Gentleman Jack

by Katy Derbyshire

  The ship’s passage as announced by the Halifax Guardian did not come about. Ann Walker returned to England by land. Did she hire a vehicle especially for the coffin? Or did it have to be loaded with the rest of the baggage? George Tchaikin probably took charge of the return journey; he and the heavily pregnant Domna wanted to be back in Moscow before winter set in. Ann Walker will have found the money for the trip waiting in Tbilisi, ordered by Anne Lister. Governor Golovin issued passes for Ann, her servants and the coffin, so that they could avoid the two-week quarantine after crossing the Caucasus.

  21 Anne Lister, posthumous c.1841, oil painting by Joshua Horner (assumed); Calderdale Leisure Services, Shibden Hall, Halifax.

  The outbound journey along the Georgian Military Road was incredibly strenuous; it is hard to imagine how it must have been with a heavy zinc coffin on the return leg. The time of year was at least more favourable, as the Cross Pass was snow-free in October. In Yekaterinogradskaya, George may well have suggested not taking the road via Astrakhan but the shorter route via Voronesh. They presumably arrived in Moscow at the end of November or in mid-December – having travelled 1,273 miles from Kutaisi. Ann went back to Mrs Howard’s hotel, where the travelling carriage with the rest of the luggage was still in storage. Needing to wait for the end of winter before continuing her journey, Ann had Anne’s coffin buried temporarily, according to Phyllis Ramsden. Did Count and Countess Panin or Princess Sophia Radzivill find words of consolation for Ann? She set off for home at the end of winter 1841. Did the travelling carriage pull the coffin after it on a trailer? We have no record of the route Ann Walker took across the almost two thousand miles from Moscow to Halifax, nor of whether Mr and Mrs Gross accompanied her.

  Ann arrived in Halifax on 24 April 1841, moving back into Shibden Hall, for which she had a life tenancy resulting from Anne Lister’s will. Five days after her arrival, she buried Anne Lister in the family crypt in the Parish Church on 29 April. It is impossible to tell where that place was. Anne’s half-destroyed slab now leans against the wall in the church entrance. Marian Lister will no doubt have come over from Market Weighton for her sister’s burial. Her relations with Ann Walker may have been rather frosty, now that the latter owned what Anne had kept from her sister. Marian lived another forty-one years in poverty, dying in 1882. Isabella Norcliffe and Mariana Lawton probably also paid visits to Ann Walker to find out more about Anne’s death. Isabella died five years later in 1846, at the age of sixty-one. Mariana Lawton lived until 1868, passing away before her husband Charles, whose death had once been the stuff of dreams for her and Anne.

  The renovations and extensions at Shibden Hall were almost finished. To this day, the house remains as Anne Lister envisaged it, though she never saw the work completed. The painter Joshua Horner delivered a posthumous portrait of James Lister, commissioned by Anne before her departure. Ann Walker, who had known Anne’s uncle, seems to have been happy with the painting, as she then ordered a portrait of Anne in the same format. Joshua Horner had met Anne Lister on several occasions but she never posed for him. Ann helped him recall her, discussing her posture, clothing and hair with him and giving him an amateurish miniature (see p. 45) as a model, which Horner made into a handsome oil painting. It is not certain how accurately he portrayed Anne Lister. The lady of Shibden Hall surely bore more signs of ageing on her death at forty-nine than the idealised thirty-year-old in the painting. Her upper lip is suspiciously fuzz-free.

  Only from the modest yields that Anne Lister’s assets brought in did Ann Walker find out how much her wife had actually owned. There was now only £4,000 left, much less than Anne had claimed to possess. Ann Walker must have realised that she herself had funded most of Anne Lister’s failed investments. Had Anne ever loved her? Or had she been lying to her from the very beginning? Ann sought answers to these questions in her wife’s diaries and letters. There are some indications that it was she who consigned the correspondence between Anne Lister and Mariana Lawton to the flames.2 Had she been able to decipher Anne Lister’s secret code and read about the early days of their own relationship, she might well have thrown the journals on the fire as well.

