The Necropolis of Glasgow where the three principal characters of this book are interred in the Baxter Mausoleum – the Romanesque rotunda on the far right.
8. The Glasgow Humane Society for the Rescue and Recovery of Drowning Persons was founded by the Glasgow Faculty of Surgeons in 1790, and the first boathouse and house built for its officers on Glasgow Green in 1796. George Geddes, the first full-time officer, was employed from 1859 to 1889; his son (the second George Geddes) worked from 1889 to 1932. The job then went to the equally famous Ben Parsonage, whose son (July 1992) now occupies the Humane Society House near the end of the suspension bridge.
St. Andrew’s Suspension Bridge, upstream from the wharf, was always a favourite place for suicides. It is a footbridge with very little traffic, and an iron lattice-work parapet which (though now covered by a fine mesh grille) was once easily climbed. The grandson of the first George Geddes was drowned while attempting to save the life of a man who jumped from St. Andrew’s Bridge in 1928.
9. The proper name is The Stewart Memorial Fountain, since it was erected to commemorate the work of Mr. Stewart of Murdostoun, Lord Provost of Glasgow in 1854. Against strong opposition from the private water companies he got an Act of Parliament passed which enabled Glasgow Corporation to turn Loch Katrine, thirty-three miles away in the depths of the Trossach mountains, into the city’s main public water supply.
However, Dr. McCandless’s mistake is understandable. Designed by James Sellars I.A. and erected by the Water Commissioners in 1872, the fountain is elaborately carved with creatures found on the Loch Katrine islands: heron, otter, weasel and owl. On the summit is set the graceful figure of Helen, the Lady of the Lake herself. Oar in hand she stands erect behind the prow of a delicately imagined bark, exactly as Fitz-James beheld her in the most famous poetical work of Sir Walter Scott.
Around 1970 the authorities turned the water off and made the stonework a children’s climbing frame. The sculptures got broken. In 1989, as Glasgow prepared to become the European Cultural Capital, it was fully repaired and set flowing again. In July 1992 it is waterless once more. A high timber wall surrounds it.
10. The steeply raked terraces of Glasgow’s West End Park were designed in the early 1850s by Joseph Paxton, who also designed Queen’s Park and the Botanic Gardens. The acute angle of the slope made it useful to Percy Pilcher when testing one of the gliders which eventually led to his death in 1899, but established the main structure of the aeroplane as it has developed to this day, and even gave the ‘aeroplane’ its name. The Pilcher connection may have led H. G. Wells to use the West End Park in his novel The War in the Air, published a month before the 1914–18 war. Wells describes Britain’s first successful airman flying from London to Glasgow and back without stopping. As he circles above the park on a level with the highest terrace he shouts to the astonished crowds there, “Me muver was Scotch!” and is wildly applauded.
11. Weather reports show that 29th June 1882 was abnormally hot and sultry. At sunset most Glaswegians were disturbed by a noise whose cause was discussed in the local press through the following fortnight. Most folk assumed it had an industrial origin and came from very far away. At Saracen Cross in the north-west folk thought something had exploded at Parkhead Forge; around Parkhead to the south-east it was thought a disaster in the Saracen Head Ornamental, Hygienic and Sanitary Iron Works. In Govan to the south-west folk thought a new kind of steam whistle was being tested in the north-east locomotive works; in the north-east it was assumed that a boiler had burst in a ship on Clydeside. A scientific correspondent in The Glasgow Herald said the phenomenon had been “more like an electrical shock than a noise”, and perhaps had “a meteorological source in an abnormal weather condition combining with fumes in the atmosphere”. A humorous periodical called The Bailie pointed out that the West End Park and University were at the centre of the area over which the noise was heard, and suggested that Professor Thomson was experimenting with a new kind of telegraph which went through air instead of through wires. A final facetious letter in The Scotsman (an Edinburgh journal) suggested that a Glasgow tinker had been playing a new kind of bagpipe.
12. Michael Donnelly has shown me the original plans of Park Circus, designed by Charles Wilson in the 1850s, plans which show a coach-house dividing the backyard of 18 Park Circus from the lane. But the fact that an architect designed such a feature would not prevent it being built till much later. The builders of the gothic cathedrals took centuries to complete their architects’ designs. The National Monument in Edinburgh, though designed to commemorate the Scots soldiers who died fighting Napoleon, is still little more than a façade.
