Joan Mary Harley 1916-2002
Ian, Sheila, Joan, Hazel in 1948
Foreword: A letter to her granddaughters
To Jennifer, Joanna, Heather, Helen, Lorna and Ann, and in loving memory of Amanda whom we miss
Your grandmother Joan would have been 100 years old in January 2016. The eldest of her seven granddaughters was born when she was fifty-one, a few weeks after her husband died. All of you only met her in the later years of her life, and experienced her mostly in her disturbed years. Which is a pity, because by then she was often difficult to be with and at times more than a little crazy. But for all her later oddities, she was a remarkable woman, and remained strong, self-directed and worldly oriented until her death.
She was a woman who had defied her upbringing, and overcome a limited education, to become her own person: a leader, a spokesperson, a crusader, an inspiration to many. She was a great role model to her daughters. We took her lessons into our lives in our own ways, which she did not always respect, but both Hazel and I knew where the strength to plough our own paths came from.
So I thought I would try to give us all some idea of who the younger Joan was. I can’t give any kind of complete portrait. I really didn’t know her all that well. I was 51 when she died, missed her first 20-odd years, and wasn’t paying a lot of attention for many of the other years of our relationship. So this is a few snapshots rather than a portrait. It is based on my memories, of times together and stories told, and on things I have learnt about her and her upbringing from all kinds of sources.
Joan’s granddaughters Joanna, Heather, Annie, Jennifer, Lorna, Helen at Annie’s wedding, Dubrovnik 2014
(Mandy was too ill to travel. Helen’s daughter, Libby, stood in.)
Joan Mary Harley
An errant woman
Joan used the word “errant” of herself. It has two meanings, both of which fit her to the proverbial ‘t’.
1. erring or straying from the proper course or standards
2. traveling in search of adventure
Introduction: The third child, the girl child
Joan, with her mother and her youngest brother, Ronald, in 1920
“Sheila, pass your father a sandwich.”
What? I am at the far end of the table and the plate of sandwiches is by my father’s elbow. Nevertheless my grandmother insisted that I get up, walk behind the chairs of my siblings, to pass my father his sandwich. This, this requirement that women should wait hand and foot on the patriarch, had survived the years in which she had raised her four children alone after being abandoned by her husband many years earlier. At ten, I thought that was pretty stupid.
Joan was only too aware of her mother’s attitude to gender roles. As the third of four children, and the only girl, she keenly resented what she saw as the disadvantages of being female. The boys were not expected to do the household tasks as she was. They got to go to boarding school, which she was denied. Furthermore when she married, and emigrated to Australia with her husband, she was to encounter legal restrictions on her rights – and those of her mother – as a woman, reinforcing her awareness of women’s inequality. I suspect this contributed to her feisty spirit and determination not to be restricted to an assigned role in life.
In 1916, when Joan was born, Britain was in the midst of a war against Germany. Her father, Cecil Harley, had joined the army at the outbreak of war and was later in the Naval Volunteer Reserve. Bessie, Joan’s mother, had two children, and two more before the war was over. The family had moved from the north of England, where the two older boys were born, to the London suburb of Golders Green, Joan’s first home. They lived close to her mother’s brother, Uncle Frederick Gilvray, and his wife, Aunt Dorothy, on Woodstock Avenue. But Woodstock Avenue was to be disrupted, when “the railroad ran through the middle of the house” almost literally. London Underground’s Northern Line was extended and the family – by then with four children, for Ronnie was born in 1917 – was forced to relocate.
“the railroad ran through the middle of the house” New Yorker Jan 28 2019
The family moved a few miles to the north, to 77 Vivian Avenue, Hendon, the family home for the next forty-five years. Glengarry, as the house was called, was a quite large house whose rooms included, besides a very elegant sitting room, large kitchen, and innumerable bedrooms, a billiard room large enough to be later converted into a separate family unit.
The Harley home at 77 Vivian Avenue, 1924 to 1960
Joan described Hendon as a “newly developing area which brought people with many different incomes and accents together. The basic friendliness was well formed by the villagers and East Enders who lived there before the new arrivals.” I think today we might use the word ‘gentrification’ and perhaps even condescension; on the other hand Joan, and also Douglas, were very good at establishing friendly relations with ‘the villagers.’
This was a childhood of some privilege, but the family fortune was soon to suffer from her father’s extravagances.
Something of an inventor, Cecil was awarded a patent in 1929 for ‘an appliance for peeling apples and oranges’.
Cecil Harley was a merchant trading in silverware, jewelry and cutlery. After working for a while in the City of London Cecil established his own business in 1932. But Cecil was a spendthrift and a playboy. Joan remembered sitting in the car outside Windsor Castle on several occasions, waiting for her father to emerge. ( I have reason to believe she was mistaken about this memory - see CF Harley bio). When he came out, he would be the worse for wear, his business evidently including drinking and gambling. But he used his playboy contacts to good advantage, for he secured the Royal Warrant as Cutlers and Silversmiths to King George V, in 1930, for the Viners Company. In return (I assume) Viners named a line of silverware ‘Harley Elegance’.
