Alfred, however, did not die at the Somme in High Wood exactly as Beth said her soldier did: he died nearby, at Vimy Ridge, two days later. The 4th Camerons were so heavily depleted by 1915 that the regiment ceased to exist, and Alfred was reassigned to the London Scottish – a regiment made up of men who had enlisted in London, but who had specifically requested to be assigned to a Scottish unit. He went out to France on 6th July 1916, but only lasted 16 days. He was killed on 22nd July 1916 at Vimy Ridge near Arras. He is commemorated at the Maroeuil British Cemetery in France.
Was Beth’s officer Alfred? I have considered other possibilities, including the tall and dashing Gordon Barber, a young officer of the 1st Cameron Highlanders.25 In favour of this theory are the date of his death, the place of his burial (Becourt Cemetery, which Beth was known to have visited) and his connections with Inverness. Beth was petite; a tall man like Gordon would have stood out as he led his men on parade, and the difference in their heights may well have been an attraction. His interest in history; his well-educated background; his interest in writing; his interest in horses – all these things would have appealed to Beth as they chimed with her own interests. This young, English officer would have epitomized her ideas about the quality of education and the possibilities open to young people in England as opposed to Inverness. Finally, his name, ‘Gordon’ stands out: why did Beth choose the pen-name ‘Gordon Daviot’ to publish her first writings under? Was it a homage to her first love?
Gordon Barber’s posthumously published diary tells the story of this period of the First World War in a way that gives a sense of immediacy not found in later history books. This was the war as Beth and her contemporaries experienced it. Gordon’s diary paints a vivid picture of a popular, boyish young man, who wanted to join an army of glorious, patriotic professionals, wearing colourful uniforms, trained to fight at close quarters as well as shoot, led from the front by officers on horseback; the sort of romantic, active young man who would have appealed to a teenage Beth.
Gordon was wounded at Ypres, and, after a short period back in England recovering, the Boys’ Own capers and constant descriptions of food in his diary are replaced by an entirely different tone. The trenches have become semi-permanent, conditions are worsening, with the countryside all cut-up round about, earthworks and barbed wire everywhere. He remarks that each day is becoming like the last; that there seems to be no change or advancement. The ground in front of his position in the trenches is littered with dead bodies. There is no truce at Christmas in 1915, as there had been the year before. Gordon laments this, as a truce would have been an occasion to gather up and bury decently the bodies of the dead. New weapons have been invented: trench mortars, rifle grenades and bombs, and he gets an idea of what gas attacks can be like. ‘War is now a much more undesirable profession than it used to be’, he writes.
Gordon was a popular officer, and he felt an enormous responsibility to the men he commanded. He knew their personal lives intimately as he was responsible for censoring their letters home, and knew exactly who would not be getting a letter after they were dead, who would be mourning a son, a brother, or a husband. He describes burying his men by moonlight as shells light up the night sky. One of the final entries in his diary states that at least going ‘over the top’ of the trenches would be a change from the daily monotony.
Gordon’s published diary ends a little while before the Somme. An introduction explains that he had not had time, before his death, to send home the latest portion, but quotes from a letter he had left to be opened in the event of his death:
Whatever be my fate, I have no fear; for the God who has watched over me from infancy will care for me still [...] if I fall it is God’s will, and is best for me. Don’t think of me as dead, but rather as living the great and glorious life of that happy band of warriors who have fought the good fight and fallen in the Faith. After all, death is only the key to life everlasting. So think of me rather as supremely happy in the arms whose protection is sure and whose care is infinite. I die happy – glorying indeed in the manner of my death.
One hopes that the letter gave some comfort to his grieving parents, John and Jane. His mother, Jane Muir Barber, donated a copy of Gordon’s published diary to a Scottish collection, inscribing in it by hand ‘with much gratitude from Gordon’s mother’. It’s hard not to feel, though, with hindsight, that the sentiments of Gordon’s final letter match more closely with the first half of the diary than with the impressions of the second half. Gordon had written this letter some time in advance of his death. Did he still hold the same sentiments when he died in the chaos of the Somme, crossing the no-man’s-land strewn with bodies?
Beth had been brought up in a religious family, but, in common with many of her generation, although her later writing shows her continuing interest in religion, she was not known as a regular churchgoer – her absence from church was remarked on in Inverness. Her generation was brought to question their fundamental beliefs by the events of the First World War. Many of them started in 1914 believing like Gordon, but the survivors, such as women who were never able to marry or men who were permanently disabled, began to question everything they had been brought up with. The post-war years were also the Roaring Twenties, when people partied desperately, trying to ignore the Depression and live for the moment, since they had seen what happened when men followed orders blindly for what they thought was the greater good.