13. Railway timetables from the 1880s show that it was possible to get off the first Midland Line night train from Glasgow to London at Kilmarnock and continue the journey on the second train which left an hour later.
14. It was improvident of Wedderburn to do so since this insurance company (now called Scottish Widows) is still a highly flourishing concern. In March 1992, as part of Conservative publicity preceding a General Election, the chairman of Scottish Widows announced that if Scotland achieved an independent parliament the company’s head office would move to England.
15. The Royal Exchange, in Queen Street, was erected and opened on 3rd September 1829. It was built by subscription at an expense of £60,000, and was not only a lasting monument of the wealth of the Glasgow merchants, but the noblest institution of the kind in Britain for many decades afterward. This splendid structure is built in the Grecian style of architecture from designs by David Hamilton. The building is entered by a majestic portico, surmounted by a beautiful lantern tower. The great roof is 130 feet in length and 60 in breadth; the roof, supported by Corinthian pillars, is 30 feet in height. The interior is now occupied by Stirling’s Public Lending Library, and as magnificent as ever.
16. Most visitors to Odessa know the great flight of stairs down the cliff to the harbour front. The granite stairway in Glasgow’s West End Park (erected in 1854 at a cost of £10,000) is equally substantial and handsome, but unfortunately in a corner where it is seldom seen and not much used by the public. Had it been erected nearer the central slope from Park Terrace it would have confronted Glasgow University across the narrow valley, and appeared to greater advantage.
17. The Russian gambler’s speech which starts: “Well,” he said with a rueful smile, and ends: “bed bugs too must have their unique visions of the world,” shows he was steeped in the novellas of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Bella could not have known this, as the great novelist had died the year before (1881) and was not yet translated into English.
18. According to The Scots Kitchen (by Marian McNeill, Blackie and Son, Bishopbriggs, 1929) this recipe omits two vital ingredients: half a teaspoonful of baking powder and a moderate amount of heat.
19. A meticulous search through the public records and newspapers of the period has unearthed no evidence that “Harry” Astley ever existed. All Scottish and several English readers will have raised their eyebrows on reading that he claimed to be a cousin of “Lord Pibroch”. Pibroch is the Gaelic name for bagpipe, and the Scottish College of Arms, like the English, insists that all titles are taken from place names. To a foreign ear, however, all decidedly Scottish names sound equally plausible, which indicates Astley was an impostor. No firm of sugar refiners called Lovel and Co. is listed in the commercial registers of the period. Who could Astley have been? Our only clue is in his undoubted links with Russia and his history lectures to Bella. These prove that behind his English façade lay no love of the British Empire. He was probably a Tsarist agent, visiting London to spy on the emigré Russian revolutionaries who sheltered there. Herzen and (much later) Lenin were the most famous of these. It is a good thing Bella refused Astley’s offer of marriage.
20. A midinette is a French work girl, especially a young milliner or dressmaker. Their wages were low but they often knew how to dress well, so moneyed men regarded their class as a source of cheap mistresses.
21. Charcot, Jean Martin (1825–93), French physician, born in Paris. He graduated as M.D. of Paris University in 1853, and three years later he became physician of the Central Hospital Bureau. In 1860 he was appointed professor of pathological anatomy in the medical world of Paris, and in 1862 he began his connection with the Salpêtrière which lasted all his life. He was elected to the Academy of Medicine in 1873, and in 1883 was made a member of the Institute. He was a good linguist and had an excellent knowledge of the literature of other countries as well as his own. He was a great clinical observer and pathologist. He spent much of his time in studying obscure morbid conditions such as hysteria in relation to hypnotism. His work at the Salpêtrière was chiefly in the study of nervous diseases, but besides his labours in the field of nerves he also published many able works on the subjects of liver and kidney diseases, gout, et cetera. His complete works came out in nine volumes between 1886 and 1890. He was extraordinarily successful as a teacher, and his many followers were most enthusiastic in their work. Dr. S. Freud was among his pupils.
Everyman’s Encyclopaedia, 1949, editor Athelstan Ridgway
22. This phrase means ‘blown up by my own bomb’. Shakespeare used it.
23. Bella misunderstood Mme Cronquebil’s dialect. The poor lady probably said ‘hole’.
24. This etching does not portray Professor Jean Martin Charcot, but Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac.
