Love and longevity

By Susan Vincent

A few years I was assailed by middle age. As with so many others, it took the form of family history.

Being from Aotearoa New Zealand but having settled in the UK, I started by wanting to discover if there were any distant traces here that I could identify, any remnants of belonging. Everyone in my family had journeyed across the globe in the nineteenth century, in the fifty or so years between the 1830s and 1880s. All were from Britain. It seems that this was the country where they could no longer see a future. But what of their past?

I started to dig … which makes it sound like shovels in a cemetery in the dead of night. But perhaps family historians are indeed something like grave robbers, working the crumbling soil on the watch for gold? I laid bare lots of stories but today’s is about a man who carried a particularly memorable moniker, Thomas Horlock Bastard, esquire.

Born in 1796, in 1858 he married Sarah Vincent, the sister of my great-great-grandfather (who having left for New Zealand eight years earlier, was not at the wedding). It was a second marriage for the widower Thomas, by now aged 62. Sarah, even at 24 years his junior, was well past the typical marrying age; a spinster that no doubt everyone thought was securely settled on the shelf.

 St Matthew's, Rowde, 1860s. Photo: Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre

It was certainly a love match, or at the very least one of affection and respect. The wedding itself, performed by Sarah’s clergyman father at his parish church in Rowde, was a jolly affair. ‘The church was tastefully decorated for the occasion by some of the ladies of the parish’, says the newspaper report, and after the ceremony Sarah walked back to the vicarage along a path that the school children had strewn with flowers. The children also presented her with a Bible ‘as a testimonial of their respect and affection’, suggesting that Sarah taught at the Sunday School or was involved with their education in some way. 

At one o’clock there was ‘a substantial dinner’ for about fifty of the older and poorer residents, comprising roast beef, plum pudding, and ‘plenty of good beer’.[1] This was provided by the bride herself. Immediately I get a picture of a woman who combined a sense of social duty with good humour, and a high degree of agency. It’s a picture that emerges when we also look at her husband, Thomas Horlock Bastard. 

 

Blessed with a large house in rural Dorset and an independent fortune, Thomas took to philanthropy with vigour and commitment. Interested in a range of causes, his special province was education.

One outcome of this was his building and endowment of a strictly non-denominational secondary school in the nearby town of Blandford in 1863. Actively concerned to improve the status of women, Thomas originally proposed that the school be for girls only but was swayed both by the need to provide for local boys and the belief – surely way before his time – ‘of the advantages which are found to result from educating boys and girls together’.[2] The school was managed by a board of seven governors, two of whom had to be women and (in line with its non-sectarian policy) none of whom could be a clergyman. Utterly convinced of the importance of rational enquiry and knowledge, Thomas also required the school to teach economics and human physiology. 

 

Thomas’s belief in the desirability – the necessity – of educating women also led him to provide Girton College in Cambridge with funds for two scholarships. In his own words: ‘in all institutions for socially and morally improving our condition, from the infant school to the college, and lecture-room, a great mistake has been made in separating the sexes, any more than in the ball-room or theatre’.[3]

 

Before founding Milldown School, THB had already in 1855 established a local labourers’ club: note the gender inclusive name. For once more in the teeth of opposition, and possibly uniquely, this was not a working man’s club but for both women and men. Designed to be a mirror of the London clubs that catered for the elite, it was a place of comfort and conviviality, with refreshments, newspapers, books and socialising. Significantly, the club was open every day, including Sundays.

That the one day of the week that was freely available to the working man and woman saw all amenities closed by law was anathema to Thomas. It left them only church and the pub, neither of which he saw as improving venues. He supported the National Sunday League, an organisation that from 1855 campaigned for Sunday opening of museums, libraries, galleries and gardens. Places like the British Museum, the National Gallery and Crystal Palace were on their hit list. 

 

His secular, rational outlook found most eloquent expression in a pamphlet he published in 1872, Scepticism and Social Justice (digitised by the British Library).

In this he argued, secondarily, that the Bible was not a work of divine inspiration – it was both scientifically impossible and internally contradictory. His main point though was that sceptics – even if wrong – ought not to be discriminated against for their beliefs: people are entitled to freedom of thought.

 

Other ideas and causes to which Thomas donated time and money were eclectic and diverse: the Playground and General Recreation Society, committed to open-air play spaces for children; the Garibaldi Fund, supporting the unification of Italy; a women’s hospital in London, to which he and Sarah gave £200; the committee for the National Union for the Improvement of Education of Women of All Classes, to which both he and Sarah belonged (a mouthful of a title commonly shortened to the Women’s Education Union). 

"For more than half a century his fresh and burly figure was constantly seen in London paying golden visits to the offices of some unfriended movement which he thought ought to succeed."[4]

 

A plaster life mask made when Thomas was around 40 helps us see more clearly this ‘fresh and burly figure’, including his receding hair and splendid early Victorian sideburns. Currently in the collection of University College London, the subject is startlingly present, his eyes only momentarily closed.

