by Jill Roe
We had a very happy journey out and in our expenditure kept both economy and the good name of our distinguished regiment in mind. Sad to say our luggage has not yet turned up but we are still hoping. We are taken care of here & enjoying our work immensely. The heat of course is rather ennervating in the kitchen but we get good rest time & I am very well.36
The work itself was no problem to Susannah Franklin’s daughter. Miles’s competence was soon recognised, first by Dr Bennett, who wrote back to Edinburgh within weeks for permission to make her head cook at £35 per annum. Instead, Matron Nye made her matron’s orderly, in charge of the stores: ‘I looked after the linen and all the clothing and bedding supplies and gave out the dressings.’ She also did mending, and on Sundays distributed tobacco. ‘I had not been so housewifely for years,’ she reflected. Literary inspiration was slow to come.37
There is a Box Brownie photo of a broadly smiling Miles with a group of Serbian orderlies and drivers under one of the elm trees, with the lake in the background. From this and other sources it is obvious that her new position suited the gregarious side of her nature. More like an aide-de-camp than a hospital orderly, she ‘cavorted all over the camp on errands for the matron’ in a manner reminiscent of early days with Mrs Robins in Chicago; and with ample afternoon rest time, she often went swimming with colleagues. The strong sense of sisterhood noted at the camp by others was agreeable to Miles. Although she did not occupy an important position, she seemed to know most people, and about a quarter of the 300 or more people apparently associated with the hospital are named in her pocket diary. She was always trekking about the countryside with other sestres (as patients called the nurses) on her days off. There were evening entertainments with the officers too, mostly Serbian, but also French and Italian, and occasionally Englishmen. Except that she never did get to ride their horses, it all sounds rather like her young days near Goulburn.38
On days off, the nurses would sometimes visit outlying villages. There they observed local women. The best Miles could find to say about their lives was that it explained how easy it was to exploit the migrants in Chicago: ‘Not one hot-water tap of progress since the days of the bible,’ she snorted. The men were worse; so exploitative. When the hospital opened a small ward for civilians, some women came or were brought by their wary husbands. The women could also be critical of the sestres, with their machine-made uniforms. But contact was limited, which is not surprising, since the villages they visited might be Greek, Turkish, Romanian or Bulgarian.39
Despite its beauty the Ostrovo site was an unhealthy spot. Early on Miles had noted that all the disagreeable features of Australian bush life were in evidence: flies, fleas, mosquitoes, wasps and snakes. She suffered greatly from accidentally swallowing a wasp — Dr De Garis noted that wasps were a great trial, making eating hazardous — and the treatment, consisting of quinine injections in the buttocks, made things worse. When it grew colder she got chilblains, and on one wintry occasion she lost her voice for a time. The greatest scourge was malaria, which Miles apparently contracted, though there is no record of when she was infected.40
After her contract for six months ended, Miles left Ostrovo on 3 February 1918. Two days later, she sailed from Salonika for Toulon on the Lafayette, arriving in London on 14 February.41
She had nowhere fixed to stay and London was experiencing air raids. For the first month or so, while determinedly concentrating on her writing, she shuttled back and forth between Miss Hodge’s at Golders Green and 22 Harley Road, South Hampstead, where Miss A. A. Smith (Nan), the long-serving editor of the WFL’s journal, the Vote, lived when not pursuing good causes elsewhere.42
Miles was unable to place her resulting sketches on her experiences in Macedonia. She was adrift and unwell, having experienced since mid-March some half-dozen malarial attacks. Worse, she feared her money was running out. For a time she helped Miss Newcomb prepare for another Dominions suffrage conference in June and she managed a book review for the Vote, but by the end of May she was back at the Minerva.43
Some good things alleviated the gloom. Agnes Nestor turned up as part of an official goodwill mission from America to England and France in April, and they had a fine time together. Miles even had a new admirer, Fred Post, a young American working in the office of the Scientific Attaché at the American Embassy, possibly a relative of the Chicago Posts, and enjoyed a last Indian summer of romance, marked by five crosses in her diary. Some Serbs turned up too. Recounting her experiences with Agnes to colleagues back in Chicago, she gave a spirited description of her men friends:
There is a beautiful boy from California attached to the American Embassy now . . . and he is always at my ear wanting to know this that and the other just like Agnes used to be when I was natl sec. I am training him up in the way he should go and am very much pleased to note he finds no one’s analysis of things satisfies him like mine — but such eagerness, such liveliness — after the placid British who never want to know anything . . . I introduce him to one young beauty but no, he is back there again the next time we meet as full of a desire to know as ever. I had him on one arm of my chair the other night and George of Serbia on the other and a beautiful young Serb lieutenant nearby, and as I was deaf in one ear and couldn’t hear out of the other thru’ big doses of quinine taken for malaria, I was in parlous condition. But he fell in love with the Serbs, so I was content. The unspoiled Serbs are the nicest men I have ever met.44
Even with warmer weather Miles did not feel well, despite two short breaks from London, one with Maud Walsöe in Hampshire in July and another longer stay near Hitchin, Hertfordshire, in August, where she met up with Matron Nye and other colleagues back from the Balkans.45
In early August Sir James Cantlie diagnosed her as suffering from influenza as well as malaria. In order to recover, Miles booked into Merchant Taylors’ Convalescent Home for Ladies at Bognor, on the coast of Sussex. This was not a good move. According to the Rules and Regulations for the Guidance of Patients preserved in the Franklin Papers, the home had been established for the benefit of ladies in need of rest and open air, due to overwork or illness. Miles fitted the bill, but found the home odious. She hated its pervasive snobbery and smell of pauperism. At least the weather remained fine, and daily walks on the seashore and inland with one or two reasonably agreeable souls proved refreshing. On one of several postcards to her mother she marked a spot by one of the groynes where she sat regularly in the hope of catching the sun, but ‘Ah for Manly Beach or Waverley or Bondi or Coogee!’ On another, of the adjacent resort of St Leonard’s, she wrote that it would have been nicer to be there in the summer and with a companion.46
She stuck it out from 2 to 21 September, mainly by writing and studying shorthand. Towards the end, on 16 September, her diary reveals she finished a novel, though what this was is unstated. Returning by train to London on the morning of 21 September, a Saturday, she spent the evening with Miss Hodge at Temple Fortune Court, and on the Sunday took tea with Olive Aldridge (the chronicler of the retreat of the Serbian army, and an SWH agent in Britain) in her top-floor flat at 41 Russell Square. Suddenly her life took another of its dramatic turns. Immediately after the reference to tea with Mrs Aldridge comes the laconic line, ‘Took on a job with Mr Aldridge.’
Henry R. Aldridge was the founding secretary of the National Housing and Town Planning Council (NHTPC), a semi-philanthropic reform body and pressure group dealing mainly with local authorities. Town planning was a new and increasingly respectable cause, and by 1918 housing was a big issue, one in which the WFL was keen to see the woman’s outlook represented. The very next day, Monday 23 September 1918, she began work at the council’s office at 41 Russell Square, Bloomsbury, just around the corner from the British Museum.47
8
AT THE HEART OF THE EMPIRE: 1918–1923
I’m a daughter of the Empiah come to help save it, and they have to put up with me.1
The British Empire and its allies won the Great War, but with ov
er eight million dead and approaching three times that number of wounded worldwide, few felt good about it. Miles Franklin observed the street celebrations in London on Armistice Day from her recently obtained perch at 41 Russell Square, Bloomsbury, headquarters of the NHTPC since 1913; but she could not accept Fred Post’s invitation to join in, as she had to get council secretary Henry Aldridge off to a conference.2
She often complained — with reason — about muddle at the office. The same could be said of the postwar world, and of her own life. Seen from London, the world was more than a muddle; it was tense and divided. On the one hand, the triumphant British Prime Minister, the ex-Liberal David Lloyd George, had promised ‘homes fit for heroes’, and legislation in 1919 encouraged public investment in housing, as the NHTPC had urged since before the war. However, Lloyd George also promised to make Germany pay for the war. Reaction rather than reform soon became the order of the day in post–World War I Britain. To this reaction Lloyd George was himself soon to fall victim, as a reinvigorated conservatism swept away his war-winning coalition, while the British Labour Party, which would first win government in 1924, gained in strength, leaving the old Liberals in the middle.