25. A scramble is a Scottish custom which operated thus: children would gather outside a house from which a bride or groom would be leaving to get married. When they did so the bride’s escort or the groom was expected to fling a handful of money into the crowd—if they did not the crowd would chant “Hard up! Hard up!” indicating that the person who had disappointed them was too poor to do the right thing. If a handful of coin was flung a wild crush would follow in which the strongest, most violent and ruthless children would grab the money and the weakest and smallest be left weeping with trampled fingers. This custom still prevails in parts of Scotland. Some modern conservative philosophers will think it good training for the world of adult competition.
Anyone who cares to try the experiment can easily walk from 18 Park Circus to Lansdowne Church in less than ten minutes by way of the park. The building (designed by John Honeyman) is of cream sandstone in the French Gothic style, with the most slender spire (in proportion to its height) in Europe. The sight of it so impressed John Ruskin that he burst into tears. The interior retains an unusual arrangement of boxed pews, and has two important stained glass windows by Alfred Webster relating biblical scenes to contemporary Glasgow. Both church and congregation date from 1863.
26. The popularity of George Geddes is proved by a comic song once performed in Glasgow music-halls. It describes a disastrous outing on a Clyde pleasure-steamer and ends with the line: “Send for Geordie Geddes ’cause the boat’s gawn doon.”
27. This story has been told and retold in so many nineteenth-century anecdotal histories of Glasgow that the original sources have themselves become the subject of an exhaustive monograph by Professor Heinrich Heuschrecke: War Frankenstein Schotte?, Stillschweigen Verlag, Weissnichtwo, 1929. Those who cannot read German will find the argument neatly summarized in Frank Kuppner’s Garscadden’s Gash, Molendinar Press, Glasgow, 1987.
28. The career of this once famous soldier began as well as ended under a cloud. At Sandhurst in 1846 a fellow student fell to his death in a prank Blessington initiated, though it was probably not he who untied the victim’s boot-laces. His family connections with the Duke of Wellington perhaps led to him being reprimanded instead of expelled. In 1848 the Duke was Lord High Constable of England and organizing the military against the Chartists in London. He employed Blessington as an aide, but found him unsuitable. Rigby in his Memoirs records the Duke saying to Lord Monmouth: “Aubrey is a brave and clever soldier, but only feels alive when killing people. Unluckily most soldiering is spent waiting to do that. We must send him to frontiers as far from England as possible. We should keep him there.”
The Duke died in 1852 but his advice was heeded. Blessington’s frontier victories (often won with the help of native troops) delighted the British newspapers. George Augustus Sala called him “Thunderbolt Blessington” in The Daily Telegraph. Though not popular with his own social class he was honoured by the Queen: in other words, Palmerston and Gladstone and Disraeli recommended him for honours. Meanwhile Parliament voted him thanks and money, though a radical M.P. sometimes suggested that he “pacified” territories with undue ferocity. Most writers liked him. Carlyle called him:
a lean skyward-pointing pine tree of a man, scraped branchless by storm yet every straight inch of him stretched heavenward because rooted in Fact. Good wood for a lance! Words are less than wind to him. Not strange, then, to find him dispraised in the pow-wows of the Westminster talking-shop. Would that the lance became a lancet to cut open the boil of putrescent parliamentary verbifaction and relieve the body politic of fever-inducing poisons!
Tennyson met him at a public banquet in support of Governor Eyre and was so impressed that he wrote The Eagle. Though many people know it, few realize it is a romantic portrait of the author’s friend:
THE EAGLE
He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring’d with the azure world, he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
But the finest poetic tribute to Blessington is by Rudyard Kipling, who believed the General had been hounded to his death by parliamentary criticism:
THE END OF THE THUNDERBOLT
The trappers round the Hudson Bay
don’t fear the half-breeds now.
In peaceful Patagonia the farmers drive their plough.
The wily Chinese traders pursue their gains in peace
Under justice dealt out cleanly by unbribable police;
While the founder of this industry, the giver of this gain,
LIES DEAD UPON THE GUN-ROOM FLOOR—
A BULLET IN HIS BRAIN.