The precarious nature of Cecil’s finances became evident in 1924, when the family moved again, leaving Glengarry rented. Joan was the only child at home when she and her mother moved into small accommodations on Willow Road in Hampstead, while Cecil established a separate residence in Twickenham, which he maintained for several years. The boys were in boarding school, but during the summer holidays, Bessie and the children lived in France, where the cost of living was lower than in England. This was hard on the family financially and emotionally. Joan resented having to be further away from her Hendon school friends , and John told me he was obliged to abandon college plans in order to help his mother financially. But for Joan life in Hampstead had some consolations.
Penelope Fitzgerald, whose father was editor of Punch, provides this description of Hampstead in the 1920s.
The village – and Hampstead still felt itself very much a small village – was a place of high thinking, plain living, and small economies. The steep, charming old streets were full of ham-and-beef shops, old bookstalls, and an amazing number of cleaners and repairers, all helpful to shabby refugees and literary men. There was even a jeweller’s where one bead could be bought at a time, for all Hampstead ladies wore long necklaces. The livery stables had only just turned into a garage …. Poets walked the streets, and Stanley Spencer pushed his armful of painting materials amiably across the Heath. Hampstead was literary, poetic, rural, part Bohemian, part genteel. … “undemanding” and “homely” (this in comparison with Bloomsbury).
Hermione Lee, Fitzgerald’s biographer, continues
The Streets were full not only of poets in their “wide-brimmed black hats,” but also of lamplighters coming round to light the gas lamps, muffin men in winter and lavender-sellers in summer, knife grinders and chair menders, pony-carts bringing milk for the dairy farm at Highgate. This sounds all too much like the London of A.A. Milne and Robert Louis Stevenson, whose verses Joan made sure we read as children, and quite different from the staid suburb of Hendon.
Hampstead’s Whitestone Pond in the 1920s. Joan would take us here to watch the children sailing boats in the 1950s. Heather was born in Hampstead in 1971.
Put your daughter on the stage
For some years Joan attended a private school for girls in Hendon. But at the age of 13, her formal education ended when she won a full scholarship to attend the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Joan wrote “I finished schooling before I was 14 as my mother had ambitions of a stage and film career for me.”
The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, Malet Street entrance, London.
Both Hazel and I lived nearby in the 1960s.
Child actors had been much in demand in the nineteenth century. Children, even some as young as two, would be on the stage every night. Ellen Terry, the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain in Victorian times, described her experiences as a child on the stage in her memoirs:
The rehearsals for A Winter’s Tale taught me once and for all that an actress’s life (even when the actress is only eight) is not all beer and skittles, or cakes and ale, or fame and glory…. Rehearsals lasted all day, Sundays included, and when there was no play running at night, until four or five the next morning.
In 1899 an Act of Parliament for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children was passed which set down the first guidelines for the employment of children, including those in the theatre. Children under seven could no longer to be employed in the theatre, and strict conditions applied to those seven to ten years old. Soon drama schools sprang up to prepare children for slightly older roles. The Itali Conti stage school, wrote Penelope Fitzgerald, “attracted stage struck parents who wanted to get their children into the theater.”
Noel Coward wrote the song “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington.” in response to letters from women begging him to find parts for their daughters in his plays. His cynical verse includes the cruel lines:
Though they said at the school of acting
She was lovely as Peer Gynt,
I fear on the whole
An ingénue role
Would emphasize her squint.
She’s a big girl,
And though her teeth are fairly good,
She’s not the type I ever would
Be eager to engage.
No more buts, Mrs. Worthington!
Nuts, Mrs. Worthington!
Don’t put your daughter on the stage!
But Bessie Harley was not a ‘stage struck mother’; rather her motives were financial, for she was looking to Joan to supplement the family income. This was a not uncommon practice, especially during the Great Depression. Ballet Shoes, a wildly popular teen novel by Noel Streatfield, published in 1936, is the story of three young girls who tried to support their family by going on the stage.
Joan always spoke proudly of her time at RADA. She believed that she had gained “deep understanding” from writers like Shakespeare, Galsworthy, Moliere, Chekov and others. Her studies included music and dance as well as Shakespeare and modern drama, and a broad selection of non-dramatic literature. Elocution, dialects, movement, impersonation and audition technique, too, were all part of the drama school curriculum. There were student performances, and some might be lucky enough to get parts in professional plays. At the better stage schools – and RADA is generally regarded as the most prestigious drama school in the United Kingdom - education was not limited to preparation for the stage. The academy also guaranteed to provide a good all-round curriculum. Joan appreciated the education she received there.
Among those studying at RADA at about the same time were to be the cream of British theater and cinema, including Vivien Leigh, Ida Lupino, and Jon Pertwee – the third Doctor Who. Joan greatly admired Dame Sybil Thorndike, who in 1924 had played Saint Joan on stage and in an early movie. Thorndike was a pacifist and member of the Peace Pledge Union which Joan was to join later. But what she shared with me about Dame Sybil was that ‘the reason her beautiful face was unlined was because she never smiled’.