It was the Liberal intelligentsia with whom Miles Franklin was associated in London in the 1920s, and the radicals among it remained radical and in important respects creative; but the rise of Labour had to be faced, and class conflict was a renewed and formidable reality of the immediate postwar years, which saw many great strikes. Likewise, the Empire was in an uproar. In Ireland, the rise of Sinn Fein (‘Ourselves Alone’) spelled the end of the Liberals’ thirty-year commitment to Home Rule, and beyond, in India, another nationalist leader, Mohandas Gandhi, was making his mark with the doctrine of non-violent resistance to imperial power.3
In such a volatile world, housing was evidently not of crucial significance. William Ashworth’s authoritative history of town planning in Britain acknowledges the NHTPC as one of the most influential propagandist groups of the Edwardian period, notable for its clarity of aims, the quality of its membership, its conferences and international contacts, and its influence through reports and other forms of pressure on local authorities. The membership lists by Miles’s time look altogether worthy, as do the council’s aims. The names of famed Liberal reformers, like George Cadbury, Seebohm Rowntree and the influential town planner Professor Patrick Abercrombie, appear on the council’s general committee, and local government, employer and employee associations connected with the building trades, trade unions and women’s organisations were represented at the council, the latter from 1918 when the vote was extended to women over thirty as well as to working-class men.4
Miles worked hard at the council. The worthiness of it all was too much at times, as revealed in her observations on the plainness of certain distinguished persons encountered at council gatherings, but she was not one to bite the hand that fed her. At £144 per annum, her salary was much the same as that earned by female clerical assistants and typists in the civil service in 1924, and above the rate paid them at that time by the benevolent Liberal employer Cadbury (£127 per annum in 1924).5
Housing never claimed her as women’s trade unionism had. As she wrote to Eva O’Sullivan in August 1919: ‘I am in the housing work. It is a thing any one can believe in without controversy . . . It is impossible to depict the discomfort of the English home.’6 Her duties in some respects resembled those of her Chicago days, when she ran around town on errands and back and forth to the printers. But Mr Aldridge was no Mrs Robins when it came to work practices: it was maddening to type memos up to twenty times, and the amount of work that she and the other office women put into his magnum opus, The National Housing Manual, over four years can hardly have been rewarding, adequate acknowledgements notwithstanding.7
Miles understood from personal experience the great need for reform and planning in British cities. She was still living with the suffrage journalist Nan Smith at 22 Harley Road, a three-storeyed semi-detached brick house located just beyond Primrose Hill. It also served as the London base of the extended Smith family, especially Nan’s worldly brothers, Thomas Brook Smith, a tourist agent in Yorkshire, and Horatio Nelson Smith, a pharmaceuticals manufacturer in Lancashire and Birmingham. Hence, there was much coming and going, sometimes to the detriment of Miles’s own work. Nonetheless she stayed on after Miss Smith’s sudden death in May 1919, possibly at a reduced rent, as she seems to have helped out with cooking and chores on occasion (though there was a housekeeper). More importantly, from diary entries it is evident that she could not rely on having a room of her own. When there was an influx of Smiths and their associates, she had to share her first-floor room with the housekeeper, which meant no privacy, or go up two floors to the housekeeper’s room, which she regarded as degrading. Such was her unusual status in the household, however, that she also went to the theatre with family members, and for walks and drives on Sunday. The family was genuinely regretful when she moved to the WFL’s Minerva Club in Brunswick Square in 1924.8
Harley Road was within walking distance of Lady Byles’ home at 8 Chalcot Gardens. It would be difficult to overestimate the importance of Lady Byles as a reference point for, and influence on, Miles Franklin in her London years. Miles had first met her in 1916, most likely through Ken and Mab Maynard, who were resident in Chicago from the 1890s to 1919, but maybe through the Sydney branch of the family, of which the solicitor and conservationist Marie Byles was a prominent member. Lady Byles became her ‘refuge and sheer delight’, as near as she found to a replacement for Alice Henry and Editha Phelps, as Miles wrote to Alice Henry in February 1919.9
