Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  After contacting Margaret McMillan, whom she had first met in 1911, Miles decided to help the McMillan sisters at their ‘baby camp’ at Deptford, near Greenwich on the Thames, one of the famous child-welfare projects of the day. There, at 232 Deptford Church Street, the McMillan sisters and their helpers ran a school-cum-clinic for kindergarteners and provided long-day care for the babies of women munitions workers. Miss McMillan advised that she needed someone to help with the toddlers in the mornings and that she could put Miles up, though not very comfortably. It had been years since Miles had had anything to do with babies, but as the eldest daughter in a family of seven, she had plenty of experience.6

  She began at Greenwich on 23 November. The ‘baby camp’ was partly outdoors, and Miles caught a cold more or less immediately; but she persisted with the camp until February 1916, when she caught German measles (for which vaccines were not then available). A young nurse, May Meggitt, and her sister, Phyllis, a trainee teacher, who were also working at the camp and became lifelong friends, took Miles home to Newport, Wales, to recover, which she found a pleasant experience. At Newport she was able to visit a dentist. She also attended a meeting of the local trades council, where as ex-secretary and treasurer of the NWTUL of America she addressed ‘a few words of hearty greeting’, courtesy of May and Phyllis’s mother, a suffragist and ardent trade unionist.7

  Another new friend was Annie Beatrice Champion, sister of H. H. Champion of the Book Lover, a British nanny resident in central London, whom Miles met through Aileen Goldstein. Aileen and her friend Geraldine Rede left for Melbourne on the SS Medina on Christmas Eve; but by then Miles had renewed contact with those redoubtable Englishwomen who had founded Shirley School near Rose Scott’s home in Sydney, the Misses Margaret Hodge and Harriet Newcomb. Hodge and Newcomb now lived at Temple Fortune Court, a model apartment building in Hampstead Garden Suburb near Golders Green tube station. They became important to Miles during her London years, especially Miss Hodge, an ardent feminist, socialist and devotee of Empire, who seemed to be in danger of losing her mind over the war.8

  On 13 December 1915 she had hired a typewriter. Soon she was writing full tilt, and as usual she kept the typescripts. A year later, by December 1916, she had written some eighteen features for the press (eight published), two short stories (neither published), two or three plays (likewise unpublished), and between April and December 1916, a longer narrative in diary form which is of some significance, as are the unpublished feature articles (to be referred to shortly), and one of the plays, ‘The English Jackeroo’. The longer narrative, ‘How the Londoner Takes his War By a Dissenting Diarist’ and addressed to ‘Dear E’, possibly Editha Phelps, consists of some forty-three sketches drawn from Miles’s daily experience during her first year in London (as may be checked against her diary), amounting to about 20,000 words. Retitled ‘Diary of a Dawdler’ and sent to Watt, the literary agent, in December 1916, it seems to have fallen into limbo; but a favourable reader’s report survives.9

  ‘How the Londoner Takes his War’ is exceptionally valuable as a guide to the direction of her thinking throughout 1916. It even casts light on Miles’s income. It was amazing, wrote ‘the Dawdler’, how much enjoyment could be had in London for a pound or 30 shillings a week. That was what she got for an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, maybe a bit more if longer than one column. With writing now her priority, Miles managed to spin out her American pay, plus at least £6 from her journalism by mid-year. Since its opening in June, she had been working on a voluntary basis a day or two a week at the Minerva, a vegetarian café established by Mrs Maud Fisher at 144 High Holborn, which gave its profits to the WFL; but in November she decided she could no longer afford this and would have to look for paid employment. In consequence, the Minerva took her on, presumably with pay and meals, for four days a week as cook/waitress.10

  Although Miles had not become a supporter of the war, the Home Front appealed strongly to her as a subject, and she was being drawn ever closer to the war effort. Something more profound than war fever was at work, nonetheless. As Miles/the narrator made her way around the imperial capital — to lectures and meetings, to churches, to concerts and the theatre, to observe or help with war work, to rallies and conferences, and to tribunals to hear the claims of conscientious objectors, noting as she did such events as the Easter Rising in Dublin, the death by drowning of Lord Kitchener and zeppelin raids overhead — she encountered the soldiers themselves. Many were Australians, on their way from Gallipoli to the Western Front, heroes of the hour.11

