Notorious Victoria

by Mary Gabriel

  But Victoria’s love of speed caused problems with the local law enforcement in Worcestershire. One of her two chauffeurs, whom she referred to as “engineers,” was ticketed for “driving furiously.” He admitted that this wasn’t his first offense, though the others had occurred on the Continent, not in England. Victoria sent a note of apology to the judge and offered a demonstration drive.

  The local law enforcement brought attention to another of Victoria and Zula’s schemes as well, albeit indirectly. Not until July 1906, when a Miss Mabel Carlyon was fined for riding a bicycle without a light in Bredon’s Norton, was notice taken in the press of a “ladies’ college at the Manor House.” The scofflaw, the article noted, was one of the Manor House residents.

  IN 1899, The Humanitarian had run a piece titled “Woman in Agriculture” on the opening of the Lady Warwick Hostel in Reading, whose goal was to train women to be self-sufficient agriculturalists. The women were to undertake two years of training during which they’d learn dairy work, gardening, and beekeeping. The article noted, “There are many women, large landowners in England (the Editor of this magazine among them) who are interested in scientific agriculture and who believe that in this scheme lurk the germs of a great movement.”

  Seven years later, Victoria and Zula had embarked on a similar scheme at Bredon’s Norton. They had taken over the Manor House, which had been the principal property in the village for nearly two and a half centuries, for the purpose. Zula, and to a lesser degree Victoria, began developing it as a residential college and club for women similar to the Lady Warwick Hostel. In August of 1906, an agricultural show was held on the grounds of Norton Park, but while Victoria was given credit by the Earl of Coventry for inaugurating the show, it was actually the idea of a Warwick Hostel alumna named Edith Bradley who had settled in Bredon’s Norton.

  Zula told an interviewer from a local newspaper, the Morning Post, that the tendency in agriculture toward specialization and small-acreage farms made the prospect of farming more suitable for women. The college, with its meals and accommodations, would allow young women to concentrate on their work and also provide the camaraderie that farming life usually lacked. She may also have been looking for camaraderie herself.

  Victoria’s daughter was an enigma. She had remained in the shadow of her famous mother throughout her life, apparently content to play a supporting role in the Woodhull drama. By following her mother to Bredon’s Norton, she had given up almost any hope of a personal life. In London or New York, her situation might have been mitigated by the busy life of both cities, but in the country the isolation would have been extreme. She bore the responsibility of caring for her brother, Byron, who was now middle-aged, and her ever-needy mother. She wrote, “I worship my darling mother who is one of the first and best noblest of women. She has been persecuted and hounded until reason at many times wavered in the balance.” A close observer described the relationship in a letter to Zula. He wrote, “I think you are more her mother than she yours, if one may judge by the anxious care that your love bestows and her genius requires in watching her daily physical needs and in guarding her from her own delightfully capricious self.”

  Zula, perhaps happy to have an occupation, busied herself with her school, which she named the International Agricultural Club and School of Intensive Petite Culture. It included a full three-year course as well as short courses of varying intervals, some as little as one week. The school was equipped with a library, a secretary/typist, a telephone, and a telegraph office in the village. At its peak, it had thirty students enrolled, but it was neither successful nor long-lived, and by 1911 Zula and Victoria had transformed it into the Manor House Club, offering recreation to both men and women.

  An advertisement in The Cheltenham Looker-On read: “Manor House Club, a Country Salon, with 100 acres, 1½ miles from Bredon and Eckington stations. Club motor meets trains. 20 bedrooms for lady residents; separate furnished cottages for gentlemen; private golf links; boating on Avon; croquet; tennis; and good hunting. Facilities for studying Agriculture and Horticulture.”

  The secretary of the club was Luther Munday, a dapper London character with neat short hair parted in the middle and an equally neat trimmed mustache who was nearing retirement after a celebrated career in English social circles. He considered the Manor House posting his “swan song.”

