what I have seen before, it gives a middle name, Barbara, and precise dates, November , , to January , , making Lambert four years Fresca’s junior. It provides details about Lamb’s viscount father’s pedigree, ‘Civil Lord of the Admiralty’, ‘the last man to have been MP under Gladstone’, and Lamb’s education, first at LMH and then at the doctoral level at the London School of Economics (where she studied the Saar region, the topic of her  book). It outlines her work for the BBC, which involved ‘the extraction of information from German POW generals in the course of chats over the teacups—Lambert spoke excellent German—in various country houses where these officers were detained’, then for the British government (Assistant Editor, British Documents on Foreign Policy –, British Editor-in-Chief, German Foreign Office Documents –) and also as a University Lecturer in Modern European History first at University College of the South-West (Exeter) (–) and then at St Andrews University (–). I learn that Lamb received the CMG, Order of St Michael and St George, in , an honor ‘awarded to men and women who render extraordinary or important non-military service in a foreign country’. The obituary also covers Lamb’s friendship with Marco, their collaboration as collectors of popular art and their publication of several books on the topic. They love to ‘forag[e] round the countryside for odd inn-signs, inscriptions of tombs [. . .] gingerbread moulds’. The obituary makes clear that among the things which tie Fresca to both Lambert and Marx is a concern for people less fortunate than themselves: ‘Whether as a historian, in which capacity [Lambert] firmly and unswervingly sought to lay bare truth, as a cherisher of the arts and crafts of the (usually nameless) “humbler people”, as a teacher, or as a practitioner of the art of friendship, Margaret Lambert added not inconsiderably to the sum of civilisation.’ I track down Lambert’s The Saar, published by Faber & Faber in . Beginning in  (after the Treaty of Versailles) this coal- and iron-rich region, which bordered both France and Germany, was ruled by the League of Nations. In her book Lambert explores the ramifications of the region’s decision to join either France or Germany, choosing between economic advantage or patriotism, 

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Coming of Age or to remain as it is, on the eve of a plebiscite. In , the territory was returned to Germany. It fell into French hands in , then went back into German hands in . I find that Lambert is a gifted writer; her approach to this complex question is clear and balanced. I learn that Lambert also later assists E. L. Woodward and Rohan Butler (eds) with Documents on British Foreign Policy (–) in . And in  she is appointed editor-in-chief of the captured archives of the German Foreign Ministry. I also find When Victoria Began to Reign: A Coronation Year Scrapbook made by Margaret Lambert, published by Faber and Faber in . It demonstrates Lamb’s lighter side and her versatility. The scrapbook, which on the occasion of George VI’s coronation looks back to Queen Victoria’s coronation  years before in , brings together the kinds of items one would have pasted into a scrapbook or album: portraits, ribbons, posters, trade cards, and other miscellaneous (everyday) items. I find ‘Miss Francesca Allinson’ among those named as ‘a band of devoted friends’, in the book’s acknowledgments alongside ‘Miss Maisie Johnston, Miss K. B. Outhwaite, Miss Alice Ritchie and Mrs [Cycill Geraldine] Tomrley’. The book is well reviewed. Nearly a decade later, in , Lambert collaborates with Enid Marx on English Popular and Traditional Art for the Britain in Pictures series. The collection of popular art that she and Marx accumulate is now at Compton Verney, not far from Stratford-upon-Avon. I visit in  to attend a day-long symposium on Enid Marx and her contemporaries. I find my first photograph of Lamb (below left). And I speculate that the woman standing alongside Fresca in the second of her LMH photos is a young Lambert.

 Photograph of Margaret Lambert (origin unknown), LMH class photo detail above.



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Part Two English Popular and Traditional Art and the  Batsford title English Popular Art confirm Marx and Lambert’s interest in ordinary people and everyday things. In the earlier of the two books, Marx and Lambert define popular art as ‘the art which ordinary people have, from time immemorial, introduced into their everyday lives, sometimes making it themselves, at others imposing their own tastes on the products of the craftsman or the machine, in contrast to the more sophisticated art made by specialists for wealthy patrons’. They insist that ‘[its] very lack of sophistication makes popular art one of the most revealing expressions of national characteristics’. Reviewing the later English Popular Art, John W. Waterer suggests that despite its rather patronizing moniker, ‘popular art’ represents ‘what remains of the mainstream of inspiration, based originally on the joy of expression through skill and intimacy with objects’. He writes that this being the case, we have neglected ‘a vital element of our national heritage’. He then ties the way popular art has ‘formed the basis of some of the most significant art of our time’ to the impact of folk-melody on the work of composers such as Elgar and Vaughan Williams and ‘the inherent artistry and aspirations of common man’ on ‘literature and drama’, the former nicely linking Lambert and Marx’s work in the realm of art to Fresca’s in that of music. I contact the writer of Lambert’s obituary, Eleanor Breuning, via her coauthor, Jill Lewis, a professor of East European History at Swansea, Wales. Lewis has coedited a book with Breuning called Power and the People: A Social History of Central European Politics – (Manchester University Press, ). I e-mail Lewis and she communicates my message to Breuning in a weekly phone call.

 Painting by Cycill Tomrley of Margaret Lambert (courtesy of Eleanor Breuning).



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Coming of Age Breuning informs me that Marx’s papers have been given to the Victoria and Albert Museum, but they have unfortunately not yet been catalogued. Lambert’s papers are still in her custody, as is the portrait of Lamb by Cycill Tomrley pictured here. Breuning also gives me the name and address of Matthew Eve whom she describes as a ‘young artist’ working on a biography of Marx. I set about trying to reach him.



In the meantime, I return to Lambert’s obituary for Fresca and her emphasis on Fresca’s musical accomplishments at LMH and afterwards: her involvement most prominently with choral work, Henry Purcell, and folk-song. As an undergraduate, according to Lambert, Fresca acquires what would become a lifelong interest in choirs, which she will form later ‘of all sorts of people—working men and children’. Lambert reports that while at LMH Fresca uses her ‘exceptional gifts’, her ‘rare sensibility in all the arts’, to ‘train an excellent a capella choir’— the choir’s repertoire extending from ‘early Italian polyphonic music, Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Vecchi (L’Amfiparnasso [sic] complete with puppets [Omnibus Puppets] was specially successful) to ultra-modern German composers’. Influential figures for Fresca in the realm of music while at Oxford are tutors Sir Hugh Allen and Ernest Walker. Fresca identifies both men in a letter of December  to W. J. Turner at Collins publishers in which she proposes a book on ‘English Traditional Songs and Ballads’ for the Britain in Pictures series. This letter is one of a number, along with another from Lambert to early feminist review Time and Tide’s editor Veronica Wedgwood, which Marx’s biographer, Matthew Eve, will give me. In the letter to Wedgwood, another LMH contemporary also listed by Brittain, written at the same time as Fresca’s obituary, Lambert further underscores Fresca’s tenacity in terms of her repertoire: ‘she was continually trying out new things.’ To the list of works performed by Fresca, Lambert adds Kurt Weill’s  Lindbergh Flight. Both Allen and Walker must have proved formidable mentors for Fresca. Allen (–; pictured here aged ) is appointed organist of New College in . In  he becomes Heather Professor of Music at Oxford and director of the Royal College of Music, where Tippett will first cross paths with him. Allen conducts the Bach Choir and the Oxford Bach Choir. Although he is hugely influential and clearly a very important force in gaining recognition for the study of music at Oxford, Allen is considered ‘elusive’. According to Thomas Armstrong, Allen’s obituary writer and his successor as conductor of the Oxford Bach Choir, Allen was a man who ‘worked hardly at all with the pen, and [who] took no pains, as some have done, to present a self-painted portrait’. Allen believed that ‘music is a living art expressing itself in sound, and only fully alive 

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Part Two

 Hugh Allen, folk dancing 1922.

when being performed. To know the music by experience was what chiefly mattered [. . .] He regarded the musical training of the musicologist as being at least as important as the education of the musician in musicology.’ He welcomed all of those interested in music and ‘elected to work largely with amateurs [even though] he knew their technical deficiencies would affect his reputation’. ‘He knew too how vivid their response to great music could be, and this response, which they gave freely, with all its unseen results, was his reward.’ In his commitment to music performance and in the breadth of his tutelage, his larger-than-life personality and his vitality, Allen anticipates Fresca. Armstrong suggests that ‘[Allen] was a man of great human quality, with the quick, decisive, instinctive brain of the fighting man, and the physical vitality of a whirlwind. His bold imagination, like that of an Elizabethan sea-captain, led him to undertake voyages whose end he only dimly foresaw: his strength enabled him to carry others along, and to support them in difficult days with his own vitality.’ In Testament of Youth, Brittain confirms Armstrong’s assessments when she describes Allen’s reputation for ‘enfant-terrible eccentricity’. She reports that fellow student, mystery writer Dorothy L. Sayers (–; pictured), a member of Allen’s Bach choir, as Brittain is herself, had an ‘unconcealed passion’ for Allen. ‘During the practices of the Verdi requiem [. . .] [Sayers] sat among the mezzo-contraltos and gazed at him with wide, adoring eyes as though she were in church worshipping her only God.’ According to Sayers’s biographer, Barbara Reynolds, Allen seems to have enjoyed the company of pretty chorister undergraduates. Reynolds describes the Bach choir as repre

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Coming of Age

 Dorothy L. Sayers.

senting for Sayers the ‘most enriching experience’ both ‘emotionally’ and ‘aesthetically’ at Oxford. Armstrong closes his obituary of Fresca’s other mentor Ernest Walker (–) by distinguishing him from Hugh Allen. Whereas Allen ‘influenced people by the strength of his personality and his immense vigour [. . .] Walker influenced them by his complete integrity and his fastidious musicianship’. Walker (in a drawing [], frontispiece of Margaret Deneke’s book) becomes Director of Music at Balliol in . Although he’s retired from the directorship by , he is still a presence at Balliol, and in Oxford in general, when Fresca comes up to Oxford ‘holding the post of Choragus for a time, acting often as an examiner for degrees, and teaching both privately and in the official schemes which H. P. Allen organized after the – war’. Walker is a solo pianist and also a chamber music player. Armstrong characterizes Walker’s musical tastes as broad, with particular interest in German romantic masters, French music, music old and new (notably Brahms and Debussy). Among his compositions those that stand out for me in terms of Fresca’s interests are his variations on the folk tune ‘Lovely Joan’ from the late s and his choral works: ‘Fantasy Quartet’ and ‘England’s Helicon’. Armstrong says that Walker brought the strict principles of his upbringing to his teaching and an attendant skepticism to his work. He was born in Bombay and was privately educated before going up to Balliol at . Like Allen, Walker has ‘respect for music as a living art, with its own contemporary masters and obligations’, one even greater than his respect for the classical tradition. Armstrong says that ‘Walker never bluffed, and was deeply musical, and this made him specially effective with the sensitive, skeptical or rebellious 

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Part Two

 Ernest Walker (from the frontispiece of Margaret Deneke’s book).

type of young man’. Armstrong mentions Adrian Allinson’s friend Phillip Heseltine as an example of such a young man, but we might add a skeptical and rebellious young woman in the form of Fresca. Allen and Walker certainly shape Fresca’s commitment to music education and to music performance, as they do her subsequent scholarship on Henry Purcell. Walker’s  History of Music in England includes a chapter on ‘Purcell and his Contemporaries’. Echoing Armstrong’s assessment of Allen and Walker, in her letter to Wedgwood, Lamb describes Fresca’s interest in Purcell as arising from ‘this idea of making music accessible to more people [one that motivated her interest in choirs] and partly from a great interest in English music’. Confirming Lambert’s statement that Fresca continued her contact with LMH for several years after graduating, and providing a name for Fresca’s choir, as late as October , , The Music Times reports that at the Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, ‘Dr William Harris played the Ten Preludes by Ernest Walker on the ‘Lady Margaret Hall Hymn Tunes’, and the Oxford New Music Choir, conducted by Miss Francesca Allinson of Lady Margaret Hall, sang verses from the unaccompanied hymns on which the Preludes are based. The Oxford Times described the event as “a memorable recital” and “an occasion of musical distinction.”’ Using the British Library’s newspaper search, I also find an article in the Gloucester Citizen entitled ‘Reviving Old Madrigals—An Oxford University Movement—Where Music is Bad Form’ which places Fresca in performance at the Mary Ward Settlement and at Morley College on Friday, February , : An Oxford Don and  undergraduates of both sexes will on Saturday sing French Madrigals and th-century music at the Mary Ward Settlement, Tavistock Street, London, and Morley College. 

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Coming of Age ‘I have gathered these musical amateurs together from the various colleges,’ said Miss Francesca Allinson, their young trainer and herself a graduate of Lady Margaret Hall, today. ‘It has not been altogether easy for somehow or other music is regarded as bad form at the ‘Varsity. At present I am concentrating almost entirely on th -century music. It has been terribly neglected, and although there is certainly a revival in England at the present time of Elizabethan music—one of the healthiest signs of revival of national music to my mind—French, Dutch and Spanish medieval music is practically unknown. ‘It is with this object that I am giving these French Madrigal concerts, and I am shortly going to Spain in the hope of resurrecting some of the old Spanish music and introducing it over here.’



Margaret Lambert’s executor, Eleanor Breuning, finds a copy of the programme for Fresca’s puppet opera among Lambert’s papers. Slipped inside it I find two undated photos strips, pictured here. These images beautifully suggest Fresca’s spontaneity and the gaiety on which many of her friends remark. The programme announces The Oxford New Music Choir and The Omnibus Puppets’ performance of Italian Renaissance composer Orazio Vecchi’s ‘commedia harmonica’ or madrigral comedy ‘L’Amfiparnaso’ (). Fresca conducts alongside puppeteers Doris and John Bickerdike. The programme gives no indication of when or where the piece was performed, but I date the performance to  based on information about the Bickerdikes at the British Puppet and Model Theatre Guild’s website. This is the first year the Bickerdikes are in  Two photo strips of Fresca (Eleanor Breuning).



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Part Two operation and they will be the first, along with Fresca, to stage Vecchi’s ‘L’Amfiparnaso’. A later programme for the Ebor Marionettes, the name the Bickerdikes take in  (Ebor, an ancient name for York), describes the Bickerdikes’s work as follows: These Marionettes, designed and made by a professional sculptor, avoid the caricature of many European puppets. They are not uncomfortably stylised and so are acceptable to people of all tastes and cultural standards. In the little theatre in Chiswick, a very mixed audience enjoys them—highbrows, lowbrows, adults, children, artists, businessmen, poets. . . Their repertoire includes plays, fantasies, musical items and a dozen separate items of variety. A short biography of Bickerdike, held in the Victoria & Albert Museum archives at Blythe House, informs me that John Maurice Bickerdike was born into a working class family in Idle, near Bradford, in . Bickerdike learnt his trade as an apprentice to a wood carver, beginning at the age of . After service in World War I, which took him to India, he returned to England and began a career as a sculptor in London, to where he moved with his wife, Doris. Friends in the art world included Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and Frank Dobson, and in the realm of music, Vaughan Williams and Edmund Fellowes. Despite some success in terms of sales and commissions, the family remained poor. Having moved into a council house in Chiswick, the Bickerdikes took up puppeteering: [Bickerdike’s] wife [Doris] had a good sense of the theatre, and, like her husband, of movement. She dressed the figures brilliantly, and manipulated them very well indeed. She saw a chance to make extra money; the Ebor Marionettes took engagements, gave small shows at home and treated themselves to two performances of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, with live orchestra and singers. This must have cost the Bickerdikes everything they had, but it was said to have been a masterpiece. Several posters at the Victoria & Albert show the Bickerdikes touring with Ebor. The venture, however, was unfortunately brought to an end when Doris and the couple’s son fell ill and died, the one within two weeks of the other. John remarried. He died in October . I search, but find no mention of Fresca in the Bickerdike materials. When I visit Blythe House, archivist Cathy Haill, beautifully clad in red suit and red high heels, takes me into the puppet storage room. It is a magical and at the same time somewhat eerie place full of figures asleep on shelves, like so many 

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Coming of Age

 Marionette of a Pierrot, close-up, by John Bickerdike, UK, ca. 1950 (V&A).

 Marionette of an 18th century lady, by John Bickerdike, UK, ca. 1950 (V&A).

guests in a Japanese hotel. Haill finds about five Bickerdike puppets and we photograph them. I go back to Fresca’s ‘L’Amfiparnaso’ programme. It informs the audience that ‘This opera [in three acts] is one of the earliest ever written, and it is a little confusing as there is no solo singing. It is composed in true madrigal style and

 Group of marionettes in the V&A archives, England, ca. 1950 (V&A).



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Part Two

 Fresca’s L’Amfiparnaso programme (courtesy of Eleanor Breuning).

therefore few voices express one character’s sentiments.’ ‘L’Amfiparnaso’ (translated as ‘Twin Peaks of Parnassus’) is the story of two love affairs involving the hero Lucio and the heroine Isabella, and Frulla, Isabella’s confidante, and Doctor Gratiano. After initially rejecting Lucio and flirting with another suitor, Captain Cardon, and on learning of Lucio’s plan to commit suicide, the fickle Isabella 

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Coming of Age elects to commit suicide herself as a testimony to her love for Lucio. Just in time, word reaches Isabella that Lucio’s suicide has been ‘frustrated by certain shepherds’. The last act of the play consists of two weddings, first that of Gratiano and Frulla, then that of Lucio and Isabella.



Another name I find linked to Fresca’s at this period in the realm of music is Herbert Just. Online, in a journal published in German named Musik und Gesellschaft, arbeitsblätter für Soziale Musikpflege und Musikpolitik or Music and the People, a Journal for Socially Engaged and Political Music, I find a / article by Fresca. She is identified in an accompanying biographical note as ‘a musicologist and choral director in London and Oxford’. The article is entitled ‘Musikalische Volksbräuche in Spanien’, or ‘Popular Musical Customs in Spain’, and has been translated into German by Just. The article records a tour Fresca took across Spain organized around music festivals (to which she referred when interviewed about her French madrigal concerts). These featured ‘spiritual and church music [. . .] folk songs and dance performed by peasants and gypsies, Spanish pagan pieces coming from the th and th century played on the organ of Seville cathedral and works from other modern composers played by the symphony orchestra of Madrid’. Fresca is clearly most touched by the traditional components of these festivals: ‘Every choir sings its beautiful songs composed by its own composers, the whole idea is that the traditions of the region are put into these songs. At the beginning of every concert a banner on a pole swings backwards and forwards to wild applause, [and] through this banner the choir conquers its audience. Men and women put their whole body and soul into their singer as can only be expected of this hot-blooded race. Out of this springs a musical coming together of the choir accompanied much more so by inner feeling rather than by external discipline. They sing because they must and they sing because they all have love for their native country.’ Fresca witnesses a wedding in Barcelona, watches gypsies, alternately wild and subdued in their movements, perform in Granada and hears a ‘child [sing] sad songs of crazy women and of the death and sadness of the holy virgin and her dead son’ in Andalusia.  A ship record confirms that Fresca (age ) makes a trip to Vigo in April . Her profession is noted as ‘musician.’ She travels first class with Cicely Allinson (age ), listed as a journalist, whom I am unable to identify. I also locate an edition of Orlando Gibbons’s London Street Cries, published by Schott two years later, in , which finds Fresca collaborating again with Just. Gibbons (–) was an English composer, virginalist and organist from the late Tudor/early Jacobean period. Although Just’s German introduction 

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Part Two to Gibbons precedes Fresca’s in English, the one a translation of the other, the language and the spirit of the preface, the interest in street criers and the comparison made with folk song, suggest Fresca. ‘These hawkers,’ she writes, ‘offered their wares through loud cries, handed down from generation to generation in the same manner as folk songs.’ She refers to various Shakespeare plays in which street criers appear (Autolycus in A Winter’s Tale, Edgar in King Lear), and also to Lydgate’s ‘Lackpenny’, a poem that portrays London life in the fifteenth century. Calling into question my desire to make this work Fresca’s, Just’s interests clearly overlapped with hers: I find other work by Just focusing on folk song, youth movements and puppets. Just’s name comes up a third time. I see it in a letter entitled ‘A Notable Musician’, an obituary notice written by Tippett to the New Statesmen and Nation on Fresca’s death. In the letter, Tippett asserts that ‘the Purcell edition of the Nagel Archives are entirely [Allinson’s] work, though [Herbert] Just, the German editor, was reluctant to admit her name beside his and, in fact, her name is missing from the first printings’. In her obituary, Lambert echoes this with: ‘The Purcell editions of the Nagel Archives [. . .] were entirely [Fresca’s] work [and] [h]er edition of the Fantasies is likely to remain the finest obtainable until such time as the Purcell Society own volume appears.’ And in a letter in which Fresca proposes the Britain in Pictures Series volume, Fresca mentions her edition of Purcell’s Fantasies for the German branch of Messrs Schott, but does not mention Just. She suggests that ‘Mr Hugo Strecker of the English branch [of Schott] will vouch for [her] editorial and literary experience’. The Schott archive (in Germany) has no materials pertaining to Fresca, and I am unable to find a record of an edition of Purcell’s Fantasies with Fresca’s name on it. I approach several Purcell scholars. In collaboration with colleagues at the Purcell Society, Rebecca Herissone, Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Manchester, identifies the ‘Nagel archive’ as ‘the archive of Nagel Verlag, German publishers, which is now a subsidiary of Bärenreiter, but which was an independent company in the s’. Herissone ‘think[s] the reference to “The Purcell edition of the Nagel archives” must be a typo, and must mean “The Purcell edition IN the Nagel archives”; there’s no Purcell material belonging to Nagel as far as any of us know.’ She gives me two titles for two volumes of Purcell’s fantasias ( and ), part of a series published by Nagel called ‘Nagel’s Musik-Archiv’ (–), edited by Just. I later find ‘Nagel’s Musik-Archiv’ described as ‘a series of over  scores [forgotten Baroque and pre-classical works] which combine serious scholarship with suitability for amateur music-making’; the series, ‘intended for the youth movement, [. . .] contribut[ed] to the revival of recorder music’. 

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Coming of Age In the letter to Time and Tide editor Veronica Wedgwood, Lambert explains what happened: ‘it is typical of musical conditions in England that [Fresca] had to work for a continental publisher and typical of the sort of spirit Hitler introduced into German scholarship that the German editor should have taken the earliest opportunity of dropping her name from the work, and conveying the impression it was his.’ Lambert closes with ‘Fresca was always more interested in the work itself than in any personal advantage to herself, and let the matter go.’ On the off chance that Fresca did receive a mention in the acknowledgments, I get hold of Just’s edition of Purcell’s Fantasien dated , not the earlier edition, with an introduction dated ‘Berlin-Zehlendorf, im April ’. I find her name there at the close of the vorwort: ‘Es bleibt mir noch die angenehme Pflicht, auch an dieser Stelle Frl. Franzesca Allinson für ihre unermüdliche und verständnisvolle Mitarbeit an der Herausgabe dieser Fantasien herzlich zu danken.’ [‘Last of all it gives me great pleasure to give sincere thanks to Miss Francesca Allinson for her tireless and sympathetic cooperation in the publication of these Fantasies.’]



Despite its centrality to Fresca’s life, music comes up very little in Fresca’s A Childhood. Only in the third chapter, entitled ‘The Forest’, does Fresca mention Charlotte’s musical apprenticeship. Here Fresca introduces Charlotte’s unconventional bachelor-uncle Robert. Uncle Robert is a veterinarian and lover of things German. He is ‘the ne’er do well of the family’ whose radical views have lost his practice the patronage of the county. ‘As a young man [Robert] had failed his veterinary examinations time after time. Having a small income to draw on, he had gone to the opera and given parties while he should have been at work.’ In Uncle Robert’s care Charlotte gains an understanding of music. ‘[Charlotte] listened to that most moving sound, the impact of notes struck from the bellies of four wooden instruments.’ Alongside music, Robert adds another piece to Charlotte’s education: an awareness of inequality and of poverty. Robert takes Charlotte and brother Cedric to ‘forest mining villages, that had the look of scars and contained lives whose squalor he had discussed before me though not with me [. . .] I learnt a great deal of the hard life of miners, and how, not a hundred years ago, women and tender-aged children—ye, far younger than either of us—had worked bitter hours in the mines.’ Robert also convinces Charlotte of the value of being a woman, citing ‘the Amazons and Pallas Athena and the beautiful ladies who ride circus horses and lady lion-tamers and Lilian Baylis [–; theatrical producer and manager, Old Vic, Saddlers Wells, also involved in ‘social housing’] and Mrs Pankhurst [–]’, [and rather ‘eccentrically’] ‘Helen of Troy 

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Part Two and the terrible Thamar’, ‘Mary Kingsley [–] and Gertrude Bell’. In one of the most moving and enigmatic scenes in the book, Charlotte finds a release in Robert’s company: I now dwelt within a little hollow, sheltered by Uncle Robert’s guardianship: he made the forest’s dangers retreat, caused its allies, certain green spiders and red scuttling centipedes, to lose their terror, and even diminished the power that thunderstorms had to appall me. Yet he did even more than that, for he released me from the captivity of solitude. When I was much alone I seemed to be encompassed by echoing walls, within which my thoughts reverberated, repeated, mocked themselves and me, til I could have cried out. For days at a time I became the victim of a phrase or a tune, and although these often had no meaning, yet through their callous and senseless repetition they succeeded in dominating my real thoughts. For hours together an automaton possessed me, driving me frantic. Ever since I had come to stay near the forest, the automaton had taken hold of the prophecy concerning Birnam wood and ground it into me like fine glass. Incessantly and insistently it pronounced each word painstakingly, drawling out every syllable to emphasize its correctness and using all manner of voices. From this torment, Uncle Robert inexplicably released me, as though his presence accompanied me into solitude and kept its demon at bay. I no longer had to listen to the whinings which had been in the habit of going on within the corridors of my head, for I could now wave them away with one thought of how he and I would row through shark-infested waters until we were able to step out upon a coral island. Neither T. R. Allinson nor Anna Pulvermacher appear to have had siblings, so I consider Michael Tippett as a model for Robert. Fresca has recently, in , as she writes A Childhood, helped Tippett with his children’s ballad opera Robert of Sicily (), with dialogue by Christopher Fry. Perhaps the choice to name her uncle Robert is a tribute to this project and to many years of shared learning about the plight of the working classes.



I turn back to work on Tippett at this point, looking for mentions of Fresca there. I am trying to get a broader sense of the musical and political atmosphere in which Fresca came of age immediately after Lady Margaret Hall. Biographer Ian Kemp identifies the s as Tippett’s Fresca period. Indeed, it appears that following completion of her undergraduate work in  at LMH, Fresca begins a second apprenticeship in music and now also in social justice, working 

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Coming of Age with Tippett and his circle on a number of projects, although the two had already known each other for some time. This collaboration continues until Fresca’s death. Interestingly, despite the suggestion of her subordination to Tippett, if we are to read A Childhood’s Uncle Robert as Tippett, it appears that Fresca was often the more actively or the first to be involved in projects of the two. Significantly, when Joanna Bullivant lists ‘Political (?) works of the s’ [Robin Hood, Miners, A Song of Liberty, Robert of Sicily and Seven at One Stroke] these are almost all works in which Fresca had a hand. Tippett’s involvement with the Communist Party and then with Trotskyism, to which he came initially via his cousin Phyl Kemp in the mid s, is quite well documented, but I am unable to gauge Fresca’s investment therein. Among the most frequently mentioned shared projects are the  Boosbeck work-camp, to which Tippett is invited by David Ayerst and in which he involves Fresca, and Alan Bush’s London Labour Choral Union (LLCU) pageants in the mid s, Tippett’s involvement with which comes through Fresca. (Tippett appears to have misidentified the date of the Boosbeck work camp as .) However, both Fresca and Tippett were, in the early s, already actively invested in arts and social change. Fresca leads a Clarion Glee choir of working-men in Tottenham, a position she takes over from Labour movement composer Rutland Boughton, and Tippett serves as choral master for the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society, a consumer cooperative. Both also have associations with Morley College which begin at about this time: Fresca performing there and Tippett conducting with the Morley-based South London Orchestra for out-of-work musicians. I get a sense of the environment in which Fresca and Tippett are working at this period with a quick look at Morley’s history. Founded by social reformer Emma Cons in , Morley began as a small theatre offering morally uplifting entertainment. Samuel Morley was a textile manufacturer and Member of Parliament. A successful lecture series at the theatre developed into evening classes and Morley Memorial College for Working Men and Women was established in . The original building, used beginning in , was destroyed during World War II; it was rebuilt and reopened in . Gustav Holst was director from –; Tippett took up the post in . Among Morley’s best known early teachers was Virginia Woolf, whom Mary Sheepshanks invited to teach ‘a class of working women’ in early . Suzanne Cole suggests that Morley was seminal in terms of Tippett’s education in early music, and I assume Fresca’s also. John Amis confirms Morley’s importance, describing it as ‘a musical refuge for all of us’, expanding not only musical repertoires, but also social networks. Amis explains that while ‘[e]lsewhere in those days the repertory was rationed to a severely limited 

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Part Two number of classics’, at Morley there ‘was Monteverdi, the Elizabethans, Purcell, Purcell and Purcell . . . the Bachs and then a big gap until Debussy, Stravinsky, Hindemith . . . and contemporary British’. Confirming the international atmosphere of Morley, he adds: ‘I nearly wrote Pritish, for wartime Morley was above all a refuge for the refugees.’ I am unable to establish the exact nature of Fresca’s involvement with Morley beyond performances there (her French Madrigals in ), but have better luck with the Clarion Glee choir organization and Alan Bush (–). Tippett says that it was Fresca who introduced him to Bush, whom she had met via her choral work. I find some information at the Bush Foundation online, but Bush clearly ranks among those ‘marginal figure[s]’, like Fresca, who have been somewhat lost to the record.



Nicolas Bell, curator of music collections at the British Library, suggests that the Alan Bush collection could be a place to find more about Fresca. He says that the letters on political issues show a very different side of Tippett than that seen in his letters to Den Newton, which contain much about sex. Bell gives me the name of musicologist Joanna Bullivant who is at work on the British Library’s Bush collection. In an email, Bullivant tells me what she knows: ‘[Fresca] conducted one of the constituent local choirs of the LLCU [Tottenham] and she wrote to Bush regarding repertoire—they were both dissatisfied with current notions of socialist music in the LLCU.’ Bullivant shares what she has gathered about Fresca, including several exchanges. In a letter to Alan Bush from Berlin (December , , from Tempelhof, Bundenring[?] , BERLIN), Fresca writes: I was speaking to one of my friends here who organizes a great deal of music for the Volkmusikschule, Arbeitermusikantergilde [?] & so on. I told him about the Labour Choir and mentioned that I thought one of its difficulties to be that practically no good socialist (propaganda) music had been written & that we are at times thrown back onto things such as Lord Balbus! He agreed that this was a difficulty which all socialists had to overcome but he told me that some very good music is being written in Berlin now. He suggested that we might find it useful. All that we should need to do is to translate the words into English & go ahead. I thought I would write to you about this & enquire whether you think it worth while pursuing the subject & bringing some of this music home. Please let me have a line as soon as possible as I have to leave Berlin on the th but will very gladly fish about if you think it worthwhile. I am 

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Coming of Age one of your conductors (Tottenham) and tremendously interested in LLCU. Yours sincerely, Francesca Allinson. Bush replies January , : I was delighted to get your letter, and to know that the L.L.C.U. possesses at least one conductor besides myself who does not consider Lord Balbus the ideal Socialist Song! It is most kind of you to devote yourself to trying to find sources of good music. As a matter of fact the same thought occurred to me while I was in Berlin a few days in November, and I got into communication with an organisation called the Deutscher Arbeiter Saenger-Bund, which with an affiliated membership of ,  choirs,  of whom are advanced enough (so I was informed) to sing the Ninth Symphony, must surely be the largest Workers’ Choral organisation in Germany. I saw their Chairman and Secretary, both of whom were extraordinarily charming and helpful. I have brought back with me their Sammlung Gemischter Choere, as well as a number of their other publications (they have their own publishing house). They have promised to help us in every possible way, and would place their printing presses at our disposal. If you could go elsewhere it would be a very great advantage also, because I do not suppose that they have a complete monopoly of labour music, although a great many prominent musicians associate themselves with them, Siegfried Ochs, Hermann Scherchen, and even Schoenberg himself among others. I look at an article that has an interesting perspective on Bush’s obscurity (in this case, compared to Tippett’s fame), an issue central to my work on Fresca. Brian Morton and Kenny Mathieson argue that it was ‘in part willed, a direct product of [Bush’s] long standing political intransigence’. Bush spent  years as a professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music and he was a lifelong member of the Communist Party (–, previously a member of the ILP and the Labour Party). Morton and Mathieson argue that Bush remained largely unknown due to his commitment to a ‘democratic standard, a music that could be played by amateur groups’. They describe his early work as forming part of the ‘fashionable avant garde’, in the style of German composer and painter Arnold Schoenburg, but they go on to say that he struggled with his later work to reconcile a ‘desire for complexity [which was necessarily elitist] and [radical] political ideals’. He turned to ‘popular songs of work and protest’. The authors compare Bush’s Lidice to Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, both responses to Nazi atrocities, in Bush’s case, ‘the expunging of a Bohemian village by the Nazis in 

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Part Two reprisal for the assassination of Heydrich’. Whereas Tippett was willing to ‘aestheticize’, Bush, the authors argue, tried to become part of the event’s ‘historical logic’, travelling to the village to perform the piece in . In , Bush formed the Workers’ Music Association, staging the ‘Pageant of Labour and the Popular Frontish Pageant of Co-Operation’. Tippett accused Bush of naivety— condemning in particular his support of Stalin’s Red Army and of the GDR. The authors explain these choices in terms of ‘reality and practicality’: that Bush saw Stalin as the only weapon against the National Socialists and that the GDR was the only place he could perform his music. They close their section on Bush by returning to the composer’s obscurity—not, they say, the result of ‘his extreme stylistic subjectivity’ nor, ‘to Britain’s credit’, of censorship. ‘In part, it has been a deliberate function of his unwillingness to compromise on conditions of performance, in part it has been due to his abiding commitment to real events over existing generalities. In large part, it has been due to the demanding and complex nature of the work itself.’



Both Tippett and Fresca spend time in Germany, together and separately, in the early s. Confirming Fresca’s hand in shaping Tippett’s relationship with Germany, when Tippett goes alone in  he stays for six weeks at a Bavarian Kinderheim (children’s home) run by Fresca’s relatives ‘on her German Jewish mother’s side’. This is prior to the trip the two make together in . According to Tippett biographer, Ian Kemp, it is during this visit that Tippett experiences a ‘beauty’ and a ‘friendliness’ that will cement his ‘affection for Germany’: ‘This was never to leave him and was later to have a marked bearing on his attitude to the Second World War.’ ‘[The aim of Fresca’s relatives]’ writes Tippett in his autobiography, ‘was to do something for some of the waifs abandoned in the streets in Berlin, after the allies had continued their blockade of Germany after the war; a sickening business, which was eventually broken by the efforts of the Swiss and the Swedes in setting up the Save the Children Fund. The children of the Kinderheim had no parents, nor nationality, but formed a family of their own with their foster parents. Being with them affected me deeply.’ Kemp locates the Kinderheim in ‘Markdorf, about five miles from the northern shore of Lake Constance’. Via a Google Books snippet view, I find a reference to the Kinderheim in a magazine called New Era: Organ of the New Education Fellowship (, p. ). Herr [ Julius] and Frau Lilli Ehrlich Lande are named as founders. They appear to have followed the teachings of Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and I find the school on a list that includes the progressive British school Bedales. The full name and address of the Kinderheim is given as Das Kinderheim Winkelhof, Post Markdorf, Amt Überlingen am Bodensee. 

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Coming of Age

 Harro Siegel’s puppets.

When Fresca and Tippett return to Germany together in , it is with the goal of Fresca helping Tippett through choral recitation classes at Georg Goetsch’s Musikheim in Frankfurt in preparation for the  Boosbeck workcamp. Fresca is better able to follow instruction than Tippett due to her more proficient German. She also takes advantage of the opportunity while there, according to Tippett, to work with ‘the Berlin puppeteer’ teaching at the Musikheim. Fresca’s interest in puppets (and Baroque churches) then takes Tippett and Fresca from Frankfurt on to Prague. The Berlin puppeteer whom Tippett does not identify appears to have been Harro Siegel (–). Siegel’s appearance at the Royal College of Music in an evening of ‘Music by Puppets, Humans and Instruments’ in October  and his participation at the Musikheim in  (where his puppets performed to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas), both events organized by Goetsch, come up in Christopher Grogan’s life of Imogen Holst. Rolf Gardiner mentions that Siegel toured the Baltic with him in  and also England several times in subsequent years in essays included in Water Springing from the Ground. Tippett’s identification of Prague as a destination for Fresca’s puppet interest suggests that she might have visited Rise Loutek, the Kingdom of Puppets. Created in , it moved to a custom-built theatre in the Municipal Library in . ‘The international puppetry association UNIMA (Union Internationale de la Marionnette) originated in Prague in . Its first president was Jindrich Veselý (–) and Czech puppeteers were at the centre of the organization. In  a great puppet exhibition was organised in Prague which proved exceptionally popular with the public. It was one of the first events in Jindrich Veselý’s attempts to support the development of puppet theatricals. In the same year, the Czech Association of Friends of Puppet Theatre was founded. One of the many signifi

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Part Two cant things that the association did to support the puppet movement was to publish the magazine Český loutkář [Czech Puppeteer] (–), which was the first specialized puppet magazine in the world. Jindrich Veselý became its editor.’ Fresca’s engagement with puppets, building on her performance with the Bickerdikes, begins to make sense to me, especially in the context of her choral work with working-class choirs. The historically marginalized status of puppets in the UK and Europe appeals to Fresca, as well as the controversial social critique which often characterizes puppeteering. Further, the micro or local quality of the work of puppeteers and the oral/popular/vernacular quality of puppet work parallels her interest in folk song.



Kemp credits Fresca with providing ‘much of the folksong music [Tippett] was to use in his earlier music’. Revealing Tippett’s long preoccupation with ballad and folk song, David Clarke explains that previous to The Beggar’s Opera, Tippett had already produced another ballad opera, The Village Opera (). Tippett follows The Beggar’s Opera with Robin Hood, a ‘new folk-song opera’, for which he writes the music, and on the text of which Ruth Pennyman and David Ayerst collaborate with Tippett, using the pseudonym David Michael Pennyless, also performed in Boosbeck (). And, in , Tippett will produce Robert of Sicily for children, to which Fresca contributes. Clarke’s mention alongside Fresca of another collaborator for Tippett in terms of folk song, composer and musicologist Jeffrey Mark (–), leads me to consider him as a lead in my search for Fresca. Both Fresca and Mark had ‘strong interests in folk music of the British Isles’, Mark was particularly knowledgeable about northern English dance and folk song, and both Mark and Fresca published on Orlando Gibbons. Mark was a mature student and a friend of Tippett from the Royal College of Music, a colorful figure whom Tippett describes as traumatized by his experience in World War I. According to Tippett, Mark urged him to abandon German classical folk song for something new. Tippett performed some of Mark’s compositions, including ‘Four Fugues on British Subjects’ and ‘North Country Suite for Piano’, and he dedicates his ‘Concerto for Double String Orchestra’ to Mark, who influenced his decision to include polyrhythms and Northumbrian elements in this particular work (like his ‘Sonata No. for Piano’, which he dedicates to Fresca [–]) which also uses folk-type material, according to Clarke). After the Royal College of Music, Mark worked at Time/Life magazine in London before moving, in , to New York to head the Music Division of the New York Public Library, his tenure there cut short by ill health. I find Mark attending Russian spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff ’s sessions in New York in 

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Coming of Age , part of A. R. Orage’s crowd. Gurdjieff was a composer, his s work influenced by ‘Caucasian and Central Asian folk and religious music’, likely a draw for Mark. Like Gardiner, and like Ezra Pound, with whom, Tippett says, Mark corresponded, Mark had anti-Semitic leanings and sympathies for C. H. Douglas’s social credit economic theory. A polymath, like so many of Fresca’s and Tippett’s circle, Mark published The Modern Idolatry: Being an Analysis of Usury and the Pathology of Debt in . While Tippett admits to finding Mark’s ideas fascinating, he characterizes them as fundamentally ‘naïve’. Mark’s ideas did however shape Tippett’s agit-prop play War Ramp (performed in ), although Tippett was ultimately appalled by the ending of the play which promoted violence as a solution to the exploitation of the ordinary man and woman during wartime. Fresca travels to New York in , Tippett says, in lieu of a trip to Spain with Ayerst, Franks and himself, and I wonder if she stays with Mark while there; perhaps she worked at the New York Public Library—her Gibbons publication with Just appearing that same year. A manifest of alien passengers for the United Kingdom found online shows that Fresca leaves Birmingham for New York on March , , on the SS Bremen, and that she returns to Liverpool on June  on the SS Franconia via Galway and Cork. Fresca gives her address as Christchurch Avenue, her profession as musician and her languages, rather ambitiously, as English, French, Italian, German and Russian! This trip clearly finds Fresca in a liberal environment because it is here that, according to Tippett, she engages in ‘one of what she called her “rutting sessions” with men who had to be foreign or Jewish’, and it is also from here that she writes to him proposing he ‘accept marriage and fake fatherhood’ of a child conceived with another man. The fact that Tippett did not reject this suggestion wholesale—he contemplates children, but wants them to be his own—reveals the strength of his attachment to Fresca at this time.



When Tippett and Fresca are in Boosbeck in September , subsequent to their Germany trip, they stage a shortened version of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (). Gay’s play is best known in its later adaptation as The Threepenny Opera () in which composer Kurt Weill and dramatist Bertolt Brecht transform the play into a critique of capitalism. The Threepenny Opera premiered in London at the Empire Theatre in April . The first words of Gay’s play are appropriate to the purpose of the Boosbeck work-camp: ‘If poverty be a title for poetry, I’m sure nobody can dispute mine.’ Set in Newgate, in the world of beggars, highwaymen and prostitutes, the play meditates on questions of marriage and trust. After conceding to the Player’s contention that Macheath’s 

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Part Two death and the ‘strict poetical justice’ which it demands does not ‘comply with the taste of the town’, and after agreeing to give the opera a happy ending, the beggar concludes the play with the following statement, a sentiment that neatly appears to approximate Tippett’s and Fresca’s views about class: Through the whole piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in high and low life, that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vice) the fine gentleman imitates the gentleman of the road, or the gentleman of the road the fine gentleman. Had the play remained, as I first intended, it would have carried a most excellent moral. ‘Twould have shown that the lower sort of people have their vices in a degree as well as the rich: and that they are punished for them. Tippett tells us that Fresca plays Lucy, but I cannot find her in a photograph of The Beggar’s Opera cast in Malcolm Chase’s Heartbreak Hill, a book about the scheme for the unemployed run by the Pennymans, owners of Ormesby Hall, adjacent to the site of the Boosbeck work-camp. The Pennymans were wealthy landowners who, in Tippett’s words, ‘initiated a co-operative market garden scheme to help the ironstone miners, and these self-help projects were extended to include furniture-making, music and drama’. Their Ormesby estate became a rehearsal spot and base for a touring group made up of Goetsch and his youth choir from the Frankfurt on Oder Musikheim, dancers from Dorset, East Cleveland sword dancers and a German puppet theatre, possibly Siegel. Important names associated with Boosbeck include Rolf Gardiner and David Ayerst and, initially tied to Gardiner and then Ayerst, Wilf Franks. Although it was the somewhat controversial Gardiner who led the effort along with the Pennymans, it was via David Ayerst that Tippett, and consequently Fresca, became involved. Whyman explains that Ayerst was motivated to include the left-leaning Tippett in part to counterbalance the right-wing Gardiner. Biographer David Fowler calls the Cambridge-educated Gardiner (–) an interwar England ‘counter-cultural figure’ rather than ‘a British Nazi’. According to Fowler, Gardiner disliked what he called ‘the metallic people of Bloomsbury and King’s’, and was drawn instead to the German Youth Movement or Wanderwögel because it was classless, involving university students and working people. But Gardiner’s was a conservative perspective where a return to the social elite control of the land was advocated—a viewpoint from which, Kemp says, Tippett, Fresca, Ayerst and Franks kept their distance. I check in with Fowler, but he has not come across Fresca in his research on Gardiner. 

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Coming of Age Suggesting possible broader contextual ties outside of Boosbeck with Fresca, Gardiner was an important figure in the realm of folk song and dance, having established the Travelling Morrice in . According to Georgina Boyes, Gardiner’s goal was to challenge ‘the existing ideology of Revival performance’ promoted by Cecil Sharp and the English Folk Dance Society or EFDS. Gardiner believed that the ‘ritualistic genesis’ of folk dance had to be acknowledged if the folk song movement was to remain vital.



How well did Fresca know the other men involved in the Boosbeck work-camp? Tippett’s letters to Manchester Guardian journalist David Ayerst (–), affirm that Ayerst knew Fresca, but it seems to me at this point that their relationship is mostly mediated via Tippett. Ayerst and Tippett met in . Although just acquaintances to start, Tippett’s relationship with Ayerst intensified in the s due to shared left-wing political interests. Tippett’s letters to Ayerst, reproduced in Schuttenhelm’s Selected Letters of Michael Tippett and in Tippett’s Those Twentieth Century Blues, cover politics, pacifism and Tippett’s homosexuality. Ayerst is one of the first people with whom Tippett speaks openly about his membership in the Communist Party and about his relationship with Wilf Franks. Suggesting the longevity of their friendship, Schuttenhelm’s selection begins with letters dating from  and ends with those from ; and indeed Tippett enjoyed a life-long friendship with Ayerst and his wife Larema. Ayerst was also part of the W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood circle in s Berlin and he connects Tippett, and in turn Fresca, to a fascinating range of people including Auden (through whom Tippett meets T. S. Eliot), Franks and psychoanalyst John Layard. Tippett always uses the epithet ‘maverick’ for John Layard (–), and in an interview for the radio show ‘In the Psychiatrist’s Chair’ Tippett says that Layard was madder than his patients (and had to be!). Both Tippett and Fresca became involved with psychoanalysis; Fresca saw a ‘professional Freudian psychoanalyst’, but Tippett could not afford to do so. While it seems that Layard did psychoanalyze Fresca, she is not mentioned in his collection in the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology at the University of California at San Diego. Although there is quite extensive correspondence between Tippett and Layard at UCSD, there is no patient file on Tippett. Tippett does mention Layard’s analysis of a dream about Wilf Franks in Those Twentieth Century Blues: ‘According the [sic] Layard’s analysis, the dream told me that if I didn’t give up homosexuality, the anima would die. A few days later, I ventured an alternative interpretation: if you cannot accept love with the shining face, then the soul is dead. That ended my consulations [sic] with Layard.’ 

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Part Two Layard’s life is fascinating. Educated at the progressive co-ed school Bedales, then in Paris and Berlin for a year, Layard then went to Cambridge University, where he became interested in folk music and anthropology. In , he traveled with anthropologists W. H. R. Rivers and Alfred Cort Haddon to the New Hebrides Islands in Melanesia. Returning to England a year or so later, Layard found that his brother had been killed in action. Unfit to fight, he suffered a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. Shortly afterwards he began psychoanalysis first with Homer Lane, then subsequently with Wilhelm Stekel (in England and Vienna), then with Fritz Wittels in Berlin. In Berlin, Layard met Ayerst, Isherwood and Auden, attempting suicide again when the latter refused to return his affections. After Germany, Layard returned to England where he joined the Department of Anthropology at Oxford and ‘became part of the literary/professorial/artistic group surrounding Mansfield “Manny” Forbes, a well-known patron of the arts. Layard lived at the Forbes’ home Finella for part of this time’. Stone Men of Malekula and Lady of the Hare were published in the s. ‘At the same time he started seeing patients as an analyst and continued his own analysis with Baynes in Oxford, Jung in Zurich, and Gerhard Adler in Oxford.’ I am as unsure about the nature of Fresca’s relationship with Wilf Franks as I am about her connection to Ayerst and Layard, although she is clearly part of their circle. Wilf Franks (–) first met Rolf Gardiner via the Boy Scouts and Kibbo Kift (a camping and hiking association); Gardiner then introduced him to Ayerst. Tippett subsequently met Wilf at Ayerst’s mother’s house in . Tippett describes Wilf as a ‘London-born painter and craftsman, fresh from studies at the Bauhaus in Weimar and various wanderings through Germany and Italy’; Wilf is short, with ‘coal black hair and large brown eyes’ and Tippett falls deeply in love with him at first sight. Wilf ’s father, Dan, a string musician and teacher, according to Kemp, is later responsible for Tippett coming on board at Morley College after this initial meeting with Wilf. Information about Wilf is sparse and, interestingly, photographs of Wilf are absent from Tippett’s autobiography as are photographs of Fresca. I find just a small photograph of Wilf in Meirion Bowen’s Michael Tippett on holiday with Tippett in Spain in . Among pieces of Wilf ’s artwork, I locate a watercolour in the possession of Barbara Slaughter who shares with me her interviews with Wilf for the World Socialist Web Site in . Wilf also designed covers for the journal related to the Stokesley Writers Group with which he and wife Daphne were affiliated and Tippett also mentions a model that Wilf made. Online I find the following: 

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Coming of Age [Wilfred] Franks was trained by Reinhold Weidensee in the Bauhaus carpentry workshop in Dessau, Germany, and knew Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, among others [between  and ]. On returning to Britain, he worked at a training school for young men in a mining area in northeast England, passing on some of the skills he had learnt in Germany. It was during this time that he met the distinguished composer Michael Tippett, who became his close friend and collaborator. Later, he joined the Margaret Barr Company as a dancer. Barr had trained with Martha Graham and was one of the innovators of modern dance in Britain. After the Second World War, he worked at the Ford factory in Dagenham for  years as part of the design team. He later turned to teaching and joined the staff at Leeds Polytechnic as a lecturer in design. I cannot find a death date for Wilf, so, on the off chance that he is still alive, I telephone four ‘W Franks’ in North Yorkshire with no results. Later I find Daphne Franks linked to a northern writing circle in Stokesley. I recognize Andy Croft’s name, author of a book about working-class writers called Red Letter Days and I query him about Wilf. He remembers Daphne and Wilf, who lived around the corner; Daphne used to babysit Croft’s children. Croft tells me via email that ‘[he] only met Wilf a couple of times—he was very old, a semi-invalid and recluse, but still an argumentative member of the Workers Revolutionary Party—a comic-opera Trotskyite sect that faded away a few years ago. Daphne

 Wilf Franks and Michael Tippett in Spain (courtesy of Caroline Ayerst).



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Part Two and Wilf had lots of children, one of whom was a blacksmith and a folk-musician who briefly moved to Canada before returning to the UK with Canadian wife (Kim) and son (Angus). But I don’t know what happened to them.’ I find a romantic historical novel by Daphne Franks entitled Quest, published by the Vanguard Press (Sheraton House, Castle Park, Cambridge, UK), but a letter to the press goes unanswered. Towards the end of my search for Fresca, I find the website of Wilf ’s grandson, Danyel Gilgan, who is at work on a book about his grandfather. We share materials, but find no evidence of a direct tie except in terms of their status as Tippett paramours; indeed, Fresca filled the gap when Tippett’s relationship with Wilf broke down. Tippett does identify ‘Fresca’s actress friend’ Judy Wogan in a letter to Alan Bush, in which he petitions for funds for Wilf, as a ‘newer/nearer friend of Wilf ’ and I look to Judy next.



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PART THREE

Judy Wogan A

N elusive figure in Michael Tippett’s Those Twentieth Century Blues is Judy

Wogan, also referred to as Judith or Jude. I first come across Wogan in Tippett’s autobiography in her capacity as a political ally of Alan Bush, Wilf Franks and Fresca. Her name appears again as the dedicatee of A Childhood; and she’s also listed in Fresca’s will, the recipient of a Bristol Glass paperweight. My initial sense is that Judy Wogan is the lesbian actress with whom, Tippett suggests, Fresca has a tempestuous relationship and from whom she will ultimately split up, but I am not entirely sure. In a  letter, Tippett mentions ‘Jude’. She’s with Fresca at The Mill House in Streetly End, Cambridgeshire: ‘[w]as glad to hear Jude [Wogan’s] voice on the ‘phone & what she said. Hope it all comes out alright & a love based on the great quiet after the storm & not with admixture of hysteria any more’. Through a Google Books search, I find Judy Wogan as coeditor, along with Bride Scratton and Eleanor Elder, of Ana Berry’s  Understanding Art. The

 Eleanor Elder (Travelling Players).



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Part Three book includes testimonials about Berry, an Argentinian writer and promoter of the arts, by poet Edith Sitwell and dancer and choreographer Margaret Morris, among others. I learn that the first of Judy Wogan’s coeditors, Bride Scratton, is best remembered as Ezra Pound’s lover in the s. Scratton had met Pound at one of W. B.Yeats’s Monday night soirees; she is described, rather cruelly, by one writer as ‘the bored wife of a dull business man, [who] yearned for a life of excitement and literary expression’. Wogan’s second coeditor, Eleanor Elder, takes me further in my quest for Judy when I find Elder’s  history of the little studied Arts League of Service travelling theatre troupe. Elder’s Travelling Players not only features stories about Wogan’s involvement with the troupe, but, as an artistic venture involving social engagement, the Arts League of Service opens up another fascinating framework within which to place Judy and Fresca.



In the opening chapter of Travelling Players, Elder describes the genesis of the Arts League of Service in the optimistic post World War I years: ‘The world was to be rebuilt, the brotherhood so vividly realized in the trenches was never to be forgotten: the benefits to mankind of education, culture and art were to be shared by all.’ Elder reads newspaper articles suggesting that returning soldiers, some of them exposed to continental European city culture, were reluctant to return to their jobs and homes in the countryside and she realizes that any effort to take entertainment out into the provinces will be encouraged. Prior to the war, Elder has studied and taught at Margaret Morris’s school of dance, training as a painter under J. D. Fergusson, a force behind the writers and artists

 Dust jacket for Elder’s Travelling Players designed by E. McKnight Kauffer.



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Judy Wogan who published the pre-war magazine Rhythm. From here Elder has returned to the theatre to work alongside Granville Barker and Laurence Irvine, and she has toured with Esmé Percy and F. R. Benson. After being stuck in India for several years during World War I due to a wartime ban on women sailing, Elder returns to London and sets about building a travelling theatre troupe. With the help of several influential friends of her politician stepfather, and also Morris, Fergusson and Berry, Elder ‘define[s] the outlines of a scheme which might, in productions, designs and music, take into the country work by artists of the day’. Elder and Berry organize meetings, described in the newspapers, Elder reports, as consisting of ‘“long haired men and short haired women”,’ to promote a programme ‘so large’, Elder realizes, in retrospect, ‘that only a Ministry of Fine Arts could have carried it out’. ‘For we claimed,’ she writes, ‘recognition for the modern artists, and the orthodox regarded us with suspicion as revolutionaries and extremists.’ The programme includes ‘an exhibition of articles of everyday use designed exclusively by artists; travelling portfolios of original drawings and paintings to be sent all over the country; lectures [and] a block of studios to be erected in Chelsea.’ Among Elder’s exhibitors are ‘Frank Dobson, Alan Durst, Frances Hodgekins, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Moore, Cedric Morris, W. Staite Murray, Paul Nash, Randolphe Schwabe, John Skeaping, Edward Wadsworth and Ethelbert White’. The equally eminent Arts League of Service council members include Wyndham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Tagore and E. McKnight Kauffer, who designed costumes as well as the cover for Elder’s history of the Arts League of Service. Elder explains that after some wrangling over the troupe’s name Arts League of Service eventually stuck. Arts, league and service did sum up what Elder wanted to do: its slogan was ‘To bring the Arts into Everyday Life’. However, the name was subject to misinterpretation and got garbled when given over the phone! After the art division folded when Berry left for Argentina several years in, Elder reports, the theatre company continued under the same name. While a somewhat grand title for the company it nonetheless showed, says Elder, that the ‘Travelling Theatre was linked from the first to an Art Movement, rather than any theatrical tradition’. This meant that the troupe had more freedom when selecting material and also that they could encourage experimentation in production, including ‘attention [. . .] to rhythm, colour, and form’. Slade-trained war artist Paul Nash was an Arts League of Service supporter. Nash gives a presentation in May  in which he hails the group’s capacity to bridge the divide between the artist and his public. It’s time, he says, for the public to understand that the artist is ‘not merely an idle, eccentric creature practically dependent on the patronage of the rich, but an intelligent man fighting for his living like the rest of us, only under more adverse and unstable conditions’. 

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Part Three The artist in turn, he says, should realize that the public’s failure to appreciate his work results not from any innate foolishness, but from a lack of education. For Nash, the Arts League of Service represents a chance to resolve this impasse. The troupe’s purpose, ‘to bring the Arts into everyday life’, is ‘sound and serious’. And he goes as far as to say that the Arts League of Service is ‘a National Necessity’.

 Paul Nash’s ‘Wood on the Downs’, 1930 (Tate Gallery).

A first tour for the Arts League of Service is booked for – and a first set of members is gathered, including William George (W. G.) Fay, one of the founders of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Angela and Hermione Baddeley (Angela was Mrs Bridges in the BBC series ‘Upstairs Downstairs’), Scottish actresses Agnes Lowson and Rita Thom, novelist and biographer John Cranstoun Nevill, Charles Thomas as stage manager and Winifred Nicholson as business manager (not the painter of the same name). Later Arts League of Service graduates include Jon Pertwee of ‘Doctor Who’ and ‘Carry On’ fame. However, although the people are in place, Elder has yet to acquire even curtains for the makeshift stage. It is at this point that Judy Wogan makes her entrance into the Arts League of Service’s story.



Elder first meets Judy when she is sent to see her about borrowing a ‘light fitup theatre’ that Judy has used to tour hospitals during the war. An apprehensive Elder, inexperienced in the business of bargaining, visits Judy in her Baker Street basement flat. But, rather than the hard bargainer Elder is anticipating, she finds a kindred spirit. The ‘small, fair-haired, Irish’ actress offers to lend her the equipment free of charge. ‘“You’re doing just what I’ve always longed to do,”’ Judy 

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Judy Wogan tells Eleanor, and while Judy has already booked a tour for that same year, she joins the Arts League of Service (ALS) the subsequent year and stays with them ‘until the end’. Elder paints a vivid picture of the many years of touring, sleeping, dressing and acting in often rough conditions. Although largely focused on the Arts League of Service’s work rather than on individual personalities, Judy’s contribution and commitment to the Arts League of Service is felt across the length of Elder’s book. Judy is an indefatigable, determined individual willing to get out and walk when the troupe’s notoriously unreliable transport breaks down,

 Arts League of Service transport (from Travelling Players).



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Part Three usually in the middle of nowhere. Elder describes Judy’s scouting missions in search of appropriate venues for the troupe. Her involvement with the troupe brings her into contact with a broad range of figures in the world of theatre and literature, among them George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy, as well as with a broad range of ordinary citizens; the troupe performs everywhere, from London’s Isle of Dogs to remote Scottish villages and also in Ireland. This willingness to range far afield extends to the troupe’s repertoire which is highly eclectic. The troupe is ‘in touch with the professional stage, from which [they] recruited [their] players and the producers of [their] one-act plays’, but Elder describes the remainder of the Arts League of Service’s Travelling Theatre’s entertainment, which includes mimes, folk songs, dancing and absurdities, as ‘not unlike the contents of a jackdaw’s nest where, among shining bits of glass and broken fragments of coloured pottery, are found a jewel, a ring, or a coin of worth’. As an actress, Judy is versatile and a clear talent. Elder writes: ‘Judy Wogan, like many attractive people, was never so happy as when appearing in a part in which she had to disguise herself completely, and as Miss Fewings, the President of the League for Promoting Poetry for People in Pastoral Places, she had ample opportunity.’ One reviewer labels Judy ‘“the cleverest artist in the League’s Companies”.’ Elder’s book also provides important clues about Judy’s past and, in particular, a glimpse of her revolutionary beginnings under the tutelage of Irish reformer Madame Markievicz. And I see a petite, very feminine Judy for the first time in a number of photographs. Elder describes how Judy ‘had been chosen on account of her long curly hair to play the child’s part in Eleanor’s Enterprise, a play by George

 Judy Wogan



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Judy Wogan

 Judy Wogan in ‘St Valentine’s Day’ (Madame Yevonde) (Caitlin Adams and V&A).

Birmingham, which Madame Markievicz and her husband were taking on tour’. Without quite realizing what he is doing, ‘[h]oping that it would cure his daughter of her passion for the stage, Judith’s father, a colonel in the army, and a strong Conservative, wired [Markievicz] himself, accepting the engagement for her’. This changed Judy’s life forever: It not unnaturally had the opposite effect and Judith found herself in the political atmosphere of the opposing party, for Madame was a keen suffragette and very much in the limelight because she could drive a four-inhand. At that time she was the leader of an independent Boy Scout movement in Ireland, and at each town she was met by a brass band and crowd of cheering lads whom she addressed, attired in a uniform consisting of an eighteenth-century coaching cloak and bonnet. This extraordinary woman, who had begun her career as an art student in Paris before she went on the stage, was later the first woman to be elected to the British Parliament although, owing to her conscientious objections to the Oath of Allegiance, she never took her seat. 

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Part Three  A young Judy Wogan (Caitlin Adams).

After her work with Madame Markievicz, Judy ‘joined Esmé Percy’s and Miss Darragh’s company to play “Joy”, in Galsworthy’s play of that name’. Judy also ‘toured as “Peg” in Peg O’ My Heart, went “on the Halls” [Music Hall] and r[a]n her own company round the hospitals during the [First World] War’. ‘Her varied experience,’ writes Elder, ‘was a useful asset and she tackled the problems of organization with zest when, shortly afterwards, she became our third Organising Secretary.’ I gather a few clues about Judy’s private life from Elder’s book. At one point Judy abandons the troupe and returns to Ireland due to the sudden death of her brother; at another, several members of the troupe spend the summer at Judy’s cottage ‘in the country’, working on the unreliable Arts League of Service vehicle. Towards the end of the book Elder mentions Judy’s retirement from touring with the Arts League of Service after their – season due to a ‘severe’ illness. At this moment, Elder says, Judy, ‘unable to face the wear and tear of a life on tour’, opens ‘a little theatre [. . .] of her own’, the Grafton Theatre [or Corner Theatre] in the Tottenham Court Road.



Hoping further information about Elder might take me closer to finding Judy, I look for her. I know that Elder marries fellow Arts League of Service troupe member Scotsman Hugh Mackay, named Hebs for the Hebridean songs he sings, and that they have two sons. I find a s’ address in St Osyth, Essex, for Elder in The Shavian, the magazine of the George Bernard Shaw society, which announces her as a new member. Local historian and long term St Osyth resident, Phyllis Hendy, reached via the St Osyth website, (pronounced Ohsith), confirms that Elder lived in the village. 

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Judy Wogan St Osyth is a small village in Northeast Essex, about  miles from Colchester. Fresca’s niece, Sonya Allinson, has mentioned the village, using the Essex dialect pronunciation Tooz[s]ie, as a holiday destination for her sisters and Fresca. And this part of Essex also came up in Lambert’s Brown Book obituary for Fresca. ‘In so short a space,’ she writes, ‘it is not possible to do justice to her manifold interests, endless generosity, and the wit, charm, and gaiety she retained until the end. One thing may be singled out. She was greatly interested in trees and afforestation and, prompted in part by Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own, has bequeathed a small wood in Essex, Martin’s Grove, near Colchester, to L.M.H.’ I google-map Martin’s Grove and find it on Frowick Lane, just outside of St Osyth. Clearly St Osyth, and perhaps also Elder’s residence there, has something to do with Fresca’s connection to Judy. Fresca’s bequest of Martin’s Grove to her alma mater takes me back to LMH archivist Oliver Mahony. Oliver locates a letter, dated May , no year given, from Fresca to LMH principal Lynda Grier floating the idea of leaving the wood to the college. Fresca describes her planned bequest, perhaps self-consciously, as ‘comical’. She worries, she tells Grier, that if she ‘acquires’ her ‘little forest’ and begins planting trees there that she’ll not be able to see it through. Such projects are generally, she says, in the hands of institutions with greater longevity, such as ‘the State, big families or colleges’. The LMH letter provides a time frame and motivation for the upcoming purchase of the wood. Fresca explains that her interest in trees and forestry is already several years old and she says that she was ‘at one time one of “The Men of Trees”’. Fresca’s mention of the Men of the Trees’ first summer school conference at LMH that summer, which I date to July , provides the otherwise missing year of the letter. The Men of the Trees was founded by Richard St Barbe Baker. In his books, Men of the Trees (Dial Press, 1931) and My Life—My Trees (Lutterworth, 1970), Baker describes his reafforestation efforts in the highlands of Kenya when he ‘enlisted on the Green Front in Africa’ in 1920. Here nomadic farming followed by ‘giant steam engines’ had laid waste to ‘beautiful and valuable’ forests. Although the land survived nomadic farming, the engines ‘destroyed delectable land’—a problem compounded by the subsequent arrival of ‘thousands of white invaders [. . .] with tractors and ploughs [. . .] fertilizers and monoculture’. Baker took action by mobilizing local tribesmen to plant trees: the first Watu wa Miti or Men of the Trees. Baker writes: I learned early to regard the forest as a society of living things, the greatest of which is the tree. Its value depends upon its permanence, its capacity to renew 

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Part Three

 Martin’s Grove letter (courtesy of LMH).



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Judy Wogan itself, to store water, its many biological functions including that of providing Nature’s most valuable ground cover, and building up to a great height stores of one of the most adaptable of raw materials: wood. Baker established a Men of the Trees group to set up tree nurseries and roadside planting in Palestine; he then launched a Save the Redwoods Fund in England, lecturing all around the country with the help of Sir Francis Younghusband, the first president of the Men of the Trees in Britain, also president of the Royal

Geographical Society and chairman of the Mount Everest Committee.



Using the internet, I find Martin’s Grove now in the hands of Mr and Mrs E. A. Greig. There’s been a local difference of opinion in terms of site usage: the St Osyth parish website records the refusal to allow the erection of a barn ‘in connection with expansion of the wild boar production’. The Parish Council opposes such development due to the ‘impact on this wood where tree preservation orders are extant’. I gather information about St Osyth from the  Kelly’s Directory, a trade directory, the ‘Victorian version of the yellow pages’ according to Wikipedia: ST. OSYTH parish is on a creek of the Colne, opposite Brightlingsea,  miles south from Thorrington and  from Great Bentley stations on the Tendring Hundred branch of the London and North Eastern railway,  west from Clacton-on-Sea,  south-east from Colchester and  southwest from Walton steamboat pier, in the Harwich division of the county, Tendring hundred, petty sessional division and rural district, Colchester, Clacton and Halstead joint county court district, rural deanery of St. Osyth, archdeaconry of Colchester and diocese of Chelmsford; some parts of this parish, which is very extensive, are high, including Beacon Hill, but a great portion is marsh land.

I also find Defoe’s seventeenth-century take on the place which explains why Sonya called St Osyth ‘Toozie’:

In this inlet of the sea is Osey, or Osyth Island, commonly called Oosy Island, so well known by our London men of pleasure for the infinite number of wild fowl, that is to say, duck, mallard, teal, and widgeon, of which there are such vast flights, that they tell us the island, namely the creek, seems covered with them at certain times of the year, and they go 

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Part Three

 Map of St Osyth. Martin’s Grove to the north and Dalte’s Farm south east.

from London on purpose for the pleasure of shooting; and, indeed, often come home very well laden with game. But it must be remembered too that those gentlemen who are such lovers of the sport, and go so far for it, often return with an Essex ague on their backs, which they find a heavier load than the fowls they have shot. 

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Judy Wogan I take a taxi to St Osyth from Clacton-on-Sea station, having traveled by train via Ipswich and Colchester from Cambridge, after a visit to The Mill House. Returning in my mind to this journey later on, I realize that the route I take is a version of that which Fresca would have taken when she traveled between Cambridge and St Osyth. In St Osyth I plan to see the Greigs, the current owners of Fresca’s wood, so I head up to their house, named, rather grandly, Fallow Hall, early the next morning. No one is at the house when I arrive so I call Ed on his mobile phone. He is feeding pigs at the adjacent Martin’s Grove. Ed isn’t at all like the rather well-to-do farmers I’d met growing up in Hertfordshire. The first clue is a very countrified accent that I can’t place. Ed is in his forties or fifties. He is short and stocky; a large red birthmark thrown over his right shoulder is visible under the unbuttoned short-sleeved shirt he wears. Ed tells me that he purchased the .-acre wood for , pounds. He offers me a tour. The gate sign warns of ‘loose dogs’ and isn’t very welcoming. I’ve imagined a beautiful lush wood, but the trees are small and the cover is thin. This is a result, I learn from Ed, of the gale of  that swept across the south of England and the north of France reaching hurricane-style wind speeds. The remaining trees consist of a few oaks, chestnut coppice, and walnuts replanted after . I learn later from Ed that while the Forestry Commission has designated Riddles, where his house stands, an ancient wood, a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI), Martin’s Grove is only ‘semi-ancient’. One of the locals, Reg Arthur, says that Martin’s Grove is a ‘boring wood’. I am a little disappointed, but Ed’s interest in Fresca makes me feel better. He wants to know all about her. Ed’s warmth and interest in Fresca are

 The entrance to Martin’s Grove (Helen Southworth).



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Part Three

 H.M. land registry map of Martin’s Grove (Ed Greig).

wonderful. So when Ed shows me the family of wild boar, fenced in one section of the wood, I’m not as appalled as I thought I might be. When I ask him how he harvests the boars, he tells me he ‘sen[ds] the wife in’! He has pigs there too— two beautiful black-and-white spotted baby pigs—and a cage of not so beautiful ferrets for rabbit hunting; ‘they bring two pounds apiece,’ he tells me. ‘You’re not a vegetarian, are you?’ he asks me, so I tell him about T.R. Ed has also dug a pond in the wood after finding a natural spring. It looks rather murky and is flanked by an odd-looking red scarecrow. I think about the place from Fresca’s point of view. She would have wanted it to be a working place: in one letter she mentions harvesting the timber. I’m not sure she would even have disapproved of the animals there, although the wild boar are detrimental to the trees. Ed clearly loves woodland; he is a working-man, unpretentious, and Fresca would have liked him. 

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Judy Wogan



My next stop is Tan Cottage (aka Old Cottage). It sits about two and a half miles across town from Martin’s Grove on Dalte’s Lane. Phyllis Hendy has confirmed for me that the Elder/Mackay house was the former town workhouse. Dalte’s Lane has been diplomatically renamed; it was formerly ‘Dolts and Imbeciles’. Ed’s wife, Rose Greig, points to the house she thinks is the right one, and she’s correct in the end, but I’m not sure. So I decide to knock on doors. I start at  Spring Cottages, at the top of the street. A man comes to a window after several knocks and I ask him a rather odd question: did he know someone who had lived on this street about  years ago. He summons his wife. Yes, she remembers Mac, as they called Hugh Mackay. Her mother did odd jobs for him. He used to tell her mother ‘the lord will repay you’. ‘A real character,’ the woman remembers. She’d owned a record of his at one point, Scottish songs, a  rpm, but it had been broken. She remembers Mackay dressed in full Scottish regalia, a tradition every time he’d leave for visits to the home country. He always waved at her as he passed by. The neighbours direct me to the Old Cottage, the house Rose had originally identified. It’s now home to the Jacobs. When I arrive unannounced, Ivy Jacobs has a guest and so I wait. We tour the cottage first, an incongruous mix of bare brick, low ceilings, small rooms and contemporary interiors. Ivy explains that the Mackays extended the house when an unidentified old lady ( Judy perhaps?) who lived in a narrow cottage had died.

 Old/Tan Cottage, St Osyth (Helen Southworth).



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Part Three

 Arts League of Service post cards (Ivy Jacobs).



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.

Judy Wogan Ivy knows a little of the history of the house. Her husband, Richard, has grown up in the village; he was the paperboy when the Mackays lived there. Richard remembers the door always open and Hugh Mackay asking him to come in and leave the newspaper on the bottom stair. When the house came up for sale, Richard jumped at the opportunity to buy it, but now it is for sale and Ivy and Richard plan to move closer to their daughter (still in the village). Ivy has a copy of Elder’s history of the ALS and a few of the official photos (left).



