Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention. Cathy Newman

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      2

       Old Battles, New Women

      1880–1914

      By the 1880s, when our tale roughly begins, a time-traveller from Britain at the start of the nineteenth century would have found much of the country unrecognisable. Its urban centres, linked by a sophisticated rail network, boasted street lighting, paved roads and – if you were lucky – state-of-the-art sewers. In the industrial north and Midlands, especially, these towns and cities were thrumming symbols of imperial pomp and civic pride. Just beyond them, in soon-to-be suburbia, the sort of houses many of us still inhabit were being thrown up at breakneck speed.

      But one thing remained resolutely unchanged. Politics was still a game played almost entirely by men – and old men at that. Benjamin Disraeli was sixty-nine when he became Prime Minister in 1874. William Gladstone, who succeeded him in 1880, was seventy at that point – and eighty-two by the time he was elected for the fourth time in 1892. Queen Victoria was dismayed at the prospect of her precious empire being at the mercy of the ‘shaking hand of an old, wild and incomprehensible man’. But then she had always disliked Gladstone, once complaining of the esteemed orator: ‘He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting.’

      Queen Victoria had to get along with ten British prime ministers during her reign, which gives you a sense of just how much change she witnessed.

      The nineteenth century was a time of massive expansion, especially for London. The capital’s population rose from 960,000 in 1801, when the first national census was taken, to nearly 6.6 million by 1901 – roughly the same as the combined populations of Paris, Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg.1 Cities swelled because of migration from rural areas: the aftershocks of 1873’s agricultural depression, triggered by a collapse in grain prices, didn’t ease until the 1890s.

      Immigration was also a factor in this urban drift. Jews fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe and Irish Catholics escaped from poverty and famine. In 1765, the Morning Gazette estimated there were 30,000 black servants in the country.2 After slavery’s abolition the numbers fell dramatically, though there would still have been a significant black presence in ports like Cardiff, Liverpool and Grimsby, as well as London, where, according to Peter Ackroyd, most former slaves and their offspring were absorbed into society’s underclass as beggars and crossings-sweepers and became ‘almost invisible’.3

      This might be overstating it. You don’t have to look far to find examples of visible black Victorian Britons,4 but history books tend to have less to say about the women than the men. Or perhaps there were just fewer of them. Nurse-cum-hotelier Mary Seacole is now as well known among primary school children as her supposed rival Florence Nightingale (in fact, the two were on friendly terms), and was in many respects as effective a nurse on the killing fields of the Crimea. The African-American actor and playwright Ira Aldridge moved to London and had two daughters, Luranah and Amanda, who both became opera singers.5 Laura Bowman, the African-American star of the musical In Dahomey – so popular it was performed at Buckingham Palace on 27 June 1903 – settled in Wimbledon with her common-law husband and performing partner Pete Hampton. Jane Roberts, a former slave who also moved to London from America and lived in a quiet street off Battersea Park, died in 1914, aged ninety-five. She’s buried in Streatham cemetery: plot 252, class H, block F.6 Caroline Barbour-James and her five children moved from Guyana to west London in 1905. Upright Christians, they were always so smart and clean that local working-class youths thought they were millionaires.7

      There was a fuss when the most recent BBC adaptation of E. M. Forster’s Howards End gave the Schlegel siblings a black maid. It was anachronistic, some said. Political correctness gone mad. But as Jeffrey Green’s fascinating Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain 1901–1914 shows, there were plenty of women of African descent in domestic service in Britain at this time, for example Ann Styles, a freed slave from Jamaica who moved to London in around 1840 with the white family she worked for. She continued in their service all her working life. Green’s own grandmother, Martha Louisa Vass, worked as a maid for a suffragette. Vass worked every day, often late into the night when the woman gave dinner parties. Every other Sunday she was allowed the afternoon off.

      And then there’s Sara Forbes Bonetta, who deserves to be far better known. In 1850, at the age of around eight, Bonetta was delivered by a Captain Frederick E. Forbes to Queen Victoria as a ‘gift’ from King Ghezo of Dahomey, in what is now Benin in West Africa. Forbes named her after his ship, the HMS Bonetta, which had been patrolling the area with orders to intercept and destroy any slaving vessels.

      Forbes worried about the ‘burden’ of bringing a child back on the ship but concluded he had no choice as Sara was now the property of the crown. He saw for the girl a future as a missionary and wrote her a glowing character reference:

      For her age, supposed to be eight years, she is a perfect genius; she now speaks English well, and has a great talent for music. She has won the affections with but few exceptions, of all who have known her; by her docile and amiable conduct, which nothing can exceed. She is far in advance of any white child of her age, in aptness of learning, and strength of mind and affection … Her mind has received a moral and religious СКАЧАТЬ