Belfast 1918 -- A Poem by Sheena Wilkinson

Today is 50 years since the Civil Rights march in Derry  the reaction to which is generally thought to have sparked off the NI Troubles  I wrote this poem in response to a photo of Belfast 1918, but 1968 and what came afterwards was very much in my mind too. 

Belfast 1918

I was never here before

At least not in these black-and-white

Silent movie days.

I won’t be born for fifty years.

These streets are not silent. Trams clatter

Past blank-blinded brick terraces

These streets are not sepia.

Nor do they run with the blood 

Of the thousands who have lately marched

Down them on their way to the Somme,

Though they will in time run red. 

Born In 1918 by Sheena Wilkinson

Last month my family celebrated two big birthdays. On 11 August I took my parents out to dinner on what would have been my granny’s hundredth birthday. She died in 1997 but a centenary seemed momentous and one of the things my mother and I have both inherited from her is the love of getting dressed up for a ‘wee race out’.

Granny at 50

I’ve been so busy this year thinking of 1918 as the centenary of women’s suffrage, the end of WW1 and the Spanish Flu, that I hadn’t really thought about its being Granny’s centenary too, and it was good to stop and reflect on it, and on what it meant to be born in that year, in that place. Granny (Elizabeth Rea Pleasants, née Hamilton, always known as Rea) was born and lived her whole life in Downpatrick, the county town of Down, where St Patrick is buried. When she was three, Ireland was partitioned and Down became part of the new Northern Ireland. She came of age as the Second World War broke out, and when she was 51, she saw Northern Ireland plunge into its own bloody war. She never let go of calling the Republican of Ireland the Free State, but in other ways she was the most modern of women. 

Like my other gran, Gran W, Granny P. lived through a great deal of history. Sometimes I wished I’d asked her more about it. But she was so busy, always rushing about. She lived in the moment, not the past. She had neither the time nor the patience to sit down and talk to a small girl about the olden days. But she took me to mass and to bingo. She slipped me embarrassingly generous amounts of money when she had it, which was not always because she was ridiculously generous to many people. The first pound note I ever held in my hand was a ninth birthday present from Granny P.

Downpatrick, 1920s, shortly after partition

1980, I'm 12; she's 62

She sang in the local operatic society and passed on to me her good, strong voice. Mummy remembers always being mortified that her own mummy sang so loudly at mass. After Vatican II she became the first woman lay reader in her local church. In the early 60s she adopted three children, two of them mixed race, an unusual undertaking in a small Northern Irish town. Whereas Gran W was a good plain traditional cook, and much given to baking, sewing, knitting and housekeeping, Granny P experimented with spaghetti and curry as far back as the fifties, but often my quiet granda did the cooking, as Granny was off to a whist drive. Gran W wore a frock and an overall, Granny P wore lipstick and trousers and a fake fur, and kept her hair jet back until well into old age.

I was born in 1968, the third of seventeen grandchildren. So yes, that’s the other big birthday we’ve been celebrating. I compare my granny at 50 to me, and my life to hers. At 50 she was very much the matriarch, whereas I’m single and childfree. Granny was bright, talented, and independent-spirited, but growing up in the twenties and thirties as a young Catholic girl in Northern Ireland, her expectations were marriage, church and family. She was very active in those areas, marrying at 21, but she also found time to work outside the house. She was in the Fire Service during the war, and even left home to work as a children’s nanny as a widow in her late sixties. She wouldn’t have had any thoughts of higher education but when I went off to university in 1987 she handed me £50, more money than I'd  ever had in my life, and typical of her generosity. 

Me at 50 -- not so different from Granny P after all 

She was very much of her time, and yet stood against it. When I do anything especially outré my mother will say, Granny the second! I always take it as a compliment. 

Diane Atkinson’s “Rise Up Women!” by Janie Hampton

 Only this month I realised that although I was not born until 1952, I am among the first generation of women born in Britain to have the right to vote: my mother was born before 1918. A few months after my 18th birthday, in 1970, I was also among the first Britons under 21 years to vote. I knew it was a big deal, but until I read Diane Atkinson’s excellent new book Rise Up women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes, I didn’t realise what extraordinary sacrifices so many women had made for British women. Apparently, my paternal grandmother chained herself to the railings of Buckingham Palace. Sadly, she died before I was born, so I can’t ask her about it. But this energetic and detailed history brings the fight to life, from the Chartists of the 1830s, to the start of women’s suffrage in 1918.