There’s always room in parliament
for nincompoop and knave,
And sentimental radicals who do not love the brave.
A host of lukewarm “realists” like things the way they are,
But feel the men responsible have “often gone too far”.
Then there are men responsible,
the men who get things done,
And some, like Kitchener, we cheer;
some curse, like Blessington!
Let radical and “realist” sleep soundly in their bed.
BLESSINGTON’S ON THE GUN-ROOM FLOOR—
A BULLET IN HIS HEAD.
Many a peaceful settlement that Englishmen call home
Was once a howling wilderness where nomads used to roam.
Many a half-tamed tribesman
mines ore, shears sheep, breaks colt
Because his savage forebears were struck by Thunderbolt.
Yes, we scorched them with The Thunderbolt
but would not sniff the reek.
We lashed them with The Thunderbolt
but did not like the shriek.
We split them with The Thunderbolt and,
deafened by the crash,
We smashed them with The Thunderbolt.
Some shuddered at the smash.
Our kindly English stay-at-homes
like things genteel and fair;
They prefer the Danes to Nelson,
the blacks to Governor Eyre.
But argosies are bringing England
meat, wool, ore and grain.
SIR AUBREY’S ON THE GUN-ROOM FLOOR—
A BULLET IN HIS BRAIN.
After such eulogy it is not unfair to quote two less friendly references to him. Dickens was writing Dombey and Son in 1846 when he heard about Blessington’s lethal Sandhurst prank. It gave a hint for the conversation on the front at Brighton where Major Bagstock asks Dombey if he will send his son to public school:
“I am not quite decided,” said Mr. Dombey. “I think not. He is delicate.”
“If he’s delicate, Sir,” said the Major, “you are right. None but the tough fellows could live through it, Sir, at Sandhurst. We put each other to the torture there, Sir. We roasted the new fellows at a slow fire, and hung ’em out of a three pair of stairs window, with their heads downward. Joseph Bagstock, Sir, was held out of the window by the heels of his boots, for thirteen minutes by the college clock.”
Lastly, Hilaire Belloc’s caricature of an empire builder—Captain Blood—was based as much upon General Blessington as upon Cecil Rhodes:
Blood understood the native mind.
He said: “We must be firm but kind.”
A mutiny resulted.
I never will forget the way
That Blood upon this awful day
Preserved us all from death.
He stood upon a little mound,
Cast his lethargic eyes around
And said beneath his breath:
“Whatever happens we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.”
29. Had Dr. McCandless waited patiently until putrefaction had set in, his friend Baxter would have lost the rigor mortis, and in such a flaccid state could have fitted comfortably into a conventional coffin. But perhaps Baxter’s odd metabolism defied the normal process of decay.
30. Four books by Dr. McCandless apart from this one were printed in his lifetime at his own expense. Unlike Poor Things he sent copies of the following works to the Scottish National Library in Edinburgh where they are catalogued under his pseudonym, “A Gallowa’ Loon”.
1886 Whaur We Twa Wandered
Verses inspired by places in Glasgow associated with the courtship of his wife. One of these (headed “The West End Park Loch Katrine Waterworks Memorial Fountain”) is quoted in Chapter 7 of Poor Things and is by far the best.
1892 The Resurrectionists
This five-act play about the Burke and Hare murders is no better than the many other nineteenth-century melodramas based on the same very popular theme. Robert Knox, the surgeon who bought the corpses, is treated more sympathetically than usual, so the play may have influenced James Bridie’s The Anatomist.
1897 Whauphill Days
Reminiscences of childhood on a Galloway farm. Though purporting to be autobiography, this says so little about the author’s father, mother and friends that the reader is left with the impression that he never had any. The only character to be described in affectionate detail is an atrociously harsh “dominie” whose approval of the author’s scholastic abilities never mitigated the severity of the beatings inflicted on him. The bulk of the book describes the delights of “guddling” trout, “running down” rabbits and smaller vermin, and “harrying” birds’ nests.