Sarah Anne Byles, née Unwin, was advanced in years when Miles met her, but still handsome and strong. Her husband, Sir William Byles, originally a northern newspaper proprietor and ‘Lib-Lab’ member of parliament for the wool manufacturing city of Bradford since 1890, had died in 1917, by which time she was an esteemed elder of the Liberal world, where she belonged in her own right as the daughter of the Colchester Unwins, a literary and public-spirited family, and as president of the Women’s National Liberal Association (later Federation) from 1906 to 1921. (The suffrage issue had caused a division among Liberal women between ‘progressives’ and ‘moderates’, with the Association supporting a moderate ‘waiting policy’ for fear of losing Home Rule for Ireland. Reunion was achieved through federation in 1919, during the final years of Lady Byles’ presidency.) Like many, the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb thought Lady Byles a stronger personality than her husband, and noted that she was sympathetic to labour.10
When she died in 1931, one of several admiring obituaries referred to Lady Byles’ ‘long and enviable life, crowded with public service in many directions, and enlivened by the affectionate companionship of distinguished and clever people’. Miles was one of them: ‘a dear sunbeam’, Lady Byles once called her. It is easy to see why Lady Byles appealed so strongly to Miles. According to the same obituary:
She had the platform manner of a cabinet minister — easy, eloquent, authoritative — and in the days of her prime she moved audiences to enthusiasm by the strength and unmistakable sincerity of her convictions. She was a great believer. Having made up her mind she harboured no doubt. She was sure, and she helped other people to be sure.11
At Chalcot Gardens in the 1920s, Miles enjoyed Lady Byles’ easy hospitality, and encountered many significant people. She was at once soothed and stimulated, and over time, strongly influenced by the thinking of Lady Byles and her circle. As evidenced by her association with the Meggitt and Smith families and her work with the McMillan sisters at Deptford and the SWH in Macedonia during the war, and even earlier through its transatlantic manifestations, Miles’s entrée to English political culture had been through the progressive but largely provincial Liberal network, encompassing (broadly speaking) suffrage and social reform, of which Lady Byles was such an ornament. Her employment at the NHTPC, probably at the suggestion of Olive Aldridge, was an extension of that ne
twork.12
Although the British Liberal Party never regained the ground lost by Lloyd George’s perfidy in abandoning the party to lead a nationalist coalition in 1916, liberalism itself provided a practical framework and set of concepts for the new woman citizen. The Women’s National Liberal Federation (WNLF) strongly supported internationalism, seeking to combat slavery and advance women’s rights and world peace through the League of Nations.13
There may even have been direct links between the world of Lady Byles and Australia. From J. S. Mill onwards, feminism had been part of liberal philosophy; and it is possible to discern through Miles’s response to Lady Byles something of the common ground between the incipiently liberal nationalist feminism she had known in Australia and the stronger imperial version she now encountered in London.14
Reconstructing Miles Franklin’s years in London after World War I is not easy, though she must have meant it to be, given the records she retained. Nevertheless, few items of what was clearly a well-maintained correspondence have survived: except for the earliest years, this is the thinnest of all periods for extant letters. In marked contrast to this dearth of letters are the literary manuscripts. These increased exponentially during Miles’s almost nine years in London after World War I.15
There are at least seven novels or novellas and linked sequences of sketches; as many as fifteen plays; three film scenarios; and some sixteen topical pieces, consisting of single sketches, short stories, anecdotes and other fragments. Sadly for her, of all this work only a handful of topical articles and one novel achieved publication during the London years, and since then only three of the novels have appeared and two of the topical pieces have been reprinted.
Amazingly, Miles never complained about the rejections, at least in print, though she did keep careful records of where her manuscripts were sent, and probably talked about her work to close friends. She just resubmitted, and kept writing. Nor did she ever mention her age, which was becoming a significant consideration: the ‘now or never’ factor. On 14 October 1919, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin turned forty. As usual, there is no reference to a birthday in her diary. The entry reads simply ‘went home and went to bed early . . . no hope of privacy or comfort’.16