  Even after Anne Lister’s death, Ann Walker did not make up with her relatives in Halifax and Scotland. What would she have told the Priestleys and the Sutherlands? That they had been right all along to warn her about Anne Lister? George Sutherland considered Ann Walker easy prey. He began by convincing his wife Elizabeth that her sister needed Stephen Belcombe’s medical assistance again. He then hired the lawyer Robert Parker for the necessary legal proceedings to get Ann into the York mental asylum against her will. On 9 September 1843, the Sutherlands, the doctor and the lawyer broke into Shibden Hall along with the constable of Halifax. Ann fled to the Red Room on the top floor, locking the door behind her. Stephen Belcombe and Robert Parker told the constable to open it which he did by taking it off the Hinges – the Room was in a most filthy condition, and on the side of the Bed were a Brace of loaded Pistols. The lawyer described the situation, possibly dramatising to justify their behaviour. The Shutters were closed – an old dirty candle stick near the Bed was covered with Tallow, as if the Candle had melted away on it – Parker wrote, suggesting that Ann was no longer in control of fire and had to be protected from herself. Papers were strewn about in complete confusion. In the Red Room were a [great] many Handkerchiefs shatted [splattered] all over with Blood.3 With Ann requiring urgent medical attention, as he allegedly saw it, she was put straight into Stephen Belcombe’s asylum. We can assume Ann Walker was indeed suffering mentally after her traumatic journey across Europe with her wife’s corpse. Whether she really needed monitoring in a clinic is questionable. Ann must have come across Eliza Raine in the asylum, as she lived there until her death in 1860. Anne Lister’s first and last lovers were both declared insane.

  The moment Ann was out of the way, Captain Sutherland came up against a strong competitor for his sister-in-law’s income: Dr John Lister senior of Swansea. The latter disproved heartily of the life tenancy Anne Lister had granted her wife in her will, which Sutherland wanted to secure for himself. He tied Sutherland up in legal disputes over Ann Walker’s claim to Shibden Hall for years. Sutherland claimed to have not only legal rights on his side but moral ones too, emphasising how perfectly simple a matter it was for any designing or unprincipled person to deceive and dupe her; and I unhesitatingly say that Mrs Lister did so to an enormous extent. Step by step, I have traced the proceedings. She first instils into Miss Walker’s Mind a Mistrust and hatred of her closest relatives; when this is accomplished, she prevails on Miss Walker to leave her her estate, and, as if this was not sufficient injustice to her Family, she persuades her to direct that the proceeds of her Estate should be placed to her (Mrs Lister’s) credit during their absence abroad. Whether Miss Lister intended that Miss Walker should ever return, God only knows!! It was not Ann Walker who was Anne Lister’s victim, he claimed, but he himself: The injury Mrs Lister has done me, my wife and [son] I sincerely feel and who would not? 4

  Although Sutherland managed to keep John Lister senior at bay, he could not enjoy the fruit of his success. In the same year in which he had Ann Walker locked away, he lost his oldest son, twelve-year-old George Sackville. His wife, Ann’s sister Elizabeth, died the next year, 1844, at only forty-three. Only two years later, the widower married the very young Mary Elizabeth Haigh. He moved into Shibden Hall with her, his two young daughters and nine-year-old Evan Charles. He did not have long to savour the victory of becoming lord of the old country pile. George Sutherland died a year later, aged only forty-nine. He left a fortune of some £30,000 to his son.

  By that point, Ann Walker had returned to live at Lightcliffe. After two years in the York asylum, her eighty-eight-year-old aunt took pity on her and fetched her to Cliffe Hill in 1845. Ann Walker senior died two years later, in the same year as Captain Sutherland. Now forty-four, Ann Walker inherited from him the legal wrangles with John Lister senior, who was unable to d
ispute Ann’s legal claims to the property. However, she remained at Cliffe Hill, living with an Irish nurse until her death at the age of fifty-one in 1854. She left to her nephew what Anne Lister and George Sutherland had left to her, about £2,000 – a fraction of what she had once had.

  Evan Charles Sutherland dissolved the Walkers’ entire estate and moved back to Scotland. He sold the Walker family seat Crow Nest in Lightcliffe to Titus Salt, the founder of the Salt Mill and the Saltaire model workers’ village in Bradford. Ann Walker’s parental home no longer exists; its grounds have been converted to a golf course. The spacious Cliffe Hill has been divided up into flats. Lidgate, where Ann was living when she met Anne, is now surrounded by new houses. Only the old estate wall remains from the days when Anne Lister was such a frequent visitor.