Bust of Thomas Horlock Bastard. Photos: 2017 University College London. Licensed under CC BY-NC-SA licence

THB knew a lot of liberal thinkers. One of them was John Stuart Mill. They frequented some of the same clubs and causes, and after Mill’s death Thomas subscribed to memorial scholarships and a statue of the great man. Having recently read and been captivated by On Liberty, I am now as giddy as a groupie. It’s like the six degrees of separation: my great-great-grandfather’s sister married a man who knew J.S. Mill. How cool is that. 

 

Statue of John Stuart Mill, Temple Gardens, Victoria Embankement, London. 

Photo: Ethan Doyle White, Wikimedia Commons

 

When Thomas himself died, George Jacob Holyoake – free thinker and a founding figure in the co-operative movement – wrote the following: 

There was no reform which promises social or intellectual benefit which he did not promote. There was no change founded on reason of which he was afraid, nor was he afraid to support it. [5]

Who could wish for a better epitaph?

 

And one last memorable achievement. Although 24 years older than his wife Sarah Vincent, Thomas outlived her by over a year. 

He died in 1898 aged 101, and ‘retained his faculties of thought to the last’.[6]

---

[1] ‘Rowde’, Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 30 October 1858, p. 8.

[2] Report on the school in ‘Book of the Month’, The English Woman’s Journal, 1 June 1863, p. 279;

[3] T. Horlock Bastard, ‘Labourers’ Clubhouses’, The Englishwoman’s Review: A Journal of Woman’s Work 19 (1 July 1874), pp. 174–82, at p. 178. Girton scholarships reported in ’Record of Events. Girton College, Cambridge’, The Englishwoman’s Review of Social and Industrial Questions, 15 July 1879, p. 308.

[4] George Jacob Holyoake, quoted in ‘Signals from our Watch Tower’, Women’s Penny Paper, 9 (7 July 1898), p. 425.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid, but widely reported in his obituaries and death notices.

Felicia Skene: writer & philanthropist by Janie Hampton

Felicia Skene, left, with her niece Zoe Thomson, wife of the Archbishop of York,
and her brother William Forbes Skene, Historiographer Royal of Scotland, in 1892.

When I first moved to Oxford I rather disapproved of the hostel next door, with its Victorian attitude to young, single mothers. I was not surprised when our local vicar told me that it was run by the ‘Skene Moral Welfare Association’. I then learned that the Skene in question was Felicia Mary Frances Skene, one of the most radical women in nineteenth century Oxford. I was even more amazed to discover that she was my grandfather’s great aunt, known in the family as ‘Fifi’. I wanted to know more.

Felicia Mary Frances Skene as a young woman

Her father James, was a wealthy Scottish lawyer and amateur artist whose engravings illustrated Walter Scott’s novels. Born in 1821, Fifi comforted Scott with fairy stories the night in 1825 when he lost everything. Roused by her cheerful spirit, he decided to fight bankruptcy and work through his debts. Scott wrote that Fifi’s parents ‘bring so much old-fashioned kindness and good humour with them that they must be always welcome guests.’ They were also enterprising and resourceful.

James Skene believed that travel was the best form of education, and so led his family on a grand tour around Europe. Fifi was taught the piano in France by Liszt, whom she described as ‘a wild-looking, long-haired excitable man’. Between 1838 and 1845 the family lived in Athens where Fifi sang with the Greek royal family. During an expedition on horseback across the Marathon plain, she spent the night in a shack with Albanian peasants and their pigs. At the age of twenty-four she brought her young nieces aged ten and eleven (one of them my great grandmother Janie) home from Athens by ship and train via Constantinople. Arriving in England she wrote her first book Wayfaring Sketches among the Turks and Christians, first in French and then in English. Her observations of conditions in slave markets, galley- ships and an Ottoman Pasha’s harem made it a bestseller.

Fifi’s father James Skene of Rubsilaw, 1775–1864,
 with two of his grandchildren.

The Skene method of education obviously worked. Her older brother James Henry married Rhalou, a Greek aristocrat and became a British Consul to Aleppo. Fifi’s brother George was Professor of Law at the University of Edinburgh and Sheriff of Glasgow. Another brother William became the Historiographer Royal of Scotland, writing the first academic history from Scotland’s point of view. One of her sisters married the Swedish ambassador to Washington, Berlin and Paris, and the other married a Greek archaeologist– the brother of her sister-in-law.
Fifi settled in Oxford, where her social views were considered overly progressive, especially for a woman. Her 1866 novel Hidden Depths was an exposure of prostitution in Oxford inspired by the injustices she had witnessed in the prison and women’s reformatories. The Athenaeum criticised her writing as ‘unrepresentative of society’, The London Review disapproved of the message and Mudie’s Library considered the subject-matter altogether too provocative. The Lesters: A Family Record warned readers of the dangers of alcohol but was denounced by Saturday Review as being ‘cheap melodramatic horror’ and ‘almost beneath criticism’ while Academy dismissed the novel as 'dull and destined for failure'.
Despite many offers, the auburn-haired and boisterous Fifi was far too busy to bother with marriage. She preferred to carve out her own life as a writer and philanthropist than belong to a man. Fluent in both French and Greek, and possessing a photographic memory, she published more than twenty books under the pseudonyms of Oxonesis, Francis Scougal and Erskine Moir. Her interest in the high-church ‘Oxford Movement’, inspired a theological work The Divine Master, which ran to eleven editions. She wrote for Blackwood’s, Cornhill and Macmillan's Magazines, Quiver, Temple Bar and Good Words, which had a circulation of 100,000 and featured contributions by Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope.