1905 The Testament of Sawney Bean
This long poem in “Habbie” stanzas opens with Bean lying in the heather on the summit of the Merrick, from which he surveys the nation which has both enticed and driven him into cannibalism. The year is 1603, shortly before the union of the crowns. Bean is suffering from food poisoning, for he has recently eaten part of an Episcopalian tax-collector on top of a Calvinist gaberlunzie. The symbolism, not the comedy of this intestinal broil is emphasized. In his delirium Bean harangues apparitions of every Scottish monarch from Calgacus to James the Sixth. Figures from Scotland’s past and future appear: Fingal, Jenny Geddes, James Watt, William Ewart Gladstone et cetera, with finally, “a poet of futuritee, | Who loses, seeks, finds Scotland just like me, | Upon that day.” Here it becomes plain that Bean and his hungry family (soon to be arrested by the royal army and burned alive in the Grassmarket, Edinburgh) symbolize the Scottish people. The main difficulty with the poem (apart from its great length and dull language) is knowing what the cannibalism symbolizes. It may represent bad eating-habits which Dr. McCandless thought were once common in Scotland, for he addresses the reader as if the Bean clan had existed. A little research would have shown him it is neither in Scottish history or legend, folk tale or fiction. It first appeared in the Newgate Calendar or Bloody Malefactors’ Register printed in London around 1775. The other stories in the book were factual accounts of gruesome English murders committed in what was then living memory. The Sawney Bean story was told in the same factual style but set upon a wild Scottish coast nearly two centuries earlier. It was a fiction based on English folk tales: tales told by the English about the Scots during centuries when these peoples were at war with each other, or on the verge of it.
I have described these four worthless books in detail to discourage others from wasting time on them. They do, however, prove that Dr. McCandless had no creative imagination or ear for dialogue, so must have copied Poor Things out of highly detailed diary notes. The manuscript burned by his wife would certainly have proved this.
31. There is reason to think he had afforded it for fourteen years. In Chapter 22 Blaydon Hattersley is quoted as boasting that he was “employing half the skilled work-force of Manchester and Birmingham” ten years after he “smashed King Hudson”. George Hudson—known as the Railway King—was a very successful shares and property speculator until the railway mania of 1847-8 plunged him into ruin. This means Bella’s father became a millionaire when she was three.
32. The patent of the MacGregor Shand twin reciprocating gubernator sockets gave Blaydon Hattersley’s Steam Traction Company a lead over its competitors which lasted until 1889 when the Belfrage popper valve made gubernators obsolete. MacGregor Shand died of consumption in the charity ward of Manchester Royal Lunatic Asylum in 1856.
33. Dr. Victoria is mistaken. This anonymous folksong was neither written nor collected by Robert Burns.
34. If Dr. Victoria had loved her husband more she would easily have seen why he wrote this claptrap. Archibald McCandless obviously wanted her to edit his book for publication. This, the only part of it which she had the experience and medical training to correct, was his way of asking for her collaboration. But she could not see it.
35. Bella Baxter’s later life was passed under the name Victoria, for in 1886 she used that name to enrol in the Jex-Blake women’s medical school of Edinburgh, and was made a Doctor of Medicine under that name by Glasgow University in 1890. In 1890 she also opened the Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic in Dobbie’s Loan near the Cowcaddens. It was a purely charitable foundation, and she ran it with a small staff of local women trained by herself. These were continually leaving and being replaced, for she employed nobody more than a year after she had trained them. To a devoted employee who did not want to leave she said, “You are a great help to me but there is nothing more I can teach you. I enjoy teaching my helpers. Go away and help your neighbours, or work for a doctor who can teach you something new.”
Several of her helpers enrolled as nurses in the city hospitals, but not many did well because (as one ward sister said) “They ask too many questions.”
Between 1892 and 1898 Dr. Victoria bore three sons at two-yearly intervals, each time continuing her clinical work until the last two or three days of her pregnancies and starting again very soon after. She said, “That’s how the poor women I treat have to do it—they cannot afford to be horizontalists. And I am luckier than most of them. I have a very good wife in my husband.”
The Fabian Society published her pamphlet on public health in 1899. It was called Against Horizontalism, and said that many doctors wanted patients laid flat because it made the doctors, not the patients, feel stronger. She agreed that rest in bed was essential to the healing of many diseases, but said childbirth, though painful, was not a disease, and came more easily in a squatting posture. She advocated birthing-stools of a sort used in the eighteenth century. She also said horizontalism was a mental as much as a bodily state. It assumed that the inner workings of the body were sacred mysteries only doctors could understand, so good patients should have unquestioning faith in them. She said:
When priests and politicians ask for unquestioning faith we know they are thinking first of themselves. Why should we with scientific training ALSO want the people we serve to remove their thinking apparatus and bow down before us? But patients will only stand up properly for doctors—doctors will only stand up properly for patients—when all know the common-sense daily foundations of the healing art.