  It was not just a resurgent sense of Australian identity that moved her, though there was that, as she felt much nearer Australia than she had in America. She was proud of the Australian soldiers and their unabashed ways; and until it was lost in the Balkans, she always wore an Australian flag brooch. But more than that, it was the same deep-seated humanism that characterised so many responses to the wanton waste of the Great War: ‘It is impossible to live in any of the belligerent countries without feeling a deep affection for the soldiers . . . just gentle, ordinary people’, full of gaiety and bravado, Miles felt, despite being assembled for the slaughter, just like the cattle in the Chicago stockyards.12

  On reflection, Miles found the soldiers’ gaiety the hardest thing to bear. And she felt strongly the constraints of gender: ‘A woman can only look from the windows.’ More ebulliently, she hoed into the Tories, who said they were protecting women. Protection! An offending party was told to read the American Commission’s report on Serbia and he would see what wars did for women (a reference to the Austrian army’s slaughter of 9000 Serbian civilians earlier in the year). Far from protecting women, war exposed them. But then, at the end of the text, she wonders if she would draw similar conclusions if writing from within the German Empire.13

  The roles available to women in World War I were extremely limited. Even a non-combatant role was not easily come by. Writing to Leonora O’Reilly in New York on 14 May 1916, Miles said she would like to go to France but it cost $25 for three months to work in the soup kitchens there.14

  Her best chance lay with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH) for Foreign Service, an all-women organisation established by Dr Elsie Inglis in 1914 under the auspices of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) ‘for both country and Suffrage’. It was funded by private donations and local groups, and run on a voluntary basis by women doctors until 1917, when Dr Inglis died, and others stepped in. Harriet Newcomb was co-opted to the SWH London committee in November 1916, and was an obvious contact for Miles Franklin.15

  The evidence suggests that the WFL’s stance on the suffrage issue also played a significant part in shaping Miles Franklin’s desire to get closer to the war. As a democratic but still militant breakaway from the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the WFL sought to occupy the middle ground in the long struggle for votes for women in Britain (which did not end until adult women under thirty were enfranchised in 1928). It consisted, it has been said, of ‘serious feminists’; and although the smallest of the three main suffrage groups, it was articulate, innovative and arguably more visionary in approach than either the WSPU or the older NUWSS.16

  Very likely she was involved with the league’s publishing arm, the Minerva Publishing Company, located at WFL headquarters on High Holborn, along with the Minerva café. Certainly her sympathies lay with causes such as that promoted in the company’s 1916 publication The Retreat from Serbia: Through Montenegro and Albania, a brief but vivid memoir by Olive M. Aldridge, a suffragist who served with the 3rd Serbian Relief Unit in the second half of 1915 and participated in the Serbian army’s terrible winter trek to the Adriatic to escape advancing Austrian forces.17

  Miles already knew Mrs Aldridge. She first called on her at 41 Russell Square, Bloomsbury, in April 1916, two months after Mrs Aldridge had addressed the WFL on ‘Our Retreat from Serbia’. Mrs Aldridge was also an organiser for the SWH, and she departed again for the Balk
ans in December 1916 (as did Nina Boyle, director of the WFL’s political department). So Miles was well aware of the Balkan situation, though still thinking in terms of France regarding her own war contribution.18

  In London houses lacked heating and hot water. Derogatory remarks about women were often to be heard on the buses. There was much jingoistic hysteria to contend with day by day, and also masochism, as criticised by George Bernard Shaw in a lecture on war economies to the Clapham WFL on Empire Day 1916. She remained emphatic that conscription was wrong. She and Charlotte Despard, sister of the distinguished soldier Sir John French, and grande dame of the WFL danced with delight when in late 1916 the news came through that Australians had voted against conscription. (The soldiers Miles spoke to said it was because politicians were — splendid phrase — such ‘unmerciful twisters’.) And after all, she observed, war was ‘the one thing in all creation for which men do not blame women’.19