Ivy tells me what she knows about Elder and Hebs’s son Kenneth Mackay, now deceased. Suggesting a strong tie to the house, Kenneth initially kept a portion of the land alongside the house after the sale in case he decided to move back, but he had subsequently sold it to Ivy and her husband after deciding to stay in Surrey. Ivy has an address somewhere, but can’t locate it. She also tells me that a second son, John Mackay, an actor, had committed suicide. Using the clues Ivy has given me about Kenneth’s move to Surrey, I track down his widow, Beryl Mackay. On the Surrey Border Film Club website, I find Beryl giving a prize in her husband’s name. With an email to the club I make initial contact: a phone call is made to Beryl. I hear nothing for close to a month, so I email again. The next day I receive a message from Dr Caitlin Adams, research officer at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London. It contains the first details that will allow me to uncover Judy’s history. Caitlin tells me that ‘Beryl’s husband Ken inherited a miscellaneous collection of family and ALS materials, which he kept in their garage for many years’. She worked with Ken ‘from  to begin sorting,’ and she has ‘carried on the task since his death’. Adams estimates that there are ‘about  large boxes, completely jumbled, of which [she has] managed to sort about two-thirds’. ‘[She] now [has] nearly all the papers temporarily in [her] custody as [she is] working on a book about the Arts League of Service.’ ‘Because the material isn’t catalogued, it is extremely difficult to pull specific items out of the storage unit. Nevertheless,’ Adams writes, ‘I would be very delighted to hear about your project and interests, and to share information if I can be of use to you.’ I receive a second email from Caitlin on the next day. She continues: Judy and Eleanor remained very close friends so there are definitely letters, though I can’t vouch for anything relevant to your interests ... Will dig and see. And some photos, although these are much more likely to be ALS era. So: you know that Judy Wogan and her husband owned the whole of the Old Cottage in St Osyth (her half may have had a different name, but 

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Part Three I don’t think I know it) before she gave half to Eleanor and Hebs as a wedding present in the mid-s? I think eventually she presented them with the other half, which they knocked together into one building. Beryl will remember these details. And you know her married name, Mrs Hain? (My recollection is that they married just before WWI and he was killed at Gallipoli—will check notes.) I google Judy Wogan myself and find first a reference to the marriage of Judith Wogan Browne and Edward Hain in  in Islington. Another hit gives a different date for Judy’s wedding, ‘// at Westminster Cathedral London to Edward HAIN son of Sir Edward’, and identifies Judy’s father as ‘Cd F.W.N. of Kereden Co Kildare Ireland’. I’m sure I can find a few more addresses for you after the ALS (when she had a place on Gower Street, part of which was used for ALS rehearsals). She leased the Grafton Theatre (Tottenham Court Road) for a few years in the ‘s. It’s a ‘lost theatre’ (possibly still there in some form, buried under McDonalds?). If I remember correctly, the V&A doesn’t have a file on the Grafton, unfortunately, but one of the London Stage reference works has production listings. More could be done with local newspapers. Yes, Hebs (Hugh) recorded several records but I’m afraid the family copies went to a cousin in Scotland, so I haven’t heard them. I’ve seen some of the flyers so I’ll try to dig them out and send details of the recordings. I can tell you more about him and his career if you like. Yes, John committed suicide c  (I’ll have to check the year). Judy was his godmother and, according to Ken Mackay, hit particularly hard because they were living in the same street [he died elsewhere] but not seeing each other very much. Like everyone she had no idea of his state of mind—it was a huge shock. He wasn’t a professional actor, but he did some amateur acting at various points. After service in the Army Education Unit he trained as a teacher and then worked for the BBC in educational (French-language) television. Where John’s letters touched on the ALS or his mother’s career (or ALS personnel, so if there’s anything about Judy) they’ve come into the archive and we might find something—but the purely private or domestic papers haven’t. Moving forward I learn that Edward’s father ran a shipping business, The Hain Steamship Company Limited. He was a successful politician with local 

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Judy Wogan posts in the St Ives/Cornwall area from – and then a seat in Parliament from  until . In , he was appointed High Sheriff for Cornwall and was knighted for services to British shipping. Despite the fact that Hain’s company was financially strong when the war broke out, losses of ships early in the war hurt the business. This was followed by more bad news: A more serious blow for Edward struck when his only son, also Edward, was killed at Gallipoli during the Dardanelles campaign [April , , and January , ]. He had been serving as a captain with the Cornish Squadron of the Royal st Devon Yeomanry. Young Edward had been training in the family business for a number of years and his father never fully recovered from his loss. In June , Sir Edward suffered a severe breakdown during a German air-raid on London, and returned to Cornwall to convalesce. On th September  he died at his home Treloyhan, St. Ives, and the news stunned the shipping world. He is buried in the family plot at Barnoon Cemetery, St. Ives. Then Caitlin Adams writes again. She’s remembered another relative who might be helpful to me: ‘a niece, Patricia Lillis, known as Trisha or Tricia, daughter of Claire’. Adams has spoken to Beryl and she ‘[can’t] remember ever hearing mention of Fresca and was surprised to hear that Judy might have been in a lesbian relationship—so clearly it wasn’t something that was discussed in her hearing.’ [Beryl] only got to know Judy slightly when John died, because she (Beryl) went to London to sort out his house. As I remembered it was in the same street (Chalk Farm, address to be confirmed). He had just sold his flat and was in the process of having his new place done up. And I got the wrong end of the stick in my previous note, because actually Beryl said she thought John was staying with Judy while the building work was done and must have been storing some of his valuables there as well (furniture was in the new place, ‘under wraps’) ... So the devastation was not that they weren’t in touch, but that they saw each other all the time, yet she still didn’t know what he intended. Beryl said all three, parents and godparent, were ‘utterly shattered’ by the suicide. And apparently there was a letter, which Beryl found at Judy’s. Beryl still finds it very upsetting to talk about. Other than that, she couldn’t recall anything else about Judy other than her long-term domestic help (that’s my phrase), Jenks, whom she (Beryl) 

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Part Three assisted with the lunch dishes, and that ‘Judy was always doing up houses’—one of her great pleasures in life. Adams estimates that ‘Judy died between  and ’. ‘Ken and Beryl couldn’t remember the date but said it must have been then according to their own recollection of where Eleanor was living at the time. It was definitely after St Osyth—I think Eleanor stopped living there when Hugh died in the mids (also TBC).’ Adams’s findings bring news of another death close to Judy: the murder of her brother, Lieut. Wogan Browne, in 1922 (a mention of which I recall from Elder’s ALS book). The Kildare Observer reports that: No incident that has occurred in County Kildare within living memory has occasioned more widespread horror and condemnation than the murder and highway robbery of Lieut. J. H. Wogan Browne, R.F.A., at Kildare, in broad-day light on Friday last. All classes and Creeds united in condemning in the strongest manner possible such a terrible outrage. Lieut. Wogan Browne was a fine specimen of young manhood, who had only reached the age of  years at the time he was done to death while serving with his regiment in his native county of Kildare. From the details that can be gathered, it would appear the young officer was in the habit of calling at the Hibernian Bank each Friday morning for cash for the payment of his men at Kildare R.F.A. barracks. About . on that day in question he called at the bank and received a sum of about .  He then left the bank and proceeded towards the barracks. At the corner of Infirmary road a Ford motor car stood. This had previously been hired at a local garage by three men, who had paid s., it appears for the use of the car, ostensibly to convey a patient from the infirmary. As Lieut. Wogan Browne approached the car he was held up by two men, who snatched the money from him and dashed for the waiting car. The lieutenant attempted to grapple with the men for the recovery of the money when, it is stated one of the men sitting in the car fired point-blank at him with a revolver. The bullet passed through his eye and he collapsed on the roadway, death being almost instantaneous. Meanwhile the driver of the motor was told by the three men to drive off as speedily as he could across Infirmary road and in the direction of Kildoon, revolvers being held to his head. He did as he was bidden, and having covered some few miles the car was stopped in Kildoon bog, the desperadoes dismounted and told him to return to Kildare, which he did. Later military police and I.R.A. united in a search 

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Judy Wogan for the miscreants. Several arrests were made later by the I.R. police, but so far no proceedings have been taken, although at least two of the men apprehended were detained and conveyed to Naas, where they have since been held. Lieut. Wogan Browne was the youngest son of Colonel Wogan Browne, of Keredorn, Naas, and therefore a member of one of Kildare’s and indeed Ireland’s oldest Catholic families. The funeral took place on Tuesday morning at . at the New Cemetery, Naas, after Mass at the Curragh. The cortege included ‘[a] firing party from the deceased officer’s regiment, the R.F.A.’, ‘a gun carriage drawn by eight horses with outriders bearing the coffin draped in the Union Jack’.  Placed on the coffin were the dead officer’s sword and cap. Behind came his charger lead by a trooper. The top boots of the deceased were fixed in the stirrups reversed. Next followed Colonel Wogan Browne, father of the deceased, with two other relatives. After this in the procession marched a detachment of the men of the R.F.A., carrying twenty-four beautiful wreaths and behind a number of buglers followed by some hundred of the county gentry, officers and men of the deceased’s regiment and thousands of townspeople of every class and creed. [. . .] For the first time in the history of relations between the military and the people of the country for the past few years was seen a complete co-mingling of the old and the new forces, police and the general public.  [. . .] Among the many WREATHS, one read ‘Dearest Jack, with love from his three sister, Molly, Judith and Claire.



Queries to the Wogan and Wogan-Browne genealogy webpage bear further fruit. A ‘John W-B’, writing from Melbourne, Australia, tells me that: Judy was rd daughter of Colonel Francis William Nicholas WoganBrowne and Beda (Costello) of Keredern, Naas, Co Kildare. She was born Judith Helen on  October  [or ?]. On  August  Judith wed Edward Hain, -year-old son of shipping magnate, Sir Edward Hain of Treloyhan, St Ives, Cornwall. Three months later young Edward was killed at Gallipoli. Judith did not remarry. She became a travelling actress with the Arts League of Service under the stage name of Judith Wogan. In August  she sailed to New York with fellow actress, Miriam Elliott. Judith later established London’s tiny Grafton Theatre. She is mentioned (with 

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Part Three photos) throughout Eleanor Elder’s book The Travelling Players: The Story of the Arts League of Service (London ). All three of Judith’s brothers died without issue. Her last sister, Claire, married Francis Lillis. The line rests in England with Charles Lillis. I’m sure Charles wouldn’t mind you contacting him on the above email. Ken Wogan sends a shipping log for the SS Minnewasca bound for New York August , , that provides a link between Judy and Miriam Elliott (–), also an actress, later associated with the ALS, also living at , Gower Street, the same address as Judy, in . Another actor George Oliver-Smith is also on board. My own research shows Judy returning to London on the SS Majestic. In the shipping log she gives her profession as ‘artiste’. The log confirms that Judy’s birth year was , making her  years Fresca’s senior and  years older than brother Jack.



I contact Charles Lillis, Judy’s grand-nephew. He writes: I am afraid that I know virtually nothing about Judy W-B apart from the fact that she was my great-aunt. As you will have gathered from his reply, my cousin John Wogan-Browne is the family historian! The Francis Lillis whom you mention was my grandfather who sadly died aged barely  in , while my grandmother (Claire Lillis, nee Wogan-Browne) died in  or . Their son, my father, died in . Their daughter, my aunt Patricia Lillis, died in  without issue. However, my aunt Mary Lillis-Jensen is still very much alive at  and has written a book about growing up in Ireland before WWII called I Just Happened to Be There published by Vintage Publications of Chelsea in London. I shall look up what she says about Judy and if there is nothing of consequence ask for more! After Charles spoke to Aunt Mary, he wrote again: She did not know Judith very well and did not mention her specifically in her book (though she talks about the Wogan-Browne aunts in general). When I spoke to her yesterday, she described Judith as “very enthusiastic, artistic, eccentric, gypsy, unorthodox in clothes and in her way of thinking”. She was on the fringe of the Bloomsbury set and at one stage lived in Bloomsbury. Apparently she lived for a time in a row of converted cottages, of which Eleanor Elder occupied one—hence being there when her 

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Judy Wogan godson committed suicide—and Aunt Mary thought that it was in St Osyth (she is not sure of the spelling) in Essex. Tom Dickie was apparently a great friend of Judith’s brother, John Hubert Wogan-Browne. [As an aside, he was sadly murdered at the age of  by the IRA in February  during the period of transition to Independence in Ireland.] This was a very tricky moment for all concerned. From the Irish point of view, he was the last male heir (in Ireland—John W-B’s side having emigrated to Australia) to a great Irish family (Sir John Wogan, Sir Charles Wogan and Sir Nicholas Wogan all feature heavily in Irish history, as do various Wogan-Browns), which was both part of the Ascendancy and Catholic. From the British point of view, he was also a British army officer, who had survived WWI. He was coming back with the pay for his men and was killed for the money. The IRA initially had no idea who he was, and when they realised asked to be represented at the funeral, a request that my great-grandfather declined. There is quite a lot of information about this incident on the internet. I have also spoken to Aunt Mary’s eldest daughter Jennifer Johnson. She was Aunt Patricia Lillis’s main heir, while Patricia had been Judith’s main heir. Thus there might be some papers relating to Judith amongst the effects that Jennifer inherited. Jennifer will look through them and let me know. If you would like to write to Aunt Mary I can let you have her address.



As I continue searching, I locate a Lady’s Pictorial article online and piece together what Judy did after her husband’s death in  and before joining up with the ALS in approximately . Society writer Margaret Chute describes Judy’s work with a group of actors called The Wandering Players, many of whom, it seems, then go on to join the ALS. Chute portrays Judy as she appears in the ‘Emily’s Excuse’ photograph— ‘the little lady with the gold-brown hair and big brown eyes’—and notes her French and Irish heritage. A few snippets from another piece in a  Illustrated War News article reveal the innovative quality of Judy’s enterprise. Until the war came to prove things otherwise, enterprise and efficiency were held to be peculiarly masculine virtues. A woman who persisted in showing signs of one or the other, or both, was regarded as a unique specimen, the exception that proved the accuracy of the theory that men were 

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Part Three born to work, and women to be ornamental rather than useful in the larger sense of the term. Women, however, have shown that feminine charm can exist side by side with intelligence and ability to do practical work. It has been proved possible, to help out-of-the-way hospitals near London which do not in the ordinary way come in for many entertainments. Any Commandant, therefore, who would like to have the benefit of the company’s services has only to write to her at , York Street, Baker Street, W., when, if it is possible, the ‘Wandering Players’ will arrive in response. Not the least delightful thing about Miss Wogan’s organisation is that the show, complete in every detail, is given absolutely ‘free, gratis, and for nothing’. [. . .] New forms of war work are always interesting, and Miss Judith Wogan has just added another to the long list of activities in which women are engaging ‘owing to the war’. She has formed a company known as the ‘Wandering Players’, at her own expense, with the object of giving entertainments to wounded men. Miss Wogan is herself an actress, and a clever one at that, as London and provincial audiences already know, and her ‘shows’ smack less of the amateur than of the ‘real thing’, chiefly because the founder of the company has devised special collapsible scenery which travels with the players and can be used anywhere, stage or no stage. It is hardly necessary to add that the services of the ‘Wandering Players’ are greatly in demand, and a busy winter season is.



I know a lot about Judy at this point, but I am still unsure about how Judy and Fresca met? Tippett has provided a few clues. I know that Judy wrote the unpublished text for a piece entitled ‘Miners’ for which he composed the music. I look at the score at the British Library, but it does not mention Wogan. Musicologist Suzanne Robinson dates the piece to circa  and calls it an ‘agitprop piece’— and ‘Eisler-ish’. Hanns Eisler was a Communist composer on whom, according to Robinson, Alan Bush modeled himself. Tippett’s reference to ‘Miners’ represents a second mention of Judy’s own work: she also wrote a one-act play called ‘Home Rule’ (/), a domestic rather than a political drama, according to Caitlin Adams, who has looked at the typescript at the British Library. ‘Miners’ was performed at Alan Bush’s Pageant of Labour at Crystal Palace from October –, . Suggesting that Judy met Fresca via the Tippett-Franks-Bush circle and not vice-versa, a letter from Tippett to Alan Bush names Judy as a friend of Wilf Franks, rather than a friend of Fresca. In a letter dated May , , Tippett 

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Judy Wogan asks Bush for a contribution to an annual fund to support Wilf Franks and lists those others he has already approached. ‘I have written therefore. . . —also to another newer friend of Wilf (Franks), a Miss Judy Wogan who runs a theatre—actually where they performed that unfortunate out-of-work play that you and I, I think, financed somewhat drastically.’ Did Fresca and Judy meet at this event, putting Judy into the picture as late as ? Perhaps Wilf met Judy via his training under dancer Margaret Barr at Dartington and she entered Fresca’s circle via this route. Giving another possible date, in a letter, Dorothy Richardson says that while in Cornwall in  she meets Fresca and a friend, who talks enthusiastically about the Arts League of Service and artist Cedric Morris: (presumably) Judy. Confirming Tippett’s information about where Judy is in , Elder also mentions Judy’s ‘little theatre of her own in London’ which she had opened [in ] when forced to abandon touring with the Arts League of Service due to a ‘severe illness’. The theatre, as Caitlin confirms, was called the Grafton. Caitlin sends me a Grafton Theatre programme from among the Arts League of Service papers. The programme outlines the ambitions of Wogan’s project under the direction of herself as ‘managing director’ and as directors, Eleanor Elder, Miriam Elliott, the actress with whom Wogan has traveled, American playwright Velona Pilcher and Lady Kathleen Pilkington (of toy bull dog fame?). The five women directors claim to be giving Londoners ‘for the first time, an “Experimental Theatre” planned on modern continental lines’. Visits have been made by the directors to theatres in other major European cities to study stagecraft, and despite its small size, the Grafton represents ‘the most original and up-to-date model theatre in the British Isles’. The programme mentions a ‘permanent company of professional players and producer’, and lists guest players, Lydia Lopokova, Margaret Morris, Sara Allgood and Penelope Spence. The Grafton’s programme will reflect a commitment on the part of the Grafton management to ‘the modern spirit with the widest catholicity’. They will produce ‘every type of entertainment’, long and short; their only criterion will be quality. They also pledge to keep their programme fresh. The management has also set up a café and bar where playgoers can meet before the performance, their desire being to draw a regular audience and to encourage discussion of the theatre aided by a library of contemporary ‘foreign and English periodicals such as “Cahier d’art”, “Der Querschnitt”, “Theatre Arts Monthly”, “The Mask” and “The Theatre Guild Magazine”.’ Their first ‘cosmopolitan programme of unusual plays and turns’ showcases Pilcher’s ‘The Searcher’; their second programme (beginning June , ) features George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Anna Janska’, ‘the story of a reactionary Empress,’ produced by American Shakespearean actor Ernest Milton (–), 

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Part Three

 Grafton Theatre programme (Caitlin Adams).

Margaret Morris as star guest in ‘New Dances,’ Peter Spencer’s ‘The Bright Young People,’ American poet Amy Lowell’s ‘Patterns’ (starring Norah Balfour [of the ALS]), ‘A Robot Dance: Ultramodern Music and Movement, arranged by the Grafton Lighting Expert from the Futurist Theatre, Rome,’ ‘SONGS— VERY NEW AND OLD: Including ‘Self-Portraits’ (words by Geoffrey Dunn to music by Herbert Murrill); ‘German student songs and Music Hall songs,’ ‘Pages from our Magazine,’ ‘Her Honour in the Toils, a glimpse of life in two throbs 

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Judy Wogan to real cinema music by Margaret Drew,’ and ‘Fledglings, A Study of Youth’ by Molnar, a Viennese satirist. Using newspaper articles, I build a timeline for Judy’s Grafton project. An announcement for the opening of Judy’s Grafton Theatre, May / appears in The Guardian on May , : It has been transformed by Miss Judith Wogan from an old kinema into a Little Theatre, which will give short plays and turns of a kind for which the ordinary playhouse and music-halls have no particular corner. The chief item in the first bill will be a war play called The Searcher, by Miss Velona Pilcher, the chief part of which will be played by Miss Eleanor Elder, who is well known to all admirers of the traveling theatres run by the Arts League of Service. Future plans at the Grafton Theatre announce a most catholic list of authors, from Aristophanes to Gertrude Stein, and among those who will help is Lydia Lopokova. Short plays by contemporary European authors like Cocteau and Molnar are among the immediately forthcoming attractions. The new house has a revolving stage, and it is hoped to make the various turns follow each other swiftly and so give a running panorama of many forms of theatrical art. Many people have talked about the desirability of a Little Music-hall which would do for vaudeville what the Little Theatres have done for drama. Now at last we are to have one. In an October , , Times article, the reviewer laments the size of the stage, an obstacle to success for productions such as Mr Archie Harradine and his chorus of three’s The Cadet Rouselle, but a fitting backdrop to Miss Selma Vas Diaz’s version of Katharine Mansfield’s monologue The Lady’s Maid. A  Theatre Arts (Volume ) article characterizes Judy’s opening production as a play that ‘has aroused more than considerable comment and interest since its publication a year ago’. I find further evidence of the innovative quality of the work at the Grafton in a notice in Gramophone, published on Friday June , , under the title ‘Off the Beaten Track’: A request for information about the making of gramophone records of music of extreme modernity to accompany a short play was the first intimation we had of the very interesting programme of the Grafton Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, just redecorated and practically rebuilt to suit its ‘Unusual Variety Bill of Plays and Turns’. The venture is just being launched, and since Miss J. M. Harvey, the Secretary of the Film Society, is its Business Manager (, Manchester Street, W.), no one who knows 

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Part Three her ability and acumen will need to be advised more bluntly than this to hurry up and write to her for particulars. Another article makes reference to the Stage Society, an organization founded in  aimed at promoting experimental theatre, and credits it for the successful production of Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale at the Grafton. ‘The need for the Stage Society was once more proved by the production at the Grafton Theatre of Mr Allan Wade’s excellent translation of The Machine of the Gods, M. Jean Cocteau’s re-telling of the Oedipus legend.’ Other articles give a sense of the variety of material presented at the theatre: in a review in JC Squire’s The London Mercury (April  to November ): ‘Miss Judith Wogan’s entertainment at the Grafton is mainly good. There was dancing, a sea-shanty or two, sketches of varying merit, a capital burlesque of Mr Edgar Wallace, a dreadfully tedious monologue written by Katherine Mansfield .’ Judy clearly began the Grafton on a shoestring budget aiming to provide affordable avant-garde entertainment. A pessimistic Glasgow Herald article of November  speculates that while Judy’s plan to offer ‘drama for a shilling’ at a time when seats could go for as much as  shillings apiece is worthy, it might not be entirely feasible. Suggesting that things did not always run smoothly at the Grafton, perhaps due to lack of funding, when Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova’s biographer mentions in a footnote her appearance in Pilcher’s play The Searcher it is to indicate that things did not go well: ‘When [Lopokova] temporarily forgot her lines on the second night, there was not even a prompt in the wings to rescue her. [Husband, John] Maynard [Keynes] made Lydia promise never to appear in such “a bad organization” again.’ Elsewhere I find the Grafton musicians described as a motley crew, this worsened by the fact that the theatre has no orchestral pit. Nonetheless, Judy’s theatre enjoyed considerable support. I find evidence of Shaw’s moral, but not financial, support for the Grafton (matching that he gave the Arts League of Service). American playwright Paul Green writes in October  from London to Frederick Koch reporting that during a visit to Shaw he has learned about Judy and Eleanor’s work. He compares it to the Playmakers and ‘our group, but without the emphasis on Folk Plays’. ‘This is really something alive,’ he writes ‘and full of well—corn.’ Shaw has told him that it is ‘one of the finest things they have over here’. Green says that Judy has recently ‘secured a small building in London that will serve as a kind of experimental place. But it’s rather small to play much part in the public’s likes and dislikes. It may grow to a large thing of course. Several people have backed the scheme. (But not Shaw among them by the way. He gives his same old 

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Judy Wogan answer when requested to help on such enterprises. “I take money out of the theatre not put it in.” He is not mad in that direction or his answer would be quite different.).’ Confirming Shaw’s reluctance to contribute, I also find an autographed postcard from ‘GBS to Judy Wogan’, dated March , , which reads ‘Judith: don’t. Have you added wages, salaries, authors’ fees and repairs to the  [Pounds Sterling]? You will die on the straw. I never put a farthing into any form of public entertainment, though I take a good many farthings out of it. But for that iron rule I should have been bankrupt years ago. The A.L.S. seems to me to be worth all these little coterie theatres put together.’



Using Google Books, I catch yet another glimpse of Judy at the Grafton in Jan and Cora Gordon’s  memoir/travel narrative A London Roundabout. The Gordons, who were musicians, writers and travellers, describe their book as, ‘as its title implies, no more than a roundabout trip, like a trip round one of those whirlpools of traffic in the greater centres of London circulation, where painted arrows on the asphalt forever swing your bus in a predetermined direction’. ‘Sitting on the top of such a roundabouted bus,’ the Gordons assert, ‘one may catch glimpses of the four quarters of London, glimpses hurried and satisfying, yet all containing something of the peculiar wholeness that makes up London from the molecular point of view.’ Among the hurried glimpses caught by the Gordons is one of Judy Wogan. Dan Rider introduces the Gordons to Judy ‘at the dress rehearsal of a new [Arts League of Service] tour’. Rider, a fascinating character in his own right, has a ‘small, queer bookstore in St Martin’s Court’ and was instrumental in helping the Gordons get their early work published. ‘Among Dan’s many interests is that of the Arts League of Service, a society which brings good drama to the remoter villages of England, Scotland and Wales, the actors transporting their own scenery in caravans, and more or less paying their own way as they go’. The Gordons preface their introduction of Judy with a discussion of luck and success—they distinguish between the kind of sound vessel-person (jug) who can transform luck into success (when luck is poured into the vessel) and the leaky jug-person who cannot. They say that one might also come across a sound vessel ‘into which the necessary luck has never been poured. Still the capacity for success is there to be noted—by the sensitive observer.’ ‘The capacity for success’ they suggest ‘reveals itself often as almost luminous toughness of human quality. When you meet such people you can feel that they seem a little more condensed than normal humanity.’ ‘[This potentiality for success] surrounds personality like an aura, something like the field of force around a magnet.’ Dan, 

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Part Three the Gordons concede, although not necessarily considered a success by ‘ordinary people,’ has that potential[ity]. ‘So also,’ they go on, ‘it was one of the most striking features of the petite figure of Miss Judith Wogan; that and the sparkling quality of her eyes.’ From the Gordons’ account of their encounter with Judy I learn a few more details about Judy’s Grafton Theatre: that it was ‘underground’, ‘right under [a] hotel’. It was formerly home to ‘a tiny local cinema specializing in wild and woolly Westerns or films of the penny-blood description. But [ Judy] had hollowed it out, and redesigned it with square pillars and amusing modern art transparencies painted by an East End artist. As a theatre it was an ideal size.’ The theatre contained a ‘little bar—for Miss Wogan was licensed to sell wines, spirits, and tobacco’. At the time of the Gordons’ visit the theatre is host to ‘a non-stop variety show’ which was not really to Judy’s taste. Dan tells the Gordons that Judy is a ‘“queer girl [. . .] Real, she is.’” He describes how she opened the theatre to produce ‘good’ ‘intellectual’ stuff. Since it wasn’t worth keeping it open during the summer, instead of closing it down, she let it to a variety company while she went off on a holiday which Dan describes as ‘off the map, yachting, roughing it’. Part way through the holiday, when Judy learns that the company manager has run off with the money, she returns and takes over the show herself in order to keep the actors in work. Miss Wogan’s little underground theatre, large enough for an intimate play, was not really large enough for an intimate music-hall, if such a thing were possible. So that in this tiny and modernistic theatre, with its back screens of folded aluminum sheeting and its elusive lighting, the show had much of the effect on the artistic palate of fried chips and pickled onion eaten off a dish of expensive modernistic ware. And to find a woman of Miss Wogan’s calibre running such a show was much like finding the editor of Art Work running Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday. In Pleasures of London, I learn that Judy’s theatre ran into problems with safety regulations. After spending a considerable amount of money, Judy failed to produce anything that ‘please[d] her particular kind of public, not even an Edwardian pantomime’. Just before the building was to be sold and too late to save the theatre, however, the local public was finally brought over and they packed the house for the pantomime. A Times article entitled ‘New Week-End Club’ of October , , suggests that Judy’s Grafton Theatre did have some longevity and that attempts were made periodically to breathe new life into it: 

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Judy Wogan A new weekend club, which will have as its main object the presentation of entertainments of established artistic distinction, will be opened at the Grafton Theatre on October th. The organizer is Miss Judith Wogan, manager of the Grafton Theatre, who was formerly attached to the Arts League Travelling Company. The first season’s programme will include William Simmonds and his puppets, the Maddermarket Theatre Company in a production of one of the lesser-known Shakespearian plays, and the Arts League Travelling Theatre Company. The first entertainment will be a mime and dance recital by Elizabeth Shan.



The mention of puppetry at the Grafton Theatre recalls Fresca’s collaboration with the Bickerdikes and her lifelong interest in puppetry, first mentioned by Tippett in terms of his and Fresca’s visit to Germany and then by Lambert in Fresca’s obituary. Kit Martin has seen Fresca’s puppets, those her nieces remembered hanging up at their grandmother’s house, but he regrets that they had likely been destroyed by moths while stored in the attic at The Mill House. Both the Grafton and the ALS hosted puppeteers and a review of the programmes of both provides me with names to learn more about Fresca’s puppet passion. Did Fresca meet Judy via puppets? I decide to explore the London puppet show scene of the period. Even if I can’t find explicit ties, I gain a sense of a movement in which Fresca is certainly involved. I begin with William Simmonds who performed with the ALS once they got a home of their own in London in . Simmonds had worked initially as an architect before studying art first at Windsor School of Art and then ‘under Walter Crane at the Royal College of Art’ and ‘between – at the Royal Academy School’. He then went on to work ‘as an assistant to the American painter and illustrator Edwin Austen Abbey working on mural paintings among other commissions’. After marriage to ‘Eve Peart, the embroiderer, in ’, and a move to London in , Simmonds worked during the First World War as a precision draughtsman on, among other things, tank design. It was in this context that Simmonds began carving, afterwards setting up a studio at his new home in the Cotswolds for carving and sculpture. ‘His life-long interest in theatricals resurfaced in the ’s when he made his first puppet for a children’s party and he continued, with Eve, to create puppet shows during the ’s and ’s. The Simmonds’ puppet theatre was one of three established in England at that time, playing an annual season of three weeks at the Grafton Theatre, London, and attending special performances at other venues including the Art Workers’ Guild and at private parties. Eve made the puppets’ costumes, mostly from fabric scraps, and she also provided musical accompaniment.’ 

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Part Three Another puppeteer linked to the Grafton Theatre is German Paul Brann. He brought Bastien and Bastienne, La Serva Padrona and Goethe’s Faust to Judy’s theatre in . These German and Eastern European puppeteers are perhaps among those Fresca sought out during her s trip with Tippett. Paul Brann (–), based in Munich, was ‘a directing student of Max Reinhardt’. He created Munich Arts Marionette Theatre/Munich Artists’ Marionette Theatre in . Brann produced Mozart and Doniz[a]etti operas, work by Maeterlinck, Hoffmansthal, Wilde, Schnitzler and other modernist playwrights. Puppet historians John McCormick and Bennie Pratasik suggest that the ‘Munich Marionette Theatre is a good example of a theatre born out of the interest in folk culture in literary and artistic circles’. They explain that the fact that many practitioners at this period had a background and education in the arts and were not simply raised with puppetry as a profession meant that the puppet and the puppet stage received renewed attention (they use the term ‘art puppetry’). McCormick and Pratasik also mention Waldo Lanchester and Richard Teschner, a Sezessionist Austrian painter and sculptor who settled in Prague in  and moved to Vienna in , famous for his foot- and-a-half tall beautifully rounded, long-limbed wooden puppets and for his Goldenen Schrein using Javanese Wayang inspired puppets.



I spend the morning of June , , another very hot day, visiting music broadcaster John Amis at his London flat. He’ll be one of the only people, apart from nieces Sonya and Vanessa and nephew Michael, whom I meet who actually met Fresca and Judy. At  (born ) I find him much sprier than I’d been led to believe he would be. John appears at the door to greet me in Hawaiian shirt, white shorts, and long white socks. He is off that afternoon to see the first performance in England of one of forty or so operas by Cavalli, at Grange Park Opera in Hampshire. We sit and chat in John’s small top-floor flat, his living room dominated by a piano and stacks and stacks of books. John can’t remember very much about Fresca; he’d met  John Amis (Helen Southworth).



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Judy Wogan Tippett and his set during the Second World War towards the end of Fresca’s life. He describes her as ‘a gay person’, ‘despite her depression’, ‘a thin, frail person’, who couldn’t keep up when they walked. He notes how odd it was that Tippett didn’t write to Fresca while in prison, remembering they nearly married, but didn’t, he suggests, in part due to the composer’s necessary selfishness. (It later made sense to me that Fresca wouldn’t have been considered an appropriate correspondent while in prison for Tippett due to her status as a CO and as an unmarried woman and therefore he chose the more ‘respectable’ Evelyn Maude). John remembers Fresca’s sympathies with the Germans as an important part of her life. He describes Judy Wogan as a ‘little bumbling bee’. He remembers Den Newton with fondness: ‘a very easy person to get along with’, ‘a very loving person’. Michael helped Den a lot during his conscientious objector days. John had lost sight of him once he moved to New York. John wasn’t quite so well disposed toward Wilf, admitting he was slightly jealous. Michael wasn’t a very sexual person, John adds, and he liked people in trouble. John mentions Karl Hawker’s suicide (married with children at this point), a second suicide, after Fresca’s, that would hit Tippett hard (and a third, that of Australian pianist Noel Mewton Wood who committed suicide at age ). He also remembers Tippett, chained and handcuffed, at his tribunal where Vaughan Williams testified on his behalf. Another name that comes up in conversation with John is that of Rolf Gardiner (whose nickname, Amis said, was ‘dig it and dung it’). John also suggests I look for Bryan Fisher and mentions Corsham.



Tippett’s memoirs are full of young men whom he befriended, always very lovingly, in one capacity or another and, indeed, Amis falls into this category. Among them I find Bryan Fisher, the brother of David Ayerst’s wife, Larema. I search for Bryan Fisher and Corsham online. On her blog, a former Bath Academy of Art (BAA), Corsham, student says she lived at ‘Parkside’ with Fisher and his family when he was bursar and she adds that she’s recently located Fisher’s son Ardan. I google Ardan and easily locate his webpage. I send him an email hoping Bryan might still be alive. Bryan has died, but within hours Ardan sends me a digital copy of Bryan’s unpublished memoir, entitled An Adventure in Living. Bryan has clearly read Tippett’s Those Twentieth Century Blues before writing and much of what he says seems to be shaped by it. However, Bryan gives the first rounded portrait of Fresca I have yet seen: Francesca Allinson, known as Fresca, was a musician who worked as a choral trainer and conductor and on puppetry. She had an air of fragility 

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Part Three above a surface of robustness, a delicacy covering an attraction to sturdiness, a light humour masking an appetite almost Rabelaisian and, at times, a longing for submission that her independence belied: her moods wavered between these opposites. She lived very much in a fantasy world of her own. She was a delightful person of whom I was to grow very fond. About this time she had written from abroad to Michael asking him to father a child for her without the commitment of matrimony. He wrote a long letter back saying that he would rather talk such a complicated matter over with her face to face but, if she wanted an answer now, he would have to say no—and he gave his reasons: he must be free legally to live his life and he could not father a child without being legally and emotionally responsible for it and the home where it lived. Fresca certainly was longing for help and refuge in a turbulent world, both internal and external. Bryan Fisher’s description of Bush’s  Anti-War Concert supported my hypothesis that Judy and Fresca had probably met there: The posters proclaimed ‘Workers Anti-War Concert Demonstration. Battersea Town Hall. Wednesday November th . Novelties. Thrills. Plays. Ballets. Speech—Chorus. Choirs. Band. Over one hundred Performers. Come and learn the Battersea Anti-War Song. Propaganda— Entertainment. Comradeship. Admission Free. Collection for the SouthWest London Leagues of Youth. International Working-Class Solidarity means Peace. Concert Director Michael Tippett. Conductor Alan Bush.’ Over a hundred performers and all the stage hands; a disparate collection of individuals all united in a cause bigger than themselves, ardent, hopeful, talented artists moved by political fervour. What a heady and fascinating world to enter for a young man with an open mind and willing heart. This particular entree was because, owing to illness, they were a man short to act in the drama called War Ramp as one of a small band of soldiers returning from the front, wounded and mud-stained, who enter singing ‘There’s a long trail a-winding to the land of my dreams’, to find a collection of business and political profiteers negotiating and gloating over their spoils made in the war. After the drama and tension of this confrontation, the leading soldier says ‘We shall know what to do with our rifles next time.’ Lights out, actors line up behind the Concert Director, lights on. He makes an appeal for the Leagues of Youth, ending with the point that International Solidarity is the only defence against war, and then calls upon everyone to sing the Internationale. 

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Judy Wogan There were to be two more such public performances in Town Halls, with modifications. From the medley of people involved I was to get to know a number; including Alan Bush, the dedicated Communist composer, Geoffrey [sic] Mark, who had recently published his The Modern Idolatry: An Analysis of Usury and the Pathology of Debt, Judy Wogan, who had theatre experience as producer and director, Roma Dewar, a Labour League of Youth leader who was also officially connected with the Trotskyite th International, Wilfred Franks and Francesca Allinson. And importantly, Bryan also clarified details about Fresca’s relationship with Judy Wogan. He writes: Fresca had lent me her flat [in approx. ] whilst she and her friend Judy Wogan were in Ireland researching Irish folk-music, (which she concluded deeply influenced our own folksong due to the emigration of labourers from Ireland). The flat was in Blandford Place in a small road running parallel for a way with Baker Street on its west side. It had a bed-sitting room running from front to back on the ground floor and a kitchen/dining room with a bath in it in the basement. Judy, whom I had met at the time of the Concert Demonstrations and was an actress, producer and writer, had the flat above. She was a lesbian with whom Fresca, a heterosexual, had started a relationship that was to develop into a love of great calm after storms and violent emotional strains. They returned from Ireland earlier than expected, but Fresca insisted I stay on at the flat as planned until I could move into a flat I had found myself in Clifton Villas between Warwick Avenue underground station and the Grand Union Canal. So I stayed on for about a week, sleeping in a bed that folded up into a cupboard at one end of the room while [Fresca] slept on the divan at the other. She made the experience seem perfectly free from embarrassment and easy in a natural way. We got on well and I was delighted with her company and sensitivity. I did not find out much about her life, but from her comments about mine I learnt a lot about the person she was, and I found her fascinatingly unusual. I was sorry to leave. Bryan also confirmed and fleshed out the St Osyth holiday home question [also ]: The next day we set off for St Osyth, a small village across the river Colne from Mersea Island on the Essex coast. Judy and Fresca were renting a 

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Part Three delightful thatched cottage there and Michael and I were to spend the first of our two-week holiday with them on a -berth yacht moored in the estuary, which had been lent to them for the occasion. We had a very happy time together on that boat. We lazed, read, cooked, bathed, went off in the large dinghy, shopped, drank at the quayside pub—and there was endless talk, full of gaiety and sombre forebodings of world events and how our and other’s lives could be affected. Fresca had relatives and friends living in Germany and she felt the dual pull of sympathies deeply. I have special memories of this short holiday for the perfection of the individual human relationship we enjoyed together: the purity of the experience was to remain with me.



 Enid Marx’s seaside wood cut for Fresca’s A Childhood (courtesy of Eleanor Breuning).

 Photograph of Jaywick.



Fresca probably wrote A Childhood during her stays in St Osyth with Judy. Several chapters from the book seem linked to St Osyth. These include the chapters entitled ‘Seaside’ and ‘More Seaside’, the first prefaced with this charming Marx woodcut, both of which take place in the fictional Woldingwick with its ‘Inner Green’ and cobbled streets. I find two towns in the vicinity of St Osyth named Seawick and Jaywick. The ‘wick’ ending is an Old

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Judy Wogan English word for a village or hamlet. The description of the landscape in A Childhood makes it sound more like Romney Marsh, in Kent and East Sussex, (Rye perhaps), although there is a St Osyth marsh. There is a ‘Tudor Green’ in Jaywick, but not an Inner Green. Along with St Osyth Beach and Hutleys, Jaywick (pictured here in the s) has the unfortunate boast of containing Essex’s ‘largest concentration of static caravan parks’. It was planned by Frank Stedman as a cheap destination for holidaying Londoners in the s. Sometime later, University College London Professor Rachel Bowlby suggests that Woldingwick might be Walberswick in Suffolk, once an art colony, home of Phillip Wilson Steer (his ‘The Beach at Walberswick’ ca. , below ) and Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and haunt of Stanley Spencer, among others. This makes sense since both Fresca and Judy had ties there: Steer had been Spencer’s teacher at The Slade (where he taught until ) and Adrian Allinson’s also, and Mackintosh had drawn up designs for the never-completed Arts League of Service studios in . It might have been here they met rather than at the anti-war concert in .

 Phillip Wilson Steer’s ‘The Beach at Walberswick’.

Fresca’s ‘Seaside’ chapters remind me of Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse, where groups of children rove about unattended, enjoying a freedom not permitted to them in town. It is in Woldingwick that A Childhood’s Charlotte falls in love, this time with a female circus performer. Fresca describes Charlotte’s emotions with the intensity of adult love: ‘for some tremulous delight had become unharnessed, as it were, and galloped uncertainly between sorrow and joy.’ It’s also the place in which female bonds are forged: with cousin Pat, between Scuttles, Pat’s mother, and dead Aunt Emily. 

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Part Three This glorious creature of tenderness, passion and infinite wisdom never emerged into a real person at all. I beheld a mist of curls and lace, and when, later, I came to know her, these became even more confused by the faint haze of scent that hung about her. La femme eternelle had giddied me. My mother’s restrained femininity, sobered through the worries and responsibilities of my father’s career, had prepared me for nothing like this; I made complete surrender of myself to a dream, a surrender as delightful as it was harmless, for I was thistle down and had no weight. My own imaginings tethered me to someone who, if she was not entirely of my creation, lay almost within the limits of its compass. Was the circus troupe the Arts League of Service troupe? Did Judy’s large circle of theatrical friends ever perform in Walberswick? And was the circus performer, a singer, of Fresca’s ‘Seaside’ chapters a tribute to Judy (here in a  photograph, ‘a mist of curls and lace’): ‘[t]his glorious creature of tenderness, passion and infinite wisdom’?  Judy Wogan.



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PART FOUR

Writer! Composer! F

RESCA’S niece, Sonya Allinson, sends me another picture of Fresca and later

I receive the same photograph from Margaret Lambert’s friend and executor Eleanor Breuning (below). Clearly, this is an image of herself that Fresca likes and one that she has shared with friends. The profile pose and the bobbed hair suggest lesbian chic of the period. I try to track down the address on the back of the photograph without success; the photographer appears to be Dorothy Fuller, Riviera Studios, A Grosvenor Road, Westminster, Victoria  (No -G). I speculate that this is a publicity photo for Schott music publishers. The image cries out ‘writer, composer’! It indicates that Fresca’s time with Judy Wogan is a time of confidence; and, indeed, it represents a productive period for Fresca in the realms of both literature and music.

 Fresca in the 1930s (Eleanor Breuning, Sonya Allinson).



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Part Four The next leg of my journey begins in the the Hogarth Press Archives at the University of Reading, a repository of detailed information about Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s business practices. The folders in the collection, named for individuals associated with the Press, hold correspondence between author and publisher and documentation pertaining to advertising strategies, contracts, and communications with overseas publishers. Their contents give a wonderful sense of how the Woolfs grew as publishers; they also confirm Leonard Woolf ’s meticulous organizational skills. And each folder tells a fascinating story about how authors and artists, many of them now, like Fresca, obscure, came into contact with the Press. I quickly solve the puzzle of how Fresca’s manuscript made it onto the Woolfs’ desks. On December , , Alice Ritchie writes from  Victoria Square, S.W.I, to Leonard Woolf. Ritchie is a Hogarth Press insider. She has worked for the Press as their first travelling salesperson, part time, beginning in , and has also published two novels under the Press’ imprint: The Peacemakers in  and Occupied Territory in . Her sister, Trekkie (Ritchie) Parsons, a Slade-trained artist, has designed several covers for the Hogarth Press, including John Hampson’s Saturday Night at the Greyhound. Trekkie will, famously, become Leonard Woolf ’s companion subsequent to Virginia Woolf ’s death. Alice Ritchie writes: Dear Leonard, I am so glad you like Miss Allinson’s M.S.—I was much impressed by it and had an idea that you and Virginia would appreciate it. She is a friend of a friend & I hardly know her—she is about thirty-four (looks older— white hair & a rather nervous manner) & she hasn’t written anything else. I rather think she has some money—she doesn’t seem to do any job & spends a good deal of time in the country. I know she has put a great deal of herself into her book & that if you have good news for her they will really be glad tidings. I’m off to Suffolk tomorrow—having been held up by influenza at Christmas; shall write later to see how it’s turning out. With all best wishes to you both Yours Alice. I guess that ‘the friend’ to whom Ritchie, pictured here at the Hogarth Press, refers is either Margaret Lambert or Enid Marx. Lambert thanks Ritchie in her Scrapbook and I later learn that Marx knows both Ritchies (and Trekkie painted Marx). 

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Writer! Composer!

 Alice Ritchie (Monks House photograph albums, Houghton Library).

Just a week later, on January , , Leonard Woolf writes to Fresca at  King’s Place, WI. Leonard tells Fresca that ‘We have read with great pleasure your MS [. . .] and we should like to publish it for you.’ Leonard offers ‘a royalty of  on the first  copies sold and  on all copies sold above that number’. He also offers ‘an advance on account of royalties of  pounds, provided that [she] would agree to give [the Press] the option of taking the next two books written by you on the same terms’. He promises to publish A Childhood ‘in the coming autumn’. He closes the letter with a suggestion that she add photographs to the book: ‘would this be possible?’ Fresca responds from King’s Place on January . She is ‘very glad’ the Press is willing to publish the book. Yes, Fresca agrees, ‘this book would gain if it contained illustrations,’ but, instead of photographs, what about woodcuts? She’s sure she can provide an artist whose fees will be low and whose work is ‘interesting’. Then she adds: ‘I have been having qualms about the last chapter and wonder what you would think of an operation, removing it altogether. It would leave a short book, shorter still.’ She proposes a meeting: ‘I am mostly in town during the middle of the week and would be very glad to call on you,’ before signing off as ‘E. P. Allinson’. On January , Leonard responds on the issue of ‘photographs versus woodcuts’. He suggests that it is ‘more a matter of taste than expense, provided that the payment for the artist isn’t too exorbitant’, and that there’s little difference in the cost. Then he adds: 

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Part Four I had my doubts about the last chapter. I am not at all sure that the book would not be improved by its removal. It is too sudden a change from what has gone before, but perhaps we might discuss this if you could come one afternoon next week. I could see you at . either Tuesday or Thursday of next week [and then in pencil] or still better if you could come at . on either of those days. Yours truly, LW



Although Leonard appears to have made the appointment, I find evidence in Virginia Woolf ’s letters to suggest that she rather than Leonard meets with Fresca. In a letter to the composer Ethel Smyth, Woolf describes an upcoming visit, at : p.m. on January , , as that of ‘a perfect stranger’ coming ‘for a long business talk about her book’. Letters editors, Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, identify that ‘perfect stranger’ as Fresca. Under normal circumstances, at this point in the Press’s life, Fresca would likely not have come into contact with Virginia Woolf. By , Woolf has largely bowed out of the day-to-day operations at the Press and is focusing on her own work. However, Margaret West, ‘far and away the best of [the Hogarth Press] managers’, with the Press since , has, just several days before (between the th and the th), succumbed to a pneumonia virus that has brought the entire Press to a standstill. The ‘crisis’ that ensues has forced Virginia Woolf to reluctantly take over West’s managerial responsibilities. But, alas, I find no record of the interview with Fresca. Woolf writes no letters, or at least none survive, between January  and February ; and diary entries are similarly missing for the period between January  and January . Leonard Woolf ’s appointment diary, held in the Monk’s House Papers at the University of Sussex, has no reference to a meeting for January . The diary entry for that day reads: ‘Work. Walk with LB.’ What might have happened if Virginia Woolf had indeed answered the door to Fresca at  Tavistock Square? The -year-old first-timer would have found the famous writer, turned  just two days before, on January , distracted, for at this point Woolf was apprehensively awaiting the publication date of The Years, already at work on Three Guineas and ‘in a pother’ over her biography of her late friend, the Bloomsbury art critic and painter Roger Fry. She was grappling with how to ‘square with [Fry’s] relatives’ or ‘euphemise  mistresses’, but found the writing ‘every day [. . .] more miraculous’. However, despite all of this work and the added burden of having to run the Press, which has led her to consider ‘shut[ting] up shop’ and ‘turn[ing] to something saner’, Woolf reported to Ethel Smyth that she is feeling ‘amazingly well’. This moment of well-being, 

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Writer! Composer! coupled with a regret over her aloofness towards the recently dead West and a resolution to ‘conquer’ it, voiced in her diary entry of January , as well as her dismay at the dinginess of West’s funeral, means that, to my mind, Fresca might have encountered a kinder Woolf than is sometimes the case. Woolmer’s Checklist reveals that , the twentieth year of Press operations, was a year of great variety at the Hogarth Press. I look over the list of what they published alongside Fresca’s A Childhood: E.M. Delafield’s Ladies and Gentlemen in Victorian Fiction, A book titled Smoky Crusade by little-known Irish socialist R. M. (Dick) Fox, his third with the Press, three biographies in the World-Makers & World-Shakers series: Socrates, by Naomi Mitchison and R. H. S. Crossman; Darwin, by L. B. Pekin; and Mazzini, Garibaldi & Cavour, by Marjorie Strachey, two Day to Day Pamphlets, a series of short works treating socio-political issues, one on military training and a second on a German’s view of contemporary Britain, Christopher Isherwood’s third Hogarth Press novel, Sally Bowles, poems by Christopher Lee, four International Psycho-analytical Library publications, a book on manners by Viola Tree, Can I Help You? and, perhaps the strangest of all, a book on diet and high blood pressure by Dr I. Harris. But despite some randomness, a closer look reveals that Fresca joins a number of lesser-known/middlebrow women writers: these include Sackville-West, Mitchison, Delafield, Tree, and Strachey. Perhaps a network is in operation here. J. H. Willis’s charts also indicate that biography and letters predominated in  with seven titles, the largest number in this category for any single year at the Press. In its capacity as a memoir of sorts, A Childhood is a good choice for the  emphasis on ‘lives’, including, in some respects, Woolf ’s own The Years with its family chronicle quality. The fact that Virginia Woolf was revisiting her own adolescence at about this same time suggests a further motivation for the selection of Fresca’s book. Woolf ’s childhood friend, Violet Dickinson, has just sent her a package containing two bound volumes of about  letters she has written to Violet as 

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Part Four a young woman. Woolf describes the letters as ‘scattered fragments of my very dejected and egotistical youth’ and asks Violet, ‘Do you like that girl? I’m not sure that I do, though I think she had some spirit in her, and certainly was rather ground down harshly by fate.’ Woolf asks Violet not to show the letters to anyone; she might like one day to write a memoir and would use lines from the letters.



On March  there is a long handwritten note from Fresca, now at Tan Cottage, St Osyth, accompanied by sketches prepared by ‘my friend, Miss Enid Marx’. Fresca tells Leonard that although it’s hard to tell what these might look like as wood cuts (‘they’re done in black and white wash’), she likes ‘the tray very much’. Several others she deems unsuitable, including the Funland illustration which is ‘too far from the vignette’. She asks that Leonard let ‘Miss Marx’ (at  Ordnance Road) or herself have a sense of the space allotted for the illustrations, this making the design easier to do. She closes by apologizing for ‘the mess on the back of the illustrations—the sheet blew onto the ground and the Peke made a bed of it for himself ’. Several letters exchanged by Leonard and Enid Marx, also in the Reading University archive folder, show that they corresponded about the design independently of Fresca. Leonard responds to Fresca on March  asking that Marx provide seven head pieces, one for each chapter. He’ll send the book to the printer and have the printer provide an estimate and a specimen page. First, however, they’ll have to decide on the size of the book—if it’s fiction, then the Press uses crown vo, if it’s biography, demy. He asks about payment for Marx’s work, regretting that the Press cannot offer much for a first book. Fresca replies saying that ‘from the decoration point of view’ Marx prefers demy. She tells Leonard that she and Marx will take care of the costs. In a March  letter, signed this time ‘Francesca Allinson’ rather than ‘E. P. Allinson’, again from St Osyth, Fresca encloses a preface, which, she says, will serve as an antidote whichever way Leonard decides to print it (and she doesn’t mind). ‘I mean, as the book sits neatly between biography & fiction, it needs a shove from one side or the other in either case.’ She asks Leonard that it be ‘dedicated to Judith Wogan’. And she closes with a question about the title: many people have said it’s dull—should she try to come up with another? Yes, says Leonard, another title might be a good idea. In a subsequent letter returning corrected proofs, Fresca says that she has decided to use ‘Francesca Allinson’ for the book rather than ‘EPA [Enid Pulvermacher Allinson]’, ‘the former [being] the name under which my other work is done’. She hopes that since the book will be ‘so slim’, the price can be 

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Writer! Composer! kept ‘as low as possible’. On May , Leonard writes back seeking a decision on the title and asking if Marx might be willing to do the book jacket as well as the chapter heads. He tells Fresca that the book will sell for  shillings and  pence. Leonard doesn’t like any of Fresca’s alternative titles, ‘A Child’s Horizon’ and ‘Childish Dimensions’, and they decide to stick with A Childhood. The remaining documents in the folder contain discussion of foreign and film rights, which do not materialize for Fresca. One letter, however, to ‘Dear Miss Lange’ (written from  Blandford Place, W.. [formerly Jury Street]) in response to a request for biographical information is revealing as it shows Fresca ‘in her own words’. She writes: I divide my time between a vegetable garden and the Reading Room at the British Museum. When my vegetable garden allows me I tend my forest nursery—but the trees having only been sown this Spring are not more than six inches high. As for other activities: at one time I played the fiddle in third-rate cinemas & sometimes even in pubs. Later on I conducted concerts of very early and very modern music—ranging from [Thomas] Tallis, [ Johannes] Schultz, Vit[c]toria etc. to [Heinrich] Kaminski, Kurt Weill & [Paul] Hindemith. I am sure that that part of the country in which I stay has no literary interests at all. But for that matter I am a regular Londoner although I am afraid I don’t quite qualify for the name of Cockney. The composers Fresca chose show the considerable range of her musical work. She lists Tallis (English), Schultz (German), and de Victoria (Spanish), all great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century early musicians, alongside Germans Hindemith, Weill and Kaminski, all three contemporary avant-garde composers and musicians with Weill and Kaminski radically political as well.



I turn next to Enid Marx. My first find is Fay Sweet’s  Independent obituary. Sweet describes Marx as ‘petite and charming, industrious and a perfectionist, outspoken and campaigning’. Marx or Marco (–) was the same age as Fresca; she studied at the elite girls’ secondary school Roedean, then at the Central School of Art and the Royal College of Art alongside Eric Ravilious. Ravilious helped her after hours through a wood engraving class to which the instructor, Frank Short, had refused her admission due to what he perceived as her lack of talent. Marx was also a protégée of Paul Nash. Marx is perhaps best known for her textile and other industrial design work, her s red and green 

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Part Four

 Marx’s London Underground textile design, 1930s.

pattern, representing the molten city and the countryside, which graced the seats on the London Underground into the sixties. Marx was also a prolific book illustrator, and she wrote and illustrated  children’s book. Among other projects, she designed stamps and was involved with Kenneth Clark’s ‘Recording Britain’ scheme during World War II, an effort to boost morale and to preserve watercolour painting. As I know from my earlier investigations into Margaret Lambert, Marx built a collection of popular English art now housed at the Compton Verney Museum in Warwickshire. Sweet says Marx began collecting as a child! Marx and Lambert also authored two books on English popular art, with sections on paper and printing; pottery and glass; painting, carving and metalwork; textiles; and miscellaneous handiwork and decoration, covering everything from tattoo designs, to quilts, shop signs, toys and milk jugs. I struggle to discover how Fresca and Marx first met. Did Fresca meet Marx via Lamb, with whom she was at Lady Margaret Hall? Or did Fresca introduce Marx and Lamb? Sonya Allinson describes Marx and Lamb as friends of Fresca’s from ‘before the war’. Suggesting a close relationship, both Marx and Lambert are named in Fresca’s will: Marx receives money and Fresca’s German china spoons, a match for a pair of her own, and Lambert her typewriter as well as the more generous gift of the rights to the site on which her house at  Mornington Terrace London N.W.I. stood before being destroyed during the Blitz. Suggesting a friendship, the illustrations for A Childhood model a playful dialogue between author and artist, Fresca and Marx. Art historian Cynthia Weaver notes in an article about Marx that ‘Colour is always sparing, but Marx achieves an impressive range and quality of line, tone and texture, [. . .] in her jacket and engravings for Francesca Allinson’s A Childhood.’ I also find an intriguing clue connecting Marx and Virginia Woolf ’s brother, Adrian Stephen, tucked in a copy of Leonard and Virginia Woolf ’s first Hogarth Press publication, Two Stories. The book contains an index card on which Marx has noted that the copy was given to her by ‘Adrian Stephens [sic] Virginia’s 

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Writer! Composer!

 Cover of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Two Stories (Random House).

brother’ in the ‘ties’. I ask (Marx and Lambert’s friend) Eleanor Breuning about this and she explains that ‘Adrian Stephen was Enid Marx’s (and Fresca’s) psychoanalyst for (I think) a brief period’. Breuning says that Adrian helped Marx ‘unearth a childhood memory of lying in bed at night and looking up at a chequered pattern of light cast on the ceiling by the nursery stove’. ‘This,’ Breuning tells me, ‘seemed to them to be connected to her life-long liking for every sort of checked pattern in textile.’ I pursue the possibility that Enid Marx’s friendship with Alice and Trekkie Ritchie Parsons explains Marx’s presence at the Hogarth Press although, as Breuning points out, Marx is a well-known book designer by this point and her association with the Hogarth Press makes sense in this regard. The Hogarth Press archive folder clears this up with the revelation that it was Alice who took Fresca’s manuscript to the Woolfs, probably on Marx’s request, and Fresca who then brought Marx on board. In a catalogue for Marx’s works for sale in , I find a wood engraving with the title ‘Leonard Woolf ’s Cat and Two Friends’. According to Breuning, Leonard Woolf, whom Marx and Lambert got to know perhaps subsequent to Virginia Woolf ’s death, gave them a Siamese kitten, but, while the cat was a gift, ‘true to his scrupulous habits’ Leonard ‘charged the ladies for her inoculation’! I find a lovely image of Marx with a Siamese perched on her shoulder at Compton Verney. 

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Part Four

 Older Enid Marx in her studio.

 Younger Marx (Design Council Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives).



The Hogarth Press publishes Fresca’s book in October  in a run of  copies, printed at the Garden City Press in Letchworth, Hertfordshire. The Woolfs bill A Childhood as ‘A book by a new writer which it is not altogether easy to classify’, and they label it, using Fresca’s own description, as ‘either biographical fiction or fictional biography’. A Childhood is advertised in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) (pictured) as ‘half fiction, half autobiography’ alongside Viola Tree’s book about manners, Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles and Anna Freud’s The Ego and The Mechanisms of Defence. An advertisement also appears in The Vegetarian News, thanks to Fresca’s contacts there, nicely placed alongside an article by brother Bertrand Allinson about children’s diets. A Childhood receives positive reviews. The London Mercury (November ) reviewer notes that: ‘The glass of memory through which Miss Allinson sees her childhood unifies without dimming the picture. Incidents are telescoped and some three or four years are run together, but every moment, every affection, every touch, every problem, every character stands out solid in the clarity of her prose. Written neither as fiction nor as biography, an exquisite little book.’ The Observer (October , ) reviewer calls Fresca’s book, ‘coming on Thursday from the Hogarth Press in blue covers and a beguiling noughts-and-crosses 

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Writer! Composer! trimmed wrapper,’ ‘altogether delightful’. In Fresca’s book s/he discovers ‘a childhood not remembered dimly, not seen in a glass darkly, but childhood vivid, large and near’. The reviewer cites the following passage from the third chapter to illustrate that ‘not a false word’ could be found there, but rather a perfection of plain writing that almost startles by its fit’: ‘I squatted among rows of savagely gleaming spinach, its dark, glossy leaves borne upon purple stems, while above me towered a wall of runner beans; the garden steamed and threatened more than I could account for.’ The reviewer closes with: ‘How small the child, how fraught with magic those kitchen-garden plants, how fearful that threat of thunder in the air. You could not say more in one sentence, nor say it better.’ In a long review in the BBC’s The Listener ( January , ), the reviewer detects ‘an authentic ring’ to what happens to Charlotte and concludes from this that her ‘hopes and fears [. . .] were clearly Miss Allinson’s own’. The reviewer places Fresca’s book in the context of a recent surge in ‘books about childhoods’. S/he questions the purpose of all this indulgent ‘interest in [one’s] infant sel[f ]’ and points out that ‘nice children do not make good reading’: ‘The children about whose childhood one reads with most interest and pleasure are, as a rule, rather pathological little wretches—children of violent feeling and little social sense.’ The reviewer finds nothing to fault in Fresca’s book:  Times Literary Supplement advertisement for A Childhood.



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Part Four She has created some life-like and moving pictures. Her childhood (or, at least, the childhood that she describes) is of the kind that most inspires nostalgia—warm, shadowy (preceding the vita-glass nursery) and at once adventurous and secure. Sickness, schwarmerei, pity, dread of decayed houses, seaside sensations and religious disquiet are all well described. Her approach to her Charlotte is, perhaps, a trifle over solicitous. This book (exquisitely produced by the Hogarth Press) would make an excellent gift for lonely people with no one to talk about the past. But such readers might be sent off into such a long reverie that they may never finish Miss Allinson’s book at all. They will burn to tell Miss Allinson exactly the way they felt, and exactly the way in which things affected them . . . One’s chief sensation, on closing this pleasant book, is sympathy with the pleasure it must have been to write. A Childhood is praised in the Annual Register of  alongside Wyndham Lewis’s Blasting and Bombadeering as one of the few readable autobiographies of the year: ‘Mr Lewis threw [a] piercing spotlight on the artistic and literary

 Vegetarian News advertisement for A Childhood (Emily Kopley).



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Writer! Composer! life of London from about  in Blasting and Bombadeering (Eyre and Spottiswoode), and Miss Francesca Allinson spoke delicately and exquisitely of A Childhood (Hogarth Press).’ And, in a review in Lady Margaret Hall’s The Brown Book, newly appointed English Professor Kathleen Marguerite Lea (–), signing KML, is effusive in her praise of the book which she has already lent out ‘to half a dozen people’. It is the kind of book, she writes, which one would have liked to have written of oneself but ‘for the life one could not’: ‘Failing this, one longs to read it out to the best people. Enough said. If I were a rich woman I would accompany this notice with a book token for s.d. for each judicious reader.’ The TLS reviewer hails the book as ‘a fresh and charming contribution to books about children for children lovers’. ‘How true and amusing is the method chosen by mother and nurse to terminate an over-prolonged and enjoyed invalidism after measles! How well Miss Allinson remembers the first grievance and sense of injury and neglect giving way to the inspiring activities of full convalescence and normal life!’ The review includes a copy of one of Enid Marx’s woodcuts. Only the Manchester Guardian reviewer expresses reservation. The reviewer, signing M. C., closes with the remark that: ‘so this is pleasant enough reading, but gives the feeling that one has eaten all the pink and white sugar but somehow missed the cake.’ While Fresca receives twenty pounds on publication of the book, the book does not sell well. In a letter to Leonard Woolf of April , , Fresca says that she ‘felt so sad at the account you recently sent me of all the unearned money that my little book is responsible for’.



The reviews lead me to consider readership and markets for Fresca’s work. Who bought Fresca’s book? And, once purchased, where did copies subsequently travel? WorldCat lists  libraries in possession of A Childhood; COPAC, which catalogues the holdings of ‘the UK’s national libraries (including the British Library), many University libraries, and specialist research libraries,’ lists nine. The abebooks.com website has nine copies ranging in price from . to ., none of which have dust jackets, while amazon.com has two used copies in a similar price range, again without dust jackets. I query a few Hogarth Press collector friends with copies of Fresca’s book. Stephen Barkway’s copy belonged to Marion Noyce. When I google ‘Marion Noyce’ I find her nephew’s profile, which mentions that: ‘George’s auntie Marion Noyce was a semi famous news reporter.’ Another abebooks copy belonged to Joan Lake, whom I am unable to identify. Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain president Stuart Clarke’s copy was the property of ‘THE COUNTY SCHOOL | WHYTELEAFE,’ a small 

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Part Four town/suburb in Surrey. Bookseller Cornfield Books has a copy for sale that belonged to Winifred Elliott Seabrook, sister of Ransom Elliott Seabrook, London School painter. Seabrook was a landscape and still-life painter who studied at the Slade School – and therefore was possibly a contemporary of Fresca’s brother, painter Adrian Allinson. Sharon Walls’s copy is inscribed to ‘Flora From Mother. Brendon. Torquay May ‘’. A last copy bears the inscription: ‘To Mummy with all wishes for a very merry xmas and a very happy New Year, Kenneth.’ I have a copy; and over the course of my search for Fresca I learn that Roger Marriage has a copy; Eleanor Breuning  copies; Matthew Eve several; the Victoria and Albert Museum several; Kit Martin has one copy inscribed to Cyril and Veronica; the Harry Ransom Center has Tippett’s copy with no inscription (and I wonder if there is another, perhaps still with Meirion Bowen) and Sonya one copy inscribed to Bertrand (‘we’re one apiece now . . .’).



I have some difficulty reaching official Enid Marx biographer Matthew Eve, but with some nudging from Eleanor Breuning, I finally manage to set up a meeting with him. We agree to rendez-vous at Marks and Spencer by Covent Garden tube station at  p.m. on a warm June day in . Eve has promised some intriguing items, among them Adrian Stephen’s psychoanalysis of Marx, and a suicide note that he is sure he has seen tucked into a book. Eve himself knew Marx, so I am very anxious to talk to him. Before meeting Eve, I spend the morning at the Victoria and Albert Museum archive in Blythe Street, Kensington. The Marx collection has yet to be catalogued, but I’m told I can consult books from Marx’s library. I’m at a bit of a loss, without any kind of list to choose from, since the archivist cannot supply me with a full book list, so I ask to see any copies of A Childhood and also any copies of other Hogarth Press titles, including Virginia Woolf ’s books, and any other Woolf-related material. In Marx’s very well-worn copy of The Waves, a purple hardback with a gold and black patterned cover, dedicated to ‘Enid with love, Norman and Joyce, th October, ,’ I find several passages marked off with a light pencil mark. The archivist has told me Marx was an annotator, but I find little evidence, except this, of engagement with the text. Perhaps Marx realized that these were valuable titles and so held off marking them up. In the first marked passage Bernard is speaking: O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s sonnets. O friendship, how piercing are your darts—there, there, again there. All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall keep 

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Writer! Composer! to my dying day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waves, he went over me, his devastating presence—dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul. It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones. All semblances were rolled up. ‘You are not Byron; you are yourself.’ To be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange. In the second marked passage we hear Rhoda’s voice: Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, my porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them—Oh! to whom? ‘Sailors loiter on the parade, and amorous couples; the omnibuses rattle along the sea front to the town. I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty. I will bind my flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will present them—Oh! to whom?’ Marx has bound most of her copies of Woolf ’s books in paper of her own design. I find a  uniform edition copy of Mrs Dalloway bound in paper of the design that has been picked up by the Tate Modern for their Marx mug. It contains her address:  Ordnance Road, NW, but has no dedication. Marx has inadvertently dropped one of Mrs Dalloway’s l’s. (Marx’s difficulty with spelling will enable me later to identify her as the writer of a list of names of people to contact to inform of Fresca’s death).

 Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, wrapped in paper designed by Enid Marx, UK, 20th century (V&A).



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Part Four Marx’s copy of a Room of One’s Own, a gift ‘from Benno, ’, is covered with a green print, also her own design.

 Marx’s paper used for her copy of A Room of One’s Own (V&A).

The Common Reader (second edition, ) is covered with yet another design in brown and cream.

 Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader wrapped in paper designed by Enid Marx, UK, 20th century (V&A).

Among Marx’s books I find three copies of A Childhood, two with dust jackets, one without. The number of copies, I later learn, is a result of Marx and Lamb’s request to Leonard Woolf on Fresca’s death for multiple copies to distribute to friends. Matthew Eve has several copies, likely also from Marx’s collection. Unfortunately, none of Marx’s copies are annotated or dedicated. Many of the Woolf books have newspaper and magazine articles slipped inside. A copy of The Common Reader: Second Series with the dedication ‘Frisk 

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Writer! Composer! to Mark June ’ [Fresca to Marx] contains an article from the Sunday Times of January , , entitled the ‘High Priestess of Bloomsbury’. Three Guineas, ‘*to Lamb from Shrimp  with L & q for services rendered* a friend in need is a friend in deed,*’ contains two newspaper cuttings, one announcing that Woolf is ‘feared drowned’, the second an obituary. Other Hogarth Press books in Marx’s collection include John Hampson’s O Providence (), Woolf ’s Orlando, The Voyage Out, A Letter to a Young Poet, and Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. I find a number of books about Woolf ’s work, including E. M. Forster’s  lecture (Virginia Woolf: the Rede Lecture, , Cambridge UP, ), and, a reflection of Marx and Lambert’s connection with Leonard Woolf, a volume of his autobiography Downhill all the Way, with the dedication ‘ML to EM, ’. I also find four volumes of Woolf ’s Collected Essays (–) with a surprise: Marx designed the covers. All are the same pattern, but volume one is blue, two yellow, three red and four dark green. After her first cover for Allinson, Marx becomes a design fixture at the Hogarth Press and then at Chatto and Windus. As well as Woolf ’s Collected

 Marx’s cover design for Woolf’s Collected Essays (1966–1967) (Random House).



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Part Four Essays, Marx illustrates Norman Douglas’s An Almanac, , and Edward Lear’s Nonsense Songs, . Her work also adorns the covers of the Phoenix Living Poetry Series.



Matthew Eve texts me. He is going to be late; it is a very hot day and the Underground is running very slowly. I take a circuitous route myself from the Victoria and Albert Museum archive to Covent Garden due to delays and closures. As we proceed from the tube station to Carluccio’s for coffee, Eve begins with the bad news. He has not managed to locate the suicide note or the Adrian Stephen psychoanalysis of Marx. However, he has found other things, more than he remembered. And he hands me a plastic bag full of letters. Ironically, like the purloined letter, these letters, which I’d hoped to find among Marx’s papers at the Victoria and Albert, are in a Victoria and Albert plastic bag. Among the materials Eve gives me are several different bundles: Fresca’s letters are mostly addressed to Marx, just a few to Lamb. These include: ) a couple of postcards from the later s (to Lamb), one from Germany, the other dated  from London; ) letters pertaining to Marx’s illustrations for A Childhood (from –) from St Osyth; ) letters from East Grinstead (–); and ) a later batch of letters from Mill House, written right up to late , on the eve of Fresca’s death. Also among the letters are several relating to a collaborative project for the series Britain in Pictures and some pages of Marx’s unpublished autobiography. I also find some notes for a book by Marx and Bertrun [Bertrand] Allinson, a connection I have not yet made. A final batch exchanged by Marx and Lambert with Cyril and Veronica and various other friends cover the months subsequent to Fresca’s death. On a later trip to the Victoria and Albert in  I check in with archivist Alexia Kirk. She tells me that she has found a box marked as containing correspondence with Fresca. I am hopeful that perhaps this means Eve has deposited the materials or that something fresh has surfaced. However, just a day before my appointment, Alexia writes concerned that what she thought was in the box is not. I am going to the Victoria and Albert archive in order to view some of Adrian Allinson’s beautiful sketches of the Ballets Russes so I take a look at the box anyway. The label on the side indeed reads: ‘E. M.—letters to and from 

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Writer! Composer! (mostly s–s)—including F. Allinson file, obit etc’ and on the top: ‘personal letters’. Clearly this is the box in which the letters were originally stored. The few letters left in the box, however, are those from the s and s, letters from friends like Jillian Leech (date ), and Shirra from the Department of Economics at the University of Haifa who seems to have been among those who lived with Marx and Lambert at Thornhill Road. Like a glove left at the scene of a crime, among the letters is one to Marx from Eve himself (dated February ) containing questions related to a paper he’s writing about Marx’s wartime children’s book, Bulgy Nelson and the Chicken Ace.



The jumbled, undated letters Eve gives me shed light on Fresca’s reading and her writing, her coping strategies, her help to others in the late s and s, and her struggles with ill health. They also highlight the close bond she shares with both Marx and Lambert. For the first time I can hear Fresca’s voice. Here Fresca is Fresc or Friskus. Marx is Marc or Marco or Marcissimo, Lambert is Mimi or Mrs M. or Lambkin. Despite the fact that it seems Fresca and Lamb were friends first, Fresca seems very close to Marco. Among the letters are a few pages of unpublished autobiographical notes written by Marx. In a chapter on the s, she writes that she met Margaret Lambert and Fresca at the Mary Ward Settlement, an educational centre in Bloomsbury, in , shortly after she moved to Ordnance Hill.  I am unclear whether Marx met Lambert via Fresca or if she met Fresca via Lambert or if Fresca and Lambert met Marx at the same time. Breuning speculates that it is Fresca who ‘caused ML’s world (where propriety was de rigueur, since some male Lambert was always either in, or standing for, Parliament, and hence it was always imperative not to let the side down lest it put off potential voters) to intersect with EM’s world of unconventionality, multifarious creativity and the quest for self-realisation.’ In terms of Fresca’s commitment to arts education and her philanthropy, Marx’s children’s books and both Marx and Lambert’s love of popular art, as well as, of course, the physical proximity of the Hogarth Press, the Mary Ward Centre is a propitious place for Marx and Fresca to meet. Mary Ward was the Victorian novelist Mrs Humphry Ward. She was an acquaintance of the Stephen family and Virginia Woolf makes several references to her in letters. Woolf dislikes Ward’s writing, mentioning in  that she has ‘blacklisted’ her. Reviewing Ward’s daughter’s biography of her mother for the New Republic in , however, Woolf is torn in terms of her admiration for Mary Ward. Troubled by the fact that Ward threw away a promising career as a historian to write extremely profitable novels and, as Woolf describes it, proceeded to live 

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Part Four like a ‘great lad[y] of the Renaissance’ a life of ‘society, entertainment and philanthropy’, Woolf nonetheless acknowledges that without her ‘novel-writing there would be no centre for good talk in the pretty room overlooking the grounds of Buckingham Palace’ and ‘without her novel-writing thousands of poor children would have ranged around the streets unsheltered’. Ward opened an [adult] educational centre in , still in existence today, first at University Hall Settlement, Gordon Square, and a second at Marchmont House, then at  Tavistock Square (–) and next (in –) at  Tavistock Square, across the square from the Hogarth Press and about a mile from Fresca’s Spanish Place birthplace. The goal of the centre was to help the community by promoting public education and social service. Among those who lectured there were George Bernard Shaw, Stanley and Beatrice Webb, and Aldous Huxley. As well as the centre, Ward began the Play Centre movement in England and she opened the first school for disabled children at the Settlement in . Michael Tippett was also involved with the settlement. In her autobiographical note, Marx describes Fresca as ‘a musicologist specialising in early music and madrigals [and who] published in Germany. A friend, admirer and patron of Michael Tippett, she also enjoyed writing and asked me to illustrate her book A Childhood, published by the Hogarth Press.’ Marx names Fresca’s brother ‘Adrian, a painter, [as] a friend of Sir Adrian Boult, the conductor’. Fresca was being psychoanalysed by Adrian Stevens [sic] and sponsored my first sessions with him. Before accepting me as a patient he enquired if I was a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Innocently I said no, I lived in Hampstead, as I had no idea what he meant. I’d only heard of Bunny Garnet [sic], then a bookseller, and Roger Fry from [textile designer] Phyllis Barron, and had read Mrs Dalloway. I did not realize that Adrian Stevens [sic] was Virginia Woolf ’s young brother.