She wanted all children to be taught basic nursing in their primary schools (“where they can learn it as a game”) and basic medical training in secondary schools. In this way all would learn not only how and when doctors could help them, but how to live more healthily, how to care for each other better, and why they should not tolerate housing and working conditions which damaged the health of themselves, their children and community. Here are some typical reactions from the journals of the period:
It would seem that Dr. Victoria McCandless proposes to turn every British school—yes, even the infant schools!—into training grounds for revolutionary socialists.
The Times
We hear that Dr. Victoria McCandless is a married woman with three sons. This is astonishing news—we can hardly believe it! From her writing alone we would have deduced that she was one of those sticklike, unwomanly women who would benefit from a course of “horizontalism”! Under the circumstances we can only offer her husband our hearty sympathies.
The Daily Telegraph
We do not doubt the adequacy of Victoria McCandless M.D.’s training, nor do we doubt the kindness of her heart. Her clinic is in a very poor part of Glasgow, and probably does more good than harm to the unfortunates who attend it. But that clinic is her hobby—she does not live by what it pays. We who earn our livings by the stethoscope and scalpel should smile tolerantly on her Utopian schemes, and return to our mundane task of healing the sick.
The Lancet
Dr. McCandless wants the world to stop being a battlefield and become a sanatorium where everybody takes a turn of being doctor and patient, as in a children’s game. It is surely obvious that in such a world the only thing to flourish would be—disease!
The Scots Observer
From 1900 onwards Dr. Vic (as the papers started calling her) was an active suffragette, and her work for the movement can be read in histories of it. The war of 1914 shocked her in a way from which she never recovered. She wanted working people and the soldiers to end it by going on strike, but her two youngest sons joined the army almost at once and were killed on the Somme soon after. She split with the Fabians because of what she called “their lukewarm tolerance of criminal carnage”, and appeared on platforms with Keir Hardie, Jimmy Maxton, John Maclean and other Clydeside Socialists (and advocates of Scottish home rule) who opposed the war. She quarrelled with Baxter, her eldest son, who supported the war effort from his desk in the Department of Imperial Statistics. In a letter to Patrick Geddes she wrote:
Baxter performs miracles of falsification, proving that the huge number being killed and maimed in France is less horrifying than the publicity suggests, since it contains many thousands who would have been killed and maimed by accidents in peace time. This comforts the shareholders and profiteers who draw unearned incomes from our war industry. It means that millions of dead young soldiers will soon be as forgotten as those who die in factory and road accidents.
It is ironical that Baxter McCandless died without issue in 1919 at the age of twenty-seven, knocked down by a Paris taxi-cab while attending Lloyd George to the Versailles peace conference.
Like many at that time she thought long and hard about why the world’s richest nations—nations who had prided themselves on being the most civilized because the most industrialized—had just fought the biggest and cruellest war in history. What puzzled her was why millions of men who, taken singly were neither bloodthirsty or stupid (she was thinking of her sons) had obeyed governments which ordered them to kill and be killed to such a suicidal extent. She accepted Tolstoy’s view that human animals are prone to epidemics of insanity, like many thousands of Frenchmen going into Russia with Napoleon and dying there, when their country would have been no better off if they had conquered it. However, being a doctor she knew epidemics can be prevented if the causes are discovered. She knew that people who live and work in overcrowded quarters are as liable to epidemics of belligerence as any overcrowded creatures, but at least a quarter of those who fought and died in the Great War were prosperous with spacious homes, and to this class belonged nearly all who had ordered and officered the carnage. She decided that although the Great War had been started by the same national and commercial rivalries which had caused the British wars with France, Spain, Holland, France, the United States and France, she believed the men fighting and supporting it had succumbed to “an epidemic of suicidal obedience” because bad mothering and fathering had left most of them with a heartfelt belief that their lives were valueless:
What men who respected their bodies could bear to queue naked in rows and have their genitals examined by another clothed man? What man who respected his mind could bear to make money by doing such a thing? Yet the medical inspection was nothing but baptism into the religion of man-killing, in which the best soldier was he who regarded his own body as the least sensitive machine—not even his own machine, but a machine steered by remote controllers. My two youngest sons willingly became such machines and let their beautiful bodies be mangled and crushed into mud. My oldest made his mind, not his body part of the war machine. I now think him as much a victim of self-disrespect as his brothers. Yet for the first ten years of their lives these three young men lived in a clean spacious home and were shaped by the care and example of loving, educated and adventurous parents. I was (as I am) a radical Socialist. My husband was a Liberal. Our boys were all preparing to be peaceful professional Scottish public servants, using the most humane modern ideas to tackle what we knew to be the great task of the twentieth century—to make a Britain where everyone has a good clean home and is well paid for useful work. Yet when war was declared my three boys AT ONCE behaved like sons of an English fox-hunting Tory. They knew I thought this was wicked behaviour. Why did they feel it was right? I refuse to seek the answer in the inherent depravity of human nature or the human male. Nor can I blame the militaristic histories they were taught at school, because that was certainly counteracted by the reading and teaching they got at home. I am forced to seek the reason in myself. For the first six or seven years of their lives I had total power over these boys, for I had plenty of money and a loving husband. Yet I did not give them the self-respect to resist that epidemic of self-abasement which was the 14–18 war. How did I fail? If I cannot find the root of the illness in myself I am no use to others. But I have found it. Please read on.
The previous passage summarizes and quotes from the introduction to a booklet she published in 1920 at her own expense: A Loving Economy—A Mother’s Recipe for the End of All National and Class Warfare. On the title-page is also printed: The Godwin Baxter Peace Press, Volume I. There never was a second volume. It received no serious attention although she posted copies to the leaders and secretaries of all the British trade union branches, in envelopes with and your Wife written after the names of the men, with and your Husband after the few women. She sent it to every doctor, clergyman, soldier, writer, civil servant and member of parliament in Who’s Who. She also posted two thousand copies to equivalent people in North America, but they were seized and burned by the United States customs. In a letter to George Bernard Shaw, who was then on holiday in Italy, Beatrice Webb wrote:
When you come home you will find Dr. Vic’s latest pamphlet awaiting you. It is an insane blend of ideas culled from Malthus, D. H. Lawrence and Marie Stopes. She blames herself for the Great War because she bore too many sons and did not cuddle them enough. She asks working-class parents to reduce future armies by having only one child. She wants them to make it feel infinitely precious by having it share their bed where it will learn all about love-making and birth control by practical example. In this way (she thinks) it will grow up free of the Oedipus complex, penis envy and other diseases discovered or invented by Doctor Freud, and instead of fighting with siblings will play husband-and-wife with a neighbour’s child. She is now quite sex-mad—an erotomaniac, to use the older term—and tries to hide it under prim language which shows she is still, at heart, a subject of Queen Victoria. Cuddles is her word for love-making, she calls fornication wedding. Yet she once had an excellent mind. I wish her poor little husband had not died. I think he kept her stable between her embarrassing affairs with Wells and Ford Madox Hueffer. And of course the loss of her sons hit her hard. The last six years have damaged all but the strongest minds.
The Clydeside Independent Labour Party socialists also disliked A Loving Economy. Tom Johnston, reviewing it in Forward, said:
Victoria McCandless M.D. wants working-class parents to increase the value of their children’s labour by going on a limited form of birth strike. In this year of lock-outs and reduced wages—a year when working-class movements everywhere are pressing the government to abolish unemployment by work rationing—such a demand from a good comrade is a frivolous distraction. Hunger and homelessness must be tackled now, not postponed to a future generation.
Clergymen of every Christian church denounced the book for the birth control proposals, but it annoyed advocates of birth control by saying commercial contraceptives were unhealthy. Said Dr. Victoria:
They fix the minds of the users upon the genitals, so distract them from cuddling. Cuddling is like milk. It can, and should, nourish our health from birth to death. Wedding is the cream of cuddling, the main delight of our middle years (if we are lucky) but it is not different from cuddling. Yet all our teaching—alas, even the teaching of the good Marie Stopes—makes it different by separating it and advertising it as a rare commodity. That is why uncuddled men fear sexual love or treat it as a smash-and-grab business.
