Square Haunting

by Francesca Wade

  Power, who was always sensitive to the emotional effects of her environment, was determined that her London home should allow her work to prosper. When she had stayed with a great-aunt back in Altrincham in 1910, she had written disparagingly to Margery about the ‘cabbage wallpapers and horsehair sofas’, which expressed ‘concentrated essence of mid-Victorianism, after the Victorians had ceased to be interesting’. The old-fashioned furniture had been compounded by a claustrophobic expectation that Power would be ‘girlish and sweet’, and ‘a deferential jeune fille’. ‘If I lived here for more than a fortnight I should die,’ she had insisted. Number 20 Mecklenburgh Square was arranged on very different lines. Power shared its two floors casually with friends – Marion Beard stayed until 1937, while Power’s sister Rhoda joined the pair in 1929. Power set up a desk by the window, where neighbours often saw her working late at night, and decorated her quarters lavishly with the ornaments she’d bought in China and knick-knacks found in Parisian ‘curiosity shops’.

  Invitation to a kitchen dance

  Her bookshelves reflected her eclectic tastes – J. H. Clapham recalled that she had ‘scores of books of poetry to one Principles of Economics’ – and each room was decked with fresh flowers and throws in Jacobean patterns. ‘I never realised before how one’s material surroundings could affect one’s spirits,’ she wrote, ‘and what a difference to one’s state of mind could be made by a merrily served meal.’

  Merrily served, for Power was reluctant to curtail her new-found freedom by taking on the burden of domestic chores. When she took 20 Mecklenburgh Square in January 1922, she ‘snatched back’ Jessie, the ‘admired and much-loved’ woman who had kept house for Eileen and Karin Costelloe when they shared a flat in Victoria while Power was a student at the LSE. Jessie, wrote Power, ‘looked after me like a mother’; she was devastated when Jessie died, after a short illness, in August 1923. ‘We had been friends for 15 years,’ she told Coulton. ‘I cannot imagine what I shall do without her. She was the old type of family servant & a real friend.’ At this point Power hired Mrs Saville, by all accounts an extremely devoted housekeeper, who remained with her at Mecklenburgh Square for the rest of Power’s life. Mrs Saville catered Power’s dinner parties, which were renowned for exquisite food and choice wines. (Power herself once refused to host a friend on the grounds that ‘I’ve lent my housekeeper to my next-door neighbour for a dinner party that night & if I cooked I should poison you’.) It’s poignant that these women became mother-figures to Power, who had lost her own mother at such a formative age; it’s also interesting that, despite the evident imbalance of power, she considered them genuine friends, an integral part of the supportive community of women she gathered around her in her home. Power was conscious that their work enabled hers, and was certainly grateful for it, though it’s tempting to wonder whether she felt uncomfortable, as a socialist, that her intellectual freedom depended on the labour of other women. Lilian Knowles, Power’s predecessor at the LSE and the first woman in Britain to work as a full-time teacher of economic history, once told a student that ‘any woman can have a career if she has A, a good husband, and B, a good housekeeper’; as trailblazers in an academic world heavily dominated by men, both these women knew that they needed a reliable support system if they were to exceed expectations of what women could do.

  At the LSE, Power found one particular colleague – and a neighbour in Mecklenburgh Square – whose commitment to historical research as a form of activism helped her recognise the political potential of her own work. Richard Henry Tawney (known as Harry) – whom Beatrice Webb called ‘a scholar, a saint and a social reformer’ and Virginia Woolf ‘an idealist with black teeth’ – disguised his radical socialism behind the veneer of a scruffy, absent-minded Victorian gentleman, sporting creased clothes with permanently ink-stained fingers and spectacles liable to tip over the back of his head. He had arrived at the LSE in 1913 as the first director of the Ratan Tata Foundation – a school of social studies established to endow research into the causes of poverty – following years spent at the Workers’ Educational Association, teaching tutorial classes across Britain to educate workers in the economic history of the eighteenth century. Tawney believed in the nationalisation of industry and free universal schooling, and wanted ‘to abolish all advantages and disabilities which have their source … in disparities of wealth, opportunity, social position and economic power’. His influential 1931 manifesto, Equality, his high-profile work as a trade union representative on the Coal Mining Commission, his advocacy for adult education and his involvement in the Labour Party made Tawney a household name in the interwar period, regularly courted by government commissions for his advice.

  For Tawney, economic history was ‘the study, not of a series of past events, but of the life of society’. (As if in proof that history was living, he used to absent-mindedly head his letters with dates from the seventeenth century.) At other universities, especially Oxford and Cambridge, history was studied as scholarship for its own sake, independent of practical applications. But at the LSE, where across the corridor sociologists and anthropologists pioneered comparative methods of study, where the Webbs compiled detailed histories of government alongside their work on policy, and where her colleagues in the history department were also delegates to international peace conferences, Power began to see how her historical research could be applied to the problems facing contemporary society. Suddenly, the medieval period revealed intriguing parallels to the economics of Soviet Russia, to rising capitalism in Asia, to nationalism in Europe. ‘The main business of the historian whose work lies in a school of social studies,’ she wrote in a lecture delivered at the LSE in 1933, ‘is to contribute his data and the assistance of his method to the general purpose of elucidating the present.’ Her feminism had already been awoken in the Cambridge women’s college, but at Mecklenburgh Square, Power’s internationalism began to flourish. At the LSE, her historical research took an overtly political turn, as her early interest in gender equality extended to a wider struggle for class freedom and world peace.