Among Fresca’s letters, there are a few early notes from the late s addressed to ‘Miss M. Lambert’ at Spreyton. In one, with a Cricklewood postmark, probably when Fresca was living in Christchurch Avenue, Fresca laments the fact that Lamb was not at a NUSEC lunch that same day. The National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (–), formerly known as the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was led by Eleanor Rathbone. The organization fought for equal pay for equal work and equal access to all types of profession, and its members pressed for legal reforms in the realm of marriage, divorce, prostitution, pensions for civilian widows, and guardianship. In the letter, Fresca 

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Writer! Composer! describes a speech by Margaret Bondfield, Labour minister between  and , as ‘magnificent’. Other speakers included Lady Astor and Megan LloydGeorge, whom Fresca describes as appealing to her audience’s emotions with her ‘most musical and rhetorically attuned’ voice, a talent, however, which Fresca fears would not necessarily translate into change before a broader audience. In the same letter, Fresca tells Lamb that she has had ‘a long & enthusiastic letter from [Fresca’s German colleague Herbert] Just’ in which he asks if he can ‘print portions of my descriptions of the music camp.’ Unfortunately, the next page is missing, either lost or I had omitted to copy it, and this letter ends ‘I think that . . .’ A second letter to Lamb (addressed as ‘Pip’) is sent from Munich, Germany, also in . Here Fresca, apparently travelling, apologizes for not having written sooner ‘because we have lived such a muddled existence’. She explains that ‘we’ stopped in Köln to see the Dome and the windows. She says she has converted her travelling companion, Huxley—whom I was unable to identify (perhaps Julian or sister Margaret, born , who was at Somerville at Oxford University between  and )—to stained glass, which she recognizes was not a very hard task due to the abundance and the beauty of the work. From Köln, she says, they continued to Nuremberg, travelling with ‘some delightful wonderful boys of  or ’. They were, she says ‘far more mature than English boys of that age’. She says they argued violently for three hours, but she has forgotten about what. She makes a few comments about the town of Nuremberg, to which their short trip didn’t do justice. Fresca then mentions that ‘there are lots of semi military & wandervogel chaps about, wearing a new band with a black swastika’. She says that she asked them ‘why they wore it & they said they [were] national anti-semitic socialists’. She goes on: ‘I felt very miserable at seeing racial hatred so organized. I must find someone to ask about it quickly. But of course everything is organized here.’ I find two German postcards. One, sent from Germany, reads: ‘A glorious thunderstorm over the lake & now alas it continues to pour. We have done nothing but eat since mid-day—before which we did many athletic things. Good bye, Fresca.’ The second has a London postmark. She tells Lamb she has been working at the British Museum and is going to see Noel Coward’s latest. She says she is ‘sickened’ by an article Lamb sent her about Rockefeller and she’s seeing an unidentified Dorothy the next day. Another letter from Cricklewood mentions Huxley again; the two of them have seen George Bernard Shaw’s The Apple Cart (which premiered in England in  at the Malvern Drama Festival). She commends the play to Lamb, saying that it is ‘a play after [her] own heart—politics & wit’. A second set of letters, dating from the late s, includes a number which make reference to Fresca’s Hogarth Press book. One marked St Osyth, Sunday, 

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Part Four I date as preceding  since it mentions that the book has yet to be quite finished. Allowing me to confirm the date, Fresca also mentions royalties from her Don Quixote arrangement, the performance date of which is January , and Virginia Woolf ’s novel The Years, published in . Dear Marc— Oi-here you are. I have just received my first royalties for Don Quixote- pounds---and feel terribly proud. I shall have earned  pound-- this year! I’ve nearly finished the bloody book. Apart from the fact that almost every sentence needs re-writing & Pity makes me sick—the proof reading is ok. And hush—here and there are little bits I like. I am doddering gently in the direction of Francesca A. —Cyril is the only one who sticks to the family cipher, I find, & I am going to be doing a good deal of libretto writing for Michael, & that will certainly go under F. A. so don’t be surprised if I change my mind. By the way, have you thought jacket-ward? Judy is certain that Vanessa B[ell] has taken a leaf out of your book for the jacket of The Years. In a moment of enthusiasm & loyalty I bought it, but have not looked at it yet. Judy thinks it lousy. Do go and see FG [?]. It may make you cross as I know you & Lamb don’t like that set. But the thing is alive & about things that matter today & that I am grappling with. Then if you’ve liked it, read it. You’ll get a completely different point from the book. Rupert has cut & cut & cut. Marcelle [Bertrand’s wife] invited me to lunch on Saturday! I think that means that Enid [niece] will be able to come here. But I didn’t accept the invitation, feeling inclined . . . . . Jude [Wogan] rushing for the post. Love F. I have trouble identifying FG, so I query my Virginia Woolf listserv. Stuart Clarke explains that FG is likely W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s play The Ascent of F, first produced on February , , at the Mercury Theatre by Rupert Doone. He adds that it is described as ‘“Mountain climbing as an expression of the yearning for elevation about the underpeople” by Laurence Goldstein, in The Flying Machine and Modern Literature.’ Catherine Hollis adds: ‘It’s a mountaineering play, of all things, and an indictment of the British imperial drive to “conquer” Mt. Everest (there were four British expeditions to Everest between  and ). It would also reflect George Mallory’s



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Writer! Composer! death on that mountain in  (Mallory, as you know, was an object of beauty and desire for Duncan Grant, Lytton and James Strachey earlier in his life).’ She adds that ‘Allinson’s background as a pacifist and a c.o. makes me think that her interest in F would be in its political satire, and anti-imperialism (F, a cross between Everest and K, is called in the play “Chormopuloda” and located in “Sudoland” where reports of the natives rioting are “grossly exaggerated”). Reuben Ellis, in Vertical Margins: Mountaineering and the Landscapes of Neoimperialism () calls it a political allegory about the rise of fascism—not really about the mountaineering at all.’ I note that the music for the original production is by Benjamin Britten, connecting it back to Fresca and Tippett. Oliver Soden also reminds me that Auden had asked Tippett to write the music for his first work with The Group Theatre, Dance of Death, only for Rupert Doone to find Tippett too severe as a composer. This irritated Auden very much, because he had wanted Tippett as his musical protégé. Had this happened successfully, as Auden hoped, Tippett would most likely have done the music for F too. Tippett also knew both Doone and his director/partner Robert Medley reasonably well. As Soden suggests, Fresca would surely have had all this in mind when going to see The Ascent of F. In a  letter from St Osyth, Fresca writes thanking Marco for the illustrations for A Childhood—and it appears that Marco has done them for free: St Osyth, Tuesday [, pre April?] Dear Marc—(and Lamb) [arrow pointing from Marc] You are a devil. What an unbusiness-like person you are. No wonder you’re not a millionairess. Thanks ever so—but you didn’t ought’er. (By the way, I’m talking about the illustrations). As to format. I’ve told L.W. he can do exactly as he likes. I’ve written  lines of preface which more or less define the status of the book, so that it doesn’t matter what it’s printed as. And Fresca adds down the side, referring to the size of the book: ‘it’s coming out demy, I told him you preferred it.’ A letter ( June , ) from Lamb to Marx alludes to the illustrations Marx has done for Fresca. Lamb tells Marx (addressing her as ‘dearest Shrimpy’) that she has spoken to Frisk: ‘She told me how delighted she was with the cover you’d done for her book. She thought it altogether charming. She was also pleased with the engraving of the tray. Further she has seen Langham Place Church & the Crystal Place as a drawing, so was delighted with that too. This was all quite spontaneous.’



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Part Four There is a note in this letter, however, that suggests that this outpouring of praise from Fresca isn’t normal at this point. I wonder if the gap in the letters between the late s and late s marks a distancing between Lamb and Marx and Fresca that is only now being bridged via Fresca’s book. Langham Place Church is just half a mile from Spanish Place and is perhaps the church where Fresca worshipped as a child. This wood cut, which prefaces ‘Sunday’, is a cityscape, with steeples, a crystal palace-like glass roof, water (the Thames) and factories, under a dramatic sky, the ‘choppy sea of roofs’ Charlotte and friend Thea see from the roof of Charlotte’s house. ‘I imagined this London of roofs is the home of crossing-sweepers, cripples and flower-women, people of gentle occupation who cherished their houses and defended them against change.’ 

 Marx’s woodcut for ‘Sunday’ chapter of Fresca’s A Childhood (Random House; Eleanor Breuning).

Another typed letter, clearly from St Osyth, sheds light on Fresca’s day-today existence at Tan Cottage with references to Jude and to Eleanor Elder’s husband, Hebs, and children. Fresca’s mention of Leonard and the question of the title of her book dates this letter to : Wednesday. Dear both of you, I’m sure you’ve cut me off without a shilling by now and struck me out of your respective address books. But we’ve had a hellish spate of visitors drop out of nowhere at us and such a cooking and arranging and entertaining as has made letter-writing, which I am never good at at the best of times, out of the question. I did write a letter to you some days ago and I enclose 

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Writer! Composer! it. Please don’t think me awful for not writing in light of kindnesses all round—Marc’s decorations and Lamb’s invitation. The lavender [sic] has just reached Jude and she is delighted though distracted at the moment with trying to do all the things she should have done during the week. Today as a final fillip we have had to feed John, Kennie, Eddie, and Hebs [Eleanor Elder’s family] because their own household arrangements have gone out of joint. I was touched to the quick by Lamb’s deft cynicism about the state of Primo. Unfortunately he is not very far on, though Jude has provided some glorious incidents, and the poor chap is swaying along inside a muff and feeling decidedly seasick. Leonard [Woolf ] thinks that the name of the book is lousy. I suppose you haven’t any ideas. I’m writing to tell him that my mind is a blank on the subject and if he likes to call it One Night of Love, or Flaming Passion, he can. He says the title has no selling power. Marc, won’t you ring up the Hogarth Press and tell them to return you sketches or even go round from Adrian to fetch them. It would be much simpler than for him to post them to me and me post them to you. I will now close because if I don’t I shall miss the post & this letter will lie about for another week. Plenty love, F. Then Fresca sends letters and flowers to Ordnance Road when Marx and Lambert are in fact at Spreyton: Marc, Fortunately, I forgot to enclose Leonard’s letter. So here it is. Write to the old lad & tell me what you say. [Fresca dashes off to catch the post]. In one telling letter, Fresca commiserates with Marco—we’re both so feminine, she writes. I’ve just read a frightfully good book by Stefan Zweig called Beware of Pity []. I was very prejudiced about him & it—but it’s a book you can’t lay down. So put it on your reading list. You know, I’ve been thinking about your silliness about not getting picked up & so on. Your difficulties are just in proportion by your value. Because you’ve got such a hell of a lot of quality to you—of which quality Cycill hasn’t got a pinch—you can’t go muddling/wandering (?) about in Cycill’s way—nor in the way I did neither. 

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Part Four Getting picked up is of such damn little importance—I know that sounds obvious though it isn’t, because I get bad patches of feeling inferior about the business because I often find I frighten men & don’t get on as swimmingly as I should like to. But actual picking up & a lot of foolery isn’t it for women of your age. Other values come into play. And you happen to be one of the few people I know—certainly to be easily counted on the fingers of one hand—who really know how to love. I should jolly like you to have a man, to live with—but somehow the more important that looms the less likely it is to happen. If you can wipe that out a bit from your mind, it’ll come of itself. You & I belong to the same pigeonhole. We’re both just intensely feminine—so feminine that it’s hard to bridge the gap to the over masculine. The gap therefore seems even larger & more important than it is. Transfer your values onto something else & that drops it into place quietly. [Down the side:] I’m going to Toosie on Tuesday or Wednesday; Sorry I am a bit unexpressed [?] but it’s so idiotic for a person like you to spend [?] feeling inferior. Love to you and Mrs M. Fresc. Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, published in  and translated the same year, is the story of a young soldier’s entanglement with a crippled young woman named Edith von Kekesfalva, a connection spurred by pity and the well-being that his pity provides him.  This is a pity that eventually turns on the soldier like, he imagines, the djinn in A Thousand and One Nights. Invalidism, psychological analysis of the impulse to pity, and love for one who is an invalid were all issues which spoke to Fresca. Suicide is also central to the novel. The story is told from the perspective of the soldier, Anton. Towards the novel’s end the narrator, Anton, considers taking his life, but is ultimately dissuaded from doing so; however, the novel closes with the suicide of the crippled young woman, Edith, after news reaches her that Anton has denied an earlier engagement to her (admittedly made in the heat of the moment) in front of his soldier colleagues. Zweig, an Austrian Jewish novelist and librettist, committed suicide with his young second wife in  having fled to Brazil from Germany/Austria via London and New York. Zweig wrote a letter on the day of his death asserting, ‘I salute all my friends! May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.’ Zweig’s decision to kill himself resonates with Fresca’s decision to do the same; but, I wonder, why was Fresca prejudiced against Zweig? Was she referring to Thomas Mann’s view that Zweig’s suicide was selfish and that in taking his own life he had given into the 

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Writer! Composer! Nazis or is she alluding to the fact that Mann also suspected Zweig committed suicide in order to escape a sex scandal. Recently, heritage authorities refused to put a blue plaque on the house Zweig occupied for five years while in London stating that there was ‘no critical consensus’ on Zweig’s work. Efforts are being made to reverse this decision; among Zweig’s admirers are Zadie Smith, Antonia Fraser, Sir John Gielgud and US film director Wes Anderson who names Zweig as the main inspiration for his  film The Grand Budapest Hotel. Zweig’s title takes me back to what I consider to be the most moving chapter in Fresca’s book entitled ‘Pity’, written before Beware of Pity. Its title is flanked by Marx’s most elaborate engraving which includes the words, almost a second, or sub-, title, ‘All My Own Work’. Interestingly, this is a chapter that Fresca had singled out in a letter to Marx as dissatisfying, perhaps because it was among the most personal. In ‘Pity’, Fresca describes Charlotte’s coming to an understanding of poverty. A romantic image of poverty and charity, dreams in which Charlotte lavished poor children with gifts and comforts and received appropriate gratitude in return, gives way to the harsh reality of indigence: ‘[Charlotte] discover[s] that beggars didn’t like being beggars, but hated it, and thought it was [her] fault, yes, [hers].’ As a result Charlotte is at first afraid and repulsed by the homeless people she sees in the street or in her own family’s hallway; a man comes weekly to receive alms from her father. She feels violated by their intrusion into her home and she experiences a loss of trust in those meant to protect her. A trip out to buy books, however, brings Charlotte face to face with ‘a beggar-woman whose simple and beautiful face was so urgent with suffering that [Charlotte] longed to give her all the money [she] had intended to spend on books’. This desire to give is counterbalanced by a horror of interacting with the woman. In the midst of this torment, Charlotte has an epiphany: ‘During its quivering stillness I caught news of an ecstasy coming towards me that flamed and roared as a comet might do. I knew what it meant: that one of those moments for which I had come to live and which I nevertheless feared was upon me.’ Having described handing over her book money to the beggarwoman and the beggar-woman’s recounting of her story, widowhood, work place injury, begging in order to feed her children, Charlotte interrogates her own experience. As she ‘turn[s] homeward, [she is] still numb, but translated’. If pity is an element, then I dwelt in it; if it is a weak self-indulgence, I over-indulged myself. My young adolescence having chanced upon an illumination, I took it for a sun that should shed light into every dark corner. As the gentleness of this pity, which I exalted into a god, shone into the crabbed chambers of my disgust, I, with my few and silly years upon me, started forgiving everybody, even myself. The old man and the terrifying 

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Part Four horde of beggars to which he belonged; my father, for whom I had long entertained nothing but anger and shrinking; and myself that had once been the most wicked person in the world and continually failed even the elements of goodness: I plunged them all into a flood of pity and drew them forth with a coat of helplessness upon them. Now they all seemed to be small children that could not help what they had done; wickedness appeared to be foolishness; and I knew that I could accept and forgive everybody, even myself, in the same way as the beggar-woman had accepted and forgiven herself.



A letter, dated Wednesday, clearly follows Fresca’s trip to St Osyth with Judy, Tippett, and Bryan Fisher: Dear Marc— Thanks for your welcome letter. I am just at this moment having a welcome pause while being x-rayed again. I’m sick of having a pain all day long, every day. The time on the boat was fun but the second week was marred by lousy weather. The problem wasn’t to keep warm but to keep dry—we dodged about in our bunks, missing drips and applying mackintoshes & cups of tea to the afflicted portions. But the first week with the boys was fun in both senses of the word. West Mersea distinguished itself by producing a couple of bottle-nosed whales (dead) which it felt very proud of until their noses got the better of their pride. Bottle-nosed whales can go very high in a remarkable short space of time. I have sent off right away for the [Peter F. Drucker’s] End of Economic Man []. It was a book I had been avoiding because of its depressing & technical title. Yes—I think the things you mention are true—we’re swollen up—& not only that, but now, our swelling touches the ground. I think the insulation from the earth is responsible for a lot. But what affects everybody most I think is the complete disillusion. We were arguing it on the boat. Michael said there hadn’t been such a dreary outlook for centuries. I argued that we just think that because we can’t see around the next corner—and other generations have felt just the same. But whether that is so or not Michael is right in saying there is an absolute reversal of the feeling that existed when we were small & doubtlessly also during the latter part of the Victorian era—that the world was getting better every day, with its intellectual and artistic widening out, and its physical improvements. Well no one in their sense can feel that way to-day. Just things rolling down and no one being able to put the break [sic] on. 

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Writer! Composer! Continuing on, Fresca is full of praise for Nora Waln’s Reaching for the Stars, published by Little, Brown in . Fresca tells Marc that Waln is a Quaker (from Pennsylvania) and that the book is about Germany. An account of Waln’s stay in Germany in the mid-s with her British husband who is studying music (and this part must have appealed to Fresca very much), Reaching for the Stars is a candid, although, in my opinion, rather naïve, account of Waln’s perception of the Germans living under the Third Reich. Waln is certainly affected by many of the horrific things she sees—friends go missing, she sees the Germans completely cowed, impassively accepting the Fuhrer’s decrees—but the antiJewish propaganda she sees everywhere seems not to affect her. The beauty of the countryside and the folk traditions, an important part of Nazism, obscure for her, it seems, the greater implications of the anti-Semitism. What Fresca seems to have taken away from Waln’s book is that there are good Germans. She reports to Marx: ‘[Waln] finds the courageous and the liberal German all over the place. She tells about a young Nazi ranker who knocked out  men for taunting an old Jewish woman with insults. He got marched off by a policeman until they reached a quiet street, when the policeman said: “My—I admire your courage. Now clear out quick.”’ Fresca follows this with talk about her cousins Else and Sofie, revealing her anxiety and her sense of foreboding, despite this optimism. Else, she says, ‘has returned to Germany in the utmost dumps [. . .] She has written to me to say that if she sees a war approaching she will drop everything and [land/launch ?] herself into England. But I can’t see any sense in that as it would only mean deportation or internment. Of course if she was interned with Sofie she’d mind that less than any other fate. Do you or Lamb know what would happen to refugees in the case of war. It’s rather important to know. Ask Lamb would you.’ Fresca closes with: ‘I’m hoping to come to town next week unless the Doctor forbids—I simply must get down to that music—so maybe I’ll be seeing you soon. Plenty of love to both & olive oil Fresca.’ Olive oil, I learn, is a malapropism for au revoir.



At the same time as her work on A Childhood, Fresca was also writing music. In a letter proposing a Britain in Pictures book on English ballads, Fresca mentions her collaboration with Geoffrey Dunn on an arrangement of ‘Don Quixote’ for the Intimate Opera [Society Orchestra] made up from Purcell’s incidental music. I date this to . Tippett mentions that Fresca asked him for help with the ‘the realization of the figured bass’ for this piece. When she did not follow his advice, he was relieved, feeling he lacked experience. The Intimate Opera Company’s performance of Fresca’s ‘Don Quixote’ was a great success. After performing January  through , , in Montreal, 

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Part Four Canada, the troupe moved to New York. In the New York Sun on Wednesday, January , , Oscar Thompson wrote: It was the last of the four brief works on the bill [at New York’s Little Theatre] that made most positive impress. Purcell, of course, did not write any such ‘opera’. This ‘Don Quixote’ is a compilation of music from his pen by Francesca Allinson. But Purcell did write a series of vocal numbers as incidental music for a play on this topic, or rather three plays, Thomas D’Urfey’s ‘Comical history of Don Quixote’ which was produced in the last years of the seventeenth century. Other music for the same productions was written by John Eccles. Last night’s ‘opera’ drew on incidents from the first of the three plays, while the music went further afield. Skillfully applied, the vocal adaptations served their purpose with a measure of theatrical effectiveness as well as genuine musical appeal. The Glasgow Herald of March , , announces that Geoffrey Dunn, Frederick Woodhouse, and Winifred Radford (–) will give a performance at the Bath Music festival of ‘Mozart’s Bastien and Bastienne and Don Quixote of Purcell “the first full presentation ever given of this work”.’ The Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette of Saturday April , , reports a performance of Don Quixote canceled due to illness: Dunn has laryngitis. I also find references to later performances in the s: The Stage. Year Book () mentions the piece ‘devised’ by Fresca with a libretto by Geoffrey Dunn and directed by Percy Heming; it lists the performers, but, on a quick search, none are still living. In Time and Tide () I find an announcement of the Intimate Opera Company’s concert performances of Don Quixote devised by Francesca Allinson to Purcell’s music. Antony Hopkins is artistic director of the Intimate Opera between  and , thus he likely oversees this later performance. Despite this evidence and Fresca’s mention of royalties, searches of WorldCat, COPAC and the British library catalogue (to which Purcell scholar Sir Curtis Price sends me) yield nothing in terms of a published version of this arrangement. I speculate that the royalties might have come from the performances. I find a letter in which Lamb explains to Veronica Wedgwood (the historian C. V. Wedgwood) that Fresca’s version of ‘Don Quixote’ was a selection and arrangement of tunes from Purcell’s King Arthur; Dunn supplied the words. Lamb asserts that ‘King Arthur as it stands is virtually unperformable, and Fresca’s aim was to make some of its enchanting music accessible.’ I suspect that she confused Don Quixote and King Arthur here. 

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Writer! Composer!

 Intimate Opera.

I want to know more about this company that approximates in a number of ways the Arts League of Service. Dunn founded the Intimate Opera Company in , along with Frederick Woodhouse (baritone) and Mabel Ritchie (pictured here with Radford, not Ritchie in  [National Portrait Gallery]), a group similar to the Arts Council’s ‘Opera for All’. The threesome ‘[take] their miniature operas to the remotest corners of the land’. They specialize in chamber opera of the seventeenth and eighteenth century (usually half-hour performances). Their repertoire includes Every Maid her Own Mistress (after Pergolesi’s La Serva Padrona), The Musical Courtship (music by James Hook), The Grenadier (Dibdin), True Blue (Henry Carey), Love in a Coffee Cup, the Offenbach pieces Acis and Galatea (Handel) and three Purcell revivals or reconstructions—Colin and his Wife, the Mosque in Timon of Athens and [Fresca’s] Don Quixote, Arne and Mozart. The Musical Times of January  reported that [Woodhouse] had taken [the Intimate Opera Company] about the country and has now returned to London and given two shows at the Ballet Theatre on December  and  []. The syndicate so formed pool their talents so as to edit, to produce in the most efficient theatrical sense, and to sing a dramatic version of Bach’s ‘Coffee’ Cantata (in which the editing went to very drastic but perhaps not illegitimate lengths), Arne’s ‘Thomas and 

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Part Four Sally’, and Pergolesi’s ‘La Serva Padrona’, each of which requires only three characters. A small band consisting of string quartet, flute, and pianoforte (Mr Norman Franklin) provided an accompaniment adequate to the size of of the theatre and size of the operas. All three are good singers, but since the honours of editing and production go to the men, it will not be unfair to stress the beautifully finished singing of Miss Ritchie and to record that she has found a most telling style of acting in which no one of the component elements suffers by the undue claims of the others. Its comedy is, furthermore, a delicious entertainment. In another piece ( July ), William Wallace describes the Intimate Opera as ‘from the beginning [. . .] the perfection of “team work”.’ He credits the Intimate Opera with ‘supreme artistry’, it has ‘touch[ed] with individuality every means of expression’ and ‘[made] points naturally and without underlining’. ‘The works were miniature in the right frames, artless, almost unconscious, without the veneer of “preciosity”. Thus,’ he says, ‘opera became ‘intimate.’ The goals of the Intimate Opera fit, to my mind, Fresca’s in terms of size and participation: ‘It would be lost,’ suggests Wallace, ‘in the expanse of stalls and circle. It must create its own audience and draw all into close fellowship with its endeavours, attracting personality to make spectators feel that they themselves are part of the rite, and have their share in the proceedings.’ Suggesting a continued connection with Fresca, Dunn’s songs are performed at Judy’s Grafton Theatre.



Among papers at The Mill House I find several letters to Fresca from Hugo Strecker at Schott & Co, Ltd. The first, dated September , , is a thank you and an apology for the delayed response to ‘suggestions for a further collection of Folk Tunes for Descant Recorder’ which Michael [Tippett] had passed to Strecker. Strecker feels the idea is practical and he’d ‘like to bring them out in another little book selling at six pence’. Meanwhile, he has sent the list to an adviser on recorder matters. He says there are about three songs which appear in other collections by Schott that Fresca might consider substituting. He offers four guineas for ‘outright purchase of the arrangement’. A second letter encloses a contract and a cheque for four guineas. It includes a list of the songs (now six) Strecker would like Fresca to replace, since they appear in other collections. In a postscript, Strecker suggests the tunes be arranged chronologically and adds: ‘Difficulty is so often a question of rhythm as well as technical difficulty.’ He proposes for a title ‘FIFTY MORE ENGLISH FOLK SONGS’ in order to ‘link up with the previous collection as far as publicity and the business side go.’ He 

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Writer! Composer!

 Fresca sitting on car bonnet, ca. 1930s (Sonya Allinson).

invites comments, then adds ‘I am aware of the objections that arose over the other collection and actually suggested this one, but I think the difference can be sufficiently stressed in the actual design and layout of the cover title.’ I am intrigued by Strecker’s references to ‘the other collection’, and ‘another little book’. In CoPac I find the following collections, but neither are published by Schott: Fifty Folk Songs: Compiled at the Request of the English Folk Dance Society, by Cecil J Sharp, published by Novello & Company Ltd, () and Fifty-eight English Folk Songs. Collected and arranged by C.J. Sharp, selected by Maud Karpeles, published London: Novello and Co, (). It is possible that Strecker refers to Sharp’s work for Schott: English Folk Songs. Collected and arranged by C. J. Sharp, etc. London: Schott & Co, (). Strecker closes the second letter on a personal note: he ‘hop[es] Fresca has successfully settled in the new house boat’.



Tippett dedicates his Piano Sonata No. I, completed in  and published in , to Fresca. This dedication happens at the moment when Ian Kemp says that Tippett, recently split from Wilf Franks, turned to Fresca. Kemp describes 

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Part Four the Piano Sonata No.  as ‘highly individual’ and as marking ‘a crucial transitional stage in [Tippett’s] development’: it anticipates ‘the bright, fresh music of [Tippett’s] Double Concerto’, although Kemp sees the ‘broad design’ of the piece, as well as ‘other structural and stylistic detail[s]’, as problematic. He describes it as ‘a tour around the world’ and mentions that it contains a Scottish folk-theme. This work, completed in , was written against a background of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism. Its invigorating exterior represented, however, not English indifference to events on the Continent but, on the contrary, a calculated attempt to offer vitality and optimism to anyone with ears to hear. This is already clear in the opening movement, a theme and variations, whose elaborate rhythmic and textural transformations are arranged in a sequence of two fast variations, a slow variation, a scherzo variation in a contrasting key, a minore variation in the style of a cadenza, and the final variation, a restatement of the theme. Tippett later revised the minore variation because its improvisatory character had lost direction and its rhythms discipline. This last consideration was crucial in a variation which marked the culmination of a process subjecting the + construction of the theme to continuous expansion and contraction. The slow movement is built around two elements, a folksong and a two-part invention. The folksong yields somewhat, being a paraphrase of ‘Ca’ the yowes’, the beautiful Scottish tune with words by Burns (which Tippett was to use again in his next work, the Concerto for double string orchestra). The invention also yields somewhat, being based on motives from the folksong. But the contrast remains extreme, an index of Tippett’s compositional daring. The Presto scherzo is equally daring—a sonata-form based on the dynamic material appropriate to a ‘first subject’ and lyrical material not appropriate to a ‘second subject’, that is, another folksong (on this occasion newly invented) and thus another clash of styles. The use of folksong of course reflected the prevailing climate of English music; but Tippett’s juxtaposition of folksong with the procedures of the great classics reflected something else, the challenges he set himself in the pursuit of technical proficiency. The most ambitious feature of the movement was his decision to place the sonata-form movement, the weightiest of all the movements in a sonata, third; it usually came first. This altered the balance and thus presented a further challenge. His solution to this particular one was an easy-going finale, couched in the argot of the music-hall but with incongruous intrusions from the well-bred language he had just abandoned— 

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Writer! Composer! the first example of Tippett’s instinct to avoid pomposity and be inclusive, here with the cake-walk, in later works with jazz, spirituals, blues and boogie-woogie. Tippett works on the Piano Sonata No. alongside an unpublished composition based on William Blake’s poem ‘A Song of Liberty’ (), a work on the performance of which Fresca worked, according to Ayerst in his sixtiethbirthday tribute to Tippett. Blake’s poem is a call to challenge authoritarian regimes and it confirms Fresca and Tippett’s political stance. . The Eternal Female groan’d! It was heard over all the Earth. . Albion’s coast is sick, silent. The American meadows faint! . Shadows of Prophecy shiver along by the lakes and the rivers, and mutter across the ocean. France, rend down thy dungeon! . Golden Spain, burst the barriers of old Rome! . Cast thy keys, O Rome! into the deep, down falling, even to eternity down falling, . And weep. . In her trembling hands she took the new-born terror, howling. . On those infinite mountains of light, now barr’d out by the Atlantic sea, the new-born fire stood before the starry king! . Flagg’d with grey-brow’d snows and thunderous visages, the jealous wings wav’d over the deep. . The speary hand burnèd aloft, unbuckled was the shield; forth went the hand of Jealousy among the flaming hair, and hurl’d the new-born wonder thro’ the starry night. . The fire, the fire, is falling! . Look up! look up! O citizen of London, enlarge thy countenance! O Jew, leave counting gold! return to thy oil and wine. O African! black African! Go, wingèd thought, widen his forehead! . The fiery limbs, the flaming hair, shot like the sinking sun into the western sea. . Wak’d from his eternal sleep, the hoary element, roaring, fled away. . Down rush’d, beating his wings in vain, the jealous King; his greybrow’d counsellors, thunderous warriors, curl’d veterans, among helms, and shields, and chariots, horses, elephants, banners, castles, slings, and rocks, . Falling, rushing, ruining! buried in the ruins, on Urthona’s dens; . All night beneath the ruins; then, their sullen flames faded, emerge round the gloomy King. 

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Part Four . With thunder and fire, leading his starry hosts thro’ the waste wilderness, he promulgates his ten commands, glancing his beamy eyelids over the deep in dark dismay, . Where the son of fire in his eastern cloud, while the morning plumes her golden breast, . Spurning the clouds written with curses, stamps the stony law to dust, loosing the eternal horses from the dens of night, crying Empire is no more! and now the lion and the wolf shall cease. Chorus Let the Priests of the Raven of dawn no longer, in deadly black, with hoarse note curse the sons of joy! Nor his accepted brethren — whom, tyrant, he calls free — lay the bound or build the roof! Nor pale Religion’s lechery call that Virginity that wishes but acts not! For everything that lives is Holy! Fresca also helps Tippett at this period finding folksongs for the ballad opera Robert of Sicily which he composes for the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society choir of primary school children (). Kemp mentions a French cradle song, used for the accompaniment for the journey to and from Sicily, Robert Burns’s ‘Ca’ the yowes,’ and William Byrd’s ‘Non nobis Domine’. Like Blake, Robert of Sicily resonates with Fresca’s and Tippett’s shared interest in social justice. The libretto for Robert of Sicily, ‘a student work of only marginal importance’ according to Kemp, was based on a Longfellow poem about a king who is taught humility by an angel—the refrain, so fitting in terms of Fresca’s and Tippett’s mission, goes as follows: ‘He has put down the mighty from their seat, And has exalted them of low degree!’



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PART FIVE

Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War O

N December , , when Fresca is , Winston Churchill, then prime minister, announces that single women ages twenty to thirty will be compelled to contribute to the Women’s Services. Married women or women with children under fourteen living with them are exempted. (This occurs as the conscription age for men is raised from forty-one to fifty-one, and lowered to eighteen.) Women’s Forces include the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and the Civil Defence Forces. A woman can choose either Women’s Services or Civil Defence, but there is no guarantee she’ll get what she wants. A woman will not be required to use lethal weapons. It seems that conscription for women was increased to include those nineteen to thirty-one with a Royal Proclamation just after the act had been passed (although ‘administratively [. . .] only the – age-groups were actually dealt with for military service’). Women who claim conscientious objector (CO) status are assigned to civil work, agriculture, horticulture or hospital work and they are only referred to a tribunal if they refuse these. According to Denis Hayes, this obscures women CO statistics. In , all available women are switched to aircraft production and conscription to the Women’s Services is suspended. Due to her age, Fresca is never in danger of being called up. Her role will consist of her support of the peace movement. In this regard she joins the ranks of Frances Partridge (–) and Virginia Woolf, whose Three Guineas, in part a response to the Spanish Civil War in which her nephew Julian Bell was killed, is published in . I cannot find any of Fresca’s own writing about peace, so I turn to Tippett’s letters in which he writes often to Fresca about pacifism. In  he tells her:



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Part Five ‘[T]here is a feeling that I really might be able to do something to break the anonymity of the  or so young ones who are in gaol already—for they are the future too. At least in my choral circles & my own profession the issue will be inescapable because I shall publicly explain what I am doing.’ Tippett could have gained an appointment as ‘librarian or some such for the RAF orchestra’. David Ayerst suggests Tippett do social work in London, but Tippett resists. ‘Do you see the unreality of all this?’ he asks Fresca. ‘I can’t help feeling I have done my whack of social nursing & that if there is to be a new life it will be a different experience altogether.’ He continues: ‘For pacifism really is something to me—not for what it is now, but for its future, in an England becoming more insidiously führer ridden every week. Heroism at all costs, as [Eric] Kennington paints—& what is to prevent the political powers fighting over the body of the heroicised RAF to make it their S.S., their Communist Party? If Kennington could but once paint the young C.O. sitting in the “glasshouse” (the military prison & pretty grim) among his blue boys, I should feel England were safer— because of the generosity & the recognition of the double necessity, the healthy tension. Everyone hopes I will compromise because the other thought [prison] is troublesome and horrid.’ Tippett was sentenced at Oxted Crown Court on June , . He served two months at Wormwood Scrubs and was released August . Suggesting Tippett valued Fresca’s perspective on peace, he consults with Fresca on the writing of his Peace Pledge Union pamphlet titled ‘Contractingin to Abundance’ (which appeared in Peace News in  and was reprinted in Moving into Aquarius in ). Tippett describes it in a letter to Fresca as ‘a forthright & clear-stated exposé of what I think to be something of the underlying processes in the relationship now of artistic creation & the mass society. That’s why I agreed to it for PPU—because I wanted to talk to the youngsters who however unconsciously have contracted out of something & who must build on the new position consequent on that shift. Also I want to make public again my stand against the mass state at a time when they would like to gloss over the past indiscretions & “try out” the new name.’ On May , , he asks Fresca to read the draft and to comment. Tippett fears it might be ‘too indefinite & too subjective’. He says that his aim is ‘to stand people on their feet & so give them confidence to go forward recreating values the war & usury have smashed. Even if they only are drawn to read the books mentioned, it will be good. I do not believe in the solution of problems—only in wrestling with them.’ He says he’s too close to it, how does it ‘read “out of the blue”’? The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) was among the most important pacifist organizations of the interwar period and this is the group with which Tippett and Fresca aligned themselves. The Reverend Dick Sheppard founded the Peace 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War

 Dick Sheppard.

Pledge Union in  with a call for people who renounced war. By , he had received , responses. In the s the Home Office compiled special reports on the activities of the Peace Pledge Union and clamped down on its activities. The Community Movement grew out of the Peace Pledge Union, supporting and encouraging efforts on the part of pacifists to create alternative communities all over the country. Stuart Morris, president of the Peace Pledge Union in , ‘envisaged the Peace Pledge Union’s role [at that point] as maintaining the pledge and supporting conscientious objectors, giving them financial aid, organizing pacifist service corps and starting to make the greatest possible effort to find peace terms’. Among those who attempt communal projects are writer John Middleton Murry and writer and Britten librettist Ronald Duncan. Both record the challenges of organizing an unskilled labour force, usually made up of young men (and women) with sound ideas about cooperation but little practical experience orchestrating them. Fresca becomes involved with two projects, Moses Farm in Piltdown, East Sussex, and a Quaker-run market garden at Kingsmead in East Grinstead, West Sussex. Her experiences are not unlike Middleton Murry’s and Duncan’s.



I travel to Piltdown, heading south out of London on the train. I have decided to stop in on my way to Brighton where I plan to look at the University of Sussex’s Mass Observation archives for materials on conscientious objectors. I am searching on this trip not for traces of the faux prehistoric Piltdown man but for another enigmatic Piltdown man, named James Archard. 

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Part Five I first come across Moses Farm in Fresca’s will. Fresca leaves her shares in the farm, located in Piltdown, and in the Piltdown Growers Ltd. to Michael Tippett. I GIVE my shares in Piltdown Foodgrowers Ltd. and all my other interest if any in Moses Farm Piltdown Sussex and all the residue of my real and personal estate and effects (subject to the payment of my testamentary expenses and debts and duties on legacies bequeathed free of duty) to Michael Tippett absolutely. [. . .] The chap to get in touch with concerning Moses Farm, at Piltdown is Jack Brewer, Wood Rising, Willingdon, Eastbourne, who is my co-landlord. Michael knows all about it. Tippett has identified the Moses project as one involving conscientious objectors in his Those Twentieth Century Blues, but he misnames it Doolittle Farm. As I plan out my journey, I note that Piltdown sits just  miles south of East Grinstead, another location in Fresca’s will, and  miles from Oxted, home from  to  of Michael Tippett. Piltdown is also only  miles north of Lewes, the nearby Charleston at Firle home to various members of the Bloomsbury Group. I am reminded of David Garnett’s and Duncan Grant’s CO status; they began their work on the land at Wissett in Suffolk, owned by Grant’s family, before moving to Charleston and finding work at a nearby farm. I discover online that Moses Farm has been transformed into luxury apartments. I contact Jon Ashe, a retired policeman and renovator of part of the farm building, via his blog, and he puts me in touch with his neighbor at Moses Farm, young Gatwick pilot Robert Johnson. Johnson and Ashe have participated in a British home renovation show in  called ‘Dream Homes’. Ashe also gives me contact information for local historian Barry Dickens and Dickens (whom I reach by phone at his job at a hardware shop) has first mentioned the name Archard. Dickens is putting on an exhibition of local history in nearby Fletching so I make that my first stop. I establish that James ‘King’ Archard and his wife Hazel Archard (– ) had most recently owned the farm and that they would probably have been there when Fresca became involved with the project. Barry tells me that despite a wish on the part of the Archards for Moses to be transformed into low-income housing, the place was sold by the charity to which it was left and luxury condos have been built there. Barry also tells me that the Archards provided a refuge for Romani Cathleen Willett, her husband, and two daughters; 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War they lived in their caravan at Moses and worked for King and Hazel. This is just one of many kind gestures performed by the Archards who seem to have been universally admired in the village. Barry introduces me to Cathleen who now lives in ‘Little Moses’, a mobile home of sorts on a small plot of land alongside Moses Farm, given to her by King Archard. I remember that in her will Fresca left a caravan to Tippett; I believe this was Judy’s Arts League of Service caravan, bought for Judy’s split-off ALS company. While the caravan ‘was beautifully fitted out to sleep eight players, and even had a bath concealed under the floor of the ladies’ compartment [not as convenient as it first appeared], [t]he caravan turned out to be too unwieldy, and the tractor that drew it a source of danger in hilly districts’.  At the time of Fresca’s writing the will, the caravan is at M. N. Rule and Son, Pleasure and Commercial Motor Body Builders in Lexden Road, Colchester. I wonder if this might be the same caravan in which Cathleen and family lived. When I stop in to talk to her, Cathleen gives me a copy of Hazel Archard’s poems that husband King had published following the death of his wife. Among the poems are several anti-war related pieces such as the following: Fifty Years On ‘Remember us, remember us,’ they cry, Who did not ask to fight, nor think to die. Young lives engulfed in battle’s crimson tide, Their dreams of future happiness denied. In alien soil their broken bodies sleep: Their lifeless eyes now have no tears to weep For the new order we have failed to build, Nor sight to see their vision unfulfilled. The silent dead through gaping wounds yet speak Phantom words on far-blown winds that reek Of battle-smoke and naked death and fear. We shall betray the dead unless we hear These cries from every far-flung soldier’s grave For the right and freedom that they died to save. . The book also contains Hazel’s biography, identifying her as a member of the Downland Poets’ Group in Eastbourne and also of ‘the Labour Party, Friends of the Earth and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (for which she spent many nights camping at Greenham Common)’. 

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Part Five In pursuit of further information about the Moses Piltdown Foodgrowers project I discover that King Archard was the brother of late film and TV actor Bernard Archard (–). Bernard’s Times obituary (May , ) lists his most famous role as Lt. Col. Oreste Pinto (pictured here), ‘a Dutch intelligence officer, reckoned to be one of the best at winkling out spies, who was based in Britain during the Second World War,’ in the BBC series ‘Spycatcher’ (–).

 Bernard Archard (Jim Belchamber).

I learn from the obituary that, like King, Bernard was ‘[a] conscientious objector during the Second World War, [and that] he worked in repertory at Chesterfield and Sheffield and ran a touring company from Torquay with his partner, James Belchamber’. The obituary mentions that Bernard and Belchamber, his partner of  years, with whom he had registered a civil partnership in , retired to Somerset. Bernard is survived by Belchamber and I find Belchamber’s profile on a family history website. Like Bernard, Belchamber went to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Unable to complete his studies due to national service, he acted and directed with the ‘Stage Club’ in Singapore. He then moved on to Entertainments National Service Association or ENSA and then the Combined Services Entertainment before being demobilised in . A busy stage career, including running, with Bernard, the Malvern Company, and some television roles ensued. I try to reach King Archard’s relatives via a solicitor. I later learn that the message did reach Bernard’s partner, Jim Belchamber, but his response has been lost. A communication via another family member brings word from Jim, this time via e mail. Jim offers to put me in contact with Robert Marriage, whom he believes will ‘be able to furnish [me] with more accurate information than [he] can [. . .] Robert was involved with Moses Farm (The Piltdown Foodgrowers Ltd) at an early stage.’ Jim describes Robert as ‘a scion of the firm, “Marriages’ Flour”, a Quaker family, hence, I presume, the connection to Francesca Allinson’. Jim continues: 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War The following is all I can tell you, learnt, mostly by osmosis, from my late partner Bernard Archard who was also a principal at that time. Bernard was a Conscientious Objector as was his brother, James (King). The Piltdown Foodgrowers was set up by a group of Quakers; Allinsons, Brewers (a Sussex firm of building material suppliers) and others, at the beginning of the war, in order to act as a halfway house for young Conscientious Objectors, coming from a sedentary lifestyle and being ordered to serve on the land. I am not sure how Bernard arrived at Moses, he was first placed at Fontmell Magna in Dorset at a farm run by one eccentric gent named Ralph Gardner [sic, Rolf Gardiner], father of the eminent music conductor, John Elliot Gardner [sic]. However, at Moses he met and became a lifelong friend of Robert Marriage and was best man at Robert’s wedding to Hazel. Bernard was cowman and instructor. King Archard arrived at a later date. Before the war Bernard had been a student at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and had an early success on the London West End Theatre scene. He was not allowed to follow his career professionally but was able to act with the local amateur theatre in Lewes. It was there he met (another) Hazel, Hazel Thorpe, who he introduced to his brother and she became Hazel Archard. Bernard remembered Michael Tippett visiting Moses, along with his benefactor, Ms Allinson. Moses Farm was a very successful venture. It schooled a number of agriculture workers and at the end of the war the farm was worth more than the originators had paid to buy it. Not wishing to make a profit from the war, those involved, financially, offered the sale of the farm to anyone who had been working there, at cost. King Archard and Bill, (who’s [sic] surname I should know but have forgotten) raised enough money to buy it and divided the farm between them. Bernard returned to his theatrical career and eventual prominence, mostly in the world of television. King and Hazel farmed Moses for many a year. Hazel predeceased King, she was a poet and after her death King published privately a book of her poems, all proceeds from the sales of the books went to charity. King retired from farming the land but was actively engaged in trying to turn all the out buildings into affordable housing for the local disadvantaged. Unfortunately, he died before that was achieved but all monies from the sale of Moses Farm etc (except for a few bequests) went to various charities, thus continuing the non-profit making of the original Piltdown Foodgrowers Ltd.

 

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Part Five Following up on Jim Belchamber’s information, I contact Marriage Flour through their website. Roger Marriage, Robert’s son, writes on January : ‘I have chatted at length to Dad about Fresca and how he took her on his motorbike looking at suitable farms. As Dad was, among other things, from a farming/milling family, it was this that she took him on for, aside from the Quaker thing. I am also a Quaker.’ In the meantime, I try to learn something about the Brewers and Jack Brewer via the still-operating Brewer family business. I receive a message from Jack’s granddaughter Alison, current director of the company, who puts me in touch with her father, Stephen Brewer. Stephen describes his father, Jack Brewer (born ), as ‘a dedicated and active pacifist who’ as a Conscientious Objector, did his / wartime service in a support role with the YMCA. Stephen does not remember Fresca, but he speculates that she came into contact with his father in the context of the strong Quaker meeting in Lewes or the Fellowship of Reconciliation or the Peace Pledge Union. Stephen does know that Jack and his younger brother Kenneth ‘made substantial contributions towards the purchase of the farm’ in : My understanding is that it was to be operated on a ‘commune’ basis by C.O.s directed to agriculture but I don’t know how they were selected or how many lived and worked there in total. I do remember there were some concerns about the fact that none of them had any practical farming experience—noticeable once when I was around and they were trying to move a large and dangerous looking bull. Stephen did remember two men who were involved: ‘a young actor called Bernard Archard (his brother King was also there) and Bill Gilbert who was already married.’ When the farm was sold after the war, Gilbert bought part of it and ‘developed into a “Pick-Your-Own” and Farmshop Business’. ‘Bernard went back to acting [. . .] ironically often playing military characters of the officer class for which he was physically if not philosophically suited.’ Among the things Roger Marriage sends me are several photographs of Moses Farm in the s. Roger tells me: ‘They were taken on a folding Kodak camera, which I still have, on the old  roll film format. As you can see, not bad for early forties.’ Roger also finds a post card from Fresca, which he transcribes for me: Euston ,  Mornington Terrace, Regents Park N.W. We’ll expect you at the above address on Friday for lunch. Make for Mornington Cre[s]cent by bus or tube & then ask your way. We can put you up in the 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War county (no ‘r’) on Saturday night. P.P.U. expects us on Friday at .. Yours Francesca Allinson, postmark CLACTON-ON-SEA ESSEX .pm  APR  Robert Marriage Esq Oak Tree Farm Kelsale Nr Sa(x) And Roger continues: ‘Helen, the amazing thing about the address is it did get to Dad. Saxmundham is a bit off the beaten track let alone Kelsale! I have tried to copy exactly so as to include her spellings. Her hand is very legible, without flourish, and done in black ink (unless faded). I also guess you know what the P.P.U. was. The postcard is ½ x ½ in. Interesting thing is the d (correctly D) stamp of King George VI is stuck on his back! i.e. at °. Now I’m not sure about the etiquette of postage stamps but I was told when young if it wasn’t straight it was an insult to the monarch. Read of that what you will. Might have been the diminutive size of the postcard...’

Moses Farm in the 1930s (Robert Marriage).



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Part Five



East Grinstead, and a place named Kingsmead, have come up several times in my research. In her will, Fresca asks that: ‘If any Income Tax papers are still sent to me concerning Kingsmead, they no longer have anything to do with me and should be sent to Jim Addison, Springfield Gardens, Kingscote, East Grinstead, Sussex.’ Tippett explains in outline Fresca’s involvement with the project. Fresca was frightened by the war and wanted to be out of London as much as possible. At this time she tried to help some of the conscientious objectors by buying a plot of land near East Grinstead, large enough to run as a smallholding. Conchies given land work as an alternative to military service could come to stay on the farm and work there. Fresca herself lived in a flat in the town, though sometimes she came to stay with me when she was worried about the bombing. Amongst the conchies who worked on the smallholding were Larema Ayerst’s brother, Bryan Fisher, and a youngster called Edric Maynard, who had both met at Toc H. Edric was known as Book Boy, because the only job he had ever had was in a bookshop. Toc H began in 1915 as a rest house for troops in Belgium in World War I (Talbot House became TH and then, ‘in radio signaller’s parlance’, Toc H). Its organizer, Reverend Phillip Byard (Tubby) Clayton, provided a library, a kitchen, and a chapel, for those who wanted it, and organized concerts and debates to provide healthy distractions and fellowship for the soldiers. In 1919, Tubby opened the first Toc H hostel in London with the help of many of those who had used the facility during the war. The goal of the new movement that emerged via the hostels was to create community service and fellowship. The earliest statement of the aims of Toc H was drawn up by Tubby with the Rev ‘Dick’ Sheppard of St Martin-in-the-Fields [of Peace Pledge Union fame], and Alexander (later Sir Alexander) Patterson early in . It was revised in  and again in . It is known as the Four Points of the Compass and is now summarised thus: . FRIENDSHIP: To love widely. To provide members with opportunities to develop a spirit of understanding and reconciliation. . SERVICE: To build bravely. To enable members, with their varying gifts, to serve their fellows. . FAIRMINDEDNESS: To think fairly. To bring to members the knowledge and experience of others. . THE KINGDOM OF GOD: To witness humbly. To work for a better world through the example of friendship, service and fair-mindedness. 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War I have also seen East Grinstead in Sybil Oldfield’s collection of Virginia Woolf condolence letters, entitled Afterwords. Fresca’s letter to Leonard Woolf is sent from B High Street, East Grinstead, and places her there in , concurrent with her involvement with Moses. I ask Oldfield if she knows whether Fresca was connected in particular to Leonard Woolf, rather than Virginia. She tells me ‘no,’ that she’s included all of the Hogarth Press authors in the section dedicated to Leonard Woolf ’s correspondents. Fresca wrote: Dear Mr Woolf, It has been a sad day for all of us, on which we have learnt our loss. To many of us, among whom I have been one, your wife ranked as the greatest contemporary writer of prose. We are all sorry and sad, and wish to tell you how we grieve. Yours sincerely, Francesca Allinson. East Grinstead historian M. J. Leppard, whom I have found online, does not know of any links between East Grinstead and Michael Tippett. I ask about Bloomsbury Group connections, similarly to no avail. Leppard concedes that World War II was a time for which records are not always complete. He does however confirm that COs worked on the land there. He provides images of Fresca’s flat,  High Street (A and B), and he also gives me the name of Dr M. Awty, current resident of Kingsmead. Awty and his wife purchased the property in the eighties from a Mr Omegna, who had bought it from Addison in . (A Mr F. Omegna, likely the same one, had run a hotel in nearby West Sussex which employed Basque refugee children during the Spanish Civil War). A letter does not reach the Awtys, but an email sent via the Oral Surgery Club (Michael Awty is a maxillofacial specialist) does.

Photographs of Fresca’s East Grinstead addresses (courtesy of M.J.Leppard).



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Part Five Mrs Awty, with whom I exchange email, gives me details of the property: You are welcome to come to see the ‘farm’—although we are afraid you will be rather disappointed. We do not think it ever was a farm—although it was called ‘Springfield Farm’ when we bought the property c. years ago. We heard that it had been a ‘market garden’—worked wholly or partly by Conscientious Objectors in WWII. We do have a copy of the Conveyance of the property, then called ‘Kingsmead Lodge and lands adjoining at Kingscote’ from ‘James Frederick Addison of Springfield Gardens Kingscote . . . Market Gardener’, to Mr. Omegna, in . He built a house on it, and we bought it from him. And later: Our land and much of the surrounding land was worked by Conscientious Objectors in the War. They lived in a number of wooden huts on this land, and in ‘the big house’ (Kingscote House), which was owned by an Army Colonel who was away fighting. He had leased the house to the owner of a nearby specialist Alpine plant nursery—who then ran the operation [Will Ingwersen]. His widow, aged +, [Kay] now lives in a home near York (in the north of England). She told us the C.O.s were graduates who had just finished university. They were not paid, but allowed to sell their produce—and were very poor, she said. It is of course certainly true that C.O.s were not very favourably regarded in those days, and often tried to keep a low profile. This is about all we know, I’m afraid. It is thought that Jim Addison had several children—but we have not been able to trace them. The Mr Omegna you found was we are sure ‘our’ Mr Omegna—but he and his wife returned to Spain a long time ago, and have since died. A market garden by the way is a small-holding producing crops, usually of soft fruit, salad, vegetables etc. and we are told there were chickenhouses (but there would not have been any other livestock). There was an old dog-kennel, and privy, on the land. A further message from Mrs Awty brings word from Will Ingwersen’s widow, Kay: I spoke again to-day to Mrs Kay Ingwersen, Will Ingwersen’s widow, and was thrilled to hear her say that she remembered Fresca Allinson well. She said she and Will went to a party at Fresca’s flat, and that she had got hold 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War of a barrel of cider—which was quite special (because in the war there was so little of any such thing to be had)! Will Ingwersen [–] was a Quaker, hence his keenness to give work to upwards of  C.O.s—they were obliged to work either in the coal-mines or in agriculture, and she said ‘the farmers did not want them because they had no relevant skills and were not “country people”.’ Mrs Ingwersen said she was happy for you to have her address—but reminded us that she is ! 



Bill Heatherington, the archivist at the Peace Pledge Union, alerts me to the Community Broadsheet, which I consult at the Peace Pledge Union archives in Kentish Town in London and at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. This newsletter, described as ‘An occasional collection of current Community News edited in behalf of the Community Service Community by G. M. Faulding, , Westbourne Terrace Rd, London W.,’ its first issue March , gives me a sense of the range of alternative communities being established at this era. Gertrude Minnie Faulding (–) was a Somerville graduate and author of Old Man’s Beard and Other Tales (), Nature Children: A Flower Book for Little Folks () and Fairies (). Among the projects listed in the Community Broadsheet is Sackville Food Growers in East Grinstead. A ‘Recent Activities’ section allows me to track the progress of the market garden. In the September/December  issue of the Community Broadsheet, Sackville Food Growers is listed at , Sackville Lane, E. Grinstead, Sussex. Enquiries are to be sent to Will Ingwersen at ‘, Holtye Road’. Sackville Food Growers is described as ‘[a] non-profit-making enterprise to provide a living for C.O. during the war. Twenty-five acres are now under cultivation.’ ‘We are extremely interested in all community experiment . . . After the war, if any of our men desire to stay on the land, will be the time when we shall consider the formation of a real community.’ This listing appears alongside another community in East Grinstead, a small group of Anglican churchmen called ‘Servants of the Will of God’ run by Rev K. Grofton-Salmond at Felsbridge, East Grinstead. Lower in the list I find Rolf Gardiner’s Springhead [Farm], at Fortmell Magna, Shaftesbury, Dorset. In the Summer/Autumn  issue, Fred Simpson is listed as the contact person and the address is given as Kingsmead Lodge. Things are going well: The group is market gardening  acres: tomatoes, cabbage, potatoes, onions and has been working  hours a day during the summer. A fine 

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Part Five

Photographs of Kingsmead.

large airy bungalow hostel—decorated with drawing of a continental folk dances—houses the bachelor members and the married couples live in cottages or huts, sometimes a mile or two from the bungalow. The standard /- per week is paid and members return to the pool all but / (for food and maintenance). Most are also members of the International Friendship League. The winter season allows for music, debates, plays and country dancing. A magazine, ‘The Compost Heap,’ is produced. In January/May , there is a long entry reporting that numbers have decreased from the previous summer, from twenty to six men, with two more soon likely to depart; and Fred Simpson is again named as secretary. The writer puts the diminishing numbers down to the fact that now it is easier for the inexperienced CO to find work. While before ‘there was quite a demand for work at such pacifist settlements as S.F.G. Now, there are plenty of jobs going at minimum wage of  pounds per week, and it requires a strong feeling of the worthwhileness of a land settlement for a CO to put up indefinitely with a very low subsistence and the nervous wear and tear of communal living.’ ‘We have 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War recently started work on a cropping plan which our small remaining group hopes to be able to cope with.’ Experience has taught those remaining that ‘[schemes] must be firmly rooted in a policy of sound and efficient food production, and a business-like attempt to be really self-supporting—not necessarily profit-making—but, at least, giving members a subsistence on which they can manage satisfactorily for an indefinite period.’ ‘We are very busy with our land work, and now have very little time left for trimmings. We are still a community, of necessity, but any social aspect of our activities is subsidiary to the main job.’ Tippett had mentioned that the East Grinstead operation fell apart when Fresca had an affair with ‘an older man, a conchie in World War One.’ I check online for records of WWI COs from the area and I find one called Victor Morris, a photographer: Victor Morris, a 38-year-old shopkeeper, appeared before a Military Tribunal on 28th October, 1916. Victor Morris told the Tribunal that he was refusing to join the army because he was a pacifist. Morris was crossexamined by Alexander Johnson, a tailor, and Wallace Hills, editor of the local newspaper. Morris’s shop was not in the High Street so he was likely not a neighbour for Fresca but at the following address: a newsagents and general store at 65, Lingfield Road, East Grinstead. Victor would have been in his 60s if and when Fresca met him. He does fit the description. I hear back from Will and Kay Ingwersen’s daughter, Karen: I have talked to mum and we have thought about your questions, and she has asked me to send you some answers. [. . .] My father would have been a CO, but had not been called up because of his age. He was born in 1905 so at the start of the war he was 35. Also he was running an alpine plant nursery, so during the war some of the land was taken up with growing vegetables. Mum met Fresca through their work with the market garden. My father did once receive a white feather from a local farmer, but there was not a great deal of local animosity. My parents were founding members of the local Quaker meeting, but mum says the Quakers were not involved in the market garden. Mum did meet Michael Tippett, but did not know him well. My father was not ever involved with the Men of the Trees. Mum knew about Fresca’s wood, but they had no involvement with it. Mum knew nothing about an affair of Fresca’s. 

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Part Five My father became a very well-known and distinguished plantsman. He travelled, and climbed and collected plants. He built rock gardens. He wrote several books, was a vice President of the Royal Horticultural Society and was awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour. He died in 1990. In the London Gazette of December , , I find a notice announcing the folding of Sackville Foods, Ltd., worded as follows: At an Extraordinary General Meeting of the above mentioned Company duly convened and held at ‘Kingsmeed Lodge’, East Grinstead, Sussex, on the th day of December, , the subjoined resolution was duly passed viz. ‘That the company be wound up voluntarily and that Frederick Arthur Simpson of “Oak Lodge,” Kingscote, East Grinstead, Sussex, and Bob Gadsden of “Windy Ridge” Mount Pleasant, Ashurst Wood, East Grinstead, Sussex, be and they are hereby appointed Liquidators for the purposes of such winding up’. Fred Simpson’s full name is given here as Frederick Arthur Simpson and I wonder if he might be the Cambridge ‘historian and eccentric’ (–), curate of Ambleside –; fellow of Trinity College –; senior dean –; lecturer at Cambridge University –, of the same name. Some of Simpson’s eccentricities, described in his Dictionary of National Biography profile, make him a likely candidate: Nearly all the rest of his time, for the remainder of his life, was given over to his eccentricities. These developed themselves as he inhabited his college: at the common table in hall, in his rooms in the Great Court, and above all as a walker through Trinity and its neighbours, snipping, clipping, pruning, lopping the leaves, the twigs, and the branches of the trees and bushes. He seemed omnipresent and could be pointed out with satisfaction to the wondering visitor as Snipper Simpson, the college eccentric. His rooms finally contained a glittering array of pruning instruments, from scissors to pole secateurs. His track round the courts and walks could often be traced by the litter of vegetation which he left behind him. In his earlier years Simpson had made rather bolder excursions into oddity: he owned and had flown for him his own aeroplane of what he would have called a Heath Robinsonian kind. This was piloted by a series of persons who became distinguished aviators, and stories of his flying 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War adventures proliferated. For all the narrowness of his ambit, he was well informed, if sometimes inaccurate in his statements, and could argue with considerable skill even with the most distinguished college guest. He made important and often surprising friends among the hierarchy of the Church of England in spite of the fact that in his later years his belief in the divinity of Jesus seems to have become uncertain. He was undoubtedly popular with undergraduates, to whom he made a number of little benefactions, and showed considerable skill in reconciling the society of fellows to his vagaries, though the long-suffering college servants were naturally the least amenable. Simpson had the capacity to sustain an attitude and a way of living which were almost entirely anachronistic in his own time, and to attain a degree of eminence in spite of that fact, or even because of it. By the end of his long life—and his reputation was due in no small degree to his longevity—he acted as if he were the last representative of an otherwise extinct race of bachelor don, of Christian priest whose vocation was pulpit eloquence, and of conscious, deliberate eccentric, able to behave in ways which successive cohorts of colleagues and students delighted to make good stories out of.



In a very upbeat undated letter from B, High St, East Grinstead, Fresca tells Marx and Lambert she is ‘full of enormous admiration for [them] going to live in town’ and she says she would like to visit them. ‘I’m certain that facing the bombs is much safer than running away from them, & I’m certain you will be all right. I have that feeling about all the people I love, pretty well.’ She asks for their new address and invites them to East Grinstead. ‘There’s an H Green Line bus leaves Victoria every half hour for East Grinstead. Over the week-ends there is only Den whom you know here, & Johnny, a funny little chap, a joiner. He is half Jewish—very shy, full of chuckles, a passion for breeding canaries, keeps racing pigeons, cockney accent, idealistic & the dirtiest lot of ideas for making money going. He enchants me with his contradictions. Beside that there’s Tickie. We are not a notorious pacifist household. In fact no one outside our circle knows. I have not broadcast the fact. Incidentally Den admires your work Marco, vastly, & is dying to meet you. So do come. Next week-end I shall be away seeing Cyril & Veronica & Judy for the first time for I don’t know how many months. And I do look forward to seeing you both.’ Fresca sends her admiration for ‘Marco’s rush order literary etc work’. She promises that she ‘will let [them] have  short stories as soon as I have a copy. At present [her] copies are out collecting help.’ She adds that ‘the Irish [?] is being read by Claire [Wogan] who has just 

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Part Five got herself out of Ireland. After that I’d be very grateful for any help you can give me over publishing. I have so little idea about the journal-magazine world.’ It seems that Fresca did visit Marx and Lambert. In a subsequent letter from Toosie addressed to ‘Dear Lambkin & Marc’, she thanks them for her stay, telling them: ‘[a]nd coming from the Sussex desert, I feel all refreshed as from an intellectual oasis.’ Her stay with Marx and Lambert has made her rethink her work in East Grinstead, she says: ‘In fact I think it’s damn silly to stay at EG as a blasted house keeper & bottlewasher. It’s a waste of my brains & all the education expended on them: & you Marco were saying that [publisher] Chatto’s had nobody to carry on their firm—& I wondered whether an ignoramus like me who’s never done a job like that, would be of any use in such work. I really would like to take on an intellectual job—literary or musical. I’d like to come & discuss things with you both. Do do a bit of thinking in my direction. I’d also like to make a bit of money incidentally.’ Fresca then goes on to tell them Judy has put a play on in the village, ‘huge fun’, she says, ‘after the army had bungled everything it had promised to do’. In another brief letter to Marx/Lambert (early Dec ) sent from Selfridges [Department Store] Fresca says she is ‘coming home [to East Grinstead?] from Toosie [. . .] about Dec. th’. She suggests they meet outside the BBC and then go for lunch. She gives her ‘address from this Thursday’ as Mill House. Among the Marx and Lambert letters, I find an undated ‘Sorry you’re on the sick list’ card that baffles me. It reads ‘Archie wishes you a happy birthday & so do I. He says you are certainly not a patient. F.’ I did a quick search for Archie and East Grinstead and came up with Archie McIndoe. Archie was a New Zealander, born , who had moved to the UK in  and in the late s opened a Centre for Plastic and Jaw Surgery at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead to treat burns. Was Archie Tippett’s unidentified and misidentified World War One conchie?



I have read about Den Newton’s ‘conchie’ status in Tippett’s Those Twentieth Century Blues. Tippett places Den with Karl Hawker working in Cambridgeshire. Tippett’s letters to Den, however, also record the possibility of Den joining Sackville Foodgrowers in East Grinstead and Fresca’s letters confirm he did spend some time there. In May , Tippett tells Den that East Grinstead has ‘immediate places for — pairs’. In June, he encourages Den to go to East Grinstead, telling him they’re building a bunkhouse there. He suggests Den organize his week by spending three days in East Grinstead and giving him three days alone, Den playing husband, Michael wife. Tippett 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War tells Den that he can ride his bicycle back and forth between East Grinstead and Oxted. In July , Tippett calls East Grinstead ‘a food growing settlement’. In his next letter, he tells Den that Edric [Maynard] is very happy at East Grinstead. Den’s address at this point is , Hills Road, Cambridge. It appears that Den did do some landwork in Cambridge, which put him in close proximity to Fresca once she moved permanently to The Mill House. It also seems that he took Tippett up on his suggestion to go to East Grinstead. What was the nature of Tippett’s relationship with Den? Was it sexual? Most Tippett scholars seem to think so. Kemp does not mention Den Newton except with a reference to a  article he wrote. It isn’t that Kemp shies away from admitting Tippett’s homosexuality; he is clear about Tippett’s love for Wilf Franks, possibly because Wilf represented an important turning point in Tippett’s sexual life. There is mention of shared beds in Tippett’s correspondence with Den, but there is also a lot of ambiguous language in Tippett’s letters that makes the exact nature of their relationship hard to deduce; and Den did marry later in life (as did Wilf ), not that that precludes homosexuality. Tippett characterizes Den as reticent and himself as extrovert; he puts Den in the same camp as Evelyn Maude, and, implicitly, himself with Fresca. He talks a lot to Den about his other lovers, Wilf Franks and Karl Hawker. I am struck reading the letters in Schuttenhelm’s Selected Letters by how the age difference between the two men shaped their relationship. Unfortunately, I cannot hear Den’s voice, but it does seem to me that Tippett’s is that of the older man coaching, often flirting with, the younger man. Den is in his early twenties and likely somewhat awed by Tippett, already famous. Frequently Tippett tells Den that it’s alright to love him or apologizes for the extent of his own passion, his need for Den. In a letter to Fresca, in May of , Michael speaks in a very fatherly manner about Den; he says that Den has been to visit: ‘He’s such a nice lad & growing now at such a pace [he’s about  at this point]. I fancy that he’s taken a second jerk on again that the need for physical warmth wh [sic] he had of me is passing. He probably begins to feel sure of himself, as he gets so much easier now & with the folk he happens to meet.’ Michael then continues: ‘Luckily for me I haven’t become seriously entangled in this manner & have always known that the pace of the friendship has to be set by the younger person, & that in his case in the long run it’s the intellectual stimulus that he really wants.’ Tippett’s later attempt to collaborate with Den on The Midsummer Marriage seems to have ended in failure. I notice several references to Den’s play and Den’s poetry, suggesting that Tippett was right in asserting that what Den sought was intellectual stimulation. There is mention of a rejection from poet Edith Sitwell (–). In 

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Part Five Sitwell’s collection at the Harry Ransom Center at University of Texas at Austin, I find five letters to Den and material pertaining to Tippett, as well as references to Sitwell’s own anti-war poetry, most famously her ‘Still Falls the Rain’ written in  in response to the Blitz (clearly Sitwell was a fellow traveller in terms of an objection to fighting): Still falls the Rain— Dark as the world of man, black as our loss— Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails Upon the Cross. Still falls the Rain With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammerbeat In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet On the Tomb: Still falls the Rain In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain. Still falls the Rain At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross. Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us— On Dives and on Lazarus: Under the Rain the sore and the gold are as one. Still falls the Rain— Still falls the Blood from the Starved Man’s wounded Side: He bears in His Heart all wounds, —those of the light that died, The last faint spark In the self-murdered heart, the wounds of the sad uncomprehending dark, The wounds of the baited bear— The blind and weeping bear whom the keepers beat On his helpless flesh. . .the tears of the hunted hare. Still falls the Rain— Then—O Ile leape up to my God: who pulles me doune— See, see where Christ’s blood streames in the firmament: It flows from the Brow we nailed upon the tree Deep to the dying, to the thirsting heart That holds the fires of the world, —dark-smirched with pain



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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War As Caesar’s laurel crown. Then sounds the voice of One who like the heart of man Was once a child who among beasts has lain— ‘Still do I love, still shed my innocent light, my Blood, for thee.’ The correspondence between Den and Tippett terminates quite soon after Fresca’s death. Tippett says that Den has embarked on a new adventure, perhaps a relationship or a new job, but Den’s move to the United States does not happen until a decade later. Tippett’s letters on Fresca’s death make clear that Fresca and Den are close. Fresca is frequently part of the two men’s discussions, their plans. Confirming a tight connection, I recall that Fresca leaves her books to Den in her will and hopes that he will finish up her folk song manuscript along with Tippett. When Fresca dies, Tippett apologizes for having written too hastily to Den of his own sorrow without considering Den’s. I cannot help feeling that Fresca may have been in love with Den.



I wonder how unusual or unconventional it would have been in the s for a single woman in her thirties to befriend a man eighteen years her junior. With almost three quarters of a million British soldiers killed in World War I, men were in short supply in the s and earlier s and many women who had assumed marriage was in their future found themselves alone, joining the ranks of ‘surplus women’. In , according to the census, there were ,,  more females than males in the population. However, by the late s a woman’s chance of marrying was substantially better than it had been. Men not of an age to serve in World War I are reaching a marriageable age. These men are Fresca’s age, but perhaps  (Fresca’s age in ) seemed over the hill, and men of her age sought out younger women. (And Tippett’s cryptic mention of Fresca’s relationship with a CO from WWI—did he mean WWII?—comes to mind again.) Likely Fresca’s association with Den results from the greater liberty at which she found herself, as an independent woman of means benefitting from the progress that the war, and the subsequent depression, brought women of her generation (ironically often at men’s expense). Although many women did find themselves in the early s forced to return to the domestic realm from which they had escaped during World War I by necessity, replacing men at the front, life has changed so radically that things will never be the same. Ruth Adam calls the Twenties ‘the Amazon era, [the era] of the latch-key girls and the career girls and women in politics and



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Part Five the public-school girls and of Shaw’s Saint Joan, who died for refusing to submit to a woman’s rôle’, for ‘wearing men’s clothes, which is indecent, unnatural and abominable’ and for ‘clipping her hair in the style of a man’; and because she had ‘against all the duties which have made her sex specially acceptable in heaven, taken up the sword, even to the shedding of human blood’. With the loss of many men at the front and the disabling of many of those who did actually make it back, women take on greater responsibilities. Single women, before considered a burden to their married siblings, ‘[come] into their own’. The spinster is ‘no longer the spare female in the family’s life who could always be put upon, but the one who kept a husband drinking cocktails in the bar after work, when he should have been coming home’. Vera Brittain’s  Testament of Youth gives me a good sense of how things shifted between around  and the s: Sophisticated present-day girls, free immediately after leaving school to come and go as they wish, or living, as independent professional women, in their own rooms and flats, have no conception of the difficulties under which courtships were conducted by provincial young ladies in . There was no privacy for a boy and girl whose mutual feelings had reached their most delicate and bewildering stage; the whole series of complicated relationships leading from acquaintance to engagement had to be conducted in public or not at all. Enid Marx’s friend Eleanor Breuning has mentioned an unsettling detail about Fresca’s approval of adult-child sexual relationships, of which, she contends, Margaret Lambert did not approve. Breuning thinks this issue may have come up in terms of Virginia Woolf ’s niece Angelica Bell who has married, at a young age, David [Bunny] Garnett, her father Duncan Grant’s lover, a man many years older than she. Bell’s father, Duncan Grant was five and a half years her mother’s junior. But I speculate that the discussion Fresca perhaps had with Marx and Lambert related to something closer to home in terms of Fresca’s own relationships with young men like Den Newton and Bryan Fisher. In his memoir Bryan Fisher recounts how when he needs to stay on in Fresca’s flat beyond her return from a visit to Ireland (because his new flat is not ready) she has no qualms about sleeping in the same room as he does. Fisher presents Fresca’s hospitality as highly unconventional. I do find relationships between older women and younger men in novels of the period, but it seems to me that the older woman is frequently married or divorced. The relationship forms part of the hero’s apprenticeship; it is the equivalent of visiting a prostitute in the nineteenth-century bildungsroman. 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War Examples gathered with a query to my Virginia Woolf listserv community include Clara and Paul in D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (), Sandra Wentworth Williams and Jacob in Virginia Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room (), and aging courtesan Léa de Lonval and Chéri in Colette’s Chéri (). Jean Rhys’s  novel Good Morning, Midnight and her short story ‘La Grosse Fifi’ from The Left Bank () also feature older women and younger men. In SackvilleWest’s The Edwardians () Sebastian has a love affair with a married friend of his mother’s, Lady Sylvia Roehampton. In Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (), Mrs Montmorency is about  years older than her husband. We also find platonic relationships between older married women and younger men, like that of Helen Ambrose and St John Hirst in Woolf ’s The Voyage Out (). Other stories I look at suggest the destructive nature of these kinds of relationships. In D. H. Lawrence’s story ‘The Blue Moccasins’ (?) Lina M’Leod, , marries Percy Barlow, a man half her age. (Lawrence’s own wife, Frieda, was six years his senior.) In this case, not only age, but class, separates wealthy, educated, travelled Lina and bank manager Percy. The story ends up setting haughty Lina up against a younger rival, Alice Howells, exactly Percy’s age, contrasting the independence of Lina’s generation of women, which threw off men, with the lack thereof among women of Alice’s, who focused on men, rather than ‘a’ man, and asserting Percy’s need for ‘woman-fond(ness)’. Unlike the earlier stories, the woman is the aggressor in Lawrence’s ‘Blue Moccasins’. Raymond Radiguet’s Le Diable au corps () features an -year-old woman who embarks on a relationship with a -year-old boy while her fiancé is fighting at the front in World War I; and in Edith Wharton’s The Mother’s Recompense () Kate Clephane finds her daughter planning to marry a man she had been in love with herself. A Pin to See the Peep-Show () by F. Tennyson Jesse tells the story of the Thompson/Bywaters case in which Edith Thompson’s husband was murdered by her lover, Frederick Bywaters, her junior by  years. Both Thompson and Bywaters were found guilty and hanged in , despite the fact that Bywaters maintained until his death that Thompson played no part in the murder. A last listserv suggestion includes The Nightingale (A Life of Chopin) () by Marjorie Strachey about Chopin’s relationship with George Sand, six years his senior, and this seems to my mind to be a more appealing fit.



In several letters exchanged between Den and Fresca, the playfulness of their relationship is clear. I find these letters, all undated but estimated to have been written in , with Tippett’s materials at the British Library. 