“In 1930 I was a very young teenager,” Joan wrote, “learning about life while working with bright young people who aspired to achieve success on the stage.”
Joan always spoke proudly of her time at RADA. She believed that she had gained “deep understanding” from writers like Shakespeare, Galsworthy, Moliere, Chekov and others. Her studies included music and dance as well as Shakespeare and modern drama, and a broad selection of non-dramatic literature. Elocution, dialects, movement, impersonation and audition technique, too, were all part of the drama school curriculum. There were student performances, and some might be lucky enough to get parts in professional plays. At the better stage schools – and RADA) is generally regarded as the most prestigious drama school in the United Kingdom - education was not limited to preparation for the stage. The academy also guaranteed to provide a good all-round curriculum. Joan appreciated the education she received there.
Among those studying at RADA at about the same time were the cream of British theater and cinema, including Vivien Leigh, Ida Lupino, and Jon Pertwee – the third Doctor Who. She greatly admired Dame Sybil Thorndike, who in 1924 had played Saint Joan on stage and in an early movie. Thorndike was a pacifist and member of the Peace Pledge Union which Joan was to join later. But what she shared with me about Dame Sybil was that ‘the reason her beautiful face was unlined was because she never smiled’.
Despite her training in this noble company, little came of her time there. When she completed her studies she was too young to act professionally, for Parliament was once again moving to protect children in the workforce, leading to The Children and Young Persons Act of 1933. This further restricted the hours, and particularly the evening and weekend hours, that school-aged children could work. Since the film industry operated during the daytime she was able to get some work at Pinewood Studios as an extra. But eventually she drifted away from acting.
There are two photos of Joan in roles she played on the stage. In one she is in costume for the part of the Lady in “The Man with a Load of Mischief”, a play by Ashley Dukes later turned into a Broadway musical.
Joan as The Lady in “The Man with a Load of Mischief”
In the other, taken in 1938, she is on stage as Abby in The Late Christopher Bean based on the play Prenez garde à la peinture by Rene Fauchois (France, 1932). Abby, the lead role, is a maid who had secretly married the deceased painter before he died. Others who played this role include Lillian Gish, Helen Hayes and Thelma Ritter. It is a comedy role, and Joan used to love to recite the line: “Owh m’um, the milkman’s bin an’ gon an’ never coom.”
Joan as Abby in The Late Christopher Bean
The costume drama we would have expected of Joan, but I was surprised to discover that she had played comedy.
Joan’s role models and the limits of women’s rights
Joan would never have described herself as a feminist, but she lived at a time of change and challenge for women. Historian Thomas Dixon wrote of women’s struggles at this time:
The period in Britain covered by the two world wars was a time when modern women struggled to escape from the age-old idea that theirs was the lachrymose sex – soft, caring, soppy, sobbing, hysterical, and manipulative. This was true in several different spheres, both private and public. Advice columns told women that tears would spoil their looks, annoy their husbands, damage their health, and alienate their friends. ….
The argument for female suffrage also required women to show that they could master their emotions sufficiently to make rational political decisions. Figures like Edith Cavell – brave, principled, and coolly unemotional – would be of propaganda value … against centuries of gender stereotypes.
Edith Cavell was one of Joan’s heroes. Cavell, a nurse, lived in Brussels and was a British agent during the First World War. She saved the lives of hundreds of soldiers not only by providing medical care, but also by helping to smuggle them secretly back home across enemy lines. After her undercover work was discovered by the German secret police, Cavell was shot at dawn by a firing squad in Brussels on October 12 1915.
Edith Cavell, executed 1915
In 1932, young visitors to Madame Tussaud’s were asked to choose from among the waxworks the individual they most wanted to be like when they grew up. The choices included heroes such as Captain Scott, Earnest Shackleton, and Joan of Arc amongst others. But the surprising winner was Edith Cavell. If Joan had participated in the contest, she may well have chosen Edith Cavell – though she is equally likely to have chosen Joan of Arc! Strong women like Edith Cavell and Joan of Arc, women who stood by their principles even in the face of death, provided ready role models for Joan.
By 1933 the Harley marriage was to all extents and purposes at an end, and Cecil soon moved to Australia and later New Zealand. Bessie remained at Vivian Avenue, and divided it into several flats which she rented out. Though she depended on her income as landlady, she always considered herself a lady of a higher class, betrayed by a profligate, and now absent, husband. But for Joan herself, in 1934, love and marriage were fast approaching. And, in her own words:
She did not enter married life with dreams of independence. Rather she took into her marriage girlish dreams, cultivated in on-screen romances.
In Madeira with Douglas, and a June wedding
Joan, 1934; photo taken by Douglas
Where or when Douglas and Joan met is not clear. In 1926 Douglas lived only two blocks away from the Harleys’ temporary residence on Willow Road in Hampstead. And on his return from India in May of 1934 he lived in Hendon only a few blocks from Joan at Glengarry. But in August Joan appears in Doug’s photo index for the first time, and from then on until their marriage less than a year later there are few photos not of Joan.
