Source Database

Section 6: Women Friends

(6.1) In her book From One Generation to Another, Hilda Martindale described her mother’s relationship with Margaret Bondfield.

My mother kept open house for another set of women whom she began to think were oppressed, as undoubtedly they were in the eighties – shop assistants. Among them came an eager, attractive, and vividly alive girl of 16, Margaret Bondfield. She was working in one of the large draper’s shops in Brighton and was not happy. She needed sympathy and was ready to talk when she found her hostess really wanted to listen. She told her about "living in" and all that it meant – sleeping in bare, dingy, stuffy dormitories, intolerably hot in summer, miserably cold in winter; never being alone, even to wash; no place to keep one’s things except a box under the bed, fines for entering the dormitory in the daytime, nights spent with a poor consumptive girl who coughed and coughed… My mother gained not only a friend who has always remained faithful to her memory, but an insight into the conditions under which shop girls were employed.

Your mother is one of the great immortals who cannot die as long as memory lasts. She was a vivid influence in my life, the first woman of broad culture I had met, she seemed to recognise me and make me recognise myself as a person of independent thought and action… my first talk with your mother was the great event of that period of my life…. She put me in the way of knowledge that has been of help to many score of my shop mates. She lent me books on social questions, which prepared me to take my proper place in the Labour movement.

One girl began to wait and wanted to take me to my bus, to accompany me home. I took a violent dislike to her and tried to evade her. She sent me presents of jewellery which I gave back to the school porter who took them with a sympathetic grin and promised to deliver the parcel to her. Some of the girls had devoted friendships, which were both normal and healthy, as in fact I had with Joan and Phyllis. But this obsession on the part of XY, as I will call her, suddenly struck me as something ugly, alarming, unhinged. What did it mean? I was twenty-eight years old and considered myself well versed in the ways of the world. I knew about the work of Josephine Butler who had devoted her energies to the moral elevation, protection and reclamation of women from the dangers of prostitution. Dr. Martindale’s Under the Surface and Elizabeth Robin’s Where Are You Going To had further indoctrinated me about the evils of the White Slave Traffic. I was familiar with the problems of illegitimacy, abortion and ‘living in sin’, though I never remember such matters being topics of conversation in ordinary society, nor even among the medical students of my day. But of homosexuality I knew nothing

In the early summer of 1909, when I was twenty-one, I met Elizabeth Robins. It was a turning point in my life… I had always read omnivorously and longed to write myself, and to meet so distinguished an author in the flesh was a terrific adventure. It was a small family luncheon at Phyllis Buxton’s house. Elizabeth Robins was dressed in a blue suit, the colour of speedwell, which matched her beautiful deep-set eyes. I was introduced as Phyllis’s friend who lives near Henfield. ‘A neighbour then?’ Said Elizabeth Robins, and with a charming grace and in an unforgettable voice asked me if I would come to tea one day and she would show me her modest little garden.

A new friend and very devoted is Octavia Wilberforce. She is interesting and far more gifted than anybody knows except me. She can go far if she makes up her mind.

Kiss me, you said tonight and my heart went out to you in a flood… At the back of my mind I shall be kissing you all your voyage across and you can’t mind that because it will only be in my mind, not the contacts you don’t like.

Margery’s mother, Marie Corbett, was an ardent Feminist, one small external sign being the fact that she regularly wore the breeches she had taken to when bicycling came in, at least a decade before war-time made them permissible. She was a woman of great drive, active in local affairs and local government and all good causes. The house was apt to swarm with people. The Corbett’s hospitality was in the best English tradition. Friends of Margery, of her younger sister Cicely – extravagantly pretty, and at the time we were at Cambridge, preparing to go Oxford and of her elder brother Adrian, then at Oxford, assembled for dances and week-end parties…. At college Margery was intensely keen on civil liberties, free trade, international good will, democracy… She spends time and energy without stint or personal ambition… She has an immense sense of duty, and must have spent a very large part of her entire life on committees and at meetings. Not to like her is and always has been impossible; she has charm and complete sincerity, and has made a success of life, in its essential relationships. She was a good daughter: she is a good wife and mother. The one boy, born during the 1914 war, when his father was in France with the B.E.F., was, as a baby, so delicate that it did not seem possible he should live; Margery insisted that he should; he has grown up a superb physical specimen.

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