  Munday set to work to attract visitors from among his circle of friends. In less than a year he boasted that the Manor House Club had “a really wonderful membership list.” Among the first was Countess Helena Gleichen, a cousin of King George, who used the club as her headquarters for part of the 1911–12 hunting season. Between April and August 1911, Munday recruited 296 other would-be members, among them the Duke of Beaufort, Count Samu Teliki of Hungary, HIH Prince Roland Bonaparte, Baron von Riepenshausen, and Baron Nicolas de Vay of Pisa. The titled members were joined by diplomats, lawyers, actors, writers, artists, musicians, members of the armed forces and the church, and, especially, the press.

  By February 1912, however, Munday was ready to retire and focus on his memoirs, though not before he had secured HRH Princess Christian of Schleswig Holstein, Queen Victoria’s daughter Helena, to be the club’s patron. That done, he declared his effort at Bredon’s Norton a success.

  It is difficult to imagine what Victoria felt about the idle rich in her midst, but it seems likely she was not particularly interested in the Munday set. She was less stimulated by title or wealth than by ideas. She had never even capitalized on a visit by King Edward VII, then Prince of Wales, to her London home at Hyde Park Gate. After Munday left his post as secretary, the club became a place not for a “social butterfly” but primarily for workers engaged in social service who needed rest and recuperation. It also became a place for artists, writers, and thinkers in search of solitude and companionship.

  EVEN BEFORE THE agricultural school failed and the titled set arrived, mother and daughter had already embarked on a new project more to Victoria’s liking. A Detroit Sunday News—Tribune article described their version of the project in a headline: “A Model School. Two American Women Found One in English Village. Widow and Step-Daughter of Millionaire Rescue Unkempt Farmers’ Children from Wretched Condition and Provide for Them Magnificently.”

  The mover behind the Bredon’s Norton school project was most likely Zula. Victoria’s name was attached to the effort, as it had been to the agricultural college, but taking over an elementary school required the energy of a much younger woman. Like the village itself, the school at Bredon’s Norton was in need of repair at the turn of the century. By 1907, Victoria and Zula decided to revoke the Church of England’s lease of the school building and run it themselves on the Froebel system, which stressed practical training and the development of individual character.

  Throughout his life, Byron Woodhull remained a living reminder for Victoria of the duties of motherhood and the tragedies of her first marriage. (Southern Illinois University, Morris Library Special Collections, Victoria Woodhull-Martin Papers, ca. 1916)

  They set about their plans without consulting either the Worcestershire County Council or local school officials. Perhaps because they owned the building they believed they could dictate what went on inside its classrooms without asking permission from the local authorities. Zula did notify the county council that she was hiring two teachers trained in the Froebel method and that she would supplement the government grant for their salaries with money of her own.

  But the county was unwilling to support the scheme either philosophically or financially. When the school opened in January 1908, it was privately owned and operated by Victoria and Zula.

  As the Detroit newspaper declared, the school did indeed appear to be a model of education. Students were instructed in divinity, history, geography, English language and literature, nature, science, drawing, painting, music, mathematics, cooking, sewing, carpentry, and gardening. Outdoor games were organized, uniforms were provided, nature walks were taken once a
week, and Victoria’s own doctor examined the children every two weeks. By April the school was attracting children from up to three miles away and there was talk of hiring a bus to bring children from five surrounding villages to study at the Bredon’s Norton Froebel School.

  Despite satisfying both students and parents, the school did not meet government standards. In the summer of 1909, an inspector determined the Bredon’s Norton school to be inadequate, saying its standards of discipline and moral training were too low. Zula promised to take steps to meet the government’s standards but by December 1909 the school was closed. Victoria’s “hobby,” as one county councillor called it, ultimately cost Bredon’s Norton its school: the children were sent to continue their education in a neighboring village. Victoria tried to make amends for the loss by providing hot dinners for the children who were sent out of their hamlet to school.

