Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module Imagining Ivy Williams 1 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module Three images … A forty-six year old woman waits in the wings of the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. In front of her, the young men are led forward to take their BAs. Some of them have studied hard and achieved first class degrees, other have done little and scraped by. Row upon row receive the most basic qualification the University awards. Time passes. Eventually, after all the young men have been dealt with, the woman is presented. With Latin incantation, the Vice-Chancellor admits her as a Doctor of Civil Law, the second highest degree it is possible to obtain. She is the first woman to whom the University has awarded the DCL for her scholarship. She has made history, and she has been made to wait.1 The same woman, a year earlier, waits in the Hall of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. She is surrounded by hordes of men, and a scattering of women. Before her stand the Treasurer and the Masters, around her fellow students who have passed the examinations taken by those who wish to be called to the Bar of England and Wales. Having achieved a distinction, the woman is called before the other women in her year. She is the first woman in the history of the legal profession to qualify as a barrister and, because she is a woman, she has had to wait. Much later, a summer in the 1940s. The same woman sits in the centre, at the heart, of a group of women who are gathered for a photograph on the lawn of the Oxford College at which they teach, and from which she is now retired, she is looking slightly down, her head covered by a plain, broad-brimmed hat. She is older than the others, 2 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module and seems somewhat distant, reflective. In 1920 she was appointed tutor in law for the Oxford Society of Home-Students and was thus the first woman to have taught law at any English University. Most of her life’s work is done now, and the waiting is of a different kind. * In what colours do we see these scenes? In the Sheldonian Theatre there is the white and gold of the painted woodwork, the maroon of the velvet benches, the black cotton of the BA gowns, and the purple and scarlet of the Doctors. Bright and bold colours, a celebratory palette. And in the Hall of the Inner Temple? Here it is darker – walls and tables of aged oak, intricate armorial shields, the spring light filtered by stained glass, sombre representations of Kings and Queens, dulled beneath ancient varnish. A bold palette still, but a more serious one befitting the gravity of the occasion. And on that lawn? There is the cream of the high-necked blouses, the pale pink of the women’s faces flushed with the heat, the muted hues of long pleated skirts, the crisp green of the grass. And everything bathed in sunlight – fresher, relaxed and more natural. Those who paint in watercolour often remark that, in contrast to oils, what is left untouched is as much a part of the final painting as what is marked with the brush. Clouds are, more often than not, the unworked paper left clear within the wash of the sky. Producing a biographical portrait of Ivy Williams is far more like working with watercolours than oils. Her life is one that can, in certain respects, be represented confidently with the strongest of colours and the boldest of strokes, but in others it is 3 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module necessary to allow the blank spaces to speak; necessary because we can only really come to understand Ivy, to know her, by what we know of the times and places in which she lived. For someone as significant as she arguably was – for women, for the legal profession, for academics – there is precious little information about the kind of person she was. Her published work gives almost no clue to her likes and dislikes, to the intensity of her religious belief, to her intellectual motivations, to her teaching style, to her politics. It is possible to infer something about her character from the scraps of personal correspondence that exist2, and from the charitable gestures that she made; and we may draw certain conclusions about which relationships were important to her from her will and other sources. But in many respects she cuts a spectral figure – a shadow cast by the history that she made. * In this appreciation I do not pretend to present a comprehensive account of Ivy Williams’ life. Not only would the paucity of information in the public domain, or otherwise accessible, make this impossible, but such facts as exist have been adequately set out elsewhere.3 Rather, my intention is to imagine that life, drawing on published and unpublished material in order to give a sense of the kind of life she had, and the kind of person I believe her to have been. As a lawyer, Ivy would have been a stickler for exactitude and evidence, but as a teacher she would – I hope, and think – have been sympathetic to creativity in the cause of empathy and understanding. 4 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module Imagine, then, north Oxford, 1966. It is late afternoon, on the 18th February, dark and very cold. A fog has formed on Port Meadow and is leaching across the canal. In the sodium of the streetlamps, ribbons of orange mist meander past the red-bricked houses that line the streets of north Oxford. In those houses, academics at the height of their careers sit at their desks marking essays, reading, thinking great thoughts. On the radio the Beatles are playing. Final year undergraduates have three months before their final examinations. Some are working, some are drinking, some are high on pot and engaged in deep and meaningful conversation, some are making illicit love on narrow beds in freezing college rooms. The mist makes its way through Jericho, and hangs in milky skeins from the tall trees on the Woodstock Road - trees which, when they were seventy years younger, provided shade for the young, tall, straight-backed woman with striking blue eyes who walked briskly beneath them on her way to an interview with the Principal of the Society of Oxford Home-Students, but who now, aged eighty-eight, lies dozing in her bed at number thirty, Staverton Road.4 Blind, ill, and reliant on care and support from others, the only visual images she has are those that exist in her mind’s eye, images which are forming, swirling and fading like the fog outside her bedroom window. There she is, a young Victorian woman, in the Winter Gardens at Bournemouth, listening to Dan Godfrey’s band5, and there she is sitting with Winter and her parents in the house in King Edward Street eating Sunday dinner with Constance after a walk in the meadows.6 Where is Connie now? The last she heard she heard she was in Bhutan, and had received a scarf from the King – but that was a long time ago now, surely. Or perhaps not? She remembers writing to her in Oxford from Germany just before she was taking her medical science exams, wishing her luck.7 But that was in 5 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module 1904 – sixty-two years ago. How do the years concertina like that? She had been in Karlsbad with mother, who spent her time taking muddy baths, and father, who was recuperating from an illness. What had she advised Connie about preparing for the exams? To take it quietly and firmly and to go to bed early, that was it.8 Already the teacher! And there was something else about that trip, something that had happened while she was writing one of the postcards – not the concert with that wife of the professor at the Vienna gymnasium, though that was pleasant enough, no – it was something she saw, something she could see. A rainbow, that was it – a rainbow that suddenly appeared when the sun broke out from between massive black clouds, the bending bars of colour vivid against the dark hills.9 It is strange how these are the memories that seem to come, the ordinary, private ones from so long ago – working as library assistant, the endless Parish Council meetings and the Cowley Emergency Committee during the War10, Winter being called to the Bar – how proud she was – and dying uselessly in the Great War, teaching students so like her, and yet so different in their expectations and ambition, weekends with Nora at Ludgershall – she did remember Nora in her will, didn’t she?11 She would hate to think that she’d been forgotten. All those extraordinary women – Dorothy and her non-regulation ear-rings12, one-legged Cheridah being carried into the Himalayan jungle in a bamboo basket just so that she could write a dissertation – an undergraduate dissertation, for goodness’ sake – on some tribe or other13, and Nora’s great friend Geraldine Coster.14 What was that book Geraldine had written? Psychoanalysis for Normal People15, that was it, the book that received the worst, and funniest, review.16 She recalls Geraldine reading it out to her and Nora with great guffaw: “… it would be quite a helpful volume if only all reference to psycho-analysis 6 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module had been omitted and the misleading impression avoided that the reader will learn anything about that subject from it.” Didn’t this reviewer realise that Geraldine, and for that matter Nora and the others – were true pioneers: that they were not only changing the way people thought, but were changing the way people thought about them, about women? The thought has not really struck Ivy before: it is not one that she has considered remotely relevant, but as she slumbers, and the mist outside the window builds and thickens, incidents from her own life come into focus. And the more she concentrates, the more extraordinary and bright they seem to be. It is 1896, and she is sitting in the hall of another north Oxford house – not far from where she now lies. She is waiting to be interviewed by Mrs Johnson, Principal of the Oxford Society of Home-Students.17 She does not know what to expect, or what the outcome of the interview will be.18 All she is aware of is the ticking of a great longcase clock and the smell of beeswax and lavender. Suddenly the study door opens and a kind, matronly, figure appears. “Miss Williams? Please, do come in and take a seat.” She follows Mrs Johnson in and sits at a chair by the fire. “I have taken the liberty of ordering some tea. You have not had to come far, I hope?” “No, from King Edward Street19. I walked.” “Excellent. And that is where you would be living should you be accepted as a student of the Society?” “Yes, I live there with my parents. We moved there from Devon, from Newton Abbot.20 My brother is in Oxford too and I have other relatives in the City – perhaps you have heard of my uncle, the Revd Cousins? He is a missionary, and is mainly in 7 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module Madagascar; but his home is in Chalfont Rd. My cousin Connie, Constance, lives there with her sisters. We are quite close.” She is conscious that she is gabbling, stops, and takes a sip of tea. “Well, Miss Williams, that is all very interesting, and I am glad that you are settled in Oxford; but it is you I am interested in. Tell me about you.” “What would you like to know Mrs Johnson?” “That is for you to decide. But you could start with telling me why you wish to enrol as a Home Student. You are quite young still.” “Eighteen, yes.” “And you wish to study law? That, if I might say, is a strange choice. You cannot have had a background in that?” “Not academically of course, but my father is a solicitor and my brother has studied law at Corpus – he intends to become a barrister21 – so law has been a constant topic of conversation at home, for as long as I can remember. My own education so far has, I think, been a good one. I was privately educated and have studied French, German and Russian, as well as Greek and Latin. And I have been fortunate to have travelled widely in Europe.” “Russian! An excellent language. I hope you shall have the opportunity to pursue that. But there are so few opportunities for a woman who has studied the law – and you realise, Miss Williams, that should you be accepted you would be the first Home Student to take that subject?” “I was not aware of that, Mrs Johnson; and that is certainly not part of my motivation. I wish to study law not for a career, but because it fascinates me intellectually.” “How so?” 8 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module “Because law demands clarity of thought. It has a purity. It is methodical, rational and organised.” There is a moment of silence before Mrs Johnson speaks. “Like you perhaps, Miss Williams?” Ivy looks down into her lap and then, conscious that this woman is not one to tolerate false modesty, looks up and meets Mrs Johnson’s gaze directly. “Yes, I suppose, rather like me.” Lying in the silence of her bedroom, recalls Mrs Johnson’s voice, which is suddenly mixed up with the sound of Ina22 and Mrs Collett23 in murmured conversation downstairs. A pipe in the bedroom burbles. What would have happened had she not been accepted? She would have enrolled, as she did in any event, for the London law degree; but would what happened to her later have been possible?24 She closes her eyes, and faces that have been important to her appear. There is Edward Jenks25 and William Holdsworth26; and there is poor, sad, brilliant Nevill with whom she translated Garshin’s short stories27, and Dr Schuster, who assisted in the Swiss research and wrote that wry review28; and there is the sea of smiles on the day she collected her BA, MA and BCL (the only woman to receive one), all on the same day.29 The pipe burbles and splutters again and she recalls the ridiculous objections to the right of women to be barristers – a discussion, she now thinks, not so dissimilar to that between the horse, grasshopper, snail, dung-beetle et al in Garshin’s What Never Happened in which the animals spend a pointless day discussing the fact that an inch for one is a mile for another. How pleased Mrs Johnson would be that she never gave up on the Russian! Time passes. A bicycle bell rings outside. There are footsteps on the landing, and then silence – silence like that she experienced at dawn 9 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module over Lac Léman when she was undertaking research in Lausanne for her translation of, and treatise on, the Swiss Civil Code30, like the hush that filled the Sheldonian as she was taken forward to receive her DCL in recognition of that work31, like the stillness over the foreign field where Winter fell and the silence in Highgate Cemetery where her mother is buried. So much silence, and so much darkness. She shakes herself. It is not like her to be maudlin.32 Her beloved Ina will be up soon with supper, not that she has any appetite. There is still so much to do. If only she had the energy she once had. Such days they were. It seems to her now, weak and breathless, that she was always bounding along, organizing things, getting things done. She looks over, without seeing, to the bookshelf. She wonders if she could get Ina to read to her this evening. From David Copperfield perhaps, from the volume that Henry Dickens presented her when, on that May day in 1920 he called her to the Bar.33 He could have chosen Bleak House (but that would, given the wait to be called, have been too depressingly ironic); or Great Expectations (but that would have implied luck and fortune based on helping an escaped convict – utterly inappropriate). Instead, he chose a book about a good man who overcomes adversity to succeed. A good choice, and a thoughtful one. She will make sure the book goes to College in the hope that one day somebody might recognise its significance.34 It is strange, she reflects, how much her life as a woman has been made possible by men. There is her father, who paid for education; her tutors, Edward Jenks and William Holdsworth; Sir John Simon, who sponsored her for the Inner Temple; Sir Maurice Gwyer, with whom she was a delegate to the Hague Conference, and Roland Vaughan Williams under whom she served as a member of the Aliens Deportation Advisory Committee. Had she let these men down, and the women with whom she had lived her life in 10 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module community for that matter, by failing to pursue a career at the Bar when to have done so would have set such an example? Had returning to Oxford to teach been the cowardly option? As she thinks these thoughts she twists and turns, uncomfortable in a room that seems too hot. She must ask Ina to adjust the boiler. No, she was not a coward. It was her calling, what she was best at. She was doing justice to Mrs Johnson’s faith in her all those years earlier, giving back something of what she herself had taken. And she has given much – the family’s land to the Radcliffe Infirmary35, money to the Society36 – which had elected her to an Honorary Fellowship, what, ten years ago now, the funding for the Law Scholarships in memory of her brother, her time to those legal committees, the Braille primer she wrote to help those who, like herself, had lost their sight but still wished to read, learn and understand. She has never trumpeted these things, it is not in her nature. Charity, she remembers, vaunteth itself not. This line from Corinthians seems suddenly important, and she wants to call to Ina to fetch the Bible so that she can read the passage in full; but no sound comes from her mouth when she tries to speak; and as she falls asleep, after a life of quiet devotion and service to others, she remembers for the last time that rainbow breaking out from between the clouds that summer in Karlsbad, and realises that she has been able to see clearly for the first time in years, albeit through a glass, darkly. 11 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module Acknowledgements I shouls like to acknowledge the help of the Librarian of St Anne’s College, the Librarian of the Bodleian Law Library, the Archivist of the Inner Temple, the Archivist of the Oxfordshire NHS Archives, and Baroness Ruth Deech (former Principal of St Anne’s College), each of whom made archival and other resources available. 12 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module Endnotes 1 The statute allowing women to be awarded degrees had been passed in 1920. See the Report of the Joint Committee of the Four Inns of Court on the terms and conditions on which Women should be admitted to the Inns of Court and called to the Bar (Documentary Appendix A). 2 An example of Ivy’s handwriting can be found in a letter from her to Miss Burrows, Principal of the Oxford Society of Home-Students in the 1920s. (Documentary Appendix B). 3 Basic factual information is drawn from Hazel Fox’s entry on Ivy Williams in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) unless otherwise stated. See also Auchmuty, Rosemary (2008) “Early Women Law Students at Cambridge and Oxford”, The Journal of Legal History, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 6397 at 88-90. 4 5 6 The house can be seen at Picture Appendix A. Card postmarked 21 VI 04, (Ethel) Constance Cousins Archive, MS 380325, SOAS. We know that in the first two years of the new century Ivy was in relatively constant touch with her eponymous cousins, the Cousins. One of the many daughters of her uncle, the Rev. W.E. Cousins, records in her diary for 1901 visits to the Williams household, most often on Sundays for dinner. For example, the diary entry for March 10th 1901: “George St with Ada. Baptismal service. Walked to King Ed. St. with Winter. Cowley with Ivy. Cathedral. Home.” ((Ethel) Constance Cousins Archive, MS 380325, SOAS). 7 “… I hope this will be in time to wish you God Speed for your first onslaught. On to victory, * star!” (the asterisk marks a star that Ivy drew in the text.) Card postmarked 21 VI 04, (Ethel) Constance Cousins Archive, MS 380325, SOAS. 8 9 Card postmarked 22 VI 04, (Ethel) Constance Cousins Archive, MS 380325, SOAS. “Here I left off to admire the bursting out of the sun between two black masses of cloud and the grand effect of a rainbow against the hill opposite.” Card postmarked 21 VI 04, (Ethel) Constance Cousins Archive, MS 380325, SOAS. 10 The two decades between taking her University examinations and her tutorial appointment in 1920 is a period in which, because there are no public markers of achievement or distinction, Ivy’s life is almost, but not quite, lost to us. The paper here is almost blank. Information comes from the Register of the Society of Oxford Home-Students (Documentary Appendix C). 11 She left £100 to Nora, who was the first woman to teach geography at Oxford and a tutor at the Society between 1914-1935. The implication in Ivy’s DNB entry is that Ivy and Nora were more than friends, but the bequest (the same as she gave her friends and cousins) suggests otherwise (Will of Ivy Williams, Documentary Appendix D). 12 Dorothy Lane Poole was Classics Tutor of the Society between 1920 and 1947. She was renowned for the elegance of her ear-rings: Reeves, Marjorie, St Anne’s College, Oxford: An Informal History 1879-1979 Oxford, St Anne’s College, 1979, p. 17. 13 Mrs Cheridah Stocks “obtained a BSc for a study of the Lapehas of Sikim into whose mountains she was carried in a bamboo basket, after being partially crippled in a plane crash: Reeves, Marjorie, op. cit,, n. 11, p. 18. 13 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module 14 Geraldine Coster was the principal of Wychwood School, a progressive girls’ school in Oxford, and co-author (with Nora MacMunn) of A Regional Geography of Europe. 15 16 Oxford: Oxford University Press (1926). J., E. (1926) Psycho-Analysis for Normal People, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, vol. 7, pp. 509-510. 17 See, generally, Reeves, Marjorie, op. cit.. n. 11. For a history of the Society, see Butler, R.F. and M.H. Prichard, The Society of Oxford Home-Students: Retrospects and Recollections (1879-1921), Oxford: Oxonian Press, 1930 (private circulation). 18 Although the category of Home Student had been in use since 1890-1, the more formal title did not officially exist until 1898 when it was adopted by the Association for the Education of Women in Oxford (founded twenty years earlier). 19 A picture of the house can be found at Picture Appendix B. The 1901 census entry for the Williams family can be found at Documentary Appendix E. 20 21 The house in which Ivy was born can be seen at Picture Appendix A. Winter Williams’ Inner Temple Admission Form and Certificate can be found at Documentary Appendix F. 22 Ina Terry was Ivy’s friend and housekeeper. She was clearly special to Ivy, though whether the relationship was more involved is impossible to say. She was certainly important enough to have been left Ivy’s house and substantial estate (valued at over £30,000 on her death) (see Documentary Appendix D). 23 Mrs Collett was Ivy’s “friend and helper”. She received £20 in Ivy’s will (see Documentary Appendix D). 24 Ivy gained a second class in the undergraduate jurisprudence examinations in 1900 (the first woman to take these), and in the BCL examinations in 1902. In 1903 she benefited from the University of London’s more liberal approach and graduated from there with an LLD. 25 Jenks wrote a Digest of English Civil Law, modelled on the German Civil Code) which finds its parallel in Ivy’s magnum (and only) opus, The Swiss Civil Code. He was also one of the founders of the Society of Public Teachers of Law in 1909 and his commitment to legal education may well have been one of the reasons why Ivy decided against a career at the Bar instead remained in Oxford to become, in 1920, and in the Society that had nurtured her, the first woman to tutor law in an English University. See Honoré, Tony “Edward Jenks” ODNB. 26 William Holdsworth was Fellow of St John’s College from 1897 and was appointed to the Vinerian Chair in 1922. See Hanbury, H.G., rev. Ibbetson, David “Holdsworth, Sir William Searle” ODNB. 27 Nevill Forbes, Fellow of Balliol College and Slavonic language specialist. He killed himself in his bath in 1929, worried about an ear infection. “Nevill Forbes” ODNB. 28 Schuster’s death was “deeply lamented” by Ivy in the preface to her translation of the Swiss Civil Code, despite a review by him in which he had said of the earlier treatise on which it was based that it was “an excellent monograph … notwithstanding occasional symptoms of inexperience”. Schuster, E. Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation and International Law, vol. 5, pp. 216-226. 14 Matthew Weait, MA in Creative Writing, Life Writing Module 29 For a picture of Ivy on the day, see Picture Appendix D. For a first person account of the ceremony see Brittain, Vera, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925, London: Penguin, 1994, p. 508. 30 The Sources of Law in the Swiss Civil Code (1923) was followed by The Swiss Civil Code: English Version, with Notes and Vocabulary (1925). The treatise was widely praised (e.g., “an extremely readable introduction to the latest of the great continental codes”, Jolowicz, H.F. (1924) Cambridge Law Journal, vol. 2, p. 132). The translation received the praise of the Swiss Ministry of Justice: “The translation by Miss Ivy Williams, M.A., D.C.L., of the Swiss Civil Code, is considered to have brought within the reach of the British public a most conscientious and correct version of the Code in question. The numerous commentaries are very much to the point and augment the value of a mere translation. Although it lies not within the our competence to give an official approval to a work of this kind, we wish nevertheless to express our private and personal appreciation of Miss Williams’ work”. Ivy’s pride in this is reflected in her inclusion of the commendation as an insert in the book. 31 32 Queen Mary had been awarded an Honorary DCL in 1921. Of Ivy, two former students wrote: “The general reluctance to accept women into the legal profession greatly saddened her, though she was never a woman to brood over reverses or to show resentment” (Penley, S. and Dodgson, E.O. (1966) “Dr Ivy Williams: An Appreciation”, The Ship, p.38. 33 Henry Dickens KC, son of Charles Dickens, was Treasurer of the Inner Temple. Ivy’s Certificate and Form of Admission for Membership of the Inner Temple can be found at Documentary Appendix G. 34 Handling that very volume, as I did on a cold October day, smelling the paper and the ink and running my fingers across the rough, red, cover I could imagine Ivy doing the same and thinking “Well that’s that then, what next?”. 35 After her mother’s death, Ivy gave property owned by her family to the Radcliffe Infirmary: see Documentary Appendix H. 36 Along with the Hon. Eleanor Plumer, Principal of the Oxford Society of Home-Students from 1940, Ivy assisted financially in the purchase of 11 Bradmore Rd as student lodgings (Reeves, Marjorie, op. cit, n. 11, p.28). 15