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Part Five Wednesday Denny Luv—I’m afraid Sunday is na-poo. The first bus gets into Cambridge at about  which would be alright but none leaves between  and  pm and I’ll not have the energy to walk home at that hour of the evening. Darnit—I owe my body a grudge for that. D’you know—sure you do—I never thanked you for the miniature book which I scoffed up with appetite never having read a word on the subject— the portraits were all new to me except that exquisite young man leaning up against a tree with Mat and Dowson [Decadent poet Ernest Dowson] —like brambles about him—a pretty queer if ever there was one. In haste to catch the cornet-playing postman (Salvation Army Band). Lots (?) of love, F And Fresca opens a second letter, suggesting intimacy, with ‘My handsome poppet ja Denlein’. Lein is a diminutive suffix in German. She writes: How nice you looked last week all in white. I feel that a seamless garment would suit you a treat—Do you think Mssrs Burgess of Trinity St could run you one up? Here are the far from seamless socks & gaudily darned, for khaki wool is not to be got for mending purposes. While in Simpsons and Lillywhites I enquired for your tweed (?) wind jacket but to no avail. But I’ll give Gammages a ring. Enough of this girlish gossip about clothes. Michael and I have been giggling fit to burst over Festing Jones’s Life of Butler. By the time you finish reading the two volumes you feel a bit confused as to which of those two was which (I mean the men not the volumes) Jones writes so like Butler & slips in so much malice not to say jest, all with pink icing on top that you are all be-moithened (?). Have read [Djuna Barnes’s] Nightwood again—this time knowing what it is about, I mean by that, why she’s put in what she has. But do you really like that obscure style? I’m sure she couldn’t help herself but I don’t think it is a style to aim at, rather one to grow out of. Saw Fred on Sunday, he seems (?) fed up with E.G. & the turnip (?) hoeing. Bob & Margaret have left (and, oh drat, I forgot to ask whether they had taken their rabbit hutches with them). Philip Zenley is back. SFG [Sackville Farm Growers] thrives. Teddy is doing excellently & Timmy continually gets the sack on account of Rosemary’s unbridled temper. This letter is written in [?] chase us (?) around the barrack. Much love and equal haste. [a PS:] how is the harem of Viennese Jewesses? 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War In a third letter Fresca proposes that Den provide the scores for her little music book if it is published by Messrs F & F. A letter of July , , from Tippett to Den, which I find at the British Library, while not explicit, suggests something has happened between Den and Fresca. Tippett writes: ‘I expect you enjoyed your visit away to Fresca and became therefore a little solaced for all the goings on before. To be in love is certainly to make a fool, if not an abjection of oneself but if it’s part of man’s terrible heritage to disappear down the slippery slope even if slimey. Everything has been done before as the French put it.’ I remember that Bryan Fisher had noted that Den ‘seemed happy living at Fresca’s flat in East Grinstead and [was] obviously very dependent on her’. Bryan ‘felt that [Den] would always be [dependent] on someone, in his relationships with the outside world’. The first letter Tippett sends to Den following Fresca’s death is very like others he sent. He writes: I’ve been crying rather a lot and feel a bit better at least. I think it was inevitable probably but we shan’t easily find the like again. Gay and gentle loving pretty things and courageous and in the end grim. Poor sweet sweetheart. But if I write more I shall cry. One is selfish all through in my opinion. We cry like thwarted children. But if she were cold and level then I would have held her hand at least. [. . .] I finished the deathly slow movement [Symphony No. ] late last night, just after Cyril phoned me. Til tomorrow. Mike. On April , in a second letter, however, Tippett backtracks. He has clearly hurt Den’s feelings. He apologizes to Den for his ‘coarse fingered[ness]’. He says that he’d forgotten ‘how close [Den was] to her and how grieved and how sore [he] would be’. He continues: ‘I didn’t mean to look in on your privacy, so to speak, just because we share a lot of memories of her.’ Her letter shows that she was unable to want to survive Germany’s agony and live into the post-war world without a healthy body and active participation in the healing. But deeper still lay her trouble that she had muddled her life because she had denied at times her love. Warmth and love were her natural world—& she strove to enter the dispersed love-world of the saint (?), but could [it] not (?). It makes us men seem horribly cold fish beside her— 

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Part Five selfish & abstracted. Yet it really wasn’t so much love from another she wanted as strength to love and cherish. But maybe had I been less abstract, less manlike in fact, [that/then] I might have helped her along to where I imagined we would end. Not that my love wasn’t perhaps too severe and passionless and understanding to be of this life anyhow. One day when you and I went over to Mill House from C[ambridge] she said to me: As I saw you two come up the path from my room, I saw a vision of springtime lovers. I remember answering a bit briskly and evasively—for I was a little shy, and a trifle distressed less this conveyed a faint feeling of envy or jealousy. But it didn’t. It was her vision of her loved ones at one with each other—the over-abiding love which she wanted to pour on us all so that we were, she believed and hoped, to love naturally as she had not, without denial. Then she spoke of you when I saw her last. She told me of the dream of her arms and wounds, and her feeling that she was forgiving herself for just this denial. She asked me of you fearing that you were not going that way, denying the love of the heart for social prejudged patterns of behaviour. I comforted her and told her that I felt it to be alright with you anyhow. But there her message is for us all, if you in particular, whom she had close. I look at this letter at the British Library (a) and Thomas Schuttenhelm seems to have missed the following sentence: ‘Not that our love wasn’t perhaps too serene & passionless & understanding to be of [?] this life anyhow, the overabiding love.’ But this [Schuttenhelm says ‘there’] & her message is for us all, if for you particularly, whom she had so close. I read the message for myself too, though it isn’t meant from her [from/for?] me just the same, because I became older when I was with her alone and she had this illusion that I had not denied what she imagined she had denied. But she did not deny, either herself or others. Only she remained to the end believing she was worthless. Don’t grieve Den dear. I don’t write like this to make you cry. I don’t tread this hidden ground to wring your heart, but to establish a bit of a basis, sentimental, analytic or what you will, where we can talk of her occasionally and where we can know that our own gaieties, lightheartedness covers the inner sensitiveness to her memory & that she wanted us to be so.



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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War At the end of the April  letter in a postscript, Tippett writes: ‘The Auden is good. Comes from this same double world: Oh wear your tribulation like a rose, a rose. It’s a very good image of what she wanted so hopefully to do, but felt she hadn’t. But to me at least she had.’ Clearly Den has referred to W. H. Auden’s ‘Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day,’ commissioned and then later set to music under the title ‘Hymn to St Cecilia’ by Benjamin Britten. St Cecilia is the patron saint of music. Among the many composers who had written odes and songs to her was, appropriately to Fresca, Henry Purcell: I. In a garden shady this holy lady With reverent cadence and subtle psalm, Like a black swan as death came on Poured forth her song in perfect calm: And by ocean’s margin this innocent virgin Constructed an organ to enlarge her prayer, And notes tremendous from her great engine Thundered out on the Roman air. Blonde Aphrodite rose up excited, Moved to delight by the melody, White as an orchid she rode quite naked In an oyster shell on top of the sea; At sounds so entrancing the angels dancing Came out of their trance into time again, And around the wicked in Hell’s abysses The huge flame flickered and eased their pain. Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions To all musicians, appear and inspire: Translated Daughter, come down and startle Composing mortals with immortal fire. II. I cannot grow; I have no shadow To run away from, I only play. I cannot err; There is no creature Whom I belong to, Whom I could wrong. 

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Part Five I am defeat When it knows it Can now do nothing By suffering. All you lived through, Dancing because you No longer need it For any deed. I shall never be Different. Love me. Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions To all musicians, appear and inspire: Translated Daughter, come down and startle Composing mortals with immortal fire. III. O ear whose creatures cannot wish to fall, O calm of spaces unafraid of weight, Where Sorrow is herself, forgetting all The gaucheness of her adolescent state, Where Hope within the altogether strange From every outworn image is released, And Dread born whole and normal like a beast Into a world of truths that never change: Restore our fallen day; O re-arrange. O dear white children casual as birds, Playing among the ruined languages, So small beside their large confusing words, So gay against the greater silences Of dreadful things you did: O hang the head, Impetuous child with the tremendous brain, O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain, Lost innocence who wished your lover dead, Weep for the lives your wishes never led. O cry created as the bow of sin Is drawn across our trembling violin. O weep, child, weep, O weep away the stain. O law drummed out by hearts against the still Long winter of our intellectual will. That what has been may never be again. O flute that throbs with the thanksgiving breath Of convalescents on the shores of death. 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War O bless the freedom that you never chose. O trumpets that unguarded children blow About the fortress of their inner foe. O wear your tribulation like a rose. Blessed Cecilia, appear in visions To all musicians, appear and inspire: Translated Daughter, come down and startle Composing mortals with immortal fire.



I am still unsure about who Den Newton was. Tippett’s letters and his memoir have not given me a clear picture. An archive online exists for Den Newton, but searches show no results for Tippett or Fresca. The archive contains, according to the description, personal correspondence, etc., but, it is unclear where the physical archive is. The Douglas Newton Archive provides access to information about the life and career of Bryan Leslie Douglas Newton. It includes his research notes, photographs, personal correspondence, and unpublished writings by and about him. This website includes biographical data, details about his professional accomplishments, art collections, curriculum vitae, exhibitions, bibliography of his publications about art, his poetry and reviews, and indexes to his photographs and research notes. The majority of the information is unique to this collection and is registered under copyright. Another primary source about Newton’s career is the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where he was employed from  until . They also have information about his accomplishments at The Museum of Primitive Art –. I take the following from the website and reproduce Holland Cotter’s obituary in full: Bryan Leslie Douglas Newton (September ,  – September , ) was born to English parents on a Malaysian rubber estate, Newton was privately educated in England. As a young man he worked in a printing office and during World War II he was an assistant editor for two anthologies and numerous other publications. After the war, Newton worked as an assistant editor for G. Weidenfeld, became a journalist and writer for the BBC, and a scriptwriter for a South Bank exhibition. He 

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Part Five was editor with Tom Ingram of the anthology Hymns as Poetry (). Also an accomplished poet, his ‘Landscapes of Night and Day’ was published in the Paris Review,  (Spring), : .

 Den Newton (Tate Gallery).

In , Newton left England and moved to New York, where he freelanced as a writer and editor before joining the Museum of Primitive Art in March  as an assistant curator. Newton was the author of several of the museum’s important monographs on the arts and cultures of Oceania.’ Douglas Newton, 80, Curator Emeritus at the Metropolitan By HOLLAND COTTER Published: September 22, 2001 Douglas Newton, curator emeritus of the department of the arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an innovator in designing museum displays of non-Western art, died on Wednesday at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was 80. Born Bryan Leslie Douglas Newton to English parents on a Malaysian rubber plantation in 1920, and educated in England, he worked as an editor, journalist and scriptwriter for the BBC before moving to New York in 1956. The following year he joined the Museum of Primitive Art, newly established by Nelson A. Rockefeller in a converted Manhattan brownstone on West 54th Street, as an assistant curator. In 1960 he became a full curator, and in 1974 the museum’s director, succeeding Robert Goldwater. 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War Mr. Newton organized 64 exhibitions for the Museum of Primitive Art, which is now defunct. His groundbreaking designs, with atmospheric lighting and striking installations, brought the museum both critical praise and public attention and had long-term influences on museum displays of so-called primitive art. ‘“He knows the fine line between showing sympathy for a tradition on its own terms and manipulating the tradition in terms of Western practices and expectations,”’ wrote Robert Farris Thompson, a Yale art historian, in 1978. Mr. Newton went on to become the principal designer for major exhibitions in other museums, including ‘The Art of Oceania, Africa and the Americas’ (1969) and ‘Te Maori’ (1984) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and ‘The Art of the Pacific Islands’ (1979) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. A fluent writer, he produced many monographs, including Crocodile and Cassowary: Religious Art of the Upper Sepik River, New Guinea (1971) and Arts of the South Seas (1999). He was also the editor of more than two dozen books on the art of the Pacific Islands. He was recently given the Manu Daula Award by the Pacific Arts Association for a lifetime of work devoted to the arts of Oceania. Mr. Newton was appointed consultative chairman of the department of primitive art at the Metropolitan Museum in 1974, and department chairman in 1975. That year, he began to oversee the transfer of the art collections, library and photograph study collection of the Museum of Primitive Art to the Metropolitan, which was given the collections by Mr. Rockefeller in memory of his son Michael, an anthropologist who died in 1961 while on an expedition in New Guinea. The works were displayed in the museum’s new Michael C. Rockefeller wing. Mr. Newton supervised the design team for the wing, which opened in 1982. Its debut was hailed as placing the art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas on a museological footing with ancient and modern art. From 1982 until his retirement in 1990, Mr. Newton was the museum’s Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede chairman of the department of primitive art. He was also senior adviser to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and was recently an adviser to the Quai Branly in Paris. He leaves no immediate survivors. In  in search of the Mill House manuscripts I contact Den’s executor and the owner of the archive site, Virginia-Lee Webb, on the advice of Thomas Schuttenhelm. Webb knows nothing about Fresca and cannot find any traces 

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Part Five of her among Den’s effects. Oddly, with the exception of Tippett’s account, Fresca’s letters and John Amis’s memory, Den’s life prior to New York has been largely erased. I decide to look for clues in Den’s poetry. In a  collection called New Poetry, edited by Nicholas Moore and published by the Fortune Press, with a cover by Lucian Freud, I find Den’s poem ‘Songes and Sonettes’ on the first page alongside Lawrence Durrell’s ‘The Unimportant Morning’: What Wyatt said so well, need I repeat? ‘They flee from me’—yes, for the grief is mine: Though next the anger of his great defeat (As just no doubt as any’s in his case) There is no more that I can stand except A bitterness to which I have no right; And I must weigh against his pacing passion Two hours of hopelessness one sleepless night. Thanks Thomas Wyatt, whose grand discontent Forced out the truth to twenty lines length Which purged and showed me what my grievance meant. Passion of weakness shall be turned to strength. I dug up Wyatt’s poem: They Flee From Me They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild and do not remember That sometime they put themself in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range, Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise Twenty times better; but once in special, In thin array after a pleasant guise, When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small; Therewithall sweetly did me kiss And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this?’ 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War It was no dream: I lay broad waking. But all is turned thorough my gentleness Into a strange fashion of forsaking; And I have leave to go of her goodness, And she also, to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindly am served I would fain know what she hath deserved. Den publishes ‘Five Poems’ in Poetry in June , just a year subsequent to Fresca’s death: ‘The Cherubs of Venus,’ ‘Night Piece,’ ‘Bishop and Naturalist (–),’ ‘Gaiety of Descendants,’ and ‘Archaic Art.’ In the course of looking further for Den the poet I come across several references online to Mary Lee Settle’s (–) relationship with ‘American poet’ Douglas ‘Den’ Newton. Settle was an American historical fiction writer and National Book Prize winner. Although the nationality is wrong, the name seems too similar to not check out. A recent memoir, published by Norton and edited by Anne Hobson Freeman, explains beautifully where Den went after Fresca left the story. In her memoir, Settle explains that she met Den at the house of Lancelot Beales in Cambridge in . Hugh Lancelot Beales (–) was a professor at the London School of Economics. He was evacuated to Cambridge along with the LSE (which was linked to Peterhouse during the war). She says that, after that first meeting, ‘[she and Den] had stood on a bridge across the Cam and talked a while;’ he calls her later that same day and invites her to go to a concert at Wigmore Hall. Settle initially refuses Den’s invitation because she has a prior engagement. However, on the way to that engagement, a wedding at St Margaret’s Westminster, she suddenly has a change of heart and heads for Wigmore Hall instead. She describes leaving the Wigmore concert with Tippett and Den to go to an Indian restaurant called ‘The Glory Hole’: ‘The food was terrible, and cheap,’ she reports, and ‘Michael was wearing my white gloves over his ears and Den was wearing my hat.’ The description of Settle’s trajectory that follows makes clear that her relationship with Den is life-changing. Den introduces Settle to an intellectual world that she has yet to experience, including friends like Conrad Aiken. Settle finds herself among ‘people who seemed to have read everything’, and from whom she acquires the habit of ‘read[ing] and read[ing]’ and writing and writing. The men and women of Den’s milieu write not for money or fame, 

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Part Five but because they believe in it; consequently most live on a shoestring budget, as do Settle, Newton, and Settle’s son Christopher over the nine years they spend together, moving between London and Cornwall (and Essex). But despite the fact that this austerity takes her into places for which her privileged upbringing has not prepared her, Settle embraces this new way of life and realizes that, as she put it, ‘for the first time I was in the right place; in the words of Thoreau, “I was born in Concord, and just in the nick of time”’: The scenes of that time come together as if it were one fine day in my memory. I see myself working every day on a big board propped on the bed. I stop by a chair in front of the gas fire . . . I am prepared.

 Den Newton and Mary Lee Settle (from Settle’s book).

Among the names of those Settle and Den socialize with I find Tippett. He stays with them often, according to Settle. Looking back at Schuttenhelm’s Selected Letters of Michael Tippett I am better able to understand some of Tippett’s comments regarding marriage versus work (in the context of which he mentions Wilf Franks, whose separation from Tippett has seen him enter into a heterosexual relationship), as well as his ‘love to you both’ salutation, in his  and  letters. Although he did not carry through his investigation, Schuttenhelm tells me he did begin to look for Settle: he sends me several letters from among Tippett’s correspondence which reveal Settle was worried Tippett had not seen Den because of her (whereas Tippett insists it’s Den’s silence that has kept him away). The letters suggest that Settle’s integration into the group wasn’t always straightforward. Also listed as a friend by Settle, I am very happy to find Judy Wogan, whom Settle labels ‘a diminutive actress who had once been known as the pocket Venus of Dublin’. Settle tells how Judy comes to the rescue on Christopher’s sixth 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War birthday (in ). When the grown-ups realise they have forgotten to make Punch a baby, Judy ‘found a carrot in the vegetable bin [,] carved a face of an angry baby on it, then dressed the baby in bright tissue-paper clothes, with a ruff around the baby’s neck’. She describes ‘Judy, the smallest of us, crouched behind the waist-high apron of the theater, [speaking] all of the parts, and [singing,] “I care for nobody, no not I, and nobody cares for me.”’ Oliver Soden tells me that this line from the folk song ‘The Miller of Dee’ was one of Tippett’s favourites, and that Tippett told Ian Kemp that he would regularly sing it as a rebellious schoolboy. With the help of Anne Freeman, editor of Settle’s autobiography, I manage to find Settle’s son, Christopher Weathersbee. He is using the name Brother Giovanni and living as a Franciscan hermit tending  goats (‘finding them jobs so they don’t have to go to slaughter’) in Buckingham County, Virginia, as part of what he calls ‘The Symbiosis Experiment’. He moved to Virginia from Vermont where he had had  goats and assorted other animals, left to him with a farm there by his mother; I learn online that he had faced cruelty to animal charges in  for failing to appropriately care for many of the goats in his charge. In his first phone message he says ‘yes!’ he remembers Judy Wogan very well; he had scuba-dived in her bath tub! In a later lengthy conversation (one afternoon in May ) Chris mentions a few other interesting things: friends of Den and Mary Lee’s included James Broughton, poet, filmmaker, and playwright (–); Eduardo Paolozzi, Scottish sculptor (–); and filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (–). He talks a fair amount about Judy Wogan describing her as ‘one of the most congenial people in the adult sphere’; he says that ‘she treated [him] like a reasonable human being’. She was living at the time he knew her, he tells me, in ‘a fascinating ground floor flat’ in Camden Town which was full of Victoriana from Dublin. He stayed with her briefly while finishing his O-levels at Bryanston School. Chris also remembers Judy’s yacht, no longer operational, moored in the marshes somewhere in Essex—it had belonged to the Spanish royalty and ‘had the order of the golden fleece on the loo door’. He’d heard stories about Judy having been in combat in Ireland during the Troubles, that she’d commanded a tank—she was barely  foot tall, he says, so she’d likely have had to have stood on something. All very romantic, Chris thinks . . . Chris last saw Den in the mid-s when his mother and Den separated. Den had met him from his plane in New York and taken him out to tell him that he and Mary Lee were splitting up. Chris says that at  he wasn’t really interested and that he didn’t feel particularly attached to Den (he’d been at Port Regis and at Bryanston, although at Megavissey he had got to know Den quite 

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Part Five

 Den with Settle and Chris (from Settle’s book).

well); however, in retrospect he feels very few people had as much influence on him as Den. He had written a letter to Den when he heard Den’s wife died, but had heard nothing back. I ask Chris about Den’s background. He tells me that Den had grown up on a Malay rubber farm (he had told Chris a moving story about a Malay woman nursing a bear that Chris felt had influenced his own feeling towards animals) and that he was a direct descendant of Sir Isaac Newton. Chris knew Den as a poet, and he mentions Den’s book Hymns as Poetry, co-authored with Tom Ingram. I ask Chris if he has his mother’s books (hopeful that perhaps Den’s copy of A Childhood stayed with Mary Lee). He says no, his mother had moved around a lot and that her books had disappeared long ago. He does have a copy of Proust that Den would have read. Chris has no recollection of any relatives for Den. Chris remembers thinking Den was a little cold at the time, but by and large a fair person, very dutiful. Chris talks about the picture of himself with Den and Mary Lee that appears in the memoir: ‘I’m the smarmiest kid I’ve ever seen,’ he says. Talking like a British school boy he adds: ‘I would have bashed that kid up to wipe the smarmy look off his face!’ Chris remembers an antiquarian friend of Den in London from whom they’d acquired a variety of objects, some valuable, including an Anatolian bull, and from the Wellcome collection a giant Maori canoe paddle and Pacific theatre stuff, some of which he’d sold.



Just before publication of this book I get several wonderful tips from Tippett biographer Oliver Soden which appear to support my speculations about Den and Fresca’s bond. First, Soden tells me that he has just looked at the late John Amis’s materials and has come across a letter from Den dated April , , 

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Pacifism in the Face of a Second World War which includes a mention of Fresca. Den tells Amis that he has found ‘[t]he part [of Tippett’s autobiography] about Fresca [. . .] moving’. And he continues: ‘I loved her a great deal and remember her very well indeed. I wish there was a picture of her—perhaps there aren’t any, and in any case her strange beauty wasn’t particularly photogenic, I guess.’ Second, Soden puts me in contact with Roger Savage, a musicologist currently at the University of Edinburgh, who brings news that Newton executor Virginia-Lee Webb has come across a manuscript which appears to be a collection of poems dedicated to Fresca with a Blake quote as epigraph. A photograph is circulating of the front page and Savage sends the following details: LOVE AND MYTHOLOGY To Francesca Allinson ‘And we are put on earth a little space That we may learn to bear the beams of love.’   x  John Lehmann [ = Penguin New Writing]  Disguises of the Artist   /     kr  Green Street   /     x  Poetry [Chicago]  Bishop and Naturalist    /      Rose and Compass    /      x  Atlantic [Anthology]  A Death Mask   /    Poetry [Chicago] Archaic Art   /   x  The Warm Statues [first title crossed out: ‘Landscape with Figures’]    /      Poetry [Chicago]  The Cherubs of Venus   /    Constellations   /     kr  The Love and Wars of Mars and Venus   /   John Lehmann  [ = Penguin New Writing]  Invasion Weather   /   [New ]Poetry  A Face like the Sun    /      kr  Getting Acquainted   /     kr  Obscure [?Obscene?] Games   /     x  Poetry [Chicago]  Night Piece   /     kr  Atlantic [Anthology]  Shuttle Cock /     New Poetry   Songs and Sonettes   /     kr  An Era’s Glass /      x  Poetry [Chicago]  Gaiety of Descendants    /      x Marshfield   /     kr   In Autumn   /     kr   Descent of the Lord /     Nature Morte   /    kr  Atlantic [Anthology]  Lacking a Guide   /    Poetry Chicago   Onionskin Man   /     The Blind Children   /     The Annunciation to the Virgin Mary   /     And on His Shoulder    /    .  The End of the [?]Potymkin Metamorphoses of Violence While many of the poems have appeared elsewhere, a number, some noted as ‘kr’, appear not to have been published. I speculate that the ‘kr’ may refer to Kenneth Rexroth who edited an anthology of British poetry to which Den 

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Part Five contributed. Reviewing letters, I note that Tippett tells Den that he has received ‘a whole set of [his] poems from Fresca,’ suggesting that all three collaborated. I read over the poems I am able to track down. Of all of them, I settle on ‘Night Piece’ as probably most explicitly for Fresca: O Crab who rules the ornament of love Prolong your steel-blue nippers through the sky, And knacker that black bastard if he lies Upon the body of the girl I loved. Somewhere she sleeps, and all that beauty’s loose And spread across a pillow. What revenge, You Constellations? Gather round her bed. Draco my friend will hiss her into tears? Or Leo tongue her soles until she cries? Aquary souse her from his icy pot, The bitch, the red-haired witch? No, none of these; Treat her kindly, stars, yes, treat her well.



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PART SIX

My Own Different Personal Life T

scholar Thomas Schuttenhelm sends me transcribed fragments of what he thinks might be Fresca’s diary entries from among Tippett’s papers at the British Library. He is unsure because Tippett’s and Fresca’s hands are similar and both are relatively difficult to decipher. However, after getting to know Fresca so well, I am certain that what I have in front of me is Fresca’s diary, probably the diary entries, not the pieces of ‘shadow biography’, that Tippett tells Den Newton he will retrieve from Cyril and Veronica Allinson’s Mill House, read, and destroy. Fresca’s diary entries represent as important a piece of the puzzle I am trying to unravel as I have yet to find. Curator Nicolas Bell at the British Library sends me the full set of pages from the mis-catalogued notebook and I later take a look at the beige hardback notebook myself, but am not allowed to photograph it. Here are  pages of unedited intensely personal notes written between July , , and March , , a period of four years, with Fresca between the ages of  and . Dealing mostly with Fresca’s efforts to give structure and meaning to her life, the diary entries consist of a reading list and a discussion of that reading with excerpts. These intimate notes provide a map of Fresca’s soul, a very troubled soul, and give a sense of the landscape of literary resources available to an educated, intellectually curious woman of the s. The diary is a reader’s diary. But I hesitate. What right have I to read and perhaps publish these exceptionally personal pieces? Further, how will these tortured notes reshape the reader’s view of my up-to-this-point sympathetic protagonist? But Fresca’s writing welcomes a listener; it invites conversation. Beginning in , while Fresca’s A Childhood is in production at the Hogarth Press, the diary entries IPPETT



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Part Six

Pages from Fresca’s diary (British Library).



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My Own Different Personal Life take me a step back as they document the lead up to Fresca’s stay at the Mill House.



On the first page of the diary, dated July , , and titled ‘the Edith,’ perhaps her location as she writes, after chastising herself for mistreating Judy, Fresca writes ‘John [Layard?] talked about truth of intercourse last week & I thought how untruthful I have been with J[udy]. I told her a lot about my feelings on xism etc. [Christianity?]. I upset her.’ Then Fresca resolves: ‘I must set about myself more systematically. Salavin was , I am nearly . Mrs Kemp [possibly Tippett’s mother] works at herself from – am. It’s a good idea. I think  minutes at a time every morning will be enough to start with. I must find out methods.’ French writer Georges Duhamel wrote five volumes about Salavin, an introspective, depressive individual with whom I have a hard time reconciling Fresca. Salavin’s narrative represents an attempt at renewal, at changing one’s life and in this regard I understand its appeal for Fresca. He writes: ‘Today, January th, my birthday [his th], I have decided to totally transform my life.’ But, at least to my mind, Fresca does not share Salavin’s negatives: ‘I have a shady character [. . .] I am poor, uninspiring [. . .] unsociable.’ ‘The man beginning this diary today is a man used up, in all senses of the word.’ Salavin decides to ‘work towards my elevation’. He rejects words such as ‘rachat’, literally ‘buying back’ or ‘atonement,’ or ‘rédemption’ (redemption), because he hasn’t really committed a crime. Men who have fallen very low, if they desire to raise themselves back up, are in a better position than is Salavin. Having touched bottom they can use it as a place from which to rebound: ‘excess itself has something elastic about it and it propels them back’. Salavin must start from zero; like the jumper with legs bound together, ‘[he] cannot count on the “complaisance” of the trampoline.’ What Fresca seems to take from Duhamel’s Salavin is his aspiration towards sainthood: ‘I must become a saint. That’s the only thing I can aspire to.’ Salavin has lost his religious faith, but it’s not a question of being a saint according to the church, an official saint. ‘In my opinion, it’s not especially religious fervor which makes one a saint, it’s the human conduct of a man, although I avoid pompous language, it’s the ordering of one’s moral life.’ Fresca writes that she has defined a saint for Judy ‘as being someone who is wide-open and yet controlled’. ‘There’s no point,’ she goes on ‘in being oneself— only in being a vessel for something else to blow through.’ She tells Judy that she doesn’t ‘very literally believe in God’; Judy has told her to ‘relax’. Fresca concurs. She writes that in order ‘to get hatred out of oneself [one must not] strain away’ and continues, ‘it merely makes the rope more taut & the knot tighter. Obviously something else has got to get in its place so that there is no 

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Part Six room for the hatred.’ She longs to know what aggressiveness is: ‘it seems like energy in the wrong channel. When I think of people like Hephzibah who has worked hard at herself and remains rebutting aggression I feel frightened.’ Hephzibah means ‘my delight is in her’; is it the name of a friend? Next, Fresca comments on the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski’s ‘artistic method’. She judges it good ‘all around’. Stanislavski published An Actor Prepares in English in . Interestingly, in terms of Fresca’s experiment in journaling, it is written as the diary of a fictional student called Kostya who is working with a group of students to learn Stanislavski’s method. Stanislavski, Fresca contends, says ‘when you close a door or strike a match on stage, it is pointless unless you do it for some further purpose.’ It’s not enough, she thinks, to ‘have off being a bounder [. . .] it must be for some further purpose’. She wonders if the Roman Catholic Church might help her. Then, ‘I think a diary will help,’ she concludes. ‘It will help me to be regular and keep track. I’d like to alter because I make J. unhappy, and because being a decent person, a mature and good person—yes a saint—is the only thing worth trying for.’ On August  [], Fresca writes: ‘There is one thing to ask for and find: strength. And with strength will come gentleness. I have not written daily partly because I have been irregular and partly because not enough has come clear. As a definite task I set myself that of being relaxed with strangers or slight acquaintances & setting them at their ease.’ Fresca is ‘looking after Enid [her niece, the oldest daughter of Bertrand]. She has wept most of the day from self-pity— also hysteria from neither sleeping nor eating. The echo of myself,’ Fresca writes, ‘teaches me.’ And then she returns to Stanislavski: ‘Stanislavski says you must first of all get clear about your object. Why and towards what you are acting. I wish above all to be worthy of J[udy] but only goodness is lovely in itself. I feel as though I had only come to know the meaning of good and evil now.’ A week later, on August  [], Fresca reports that she has committed to five minutes of meditation per day, but even that short period of time proves challenging. Maybe she’ll try twice a day, she says. She’s been changing subjects every day, but thinks it might be best to fix on one per week. ‘So far I’ve been thinking about opening the sluice gates of myself so that what for shortness sake I’ll call God can pour in—& displace the bad me. Fill myself with God and there simply won’t be room for anything else. I wonder what terms I should set myself for the preliminary job—after all I’ve only set myself the conquering of what Basil called the animal nature. He said that someone was letting themself go to the animal when they were merely disagreeable or cantankerous. My passions of anger, disgust & horror are pure animal passion.’ On August , Fresca adds: ‘Within a month I will have corrected my stooping position & stand straight. I don’t think I have even considered myself 

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My Own Different Personal Life or anybody else for that matter as a creation of will. Most of my -minute thinks which I still cannot increase boil finally down to this as an idea. One is born an individual vessel that can hold an individual quantity and quality of good. Nobody can hold it all. Make the vessel as good a one as one can that it may contain God/good as well and as fully as possible.’ Two weeks later on August , Fresca writes that there is [n]o progress of any importance to report. I do stand straighter and as I get used to bracing to an upright position it becomes easier.’ She is ‘staying at home with Mother [pictured with Fresca]. I will keep her company, behave sociably and not give way to irritation. I will neither speak nor think abuse of people. I will first of all cut out my own family. Certain others are still too difficult to be positive about. I have been furious with the BP’s [Bertrand Pulvermachers], for having had [Fresca’s niece] E[nid] for nearly  weeks, neither of them has had their feeling, or as substitute, manners, to write and thank me. What does it matter! I didn’t have E so as to be thanked. I suppose I would like to be proud of my family. All the above are very trivial. But it is out of trivialities that I shall build up to the less small. I have been a complete mess the last few days— flooded by evil feelings.

 Fresca and her mother, Anna (Sonya Allinson).



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Part Six



Fresca does not return to her notebook for the next four months. In December , just three days before Christmas, she is rereading what she has written and is appalled by her own priggishness, despite her efforts to be genuine. The diary is meant to represent a refuge, a place to ‘make for’ ‘every time I get into too tight a corner’. Fresca uses the German term Tagebüch (journal)—she wishes to make this into a real Tagebücher. She is again ‘inundated with evil feelings’, which she has temporarily succeeded in suppressing, but which have caught up with her, causing her to be as ‘rude as hell—& to spoil everything’. But she’s ‘made a lot of decisions’ and has spent the whole day reading Joanna Field’s An Experiment in Leisure, published very recently in . She describes the writer as ‘extraordinarily intelligent [and the book] almost souly [sic] about my own problems’. She plans to write out extracts from the book in her notebook. But before she does so, Fresca shifts to another writing project: ‘It’s been in my mind for some time that I want to write a book of short stories of horrors. My own personal horrors. And to write them will be to detach them. This has been in my mind for some time. I shall jot down the themes here as they occur & let them summon themselves into existence.’ She concludes that if one wants to ‘deal with one’s horrors’ one must ‘find out what they are’. She then describes her ‘raging hatreds’, specifically against women and ‘women in general, not only the feared variety’. She explains that as a child she’d feared groups of people, that she’d ‘imagined [her]self venting contempt and disgust on gatherings of people’ (she gives ‘vegetarians’ as an example, probably guests of her parents). This had given way to hatred for and fear of women: ‘I think only of their vile qualities & not of their good ones.’ She describes a scene from a mediocre Polish ballet she has recently seen where a single figure emerges from within a ‘football scrum’ of devils on stage. ‘I saw myself in the position of the hero, & the devils were women who were threatening to submerge me.’ On December , Fresca starts outlining her short stories. The clearest story so far is ‘The Pound of Sausages’. It will be funny. There is a storm gathering in the skies but Mrs X (not yet named) who lives at (under[?])ground view in a London suburb sets out to do her shopping all the same. The storm approaches & she goes from shop to shop—at one place she complains that they did not answer a letter & the shop keeper replies that they never received it—but she insists that they ought to have answered all the same (pinched this from Thibaud [ Jacques, violinist, –?]). All this should be Stanley Spencerish Zwemmer & comical. [Spencer exhibited at the Zwemmer Gallery in London in 

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My Own Different Personal Life ]. The storm lets loose. Lightning strikes her umbrella & buries itself in the lb of sausages, reducing them to a cinder. That’s all. [Then she cryptically notes the Britts, the Normans in Miss B’s Gardener].  There will be a trilogy—terror of the stranger that inhabits me.  terror of being imprisoned within oneself  terror of emptiness. This will be comical—the man will keep trying to fill himself up.  Lilting in the sea. The Moreland house in a snow & mist will have to be there. I don’t know what it will be about. Sometimes it is a fierce wild house with blown out nostrils, showing the whites of its eyes—sometimes it is a shaggy melancholy little house, rather dumpy. I don’t know if my German comes in. The groom pointing out a man? telling me that she was Venus. The submerged country (New York) will certainly have to be there. I don’t know if anything happens at all. I think they will mainly all be nightmares—but some of them tender. The worshipper at a [?] she does not believe in. In search of these stories that Lambert also mentions in her obituary, I contact Faber, Lambert’s publisher. I hear back from Faber archivist, Robert Brown, who tells me that the ‘[Faber] archive is almost entirely organized around titles that Faber actually published. There is little chance of tracing whether Lambert sent the stories to Faber; and even if so, the firm always returned Mss. to authors.’ Unfortunately, he can’t find any trace of Allinson. Eleanor Breuning has sent me the typed manuscript of a Spanish Civil War-related play from among Lambert’s papers believing that it might be Fresca’s work. It’s appealing to think that it is, but the handwritten changes to the script appear not to be Fresca’s. It’s possible the typed manuscript is Fresca’s and the comments are Marx’s or Lambert’s.



After outlining her stories, Fresca returns to psychoanalyst Joanna Field (pen name of Marion Milner). She begins by copying the following extract from An Experiment in Leisure (). ‘So to me it seems that it is nursery morals which are concerned with “being good” and “being bad”, with “ought”. I’m sure the moment you are consciously concerned with being good, priggishness comes in and mental sterility. Real wisdom only flows under the conditions of utter loss of all sense of purpose, standard, ideal, or of being pleased with yourself for being at least partly on the way to your goal (p. ).’ Her discussion of Field is interrupted by an erotic dream. On December , she adds: ‘I want to put down a dream I had  or  nights ago. I can’t read it. A 

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Part Six Man, rather a dark Mexican type, asked me to dance with him. He told me his name was the last word of the first line to which we were going to dance. His name proved to be Soil. He was a splendid dancer & so was I—my steps fitted his like a glove. At the end he asked me to sleep with him. I said yes, with qualms at being so immediately compliant in reply. We went each to our own house. He lived opposite me in a high sww plain. After he had gone into his bungalow, a priest went in. He was vestmented in such intensely white vestments that the snow looked dirty beside them. All the next day I felt pleased with this dream.’ Then Fresca goes back to Field: ‘The great thing to find out, following J. Field’s method is why so much of my unintended thinking is full of hate. Why bother to think about the horrors—they don’t concern me. But I can trace the need to down people in other relations. Die Hausdame urbanum [the urban housemaid?]. I find myself downing her too. And after so much kindness.’ On New Year’s Day, , Fresca notes that she has ‘finished reading J. Field’s [] book A Life of One’s Own.’ She proposes to ‘try some method of following [Field’s] way of growing up’ but she is ‘[t]oo beastly obsessed & full of hate for words. Dreamt of the horrors last night after evening’s conversation about them, & woke up heavy with nightmare. Yesterday horribly depressed—slightly less so today.’ Fresca finds that ‘J.F.’s book is so much about my head that it alarms me—the thought of imitating her at all.’ She decides to ‘write to Adrian Stephen to see if he knows [Field]. I’d like to know the result of all that effort. Is she a likeable person? As I plan to turn upside down so rigorously after [analysis?], I’ll devote those times to regular thinkings. J.F’s first job was to write down the moments of real happiness. So I’ll start off with that.’ She makes a list: Finding on Saintt’s . . .? the little guano seagull nests. Setting light to dry grass. Controlling the car when she sidled in the wind. Explaining tricks of playing Monopoly & surreptitiously helping J to bank. Getting J’s bottles and flour. This seems a silly toll for today. Field’s obituary (written using her real name, Marion Milner) for Adrian Stephen’s wife, fellow psychoanalyst Karin Costello, confirms that she and Stephen knew each other. The obituary mentions the couples’ King’s Head home, on the Handford Water near Harwich on the Essex coast, north east of St Osyth, which Karin rented in  and bought in . Milner’s description 

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My Own Different Personal Life suggests that she has been there: ‘It had been an inn where laden barges used to call, for the high spring tides would reach right up to its walls; and the shining east coast air and sharp salty tang of the mud seemed somehow symbolic of so much that was also in them.’ Two days later, on January , , Fresca reports that she had [lain] awake a long time last night trying to be conscious of the way out of things. Wished I’d been born without thyroid. I’d be such a different person. Totally different. When I was round the twenties—& a little bit always—if I saw anyone handsome and attractive & confident among young men, my reaction was—well I’ll show you that I don’t admire you— & did I suppose. What an appalling way of behaving. If I hadn’t been so damned repulsive and ugly with my goiter I suppose I shouldn’t have set about reacting like that. I would like to make a story about letting in water to a great parched plain. It could be fearfully exciting. Letting in the sea. Happiness yesterday Pruning the apple trees Talking to Jim & Hunt about farming Talking with J. over a bottle of wine. Hearing that the slang word for [?] is snow. Then Fresca turns again to Field’s A Life of One’s Own which she has just gone through ‘for a second time’. ‘On [a] first reading I thought the whole thing of use to me. Now I discern that there is just one idea, variously expressed that is good, but supremely good. Being passive instead of active: relaxing instead of effort.’ Fresca follows this with various quotes from Field (first from A Life and then from Experiment) in which she says, for example, that she realizes the best way through is ‘to let go & be free from this drive after achievement—if only I dared’. This letting go might open the way to an ‘aware[ness] of some other purpose that was more fundamental, not self-imposed private ambitions but something which grew out of the essence of one’s own nature’. Fresca also selects quotes where Field talks about first, femininity and the average Westerner’s fear of Eastern religions because they favour the female attitude to life, an attitude which goes against Western ideas about success (activity, efficiency); and second, about ‘helping others NOT as a means to an end, but an end in itself.’ Fresca does not quote the following from Field, but it appears to sum up what she is trying to do: ‘So I began to have the idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to f it my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and 

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Part Six growth of a purpose which I did not know. I wrote: “It will mean walking in a fog for a bit, but it’s the only way which is not a presumption, forcing the self into a theory” ’; ‘At that time I could not understand that my real purpose might be to learn to have no purposes.’ Fresca also takes one sentence from Field’s Joseph Conrad epigraph [from Lord Jim] to her first chapter: ‘In the destructive element immerse.’ Conrad compares being born to being thrown into the sea. If one wants to avoid drowning, he says, one must submit to the destructive element ‘and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up . . .’ Fresca ends her extracts from Field with a quote from An Experiment: ‘to make the matter intelligible I should have to write a whole book . . . Everything that I have written has the closest possible connection with what I have lived through, even if it has not been my own personal experience; in every new poem or play I have aimed at my own spiritual emancipation & purification.’ Field is quoting Ibsen here.



Fresca’s singling out of Field interests me a lot. Not only does Field’s method shed light on Fresca’s self-analysis, but the style of her book, her experiment, mirrors my own project. The Pelican edition of A Life of One’s Own is subtitled: ‘An enquiry, based on the author’s intimate diary, into the conditions for obtaining happiness and a personal standard of values.’ Field opens by saying: ‘This book is the record of a seven years’ study of living [written in the late s; published ]. The aim of the record was to find out what experience made me happy.’ Her method consists in finding out what makes her happy and writing it down; she then goes back to her written record to see if there are ‘rules about the conditions in which happiness occurred’. Field makes an argument for why the quest form matters. In her introduction to a recent rerelease of A Life of One’s Own, Rachel Bowlby calls the book ‘a voyage of [Field’s] own personal experiential discoveries’. Field is detective and explorer. If one ventures out without a map or prescribed route, she argues, methods can change as one goes. (Field advocates for ‘wide perceiving’, that is not focusing too much on purpose.) ‘The form of the book follows from the nature of the experiment. I have tried to show the development of the problem by giving actual extracts from my diaries.’ Field’s acknowledgment that purpose is slippery must have appealed to Fresca, as must the literary quality of Field’s work. And in a description of methodology that resonated for me, Field continues: ‘I have tried always to keep to the facts as I saw them in order to show how I gradually pieced together the hints and clues which led to my final conclusions.’ Field says that she has written the book ‘in the spirit of a detective 

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My Own Different Personal Life who, baffled by the multitude of his facts, goes over and makes a summary of the progress of his investigations in the hope of finding something he has missed’. She describes the book as ‘a contemporary journal of an exploration which involved doubts, delays, and expeditions on false trails, and the writing of it was an essential part of the search’. Field is advocating a method, rather than offering interpretations. The book cannot tell the reader ‘how to be happy’. This, Field believes, cannot be universally mandated. And she believes, reaching out to the likes of Fresca, that ‘the need for such a method in these days [the mid-s] is obvious, a method for discovering one’s true likes and dislikes, for finding and setting up a standard of values that is truly one’s own and not a borrowed mass-produced ideal.’ A quick search reveals that among readers, Field counted British writer Antonia White, Canadian poet P. K. Page, and poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, both of whom reviewed Field’s work. Suggesting the adventurous nature of her enterprise, Field prefaces her chapters with quotes from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and also, on the more philosophical side, from works by Montaigne and Lao Tze [Tzu]. Field says she has not included much about her reading. She finds that if she delays writing in order to read or to verify what she thought by reading others, she never gets to writing. But Field does cite in full a passage from Virginia Woolf ’s essay ‘On Montaigne’ that she says she copied onto a scrap of paper and then found later in her pocket as an inspiration for A Life of One’s Own, perhaps explaining the title’s echo of Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own. The passage is the following: ‘This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say . . . Really she is the strangest creature in the world, far from heroic, variable as a weathercock, “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal”—in short, so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public, that a man might spend his life in merely trying to run her to earth.’ Bowlby speculates on Field’s titular reference to Woolf ’s A Room. She decides (and I agree) that Milner’s is an ‘extension’ or an expansion of Woolf ’s piece, published just five years before. Milner had a degree . . . she had a room of her own . . . and a child; she will ‘explore wider and wilder worlds’ than Woolf. Fresca’s lists of likes and of wants and fears are clearly inspired by Field. In Field’s third chapter, ‘Exploring the Hinterland’, she describes how she first made lists of things she liked and things she hated. She then switches to a looser approach, writing down ‘whatever came into her head’. This, she reports, yielded better results than the lists, for she discovered that she had written down things 

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Part Six which she had not expected; she’d moved beyond the ‘surface of [her] mind’ and ‘plunge[d] [. . .] into a different element where the past was intensely alive’. ‘The act of writing’ calmed her.  Field then compiles a list of her fears. This led her to identify ‘two quite different selves’, the one ‘deliberate’, the other ‘automatic’. She realises that her inability to make decisions stemmed from not listening to her automatic self and concludes that free-writing might help her to make decisions. ‘For I had taken the surface ripples for all there was, when actually happenings of vital importance to me had been going on, not somewhere away from me, but just underneath the surface of my own mind.’ She goes on to say that while all of the memories were not pleasant ones, ‘at least they gave [her] a sense of being alive’. In a fourth chapter entitled ‘The Coming and Going of Delight’, Field describes how she established that she had thoughts she did not know about and how she resolved to look at some specific experiences in detail. ‘Particularly was I struck by the effect of writing things down. It was as if I were trying to catch something and the written word provided a net which for a moment entangled a shadowy form which was other than the meaning of the words.’ In a chapter on ‘purpose’, Field calls into question mental training experts’ advocacy of a ‘single formulated purpose’, given the complexity of life. Sometimes one thing seemed important, she says, sometimes another. After making a list of aims, Field decides they are ‘expressed in adult terms but the ideas which I felt explained them were chiefly in terms of childhood memories’. This takes me back to Fresca’s A Childhood: was it a book about Fresca’s adult aims, but in terms of childhood memories? It is here Field reaches the important conclusion cited above and repeated here: So I began to have an idea of my life, not as the slow shaping of achievement to fit my preconceived purposes, but as the gradual discovery and growth of a purpose which I did not know. I wrote: ‘It will mean walking in a fog for a bit, but it’s the only way which is not a presumption, forcing the self into theory.’



On January , , Fresca moves on to another rather alarming dream: A dream, so obviously significant to my mind that I must write it down. I dreamt I was going to see, I think, Flora. I arrived in a part of London altogether unknown to me & came upon a wide road by the river. On the opposite bank of the river were  or  deep red chimney stacks. I was horrified at this bit of London & said I can’t possibly go & see anyone here & 

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My Own Different Personal Life fled. As I turned about I noticed raised lumps on my flesh which were big bites. When I looked at them again they had developed and become clusters of protuberances—like the berries on Burning Bush. Someone said ‘You must cut them off.’ I said ‘No, that’ll hurt too much.’ They said ‘No it won’t hurt’ and I did so. The cut didn’t hurt & I cut these knobs right off, flush with the flesh. Where I had cut was a tiny red raw spot—that was all—except out of each one stuck a needle, point outwards. She continues: ‘I had [a] whole confusion of sins & motives to record but now they have gone out of my mind. I found I was even worse than I imagined— not that this pushes me down but that it’s something to go on.’ Five days later, on January , Fresca reports that she ‘[g]ot drunk with Fritz K. [perhaps Selim’s husband (to be)] on Liebfraumilch by accident  or  days ago. Apparently while I was unconscious,’ she writes, ‘I behaved in the most downright and autocratic way possible—Selim dubbed me the empress. Since then flashes of it keep on recurring in cold blood. My Lady it must be curbed, except that that’s the wrong way round. I can conceive of no rebirth but as selfsurrender—though to what I am unclear. Last night J. acted around to the wireless & lifted me right outside myself. Even that is some kind of larger world to live in although it isn’t one in which to live permanently. But there must be one. I’ve been reading a first rate book by W. [William] James, Varieties of Religious Experience [published ] & this is a good patch.’ Fresca closes the day’s entry with a quote from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. She records that Dostoevsky says ‘“I have made up my mind to be polite and sincere to every one, more cannot be asked of me” p.. This is after the fairy tale about Marie.’ On January , Fresca decides that ‘[s]elf surrender is all nonsense unless you surrender to someone or something. I suddenly thought this morning that did he exist, I would be eased by surrendering my fears to God—all of them. When I was with A. S. [Adrian Stephen?] I had the same curious desire to give him my faults, “make a present of them to him,” as in a figure [?] for good I think.’ January ’s entry reads: ‘St Augustine’s antinomian saying if you only love God enough you may safely follow all your inclinations p.  W. James. Dilige et quod vis fac—if you but love (God) you may do as you incline. [literally: Love and what you will, do].’ On January , Fresca outlines further short story ideas: ‘J[udy] said how it would make a short story, the servant’s deductions of the previous day by what she finds in the morning. Yes it would. But I see in it one more expression for mysterious intentions—as if of some great mystery. And thus, practically thinking, I thought that the maidservant would try to have something of the child she idolized, and there would be tragedy somewhere. And then looking at 

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Part Six the Gilligan painting in the dark I thought of a darkened room with a brilliantly lit doorway. The room is inhabited by sordid complaining women. They can’t cross the threshold of the door, because . . . because . . . and the child races through it.’ She continues with the storyline on January : ‘They are discussing illness, the illness of a child in an adjoining room. It has rickets, or infantile paralysis. The doctor has come, the mother is with the child, massaging him, nursing him, [curing him?], refusing even to discuss the illness except with the doctor. The women think they are communicating with the mother or child but as a matter of fact they are floating: schadenfreude & vaunting themselves that they are not so ill as the child although their own illnesses are most absorbing. All this time, the brilliant door is wide open & they complain of their inability to cross its threshold. Mrs Collins is one of the[se] women & even her sick plants might come in . . .’ On February , Fresca reports that Michael [Tippett] has lent her the Secret of the Golden Flower, a Chinese Taoist book about meditation. But, she says, she understands very little of it. The Secret of the Golden Flower was translated first into German by Richard Wilhelm, a friend of Jung, and then into English in  by Cary F. Baynes. Fresca copies out the following: ‘We, indeed, think we can flatter ourselves at having already reached such heights of clarity because such phantoms of gods seem to have been left far behind. But the things we have outgrown are only the word-ghosts, not the psychic facts which were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are just as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were gods. To-day they are called phobias, compulsions etc. or, briefly, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; not Zeus, but the solar plexus, now rules Olympus and causes the oddities of the professional office hour, or disturbs the brains of the politician or journalist who then unwittingly release mental epidemics (p. ).’ And more: ‘It is not a matter of unconcern whether one calls something a mania or a god. To serve a mania is detestable & undignified, but to serve a god is full of meaning, and rich in possibilities because it means yielding to a higher, invisible, and spiritual being. When God is not recognized, selfish desires develop, and out of this selfishness comes illness.’ On March , , Fresca recounts more dreams: ‘All my dreams of late have been on the same subject. After an evening’s talk with Michael a particularly clear one came up. I was in a taxi on my way to a Haydn concert at the Wigmore Hall. At a traffic stop in Marylebone Road I suddenly realized that my taxi driver was taking me a ridiculously long way round. I expostulated to her—it was a woman taxi-driver. She said: “Oh you would, would you” & chucked me under the chin or some such thing. I was furious at her & turned to bite her fingers. I woke biting my green sheets.’ 

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My Own Different Personal Life And then: ‘Last week I dreamt Elsa Lanchester [– ; pictured here in Bride of Frankenstein ()] wanted me to live with her. I thought all right, I’ll see if I am capable of such a thing. It was a very long thin boyish figure. I remembered I should be committing an infidelity & dismissed the accusation because I was experimenting.  Elsa Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein. Elsa had horrible nipples— about ½ inches long & hard leather-jacket garb. I realized the business was out of the question & repulsed her.’ ‘Last night I dreamt C. Cook/Crish [?] was reverend mother of a convent & an actress—Her name was Julia Caesar. She was short & fat & warm-hearted. She kept on saying Fancy being called Caesar! (Was there a pun meant? Seize her?). She was elderly & put her hands out to caress my breasts. I pushed her away at once with however a mental reservation that I supposed oldish people wanted to touch young things. She then took me into her theatre from which she had taken a night off & pushed me into a seat. Before her/me now was a  ft pane of glass all the way along which was supposed to magnify the scene/screen on stage—actually it minimized it—and all the sound came through amplifiers. Then there was a lot about a convent dinner at which the reverend mother presided & I could find no suitable frocks—only  scarlet ones that I didn’t think suitable. I don’t think C. Cook [?] stood for herself at all particularly.’ ‘More spiritual attempts. I can only think that a relationship can be successful if it is first given up. You have to renounce the people you care for. Give them to God—I’m not sure how that works—but you must. When you give things up, give them to someone—I can’t be impersonal. I can’t dump things in a void. And thus, when you find yourself overcome with difficulties. Again surrender yourself to something else & let that [?] deal with them. Whether you surrender yourself to avoid that part of yourself—perhaps the feminine self—or again to God (?) I don’t know. Anyhow I’ll try it out.’ On March , Fresca shows some resolve: Yes I’ve seen it is essential to reorientate, so that you live not for yourself, not for another person, but something right outside. It also seems to be the only possible way out of another impasse—the problem of passion. I 

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Part Six must ask other people their experiences—but there are so few to ask. Anyhow I should like to write the whole thing out in a book; as narrow & direct as Constant’s Adolphe. I haven’t mentioned the problem yet, but I’m coming to it. A young couple love—I would write it from the man’s angle. This love is all expectation, promise & sham [elan?] at the beginning. They settle down together, they marry & there are no children— perhaps children help to solve the question. With her, this love is light, floating & subordinated to many things. With him, the passion becomes poisoned—the unremitting pain of beauty—the agony without sensible cause—the desire which no physical satisfaction can still. There is no solution to this—it just continues and persecutes him. The moral solution is to find a god to live in & for. It doesn’t consist in ceasing to love, but to have loving in that way.



On March , Fresca quotes from Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul, published in English in . Fresca chooses the following passages: First, ‘p.. However beneficial a secret shared with several persons may be, a merely private secret has a destructive effect. It resembles a burden of guilt which cuts off the unfortunate possessor from communion with his fellow-beings.’ And second, ‘p.. [But] if self-restraint is only a private matter, & perhaps devoid of any religious aspect, then it may be as harmful as the personal secret. From this kind of self-restraint come our well-known ugly moods and the irritability of the over-virtuous.’ Both of these extracts are from Jung’s second chapter, entitled ‘Problems of Modern Psychotherapy.’ Here he explores the four stages of ‘analytical psychology’: ‘confession, explanation, education, and transformation.’ This chapter and the one preceding it, ‘Dream-Analysis,’ explain Jung’s ideas about the ‘shadow’, and also how his theory of the unconscious differs from Freud’s. (I had still not located the ‘shadow biography’ that Tippett planned to retrieve from The Mill House subsequent to Fresca’s death.) For Jung, the unconscious forms a necessary part of the psyche or the self. It is not a demonic monster [as it was to some degree for Freud] but a thing of nature that is perfectly neutral as far as moral sense, aesthetic taste and intellectual judgement go. It is dangerous only when our conscious attitude towards it becomes hopelessly false. And this danger grows in the measure that we practise repressions. But as soon as the patient begins to assimilate the contents that were previously unconscious, the danger from the side of the unconscious diminishes. As the process of assimilation 

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My Own Different Personal Life goes on, it puts an end to the dissociation of the personality and to the anxiety that attends and inspires the separation of the two realms of the psyche. That which my critic feared—I mean the overwhelming of the consciousness by the unconscious—is most likely to occur when the unconscious is excluded from life by repressions, or is misunderstood and depreciated. To sum up, Jung writes: ‘I must have a dark side if I am to be whole; and inasmuch as I become conscious of my shadow I also remember that I am a human being like any other.’ What drew Fresca’s and Tippett’s generation to psychoanalysis? In his ‘translator’s preface’ to the book Fresca read, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Cary F. Baynes suggests that psychoanalysis appeals to those who ‘have outgrown the Church as exemplified in Christianity, but have not therefore been brought to deny the fact that a religious attitude to life is as essential to them as a belief in the authenticity of science. These people,’ he goes on to suggest, ‘have experienced the soul as vividly as the body, the body as vividly as the soul. And the soul has manifested itself to them in ways not to be explained either in terms of traditional theology or of materialism. They do not wish to sever the real piety they feel within themselves from the body of scientific fact to which reason gives its sanction. They are convinced that if they can attain to more knowledge of the inner workings of their own minds, more information about the subtle but none the less perfectly definite laws that govern the psyche, that they can achieve the new attitude that is demanded without having to on the one hand regress to what is but a thinly veiled medieval theology, or on the other, to fall victims to the illusions of nineteenth century ideology’. Tippett scholar David Clarke concurs with this in terms of Tippett whom he calls, after Arnold Whittall, a ‘post romanticist’. According to Clarke, Tippett sought something with which to replace metaphysics and mysticism and he found Jungian psychoanalysis. What did Jungian analysis offer that Freudian analysis did not? Anthony Stevens explains that Jung’s approach was more dialectical and more open minded than Freud’s. Jung encouraged participation. He was interested in ‘development’ and he saw the symptom not as ‘a form of futile suffering’, but ‘as the growing pains of a soul struggling to escape fear and find fulfillment, as providing an invaluable opportunity to become conscious and to grow’. For Jung, neurosis was ‘the suffering of the soul that has not found meaning’. ‘The essential difference between the two approaches is that the [Freudian] psychiatrist sees the patient as a victim of illness, whereas the Jungian [sees him/her] as a candidate for individuation.’ For the psychiatrist ‘mental illness is an enemy [. . .] to be fought and overcome, a “devil” to be driven out. To the Jungian 

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Part Six the illness is a symbolic communication from the unconscious indicating where the patient has got stuck in his efforts to meet the demands of the archetypal programme for life.’ Jung saw ‘the benefits of civilization’ as the cause of unhappiness. Increasing secularization, greater material wealth and extraversion led to a feeling of ‘“senselessness and aimlessness” in our lives’. The only answer was ‘hard psychological work to open our minds to the inner wealth of the unconscious in order to realize in actuality our own capacity for wholeness’.  Jung treated his patients as equals, according to Stevens. Unlike Freud who took his patients from the upper middle classes, Jung’s patients (at least to begin with) were from all walks of life—his interest in ‘establishing universal truths [. . .] for all human beings’. Stevens lists the techniques of Jungian analysis as follows: ‘the two chairs, the dialectical mutuality between equals, the relatively frequent breaks and progressive reduction in the number of sessions, the personal work on dreams and “active imagination” outside the analytical situation.’ All of these ‘heighten this sense of responsibility in the patient for his own process of growth’. All of this made sense in terms of the appeal of Jung to Tippett and Fresca.



After discussing Jung, Fresca continues with yet more dreams: ‘Had an odd dream last night. I was in the country & knew that I must steal something in order to be put in prison. I had to make sure that it was a big enough theft to ensure my being put in prison. So I considered a number of white velum bound books like Frau Musika—I knew I would have easy access to them being a wellconsidered person. This dream alarms me after reading Jung. It sounds as though I would have to do something bad just in order to get punished. Oh dear & the Spring is getting me unanchored & making me want to throw everything to the winds & act regardless of result.’ On April , , Fresca turns to Rainer Maria Rilke’s autobiographical novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, originally published in . She reads ‘in English this time because I want J. to read it.’ ‘But,’ she goes on, ‘its problems & its solutions are not hers.’ ‘I find that he is in my bones and of my bones. I understand so much now & most of the symbols [are] clear at least for me.’ The Notebooks is clearly a seminal book for Fresca. Rilke says oh so many things I want to say, in the way I want to say it. And yet I am not going to refrain from saying it out again, nor from using his symbols. The story of little Malte’s terror when he dresses up in the clothes from the attic & becomes what they dictate is the story of the soul pinioned within our personality—bound to be only itself. Well, then I will use this 

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My Own Different Personal Life symbol of clothes. And then the story of the false Tsar so frightened of his own blood that [?] at him and tyrannized our lives is the haunted man of the story I have failed to write perfectly as yet. And then individual limbs. There must be a story about a hand & its private life, its talents and inclination & scents. Sometimes the symbol comes before its content is clear & one must be satisfied for a time. What did Fresca find so compelling in Rilke, and in particular in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge? Described variously as an anti-novel or a long prose poem, The Notebooks has a collage-like quality. Meditations on childhood, on love, and on the ‘fear of death’, are mixed with accounts of the narrator’s traversing of Paris, family stories, and discussions of historical figures and writers, among other things. The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge was published originally in  in German. It was first translated into English by John Linton in  as The Journal of My Other Self and published in the US by Norton and in England by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press (/) under the title The Notebook of Malte Laurid Brigge. Since Fresca read it in German first, her reading could have predated . The book is a kind of diary, the author’s search to know others and to know himself. Newly arrived in Paris, Rilke’s Danish narrator, -year-old Malte, a writer, author of a life of fifteenth-century Italian painter Vittore Carpaccio, a play, and some verse, is on a quest: ‘I am learning to see. Why, I cannot say, but all things enter more deeply into me; nor do the impressions remain at the level where they used to cease. There is a place within me of which I knew nothing. Now all things tend that way.’ The writing of the notebooks represents a new departure for Malte: ‘I am a beginner in the circumstances of my own life.’ Malte muses at length on the question of when one is ready to write. Only once one has lived, experienced many things, seen ‘a great many cities, people and things, [gained] an understanding of animals, sense[d] how it is to be a bird in flight, and know[n] the manner in which the little flowers open every morning’: In one’s mind there must be regions unknown, meetings unexpected and long-anticipated partings, to which one can cast back one’s thoughts— childhood days that still retain their mystery, parents inevitably hurt when one failed to grasp the pleasure they offered (and which another would have taken pleasure in), childhood illnesses beginning so strangely with so many profound and intractable transformations, days in peacefully secluded rooms and mornings beside the sea, and the sea itself, seas, nights on journeys that swept by on high and flew past filled with stars—and still it is not enough to be able to bring all this to mind. 

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Part Six [. . .] And it is not yet enough to have memories. One has to be able to forget them, if there are a great many, and one must have great patience, to wait for their return. For it is not the memories in themselves that are of consequence. Only when they are become the very blood within us, our every look and gesture, nameless and no longer distinguishable from our inmost self, only then, in the rarest of hours, can the first word of a poem arise in their midst and go out from among them. A sense of uncertainty predominates in The Notebooks. In one section, Rilke lists the questions of ‘this nothing’, ‘Brigge, twenty-eight years old now and known to no one’. These interrogations illustrate the profundity of the ideas addressed here, focused on the discrepancy between surface and depth, the masses and the individual: Is it possible, it thinks, that we have neither seen nor perceived nor said anything real or of any importance yet? Is it possible that we have had thousands of years to look, ponder and record, and that we have let those thousands of years pass like a break at school, when one eats a sandwich and an apple? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that despite our inventions and our progress, despite our culture, religion and knowledge of the world, we have remained on the surface of life? Is it possible that even that surface, which might still have been something, has been covered with an unbelievably boring material, leaving it looking like drawing-room furniture in the summer holidays? Yes, it is possible. Is it possible that the entire history of the world has been misunderstood? Is it possible that we have the past all wrong, because we have spoken of its masses, exactly as if we were describing a great throng of people, rather than speaking of the one man they were all gathered around—because he was a stranger and he was dying? And Rilke continues, ending with: ‘But if all this is possible, if there is even so much as a glimmer of possibility to it, then something must be done, for pity’s sake. Anyone—anyone who has had these disquieting thoughts—must make a start on some of the things we have omitted to do; anyone at all, no matter if he is not aptest to the task; the fact is, there is no one else. This young foreigner of no consequence, Brigge, will have to sit himself down, five flights up, and write, day and night: yes, that is what it will come to, he will have to write.’ 

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My Own Different Personal Life The disjointed quality of the narrative as a whole, a series of anecdotes, unfinished letters and lists, reflects another central theme of Rilke’s book, that is, homelessness, both real and figurative. Rilke’s Malte, a foreigner, is an outsider and a misfit. He has to act in order to fit in. Several passages in Rilke pertaining to Malte’s status as an outsider take me back to Fresca’s ‘Pity’ chapter in A Childhood where Charlotte encounters a homeless woman. In one scene, Malte follows a man with a ‘hopping motion’. He empathizes strongly with the other man and even begins to stumble himself so as to draw attention away from the other man: ‘I gathered what little strength I had, like cash,’ says Malte, ‘and, looking at his hands, begged him to take it if he had any need of it.’ Malte refers to these disenfranchised men and women as ‘them’, but he clearly identifies as one of them. In another section on ‘neighbors’ we see the same effort to reach out: ‘[t]he fact was that one day I grasped that [the neighbor’s] own willpower was exhausted; and ever since, whenever I felt it coming, I would stand on my side of the wall urging him to use mine.’ Memories of childhood are also numerous in The Notebooks. To be able to retrieve one’s childhood is to give one’s life meaning. Childhood memories of illness in particular recur. Malte describes his memories of his aunt Ingeborg’s illness and death. He also recounts his own childhood experience with illness in terms which anticipate Fresca’s descriptions in A Childhood. And then came one of those illnesses that had the effect of demonstrating to me that that was not the first experience that was wholly mine. The fever raged within me and dredged up from below experiences, images, facts I had known nothing of; I lay there, surfeited with myself, and waited for the moment when I would be commanded to layer it all back into me, in an orderly fashion, in proper sequence. I made a start, but it grew beneath my hands; it resisted; it was too much. But it was the afternoons that were long during such illnesses. In the morning after a bad night, you always fell asleep, and when you woke and supposed it was still early in the day, it was in fact afternoon, and continued to be afternoon, and did not cease to be afternoon. There you lay in your freshly made bed, perhaps growing a little at the joints, far too tired to conceive of anything at all. The taste of stewed apple stayed in your mouth, and that was all you were capable of: involuntarily to interpret that flavour, and savour the pure acidity in place of thoughts. If I think about it now, I am amazed that I was always able to make a complete return from the world of those fevers and to find my way back into that altogether shared existence in which everyone sought reassurance 

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Part Six that he was among familiar things and where people were careful not to stray from the realm of the comprehensible. Finding yet more to draw Fresca to Rilke, I note that at one point in the book Rilke addresses Beethoven: ‘But if ever a virgin with an untouched ear were to lie with your sound, Master, he would die of bliss, or he would grow pregnant with the infinite and his fertilized brain would needs burst for sheer birth.’ As well as the Malte and clothes episode, Fresca singles out ‘the story about the hand’ (‘And then individual limbs. There must be a story about a hand & its private life, its talents and inclination & scents.’). In this episode, the young Malte is drawing and his mademoiselle sits reading across the room. When he gets down from his chair to retrieve a crayon he has dropped, he is at first disoriented in the darkness below the table. However, as he gradually finds his way, he finds his hand takes on a life of its own as it searches for the crayon. Malte watches his own hand and sees another emerge from the wall. This second hand also searches for the crayon. ‘It was searching in similar fashion, from the other side, and the two outspread hands moved blindly towards each other. My curiosity was not yet satisfied, but all at once it was at an end, and all that remained in its place was horror. I sensed that one of the hands belonged to me and that it was about to enter into something that could never be righted again.’ Malte is unable to express what he has just experienced. He interprets it in the following way: ‘It is of course imagination on my part if I now maintain that at the time I already felt that something had come into my life, mine and none other, that I alone would have to bear with me henceforth, for ever and ever. I see myself lying in my little cot, not sleeping, somehow vaguely foreseeing that that was how life would be: full of special things that are intended for one person only and cannot be put into words. What is certain is that, little by little, a sad and weighty pride uprose within me. I pictured what it would be like to go through life filled with inner experience, in silence. I felt a passionate sympathy for adults; I admired them, and resolved to tell them so.’ Fresca also mentions ‘the story of the false Tsar so frightened of his own blood.’ This refers to a story Rilke tells of a false tsar who is so afraid of the ‘half-Portuguese’ blood running in his own veins that he never drank, nor made love to a woman. He carries his worldly possessions with him in order to try to persuade the blood of his legitimacy, but the blood is not convinced. Poignant in terms of my own efforts to rescue Fresca from obscurity are Rilke’s statements about fame in a section on Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. These seem especially apropos for Fresca. Don’t seek fame, Rilke says, for it will strip you of your edginess, your creativity. Fame will distract you from and destroy your work: 

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My Own Different Personal Life There I sat with your books, you headstrong man, trying to form an opinion of them, as others do who have not read you all of a piece but have taken a part for themselves and been satisfied. For I did not yet appreciate the nature of fame, that public demolition of one who is in the making, on to whose building site the mob irrupt, knocking his stones all over the place. Dear youngster, somewhere or other, in whom something is burgeoning that makes you tremble: make good use of the fact that no one knows you! And if those who see your worth as nil contradict you, and those who you keep company with abandon you completely, and if they would destroy you on account of your tender thoughts—why, what is that manifest danger, which gives you your inner strength, compared with the wily enmity of fame that will come later, which renders you harmless by scattering you piecemeal? Ask no one to speak of you, not even with contempt. And if time passes and you realize that your name is on people’s lips, do not take this more seriously than anything else you find in their mouths. Think instead that your name has become a wretched thing, and cast it off. Adopt another, any at all, so that God may call you in the night. And keep it a secret from everyone. And later, in a section about ‘solitaries’, Rilke writes that many people have never ‘set eyes on a solitary; they have merely hated him without knowing him’. ‘And when he paid them no attention’ men have struck back at the solitary—they ‘threw stones at him to drive him away all the faster. And in their ancient instinct they were right; for he was indeed their foe. But then, when he did not look up, they paused to reflect. They sensed that in all they did they were doing his will; that they had been giving him strength in his solitude, and helping him to separate from them forever. And at this they changed their approach, and adopted their final and ultimate tactic, that other means of spurning: fame. Whenever this clamour has been made, there has hardly been a man who has not looked up, and been distracted.’



I remember that Rilke has come up elsewhere in my quest for Fresca, in this other instance in conjunction with Jung. I take a short diversion from the diary and return to this other mention. In his autobiography, Tippett includes a letter from Fresca, dated Invasion Day, June , , in which she recounts a dream. This is the only time we hear Fresca’s voice in Those Twentieth Century Blues until her suicide note: 

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Part Six Michael Darling-Ah-ah-ah-I had a waking dream last night which I must tell you before it fades at all. I was lying in bed thinking what scum I was and wondering if I couldn’t even begin to be good & why I didn’t know how to approach God, when I saw a number of fair-headed young women all pressed up against something that looked like a tomb or a pedestal. I was behind them. My thoughts rambled off but every time I thought of God the same picture appeared so I decided to attend to it. I very much wanted to join these young women who were dressed in Victorian blouses & skirts. I even tried to get into a pew among them but it was no good—So I had to take myself off—and I know that I had no place among them because they were young & beautiful & innocent & I wasn’t. Now two nuns appeared in black & white habit. They were in a bare semicircular chapel. One was oldish and stood in the middle—the other was small & young & stood behind her to my left. After a while I went to the older nun. She was willing to help me and asked me what I wanted. I expected to hear myself wish for health, but instead heard myself say—I want to fulfill the object for which I have been put in this world. She was pleased at this—and motioned me forward. Then the scene shifted a little. The young nun came forward & knelt opposite her & the young fair-headed women were in the nave of the church. So: YM [Young Man?] Women

Old Nun Me

I knew that the old nun was wise and controlled things. But she knew that the young nun was greater than herself though humble & serving—The young nun did not know that she herself was that which she was adoring. I was to look at the young nun opposite me, but couldn’t open my eyes. I was arguing with myself & accused myself of cowardice. But gradually although my eyes were closed I knew that in place of her was a golden flickering vision, that she was transfigured. Sometimes I looked at the old nun and saw the vision out of the tail of my eye. I knew that there was something to be done—but didn’t know what. I wondered whether I should join the young women but knew that that would spoil the symmetry—then I wondered whether they should join me—but then the gold vision faded. She became a young nun again and everybody left the church & I felt sad and decided I would kneel at the very back of the church. When I was there I couldn’t look at the altar (which wasn’t there I think or never was) but only at this arch by the altar. Upon it were painted apocalyptic animals. I tried to look at them all but could only see this at 

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My Own Different Personal Life this left side of the altar. It was the lamb of St John with its thin little cross. And I knew them. I too was a lamb, bore only a very small little cross and was one of the innocents after all. Tippett interprets Fresca’s dream as ‘a joyous dream. . .’ one which ‘ought to satisfy [her] a long while’. It’ll bear a lot of pondering & savouring. Invasion Day is a sort of symbol too—Einbuch [a collapse, invasion]—of the two sides coming to grips after years of preparation. Only in the dream sense, there has to be no defeat & capitulation, but tension of forces & balance. All of the feminine figures show that it’s at its most conscious—never likely to be more explicit. It reminds one of a dream of marriage between  long lines of young men in a church headed by Wilf & myself—refreshing contrition & forgiveness [a reference to a dream Tippett had had himself ]. In your dream the various symbols have their proper place. The crowd of young women are a symbol that recedes if you try to force your way into it but returns when you are ready to stay in your place for the sake of symmetry. The black & white nuns seem to show that the deep-seated moral problem is beginning also to be assimilated & to have its place—in fact to be the basis of transfiguration. I have always known somehow that we can’t throw away this terrific deposit of moral value (the black & white habit), but like you, I spend my hankerings on the beautiful young crowd—tho for me it’s usually Greek & not late Victorian. While the transfiguration of the moral into the divine would seem so extraordinary that I would close my eyes & prefer to retire to the back of the church & contemplate somethime [sic] less aweful & transcendent. I suppose the young crowd do belong in the nave of the church & don’t personify so sharply as the other elements. I found the dream wonderfully cheering. It’s a general, ‘big’ dream & means a lot to me as well as to you. Really the dream is already one step beyond this: the general problem (that’s why it’s so exciting)—.  And then Tippett includes Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, No. . This sonnet cycle, considered alongside Duino Elegies as Rilke’s masterpiece, was ‘inspired by the news of the death [from leukemia] of [dancer-turned-musician] Wera Ouckama Knoop (–), a playmate of Rilke’s daughter Ruth’. ‘[Rilke] dedicated them as a memorial, or Grab-Mal (literally “grave-marker”), to her memory.’ Wera’s mother sent Rilke the girl’s own record of her impending death (a record characterized by ‘a constant accent on living and openness even at the door of death’): 

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Part Six Who alone has already lifted the lyre among the dead dare, divining sound the infinite praise. Who alone has with the dead eaten of the poppy that is theirs will never again lose the most delicate tone. Though the reflection in the pool swims often before our eyes: Know the image. Only in the dual realm do voices become eternal and mild.



After Rilke’s Notebooks, Fresca returns again to her own writing: ‘The book on the subject of passion is changing in my hands. Our distortion of passion & jealousy & the total submersion of a woman’s being by passion will be in terms of my sisterin-law. The beginning with its falling in love must be modeled on  other beings—& not a war-time love but such a one as befalls any one of us: the solution will come from outside. The wife’s parents will beg for her to nurse her mother & have the children in the care of their Tickie for a little. The period extends to six months during which time she is able to swim out of her underworld & looks with astonishment & horror at what had been her life. A profound re-orientation takes place. The associations of her childhood recall her to the values of the religion of her upbringing—& although its actual faith is useless to her, its direction draws her forward & sets a path for them to tread.’ Fresca then reports on her own living situation: ‘I feel now as before that a six-month separation from J[udy] would be good & is a necessary thing for me. I plan that it could take place in the winter—say from October to Feb—that is only shortly. I would go north & live in a big depressed area as I have always intended to do & perhaps this book would be mature in me by then & ready to be written.’ And then she adds: ‘My soul is still black. I am sure that Jung’s remark about men’s restraint ( pages back) is right. And I’m not going on that way either in thought or action. To hate & despise & consequently retreat into superiority is not only beastly but it draws you in & makes you smaller in yourself. It is far better in my thoughts to think compensating ones—and I believe that is true in action—whatever the consequences.’ 

