Margery Spring Rice L UCY P OLLARD Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century To access digital resources including: blog posts videos online appendices and to purchase copies of this book in: hardback paperback ebook editions Go to: https://www.openbookpublishers.com/product/1132 Open Book Publishers is a non-profit independent initiative. We rely on sales and donations to continue publishing high-quality academic works. MARGERY SPRING RICE Margery Spring Rice Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century Lucy Pollard https://www.openbookpublishers.com/ © Lucy Pollard This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work; to adapt the work and to make commercial use of the work providing attribution is made to the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). 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Attribution should include the following information: © Lucy Pollard, Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women’s Health in the Early Twentieth Century Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2020. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0215 In order to access detailed and updated information on the license, please visit https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0215#copyright Further details about CC BY licenses are available at https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web Any digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https:// doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0215#resources Every e ff ort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if noti fi cation is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-78374-881-5 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-78374-882-2 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-78374-883-9 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-78374-884-6 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-78374-885-3 ISBN Digital (XML): 978-1-78374-886-0 DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0215 Cover image: Margery pushing a young friend along the Crag Path in Aldeburgh, New Year, 1968. Drawing by Christopher Ellis (1968). Photograph: the author (2020). Cover design by Anna Gatti. Contents Preface and Acknowledgements xi Note on Sources xiii Family Trees xv 1. Cherished daughter (1887–1907) 1 2. Independence (1907–1912) 25 3. Loss (1912–1916) 45 4. False Starts (1916–1924) 63 5. Finding a Cause (1924–1931) 77 6. A Single Woman (1931–1936) 101 7. War Again (1936–1945) 115 8. Matriarch (1945–1956) 145 9. Running down (1956–1970) 163 Bibliography 179 List of Illustrations 185 Index 187 For Caitlin and Malcolm ‘I thought it possible that your habitual opinion that valour is the better part of discretion might seize upon you...’ Eileen Power, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 18 August 1910 Preface and Acknowledgements This book could not have been written without the collections of family letters and papers preserved by Anna Mercer, Sam Garrett- Jones, Camilla Garrett-Jones, Robert Robertson, Sebastian Garrett and Stephen Robertson. I am immensely grateful to them for keeping so much, for all the family knowledge they have so generously shared, for the suggestions they have made and the mistakes they have corrected. Many of the photographs have been provided by Sam Garrett-Jones and Robert Robertson. I am also particularly grateful to Margaret Young for sharing her huge knowledge of the Garrett family. Many other people have helped me with this project: I want to thank Jane Abraham, Brian Boulton, John Charlton, Jane Darke, Marlene Baldwin Davis, Sylvia Dunkley, Emma Ellis, Rachel Forbes, Constantine Gras, Jeremy Greenwood, Heather Holden-Brown, Barney Hopkinson, Matt Jolly, Ben Johnston, Pamela King, Nina Lambert, Sonia Lambert, Stephen Mael, Marcos Magariños, Julian Minns, Dominick Robertson, Matthew Robertson, Stephen Robertson, Thomas Robertson, Catherine Sandbrook, Sally Schweitzer, Sarah Slinn, Charlie Spring Rice, Tom Stevens, Hew Stevenson, Alison Stuart-Klein, Karen Taylor, the late Michael Wheeler-Booth, Joane Whitmore and Richard Wilson. The librarians and archivists of the British Library, Cambridge University Library, Girton College Cambridge, the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics, the Su ff olk Record O ffi ce, the Britten-Pears Library, the Wellcome Collection, the Church of England Children’s Society, Leeds University Brotherton Library, the Law Society Library, Pembroke College Cambridge, King’s College Cambridge, the Imperial War Museum and the Royal Voluntary Service have been unfailingly helpful. I am also enormously indebted to my editors at Open Book Publishers for their friendly professionalism. xii Margery Spring Rice I am extremely grateful to the Old Girtonians Fund for their fi nancial support for the publication of this book I would also like to thank my husband; my sons and their partners; and other members of my family for their support and encouragement, and for reading and commenting on sections of the book at various stages. The family trees (which are simpli fi ed) were made by