July 1899 continued
Alice Pollock and Alice and Emily Fletcher brought some of the children for the day. Fred, Mary Usley, Emily, Polly, Jack Alice, Jimmy, Wally, the new child Charlotte and Deb and Mrs Broadrill. They had lunch and tea here. It was luckily a delicious hot day. The Alices and Dorothy went to see George. Imo went to London.
These are the children from Southwark that Antonia taught at the Settlement. Antonia stopped going to Southwark almost immediately after her marriage suggesting that, on the whole, the activity was considered more suitable for single women.
Meg to London. She and Imo met Charles and went to the Eton and Harrow and came back here to dinner.
Mr Huxley came to take out the stiches. George tired but more comfortable.
In 1876 British surgeon Sir Joseph Lister—who helped introduce the concept of antiseptic surgery—gives a presentation at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition’s Medical Congress that inspires medicated plaster maker Robert Wood Johnson to start Johnson & Johnson, aimed at furthering the cause of sterile surgery. “In those times, surgeons used to operate in their street clothes, and would carry the same instruments and dressings from patient to patient, not even cleaning them in between use,” Johnson & Johnson start manufacturing sterile sutures in 1887 (made of either catgut or silk) as well as surgical dressings, cotton and gauze[1] so it is likely that George’s stitches were made out of sterilised silk or cat gut.
Charles went back to Ludgrove[2] in the evening.
Too hot almost for George but very very lovely.
2:30 pm Tuesday July 20th 1899 Dearest, I hope that the three men in the Brougham (to say nothing of the bags[3]) got safely to the train and to London and that you are now being feasted by Messers Thorley on the successful termination of the case in which you have chivalrously defended the poor down trodden feeders of cattle from the unscrupulous Magree. We have been, as usual, much divided in our occupations this morning except that I sat and sewed for a long time whilst Imo practiced the works of Weber and Bach. We are now going to look at Sidcup, four precious souls in our barouche landau and pair. I mean to buy stamps and a postal order[4] at Sidcup in order to find out diplomatically from the post office people all about the neighbourhood. Nora Annora B. M. writes to say she knows nothing of St Margaret’s Bay so we must find out from somebody else. Oh and if you can see Tommy Coltman some time without trouble I should so like to know about Urith. Take great care of the keys of the house and remember to do all that you ought to do and be very good and come back tomorrow. I had a letter from Gertrude today saying that Annie has been twice to the dental hospital and I have just written to urge her to go on until the doctors have done all that they want to do to her teeth. I also said we would pay anything that needs to be paid, apparently it will be about 6 shillings.[5]
Stephen Spring Rice departed.
So up until this point they have had three invalids in the family, Antonia, who seems to have been having a difficult pregnancy, George, who was recovering from his appendicitis operation and Stephen Spring Rice who was recovering from surgery on his twice broken arm.
“I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worthwhile.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
Historically, bed rest as a therapeutic treatment was an extended period of remaining supine, to recover from illness or exertion, or to gain general health benefits. It was something that you did even if you were generally well but wanted to increase vitality and vigour. …(In the nineteenth century) it was a popular treatment for patients with tuberculosis, and for those diagnosed with nervous exhaustion or ‘hysteria’, particularly in women (where the treatment was found to be unbearably oppressive and infantilizing for many, including Virginia Woolf. (http://www.thewildgarden.ca/writings/winterruhe-bed-rest-sleep-recovery-and-the-lost-art-of-convalescence.)
We had breakfast in the garden and from this time forth had it there for weeks on end.
The tenses used here betray the fact that Antonia is writing this some weeks later.
Georgie Wellerby came down with Imo. I went up to London and lunched at Queens Gate. Lady Macnaghten gave me the christening robe that they have all worn. I put it away in mother’s wardrobe at GCP.
Margaret Cornish came to stay the night and talk about going to Berlin with Imogen. Mother was suddenly poorly and had to go to bed. Mother still very poorly, just one of the old attacks. Margaret Cornish and Georgie left after lunch.
Urith and Captain Perrott sailed for England on this day, I think.
Mother still in bed but a little better. She got up in the afternoon.
Mother much better.
August 1899
George came downstairs and sat in the garden.
I went up to London and lunched at Queens Gate.
Charles came home for his holidays.
Theodore[6] came down for the night.
Mr W.M. Fletcher came down to tea and dinner.
Theodore came down for the night again.
We celebrated the birthdays of Meg and Charles with an enormous cake and great splendour. 20 and 13.
Malcolm drank Methylated spirits in the early morn!
Terrible effect all day.
Here is a methylated spirit bottle of the time though in all probability Malcolm drank some that had been decanted into a some other kind of bottle, like a lemonade bottle, that confused Malcolm. Methylated spirit contains 80 per cent alcohol, 10 per cent ethyl, pyridine and sometimes aldehyde, which makes it very poisonous. Methylated spirit is highly soluble and it permeates into stomach and veins very quickly and can cause death.
Malcolm didn’t go to work.
Delicious day.
We all went to Kensington.
Dreyfus trial began today.