Against the theory that Gordon Barber was Beth’s officer is the fact that Beth’s name is never mentioned in his diary. Gordon spent very little time in Inverness and so had little opportunity to meet Beth there, though there is the chance that they could have met in England, when Beth was working as a VAD. Either way, the window of time when Beth and her officer could have met is very small indeed: Beth’s first experience of love was a high-pressure wartime romance.
I have considered other possibilities when trying to identify Beth’s soldier by name, such as other Cameron Highlanders buried at Becourt, an Australian soldier met by chance on the train to Anstey (Travenna in Kif is Australian), or even one of Beth’s cousins. In each case there is no definite link. Gordon and Alfred are the most likely candidates, but it could equally be someone I have not yet come across. Young officers like Gordon and Alfred were a breed that was virtually wiped out by the war. Graduates of public schools, feeling a deep devotion to those schools, their family and their country, their average life expectancy on the Western Front was six weeks. They led their men from the front, and were usually first over the top of the trenches and running out into no-man’s-land, to be shot down almost instantly. The death toll for the British Army on the first day at the Somme alone was 60,000 men. Beth’s home town of Inverness at that time had a population of around 20,000. When the battle of the Somme was over, with a total Allied loss of anything between 400,000 and 500,000 men, and a similar number from the German side, it wasn’t entirely clear which side had won. Whoever Beth’s officer was, for Beth it was very meaningful, and the conditions in which it took place, and the way in which it ended affected her deeply. It was her first experience of love, and one which was not allowed to develop due to the artificial, heightened wartime atmosphere.
The death of Beth’s officer came to symbolize for her the death of one possible route her life could have taken: instead of being allowed to develop a relationship and marry, like so many of her generation Beth’s life took a completely different track because of the devastation of the First World War. In later life, Beth was to make more than one journey to see both the spot where her officer fell and the cemetery where he was commemorated. In her writing, she refers to the Somme in passing more than once, even in unlikely contexts, such as in her biography of seventeenth-century figure Claverhouse. Her second major play, The Laughing Woman, set partly in France and featuring a character whose potential is wasted and whose friend’s life is devastated after he is killed in the war, is dedicated ‘FOR—— /BECAUSE OF THE HYACINTHS AT BECOURT’. Whose
name could fill in the blank space? Gordon Barber? Alfred Trevanion Powell? (Or, alternatively, Beth’s sister’s name, since it was Etta and Jean who made the journey to France with Beth to visit the battlefields). Did Beth pay homage to her first love in her first choice of pseudonym when she chose to call herself ‘Gordon Daviot’ – the ‘Daviot’ part referring to a place near Inverness where she had enjoyed happy pre-war family holidays as a child, and ‘Gordon’ after a young soldier? Her first pseudonym as an evocation of her lost childhood and lost young womanhood, a summation of the different paths that led her to her writing.
Chapter Five
Anstey’s second year, and teaching
After the summer of 1916 which saw the devastation of the Somme, Beth returned to Anstey College for her second year.1 The long train journey south was becoming familiar – throughout her entire body of writing are detailed descriptions of the journey south from Inverness, from the winter trip described in her early short story, ‘Madame Ville d’Aubiers’, to the night train in The Singing Sands. However, the familiar journey was also different each time: the trains were still full of soldiers, but now Beth saw them less romantically, as men who would face death. Beth was moving through a changing landscape in many ways: after the Battle of the Somme, if not before, people could no longer kid themselves that this was a glorious war that would be over quickly. The scale of loss of life was immense, almost unimaginable, and the men who were dying now were not only young, but also conscripts: people who had not chosen to volunteer to fight. The air raids over Birmingham had brought war home in another fashion. However, Beth was starting now to think about staying in England, not returning home to the Highlands for every holiday but instead planning a new future for herself, embracing the change. In the final year at Anstey, preparation for work was important. The curriculum at Anstey was mentally and physically demanding, and by absorbing herself in her studies Beth could put feelings of loss after her officer’s death to the back of her mind.
Rhoda Anstey, who was still principal of the college she had set up, was an enthusiast, passionately interested in a wide variety of subjects and dedicated to teaching her students. She had done her initial training at the college of a Madame Bergman Österberg in London, the premier, original and most respected of the new breed of women’s physical training institutes.2 Before Madame Österberg started to teach in Britain, the main sort of physical training taught in schools was military drill. Madame Österberg, a Scandinavian, had been unimpressed, and set up her college to establish the Swedish system of gymnastics, in which students practised a carefully-worked-out system of movements, designed to improve and encourage natural movement and posture. It has elements in it of physiotherapy or the Alexander Technique, where practitioners try to understand the body and work with it, rather than forcing it into unnatural positions. There were no similar institutions for men at the time Madame Österberg began her work, and the net result was that women’s physical training became far superior. The students who trained under this system saw it almost as a vocation; it was their duty to spread the word and improve women’s health. Rhoda Anstey was a total convert to Madame Österberg’s cause, but also continued to cast around for other new ideas, enthusiastically sharing with her students her thoughts on subjects as varied as vegetarianism, vaccination, the benefits of sunbathing, clairvoyance, horoscopes, or her own brand of practical Christianity.