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My Own Different Personal Life On May  [], she includes other book ideas: ‘Have been in bed with sciatica for weeks. Now there is a new story to be written. Release from pettiness by wallowing in a great dirt. The cleansing dirt will be a great rut plunging everything into a blinding unconsciousness. A black fog will descend & it will happen within it. The little woman will not be a Bloomsbury highbrow as she very well might be—bound in with her views, her intellect & her unintuitiveness—but a little person of the what-will-the neighbours-say type.’ And then she recounts more dreams, interspersed with stories: ‘I’m going to keep a closer record of my dreams. Michael has such fun with them. Last week I dreamt I was in a room with a lot of silly week-end party people of Malcolm[’s] set. And I was talking to some foolish young man & being bored and bothered by senseless drinking. I then went along a passage (I suppose a bell must have rung) and at the end of it,  or  steps up, was Michael’s mother & a man. She was Malcolm’s wife [&] wore a brilliant yellow scarf around her shoulders & a black Welsh high hat. She said she would not come in because Malcolm’s mistress was so jealous of her.’ Here Fresca includes a diagram and then continues: Two or three days ago I dreamt I was coming back from the Botanics across the Inner Circle & Regent’s Park but they were more like a wellordered jungle than anything else. It was dull & it drizzled. At Marylebone Rd. opposite the church it suddenly became very dark & as I was also feeling weak & pained (from my present sciatica) I asked a postman to assist me across the road. To the left of the church was a home with a huge flight of steps. I went up these & was met by a funny ugly dark little man. He put his cheek against mine to comfort me & then led me down a deep light staircase with a kink in it. He started making love to me which annoyed me & I stopped him & we went on & on down. Tickie woke me. [Here Fresca includes another diagram; see page ] The man was on my left. Last night I dreamt I was in prison. I slept on a hard bed, kept to my cell & lived on hard biscuits & dry bread. While I was arranging to get hold of more hard biscuits I discovered that I could eat what I liked—& also go about as I liked. I think my warder told me that. He also said— All you have to do is to tell the [?] that you’ll be out from  to . or  & it will be quite all right. I went out again along Marylebone Road, near Baker St Station. Then Mrs Sisson appeared. She walked like a healthy person & showed me my bed—a firm thick straw mattress covered with rich embroideries. Then I found that the jerry [toilet] in the corner of the room was a kind of bee skip [bee hive] & proceeded to use [it] rather inef

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Part Six fectually because it wasn’t really water tight. At the time of dreaming I realized that I had been being my own person, not the prison’s. Back to the new theme. I don’t know the good woman’s social position but she is distorted by self-righteousness (superiority) & by meanness— towards herself largely. June [], ‘After much walking around in circles inside myself—violent effort at Toozie, I dreamt this: I am in a strange town trying to get to a theatre I think in order to meet someone—perhaps J[udy]. I find I have gone too far on the bus & the conductor indicates where I am to go—across an allotment parking place towards a large church town (square and built very ugly & surmounted with a large cross). Near this I will find the theatre. I start across the open land but find it hard to get near the church because it is covered with bar/nked barriers in // [parallel] lines about  ft apart. These just don’t lead to the church. It was [diagram of cross and parallel lines]. However I get to the theatre & meet ?’



In what remains of the diary Fresca turns almost exclusively to her reading. On June  [], she includes a quote from James Bridie’s play A Sleeping Clergyman, (): ‘And don’t forget that to make for righteousness is a biological necessity. p. .’ And on June  [], she writes: Have been reading that glorious work [Blake’s] The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—stuff that one wants to get right inside one. Have had confused dreams the last two nights that I can’t remember properly— last night I dreamt I had decided to go south—south of France I think with no money at all (a reference to the Rhondda Valley idea) and I met Bill in a large gloomy marquee. He said if he hadn’t responsibilities of his own he’d come with me. But he advised me not to go. He said that sticking where you were developed backbone. I want to write another section from my book of short stories. But it’s not even a story, but just a list of my saints & rambling discussion around them. How they are not total saints at all—but just bits of them—as it were, a big toe or an arm that puts them into my hagiography. And sometimes as you get to know them, the quality blurs and you think that maybe you made it up. But that doesn’t matter at all. Sometimes it’s just a warm heart that puts them there. Anyhow this odd list will include Iago! Little John! Margaret, Gran! Judy, Mike, Bill, Tickie. 

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My Own Different Personal Life Two weeks later, on June , , she reports that she ‘has read a good life of Dostoevsky by [E.H.] Carr, []’ and she quotes the following: p. . ‘The ideal of Myshkin is then one which expresses itself in suffering rather than in action, and subordinates actions to feeling. The moral & psychological relation between man & man is all important, the action which proceeds from it relatively indifferent. In the antinomy between feeling & action the West has constantly given the preference to the latter & the Western forms of Christianity have tended more and more to regard religion as enjoining or forbidding certain courses of action . . . . the  great commandments of Jesus as contrasted with the Hebrew , enjoin not actions but states of feeling—to love God & to love one’s neighbour. The beatitudes . . . declare the blindness of certain states of virtue . . .’ p. . ‘We must go back to D[ostoevsky]’s precursors, to the days of the Renaissance & of Elizabethan England, before the orderly blight of rationalism had descended and before human-nature had been obscured beneath a specious surface of coherence and consistency.’ The quality of the handwriting here suggests that Fresca is jotting these quotes down quickly as she reads. p.  [Carr]. ‘His men fell into the error of those . . . who posited sin as the cause of suffering; but he believed firmly that suffering was the necessary condition of the forgiveness of sin. The forgiveness which seemed important to D. was not forgiveness by others, but the forgiveness of the sinner by himself; it was a process of his own conscience.’ p. . ‘DH Lawrence’s epigram or the doctrine of D: “Sinning your way to Jesus.” “The sense of sin which leads to salvation is not for D. the sense of personal sin which has played so large a part in Christian theology. It is a theory of what may at best be described as communism in sin.” “Each of us,” Zosima tells Alyosha [Brothers Karamazov], “bears the guilt of all and of everything on earth, not merely the general world of guilt but each one individually for all & each on earth.” “It is perhaps the only theory which can make tolerable the theological doctrine of the Atonement. In ordinary western theology, the Atonement is presented in a form which is both incomprehensible & repugnant to the sensitive mind; but for Dostoevesky, suffering for the sins of the others becomes the prerogative of every Christian.”’ p. . ‘Most good romantics found the richness of this nature enhanced by postulating its divisions between two variously defined but always anti

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Part Six pathic elements. It was a natural answer [?] against naturalism. And by making human nature more complicated, made it seem even more interesting & more spiritual.’ p. . ‘Remove the antithesis & you can never arrive at the perfect synthesis. Do away with the sense of sin, & you cannot have salvation.’ On August  [], she continues: ‘Have been reading Mark Rutherford’s autobiography, a man very like myself but taking life more firmly and with greater integrity.’  She quotes the following extract: p. . ‘the innocent had everywhere and in all times to suffer for the guilty. It had been objected that it was contrary to our notion of an all-loving Being that he should demand such a sacrifice; but, contrary or not, it was time, quite apart from Jesus, that virtue was martyred everyday, unknown and unconsoled, in order that the wicked might somehow be saved. This was part of the scheme of the world, and we might dislike it or not, or (?) could not get rid of it. The consequences of my sin, moreover, are rendered less terrible by virtues not my own. I am literally saved from penalties because another pays the penalty for me. The atonement, and what it accomplished for man, were therefore a sublime summing up as it were of what sublime men have to do for their race, an exemplification rather than a contradiction, of Nature herself, as we know her in our own experience.’ Then Fresca adds: ‘I think I have always felt this to be a fundamental truth though it takes more maturity to accept this than I have. I have to accept this deep into my life. Alice Meynell [–] has expressed this same idea in a poem, very gently and very much a part of herself. I must copy it out.’ Was the poem Meynell’s Renouncement? I must not think of thee; and, tired yet strong, I shun the love that lurks in all delight— The love of thee—and in the blue heaven’s height, And in the sweetest passage of a song. Oh, just beyond the fairest thoughts that throng This breast, the thought of thee waits hidden yet bright; But it must never, never come in sight; I must stop short of thee the whole day long. But when sleep comes to close each difficult day, When night gives pause to the long watch I keep, And all my bonds I must needs lose apart, 

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My Own Different Personal Life Must doff my will as raiment laid away,— With the first dream that comes with the first sleep I run, I run, I am gather’d to thy heart. Then Fresca goes back to The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford : p. . ‘yet I could not make up my mind to accept a life which was simply living. It must be a life through which some benefit was conferred upon my fellow men. This was mainly delusion. I had not yet learned to correct this natural instinct to be of some service to mankind by the thought of the boundlessness of infinity and of nature’s profuseness. I had not come to reflect that, taking into account her eternities, and absolute exhaustiveness, it was folly in me to fret & fume, and I therefore clung to the hope that I might employ myself in some way which, however feebly, would help mankind a little to the realisation of an ideal.’ On the next line she adds ‘Poor man. But that too has its echoes in me.’ Fresca then extracts lines from T. S. Eliot’s  play ‘The Family Reunion [prompted by Electra],’ the story of heir Harry’s return to the family’s country seat, Wishwood ‘a country house in the North of England,’ after the death by drowning (which turns out to be a murder perpetrated by Harry) of his wife. Harry’s return, along with that of his brothers (neither of whom make it) and aunts and uncles, is ostensibly to celebrate the birthday of his mother, Amy, Dowager Lady Monchensey. The Family Reunion is the story of a dysfunctional family, brothers, one of whom is described as being without consciousness and another stupid and reckless, an egotistical mother and an absent father. The only sympathetic character is Aunt Agatha, the principal of a women’s college. The Eumenides—the spirits of vengeance from the third part of Aeschylus’ Oresteia (in which Orestes kills his mother Clytemnestra who has killed his father Agamemnon) appear in the play. The play was performed at the Westminster Theatre to poor reviews between March  and April , , and starred Michael Redgrave, Helen Haye, and Catherine Lacey. Virginia Woolf had read the play and didn’t like it: ‘[Tom]’s a lyric not a dramatic. But here there’s no free lyricism: is caught back by the character: has no power to embody: as stiff as pokers.’ Leonard and Virginia Woolf attended the performance on March  and Woolf remarked in her diary: ‘There can be no doubt that Tom knew that his play was a failure.’ Fresca picks out the following lines: Agatha: I mean painful, because everything is irrevocable, 

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Part Six Because the past is irremediable, Because the future can only be built Upon the real past May [Amy]: You attach yourself to loathing As others do to loving; an infatuation that’s wrong, a good that’s undirected … Mary: I believe the season of birth Is when we have knowledge of death Harry: I feel quite happy, as if happiness Did not consist in getting what one wanted Or in getting rid of what can’t be got rid of But in a different vision … Agatha: We do not pass twice through the same door Or return to the door through which we did not pass. Harry: Now I know that all my life has been a flight And phantoms feed upon me which I fled. Now I know That the last apparent refuge, the safe shelter, that is where one meets them. That is the way of the spectres And now I know That my business is not to run away, but to pursue, Not to avoid being found, but to seek. I would not have chosen this way, had there been any other! It is at once the hardest thing, and the only thing possible. Agatha to Amy: But you are just the same: Just as voracious for what you cannot have Because you repel it. Amy: I always wanted too much for my children. More than life can give. Now I am punished for it. Fresca probably sympathized with Agatha: ‘In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction / Will appear to run away.’ Fresca follows her extracts from Eliot with a quote from Le Lama aux cinq sagesses, a  novel by Alexandra David-Néel, a Belgian-French woman who had travelled extensively in the East and studied and wrote about Eastern religions and mysticism. ‘Sache, toi qu’afflige la malveillance que les êtres s’entretémoignent, qu’à la racine de chaque acte cruel existe une fausse notion de notre 

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My Own Different Personal Life “moi” et de celui de l’autrui. Les actions du méchant lui sont inspirées par la crainte de souffrir ou par le désir d’accroître sa jouissance, sans qu’il s’apercoive qu’en les commettant il risque, au contraire, d’attirer plus de souffrance sur lui et introduit, dans sa joie, le poison de l’insécurité.’ (Know, you who is afflicted by the ill-will that people visit upon one another, that at the root of every cruel act there is a false notion of the self and of the other. The actions of the evil person are motivated by the fear of suffering or by the desire to increase pleasure, without realizing that by committing these actions he runs the risk, on the contrary, of bringing more suffering upon himself and introducing, into his joy, the poison of insecurity.) 



Fresca writes nothing in her diary between August  to September , . She begins her next entry on a new page: We have been at war for just one week and a few hours, though I suppose that the war as far as England itself is concerned, has not yet begun. I feel a mixture of despair, apathy and a desire to be swallowed up in activity. We have  lovely boys billeted on Tan Cottage—partly at my request— but I suspect I shall do little for them as Mrs. H. will swallow them up in her vast well for energy outlet. Jude’s [Wogan] artistic projects and mine are both knocked on the head. And I can’t write at this moment. Last night, at the end of the boys’ first day, we had a sort of clean-up. It is always born in on me that I do not know how to love—not with unselfish, selfsacrificial love. I am self-centred and have no centre yet. I must not spoil J’s life. I work for the rebirth to happen within me, and it does not come. How does one learn to love? On November , , a further two and half months on, Fresca adds a quote from Virginia Woolf ’s recently published ‘Life of Roger Fry’ [Roger Fry: A Biography]. The extract is in French and represents a piece of an account, cited by Woolf, that Fry wrote about a woman he had met at a sanatorium in Nancy, France. In the biography, Woolf prefaces the extract with a discussion of Fry’s attitudes about love and the body. She says first that Fry, contrary to ordinary standards of the day, ‘was always perfectly simple, open and even matter-of-fact’. He found it ‘far more immoral to suppress the body than to give it its natural place’. However, she adds, he dubbed pornographic any ‘import[ing of ] the body into places where [it] is out of place’. Fry talked openly about casual love affairs, but, Woolf suggests, no one felt more than he did the importance of the ‘love that was not passing, that was transformed into a relation where mind and body mixed indistinguishably’. 

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Part Six Woolf then gives an outline of the ‘“tragic story”’ that led Fry to write the account from which she takes the extract. It is uncannily similar to Fresca’s and Tippett’s story. The woman of the story is a fellow patient whom Woolf describes (using other documents) as ‘neither young nor beautiful, but witty and sympathetic’. The two strike up a friendship and, says Woolf, ‘[t]he rest followed.’ ‘[Fry] had reason to believe that for both of them the relationship, in spite of its difficulties—she was ill, they were often separated—was of extraordinary value, when, for no reason that could be discovered, in a sudden access of insanity his friend put an end to her life. Far from having caused this tragedy, he had given her, as her family assured him, the greatest happiness she had ever known. But the shock was terrible, and in the months that followed he wrote an account of this “tragic story” in French.’ The piece of the extract that Fresca chooses is the following (from p.  in her edition): ‘[Et] la sagesse consiste dans la complète rénonciation de tout en nous qui réclame la justice. Il faut que l’on se résigne à ne pas croire [même] dans sa propre personnalité. L’ensemble de notre caractère est tout aussi bien le résultat pour ainsi dire fortuite de l’hérédité et du milieu que tout autre chose … Il faut écarter toute idée de mérite et de blâme. Il faut traquer la vanité jusque dans ses coins les plus intîmes, l’écraser complètement et alors la vie peut se poursuivre tranquillement.’ (Wisdom consists in the complete renunciation of everything in us which calls for justice. One must resign oneself to not even believe in one’s own personality. The ensemble of our character is as much the, let us say, fortuitous result of heredity and of milieu as it is of all other things . . . One must separate out all ideas of merit or blame. One must chase vanity into its most intimate corners, crush it completely, and then life can go on peacefully.) Here Fresca omits a mention of the ancient Chinese philosopher, father of Daoism, Lao Tzu, who Fry identifies as the only philosopher to have announced this profound truth. Woolf clarifies with a quote in French from Lao Tzu: ‘L’homme naturel résiste à la nature des choses, celui qui connaît le Lao coule par les interstices.’ (Natural man resists the nature of things, he who knows Lao flows with it.) Fresca continues to quote: ‘La vie n’est qu’une longue apprentissage dans l’art de se ficher complètement de son égo. Et la folie n’est autre chose que d’être complètement imprisonné. La sagesse n’est autre chose que la suppression de toute déformation, l’acceptation complète de ce qui n’est pas nous. C’est le triomphe de l’adaptation au milieu.’ (Life is only a long apprenticeship in the art of not giving a damn about one’s ego. And madness is nothing other than being completely imprisoned. Wisdom is nothing other than the suppression of all deformation, the complete acceptance of that which is not us. It is the triumph of adapting to the milieu.) Fresca stops here and misses out the last line of the block quote: ‘Ce n’est pas le bonheur mais quel 

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My Own Different Personal Life Démon nous a soufflé dès notre naissance l’idée funeste que nous avons droit au bonheur?’ (It is not happiness but what Demon whispered to us from birth the dreadful idea that we had a right to happiness.) Fresca also omits the subsequent pieces of Fry’s account that Woolf weaves into the next paragraph: ‘“Je vais me guèrir je le sais. . . je ne vais pas donner à la nature en plus ce spectacle ridicule de l’homme en révolte. Il y a plus de fierté dans l’acceptance, dans l’humilité complète. Je vais goûter la saveur d’être vieux, de ne plus être aimé, de n’avoir plus d’espoir ni d’ambition. Il faut que la sagesse nous enseigne encore comment nous soumettre à ses conseils. C’est la dernière et la plus dure passe de la philosophie.”’ (I am going to get better, I know I am . . . I am not going to give to nature on top of everything else this ridiculous spectacle of man in revolt. There’s more pride in acceptance, in complete humility. I am going to enjoy the taste of old age, of no longer being loved, of having no more hope or ambition. Wisdom must teach us still how to submit to its advice. It is the last and hardest past [history] of philosophy.) Instead, Fresca closes with a sentence from the very end of Woolf ’s biography where Woolf uses Fry’s own words to elucidate Fry’s character. According to Woolf, he was ‘a saint who laughed; a saint who enjoyed life to the uttermost. “Whereas piety & holiness make goodness stink in the nostrils,” he once wrote, “saintliness is the imaginative power to make goodness seem desirable.”’ It is interesting to note that Woolf closes her biography with a Spinoza quote: ‘A free man thinks of death least of all things; and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life.’



Following her thoughts on Woolf ’s Fry biography, Fresca goes back to the war, this time after a four-month gap. On March , , she writes: ‘The war has been happening for  months—you can’t say fought, but happening. I hear the German planes overhead now, passing on their way to London and in the afternoon saw ghostly streaks in the sky when a shoal of planes was returning to Germany—or France I suppose. There are several girls in the town their faces torn and rendered hideous for life. I feel excessively for them. And there is no prospect of a peace for years & years.’ And then she continues (and it is from here that I take my title for this part of the book): One suffers this common collective life without cease and within it I live my own different personal life. I am separated from J. Loving her as much as ever, recognizing how impossible a complete common life between us is. It seems to be my fate to love what I forbid myself—or perhaps to forbid what I love. In any case there is a deadlock. But my only method of living 

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Part Six is through loving and I do not yet know how to love. Loving as a state of being, as an activity which is a final end in itself. My attempts to find good men, saints shall we say, are abortive. The two that I cast for that role have proved equally inappropriate. They both turn out to be professional good men. For me goodness must be spontaneous, beyond control. Not striven for. How would you tell both of them to alter themselves if they asked you. Goodness knows. The flaw seems to be the same as Beethoven’s—the desire to be a great musician, or a good man, rather than a passion for great music or goodness. Perhaps goodness must be allied or qualified with foolishness or some deep fault—the Russians and the Pater. Then Fresca adds, in a tighter hand than I have seen before, several quotes from E. I. Watkin’s Catholic Art and Culture (). Fresca was probably drawn to Watkin’s book due to her interest in churches, with its multiple illustrations of church art and church architecture. Writer Edward Ingram Watkin (–) converted to Catholicism in  and was the founder in  of the inter-war Catholic pacifist movement Pax along with Eric Gill, Donald Attwater, and the American Dorothy Day.



Fresca final entry in her notebook is a short quote, without comment, from Ivan Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man (possibly in pencil; it looks lighter in my photocopy), a reference to the narrator’s mother: ‘“I have known no woman whose moral excellence was less productive of happiness. She was crushed beneath the weight of her own virtues & was a source of misery to everyone, from herself upwards.”’ I find the passage early in Turgenev’s story, which continues: In all the fifty years of her life, she never once took rest, or sat with her hands in her lap; she was forever fussing and bustling about like an ant, and to absolutely no good purpose, which cannot be said of the ant. The worm of restlessness fretted her night and day. Only once I saw her perfectly tranquil, and that was the day after her death, in her coffin. Looking at her, it positively seemed to me that her face wore an expression of subdued amazement; with the half-open lips, the sunken cheeks, and meekly-staring eyes, it seemed expressing, all over, the words, ‘How good to be at rest!’ Yes, it is good, good to be rid, at last, of the wearing sense of life, of the persistent, restless consciousness of existence! But that’s neither here nor there.



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PART SEVEN

No Remaining, No Place to Stay Isn’t it time that in love we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling endured as the arrow endures the string collecting itself to be more than itself as it shoots? For there is no remaining, no place to stay. (Rilke, from First Elegy, Duino Elegies)

F

RESCA’S decision to leave London and St Osyth to live with her brother Cyril and his wife Veronica in the Cambridgeshire countryside cannot have been easy. However, it is clear that she has a very special connection with Cyril, who is Cedric in A Childhood, and also with Veronica. Niece Sonya Allinson stayed at The Mill House for three weeks during the war. At that point, she remembers, Fresca ‘was in poor health [. . .] but much engaged with work on her book’. She recounts Fresca’s communication with Ralph Vaughan Williams over the preface to her book—Fresca anxious at not having heard from him, ‘her theory [. . .] in complete opposition to his.’ Sonya reports Fresca’s positive but exhausting meetings with publishers in London and the proofreading that ensued. Sonya, who longed to be a painter, describes



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Part Seven Fresca’s efforts to bring out the musician in her. She guesses that at this point Fresca thinks little of Adrian Allinson’s work and does not consider painting ‘a recipe for a happy life’. In retrospect, Sonya feels, this was an error on Fresca’s part considering Adrian’s fame, in large part thanks to his partner Molly [Mitchell Smith] and the dealers. Sonya mentions the early Dolmetch recorder, valuable, but not functional by the time she got her hands on it, bequeathed to her by Fresca that she picked up from Schott’s after Fresca’s death. ‘I dreamt of seeing more of [Fresca] when I grew up a bit and the war was over. Her death was shattering of course.’ I visit The Mill House for the first time in . I take the train from London to Cambridge and then a taxi from Cambridge station to Streetly End, a hamlet in the parish of West Wickham. When I arrive, Kit Martin is mowing, hard at work on a small farm project which includes sheep, goats, and chickens, and that clearly represents a full-time job for both he and Jean, both of them retired teachers. The grounds and house, a fifteenth-century structure, and the mill for which the house was named, the tallest in Cambridgeshire, Kit tells me, look glorious in the summer sunshine. During this first visit, Kit tells me all about Cyril. He describes Cyril as a playboy who skied and summered in fashionable places. Cyril and Veronica bought The Mill House in . Suggesting affluence, they also had a flat in St John’s Wood and a cottage in Leighton Buzzard. Cyril did run the Allinson flour mill for a time, unwillingly it seems, after having failed to establish his own electronics company.

 Entrance to The Mill House (Helen Southworth).



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No Remaining, No Place to Stay According to Kit, Fresca, not Cyril, first meets Veronica. Veronica (née Shaw) descends from an aristocratic Scottish family and, after having read H. G. Wells’s new-woman novel Ann Veronica, based on a feisty young woman called Amber Reeves with whom Wells had had an affair, leaves home for London. Here she plays music with Fresca in ‘aspidistra rooms’, pubs, and cinemas, according to Fresca; and it seems she lives in the Allinson family house in Christchurch Avenue, as does Tippett’s cousin, Phyl Kemp, before meeting Cyril. Cyril and Veronica had no children—to Veronica’s regret, according to Kit—but they did have cats. An aerial painting of the house signed Erhlich (an Allinson cousin), dated ‘anno ’, beautifully records the layout of the house and gardens with cats, Lilly, Mankel, Blackie, Caesar, and Pompey, hiding. Fresca has left her mark on The Mill House in terms of the diversity of the trees there. Kit points out gingko and hazelnut. Fresca’s commitment to the house and garden is reflected in her bequest of  pounds to Veronica for completion of the house and garden. Current owners, Kit and Jean have also added their mark to The Mill House, but have kept it largely as it was, and it has a beautiful Charleston/Bloomsbury-like feel to it. Fortunately, Kit, who knew Cyril and Veronica well and bought the house on their deaths, has kept many miscellaneous things, and offers for my perusal a small Fresca archive. He has:

 Drawing of Mill House by Erhlich (Kit Martin).



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Part Seven . . . . .

A copy of Margaret Lambert’s When Victoria Began to Reign (Faber ), to which Fresca contributed, A plaster bust of T. R. Allinson by Adrian Allinson, Anna Pulvermacher’s small sketch book with pencil drawings, The Allinson telephone, A catalogue for the sale of Adrian Allinson’s work on his death. Kit says that he accompanied Cyril to the sale. Cyril had asked for something as a souvenir, but to no avail.

Also at The Mill House I see: . . . . . . . . . .

A sketch of Michael Tippett by Karl Hawker, A Tippett manuscript, A piece of Fresca’s folk song book, Anna Pulvermacher’s will, Deed poll name change documents, Clara Barkow’s death certificate (died ), A copy of Cyril’s memoirs as transcribed by Sonya, A portrait of Bertrand or Cyril by Adrian, Photograph albums, A copy of A Childhood dedicated to Veronica and Cyril.

I ask Kit if he has any photographs of Fresca. Yes, he is sure he has seen one. He opens up a photo album and there she is skating at Virginia Water in Windsor Great Park in  with Cyril and Veronica. The photos beautifully confirm the connection Fresca, Cyril, and Veronica share. They explain the warmth of Fresca’s portrait of Cedric in A Childhood: he has bicycled all the way from London and his ‘loose long legs straggled so comfortably out of his shorts’. I have no way to make a good record of the photo due to an inferior camera, and there are not any shops close by. You can have it, Kit says, and goes inside for the scissors to cut out the page. No, yes, no, yes . . . Shamelessly, I let him cut the page out!



Fresca’s Mill House letters to Marx and Lambert, dating from  to , constitute the lion’s share of the letters Enid Marx biographer Matthew Eve has given me. At this point Fresca is mostly at The Mill House in Streetly End, and Marx and Lambert back and forth between Spreyton in Devon (the Lambert family seat) and London. I photocopy these letters rather hastily at Kilburn Library on Salusbury Road, having to plug the photocopier manically with coins and to step aside when other patrons want to use the machine. In 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay

 Fresca skating at Virginia Water in Surrey with Cyril and Veronica from scrapbook at the Mill House (Kit Martin).

my haste, I do not always keep track of which letter went in which envelope. I meet Matthew Eve at Victoria Station and hand the bag of letters back to him. As a set, these letters offer an excellent picture of how several, admittedly rather affluent, households survive the privations of World War II; they document how Fresca, Marx, and Lambert continue their intellectual work in the face of shortages and prohibitions. The letters also record the mutual support that Marx, Lambert, and Fresca and Fresca’s family afford one another, the traffic of material and emotional sustenance between Cambridge and London. I find just one instance of tension between Fresca and Marx in a letter which followed Fresca’s th birthday (August ). The letter clearly postdates Fresca’s loss of her Mornington Terrace house during the Blitz, between September , , and May , , an event which precipitated Fresca’s move out to The Mill House. The letter indicates that there may have been a break in communication between the friends that is just now being resumed. After opening with a thank you for a birthday letter and for Marx’s news (about the death of Marx’s dog Bella and the imminent birth of Margaret Lambert’s 

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Part Seven nephew) and then a bit of news about her own recent activity, Fresca suddenly says: ‘I ran into Jonathan & Joan at Richoux [restaurant] & had news of you,’ and then quite suddenly she adds: ‘I spent a month in town digging blankets & towels & soft things out of —also irreplaceable music & books, but not in a condition fit for use—just for technical reference. The whole corner is cleared away now & makes a pleasant open space. Your name went out of the address book when your reply to my telling you the house was gone was Oh—you must go & cook supper at once as you were late. I didn’t want sympathy & nobody with their head screwed on right would want any feelings nowadays, but I thought you might have said, can I help? Hence my long silence.’ If there has indeed been a falling out, it doesn’t damage Fresca’s rapport with Marx. Testament to the strength of the friendship, the two women pick up where they left off. Fresca addresses Marx as ‘Darling Marco’ and as ‘Marcissimo’, and she calls Lambert ‘Dearest Mimi’ and ‘Lambkin’. She closes her letters affectionately, with ‘Very much love, Friskus’ and with ‘Heaps of love to you both, Friskus.’ She includes a playful little symbol. There is much of the day-to-day in these letters. Fresca is sewing and knitting in an effort to ‘Make Do and Mend’. Clothes, food and alcohol, and toiletries travel back and forth between the two households. Marx sends gloves, a lipstick called Tangee, advertised as ‘the world’s most famous lipstick’, and soap. Fresca dispatches pajamas. In one letter, Fresca announces the arrival of gin in French: ‘Voici le gin’! She asks Lamb to measure Marco from wrist to wrist with outstretched arms; she is knitting her a bed jacket and needs dimensions. If it turns out to be too large, Marx can give it to Lamb and she’ll make a smaller one. And, by the way, can Marc and Lamb get her some of that peppermint they said they could get from the chemist without coupons. It might settle her ‘recalcitrant tummy’. Fresca seems most put out at this point by the ‘bloody [. . .] situation’ with paper rationing, which begins in September 1942. She begs Marx ‘[not to] go dry because of it’, suggesting that she ‘work in a slight & temporary vacuum’. Since Marx’s ‘books are not related to current events—I mean Sammy isn’t [. . .] couldn’t [she] carry on on spec a bit.’ In characteristic fashion, Fresca manages the situation. She uses her mother’s old paper for correspondence. She’s also ‘been busy collecting angel’s hair’; she says ‘that’s what the German children call the anti-radio location strips. The new ones are much nicer—about 10 inches long & paper on only one side.’ She offers to ‘send [Marco] a big wodge—the meadows are strewn with them—one every ten yards about.’ And she exclaims in closing: ‘The things that do fall out of the sky these days!’

 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay Indicating that Fresca remains connected socially while at Streetly End, the letters from The Mill House are full of names, some old, some new. Fresca’s concern for and her desire to help others motivates many of these mentions. Cycill Geraldine Tomrley is among old friends mentioned. I have seen her portrait of Lamb at Eleanor Breuning’s house and her name in the acknowledgments of Lamb’s Scrapbook alongside Fresca’s. Tomrley is a Slade-trained painter and designer, and author of Furnishing Your Home, published by Allen and Unwin in . Among new names is Grace, who appears to be Fresca’s doctor. A letter dated Wednesday from The Mill House finds Fresca awaiting a bed at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, but nonetheless in good form and hoping to help Grace by having her connect with Cycill: ‘Hullo, ship-ahoy,’ she begins. ‘I saw Grace yesterday who is very miserable and lonely & overworked and wants a pal. I’ve asked Cycill to meet her & see if she can’t introduce her to someone in Cambridge.’ In another letter, Fresca tells Marx that she has just heard from her cousin Selim: ‘Her pal Victor White is the editor of Blackfriars, he is apparently Julie’s godfather & therefore nearly a relation of mine. Selim says write to him & mention her (she is Selim Kouekamp now).’ Father Victor White, O.P. Blackfriars Oxford, was a Dominican priest known for his correspondence and collaboration with Jung. In a letter dated ‘Sunday’, thanking Marx for letting her visit despite the fact she was ‘so bloody busy & all’, Fresca makes another connection as she discusses the possibility of Marx and Lambert taking ‘Priaulx’s flat’. Priaulx is Priaulx Rainier the South African/British composer. In an attempt to date the letter I look at what Rainier was doing in the late s and early s. On the Royal Academy of Music website, I discover that during the war Rainier had ‘bec[o]me an air-raid warden in Kensington, and during summer months she worked as a land-girl in the Hertfordshire countryside [and that] [i]t was during this period that she met the ballet dancer Pola Nirenska and developed friendships within the dance community.’ It was subsequent to this that ‘[s]he met Michael Tippett and his circle at Morley College, and became acquainted with sculptor Barbara Hepworth and artist Ben Nicholson’. She taught composition from – at the Royal Academy. ‘In , she wrote and recorded the (percussive) music for a short public information film “Fire in our Factory”, and “String Quartet” was given its first public performance at Wigmore Hall (hitherto, it had only been performed privately, in ).’ Fresca mentions Tippett only once in her letters to Marx and Lambert, in terms of an article in the Picture Post, which she thinks was meant to ‘synchronize with the Royal Albert Hall’. It has an unusually good picture of Tippett, who, she says, usually looks like a curate in photos! This likely refers to a 

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Part Seven performance of ‘A Child of Our Time’ in . The absence of Tippett from these letters does not surprise me. Marx and Lambert are not fans; they have, rather disparagingly, nicknamed him ‘Mickey Tippett’. Fresca makes frequent references to her family. At one point, she tells Marx that the Allinson family nanny Tickie is staying at The Mill House, old, deaf, and happy to do nothing all day, ‘Bless the old darling.’ Veronica is mentioned often, frequently with messages for Marx and Lamb. In one letter, Fresca discusses Veronica’s involvement with Saluting [Salute the] Soldier[s] Week, a campaign aimed at encouraging citizens to save money in government accounts which took place in towns across Britain between June  and , ; in another, her appearance on “The Brains Trust”. This BBC show began in  on Force’s Radio Service, with philosopher and psychologist C. E. M. Joad, biologist Julian Huxley, and retired naval officer Commander A. B. Campbell moderating. Listeners sent in questions and panelists responded. Veronica doesn’t do very well; she isn’t ‘the right type for B. T.’, Fresca tells Marco. ‘Terribly good manners which include a rather impersonal attitude [which doesn’t] conduce to good argument among strangers.’ Fresca also has problems hearing what Veronica is saying. At one point Fresca sends news of nephew Michael and brother Adrian: She has ‘just heard from Adrian that young Michael is in France’. She ‘feel[s] a terrific mixture of feelings but shall write often to him as I gather any letter in a slit trench or up any gum tree is better than none.’ For his part, ‘Adrian has been asked to translate a German book on Chinese art. He is solemnly doing this in Minchinhampton [in the Cotswolds] at the moment.’ I also find another reference to family among the letters in the form of the undated beginnings of a book (several sheets of paper folded into the shape of a book) called Treasure Trove, its authors given as ‘Enid Marx and Bertrum Allinson’. The book is to be about collecting. The alternative spelling for Bertrand is perhaps a result of Marco’s notorious misspelling. This is an intriguing item, not only because it connects Marco and Bertrand, but also in terms of its focus and structure. A ‘contents’ heading and an ‘illustrations’ heading include no details and under the heading ‘Introduction’, I find only the subhead ‘about collecting’. There are three chapters, entitled Sea-Side, Ponds, and The Garden. Judy Wogan appears four times in Fresca’s letters. In the letter written not long after Fresca’s th birthday where Fresca questions Marx’s reaction to the loss of her London house, Fresca tells Marx that she has just ‘had a ravishing birthday with Judy’. She’s clearly showing off to Marx, but the paragraph that follows records the strength that Fresca gains from her time with Judy. ‘D’you know I like getting older very much,’ Fresca tells Marx. 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay I’ve been shedding difficulties of late, the Adrian [Stephen] variety. (I have kept a long letter from him for you—it’s full of his opinions about the war). I wish yours were not so faithful. But I have long suspected that your artistic excellence is bound up with them—if you left off flapping you’d be doing illustrations for Nash’s Magazine. Given the choice, what do you prefer? I’ve had a terrible lot of inferiorities—& then wonder with horror if I’m developing rhinoceros skin or am becoming bumptious. But I like not always feeling a worm. And then too I feel really mature suddenly in some directions. As if I really did know how to handle people or mould them a bit. I’ve taken to liking people by & large very much, & they appear to like me too. Oh dear I’m rather like Cycill I need a bit of gentlemanly admiration. I evoke more of it than I used to & it satisfies one bit of me, a silly bit, granted. In another letter, Fresca tells Marx that Judy has telephoned to report on the birth of some new puppies, conceived accidently while Judy was in London at the dentist, and to remind Fresca that it is her birthday, which was October : ‘so I really should remember that  of the people I am most fond of have birthdays in the same week, Cyril being no.  on the nd.’ In a third letter, written across a number of days, on a ‘Saturday’ and then ‘Monday’ (and also perhaps Sunday) at The Mill House, Fresca mentions Judy again. Although I dated this letter to January , , because Fresca says it is Twelfth Night, which was a Sunday in , I feel sure it was written later. Fresca says she will stay with Cycill in Cambridge and spend Thursday and Friday nights, January  and , with her friends. She says she plans to have the ‘[Cecil] Sharp ms’ sent to the University Library for a final vet, which suggests the later date. Following the Cambridge stop, Fresca tells Marx that she plans to go to St Osyth to see about cutting down an acre or so of timber. She says that she ‘can’t afford to not cut if the timber is ripe and she can either get a woodman or a timber firm to cut’. Her plan is ‘to spend the night in Colchester & to taxi out to the grove’. She has ‘told Jude [her] intentions and [ Judy] has asked her to stay at Toosie’. She goes on: ‘I don’t know if it’s wise to do so, but if the timber is ok I will accept Judy’s offer. I am afraid of lots of complications but want to go too much to bother about wisdom. Anyhow I don’t know what’s what.’ A last letter suggests that Fresca and Judy are out of contact. Fresca is concerned about Judy since she has heard that St Osyth has suffered a ‘bad blitz’, with farms wiped out. Fresca has had no news about her Martin’s Grove man Mr Jefferies or about Judy, for that matter, despite the fact that she wrote to her  days previous. Clacton-on-Sea (just up the road from St Osyth) was in the 

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Part Seven flight path for German bombers and in May of  Clacton residents became the first civilian deaths when a German bomber accidently crashed onto the town. Fresca, however, appears to be referring to a later incident of February , , when St Osyth suffered its biggest losses. I find local Syd Bruce’s description at the parish website that includes a mention of Dalte’s farm, which was just adjacent to Judy’s cottage: During the day we learnt that Lodge Farm buildings had been burnt to the ground and a bomb had done considerable damage to Dalte’s Farm house and buildings, Braziers Farm and St Clere’s Hall received damage too.  The two bombs exploding in the mill pond severely damaged Warren Farm and Wigboro Wick Farm.  At Whyers Hall Farm, buildings were badly damaged and an unexploded bomb was found in the garden by the kitchen window!  After the building was repaired or rebuilt a few weeks later by the firm, another bomb exploded in a nearby field destroying much of our work!  Cockett Wick suffered too, as did a number of houses, losing tiles off their roofs and had much of their window glass smashed, all of which kept the firm busy for many weeks carrying out repairs. At first it was thought the Priory had been the main target until it was realised that practically every farm in the area had been pinpointed and it became obvious it was part of Hitler’s threat to starve our island into submission, which the U boats had failed to do! It was obvious too that the creek and millpond played a big and chilling part acting as a guide for the aircraft to these farms.



Fresca makes the most of Cambridgeshire and The Mill House. Descriptions of the beauty of The Mill House garden abound in the letters. Fresca is often outside, rigging raspberry canes, tending to fruit trees and ‘coping with the greenhouse’. ‘It’s been ravishing down here till this last week as words can’t say—but for a rather richer and subtler Ravilious to paint’ she tells Marco. ‘I’ve never been in grain[-]growing country during an Indian summer before & it’s lovelier than elsewhere.’ She has been out on ‘two longish jaunts’ and has visited a goat breeders’ farm. ‘[The farmer] has a magnificent Billy. [. . .] we took a great fancy to one another. He’s a huge creature that rears himself to a great height—half as tall as me again—when he’s feeling gay, is very shaggy, blows smacking great raspberries with his nostrils (apparently all goats do this but I’ve never met it before) & puts his head at an angle which makes me feel odd inside because of [?] & pagan associations. And gosh how he stank. And among others there was a little Nubian nanny—they are entrancing. She has long lop 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay ears, eyes wide apart & a face like a Bidlington—very sheepish & mild & sentimental.’ Fresca trades stories with Marx and Lamb about the animals of the various households, dogs and cats and even their own goat: ‘We’ve been rearing a nannykid for the last few weeks—a completely white kid with pretty ways. It sat on our laps, ate our clothes, and followed us like a dog. Unfortunately we became suspicious about its tiddly bits and so took it to the goat woman. Alas, it turned out to have turned into a ‘maf ’ (?)—a hermaphrodite—and has gone to [?]. Apparently this is a bad goat year and all the little kids have been doing the same. But any how our mother goat is giving us  or  pints of milk a day and we’ve started making butter—it tastes no different from cow butter & is an all fueling cock-a-hoop.’ Fresca reports on the goings-on in Streetly End and surrounding villages. In one letter she tells Marco: ‘We have a lot of pretty negroes in the nearest camps & two Eyteyes in the farm opposite. The girls get pally with both & the results are awkward. I wonder whether the country-side will be full of coffee-coloured babies.’ In other news from the village, she reports seeing two local boys set fire to a straw stack: ‘Two little boys from the pub who are the local criminals had set it on fire. As their pa occasionally beats their ma up so much that she sends someone round to us to telephone for the police, it’s no wonder those little chaps go off & set alight to something. After having read Watson’s The Magistrate & the Child, I think they stand a better chance by getting into the law’s hands as they are doing this thing than by being let off as they always have been so far.’ The letters contain surprisingly few mentions of current events, perhaps something Fresca did not want to discuss with Marx and Lamb. In a first explicit reference to her pacifism, she says: ‘Oh I do hope the Russians hit Mojaisk soon (Intimate confessions of a C.O.).’ and in another: ‘I say isn’t the Russia news terrific! We all rather hope the Americans may get a big enough beating to knock some of the conceit out of them & not big enough to matter. (Nice sentiments for a conchie!).’ She asks Marco if she and Lamb knew ‘about D-Day before it happened.’ ‘There was such a blooming noise in the sky all Monday night that we only slept fitfully & felt sure the invasion was happening. There was such a row last night also that we thought we must be landing somewhere else.’ She follows this with a description of her trip into Cambridge to see the Greek Exhibition []. She had wanted to see the ‘tiny Byzantine exhibits’— beautiful gold coins, jewellery, and embroideries. She recommends to Marco the ‘Staffordshire stuff ’: a ‘large enchanting outside of a Fair Theatre done in China, monkeys on hurdy-gurdies’. In another letter Fresca describes the nighttime air activity: ‘The last few nights we’ve all been entranced by the squadrons of lighted planes that go over

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Part Seven head at about  or :. Before we only saw single planes with their riding lights on, but now anything up to  or  cross the sky, looking like flying Christmas trees. But god the noise—day & night—we might just as well be in Mornington Terrace. Talk about quiet countryside.’



Underlying Fresca’s lightheartedness, however, is the distress caused by her poor physical health mentioned in almost every letter. In one letter, Fresca reports to Marx that she has been ‘horribly exhausted & [has been] doing nothing but sleep’. She has ‘felt hopelessly down in the last few days [to the point that] lying in bed seemed too much exertion’. She tells Marx that ‘Grace is coming over next week to look at [her]’ then dismisses her problems as ‘nothing but anaemia I guess’. Later Fresca tells Marco that: ‘[Grace is] putting me into hospital for  hours’ observation, a thyroid test etc—I don’t know when they can take me yet but shall be glad to get the job that you suggested long ago done.’ In another letter, simply dated ‘Friday’, she complains of depression ‘at being so low’. However, things are better than they were. She explains that she had been ‘getting prickling sensations in [her] face’, and that she ignored it until about a week later when she looked at herself in the mirror only to discover ‘red rashes on my face, neck, wrists, elbows, ankles, knees & outside of legs and arms’. After waiting a few more days, she has asked her brother Bertrand [a doctor] about it. He has told her that she has an allergy to bread and that she should stay away from yeast. Cutting out bread has cleared up the rashes and Fresca hopes her tummy might behave better also. ‘I am so bloody fed up with not being well,’ she confesses to Marco . . . ‘Sorry for all this but a good groan cheers me up.’ In a letter dated January , likely  due to a reference to Mojaisk, Fresca thanks Marx ‘for the luscious soap [another rationed item]’ and tells her: ‘really good smells are essential to me for I have been through the football stage of this disease—your tummy blows up like a Negro Toto’s tummy—large & round— then when at last by dint of various diplomatic ploys you do get a move on— well you roar with farts & belches. And what rich ones! I disappear to my room till the room is thick as with smoke—and return a new woman. I eat enormously of simple foods—it’s hard to believe— slices of bread, then pints of milk, two eggs, not to mention potatoes & vegetables galore [above] every day. I’m getting fat on it all.’ At one point Fresca is waiting for a bed to become vacant at Addenbrooke’s. Her health continues to bother her: ‘my tummy won’t behave.’ Fresca closes another letter with ‘Turning poorly.’ 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay These health-related comments take me back to Tippett’s letters to Fresca and Den of the period. Here too questions about Fresca’s health come up often. At one point Tippett tells Den that a bout of ill health, caused, he speculates, by ‘leaving the goiter operation so late’, has forced Fresca to ‘go and stay as a half-invalid’ with her brother Cyril and his wife in Cambridgeshire. In November , Tippett writes that ‘[he] hopes at last [Fresca is] better’. Also in , he writes: ‘Glad the doctor thinks better of it—all such nonsense about ulcers must be firmly put aside . . .’ In a  letter (no month or day indicated) he writes that ‘[he’ll] be thankful when [she’s] properly well’. In March/April , Tippett tells Fresca in a letter that he is ‘sorry to hear [she’s] off to Addenbrookes.’ On November , later that same year, Tippett tells Den that Fresca is ‘again house-bound, as she calls it’. And in August  Tippett confides to Den that Fresca ‘[in] full clothes and overcoat’ is down to  and ½ stone ( lbs) due to the goiter.



Despite her poor health Fresca is hard at work on a variety of schemes, reading copiously and writing, eagerly engaging with Marx and Lamb on their projects. I know from Fresca’s will that she subscribes to the Times book club—she bequeaths the subscription to Tippett—and the newness of some of the book titles she mentions reflects this. Among the books Fresca is reading is Indigo, a  novel about India by Christine Weston. Fresca finds it ‘excellent reading’ and says that ‘it’s one of the very few books that have appeared during this war which seems allergic to words (or perhaps vice versa would be more correct).’ Christine Weston was an American writer born in India whose work was set mostly in India. E. M. Forster, himself a lover of India, praised Weston in  as a ‘serious’ writer, ‘carefully compassionate [. . .]; she is not interested in the glamorous East or in the boosting of this or that political creed; she writes for those who are emotionally involved in the country and who love it.’ Weston herself wrote, perhaps explaining Fresca’s enthusiasm for her work: ‘The country of one’s childhood is always predominant in one’s memory: India is a beautiful, kindly land, and notwithstanding all the perils of life in the tropics, it is a fine country for any child to grow up in.’ Fresca is also reading Michael Roberts’s The Recovery of the West, recommended to her by her brother Adrian. She describes Roberts as one of Gwenda’s ex-boyfriends of her Fitzroy Square days and asks Marco if she remembers him. Roberts (–) was a poet, critic, and the editor of New Signatures and New Country, two collections of the poetry of the W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis generation, published by the Hogarth Press in  

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Part Seven and . He was also an avid mountain climber. Fresca describes Recovery as ‘a sort of kybosh to [Spengler’s ] Decline of the West’. She finds it to be ‘poor in the construction bits but fascinating in its analysis & criticism of the s and s’. ‘It gets me thoroughly,’ she says. [Roberts] has a lot to say about the ‘naturalism’ that everyone went in for unconsciously—the belief that because a thing was natural it was good— a belief incidentally opposed to Xianity by and large which says that everything natural is bad (or perhaps that was Victorian Xianity). I always fought with the family medical ideas because I couldn’t see that natural physical cures fitted into the rest of life. But the real question to bring is— why should the natural anyway be set on this pedestal? And also who on earth even knows what is natural and what isn’t. I think most people, amateurishly interested in psychoanalysis (people like me) have thought [psychoanalysis] backed the natural—though it actually doesn’t at all. Naturalism isn’t actually any standard at all—and I’m very grateful for having the idea cleared up by Michael Roberts for me. Fresca moves on to tell Lamb she is reading John Hammond’s Agricultural Labourer (The Village Labourer –: A Study of the Government of England before the Reform Bill [] with Barbara Hammond). ‘Blimey,’ she says, what an upheaval there was and what a terrible time. I am torn between a passionate sympathy for the labourer and a conviction farming couldn’t have progressed without big farms & capital behind them. Is it a similar pre-enclosure state of affairs that you are concerned about in the Balkans? I am fascinated also with the visual picture that I glean from the Hammonds’ descriptions of England. How different the countryside must have looked with strip cultivation, no hedges and masses of gorsy common land. Having just read Tom Jones, I can visualize that too. Several letters suggest that Fresca still hopes to get her own place at this period. She thanks Marco ‘for the work shop offer’. But goes on to say that: ‘I think it is a better bet for me to get a house with a low rent and divide it with working class people so that they could look after me à la Hunts & Judy. The lorry driver I met in the train had a /- a week -roomed house next door to him vacant in Bow. That’s a long way off though I’ve always had a yen for the river down there & cast my mind at Greenwich or Lambeth or the Isle of Dogs. Anyhow I shall work in that direction as it seems most sensible and most fun. But I don’t want to go so far that I put myself off or have fantastic journeys to make.’ 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay In another letter, written on ‘Tuesday’, in which Fresca worries about how Marx and Lamb are coping with the ‘night alerts’, she tells them that she has decided ‘to try the Sudbury district for a cottage. That’s Suffolk, a ravishingly beautiful part among the most beautiful old villages I’ve ever seen (Long Melford & that lot).’ Sudbury, she tells them, ‘has a good railway service to town [so they’ll] find week-ending easy.’ She going to get Grace to help her, as ‘it is her district & she knows all of the cottage shopping that goes on’. And, in search of a retreat at The Mill House, Fresca tells Marx that she has ‘fixed [her]self up an attic in the Red House as a study.’ The furnishings leave a bit to be desired, ‘a wobbly card table that came out of the Blitz, not very good to type on—a bur[n]t wood chair & a deck chair,’ but ‘the attic has a heavenly view and is blissfully cut off, which I adore’. Fresca inquires frequently about Marx and Lambert’s work. Fresca mentions Marx’s Bulgy The Barrage Balloon, published by Oxford University Press in 1941, and says that she’s ‘sorry they haven’t called off the war on account of Bulgy— though [she] thinks it would be an admirable reason’. She tells Marco of Den Newton’s admiration for her work and laments the fact that a lot of her Marx collection was lost when Mornington Terrace was bombed. Fresca says she’ll of course help with the Puffin and that it won’t matter to her ‘Tom Tidler’s Ground’. In several letters, we see Fresca buoying up Marx and Lamb’s morale. Writing on Wednesday from The Mill House, Fresca makes ‘Dear Lambkin’ a generous offer of support: ‘The other day you said something about chucking your job & letting me keep you while you gave yourself plenty of time over another. I hope you meant that seriously as I took it. If ever you are hesitant to chuck a job for financial reasons please remember me and put your mind & pocket at rest. You once said the giving and taking of cash came between people—but it doesn’t. Marx and I are no less good friends because of Adrian [Stephen]. Love F.’ Several letters make reference to Lamb’s passing her viva, presumably for her London School of Economics PhD. It appears that she did not defend the PhD until , although she published her book The Saar, the topic of her work at the London School of Economics, with Faber & Faber in . In another letter, Fresca tries to help Marx through a sticky situation with ‘Ian’, possibly Chatto and Windus publisher Ian Parsons. She writes: ‘I think your final letter to Ian excellent. I think it probably will be difficult to heal the breach but at least nothing has been contributed by that letter to any widening of it. And these things do blow over. It is a beastly thing to have happen & I am awfully sorry for you. I should have been in a stew if it had happened to me— but Mrs M. is a pillar of strength not to say detachment on these occasions. I shall keep your letter with all the facts.’ 

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Part Seven In yet another letter, Fresca closes by ‘hop[ing] Mrs. M is getting full value out of her scandal & not only anxiety’ and ‘You still don’t tell me how Mum [Lamb?] dealt with [Noel?] Carrington.’ She signs off with ‘Much love & cheer up & [?] with little and often. F.’ And adds: ‘Thursday. Did you hear much last night? We had a ration of bombers somewhere about.’ The Carrington question is apparently answered—and Fresca responds with: ‘Carrington sounds a regular swine.’ Fresca sends her sympathies to Mrs M., facing a crisis, and Grace too and says to Marco, ‘You are a sort of universal cushion onto which everyone flings themselves.’ The Mill House, Tuesday Dear Birthday Marc [October ; it was a Tuesday in ]—heaps & heaps of good birthday wishes—lots of luscious jobs, triumph over Carrington Per [?] er & Co, no flaps, & many reviews & a posse of char women at your imperious beck and call. Please think of something luscious you fancy, & we will go and get it when you come up. And please think out something for Lamb’s birthday too [November ]. F. In a letter dated ‘Tuesday’ Fresca floats a collaborative project, this one an ‘International Children’s Series’. Fresca tells Marco that she has just had an idea for ‘the map end of things’. She proposes that one put numbers in ‘the boring bits of shading that represent a range of mountains’ which you’d accompany with ‘an illustration saying—if you lived in these mountains this is what you’d see out of your bedroom window. And so on & so on over towns, lakes, sea ports, rivers etc. Then the dots & lines of a map would take on pleasure.’ The letter then turns back to ‘tunes’. Fresca appears to be helping Marx identify a tune ‘the first lines of which would really be a trailer & act as an advertisement which,’ she says, ‘could be pointed out to any recalcitrant publisher’. In this same letter, Fresca mentions Marx’s appearance in the Picture Post, with a photo and a copy of one of her designs. She enquires about several letters Marx has been writing to the newspaper, including one to the Times which Fresca hopes will be printed. Fresca is also glad Lamb is having Ben [Britten?] to the BBC. She describes him as ‘a most friendly little chap, full of enthusiasms and with a terrific personality that you don’t expect of something that looks like a prefect at school’! On ‘Friday’ (perhaps the same day as the last letter) Fresca thanks Marx for ‘both p.c. and letter and synopsis of your work. I find it excellent and have no criticism to offer at all. And I greatly hope you get the job. I have put the 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay synopsis away with your inventory and more last will and testamentary letters. Thanks also for the cheque which I am passing on.’ In a letter dated ‘Tuseday’ from The Mill House Fresca says ‘Here are the tunes.’ She’s going to give Marx two versions of ‘Green Bottles’, a tune suggested by Veronica’s sister, Dilly. ‘It’s a four-part round [and] one usually prints a star where each new voice comes in’ she tells Marx. She hopes it will ‘fit [Marx’s] words’. Fresca urges Marx to ask about copyright. In another letter, undated, but probably from –, she writes: ‘Here are a sample of ballads, a mixed bag—some narrative and some more lyrical. I thought duplicates might be more useful so I’ve carboned them. Those ballads with asterisks by their titles may have copyright. With the exception of a brisk young sailor from Sharp, the others come from English Country Songs published in . I don’t know how they stand. I’ve not sent the tunes as they wouldn’t mean much to you would they. You can reckon on them being  or  bars long.’ I find a typed letter, dated January  (unsigned, but evidently from Marx), regarding the Britain in Pictures series, proposing the English Popular Art title that would come to fruition in . The proposal letter includes discussion of the pictorial quality of ballads and broadsides, perhaps Fresca’s contribution to the project. Britain in Pictures was a series ‘Begun in , [which] aimed to give British and overseas readers a comprehensive picture of the UK. The typical volume has  pages of text with black and white illustrations and eight or more colour plates.  of the projected  volumes were published, covering British achievements in literature, arts and crafts, exploration, science, and just about every aspect of life in town and country, including natural history and sport. Several volumes covered the overseas Dominions and colonies. The editors showed considerable inspiration in their choice of authors, many of whom were not as celebrated then as they became in later decades.’ Interestingly, the English Popular Art letter is preceded by and modeled on another typed letter dated December  from Fresca at The Mill House to W. J. Turner at Mssrs. Collins proposing a volume for the series on English Traditional Songs and Ballads. Turner has himself written the volume on English Music for the series in . It is in this letter that Fresca gives Hugo Strecker at Schott, and Dr Ernest Walker and Sir Hugh Allen at Oxford, as references. There are a few things that I cannot explain in the folder. These include typed versions of Marx’s works ‘Lazy Lawrence’, ‘Elva the Eel’, and ‘Slippery Sam’, and a letter from Marx to Mr [Richard] de la Mare at Faber & Faber. Clearly, however, Fresca and Marco are collaborating on all sorts of things. It is not surprising, then, when I run across the following illustrations for sale at Abbott and Holder in June  [‘ impressions of the  wood-engravings for 

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Part Seven

 ‘1988 impressions of the 1939 wood-engravings for Francesca Allinson’s Nursery Rhymes’ on sale at Abbott and Holder.

Francesca Allinson’s “Nursery Rhymes”’ pictured]. When I query Abbott and Holder about the source of information they tell me that it came from the man who gave them the prints who has had them ‘directly from the artist’. Marx did illustrate the Zodiac Volume of Nursery Rhymes in  and Fresca is indicated variously on the internet as the book’s author. Comments in the letters enable me to track Fresca’s progress on the folk song manuscript. In the letter of approximately September , written following Fresca’s August th birthday, perhaps providing a start date for the folk song project, Fresca says that she is ‘just about to plunge into a ms., to be attached to a monograph one day. When I’ve finished the ms. I shall work with CEMA. I hope to organize concerts for them in the big London suburbs.’ The letter is sent from  Magdalene St, Cambridge, which is the site of Magdalene College, suggesting Fresca is using the library there. CEMA was the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, formed in , with the objective of providing funds to ‘cultural societies finding difficulties in maintaining their activities during the War’. Among those involved was Imogen Holst, Gustav Holst’s daughter, who acted as the organiser for the southwest region of England; other actors in the organization included Sybil Eaton and Ronald Biggs. Britten and Pears toured with CEMA. John Maynard [Lord] Keynes headed the organization from –. Apparently a little further into the process, in another letter Fresca reports that she has ‘found that with the exception of about six important families of tunes, all the rest are variations on one tune’. ‘Simplification,’ she says, ‘can go no further.’ Then Fresca sends word to Mrs M. that she’ll soon send her her manuscript and in the same letter commiserates with Marco about ‘the article’ (possibly a rejection) and suggests the Cornhill Magazine. In a later letter she 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay asks: ‘Could [she] have her ms back from Lamb.’ She wants to send the last bit off to Vaughan Williams. ‘It’s alright musically,’ she says, ‘whatever it is otherwise.’ Then she adds: ‘OUP still hasn’t replied.’ And then: I plucked up the courage to write to Vaughan Williams & ask for my stuff back. I immediately got an answer. He is setting about writing a refutation, has asked to send my stuff to Miss Karpleles! [Maud Karpeles –, advisor to Douglas Kennedy, director of the English Folk Dance and Song Society.] Also for advance/advice comments. And then he wants me to publish thesis and refutation together. I think it an enchanting idea. Of course if his refutation convinces me then all my stuff can go in the waste paper basket—but I don’t think it will be easy to refute my evidence. But if the refutation doesn’t convince me & I think my argument as good as ever then the publication of the lot won’t hurt the soundest argument & will be a stimulating sort of […]



I see my first copy of Fresca’s folk song monograph, entitled The Irish Contribution to English Traditional Tunes, when on a second visit to The Mill House. I find a portion of the manuscript labeled ‘Chapter Three’ on which Fresca has written in pencil: ‘first version. This went to OUP [Oxford University Press]. It is dead.’ It seems to mark the end of the project. However, there is a tentative tone to this chapter suggesting the contrary. Fresca opens by saying that we have established ‘what happened to English traditional song that caused it to change radically in the nineteenth century’— but we still need to establish ‘when,’ ‘how and why.’ She recognizes this is puzzling and hopes that even if she’s not quite right, her work will encourage others to look further into this question. Fresca notes the similarity between English tunes and those Sharp found in the Appalachians among immigrants from England and Scotland. If the emigration to the US had taken place in  or even  she says—then this dates the arrival of the tune change in England to the mid-eighteenth century—giving time for the tunes to establish themselves in England. Fresca likes these dates because they coincide with the arrival of the Irish in England for ‘road, canal, and railway digging’. Fresca attributes the lag between the introduction of Irish tunes to England and their publication by collectors simply to the fact that collecting was not in vogue until some time into the nineteenth century. The bigger question is why would ‘conservative country people’ admit foreign tunes and in some cases let them displace their own music? The English, she says, did not accept Irish tunes wholesale. Fresca admits she does not know much 

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Part Seven about how ‘English ballad tunes came to be attached to Irish tunes’, but she cites Irish historian Patrick Weston Joyce who describes how English songs were sung to Irish airs when they caught on in Ireland. She stresses the degree to which English reception of Irish tunes was not passive, but ‘positive’ and ‘an act of creation’. She says that it might be that our forefathers were ‘redressing an imbalance by adding to our domestic and less sensuous airs, the romantic element that had been lacking til then’. But why then? Irish tunes had been around before, so why, Fresca asks, did ‘our attitude to these airs’ ‘change’ so ‘fundamentally’ at this period? At this point she advances a theory which links the introduction of the Celtic element to English folk song to the ‘Romantic Revival’ in the other arts. She notes that unlike other artistic forms that characterize the Romantic movement, however, songs didn’t dispense with form—they are actually more formal than the English tunes they displace. She asserts that there’s no reactionary element in traditional song, as there was in the realm of literature against ‘the preceding classical period, against the formalism which had in its poorer manifestations become empty and dry’; ‘Our tunes had been more or less the same for hundreds of years.’ Fresca suggests as an alternative theory that ‘working class susceptibility to romantic emotion—the artistic mood which reaches out towards individualism, solitude, melancholy, and unsatisfied desire—must have been intensified by the passion of hostility which the introduction of machinery aroused and the squalour of mass-living which mass production brought in its train’. She adds that while we tend to discuss traditional songs as the province of country rather than town folk, there’s no support for this. And, of course, ‘it’s only quite recently that more people have come to live in towns than in the country’.



Among the Marx and Lamb letters, I find one in which Lamb explains the genesis of Fresca’s folk song project. Lamb writes to Veronica Wedgwood: ‘Like many musical scholars [Fresca] was puzzled why native English music, so flourishing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries should have become virtually extinct in a few years. It was from speculating on this question that she came to make an intensive study of English folk song. She was struck by the fact that what may be termed non-technically the Celtic element in English folk song made so late an appearance in the great collections. This led her to make an elaborate study of the “Celtic” element and to advance a theory as to where it came from.’ The folk song study appears to have begun in collaboration with Tippett. Fresca’s and Tippett’s shared work on folk song dated back to their staging of Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, which consists of folk songs, in Boosbeck in the early 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay s. Jeffrey Mark also comes in here. The trajectory of Fresca’s musical career, from Gibbons to Purcell to folk song, makes sense. And certainly the engagement of both Tippett and Fresca in working-class issues meant that interest in a form of art generated by the people fit. Maybe Fresca’s burlesque actor neighbours, the Grossmiths, had a hand in it . . . (although Cecil Sharp is very disparaging about music hall and its detrimental effects on English folk). Fresca has helped Tippett look for folk songs for his ‘Robert of Sicily’. And in honour of her work, Tippett has dedicated his – ‘Fantasy Sonata’ (Piano Sonata, No. ) to Fresca. I am able to chart the work on the monograph via letters Tippett sent Fresca reproduced in Tippett’s Selected Letters. Tippett refers to the project as ‘our book’ and in the letters makes frequent contributions. In , for example, Tippett adds a lengthy ‘pps’ to a letter: No. I’m thinking that what you are on in your job [ie studying folksongs]—that there’s masses of work to do & I don’t think it’s all certainly in the British Museum. Also, I think the sorting out & composition of all this material out of [Cecil] Sharp & the B[eggar’s] O[pera] is not to be done in a day. One thing will lead to another. To establish our contention to use the B.O. as one of the prime standards of English texts, we shall have to go into so much surrounding it all. If you have, for instance, now got ‘town’ and ‘country’ groups, then it’s good to see how it works out elsewhere & then on to other articulations, such as dance rhythmical tunes—wh[ich] will tend to appear in the gay ‘town’ section, then coming bang out of country dancing! I’m sure the question of time-signature is a fruitful one. Because we shall probably eventually get a sort of ladder—the root in romantic, immediate expression—what Sharp went to find—& the heaven of the ladder will be the classical, artistic, turned, articulated stuff. And what we shall seek to show is the elements wh[ich] were at work to form it: such as the necessary formulation of dancing, the influence of poetic forms, the artistic feeling in the composer. The B.O. is a good English work of art because it faces both ways—it protests against the excessive influence of the foreigner & the romantic inchoate expressiveness of the Sharp ‘natural’ peasant. Hence again we erect it (& it doesn’t matter altogether how factual all this is) as a standard for our day. There must be cross-currents in art & tension—& again now there are two ways to face (if not !)—against the German Schwermut, against the jazz-nostalgia, against the Celtic Twilight. Positively, on the other hand, for the roots in the ‘town’ and ‘country’ streams of English tradition, for balance between them, for full artistic integrity— & a historical immediate sense of the good models. 

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Part Seven This sounds like a text book, but so much can hang on one essay-vide Eliot. The real thrill will be the writing—when every phrase must tell & concur to bring out the attitude. It is not the ‘country’ as such that we define against the ‘town’. It is the nostalgic, vague hovering with the excellent quality of folk expressiveness, as opposed to the consciously artistic articulation of it. Sharp was probably stymied before it. It got him on his weak, undeveloped side—so he either toned it up with jokey fortes, or tried to present it under the guise of the irrational peasant. We show, if we can, that in an articulated, mastered form, it is just good, English & highly presentable, differing in no necessary inferiority, or superiority, from the gay stuff. What we refuse in [is?] inchoate subjectiveness (except as folklore) & Sharp’s subterfuges & lack of mastery, let alone maturity. M. In a subsequent letter, Tippett continues: ‘The enclosed is what I’ve been trying to plan out—feeling our way to limits for our book. You’ll see that I’ve shifted the ground at the end. I see much more clearly now where our “Little England” attitude won’t carry sufficiently. That’s again in the Sharp past.’ And, as Tippett is about to be released from Wormwood Scrubs, he tells Evelyn Maude to tell Fresca he has found some more ABBA [abba] tunes. I find another much later reference to the collaboration in a  The Listener article, a review of E. D. Mackerness’s A Social History of English Music, Le Roi Jones’s Blues People: Negro America in White America and Wilfrid Mellers’s Music in a New Found Land, under the title ‘A People and their Music’. ‘For some years up to the war,’ Tippett begins, ‘I was occasionally occupied with a woman friend of mine (who did all the real work) examining the question why the folk-songs which Cecil Sharp uncovered were quite different from those tunes printed in Chappell’s Popular Music of Olden Time () or in the ballad operas of  years or more earlier; and why these songs had never come to the surface before. We came to the conclusion that the Sharp-type songs were Irish in origin (we found exemplars for all of them in the Irish collections) and that they came to England with the immigrant Irish labourers of the Industrial Revolution.’ ‘This,’ he goes on to say, ‘is a primitive example of an attempt to find the “why” of musical expression in a country’s social history.’ Tippett admits that Mackerness’s study is a far more elaborate effort than was his and ‘Miss Allinson’s’: and whereas he and Fresca were ‘sociological amateurs’, Mackerness is an expert. However, Tippett finds Mackerness’s book ‘dull’. While he likes Mackerness’s chapter on ‘the popular musical expression of the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution’, he’s disappointed when Mackerness makes no ‘attempt to show how the intervals and 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay rhythms of this music really helped to form our national musical temper. That,’ he asserts, ‘is the kind of monograph which could be immensely rewarding.’ Tippett sees the ‘excitement’ in writing about the ‘social circumstances of the Negro American’s characteristic music having conquered the world’. He asserts that ‘we are all involved in jazz, whether we are black, white, American, or nonAmerican. Consequently the whole question of the relation of a people or its land to its music takes on a much richer connotation nowadays.’ America, for Tippett, is ‘the paradigmatic crucible because everyone is there’. The ‘exhausted and stale’ quality of Mackerness’s book—especially alongside those of Jones and Mellers— ‘reinforces [Tippett’s] fear that our [English] music is too often complacent, flaccid, slick, where it should be vibrant’. Maybe, he says, ‘we need more “Blues People”’—but the blues is the invention of the American Negro, not the West Indian or the African’, and we don’t need ‘serialism, which rarely liberates’. Maybe, we need Dada, although Dada is destructive. ‘If we are to have any further musical history,’ Tippett concludes, ‘we must create living music at every level somehow out of the turmoil [. . .] Because the turmoil is where we live now, whether the roar of the industrial city, or the “noise in the pool at noon.”’ The fact that Tippett remembers his work with Fresca as he writes this review seems to me to go beyond the fact that it approximates these others in its capacity as a social history. Like Jones’s and Mellers’s books, Fresca’s work represents an ‘attempt to show how the intervals and rhythms of this music really helped to form our national musical temper’. Den [Newton] also appears to have become involved with the folk song manuscript—hence Fresca’s suggestion that he aid Michael with its completion after her death. I go back to what Tippett has said about this in TTCB and find my next place to look for clues: In her own research, she questioned Cecil Sharp’s assertion of racial purity of English folk song. She compared his tunes with those in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, in The Beggar’s Opera and Chappell’s collection, Popular Music of the Olden Time, coming to the conclusion that they were deeply influenced by Irish folk-music, due to the emigration of labourers during the Industrial Revolution. She wrote all this up and sent a copy to Vaughan Williams, asking if he would contribute a preface for publication. V. W. was outraged that his cherished English folk-songs should turn out to be impure! At her death, Fresca left her book to me, hoping I would arrange for its publication. But I was rather dilatory about it and in the end, presented it (rather ironically) to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library.

 

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Part Seven The Vaughan Williams Memorial Library (VWML) at the Cecil Sharp House is closed when I arrive on foot from Camden Road overland station. The redheaded, Welsh-accented receptionist busies herself while I wait. Several classes are in progress downstairs in the basement area next to the café. Twenty or so black-clad students chant and move in unison. The librarian is ill, and his assistant, with whom I have corresponded, is at a class at University College London so the archivist, new to the job, graciously opens the library for me. I look first at correspondence between Tippett and Maud Karpeles. It is  and Karpeles has gone back to Fresca’s work as she researches her book about folk song in Newfoundland. Using the correspondence, I track Tippett’s handling of the manuscript after Fresca’s death and I establish the route via which the monograph found its way to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. On November , , Karpeles writes to Tippett at Parkside, Corsham, Wiltshire. Dear Mr Tippett, In going through old files I have come across some correspondence which I had twenty years ago with Miss Francesca Allinson on the subject of Irish tunes and in particular the abba form. Apparently she sent me an article which I returned and which had previously been sent to R. V. W [Ralph Vaughan Williams]. I should very much like to reread the article as I think it might throw some light on the tunes which I found in Newfoundland and which I am preparing for publication. Do you happen to know where the manuscript is, and if it is in your possession would it be possible for me to borrow it? Please forgive me for bothering you with this request. I shall be very grateful if you can help me. Yours sincerely, Maud Karpeles. A day later, Tippett responds to ‘Dr. Maud Karpeles, O.B.E. at the International Folk Music Council,  Princess Court, Queensway, London W.’: Dear Miss Karpeles, Many thanks for your letter. I still have Miss Allinson’s monograph on Irish tunes. I was a kind of sitting collaborator with her. When she died she left the manuscript to me, having previously expressed the hope that I might be able to have it published. I did make an effort to do this with Oxford University Press but the project fell through. I have since many 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay times thought I ought to proceed further, and I had spoken of the matter to Ursula Vaughan Williams. But as usual I have been so overwhelmed with work of one sort or other that this matter gets consistently postponed. I will now hunt out the manuscript again and send it to you for perusal. I had better send also the music examples which exemplify the argument, though they’ll be known to you already. Yours sincerely, Michael Tippett On November , Tippett writes to Karpeles: ‘I have a feeling that somewhere or other there was a clean copy of the mss. but I’m quite unable to find it.’ He encloses ‘what Miss Allinson calls her master-copy in the rather rough state which I find it now is, and the sheaf of tunes with it’. He says he ‘welcomes very much any comment you have to make about the possibility that after all it should be published in some form when it had been properly edited’. Several months later, on January , , Karpeles responds to Tippett saying that she thinks the work contains ‘a great deal of interesting material’, but that it seems ‘to be somewhat inconclusive’. She’s not convinced by the argument and finds it hard to follow, ‘possibly some of the script is missing’. This said, she feels that ‘the result of so much work should not be hidden away’ but she’s not sure what ‘can be done with the material’. ‘It’s not ready for publication,’ but she thinks that ‘some scholar might find it useful as raw material to work on’. Karpeles suggests that Tippett deposit the manuscript in the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library at the Cecil Sharp House. Tippett agrees with Karpeles. He still believes, nonetheless, that he has ‘a cleaner and more definitive copy’ somewhere in his house. He mentions a chat he has had with Michael Yates in Dublin recently. Yates was the Folk Music Journal editor and folklorist who retraced Cecil Sharp’s steps in the Appalachian Mountains. ‘He made me feel quite certain that Miss Allinson’s theory is wrong,’ that in fact, ‘the version of the tunes found in the Irish collection are all the same English in provenance. Yates is quite sure that the only absolutely Irish material is Gaelic and of a different kind.’ Karpeles adds: ‘There is certainly a distinction between tunes which accompany Gaelic and English texts, although there is a certain degree of mutual influence. The folk music of a bilingual country is an interesting problem. I hope that some day an intensive study will be made, and when this is done, Miss Allinson’s work should be very useful, even if the conclusions are not correct.’ I contact Oxford University Press to see if they have records of Fresca’s submission, or its rejection. An email from OUP informs me that they only keep rejected materials for a fixed amount of time. 

