EDITOR BURNS WITH HATE OVER GIRL CALLED STEPHEN
"I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic
acid than this novel," declared Sunday Express Editor James Douglas
Author Hall (left) and wife: The writer was taken to court and her book banned
THE WORDS of editor James Douglas kicked off a campaign that led to the tender but graphic book about a lesbian love affair being burned in the furnaces of Scotland Yard.
Shortly after The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall was published, Douglas, with a reputation of being 'prudish and priggish', unleashed his hatred over "unnatural practices between women" in the pages of his newspaper with the headline: 'This book that must be suppressed!"
But you can buy it today, nearly 100 years on and I found it moving and an insight into the turmoil a lesbian went through at this time in our history.
Published in August 1928 it follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an Englishwoman from an upper-class family who finds love with Mary Llewellyn, whom she meets while serving as an ambulance driver during the First World War.
But their happiness together is shattered by being rejected by society and they are broken hearted. The story screams the message: "Give us also the right to our existence!"
The book begins with Stephen's birth. Her father, Sir Philip, had always wanted a boy and even put his proposed name Stephen, down for Harrow. Instead, he had a daughter with pretty hands and pink nails. But he loves her at first sight and always will, so he names her Stephen just to fulfil his dreams.
In womanhood, Stephen meets Martin, who is charmed by her and wants to make love. Although she adores his strong young body and handsome looks, she finds the idea repugnant. She feels something is wrong with her and breaks into tears. A great sense of incompleteness engulfs her, and she runs into her father's house.
That evening she talks to Sir Phillip in his study about Martin. And it seems to her that he knew somehow that she was coming to see him.
"Is there anything strange about me, father, to have felt the way I did?" she asks.
The moment has come, and it falls on Sir Philip like a hammer blow. His hand shading his pale face trembles, and he feels the trembling take hold of his spirit. He shrinks back, almost cowering. He dares not look at her.
She says again: "Father is there anything strange about me? I always felt as a child I was not like other girls."
She sounds apologetic and he knows that if he looks, he will see her lips quivering and tears in her eyes. He can barely stand it.
His loins ache with pity. Merciful God! How can a man answer, he asks himself? And that man her father!
Editor James Douglas
The book is not a lustful romp through The Roaring Twenties. I found it mostly a sensitive story of feelings and prejudices of the time. Boring in places, it digs deep into the sexual psyche of both men and women through the eyes of the writer Ms Radclyffe. Although there is sex too, why not?
The publishers, Jonathan Cape were unsure, they sent the novel to the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, for his views, and he agreed with Douglas and his supporters, that its 'continued publication would corrupt the morals of the public, and particularly young people.'
The Well of Loneliness was dragged before an obscenity trial at Bow Street Magistrates Court and banned with all copies sent to Scotland Yard to be destroyed, under the eyes of a senior commander. It was not until 20 years later that it was published again in England.
Douglas became the first editor of the Sunday Express in1918. He left the paper in 1931 and died in 1940, aged 73.
The writer Aldous Huxley said of him: "Mr Douglas is that rare and, to the newspaper proprietor, extremely valuable person — a writer of Sunday articles who believes in his own sermons. He has the great and precious gift of hysteria. He can work himself up almost instantaneously into a state of rhapsodic fury or raving admiration.
"He has even denounced me as a limb of Satan and extolled me as the Ibsen, the Homer, and goodness knows who else of my age.”
Huxley made Douglas 'a sporting offer over his statement that he would rather give a child a phial of prussic than read Radclyffe's novel. "I will pay all the expenses of his defence at the ensuing murder trial and erect a monument to his memory after he has been hanged," he said.
Writer Radclyffe Hall was distraught that two years of hard work, following many years of study, had suffered at the hands of the wilful ignorance of Douglas and of prejudice amounting to persecution of sexual feelings.'
She said: "I am proud and happy to have taken up my pen in defence of the wronged."
CARTOON ICON IS SAVED BY
THE BELLES OF ST TRINIAN’S
Searle's drawings became a hit movie
"TO WAKE up every morning with a thousand miles of jungle between yourself and help and find a fellow prisoner dead on each side of you ... one begins to clarify in one's mind the nuances of the word — mortality."
If I had a hat and had to take if off to someone in the history of the media, the man who said these words, would be in my Top Ten. Cartoonist and satirist Ronald Searle.
Who would have thought that this talented Punch magazine man of laughter would have found the spirit to make people laugh with his St Trinian’s cartoons created in the hell of a Japanese PoW camp and while sweating his way to near-death working on the notorious Burma Railway.
There were more serious drawings of course, showing our sick British lads being beaten in the Hell Camp of Changi in Singapore. He documented the horror of it all. A fellow prisoner later said:
"If you can imagine something that weighs six stone or so, is on the point of death and has no qualities of the human condition that aren't revolting, calmly lying there with a pencil and a scrap of paper, drawing, you have some idea of the difference between this man an ordinary human being."