Nurse Schliemann went away this morning.
Father and Meg and Imo depart for Ireland.
George went to the office for the first time.
Flora came to dinner.
Malcolm and I to Abinger.
Antonia and Malcolm were visiting Abinger Hall in Surrey, the home of Thomas Farrer and his family.
We travelled down with Noel[7]. Mr and Mrs Horace Darwin[8] were there with Erasmus, Ruth, Nora, and the three little Farrers.
Mrs Horace Darwin, was christened Emma Cecilia Farrer, the daughter of Thomas Henry Farrer and his wife Frances who lived at Abinger Hall. As a young child, she loved to read Hans Andersen’s fairy tales, and identified with the main character in his story ‘Little Ida’s Flowers’. She was known as Ida for the rest of her life.
In later life Ida Darwin had an Iris named after her.
“She (Ida Darwin) must have been enchanting when young; so fine-spun and rare, with her sloping shoulders and shining Victorian perfection.”[9]
Her father, Thomas Farrer, Antonia and Malcolm’s host at Abinger Hall, was a great friend of Charles Darwin. Thomas Farrer was Permanent Secretary to the Board of Trade and a keen amateur botanist. In 1873 he married Darwin’s niece, Katherine Euphemia Wedgwood, known as Effie.
In 1877, Charles Darwin and his wife visited the Farrers at Abinger Hall; Charles was fascinated by the worm casts in the tessellated Roman pavement discovered at nearby Eversheds. In November Thomas and Effie Farrer made a return visit to Down House where the Darwins lived and Thomas Farrer wrote a delightful account of the visit in his notebook.[10]
“CD (Charles Darwin) was out hour by hour from 7.30 till dark walking slowly to his greenhouse alone, with straw hat and short cloak, eyes on ground, taking measurements of movements of plants which now occupy him. “They say plants are distinguished from animals by want of motion”. “By Jove!” he says, “I believe at the beginning they have quite as much movement as animals, and afterwards lose what they don’t want”.
‘Thomas Farrer was very struck by Charles Darwin’s cheerfulness and cordiality, his willingness to accept gentle ribbing from his family, his interest in politics (both men were firm Liberals) and his seeming openness to new suggestions, even uninformed ones. However, as Thomas noted there is a certain “Ah, indeed”! with which he receives a new fact or assertion, which may cover a great deal of incredulity and sarcasm. Thomas was also much struck ….that the household revolved around the great naturalist: “The want in the house is privacy, but this does not apply to C.D. Everything is done to favour his work. He comes in and chats when and as long as he likes – sometimes too long, and Mrs Darwin says severely “Charles, when do you think of going to bed” or “when do you mean to have done talking”! upon which he generally retires. Effie chaffed him more than usual …. saying “Uncle Charles, I am thinking whether I shall try to read one of your books”! to which he ultimately replies “Goodbye Mrs Impudence”.’
The friendship of Darwin and Farrer was tested shortly afterwards when Thomas’s daughter Ida, fell in love with Charles’s youngest and feeblest son Horace. Thomas was hoping to find a wealthy lawyer or banker for Ida so Horace’s seeming lack of prospects alarmed him. True love prevailed and the couple were married on 3 January 1880, but relations remained strained. Happily the breach was repaired before Darwin’s death in 1882.[11]
In 1883 the Farrers daughter Ida Darwin became an active member of The Cambridge Association for the Care of Girls. The aim of the Association was to protect girls in Cambridge who were ‘in trouble’. ..Ida became aware that a number of these vulnerable girls were termed ‘feeble-minded’; this started her life-long interest in learning disability and the need for social reform to provide support for these disadvantaged individuals….It was during this time that Ida became interested in eugenics. In 1910 Ida gave a talk on ‘Inherited Pauperism’ at the Annual Meeting of the CACG. Ida Darwin was not alone in her interest in Eugenics.
Malcolm’s vacations begin which means that generally only go to London three days of the week and will get back much earlier on those days. Hurrah.
Heavenly day. Garden party. Margaret Vaughan Williams came and brought news of Sybil Vaughan Williams engagement to an artist Mr Barkworth. Wedding at the end of the month!
Daphne Rendel was there, she is to be married in October and Mrs Gladstone with her. Very affable.
The Mrs Gladstone mentioned here must have been Mrs Maud Gladstone nee Rendel who was married to the Late Prime Minister’s son, Henry Gladstone and was the sister of Daphne Rendel.
Daphne Rendel’s father, Lord Rendel, was great friends with one of Britain’s greatest Prime Ministers, William Gladstone, on whose recommendation he became a peer. He once wrote, ‘my intimacy with Mr Gladstone will be probably the feature of my life that may longest survive obliteration.’ Their friendship was also entwined in family alliances. Rendel confessed, ‘I do not know how Mr and Mrs Gladstone came to be so often my guests. I think it was because Mrs Gladstone desired to promote the friendly relations of her children and mine’. It seems that Mrs Gladstone’s maternal motives were a success, as Rendel’s daughter Maud married Gladstone’s son Henry.[12]
William Gladstone had died the year before and Lord Rendel had walked beside the coffin.
