Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Jacquetta Hawkes was born in 1910, in Cambridge, the youngest of three children. Her mother, Jessie, had trained as a nurse; her father, Frederick Gowland Hopkins, was a biochemist who in 1929 was awarded a Nobel Prize for the discovery of vitamins, along with Christian Eijkman. It was a formal, self-disciplined, undemonstrative but mostly happy household. The family villa, commissioned by her father in easy walking distance of his laboratory, was distinctly grand (it was approached via a gravel drive that curved round a semi-circular lawn), and the family income sufficient that her mother could employ a cook, parlour maid and nanny. Jacquetta’s childhood was ‘steeped in sweetness and light with no awareness of harsher ways’. Her parents were liberal agnostics who believed in the education of women, and in women’s rights in general. When Jacquetta was four her nanny took her to see the smouldering beams of a house that had been set alight by suffragettes. Tiny as she was, she assumed, not unnaturally, that such women must be monsters. Why else would they commit such a horrifying crime? But when a suffragette march was held in Cambridge her mother – surely she would go to prison for this! – pinned a large rosette to her lapel and headed out to join it. The Gowland household is missing from the 1911 census, of which the suffragettes famously organised a boycott: ‘If women don’t count, neither shall they be counted.’

  Jacquetta the tomboy

  (Special Collections, University of Bradford.)

  Jacquetta was a tree-climbing tomboy who detested dolls – on one occasion she deliberately smashed a large blue-eyed china doll on her mother’s rockery – and preferred to play with her bow and arrow. It was a point of pride, too, that she never appeared to be a wimp in front of her brother, who was eight years her senior; aged about five or six, she would make herself endure mild pain, and set about conquering her fears of mice, bats, earwigs, spiders and the dark (the last she mastered by walking a little further down the garden every night). Later on, at the Perse School for Girls, she would periodically refuse to wear uniform or take part in organised games. She also founded a Trespasser’s Society: members were awarded points for daring to enter illegally ‘gardens, college properties, farms with ferocious farmers and estates with outstandingly fierce gamekeepers’.

  She knew she wanted to be an archaeologist from an ‘absurdly tender age’. In the garden, a large hydrangea stood proxy for a prehistoric cave, and she would draw bison and mammoth on the walls beside it. The family home had been built where a Roman road lay beneath an Anglo-Saxon cemetery, and at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology she saw an amber necklace that had been unearthed near one of its gateposts. She longed to find some similar artefact herself – perhaps something as extraordinary as the Grunty Fen armilla, which dated from 1000 BC and the golden curls of which had sprung up as though by magic through the covering peat – but having been denied permission to embark on her very own dig, resolved to slip out into the garden at night, in secret. ‘I took a torch and my garden trowel and laboured greatly in the middle of the lawn to remove about one square foot of turf in many fragments,’ she recalled. It would, she imagined, be easier the deeper she went. But, to her chagrin, she was wrong about this: ‘I drove the trowel downwards again; it came up with only a dessert-spoonful of dull earth. Every time a bicycle went by, usually with a bobbing and wobbling front light, I put out my torch and squatted over the hole. My right palm was beginning to blister, and I seemed to have been at work for hours. I stood up to survey my excavation by torchlight. The sides sloped inward, meeting at a point about eighteen inches below the surface. It was no good.’

  In 1929 Jacquetta began studying for an archaeological degree at Cambridge.* She was a diligent student – she had her father’s powers of concentration – but also, by her own account, an extremely innocent one. Her first two ‘proposals’ came from men who shared her interest in ornithology: ‘My “bird-watching” became something of a joke among my Newnham friends.’ This inexperience led her into ‘serious involvement long before I was ready for it’. During her second year, needing some practical knowledge of excavation, she was dispatched to Camulodunum, the Celtic site at present-day Colchester, where the work was being directed by a young man called Christopher Hawkes. At just twenty-seven he was the leading authority on Celtic Britain. He was also, in spite of his diminutive stature and horn-rimmed spectacles, in possession of a dashing and slightly intimidating reputation as an ‘ardent and successful charmer of women’.

  Jacquetta expected to be invisible to him. His girlfriends up in London – she had heard the gossip – sounded so sophisticated and glamorous. How could she compete, especially in her working clothes? But before the digging season was out he had declared his love for her. ‘Of their very nature archaeological digs produce a fine tilth for love affairs,’ she wrote years later. ‘And Camulodunum was no exception. I soon found that I could have a choice of suitors, but Christopher Hawkes could not fail to eclipse the rest.’ Did she love him? She thought she did (though it worried her that she found their physical relationship – so far unconsummated – unexciting). Her lover seemed so worldly, with his flat in London and his friends who moved, like his family, just on the edges of what was known as ‘society’. He was so . . . impressive. It isn’t clear at what point Hawkes proposed to Jacquetta, but in 1932, when she set off on a travel scholarship to join a dig on Mount Carmel in what was then Palestine she took a framed photograph of him with her, the better to try and work out whether she should marry him on her return.*

  By the spring of 1933 they were engaged, Jacquetta having accepted Christopher’s proposal during a visit to Grime’s Graves, a Neolithic flint mine in Norfolk. This should have been a happy time, but she began to have doubts almost immediately. First, there was the discovery that, in spite of his reputation, Christopher was a virgin (‘absurdly immature though I was, I remember a feeling of betrayal’). Then there was Christopher’s mother, who had taken against her, disliking her for her cleverness, her shyness and her lack of sophistication. The class-obsessed Mrs Hawkes was horrified to learn that Jacquetta had not ‘come out’. ‘She will be no use to you,’ she is supposed to have said to Christopher. ‘She doesn’t wear gloves.’ In a note she urged her son to tell Jacquetta to use make-up.