Groucho Marx called him a genius; John Lennon announced that, along with Lewis Carroll, he was one of two people who had the most influence on his life; and Cecil Day Lewis wrote him a dirge.
Searle's heartbreak cartoon of PoW life
Searle's war was a long way from his local paper, the Cambridge Daily News, where he published his first drawing at the age of fifteen. The few bob he earned helped to pay for his studies at art school.
He served seven years as a soldier and was imprisoned by the Japanese from 1942 to 1945.
Now 400 of his drawings documenting the torment, torture and despair of our boys during the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia, are in the Imperial War Museum. They were put through various stages of conservation (de-acidisation of paper, etc.) before they went on show to the public.
Searle said: "To have worked in almost total isolation, total brutality, total filth and disgust, and virtual slavery at the age of twenty-three, marks one's outlook on anything one relates to afterwards — if you were lucky enough to be counted among those few who had an ‘afterwards.’.”
It was Searle's determination to carry out his self-appointed task of documenting what was happening, and the St Trinian girls, that kept him alive.
Riddled with dysentery and running sores and suffering from malaria, he would hide his work where the Japs wouldn't think to look — under the bodies of men who had died of cholera.
Back in Blighty, after Changi was liberated, he rapidly became famous with his macabre sense of humour and drawings.
Searle had to hide his work
He became a publisher in his own right. At Malcolm Muggeridge's insistence he joined The Table of Punch along with John Betjeman and Anthony Powell, and he darted back and forth across the Atlantic on film work in Hollywood and editorial work in New York and London, which included the Daily Express and News Chronicle.
He continued to draw St Trinian's school girls until 1953 and they were made into four motion pictures, the first of which was The Belles of St. Trinian'
His career as a 'famous' artist was now unstoppable until one day he quietly stopped it himself.
In 1961, he suddenly left his wife, journalist Kaye Webb and twins Kate and Johnny and exiled to Paris to reflect on his life and rethink his work.
"I always felt at home there, and certainly on the Left Bank, more so than in London, which I love," he said.
"So far as the bread and butter was concerned, in Paris, if you were cold you could work in a cafe all day over a cup of coffee and if you hadn't got cooking facilities, the local baker would roast a bird for you if the occasion was grand. That was Paris."
Ronald Searle, who got married again to painter and jewellery designer Monica Ilse Koenig, died on December 30, 2011, in Draguignan, France, aged 91.
CATS EAT HORSES, DON'T THEY?
Wonderful 1921 picture of cat meat men enjoying a rowdy New Year dinner
OVER 300 men sat down in their best bibs and tuckers and banged on the long tables with their knives and forks as soup, roast beef and mutton arrived to shouts of "Meee-aat!"
The atmosphere was bawdy, according to the Morning Post, and the only touch of refinement to the evening was the attendance of the Duchess of Bedford, who passed round the sprouts to the strains of a violin from a classical musician playing to a purring cat.
The guest of honour added a touch of class to the evening. He was Louis Wain, the English artist famed for drawing surreal cats.
This was the scene at the Baronial Hall in Holborn, London, on Thursday evening, January 10, 1901, and the occasion was the Cat's Meat Men's annual New Year Ball.
Cats were big business. There were over 230,000 in London at the time, with one cat for every ten Londoners, and the population was 2.3 million. Serving the felines were over 1,000 Cat's Meat Traders pushing barrows of offal and horse meat through the streets in barrows, shouting out: 'Meee-aat!'
One carrier told a Post reporter that he seldom went less than 40 miles, through the streets every day, selling the scraps of horses for up to three pence a bag.
A cat meat man feeds his hungry customers horse meat on a London street
Some men were born into the trade, but others went into it at the scrag end of their working lives. Some were butchers who had lost their shops through debts, but many were carriage painters whose health had been broken by the noxious paints they had been inhaling for decades.
Sometimes they were widows pushing old prams full of meat. Newspapers were happy to take ads from cat's meat men selling their rounds, which were fiercely guarded. Woe betide anyone who strayed on someone else's patch. I guess it was like our ice cream wars of the Sixties.
In his weekly magazine All the Year Round, Dickens ran an account of a visit to a central London abattoir to watch the midnight ritual of horse slaughter to supply the street traders. The animal was to be used mostly for the city's cats, but some would find its way into restaurants. Many literary critics say Dickens wrote the piece himself.
"On the night there were three dozen elderly or ailing nags waiting to be stunned, killed, stripped, rendered, and boiled," he wrote.
"After the flesh has been cut up into manageable chunks, it was piled into light carts and at 6am, men set off to deliver meat to the 40 or so vendors who have put in their orders for 'undred and a arf ' or 'arf a undred and three penn'orth'.
"The cat's meat men then spend an hour or so threading the chunks on to wooden skewers, to make up anything from a ha'penny snack to a three-penny feast. At 8am, hand carts loaded, they rumble off on their rounds."
*****
TERRY MANNERS will be on holiday until Monday April 7, when he will return with more bollocks about the history of our Fleet Street patch.
17 March 2025
