by Mary Gabriel
Martin’s doctors recommended that he leave London for the winter and he determined to go to the Canary Islands, but he could not persuade Victoria to go with him. In his diary, John hinted that there were “matters” that Victoria refused to allow to “take their own course,” but it could also have been that she was too sick to travel.
The night before he left, John Martin wrote his father, “I have determined to get to Tenerife on the ‘Lusitania’ which sails tomorrow about noon. . .. My great drawback is that I am afraid that I shall not be able to persuade Victoria to come with me and she is as much in need of a change as I am, & is already very much depressed: I am afraid that this condition will not be improved by my going away, & I am quite anxious at leaving her alone. Since she has so few to whom she can turn for any really friendly feeling.”
On January 13, 1897, John Martin left England alone. He wrote from the ship, “My own dear little wife, you will have heard that I got myself safely on board; it is very cold as we are steaming down the river, & I have time to write you a line which should reach our dear little nest by tomorrow morning—it will be landed at Dover tonight. I don’t know where it will find you, when it does I shall be leaving land with no chance of hearing of you for a week.
“I cannot bear to be going away from you to get well, when you want health as much as I do, as when you want me day & night to support & strengthen you. Wherever you are while I am away, be sure that I am with you get yourself well & be very careful of yourself that we may meet again strong & able to put down all who have caused us so much unhappiness. Remember as I do that all the happiness we have had has been when we could look on the world outside, & be happy together in our dear home & let us look forward to better days, when we shall go together & do our work with health & strength to help us—God bless you now & always, my own dear wife.”
On January 15 Victoria responded, “My precious husband, . . . your dear letter lies next to my heart and it breathes to me of love and fidelity, God bless and watch over you in the constant prayer of your devoted wife.”
January 25: “My darling husband here I am again in the north room worrying about you. I went down to [?] stayed four days it was bitterly cold and bleak all the time my lungs were very painful and I dared not risk the drafts—My heart followed you every hour and longed to be near you fearing you might catch a fresh cold. Oh how lonely our dear home is but thank God you are in a more sympathetic climate than London. The snow is falling now and I am chilled to the bone. I shall be delighted when I see again your handwriting. I know the message it will convey.”
February 1: “Dear little wife, I wonder whether this letter will ever reach you; may it find you safe and well wherever you may be. I am out of the world; there are 24 hours of mountain-path before the mule that carries the mail will reach any civilized place, there is no telegraph, no newspapers. . .. I left all these things three days ago, but after leaving the last outpost I heard that there is a telegram for me at Orotava, how I think & think what it may have to say to me!”
February 26: “Darling husband . . . Oh could we but live our life over again those who have made us suffer so intensely might attempt in vain to disturb the tranquility of our hearts—I cannot bear to see them or hear their voices get well and we shall yet see some happy days together.”
February telegram: “Precious husband live for my sake my heart is breaking—my soul is with you are better Mizpah.”
February telegram: “When coming home heart anxious, Mizpah.”
March 6: “Dear little wife, I shall therefore sail tonight for the most remote of all the islands & be cut off from the world for 10 days. Then I shall get back here, on 16th, & on 20th I hope, take one of the steamers to England so that I ought to be back to you and to our dear home before the end of the month. I wish I had you here. . .. I hope that this will duly reach you. God bless & keep you till we meet, & always keep your heart happy, & all will be well, & we will be happy together in the future as in the past. God bless you dear little wife.”
March 18 telegram to Victoria about John Martin from a hotel manager in Las Palmas: “Very ill but no immediate danger will wire again.”
Victoria responds in wild handwriting with inch-high letters: “My precious husband, I only heard yesterday morning that you were ill—it has broken my heart to think of you so far off and suffering and I cannot go to you. Oh my husband I am so weary of life since you left I have not been well and I have aged so you would not care to see me. Oh my God take care of my boy is the prayer that reaches heaven hourly from my lips . . . can you hear me call you this moment my soul speaks to you. Live for my sake we may be happy yet. Mizpah.”
March from Las Palmas: “Martin worse in danger fourth day illness, Doctor Melland.”
March 20, Las Palmas: “Afraid Martin sinking no use coming, Doctors Melland and Collam.”
March 20, Las Palmas: “Your dear husband died this afternoon please wire directions immediately.”
March 21, Las Palmas: “Dear Mrs. Martin, I am sending you a few lines about your husband’s terribly acute and sudden illness, and hope to write more fully later on. He was taken ill while on the Island of Lanzarote last Sunday night the 14th of March with rigors and very severe pain at the base of the right lung as if a knife were there. . .. He landed here on Tuesday morning early, very ill. He was delirious all that night and never took off his clothes. . .. I saw he was very ill and that he had got pleuro-Pneumonia. . .. On Saturday morning he became delirious and unconscious and passed away at three in the afternoon, yours truly Brian Melland MSC MB Lord.”
John Martin was fifty-five. His body was brought back to London by his nephew Robert Holland and cremated in Woking on April 6 while the bells at the church in Overbury rang in tribute. His obituary in The Humanitarian declared him to be “chivalrous, long-suffering, and generous; a gentleman in the truest sense of the word, in a sense which an old writer used it when he defined the term as: ‘A man and strong, a man and good, a man and gentle.’”