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Part Seven



I look next at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library’s version of Fresca’s folk song manuscript (the one Tippett sent to Karpeles). This ‘master copy’, much more substantial than that which I’d found at The Mill House, approximates some  pages. The table of contents page promises two parts and seven chapters. Suggesting that this version postdates the Mill House copy, I find a more assured voice here. Fresca makes her point on the first page. She records the successes of folk song collectors such as Sandys, Davies, John Broadwood, Chappell, through Sharp and Vaughan Williams, who together accumulated ‘a vast treasury of airs—rich, expressive and infinitely beautiful—such as few countries can equal, let alone surpass’. But, she says, what makes these tunes so remarkable is not that they are new tunes, but that they are tunes ‘of a new type’. The examination of this type, she says, will constitute the focus of her work. Before getting to this question, however, she proposes to describe the traditional songs that were heard up until about . (This piece appears to have been meant to precede the Mill House piece of the manuscript). Fresca identifies this date as a moment when the older tunes ‘had passed’ ‘their heyday’ and ‘the society which had fostered them’ began to change radically (although the new songs wouldn’t replace them for another half century). Fresca borrows her definition of ‘traditional tune’ and of the peasant class from Hungarian composer Béla Bartók. She proposes to consider three things: ‘the temperament and character of the people who expressed themselves in tunes; the society in whose midst they flourished; and the uses to which they were put’. Fresca continues: ‘[t]he temperament and character of the people who made and modified the tunes can be gathered from the tunes themselves. Their music is that of an active and virile people, not given to languishing sighs and feminine passivity, and their temperament is vigorous, gay and sensible. The music is direct and rather bare, without circumlocution or evasion, and little given to sensuousness. . . it is the music of an outward-looking people, not dissatisfied with life and socially well adapted.’ This kind of national temperament, Fresca claims, holds true. Even if those of the Elizabethan period lived very different lives, ‘in essence our character and our emotional attitude toward life have remained the same as theirs’. It is the ‘condition of life’ that has however changed. And this is where  and enclosure comes in. According to Fresca, this meant a change in the ‘fundamental and intimate social unit’ which had previously seen ‘the lord of the manor, the parson, the artisan, the yeoman farmer and the cottager’ living in close proximity. It was in terms of this proximity or intimacy that traditional songs were ‘fashioned’ and preserved. 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay Before anthropologists began collecting folk songs, the preservation of those songs depended on the willingness of ‘cultivated people’ to record them. She concludes: ‘If in the Elizabethan age [. . .] poor man and rich man had been sealed off from each other as they so largely were during the nineteenth century, we should in all probability know nothing about the early traditional tune.’ Fresca emphasizes the importance of the intermixing and reciprocity of social classes and its impact on traditional tunes. She uses Pepys, singing with his servants, choosing them for their sweet voices. ‘[T]he musical instincts that cultivated music fosters in its performers and amateurs, filtered into those classes whose particular music was that of traditional song and modified their instincts.’ Fresca makes a comparison between traditional music’s infiltration into the fabric of life in the Elizabethan period and jazz of today, although she feels traditional music was even more tightly interwoven. Every trade, she says, had its ‘special song’. This brings to mind Fresca’s work on Orlando Gibbons’s ‘London Street Cryes’. While Fresca acknowledges that with the passing of the Elizabethan period the ‘advancement of traditional and other music’ was never the same, she appears to be skeptical that this was purely due to the Puritanism of the seventeenth century. She quotes from Bunyan and from Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler () to suggest that music continued to play an important role in people’s lives and to show that society was still integrated. Tom D’Urfey’s musical composition for Charles II, Fresca contends, was important to the music of the subsequent period. Charles II liked to be able to ‘beat time’ to music and D’Urfey wrote songs and verses with great popular appeal. D’Urfey’s work heralded the popularity of the ballad opera. From here, Fresca addresses The Beggar’s Opera and the success of ballad operas. While The Beggar’s Opera was initially meant as a ‘counterblast’ to the monopoly of Italian opera, its huge popularity spurred a trend for ballad operas. This boom lasted for about seven years, says Fresca, until the English traditional tunes used for the operas were replaced by foreign and after the mid-eighteenth century the comic opera took the ballad opera’s place. Fresca suggests that a new element enters English folk song in the nineteenth century—and she identifies that element as Celtic. In order to counter claims that the English influenced the Celtic rather than the other way around, she says that the Celtic tradition remains the same, whereas the English changes. The Celtic element takes the form of abba songs.



When Fresca decides to write about folk song does she anticipate how controversial her views on the matter will prove? Does she foresee how difficult it will 

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Part Seven

 Cecil Sharp.

 Ralph Vaughan Williams (1938).

be to get past Sharp (–; pictured at left) and Vaughan Williams (– ; at right)? Cambridge-educated Sharp began collecting folk songs in  or  subsequent to an encounter with a group of Morris dancers at Headington near Oxford in  and a stint in Australia. He began by collecting, arranging, publishing, and lecturing about the songs—then tried to get them into the schools. Following a disagreement with the Folk Song Society, Sharp wrote, and self-published in , English Folk Song: Some Conclusions. From early on in his English Folk Song Sharp makes the distinction between ‘art song’ and ‘folk song’, the former being ‘the composition of the individual’ and the latter ‘a communal and racial product, the expression, in musical idiom, of aims and ideals that are primarily national in character’. Folk song, he asserts, is the ‘wild flower of nature’, whereas art music represents the ‘gorgeous blooms of the cultivated garden’. He concurs that at the folk song’s origin there must have been an individual, but what is important is ‘the method by which it has been preserved and handed down from one generation to another’. He concludes that folk songs are communal in two senses: in terms of authorship and also in the way in which they reflect the mind of the community. Art music is ‘the work of the individual, and expresses his own personal ideals and aspirations’, a quickly composed tune ‘committed to paper [and] forever fixed in one unalterable form’. Folk music, by contrast, ‘is the product of a race, and reflects feeling and tastes that are communal rather than personal; it is always 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay in solution; its creation is never completed; while, at every moment of its history, it exists not in one form but in many.’ In terms of its evolution, Sharp compares folk song to a pebble: ‘just as the pebble on the sea-shore is rounded and polished by the action of the waves’, so the individual singer ‘suggests’ and his suggestions are ‘tested and weighed by the community’, ‘accepted or rejected by their verdict’. He compares the evolution of folk songs to the evolution of ‘a species of the animal and vegetable world’: ‘[t]hose tune variations which appeal to the community will be perpetuated, as against those which attract the individual only. The nature of that appeal may be of two kinds. It may be an appeal to the sense of beauty, i.e. aesthetic in quality; or it may appeal to the understanding, i.e. expressive in character. Which of these will be the determining factor in selection will depend, ultimately, upon the racial characteristics of the community. The Celt, will, in all probability, be attracted by those variations which are primarily sensuous, and which satisfy his somewhat ornate feeling for beauty; whilst in the case of the Anglo-Saxon those variations which make for self-expression will be given the preference.’ ‘[N]ational peculiarities,’ Sharp concludes, ‘must ultimately determine the specific characteristics of the folk songs of the different nations.’  Sharp uses another image, this time that of a flock of starlings, to describe how the folk song develops: at a distance ‘the bounding lines of the moving and living mass’ look ‘smooth and even’, but on a closer look its edges are ‘rough and jagged’. Individual birds create irregularities by ‘darting out at acute angles to the line of flight’; sometimes they return to the flock, sometimes other birds follow them. ‘The individual invents . . . ; the community selects.’ Sharp concedes that ‘communal composition is unthinkable’; ‘the racial character of a ballad or song,’ he says, ‘is due . . . not to communal invention, but to communal choice.’ In a chapter on ‘conscious and unconscious music’, Sharp distinguishes between art music, which is conscious and intentional, and folk music, which he considers unconscious. Folk music ‘proceed[s] from out of the heart and soul of a nation’ and, therefore, ‘it embodies those feelings which are shared in common by the race which has fashioned it.’ Sharp compares the history of music to the history of language: ‘literature has been built upon the speech of the common people; . . . art music has been founded on their music.’ For Sharp, the music of the common people is ‘genuine and true’. In the last chapter of his book, Sharp expounds on the salutary impact of folk song on English music. It represents a means to prevent England from ‘go[ing] down to posterity as the only nation in all Europe incapable of original musical expression’. He hopes that the recent discoveries will lead to an ‘English National School of composition’. Sharp discusses critics who see national characteristics as elements of weakness rather than strength. While he acknowledges the value 

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Part Seven of the universal since it is intelligible regardless of nationality, he nonetheless points out that the products of every existing Western European school of music are ‘characterized by certain attributes which are essentially and demonstrably national’. He argues that ‘[m]usic is a medium of expression analogous to that of language, and, although its range may be less restricted than that of speech, it is itself bound by certain national limitations’. Sharp emphasizes the communal and racial aspects of folk music: ‘the natural musical idiom of a nation will, therefore, be found in its purest and most unadulterated form in its folk music.’ Why has English music waned? he asks. Was it the grand tour tradition that had people returning home and ‘turn[ing] up [their] noses’ at things English? Or was it the Puritan influence? Whatever the reason, English music was ‘practically moribund by the beginning of the nineteenth century’. Sharp is optimistic about the capacity of English music to resuscitate itself. He predicts that ‘[w]hen every English child is, as a matter of course, made acquainted with the folk songs of his own country, then, from whatever class the musician of the future may spring, he will speak in the national musical idiom’. A constant theme in Sharp’s work is the importance of folk song to English heritage. The common perception that England was a musical wasteland after Purcell is challenged, according to Sharp, by recent discoveries in the realm of folk song. Whereas the English have had to turn to the Continent for their music, or to the music hall for their entertainment, folk song offers a more English and a more edifying alternative. It presents an opportunity to create ‘Englishmen’ rather than ‘citizens of the world’, as has been the case. Both Ralph Vaughan Williams and Maud Karpeles were Sharp supporters. (Interestingly, like Fresca, Karpeles was of German-Jewish descent. Her dates were –, making her  years Sharp’s junior). In a  appreciation prefacing a later edition of English Folk Song, Vaughan Williams writes: ‘[i]t was left to Sharp to declare, in no half-hearted manner, that here was something of supreme beauty which had grown up, as part of our life, with our language and our customs. And he set to work both by precept and by practice to enable, at all events, the younger generation to recapture their great heritage of song which their fathers had nearly let slip through their fingers.’ In her September  preface to the same edition, Karpeles writes (this, at the same time that she is writing to Tippett): ‘[w]ith a few exceptions, [the] songs [of the inhabitants of British descent of the Appalachian Mountains] were the traditional songs that their forefathers had brought with them from the British Isles, and such changes as had been wrought during the course of time in the melodies and the texts owed little or nothing to extraneous influences, but were the result of oral transmission working within the community.’ 

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Fresca’s niece, Sonya Allinson, mentions Vaughan Williams’s involvement with Fresca’s manuscript, as do Lamb and Fresca herself. Tippett, too, remembers that when Fresca ‘sent a copy to Vaughan Williams, asking if he would contribute a preface for publication [he] was outraged that his cherished English folk-songs should turn out to be impure!’ I know that Vaughan Williams had planned to write a prefatory refutation suggesting that while he recognized the value of the work he could not entirely endorse it. In David Clarke’s work, in a footnote, I find mention of remarks made on the manuscript by Vaughan Williams. Clarke quotes Vaughan Williams as having written: ‘this is not a merely academic question, the whole edifice of English music depends on it [. . .] we cannot view this matter in a calm, detached manner, our very musical life seems to depend upon it.’ These remarks suggest that Fresca’s views are radical and potentially threatening. In a letter I find in the Hogarth Press archive file at the University of Reading, written not long before Fresca’s death in early January , Fresca writes to Leonard Woolf asking that he give her permission to ‘peddle a book that I am sure would be of no use to the Hogarth Press elsewhere’. She describes it as ‘a technical monograph on the Irish Contribution to English Traditional Tunes’ and as having ‘ pages of musical illustration’. She continues: ‘It is a highly controversial book and I have already shown them the preliminary version for I felt that you wouldn’t care for it and I didn’t wish to tempt the gods by asking you first. OUP were interested by the first version I sent them and now that the final one is nearly completed I should like your sanction.’ According to Clarke, there are ‘three differently typed transcriptions of comments on the book made by Vaughan Williams, and two letters from Oxford University Press: one to Allinson (dated  September ), and one to Tippett (dated  November )’, the latter suggesting that Tippett did pursue publication after Fresca’s death. I find these on a second visit to the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library in  and I am convinced that they were not there on my first trip. In one rather warm letter in which he apologizes for his delay in responding, Vaughan Williams suggests Fresca send the manuscript to the Folk Song Journal, but advises that she include both his and Miss Karpeles’s comments ‘as people are inclined to take as gospel everything they see in print’. In an attempt to better understand Vaughan Williams’s response to Fresca’s manuscript, I explore Vaughan Williams’s nationalism. Could his nationalism have led him to press Oxford University Press not to publish Fresca’s work? How might Vaughan Williams’s friendship with OUP editor Hubert Foss have 

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Part Seven

 Handwritten comments by Ralph Vaughan Williams (VWML).

 Transcription of handwritten comments by RVW (VWML).

perhaps impacted his decision on Fresca’s book. Significantly, I learn that Foss remains close to Vaughan Williams after he resigns his editorship at OUP in  due to stress. He writes a biography of Vaughan Williams (published by Harrap in ) to which Vaughan Williams himself contributed a ‘Musical Autobiography’, an unusual gesture for the very private Vaughan Williams. As part of an effort to reevaluate the nationalism of figures like Vaughan Williams, critic Alain Frogley suggests that Vaughan Williams’s compositions 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay

 Transcription of handwritten comments by RVW (VWML).

often ‘go in a markedly different direction than his published verbal pronouncements’. Frogley argues that Vaughan Williams is actually very international in his tastes and influences, that when, for example, he was giving his lectures on National Music at Bryn Mawr in  he was composing his Fourth Symphony which Frogley describes as ‘notorious as a violent and convulsive work, dominated by grinding dissonances of an aggressively modernistic and, it might be argued, international kind’. I pick up Vaughan Williams’s National Music in order to get a sense of what he sounded like in the early s. I find ideas with which I know Fresca would have been highly sympathetic alongside others, mostly those that are clearly anti-experimental, that appear to be antithetical to her vision of the world of music. In the opening lecture of the National Music series, Vaughan Williams insists that when a composer composes it is to reach and please others and who, he asks, is more likely to be receptive to a composer’s work than those with whom he shares race, tradition, and culture. It is those of the composer’s own nation or his/her own ‘homogeneous group’ to whom he/she appeals. Countering claims that music represents a universal language, Vaughan Williams argues that music does have a nationality. Any artist, he 

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Part Seven insists, who tries to be cosmopolitan will fail. He asks: ‘[w]as anyone ever more local, or even parochial, than Shakespeare?’ We might think of Bach as universal but, Vaughan Williams asserts, ‘no one could be more local, in his origins, his life work, and his fame for nearly a hundred years after his death, than Bach’. Bach did study foreign music, Vaughan Williams concedes, but the foundations of his music are his Teutonic predecessors and the popular hymns of his own people. One of Vaughan Williams’s main lines of argument is that musical composition results from collaboration: according to Vaughan Williams, the artist does not create alone. ‘The actual process of artistic invention, whether it be by voice, verse or brush, presupposes an audience; someone to hear, read or see . . . a composer wishes to make himself intelligible. This surely is the prime motive of the act of artistic invention and to be intelligible he must clothe his inspiration in such forms as the circumstances of time, place, and subject dictate.’ Thus nationalism is un-self-conscious and should be. Just as the artist does not create alone, so genius does not spring from nowhere. Vaughan Williams follows this with several passages that catch my eye because they pertain to Fresca’s lack of interest in celebrity. ‘Great men of music,’ writes Vaughan Williams, ‘close periods, they do not inaugurate them. The pioneering work, the finding of new paths, is left to the smaller men.’ Wagner’s ‘mighty river’, he suggests, ‘is the confluence of smaller streams, Weber, Marschner and Liszt’. Vaughan Williams ‘define[s] genius as the right man in the right place at the right time’. ‘[W]e shall never know of the numbers of “mute and inglorious Miltons” who failed because the place and time were not ready for them.’ Vaughan Williams contends that Bach would have been unable to create without the ‘generations of smaller composers’ that preceded him. In many senses Fresca is one of Vaughan Williams’s ‘mute and inglorious Miltons’.



Fresca is diplomatic in her critique of Sharp. She does not undermine Sharp’s contention that there is a racial component to folk tradition. Rather, she challenges some of his ideas about the potential uplift folk song can bring in terms of national pride. However, there is something about the moment at which Fresca chooses to expound her theory that likely made it harder for the establishment to accept it. On the eve and in the early years of World War II patriotism is being promoted via the arts. Examples include Kenneth Clark’s Recording Britain scheme, W. J. Turner’s Britain in Pictures series, and British Official War Artists, in all of which Fresca’s friends and family are involved. 

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No Remaining, No Place to Stay Fresca, like so many artists of her generation, is caught between a love of things English and a desire to escape patriotism and to embrace new ideas and freedoms coming from abroad, as was Virginia Woolf, famously, in her  Three Guineas. ‘For,’ the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’ And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child’s ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world. The same things that draw Vaughan Williams to folk song also draw Fresca, that is, that it is the music of the people. However, Fresca, perhaps freer in her obscurity, embraces experimentalism and modernism in a measure that Vaughan Williams, at least in his verbal pronouncements, does not or cannot in . Looking at Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra (–), Clarke argues that Tippett had reservations about the English musical culture of Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst not due to its sound, but rather ‘its perceived technical limitations and ideological connotations. Regarding folk music in particular,’ Clarke contends, ‘[Tippett] seems to have reached a position during the course of the s where both its potential for integration into a high-art aesthetic and its socio-cultural meanings could be reassessed and implemented.’ What Tippett and Fresca are trying to show, Clarke argues, is the non-purity of the English folk songs. Sharp had a preference for songs orally transmitted and for ‘the unlettered peasant artist’ figure (he qualified his rural/urban dichotomy). Fresca argues that there is a distinction within the tunes Sharp collected between those which carry on the old tradition and others characterized by the ‘“strangeness of their melodic line, of their form and the emotions they evoke.”’ She identifies these latter tunes as Irish. What Clarke sees as important is Fresca’s and Tippett’s efforts not to dismiss folk song, but to ‘reconceive it from within’. This parallels, for Clarke, Tippett’s attitude towards English musical traditions; that is, they were ‘not to be rejected in favour of some kind of internationalist agenda, but to be embraced without specious nostalgic distinctions between urban and rural’. The Beggar’s Opera, says Clarke, is key here, in the sense that, as Tippett put it, it 

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Part Seven ‘faces both ways’. This phrase beautifully sums up Fresca’s and Tippett’s own openness but, at the same time, it is a reminder of the in-betweenness of a whole generation which grew up amidst the upheaval, both productive and destructive, of a world at war.



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PART EIGHT

Love Under the Shadow of Death I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. (Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’) The River Stour stretches  miles from eastern Cambridge via Cavendish, Sudbury, Dedham Vale, and into the North Sea at Harwich. It takes its name from the Celtic word for strong. The river has been painted by Constable (Dedham Vale, ) and by Gainsborough, who was born in Sudbury. John Nash created a lithograph of the river titled Early Summer to illustrate Adrian Bell’s Men and the Fields (): ‘In this print the banks of the River Stour are burgeoning, its flanks golden with corn, and the river willows, long unpollarded, have grown luxuriant in the summer sun.’ The banks of the River Stour were also home to Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines’ East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing at Dedham, Essex,  miles north of St Osyth, founded in  (later at Benton End, Hadleigh, Suffolk). Much of the River Stour is today designated by the environmental agency as an Area of Outstanding Beauty. Significantly at its upper end, the river passes to the east of Haverhill, close to The Mill House at Streetly End, Fresca’s home in . What happened in the week prior to Saturday, April , ? Headlines in the The Times of April  predict a victory over Nazism in World War II. They include ‘Whole Ruhr Cut Off—American First and Ninth Armies Meet— Armoured Divisions Driving into Germany’, and ‘Third Army’s Thrust— Consolidation of Infantry—Fighting near Cassel’. On April , Ohrdruf extermination camp, the first Nazi concentration camp, is liberated by American 

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Part Eight

 Constable’s ‘Dedham Vale’ 1802.  John Nash’s lithograph of the River Stour, Early Summer, for Adrian Bell’s Men and the Fields.



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Love Under the Shadow of Death troops. It is, somewhat counter-intuitively, against this backdrop of victory that Fresca decides to take her own life. Tippett describes Fresca’s movements on the day of her suicide in his autobiography. She’s ‘[d]epressed by ill-health and the war’. Despite efforts on the part of her family to prevent her from committing suicide, as she has indicated that she might, Fresca slips away from the house and she travels by taxi to Clare, a village on the Cambridgeshire/Suffolk border. Here, Tippett writes, she ‘threw herself from a bridge into the River Stour, in imitation of Virginia Woolf ’. He continues: ‘She was wearing a tiny silver cross which Evelyn [Maude] had originally given to me, but which (insensitively) I had given to Fresca. She left two letters—one for Judy Wogan, the other for me: also a tiny photograph, taken during our  tour of Germany and Czechoslovakia, of myself with a little child; and a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets open at No. LVII.’ Niece Sonya Allinson has a different version of the day’s events. According to Sonya, Fresca’s destination on that last day is her wood, Martin’s Grove, to the southeast of Cambridge, in St Osyth near Colchester. Sonya puts Fresca on a train from Haverhill to Clare, presumably en route to the wood. It’s likely Fresca intends to take the train all the way to the end of the line at Marks Tey station (just South of Colchester), but instead gets off just three stops along the journey (Haverhill – Sturmer – Stoke – Clare). It is possible Fresca does take a taxi that day, but perhaps only the approximately five miles to Haverhill from The Mill House, or maybe she walks. Virginia Woolf, fifty-nine at the time of her death to Fresca’s forty-two, has taken her own life on a spring day just four years earlier—on the other side of the war—in the River Ouse in Sussex. I revisit the details of that famous death in order to try to understand what Fresca’s suicide looked like. Woolf walks into the river on Friday, March , , leaving her hat and cane on the riverbank; she has weighted herself down by placing a stone in her pocket. Woolf ’s body is not recovered for almost three weeks, until April , when a group of teenagers out cycling find the body of a woman in a fur coat floating in the river and pull it ashore. ‘The body, it seemed, had not travelled far; it had got wedged either under the piers of the bridge at Southease or in one of the holes dug under the fences on the river banks to prevent cattle getting into the river at low tide. Eventually it had got dislodged and had floated a little way downstream.’ In the film version of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, with the river full and moving rapidly, Nicole Kidman dressed as Woolf in a belted checked coat wades in up to her neck; she’s dragged under. Did Fresca intentionally mimic Woolf? In a letter to Edward Sackville-West about his The Heart’s Assurance song cycle tribute to Fresca, Tippett repeats the identification: ‘The songs,’ he tells Sackville-West, ‘in any case were to the 

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Part Eight

 Fresca’s death certificate (Kit Martin, The Mill House).

memory of a very gentle, lovely person who went the way of Virginia Woolf into a river.’ I try unsuccessfully to locate a coroner’s report for Fresca with letters to the appropriate authorities, and fail to find stories in the local newspapers. A simple announcement of Fresca’s death in The Times of Tuesday, April , , alongside a long list of soldiers, notes that she was ‘Loved by all who knew her’, and asks for ‘No flowers.’ According to Fresca’s death certificate, still among her things at The Mill House, she suffers ‘cardiac failure due to shock from complete immersion in very cold water’. In a second sentence the cause of death is confirmed, using conventional language, as ‘Suicide whilst the balance of her mind was disturbed.’



Tippett is wrong about the number of suicide notes. Enid Marx biographer, Matthew Eve, has seen a letter from Fresca tucked inside a book in Marx’s library, written for Marco and Lamb. I wonder if Marx may have destroyed it much later, too distressed by the memories it evoked. Kit Martin has also seen one written for Cyril and Veronica. This makes four letters, with unfortunately only Tippett’s transcription of his letter from her surviving. Tippett reproduces the letter as follows in his Those Twentieth Century Blues. 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death [Letter from Francesca Allinson] Darling—it’s no good—I can’t hold on any longer. One has to be a better and a stronger character than me to be able to face a life of invalidism. The monograph has kept me going these years—and now I am too exhausted to give it the finishing touches & see it into print. Will you & Den [Douglas Newton] do so for me? You don’t know how long and ardently I have longed to die. I should have loved to have talked it over with you—but that would have involved you in responsibility for my suicide and so it could [not?] be. I have thought endlessly about whether it is wrong—and perhaps it is. But one would have to feel very sure about its wrongness to go on existing as a helpless unhelping unit in the terrible post-war years that are to come. I am to be going during Germany’s agony and don’t want to survive it. If we have to live many lives, may I live near those I now love again and make a better job of living. And may I love a bit better. I can’t live without the warm enfolding love of another person— and in this life I have smashed up my chance of that (in my love too). Darling, forgive me. I am so tired and have been for so many years. All my love, Fresc. I had thought of Fresca’s and Michael Tippett’s relationship as similar to that of Dido and Aeneas to start. Virgil’s ill-fated lovers appealed because they brought together Tippett and Fresca and Purcell. But the note said something different. Fresca’s exit was one that she had long and carefully considered. However, several things in the suicide confuse me. Fresca does not mention her fellow German Jews, as one might expect her to; her sympathies are with the German people more generally, perhaps reflecting her stronger identification as a German than a German Jew. And Fresca’s sense of not having loved well enough seems misplaced, especially in relation to the homosexual Michael Tippett. Perhaps she refers to Judy, or maybe Den.



I visit Clare in , crossing the beautiful Cambridgeshire and Suffolk countryside in Kit Martin’s battered Subaru. Clare station opened in  as a continuation of the line from Marks Tey on the London-to-Colchester line to Sudbury; it stopped passenger operations on March , . The station building is now transformed into a visitors’ centre, but the tracks have been removed. What’s left is a smooth green corridor that gives the place a magical quality. The station was built on the grounds of the local castle. Kit and I cross 

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Part Eight

 The River Stour (Helen Southworth).  Clare Railway Station (Helen Southworth).

the bridge over the river. The river does not appear deep enough for a drowning, but this is October, not April. The fact that Fresca might have been trying to reach Martin’s Grove and St Osyth, at least according to Sonya’s version of events, takes on significance in part due to the similarity between the story of St. Osyth and that of Fresca. I locate medievalist Jocelyn Wogan-Browne’s version of the life of St. Osith, Abbess of St. Osith’s who died circa AD  at Chichester, Essex: According to tradition, Osith was daughter of Frithuwold, the Mercian sub-King of Surrey. Her mother was Wilburga, daughter of King Penda of Mercia. The parents of Osith, with St. Erconwald, founded the monastery of Chertsey (Surrey) in AD . She was born at Quarendon, near Aylesbury (Buckinghamshire), and her childhood was spent in the care of her maternal aunts, the two holy abbesses, St. Edith of Aylesbury and St. Edburga of Bicester. There is an old story that St. Edith sent Osith, one day, to take a book to St. Modwenna at her nunnery, in order to point out to her a particularly interesting passage she had discovered. To reach

 St Osyth.



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Love Under the Shadow of Death Modwenna’s house, Osith had to cross a stream by a bridge. The stream swollen, the wind was high, she was blown into the water and remained there for two days before she was discovered. Edith thought she was safe with Modwenna who, not expecting her visit, was not surprised at her non-appearance. On the third day, Edith, wondering that her pupil had not returned with an answer to her message, came to Modwenna. Great was the consternation of the abbesses when they found they had lost their charge. They went to search for her. Following the banks of the stream, they saw the child lying at the bottom, holding the book open at the passage she had been told to show to Modwenna. The abbesses prayed for her restoration, and commanded her to arise from the water and come to them. This she did: she, her dress and the book being quite uninjured. In other versions of the story, Osyth is executed by beheading. Where she falls a spring issues forth from the ground; she picks up her head and walks to the door of the nunnery where she knocks three times before collapsing. To this day, Osyth’s ghost walks along the priory walls carrying her head one night each year. I imagine that Fresca, too, haunts Clare.



I receive a list of the contents of Fresca’s Hogarth Press Archive folder in advance of my visit to the University of Reading, so the extra chapter of A Childhood, omitted in the final  publication of the book, is not a complete surprise. However, I am taken aback by its subject and its form, so different from the work it had originally brought to a close. In retrospect, I wonder, could one have read it as a prediction of her decision to commit suicide? This discarded last chapter is entitled ‘Adolescence’. Correspondence between Fresca and Leonard Woolf from the Hogarth Press Archive folder shows that it was Fresca who suggested the excision of the last chapter, but that Leonard quickly concurred, concerned that the chapter changed gears too suddenly. The chapter is marked ‘OUT’. The similarity of the handwriting to that I find on the folk song manuscript chapter suggests that Fresca had in fact been the one to write this, possibly when she was visiting the Woolfs at Tavistock Square. I imagine her taking the manuscript from Leonard Woolf and marking the last chapter for omission in a very forthright manner. In this last chapter, Fresca abandons the third person narrative of the earlier chapters and we hear two voices, identified only as ‘’ and ‘’, in dialogue with each other. This is a curious way to end what is in many senses a relatively conventional narrative. It reads more like a play script, perhaps Judy Wogan’s influence. 

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Part Eight Rather than two separate characters, however,  and  appear to represent two parts of a single self. This reminds me of Adrian Allinson’s mention in his autobiography of Fresca’s, and his own, ‘many sidedness’, their doubleness. It suggests that doubles might represent a key to the book as a whole. In places, it appears that  might also be Judy, and perhaps the chapter is a kind of declaration of love, a forbidden love. At one point  says ‘we certainly shall never be able to walk arm in arm’ and  adds ‘Nor kiss each other—.’ However, I favor the self as double interpretation, with self-love and self-esteem as a way to happiness and creativity.  celebrates adolescence; it represents an awakening, a time ‘to do big things’, to ‘explore and discover’ not necessarily places, but rather ‘Truth and Beauty’.  tells : ‘I want us to go out into the world together.’ But  is apprehensive; she fears that ‘we might get lost.’  wants to stay close to home for as long as possible—there’s plenty of time, she thinks, ‘to live’. But  is ‘longing to be off ’. There is so much to do and she fears she will run out of time; she ‘must know everything and do everything’.  describes herself as feeling as if ‘an earthquake or a volcano were breaking [her] up and spitting out fire and flames’. She has ‘such visions at night. [Her] whole body throbs with ideas and discoveries. They come foaming out of [her] and make [her] almost boil over with excitement.’ She believes she will ‘be an exceedingly great person when [she has] finished turning into [herself ]’.  advocates caution: she suggests one of them should ‘go on being themselves’ in order to avoid ‘fearful difficulties’. Next,  outlines a very important discovery that she has just made, that is that the world only exists in relation to oneself; ‘as I change inside,’ she asserts, ‘so the world changes outside.’ ‘I can never decide where I leave off and the world begins. And the most bewildering part of it all is that I’m not even alike all over. I seem to be made of different bits, all of them contradictory.’ ‘Perhaps,’ she says ‘it’s easier when one is older; maybe the bits sort themselves out and make a pattern. But now, when I feel restless, I get into a terrible muddle, and I often want to break out of my own world, the one I’ve made, and get into another. And I can’t. It gives me a horrible feeling of being shut up.’ In this sense, there is no such thing as real people, asserts . She mentions her Jewish friend Thea from chapter  of A Childhood (‘Sunday’): was she fine, as we believed, or was she in fact ‘horrid’, as her mother thought? Is there any way to tell?  finds this uncertainty horribly unsettling, and when she says to  ‘I hate you,’  responds with ‘so do I.’ Then  moves on to assert that ‘there is a different way of loving’. However, in an outburst of self-doubt, she declares herself inadequately accomplished to be loved in that way.  invokes Uncle Robert’s marriage offer, but  dismisses it as play: ‘he’s never loved me the other way.’ I wonder if this is perhaps a reference to Tippett. Neither  nor  knows what that other way of loving 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death looks like, but  ‘imagine[s] a tenderness that like summer rain would wrap [her] around ever so gently and closely, and would become part of [her] almost’. Then  comes up with an idea. Why shouldn’t  and  love one another? It’s here where the discussion seems to have a double meaning: to suggest Fresca’s desire for improved self-esteem and a tribute to her love for Judy. Together  and  will ‘build a cathedral or write an opera’; ‘[they] might find a gold mine with so much gold in it that [they] could make all poor people rich.’ They’ll stop ‘wars and persecutions and injustices!’ They’ll ‘build a great big house that would be open all the time to anybody that wanted to go in’. ‘We’ll produce immortal works’ says , and ‘[p]eople will write books about us,’ says . But then  draws back again. These things are too easy. ‘I can feel such power, such sensibility, such genius in my nerves, and my strength tears at me so that I know that the earth is not big enough to satisfy it. I only want the unattainable, and I can find nothing unattainable. I am often sorry for God, because He can do everything. And sometimes I feel as if I were God.’ And she continues: ‘No, there’s only one thing definitely worth doing’ . . . ‘Let us die—’, frightening words from the mouth of an adolescent. When  protests with ‘[b]ut we’re only just at the beginning of life’,  replies ‘That’s why it would be so perfect to die now.’ : I don’t see that at all. And you don’t know what Death is. : No, and that’s why I love it so. I am sure though that it must be more beautiful than anything on earth. It is a breaking wave, light in a cavern, a dark lover. I love Death passionately. : Well, I’ve often felt curious— : There, you feel just as I do. Let us take our youth to Death. He must be so tired of receiving the old and those who do not care to go on living. He will welcome us so eagerly. Oh, how glad I am that I don’t know what Death is, and can’t even imagine it. I knew you wouldn’t disappoint me. : Well, if you are really set on dying . . . but let us hold each other very closely. : Yes, we will. Oh, I am so happy. Then both hesitate: : It’s funny how precious everything seems when you are going to leave it. : Yes, very funny—glorious. : It makes me think about everything I’ve liked doing best. 

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Part Eight : It does me, too. D’you remember the house that we built up in the branches of the oak-tree? : And getting up secretly at half-past four in the morning? I used to feel certain that nobody had ever got up so early before. : It was thrilling. I like it when it rains and rains and blows hard— : And you come home and roast chestnuts by the fire— : And Mum tells ghost stories— : And we go to bed shivery—and you suddenly decide to write poetry. : I wish I were better at rhymes. : You may get better. I say— : Yes? : It does seem silly to die—just now, when everything is so lovely. : I was afraid you’d say that. : Don’t you think we might put it off for a little? : I was afraid you’d say that, too. : But it’s a good idea, isn’t it? As life is so lovely, it would be silly not to live it. : It’s not as simple as that. Darling, I’ve talked so much nonsense and I get so bewildered that I don’t know what I want, nor what sort of person I want to be. But when I think of Death, I do seem to see more clearly. Death seems to hold all that is desirable in his shade, and I feel sure that Truth and Beauty are to be found there [A Keats reference, perhaps; Fresca is ‘half in love with easeful death’]. But perhaps I’m wrong. I think you will have to decide for both of us. : Well—I’d like to do what you really like to do. If it really is death that you love best of all, I’ll be quite willing to die. But as you are not quite certain, and there are lots of things that I still want to do— And the text ends with  exclaiming ‘let’s live a little longer,’ as Fresca elects to do at this point.



I contact Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge in search of admissions records for Fresca. Record’s office archivist Hilary M. Ritchie tells me that recordkeeping was inconsistent during the war and thus no such records remain—but what she can offer me is Fresca’s post mortem and I can see it if permission is granted by Fresca’s executors. The post mortem, dated ‘. [?].’ and ‘..’, is undertaken by Reader in Medicine Dr. Robert Alexander McCance, described in a history of Addenbrooke’s as, due to the war, the only qualified medical staff member at 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death the hospital in . McCance (–), whose short biography I find on Wikipedia, is just four years Fresca’s senior and has trained at Cambridge and at King’s College Hospital in London. He has expertise in the field of nutrition and has authored several books on the topic, including The Chemical Composition of Foods () with Elsie Widdowson. He’s also collaborated with Widdowson in ‘wartime rationing and s government nutrition efforts’. The Allinson name is probably one he recognizes. McCance opens the post mortem with a narrative about Fresca’s treatment at Addenbrooke’s Hospital for thyrotoxicosis and with a mention of the ‘indigestion’ from which she suffered, although no organic cause is found for the latter. The report continues: ‘Was found dead in river and coroner returned verdict of death at inquest medical evidence was given that death was due to shock. Left letters saying that she intended to commit suicide, and that she would take cyanide; but at inquest no evidence was produced that she actually had taken any cyanide.’ Then: ‘(Body was given to Hospital, in accordance with the deceased’s wishes.)’ Despite the fact that no evidence for consumption of cyanide could be produced, the post mortem suggests that Fresca had used it. ‘All organs, especially heart and spleen, have a definite though faint almond smell.’ And later, ‘Grey-brown semi-fluid contents in stomach, smell of cyanide not definite, being masked by other smells.’ I wonder how Fresca might have gained access to the cyanide? Could she have used rat poison or something similar from The Mill House? I remember that Adrian Stephen had offered a prescription of morphine to the Woolfs, who had talked about taking their lives in the event of a Nazi invasion, fearing that Leonard’s Jewishness would make them a target; and indeed, their names were on the Gestapo’s Most Wanted list. McCance finds ‘blood and tissues [to be] unusually bright red in colour, but body is very cold (brought straight from the refrigerator)’. Unusual also, for McCance, is the only ‘slight post mortem changes; in fact almost none’. Like Osith, Fresca almost seems to come back to life. He reports ‘conspicuous melanosis of the colon,’ which I discover was likely due to overuse of herbal laxatives. A long section of the document, accompanied by a diagram, gives details about Fresca’s thyroid, including the operation she had in the s, in Switzerland, according to Tippett: Considerable enlargement of L. lobe of thyroid which extends well round behind the trachea. The cut surface of this lobe shows abundant glistening colloid and many small (up to  cm) rather ill defined nodules. The isthmus of the thyroid is absent and there is no right lobe in the normal 

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Part Eight position; and the scar of an old surgical incision of the kind seen after thyroidectomy suggests that part of the gland had been removed by the surgeon. The pyramidal lobe of the thyroid is present and considerably enlarged, its cut surface being the same as that of the L. lobe. A nodule ( x  . x . cm) of ? aberrant thyroid tissue is present at the R side of the larynx (see diagram) but the cut surface of that nodule differs from that of the rest of the thyroid, being more uniform & less glistening, so that it has an appearance somewhat resembling pancreas or salivary gland.

 Post mortem (Addenbrooke’s Hospital).

The post mortem represents a map of Fresca’s whole body. It gives the weight of all of her organs (‘heart  oz,’ right lung  oz, left ½ oz), their colours (‘purplechocolate’ liver), shapes and textures (‘smooth surfaced spleen’). The closing lines are sad in their objectivity: ‘normal menstruating endometrium. Brain normal. Rather thin but not obviously wasted grey haired woman with an unusually long neck, poorly developed breasts and lower limbs which appear relatively better developed than the rest of the body.’ The conclusions are the following: Cyanide poisoning Visceroptosis Thyrotoxicosis I find that ‘Visceroptosis’ is defined as a prolapse or a sinking of the abdominal viscera below their natural position. [. . .] Generally [. . .] there is loss of appetite, heartburn, nervous dyspepsia, constipation or diarrhea, abdominal distention, headache, vertigo, emaciation and loss of sleep. Any or all of these symptoms may 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death be present. The condition is brought about by loss of muscular tone, particularly of the abdominal muscles, intestinal autointoxication, with relaxation of the ligaments which hold the viscera in place. It appears to be consistent with the complaints from which Fresca has been suffering in the run up to her decision to take her own life.



Fresca is buried six days after her suicide, on Friday, April . Two days later, Nazi concentration camps at Bergen-Belsen will be liberated. Fresca will be spared reports of ‘Internment Camp Horrors’ at Belsen in which the senior medical officer to General Dempsey described ‘a pile—between sixty to eighty yards long, thirty yards wide, and four feet high—of the unclothed bodies of women all within sight of several hundred children. Gutters were filled with rotting dead and men had come to the gutters to die, using the kerbstones as back-rests.’ In a letter dated the day of the funeral, one of a number pertaining to Fresca’s death that I obtain from Marx’s biographer, Matthew Eve, Cyril writes thanking Lamb for her letter and ‘the trouble [she has] taken’. He says that he has ‘posted the letter to the Hogarth Press [to ask for any remaining copies of Fresca’s book] & will let her know the results as soon as [he] hear[s] from them’. He adds ‘Fresca is being buried today at the bottom of our wild garden. So both her wishes are being carried out—to be of use to a hospital and to help something to grow.’ In her will Fresca has asked that her body be donated to a hospital and that if they don’t want her, that she be buried. ‘I don’t want any kind of funeral,’ she asserts. ‘If the hospital won’t take what’s left of me, have a hole dug near where they find me and put some lime in. I’ll help something to grow.’ The following day Veronica writes to Lamb: I always felt of Fresca that she was an honoured presence in my house, almost a passer by, the touch of her person and her living was so light. I never presumed upon nor claimed any more of her affection than any other and think I know the extent of what I had. I have always had a special feeling for her, ever since the days I went to live at Christchurch Avenue before I married Cyril, and I have never swerved from that feeling whatso-ever. It was my fortune to have been the one to have had her when she needed somewhere to go. If I’d been different I might have helped her somehow. She then thanks Marco and Lamb for their kindness. She and Cyril were, she writes, ‘too stunned to think of helping other people’. Veronica then gives 

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Part Eight an account of Fresca’s burial ‘in the garden’. She talks in an almost distracted way about the experience of the gravedigger ‘digging graves for  years’ and the skill of his sons in carrying the coffin. When they’d filled in the grave they stuck a piece of elder in the ground at the head and foot. Willy, Cyril, and I picked oxslips, violets, and wood anemones and covered the grave with them. We shall plant one of her own oaks when the time comes in the autumn. Just in case she knows what we’re doing I hope she will be pleased. Cyril and I are happier with it this way. Martin’s Grove is a long way off.  Fresca’s unmarked burial site, The Mill House (Helen Southworth).

Veronica writes to Marco and Lamb again on ‘Sunday’: It occurred to me, rather late in the day, that you both might like to come here. If so you are more than welcome. But I warn you, you might not get from coming what you would expect. I believe B. P. was disappointed. You might think that by coming to where she lived for so long, you would get nearer her. My own experience in this house is that I am never so near as when I am alone and that the more one talks about her the further she recedes. To try to discover why she went leads to confusion. The only thing is to keep still and let images and thoughts come at will. To be alone and quiet is sad, but sadder still to laugh and talk, and saddest is when you feel nothing and think of nothing—a sort of vacuum in which you are bereft of pleasure or pain. Among the letters I also find one from B. P., Fresca’s brother Bertrand Pater Allinson, to Marco and Lamb: Dear Marco and Lamb, Thank you so much for your letter—it is as you say—words cannot express what we feel and the sense of loss does not lessen as the days go by—at times I say—I fully understand and might 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death have done the same—if I had the courage—which I doubt—at other times it seems incomprehensible for in spite of all her life was rich and in many ways satisfying[;] indeed I have envied it. But it was no rash deed embarked upon in a moment of despair but a familiar wish, fully intended to be fulfilled ultimately. I have a considerable feeling of responsibility because in the last few years or two I made no endeavour to counsel her about what she was doing about her health—thinking—rightly or wrongly—that I might prejudice the success of what was being undertaken. In another letter (Thursday), Veronica thanks Marko (sic) for her book: Fresca had a great affection for your talent especially the childish side of it and a great respect too. Cyril and I used to say to her that all her geese were swans. But she knew one or two swans all right. Sometimes now she seems to me not dead but somewhere else. And this is the best feeling and will I hope in time be the only one left. At other times her death seems dreadfully irrevocable with the added desperation that we could just have stopped it. It seems as if one’s own breath would stop with the effort of going on trying to stop it in retrospect. I wonder too if I will ever lose my sense of guilt or must I have that with me for always. I wonder if Lamb could bear to take her lovely new blue suit. I have tried to imagine myself in it but it doesn’t seem good. I could try it on Dulcie. Have you met her? Fresca used to think that she (Dulcie) & Lamb were the best types of English women she would bring forward as examples of what we could produce for a foreigner. I agreed. Some of Fresca’s clothes I have given to Grace for her children. If there’s anything you have a mind to and would wish for, tell me. We mustn’t feel like we are dividing her garments or anything like that. Later Veronica writes again to Marco and Lamb setting up a lunch date. I am glad you mentioned the things you want. I thought somebody might want the white jacket and am glad it is you. I have taken it to be cleaned so shan’t be able to bring it this time. Nor the silver spoons either because they are away being valued for probit. The belt I will bring. Can’t call to mind the tartan pill box but shall cherish it when I find it. I am keeping her work box on the table where it always was and shall continue to do so. Fresca always looked upon that as a loan from B. P. and when I told B. P. so he said he’d given it to her but would I continue to look upon it as a 

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Part Eight permanent loan. Which I was very glad to do. Everything to do with sewing was characteristic of Fresca because she made out she was so silly at it. Actually she was quite good and rapidly improving. She was anxious to leave us something she had made herself. I can see that now. For me the napkins. (Incidentally I’ll be very happy to return you the coupons for the stuff ). And for you the aprons. She was awfully pleased with them I think. I am finding out more ways of missing her than I did at first. For the first fortnight I was extremely jumpy and could not read or even sit in a chair for long. I continued to feel every minute of the day. Now I think of things she said and did fairly recently and when the significance of them comes over me, something inside me turns right over.



I also find among the materials given to me by Matthew Eve a list of people to whom Marx and Lambert want to send a copy of A Childhood, and several whom they just intend ‘to tell’. This list provides me with yet another network for Fresca. I identify the handwriting as Marx’s due to its similarity to the lettering on the cover of A Childhood. The erratic spelling confirms it was the hand of the bohemian Marx, rather than that of the more meticulous Lamb. First on the list is ‘Flora’. In a letter dated April  (address , Waller Road, New Cross, SE) Flora thanks Lamb for the offer of a copy of Fresca’s book, but says she already has one. After reading of Fresca’s death she had written to Cyril and Veronica (whom of all the family she’d never met) and Veronica has written back and ‘explained all’. ‘I write to you what I did to her “I’m not shocked that she took her life if she found it intolerable, but that she found it necessary, and that such a cruel unforgiving illness should have befallen a person so dear & above all so vital.”’ Flora tells Lamb that Fresca had stopped writing to her ‘ years after the war [began]’ and that she suspected all was not well. Flora had been evacuated, first to Teignmouth then to Barnstaple and was ‘entirely cut off ’. Back in London she had lost both parents and their house in Twickenham. ‘I always thought with a lovely warm feeling of seeing [Fresca] again soon, in fact this summer; & reading her book again in Spring had made her even more vivid [. . .] I still can’t believe she is dead, not having seen her for so long.’ Flora appears to have been part of one of Fresca’s choirs. Second on the list is ‘Ellis at the BM’. Based on Fresca’s attachment to the British Museum, I decide that this could be Edward Fenwick Ellis (born – ), author of The British Museum in Fiction: A Check-list. At number  is Teddy Croft-Murray, another library-related acquaintance. Croft-Murray was ‘Major, British Element, Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives (MFAA)’. Educated at Lancing and Magdalen College, Oxford, Edward ‘Teddy’ Croft

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Love Under the Shadow of Death Murray volunteered as a research assistant in the Print Room at the British Museum. In  he was named Assistant Keeper. During World War II, he served in the Admiralty and the War Office and was later transferred to the MFAA in Italy and Austria. Croft-Murray returned to the British Museum in  and was promoted in  to Deputy Keeper. In  he succeeded A. E. Popham as Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings where he remained until his retirement in . Considering Lamb’s connections to the world of diplomacy, I think that ‘Rendel,’ at number  on the list, might be Sir George William Rendel (– ), British diplomat. I am unable to identify ‘The Siss[i]ons’ at number . Tippett has some friends called the Shaxsons who lived ‘at Elsted’ and who appear to know Fresca and I wonder if Marx meant them. At number  is ‘Barbara Franks’ (d. ), the wife of Oliver Franks (– ), philosophy professor, ambassador to the United States (–), permanent secretary to the Ministry of Supply (–) and author of a report on the Falklands War that exonerated Margaret Thatcher, among other things. Barbara, then Tanner, had been a student at Lady Margaret Hall (LMH) at the same time as Fresca and Lamb. Eleanor Breuning confirms this identification; she met Barbara via Lamb. Barbara’s and Oliver’s families (both Quaker) were neighbors and they had known each other as teenagers. After he became her tutor at Oxford, they were married in . In Oliver’s biography, Barbara is described at LMH as ‘an attractive young woman with light brown curly hair and a well developed dress sense, at once responsible and adventurous, captain of Boats, a lively dancer, often the leader in such enterprises as finding the best way onto the roof to sleep under the stars.’ She also has ‘a keen social conscience, and an impulsion to act.’ All of this makes sense in terms of her being part of Fresca’s crowd. I identify Barbara sitting alongside Fresca in the  LMH photo (see page ). After LMH, Barbara worked with the poor and as a research assistant to historian Sir George Clark; she read German newspapers for the Press Research Department of the Foreign Office during World War II, joined the Women’s Voluntary Services in , and became an Oxford magistrate (–). I am pretty sure that ‘Elza & Sophie’ at number  are Fresca’s German cousins, the Ehrlichs. Did this mean they survived the war and were possibly living in England? I wonder if the ‘Mo’ of ‘Mo Christian’ at  means Monsignor, something to do with Fresca’s conversion to Catholicism. But I see a reference to a Mrs. Christian in one of the letters and Eleanor Breuning thinks that the ‘Mo’ is short for Maureen. At number  Marx lists eminent historian and writer Veronica Wedgwood. Wedgwood began her undergraduate work at LMH as Fresca finished, in . Among the papers from Matthew Eve I find a letter to the editor published in 

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Part Eight Time and Tide, April , , in which Wedgwood clarifies her relationship with Fresca. Citing Lamb, she acknowledges Fresca’s gift to many generations of undergraduates of ‘new horizons and immense possibilities of musical appreciation’. However, this was not the realm in which Wedgwood says she really knew Fresca: ‘It is, however, as an historian that I would like to record my own gratitude for her learning and her help. She had an astonishing capacity for going to the essential of a problem: more than once a few minutes of conversation with her has opened up for me fruitful lines of investigation. I am no musician, but the music of my age is revealing and I owe much to her for supplying the defects of my understanding, not to say my hearing, in these by-paths of history.’ ‘Adrian Allinson’s Molly,’ the ceramicist Molly Mitchell Smith, is at number . She’s perhaps known to Marx and Lambert independently of Adrian in her capacity as an artist. At  I identify ‘Tommy Taylor BNC’, as a fellow Oxfordian (at Brasenose College), part of Fresca’s choir. Suggesting the importance of LMH ties, at numbers  and , Marx includes tutors ‘Miss Coate’, Mary, and ‘Jimison’. Evelyn Jamison’s papers are at the Warburg Institute and I find the following short biography there: ‘Evelyn Mary Jamison was born in Lancashire, , and raised there and in London. As a young woman she attended art school in Paris before going up to Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Awarded a research fellowship by Somerville College, Oxford, she spent several years in Rome and Naples. Returning to Oxford, she became Librarian and Bursar (–) Assistant Tutor (–) and Tutor and Vice-Principal (–) at Lady Margaret Hall; she was also a University Lecturer in History (–). Jamison retired to London aged  to concentrate on her edition of the Catalogus Baronum (Baronial Catalogue). She continued to carry out historical research until her death in .’ I cannot identify ‘Kit Garvin’ at number . Christopher Garvin is a character in The Death of the King’s Canary by Dylan Thomas and John Davenport (possibly Stephen Spender), but this doesn’t seem to fit. James Garvin, previously editor of the Observer, was a very close friend of David Ayerst (who eventually wrote his biography). Number 15’s ‘Doris & Liza’ are a mystery. At 16, I find ‘Cycill Tomrley’ whom I recognize as a contributor to Lamb’s Scrapbook. Fresca also mentions Cycill several times in her letters. Eleanor Breuning identifies her as a painter, possibly Czechoslovakian. The fact that she has painted Lamb as a young woman suggests she might have been a student at LMH, although I find a reference which has her Slade trained. Number , ‘J. Layard’, is, of course, the anthropologist turned psychoanalyst John Layard. At , ‘John Amis’ is a name I know. He tells me he didn’t remember receiving a copy of the book. I have trouble identifying ‘Cycil Hacket’ 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death at number , but I later find ‘Pearl Hackett, December ’ written in the front of a used copy of Marx’s Zodiac Books Book of Nursery Rhymes. Online I find Hackett’s death announcement (), where she’s described as a retired school teacher living in Sherborne, Dorset. I see her name attached to a book about the all-girls independent school Bedford High School. I cannot identify ‘Peggy Prouse’ at number . At number  is Edward Lockspeiser, the composer, who died at age  in , and who had written about Debussy. Tippett mentions him in several letters to Fresca in . Lockspeiser has been undergoing analysis with John Layard. He has the flu and the analysis ‘is sucking him to perdition’, according to Tippett. ‘His woman,’ says Tippett, is having better luck. Layard, to whom she had gone for ‘her curious trick of missing bars & beats in singing’, has managed to help her ‘in  sittings to a most lovely set of Jungian religious dreams—the last one a real miracle’. Layard has ‘permission to publish’, and Tippett promised to describe the dreams to Fresca when he sees her next. I also find a letter among materials related to Fresca’s folk song manuscript at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library in which Lockspeiser, writing from , Christchurch Avenue (Fresca had lived at number ), introduces Fresca to Dr A. Mahr, director of the Department of Education at the National Museum of Ireland in Kildare Street, Dublin. According to the letter, dated September , , Fresca is going to Dublin to do research on folk song and needs to find an authority on the matter. At number , ‘Celiem’ is most probably Selim, Fresca’s (second) cousin. Number ’s ‘Grace Griffiths’ might have been a World War II poet. The name Grace has come up many times in Fresca’s letters and usually alongside Dulc[i]e. Kit Martin identifies Dulcie as Dulcie Taylor, a woman farmer, a neighbour to The Mill House who skis with Cyril and Veronica. Grace, he thinks, is Dulcie’s cousin. Number ’s ‘Lucy Mair’ is mentioned by Flora (at number ) as a member of Fresca’s choir. I find Mair’s biography online. A graduate in Classics from Newnham College, Cambridge, in , she then studied anthropology under Bronisław Malinowski at the London School of Economics where she later taught. Mair became a prolific scholar of Africa. Her Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) entry reveals that her father, a Mathematics Professor at Cambridge, was cousin to William Beveridge, later London School of Economics director, and that William Beveridge married her mother after her father died. The DNB entry’s concise summary of Mair’s trajectory says a lot about the intellectual and professional landscape for women of this period. On her arrival at Newnham College in  she had found women under intense pressure to prove themselves as good as men: the pursuit of 

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Part Eight anything other than excellence was a betrayal. But when she looked beyond her immediate family she found a world devastated of men, by men. Indeed, like many formidably clever women of her age, she never married; and her chapter on Marriage entitled ‘What are husbands for?’ suggests that she was still preoccupied with the contradictions, not to say absurdities, of women’s assumption that men were superior beings, to be emulated. Number ’s ‘Betty Anthwait’ is clearly a misspelling of Betty Outhwaite, two of whose letters I find among those Matthew Eve has given me. The first responds to news of Fresca’s death, and a second dated January ,  follows up. In the first letter, Betty tells Lamb that she and Fresca ‘were Oxford. I think between you, you did as much as can be done to make another person happier and more truly living.’ Betty lists other choir members as ‘Helen Crichton, of course, now at , London Rd, Reading, secretary to the vice chancellor & Norah Wright, Dorothy Owen (now married), Frances Mallett (also), & of men I can only think of Bobby Howe (Keble), Dick Wood, & of course Tommy Taylor’. A later letter adds Charles Crichton (New College) and Hugh Tapper (Keble), Helen Anderson of LMH and Helen Munro. In the second letter Betty has been ‘turning out odd drawers’ and has come upon ‘letters from [Lamb] and Fresca’: I had meant to destroy all my dusty past, but these have brought the two of you so clearly to mind that I haven’t the heart to. There was a notelet of Fresca’s: ‘!! Oh God! I’ve forgotten to buy the coffee—I only remembered the liquid paraffin. I’ve got milk’—Isn’t it just the sort of thing she was always doing? It was lovely to read over again all her instructions for the choir and instruments—the machinations to cast out gently the undesirables and entice in likely ones—‘Young Bradbury can come or not as he likes—he makes no noise.’ And ‘Don’t forget Toynbee window, & don’t tell Lamb’ when she was coming in late. Bless her heart. And the pages and pages you devoted to my education! How to make puppets, masks and casts and so on, what books to consult on various topics, a glorious page on how to acquire a compelling look by practicing dirty looks at a chalk spot on a mirror, from all angles, and assignments at sleuthing work—did you ever find out about Dulcie Maitin, the belle of Teignmouth? The two of you certainly kept me busy, mentally and physically, and how much I enjoyed it all and should do again! Among the names of choir members Betty Outhwaite gives Lamb is Helen Anderson (–). I find Anderson’s March , , obituary in which 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death she is described as ‘[a] Traveller who improvised music to keep up wartime spirits in the North of England’. She sounds like a younger Fresca and was possibly a member of Fresca’s Bach choir: Helen Anderson, then , was appointed music traveller for Northumberland, Durham, and North Yorkshire. She travelled her region in an elderly, unheated Austin Tourer, with blinkered headlights. She arranged music of all kinds whenever and wherever she could. One moment she would be organising the details of a music festival. The next, with a concert imminent, she might be trying to find the local dustman— said to be keen on the cello—who might have a music stand. The warmth of the reception she got in the mining villages of Northumberland and Durham gave her great encouragement and happy memories. One dark night she was driving the recently discovered contralto, Kathleen Ferrier, to a recital that she was giving. Kathleen was acting as navigator. They knew they were lost when they asked the way of a man standing on a corner, who said: “I told you half an hour ago”. [. . .] She read music and history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, going on to the Royal College of Music in . The next few names on the list I fail to identify. They are, at , Maj Thomas; at , Jill Brown; and, at , Dorothy Newel, all possibly former fellow students at Oxford. At Number , ‘Mrs Pirimas [sic.] & Thisbe’, initially baffles me. I do find two Enid Marx fabric designs named for the comic ill-fated lovers whose story

 Thisbe furnishing fabric, by Enid Marx for the Utility Design Panel, UK, 1945. (V&A).



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Part Eight  Pyramus furnishing fabric, by Enid Marx for the Utility Design Panel, UK, 1945 (V&A).

originated with Ovid and was retold by Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Shakespeare. The fabrics are dated the same year as Fresca’s death and I conclude that they may have represented a tribute to her. At number , ‘Benjamin Brittain’ [sic] is just misspelled. Tippett met Britten at Morley College and Fresca got to know Britten via Tippett.



At the end of the list Marx has written, almost as an aside: ‘Tell Michael Roberts, Jonathan Griffin, Waldo Lanchester, Fo[a]xgons.’ Roberts is a name that has come up in Fresca’s letters in terms of his Recovery of the West, which she’s reading. I identify Jonathan Griffin as journalist and wartime head of European intelligence at the BBC. Griffin had coauthored, with his wife Joan Griffin, Lost Liberty?: The Ordeal of the Czechs and the Future of Freedom, a  Chatto & Windus title. This certainly makes sense in terms of Lamb’s interests. I’ve seen Griffin’s name alongside Roberts’s in Fresca’s letters to Marco and Lamb from The Mill House. Roberts worked in – in London for the BBC European Service. In a letter, dated ‘Friday’ and addressed to Lamb, Fresca writes: ‘Dearest Mimi—that bloody Jonathan—no more than I should have expected of that selfish old granny. And as for Michael R. I should guess he’s very emotional indeed. My hat off to the Czech section. What splendid chaps they are. As for you, Mimi, my hat is permanently off and perched on top of a long pole.’ 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death The third name on the ‘to tell’ list, Waldo Lanchester, is not at all hard to find: Waldo Lanchester (–) was at the forefront of the British revival in popularity of the string puppet and was a leading player in the formative years of the British Puppet & Model Theatre Guild, which remains Britain’s leading Puppetry Organisation. With colleague Harry Whanslaw, Waldo established the London Marionette Theatre in Hammersmith in  – the first puppets anywhere in the world to appear on television. Assisted by his wife, Muriel, he went on to run the Lanchester Marionette Theatre, based in Malvern, from  to  including a prestigious appearance at Buckingham Palace in . Waldo was a fine craftsman with incredible attention to detail.  He was the author of the greatly respected book Hand Puppets and String Puppets, first published in  and his work featured in the acclaimed documentary film ‘The Creation of a Marionette’ produced by Douglas Fisher (). I find several photos of Lanchester and his wife Muriel and of Lanchester’s puppets for his version of L’Amfiparnaso for the Arts Council of Great Britain in Lanchester’s Hand Puppets and String Puppets. Alongside the list are a number of letters of condolence including one from Dorothy Sarmiento possibly author of a book entitled Roles and Relations,

 Waldo and Muriel Lanchester.



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Part Eight

 Lanchester puppets for L’Amfiparnaso.

published by Chapman Hall in . Sarmiento writes from , Damer Street, Sheffield, on April , , to say that ‘[t]he news of [Fresca’s] death was a great shock’. ‘Of course I have been out of London since  and heard no news of anyone, but Fresca was such a vivid personality that one forgot the lapses of time when she suddenly appeared again and was always the same. I am glad the work can be completed.’ There is also a letter dated February  from Eglantyne Buxton, daughter of Charles Roden Buxton and Dorothy Frances Jebb and niece of Save the Children’s founder Eglantyne Jebb. Eglantyne Buxton graduated from Somerville, Oxford. In a first letter she asks Lamb to tell her what happened to Fresca; she’s seen the notice of her death in the newspaper. In a second letter she says that she has a thyroid issue too and is ‘only too familiar with the sudden spurts of energy that do not last which you mention’. 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death In another letter dated June , , LMH principal Lynda Grier says she has been to ‘see the wood [Fresca] left us’ and has written to ‘the brother [Cyril] to whom I spoke on the telephone just after her death, to tell him what a beautiful wood we think it, and how fitting a memorial of her’. My dear, what a tragedy it was and is. The thing that most troubles me in these cases is the thought of the torment people must have gone through to bring them to such an act. And Francesca was so full of life, the essence of it. I think I always felt more alive when she had paid me one of all too infrequent visits. Last time she came it was to tell me about the wood, I suppose about . She was looking magnificent, and as usual I felt revived by the sight of her. You will be missing her terribly, for I believe you more than anyone else kept up with her. Well it was always the Francesca we knew who was the real person. Her illness was not her. I always feel in these cases that the real person has gone away, wholly, or partly. We have known and shall continue to know the real person before illness fell on the spirit and the body. In a later letter, dated February , , Grier has just finished reading Fresca’s book, received from Lamb. ‘When I began I hardly stopped,’ she wrote. ‘What an enchanting picture it is of a sensitive & most charming child.’ I am glad she had such a lovely mother. For with someone less understanding tragedy might have come much earlier than it did. There is something very poignant about it all. The one thing I could wish is that she had had something given to her of the religious side of life, for I think she would have been particularly responsive to it, even if she had never held to any special church, as she easily might not have done. It is difficult for parents with no faith of their own to know what is the right thing to do in such matters. They cannot teach what they think is a sham, yet it is surely cheating not to give children the chance of it. I do not know what is right. Yet I never felt the lack of it so strongly as in Francesca’s book, & perhaps in what I knew of her life afterwards.



One name conspicuously missing from the letters of Marx and Lambert and Cyril and Veronica is Judy Wogan. I am unclear how well she knew Marx and Lambert or Cyril and Veronica—although she has certainly spent time at The Mill House and letters from Fresca to Marx and Lambert make frequent mention of Judy. Tippett does tell Den that he has had a ‘long incoherent 

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Part Eight letter’ from Judy ( June , ) and she reappears much later in  at the St Ives Festival, but otherwise she drops from the story at this point until I find her in Settle’s book. In a photo given to me by Arts League of Service historian, Caitlin Adams, I find a very pensive and languid Judy (center) and Eleanor (right) and I imagine this was a photo taken subsequent to Fresca’s suicide. The third woman is probably Eleanor’s sister, Kathleen, according to Adams.

 Eleanor Elder, Judy Wogan, Elder’s sister (Caitlin Adams).

In Fresca’s will, Judy is the recipient of a Bristol glass paperweight. Bristol glass does not appear to be of any particular monetary value and it seems somehow appropriate that personal rather than financial value dictates Fresca’s gift for Judy. Fresca also asks that Cyril ‘[p]lease return the little ivory embroidery case which is in the work-box to Judy. It’s one of her family’s possessions,’ she goes on to say, ‘and I’ve never regarded it as anything but a loan.’ One wonders how Judy might have taken this last statement. In the will Fresca also gives Judy’s whereabouts as ‘Tom Dickie’s in Furneux Pelham’. Furneux Pelham is in Hertfordshire, just  miles southwest of The Mill House and  miles west of Clare. It is likely at this address that Judy receives Fresca’s suicide note, although it’s unclear if she posted it. Fresca also mentions in her will that Judy might like the flat for which she’s been negotiating. I make some inquiries regarding Tom Dickie with a letter to a Furneux Pelham priest, by the name of Father Ian Dickie, and another to the address in the will. Father Dickie sends me a postcard of the church stating in a very matter-of-fact way that he has no knowledge of Tom Dickie; the fact that they have the same name is ‘pure coincidence’. My second letter, however, yields results. Malcolm Ewen, local historian, has been ‘handed [my] letter because there currently is no Willows Cottage in our village’. Ewen tells me that he ‘did own Willows Farm in Stocking Pelham and there is a cottage called 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death Willows Cottage adjacent the farm entrance and the boundary between the two villages goes right through the farm’. He promises ‘to search records for any of the names you mentioned in your letter, but [he] believe[s] Judy Wogan was connected with an odd music composer that some of the senior citizens recall’. In a later message, Ewen tells me that Tom Dickie ‘is remembered by one or two people in the village’: [Dickie] lived in Willow Cottage, Stocking Pelham as I surmised, which he shared with another man (thought to be a Mr. Jordan). Mr. Dickie was thought to deal in stocks and shares and seemed to have dealings/visits from a lot of London people. He had an Austin  car, one of only two cars in the village. He is thought to have moved to the Hastings area sometime in the s and was replaced at Willow cottage by Sir Henry WilsonSmith, who was a director of the Bank of England. Telephone directories show that Sir Henry was in the house by , and stayed until , when he moved to the Old Rectory in Stocking Pelham. Interestingly, Hazel Colvill (a lifelong Furneux resident) says that Tom Dickie was very friendly with a Mr Jordan, who was often at the house, and Dickie was also a great friend of Miss Turner, who lived at the Old Rectory at Stocking Pelham. Ewen is ‘sure there is more to uncover’, but he thinks ‘maybe this will take time for [Hazel] to recall memories’. He closes with ‘No news on Judy Wogan perhaps she was one of the visitors from London.’ I later learn that Dickie was a friend of Judy Wogan’s brother. After her stay at Tom Dickie’s, I follow Judy around London using address and phone information. Licensing information records in terms of Judy’s theatre work suggest that Judy’s penchant for doing up houses was more than just a hobby and perhaps explains her frequent moves. Diana Howard’s London Theatre and Music Halls – lists Judith Wogan’s licensing of Grafton Theatre Ltd –, Associated London Properties Ltd –, and Inaugurated Plays Ltd –.  and :  Gower Street, Museum ;  Tan Cottage, St Osyth;  and :  Primrose Hill, Primrose ; –:  Haverstock Hill, Primrose; :  Oval Road Gulliver, London; –:  St Ann’s Gardens NWs/ Gdn Mews?. (?), Gulliver 

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Part Eight Judy appears to have died at St Pancras [Hospital] in , although later dates are cited. I find Judy’s copy of Elder’s Travelling Players book at the National Trust’s Chastleton House in Oxfordshire. The book is inscribed: ‘Judith Wogan / Tan Cottage / St. Osyth’. ‘Binding: Grey cloth, blue-lettered, blue spine, printed paper.’  The provenance is indicated as Clutton-Brock, likely, I surmise, Barbara, and not critic and writer Arthur Clutton-Brock (her father-in-law), who died in . A description of Barbara as ‘an independent-minded intellectual with a strong aesthetic sense’, ‘friends, [with her husband, to] the painter Sir William Coldstream, George Orwell, EM Forster, Dorelia John and fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group [and] Stevie Smith, who dedicated a poem to Barbara,’ suggested she could have been a friend of Judy. I am unclear how Judy’s book got there—I send an email query to Chastleton, but receive no reply. Unsurprisingly, I find no mention of Tippett among Marx’s and Lambert’s lists and letters. All of the people I meet who knew the ladies tell me that they did not like Tippett very much. They think he exploited Fresca. Oddly I do find some of Judy Wogan’s books among Tippett’s collection at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, among them her copy of J. M. Synge’s The Aran Islands and a copy of Velona Pilcher’s play The Searcher, dedicated to Judy from Fresca. Kit Martin does have a letter from Tippett to Cyril and Veronica. In the letter Tippett says that he thought Fresca would give him the wood and he

 Sketch of Tippett by Karl Hawker, Christmas card for Cyril and Veronica Allinson (The Mill House).



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Love Under the Shadow of Death would have to learn how to tend it; he’s shocked by her generosity, and he mentions a third share of the farm (probably Moses Farm). Alongside the letter I also find a Christmas card for , oddly a sketch of Tippett by Karl Hawker. And, confirming Tippett maintains ties with the Allinsons, in , Tippett mentions to Benjamin Britten a visit to ‘the Allinsons of Streetly End, just over the West Suffolk border into Cambridge’. On January , , Tippett thanks Britten for his contributions to the th birthday tribute held at Morley College. The music performed included Tippett’s Piano Sonata no. , which Tippett had dedicated to Fresca in . Tippett writes ‘Boyhood’s End stood up well, I thought, from the far away and long ago days when I wrote it for you both; and Fresca was still alive.’



Tippett’s love letter to Fresca will take the form of a song cycle and it will be five years in the making. In , Tippett dedicates The Heart’s Assurance to Fresca. Tippett finds the songs for his piece in the poetry of two young poets, one British, Sidney Keyes (–), and the other Welsh, Alun Lewis (–), both of whom died during World War II. The decision to use the work of two poets, rather than one, represents a tribute to the productiveness of collaboration. I look at the poems first. Tippett’s choice of a poetry-based piece for Fresca seems appropriate in the sense that she herself is writer and musician; she works with both words and notes. This decision, Tippett says, was prompted by impresario Howard Hartog. Lewis’s poem ‘Song’ opens Tippett’s cycle. ‘Song’ appeared initially in Lewis’s collection Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets: Poems in Transit in Part One: England. Parts Two and Three, following Lewis’s own trajectory, are titled ‘The Voyage’ and ‘India’. The collection was published posthumously in August . The title of the collection, chosen by Lewis, is a quote from the Book of Job  (used ‘ironically’). . ‘Song’ Oh journeyman, Oh journeyman, Before this endless belt began Its cruel revolutions, you and she Naked in Eden shook the apple tree. Oh soldier lad, Oh soldier lad, Before the soul of things turned bad, 

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Part Eight She offered you so modestly A shining apple from the tree. Oh lonely wife, Oh lonely wife, Before your lover left this life He took you in his gentle arms. How trivial then were Life’s alarms. And though Death taps down every street Familiar as the postman on his beat, Remember this, Remember this That life has trembled in a kiss From Genesis to Genesis, And what’s transfigured will live on Long after Death has come and gone. The abiding mood of Lewis’s poem appears to be one of optimism: ‘what’s transfigured,’ the poem tells us, ‘will live on.’ The power of memory is emphasized in the lines ‘Remember this, Remember this’: memory somehow soothes one who has lost something; and death, the poet tells us, can be overcome. A journeyman is an apprentice, and the other protagonists are the soldier-lad and his lonely wife; all three are innocents, this perhaps emphasized by the references to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The tone shifts with the second poem, this one by Keyes (dated July ). The second song is less gentle, less optimistic. The message is essentially that one should be afraid—this seen in the repetition of ‘o never trust’ and the ‘fear’, ‘distress’, and ‘broken’, of the poem. This second poem provides the title for the full song cycle, the positivity of the title belied by its incorporation in the negative of the first line. It seems to counsel exactly the opposite from the first poem, that is: don’t submit, don’t surrender, there’s nothing worthy in heroics that lead to death. More than in the first poem, I can hear Tippett’s voice here pleading with Fresca to go back and stay safe, ‘though [she] will never hear’. . ‘Song: The Heart’s Assurance’ O never trust the heart’s assurance— Trust only the heart’s fear: And what I’m saying is, Go back, my lovely— Though you will never hear. 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death O never trust your pride of movement— Trust only pride’s distress: The only holy limbs are the broken fingers Still raised to praise and bless. For the careless heart is bound with chains And terribly cast down: The beast of pride is hunted out And baited through the town. The third poem, a second by Lewis, shifts gears once again. This poem comes from the same ‘England’ section of Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets as did ‘Song’. The poet is still at home: . ‘Compassion’ She in the hurling night With lucid simple hands Stroked away his fright Loosed his bloodsoaked bands And seriously aware Of the terror she caressed Drew his matted hair Gladly to her breast. And he who babbled Death Shivered and grew still In the meadows of her breath Restoring his dark will. Nor did she ever stir In the storm’s calm centre To feel the tail, hooves, fur Of the god-faced centaur. This poem is also harder, more graphic than those that precede it. ‘She’ is a powerful figure, unafraid, bold, able to comfort ‘him’ in the face of horror. Did Tippett mean this to be a tribute to Fresca’s strength, ‘her lucid simple hands’, and her support of him? 

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Part Eight The next poem is another by Lewis, the subject also a woman, but a Bansheelike woman defiant in the face of death. The Dancer is perhaps the figure of the poet/musician who works in order to stave off a debilitating sorrow, ‘the choking blackness of the tomb’. This poem appears in a section called ‘Songs’ in Lewis’s Raiders’ Dawn and Other Poems published in March . Justin Vickers speculates that this poem may have come to Tippett’s attention as early as  when it appeared in the Welsh Review, a poetry journal. . ‘The Dancer’ ‘He’s in his grave and on his head I dance,’ the lovely dancer said, ‘My feet like fireflies illume The choking blackness of the tomb.’ ‘Had he not died we would have wed, And still I’d dance,’ the dancer said, ‘To keep the creeping sterile doom Out of the darkness of my womb.’ ‘Our love was always ringed with dread Of death,’ the lovely dancer said, ‘And so I danced for his delight And scorched the blackened core of night With passion bright,’ the dancer said— ‘And now I dance to earn my bread.’ For his last poem, Tippett returns to Keyes. The densest of the five poems, ‘Remember Your Lovers’ is a second poem about memory. This time it is an invocation on the part of the poet to those who have passed to remember those who remain, to recognize the struggle of those who live on. . ‘Remember Your Lovers’ Young men walking the open streets Of death’s republic, remember your lovers. When you foresaw with vision prescient The planet pain rising across your sky 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death We fused your sight in our soft burning beauty; We laid you down in meadows drunk with cowslips And led you in the ways of our bright city. Young men who wander death’s vague meadows, Remember your lovers who gave you more than flowers. When truth came prying like a surgeon’s knife Among the delicate movements of your brain We called your spirit from its narrow den And kissed your courage back to meet the blade— Our anaesthetic beauty saved you then. Young men whose sickness death has cured at last, Remember your lovers and covet their disease. When you woke grave-chilled at midnight To pace the pavement of your bitter dream We brought you back to bed and brought you home From the dark antechamber of desire Into our lust as warm as candle-flame. Young men who lie in the carven beds of death, Remember your lovers who gave you more than dreams. From the sun sheltering your careless head Or from the painted devil your quick eye, We led you out of terror tenderly And fooled you into peace with our soft words And gave you all we had and let you die. Young men drunk with death’s unquenchable wisdom, Remember your lovers who gave you more than love. Tippett does not include the third stanza and changes ‘warm’ to ‘bright’ in the penultimate stanza. If Schuttenhelm’s Selected Letters of Michael Tippett dates are correct, and there is strong disagreement here, Tippett had begun work on The Heart’s Assurance before Fresca’s death. Certain references suggest that Pears commissioned the piece before Tippett elected to dedicate it to Fresca, although there is no letter recording this commission. The manuscript and published score hold the notation: ‘commissioned by Peter Pears’. In several letters (dating from midSeptember  to ) Tippett tells Britten he is working on the piece: ‘Am just doing the second song for Peter,’ ‘Tell Peter I shall be sending him a second 

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Part Eight song.’ However, reference to a ‘third song’ in the Britten/Tippett correspondence does not appear until : ‘I’ve finished a rd song. I hope your hair won’t turn grey. It’s a bit schwermütig and wildly romantic—that as you’ve heard, I’ve had to put in another gayer and lighter one, which I’ve just sketched out— a kind of tarantella. Then the most important of them will be the th and last. To a rather fine poem of [Sidney] Keyes.’ In a subsequent letter, Tippett tells Britten ‘I think you’ll like the songs, though I’m a bit close to them for the moment to assess them very dispassionately. Certainly,’ he writes, ‘Francesca could have thought of no lovelier memorial to her than the proposed occasion on May . The theme is so close to her own experience and the friends involved so near and dear.’ And later in the same letter: ‘There are one or two happy “quotations” from you—turns of phrase which strike my ear as having been learnt from the master! Anyhow, Francesca would bless you for it. In a letter she left behind for me she wrote: keep a place warm for me in your heart. That’s just what happened and what the song expresses—but for all of us lovers so to speak. I think it could only be possible now that the wound is healing and I can think of her death without resentment.’