Fifi’s 1865 anonymous pamphlet, ‘Penitentiaries and Reformatories’ on the humiliation of ‘fallen women’ whom society ‘sought to hide its blackest curse under a veil of mock prudery. . . because their sin was unfit to be named in the polite society that received with open arms the very men on whom they sinned’. (University of Indiana's Victorian Women Writers Project)

Fifi was a deeply religious and principled woman and used the income from her books and articles to finance her philanthropic work. Her biographer, Edith Rickards, wrote in 1902 that ‘it was her rule throughout her long life never to spend on herself what she gained from her writings, partly from her natural love of giving, partly from an old-fashioned idea that it was an undignified thing for a lady to earn money for her own personal advantage.’

'The Skene Arms', left, in St Michael’s Street, Oxford.

For most of her life, Fifi lived in St Michael’s Street in the centre of Oxford. It’s nickname was ‘The Street of Seven Deadly Sins’. Her home was known as ‘The Skene Arms’, because it was always open to beggars, clergymen, prostitutes, politicians and students. In her Cornhill Magazine article ‘Ethics of the Tramp’ she wrote that like her parrots, men of the road should roam free and never be incarcerated. She braved the wrath of local pimps and drunken husbands by finding refuge for women fleeing prostitution and domestic violence.

Fifi, Tatters and Rev. Algernon Barrington Simeon,
the first Warden of St Edward’s School,
whom she nursed though diphtheria, 1875.

After years of impromptu visits to Oxford Prison accompanied by Tatters, her Skye terrier, Fifi became England’s first official female Prison Visitor. She insisted on complete confidentiality and demanded that male and female prisoners be housed separately, for the protection of the women. On their release, she gave prisoners a hearty breakfast and a reference for employment. She even organised marriages to legitimatize the children of ‘fallen women’. Independently of any political movement, she fought for prisons to be used for rehabilitation; for the abolition of capital punishment; and for the decriminalization of suicide. She also campaigned against female inequality, animal vivisection and religious intolerance. When the Prime Minister, W.E. Gladstone, asked her advice on the new theory of evolution, she told him that Darwin’s discovery was true, and compatible with Christianity. 

Fifi helped found St Edward’s School for the sons of poor clergymen and dug the first sod of earth for its new buildings in North Oxford. With Dr Henry Acland, Fifi trained nurses to deal with cholera and smallpox outbreaks in Oxford. But when she offered her nurses to Florence Nightingale for the war in the Crimea, all but three were turned down for being ‘too working class.’

Fifi, 1821-1899, in old age.

Fifi died of bronchitis in 1899 and was buried in St Thomas Church, near Oxford railway station. A century later the assets of the Skene Moral Welfare Association were redistributed among Oxford’s social housing associations. In old age, Fifi had said of herself, ‘I am like the Martyr’s Memorial – everybody knows me and no-one is interested me.’ Beyond Oxford, she has largely been forgotten, but in 2002 a blue plaque was erected outside her home, now a hostel for single men. The plaque describes Fifi as ‘Prison reformer and friend of the poor’ but there is no mention of her literary achievements.
At times I have felt that my own career, which is split between writing popular history books and international development, confuses people. Great Aunt Fifi demonstrated that a woman can have as many different careers as she likes.

 Some of her titles: Wayfaring sketches among the Greeks and Turks, and on the shores of the Danube by a seven years resident in Greece, 1849. The Isles of Greece, and other poems, 1843. Use and Abuse,  a tale, 1849. The Inheritance of Evil or, The Consequence of marrying a deceased wife’s sister, 1849. The Tutor's Ward, 1851.  The Divine Master, 1852. S. Alban’s, or, the Prisoners of Hope, 1853.  Hidden Depths ,1866. Still and Deep, 1875. Memoir of Alexander, Bishop of Brechin, 1876. Raymond, 1876.  Life of Alexander Lycurgus: archbishop of the Cyclades, 1877. More than Conqueror , 1878. The Shadow of the Holy Week, 1883. A Strange Inheritance, 1886. The Lesters: a Family Record, 1887. Through the Shadows: a Test of the Truth, 1888. Awakened. A tale in nine chapters, 1888. Dewdrops: selections from writings of the saints,1888. Scenes from a Silent World, or, Prisons and their Inmates, 1889.

www.janiehampton.co.uk