Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland with her daughter at the Ladies Automobile Club (1903).
‘Her grave is the sixth from the left in the back row.’
– An Allied Bureau letter to M.I.5. about Edith Cavell, enclosing a photograph of seventeen white crosses, 1917.
December 1917 was one of the coldest months in recent memory in Lancashire. A hard frost had come overnight, turning the ground white outside the Dick, Kerr and Co. factory in Preston. Still, there they were, kicking a football around on their dinner break – the women who were sending Britain’s troops 30,000 artillery shells a week.
From inside the office, administrator Alfred Frankland watched a darkhaired teenager named Lily send the ball sailing through a cloakroom window. Frankland leaned out over the courtyard, his shout carrying on the wind: ‘Goal! Pay up, mates. That’s a Five Boys for the ladies!’
The factory’s male workers knew when they were fairly beat. But win or lose, football made them feel more connected to their friends deployed in France and Italy. There, too, men were kicking a ball around in the bitter cold, practising for rag-tag matches in the precious peace of the holiday ceasefire.
On Christmas Day, as the guns fell silent, the women from two Preston factories took the field at home. Dick, Kerr beat Arundel Coulthard by 4-0 in a match that drew 10,000 spectators and raised almost £500 for wounded soldiers. Propelled by the showmanship of Frankland, ‘Dick, Kerr’s Ladies F.C.’ would become the most famous name in women’s football in wartime England. The sport was one of thousands of threads that connected the lives of women on the home front with men yearning for home.
Football was hardly an earth-shaking advance for female workers, but it was emblematic of social changes that had been percolating since the late 1800s. Now war had turned up the heat. Many of the women that had taken up jobs in factories, public transport, farms, nursing and civil service would become unemployed in 1919 when the soldiers returned home. But for the time being, both their wages and their sense of liberation were on the rise.
Not everything changed for women en masse. Women of the middle and lower classes remained largely anonymous in their wartime roles, while female aristocrats were named on the society pages and lauded for their selfless war efforts.
****
Millicent Fanny Leveson-Gower (née St Clair-Erskine), Duchess of Sutherland, was a woman who deserved every bit of the newspaper attention she received. Born into privilege in 1867, she was a society doyenne, writer and social reformer. Manufacturers called her Meddlesome Millie due to her campaigns for better working conditions in factories. The death of her first husband, 4th Duke of Sutherland, left her a widow in 1913 and she took on the outbreak of war as a fresh challenge.
The Duchess was no stranger to the artist’s canvas. She posed for a stunning portrait by John Singer Sargent in 1904; in it she wears a blue silk gown that would have kept the ladies of Dick, Kerr in football jerseys for decades. Sargent sketched and painted her more than once, as did others, but it is a little-known French artist by the name of Victor Tardieu who captured her inner beauty.
On 8 August 1914, four days after England declared war on Germany, the Duchess travelled to Belgium to establish the Millicent Sutherland Ambulance unit. She set up operations in the provincial town of Namur together with eight nurses, a doctor and a stretcher-bearer. Like many aristocratic women, she was used to running a large household and made short work of organising her staff. She also enlisted the help of the local nuns.
The Duchess saw more action than she anticipated in August. It started with a harrowing, five-day siege of Namur that trapped her behind the German line. Although she escaped to England, she went to France less than two months later to help direct field hospital operations there. Her bravery earned her Red Cross medals from Belgium and Britain and the Croix de guerre from France.
It was in France, in 1915, that soldier Victor Tardieu painted ten scenes documenting the tent hospital set up by the Duchess at Bourbourg near Dunkirk. Tardieu’s subjects are notable for making unflinching eye contact with the viewer. The settings look almost cheerful, as in Tents with Stores and Flower Tub. The Duchess looks stoic and the men are clearly damaged, but Tardieu changes the atmosphere with a pitcher of fresh geraniums.
Across the bottom of one painting is an inscription that reads: a Madame la Duchess M de Sutherland / Hommage respecteux et tres reconnaisant / d’un simple soldat. Tardieu chose not to compliment the Duchess on her beauty, rank or wit – the things held dear by British society – instead expressing respect, esteem and gratitude ‘from a simple soldier’.
Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland with her daughter at the Ladies Automobile Club (1903).
The Duchess of Sutherland was not the only woman of her class to go to war. Siblings Marcia and Juliet Mansel left their wealthy family to nurse soldiers close to the Front. And Lady Dorothie Feilding volunteered as a nurse and ambulance driver in Belgium, becoming the first woman awarded the English Military Medal for Bravery in the field. A drawing by General Hely d’Oissel shows a curious scene of Lady Feilding and a dog watching a bomb explode overhead, while an officer with a camera stands by.
But it was the Duchess of Sutherland who captured the sad confusion of the war ordeal most poignantly. She penned these words about time spent in a Namur cellar after the Allied support failed to materialise: ‘We had taken refuge there with all the schoolchildren, who were very frightened … The German shells had been whistling ominously over the Convent for 24 hours … I was so tired of the discouraging refrain ‘Oû sont les Anglais?”39
Lady Dorothie Feilding after receiving the Order of Leopold from King Albert of Belgium for services to the wounded (1915).
Four months to the day after that frightful experience, an item appeared in The Sketch in London:
Millicent Duchess of Sutherland … came back from Dunkirk to attend the annual Christmas sale at the New Bond Street depot of her Potteries Cripples Guild. She looked yet another of her successful parts – a graceful and beautiful leader of Society; then she spoke, and proved herself the true orator who speaks simply and from the heart. Pleading that the heroic men at the front who come home disabled in any way should be given permanent employment, she suggested handicrafts and enlarging such schemes as the P.C.G. Very charmingly did her dress of black stamped velvet, the coat edged with black fur, suit her also the black hat, with its cluster of silver and white grapes at one side.40
Set side by side, the Duchess’s diary and the newspaper article illustrate war’s uneasy marriage with the British upper class, and with its women in particular. It was more comfortable to reveal what an aristocratic woman was wearing, than what she was thinking. As the conflict dragged on, more women would put aside their world of fine dining, fancy dress and patisseries to do meaningful work. Their experiences created a seismic gap between how society saw them and how the women came to see themselves. Art began to close that gap by portraying wealthy women in new roles.
The Marchioness of Londonderry (née Edith Helen Chaplin) is a case in point. The Marchioness was a distinguished society hostess who held strong political views and was a vocal supporter of women’s suffrage. She was also a lifelong sitter for portraits, starting as a child with her brother Eric, later 2nd Viscount Chaplin.
The Marchioness found her stride in war. She was named Colonel-in-Chief of the Women’s Volunteer Reserve force in 1914 and established an officers’ hospital in Park Lane at Londonderry House, her London home. Three years later she became the first Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Military Division – all before the age of 40.
The evolution of the Marchioness of Londonderry was best captured in three portraits by Philip de László, the talented Hungarian painter who made a name for himself among aristocrats. De László married into the Guinness dynasty of Dublin and was a newly minted British subject when war commenced.
In his first portrait of the Marchioness, completed in 1913, de László shows a relaxed-looking woman in full dress in the Irish countryside. Her face is turned partway toward the viewer; one hand holds the leash of her dog Fly. By 1918, de László’s vision could not be more different. In this portrait, the Marchioness’s military uniform and tightly gripped hands make no attempt at femininity. Her face looks directly out of the frame with an expression of absolute command.
A third portrait, completed in 1927, was painted by de László in his model’s sitting room at Mount Stewart House in Northern Ireland. By then an interwar peace had settled over Britain, and the Marchioness had returned to her role as society hostess. On her head is the famous ‘all-around diamonds’ Londonderry Tiara. In this portrait, the Marchioness stares off into the distance with no pretence of engaging the viewer – a woman uninterested in trivialities.
****
Female artists in Britain did an admirable job of documenting the First World War on the home front, which in turn elevated their influence. The government saw value in bearing witness to war with a woman’s eye. In 1918, the short-lived Ministry of Information commissioned two works from Flora Marguerite Lion, giving her special access to factories in Leeds and Bradford to paint women doing wartime work.