Rhoda was also an active campaigner for Women’s Suffrage. In 1910 she had taken Anstey students with her on Christabel Pankhurst’s march through London to demand the vote for women. She had also been taken to court for non-payment of taxes after being part of the campaign where women refused to pay the government money if they were denied the vote. The First World War had stopped suffragist activity, as women concentrated on the war effort, but Beth was in an institution where women’s talents and abilities were highly valued. Beth wrote later that she never considered herself a ‘feminist’, but she came from a background where women were equals whose work and opinions were valued, and she was educated in institutions where that was the norm.
Although the Anstey curriculum had become more formal and professional over the years, with training for Anstey students in Anatomy and Dissection taking place at Birmingham University, Rhoda’s strong personality still had a lot of influence. In pictures of the staff and students of Anstey, Rhoda stands out as a big, formidable-looking woman, with fair, rather untamed hair standing out around her face. Described as a ‘countrywoman’ by her colleagues, she was quite at home in Anstey’s rural surroundings. She was strong and capable, stood no nonsense and was quite single-minded when it came to doing the best for her students (or her patients, in the early years when Anstey had been more of a health retreat than a training ground), regardless of how this affected her long-suffering staff. Rhoda Anstey was clear about what needed done and who was to do it – and what she herself was willing and able to do. One of Rhoda’s particular talents was to hire as teachers women who were as competent as herself, who were passionate about their subjects and dedicated to aiming to the highest possible standards. Although Rhoda’s eccentricities could have made her a difficult person to work with, her ability to hire professionals, and the confidence she was then able to place in her staff, made Anstey an excellent college. It was, by the time Beth attended, well established, and in the process of expansion: a new gallery and cloakroom were added onto the existing gymnasium in 1915.
At Anstey, Beth was exposed to women of different cultures far more than in Inverness: in addition to having pupils from all over the UK, Swedish teachers were also employed. There are Swedish characters in Beth’s later writing, including a gym teacher in Miss Pym Disposes, and the main female character in The Laughing Woman. ‘Ingrid’, the Swede in The Laughing Woman, is based on the real-life Sophie Brzeska, who was Polish. With large quantities of dialogue given to Ingrid, Beth made the decision to change her nationality to one she was familiar with, and whose speech patterns she could more easily replicate. As well as exposure to different students and staff at Anstey, Beth met people in Birmingham, as Anstey students were encouraged to take gymnastic classes in the local community (another thing described in Miss Pym Disposes). Beth herself taught keep-fit classes at the local Cadbury factory, travelling around Birmingham by tram, and returning on foot in the dark to college to save money.3 In addition, students continued to do similar work to VADs, using their nursing and physiotherapy skills to help out in local hospitals or medical practices. Local people, at first resistant to this strange community in their midst, had, by Beth’s time at the college, accepted them, and were regular attendees at the annual Demonstration of students’ skills at the end of the year. This Demonstration forms a key part of the plot of Miss Pym Disposes. Beth’s later writing is also foreshadowed in Anstey students’ extracurricular interest in drama.
Anstey women went on to many and varied career paths, including setting up private practices, physiotherapy, teaching, housewifery in extremely varied settings from English farms to overseas, war work and government work. The mixture of body and mind that was an integral part of Anstey’s training meant that Beth was being exposed to myriad new ideas and influences, being shown through example that women could have fulfilling careers in many different areas. With so many men away fighting in the war, women around her were doing jobs that had previously been men’s work.
As well as this mental stimulation Beth was physically tired from the work she was doing as an Anstey student. A typical day started with that early rising bell Miss Pym was so horrified by, with early lectures sometimes before breakfast. An assembly or prayers was held at the start of the day, marking a more traditional, Christian sensibility than would be found in a similar establishment today. Beth’s later religious plays are less accessible to the modern reader than her historical or modern works, but to her contemporaries they would have been a natural expression of interest in a subject that was far more pervasive than religion is in our live
s today. More lectures were then followed by ‘remedials’ or practice (that is, exercises), then lunch. Afternoons were devoted to team sports like hockey, netball or cricket, and there was even more activity in the evening, with dancing before dinner. Remedials were given higher priority than team sports, as the small number of students at Anstey meant there was not always the right numbers for teams. The emphasis in the team games was on how the Anstey girls would teach games like hockey or cricket to their future students. Netball had actually been invented by Madame Österberg (from the American sport of basketball) and remained very popular within physical training colleges. Occasionally, Anstey students were able to play away games against school, university or local teams – cricket matches against the workers from the local Cadbury / Bournville factory (where Beth took keep-fit classes) were particularly popular as chocolate was served at half-time. The model village built for Bournville workers had an Anstey Old Girl as its resident PT teacher.
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