Joan was eighteen, Douglas thirty-one, an age disparity which, according to Joan, was an important element in their relationship: “He had the simple joy of knowing that Joan was intelligent enough to keep him reasoning but that, with 13 years between them, she would inevitably give in gracefully in the end.”
Their meeting ground, Joan wrote later, was a shared interest in world affairs. Douglas’ mother “was an active intelligent internationalist”, and Douglas, born in the United States and still a US citizen despite his British upbringing, shared a “genuine internationalism and interest in management of public affairs. … We sat up late, drinking percolated black coffee, arguing about putting the world to rights.”
But just where did they sit up late at nights? For in February of 1935 Joan sailed from Southampton to take up a position in a tourist shop in Madeira. She described herself as ‘manageress’ in the ships manifests, and I believe she worked in a shop selling Madeira lace.
Most of Madeira’s embroidery is carried out traditionally, at home.
It seems that Douglas followed her, for there are 19 photos, all of them of Joan, taken in Madeira in March and April listed in his photo index (sadly the album itself is missing). I can find no travel documents confirming his sailing to or from Madeira, but he may have flown, given that he was accustomed to doing so a decade earlier. So though I cannot be certain, it seems as though Douglas and Joan developed their romance on the sunny island of Madeira.
Joan and Douglas were in Funchal together in 1935
Douglas’s stay there ended, though, when his mother died. He returned to England in time for her cremation on April 9 at Golders Green Crematorium for cremation. To Douglas’ surprise his father, Robert Hamilton Macnee, came to the cremation. Robert was there, according to Joan, not to mourn his wife but to inform Douglas that he intended to contest Emma’s will. By this time Douglas had contracted with Standard Telephones and Cables (for whom he was to work for the remainder of his working life) to travel to Australia to help establish an STC branch there. Planning to leave the country in June, Douglas was in no position to be tied up in a legal contest, so he reluctantly agreed to his father’s demands.
Joan returned from Madeira a month later, arriving in Southampton on 7 May. But before they could marry they had a different legal problem on their hands. Their marriage needed approval. At nineteen Joan was a ‘minor’, and legally not allowed to be married without her father’s permission. Even though he had abandoned the family and was by then living in Australia, Joan’s mother was not empowered to permit the marriage. So Joan was made a ward of court and her marriage approved by a judge, a total stranger. A powerful lesson in the unequal status of women.
Joan and Douglas were married on June 1, 1935, at Hendon Parish Church. Her brothers, John and Tony, are standing behind them. One week later, on June 7, the couple set sail for Sydney, Australia.
Australia 1935-1937
They sailed from Plymouth, on the SS Bendigo, and made stops in Gibraltar, Malta, Port Said, Suez, Aden, Colombo, and Melbourne before arriving in Sydney in mid-July. In the ship’s manifest Douglas’ occupation was given as engineer. While Australia was entered as his intended permanent residence, he gave as his address the Westminster Bank in London.
A second lesson in the unequal status of women came, , so soon after the first, when Joan disembarked in Sydney. British law at the time specified that a married woman’s nationality was always that of her husband. After marrying ‘an alien,’ (a non-British subject) a woman acquired her husband’s civic status and lost her own. So it was not evident that Joan was still entitled to British citizenship or that her passport was valid. The Australian Naturalization Bill of 1903 had echoed this provision, despite this memorable statement from one of the Senators:
We do not take away a man’s citizenship if he commits a felony. We do not take away his citizenship if he commits a murder. Certainly, we hang him, but until we take away his life he is still a citizen. But if a woman, born a British subject, with all the rights which that implies, marries a foreigner, no matter what his position or intelligence may be, she will forfeit her rights of British citizenship and become a foreigner.
In 1931 the British Government had declared that
it considered it right that all disabilities of married women in matters of nationality should be removed, and that in so far as nationality is concerned a married woman should be in the same position as a man, married or unmarried, or any single woman.
On July 23, just after they arrived a petition was presented to the British Parliament, pointing out that the government had as yet failed to give legal effect to its earlier policy declaration.
The petitioners pray the House of Commons to ask the British Government immediately to declare that it is willing to have legal effect given immediately to the above quoted declaration of policy, and to take all possible steps to secure the early passage of such legislation so that a woman, married or unmarried, shall have the same right as a man to enjoy independent nationality in her own person, and the same right to retain or change her nationality. And your petitioners, as in duty bound, will ever pray, etc. The fair land of Australia?
Presumably they did so declare, with immediate effect, for Joan’s travel documents were approved.
Joan arrived in Sydney, a new bride in a new country, to start a brand-new life.
As a young 19 year old, in love with a difficult, alienated bachelor of 32, Joan began a glorious campaign to make that man happy,” she later wrote. “This young wife took her unspoken instructions from her husband. Partially self-educated and having learnt a lot from romantic films in which women were loving, I did not cultivate a philosophy of independence.
She had relatives in Sydney – her aunt Connie Williams, her father’s sister, Uncle George and her cousins, another Douglas, and Jennie, with whom Joan and Douglas were to spend much time.
