Edith aged five, with her mother Louisa and younger sister Florence
Darwinism caused a theological stir. A month before Edith Cavell was born a large Church Congress was held in Norwich at St. Andrew’s Hall: “Never before was there such a gathering of clergy in the city … Bible history was ably vindicated against the objections of geologists and freethinkers,” wrote A. D. Bayne in 1869 in his Comprehensive History of Norwich.
The customs and lifestyle of Swardeston were resistant to the objections of geologists, freethinkers and suffragists. Though these customs were formed from a patriarchal spiral down from God to monarch, squire, vicar, bricklayer, woman, ape and rock pigeon, creationist ideas transmuted into the common-sense habits and kindnesses of village life. Such daily life defined Englishness. Change was slow. Things were as they had been, and as they had been, so should they continue.
The Reverend Cavell expected his children to be conformist and devout. Drummed into them was the necessity of salvation through prayer, obligation to the poor and service to others. A second Cavell daughter, born in June 1867, was named Florence, after Florence Nightingale, “the Lady with the Lamp,” the “ministering angel” whose nursing methods saved thousands of soldiers’ lives in the Crimean War. A third daughter, Mary Lilian, followed in September 1870. Their births were further cause for thanksgiving and financial concern. The desired son and heir John Frederick Cavell was born in 1873. Named after his father and grandfather, the expectation for him was that he would carry forward the family name, but he never married and in adult life took to the bottle, suffered bouts of depression and for thirty-two years worked for the Norwich Union Insurance Company.
3
GROWING UP
Edith Cavell described her Swardeston childhood as a time when “life was fresh and beautiful and the country so desirable and sweet.” Norfolk was a lush county, truly green and pleasant. Its landscape inspired the Norwich School of Painters, with pastoral scenes by John Crome and Joseph Stannard of peasants and horse-drawn plows, rain-filled skies, oak trees and thatched cottages. Edith showed a talent for art like her uncle John Scott Cavell, and in her teens did seasonal drawings of girls in bonnets and short-sleeved dresses gathering grasses on Swardeston Common or muffled in fur-trimmed coats making footprints in the snow.
Edith Cavell as a teenager
Edith’s drawings for greetings cards to raise money for a Swardeston Sunday School, c. 1885
The village was largely self-sufficient. There was much preserving of fruit and bottling of jam. Crops were rotated, wheat and barley then turnips and clover. Villagers had smallholdings, kept a pig for ham, tended a vegetable patch. At the general store “beefin” apples, baked then pressed flat without breaking the skin, were sold at sixpence a dozen. There was a bakery, a post office, cottages where boots were made and mended. Poultry was plentiful, particularly turkeys and geese. Rabbits and pheasants were trapped and shot, there was an abundance of freshwater fish in the rivers and streams and huge herring and mackerel fisheries at Yarmouth twenty-three miles away.
The Cavell children rode ponies on the gated common where horses and cattle grazed, played croquet on the vicarage lawn and swam in summer and skated in winter in and on the lake in the valley, by the Old Rectory where their neighbors the Kemp family and then the Blewitts lived.
The life that was fresh and beautiful was seemingly safe. Progress took the shape of better drainage of the turnpike lanes, better suspension for the horse-drawn carriages, more of the railway links that intersected the county. Fast development of the railway companies and laying of tracks meant that by 1880 when Edith Cavell was fifteen, it was possible to go by steam train directly from Norwich to Lowestoft, a journey of thirty miles through a landscape of rivers and water meadows. Lowestoft was a gentrified resort for the Victorian middle class with its promenade, pier and band. For their summer holidays the Cavells rented a house on the seafront with Edith’s Great-Uncle Edmund’s family. He was a country solicitor. Edith was protective of his youngest son, Eddy, who though three years her elder was mentally fragile and too shy to socialize. In adult life he lived alone and managed a smallholding. Some years the two families went to Cromer with its jetty, curing houses for fish, cliffs, fine sands and bathing machines.
Despite Swardeston’s setting of pastoral tranquility, it was hard to be a free spirit in the Cavells’ large Gothic vicarage. The house was expensive to run—coal and wood for heating and cooking, oil for the lamps, water to be pumped in the scullery, heated and carried to the bedrooms … It needed servants. At the time of the 1871 census the family had a live-in cook, a housemaid and a nanny for Mary Lilian, the third child, then three months old. None of the servants was local. All were unmarried women in their twenties who arrived after answering advertisements in the Church Times. Their hope was for safe lodgings, their keep and survival pay. They had no security of employment, or prospects, or independence. They inhabited the fireless attic rooms, accessed via the back staircase. In 1876 one of them, a Miss L. Brown, graffitied on to her bedroom wall, “The pay is small, the food is bad, I wonder why I don’t go mad.”2
Frederick Cavell held family prayers each morning at eight. Servants in the house attended these too. Sundays were unrelenting in their piety. In her teens Edith told her cousin Eddy, “I’d love to have you visit, but not on a Sunday. It’s too dreadful, Sunday school, church services, family devotions morning and evening. And father’s sermons are so dull.” The freshness of childhood was countered by the correction of prayer, indulgence was balanced by a command to share, and freedom was subsumed by the dictates of the Church calendar: Christmas, Epiphany, Easter, Advent, Lent, Pentecost, Communion.