  In subsequent years, Victoria became the village’s “fairy godmother.” She was the unseen presence who gave the residents elaborate Christmas parties and gifts each year, turned her barn into a theater for the village’s entertainment, supported youth movements, allowed the Boy’s Brigade to hold its camp on the grounds of Norton Park, and had as her protégés the Bredon’s Norton troop of Boy Scouts. She made every effort to improve the life of the children in the village even if she could not provide them with a school.

  By the time World War I broke out in 1914, Victoria, then almost seventy-six, was fully engaged in making sure that her village would be able to endure the hardships and that its people were mobilized to support the troops. One of her first acts after the outbreak of war was to distribute to every household in Bredon’s Norton vegetable plants and seeds to provide winter and spring food, as well as sugar for making jam. She sponsored lectures on home economy to help mothers through the hard times and provided instruction to the young girls in the village on canning fruit.

  For the larger war effort, Victoria worked with the Red Cross. As early as September 1914 she sponsored the Children’s Harvest Home program to raise money for the Red Cross; she provided material for women to make flannel shirts for soldiers; she sent food to the nearby Red Cross hospital at Tewkesbury; and she began entertaining wounded soldiers at the Manor House by May 1915. She sponsored lectures to inform local residents on the progress of the war and held the Women’s Land Fete to emphasize the importance of women’s work in agriculture while men were away at war.

  When the United States entered the war in 1917, Victoria began flying the American flag over Norton Park. She had eagerly anticipated the arrival of U.S. troops in Europe. She could not tolerate the fact that her country had not come to the assistance of its allies earlier. Since 1911 she had been involved in an effort to commemorate the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent, which had ended American-British hostilities, and more recently she had committed time, energy, and money to securing George Washington’s ancestral home, Sulgrave Manor, for the cause of “Anglo-American Friendship.” For Victoria, World War I fed her obsession concerning the countries’ ties. After the war ended in 1918, she promoted the idea of a formal alliance between the two nations as the only way to secure lasting peace in Europe. She even made the grand gesture of offering to donate the Manor House and adjoining Hermes Lodge to the new Sulgrave Movement, which had been formed to further the alliance. Victoria’s offer received international attention and even royal approval. The Prince of Wales said he “greatly appreciated” her gesture. But, in fact, whether by Victoria’s intentional delay or a fallout between the British and American Sulgrave groups, the property was never transferred out of Zula’s hands.

  BREDON’S NORTON, JUNE 9, 1927

  The war effort and the Anglo-American alliance flurry were Victoria’s final spurts of activity. She was a small, lovely old woman, with gray hair swept back off her face and a jaw still firmly set, but she had no more battles to fight, except those against death. She had KISMET and NIKH printed into the molding above the doors of her house and painted on its paned glass as a kind of talisman against the final, inevitable defeat. She saw death in any form as a bitter cruelty. A gardener who worked at Norton Park remembered the old woman tapping on the window of the great house from inside and ordering him to stop straightening a path. She shouted, “Those weeds have the courage to grow in the path of man and you murdered them.”

  She prowled her home and gardens but rarely engaged anyone and failed to attend even those functions that honored her generosity. She had a card printed up that announced, “I do not shake hands from a sanitary standpoint. Victoria C. Woodhull.”

  Victoria had outlived most of her contemporaries. Henry Ward Beecher had never been hurt by any of the scandal surrounding him. Far from diminishing his stature, the odor of scandal only enhanced the preacher’s appeal. By the end of his career he was so secure in his power that he was lecturing on the abolition of hell, perhaps thinking that if it didn’t exist he wouldn’t have to worry about going there. Whatever the reason, he had tackled the hell issue just in time: on March 8, 1887, the reverend died of a stroke.