  John, Muriel, Vivien, Phyllis, Helena, Jill & Angela

  A year after Ann Walker’s death, Dr John Lister senior took over Shibden Hall in 1855. From then on, the doctor divided his time between his practice on the Isle of Wight and the new family home in Halifax, where his wife, Louisa Anna Lister (née Grant), raised their three children, John junior, Charles and Anne. In 1856, Dr Lister sold Northgate House, which remained a hotel, just as Anne Lister had planned, until its demolition in 1961. Her casino was used as a theatre and cinema hall.

  John junior (1847–1933) became lord of Shibden Hall in 1867. As described in the Prologue, it was John who began researching Anne Lister with his ‘Social and Political Life in Halifax Fifty Years Ago’ series (1887–1892) in the Halifax Guardian. Unlike his Tory aunt, he was a founding member and treasurer of the Independent Labour Party, supporting workers’ rights, organising soup kitchens for strikers and standing as the first ever Labour candidate in Halifax in the 1893 general election, though he lost against the Liberal candidate. The founding president of the Halifax Antiquarian Society, he spent decades investing more money in voluntary activities on behalf of cultural institutions and schools than Shibden Hall brought in. He was close to bankrupt by 1923. In view of his great accomplishments, the town of Halifax purchased Shibden Hall from him and granted him life tenancy. Edward, Prince of Wales, the uncle of Queen Elizabeth II, opened Anne Lister’s landscape garden to the public in 1926. Sadly, her moss hut is no longer standing, probably sacrificed to railway works.

  Shibden Hall was converted into a museum in 1934; visitors can now view Anne Lister’s writing materials and her false curls. After visiting the house and gardens, those in need of a bite to eat or something stronger can walk the path she laid out, inaugurated in 1837 to commemorate Queen Victoria’s coronation, to Anne’s Stump Cross Inn on Godley Lane. These days, anyone can drink there, regardless of their politics.

  After John Lister died in 1933, the trainee librarian Muriel Green (1909–1997) viewed Shibden Hall. The books overflowed from the shelves onto the chairs and tables and even onto the floor. There were numerous large and dusty trunks containing leases, wills, accounts, recipes, funeral notes, diaries, letters etc. and from time to time another trunk or box of manuscripts would turn up from beneath a pile of lumber from some other part of the house.1 Over several years, Green compiled an inventory of the Shibden Hall Papers, dividing them into sections. As her dissertation project, Green transcribed 395 of Anne Lister’s 1,850 surviving letters and added editorial notes. She used the diaries found in John Lister’s ‘closet’ for dating purposes and to clear up tricky details. Thanks to Arthur Burrell’s key to Anne Lister’s code, Green realised who she was dealing with – and decided not to mention Anne’s love of women in her letter collection A Spirited Yorkshirewoman: The Letters of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall b. 1791 d. 1840 (1938). She later commented it would have cast a slur on the good name of the Lister family.2

  The historian Vivien Ingham (c.1918–1969) was the next researcher to work on Anne Lister. She looked into the diaries in the 1940s for a work about dress fashions in the period. Not until 1958, though, did she find time and opportunity to begin any real study of this vast quantity of material. This time I was joined, greatly to our mutual benefit and enjoyment, by my friend and our fellow-member, Mrs Phyllis M. Ramsden, BA, PhD. It appeared likely to us that the Journals had never before been read in their entirety, and this we decided to do.3 Dr Phyllis M. Ramsden (née Crowther) was married to the editor of the Halifax Courier and hoped to find material of more general interest.4 Vivien and Phyllis spent eleven years poring over the journals together, reading each of the twenty-four volumes twice over. Using the key to Anne’s secret code, the two jointly spelled their way through a great deal of lesbian sex. Did their elbows touch? Did their hands cross? Did Ramsden have reason to suspect anything of the unmarried Vivien Ingham?

  The two friends did not agree on how to deal with Anne Lister’s love life in any future publications. Ingham began a dissertation on ‘The Life of Anne Lister’ at the University of London in 1967; according to her adviser, Olive Anderson, she planned to cover Anne’s lesbianism (which there was no question of excluding).5 Ingham sketched out several chapters on Anne Lister’s travels and published an article about her ascent of the Vignemale in Alpine Journal in 1968 – the first publication on Anne Lister since John Lister’s series in the Halifax Guardian. Ingham described Anne as a forceful woman of great energy and masculine tendencies.6 In a longer version of this article for the Halifax Antiquarian Society, she varied her insinuation. She was tall by the standards of her time and in her long black coat and stout leather boots she could easily be mistaken for a man.7 By the time this second piece appeared in April 1969, Vivien Ingham had died. Her unfinished dissertation went to Phyllis Ramsden.