The exhortation to remember the poor, the downhearted and the needy was ever present in the Cavell household. The Reverend Cavell impressed on his children that they must lead by example. Sunday fare might be a well-roasted chicken and vegetables, a marmalade roll pudding and scones for tea, but such privilege must be shared with the poor. The children were sent to give bowls of the food to villagers in need. Their own share, when they ate it, was often cold.
Charity was the civilizing force in early Victorian society. The poor depended on it. In every village, town and city there was pervasive need. It served as a prompt to the better-off to give alms and show altruism. Giving was piecemeal and unregulated, haphazard as to place, contingent on creed and conformity and demeaning in its expectation of gratitude. Frederick Cavell was chaplain of the workhouse at Swains-thorpe two miles from Swardeston. Part of his chaplaincy was to conduct marriage and funeral services for the destitute there. In nearby Norwich the rich endowed many charities, all of which held stigma for the beneficiaries and social advantage for the benefactors. The Norfolk and Norwich Magdalen on Life’s Green put a roof over the heads of women who “having deviated from the paths of virtue may be desirous of being restored to their station in society by religious instruction and the formation of moral and industrious habits.”
At the Hospital for the Indigent Blind, women knitted and made nets, and the men made baskets and sacks. There was an endowed lunatic asylum, a female penitentiary, a “lying-in” charity3 and an almshouse for the aged poor. There was the Bethel Hospital for “poor lunatics, and not for natural born fools or idiots,” a Mendicity Society for the relief of distressed travelers, a Provident Coal Society for supplying the poor with coal at reduced prices, and a charity for Clergymen’s Widows and Children in Norfolk. At the Boys’ and Girls’ Hospital School for impoverished children, pupils were given a suit of blue clothing every Lady Day—the March festival of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary. When boys left they were apprenticed; girls were given £3 for clothes so that they could go into service. The Gurneys of Swardeston Manor financed a school in St. Stephen’s Mews where sixty impoverished girls were taught and given clothes. At the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital, four physicians and four surgeons gave free service to the poor on Saturdays and Tuesdays: “the operation for the stone4 i
s performed here in the greatest perfection on these days; the whole number cut for this dreadfull disease since the opening of the hospital is about 700 of whom not more than 100 died.”
Edith Cavell’s father was stern and censorious, but her mother was gentle and loving, though her only reading was devotional books about Jesus and the gospels. Toward her mother Edith was protective and from her she learned to cook, knit, embroider and sew. The effect on her of her father’s exhortations was not as with her brother, to drive her away from religion, but to pursue the practicality of virtue rather than its theory. In adult life her Christian focus came not from the Old Testament but from Thomas à Kempis’s spiritual manual, The Imitation of Christ.
Like provision for the poor and sick, nineteenth-century education was a haphazard affair. Unregistered teachers gave home tuition or taught in private fee-paying schools. When Edith was five an Elementary Education Act, drafted by Liberal MP William Forster, aimed to provide, through school boards, non-denominational elementary education for children aged five to twelve. Such schooling did not become compulsory until 1880, when Edith was fifteen.
Secular state education met opposition from the Church. Neither vicar nor squire would send their children to the village school. Frederick Cavell’s ambition for his daughters was that they should be competent to earn a living in a womanly way in service to the Lord. Service took priority over marriage to the squire’s heir—the romantic solution to penury made popular by Jane Austen.
Edith Cavell’s home education, until she was sixteen, was a mix of tuition from her father and from a resident governess. Reading, writing with a dip-pen in a clear forward-sloping hand, and arithmetic were standard fare. She had a talent for languages, particularly French, and a love of drawing. From her father she learned of the philanthropy of Thomas Barnardo, who trained as a doctor at the London Hospital and set up homes for street children, and of the nursing achievements of Florence Nightingale. She read Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations and Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Martin Chuzzlewit. But the book she was most familiar with was the Book of Common Prayer’ and when she played the piano it was hymns and devotional songs.
In 1881 when she was fifteen she and her sisters were taught by a live-in governess, Harriet Joyce Baker from Chackmore, a hamlet in Buckinghamshire. Harriet Baker was twenty-seven. Her father, a bailiff for the County Court, had been widowed in his early forties. Six of his children still lived at home. His son Frederick, an organ builder, brought in some money; so did his daughter Anne, a dressmaker, but the other four were under twelve.