  A degree of mystery hangs over Miles’s literary goals during this time in London. Probably she was most concerned about her American novels. On 25 November 1915, A. P. Watt had advised ‘G. Marriott’ that Mills & Boon had returned On Dearborn Street, saying it needed revision and that many of its Americanisms would not be understood in the United Kingdom. Six months later, on 4 May 1916, Watt further advised that the publisher Duckworth had also declined it. The style was ‘very attractive’ but it was too ‘native’. Duckworth did suggest, however, that if an American publisher could be found, the firm would consider an edition from unbound pages. Meanwhile, The Net of Circumstance had proved a deep disappointment, with no known reviews and few, if any, sales (a royalty statement dated June 1918 recording 1167 copies in stock is marked ‘NO SALES’).20

  On 27 April 1916 Miles applied for a reader’s ticket to the reading room of the British Museum in Bloomsbury (where the British Library was then located). The application reads in part: ‘I should like the privilege of the reading room for an indefinite period for use when writing magazine articles on current affairs, stories and plays, but would need to use it only for references not procurable in the libraries nearer my place of residence.’ The application, signed ‘Stella Miles Franklin’, cites a letter of introduction from B. R. Wise, Agent-General for New South Wales, describing her as ‘a well-known author and journalist’ and ‘a lady of good social standing’. A reader’s ticket was ready for collection on 29 April and Miles picked it up on 5 June.21

  Initially, Miles was hoping to survive in London as a freelance journalist. With nine articles known to have been published in the twelve months following her application for a reader’s ticket, six of them paid at the Sydney Morning Herald’s standard rates, she was surely keen, as evidenced by her vivid London sketches (unpublished, however, to this day).22

  Unfortunately for Miles Franklin there was limited scope for expatriate women journalists in the Australian press during World War I, and it seems her attempt to short-circuit the red tape involved in sending articles to the United States in early 1917 failed, despite her being granted a dispensation freeing her work from postal censorship. Inevitably the Home Front was of less interest to readers than the progress of the military; and with the Russian Revolution and America’s entry into the war in 1917, it became harder to write interesting or useful copy from London.23

  The possibility of returning to Chicago began to exercise Miles’s mind. But she was not ready to leave London: ‘I had hoped to be sailing for home by now but I can’t manage it yet,’ she wrote to Agnes Nestor in late October. Why that should be so is never explained, though it was probably due to a lack of funds and the progress she seemed to be making with her writing. Maybe she should resign from the league executive. This she finally did in a letter to Emma Steghagen dated 31 December 1916. It would not be possible to return to America in time for the next convention, she advised (which means she now intended to stay in London until at least mid-1917).24

  In coming months she continued to potter over manuscripts, but the prospect of ‘active service’ proved increasingly attractive. According to a draft application retained in her papers, on 12 March 1917 Miles Franklin applied to the SWH administration in Edinburgh to serve, preferably in France, indicating that she was available right away, and giving her age as thirty-something. However, a vacancy for an assistant cook in Macedonia occurred and she grabbed it.25

  She would be serving in the ‘America’ unit under Dr Agnes Bennett, and she would need to be robust. The unit was attached to the Serbian army, and she would be leaving in less than three weeks. As it turned out, she spent the latter part of her time in Macedonia as a superior kind of orderly.26

  Despite some early irritation, the appointment suited Miles well. The Balkan Front was a known cause; Macedonia was exotic; and the bonus would be working with a number of fellow Australians, since Dr Bennett and ‘Frankie Doodle’, as Miles became known, were not the only Australian women to serve in the unit. Others included Dr Bennett’s successor as chief medical officer, Dr Mary De Garis, and the fearless dressing-station sister, Agnes Dorothy Kerr. Unbeknownst to Miles at that stage, from July 1917 there would also be numerous Australian nurses working in British army hospitals near Salonika (modern-day Thessaloniki), including Matron Prichard, who would become an associate in Sydney in the 1940s.27