LONDON, DECEMBER 1901
In July 1897, John Martin’s will was read. In an odd twist of fate, Martin’s eighty-eight-year-old father, Robert, had died three days before him. In addition to part of his personal fortune, Robert Martin had bequeathed to his son a family property at Bredon’s Norton, as well as other hamlets and a field at Kemerton in Gloucestershire. All this was passed on to Victoria through her husband, from whom she also inherited the house in Hyde Park Gate and nearly all its contents. All told, Victoria’s inheritance had a net value of £147,129; she had also become the largest shareholder in Martin’s Bank. It was a sad example of what a Worcestershire canon called Victoria’s “amazing good fortune.” If Robert Martin had outlived his son, Victoria would have inherited only one hundred pounds upon her father-in-law’s death; the portion of the estate originally marked for her husband would not have come to her. But because the father died before the son, Victoria was left an extremely wealthy and propertied widow.
Following Martin’s death, Victoria sought refuge in her work on The Humanitarian and in her daughter, Zula. In December of that year she told an interviewer that she wanted her “daughter to be recognized as fully sharing in all [her] labours and interests.” Zula took the place of John Martin at The Humanitarian and was given the title associate editor.
The interviewer asked, “And of yourself, Mrs. Martin, what is there to say?”
“Nothing. I am absolutely identified with the work of the magazine, and give much time and thought to its welfare.” She added, “[My] least care is for effects, causes are all I am interested in.”
An odd letter, which may or may not have been written by Victoria to herself but which certainly bears her “corrections” (Victoria had an odd habit of editing letters sent to her), suggests her sense of loss in the year following her husband’s death: “To-day I see you standing alone and although your financial foundation is solid yet it does not bring you rest and happiness. Why should it. It is good for it
s uses when I look back to those days of your power I wonder it seems so far away and so wonderful . . . and what of to-morrow? Is the question with you today. It is not your nature to lay still. Your temperament is of the active type. A kingdom to conquer. I don’t see you so restless as in the days gone by—but I feel a sad tired feeling—a . . . lonesomeness. And a soul asking of what is life—wealth only shows you the falsity of life. They would flock to you for material things—so different from those way back who came to you because they understand the truth and your mission. What does one gain if they get the world and lose soul power?”
Victoria became detached, apparently content to work in her library at 17 Hyde Park Gate, which she filled with American mementos—prints of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln—and where the American flag was intertwined with the British above the door. Busts of Seneca and Minerva looked down upon her where she worked next to volumes by Herbert Spencer and other great thinkers.
Not surprisingly, after Martin’s death The Humanitarian began probing questions of life and death and Victoria’s growing horror of disease. Articles were published in which the author wondered if spirits could be photographed. Pieces titled “Is Life Worth Living?” and “The Art of Dying” were featured. The magazine also began running a series of articles on the spread of infection and the presence of germs on telephones, in rail carriages, and on circulating library books. One article focused on a study that showed how “a man in the act of speaking distributes germs throughout a considerable space about him.” Another issue contained a piece on the unhealthiness of long skirts, which train on the ground and collect “whole colonies of microbes and bacilli.”
By 1900, Victoria was preparing to leave the city and its teeming germ colonies and head to the country. She planned to retreat to the estate she had inherited.
VICTORIA HAD NEVER felt fully accepted by the Martin family. In letters to her husband she repeatedly questioned whether they approved of her and indicated that she had convinced herself otherwise. It is likely that the mere contemplation of the move to Norton Park, the family home she inherited at Bredon’s Norton, revived those anxieties, whether real or imagined.
In a bizarre and anguished note she wrote about herself, “By a strange irony she allied herself in marriage to the scion of a race that stood high and stands high, for tradition! tradition! tradition!!! Martin the bankers represent the very soul of conservatism—its best is the trust it inspires—its worst is its inability to see the signs of the times. . .. But, she conquered even in this, for if the time is not yet ripe it soon will be when the Martins will honor the independence of the woman who entered their guarded fold and took their finest representative into her visionary realms.”
In 1900, she expressed her concerns in Claflin-family fashion by dredging up a controversy that did not exist. She wrote to Richard Martin, her late husband’s brother, expressing concern that the family planned to take legal action against her; she also wondered if they had disposed of her husband’s ashes as instructed in his will.
“Dear Victoria,” Richard responded, “you have reported to me that certain scandalous reports have been circulated in and about Norton to your annoyance & detriment. So far as regard certain of these statements I beg emphatically to say that there is & never has been any question of a lawsuit between any member of my branch of the family (the Overbury branch as specifically stated) as to the Norton estates or any other matter whatever, on the contrary, we have always had the most friendly relations. With regard to the ashes of my late brother John, I desire to say that they were entrusted to our nephew for disposal and have been disposed of in a decent & proper manner. . .. Pray do not give any attention to the ridiculous gossip of a petty village or by taking any legal or public action to draw attention to the existence of such gossip which you can afford to treat with perfect contempt.”