In Harriet Baker, Edith Cavell observed the strictures for a governess transplanted into a family house. She received her keep and meager pay. There was a limbo to her position, for she was not part of the family, though she was a cut above the cook and housemaid. And there was the difficulty of contriving a syllabus for siblings of different ages. When Edith was fifteen her sister Flor, as she called Florence, was thirteen and Lilian was ten. Jack, as John was known, was eight.
Edith Cavell had reason to suppose that to become a governess would be her fate too. It was one of the few occupations open to her of which her father approved. When she was sixteen he caught her smoking a cigarette in his study. It was not an acceptable transgression for a vicar’s daughter and soon after it she was sent away to school.
4
SCHOOL
Between 1882 and 1884 Edith Cavell went to three different girls’ boarding schools in different parts of the country away from her mother, sisters, brother, home and friends. Her father chose the schools through Church connections and according to the financial concessions they offered to the clergy.
Nineteenth-century private schools for modest fees were institutions of neither comfort nor fun. By the 1880s there was in England a spate of small boarding schools that “finished” girls from respectable homes. The idea was to equip them with housewifery skills, a smattering of uncontentious information to put to social use, and a genteel femininity. They offered no standardized syllabus and as with most other social provision were subject to no quality control. As early as 1867 the educational reformer Emily Davies was critical of these self-styled schools: “They are obliged to profess French and music and I do not think they do much besides.”
It was a training designed to prepare Edith Cavell to be the wife of a doctor or clergyman or, if unmarried, a governess with a well-to-do family where she might responsibly look after someone else’s children. Academic subjects and all professions were closed to her, whatever her aptitudes, inclinations or dreams.
She spent a few months at a school in Kensington for daughters of the clergy, then was moved to Belgrave House in Clevedon near Bristol for a year. The syllabus was literature, drawing, music, a competency in French and German, and of course the domestic arts. She did not overtly rebel against the limitations of these transient all-female environments. From them she learned self-discipline and application, but a kind of reserve and withdrawal afflicted her, a repression of expression of emotion, an aloneness. She had little choice other than to be serious, devout and inarticulate about personal desire.
At Clevedon when she was eighteen she was confirmed by the Bishop of Bath and Wells in St. Andrew’s Parish Church. She was five foot three, gray-eyed, had dark wavy hair, and was pretty. She took her vows seriously: affirmation of faith in Christ, the renouncing of sin, rejection of all rebellion against God. Her life was being mapped out in a way that conformed to the traditional values of Victorian England: the authority of God, the superiority of men, the subjugation of women.
When she was nineteen she went as a pupil teacher to Laurel Court School, a large stone house in the precincts of Peterborough Cathedral. The school, owned and run by Miss Margaret Gibson and her partner Miss Annette Van Dissel, had the approval of the Bishop of Peterborough. Miss Gibson advertised in the Peterborough Advertiser. Laurel Court offered girls “a high moral training and the advantages of home life. French and German are the languages of the house. Special attention is paid to the culture of Music.” Drawing was on the syllabus too, and English literature and Italian. Girls were “to be prepared for the Cambridge and Oxford examinations.” These gave women a qualification to teach simple subjects to young children, as a way of combining low-paid employment with civilizing activity. Women were not admitted as Cambridge undergraduates until 1948.
Miss Gibson’s school year was divided into three terms. Tuition fees were sixty guineas a year, payable in advance, and a term’s notice was required before a pupil left. There were special rates for daughters of the clergy and fees were waived for student teachers like Edith Cavell.
Miss Gibson hated theories of pedagogy and education, liked spicy gossip and had a stern attitude toward right and wrong. Breakfast was at six in the morning, followed by church. School lessons began at seven and the day girls arrived at nine. Miss Van Dissel taught French and German by rote, and girls from France, Holland, Germany and Denmark helped with conversation classes in return, like Edith Cavell, for waived fees.
The family life on offer at Laurel Court was eccentric and entirely segregated from men. Miss Gibson was a lesbian separatist. She referred to men as the Adamses, complained that they never showed chivalry toward Eve, said she detested them, and resisted employing them in her school. There were fifty residents in Laurel Court and one lavatory. Boarders had a weekly bath with little water and no lingering and were in bed with the lights out by nine. There were pianos in many of the rooms and coal fires in winter. The place smelled of cats and there was an evil-smelling wolfskin rug in Miss Gibson’s sitting room. All the windows in the school were usually closed. There were no facilities for games or sports.
Miss Gibson, born Margaret Gibson in Mallow, County Cork in 1837, was the daughter of an Irish clergyman and a French mother. Her family moved to London after the devastation of the Irish potato famine of 1845. She was fluent in French and German so she went as a governess to Holland in the 1860s where
she met Annette Van Dissel. They formed an inseparable partnership, traveled to England together and in 1870, after being impressed by a sermon in the Cathedral by Bishop Magee, chose to make Peterborough their home. To earn their living they boarded and taught girls at their house at 2 South View in the London Road then “within a year” bought out Mrs. Freeman, the owner of Laurel Court School in the Minster Precincts.
Edith Cavell Page 2