Joan, centre, in Sydney with her cousin Jenny and Aunt Connie
There was another family member in Sydney too, with whom she chose not to spend time. One day, she told me, she saw her father at a bar. When I asked what happened between them, to my surprise she told me she had not spoken to him for she had nothing to say to him. As far as I know she never saw him again, and as far as we know he spent the rest of his life in Australia and New Zealand.
The couple lived in “a well situated flat overlooking the magnificent bridge and part of the quite beautiful harbor,” she wrote, and before long they had acquired a dog, the first of a line of wire-haired fox terriers named Boots. The flat was in Potts Point, overlooking the racier Kings Cross, where Sydney’s restaurants, nightclubs and strip joints were located. Potts Point was more respectable, with grand Regency and Georgian mansions and villas, and Art Deco and Spanish style flats. Joan was a high-spirited wife, and enjoyed living in central Sydney; she told me a story of having climbed out of an upstairs window after Doug told her to stay at home. They moved later to 24 Sydney Street, Strathfield, a pleasant tree-lined, and quieter neighborhood further north.
Joan with Boots, Sydney
While in Australia Douglas and Joan began what was to be an ongoing part of our family life. Weekends were times to go places, and for the next year and a half Joan and Douglas travelled throughout the beautiful scenery and sights of New South Wales, which Douglas recorded with his trusty Leica camera, as was to be his habit for the rest of his life. Sadly we have none of these photos, just the record that he took them in the photo index that he kept religiously, documenting date, location and content, including people, of every single one. They explored Sydney itself, including Taronga Park Zoo, the Heads, Vaucluse House near the home of the Williams family. There were days spent at Bondi Beach, up the coast to Collaroy and Pittwater, trips to the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury Valley. The photos featured many long term friends, such as Ken Brown, and Val and Poss Simpson and their daughters Val and Pat, who were to visit us several times in England.
Joan had some preconceptions about Australian society that were to confound her however. She had learned that Australians were egalitarian, and compared to their cousins in the British Isles, this may have been true. Women’s suffrage, for example, was established by 1911. But Joan was anticipating that everyone lived as equals and shared, fairly evenly, the comforts of life … that this would be a place without class distinction, [without] the ‘small-minded snobbery’ of our mothers.
She was destined to be profoundly disappointed. The snobbery of her peers was made painfully obvious one afternoon when she took an Irish friend to nearby courts to join other friends with whom she played tennis. Here she experienced
the awful snobbery towards the Irish. … During the whole of the afternoon my friends had no conversation with my Irish friend. The bad manners were so blatant that the owner of the courts apologized to us. This was my model of a friendly nation? A community without snobbery?
There were others who suffered from social injustice in Terra Australis. Before long she was to learn of the plight of Australian Aborigines, and while she did not know it at the time, Aboriginal culture was the example that Joan was looking for, of an egalitarian and communitarian society, one she was to discover later.
Douglas was deeply concerned, she wrote, and talked to her about their appalling living conditions, including lack of safe water and untreated health problems. “They were not even recognized as Australian citizens so they did not have a vote.” Margaret Tucker, an Aboriginal activist who had recently begun campaigning for indigenous rights, came to speak in Sydney’s Hyde Park, not far from where Joan was living.
Joan heard Margaret Tucker speak at Sydney’s Hyde Park
Joan would return to these concerns but for now, Douglas had decided to return to England, where his career prospects – and in particular his opportunities for cutting edge research – would be greater than in the far reaches of the Empire. So, in April 1937, they left Australia.
They sailed from Woolloomooloo on the RMS Orford, of the Orient Line, travelling first class. The voyage went via Perth, Colombo, Aden, the Suez Canal, Naples – Douglas took lots of photographs of the ruins at Pompeii – Toulon, Gibraltar, Nice and the Bay of Biscay to the Isle of Wight. Joan was well advanced in pregnancy but it doesn’t seem to have constrained her activities on board ship.
They arrived in Southampton on June 3 and headed for Hendon where Ian was born on July 26, and Joan became a mother.
War and Peace: Changing the World
On their return from Australia Joan and Douglas settled in Petts Wood, Kent, south of London, from where Douglas commuted to the Standard Telephones and Cables factory in North Woolwich, on the south bank of the Thames. But there were clouds of war on the horizon.
Joan was born in wartime, and war and peace were to shape her life. The World War of 1914-18 was judged to have been the ‘the war to end wars’ and Joan’s formative years saw the development of international institutions and laws under the guidance of the League of Nations aimed at ending war as a tool of international affairs. Yet by the time she was twenty-three years old the world was at war again.
A month after war was declared in September 1939 Joan and Ian left London for Anglesey. There they lived in a cottage called Sport-y-gwent, close to the Menai Suspension Bridge, and Douglas visited at weekends. By May of 1940 Joan was pregnant again; she would tease me that I had been conceived ‘under a bridge’.
The Menai Straits Bridge - a bit before my time.
In 1941, however, the Standard Telephones Woolwich section, being a major producer of communications technology and located in an area heavily targeted in bombing raids, was relocated to safer terrain. An old textile factory in the southwest of England was requisitioned and the entire company and staff were moved to Somerset.