What is the theme of the piece Tippett chose to dedicate to Fresca? For Tippett, ‘the unity of mood which entirely joins [Sidney Keyes and Alun Lewis] together’ is ‘the experience of “Love under the Shadow of Death”’ and the phrase became a subtitle to The Heart’s Assurance. In its capacity as subtitle, it appears to me to be an appropriate choice because it repeats the hesitation that I find so frequently when Tippett talks or writes about Fresca. More than the work’s title, the subtitle and the subtext, it seems to me, is for Fresca. In May , Tippett writes to Pears: ‘[the songs] are to be (for me) a memorial to Francesca Allinson. Something I have wanted to do for a long time.’ He calls the poems love songs and tells Pears that ‘[t]heir theme is personal love during war’. Tippett describes his response to Keyes’s poetry as being twofold: ‘arising from my own life—concerning the woman to whom the song cycle is dedicated who died as the last war [World War II] ended’ and ‘a response to a more general situation on which my personal experience might be subsumed: Love under the shadow of Death.’ Arnold Whittall feels that while the ‘Lawrentian style’ of the poetry ‘may have dated the subject-matter touches, however obliquely, on Tippett’s abiding concerns—the need for honesty, self-knowledge, and revulsion at man’s destructiveness.’ Barbara Docherty argues that ‘[i]n The Heart’s Assurance Tippett came to terms with the “shadow”, the bitter “birth-to-death charade” of Allinson’s life’. Docherty offers a protracted version of the Fresca story: ‘“She” 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death was Fresca Allinson, for some  years from the mid-s Tippett’s mentor, confidante and conscience. Their love endured through several lesbian relationships and Tippett’s passionate attachment to Wilfred Franks, and they considered marriage and children, but feeling herself in a situation where she would be always a “sad slave” of Tippett’s creative demands she drowned herself in the River Stour in April .’ In a recent thesis focused on The Heart’s Assurance, the most extensive study to date, Justin Vickers cites Kemp as saying that Tippett ‘imagined the comingling of the poets’ voices as that of a single narrative voice, or the very “I”—in the first person’, this in terms of the work’s status as a song cycle; Whittall calls it a collection of arias or arias and monologues. Vickers introduces into the scholarship on The Heart’s Assurance a series of more than  previously unpublished letters exchanged by Pears and Tippett held by the Britten-Pears Foundation in Aldeburgh, Suffolk. These touch on the genesis of the song cycle.



When I find photographs of the two poets, Keyes and Lewis, in uniform in an article by Docherty, the femininity and innocence of the two young men leads me to consider their proximity to Fresca. I wonder if Fresca knew the writing of Keyes and Lewis. Both men published in venues where she might have encountered their work; and both men’s deaths predate Fresca’s. I want to think of these men first as men and as poets and second as soldiers, a dichotomy highlighted by the poignant first lines of Keyes’s ‘The War Poet’: I am the man who looked for peace and found My own eyes barbed. I am the man who groped for words and found An arrow in my hand. (March )  I know that Tippett read Keyes’s work in the anthology For Your Tomorrow, a book he describes to Pears as having ‘a gentle flavour of young spring promise cut short’. However Tippett may have encountered Keyes’s work elsewhere at an earlier date. (Several volumes of both Keyes and Lewis are among the recently catalogued items in Tippett’s library purchased by The University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center). For Your Tomorrow was an anthology, published in , of poetry ‘by young men who left English Public Schools shortly before or during the World War of – and died while serving in it’. Keyes was Oxford educated and already active as a poet while a student there, publishing his own work and that of his student contemporaries with Herbert Read at 

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Part Eight

 Sidney Keyes.

 Alun Lewis (Gweno Lewis).

Routledge. Of the two poems chosen by Tippett, one, ‘Remember Your Lovers,’ was ‘the first poem Keyes wrote at Oxford’, purportedly right after an examination, in October ; the other, ‘Song: The Heart’s Assurance’, is dated July . As noted in the preface to For Your Tomorrow, which includes ten of Keyes’s poems, by  Keyes’s poems had ‘already received conspicuous recognition’. He was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for  (‘for a work of imaginative literature for a British Subject under ’) posthumously in  for his collections Cruel Solstice and the Iron Laurel, published in London by Routledge in  and , respectively. Despite his youth, Keyes, like Fresca, knew about unrequited love. At Oxford he had fallen in love with a young German woman named Milein Cosman (pictured with Keyes in ), an art student at the Slade Art School, which had been temporarily relocated to Oxford. Despite her great admiration for Keyes’s intellect and artistry, Cosman was unable to reciprocate his love. Keyes dedicated many poems to Cosman. The Dido and Aeneas-like quality to Fresca and Tippett’s relationship is seen in Keyes’s ‘Dido’s Lament for Aeneas’: He never loved the frenzy of the sun Nor the clear seas. He came with hero’s arms and bullock’s eyes Afraid of nothing but his nagging gods. He never loved the hollow-sounding beaches Nor rested easily in carven beds.



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Love Under the Shadow of Death The smoke blows over the breakers, the high pyre waits. His mind was a blank wall throwing echoes, Not half so subtle as the coiling flames. He never loved my wild eyes nor the pigeons Inhabiting my gates. August .  Keyes died just two weeks into active service in Tunisia on April , , one month before he was to turn twenty-one. The actual circumstances of his death remain obscure; no personal effects were ever returned to his family. In contrast to Keyes, Lewis was not a public school boy, a fact that might have appealed to the class-conscious Tippett. For this reason, Lewis’s poetry was not included in the anthology For Your Tomorrow, and Tippett would have had to have found his work elsewhere. The older of the two men, Lewis was born in Wales in , the son of two teachers. He went first to a grammar school and then to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he published his first short stories and poems. Lewis subsequently did postgraduate work on the thirteenth-century papal legate, Ottobono, at the University of Manchester. Lewis’s poems appeared in The Observer and Time and Tide as early as , as many as seven in The Observer. His first collection, Raider’s Dawn, appeared in  and a collection of short stories, The Last Inspection, followed in . Both were very well received. Despite ambivalence about fighting, including an article entitled ‘If War Comes—Will I Fight’ in the Aberdare Leader, Lewis enlisted ‘impulsively’ in May . He joined the Royal Engineers in London, ‘anxious to avoid killing a man’. Lewis’s battalion, the Sixth Battalion of the South Wales Borderers, was posted to India in late . Lewis had married Gweno Ellis, a teacher, in , and he spent his last night with her before departing for India. Eight months later, while on leave in India, Lewis fell in love with a second woman, Freda Aykroyd. Lewis was not killed in combat. Stationed at Bawli, India, safe at camp, he was discovered on the morning of March , , by the  Keyes with Milein Cosman. latrines having just washed and 

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Part Eight shaved. He had been shot in the head; his revolver was in his own hand. After an investigation, Lewis’s superiors declared the incident an accident, although it is assumed his death was a suicide. In a review of Keyes’s Collected Poems (Holt ) for Poetry, David Daiches, writing in October , distinguishes between Keyes and other war poets like Wilfred Owen (–), a favorite of Tippett, and Siegfried Sassoon (–) in terms of the fact that Keyes knew nothing of pre– peace. This could apply to Lewis also. Daiches calls Keyes a ‘modern war poet’. ‘To read Keyes’ poems’ writes Daiches, ‘is to come really to grips with that second lost generation, the generation that was in its teens when Hitler marched into Poland, that grew up against a background, not of disillusion merely, but of positive Fascist screams for death; a generation that entered the University in the midst of “England’s finest hour” when the whole country was a military camp and when there was no room—no room, no time, no desire even—for Rupert Brooke’s mood towards Granchester.’ In Keyes’s collection, I find a poem written on Virginia Woolf ’s death. In some ways, this poem, I come to think, might also be read as for Fresca. Keyes did not meet Woolf, according to biographer John Guenther, but he knew her work. According to Guenther, like The Heart’s Assurance, ‘[the poem] was also a requiem for all of those killed in air raids or who died from war causes. Like Dylan Thomas’s better known poem, Refusal to Mourn, it is a permanent memorial to civilians who gave their lives from England in wartime.’ Elegy for Mrs Virginia Woolf Unfortunate lady, where white crowfoot binds Unheeded garlands, starred with crumpled flowers, Lie low, sleep well, safe from the rabid winds Of war and argument, our hierarchies and powers. Let the clear current spare you, once A water spirit, spare your quiet eyes; Let worm and newt respect your diffidence— And sink, tired lovely skull, beyond surprise. Over that head, those small distinguished bones Hurry, young river, guard their privacy; Too common, by her grave the willow leans And trails its foliage fittingly. 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death In time’s retreat, a stickleback’s Most complicated house, she lies: Colours and currents tend her; no more vex Her river-mind our towns and broken skies.



Sonya Allinson attends the premiere performance of The Heart’s Assurance with her mother. At this point they go often to Wigmore Hall since it is their ‘local’. They sit near the back, and Cyril is just a few rows in front of them. Sonya isn’t sure if they speak to him. Sonya finds the music ‘extremely strange’. I listen to the piece over and over and find something a little terrifying about it to my untrained ear, intensified by Peter Pears’s tenor voice. I consider Robert Samuels’s interpretation of Tippett’s A Child of Our Time as a work of protest and wonder the degree to which the disjunctive sound is an apt reflection of the inhumanity that cost not only Fresca, but also Keyes, Lewis, and myriad others their lives. When I interview Meirion Bowen at his Muswell Hill home in , he tells me that he created a different (he says ‘more listenable’) version of The Heart’s Assurance. In a positive review of Bowen’s version, David Clarke explains how Bowen gets around the ‘extended demisemiquaver roulades of the first movement, which, in the piano original, change colour by imperceptible transition according to register, and are enfolded in a halo of resonance by the sustaining pedal’ by ‘redistributing the technically tricky line between strings and woodwind’. While this results in ‘fragmentation’, Clarke says it’s ‘nonetheless mitigated by the effective use of harp and horns to realise the accumulating background sonority’. Although Tippett aficionados may have suggestions about the piece, Clarke feels that ‘Bowen’s orchestration revealingly illuminates a side of the piece that complements the intimacy of the original (we know that its theme of “love under the shadow of death”’ had strong private associations for Tippett as a memorial to Francesca Allinson). In this more extroverted and public guise The Heart’s Assurance enters the exuberant world of The Midsummer Marriage and accrues to itself much that is so affirmative about the opera.’ I look to Bowen’s interpretation of Tippett’s original version for help: Bowen notes that ‘[t]rue to his aesthetic, Tippett obliterates the distinctions between the two poets in setting their verse to music. As he points out, “The ‘music’ of the verse merely provided me with raw material for my own music.” He thus makes a special expressive highlighting of the “he’s” and “she’s”’ in the third song, Compassion, shaping and colouring them in the same way with long, expressive notes: this occurs all the time in the original poetry.’ According to Bowen, ‘Tippett adds a contextual image of distance in his treatment of the last song, 

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Part Eight Remember Your Lovers, so that he can imagine “a young woman singing out over the Elysian fields to the young man in the fields beyond.”’ Bowen goes on to argue (and I quote at length): love and death are polarized within the verbal and musical imagery [of the cycle]. The contrast becomes most explicit in the last song. Here each stanza begins with a sort of vocalized reminiscence of the Last Post, declaimed, unaccompanied and answered each time with a subdued fanfare-with-drums motif in the piano part though this military motif on the piano is lost in the swirling lyrical decorations that typify the song. At its fourth and final appearance, the refrain is accompanied by the military motif and the arresting perfect fifth interval of the Last Post is raised eloquently by a semitone. Since the The Heart’s Assurance is a product of the same compositional phase as The Midsummer Marriage, it is not surprising that love and lyricism there overwhelm death and rhetoric. Love is quite plainly portrayed as a stronger force than aggression or extinction. The first, third, and fourth songs almost suppress any hints of conflict. The first remembers the innocence of seduction and the vocal line is swathed in pianistic caresses. The third builds its rhetoric from images of compassionate love. The fourth, almost a sketch for the third ritual dance in The Midsummer Marriage, conjures the gaiety of love defiant in the context of death. Throughout these songs there seems to be no apparent check on Tippett’s freewheeling lyricism with its characteristic tonal elisions, the art in the work is prodigious but concealed. Each of the strophes in the first song undergoes pointed transformations, some incidental, some fundamental. The vocal addresses to the journeyman, the soldier, and the lonely wife are the same for the first two, then modified for the third; a second on the subdominant of B minor becomes a gentler seventh on the leading note of F major. The gentle pianistic throbbing that underpins the last four words of ‘Before this endless belt began its cruel revolution’ is used a modulatory device at ‘things turned bad’ and its point is made explicit at ‘before your lover left this life’. The same kind of insistence—whereby the lyrical flow of the music is retarded by pedal-point—comes in the motif for ‘death taps down every street’ in the coda to the song. Thus, the presence of symbolic disturbances to the lyrical abundance of the work gives it its strength and toughness. The Heart’s Assurance delineates human love, passion, and heartbreak with a depth and directness only an artist in his prime might accomplish. 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death Many reviews of the original piece seem to confirm my sense that The Heart’s Assurance represents a turning point for Tippett. After its  performance at Wigmore Hall in celebration of Tippett’s birthday, Michael White describes The Heart’s Assurance as ‘a great work: one of the finest song cycles in the English language and central to what history will probably judge the richest period of Tippett’s creativity’. ‘The mood is ecstatic (except for the last song, which intensifies into a solemn, Beethovenian weight of address), the voice stretched across toccata-like piano figurations that make texture through sheer business of movement; while the image that connects the texts—of love dancing on the precipice of death—is taken deep into the music. It isn’t difficult to come out of this score unsettled and disorientated by its paradoxically invigorating pathos.’ In his thesis, Vickers notes the lack of stability to the music for the opening song, also the rapid piano gesture, and a sense of never ended-ness. The third poem, ‘Compassion’, is vocally, according to Vickers, the most challenging— spanning nearly two octaves. Vickers highlights the Purcellian quality of the setting for ‘The Dancer’ and the Last Post, rising fifth of the last poem, ‘Remember Your Lovers’. What Vickers perceives as an emphasis on ‘song as an artform’ (in Tippett’s ‘conclusion’) again takes us back to Fresca. Interestingly, Pears himself responded negatively to The Heart’s Assurance in his piece included in Tippett’s th birthday tribute. Pears felt that the music swallowed up the poetry and that ‘[the elaboration of voice and piano] applied to the song-forms in The Heart’s Assurance […] damages it by expanding essentially simple shapes. The ur-forms of the three slower songs are simple lyrical utterances which do not need the pianistic figures which expand and blur. The fourth song is an effective and brilliant toccata (Scarlatti-like) with vocal obbligato; the second is a very original two-mooded piece where the vocal ornaments are balanced by the plain cadences. The cycle is coloured with a deep warmth; it is perhaps a too strong feeling for the situation of the three big songs which has driven the music to destroy the poem—by inflation.’ Despite the difficulties others had with the piece, Tippett’s own reaction to the Heart’s Assurance confirms his commitment to it. In Those Twentieth Century Blues he admits that he is still ‘unutterably moved when [he] hear[s] it performed’, and indeed when the piece was included at his ninetieth birthday gala, on January , , fifty years after her death, Tippett wept openly on the stage. In a January , , Daily Telegraph article entitled ‘Tippett’s tears from the heart’, Michael White describes the event: The National Theatre once performed a play about Benjamin Britten with a scene, backstage at a recital, where he shrank from the proffered kiss of his lover Peter Pears. ‘Not in the Wigmore Hall!’ snapped Britten, purse

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Part Eight lipped as he smoothed the creases from his tail coat. The Wigmore instantly acquired the reputation of a passion-killer: a place of culturally conditioned prophylaxis where the wayward feelings of not wholly onthe-straight-and-narrow artists were brought into line. The truth, though, is that it has always been the opposite: a sort of safe house where things could be said and done, as it were, among friends, with a liberating intimacy you wouldn’t find in any other hall. And so it was that after the concert for his th birthday, Sir Michael Tippett stood on the Wigmore stage and wept. Well, it was an emotional occasion. But specifically the tears were in response to his own music: the song cycle The Heart’s Assurance, which had been premiered in this very hall years before (in , by Britten and Pears as it happens) and was sung on Monday, very effectively, by Martyn Hill with Andrew Ball, piano. [. . .] But an author’s tears, in front of an audience, are something else. Though potentially rather tacky, in Tippett’s case they reveal the unselfconscious candour which is one of his more engaging qualities. Time and again you find in Tippett things you’d rather not, often of miraculous invention compromised by silliness or sheer bad taste. But they also tell of a mind too preoccupied with great issues or visionary prospects to care very much about niceties of taste. He writes with a take-it-or-leave-it frankness; and you take it—down to the last, nauseating urban cliché— because the infelicities are part of the deal. They are a condition of the genius that occasionally bursts out elsewhere. 



It is not until I am a fair way into my pursuit of Fresca that I realize the value of several recorded interviews with Michael Tippett. While Fresca’s is a voice that I will never hear except via her fiction or her music, Tippett’s is one I don’t need to imagine. I can hear his voice, see him moving around the room, standing at a podium, as Fresca had. And this is important. Tippett is the man Fresca hoped to have children with, the man with whom she’d come of age both musically and politically. On YouTube I find Sir Michael Tippett rehearsing Charles Ives’s Putnam’s Camp with the Leicestershire Schools Symphony Orchestra in . The clip I watch includes an interview with Tippett. I watch Tippett moving vigorously at the podium. I register his continued commitment to educating everyone about music. He clearly enjoys the work he is doing. He has a thin, angular face, and a full head of hair, still brown even in his early sixties. 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death Among recordings of Tippett is a BBC Radio Four interview he gave in  to Anthony Clare, presenter of ‘In the Psychiatrist’s Chair’ (–). This represents an important resource because it’s the one of just a few instances where we hear Tippett talk about his relationship with Fresca. Tippett, in his early eighties, is slightly affected. He calls Irish-accented Clare ‘love’. Clare opens with an introduction of Tippett talking about his lawyer father and his suffragette mother, his pacifism, and his ‘radical political sympathies’ and his sense that there is a need for individuals to comprehend the social as well as the psychic. Clare calls Tippett ‘this country’s greatest living composer’. Anthony Clare notes that Tippett has given a lot of interviews over his lifetime, and he characterizes Tippett’s life as ‘a life of self-reflection’. He asks Tippett if he thinks there’s been too much self-reflection. Tippett hesitates, he’s ‘not sure it exists at all’. He asks Clare to define what he means by ‘self ’, but he says you’d ‘have to consider the social problems in which I live, the child of our time is not only the child of my time, but the child of our time’, to do that he’d ‘have to come outside of [him]self and yet [. . .] deal with the problems of [his] own psyche and [his] own emotions . . . how have they affected it?’ Tippett quotes W. B. Yeats on the artist at this point: ‘out of the struggle with his environment he makes rhetoric, out of his struggle with himself he makes poetry.’ The actual line, from Yeats’s ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae, Anima Hominis’ is: ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’ It continues: ‘Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders.’ Tippett thinks that ‘this has some reasonable sense as long as we can sort out or see what the jargon is’. Clare says that clearly Tippett is preoccupied by that process in a way other composers might not be. Tippett agrees and he ultimately concedes that he is, ‘of course’, interested in the process of ‘self-revelation’. Clare notes that a lot of this starts to gel in the late s with Tippett’s interest in Jung. But before that . . . Clare suggests that Tippett’s childhood was not particularly intellectual, but Tippett disagrees. Tippett begins with his parents. He says that his father’s bookshelves provided an intellectual environment. When his father read to him and his brother there was an emotional and aesthetic response: ‘[they] drank it in.’ Tippett was nine when World War I began. At around this time, he tells Clare, his father lost his money and the family’s lifestyle changed radically. Instead of being looked after by even a nurse, the boys had to take part in the running of the house. Clare says that he sees very sharply throughout Tippett’s work the notion of break and catastrophe but, he says, this doesn’t seem to be when it happened. Tippett says Clare is right, 

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Part Eight that the break came afterwards. He says he was very slow politically to know what was going on. He didn’t know what it meant when the first World War war ended. But after that there were two polarizing things: one was coming to London at last in . In , he went to London and he found the city full of exuberance and of artistic activity; but, on the other side, he also saw men who had lost their limbs, of whom he was acutely aware; he saw films which came out of the war and he was shattered. Tippett says he came to the feeling that was expressed by [Russian poet Anna] Akhmatova: that is, that the century began in , and that this was the real catastrophe. Tippett says that it was difficult to realize that one’s first spring of love was in this catastrophic springtime and that things have never been the same again. Tippett portrays the midand late s as a time of crisis. At this point, he mentions his awareness of being gay from age , and he talks about his effort to self-analyze. Tippett tells Clare that this crisis was affecting his music and that this sent him into therapy. But therapy frightened him—he [feared that] he’d lose the violence within him which made art. He describes a second birth—which brought more power over psychic forces. Clare asks, ‘What died for you?’ Tippett answers first ‘my fears’, though, he adds, it was a second birth from which he emerged as a ‘much more mature artist’ with more power over his psychic forces to do art whatever it cost. One of the conflicts at the time was between ‘[the] social and emotional side of life and [his] life as an artist’. Tippett says he realised at this point that it would never be right, it would be a matter of balance. He was suffering with a deep wound, but he didn’t blame anyone for the wound or really understand what the wound was. Then Clare turns to Fresca. He says that it is at about this time that Tippett had several important relationships. Tippett’s first comments about Fresca suggest a distance. He calls their relationship ‘curious’, but as he speaks, Tippett becomes gradually more honest, finally calling it ‘profound’. I noted that the language of the interview is similar to that used in the autobiography—which followed the interview. Tippett speaks disjointedly: This woman, Francesca Allinson. [. . .] That was a curious relationship. She was also bisexual in some way. Between us there was a kind of tenderness, serene, whether it was because elemental [?]. When she died it was the worst of them all, somehow it all came back. I don’t know if she wanted to be my lover. She left a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets and a miniature photo of me in Germany with a child. She had kept this . . . when you receive this after the death . . .When I got this I was violently angry. I wrote violent letters. She was half English, half Jew. It was a profound relationship . . . I can’t tell you what it meant. It was stable, but she wasn’t 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death stable herself. She wanted a social life and, gentle though I was, I was locked in this obsessive relationship with music. Then Clare asks: ‘Is that the wound, that there are no children?’ Tippett says he does not know.



It is in the letters that Tippett sends to David Ayerst on learning of Fresca’s death that he is perhaps most explicit about how he feels about Fresca’s suicide. He writes to Ayerst: ‘[Fresca’s] gaiety & gentleness & even her waywardness & her love of pretty things all seem irreplaceable values. I loved her more deeply than I knew when she was there. The memory is extremely sweet & fragrant. Her going out has turned everything topsy-turvy.’ Tippett tells Ayerst that he had written a first letter to him ‘as a whipping boy’ (blaming him for his support of the war) but had then destroyed it. He describes a ‘nightmarish quality that hangs so easily over or just behind our present life’: ‘It isn’t [Fresca’s] going that seems wrong or unexpected, it’s that the manner seems to enter with me this nightmarish world. If she were cold & afraid I would or should have been there.’ Tippett closes with: ‘[Fresca and I] were both marked as so many of our generation have been—but perhaps my career especially got in the way & she is part of the price. We never learn about real loss till it’s there in our persons. Her going is less perhaps than the maiming & death of so many young folk, children, mothers in this lunatic power-driven world. But I know it sharper. She was a lovely, lovely creature as I feel, & lived her birthright out with courage— poor lamb.’ In Ian Kemp’s collection of sixtieth-birthday tributes to Tippett, I find Ayerst echoing this profound sense of loss in a mention of Fresca. For his tribute, Ayerst undertakes a tour of Tippett’s bookcase as a means to track his development (much as I had done with Fresca’s diary). Ayerst addresses Tippett: ‘For most of your life there was, of course, only one bookcase. It followed you from place to place. When you were young, and poorer than most young men, it was rather a horrid pitch-pine colour like the pews in a Victorian church. In your last home it became a pleasanter white—and rather smaller. You cut off the end to fit it to a new wall, and I don’t think you have ever regretted the books that were inevitably cast out—not even the one with that glorious title, Seven Splendid Sinners.’ Ayerst mentions Tippett’s copy of Jonathan Cape’s edition of Samuel Butler first, an author who brought the two men together. Tippett’s favorite Butler is not Erewhon or The Way of All Flesh, but ‘Life and Habit and the portions of the Note Books which bear on the theme of creative evolution’. This choice ‘[to 

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Part Eight concentrate] on a minor strand in a man’s achievement’, according to Ayerst, was ‘characteristic of a good deal of [Tippett’s] reading [as it was of Fresca’s]— as you moved from writer to writer it was the rhythm of your own development that you followed’. In the s, Ayerst says, Tippett, still concerned with ‘creative evolution’, reads Bergson’s L’Elan Vital, Shaw’s Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Next comes the complete works of Goethe, which represents ‘the next important stage in [Tippett’s] intellectual education’; it is in order to read Wilhelm Meister in the original in part that Tippett learns German. Goethe’s ‘concern with the self-awareness of the artist and with the nature of art itself ’ are also draws for Tippett at this stage in his life. Alongside Goethe, Ayerst puts the first volume of Romain Rolland’s ten-volume roman fleuve Jean-Christophe; Germany and pacifism are issues that draw Tippett to Rolland. Ayerst recalls next that Tippett read all  volumes of Frazer’s Golden Bough in  or . A title marking the political excitement of the time was Engels’s Anti-Dühring. Other more personal books in the political category are cousin Phyl Kemp’s Healing Ritual: Studies in the Technique and Tradition of the Southern Slavs and a volume of poetry entitled The Maiden and the Unicorn by mathematician Paul Dienes, friend of Tippett and a refugee from Horthy’s Hungary. Ayerst dates the volumes of Jung’s work in the bookcase to  or . This was a time ‘when Europe turned “on its dark side” and many young intellectuals were drawn increasingly into politics’ asserts Ayerst. ‘You yourself took an opposite course, disengaging yourself from your political interests to come to terms with the personal problems which confronted you.’ Shelved alongside Jung is John Layard’s The Lady of the Hare. Then Ayerst comes to Fresca: A similar personal debt is recalled by another of your books, A Childhood by Francesca Allinson. She was the gayest and daintiest of women whose companionship over many years meant much to many of your friends, but most of all to you. Next to it should stand your copy of Blake’s poems. His Prophetic Books were a constant preoccupation of yours in those years, and Fresca was closely associated with you in the performance of one of the latest of your unpublished works, A Song of Liberty from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Fresca’s friendship is one of the few persistently sad memories that we share. It was the ‘darkness at noon’ which overshadowed both the great world and her own spirit which drove her to take her own life. Her death is a boundary stone which still marks a period in your life. 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death ‘By this time, and by the time you came out of prison, your education was complete,’ Ayerst tells Tippett. He could close the letter at this point, he says, but not without mentioning W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot, singling out The Family Reunion (a work Fresca mentions in her Diary) for its focus on ‘multiple forces which are greater than individual men, but which are to be recognized only by their working in individuals’. At another venue, addressing The Burford Society, much later in , Ayerst tries to capture Fresca: I wish I could re-create Fresca for you. I tried to describe her for Ian Kemp and gave him the adjective ‘dainty’ which duly appears in his magnificent biography, but I was reminded by John Amis at the first English performance of the Mask of Time that ‘dainty’ was the wrong word. So it was. When I first met her she suffered from goitre and, though that was removed, I think it left its mark as a contributory factor to the depressions to which she was prone. For lack of a substitute for ‘dainty’ let me just say that she (?)was always captivating, whether she was being still and quiet or overflowing in liveliness. Fresca was a passionate musician, an expert who had done pioneering work on the origins of folk song, but she was never pompous. She was indeed racy in speech, warm in affection, no beauty but a lovely person: ‘a daughter of Earth and Water, and a nursling of the sky’. More to the present purpose she was the dearest of all Michael’s women friends and quite the most suitable companion for him on his visit to Georg Götsch. She had a number of German relatives so that when in  Michael decided to learn German thoroughly Fresca had arranged for him to stay with one of her cousins who ran a Kinderheim near the Bodensee. The lines from the last stanza of Shelley’s ‘The Cloud’ are so beautifully chosen by Ayerst for Fresca, they need no commentary. I am the daughter of Earth and Water, And the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but I cannot die. For after the rain when with never a stain The pavilion of Heaven is bare, And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams Build up the blue dome of air, I silently laugh at my own cenotaph, 

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Part Eight And out of the caverns of rain, Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb, I arise and unbuild it again.



Tippett tells Peter Pears that he chose the poetry of Keyes and Lewis for The Heart’s Assurance because their work dealt with ‘personal love during war.’  This prompts me to think about the story I am trying to tell as one about friends and friendships, about growing up in the interwar years, about precisely this: personal love during war. Tippett’s phrase takes me back to a line from Fresca’s diary about togetherness and apartness: ‘One suffers this common collective life without cease,’ she writes, ‘and within it I live my own different personal life.’ A title missing from Tippett’s shelf in Ayerst’s catalogue, but one clearly important in terms of his relationship with Fresca, is Woolf ’s  novel-poem The Waves. The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has Tippett’s books, but on a first enquiry they had yet to be catalogued; a short list did include Woolf ’s A Writer’s Diary. Two quite different lists came to me later from Oliver Soden, one covering books sent to the Center and those owned by the Center—neither included The Waves. I wonder if Tippett’s copy of The Waves might be among items still held by Meirion Bowen. In a  letter Tippett tells Fresca he will bring her a copy of The Waves as ‘a very early Christmas gift [. . .] because it’s so much our own book in some curious intimate way’. The symphonic quality of Woolf ’s novel would have appealed to both Fresca and Tippett. I recall that at another point, Tippett has also used the strange phrase ‘our joint selves’ in terms of himself and Fresca and it seems to describe perfectly the relationships between the characters in The Waves. I return to the marked passage from The Waves in the copy lovingly bound in paper of her own design in Enid Marx’s collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Of the two passages she has marked lightly with a pencil, one pertains to ‘friendship’. Bernard, Woolf ’s major narrator and possible alter ego, speaks: O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. O friendship, how piercing are your darts—there, there, again there. All mists curl off the roof of my being. That confidence I shall keep to my dying day. Like a long wave, like a roll of heavy waves, he went over me, his devastating presence—dragging me open, laying bare the pebbles on the shore of my soul. It was humiliating; I was turned to small stones. All semblances were rolled up. ‘You are not Byron; you are yourself.’ To be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange. 

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Love Under the Shadow of Death Bernard’s reference to Shakespeare’s sonnets reminds me that Woolf ’s title recalls another Shakespeare sonnet. At number  it anticipates Fresca’s choice of sonnet  to accompany her parting note for Tippett.  (The Waves): Like as the waves make towards the pebbl’d shore, So do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before, In sequent toil all forwards do contend. Nativity, once in the main of light, Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d, Crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight, And Time that gave doth now his gift confound. Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow, Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth, And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow: And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand. Number  (Fresca’s choice): Being your slave, what should I do but tend Upon the hours and times of your desire? I have no precious time at all to spend, Nor services to do, till you require. Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour, Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you, Nor think the bitterness of absence sour, When you have bid your servant once adieu; Nor dare I question with my jealous thought Where you may be, or your affairs suppose, But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought, Save, where you are, how happy you make those: So true a fool is love, that in your will (Though you do anything) he thinks no ill. The appeal of Woolf ’s The Waves was the fact that the characters also capture in their diversity Tippett and Fresca—who came of age in the interwar period— their ever shifting and changing selves and their relationships with their ‘vast circle of friends’. Bernard asserts: 

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Part Eight We have proved, sitting eating, sitting talking, that we can add to the treasury of moments. We are not slaves bound to suffer incessantly unrecorded petty blows on our bent backs. We are not sheep either, following a master. We are creators. We too have made something that will join the innumerable congregations of past time. We too, as we put on our hats and push open the door, stride not into chaos, but into a world that our own force can subjugate and make part of the illumined and everlasting road.



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Coda M

Y quest for Fresca ends with another teenage girl. I find Jacqueline Mesmaeker online in . Searching for Fresca’s A Childhood, this time drawn even deeper into a Google Books search than usual, I find the following annonce:

JACQUELINE MESMAEKER – ‘A Childhood’ ()  Cette édition rassemble les pages dessinées au crayon par Jacqueline Mesmaeker dans le livre de Francesca Allinson A CHILDHOOD (Hogarth Press, ) qui lui fut offert et dédicacé en  par Smithy, officier à la RAF. Tiré à  exemplaires (+E.A.) numérotés et signés, ce livre comprend trois dessins originaux.  Prix  : membre  : / membre – ans : / Non membres : 

I discover that Belgian artist Jacqueline Mesmaeker has made an ‘artist’s book’ out of Fresca’s book. The organization Jeunesse & Arts Plastiques has published a limited edition, just  copies, of a selection of Mesmaeker’s images from A Childhood. Just a few details accompany the description of the project: the artist had been given the book in  by a Royal Air Force officer called Smithy. With multiple emails and a letter sent to an address also found online, I reach Jacqueline. I am full of questions and over the course of several months she slowly answers them in French and English, preferring, she tells me, not to go in order. Jacqueline now in her eighties tells me that it is still difficult to talk about the liberation of Brussels. The war was not over when Belgium was freed and there were still bad things to come. The Belgians continued to suffer bombardments even after liberation from the Germans in August and September of , after close to four years of occupation. ‘We lived near Avenue des Nations,’ she wrote, ‘which has been named since Avenue Franklin Roosevelt. That avenue cut in two part S.W. and S.E. of Brussels, and between is a wood: Bois de la Cambre.’ She continued:



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Coda

 Jacqueline Mesmaeker.

Yesterday I phoned to a friend who runned [sic] with me to the first tanks, really the first (l’Avenue des Nations étant un des axes de pénétration dans Bruxelles.) Par je ne sais quel ultra rapide mode de communication, nous savions qu’en courant au plus rapidement de nos jeunes forces nous n’allions pas manquer les very first. Perchés très haut émergeant de la tourelle de leur char à l’étoile blanche, avec leur casque très reconnaissable,c’étaient des américains. Dans la lumière orange du soleil couchant, ils apparaissaient comme des dieux antiques: bronzés, le regard circulaire tout à leur mission et probablement entravés par l’innocent enthousiasme de notre petit groupe, très vite nous avons compris à leur austérité, qu’il fallait dégager et ne pas entraver leur détermination. Toute la nuit, j’ai entendu des tirs et le lendemain, les britanniques avaient installés leur quartier dans le Bois de la Cambre. L’amie de lycée avec laquelle je me trouvais au bas de ce char, me dit qu’elle avait pensé “Hélène est sauvée” —Hélène était sa compagne de classe, une jeune juive cachée chez un professeur de langues, laquelle risquait sa vie sans aucun doute. Pendant toute la guerre, nous vivions dans l’angoisse de ces disparitions, bien que très vite, plus aucune étoile jaune ne circulait, soit exterminés soit secrètement cachés. L’ Université libre de Bruxelles a décidé d’arrêter toute activité et de fermer les portes. Plusieurs professeurs et étudiants étaient juifs, les suds américains de la Fondation Ruma ont repris le bateau à Anvers, sur le JeanJadot. Tous les étrangers sont partis, mais un presque voisin qui nous saluait avec beaucoup de politesse (nous ne le connaissions que de vue ) est soudain apparu en uniforme d’officier allemand ..............? 

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Coda Jacqueline tells me that her father met Royal Air Force Officers Smithy and Johnny in Brussels, where they were on leave. He brought them home to Uccle, a Brussels suburb, to meet his daughters, Jacqueline and Peggy. On a subsequent visit at Christmas time, the two officers invite the girls to the officers’ mess for a dance. Sixteen-year-old Jackie dances for the first time in the arms of the handsome, moustachioed Smithy. On this same occasion, Smithy presents Jackie with a souvenir, a book—the light blue cover of which, Jackie remembers, matched his RAF uniform. That book is Fresca’s A Childhood. And it is a book, she remembers, that clearly had meaning for Smithy: Smithy and Johnny were friends, both officers in the RAF. They were resting in Brussels, I supposed. Brussels was already liberated. The war was finished just some months earlier and the allied force were staying around. My father met them, as they were visiting the town, and took them back home. It was the beginning of a short war friendship. They invited my sister Peggy and I to dance in the officer’s mess. This was the first time I was dancing in couple! Smithy was my choice and I was his. He was very elegant with a black moustache and black hair. He was hiding his humour behind a light smile. I can’t exactly remember but I think that, after a while, they had to return to England, for a permission. My parents invited them later to celebrate Christmas, and on that occasion he offered me what seemed to be a precious souvenir for him. It’s my last souvenir of them.

 Dedication page.



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Coda  Young Jacqueline.

We never had any news after, and we preferred to ignore if they were still alive or not. The period was always intense for the aviation: they were bombing Germany, with no mercy. Does she recall their surnames? Unfortunately, no: ‘je ne connais pas leur nom de famille, et les vagues du temps font que cela a disparu. Or perhaps, that was a war rule, but, I’ll never forget Smithy and Johnny who was fair hair et plus baraqué, sans être gros du tout.’ Fifty-one years later, in , Jacqueline returns to Fresca’s book. Why ? Significantly, (although unbeknownst to Jacqueline) in an astounding coincidence, this is not long after Tippett made news as he wept openly on stage at the Wigmore Hall at the performance of The Heart’s Assurance during his ninetieth birthday celebration. This also marked the beginning of Tippett’s decline: in  his health begins to falter and he dies in . Jacqueline tells me: Non, je n’ai pas lu le livre tout de suit et souhaite ardemment m’y replonger et par la même occasion, retrouver le passage “post-war world, and a young lady”. During the years ‘, ‘, ‘, je dessinais sur les murs en des lieux effectivement désaffectés afin d’éviter le système des galeries tout en sortant du domicile. La ère fois, ce fut dans l’immense salle sombre d’une glacière désaffectée juste éclairée dans le haut par un trou de  x  cm. environ; des centaines de dessins couvraient les murs de briques, peints en blanc devenu poussiéreux, la salle était immense, froide, sans aucun confort. Pourquoi ai-je fait cela, ces secret outlines? Par dépit probablement, sachant qu’ils ne seraient vu que par quelques personnes, le lieu étant une usine désaffectée. J’ai recommencé cette expérience, plus officiellement cette fois dans le cadre d’une exposition collective invitant des artistes de quelques pays. C’était aussi un grand lieu désaffecté, où seule jour après jour j’ai couvert les murs de petits dessins, réalisés au crayon ou au tampon par l’intermédiaire de gabarits.



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Coda In another message, Jacqueline describes how she ‘secretly’ set to work on adding her own illustrations to A Childhood. In so doing she would open a conversation with Fresca and with her own childhood. I made a few drawings with a pencil in the original book, and this book has been exhibited in a show at the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh (or was it in Norwich in the Art School Gallery? I’m suddenly not so sure about this). In , the Brussels-based association JAP ( Jeunesses et Arts Plastiques) made an edition based on this book: a digital reprint of the pages and the drawings, on a slightly blue paper. By adding drawings in the original version of the book, I paid a particular attention to the original drawings of Enid Marx. Comme je l’ai dit précédemment, j’ai ajouté les dessins en me laissant guidée soit par les chemins de la typographie, soit par un mot, une expression ou une évocation.

 Petals.

 Clown.



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Coda

 Fish.

Jacqueline adds more than  marks to Fresca’s book. Some of her interventions are minimal, such as small petal-like insertions decorating individual words. In other instances, she pastes in a picture. She inserts an outline drawing of a clown or a fish and she covers another entire page with red and yellow crayon squiggles. I find a definition of an artist’s book which gives me a better sense of Jacquelin’s project: Ces éditions originales cherchent à élargir la définition du livre. Elles ne s’enferment pas dans un moule mais maintiennent la possibilité, sans extravagance, d’échapper aux conventions de l’édition en créant une relation d’intimité avec le lecteur et une expérience de plaisir déterminante. The artist’s book’s refusal of conventional parameters echoes beautifully for me the openness towards which Fresca and her circle of friends always aspired. It is an openness to possibility I hope I too have maintained in my own life and work over the many years of the writing of this book.



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NOTES

Preface       

  

Francesca Allinson, A Childhood (London: Hogarth Press, ), p. . Hereafter A Childhood. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, ), p. . Hereafter The Waves. A Childhood, p. . Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Orlando: Harcourt, ), p. . Woolf also uses the same first short phrase at the close of A Room, p. . Hereafter A Room. Virginia Woolf, ‘How Should One Read a Book’ in The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume , –. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (Orlando: Harcourt, ), p. . Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, ), p. . I do appreciate Leon Edel’s contention that ‘a biography should find its own length; and the length is prescribed by the dimensions of the subject, perspective, a sense of relevance. It should never be a way of stuffing in all the little facts on the theory that every surviving scrap, every tiny button, has relevance. Facts have importance only in a chain of evidence.’ He adds: ‘A writer of lives must extract individuals from their chaos yet create an illusion that they are in the midst of life—in the way that a painter arrives at an approximation of a familiar visage on canvas.’ Leon Edel, Writing Lives (New York: Norton, ), pp. , . Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf ’s Nose: Essays on Biography (Princeton: Princeton UP, ), p. . Alison Light, Common People: The History of an English Family (London: Fig Tree/Penguin, ), p. xxv. Personal correspondence.

Prologue  J. Howard Woolmer. A Checklist of the Hogarth Press – (Woolmer/Brotherson Ltd: Revere, PA, ), p. . Hereafter Woolmer.  Email communication, September , .  Michael Tippett. Those Twentieth Century Blues: An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, ). Hereafter TTCB. Tippett calls it a ‘maverick book [and] a collection of stories’ (TTCB, pp. xi–xii).  Ibid., p..  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., pp. , , .



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Notes                        



Ibid., p.  my emphasis. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Thomas Schuttenhelm. Selected Letters of Michael Tippett (London: Faber, ), p. . May , . Hereafter Selected Letters of Michael Tippett. Ibid., pp. –. A Childhood, p. . J.H. Willis Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press – (Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, ), pp. , . Paula Byrne, The Real Jane Austen (New York: Harper Perennial, ), p. . See also Lisa Cohen All We Know: Three Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ). I am also reminded of Irving Penn’s  ‘Portrait with Symbols’ of Orson Welles and Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence. A.J.A. Symons. The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (New York: NYRB Books, ), p. .

Part One  http://artuk.org/discover/artists/allinson-adrian-paul-  David Boyd Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (London: Old Street Publishing Ltd., ), Frontispiece and Colour Plates (Section One).  Oliver Soden notes that Adrian was also very close to the great war poet Isaac Rosenberg. Adrian appears frequently in Jean Moorcroft-Wilson’s Rosenberg biography, where he is described as being ‘anti-semitic’. See Jean Moorcroft Wilson. Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet: A New Life (London: Weidenfeld, ).  Carole Angier, Jean Rhys: Life and Work (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), pp. –. Hereafter Angier.  Jean Rhys, “Till September Petronella”, in The Collected Short Stories (New York: Norton, ), p. .  Lillian Pizzichini, The Blue Hour: A Life of Jean Rhys (New York: Norton, ), pp. –.  Angier, pp. –.  Terry Gilliam collects Odle’s work.  Martin Steenson, The Life and Work of Alan Odle (Stroud: Books and Things, ), p. .  Qtd in Angier p. . See also John Rosenberg’s Dorothy Richardson: The Genius They Forgot (London: Duckworth, ), p. . Allinson painted a picture of Odle and Richardson in the s.  Adrian Allinson, A Painter’s Pilgrimage. Unpublished manuscript held at University of Tulsa, with the Dorothy Miller Richardson papers, p. . Page numbers for Adrian Allinson’s autobiography are from my transcribed copy. Hereafter Painter’s Pilgrimage.



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Notes           

                  



     

Painter’s Pilgrimage, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . I found a Sofie Ehrlick born about  in New York in the  US Census, living at Ocean Avenue, New York, Kings, New York. I asked Sonya about Maitland, but she knew nothing about her. Sonya mentioned Selim and Geoffrey, and their young mother. I found a few references to people with these names. In Selected Vital Records from the Jamaican Daily Gleaner, p, : ‘Miss Selim Myers (Violin Mistress) will be returning to England. Miss Myers will be greatly missed in the community where she has made a great many friends. . . . ’; The Song of the World () by Jean Giono, is translated by Henri Fluchère and Geoffrey Myers; and Ros[e]y Myers is listed as  and living in Crumpsall, Manchester, in the  UK Census. My emphasis, Painter’s Pilgrimage, p. . Ibid., p. . Tippett mentions a Jewish friend of Fresca, named Kitty Zeidmann, who had gone with him to Belgrade to help Phyl Kemp (TTCB, p. ). A Childhood, p. . Letter from Margaret Lambert to Miss Fletcher, dated November , . Property of Matthew Eve. Painter’s Pilgrimage, p. . Robert Graves and Alan Hodges, The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain –, (New York: Norton,  []), p. . Hereafter Graves and Hodges. https://wigmore-hall.org.uk/about-us/history http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/written_answers//apr//german-governess-repatriation Panikos Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War (Oxford: Berg, ), p. . TTCB, p. . Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume , –. Eds Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Boston: Mariner Books, ), p. . My emphasis, Painter’s Pilgrimage, p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . ‘The instrument was handed over to brother Bert who had just left Wrekin and upon whom Father’s hopes for a successor were now set.’ Ibid., p. . Meaghan Clarke, ‘Sex and the City: The Metropolitan New Woman’, in Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, Jennifer Mundy (eds.), The Camden Town Group in Context, Tate Research Publication, May , https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/meaghan-clarke-sex-andthe-city-the-metropolitan-new-woman-r. University of London War List –. http://www.ulrls.lon.ac.uk/resources/WARLISToptimised.pdf. Cyril Pulvermacher Allinson and Bertrand Pulvermacher Allinson are listed as University College. Bertrand as Lt. RAMC and Cyril as Wireless Operator RN. www.wallacecollection.org. I find a Prospect House not far from Kew Gardens listed online as a protected property. Cyril Allinson. Unpublished autobiographical fragments in the possession of Sonya Allinson, p. . I identify this as possibly Wembley Park Drive. Adrian describes this as ‘a dreary semi-detached villa in Wembley near the Park’ (Painter’s Pilgrimage, p. ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Grossmith_Jr. Painter’s Pilgrimage, p. .

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Notes  Paul Emden, Jews of Britain: A Series of Biographies (S. Low, Marston and Co., ), p. .  After Bethnal Green, mills were purchased in Castleford and Newport in Wales. The business was consolidated with six other businesses in  by Willard Garfield Weston to form Allied Bakeries.  , in  is the equivalent of between ,,. and ,,., according to www.measuringworth.com.  Publication details on Google Books: manager, Allinson Publications, , Fairfax Rd., Kilburn, , also .  Allinson’s Essays: Extracts from the Essays of T.R. Allinson (Peterborough: Allinson, no date). pp. –. Hereafter Allinson’s Essays.  Allinson’s Essays, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p .  Letter from Chris Lloyd, January , .  Christopher Scott, “Gandhi and the ‘struck off ’ doctor, Thomas Richard Allinson (–)”, Journal of Medical Biography ,  (August ): pp. –.  A Childhood, p. .  Ibid., p. .  PP, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. . My emphasis,  Ibid., p. .  PP p. . My emphasis.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthyroidism  Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’ in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume , –. Ed. Andrew McNeillie (Orlando: Harcourt, ), pp. –. My emphasis.  Ibid., p. .  A Childhood, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  The clipping had neither date nor source information.

Part Two  M.L. ‘In Memoriam: Francesca Allinson.’ (The Brown Book, Lady Margaret Hall, ), pp. –.  ‘University Examination Results, .’ The Review of English Studies, Vol. , No. . (Oct. ), pp. –.  W. A. C. Stewart, W. P. McCann, The Educational Innovators: Volume II: Progressive Schools – (London: Macmillan, ), p. .  The Spectator, ( July , ), p. .  Fresca completes groups B. and B. in  and the Oxford School Certificate in Religious Knowledge in July ; she receives an exemption from Holy Scripture in  and completes her degree in English Language & Literature with a Class II in the Trinity Term, Spring of ; her B.A. is awarded November , .

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Notes  Diana Condell, ‘First Woman Appointed to a Senior Rank at MI’, The Guardian ( June , ). Bagot appears as a member of Fresca’s choir in an undated programme held at Lady Margaret Hall. The producers of the show, which includes songs by Byrd and Sharp, are listed as ‘Music-E Allinson,’ ‘Acting-M.Rawlings, ‘Clothes etc. S.E. Wart.’ Margaret Rawlings (later Lady Barlow) (–) became an acclaimed actress. http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp/margaret-rawlings-lady-barlow  Judy Batson, Her Oxford (Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, ), pp. –; hereafter Batson.  See the Dictionary of National Biography and Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations (New York: Sarah Crichton Books, ).  ‘Cambridge [for its part] refused to admit women to university membership, but in  passed “Graces” which granted degree titles to women graduates’ (Graves and Hodges, p. ).  Stacy Marking, ed. Oxford Originals: An Anthology of Writing from Lady Margaret Hall: –. Oxford: Lady Margaret Hall, p. .  ‘University News.’ Times [London, England], (April , ), . The Times Digital Archive. Web. Jan. , .  Batson, p.   Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Penguin [] ), p. .  A Childhood, p. .  Oliver Soden notes that there is a Thea in Tippett’s third opera, The Knot Garden.  Ruth Adam, A Woman’s Place – (London: Persephone Books,  []), pp. –; hereafter Adam.  Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume : – (New York: Harvest/HBJ, ), p. ; hereafter L.  L, p. . May , .  Virginia Woolf, ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume : – (New York: Mariner Books, ), pp. –; hereafter ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’. Also published under the title ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’.  ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. . My emphasis.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Virginia Woolf, Women & Fiction. The Manuscript Versions of A Room of One’s Own. Transcribed and edited by S.P. Rosenbaum (Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press/Blackwell: ), p. xv; hereafter, Rosenbaum.  See Anna Snaith and Christine Kenyon-Jones, ‘Tilting at Universities: Virginia Woolf at King’s College London.’ (Woolf Studies Annual, Vol. , ), pp. –.  Virginia Woolf. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume . –. Ed Anne Olivier Bell (New York: Harvest, ), pp. –.  Kathleen Raine, The Land Unknown (London: George Braziller, ), p. .  M. C. Bradbrook, That Infidel Place: A Short History of Girton College, – (London: Chatto and Windus, ), pp. –. Qtd in Rosenbaum, p. xviii.  M. C. Bradbrook, ‘Review of Woolf ’s work.’ Scrutiny, (May ), pp. –. See also Rosenbaum, pp. xviii–xix.  Moore continues: ‘The bitter story of the Arts urges one to ask what man has ever had a room of his own that he did not have to earn with cadging, pandering, humiliation, fill with wives and children and bailiffs, and still produce by the spirit-alchemy of sweat and desire the works he is remembered by? As though England were not honeycombed with passive aesthetically sterile women of all ages,

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Notes

        



            

        

in rooms of their own ranging from five hundred to five thousand a year! Possibly it produces a local (village) industry. That is as much as five hundred a year will produce anywhere. To the creative artist  is not enough. It must be five millions. Or five pence.’ Olive Moore, Apple is Bitten Again, in Collected Writings (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, ), p. . The Nation & Athenaeum (November , ), p. . Woolf ’s response to Irvine suggests the pragmatism of her argument. A Room, pp. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., pp.–. Ibid., pp. . My emphasis. Vera Brittain, The Women of Oxford: A Fragment of History (New York: Macmillan, ), pp. –. My emphasis. Accessed online: https://archive.org/details/womenatoxfordafrmbp Breuning, Eleanor. ‘Margaret Lambert.’ The Independent. (February 1, 1995). D. L. (David Leslie) Murray. ‘Review of Queen Victoria’s England: Coronation Memories of .’ The Times Literary Supplement. (London, England). May , ; Issue : p. . Enid Marx and Margaret Lambert. English Popular and Traditional Art, (London: Collins, ), p..‘[Marx] expressed the firm belief that a strong tradition of British cultural creativity was being lost to the postwar generation, a tradition that Marx and Lambert wanted to preserve for posterity as a field of study.’ Twentieth Century Design. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. . Review at http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/41365367?uid=3739856&uid=2129&uid= 2&uid=70&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102177500517 John W. Waterer, ‘Review of English Popular Art.’ Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. (No. , No. , April , ), pp. –. See also Tanya Harrod, ‘For the people.’ The Spectator ( July , ), p. . Turner has himself published English Music as part of the Britain in Pictures series in . Personal correspondence. April , . TTCB, p. . Thomas Armstrong, ‘Obituary for Hugh Allen.’ The Musical Times (March ), p. ; hereafter Allen obituary. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Vera Brittain. Testament of Youth (London: Penguin, ), ; hereafter Testament of Youth. Testament of Youth, p. . Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, (London: St. Martin’s Press, ), p. . Thomas Armstrong, ‘Obituary of Ernest Walker.’ The Musical Times (March, ), p. . Found at http://www.jssgallery.org/Paintings/Mugs/SirHughAllen.html. Heseltine was Peter Warlock. Warlock was also part of Adrian Allinson’s circle. In her tribute to Walker, Margaret Deneke, who led the Lady Margaret Hall choir and likely also knew Fresca, reports that they established an African party for freshers at LMH ‘in whom Walker always became interested.’ (Margaret Deneke, Ernest Walker [London: Oxford University Press, ]), p. . Published by Clarendon Press, Oxford, . Letter is dated April , . The Music Times, (October , ), p. . Sir William Henry Harris (–) was an English organist and composer. He was affectionately nicknamed ‘Doc H’ by his choristers. https://www.britishpuppetguild.org.uk Cyril Eland collection: Oxford (–) holds a handbill or programme for this event. Omnibus puppets became Ebor Marionettes (http://www.iandenny.co.uk/page45k.htm). Located at https://books.google.com/books, searching for francesca+allinson+Soziale+Musikpflege Ibid., p.. My translation. Record located at findmypast.co.uk. Titles include: Die Förderung der Hausmusik und die Durchführung des ‘Tages der deutschen Hausmusik.’ . (The promotion of the music and the implementation of the ‘Day of German music’.); Ratgeber für Sing- und Spielkreisleiter in organisatorischen, rechtlichen, steuerlichen praktischen Fragen  (Guide to sing and Spielkreisleiter in organizational, legal, tax practical questions); Die deutsche Jugendmusikbewegung [Youth Music Movement] in Dokumenten ihrer Zeit



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Notes



 

        

   







     

von den Anfängen bis  [. . .] XA-CH-ZH ; and Puppenspieler, Mensch, Narr, Weiser, , a volume celebrating the work of German puppeteer Max Jacob on his th birthday (– ). The library record reads: Fantasien für Streichinstrumente. Henry Purcell; Herbert Just, –. No Linguistic Content. Musical Score: Printed music: Multiple forms score ( v.)  cm. Hannover, A. Nagel. Edition recorded: Nagels Musik-Archiv, Nr. , p.  (Hannover, A. Nagel, –). http://imslp.org/wiki/Nagel. https://www.baerenreiter.com/en/publishing-house/baerenreiter-encyclopedia/nagels-verlag/. The  edition has exactly the same wording in terms of the thanks given to Fresca, although the introduction appears to be a bit longer and to include a reference to the fact that the materials were in the British Library, explaining Fresca’s role in the process. A Childhood, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. , , . Ibid., p. . Ian Kemp, Michael Tippett: The Composer and His Music (Oxford: Oxford UP, ); hereafter Kemp. Joanna Bullivant,‘Tippett and politics: the s and beyond.’ Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett. Eds. Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ), p. . It appears Fresca was involved with radicals. Soden tells me that Alan Bush mentions meeting Emma Goldman at Fresca’s house. According to Mark Whyman, the first camp is in April , the second, September , the third April , the fourth August , the fifth April  and the sixth April . Mark Whyman, The Last of the Pennymans of Ormesby: The Lives of Jim and Ruth Pennyman, Vol. : – (Richmond: Bargate Publications, ); hereafter Whyman. See Kemp, pp. –. Woolf taught there until . Vaughan Williams and David Hockney were also associated with the college. Suzanne Cole, ‘“Things that chiefly interest ME”: Tippett and Early Music’ The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ), p. ; hereafter Cole. John Amis, ‘Wartime Morley.’ Michael Tippett: Symposium on his th Birthday. Qtd in Anne Martin Musician for a While: A Biography of Walter Bergmann. (London: Peacock Press, ), p. . See Cole. Joanna Bullivant’s ‘Modernism, Politics and Individuality in s Britain: The Case of Alan Bush.’ Music and Letters, Vol. , No. , (), p. . Bullivant’s Modern Music, Alan Bush and the Cold War: The Cultural Left in Britain and the Communist Bloc, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Oliver Soden shared another letter from Fresca to Bush: ‘ Christchurch Avenue, NW, Wednesday [otherwise undated, but presumably January ]. Dear Mr Bush, My friends’ name and address are Nesfield[?] Andrewes, Chepping Kennels, Chingford, Essex. He tells me that he has only one free evening left this term, and that is Friday. If that is of any use to the Watford Choir, he will be delighted to take it on. Thank you so much for Ritchie’s address. I am afraid that I did not turn up on Friday because a Queens Hall concert, offering the allurements of Honegger and Stravinsky among others, was too much for me. Yours sincerely, Francesca Allinson.’ Francis Nesfield Andrewes appears to have been a veterinarian and a member of the English Folk Dance Society in . https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/35301/page/5814/data.pdf Kenny Mathiesen and Brian Morton. ‘Parallel Lives.’ Marxism Today (March, ), pp. –. In a second part of this article focused on Tippett, the authors mention Tippett’s contribution of a piece called ‘Miners’, with words by Judy Wogan, to Bush’s  Pageant of Labour. TTCB, p. . Kemp, pp. –. TTCB, p. . http://ufrhss.unicaen.fr/recherche/mrsh/sites/all/modules/ereNouvelle/pdf/–.pdf TTCB, p. . Ibid., p. .

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Notes  Christopher Grogan, Imogen Holst: A Life in Music (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, ), pp. , .  Rolf Gardiner. Water Springing from the Ground. Ed. Andrew Best. (Oxford, Alden Press: ), pp. , . Gardiner’s papers at Cambridge University include materials pertaining to Siegel. See: https://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?submit=Go&search=harro+siegel. Max Jacob (–) also seemed like a good candidate for Fresca’s Germany trip. I find him via Herbert Just, Fresca’s German collaborator, who edits a tribute to Jacob in the s. Part of the Wandervögel movement, Jacob discovered puppeteering in .  http://www.czechmarionettes.com/en/TheAmateurPuppeteers  Kemp, pp. , .  David Clarke, Tippett Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ), p. ; hereafter Clarke. See also TTCB, p. .  See Clarke, p. . I find The Orlando Gibbons tercentenary; some virginal manuscripts in the Music division, by Mark from the s (New York: New York Public Library, ), predating Fresca’s own work (with Just) on Gibbons ().  TTCB, p. .  Clarke, p. .  Paul Beekman Taylor, Gurdjieff ’s America: Mediating the Miraculous (Cambridgeshire, UK: Lighthouse Editions Ltd), p. 58. Accessed online: https://books.google.com/books?id=50w1tPTV0EEC&dq=%22jeffrey+mark%22  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_GurdjieffMusic  TTCB, p. .  Ibid., p. .  John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (London: Penguin Books Ltd, ), pp. –.  TTCB, p. .  Quoting Malcolm Chase. Whyman, p. .  David Fowler, ‘Rolf Gardiner: Pioneer of British Youth Culture –’, in Matthew Jefferies, and Mike Tyldesley, (ed.), Rolf Gardiner: Folk, Nature and Culture in Interwar Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, ), p. , p. .  Kemp, p. .  Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture, Ideology and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: Manchester UP, ; reprinted ), p. .  Michael Tippett, with Anthony Clare, ‘In the Psychiatrist’s Chair.’ Interview reproduced in The Listener, , No.  ( August, ), pp.–.  TTCB, p. .  Ibid., p. .  See Layard’s biography at http://libraries.ucsd.edu/speccoll/findingaids/mss.html  https://www.wsws.org/en/articles///bau-n.html  Email communication.  Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. .

Part Three  TTCB, p. .  J.D. Fergusson, Cedric Morris, Frank Dobson, Kathleen Hale, John Skeaping, who calls Berry his ‘Artistic Nanny’ and Susana Larguia, who mentions Berry’s connection to Victoria Ocampo and art critic Julio Payro after her move to Argentina. Ana Berry, Understanding Art, edited by Judy Wogan, Bride Scratton and Eleanor Elder (London: Studio Publications, ).  J. J. Wilhelm, Ezra Pound in London and Paris: – (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, ), p. .  Eleanor Elder, Travelling Players: The Story of the Arts League of Service (London: Frederick Muller Ltd., ), ; hereafter Travelling Players.  Travelling Players, p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. . Plans for the studios exist, but they were never built.  Ibid., p. .

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Notes                 

 

 

           

Ibid., p. . Ibid, pp. –. As was Gordon Bottomley. Several weeks later an article appeared in G. K. Chesterton’s New Witness. Andrew Causey, ed., Paul Nash: Writings on Art (Oxford, Oxford UP, ), pp. –. Travelling Players, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Property of Caitlin Adams. Other Yevonde Arts League of Service photographs can be seen at the National Portrait Gallery. Travelling Players, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Oliver Mahony provides further documentation that shows that Martin’s Grove was sold by Lady Margaret Hall between  and . A ‘review of trust funds’ dated August , , indicates that Fresca’s deposit account was closed in  and funds were used ‘to provide emoluments for a Scholar’. ‘Latterly,’ it states ‘the income in the proceeds of the sale of Martin’s Grove have been devoted to the library.’ Richard St Barbe Baker. My Life—My Trees (Lutterworth, 1970), p. 58. August , : //AGRIC Mr & Mrs E A Grieg, of Fallow Hall, Clay Lane, St Osyth. Erection of barn for feed and equipment in connection with expansion of wild boar production. The Parish Council recommends refusal. It is concerned at the proposed increase in the number of wild boars in the area. http://www.stosyth.gov.uk/. http://www.stosyth.gov.uk/. Daniel Defoe. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, ), p.. An email from Clive Dawson, Principal Tree and Landscape Officer, Tendring District Council, provides an official description of the wood: ‘The woodland to which you refer has the following grid ref TM. It is designated as a Local Wildlife Site (ancient woodland) within our Tendring Wildlife Habitat Survey. This document is currently out to consultation and should, in the fullness of time, be adopted as part of the Local Development Framework. The wood is, at the present time, protected by Essex County Council Tree Preservation Order Ref A/. The wood is described as Sweet Chestnut coppice with Pedunculate Oak standards, also high percentage of Hornbeam coppice. Dense shading has affected ground flora quality with bramble and bracken being the dominant species, with occasional Bluebells. Recommencement of coppicing is put forward as a positive management operation.’ An announcement published in the St Ives Times and Echo, St-Ives Births, Deaths and Marriages. http://newsarch.rootsweb.com/th/read/CORNISH/2000-07/096261142 http://west-penwith.org.uk/hain.htm http://www.kildare.ie/greyabbey/archives/2008/04/death_of_wogan.asp; Kildare Observer, February 18, 1922. http://www.cairogang.com/soldiers-killed/wogan-browne/wogan-browne.html Margaret Chute. Lady’s Pictorial. The Illustrated War News. January , . Accessed online. http://www.archive.org/stream/nsillustratedwarlonduoft/nsillustratedwarlonduoft_djvu.txt Suzanne Robinson, ‘From Agitprop to Parable: A Prolegomenon to A Child of Our Time,’ in Michael Tippett: Music and Literature, ed. Suzanne Robinson (Farnham: Ashgate, ), pp. –. http://www.alanbushtrust.org.uk/ In Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, Schuttenhelm says ‘nearer’, wrongly according to Rachel O’Higgins of Alan Bush Trust (Email communication). Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. . ‘Dorothy Richardson: A Calendar of the Letters.’ http://www.eltpress.org/RichCalendar/CalendarPDF/TheCalendar.pdf Travelling Players, p. . The Guardian (May , ).

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Notes     

  

              





The Times (October , ). Theatre Arts, Volume , (). Gramophone ( June , ). Life and Letters and London Mercury, pp. –. A letter from T. S. Eliot to Wogan declines a stage adaptation of his poem ‘The Hollow Men’ in December . I find Wogan’s copy of W. H. Auden and Garrett’s The Poet’s Tongue () for sale at abebooks and her Nicholas Moore’s A Book for Priscilla: Poems () at another website. I also find several books that belonged to Judy in Michael Tippett’s library at the Harry Ransom Center. Judith Mackrell, Bloomsbury Ballerina (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ), p.  note. Paul Green, A Southern Life (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, ), p. . From Shaw collection at Brown University: http://books.google.com/books/about/Autograph_Postcard_Signed_by_Shaw_G_B_S.html?id= OsqcgAACAAJ Jan and Cora Gordon, A London Roundabout (London: George G. Harrap & Co., ); hereafter London Roundaout. London Roundabout, p. . Ibid., pp. –. Maurice Willson Disher, Pleasures of London (London: Hale, 1950), p. 346. See also Raymond Ander and Joe Mitchenson. The Lost Theatres of London (New York: Taplinger, ), p. . Pleasures of London, p. . ‘New Week-End Club’ (Times, October , ). http://oakridgecommunityarchives.org/items/show/ John McCormick and Bennie Prastasik. Popular Puppet Theatre in Europe – (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ), p. . Ibid., p.. Ibid., p. . Bryan Fisher. ‘An Adventure in Living.’ Unpublished ms. undated, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . The Tate.org display caption reads: ‘Steer made many visits to Walberswick in Suffolk, where he had friends. He completed a number of paintings of the beach there that are among the most authentically Impressionist works produced in Britain. They are all fluidly painted and concentrate upon effects of atmosphere and light but, unlike Monet, Steer was just as interested in the figures as their setting. When paintings like this were exhibited for the first time in Britain in the s and s they were seen as being uncompromisingly avant-garde. One critic in  even described such works at the New English Art Club exhibition as “evil”.’ (http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/steer-the-beach-at-walberswick-n) Walberswick Artists Colony c. . ‘“Seaside” artists colony. Early residents include Charles Keene and Phillip Wilson Steer. Charles Rennie Mackintosh (–) and his wife lived here (/), they were forced to return to London suspected of espionage after letters were found in their house from the Austrian Secessionist painters. GRID REF: TM REF: The Good & Simple Life. http://www.utopia-britannica.org.uk/pages/SUFFOLK.htm See also Richard Scott, Artists at Walberswick: East Anglian Interludes, – (Bristol: Samson & Co., ). Arts League of Service Studios, Chelsea: Glebe Place Block, garden elevation no.  . Description: IH inscr. b.l. “Glebe Place Block Garden Elevation No ” DES MACKINTOSH, Charles Rennie; (Scottish; –). The Arts League of Service was founded in  to encourage the arts through exhibitions of young artists’ work and a travelling theatre. It was run by Miss Ana Berry, who in March  commissioned Mackintosh to design a scheme at the west end of the property, on the site of the demolished Cheyne House. The site formed part of the same block as Mackintosh’s artists’ studios, but fronted to the south over Upper Cheyne Row with a side elevation looking east over Cheyne House Gardens. The original concept was extensive, providing up to  studios, some with living accommodation. It aimed to provide support for artists in the depressed post-war years. Mackintosh’s stark, angular concrete facades prompted swift opposition. Indeed, it is thought that the London County Council refused some of Mackintosh’s designs. Although planning permission was granted in December, nothing ever became of this project. It

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Notes

   

seems likely that a lack of funds may have prevented [the] scheme from being executed. The collections contains a range of designs related to the project. To locate these, enter Arts League of Service into Keyword search. http://www.huntsearch.gla.ac.uk/cgi-bin/foxweb/huntsearch_ Mackintosh/DetailedResults.fwx?searchTerm=41586 [Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow] The other place, apart from Toozie, where Sonya says Fresca took her sisters as children was Cley next the Sea. A Childhood, p. . Ibid., p. . The Graphic ( January , ), p.. Accessed online.

Part Four  See The British Journal of Photography (Volume , October , ), p. : ‘Here Miss Dorothy Fuller tells how she came to take up photography, after a training in art at the Slade School, and how she worked for several years before venturing on portrait photography professionally.’ Dorothy is possibly one of the Fuller Sisters (Rosalind(e) [–], Cynthia and Dorothy) a trio which performed folksong and had ties to Cecil Sharp. The oldest Fuller daughter studied harp at the Royal College of Music.  Correspondence in Allinson’s folder in the Hogarth Press Archive, University of Reading, Reading, Berkshire, UK. Hereafter Allinson, Hogarth Press Archive.  Virginia Woolf ’s Monk’s House photograph albums –, Houghton Library, Harvard University. http://ids.lib.harvard.edu/ids/view/?buttons=y  Fresca agrees to the two-book contract, but asks that if the Press rejects her subsequent titles the option be ended (Allinson, Hogarth Press Archive).  [. . .] agreeing to Fresca’s terms for the two-book option and promising to send ‘an agreement for [her] approval’. (Allinson, Hogarth Press Archive).  Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Volume : –. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. (New York: Harvest/HBJ, ), p. , fn . Hereafter L.  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Virginia Woolf. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume : –. Eds. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harvest, ), p. . Perhaps Virginia Woolf ’s own immersion in biography when Fresca’s manuscript arrived at the Press influences the Woolfs’ decision to publish Fresca’s A Childhood. Suggesting that her interest lay in non-fiction at this point, Woolf tells Janet Case in December  that she is reading ‘a huge bundle of manuscripts’ adding ‘how I loathe novels’ (L p. ).  Woolmer, pp. –.  Willis, Appendix A.  L, p. .  See letters to Dickinson and Janet Case (L, pp. –, pp. –).  Sent May , , from St Osyth.  J. B. Priestly passes through but does not stop in Essex on the tail end of his English Journey (London: Heinemann, ): ‘I would not set foot in Essex. Because Essex begins somewhere among back streets in London’s eastern suburbs, some people think it has no mystery, but I know that Essex is a huge mysterious county, with God knows what going on in the remoter valleys’ (p. ).  Fay Sweet. ‘Obituary: Enid Marx.’ The Independent, May , . http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/obituary-enid-marx-.html  Cynthia Weaver. ‘Enid Marx: designing textiles for the Utility Furniture Design Advisory Panel’, in Utility Reassessed: The Role of Ethics in the Practice of Design (Manchester: Manchester University Press, ), pp. –.  Breuning, personal letter.  London Mercury (November ), pp. xxxvii, .  The Observer (October , ), p. .  The Listener ( January , ), p. .

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Notes           

          

  



 

   

  

Annual Register (), p. . The Brown Book. Lady Margaret Hall, /. Allinson, Hogarth Press Archive. http://copac.jisc.ac.uk/ Email from book seller Michael Johnson. Marx’s edition of The Waves (London: Hogarth Press, ), p. . (The Waves, New York: Harcourt, , p. ). Ibid, p.  (Harcourt edition, , p. ). www.marywardhouse.com Personal communication, January, . Hermione Lee. Virginia Woolf. (London: Chatto and Windus, ), p. . Virginia Woolf, ‘The Compromise’ in The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume Three: –, ed. Andrew McNeillie (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), p. . Originally published in the New Republic in January . The settlement is currently at  Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury. Enid Marx. ‘Autobiographical Note.’ Unpublished. Property of Matthew Eve. See Batson on Huxley, p. . A Childhood p. . Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, trans Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt, (London: Cassell & Co.,). Qtd in Leo Carey. ‘Escape Artist: The Death and Life of Stefan Zweig.’ The New Yorker (August , ). See Anka Muhlstein. ‘His Exile was Intolerable.’ New York Review of Books (May, , ), and Carey. A Childhood, p.. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Suzanne Cole cites this as coming from a Manchester Guardian article called ‘Purcell Rediscovered’ June , . The Cambridge Companion to Michael Tippett, ed. Kenneth Gloag and Nicholas Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . http://fultonhistory.com/Newspaper . . . .pdf Glasgow Herald, March , . https://books.google.com/books?id=ug-AQAAIAAJ&q=allinson+don+quixote . . . Oliver Soden finds other performances: at the Mercury Theatre in June, October, and November ; at the Repertory Theatre September ; back at the Mercury Theatre ; then toured through Northern Ireland in January , starting in Belfast, and then moving further south; the cast was quite distinguished: Eric Shilling bass and Joseph Horowitz pianist. A letter I wrote to Hopkins was never answered. See Peter Shaffer. ‘Opera in Miniature: Growth of an English genre.’ Tempo (No. , Summer ), pp. –. Oliver Soden speculates that this might have represented a tribute of sorts to Fresca. http://copac.ac.uk. I do find both Tippett and Britten arrangements of Purcell at the British Library: Purcell’s ‘From rosy bowers’ [for voice & keyboard] / Ed. M. Tippett & W. Bergmann. High voice, C minor (orig. key), published by Schott, c. Tippett produced and published almost thirty arrangements of Purcell, some co-edited with Bergmann, all published by Schott between –. I also find an Intimate Opera Society Orchestra recording of some Purcell: ‘Return, revolting Rebels’ performed by Frederick Woodhouse (bass) with Intimate Opera Society Orchestra. F.H. ‘Intimate Opera.’ The Musical Times, Vol. , No.  ( January, ), p. . William Wallace. ‘Intimate Opera.’ The Musical Times, Vol. , No. , ( July, ), p. . Ibid., p.. I found a recording of the Intimate Opera, but it unfortunately did not include Fresca’s arrangement. ‘The historic recording presented here features the magic of the original ensemble performing the above mentioned pieces as well as works by Giovanni Pergolesi, James Hook, Henry Purcell and James Oswald. Two disc set, all selections newly remastered.’ http://www.amazon.com/Intimate-Baroque-Remastered-Historical-Recording/dp/BQRP Kemp, p. . Kemp, p. . Ian Kemp. Liner notes to Steven Osborne’s recording of the Tippett piano works, Hyperion, CDA/. www.hyperion-record.co.uk/dw.asp?dc=W . .