  On 13 June Miles passed a medical. Soon after, she underwent the requisite inoculations; on 18 June her kitbag and haversack arrived; and on 27 June she had a farewell lunch with an admiring compatriot, Ada Holman (wife of New South Wales Labor Premier W. A. Holman), whom she had met in Chicago in 1914. (Reporting to Rose Scott, Ada said, ‘She is the kind of girl who always takes up the roughest work, and does it thoroughly too.’) That same day Miles signed the unsalaried employees agreement to serve in the America unit at Ostrovo in northwest Macedonia, with uniforms provided and all costs and expenses (but not medical liability) covered. Then on 30 June, shorter-skirted, high-booted, and adorned with the tartan accoutrement of the SWH, she moved to the Wilton Hotel near Victoria Station with her luggage, ready for departure.28

  After a short delay over passports, on Monday 2 July 1917 the new recruits caught the train to Southampton, and the following day set off for Paris and beyond. Miles was somewhat disappointed to be going overland, but apparently insouciant: ‘I hear there are plenty [of] horses in Macedonia, so I shall be in my element,’ she wrote in a last-minute letter from London to her dearest Rose Scott.29

  The seven months between leaving England on 3 July 1917 and her return after the contracted six months’ service on 14 February 1918 represent an exhilarating and influential chapter in Miles’s life, as recorded in her diary and elaborated in her writing, most notably in another vivid set of sketches. SWH personnel were required to sign an undertaking not to write for the press while on service, and only three press articles detailing her experiences ever appeared.30

  Thanks to Susannah Franklin, some postcards survive. Miles sent at least half a dozen to her mother en route to Salonika (or Salonique, as she usually spelled it, French being the lingua franca in the Balkans), from Le Havre, Paris, Turin, Rome and Taranto on the southern tip of Italy. Arriving at Taranto on 8 July 1917, she got a taste of what lay ahead. There had been no cakes in Paris, and no butter in Rome; now it was all mosquitoes and flies, with noise and men everywhere. She was one of only three women among 3000 men on the troopship which took them via Corfu and Milos, to arrive at Salonika after almost a fortnight’s travel on 15 July.31

  Miles’s initial impressions of Greece were scarcely enthusiastic: from Milos Harbour, the view was of ‘treeless lands under the glaring sun and funny little white villages looking like cemeteries on the ribbed hillsides’. Contemporary visual records confirm this first impression of treeless lands. But she soon came to terms with the spare scenery, and within a week she was enjoying it all: ‘The landscape grew hourly more beautiful to me.’32

  Since it was past 2 p.m. when she disembarked, Miles thought she would be sleeping in Salonika over
night. But Dr Bennett arrived to collect her in the early evening. She gathered up her things and they set off almost immediately in the hospital ‘Tin Lizzie’ for Ostrovo, about 160 kilometres west along the ancient Via Egnata, then known as the Monastir road and now a busy European freeway. It was, Miles recalled, ‘the roughest journey I ever underwent’ (which was fair comment, considering others described the roads beyond Salonika as ‘fit only for bullock transportation’); but with the SWH’s (male) mechanic-chauffeur, known only as Fitzpatrick, at the wheel and the passengers acting as ‘shovers’ when they reached the hills, they arrived at their destination some five or six hours later, at 1.45 a.m., without incident.33

  Next morning Miles was up and on the job by 8 o’clock. Like many country people, she took no pleasure in roughing it. The tent cookhouse proved to be ‘a beastly little gunyah . . . placed in the open’. Moreover, July was scorchingly hot, and there were no trees to shade the orderlies’ tents. Nevertheless, she soon learned to cope with the food and adapted readily enough to camp routine, rising at 6 a.m. and working a long day until 7 p.m., with a rest period in the afternoon.34

  Looking about her in the light of day, she found the country traversed the previous night had changed from the alluvial Plain of Salonika to a landscape of woods and hills, ‘pretty as a picture’. The 200-bed tent hospital nestling in a grove to the north of Lake Ostrovo was located about five kilometres from the tiny village of Ostrovo, just before the road ascended to Gornichevo on the way to Monastir, and surrounded by a rim of mountains topped by the majestic Mount Kaimacktchalan.35

  In the only known extant letter, submitting expenses to Edinburgh, ‘Stella M. Franklin’ went on in cheerful vein: