Edith Grace Collett was initiated into the Golden Dawn at its Amen-Ra
temple in Edinburgh on 8 June 1896, taking the Latin motto ‘Caritas nunquam
excidit’. She did not give the GD any address
at which they could contact her; and when she moved to England she did not
continue her membership of the GD at its Isis-Urania temple in London.
She had more
important demands on her time and effort: when she was invited to join the GD she
was in the process of qualifying as a doctor.
In terms of the women who were in the GD, she was a rare bird indeed.
May 2014: I’ve
been able to update this biography with more details of the sanatorium where
Edith Grace was working between 1901 and 1903.
I was emailed by a researcher saying: did I know that Emily Carr had
been a patient at East Anglia Sanatorium?
I had never heard of Emily Carr, who turned out to be an artist renowned
in her native Canada but virtually unknown here - hopefully that will change
following the exhibition of her work due this autumn at Dulwich Art
Gallery. It turned out that Emily Carr
was never Edith Grace’s patient, but despite that disappointment I’ve been able
to add a lot more detail about Edith Grace’s working life in what was probably
her first important post. Many many
thanks to the researcher, who prefers to remain anonymous.
Edith Grace’s
family
The family history
website www.collettfamilyhistory.net is a
collaboration between many people with the surname Collett (originally
Colet). They trace their ancestry back
to 1360 in Suffolk, branching out into Buckinghamshire; and to 1485 in
Gloucestershire. According to this
exhaustive website, Edith Grace was a descendent of the Suffolk Colletts. Her grandparents on the Collett side were
Cornelius Collett and his wife Amelia.
Cornelius Collett was probably dead by the day of the 1841 census,
because Amelia Collett was head of the household, living in North Lane,
Beverley, Yorkshire with three of her four sons: Charles and Samuel described
incorrectly as both aged 15; and Daniel aged 12. The youngest, Trusson, was not
at home. He was probably at school but I
couldn’t find him, probably because of his odd forename, mis-spelled several
times in subsequent censuses.
None of the
Collett boys went to university, there was probably not money in the family for
that expense. Samuel doesn’t seem to
have worked at anything; Daniel became an engineer; and Trusson worked in the
offices of a London wine merchant.
Charles joined the Madras Civil Service, arriving in India in April 1845
and spent about ten years working as a tax collector with the Madras
magistrates’ service, being posted to Malabar and Calicut (now Kozhikode). In the 1850s he began to study law, intending
to qualify as a barrister. He took two periods of leave in England, in 1856 and
1859, to do the bar exams and the social side of qualification, and was called
to the bar of Lincoln’s Inn during his second period of leave, in January 1861. He had already spent periods standing in as a
judge for people on leave, and in March 1866 he was promoted to the Madras high
court as one of four judges serving under one senior judge.
In 1869 Charles
Collett was living at 2 Harrington’s Road, in the Chetput district of Madras
(largely occupied by European residents and businesses) and was earning 3750
rupees per year. This is important
information because it was in 1869 that his daughter Edith Grace was born, on
18 July. Her baptism record survives,
though without the details of which church the service took place in (probably
the Cathedral); it gives her parents as Charles Collett and his wife Dahliah, née Phillips.
The baptism record
has been put online at familysearch. I
have hunted high and low, in Indian records and UK ones, for the record of
Charles Collett’s marriage to Dahliah Phillips and not been able to find
it. The best I can do is suppose that he
married the daughter of another English resident of Madras, and look for people
called Phillips. The highest-ranking and
longest-serving candidate is Henry Dominic Phillips, who went to India in 1829
and who by the 1860s was the most senior paid official in the whole of the
Madras civil service. There are two
other possible candidates, another judge and an army officer, but they had both
spent less time in that part of India and may not have been old enough to have
daughters of marriage-able age.
Nor can I find any
record of the death of Edith Grace’s mother.
She must have died, probably in India, between Edith Grace’s baptism and
1871, because by the day of the 1871 census Charles Collett was in England,
staying at a lodging house on Piccadilly, and describing himself as not
married. He had retired from the Madras
Civil Service and was back in England for good. Charles’ mother Amelia Collett
and his brother Samuel had moved south and were living at Clare Lodge, Spring
Grove Isleworth by 1871, according to the Collett family history website. I’m suggesting that Charles Collett came back
to England partly to leave Edith Grace with her grandmother, at least as a
temporary measure.
In 1872 Charles
Collett married Lucy Ellen Daniels. They
had five children, half-siblings for Edith Grace: Phyllis, Margaret and
Charles, all born in London; and Laura and Arthur, born after the family moved
to Torquay. I say ‘the family’ but I do
wonder whether Edith Grace ever lived with them: all those involved with the
situation may have thought it preferable for her to stay with her grandmother.
She was not living with her father, on the census day of 1881. She was at school; one of the few GD members
whose schooling I have any direct evidence of.
Edith Grace was one of four boarders at the school on that day; perhaps
most of the pupils were day-girls; or had gone home for the holidays (the habit
of holding the census during the Easter vacation has been a real curse on my
research work - everybody goes away!)
The school was a small one, contained in one house in the St Andrew’s
district of Bristol and was run by Mary Robe, a local woman, and Elizabeth
Crampton, who’d been born in Ireland.
They both described themselves as school-mistresses so I guess they took
most of the lessons between them; but they employed Phébé Trouzel (or possibly Touzel), a Frenchwoman, to teach
French.
I’ve tried to
discover a bit more about Miss Robe and Miss Crampton’s school - especially
what was taught there - but I haven’t had any luck except to find that it was
still going in 1901, having moved to Frenchay on the outskirts of Bristol. This argues that generations of parents were
satisfied with what it taught; but when it came to what girls were taught, 19th
century parents tended to be satisfied with very little. And of course I don’t know how long Edith
Grace stayed at Miss Robe’s school; or whether she went on to another school
elsewhere; or whether she studied on her own or was lucky enough to find a man
willing to teach her (it would have had to be a man, I think). I would really like to know, because by the
late 1880s, Edith Grace had persuaded Glasgow and Edinburgh universities to
take her on to study medicine. Where did
she learn enough science to do it? She
would have had to persuade her father to allow it, as well, particularly as she
was very young to be taking such a big step, a step that most parents would
have viewed as lowering the chances that she would marry. She was only 20 when she began her studies.
Edith Grace passed
her final medical exams in 1892, one of five women out of 106 students in total who took the exams that year and 56 who
passed them. By passing these exams the
five were automatically licensed by the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh
and the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh; and could practice medicine. On 27 October 1892, Edith Grace went through
the final hoop in the process of preparing to start work, by registering with
the General Medical Council (GMC). She
was now ready for a job. IF she could
get one. If you were a woman doctor,
qualifiying was often just the start of your problems. (Perhaps I should say here that registration
with the GMC is permission to work; it’s not an indication that you are
working.)
Charles Collett
had died while Edith Grace was an undergraduate, on 28 January 1891, at his
home at Highclere, Warberry Hill, Torquay.
Lucy Ellen was his sole executor.
He left a tidy sum, eventually assessed as £25036. I haven’t seen the Will (copies are quite
expensive) but I’m rather supposing that Edith Grace did inherit some kind of
income from her father; otherwise she might not have been able to finish her
studies. Money was not the issue, I
think, in her decision to become a doctor.
When Edith Grace
registered with the GMC in 1892 she was living at 27 Comiston Road in the
Morningside district of Edinburgh. She
was still living in Edinburgh in 1896 when she joined the GD there. Once more, I have to guess what she was doing
in these years, but it’s a good bet, I think, that she was gaining practical
experience; probably unpaid but valuable just the same. Perhaps she even got as far as setting
herself up as a general practitioner; but I have to say that I haven’t found
any evidence of it. Five or six members
of the GD in Edinburgh were medical practitioners, and it’s very likely that
Edith Grace was acquainted with some, if not all, of them. However, when she joined the Theosophical
Society in August 1894 her application was sponsored by Dr Robert Felkin and
his wife Mary, so it was mostly likely to be the Felkins who recommended her
for GD membership. Edith Grace may have
been one of Robert Felkin’s students: from 1886 to 1896 he taught tropical
medicine at the University of Edinburgh medical school.
I daresay Edith
Grace realised quite soon after her GD initation that to follow up her
initiation properly she would have to dedicate more time to it than she was
willing to. She opted to stick with the
TS, continuing to pay her yearly subscriptions, at least, until 1899 when the
TS in Scotland lost contact with her.
She had moved to England, because she had got a job.
The job had come
through Jane Harriett Walker. She and
Edith Grace had either been fellow students at Edinburgh for one year, or just
missed each other, because in 1890 Jane Walker gone to Brussels to qualify rather
than stay and get her qualifications in Scotland. After a visit to the Nordrach
Sanatorium in the Black Forest in 1892, where the new ‘fresh-air’ treatment for
tuberculosis was being pioneered, Dr Walker had returned to England determined
to set up the first such sanatorium to operate in the UK. She had started small, in a building
converted for the purpose, in Downham Market, in 1896, and spent the next three
years raising money and searching for a suitable site on which to build. The East Anglia Sanatorium Company was
founded in 1899 to run the new hospital, which opened in January 1901 on a site
in the village of Nayland-with-Wissington, in Suffolk. Dr Walker was its
medical superintendant, but spent most of her time working in London. She was already known for an active policy of
employing women - in 1903 the driver of the sanatorium’s horse and cart was the
only man on the staff - and I think this where Edith Grace Collett came in,
either as someone Walker knew personally, or as someone with family in the
district, who recommended her; or both.
On the day of the
1901 census, two months after it had opened, the East Anglian sanatorium
already had 15 patients and a large staff: a matron, a gardener, three nurses,
a cook, and seven domestic servants.
Described by the census official as the head of this household was Edith
G Collett, house surgeon.
From 24 June to 10
August 1901 Edith Grace would have found herself treating the writer George
Gissing, who had been recommended to go to Dr Walker by a mutual friend, after
not recovering well from a severe cold he’d had in the spring. Dr Walker had diagnosed emphysema, rather
than TB, but she had sent him to the sanatorium anyway. Something very similar happened to the
Canadian artist Emily Carr early in 1903: although there was no question of her
having TB - she knew herself that all she needed was a period of rest - Dr
Walker sent her to the sanatorium anyway and Carr remained there for over a
year. The notes and sketches she made at
the time were published after her death, giving an account of what life was
like in the sanatorium just after Edith Grace had left it. Carr’s biographical writings are not always
an accurate representation of what actually happened, apparently, but her
descriptions of the treatment regime followed by the sanatorium’s TB patients
are confirmed by other evidence I’ve read.
It’s clear from
Carr’s book that the sanatorium stuck closely to the Nordrach system of fresh
air and lots of food. The Nordrach
treatment focused on fresh air day and night whatever the weather; eating well
in order to regain weight lost because of the illness; and exercise for those
judged fit enough. Carr arrived in January 1903, but all doors and windows in
the sanatorium were still open, blowing snow into her room. Treatment was based on a weekly schedule,
agreed for the next seven days during a Saturday morning round of the wards,
led by Dr Walker with the resident doctor and the senior nurse in tow. All the patients were weighed and the TB sufferers
were expected to weigh more than they had the previous Saturday. After the ward round, all the TB patients who
were able to get about went in turn to the consulting room for further
assessment. The TB patients were fed
enormous meals. Carr describes watching
at mealtimes as the resident doctor and senior nurse stood over patients who
hadn’t gained weight, making sure they cleared their plates. As regards exercise, the Nordrach system
divided patients into three groups which Carr calls ‘down’ - she was ‘down’ in
her first three months of bed-rest; ‘semi’, those who were allowed to get up
and sit outdoors and do some gentle exercise; and ‘up’, those who were getting
well, and who were expected to do a lot of walking and were the only patients
allowed to go to the local village.
It was not Edith
Grace’s job to assess prospective patients.
Although she had probably never intended to live at the sanatorium, Dr
Walker still undertook all first examinations of prospective patients, and
these took place at her rooms in Harley Street.
Dr Walker was also the only person allowed to decide when a patient
could leave. However, Dr Walker worked
in London all the week, going down to the sanatorium on Friday evening and
returning to London late on Sunday. To
assist her she had a matron who took charge of the domestic arrangements, one
trained nurse and a number of untrained nurses, most of whom were
ex-patients. An extra trained nurse was
hired when Dr Walker felt one was necessary to care for a patient in their last
few weeks of life. Edith Grace carried
considerable responsibility, therefore, overseeing treatment of the patients
from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon with a limited number of experienced
helpers.
Edith Grace was
not expected to play an active part in the management of the limited company
which owned the sanatorium. This was
done by a board of directors with Dr Walker as managing director. She may have been glad not to have that
responsibility in what was almost certainly her first job at such a senior
level; but it did mean she did not have a great deal of say in decisions about
the sanatorium’s future. Emily Carr’s
descriptions of the doctor she calls “Dr Bottle” - that is, Dr Walker - are
borne out by all the other evidence I’ve read: she was a strong and dominating
personality, she had drive and confidence and energy; but she can’t have been
easy to work for. It’s not clear, for
example, how much say the resident doctor had in decisions on patients’
treatment. Carr believes Edith Grace’s
successor in the job had very little say.
As a patient, Carr could only observe the relationship between the
doctors from the outside; but I have a feeling she was right and that might
have been one reason why Edith Grace might choose to leave the sanatorium after
gaining two years’ experience; another might have been that Edith Grace had
decided she didn’t want to specialise in TB or in a sanatorium environment.
Edith Grace had
left the East Anglian Sanatorium by the beginning of 1903, when she was listed
in the GMC register as living at a house called Marcina, on Down View Road in
Worthing. I haven’t found any evidence
of her working in another hospital so I suppose she was now in general
practice. However if she was, she didn’t
do go about it in the way I would have expected, always staying in the same
place once her practice had been established.
Quite the contrary, she seems to have moved quite a few times and spent
periods out of the UK altogether - for example, for a couple of years around
1911. I haven’t been able to find out
where she went. Was she working? Did she return to India? - she can hardly
have remembered it, having left when she was two, but goodness knows there was
need enough for doctors there. Or did
she set up in practice in a town in Europe with a number of British
residents?
By 1914 she was
back in England, living in Sidmouth, in a house called San Michele on Salcombe
Hill. From there she played her part in
an exchange of opinions published in the British Medical Journal,
showing herself to be keeping right up to date with new techniques in her
profession. Sticking her neck right out
on a subject which is still quite controversial, she said that she was in
favour of the use of Freudian psychoanalysis.
She did qualify this view by saying that they must be properly trained
(her letter reads as though she was not trained in psychoanalysis herself) and
that the technique should be used only when the experts deemed it
appropriate. However (I think with some
amusement) she noted that its more fervent supporters were actually putting
doctors off its use: she said that they “appear to discern sex from A to Z in
almost any given problem”. One of
Freud’s acquaintances in England sent copies of the whole correspondence to Freud
to read; so Freud did actually get to hear of Edith Grace Collett.
According to the
GMC Registers Edith Grace was living in Sidmouth between 1914 and 1919. I can’t quite square this with evidence I
came across by accident in December 2015 indicates that she was working in the
Midlands, probably from 1912 to 1916. A
job for a resident medical officer at the Ransom Sanatorium near Mansfield had
been advertised in January 1912 at £160 per year in salary, plus board and
lodging and all washing. Applicants had
to be female, so I take it that the successful applicant would be working on
the women’s wards. Edith Grace Collett
resigned from such a post, at that sanatorium, at the end of 1916; so I assume
she was the successful applicant.
The Ransom Sanatorium
had been founded in 1902 by the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Association for
the Prevention of Consumption. It was
taken over by Nottinghamshire County Council in 1910 and the post advertised in
January 1912 was probably part of this process.
There were other changes too: after taking only private patients in its
early years, the sanatorium started to take patients paid for by the new
National Insurance scheme as well (or possibly instead). And the name of the sanatorium was changed,
to honour William Bramwell Ransom (1861-1909), physician at the Nottingham
General Hospital and a pioneer of the Koch treatment for TB.
Her work at the
Ransom Sanatorium might have given a Edith Grace a second chance to have come
across someone who was very famous later; though he was never a patient, only a
visitor at the most (if visitors were even allowed), and at the time he was
only a teacher called ‘Bert’ with literary aspirations. In 1911 (though I don’t know about later) a
young woman called Hilda Shaw was a patient at the Ransom Sanatorium, a friend
of Louie Burrows and Louie’s then-fiancé D H Lawrence.
Edith Grace
resigned from her job at the Ransom Sanatorium at the end of 1916. This was a
very serious time to be doing such a thing - the end of the year of the Somme -
and I don’t suppose she made the decision lightly. Why she left, where she went, and what she
did afterwards I don’t know, but she was no longer giving Sidmouth as her
address by 1923 - the GMC listings have only a ‘care of’ address, that of her
bank. She had gone abroad again and this
time she didn’t come back. She died on
23 September 1927, in Susa, a town in northern Italy.
BASIC SOURCES I
USED for all Golden Dawn members.
Membership of the
Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert. Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986. Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the
names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of
the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888
and 1914. The list is based on the
Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of
parchment on which all new members signed their name at their initiation. All this information had been inherited by
Gilbert but it’s now in the Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of
England building on Great Queen Street Covent Garden.
Family history:
freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk; familysearch; Burke’s
Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Armorial Families;
thepeerage.com; and a wide variety of family trees on the web.
Famous-people
sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female
members of GD. Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography. Who Was Who. Times
Digital Archive.
Catalogues:
British Library; Freemasons’ Library.
Wikipedia; Google;
Google Books - my three best resources.
I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the
historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.
SOURCES FOR EDITH
GRACE COLLETT:
THE COLLETT FAMILY
The Collett family
website at www.collettfamilyhistory.net is
thorough but isn’t aware of a first marriage for Edith Grace’s father
Charles. Its coverage of his second
marriage, and the children of that second marriage, peters out a bit after
about 1890.
Edith Grace’s
father CHARLES COLLETT
India Office
and Burma Office List 1845
p10 Madras Civil Service. Madras
Almanac and Compendium of Intelligence 1846 p134.
Madras
Almanac... 1847 p132
Madras Civil Service list.
Madras
Almanac... 1851 p132
Madras Civil Service list.
All the Madras
Almanac... published in the 1850s have lists of European births, marriages
and deaths but I couldn’t find a marriage of either Charles Collett or a D
Phillips. With its issue for 1862 the
Madras Almanac... became the Asylum Press Almanac and gave up publishing
birth/marriage/death data alas! The
section on the Madras Civil Service contains biographies of its senior personnel
to date. Both the men called Phillips
are still in the Madras Civil Service.
Asylum Press
Almanac 1862 continuing
the career details of Charles Collett, starting from the job at Malabar:
19 Feb 1855 acting
sub-judge at Calicut
April 1855 sub
collector and joint magistrate, Malabar
Aug 1856 acting
deputy collector of sea customs Madras but he’d gone home for a period of leave
in Europe, departing 29 July 1856.
Oct 1857 acting
deputy collector of sea customs Madras
June 1858 additional
sub-collector and joint magistrate Bellary
March 1859 another
period of leave in Europe, from which he didn’t return until
April 1861 collector
of sea customs Madras. 1861 was on the
organising committee based at Madras for the London Exhibition of 1862
Aug 1861 commissioner
for assessment of income tax
Aug 1861 sub-judge
at Calicut
Just noting that
there are 5 men called Phillips in the list of European residents in the
presidency. Indian Army and Civil
Service List 1863 Madras Civil Service list p236.
London Gazette issued 6 March 1866 p1647.
Indian Army and
Civil Service List July
1866 Madras Civil Service: p272, P280.
Asylum Press
Almanac for Madras 1869
issue: P83, P87, P107-09.
Indian Army and
Civil Service List July
1871 p253 which is the last time Charles Collett is listed in any Indian
directory.
Thacker’s
Indian Directory 1885
p1075 just to confirm he wasn’t there.
Charles Collett
had several books published:
The Malayalam
Reader: A Series of Original Papers, published by the Church Mission Press in 1856. As compiler.
Charles Collett’s
other publications are all his own work:
1869 A Treatise
on the Law of Injunctions
1882 The Law of
Specific Relief in India. In the
book The Malavikagnimitra: A Sanskrit Play pubd 1891 p121 there is an
advert for Collett’s The Law of Specific Relief, confirming that he has
retired.
1886 A Manual
on the Law of Torts.
THE MARRIAGE OF
EDITH GRACE’S PARENTS; AND HER BIRTH
Madras
Marriages 1698-1948 at the
British Library India Office Collection in which I couldn’t find anything.
India List for 1869 there were 3 quite high-ranking
men called Phillips in the Madras presidency including H D Phillips the
highest-ranking civil servant in the presidency; a judge currently based at
Chingleput; and a lieutenant-colonel in the Madras army.
Baptism record for
Edith Grace, via familysearch: Edith Grace Collett was baptised in Madras on 19
September 1869; she’d been born 18 July 1869.
Her parents were Charles Collett and Dahliah (sic) née Phillips.
A supplement to
the website www.collettfamilyhistory.net dated
Feb 2012 says that Samuel Collete, still unmarried was living with his mother
Amelia at Clare Lodge, Spring Grove Isleworth by 1871. I searched diligently for them on the 1871
census in case Edith Grace was with them, but I don’t think they were in the UK
on that day.
List of
Shareholders in the Grand
Trunk Railway Company of Canada, published October 1875 p33.
EDITH GRACE AS A
DOCTOR
For a general
summing-up of the rise of the medical profession during the 19th-century,
see chapter 1 of Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in
Victorian England by Janet Oppenheim.
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991.
Glasgow Medical
Journal volume 32 1889
p134.
British Medical
Journal issue of 12
November 1892 p1088
General Medical
Council Registers: Edith Collett was first registered with the GMC on 27
October 1892, giving 27 Comiston Road Morningside Edinburgh as her address:
Licensed by the Royal College of Physicians at Edinburgh 1892; Licensed by the
Royal College of Surgeons at Edinburgh 1892; Licensed by the Faculty of
Physical Surgery Glasgow 1892.
Robert Felkin at
Edinburgh University: his obituary in British Medical Journal issue of
12 February 1927 p309.
East Anglian
Sanatorium
See www.pastscape.org.uk for some local detail. The sanatorium at Nayland-with-Wissington was
opened in 1901. It was purpose built to
an Arts and Crafts design by Smith and Brewer.
It’s now listed, but has been turned into eight houses.
Good information
on it in www.nationalarchives.gov.uk hospital
records database but beware it being known by a number of different names,
which confused me when I was researching it.
Via
Access2Archives further information on what exactly is held at the Record
Office at Bury St Edmunds:
ID 507/1 is records of the limited
company covering 1899-1904
ID 507/2 is committee records and
minute books BUT ONLY from 1940s
ID 507/3 is staff records BUT ONLY
nursing and administration, AND ONLY 1905-19.
The web-page has a summary of the history of the sanatorium including
the opening date, 22 January 1901.
The Contemporary
Medical Archives Centre at the Wellcome Institute says that Walker’s diaries
from 1896-97 are amongst the archives at Suffolk Record Office.
On George Gissing
at the East Anglia Sanatorium:
The Gissing
Journal volume XXIX number
2 issued April 1993 and found July 2012 on the web, has an article pp1-10 by
Martha S Vogeler in its series People Gissing Knew: Dr Jane Walker.
On Emily Carr at
the East Anglia Sanatorium:
Emily Carr by Doris Shadbolt. Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre
1990: p21-23; pp28-30 and its Chronology pp219-222.
Emily’s own take
on her time at the East Anglia sanatorium:
Pause: A Sketch
Book by Emily Carr.
Toronto: Clarke Irwin and Co Ltd 1953 passim. This sketchbook only mentions two doctors,
“Dr Bottle” - that is, Jane Walker - and the resident doctor, whom Carr calls
“Dr McNair”. From the details Carr gives
of Dr McNair, she wasn’t Edith Grace Collett.
From my anonymous
researcher of Emily Carr’s time at the East Anglia Sanatorium, some follow up
if you’re interested in finding out more about Carr’s work:
A web copy of the
manuscript sketchbook that was the basis for Carr’s book Pause,
containing more sketches than in the published version:
http://www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/sgc-cms/expositions-exhibitions/emily_carr/en/search/index.php
Try limiting the
search by institutional collection and tick McMichael Canadian Collection.
Carr and others in
Cornwall:
Women Artists
in Cornwall exhibition
catalogue by Catherine Wallace, 1996.
Wallace is an expert on the art of the Newlyn School. Copies of this book are very hard to find so
try the website cornishmuse.blogspot.co.uk.
Carr’s later brush
with theosophy:
Canadian
painting in the 1930s exhibition
catalogue by Charles C Hill. Ottawa:
National Gallery of Canada 1975.
The Logic of
Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting 1920-1940 by Ann Davis.
Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press c 1992.
Defiant Spirits:
The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven by Ross King, a Canadian historian who lives in the
UK; editor, David Staines. Kleinburg
Ontario: McMichael Canadian Art Collection and Vancouver BC: Douglas and
McIntyre 2011.
Edith Grace on
Freud:
Www.bmj.com/cgi/reprint shows the content of British Medical Journal Volume 1 no 2771,
issued 7 February 1914: p341.
At www.pep-weg.org, the Psychoanalytic Electronic
Publishing site, there’s the text of a letter from Ernest Jones to Sigmund
Freud dated 6 February 1914 about the letter to the BMJ by Mercier that
had started off the exchange; and enclosing copies of all the replies it had
elicited, including Collett’s. Jones
tells Freud that Mercier has a French father, but still manages to be paranoid
about “everything from the continent” and obsessed with “English
clean-mindedness”. Jones notes that all
the replies which he encloses with his letter do favour the use of
psychoanalysis in Britain.
THEOSOPHICAL
SOCIETY MEMBERSHIP
Theosophical
Society: Membershipship Register for June 1893-March 1895, held at the TS
headquarters building on Gloucester Place in London.
Edith Grace’s
employer at the East Anglia Sanatorium, Dr Jane Harriett Walker:
The Hospital
Gazette and Student’s Journal
1885 list of doctors recently licensed to practice after qualifying in medicine
at King and Queen’s College of Physicians at Dublin. Walker was licensed to practice both medicine
and midwifery.
Edinburgh
Medical Journal volume 35
part 1 1890 which confirms that she and Edith Grace were both studying medicine
at Edinburgh in the same academic year.
Walker qualified as LRCS at Edinburgh.
General Medical
Council Registers in which Walker never gave the East Anglia Sanatorium as her
address.
The Gissing
Journal vol XXIX no 2
April 1993 found on the web, has an article pp1-10 by Martha S Vogeler in its
series People Gissing Knew: Dr Jane Walker.
Dr Jane Walker
and Her Hospital by Anna
and Michael Smith. Printed The Lavenham
Press Suffolk. No printed publication
date but in the copy at the British Library a pencil note “[1999]” is written
on the title page. This booklet includes reproductions of some of Emily Carr’s
sketches, with the people identified by their correct names. The resident doctor Carr calls “Dr McNair” is
named as Eleanor Soltau, not Edith Grace Collett.
The Collected
Letters of George Gissing: 1900-02 by Gissing, Paul F Mattheisen and Arthur C Young 1990. Fnp203
Tubercle: the
Journal of the British TB Association volume 20 1938 p137, an obituary.
ELEANOR SOLTAU
I couldn’t find
anything much about her, at least on the web, just hints at a fascinating and
far-flung life as a medical missionary and daughter of missionaries. Some sources of what little information I did
find:
History of the
Korea Mission: Presbyterian Church USA 1884-1934 by Harry Andrew Rhodes and Arch Campbell. Chosen Mission Presbyterian Church USA 1934:
p669.
Via archive.org to
Through the Serbian Campaign: the Great Retreat of the Serbian Army by
Gordon Gordon-Smith. London: Hutchinson
and Co 1916: pp264-66.
At www.cmf.org.uk the web pages of the Christian Medical
Fellowship: article in its series Looking Back - Working Visionaries. From 1997, the reminiscences of medical
missionary Henry Backhouse originally published in the magazine Among All
Nations number 3 spring 1998.
At
www2.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives, Billy Graham Center. Introduction to the Center’s collection
Papers of Roy W Gustafson.
Via web to
graceandpeacepc.org the website of the Presbyterian Church in America: a review
dated May 2013 of The Desert Rat, biography of Annette Adams by Aileen
Coleman. And the book itself p32.
Via google to Christian
Herald volume 104 1981 p7.
Eleanor Soltau is
buried next to Jane Walker in the graveyard of the church at Wissington. Source for this: photo of the two graves,
taken by the anonymous researcher.
RANSOM SANATORIUM
Burdett’s
Hospitals and Charities
issued 1918 p862.
At www.nottinghamhospitalhistory.co.uk re William Bramwell Ransom 1861-1909. He died of TB himself. The British Medical Journal has an
obituary: issue of 18 December 1909 pp405-06.
Chemist and
Druggist volume 76 1910
p871 for the Sanatorium’s change of name.
The job advert
that Collett probably answered: it’s in the British Medical Journal
issue of 27 January 1912 pp109-110 and in The Lancet 1912 p206.
Local Government
Board Annual Report volume 43 1915 issued by HMSO plxvi-lxvii: a brief
history and some current statistics of the Sanatorium.
Via archive.org to
a National Insurance Acts. Handbook
for the Use of Approved Societies revised to August 1915 and issued HMSO
1915.
The Medical Officer volume XVI July-December 1916. Published by Macmillan Ltd; London; 36-38
Whitefriars St EC. P428 issue of 18
November 1916: announcement of Dr Collett’s resignation. Her replacement, Dr Ethel Dukes, was going to
earn a great deal more than she had.
The connection
with D H Lawrence:
At
mss-cat.nottingham.ac.uk, the catalogue of the university’s D H Lawrence
collection has two letters from a woman called Hilda, to Louie Burrows although
its clear from the text that she knows DHL as well. Letters La B 195 and La B 196. Neither letter has a full date on it but the
archive assigns them to 9-12 February 1911; and between 16 April and 18 May
1911. Of course, the letter writer signs
herself only as ‘Hilda’. That she is
Hilda Shaw is also a deduction by the cataloguers and there’s no indication in
the letters as to how Hilda, Louie and DHL knew each other. I rather hoped I’d get some clue as to how,
from this book:
Louie: Her
Remarkable East Midlands Life
by Jon Turner. Dave Dover Reprint of
Loughborough 2010. Unfortunately, Hilda
was never mentioned in it. However, see
pp8-45: Louie and DHL met while training to be teachers at Ilkeston Pupil
Teacher Centre in 1905. They got engaged
in December 1910 but DHL broke it off on Louie’s 24th birthday, in
February 1912.
Copyright SALLY
DAVIS
29 January 201
Find the web pages
of Roger Wright and Sally Davis, including my list of people initiated into the
Order of the Golden Dawn between 1888 and 1901, at:
http:www.wrightanddavis.co.uk
***