The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  No subject lay closer to the Baroness’s heart than the protection of animals and the prevention of cruelty. It need scarcely be said that she was a very active member of the SPCA; and in these columns she often uttered some indignant protest against the ill-treatment of dogs, the trapping of singing birds, and the like. Those who remember the extraordinary story of “Greyfriars Bobby” — the little dog which followed his master to the grave in Edinburgh, and who constantly revisited that spot from the year 1858 to the time of his own death in 1872 — may like to be reminded that the Baroness erected a monument and drinking-fountain in the dog’s honour at the corner of George IV Bridge. She made effective protests against the cruelties of the over-sea cattle trade; and improved cattle trucks were planned and carried out at her expense for the home railway traffic. Probably nothing contributed more to her popularity with the working classes in London than her efforts, not only on behalf of the costermongers, but on behalf of their donkeys. She built large stables for them on the Columbia estate, and the costers’ donkey shows, in which prizes were given for the best-kept animals, were, and we believe still are, a great feature in the life of East London. The Baroness was also one of the founders of the Whit Monday Cart-horse Parade, now one of the most popular and useful of annual institutions; and one of the most memorable days in her life was that on which, in May, 1882, she attended a parade at Newcastle and distributed the prizes not only to the owners of cart-horses, but to the colliers who brought their pit-ponies, harnessed to the little trollies with which they work underground. A local paper at the time said that “a hundred-thousand people came into town to see the Baroness,” and their enthusiasm was extraordinary.

  Special mention should be made of the Baroness’s efforts in practical beneficence made in the cause of Ireland. Neither she nor her friends imagined that she was going to solve the Irish question by helping a single fishery centre; but here as elsewhere she believed that she might not only be of direct service to a number of individuals, but that she might lead other private benefactors and public authorities in the right way. Long afterwards the Duchess of Teck, writing to the committee of the Chicago Exhibition on the subject of the Baroness’s philanthropic work, said with truth that, “great as have been the intrinsic benefits that the Baroness has conferred on others, the most signal of all has been the power of example — an incalculable quantity, which no record of events can measure.” The Duchess meant primarily the example of character, but we may extend the phrase to the definite example set by her good works. The success of her efforts in the then miserable district of Skibbereen and Baltimore in Co Cork, which began so long ago as 1862, to start a fishing industry and a lads’ training-school in fishery, was considerable enough to have encouraged many similar efforts round the coast of Ireland; and if the example has not been largely followed, it is not the Baroness’s fault. In the evil days of 1880, when a failure of the crops combined with the new agrarian agitation to make the Irish question more acute than ever, the Baroness proposed to the Government a scheme more splendidly munificent than any of her previous benefactions — nothing less than the advance of £250,000 for providing seed to impoverished peasantry. In a word, her desire to help the poor of Ireland was just as keen as her desire to help forward the material and moral interests of the poor of London. But in this matter, as in others, she carefully kept herself clear of any sort of political partisanship. She never took any step in favour of a Liberal or a Conservative Government as such; she never appeared on a political platform, even in her husband’s constituency of Westminster; and we believe it to be a fact that she carried the principle of non-intervention so far that some time before each Westminster election she left London, lest she should be supposed to influence the votes of the poor people whom she had benefited.

  The definite events in the life of Lady Burdett-Coutts which afford matter to the chronicler are not many; perhaps, indeed, only three emerge from the constant series of benefactions, unobtrusively performed, of which we have mentioned some of the chief. The first of these events took place in May, 1871, when Queen Victoria, in the Premiership of Mr Gladstone, offered Miss Burdett-Coutts a peerage, and she became Baroness Burdett-Coutts of Highgate and Brookfield, in the county of Middlesex. The second was the interesting and as yet unique ceremony in the Guildhall on July 18, 1872, when the freedom of the City was conferred upon the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, the only lady, as the City Chamberlain remarked, who had ever been admitted to that distinguished fellowship. It may be added that similar distinctions were conferred about this time upon Lady Burdett-Coutts by the Turners’ Company, by the Haberdashers’ Company, and by the city of Edinburgh. The last and most important of the three events took place in 1881, when, to the surprise of the whole world, it was announced that her ladyship, who was then nearly 67 years of age and who was thought to be as much vowed to celibacy as the Virgin Queen herself, was about to be married. Her choice fell upon Mr William Lehmann Ashmead-Bartlett, her private secretary and the administrator of her charities in Bulgaria, who was born in 1851. The marriage took place in February, the bridegroom took the name of Burdett-Coutts, and four years later the electors of Westminster elected him their representative in Parliament, a position which he still holds.