Cousins Lucy and Harry Roscoe, the St Loe Stracheys with famille, Mildred Massingberd[13], Merediths[14], I will shake hands boldly with Mrs Meredith next time I meet her whatever happens! Other people who I can’t remember. Tom Farrer[15] came in the evening.
To lunch with Lady Farrer, Bethels and Ruth. We ate gooseberries on our return.
Picardy Pudding.—lb. suet, 10oz. flour, break cupful of gooseberry one teaspoonful of carbonate of soda, and a little milk. Mix all the ingredients together, and put into buttered mould, cover with a buttered cloth, and steam for three hours. This is a cheap easily made pudding, and is light and digestible. —Nurse Robinson, North Riding Infirmary, Middlesbrough, Stockton Herald, South Durham and Cleveland Advertiser – Saturday 19 August 1899
Theodore came at tea time just in time to see Malcolm depart to see Roger Fry[16].
This is Roger Fry.
Roger Fry is painting me. It is too like me at present, but he is confident he will be able to alter that. Post-Impressionism is at present confined to my lower lip… and to my chin. — E. M. Forster.Source: IdleHearts
And this is Roger Fry’s portrait of the author E.M. Forster. Roger Fry and E. M. Forster were friends. ‘Very early on, before Fry and Forster came to know one another, Forster admired a series of Adult Education lectures on art that Fry gave in Cambridge, in his pre-Post-Impressionist years. Later, in an early draft of A Room with a View, Forster included a character called Rankin (later dropped from the novel), an art historian attending tea-parties in Florence at which Florentine attributions were a leading topic and ‘pictures were snatched from one great name and thrust upon another, or slighted and left as doubtful [. . . ] or utterly damned as the work of a clever forger who flourished in the middle of the nineteenth century at Hamburg’. In her recent book Roger Fry and Italian Art (London 2019), Caroline Elam gives an excellent, detailed account of Fry and Forster and the influence of the former’s aesthetics on the latter (although Forster was never entirely converted to Fry’s full-on formalism). Fry drew curious endpapers and a non-figurative cover for Forster’s book of short stories The Celestial Omnibus, published in the same year as the present portrait was painted. Just as Fry was completing the picture (painted in his house at Guildford), Forster wrote to a friend, that he appeared to be ‘a bright healthy young man, without one hand, it is true, and very queer legs, perhaps the result of an aeroplane accident, as he seems to have fallen from an immense height on to a sofa’ (letter to Florence Barger, 24 December 1911). Actually Forster liked the picture and bought it but, after it was shown in Fry’s one-artist exhibition in 1912, he gave it to his great friend Florence Barger and it was not seen again in public for well over fifty years.’[17]
Home again. Found that mother had been bad.
[1] https://www.jnj.com/our-heritage/history-of-sutures-ethicon
[2] Preparatory School.
[3] This is a reference to Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by Jerome K. Jerome
[4] A postal order or postal note was a type of money order usually intended for sending money through the mail. It was purchased at a post office and is payable at another post office to the named recipient.
[5] I think that Annie is one of their servants so this would suggest that Antonia and Malcolm paid the dental costs of their servants.
[6] Theodore Llewelyn Davies.
[7] The hon Noel Maitland Farrer, son of Thomas Farrer, 1st Baron and brother of Mrs Ida Darwin.
[8] Daughter of Thomas Farrer.
[9] Raverat, G., Period Piece: London, Faber & Faber, 1952.
[10] Held by Surrey History Centre (SHC ref 9609/4/3/2).
[11] https://www.surreycc.gov.uk/culture-and-leisure/history-centre/marvels/a-visit-to-mr-darwin
[12] https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hatchlands-park/features/the-rendel-family-at-hatchlands-park
[13] Less than a year later, In 1900, Mildred Massingberd married her second cousin Leonard Darwin, fourth son of Charles Darwin.
Letter from Adeline Vaughan Williams to Ralph Wedgwood December 1st [1900]
10 Barton Street
Dear Randolph
Ought you not to have been here last Thursday when there was a great mustering of Wedgwoods & Darwins to see Mildred Massingberd married? Had I been her I think I would have chosen one of the other brothers – especially William – but I believe they are all provided with wives at present. This marriage however seems a very happy one & Mildred is a wonderfully informed person, not meriting at all Mrs Godfrey Wedgwood’s dismal description of her as ‘a good old maid gone wrong’!
[14] These were probably the wider family of the poet and novelist George Meredith.
[15] Tom Farrer was President of the Royal Statistical Society from 1894 to 1896.
[16] Roger Fry and Malcolm Macnaghten were both members of the Apostles at Cambridge. Roger Fry was an English painter and critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasised the formal properties of paintings over the “associated ideas” conjured in the viewer by their representational content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as “incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin …In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry”.The taste Fry influenced was primarily that of the Anglophone world, and his success lay largely in alerting an educated public to a compelling version of recent artistic developments of the Parisian avant-garde. Wikipedia
Antonia and Mary 