Suffragette chained to a railing, later copied by activists chaining
themselves to trees to demonstrate against road-building. 

A question often asked is ‘What is the difference between a suffragist and a suffragette?’ Suffragists hoped to achieve votes for women by gentle persuasion. Although there were fewer suffragettes, they were noisier, more militant, often violent, and so got noticed. They showed, as many activists have done since, that being polite and asking nicely may not get you as far as attacking property and blowing up  post boxes. 

`Deeds Not Words!' was the suffragette's slogan on bombed post-boxes, acts of arson and works of art.

From the start of Edward VII’s reign in 1901, the suffragettes’ actions were public and militant and as a result, they endured public derision, assault and imprisonment. In the Great Pilgrimage of 1913, courageous suffragettes marched from Newcastle, Cromer, Bangor and Land’s End, meeting in a rally of 50,000 people in Hyde Park. Women of all classes walked together, camped together and stayed in each other’s homes. They also endured being stoned, beaten up, having dead rats thrown at them and their speeches interrupted. But it gave them even more strength, solidarity and purpose; and they refused to be crushed.

Suffragette rally in Trafalgar Square.

Atkinson relates the tales of women from all classes who fought with flair, energy and imagination: mill workers and actors; teachers and doctors; seamstresses and scientists; clerks and boot-makers. The stars of the suffragette movement are well known: the Pankhurst family, Emmeline and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia; and Emily Wilding Davidson who became a martyr after running under the King’s race horse at Epson. There were also female students at Oxford University (a rare breed) who opened a hat- repair shop to raise funds; the Honorable Evelina Haverfield whose talent was to stand beside police horses during demonstrations and get them to lie down; and Mary Richardson who after slashing Velasquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery was sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labour. 

Suffragette Dora Thewlis is arrested in 1907.

Phyllis Keller broke the windows of anti-suffragist Lord Curzon and in her Holloway prison cell longed for Camp coffee and potted meat. The government refused to treat suffragettes as political prisoners, so they stopped eating and went on hunger strike. And the stronger the women, the crueler became their punishments. Kitty Marion, a comedian by profession, was force-fed lumpy soup through a tube 232 times during her three months sentence in Holloway Prison in 1914. It made little difference to her nutrition: she vomited for hours after each ‘meal’ and lost 36 lb. “I found blessed relief to my feelings in screaming, exercising my lungs and throat after the frightful sensation of being held in a vice, choking and suffocating,” she wrote later.

This poster of a suffragette being force-fed in prison haunted me as a child.
I could not understand how women and doctors could do this.

The infamous ‘Cat and Mouse Act’ (officially the “Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill-health) Act, 1913”) allowed suffragettes early release if they had been on hunger strike, but once their health was restored, they were re-arrested, and the starvation and force-feeding began again. Atkinson relates the stories of many who endured horrific prison sentences, when they could easily have led comfortable lives as dutiful wives or daughters. While recovering from a hunger strike at home, Annie Kenney donned black clothes and escaped from the police by climbing down a rope ladder at night. After secretary Hilda Burkitt and bookkeeper Florence Tunks were arrested for a campaign of arson in Suffolk, Burkitt told the judge to put on his black cap “and pass sentence of death or not waste his breath”. You have to admire these gutsy women, and what they did for us, the next generations. 

'How women will answer Mr Asquith'
the new British Prime Minister in 1908.

At the outbreak of the war in August 1914, an amnesty was announced and all suffragette prisoners were released. They threw themselves into the war effort and in February 1918 were rewarded with the Representation of the People Act, which gave the vote to women over the age of 30 years, albeit only if they were married or owned property. It wasn’t everything but it was a start. 

History is about remembering the people who got us where we are, and Rise up Women! certainly does that. At over 600 pages,this is a definitive history of the suffragettes’ determination during the decade-long militant campaign they fought on our behalf. This book would make an apt present for anyone, female or male, on their 18th birthday. Then they will appreciate what was done to win half our population the right to a vote.
Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes by Diane Atkinson is published by Bloomsbury.