  Power began research on the medieval cloth industry, developing a history of international trade in tandem with Tawney’s work on the origins of capitalism. Their shared vision manifested in the joint courses they soon established, which explored the rise of modern industry from sixteenth-century agrarian law, through the Industrial Revolution, to the Factory Acts of the nineteenth century and on into the trade union movement and the evolution of Labour – and the future politics which members of the School staff were actively shaping. Power and Tawney co-edited a book, Tudor Economic Documents, its three volumes published between 1924 and 1927, and in 1926 they became founding members of the Economic History Society, an international alliance of scholars. Power’s work for this society – particularly her editorship of its journal, the Economic History Review – placed her at the forefront of her discipline, and led her into fruitful collaborations with economic historians across the world. And her strong friendship with Tawney outside of the LSE made Mecklenburgh Square the vibrant centre of an alternative Bloomsbury set, its activities focused not on abstract discussions of art or philosophy but on practical policies designed to change society for the better.

  When Power’s friend Karin Costelloe became engaged to Virginia Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen in 1914, Power wrote to Margery to complain that she considered ‘all those Bloomsberries as unsatisfactory folk w. whom to have permanent relationships’. She eventually came round to Adrian – and dined with his sister on at least two occasions – but Power was always determined to define herself in opposition to what she thought of as stereotypical ‘Bloomsbury’. Likewise, Tawney’s wife, Jeanette (the sister of William Beveridge), insisted that on moving to Mecklenburgh Square they had ‘hankered after the geographical Bloomsbury, not the mental attitude’; Tawney, more bluntly, called the Bloomsbury set ‘a mental disease’. These judgements were, at least in part, made for rhetorical effect – Leonard Woolf
collaborated with Tawney on a petition for miners’ rights after the General Strike of 1926, when Mecklenburgh Square became an unofficial distribution ground of the Labour strike paper The British Worker, while the Tawneys knew that the Hogarth Press had demonstrated a commitment to working-class and socialist writing. But Power was never interested in artistic bohemianism for its own sake; she was impatient with philosophical posturing or self-indulgent introspection of the sort the Bloomsbury Group’s famous Memoir Club went in for, and preferred her gatherings to centre on action, not aesthetics. The activities of her Bloomsbury group were focused on concrete solutions to social injustice; here, discussions ranged from nationalism to nationalisation, with occasional excursions into Freudian psychoanalysis, modern painting and the novels of D. H. Lawrence.

  Tawney rented four different houses in Mecklenburgh Square over the decades, but during the time Power knew him he was living at number 44, the former home of H. D. and Dorothy L. Sayers. In contrast to Power’s elegant decoration, Tawney’s tables were invisible beneath piles of books, tobacco residue and old cheese sandwiches, while he worked hunched over his desk or supine on his window seat, wrapped in his moth-eaten sergeant’s tunic from the First World War. To his chaotic study – once described by an Observer interviewer as ‘a compost-heap’ – came a regular trail of visitors, from LSE students to miners, Cabinet ministers to cotton workers, all hounded on entry by Jeanette’s band of lame dogs and Harry’s rival troupe of cats. This was a time when close relationships existed between political leaders, journalists, theorists and writers, when gatherings in kitchens and drawing rooms could hope to change society as effectively as debates in the House of Commons. Power and Tawney were determined to make Mecklenburgh Square a place where their students could join them for open discussions of urgent economic questions, putting their studies into action.

  Their gatherings were eagerly attended by one particular student, who had joined the LSE at the same time as Power. Michael Moissey Postan – known to his friends as Munia – had been born in Russia in 1899, and had studied at the universities of Odessa, Kiev and St Petersburg. A socialist activist, thoroughly grounded in Marx’s writings, but a staunch anti-communist, he had left the country after the revolution and travelled around Central Europe, like Mirsky and Remizov, in search of a sympathetic home. In the autumn of 1921, he had enrolled at the LSE as an undergraduate, becoming one of Power’s first pupils. He left to undertake postgraduate study in economic history at University College London, but Power, sympathetic to his background and alert to his potential, helped him procure the funding to return to the LSE as her personal research assistant in July 1924 (‘he really is quite outstanding … We really need Postan very badly for all our schemes,’ she wrote to the board). He began by checking her references in archives and books, then joined a project she was leading on wool merchants; thereafter she proposed him for a lectureship at the LSE and invited him to co-run her famous medieval economic history seminar. In Postan, Power found first a protégé whose talent she identified and nurtured, then a collaborator from whom she could learn as well as teach (‘you are continually having to give me advice & help in work for which I get the credit,’ she told him guiltily). Their relationship would, over the years, deepen and develop into something else; at this stage, he and Tawney were her closest friends at the LSE, firm allies on projects both historical and contemporary.