  At the time of her death Lady Burdett-Coutts had reached so great an age that to a certain extent she experienced the fate of all those who outlive their contemporaries. Such people necessarily find that the details of their work are forgotten and that a new age has brought new conditions and new ideals, superseding those with which they were familiar. But, none the less, history will always regard her as one of the striking figures of the Victorian age in England; as one of those who, having become possessed of great opportunities, did all that in her lay to make use of them for the benefit of her fellow-citizens. She was a queen in her own circle; and it is not fanciful to say that in her realm of beneficence she modelled herself so far as was possible on the great Queen of whom she was one of the most devoted subjects. That is to say, she felt herself born to high responsibilities, and she fulfilled them with complete self-abnegation, with conscientious thoughtfulness, and with the help of the best advice that she could command. The task of dealing with the immense problems of London poverty as a whole was beyond her power, as it is beyond the power of any private person or group of persons. But she did much, and she showed the way in which others might do more. Let it be remembered that in the days of her greatest activity there was no Elementary Education Act, and that Mr Torrens, Lord Cross, and other reformers had not begun to make even the first attempts to solve the housing problem. Local government was extremely imperfect; the sanitary laws more imperfect still, there was no Charity Organization Society, and Mr Charles Booth had not laid out the ground for future reformers by writing his great book on the London poor. That, in the face of so much general ignorance and disorganization one woman, furnished with nothing but wealth, a warm heart, and a clear head, should have accomplished so much is an astonishing fact; and, however the details of her achievements may be open to the criticism of a later age, nothing can deprive the Baroness Burdett-Coutts of her claim to lasting public gratitude.

  In Westminster Abbey yesterday the “Dead March” in Saul was played at the conclusion of the service, and the Archdeacon of Westminster in the course of his sermon alluded to Lady Burdett-Coutts in the following terms:—“Now and again the Divine nature immanent in humanity provides us with a sample pattern of a life lived for others. Such a life pre-eminently was that which, after 92 years in the body, passed out of the body this morning. The life of the Baroness Burdett-Coutts stands next to that of Queen Victoria herself in the Victorian era. It would not be possible here and now to enumerate her countless services to humanity, the Bishoprics she has endowed, the churches she has built, the charities she has helped to initiate. She is the only woman upon whom a peerage of the United Kingdom has been conferred in recognition of personal merit and public service. Her great philanthropic work in Ire
land will never be forgotten. She was the first to erect model dwellings for the artisan class. She inaugurated the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. She contributed more than any individual of her time to the furtherance of education. Unflinching devotion to duty, ceaseless recognition of responsibility for the public welfare, fidelity to the lofty demands of freedom, justice, and purity — these were the motive forces of her whole being and it would be difficult to imagine a life more deserving of the epitaph pronounced upon King David, majestic in its simplicity, exhaustive in its comprehensiveness:—“After she had, in her own generation, served the counsel of God, she fell asleep and was laid unto her fathers.”

  Baroness Burdett-Coutts, philanthropist, was born on April 21, 1814. She died on December 30, 1906, aged 92

  JOSEPHINE BUTLER

  * * *

  CAMPAIGNER FOR WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND HEALTH

  JANUARY 2, 1907

  We regret to announce the death of Mrs Josephine Butler, which occurred on Sunday night at Wooler, in Northumberland.

  A correspondent writes:— Josephine Grey was a Northumbrian, the daughter of John Grey, of Dilston, where she was born on Apri1 13, 1828. In 1851 she met George Butler, then a tutor at Durham University, whom his intimate Froude described as “the most variously gifted man in body and mind that I ever knew”; and the marriage took place at Dilston early in 1852. The first five years of her married life were spent at Oxford, where she proved a most capable and sympathetic helpmate to her husband, drawing maps for his lectures, or puzzling out old Chaucers in the Bodleian. It was here in Oxford that her indignation was first aroused against “certain accepted theories in society” — as “that a moral lapse in a woman was immensely worse than in a man,” and that the social evil was to be passed over in silence. “There echoed in my heart,” she says, “the terrible prophetic words of the painter-poet Blake:—

  ‘The harlot’s curse, from street to street,

  Shall weave old England’s winding-sheet.’ ”

  It was here too that the Butlers, who were absolutely at one on the moral question, took from Newgate into their service a young betrayed mother who had been sentenced for the murder of her infant; “the first of the world of unhappy women” who were thus welcomed. In 1857 came a double trial; her father’s heavy losses by a bank failure, and her own ill-health, which made removal from Oxford imperative. Her husband now accepted the vice-principalship of Cheltenham College. At Cheltenham her health greatly improved, but a still greater trial was in store — the death of her only daughter by falling over a banister. From 1866 till 1882 her husband was principal of Liverpool College; and in that great city she was, as she says, “possessed with an irresistible desire to go forth and find some pain keener than my own.” The result of her visits to the hospital and oakum-picking sheds of the Liverpool workhouse, and to the quays, drew down upon her “an avalanche of miserable but grateful womanhood.” Into the garrets of their house the Butlers “crowded as many as possible of the most friendless girls who were anxious to make a fresh start.” In time the pair of good Samaritans established a House of Rest for such cases — which long afterwards became a municipal institution — and also an industrial home for healthy and active but friendless girls.