  Both principals in the Tilton household had also died: Elizabeth, lonely and blind at her daughter’s home in Brooklyn, and Theodore in Paris. He had lived there alone in an attic room on the Ile St-Louis, writing bad poetry and playing chess with the former secretary of state for the Confederacy, Judah P. Benjamin. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had both died too, without having secured the vote for women despite a half century of trying. And in 1923, Tennie died.

  The two once-inseparable sisters had been estranged for years. Tennessee’s marriage to Francis Cook had been an unhappy one. Early on, Victoria recognized Cook as “an old man libertine” who, she said, “openly insulted” Tennessee and boasted about it. Under John Martin’s guidance, Victoria had distanced herself from her sister’s domestic troubles and had remained distant even after Cook died in 1901.

  Tennie appeared to grieve neither the loss of her husband nor the separation from her sister. Shortly after Cook’s death, she established a bank in London that she called Lady Cook & Co., but it closed just as quickly as it opened. She tried to revive her scheme of a salon, the same enterprise she had once hoped in New York would be funded by Vanderbilt or Rothschild. This time she had the money to finance the plan herself and a card was submitted to local newspapers signed by “Carlton” that read, “Lady Cook, the wife of Sir Francis Cook, whose death has been reported, managed to create quite a literary and artistic circle around her, her invitations embracing nearly everybody of note in London and with no other motive than that of bringing clever and distinguished people together.”

  She also took her enthusiastic mourning to America, where she brought reporters with her on a tour of the Ludlow Street jail and described her ordeals there in 1872. She interviewed Theodore Roosevelt on women’s suffrage and in 1914, on behalf of the war effort, she proposed organizing an amazon army of women.

  Tennie was as irrepressible as ever and even more beautiful. Her full cheeks had hollowed and her mane of brown curls had turned silver. When she delivered a lecture at the Albert Hall in London on “The Present Revision of Morals and Laws,” she drew a crowd of seven thousand. Victoria was not among them, however.

  On January 18, 1923, Lady Cook, the former Miss Tennessee Claflin, died at the home of her grandniece Lady Utica Celeste Beecham at the age of seventy-seven. She left no will. Victoria briefly noted her sister’s passing in a distracted line: “To be buried at West Norwood in the Cook vaults very peaceful & happy & talked so sweetly & lovingly of Mrs. Martin.”

  In fact, by 1924 Victoria was spoken of sweetly by nearly everyone. On her eighty-sixth birthday, a delegation representing the villagers visited her at Norton Park to present an album containing a letter of congratulation signed by every inhabitant of Bredon’s Norton. She accepted the gift and, reverting in a half-hour burst to the Victoria of old, described “in forcible language” her philosophy of life. The delegation was said to have come a
way “impressed with the greatness of her aims and the largeness of her soul.” Her acts of charity and efforts on behalf of the village had earned her the title Lady Bountiful.

  Zula Maud Woodhull was featured in the British society journal Country Life on June14, 1902, but she always remained in her mother’s shadow. (By Permission of the British Library)

  VICTORIA HAD ACQUIRED an apartment in the seaside town of Brighton for the benefit of her health and that of her now sixty-eight-year-old son, Byron, and was ferried between there and Bredon’s Norton in her latest car, “a powerful Talbot-Darracq.” By 1925 she was no longer able to climb the paths behind Norton Park, so Zula had a road built to the summit of Bredon’s Hill—described in the local press as a “remarkable engineering feat”—in order to provide her mother with a view of the rolling landscape. Victoria spent her days sitting back in her automobile while her driver sped through the countryside, and at night she slept upright in a chair for fear she would die if she reclined. But she knew the end was approaching quickly. She left instructions: “There must be no screws used when I embark my ashes by loving hands I wish thrown into the sea. I do not want the world family to annoy my child they have never understood her.”

  For her son, she made the provision that if Zula should die before her, “Byron Woodhull shall be placed with some private family where he will be treated with kindness and that my Trustees shall make such other arrangements for his comfort and happiness as they shall think fit.”

  For Zula, she provided a fortune of £181,722.