  After Ingham’s death, Ramsden attempted to establish her own interpretation of the coded passages in Anne Lister’s journals. Whereas Ingham had discovered many details of general interest in them, writing that no one with pretensions to serious study of the Journal can entirely ignore them,8 Phyllis Ramsden vehemently opposed this view. Her affection found her outlet among her own sex, Ramsden did concede in her article ‘Anne Lister’s Journal’ (1970); she was naturally drawn to the prettiest, gayest, most good-natured and most accomplished in domestic arts. However, there are long accounts in crypt-writing of her sentimental exchanges with her friends, excruciatingly tedious to the modern mind. All that Vivien Ingham had hoped to reveal, Phyllis Ramsden set about covering up again. It is natural to assume that these secret passages are of some special significance and must be deciphered at all costs. Fortunately this is not at all the case. With very few exceptions the passages in ‘crypt’-alphabet are of no historical interest whatever. Instead, they covered merely family and financial matters, but these passages can usually be identified by their context and are generally short enough to be quickly deciphered. Apart from this the ‘crypt’ passages tend to be purely personal, and it can be taken for granted that the longer the passage the less it is worth the tedium of decoding.9

  Despite her many years of research, Ramsden published only a single article on Anne Lister. Olive Anderson assumes the collection at the West Yorkshire Archive Service by the name of the Ramsden Papers might just as well be called the Ingham Papers. The collection contains long texts on Anne Lister’s travels, chronologies and dated excerpts from the encrypted passages.

  Ramsden died in 1985, sparing her the embarrassment of the first published edition of Anne Lister’s journals, including detailed citations from the coded passages. Helena Whitbread (born 1931), a mature student and mother of four, came across Anne Lister by chance. In 1984, she was looking for a research project in the Calderdale District Archive in her home town of Halifax. Did you know she kept a journal?10 the archivist asked her, and showed Whitbread a discouraging coded page on microfilm. Helena Whitbread was instantly fascinated. With the key by her side, she transcribed fifty pages of Lister’s diaries, week after week. In 1988 she published I Know My Own Heart: The Diaries of Anne Lister 1791–1840, featuring extracts from the years 1817–1824. In 1992 came No Priest But Love: The Journals of Anne Lis
ter 1824–1826. Parts of the British public reacted with shock. There were cries of forgery, which soon fell silent. Anne Lister’s diaries debunked the idea of chaste ‘romantic friendships’ between women put forth by Elizabeth Mavor (1971) and Lillian Faderman (1981). When the BBC broadcast the sugar-coated TV drama The Secret Diaries of Miss Anne Lister in 2010, a new edition of Whitbread’s first book was issued under the same title, with added extracts from 1816.

  After Helena Whitbread’s pioneering editions, eighty-three-year-old Muriel Green edited her 541 typed pages down to less than half the length and in 1992 published Miss Lister of Shibden Hall: Selected Letters (1800–1840).

  At that point, the social historian Jill Liddington (born 1946) undertook to transcribe and digitalise the entirety of Anne Lister’s journal. In preparation for a funding application she tallied up the amount to be transcribed, arriving to my horror11 at four million words. Liddington estimated that a complete transcription of Anne Lister’s diaries would take nine years. She therefore limited her project to the previously almost unknown partnership with Ann Walker. In Female Fortune: Land, Gender and Authority. The Anne Lister Diaries and Other Writings, 1833–36 (1998), Nature’s Domain: Anne Lister and the Landscape of Love (2003) and numerous articles, Liddington also examines Anne Lister’s political and entrepreneurial activities.

  I have had a similar experience with Anne Lister to all the women in her life – first she seduced me, then she betrayed me. What I liked even more than Anne Lister’s astoundingly open way of speaking about her desire was her certainty of herself: her desire was an expression of her nature, and that was that. She knew about her oddities and made sure everyone in Halifax and York knew of them too, more or less. Most of her lovers, however, did not consider themselves odd. In what we think of as the prudish pre-Victorian age, there seems to have been no great risk or consequence to women loving women and it was not thought wrong. They simply did not talk about it, and went on to marry apparently unsullied. Ann Walker proved just as brave as Anne Lister by moving in with her and sitting in the front pew with her at church. Despite anonymous marriage announcements ridiculing Captain Tom Lister and Ann Walker, the two women laid the foundation stone for the Northgate Hotel together, clearly a couple – an emancipatory milestone in the history of women loving women.