Mary Beard's "Women & Power: A Manifesto" by Janie Hampton

Professor Mary Beard, © Caterina Turroni

Professor Mary Beard is Britain’s most famous classicist and The History Girl’s History Girl. Her book Women and Power: A Manifesto is a reminder of  the progress, or lack of, that women have achieved in the last hundred years.
This highly readable book of 100 short pages is based on two lectures Mary Beard gave for the London Review of Books at the British Museum in 2007 and 2014. She uses classical examples to remind us of the deep strata of ugly gender prejudice that underlie what women are still up against. “This is not,” Beard insists, “the peculiar ideology of some distant culture, however distant in time it may be.”

Telemachus tells his mother Penelope to keep on weaving, Athenian pot, 500 BC

She takes the story right back to the first known account of misogyny: Homer’s Odyssey, composed almost 3000 years ago. Telemachus, the teenage son of Odysseus, ordered his middle-aged mother Penelope to be quiet and go back upstairs to her weaving, and leave the men to get on with the important job of talking to each other. Haven't we all been there? I am old enough to have been to dinner parties where after the cheese course, the women withdrew to the drawing room to chat about childcare and recipes, leaving the men to drink port, smoke cigars and discuss world affairs (or so we assumed). My innocent husband once tried to join us women, but was physically barred from leaving the dining room by our host! Telemachus was learning the art of being a real man, which included telling women to be quiet. How many women readers of The History Girls have sat on committees, and either not been allowed to speak or had their bright idea taken up by, and credited to, a man?
Beard explores with wry wit and accessible language, the early history of misogyny and how it has been reinforced ever since Western “civilization” began. She gives the stories of three women who spoke up in the Roman forum. Unfortunately, according to the male Roman writing about her, Maesia "really had a man’s nature"; and as for Afrania, her speech was “yapping and barking”. Her demise in 48 BC was recorded, only because "with unnatural freaks like this" it was more important to record her death than her birth. The third woman, Hortensia, was only permitted to speak for other women, and not on behalf of men too. There are echoes here of modern governments that have Ministries of Women. “Look,” say the ruling men. “We have a Ministry for Women. We can’t possibly be misogynists." Like the dinner parties, the women are encouraged to knit and cook, leaving the men to govern the important things like the economy and war.
Demeaning language about ‘yapping’ women also continues today. In 2017, a Times headline screamed “Women prepared for Power Grab of London in Church, Police and BBC.” While men are awarded positions of power and authority, women have to grab them, pushing aside those unfortunate, less qualified men who previously gained the work or positions.
Little has changed in two thousand years. The image of Donald Trump as the Greek god Perseus holding aloft the decapitated head of Hillary Clinton as Medusa, was an unpleasant and graphic warning during the 2016 U.S. election campaign of how Trump would rule as president.

Donald Trump as Perseus with the head of Medusa depicted as Hillary Clinton, 2016.

Beard’s saddest observation is that women are their own worst enemies. Women often condone and reinforce misogyny, and behave and present themselves as "almost men." In 1588, Queen Elizabeth I is reputed to have encouraged her troops who were about to face the Spanish Armada, with the words, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” In other words, “Forget I’m a woman, I’m as good as a man.” She knew that only by ignoring her sex could she hang onto her power: with marriage and babies she would lose it. 

Elizabeth I rousing her troops at Tilbury, 1588.
She seems to be giving  'two fingers' to the Spanish.

Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May both reached their positions of high power by emulating men’s deep voices and long strides. Neither woman has behaved, at least in public, in a feminist or friendly way to other women, although they have both cleverly made use of a symbol of womanhood to reinforce their positions: Thatcher’s hand-bag became a weapon and May’s uses her kitten-heeled shoes to mollify. Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel both wear trouser suits, presumably to ‘blend in’ with the men. “Having women pretend to be men may be a quick fix, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem,” writes Beard.
Even though Mary Beard has broken through many of the barriers preventing women from achieving their potential, she still suffers abuse just for being herself. Without appealing for sympathy, she reflects on how she has been treated in both print and social media. She has not been judged on her skills or intelligence, but on what she looks like. The late food critic A.A. Gill commented not on the content of her television programmes but on her teeth, hair and clothes; and judged her to be "too ugly for television". Although undoubtedly hurt, (even tough, hard-working women have feelings) she fought back against "the blokeish culture that loves to decry clever women" and hoped to show young women that there was more than one way of being a woman, and of growing older.
Despite gratuitously rude men like Gill, Beard is both respected by her academic peers and admired by television viewers for her authenticity. In 2013, I saw her presented with “The Oldie Pin-up of the Year Award” at the smart London restaurant “Simpson's in the Strand”. In a forthright and witty speech to the male-dominated audience, she made no concessions. She was probably the only woman present not wearing lipstick, and certainly the only one in a comfortable grey cardigan.
Beard considers how the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded, and how the views of male ancient Greeks are still repeated, in order to make gender violence seem normal. As Jacqueline Rose wrote in The Guardian, Beard describes “the poison of patriarchy as it drips into the body politic of what parades under the banner of civilisation.”
All round the world there are women who dare not speak at all, even when raped. Let’s hope that the news of sexual harassment from Hollywood and Westminster will not become tomorrow’s chip-wrappers. Those who support the ‘witch-hunt’ hypothesis certainly hope so. Beard notes that sexual predation is about power, and it is the men who usually have that; if they happen to be film producers or politicians, even more so.
Beard makes a plea that women should be allowed to make mistakes, and then pick themselves up without being pilloried. “If I was starting this book again from scratch,” she writes, “I would find more space to defend women’s right to be wrong.”
The conclusion that Beard comes to is a surprise. Women must stop trying to gain equal power because power itself is designed by men, and not what we really want or need. Society will only improve when power is redefined. "We don’t have a model or a template for what a powerful woman looks like,” she writes. “We only have templates that make them men." This brilliant and readable book will hopefully make us all wonder how can we help men to achieve equality for women. And ask, what would a world with articulate women allowed to speak look like? Would there be less violence? No rape, no guns? More equality?
Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard published by Profile (£7.99).
PS I have noted the irony that I have used Mary Beard’s father’s name – the patrilineal. Even journalists and academics model themselves against men!

Tamara Karsavina & Henry Bruce, Part Three by Janie Hampton

Tamara Karsavina aka Mrs Henry Bruce in 1923. 

Karelia, Russia. July 1918. The British diplomat Henry Bruce, his lover the ballerina Tamara Karsavina and their 19-month-old son Nikita are fleeing for their lives. But having left their home in Petrograd to escape danger, the further they went, the worse it got. Here is the final part of their epic journey.  Read Part One of their adventure  here,  and Part Two here.
Half way between Petrograd and the White Sea, Henry and Tamara discovered they had unwittingly crossed the front line of the Russian civil war and were now among the Red Army Bolsheviks. The commissar of Sumozero village believed they were foreign spies and told them they would be rowed to the next village across the lake. But his men were drunk and there was a storm brewing. Tamara’s patience ran out and she screamed at him. She was sympathetic to the communists but she could not tolerate bad behaviour in a drunk commissar, not even in the name of  "Peace, Bread and Freedom".

Tamara as Pimpinella in Pucinella

The commissar ordered them to be locked overnight in a barn, from which Henry knew they were unlikely to emerge alive. Then he remembered he had an old permit to travel to Moscow, signed several months before by the Bolshevik leader Georgy Chicherin. Gambling that the commissar was unable to read more than Chicherin’s name, Henry showed it to him, and then threatened to report him for disobeying government orders. It worked, and the commissar declared they could, after all, continue round the lake on their hired horse cart, but under armed escort. They still had to cross the River Suma by raft.

Map of their route by cart  from Lake Sumo , to Murmansk by steam train
and through the Arctic Ocean in a coal-boat.

The next day, at Xvornii village, they were handed over to another Red Army commissar who recognised Tamara. Much to Henry’s surprise he issued them with a pass to continue. But it was for only twelve hours, not nearly long enough to reach the White Sea. Henry protested, and the commissar simply told them to get moving. Heading towards the Arctic Circle, the nights remained light.
Twenty-four hours later, they reached the fishing village of Sumsky Pasod on the White Sea and realised they had crossed back into friendly territory. But the Red Army was closing in and the villagers were leaving. They leaped into the last boat and a fisherman rowed them up the White Sea to Kem harbour. From there they walked seven miles across the marshes to the railway line.
At Kem station they found a throng of refugees, unsure from whom they were escaping – was it the Germans, Whites, Reds, or Finns? The railway line had been built in 1916 to transport arms and food from the Arctic Ocean to the German-Russian front. Now that Russia had made peace with Germany, the single track between Murmansk and Petrograd was being commandeered by both Whites and Reds to move their respective troops and supplies, north and south. When Henry asked to buy first-class tickets to Murmansk, the station manager told him, ‘I shall be obliged to close this conversation, Comrade, if you speak in tones unworthy of a socialistic state. And it is useless to bring the Lord into it. The rules state there is no Lord, but our saviour Lenin.’
The train steamed out of Kem just days before the small town fell to the Red Army. Progress was slow: on orders from the Czar, the track had been built in only a year by Chinese labourers and 10,000 Austrian prisoners of war, without a proper survey. At bends the locomotive tilted precariously and at weak bridges everyone clambered out and walked across behind the train. The approach to the watershed between the White Sea and the Arctic Ocean was so steep that the train had to take a second run. The exhausted family travelled into the Arctic Circle past the snow-capped Khibiny Mountains and beside navy-blue lakes. It was a beautiful but terribly remote landscape, unchanged when my daughter Daisy and I travelled the same route 80 years later to the nuclear submarine city of Murmansk.
In 1918, Murmansk, 850 miles north of Petrograd, was then only one year old, a single dusty street of wooden barracks called Pall Mall. Hugh Walpole described it as: "Simply the end of the earth. There are a few vessels, and nothing else save wolves and ptarmigans". The local forces were continually changing allegiance and that month Murmansk’s commissar was in alliance with the British general. Tamara and Henry found a railway carriage to sleep in but it gave little protection from the relentless sunlight, stifling heat, mosquitoes and stench of reindeer. When they heard that Tsar Nicholas II and his family had been assassinated in Ekaterinburg, they realised that they would not be returning to Russia soon.
Two weeks later they boarded a British collier as ‘Purser’ and ‘Stewardess’ and steamed up the Kola Inlet and into the Arctic Ocean. For two days and nights, a storm raged. For Tamara, the fiercer the wind blew, the more her memories of the past months diminished, as she vomited repeatedly over the rail. The crew and their exhausted passengers felt their spirits rise as they threaded their way through the islands of Norway and out into the North Sea. Near the Orkneys, a German submarine fired a torpedo which missed their hull by a matter of yards.
Tamara, Henry and Nikita arrived on the east coast of England at Middlesbrough in late August 1918. It had been a journey of two thousand miles by steamer, horse and cart, on foot, in a rowing boat, by train and by collier boat. That same month the Red Terror began in which over a million Russians were tortured and killed. In November the World War officially ended, although British, French and American armies continued to fight, and on the losing side, until 1922.

Tamara Karsavina aka Mrs Henry Bruce,
in her kitchen in London in 1948.

Tamara Karsavina, formerly wife of Vasili Moukine, was now ‘Mrs Bruce’. How this came about we do not know. Under Russian orthodox law, divorce was impossible, and after the revolution the Bolshevik government abolished marriage. Did Tamara marry Henry in Petrograd, as they both claimed? Or perhaps the captain of the collier married them somewhere in the Arctic Ocean.
Henry’s employers at the Foreign Office posted him to Tangiers, ‘a quiet posting away from it all’, but only on condition Tamara stopped dancing. When Diaghilev pleaded with her to rejoin the Ballet Russe, Henry chose to leave the diplomatic service and the family settled in London.
With the Ballet Russe, Tamara worked with Matisse, Nijinska, Picasso and J.M. Barrie. She appeared in silent movies with Leni Riefenstahl and Johnny Weissmuller.
 In 1930, shortly after Diaghilev died, Tamara helped start the Royal Academy of Dance and her autobiography, Theatre Street, was published. An abridged edition appeared in the Soviet Union in 1971, with all references to Henry, Nikita and their escape from Russia deleted.

Tamara looks at a portrait of herself painted by
Sir Oswald Birley in 1920, The Tatler, 1951.

Until her eighties Tamara choreographed and taught ballet to leading dancers including Margot Fonteyn. She never returned to Russia and died in London aged 93, nearly 30 years after she had buried her beloved Henry. Tamara and Henry had led one life that was only known in the Soviet Union; and another life after their escape in 1918 that was only known in Britain. It was a strange fate for one of the twentieth century’s greatest dancers.

Henry James Bruce, British diplomat, 1934.

Nikita went to Eton College, served in the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War, married and became an advertising executive with Schweppes. In 1971 he attended my wedding – one of many distant cousins in tail coats. If only I had known to ask him about his parents and early childhood.

Tamara and Nikita shortly before their escape from Russia in 1918.
Henry's cousins were surprised that he had recently married a dancer, and
that their child was already walking. Tamara's good nature soon won them over.

Here is a silent movie of Tamara in 1923: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMsHWuLbsOI
Tamara Platonovna Karsavina (1885-1978). Henry James Bruce (1880-1951). Nikita Bruce (1916-1993)

Tamara Karsavina & Henry Bruce, Part 2, by Janie Hampton

Tamara Karsavina in Le Spectre de la Rose, 
choerographed by Fokine, costume by Bakst, in Paris 1913.

Continuing the story of the British diplomat Henry James Bruce and Russian prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina, who fell in love in St Petersburg in 1913. Eight months after they had witnessed the October Revolution in 1917, Lenin declared Britain an enemy of the Bolshevik government. Henry’s British Embassy colleagues fled from Moscow to Britain via the Crimea. But Henry went in the opposite direction, north to Petrograd, to rescue his lover and their 19 month old son, Nikita.

Read Part One of their adventure  here. 

Petrograd had been Tamara’s home all her life, but now she agreed with Henry that it was time they left. Although she had no political objections to the new order, communal life was stressful. The apartment in Millionaya Street, where she lived with Nikita and their cook, nanny and maid, was now shared with five families. Life was chaotic, with children playing in the shared passage, its ceiling criss-crossed with washing lines. Tamara’s cook Liza had been elected onto the house soviet committee but nobody knew who owned the house or to whom they should pay rent? 

Henry James Bruce at Eton in1899

Tamara had been with handsome, clever Henry for five years but now that Lenin had made peace with Germany, her dull husband, Vasilii Moukine, might return from fighting. He had agreed to divorce Tamara but the Bolsheviks had abolished both marriage and divorce. 

Postcard sent from Berlin in 1912 to Tamara,
written in French, the address translated into Russian

The chaos extended far beyond Millionaya Street. When Moscow became the capital in March 1918, Petrograd, formerly St Petersburg, was of little national or international importance and was now bankrupt. The canals, once busy with barges bringing food and fuel, were collapsing and choked with rubbish and sewage. Cholera and typhus had already killed several thousand people that winter. Although the population had halved, there was not nearly enough food. Most of the cab-horses had starved to death, and the electric trams no longer ran. Henry was compelled to walk to the former British Embassy where he found Captain Cromie, the Naval Attaché, the only British diplomat left. Cromie showed him coded telegrams which revealed that all routes south to the Crimea, east to Japan and west to Finland and the Baltic Sea were closed. Their only way out of Petrograd was north via Murmansk in the Arctic Circle, where British troops were stationed to reinforce the White Army. 

Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky in Jeux, by Debussy, in Sir Thomas Beecham's
Grand Season of Russian Ballet at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, June 1912.

However, they couldn’t tell where the front line of the civil war between the White and Red armies was located, only that it was getting closer every day. As a foreigner, Henry needed a permit from the Foreign Ministry in Moscow to travel; and even Tamara needed permission from the workers’ soviet that now controlled the Marinsky Ballet. Another problem was that Tamara’s face was even better known than the Czarina’s or Lenin’s. For 15 years she had appeared to two thousand people at each performance in the Marinsky Theatre and she had toured all over Russia and Western Europe with Diaghlev's Ballet Russe. Postcards were sold of her posing as Giselle and Salome; and with Nikita on her lap. His thick curly hair and his mother's large dark eyes were unmistakable. If a reward was posted for their capture, they might easily be denounced to the authorities in exchange for a meal or a few logs of firewood. 

Famous all over Russia and Europe, Tamara Karsaviina
as  Zobeide on Sheherazade  by John Sargent, 1913.

After a tense week of enquiries, an unidentified woman telephoned the apartment. She had passes for a steam-ship departing the following morning. It would take them along the River Neva and through Lakes Ladoga and Onega north to Petrozavodsk, which was beyond the front line on the railway to Murmansk. Tamara packed two trunks, which was the most they risked taking without arousing suspicion. She found it a nightmare choosing what to include and after a desperate search failed to find the key to her bureau containing her personal letters and photos. They waited until three in the morning when it was dark enough not to be seen. Liza the cook and Katiousha her maid put aside their new revolutionary status and marked an ancient custom. They all sat in a circle in silence, then crossed themselves and quietly said goodbye. Tamara’s neighbour Prince Dolgorukov accompanied them to the pier on the Neva embankment. Henry spoke fluent Russian, French and German, and both he and Tamara had travelled all over Europe. But neither of them had travelled incognito, with a child, through enemy country before. 

Portrait of Tamara Karsavina by Henry J. Bruce, 1918.

The steamship was crowded with families anxious to return to their homes around the inland lakes before they were cut off by civil war. There were also young men eager to join the fighting – wherever the front line was now. A young Count told them that he planned to join the White Army, though it already had a surplus of officers and not enough soldiers. The Red Army had the opposite problem – too many private soldiers, who decided military strategy by vote. 

After five days the boat arrived in Petrodovask on the west coast of Lake Onega, where they planned to catch the steam-train north. Henry and the Count disembarked cautiously. The road leading up from the empty harbour to the railway station was shrouded in drifts of willow seed, stained with blood. A French officer told them that the streets were overlooked by snipers and the trains were full of Red Army soldiers, whose few officers could not control them. He advised them to return to Petrograd, even though the situation there had deteriorated even further. Count Mirbach, the German ambassador, had been assassinated in Moscow and Lenin had laid the blame on Britain. As a result, Captain Cromie had been killed defending the former British Embassy in Petrograd. They decided to remain on the boat which was heading to the north of the lake. The young Count went to search for food but was shot by a sniper within sight of the steamer. He managed to crawl back to the boat, his plans to join the White Army in ruins. 

Map of the route from Petrograd by steamer and cart to Lake Sumo, July 1918

Five days later their boat arrived in Povenetz, a village at the far north end of Lake Onega. There they were told of a disused post-road leading north-east for about 200 miles to the White Sea, and they hired a horse and cart. Tamara was forced to reduce their luggage to a few pictures, some blankets and a teaspoon which had belonged to the dancer Taglioni. She gave away most of Nikita’s clothes, and asked the captain to return their trunks to Petrograd. From Povenetz, they travelled slowly through the forest, crossing marshes and rounding lakes. Mosquitoes rose in huge clouds and swarmed around their heads. For several days they saw only the occasional peasant, shrouded in muslin, working in an isolated clearing. At night, they shared the floor of rough window-less huts, lit by rushes. They drank weak tea, and ate hard sausage. The local people were friendly, but knew nothing of politics or the movements of the Red Army. Twenty years of dieting and dancing with bleeding feet, had taught Tamara to ignore both hunger and pain, while Henry had been toughened up by British boarding school. Nikita, a pampered city child, clung to his mother and screamed. 
After six days and nights in the forest, they arrived at a slightly more prosperous village on the edge of Lake Sumo. They had just let the horses go for the night when they learned that the village had a soviet committee. Without realising it, they had crossed the line into Red Army territory. Worse still, a consignment of vodka had just arrived. In an effort to improve productivity in both factories and farms, the Tsar had passed a law, which the Bolsheviks had upheld, against distilling vodka. But with the increasing anarchy, it had been impossible to enforce. After a short, fitful sleep in a hut, the leader of the soviet, Commissar Solkov woke them and announced that rather than let them continue round Lake Sumo by cart, his men, who were all drunk, would row them across. He obviously didn’t trust this well-dressed man with a strange accent, his beautiful wife with soft hands, and their child who wore shoes. If they did not agree, then he would lock them up in a barn. Henry remained outwardly calm, guessing that the commissar would almost certainly set the barn on fire.

Postcards of Tamara Karsavina were on sale in Russia.
Here she is with Louloushka, her King Charles Spaniel.

Tamara pointed out that a storm was brewing, the lake was already rough and Nikita could not swim, whereupon he said, “It matters not if the little cur drowns.” At this Tamara was enraged and flew at him, screaming. She could cope with the new social order, but not with insults to her son. Henry thought it was all over. Despite their luck and fortitude so far, their escape seemed to be ending in disaster.
Will they get away? Find out next month.
Part Three, December 27.

"Do not gurgle" - by Katherine Langrish

This little book was printed in 1918.

It begins: "It is a sign of the times that there is a very large demand for a handy little manual which will present in an easily comprehended and concise form a summary of those points which constitute a claim to the possession of good manners. With the spread of education the old-fashioned lines which so sharply divide the classes are fast vanishing. And now that there is so little distinction in clothes, all that tends to make or mar is to be seen in manners and heard in speech."

So how would we fare if we were spirited back to 1918? Would we 'pass' as 'gentlefolk' or be shunned as hopelessly out of our depth in good society? I fear the latter, and I suspect that many a BBC television adaptation gets these things wrong, too. For example:

 
With ladies, a gentleman never offers to shake hands. It is the privilege of the lady on all occasions to make the first move. This is an invariable rule. 

The lady must always extend her hand first, and if she does not, the gentleman must not attempt to shake hands with her. 

Always remember the claims to courtesy due to the fair sex and to your elders. If in any doubt, always err on the wrong side. Cross a room to open a door for a lady rather than allow her to open it for herself. Never sit in the presence of a lady who remains standing. Rise always when a lady leaves the room. 

And:

After an introduction, the gentleman on a future occasion must always await the lady's signal of acknowledgement. He must not presume upon the fact of a prior introduction to begin an acquaintanceship. 

One thing that strikes me about this little pamphlet is that it is relentlessly addressed to the male reader. Perhaps to those 'temporary gentlemen' (horrid phrase!), the working or middle class men who had been raised to officer status during the war. Was there another pamphlet for women? Or was it simply that women were less socially mobile and therefore less in need of this kind of advice?

Reading it, I am struck by what seems now the extreme and complicated formality of social rules at the time. Need to know when to raise your hat? The pamphlet explains. You must raise your hat to any lady of your acquaintance, chance-met in public - but only if she has bowed or nodded to you first. If, however, you need to perform some slight service for a lady whom you do not know, (for instance, to pick up an item she has dropped), you should lift your hat first. Ordinarily you don't lift your hat to a male friend, but if you have a lady with you he will lift his hat to her, and you must return the salute. However, you may raise your hat to a man who is senior to you 'in years or station', and he should raise his hat in response.

All this had to become a reflex - an instinctive, spontaneous response.  Or else you were out of your depth, struggling, and patently no gentleman...

I've never quite understood (neither does this pamphlet explain) why 'for afternoon calls morning dress is worn - frock coat or morning coat and silk hat.' But I'm relieved to discover that the author encourages 'sympathy and understanding in dealing with servants', urging us to remember that ' they are of the same material as yourself, with the same desires and needs, emotions and thoughts, which differ in degree only, and not in kind. It should be your place to set them an example... Ask kindly, if firmly, for what you want done.'

Hmmm...

I think most 21st century time travellers would be rapidly found out. How about this for a culinary problem?

DESSERT - This is sometimes a difficult proceeding. To peel an orange, apple or pear with a fruit knife and fork requires some practice. If you feel doubtful about it, take some other fruit. ... Bananas should be peeled with the dessert knife and fork and eaten with the fork, which should be used to divide the fruit into small pieces. 

And it might be difficult to accustom oneself to this:

SERVICE - Remember that the servants are there to wait. Do not ask a fellow guest to pass something if a servant is at hand. Do not lean over the table to reach for anything; ask a servant to pass it. 

Some of the advice is priceless (and timeless), though:

EATING - Eat quietly and deliberately. All haste is vulgar; in eating it is particularly so. Make no noise in masticating your food, and keep the mouth closed during the process. ...In taking soup do not gurgle or make throat noises. 

And as for drinking:

Do not elevate the glass as though trying to stand it on your nose. 

Lastly, oh History Girls, bear in mind these strictures on instilling virtues in children:

MANLINESS - Teach your boys to be honest in all things; never do a mean or dirty action; to be straightforward and truthful in all their dealings; to be open, fearless and courteous on all occasions, and especially to their sisters. 

MODESTY - Teach your girls to be as good as your boys (as fearless, as open and as courteous), only from them a little more fineness and more reserve is expected - a tribute to their delicate and finer nature.