Their nephew Robert Holland also responded to Victoria’s lawyers. He wrote, “Dear sirs, in reference to the report that my late uncle Mr. John Biddulph Martin’s ashes were thrown to the wind on Bredon Hill, I assure you that there is no foundation for such a report. My uncle’s ashes were placed in a box and buried by me at sea. You and my aunt are to be the only persons who shall know this.”
Apparently satisfied that she could move to the country unmolested by the family, Victoria began readying the house at Norton Park. In November 1900, she endowed the small church at Bredon’s Norton with a brass-eagle lectern in memory of her husband. In February 1901, she announced in The Humanitarian that she had just installed an acetylene gas generator at Norton Park. By November she had transferred the estate to Zula and in December she announced The Humanitarian’s last issue.
Farewell. By the Editor:
With the current number, the Humanitarian comes to a close, after a career of nearly ten years. . .. I have determined to bring it to an end with the close of this year. This decision has not been taken without serious thought. But the mental strain in carrying on a magazine of this nature from month to month has been very great, and other causes, on which it is unnecessary to dwell, have combined to make the strain greater still. Moreover, many of the subjects which I have dealt with in these pages and elsewhere, have come to be freely discussed on the platform and in the Press—questions which at the time I first dealt with them, required unusual courage to grapple with, especially social questions.
Victoria concluded, “It is with regret that I remember this is the last time I shall speak through the pages of the Humanitarian.”
BREDON’S NORTON, AUGUST 1914
The village to which Victoria moved in 1901 was in sorry shape. The house, Norton Park, had been unoccupied for ten years and the village’s population during that time had dropped nearly 16 percent. The new chaplain, Reverend William J. E. Saywell, said that the “sad and neglected state” of the hamlet was “hard to describe in words.” He and Victoria set to work to revive the place. As the lady of the manor, she had the village cleaned up, streetlights installed and maintained, and postal service improved. She secured a telephone exchange for Bredon’s Norton and provided phones for the local farmers, ordered derelict buildings torn down, and designated a site for a village reading room. A local newspaper said of the effort, “Sleepy hollow has been subjected to a series of galvanic shocks.”
But Victoria’s efforts to transform Bredon’s Norton into a “model town” met with bitterness from the local residents. According to the mistress of the local church school, Rosina Evans, the problem was that in undertaking the village modernization, Victoria had neglected to consult the residents. Evans had warned Victoria as early as 1898, telling her to “improve gradually; they have funny ideas.” But neither Victoria nor Reverend Saywell heeded the warning. The chaplain said that, as a result, “no one next to our Lord has been more cruelly misjudged and spoken ill of than Mrs. Biddulph Martin.”
A vandal even made a point of expressing his displeasure with Victoria’s attempts at improvement. On October 3, 1904, the eight iron light standards that Victoria had installed were destroyed. Someone climbed the posts, removed the lamps, smashed the glass chimneys, and stomped on the oil reservoirs. A twenty-five-pound reward was offered for information leading to a conviction, but the criminal was never caught.
It was a tempest not unlike those Victoria had encountered throughout her life whenever she pushed for change, but in miniature. She did not desert Norton Park in the face of the hostility, but neither was she insensitive to it. In random notes she wrote, “Mrs. Martin’s surroundings are dead against the mission of her life—geographically she could hardly be more alone—in the inheritance of the property of her husband she is placed in the very hot-bed or rather damp sheets of dead Old England’s self-centered, self-satisfied village life.”
The villagers rarely saw her. Victoria lived above the village on Bredon’s Hill in a Tudor-style mansion made of Cotswold yellow stone, with high-pitched gables, mullioned and painted-glass windows, huge fireplaces, paneled walls, and ten
stables. From the top of Bredon’s Hill could be viewed the Severn Valley, with the Malvern Hills on one side and the Cotswolds on the other. But the view from Victoria’s home midway up Bredon’s Hill was just as magnificent. Wild primrose covered the west lawn, with tulips in front and apple trees in the distance. Walled vegetable gardens and mossy green grazing fields, gentle rolling hills and paths named after Tennyson and Swinburne, combined to give the fifteen hundred acres in her charge a feeling of utter serenity. The red-brick village lay at the base of the property, but even its proximity could not mar the sensation of being a world apart.
Besides, Victoria had a new love to help her escape when village life became too stultifying—the automobile. She had discovered the joy of bicycling earlier, and now the four-wheeled conveyance with its speeds of twenty miles per hour caught her fancy. As with everything, she turned motoring into a crusade. She was the first woman to drive through Hyde Park in London and the first to take a driving tour on English country roads. She and her daughter also were the first women to “motor from England through France and back again.” For that excursion they drove a white Mercedes Simplex, which was described as the best of the “little flotilla” of cars kept at Norton Park. The trip took them to Nice, Beaulieu, Monte Carlo, Menton, and Paris.
At age sixty-five, Victoria and other like-minded women formed the Ladies Automobile Club, which first met in June 1904. This “exclusive social company of ladies” was led by the Duchess of Sutherland as president. Victoria’s place in the line of cars was number four, out of sixty. On the occasion of the group’s first meeting, the cavalcade drove past Buckingham Palace where the Queen had once “given her cachet to this mode of locomotion for ladies.”