  Jacquetta and Dorothy Garrod on donkeys in Palestine

  (Special Collections, University of Bradford.)

  Finally, there was the wedding itself, over which Jacquetta seemed to have no control whatsoever. Christopher, a high Anglican, was determined they would marry in church, but she felt, having not even been baptised, that this would be wrong and for a time had tried to resist. In the end, though, she surrendered. ‘There was a day at Winchester College [his alma mater] when he marched me, weeping, round and round the cloisters until I surrendered and agreed to be wed in my father’s college chapel.’* After this her future mother-in-law, perhaps realising that Jacquetta’s parents weren’t at all up to organising a proper wedding, ‘assumed a masterful command’. Her satin gown would be made by Elspeth Fox-Pitt, who had designed the costumes for H. K. Aycliff’s controversial jazz-age production of the The Taming of the Shrew in 1928, and her bridesmaids’ dresses – all six of them – by Motley.* There would be champagne, and a great number of guests. Meanwhile, Jacquetta and Christopher made, rather more quietly, their own preparations for what would come after the ceremony. She was fitted with a ‘birth control device’ and had her hymen stretched. He turned gratefully to a booklet given to him by a kind but obviously rather beady female friend – a guide to what would be expected of him in bed. Through all of this, Jacquetta hung on to her self-respect by working on her first scholarly article.† But only just. Work had to be squeezed in between writing letters to people she barely knew, thanking them for their mostly unwelcome wedding presents. At home her unease must have been obvious; her mother asked several times if she really wanted to marry Christopher. Jacquetta, though, was reluctant to speak her mind. Christopher had made two previous proposals. The first was turned down;
the second was accepted, only for the girl in question to tell him soon afterwards that he must place a notice in The Times announcing that the engagement was off. Jacquetta was unwilling to inflict on him a third humiliation.

  ‘I recall a sense of bewildered incredulity as I went up the chapel on my father’s arm,’ Jacquetta wrote afterwards. ‘I saw through my veil that Christopher was wearing spats.’ The reception was crowded – A. E. Housman was supposed to have been among the guests, though if he was, she never saw him – and she ‘floated through it all, lost in unreality’. In the wedding photographs she looks doubtful, animated by duty rather than excitement. Thanks to her heels she stood a touch taller than her husband that day, a fact that would make his body language seem all the more poignant in years to come. It is quite painful to see. He looks at her, fond and obviously proud;* she looks slightly shifty, as if already contemplating her escape. After the wedding breakfast, they changed – in separate rooms – before leaving for their honeymoon in Majorca from Cambridge station. When Jacquetta leant out of the train window, and said to her husband’s best man, a Count Orloff, that she wished he were coming with them, it wasn’t the champagne speaking. She meant it.

  According to Jacquetta, the honeymoon was not a disaster. But neither was it a roaring success. Christopher’s request that the hotel replace their twin beds with a double – ‘the small hotel was shaken by the tramping and banging of the removal and installation’ – turned out to be a hostage to fortune, and they did not, it seems, make the most expressive use of its cool expanses. As she put it in her 1980 memoir-cum-novel, A Quest of Love: ‘While I came nowhere near to passion, it would not be just to say that I proved frigid or altogether indifferent. I wanted to please my husband and even gained some little pleasure in the attempt. Of course this was not enough, and had I truly loved and desired him, he might well have discovered himself as a better and more joyous lover. As it was we enjoyed the sun, the bathing and visiting antiquities – and were not unhappy.’ One day, needing to be alone, Jacquetta disappeared for several hours. It was an absence neither one of them referred to again following her return.

  The couple made their home in a flat near Paddington Station. Christopher was working at the British Museum and Jacquetta planned to continue her own work: she was writing a book about the archaeology of Jersey, which would be published in 1939, the same year that she was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries by some extremely distinguished peers. She was expected to entertain – and be entertained – but it wasn’t difficult to find time in which to write; her new husband was a workaholic. When he wasn’t at the museum he was closeted in his study. Often he would work through the night. In 1934 he had a breakdown – the result, his doctor said, of overwork rather than ‘any inherent nervous disability’ – and a month of enforced rest followed. For Jacquetta, this must have been alarming. She had only just married him, and now he was crumpling in front of her very eyes.

  The wedding: Trinity College, Cambridge

  (Special Collections, University of Bradford.)