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Notes  Tippett mentions he has been reading Gilchrist’s Life of Blake in a  letter to Fresca: ‘Makes Blake v. human & substantial, as well as being a real mystical genius’ (TTCB, pp. –).  William Blake. ‘A Song of Liberty.’ The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. (Oxford: Oxford UP, ), pp. xxvii–xxviii.  Kemp, p. .  Ibid., p. .

Part Five  Dennis Hayes, Challenge of Conscience: The Story of the Conscientious Objectors of – (London: George Allen and Unwin, ), p. . Hereafter Hayes.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  TTCB, pp. –.  Ibid., p. –.  Hayes, p. .  Duncan’s Journal of a Husbandman (London: Faber, ) and Middleton Murry’s Community Farm (London: Peter Nevil, ).  See Ian Collins, A Broad Canvas: Art in East Anglia since  (Norwich: Black Dog Books, ).  Travelling Players, p. . In a letter of ca. October  from Oxted, Tippett writes: ‘I think the caravan might well be a help here—because it might be used to house any young couple even, who might like to “farm” the land temporarily—keep the gardens going. I have an idea that conchies will be thrown out & may be glad of a tide-over. In any case it would do one proud as an extra room. But if Jude [Wogan] is in need of the  pounds, then she’d better sell it. Do what you feel to be best’ (TTCB, p. ).  Hazel Archard, Selected Poems by Hazel Archard (Piltdown: Moses Farm Publications, ), p. .  Ibid., introduction.  Email, undated.  Email, December .  Email, January , .  Email, January , .  TTCB, p. . A file on Edric is among John Layard’s patient files at University of California, San Diego.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toc_H. Although Toc H was only open to men, there were a few women who had been nurses in the war and had known Talbot House. Under the leadership of Alison MacFie they established the League of Women Helpers to support Toc H’s work. They would gradually take a more active role in the work of Toc H particularly during the Second World War when many of the men were away. They later became Toc H (Women’s Section) and eventually merged fully with the men’s movement in the early 1970s.  Sybil Oldfield. Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf (New Jersey: Rutgers UP, ), p. .  Letter May , .  Email, July , .  Community Broadsheet, September/December .  Community Broadsheet, Summer/Autumn .  Community Broadsheet, January/May .  TTCB, p.   John Simkin, ‘Conscription in the First World War,’ September , update January , http://spartacus-educational.com/FWWconscription.htm (Primary Source ).]  Email.  Simpson’s papers are at Trinity College, Cambridge University.  Peter Laslett, ‘Simpson, Frederick Arthur (1883–1974)’, rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edn, Sept. 2012 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31689]

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Notes  TTCB, p. .  Held at the British Library; just one of which appears in Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. .  TTCB, p. .  The Harry Ransom Center letters confirm that Tippett, Newton, and Sitwell were friends, but provide little other information. See http://www.poetryarchive.org/poem/still-falls-rain.  TTCB, p.   See Virginia Nicholson, Singled Out (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), p. 42. On older women supporting younger men, ‘gigolos’, see Adam, pp. 116–17.  Adam, pp. –. From  to , the proportion of women to men fell from  to .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Adam, p. .  Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Penguin , ), p. .  Also a reminder that ‘Virginia Woolf ’s aunt Annie Thackeray Ritchie married a much younger man, and so did George Eliot.’ Eliot married John Walter Cross in  (shortly after G. H. Lewes passed away),  years her junior  These were maybe those that Tippett mentioned he had gathered when he went to The Mill House after Fresca’s death.  Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  W.H. Auden. ‘Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day.’ W.H. Auden. Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, ), pp. –.  http://www.douglasnewtonarchive.org.  Christopher Hilliard mentions Newton’s article ‘Avoiding Wasting Energy’ in Writer April 5–9, 1939 (To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge: Harvard UP, [1944] 2006), p. 317. Newton also published with Tom Ingram, Hymns as Poetry (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1956).  Douglas Newton. ‘Songs and Sonettes.’ New Poetry. Nicholas Moore (ed.) (Fortune Press, ), p. .  Accessed online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/.  Thanks to Oliver Soden for this identification.  Mary Lee Settle. Learning to Fly (New York: Norton, ), pp. –. Hereafter Settle.  Settle, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Among other co-habitants in the Newton-Settle household was a man named Desmond Green. Settle also says their address served as that of twenty or so conscientious objector friends of Den.  Settle, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. .  Douglas Newton. ‘Night Piece.’ Poetry, Vol. , No.  ( June, ), pp. –.

Part Six  Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p..  My emphasis. Francesca Allinson. Unattributed Diary Entries. (Tippett Collection, British Library Board, BL Add MS ), p. . Pages are numbered on every other page at top right. Hereafter Diary.  My translation. ‘Je suis de caractère ombrageux [. . .] je suis pauvre, sans éclat [. . .] je suis peu liant.’ ‘Celui qui commence aujourd’hui ce journal est, au regard de tous, un homme usé.’ Georges Duhamel, Journal de Salavin (Paris: Mercure de France, ), p. –. Hereafter Duhamel.  My translation. ‘travaille à mon élévation.’ Ibid., p. .  My translation. ‘l’excès même a quelque chose d’élastique et les repousse.’ Ibid., p. .  My translation. ‘Je dois compter sans la complaisance du tremplin.’ Ibid., p. .  ‘Il faut que je devienne un saint. Voilà bien la seule chose qui dépende encore de moi.’ Ibid., p. .

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Notes  ‘A mon avis, ce n’est pas spécialement la ferveur religieuse qui fait le saint, c’est la conduite humaine d’un homme ou, mieux encore, bien que je me défie du langage pompeux, c’est l’ordonnance de sa vie morale.’ Ibid., p. .  Diary p.. Sybil Oldfield suggested this might refer to pianist Hephzibah Menuhin (–), sister to Yehudi Menuhin, although she is perhaps too young (personal correspondence).  Konstantin Stanislavski, An Actor Prepares, trans. Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood (New York: Theatre Arts, Inc. , ). Diary, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. . In terms of diary-writing, in her review of James Woodforde’s diary, ‘Life Itself ’ (published in the Nation & Athenaeum, ), Woolf writes: ‘When James Woodforde opened one of his neat manuscript books he entered into conversation with a second James Woodforde [. . .] it was a relief to inform the other self who lived in the little book [. . .] [a]n essential part of him would have died had he been forbidden to keep his diary.’ Virginia Woolf, The Essays of Virginia Wool,. Vol.  – (New York: Harcourt, ), p. , p. .  Diary, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Moreland Street is in Islington, but there also seems to be a connection with the Edgware/Golders Green area where Fresca grew up.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., pp. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Marion Milner. ‘Obituary: Karin Stephen (–)’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol.  (), pp. –.  Diary, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Field qtd, in Diary, p. . Diary gives p.  for Field; Joanna Field. A Life of One’s Own (London: Virago, ), p. . Hereafter A Life of One’s Own.  Diary, gives p. ; A Life of One’s Own, p. .  A Life of One’s Own, p. , p. .  Qtd in Diary, p. ; Diary gives p.; A Life of One’s Own, p. .  Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim (London: Penguin, ).  Qtd. in Diary, p. . Diary give page number as p. ; Joanna Field, An Experiment in Leisure, (New York: Routledge, ), p. .  See front cover of Joanna Field, A Life of One’s Own (London: Pelican, ).  A Life of One’s Own, p. .  Rachel Bowlby, ‘Introduction.’ A Life of One’s Own (London: Routledge, ), p. . Hereafter Bowlby.  A Life of One’s Own, pp. –. One gains a sense in A Life of One’s Own of Field’s love of music, also theatre and art, standing before a painting. She includes pictures. Field’s work has been compared with that of another of Fresca’s contemporaries, Stevie Smith. See Lindsay Stonebridge. The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (London: Macmillan, ).  A Life of One’s Own, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. . My emphasis.  W. H. Auden, ‘To Unravel Happiness’ (The Listener, ). Stephen Spender ‘The Road to Happiness’ (The Spectator, ). Both are held in the Marion Milner Collection in the Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society in London.  Qtd. on pp. –, A Life of One’s Own.  Bowlby, p. .  A Life of One’s Own, pp. –.  Ibid., p. 

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Notes                      

       

 

     

Ibid., pp. – Ibid., p. – Ibid., p.  Ibid., p.  Ibid., p.  Diary, pp.–. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p.. Ibid., p.. Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. – Ibid., pp. – Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (New York: Harcourt, ). Qtd in Diary, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. viii. Clarke, p. . Anthony Stevens. A Very Short Introduction to Jung (Oxford: Oxford UP, ), pp. –. Hereafter Stevens. Jung’s approach is dominated by the archetype. His work consisted in creating a typology and his method, according to Anthony Stevens, approximated that of the archaeologist, a profession Jung at one point entertained. Jung believed that we all have the same equipment, but we differ in the way that we use it. Stevens, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . ‘Martin Luther wrote Fraw [sic] Musica as a rhymed Vorrede to “every good song book”, originally to Johann Walter’s extensive work on the art of music, Lob und Preis der loblïchen Kunst Musica, . Frau Musica as a term for the art of music stems from a medieval tradition connecting female personifications to the disciplines of the septem artes liberales. Luther’s poem praises both the joys of music and its liberating powers.’ German composer Paul Hindemith (–) in the late s used Luther’s text in his cantata Frau Musica. Before this Hindemith based an earlier piece on the writings of Rilke, Das Marienleben op. . Fresca mentions Hindemith as an influence on her own work in a letter to the Hogarth Press. Eyolf Østrem, Jens Fleischer, Nils Holger Petersen, eds., The Arts and Cultural Heritage of Martin Luther (University of Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, ), p. . Diary, p. . Ibid., pp. –. Malte finds old uniforms, gowns and masks in ‘deep wardrobes painted grey’, in a rarely visited room in his childhood home. When he tries on the clothes, he ‘tremble[s] to be in costume’: ‘how thrilling it was when I actually wore it; when something emerged from the gloom, more slowly than oneself, for the mirror did not believe it, as it were, and sleepy as it was, did not want to repeat what it was told.’ And Malte continues: ‘In those days, I came to recognize the very real power that a particular costume can exert.’ Rainer Marie Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (London: Penguin, ), pp. –. Hereafter Rilke. Rilke, p. . Ibid., p.  Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .

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Notes  ‘I do not underestimate it. I know it takes courage. But let us suppose for a moment that someone does have the courage de luxe to follow them and then to know forever (for who could forget or confound it?) where they creep away to and what they do with the rest of the livelong day and whether they sleep at night’ (Rilke, p. ).  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  ‘And one has no one and nothing oneself, and one travels the world with a suitcase and a box of books and, when all’s said and done, no curiosity at all. What kind of life is it, with neither house nor inherited things nor dogs? If only one had one’s memories, at least. But then, who does? If only one had one’s childhood—but it is as if it were buried deep. Perhaps one has to be old to have access to all of this. I suspect it may be good to be old’ (Rilke p. ).  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  My emphasis. Ibid., pp. –.  Diary, pp. –.  Rilke, pp. –  Ibid., pp. –. My emphasis.  Ibid., pp. –. My emphasis. Another oft quoted line of Rilke: ‘Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstanding that can gather around a new name.’  TTCB, pp. –.  Ralph Freedman. Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, ), p. , p. .  Oliver Soden points out that Tippett includes this first verse (‘Who alone has already lifted the lyre among the dead’) in his (own) libretto to The Mask of Time (–), Part . Soden wonders, rather romantically, he admits, if Tippett associated Orpheus’s inability to bring Eurydice back from the dead with himself and Fresca, even forty years later.  Qtd in TTCB, pp. –.  I am unclear as to whom Fresca refers here: Veronica or Joan or Marcelle, Bertrand’s Belgian wife.  Diary, p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Mark Rutherford. The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (London: Trubner and Co., ). Hereafter Autobiography of Mark Rutherford.  Alice Meynell. ‘Renouncement.’ In Jon Stallworthy. A Book of Love Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –.  Autobiography of Mark Rutherford.  Virginia Woolf. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume  (New York: Harcourt), pp. , . Woolf makes a connection here with her writing of Pointz Hall which became Between the Acts.  T. S. Eliot. Family Reunion (New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, , ), p. . Hereafter Family Reunion.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p.  qtd in Diary, pp. –.  Family Reunion, p..  My translation. Qtd in Diary, pp. –. Alexandra David-Néel, Le Lama aux cinq sagesses (Paris: Pocket, ).

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Notes  Diary, pp. –.  Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (New York: Harvest/ Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,  []), pp. –. Fresca’s page numbers conform with mine. Hereafter Roger Fry.  Roger Fry, p. .  All translations from Woolf ’s Roger Fry are mine.  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. . Qtd. in Diary, p..  Diary, p. –. My emphasis.  E. I. Watkin. Catholic Art and Culture (New York: Sheed and Ward, , ). Qtd in Diary, pp. –.  Diary, p. . According to Wikipedia: ‘The superfluous man [. . .] refers to an individual, perhaps talented and capable, who does not fit into social norms. In many cases this person is born into wealth and privilege. Typical characteristics are disregard for social values, cynicism, and existential boredom. Typical behaviors are gambling, romantic intrigues, and duels. He is often unempathic and carelessly distresses others with his actions. The Superfluous Man can be seen as a nihilist or fatalist. Scholar David Patterson describes him as “not just...another literary type but...a paradigm of a person who has lost a point, a place, a presence in life,” before concluding that “the superfluous man is a homeless man.”’  Ivan Turgenev, Diary of a Superfluous Man (New York: Charles E. Lauriat and Co, , ). Accessed online: https://books.google.com/books?id=HsNAAAAIAAJ&pg

Part Seven           

     

Personal correspondence. A Childhood, p. . All letters quoted, unless indicated, are from the collection held by Matthew Eve. This is the title of a World War II programme and pamphlet designed to encourage reuse. http://www.hausfraujournal.com///tangee-lipstick-review.html In a letter that I dated to after D-Day ( June , ), Fresca asks Marc if first she’d ‘like to buy a pair of corduroy trousers (buff ) off Mrs Darcy’. ‘They are coupon free but cost /- or /-.’ He studied at Blackfriars, Oxford, then was assigned to Blackfriars, Cambridge, and was the editor of Blackfriars Journal. ‘The Papers of Priaulx Rainier,’ The National Archives (UK), accessed October , , http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/rd/cbf-b-eb-bf-aeebc. TTCB, pp. –. There is an article about Tippett in Picture Post by Maurice Edelman, March , . According to Eleanor Breuning. Tippett was known as Mickey and Mike by friends. The headings for each of these are decoratively sketched in pencil, then in each case a cutting from a book has been pasted in. In each instance a list of items, likely illustrations, appears under the pasted-in sheet. The page under the title ‘Sea-Side’ begins as follows: ‘This is the last of three books which began with one, Insanity Fair, a book intended to be complete in itself. Events, by their prompting vindication of that book, produced its sequel, Disgrace Abounding, and by the same process have led to Prophet at Home.’ This appears to be page  of Douglas Reed’s Prophet at Home, published by Faber in . The page under the title ‘Ponds’ is page  of a translation from the French of Zygmunt Litynski’s I Was One of Them also published by Faber in . The page under the title ‘The Garden’ is a review of or introduction to Ralph Bates’s The Olive Field (Cape, ). ‘War in St. Osyth,’ St Osyth Parish Council and Village website, accessed October , , http://www.stosyth.gov.uk/default.asp?calltype=febwarinstosyth. TTCB, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. , p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. .

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Notes    

      

       

  

                   

Letter at British Library. Selected Letters of Michael Tippett,. p. . Christine Weston, Indigo (New York: Charles Scribner, ). Qtd in Eric Page, ‘Christine Weston, , Author of Novels and Stories (obituary).’ (New York Times, May , .) Accessed online: http://www.nytimes.com////obituaries/christineweston--author-of-novels-and-stories.html Ibid. Her uncertain status or a reference to a game similar to tag, perhaps something on which she is working. A reference to the fact that Fresca paid for Marx’s psychoanalytic sessions with Adrian Stephen. The World’s Who’s Who of Women (Cambridge: International Biographic Center, th ed. /), p. . Possibly a reference to the Zodiac Books Book of Nursery Rhymes. Perhaps this explains why Fresca’s name does not appear on the published version. ‘Series: Britain in Pictures,’ Library Thing website, accessed October , , http://www.librarything.com/series/Britain+in+Pictures. All subsequent references are to Francesca Allinson, The Irish Contribution to English Traditional Tunes (Mill House Version). (Unpublished manuscript held at The Mill House, Streetly End, Cambridgeshire). Ibid., p.. Ibid., p. . Letter from Margaret Lambert to Veronica Wedgwood, April , . TTCB, pp. -. Ibid., p. . Ibid. p. . Michael Tippett, “A People and their Music”, The Listener  (): p. . A reference to an Emily Dickinson line used by Wilfrid Mellers for the title of an article about Aaron Copland (). Wilfrid Mellers, “Aaron Copland, Emily Dickinson, and the Noise in the Pool at Noon”, Tempo  (October ): pp. –. According to Oliver Soden, Tippett loved the phrase from the Dickinson poem, using it as the original title for an essay on Charles Ives. TTCB, p. . Michael Yates, ‘Cecil Sharp in America’, Musical Traditions (Internet Magazine). Accessed online: http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/sharp.htm. All subsequent references are to Francesca Allinson, The Irish Contribution to English Traditional Tunes (VWML version). (Unpublished manuscript held at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, London). Pages are unnumbered in the original. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Cecil J. Sharp. English Folk Songs: Some Conclusions (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co. Inc., ), pp. xxiv, . Hereafter Sharp. Sharp, p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., pp. , . Ibid., p. .

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Notes            

Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. viii. Ibid., p. xii. TTCB, p. . Clarke, p. , n. . My emphasis. From Francesca Allinson folder at Hogarth Press Archives, University of Reading. Clarke, p., n.  Letter held by Vaughan Williams Memorial Library. Vaughan Williams wasn’t the only one who had questions about Fresca’s argument. Margaret Lambert also responded at length to the manuscript. Her letter is among those held by Matthew Eve. Writing on June , , Lamb focuses on problems with the history, her field, although she doubts Vaughan Williams will notice this as ‘he’s a musician and in any case probably approaches the question with certain prejudices’. She’s in a rush, so she’s going to keep it relatively brief. Fresca has clearly asked her for a quick turnaround. She’ll send more comments if Fresca gives her more time. She even misses the nine o’clock news, obviously a ritual, in order to comment on Fresca’s work. Lamb queries Fresca about her use of the term ‘Celtic’. She sees it used to characterize a literary style and then in an ethnographic sense ‘to describe a certain geographical[ly] located race’. She points out using her Phillips school atlas that ‘ethnographically the island of Britain and the island of Ireland are about the same, that is to say that the largest (middle) part is occupied by non-Celts, Angles, Saxons, Jutes or what not, and a small fringe of aborigines commonly called Celts’. Lamb says she thinks it was Matthew Arnold who linked a particular style to a particular race, but his theories were called into question due to the sparse ethnographic research available. She says that ‘Wales and the Scottish Highlands [. . .] represent a much larger block of solid Celt than Gaelic [. . .] parts of Ireland’. Lamb goes on to say if Fresca then says that the tune she is looking for is not found in the biggest Celtic areas ‘to call it Celtic is a verbal quibble’. She then goes on to use Matthew Arnold’s work on the Celtic element in literature (that she dates to ) to question Fresca’s dating. If there had been a Celtic element before Arnold, someone would have noticed. Fresca can, Lamb concedes, refute her on this since Arnold does use earlier examples of literature. But, Lamb says, Fresca is herself making a similar argument—saying that if these tunes had existed before why wouldn’t they have made it into print? ‘On the contrary,’ says Lamb, ‘I think there is every reason’ to believe the Celtic tunes ‘existed very happily unknown’. Her proof—two new phenomenon at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the Romantic Movement and the scientific collector. She compares it with the Czech language, a subject close to her heart, which seemingly disappeared (but merely went underground) in  before surfacing again with the Romantic revival: ‘it survived as a folk language quite happily for  years.’ She makes further comparisons with the Slovak language and Romanian people and their language. All of these call into question, Lamb believes, Fresca’s assertion that because she ‘find[s] Celtic tunes in Irish collections  years before [she] find[s] them in English collections’ that they’re Irish. Lamb thinks Fresca would need ‘at least a couple of centuries to be on the safe side’. She suggests that ‘all that [Fresca] can perhaps argue is that [. . .] the influence of the Romantic revival was felt more strongly and earlier in Ireland and on the Continent [. . .] than in England’. Lamb is sorry to burst ‘Dear Frisk[’s]’ bubble, and worries that it was she who ‘put [Fresca] all wrong with migrant Irish labour’. She feels that Fresca, however, has spent too much time and energy on the book ‘to spoil it with vague historical speculations, or the sort of territorial arguments my Balkans bring out when they fancy a chunk of territory from the neighbours’. She says that if Fresca can’t rewrite chapter , that she should ‘relegate it to a footnote and the Irish labour with it, as a suggestion thrown out en passant, not as a main pillar of your book’. The book, Lamb feels, will ‘stand or fall on its musical analysis’. Fresca responded (typing) on June . She appreciates Lamb’s comments very much and promises she’ll let her keep the manuscript for longer when she returns it. In the meantime however she needs to send it to Vaughan Williams as soon as possible: ‘He is such an old chap [over  at this point] and I am too much of a pip-squeak to go bothering him a lot.’ Fresca is not too concerned about Lamb’s criticisms. She feels that they mostly signal omissions: ‘[m]y

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



      

greatest fault in writing an argument is that I omit many important steps and instead of stating, I infer.’ Fresca agrees that she needs to clarify her use of the term Celtic. She says she means ‘a culture’ not ‘a race’: ‘a common culture which the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the Bretons shared’. She asks Lamb if she’s read Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (a book that gave T. S. Eliot his title for The Waste Land, and a book Tippett held dear). As for the Matthew Arnold question, Fresca makes a distinction between his being the first to draw attention to an element that has ‘existed all along’, the Celtic alongside the classical, and her being the first to note something new, that a ‘double tradition did not exist until the adoption of Irish tunes’. She adds by hand ‘the arts did not move pari passu’. Fresca invokes the work of Frank Kidson (–) to justify her assertion that ‘the new tunes (new in England)’ are old. She says that the ‘tunes are immensely assured and experienced: also, they are emotionally old. (This latter reason is not provable.)’ Fresca concedes that Lamb is right about the processes of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century song-book publishers—that they were completely different from those of the scientific collector. But, she says, this is not enough ‘to account for the total absence of one song type. A type that runs counter to everything we have produced musically.’ She goes on: ‘We have not a strong sense of form and the romantic tunes, strangely enough, have an extremely strict and exigeant form. This form is so uniform that after examining hundreds of tunes, you almost throw up your hands and say—these are all one tune.’ ‘Beside,’ she adds, ‘the ethos (a newly acquired term from Michael) is totally foreign to the English ethos.’ Fresca dismisses Lamb’s comparison with ‘Czecho Slovakia, Chaucer and Donne’—they don’t, she says, ‘fit the facts’. At point . she agrees that ‘ years’ priority is insufficient’, but ‘[she] infer[s] a priority of  years’, and will make this clearer. Fresca is somewhat apologetic because she’s asking Lamb to ‘carry [. . .] out a post mortem without the corpse’ because she doesn’t have the tunes. In a penultimate paragraph, Fresca says that Michael, like Lamb and David (Ayerst?), was initially skeptical, but he has completely come round. She’s convinced that were Lamb to scrutinize ‘the English, the Irish, and the nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish [tunes]’ she’d see there ‘is no room left for doubt’. Fresca is just surprised that some of her eminent predecessors in the study of folk song, Kidson, Lucy Broadwood, Annie Gilchrist, all of whom stated this, never ‘organize[d] their knowledge into a general statement’. ‘Practically all of the tunes are interrelated, which is not to be wondered at since the strict arc-shaped abba form is so peculiar: in consequence, if you accept any of them as Irish, you must accept the whole lot.’ She closes thanking Lamb for the dates from Fay (?)— she’d arrived at the same dates looking at the Appalachian tunes. She signs off by hand ‘Much love, F.’ Duncan Hinnells. An Extraordinary Performance: Hubert Foss, and the Early Years of Music Publishing at the Oxford University Press, (Oxford: OUP, ), pp. –. Could Vaughan Williams’s anxiety over Fresca’s monograph have led OUP to ultimately reject it? Alain Frogley, ‘Constructing Englishness in Music: National Character and the Reception of Ralph Vaughan Williams’, in Alain Frogley ed., Vaughan Williams Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ), p. . Ralph Vaughan Williams, National Music (London: Oxford University Press, ), p. . Ibid., p. . Ibid., pp. –. Ibid., p. . Ibid., p. . Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. (London: Penguin, ), p. . Julian Onderdonck takes a very balanced view of Vaughan Williams’s nationalism. He calls Vaughan Williams ‘a philosophically complex artist whose outspoken dedication to society and to the needs of musical amateurs coexisted with an intense privacy about the sources of his musical inspiration and a metaphysical belief in music as a spiritual force often far removed from worldly issues or concerns. A political radical and acknowledged atheist from early years, he cooperated with the most powerful political and cultural institutions of the day, including the monarchy and the Established Church.’ Onderdonck suggests that Vaughan Williams’s nationalism and conservatism were largely socially constructed in the years subsequent to World War I when people felt the need to promote national values via ‘a return to the nation’s pre-industrial past’. While this meant success for the composer in the s and s, a subsequent backlash against

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   

nationalism after World War II, one which the likes of Fresca and Tippett came to even sooner, led to a loss of acclaim for Vaughan Williams. ( Julian Onderdonck, ‘The Composer and Society: Family, Politics, Nation’ in Alain Frogley and Aidan Thomson, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Vaughan Williams [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ]), pp. –. See also Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village. Clarke, p. . The Irish Contribution to English Traditional Tunes, qtd. in Clarke, p. . Clarke, p. . ‘The B.O. is a good English work of art because it faces both ways—it protests against the excessive influence of the foreigner & the romantic inchoate expressiveness of the Sharp “natural” peasant.’ TTCB, pp. –. See also p. .

Part Eight  The Bookroom Art Press. https://www.bookroomartpress.co.uk/product/nash-john-john-nashearly-summer/  TTCB, pp. –.  Hernione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Chatto & Windus, ), p. . Hereafter Lee, Virginia Woolf.  Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. .  Obituary Notice. The Times (Tuesday, April , ).  Fresca knows that suicide is technically illegal at this point. It will not become legal in the UK until  with the passing of the Suicide Act. She has referred to the trial of Hubert Foss from the Oxford University Press for attempted suicide in a letter to Enid Marx. I wonder how her decision to take her own life meshed with her Catholicism. Maybe the war and her illness push these concerns aside.  I assume Meirion Bowen holds the original.  TTCB, p. . The similarity of Fresca’s letter to Woolf ’s suicide note is remarkable. Fresca would have been able to read extracts of the letter in articles about Woolf ’s death as early as late April, .  Fresca’s copy of Virgil is at The Mill House. Henry Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas dates from .  In a letter to Ayerst, Tippett writes: ‘As I guessed, [Fresca’s] letter shows that she was tied up with Germany’s agony, did not want to survive it, or into the post-war years without a constitution to take her there (as she felt necessarily practical and energetic) in the healing.’ Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p..  Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ‘The Life of St Osith: introduction.’ Papers on Language and Literature, , ,  (Summer & Fall, ): p. .  ‘Chapter VIII: Adolescence.’ E. Allinson folder. (Hogarth Press Archive, University of Reading), p.. Pages are numbered.  I use ‘she’ here, but genders of ‘’ and ‘’ are not identified.  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp.–.  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., pp. –. Soden suggests a Jungian reading of the split self—‘it reads to me like a dialogue between the ego and the shadow, an explication of Tippett’s line, from his libretto to A Child of Our Time’, ‘I would know my shadow and my light, so shall I at last be whole’, ‘Turning into [herself ]’ ‘a very Tippett-y concern’, ‘dare the grave passage’ ‘(from Child of our Time) meaning the journey into the unconscious, the quest for self-knowledge via a coming-to-terms with the dark unconscious (rather than projecting it onto others)’. ‘As I change inside so the world changes outside’ ‘also rings with Jung to me: his sense that a knowledge of the individual unconscious will alter the state of the world via the collective unconscious’. Personal email.

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Notes  Arthur Rook, Margaret Carlton, W. Graham Cannon, The History of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ), p. .  ‘Post Mortem for Miss Enid Francesca Allinson, age .’ Addenbrooke’s Hospital. p. . Hereafter Post Mortem.  Post Mortem, pp. –.  As Oliver Soden suggests, this would suggest that Fresca could bear children.  Ibid., p. .  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visceroptosis  ‘The Horrors of Buchenwald.’ The Times, April , . https://www.theguardian.com/century/–/Story/,,,.html  Fresca’s will is at The Mill House.  Clara Barkow’s death certificate suggests that she also might be buried at Mill House (d. ).  The grave was unmarked when I visited The Mill House. In a much later letter to Kit Martin, Sonya and her sisters had suggested as a grave marker ‘something small and simple’, ‘a small block of rough-hewn stone with simple lettering, not too regular, and the dates’. They hoped that ‘[p]erhaps in time some creeper would grow around it’.  Rendel was Oxford educated. ‘He was head of the Eastern Department of the Foreign Office, –. In  he and his wife Geraldine (–) crossed Arabia. His wife, Geraldine, was the first European woman to be received for dinner at the royal palace in Riyadh [. . .] In , he was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, a post held until . He was knighted in the latter year and served as Ambassador to Belgium between –.’ Wikipedia.  TTCB, p. .  Alex Danchev, Oliver Franks: Founding Father (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. .  http://www.hsomerville.com/meccano/Articles/Franks.htm  Archives in London and the M area. “Warburg Institute: Jamison, Evelyn Marie.” http://www.aim.ac.uk/cats//.htm  Thanks to Oliver Soden for this.  TTCB, pp. –.  I find an interview with Lucy Mair at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1WhUMTFfLg. Her obituary is in Anthropology Today ,  (Aug., ), pp. –.  John Davis, ‘Mair, Lucy Philip (–)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, ) [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/, accessed  Oct ]  Helen Anderson obituary. The Times. http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/obituaries/article .ece  http://www.iandenny.co.uk/page.htm.  Née Wolff, according to Eglantyne Buxton.  It is Tippett who confirms that Judy also received a note.  From Caitlin Adams or the Wogan-Brownes.  Diana Howard, London Theatre and Music Halls – (London: Library Association, ), p. .  and on, Wogan appears not to have been licensed.  She does not appear to have taken the flat Fresca mentioned in her will.  National Trust Collections. ‘Travelling Players…the Story of the Arts League of Service.’ http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/  The Telegraph. Barbara Clutton-Brock obituary. June , . http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries//Barbara-Clutton-Brock.html  http://catalog.lib.utexas.edu/search~S?/xtippett+synge/... The latter book is listed in the record as from ‘Judy to Thelma?’ but I am sure this is a misreading as the question mark indicates.  Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, pp. –.  Tippett gives their ages at death incorrectly as  and . TTCB, p. .  TTCB p. .  Alun Lewis, Collected Poems (Mid Glamorgan, Wales: Seren/Poetry Wales Press, ), p. . Hereafter Lewis.  Lewis, p. .  Sidney Keyes, Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcarnet, ), p. . Hereafter Keyes.  Lewis, p. .  Justin M. Vickers, ‘“The Ineffable Moments will be the Harder Won”: The Genesis,

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Notes Compositional Process and Early Performance History of Michael Tippett’s The Heart’s Assurance’ (A. Mus.D. dissertation, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, ), p. . Hereafter Vickers.  Lewis, p. .  Keyes, p..  Vickers disagrees with Schuttenhelm’s composition dates for The Heart’s Assurance, for example Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. . Vickers, pp. –.  My emphasis. Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, pp. –. Vickers dates the first mention to , p. .  Tippett continues: ‘I tried to express in the setting of these poems their dominant quality, the threat which death gave to love.’ Qtd in Arnold Whittall The Music of Britten and Tippett: Studies in Themes and Techniques (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ), p. . Hereafter Whittall. Whittall’s note indicates this quote is from: ‘Notes with the recording on Argo D A .’ n. , p. .  Unpublished letter (May , ) from Tippett to Pears qtd. in Vickers, p. .  Tippett qtd. in Vickers, p. .  Whittall, p. .  Barbara Docherty, ‘Tippett’s “War Requiem.”’ Michael Tippett: Music and Literature, ed. Suzanne Robinson (Burlington: Ashgate, ), pp. , .  Keyes, p. .  Qtd. in Vickers, p. .  J.C. Vaughan Wilkes et al., For Your Tomorrow: An Anthology of Poetry Written by Young Men from English Public Schools Who Fell in the World War, – (London: Oxford University Press, ). Hereafter For Your Tomorrow.  John Guenther, Sidney Keyes: A Biographical Inquiry (London: London Magazine Editions, ), p. . Hereafter Guenther.  For Your Tomorrow, p. vii.  Guenther, p. .  Keyes, p. .  Keyes’s death was not reported until December  ( or ?) in The Times.  Perhaps in the George Allen and Unwin edition of Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets: Poems in Transit with a foreword by Robert Graves, . The Harry Ransom Center has Tippett’s copy of this volume, with the following notation: ‘manuscript notation (withdrawn)’.  Lewis, p. .  See Alun Lewis, A Cypress Walk: Letters from Alun Lewis to Freda Aykroyd with a memoir by Freda Aykroyd (London: Enitharmon, ).  David Daiches, ‘Questions and Answers: A Review of Collected Poems by Sidney Keyes (Holt) and W.J. Turner Fossils of a Future Time (Oxford).’ Poetry (October ), p. .  Ibid., p. .  Guenther, p. .  Keyes, p. . Lewis also wrote a poem called ‘The Suicide’.  Letter from Sonya Allinson, received February , .  Robert Samuels. ‘Tippett, Britten, and Shostakovitch and the Music of Total War’ http://therestisnoise.southbankcentre.co.uk/explore/Art-Of-Fear/. (podcast)  This orchestrated version was commissioned by the London Bach Orchestra in celebration of the composer’s th birthday.  David Clarke. ‘Tipping the Balance: Tippett’s String Quartet No. ; New Year Suite; The Heart’s Assurance by Meirion Bowen.’ The Musical Times, ,  (Sept. ): p. .  Meirion Bowen, Michel Tippett (London: Robson, ), pp. –. My emphasis.  Michael White, ‘Tippett’s tears from the heart.’ Independent ( January , ). http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical-music-tippetts-tears-from-the-heart.html Hereafter White. My emphasis.  Vickers, p. .  Ibid., p. .  Peter Pears. ‘Song and Text’, in Ian Kemp, ed., Michael Tippett: A Symposium for His th Birthday (London: Faber, ), p. . My emphasis.  TTCB, p. .  White.

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Notes  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JbBYZzaSgnU  An edited version was reproduced in The Listener ,  (August , ), but I use the actual show here.  Also see ‘Tippett’s Time’ (London: Channel Four Television, ).  There are two versions of this letter TTCB, p.  and Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. . A letter to Den Newton explains that David Ayerst is a whipping boy (for Tippett) because of his support of the war. Tippett writes a similar letter to William Glock, Selected Letters of Michael Tippett, p. .  David Ayerst, in Ian Kemp ed., Michael Tippett: A Symposium for His th Birthday (London: Faber ). p. . Hereafter, Ayerst.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. .  Ibid., pp. –.  Ibid., p. . Ayerst closes with Tippett’s mother: ‘An early career as a novelist [. . .] an ardent period as a suffragette; endless personal generosities; a devotion to off beat causes; and now, in late autumn, the self-taught painter of an inner world—this is clearly the only kind of mother you had to have’ (p. ).  Courtesy of Caroline Ayerst. Ayerst, presumably checking Kemp for dates, gets the trip to the Kinderheim wrong, at least according to Blues which I follow in my earlier accounts.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/  Unpublished letter (May , ) from Tippett to Pears qtd. in Vickers, p. . (See also note , this chapter).  Diary, p. .  TTCB, p. .  I try to identify the characters with whom Fresca and Tippett might have aligned themselves in The Waves. Susan seems a likely candidate for Fresca, not only in terms of her tie with Bernard, but also in terms of her tumultuous inner life (apparent at a young age). Susan is the figure tied to nature, but also the most maternal of all of the figures in the work. ‘I love,’ said Susan, ‘and I hate. I desire one thing only. My eyes are hard. Jinny’s eyes break into a thousand lights. Rhoda’s are like those pale flowers to which moths come in the evening. Yours grow full and brim and never break. But I am already set on my pursuit. I see insects in the grass. Though my mother still knits white socks for me and hems pinafores and I am a child, I love and I hate.’ ‘But when we sit together, close,’ said Bernard, ‘we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an unsubstantial territory’ (The Waves [New York: Harcourt, ], p.). Introverted Rhoda is perhaps also a candidate? Rhoda commits suicide; Rhoda also has ties to music and to opera. Louis and Rhoda are conspirators. Louis suggests Tippett. Or is he Bernard—the voice that remains? In a second marked passage, Enid Marx has singled out Rhoda: ‘Oh! to whom? There is some check in the flow of my being; a deep stream presses on some obstacle; it jerks; it tugs; some knot in the centre resists. Oh, this is pain, this is anguish! I faint, I fail. Now my body thaws; I am unsealed, I am incandescent. Now the stream pours in a deep tide fertilizing, opening the shut, forcing the tight-folded, flooding free. To whom shall I give all that now flows through me, from my warm, my porous body? I will gather my flowers and present them—Oh! to whom?’ ‘Sailors loiter on the parade, and amorous couples; the omnibuses rattle along the sea front to the town. I will give; I will enrich; I will return to the world this beauty. I will bind my flowers in one garland and advancing with my hand outstretched will present them—Oh! to whom?’ (p. ).  The Waves (New York: Harcourt, ), p. . Hereafter The Waves.  Ibid., p. . My emphasis.

Coda  http://www.jap.be/editions. JEUNESSE & ARTS PLASTIQUES,  RUE RAVENSTEIN –  BRUXELLES BUREAU:  RUE RAVENSTEIN –  BRUXELLES. CARINE BIENFAIT, directrice; THIBAUT BLONDIAU, coordinateur. ‘This edition collects together the pages drawn in pencil by Jacqueline Mesmaeker in the book of Francesca Allinson’s A

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Notes



 

 

Childhood (Hogarth Press, ) which was given to her with a dedication by Smithy, RAF officer.  copies printed (+E.A.) numbered and signed, this book consists of three original drawings. Price: members: / members under  years old : / Non-members: .’ ‘The Avenue of Nations being one of the access points into Brussels. Via some ultra rapid means of communication, we knew that if we ran as fast as our young forces would allow us we would not miss the very first to arrive. Perched very high up in the tower of their tank decorated with a white star, with their signature cap, it was the Americans. In the orange light of the setting sun, they looked like ancient gods: tanned, looking around, alert, likely hampered by the innocent enthusiasm of our little group, very quickly we understood that we should withdraw and let them get on with their work. All night long, I heard gun shots and the next day, the British had set up camp in the Bois de Cambre. The school friend with whom I was near the tank tells me that she had thought “Helene is safe”—Helene was her classmate, a Jewish girl hidden at the home of a language teacher, who risked her life without a second thought. During the war, we lived in fear of these disappearances, even though, very quickly, no yellow stars were in evidence, either destroyed or secretly stashed away. The Free University of Brussels had stopped operations and closed its doors. Several professors and several students were Jews, South Americans from the Ruma Foundation took the boat to Anvers, on the Jean-Jadot. All the foreigners left, but a person from my neighborhood who used to greet us very cordially (we only knew him by sight) suddenly appeared in a German officer’s uniform.’ My translation. ‘I don’t know their surnames, and time has wiped them from memory . . . and more well built, without being at all overweight.’ My translation. ‘No, I did not read the book immediately and want very much to get back to it and at the same time, to relocate the passage ‘post-war world, and a young lady.’ During the years , , , I drew on the walls of abandoned places in order to avoid the gallery scene while at the same time working outside the house. The first time, it was in the large dark interior of an abandoned commercial freezer/ice house lit only by an approximately  x  cm hole in the ceiling. Hundreds of drawings covered the brick walls, painted in white become dusty, the room was huge, cold, uninviting. Why did I create these secret sketches/outlines? Out of spite, probably, knowing that they would only be seen by a few people, the space being an abandoned factory. I began this experiment again, more officially this time in the context of a collective exhibit involving artists from several different countries. It was also in a big abandoned place, where alone day after day I covered the walls with small drawings in pencil or with a rubber stamp using templates . . .’ My translation. ‘As I said before I added drawings, letting myself be guided either by the lines of the typography or by a word, an expression or something evocative.’ My translation. ‘These original editions seek to expand the definition of the book. They refuse to be fit into a mould but maintain the possibility, without pretense, of escaping from the edition by creating a relationship of intimacy with the reader and a defining experience of pleasure.’ ‘The book is a unique medium in that it only performs its function if the viewer interacts with it, and turns its pages. The artist’s book is above all a physical object with which we interact with the physical world.’ Barbara Cinelli, “Artists’ Books and Futurist Theatre: Notes for a Possible Interpretation”, in Il Libro Come Opera d’Arte/The Book as a Work of Art (Rome: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, ), p. . My translation.

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INDEX

Italic font is used for titles of books, music, plays and other media. Names of authors are shown in brackets. Italic page number are used for illustrations. Names of people who changed their names are given in round brackets, i.e. Alfred became (Adrian). Names of people in square brackets are those by which they were known to others, i.e. Enid (Francesca) was known as [Fresca]. Fresca Allinson is abbreviated to FA. —————————— Actor Prepares, An (Stanislavski),  Adam, Ruth, –, – Adams, Caitlin, –, , ,  Addison, James Frederick,  affair of FA during WWII, ,  Afterwords (Oldfield),  All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, –,  Allen, Sir Hugh, –,  Allinson, Alfred (Adrian) (brother of FA) on Anna, his mother,  art and democracy ideas of,  autobiography of, –, – Boult, Sir Adrian, friendship with,  conscientious objection of, –,  dandyism of, , , – FA, relationship with,  family background, , –, – Germanness of, – name change of,  obituary, – work by, –, –, –, , ,  Allinson, Anna (neé Pulvermacher) (mother of FA) artistic skills of, ,  Childhood, A in,  death of,  FA, relationship with, ,  family background,  household of, – personality, , , – photographs of, ,  on vegetarian food, 

Allinson, Bertrand (brother of FA) career,  and FA, , – family background, , – marriage of,  Marx, Enid [Marco] collaboration with,  name change of,  Allinson, Cicely,  Allinson, Cyril (brother of FA) Childhood, A in,  childhood of, – effects sent to Edinburgh University, – FA, burial of, – family background,  marriage to Veronica,  name change of,  personality,  Allinson, Dulcie (sister of FA), ,  Allinson, Enid (Francesca) [Fresca] affair during WWII, ,  Ascent of F, The (Auden and Isherwood), opinion of, – book proposal,  books read by, , –, –, – Boosbeck camp, North Yorks., –, , , – burial of, – career, – childhood, –, , –, , , ,  Childhood, A, publication of, –, , –, , , – choirs involved with, –, , , , , –



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Index Allinson, Enid (Francesca) [Fresca] (continued) Christianity and, , , , , ,  conscientious objectors, involvement with, , , , , –, –,  diaries of, , , –, –, , – dreams of, –, –, –, , –, – East Grinstead, Sussex, living in, , , – education, , , , –, , –,  folk song projects, –, –, – Germany and, –, , , ,  goats and, – gossip in Streetly End, Cambs.,  handcraft skills, ,  illnesses of diagnosis of hyperthyroidism,  postmortem of, – sciatica, pain of,  symptoms of, , – ugliness of,  Irish Contribution to English Traditional Tunes, The, –,  meditation and, –,  Mill House, Streetly End, Cambs., –, , –,  Morley College, London, and, ,  music in Allinson home, – customs in Spain, article,  folk song projects, –, –, – Gibbons, work on,  influences, – performances, , –, , ,  Purcell, work on, – Tippett, projects with, – written by, –, –, – naturalism and,  New York, trip to,  obituaries, –, , , , ,  pacifism of, –, , ,  patriotism and the arts, – personality, , –, ,  photographs of, , , –, , , , ,  play, possibly by,  post mortem of, – psychoanalysis, interest in, 

psychoanalysis of, , , ,  puppets, interest in, , –, , – self-analysis of, – sexuality of, , , , , ,  social change and, – stories planned by, –, –, –, ,  suicide of, , –, , ,  will of Allinson, Veronica (wife of Cyril),  Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, England, ,  Lambert, Margaret [Lamb],  legacies,  Marx, Enid [Marco],  people omitted, – Tippett, Sir Michael, –, , – Wogan, Judith [ Jude/Judy], , ,  women, hatred and fear of,  Woolf, Virginia, death of,  World War II in diaries, ,  World War II in letters, –, , , – Zodiac Volume of Nursery Rhymes, ,  Works of Childhood, A, –, , –, , , – Irish Contribution to English Traditional Tunes, The, –,  Zodiac Volume of Nursery Rhymes, ,  Relationships with Allinson, Alfred (Adrian),  Allinson, Anna (mother), ,  Allinson, Bertrand (brother),  Allinson, Sonya (niece of FA), –, , , – Allinson, Veronica (wife of Cyril),  Just, Herbert, –,  Lambert, Margaret [Lamb], , , –, , –, ,  Marx, Enid [Marco] collaboration with, –,  femininity of, – first meeting with, ,  illustrations for A Childhood,  letters relating to, , –, – suicide note to,  tension between, –



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Index Newton, Douglas [Den], , –, –, – Tippett, Sir Michael biography of FA,  first meeting,  folk song project, –, ,  Germany, trip to with, –,  holiday at St Osyth, Essex, –,  influence on work of, ,  in letters to Marx and Lambert, – Moses Farm, visit with,  music dedicated by, –, – relationship with, –, , , –, , – suicide of FA, impact, –, –,  talks of to Anthony Clare, – work with, –, – Vaughan Williams, Ralph, –, – Wogan, Judith [ Jude/Judy] book dedication to,  Christianity, discussed,  letter to,  mistreatment of,  relationship with, –, , , –, – separation from, ,  suicide note to,  Allinson, Enid (niece of FA), , ,  Allinson, Marcelle (wife of Bertrand),  Allinson, Michael (nephew of FA), –, ,  Allinson, Sonya (niece of FA) Allinson, Cyril, interviews,  Allinson, Michael, on,  Barkow, Clara, on,  FA conversion to Catholicism,  Lamb and Marco,  memories of, –, , , – photographs of, , ,  suicide of,  family background, – on Heart’s Assurance, The,  work by,  Allinson, Thomas Richard [T. R.] (father of FA) appearance, , ,  career, , , – Childhood, A in,  family background, , 

health,  household of, – opinions of, –, , ,  personality, , ,  wife, choice of,  Allinson, Tim (gt nephew of FA), , ,  Allinson, Vanessa (niece of FA), , –,  Allinson, Veronica (wife of Cyril), , , – Allinsonian children, –,  Amfiparnaso, L’ (Vecchi), –, –, , ,  Amis, John, –, –, , –,  Anderson, Helen, – Angier, Carole,  Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day (Auden), – anti-German sentiment in England,  Apple Cart, The (Shaw),  Archard, Bernard, –,  Archard, Hazel, – Archard, James [King], – Armstrong, Thomas, – Arthur, Reg,  artistic method of Stanislavski,  Arts League of Service, –, , , , , ,  Ascent of F, The (Auden and Isherwood), – Ashe, Jon,  Auden, W. H., –, – Autobiography of Mark Rutherford, The (Rutherford), ,  Awty, Michael,  Awty, Mrs.,  Ayerst, David, , , , , , , – Bagot, Milicent,  Baker, Richard St Barbe, ,  ballad and folk song, Tippett’s interest in,  ballad operas, FA work on, ,  ballads, suggested by FA to Enid Marx,  Barkow, Clara [Tickie], , , , –, , , ,  Barkway, Stephen,  Barnes, Djuna,  Batson, Judy,  Baynes, Cary F., ,  Beales, Hugh Lancelot,  Beggar’s Opera, The (Gay), , , –, , , –



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Index Belchamber, James, – Bell, Angelica,  Bell, Julian,  Bell, Nicolas, ,  Berry, Ana, ,  Beware of Pity (Zweig), ,  Bickerdike, Doris, – Bickerdike, John, –,  Birmingham, George,  birth-control pamphlets of T. R. Allinson, ,  Blake, William, –,  Bondfield, Margaret,  Book for Married Women, A (T. R. Allinson), ,  Boosbeck camp, North Yorks., –, , , – Boult, Sir Adrian,  Bowen, Meirion,  Bowlby, Rachel, , ,  Boyes, Georgina,  Bradbrook, Muriel,  Brains Trust, The (radio programme),  Brann, Paul,  bread, Allinson’s, ,  Breuning, Eleanor FA people sent copies of book, – photographs of, ,  possible play,  psychoanalysis of,  Marx, Enid and Margaret Lambert, on,  Marx, Enid [Marco], on, –, ,  Brewer, Jack,  Brewer, Kenneth,  Brewer, Stephen,  Bridie, James,  Britain in Pictures series, , ,  Brittain, Vera, , , ,  Britten, Benjamin, , , , – Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky),  Brown, Jill,  Brown, Robert,  Bruce, Syd,  Bulgy The Barrage Balloon (Marx),  Bullivant, Joanna, ,  Bush, Alan, , –, , – Buxton, Eglantyne,  Byrne, Paula,  caravan of Arts League of Service,  Carr, E. H., –

Carrington, Noel,  Catholic Art and Culture (Watkin),  Catholicism of FA, ,  see also Christianity and FA CEMA (Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts),  Chase, Malcolm,  Checklist of The Hogarth Press (Woolmer), , ,  Child of Our Time, A (Tippett), –, –,  child-rearing, T. R. Allinson’s opinions on, – Childhood, A (Fresca Allinson) artist’s book made from, – copies sent out on death of FA, – dedication of, ,  description of, –,  education in,  extra chapter, – and FA’s childhood, – illness in, – inequality and poverty in,  Jewishness in,  landscape of,  music in,  pity in, – publication of, –, , –, , , – readership of, –,  reviews of, – value of women in, – woodcuts by Enid Marx, , , , , , , ,  writing of,  choirs FA involved with, –, , , , , – Christchurch Avenue, Brondesbury, London, , , , , ,  Christian, Maureen,  Christianity and FA, , , , ,  see also Catholicism of FA Chute, Margaret,  Clarchon, Tante,  Clare, Anthony, – Clarion Glee choir, Tottenham, London, ,  Clarke, David, , , , , – Clarke, Stuart, ,  Clayton, Phillip Byard [Tubby],  Clutton-Brock, Barbara, 



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Index Cohen, Lisa,  Cole, Suzanne,  Collected Essays (Woolf ), ,  Collected Poems (Keyes),  Common Reader, The (Woolf ), ,  Community Movement,  Concerto for Double String Orchestra (Tippett), , ,  Conrad, Joseph,  conscientious objectors (CO) Allinson, Alfred (Adrian) (brother of FA), –,  Archard, Bernard, – Archard, James ‘King,’ – Brewer, Jack,  FA and, , , , ,  female,  Marchant, William, opposed to,  Newton, Douglas [Den], , ,  Peace Pledge Union and,  project at Kingsmead, East Grinstead and, –,  project at Moses Farm, Piltdown, Sussex, – Tippett, Sir Michael, , , ,  Cosman, Milein, ,  Costello, Karin,  Cotter, Holland, – Cotton, Lillian [Lilly], ,  Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA),  Crisis of Brilliance, A (Haycock),  Croft, Andy,  Croft-Murray, Teddy, – Currie, John S.,  Daiches, David,  Dance of Death (Auden),  David-Néel, Alexandra, – diaries of FA, , , –, –, , – Diary of a Superfluous Man (Turgenev),  Dickens, Barry,  Dickie, Tom, , – Dickinson, Violet, – Dido and Aeneas (Purcell), ,  Docherty, Barbara, – Don Quixote (arrangement by Fresca Allinson), , –

Doone, Rupert, ,  Dostoevsky, Fyodor, , – Dr. Allinson’s Cookery Book Comprising Many Valuable Vegetarian Recipes (T. R. Allinson), – dreams of FA, –, –, –, , –, – Drucker, Peter F.,  Duhamel, Georges,  Duncan, Ronald,  Dunn, Geoffrey, , , ,  East Grinstead, Sussex, –, ,  Ebor Marionettes,  education of FA, , , , –, , –,  education of women, –, – Ehrlich, Else, ,  Ehrlich, Sofie, , ,  Elder, Eleanor Arts League of Service, –, –,  and Grafton Theatre, ,  house in St Osyth, Essex, , , – marriage and family life, ,  Travelling Players, –, , ,  Wogan, Judith [ Jude/Judy] and, –, –,  Eleanor’s Enterprise (Birmingham),  Eliot, T. S., – Ellis, Edward Fenwick,  Ellis, Reuben,  Elm Tree Farm, Wembley Park, London,  Emden, Paul,  End of Economic Man (Drucker),  English Folk Song (Sharp), – English Popular and Traditional Art (Marx and Lambert),  English Popular Art (Lambert and Marx), ,  Eve, Matthew, , , , , ,  Ewen, Malcolm, – exercise, T. R. Allinson’s opinions on, – Experiment in Leisure, An (Field), , , – Family Reunion, The (Eliot), –,  Fantasien (Purcell),  Faulding, Gertrude Minnie,  fiction, Virginia Woolf on, – Field, Joanna, , , , – Fisher, Ardan, 

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Index Fisher, Bryan, , , ,  Flying Machine and Modern Literature, The (Goldstein),  folk songs FA projects on, –, –, – Sharp on, –,  Tippett’s interest in, , ,  food, T. R. Allinson’s opinions on, –,  For Your Tomorrow (Wilkes et al.), – Foss, Hubert, , ,  n Fowler, David,  Franks, Barbara,  Franks, Dan,  Franks, Daphne, – Franks, Oliver,  Franks, Wilf, , –, , , –,  Freeman, Anne Hobson,  Freud, Sigmund, – Frogley, Alain, – Fry, Margery,  Fry, Roger, , – Fuller, Dorothy, ,  Galsworthy, John,  Gandhi, Mahatma,  Gardiner, Rolf, , –, , , ,  Garnett, David [Bunny],  Germanness of Allinsons, – Germany Allinson family ties to, –,  Barkow, Clara [Tickie], threatened deportation to, – FA and, –, , , ,  Tippett and, ,  Gertler, Mark, – Gibbons, Orlando,  Gibbons, Stella,  Gilbert, Bill,  Gilgan, Danyel,  goats and FA, – Goldstein, Laurence,  Gordon, Cora,  Gordon, Jan,  gossip in Streetly End, Cambs.,  Goupil Galleries,  Grace (cousin of Dulcie Taylor),  Grace, doctor of FA,  Grafton Theatre, Tottenham Court Road, London, –, 

Grant, Duncan,  Graves, Robert,  Green, Paul,  Grieg, Ed, – Grieg, Rose,  Grier, Lynda, , ,  Griffin, Jonathan,  Grogan, Christopher,  Grossmith, George, Jr., –,  Guenther, John,  Gurdjieff, George, – Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets: Poems in Transit (Lewis), ,  Hackett, Pearl, – Haill, Cathy, – Hain, Edward (husband of Judy Wogan), – Hain, Sir Edward, – Hammond, Barbara,  Hammond, John,  Hamnett, Nina, ,  Hampson, John,  handcraft skills of FA, ,  Harrison, Jane,  Hawker, Karl, ,  Haycock, David Boyd, – Hayes, Dennis,  health of FA diagnosis of hyperthyroidism,  post mortem of, – sciatica, pain of,  symptoms of illness, , , – ugliness of illness,  health, T. R. Allinson’s opinions on, –,  Heartbreak Hill (Chase),  Heart’s Assurance, The (Tippett), , –, –, –,  Heatherington, Bill,  Hendy, Phyllis, ,  Her Oxford (Batson),  Herissone, Rebecca,  Heseltine, Phillip (Peter Warlock),  Hodges, Alan,  Hogarth Press, –, –, –,  holidays of Allinson family,  Hollis, Catherine, – Home Rule (Wogan),  Howard, Diana, 

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Index Hubank, Roger,  hyperthyroidism,  I Just Happened to Be There (Lillis-Jensen),  Idiot, The (Dostoevsky),  illness in literature, ,  illness, T. R. Allinson’s opinions on, –,  illnesses of FA diagnosis of hyperthyroidism,  postmortem of, – sciatica, pain of,  symptoms of, , , – ugliness of,  Indigo (Weston),  Ingwersen, Karen,  Ingwersen, Kay, ,  Ingwersen, Will, –, – Intimate Opera Company, , , –,  Irish Contribution to English Traditional Tunes, The (Fresca Allinson), –,  Irvine, Lyn Lloyd,  Isherwood, Christopher, – Jacobs, Ivy, ,  Jacobs, Richard,  James, William,  Jamison, Evelyn Mary,  Jaywick, Essex, ,  Jewishness of Allinsons, – Jews in England, – Johnson, Jennifer,  Johnson, Robert,  Jones, Henry Festing,  Joy (Galsworthy),  Joyce, Patrick Weston,  Jung, Carl, – Just, Herbert, –,  Karpeles, Maud, , –,  Kemp, Ian FA and Tippett, , , – Franks, Wilf,  Gardiner, Rolf,  Tippett, Sir Michael, , , ,  Kemp, Phyllis [Phyl], ,  Kendrick, Hayden Mostyn, – Kennington, Eric,  Keyes, Sidney, –, –, –, –, 

Kinderheim, Markdorf, Germany,  Kingsmead, East Grinstead, Sussex, project with conscientious objectors, –,  Kirk, Alexia,  Kouekamp, Fritz,  Kouekamp, Selim, , ,  n labour music, – Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, England Allinson, Adrian’s paintings for, – FA bequest to LMH, , ,  continued contact with, ,  education of, , –, –, –,  Lambert, Margaret [Lamb], , ,  Tanner, Barbara,  Lake, Joan,  Lama aux cinq sagesses, Le (David-Néel), – Lambert, Margaret [Lamb] biography, –, – FA folk song project, ,  n friendship with, , , –, , –, ,  letters received on death of, – musical repertoire of,  name change of,  obituary, –, , ,  Purcell, interest in, ,  Purcell, work on, ,  will of,  Marx, Enid [Marco], , –, ,  Ritchie, Alice, friendship with,  Tippett, Sir Michael, dislike of,  Woolf, Leonard,  Works of English Popular and Traditional Art,  English Popular Art, ,  Saar, The, – Lanchester, Elsa, ,  Lanchester, Muriel, ,  Lanchester, Waldo, ,  Langham Place, All Souls Church, London, –,  Lao Tzu,  Lawrence, D. H.,  Layard, John, –, , ,  Lea, Kathleen Marguerite,  Lehmann, Rosamund, 

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Index Leinster House School for Girls, London, – Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers (Willis), ,  Leppard, M. J.,  Letters of Virginia Woolf (Nicolson and Trautmann),  Lewis, Alun, –, , , – Lewis, Jill,  Lidice (Bush), – Life of Butler ( Jones),  Life of One’s Own, A (Field), , – Lillis, Charles,  Lillis, Claire,  Lillis, Francis,  Lillis, Patricia, ,  Lillis-Jensen, Mary,  Lloyd, Chris,  Lloyd-George, Megan,  Lockspeiser, Edward,  London Labour Choral Union (LLCU), , – London Roundabout, A (Gordon and Gordon),  London Street Cries (Gibbons),  London Theatre and Music Halls - (Howard),  Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain –, The (Graves and Hodges),  Lopokova, Lydia, ,  Lord Jim (Conrad),  luck and success,  Machine of the Gods, The (Cocteau),  Mackay, Beryl, ,  Mackay, Hugh, , , , ,  Mackay, John, , , ,  Mackay, Kenneth, ,  Mackerness, E. D.,  Mackintosh, Charles Rennie,  Mahony, Oliver, , , ,  Mair, Lucy, – Maitland, Lena,  Manhire, Bill,  Marchant, William,  Mark, Jeffrey, –,  Markdorf Kinderheim, Germany,  Markievicz, Constance, – Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The (Blake), 

Marriage, Robert, – Marriage, Roger, ,  Martin, Kit Allinson, Alfred (Adrian) (brother of FA), ,  Allinson, Anna, and, ,  Allinson, Cyril, and, , , – Childhood, A, copy of,  FA biography of,  items connected to,  suicide notes from,  will of, ,  puppets seen by,  Taylor, Dulcie, identification of,  Martin’s Grove, Essex, , , , –, –, ,  Marx, Enid [Marco] autobiography of,  books owned by, –, –,  career, –,  letters of, – photographs of,  Relationships of,  Allinson, Bertrand, collaboration with,  Allinson, Sonya, and, ,  FA collaboration with, –,  description of,  letters received on death of, – relationship with, , , , , –, , – suicide note from,  Lambert, Margaret [Lamb], , –, ,  Ritchie, Alice, friendship with, ,  Stephen, Adrian, psychoanalysis by, –,  Tippett, Sir Michael, dislike of,  Woolf, Leonard, given kitten by,  Works by book covers designed by, , , ,  Bulgy The Barrage Balloon (Marx),  Childhood, A, woodcuts in, , , , , , , ,  English Popular and Traditional Art (Marx and Lambert),  English Popular Art (Lambert and Marx), , 

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Index fabrics designed by, –, – paper designed by, –, – Zodiac Volume of Nursery Rhymes, ,  Mary Ward Centre, London, , – Mathieson, Kenny,  Maude, Evelyn,  Maynard, Edric, ,  McCance, Robert Alexander, – McCormick, John,  McIndoe, Archie,  meditation by FA, –,  Men of the Trees (Baker),  Men of the Trees, The, , ,  Mesmaeker, Jacqueline, –, , – Meynell, Alice,  Midsummer Marriage, The (Tippett), ,  Mill House, Streetly End, Cambs., –, –, , –,  Milner, Marion see Field, Joanna Miners (Tippett),  Mitchell Smith, Molly, , ,  Modern Idolatry, The (Mark),  Modern Man in Search of a Soul ( Jung), – Moore, Nicholas,  Moore, Olive, – Morley College, London, , –,  Morris, Stuart,  Morris, Victor,  Morton, Brian,  Moses Farm, Piltdown, East Sussex, –,  Mrs Dalloway (Woolf ), ,  Murry, John Middleton,  music and FA in Allinson home, – customs in Spain, article,  folk song projects, –, –, – Gibbons, work on,  influences, – performances, , –, , ,  Purcell, work on, – Tippett, Sir Michael, dedicated by, –, – Tippett, Sir Michael, projects with, – written by, –, –, – music, socialist, – My Life—My Trees (Baker), ,  Myers, Geoffrey,  n  Myers, Rosy, ,  n  Myers, Selim, , ,  n

Nagel’s Musik-Archiv,  name changes of Allinson family, ,  Nash, Mrs.,  Nash, Paul, –,  National Music (Vaughan Williams),  National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC),  nationalism of Vaughan Williams, – naturalism, FA on,  New Poetry (Moore),  New York, United States of America, , –,  Newel, Dorothy,  Newton, Douglas [Den] biography, –,  conscientious objector, , ,  FA relationship with, , , , –, –, – folk song project,  Settle, Mary Lee, relationship with, –, ,  Tippett, Sir Michael, relationship with, –, –, – Weathersbee, Christopher, relationship with, –,  Nicolson, Nigel,  Nightwood (Barnes),  Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, The (Rilke), – Noyce, Marion,  NUSEC (National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship),  obituaries of FA, –, , , , ,  Odle, Alan, ,  Old Cottage (Tan Cottage), Dalte’s Lane, St Osyth, Essex, , , –, –,  Oldfield, Sybil,  Omegna, F., – Omnibus Puppets,  On Being Ill (Woolf ),  Ormesby Hall, North Yorks.,  Outhwaite, Betty,  Oxford Bach choir, – Oxford New Music Choir, –, , ,  Oxford University, education of women,  Oxford University Press, , , , 

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Index pacifism during World War II of FA, –, , ,  Kingsmead, East Grinstead, Sussex, –,  Moses Farm, Piltdown, East Sussex, –,  of Tippett, , , ,  Pageant of Co-Operation (Rome),  Pageant of Labour (Bush), , , – Painter’s Pilgrimage, A (Adrian Allinson), – paper rationing during WWII,  Parent, Mademoiselle,  Parsons, Trekkie [Ritchie],  patriotism and the arts, – Patterson, Sir Alexander,  Peace Pledge Union, –, ,  Pears, Peter, , , ,  Peg O’ My Heart (Manners),  personality of FA, , –, ,  Phare, E. E.,  photographs of FA, , , –, , , , ,  Piano Sonata No. I (Tippett), –,  Pilcher, Velona, ,  Piltdown, East Sussex, –,  Piltdown Foodgrowers, , – Pizzichini, Lilian,  Poetry, Fiction and the Future (Woolf ), – poetry, Virginia Woolf on, – postmortem of FA, – Prague, Czech Republic, – Pratasik, Bennie,  Price, Sir Curtis,  prose, Virginia Woolf on, – Prospect House, Heston, Hounslow, Middlesex,  psychoanalysis of FA, , , ,  Jungian vs. Freudian, – of Marx, Enid [Marco], –,  of Tippett, ,  Pulvermacher, Anna see Allinson, Anna (neé Pulvermacher) (mother of FA) Pulvermacher, David (grandfather of FA),  puppets, –, , –, –, ,  Purcell, Henry, , –, – Quakers and conscientious objectors, , , , 

Raiders’ Dawn and Other Poems (Lewis),  Raine, Kathleen,  Rainier, Priaulx,  rationing of paper during WWII,  Reaching for the Stars (Waln),  recorder music, – Recovery of the West, The (Roberts), – Red Letter Days (Croft),  Rendel, Sir George William,  Reynolds, Barbara, – Rhys, Jean, ,  Richardson, Dorothy, , ,  Rider, Dan, – Rilke, Rainer Maria, –, – Rise Loutek, Prague, Czech Republic,  Ritchie, Alice, , ,  Ritchie, Mabel, – River Stour, , , ,  Robert of Sicily (Tippett), , ,  Roberts, Michael, –,  Robin Hood (Tippett),  Robinson, Suzanne,  Roger Fry (Woolf ), – Rogers, Stephen,  Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf ), , , –, , ,  Rose, Ernestine,  Rosenberg, Isaac,  n Rougemont, Louis de,  Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society, ,  Rudge, Gertrude Elizabeth [Cissie], – Rutherford, Mark, ,  Saar, The (Lambert), – Sackville Food Growers, East Grinstead, Sussex, –, ,  Salute the Soldiers Week,  Samuels, Robert,  Sarmiento, Dorothy, – Savage, Roger,  Sayers, Dorothy L., –,  Schott & Co, Ltd., –, – Schuttenhelm, Thomas, , , , , , , –,  Scott, Christopher,  Scratton, Bride, – Seabrook, Ransom Elliott,  Seabrook, Winifred Elliott,  Searcher, The (Pilcher), , 

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Index Seawick, Essex,  Secret of the Golden Flower (Baynes),  Selected Letters of Michael Tippett (Schuttenhelm), , , , , , –,  self-analysis of FA, – Settle, Mary Lee, –, ,  sexuality of FA, , , , , ,  Sharp, Cecil, –, –, ,  Shaw, George Bernard, , –,  Shaw, Veronica see Allinson, Veronica (wife of Cyril) Sheppard, Dick, –, ,  Siegel, Harro, ,  Simmonds, William,  Simpson, Frederick Arthur, –, –,  Sitwell, Edith, – Slade School of Fine Art, London, , –,  Slaughter, Barbara,  Sleeping Clergyman, A (Bridie),  Smith, Stevie,  social change, FA and, – Social History of English Music, A (Mackerness),  social justice, , –,  socialist music, – Soden, Oliver, , , , –,  Some Later Primitives and Madame Tisceron (Currie),  Song of Liberty, A (Blake/Tippett), –,  Sonnets to Orpheus (Rilke), – South London Orchestra, ,  Spain, musical customs in, article by FA,  Spanish Place, London, home of Allinson family, , , –,  St Osith [Osyth] (Anglo-Saxon saint), – St Osyth, Essex, –, –, , –, – see also Martin’s Grove, Essex; Tan Cottage (Old Cottage), Dalte’s Lane, St Osyth, Essex Stage Society,  Stanhope, Winifred, –,  Stanislavski, Konstantin,  Steenson, Martin,  Steer, Philip Wilson, ,  Stephen, Adrian, , , , , ,  Stevens, Anthony,  Still Falls the Rain (Sitwell), –

stories planned by FA, –, –, –, ,  Stour, river, , , ,  Strachey, Pernel,  Strecker, Hugo, – Streetly End, Cambs.,  see also Mill House, Streetly End, Cambs. suicide of FA, , –, , ,  Sweet, Fay, – Tan Cottage (Old Cottage), Dalte’s Lane, St Osyth, Essex, , , –, –,  Tanner, Barbara (Barbara Franks),  Taylor, Dulcie,  Taylor, Tommy,  Testament of Youth (Brittain), ,  Theosophism, – Thompson, Oscar,  Those Twentieth Century Blues (Tippett), –, , , , –, ,  Three Guineas (Woolf ), , ,  Threepenny Opera, The (Weill and Brecht),  Tippett, Sir Michael appearance, ,  ballad and folk song, preoccupation with,  books read by, –, – childhood of, – Germany and, , – interviews with, – Morley College, at,  pacifism of, , , ,  psychoanalysis of, ,  therapy of,  Relationships of Auden, W. H., asked to write music by,  Ayerst, David, political interests of,  Bush, Alan, accused of naivety,  FA affair with conscientious objector,  biography of,  Boosbeck camp, involvement with, – dream of, – folk song project, –, ,  Germany, trip with, –,  holiday at St Osyth, Essex, –,  illness of,  Kingsmead, East Grinstead, Sussex,  loan of book to, 

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Index Tippett, Sir Michael (continued) model for Uncle Robert in A Childhood, – Moses Farm, Piltdown, Sussex, visit to,  music dedicated to, –, – obituary,  relationship with, –, , , –, – suicide of, , –, –,  talks of to Anthony Clare, – will of, –, , – work with, –, – Franks, Wilf, , , ,  Layard, John, ,  Mark, Jeffrey, work with, – Marx and Lambert not fans of,  Newton, Douglas [Den], –, –, –,  Wogan, Judith [ Jude/Judy], – Works of Child of Our Time, A, –, –,  Concerto for Double String Orchestra, , ,  Heart’s Assurance, The, , –, –, –,  Midsummer Marriage, The, ,  Miners,  Piano Sonata No. I, –,  Robert of Sicily, , ,  Robin Hood,  Song of Liberty, A, –,  Those Twentieth Century Blues, –, , , , –, ,  War Ramp, ,  To The Lighthouse (Woolf ), ,  Toc H,  Tomrley, Cycill Geraldine, , ,  Trautmann, Joanne,  Travelling Players (Elder), –, , ,  Turgenev, Ivan,  Turner, W. J.,  Two Stories (Woolf and Woolf ), –,  Understanding Art (Berry et al.), – University College, London,  Vanity Fair (British magazine),  Varieties of Religious Experience ( James), 

Vaughan Williams, Ralph, , , , –, – Vecchi, Orazio, –, –,  vegetarianism, , –, ,  Vertical Margins (Ellis),  Veselý, Jindrich, – Vickers, Justin, , ,  Village Labourer -, The (Hammond and Hammond),  Walberswick, Suffolk, ,  Walker, Ernest, , –,  Wallace Collection, London,  Wallace, William,  Walls, Sharon,  Waln, Nora,  Wandering Players, The, – War Ramp (Tippett), ,  Ward, Mary, – Warlock, Peter,  Water Springing from the Ground (Gardiner),  Waterer, John W.,  Watkin, Edward Ingram,  Waves, The (Woolf ), , –, – Weathersbee, Christopher, –,  Weaver, Cynthia,  Webb, Virginia-Lee, –,  Wedgwood, Veronica [C. V.], , , , – Wembley Drive, Wembley, London,  West, Margaret,  Weston, Christine,  White, Michael, – White, Victor,  Whittall, Arnold, – Whyman, Mark,  Whyte, Anna D.,  Wigmore Hall, London, , – Wilby, Harriet, – will of FA Allinson, Veronica (wife of Cyril),  Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, England,  Lambert, Margaret [Lamb],  legacies,  Marx, Enid [Marco],  people omitted, – Tippett, Sir Michael, –, , – Wogan, Judith [ Jude/Judy], , ,  Willett, Cathleen, – Willis, J.H., , 

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Index Wogan, Claire, , – Wogan, Judith [ Jude/Judy] acting career, –, –, –,  after death of FA, –,  Arts League of Service, and, –, , , ,  books owned by,  death of,  family background, – and Grafton Theatre, –, – house in St Osyth, Essex, , , –,  marriage of, ,  personality,  properties licensed by,  Understanding Art, – Years, The, (Woolf ) criticism of,  Relationships of Elder, Eleanor, –, –,  FA book dedication of,  Christianity, discussed with,  mistreatment by,  relationship with, –, , , , – separation from, ,  suicide note from,  will of, , ,  Mackay, John, godmother to, ,  Tippett, Sir Michael and, , , , ,  Weathersbee, Christopher, memories of Judy,  Wogan, Ken,  Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, – Wogan-Browne, John, – Wogan Browne, John Hubert (brother of Judy Wogan), –,  Woman’s Place -, A (Adam), –, – women education of, –, – FA, hatred and fear of,  freedom of after WWI, – liberation of,  relationships with younger men, – service in WWII, 

value of in A Childhood,  Women at Oxford, The (Brittain),  woodcuts in A Childhood, , , , , , , ,  Woodhouse, Frederick,  Woolf, Leonard Childhood, A, publication of, –, –, , ,  FA folk song project,  FA letter to on Virginia Woolf ’s death,  gift of a cat to Marx and Lambert,  Woolf, Virginia Allinson, Alfred (Adrian) on,  Childhood, A, publication of, – elegy by Sidney Keyes, – FA and Tippett, shared passion for,  FA, influence on, , ,  n Family Reunion, The (Eliot), dislike of,  female students’ lack of respect for, – suicide of, ,  Ward, Mary, opinion of, – Works of Collected Essays, ,  Common Reader, The, ,  Mrs Dalloway, ,  On Being Ill,  Poetry, Fiction and the Future, – Roger Fry, – Room of One’s Own, A, , , –, , ,  Three Guineas, , ,  Waves, The, , –, – Years, The,  Woolmer, J. Howard, ,  World War II in FA diaries, ,  in FA letters, –, , , – see also pacifism during World War II Wyatt, Thomas, – Yates, Michael,  Years, The (Woolf ),  Zodiac Volume of Nursery Rhymes (Enid Marx), ,  Zweig, Stefan, , –

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