  Postan lived on Taviton Street, not far from Mecklenburgh Square; he was part of a young, international gang of historians, economists, anthropologists and artists who lived around Bloomsbury and frequented the 1917 Club and the Hambone (a cabaret in Soho’s Ham Yard famous for its whisky and saxophones), the Russian ballet and Soho’s Indian restaurants. Through Postan, Power met Hugh Dalton, Evan Durbin and Hugh Gaitskell (all University of London economists, tipped to be future stars of the Labour Party), who became regular fixtures at the various dining tables in Mecklenburgh Square, once Power had in turn introduced them to Tawney. Sharing a zeal for democratic socialism and a sympathy for the disenfranchised, they formed a group to discuss the historical and sociological implications of current economic problems and to debate the ideology and policy of a future Labour government. From these informal meetings, throughout the 1930s, the group developed a detailed economic programme setting out a blueprint for socialist policy that took in plans for industry, banking, employment and social justice. It was an exciting moment to be invited to Mecklenburgh Square – and an even more exciting time to live there. When Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby (Dorothy L. Sayers’s contemporaries at Somerville) left the top-floor flat they shared in Doughty Street, a horrified friend asked them, ‘Why are you leaving the neighbourhood of Tawney and Eileen Power for a place called Maida Vale?’

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  Power was not only concerned with an overhaul of domestic policy. Her trip to the Far East in 1920 had expanded her horizons at a time when Europe was in deep aporia about its own survival. The First World War – ‘the war to end all wars’ – had ended two years before Power set sail from Dover, but the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles had left national boundaries in disarray and pacifists distraught over the punitive measures meted out to Germany. Most on the left believed that the treaty would weaken Germany so disastrously that a second war – fuelled by newly developed destructive weapons – would be inevitable; hopes now rested on the prospect of a new, transparent system of world government, which could override the divisions entrenched by the sanctions, promote a common system of law and settle future disputes without recourse to arms.

  At Girton, Power had volunteered as treasurer of the Cambridge branch of the Union of Democratic Control, a pacifist organisation also supported by Jane Harrison. Along with her friend Margery – later a founding member of the National Birth Control Association and author of the pioneering social study Working-Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions – she also joined the League of Nations Society, established in 1915 following a report, commissioned by Sidney Webb for the Fabian Society and written by Leonard Woolf, which argued that the first step towards a peaceful future must be the creation of ‘an international authority to prevent war’, based on cooperation, moral pressure and shared values. Power organised informal meetings in Cambridge to discuss the society’s work, and made copious notes analysing the possible difficulties such a league might face in practice. She lectured on its platform about the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15 – a meeting of European ambassadors to negotiate a peace plan for Europe following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars – and the subsequent, flawed attempt at government by a European confederation. ‘The parallel with the present is simply amazing,’ she wrote. ‘It is exceedingly important as propaganda because it broke down for reasons which will wreck the League of Nations after the Congress at the end of this war, if its mistakes aren’t avoided.’

  The Peace Conference of 1919 resulted in the foundation of the League of Nations, the first international organisation with the declared aim of maintaining world peace. The previous October, the League of Nations Society had merged with the League of Free Nations Association, chaired by Jane Harrison’s friend Gilbert Murray, to form the League of Nations Union (LNU), a campaign group designed to promote public understanding of the work of the League. Over the interwar period, the LNU would be the most influential organ of the peace movement in Britain, with local branches up and down the country organising meetings, writing letters and hosting parties and study circles. Leaflets proclaiming the League ‘the greatest ideal that the world has seen since the founding of Christendom’ were distributed to homes all over Britain, positing it as the saviour of war-torn civilisation and the harbinger of a new modern age for democracy. ‘The hope of the world is the League of Nations,’ wrote H. G. Wells in 1917. ‘Let us insist upon that. Not only German imperialism, but English Toryism and every class and clique, every antiquated institution, every cant of loyalty and every organised prejudice, must be sacrificed and offered up to that great
idea of World Peace and a unified mankind.’

  Power was a friend of Wells, and a regular visitor at his Essex home, Easton Glebe. After the First World War, he turned his energies – previously invested in Fabian socialism – to the promotion of a ‘world vision’. Wells was fascinated by the idea of ‘salvation by history’: that the ways in which we understand the past could directly affect the way we conceive of the future. From his conviction that ‘there can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas’ sprang his book The Outline of History, which structured its narrative not around the rise of individual, competing nation states, but around humanity’s shared endeavours. Power admired the book immensely, both for its use of history as an intervention into politics and for its mass-market potential. She especially appreciated its emphasis on what people have in common across time and place, the subject which had occupied her since her Kahn Fellowship. While commentators fearful of a second war were darkly warning politicians to learn the lessons of history, Power knew that the content of such lessons – and their usefulness – would depend on the perspective of the historians writing. ‘The only way,’ she wrote, ‘to cure the evils which have arisen out of purely national history (and to a lesser extent out of purely class solidarity) is to promote a strong sense of the solidarity of mankind as such; and how can this be better begun than by the teaching of a common history, the heritage alike of all races and all classes?’