  In 1937 Jacquetta gave birth to a son, Nicolas, and soon after the family moved to Fitzroy Road in Primrose Hill. Relations with her mother-in-law were no better – things were so bad, in fact, that Christopher wrote an angry letter to the other Mrs Hawkes, warning her that if she failed to moderate her language she would cause ‘serious and irreparable harm’ and might never come to know her grandson – but the move north marked the start of a new chapter. It was in this house that Jacquetta’s social life would begin to spark, and it was here, too, that she would write A Land. Though her marriage was moribund – every year it became ‘more lifeless and stultifying’; she and Christopher were, she thought, now growing ‘positively unhappy’ – her confidence was growing. In 1939, for instance, she travelled alone to County Waterford, Ireland, for the excavation of a Megalithic tomb of which she was in sole charge (Nicolas was left with his Irish nanny, Kathleen O’Toole). It was a tough summer. The hotel was awful and crammed with priests, who disapproved of the study of pre-history almost as much as they disapproved of a married woman being so far from home. She was, she told her friend Diana Collins, rather lonely. But was she tempted to give it all up? No. As it had been during her engagement, work was a distraction and a balm.

  She and Christopher were quite clear about the fact that war was coming – he had been involved in the operation to move items from the collections of the British Museum to the safety of Aldwych station – and in September, just a few days after her return to London, it was duly declared. On Primrose Hill trees were felled and a gun emplacement erected. In 1940, driven by the threat of a German invasion, Jacquetta and Nicolas left London for the relative safety of rural Dorset, where they stayed with family friends, the Pinneys, at their manor house. The thought was that Nicolas would enjoy playing with the Pinney children, and that life away from the city would be a good deal less hairy. In fact, their new situation proved to be tumultuous: even Nicolas, then just three years old, sensed something was amiss. In Dorset Jacquetta, experiencing ‘a sudden undamming of feelings of an intensity I did not know I possessed’, fell violently in love with Betty Pinney.

  Jacquetta in Ireland

  (Special Collections, University of Bradford.)

  What did this relationship involve? It depends who you believe. According to Jacquetta, her emotions, though fierce, were pla-tonic, ‘romantic and ideal’ (she would later describe herself as an ‘adolescent longing to be able to rescue my lady from some dragon or other’); it was the lean and aristocratic-looking Betty – I’m told that she resembled Maudie Littlehampton, the cartoon character created by Osbert Lancaster – who wanted a physical relationship, and on the one occasion she tried to persuade Jacquetta to sleep with her, Jacquetta at once ‘retreated’. Other reports have it the opposite way round. But whatever the truth of the matter, at some point in the summer of 1940 Jacquetta was in such a state over the relationship that she threw herself from a first-floor window. The ambulance that was called took many hours to arrive: thanks to the threat of invasion all the local signposts had been dismantled, the better to foil any German visitors. Lucky, then, that she was not badly hurt.*

  The strange thing was that even in the throes of this passion Jacquetta felt ‘a curious apartness, being always conscious of the absurdity of my condition’, and it was, she believed, this sense of her own ridiculousness that eventually sent her back to London and to Christopher, with whom she would remain throughout the Blitz, the only time in her life she ‘had to experience and resist extreme physical fear’ (Christopher had been seconded to the Ministry of Aircraft Production; Nicolas and his nanny were sent to his maternal grandparents in Cambridge). Primrose Hill was bombed regularly, the planes aiming at the gun emplacement at one side, and the railway line out of Euston Station at the other. It also fell victim to some of the earliest doodlebugs; one landed close to the Hawkes’s home, breaking windows in many of the houses in their street. But while all this was frightening, such adrenalin-fuelled privations also had a useful side-effect: although she and Betty continued to write to each other for many years, the Blitz put paid to any true backward glances.

  In the city again, Jacquetta became a civil servant, first in the Ministry for Post-War Reconstruction and later in the Ministry of Education, where she was editor-in-chief of the film unit. She also embarked on a couple of ‘experiments’ – her word for minor affairs (‘I remember that I first became an adulteress to the sound of Mozart’). Then, in 1942, her college friend Peggy Lamert, who was working at the publisher Chatto, introduced her to Walter J. Turner, an Australian poet and one-time friend of Ottoline Morrell (their friendship ended after he caricatured her in his 1927 book, The Aesthetes). Turner, two decades her senior, was a notorious (and married) womaniser, hugely intelligent, passionate, unconventional and uninterested in any of the usual proprieties – and Jacquetta swiftly became ‘wholly infatuated’ with him. It was a devotion that came on like sudden illnes
s. Meeting him unexpectedly at an exhibition one day, she promptly fainted.

  Their affair lasted for four desperately exciting years. But in 1946 Turner died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. He was just fifty-seven. Jacquetta was distraught – unable, once again, to hide her emotions behind her usually gelid exterior. Both her son and her husband found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to console her for her loss. ‘Poor mummy,’ said Nicolas, touching her arm.* Christopher, who had recently been appointed Professor of European Archaeology at Oxford, even wrote her a letter of condolence (he knew about the affair, clearly). ‘My darling,’ it reads. ‘I do feel your grief for Walter’s death inexpressibly much and do assure you of my very deepest sympathy. It is a dreadful shock and sorrow and loss to you which I know is irreparable. Loneliness I feel sure is what you feel worst, and a sense of being cut off from vitality and happiness.’