Lion was a painter who studied at St John’s Wood Art School and the Royal Academy. Her landscape training served her well in the cavernous factory environments. She was 35 years old at the time of the commissions, and had achieved prominence as a society portrait painter. She drew on both genres in her factory paintings, depicting the anonymous women as often weary but never bowed – a tribute to the more than a million female workers who kept the British munitions industry going during the war.
Other notable British artists who looked at the war with a woman’s eye include Olive Mudie-Cooke, Anna Airy, Clare Atwood, Norah Neilson Gray and Victoria Monkhouse.
Olive Mudie-Cooke was just 26 years old in 1916 when she joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) with her sister, Phyllis. They travelled to France together. Mudie-Cooke was one of the few women with access to the Front due to her skills as an ambulance driver. Shortly after the end of conflict she was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to depict the British Red Cross providing aid to soldiers in France.
Mudie-Cooke worked primarily in watercolours with a fluid, sometimes murky technique. Her subjects show great humanity. In one painting, medics comfort an injured peasant; in another, an aide lights a cigarette for a soldier in the dim interior of an ambulance. Mudie-Cooke’s war experiences might have coloured her perspective as an artist for many years to come had she not died in her thirties.
London-born Anna Airy also received a commission from the Imperial War Museum in 1918. Airy trained at the Slade School at the same time as future war artist William Orpen and his contemporaries. The museum’s commissioning committee hedged its bets with Airy – they built a right of refusal and non-payment into her contract, but ended up purchasing four large factory scenes from her.
Airy must have welcomed that income at a time when many London artists were still struggling. The war’s effect on the art market had been widely recognised – on 15 May 1916, Her Majesty Queen Mary attended an exhibition of female artists at the Georgian Gallery of Waring and Gillow. The Sporting Times noted that the queen, ‘showed her practical interest and sympathy in women artists who have been badly hit by the war.’ The queen acquired a number of works when touring the exhibition, displaying a deep interest in the women’s points of view. One of her purchases was a painting called The Golden Plum Tree by Airy.
Other female artists found work through international sponsors. Clare Atwood was born in London and studied at the Westminster School of Art and the Slade. She was a member of the New English Art Club and exhibited at London’s Carfax Gallery – but it was the Canadian Government that gave her a commission as a war artist in 1917. Atwood was offered access to a military camp in Kent to gather ideas for the work. Instead, she chose to paint troops waiting in a London railway station for trains to the Front. She later secured commissions from the Imperial War Museum to produce works both during and after the war.
The Scottish artist Norah Neilson Gray was treated to a first-hand look at how government support for female war artists could be subject to influence. Gray volunteered as a nurse in France with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals; she subsequently submitted a painting entitled Hôpital Auxilaire to the Imperial War Museum. It was rejected for depicting only nurses and returned to her with a request that she show a female doctor instead. Gray’s second attempt was set at the same venue, the Cloister of the Abbaye at Royaumont, but depicted Dr Frances Ivens inspecting a French patient. It was finally accepted in 1920.
The artistic skills of Victoria Monkhouse were put to use more directly on the home front. Monkhouse worked for a Cambridge University publication as an illustrator. In 1916, the Imperial War Museum asked her to create portraits of working women in England. Monkhouse took a unique approach to this request in that she used amateur sitters for one-on-one depictions of women in jobs previously held by men. The only drawback was that her models were busy women and seldom had time to sit.
Monkhouse’s watercolours of female ticket collectors, bus conductors and window cleaners had a storybook-like simplicity that became immensely popular with the general public. In some ways they echoed the poster and cartoon art that had become a morale-boosting staple of wartime England. But the drawings were also explicit illustrations of modernity, showing women asserting themselves in the workforce.
In depicting the realities of war, artists of both genders were in competition with the meteoric rise of photography. In 1915, the Eastman Kodak Company inserted itself in the middle of the war effort by advertising, ‘The gift he will appreciate most is a Soldier’s Kodak … Every incident in camp, aboard ship, foreign ports, or at the front, makes an interesting subject for a Kodak snapshot.’
Cameras had their place both as a novelty and as a connection to home. Nevertheless, it is difficult to envision how the conflict would have shaped humanity’s perception of war without the lens of art. To paraphrase Picasso, the artists painted war as they thought it, not as they saw it.