STC’s new home in Dowlish Mills, Somerset, was a far cry from war-torn London
Joan and Ian joined Douglas there, finding a house in Dowlish Wake to share with the Newman family, and their baby daughter Elizabeth. I was born in January 1941, and by mid-year the families moved into separate homes. Newmans moved to Westport, near Langport, and we moved into the thatched cottage which was to be our home for the next seven years.
While settling into a tiny rural hamlet with two small children would not have been easy, Joan did not make it easy for herself. Around the time I was born she became disaffected with the Church of England, which still played a dominant role in English country life. Whether it was the jingoism of the sermons, or social rivalries amongst village residents that drove her away is not clear, but Joan refused to have her second child baptized. The consequences were far-reaching for, in this village of a few hundred souls, she was now excluded from membership in the Mothers’ Union, the primary social support network for women. At twenty-five, and mother of two, she was on her own. But she soon found ways to fill the void.
Joan was one of thousands of young women, joining others from all across England who, in the absence of the men now ‘gone for soldiers,’ learned to keep farm production going as part of the Women’s Land Army. A city girl, born and raised in London, and new to hard physical labour, she took to rigourous farm work like a fish to water. The presence of child number two did not slow her down. She would set the baby on a blanket in the shade of a hedgerow, she told me, where I lay “as quiet as a lamb” for the hours between feedings.
Before the war ended there was a third child. Hazel was born in June 1944, four days after D-Day, This was the beginning of the end of the war, first in Europe, and then – devastatingly with the detonation of the first nuclear bombs – in Asia. This event was to prove decisive in Joan’s future. But with three children now, Joan decided that Rose Cottage was too small. In November 1948 the family moved four miles north, to the larger village of Merriott.
The house at Merriottsford
This gave Joan the opportunity to find a new church, and after exploring the several available, she found an internationally oriented minister at the Methodist Church – where I was finally baptized, at nine years old. But Joan was not ready to stay at home baking cakes for church sales.
“When my three children were all at school”she wrote. “I became very conscious that their lives were more affected by what sort of thoughts and ambitions the local community had, than they were by what they learnt in the classroom.”
Before long she became involved with one or two others in starting a youth club for the young boys of the village. One of these young men, David Gibbs by name, remembered Joan many years later. I asked him if it was true that she had helped start the youth club.
Oh yes, I remember her well. One night she sat beside me and told me that I had stubby fingers. As I look at them now I see that she was right.
What an extraordinary thing to remember over six decades later. David remembered more. He delivered bread around the village on Saturday mornings, on his bike. He remembered coming to our house, and that Joan was the only person in the village who paid with a cheque, telling hime that our family must be very rich. Joan was soon sufficiently well known in the village to be asked to join the Parish Council. I believe – though I may be wrong – that she was unopposed. But her next step did involve an election, when she decided to run for the Chard Rural District Council.
One summer day I was playing a solitary game of tennis against a garage door, when I heard a loudspeaker broadcasting from a car out on the main road. She drove up and down and throughout the village, proclaiming her message.
I am not asking for your vote but I am asking you to exercise your right to vote.
Council seats were held without question by members of the local gentry and as a result many people did not bother to go to the polls. The outcome of the election was thus a foregone conclusion and Joan had no expectation of winning. But she wanted to encourage people not to automatically tip their hats to the gentry, but rather to consider casting an independent vote. This was a novel notion in rural Somerset. Remarkably, Joan won, and was re-elected three years later.
Local politics was by no means Joan’s only civic focus. Driven by a desire to see the power of nuclear weapons removed from the control of any one nation she joined organizations such as Federal Union, which worked for World Federal Government, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interfaith movement for peace founded after the First World War. Preventing future wars in Europe was a major concern, and I remember her coming home from a meeting with Edward Heath, a Conservative Party leader who was to become Prime Minister in the 1970s, excited by his dreams of a united Europe. Being Joan, however, she did not hew a party line. In 1949 she wrote a letter published in the local paper critical of the way in which the Conservative Party was operating; in response her friends in the party told her that she was correct but that ‘one did not write about it’. Truth, she learned, was not welcome.
Before long Joan was taking an organizing and leadership role herself. The speaker at the first meeting she ever arranged, in 1950 or 1951, was Richard St. Barbe Baker. Working in Kenya in the 1920s he had witnessed the environmental devastation from both traditional slash-and-burn farming and land-wasting colonial agriculture. With Kikuyu Paramount Chief Josiah Njonjo, Baker had formed Watu wa Miti, or People of the Trees, the first global conservation movement. It is now known in many countries as the International Tree Foundation.
At about this time Joan lost her companion in many of these projects, the Methodist minister. He was replaced by someone less congenial to her viewpoints. She resumed her search for a spiritual home, and soon discovered the Society of Friends, a religious group dedicated to working for peace and justice. Prison reform had been a key component of Quaker activism since the society’s founding in the seventeenth century, and Joan added this to her list of active concerns.
The on-and-off marriage years
Dedicated, informed and outspoken, by her mid-thirties Joan had begun what was to become a lifelong commitment, one she would carry on her shoulders for the next fifty years. While Douglas had initially shared her passion, it was clear that by this time he was not involved, and was perhaps resentful of the time she spent out of the home. The marriage was to founder on the rocks of her public activism.
But first a tale, through the eyes of a ten year old.
London 1951, a child’s view
The doorbell rang as we sat around the table finishing dinner in my grandmother’s kitchen. I was nearest, so I walked down the dimly lit hallway to the front door, where the porch light cast a dim shadow through a small, frosted glass window. I opened the door to see standing outside a stockily built man, wearing a raincoat and hat. “Is your mother in?” he asked. “I’ll go and see if she is available” I replied, before closing the door, and called “Mu-um, it’s for you”. As she opened the door I heard her say “Oh, it’s you Douglas. Come in.” Douglas? That was my father standing there? I had closed the door on him! How long had it been since I had seen him? Two months? Perhaps three? Yet I had not recognized him. I stood there in silence, pondering, while they moved off to the sitting room to talk.
A month or two earlier Joan, Hazel and I had taken the train to London, where we were staying with Granny Harley. This was not a normal visit, for Hazel and I began to attend the local primary school with our cousin Margaret. What led Joan to leave home that January day in 1951 with the two of us – Ian was at boarding school – to live with a mother with whom she was not close, I don’t know.
I did know that she was restless. The war years had opened up new worlds for her, as it had for many women. She struggled against full-time domesticity and had begun to find activities to get involved in which took her away from the home sometimes in the evenings. Mealtimes were especially fraught, as we children listened to our parents argue. “We are not fighting,” we were told in response to my “you always tell us off for fighting” complaint. “We are discussing”. Sounded like fighting to me.
But what ran through my mind that night, as I stood in the dark hallway? It dawned on me for the first time that my parents were getting divorced. I had heard people talk about divorce. I knew it was something rather shameful. I knew it made life difficult for children. In fact, I had heard, it was very bad for the children, who would be affected in a myriad mysterious ways. This would not turn out well.
However, it didn’t lead to divorce, then or ever, despite several more separations. Joan moved back to the house in Merriott in June. But a year or so later she moved out again, this time to stay with our friends the Newmans, who lived seven miles away.
This turned out to be a most unusual ‘separation’, because Joan would come to the house every weekday, clean and cook, and be there when Hazel and I got home from school (Ian was at boarding school). She would have a light supper with us, then leave before Dad got home. This lasted for several months, when once again she returned. But in 1955 there began a more long-term separation.
For years, ever since the war ended, it had been assumed that at some point Standard Telephones would return the Somerset-based divisions back to London. After a number of delays, however, it was announced that in 1955 these divisions would move not to London but further west, to Paignton in Devonshire. This meant selling the Merriott house and all of us moving out. But Joan decided to leave the marriage again, and found herself temporary accommodation, with Hazel and me, first in Ilminster, but then at Chitcombe Farm, in the Brendon Hills.
Chitcombe Farm, summer of 1956. Doris Flatt, Joyce Lindley, Hugh Flatt on tractor, David Lindley, Joan with pitchfork. 2 Flatt and 2 Lindley children, Hazel on front at the top of the stack. (David and Joyce were Quaker friends who helped arrange our Quaker schooling.
Chitcombe was owned by Hugh and Doris Flatt, who were Quakers, farmers, and vegetarians, ran the farmhouse as a retreat. Joan was to assist in the latter function, though it was all very informal and we all joined in on the farm work and the housework. But Hazel and I were to go to boarding school: Hazel to Sibford in Oxfordshire, and I to Ackworth in Yorkshire, both Quaker schools. We came home for vacations during the next school year (1955-56).
Then in the autumn of 1956 Joan moved again. She moved to the Yorkshire town of Wetherby, where we three spent some part of the summer – till Hazel threw a saucepan of water over the landlady for reasons long forgotten. Joan found employment at Spofforth Hall, a Quaker-run home for women and their children. This was an alternative for women who would otherwise have been sentenced to prison for child neglect or abuse. Hazel and I spent one or two school vacations there, became friendly with both staff and clients, and learnt that most of the women had themselves suffered abuse. Neither of us ever forgot.
Douglas, meanwhile, had bought a house in Paignton and in 1957 Joan joined him there, ending the third, and so far the longest, period of separation. But togetherness was not to last long. Ian had long since left hime and was now in the Royal Air Force. Hazel and I were in boarding school, so only spent school holidays at Appsley. There was not much to anchor Joan. She remained for a few years, but left again, moving to London in 1962. She returned, in 1965, only when Douglas’s health began to decline. He died in 1967.
Appsley, Broadsands, Paignton
A young 51 years old, Joan stayed at Appsley, and continued to be active in civic life in the Torbay area. She enjoyed meeting students from around the world attending the South Devon Technical College. She would invite them to the house, but it was rather difficult for them to get to her in Broadsands, seven miles from the college in Torquay. So Joan decided to sell Appsley, and move into Paignton, to set up a small boarding house for international students with families.