Stephen Robertson. The battle area map was made by Brian Boulton. I have to confess a personal interest: I am one of Spring Rice’s grandchildren. Writing this book has taken me on a sometimes- uncomfortable journey from child’s-eye view to biographer’s view. It is a journey that began, I think, over sixty years ago — long before I ever thought of writing about it. When I was eleven, my grandmother wanted to take me to a big society wedding at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields Church in London, followed by a reception in the House of Commons. She also suggested a shopping trip on the morning of the wedding. My mother tried, without being at all speci fi c, to persuade me to forego the shopping, but I was adamant that I wanted to spend the whole day with my grandmother. It was only the experience of my grandmother complaining about every item she looked at, to my great embarrassment, that made me realise what my mother’s unspoken message had been: how di ffi cult my grandmother could sometimes be. On the other hand, I cannot imagine a more wonderful grandmother. Despite all her failings, in her public life she was, as one of her North Kensington clinic colleagues said, ‘far in advance of the rest of us & far in advance of [her own] time’. 1 As her biographer, I have tried both to be dispassionate and to do justice to her great strengths; but in the end, leaving aside my faults and hers, what I am left with is still my childhood love and admiration for her — love and admiration that are, in Seamus Heaney’s words, ‘something else the tide won’t wash away’. 2 Any mistakes are my own. Lucy Pollard Su ff olk, 2020 1 Phyllis Bowen, letter to Margery Spring Rice, 15 June 1958. 2 Seamus Heaney, ‘The Strand’, in The Spirit Level (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 62. Note on Sources The principal sources for Margery Spring Rice’s personal life are the letters and papers preserved by members of her family. These include hundreds of letters, unevenly distributed in terms of date, but nevertheless extending over the whole course of her life. The Garrett and Jones families are both well-represented in these letters, but there is almost nothing from the Spring Rice side. Most of the letters are to her, from family and friends, rather than from her. Spring Rice kept two brief diaries, one in childhood and one when she was a young woman, which have survived, and her brother Douglas kept a diary over a twenty- fi ve- year period. Towards the end of her life, one of Spring Rice’s grandsons recorded, transcribed and annotated her recollections of various incidents in her life. The visitors’ books that she kept from 1936 until 1970, far more than just a record of names and dates, also survive. One other extant document is a copy of the fi fty-page statement that Spring Rice made to the court in 1929, when she was thinking of applying for custody of her two youngest children. I very much hope that some, at least, of these papers will end up in a public archive. Where I have quoted from diaries and letters, I have not made any editorial alterations, but have kept the quotations exactly as in the originals. In footnotes to letters, I thought it clearer to refer to Spring Rice throughout as ‘Margery Spring Rice’, even when the letters date to periods when her name was ‘Garrett’ or ‘Garrett Jones’. On the same principle, I have referred to Spring Rice by that name throughout the book. I have treated other women’s names in the same way, using the most appropriate surname for each. There is a mass of material, particularly for Spring Rice’s public life, available in public archives: the records of the North Kensington Women’s Welfare Centre and the Family Planning Association are in the Wellcome Archive; Eileen Power’s letters to Spring Rice are in the xiv Margery Spring Rice archives at Girton College, Cambridge; Spring Rice’s correspondence with Benjamin Britten is in the archives at the Red House in Aldeburgh (now part of Britten Pears Arts); and Stella Benson’s diary is in Cambridge University Library. Unfortunately, none of these has been digitised. There are also copies of Edward Jones’s World War I letters in the Imperial War Museum. A biographer will always have to contend with gaps in the record, some of which may not even be recognised. In this case, there is one large gap that I am aware of: the great majority of the surviving letters are addressed to Margery Spring Rice, not written by her, so the contents of her letters often have to be deduced from the replies. The exceptions to this are the correspondence with Britten (of which both sides are extant) and, to a lesser extent, the records of the North Kensington clinic, which contain a number of her letters, though of course these are not primarily personal. It is particularly frustrating not to have Spring Rice’s letters to Dick Mitchison — they may possibly survive in private hands but are not accessible at the present time. Many people have parts in Spring Rice’s story. To make it easier for the reader, in the index, I have given family members’ relationships to Spring Rice under their names. Family Trees xvi xviii