  It was in 1869 that a group of medical men, who had been strenuously opposing the introduction into England of “the principle of regulation by the State of the social evil,”* became convinced that some far stronger force than scientific argument was needed to ensure success, and that women, “insulted by the Napoleonic system,” must find champions among their own sex. Appeals for Mrs Butler’s help poured in, and the call seemed clear to her mind; but at first she shrank back. A woman of extreme delicacy and refinement of mind, with a horror not only of contact with vice, but of publicity and agitation, she was only driven to action by passionate love of purity and justice, and boundless love of her unhappy sister-women. She entered the arena in the spirit of a martyr going to the lions. “The toils and conflicts of the years that followed,” she says, “were light in comparison with the anguish of that first plunge.” Her husband, foreseeing what it meant for her and for himself, loving peace and hating strife, his happiness (like hers) centring in domestic life, nevertheless recognized “the call of God to conflict.” Mr Butler — Canon Butler, as he became, of Winchester — took an active and by no means perfunctory part in the movement; and on one occasion, at the Church Congress of 1872 in Nottingham, when he began to read a paper on “The Duty of the Church of England in Moral Questions,” he was shouted down; but he was necessarily fettered by his work at Liverpool, and one of the many trials with which they paid for their devotion to public duty was the frequent separation of husband and wife. Together or apart, as Mrs Butler says, they had to endure “the cold looks of friends, the scorn of persons in office and high life, the silence of some from whom one hoped for encouragement, the calumnies of the Press, and occasionally the violence of hired mobs.” But, she adds, “the working classes were always with us”; and the forces of organized religion by degrees ranged themselves largely, and in many cases enthusiastically, on the same side.

  One of her earliest helpers in the movement was Mrs Butler’s cousin, the Rev Charles Birrell, a gifted Baptist minister at Liverpool — Mr Augustine Birrell’s father. Among the distinguished women who supported the movement were Florence Nightingale, Harriet Martineau, and Mary Carpenter. The agitation spread to the Continent; international congresses were held, and a central office for the propaganda was established in Switzerland. In France Mgr Dupanloup and M Yves Guyot were among those who welcomed the Butlers’ aid. In England a Royal Commission was appointed in 1871, but reported against the object of the agitation, though Mr Cowper-Temple and Mr Applegarth dissented from the view of their fellow Commissioners. The first debate and division on the subject in the House of Commons took place in 1873, when the attack on the Contagious Diseases Acts was repelled by 265 to 128 votes. Ten years more of persistent agitation led to a practical victory; the enforcement of the obnoxious laws was suspended in consequence of a vote of the House of Commons. In 1886 the House resolved, nemine contradicente, that the Acts ought to be repealed — an amendment, declaring that repeal should be accompanied with the provision of hospital accommodation for women voluntarily seeking admission, having been defeated by 245 to 131. The repeal actually came in April of the same year.

  Canon Butler died in 1890, and it is from Mrs Butler’s published “Recollections” of him that I have drawn the quotations in this article. Mrs Butler also wrote a life of Catharine of Siena; a biography of Oberlin; and a sketch of her sister, Mme Meuricoffre; besides such controversial books and pamphlets as “Government by Police” and “Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade.” She did not consider the crusade ended with the legislation of 1886; and in 1898, in a prefatory note to a pamphlet attacking the continuance in India of the system abolished in England, she wrote:— “I love my country. It is because of my great love for her… that I will not cease to denounce the crimes committed in her name so long as I have life and breath.” Mrs Butler’s father had been an active worker with Clarkson for the abolition of the slave trade; and she herself published in 1900 a book, “Native Races and the War,” controverting the pro-Boer views of many of her friends.

  Mrs Butler is described by one of her fellow-workers as “an almost ideal woman; a devoted wife, exquisitely human and feminine, with no touch in her of the ‘woman of the platform,’ though with a great gift of pleading speech; with a powerful mind, and a soul purged through fire.”

  Josephine Butler, social reformer, was born on April 13, 1828. She died on December 30, 1906, aged 78

  * Editor’s note: The “principle of regulation by the State of the social evil”, which The Times of 1906 was too fastidious to spell out, is a reference to the Contagious Diseases Acts, which controlled the spread of venereal disease by empowering magistrates to order humiliating genital examinations of prostitutes and to deta
in in hospital those found to be infected.

  FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

  * * *

  A “MINISTERING ANGEL” IN THE MILITARY HOSPITALS OF THE CRIMEA AND A DETERMINED REFORMER OF HOSPITAL NURSING AT HOME AND ABROAD

  AUGUST 15, 1910

  We deeply regret to state that Miss Florence Nightingale, OM, the organizer of the Crimean War Nursing Service, died at her residence, 10, South-street, Park-lane, on Saturday afternoon. She had been unwell about a week ago, but had recovered her usual cheerfulness on Friday. On Saturday morning, however, she became seriously ill and she gradually sank until death occurred about 2 o’clock. The cause of death was heart failure. Two members of her family were present at the time.

  Miss Nightingale, who had for some time been an invalid and had been under the constant care of Sir Thomas Barlow, was in her 91st year. She celebrated her 90th birthday on May 12 last, and one of the first acts of the present King since coming to the throne — King Edward had died on May 6 — was to send her a telegram of congratulation. The message was worded as follows:—