She worked on the project with a friend who was to be the housekeeper, and went ahead and bought the house in Paignton. There was accommodation for 7-10 residents, a large shared dining room and kitchen, as well as sitting room and study/library, which everyone was welcome to use. They took in their first guests in February 1970.
Then several disasters struck and Joan’s world fell apart.
What happened in 1970?
I don’t really know the answer to this question, but this is the best I have been able to work out.
Joan was hospitalized for thyroid surgery in May, but after she arrived the surgeon informed her that, despite a visible goiter, she did not need the surgery. Tests had revealed that there was not a problem after all and she was sent home, with no plan for further observation or treatment. Thyroid disease was little understood at that time, and many women found their lives disrupted by the hormonal effects of menopause.
Secondly, she had not succeeded in selling Appsley, and was in need of money to tide her over. She had sufficient funds in a trust account left to her by her mother, with her three brothers as trustees. The two younger brothers agreed without hesitation, but John, the eldest, thought the scheme unworkable, and refused to release the funds. Thirdly, Joan’s partner in the project proved to be emotionally unstable, and before long departed, leaving Joan to carry on alone. I hypothesize that the combination of these events contributed to her collapse.
During the spring and summer I heard from her often – both letters and phone conversations. At some point it became clear that there was something wrong. I was finding her communications rambling and incoherent. When I checked with Hazel and Ian, it was clear that all of us were confused. I flew to London overnight from Madison via New York on July 4 and took the train to Paignton, where I expected she would meet me. Instead, after a short wait, I took a taxi from the station.
When I arrived at the house it was approaching dinnertime. Joan met me at the door, took me to the kitchen, handed me some implements, and indicated that I was now in charge of delivering dinner to a houseful of paying guests. There was a family of four – including a two-week old baby – from Nigeria; another married couple, and 3 or 4 other guests of various faiths and dietary needs. Somehow dinner got served. But it was downhill from there.
Over the next few days I watched Joan’s behavior become more and more irrational. Several friends who came to see her left visibly shaken. Her doctor was worse than useless. “All she needs is rest,” he would say. “Just keep her relaxed and in bed.” That was easier said than done; Joan was in a manic state and would wander along the corridors, sometime on her hands and knees, looking for who knows what. Meanwhile I took care of the guests in the house as best I could. Fortunately their college term was ending and they were all soon to leave.
Eventually the doctor conceded that Joan was having a ‘nervous breakdown’ and prescribed medications. The drugs in those days were overly powerful, and in no time Joan’s mania had turned to depression, leaving her bedridden and asleep most of the time. This was somewhat easier to deal with, I have to admit.
After two or three weeks she recovered some degree of stability and agreed to see a psychologist. She saw him several times but when he recommended residential placement and electric shock therapy, Joan adamantly rejected both and refused to see him again. She had had experience, when we lived in Yorkshire, of visiting patients undergoing shock therapy, which was horrifying in its early years of use. I had sympathy with her refusal.
Tom and Jennifer joined me in Paignton – we were to travel on to East Africa where Tom would carry out his doctoral research. Hazel and Keith were in England for the summer, with Mandy and Jo. And Ian introduced us to his girlfriend Liz Kinnear. After a few weeks in Paignton Tom found us a place to stay in London while he did library research. We stayed in close touch with Joan, visiting her in Paignton several times, but then we left for Nairobi in early December.
Paignton 1970: Liz, Keith, Hazel with Jo and Mandy, Ian, Sheila with Jennifer, Joan. Tom is behind the camera.
Depression years 1970-1974
Joan was invited to join the Kinnear family in Dundee for Christmas. Liz reports that her father, a doctor, made it clear that he felt the goiter should have been removed. He also said of Joan, Liz reported, that ‘she was mad’. Despite this Liz continued with her plan to marry into this possibly crazy family, and despite the family’s awareness of her state of mind, Joan was invited to attend the marriage of Ian and Liz in Dundee the following year.
By the end of 1970 Joan had sunk into what was to become a four-year long clinical depression. The Newmans, Nete and Harry – with whom we had shared a house in 1940 and with whom Joan had lived during the second separation – were crucial in caring for Joan during those years. They found her a room in a boarding house in Torquay, and visited frequently as well as often having her to their home for Sunday dinners. Thus Joan was provided with room and meals, but for the most part her life was one of abject emptiness and despair.
When Hazel and Keith were in England in 1972 they brought Joan from Torquay to stay with them in Suffolk for the summer. And throughout this period Ian visited, her too. I know that Joan considered taking her life on several occasions, and her failures, she told me later, persuaded her that she had, deep down, an indomitable desire to live.
In early 1974 she emerged, slowly, from the depression. Soon it was clear that there was enough progress in her condition that Ian and Liz brought her to stay with them in Rayne. She remained with them for several months, and then, in December, she travelled to Australia to live with Tom and me in Melbourne.
A new life begins
Joan was to remain in Australia. At the age of forty-eight, she started a new life. I am not ready to tell that story yet. It is still too close to me. And so I end by saying that Joan Harley Macnee, my mother, was an indomitable woman, whom nothing could repress. Her desire to leave the world a better place than she had found it remained her driving force for the next thirty years.