So although Victoria McCandless placed advertisements for A Loving Economy in the major British newspapers it had only two favourable notices: one by Guy Aldred in an anarchist periodical, one in The New Age by the stone-carver and typographer, Eric Gill. Beaverbrook took a hint from the churches and enlarged the circulation of the Daily Express by a successful campaign to deprive Victoria McCandless of her clinic. Here is an extract from an article headed LADY DOCTOR ORDERS INCEST:
We all know what a mother’s boy is—an effeminate little pansy who wants everyone to admire him yet is too cowardly to strike a blow in his own defence. If Dr. Vic has her way all British boys from now onward will be turned into exactly that sort of whining cissy, but before she corrupts our children she must corrupt their parents. This is exactly what she is trying to do.
Two days later this appeared:
DOCTOR VICTORIA PRESCRIBES NATIONAL SUICIDE
If the Dr. Vic’s “sex through a sheet” method becomes popular (and it may—she has spent a fortune advertising it) in a few years every British male of military age will be outnumbered by the Catholic Irish. If it becomes fashionable throughout the civilized world we will be overwhelmed by the Bolsheviks, the Chinese and the Negroes. It cannot be coincidence that she is a close friend of John Maclean, the Bolshevik Consul General in Britain. It cannot be coincidence that she was one of the “pacifist” harpies who would have been awarded an Iron Cross by Kaiser Wilhelm if his hordes had succeeded in placing him on the British throne.
Soon after came:
DR. VIC’S BOLSHEVIK CHARITY!
The most sinister figures in the twentieth century are people with unearned incomes who, under the guise of socialism, use their money-bags to spread discontent and evil practices among the poor. The Express has discovered that for the last thirty years Victoria McCandless, the Bolshevik doctor, has been secretly teaching what she now openly preaches. At her so-called “charity” clinic in a Glasgow slum she has taught thousands of poor women to defy nature, the Christian faith and the law of the land: we refer to something graver than her ridiculous “sex through a sheet” idea. We mean abortion. That is what her “Loving Economy” comes to in the end.
The Express reporters had no proof that Dr. Victoria performed abortions. They did, however, produce two former employees of the clinic who swore she had trained women to perform abortions on each other, and this resulted in a public prosecution. The prosecution failed (or did not completely succeed) because it was proved that the two employees had been to some extent bribed by the Daily Express, and were also mentally retarded. Campbell Hogg, the procurator fiscal, tried to make something of this last point during his cross-examination, and very nearly succeeded:
CAMPBELL HOGG: Doctor McCandless! Have you trained many mentally retarded women to assist you?
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: As many as I could.
CAMPBELL HOGG: Why?
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: For reasons of economy.
CAMPBELL HOGG: Oho! You got them cheaper?
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: No. The accounts of the clinic show they were paid as much as cleverer nurses. I was not talking about financial economy but social economy—loving economy. Many people with damaged brains are far more affectionate, if given the chance, than many we classify as “normal”. They can often be taught to perform the most essential nursing tasks more efficiently than cleverer people—people who want to be doing more ambitious things.
CAMPBELL HOGG: Things like writing books on Loving Economy?
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: No. Things like acting the buffoon in a court drama set up for the amusement of the gutter press.
(Laughter in court. The sheriff warns the accused that she is in danger of being held in contempt of court.)
CAMPBELL HOGG (forcibly): I suggest that you deliberately choose cretins for your helpers because sane people are unlikely to believe what these say about your clinic!
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: You are wrong.
CAMPBELL HOGG: Doctor McCandless, have you never (think hard before you answer) have you never given your patients instruction which would help them abort an unwanted baby?
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: I have never given instructions which could hurt their mind or body.
CAMPBELL HOGG: The answer I want is “yes” or “no”.
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: You will get no more answers from me, young man. Go and teach another older person their job. Try an unemployed engineer—one who fought in the war.
(The sheriff warns accused that she must answer the procurator, but can choose her own words.)
VICTORIA McCANDLESS: I see. Then I repeat that I have taught nothing which can hurt mind or body.
Since the trial was in Scotland the jury was able to bring in a verdict of not proven, and did. Dr. Vic was not struck off the British medical register, but not declared guiltless.
When Victoria and Archibald opened the Natal Clinic in 1890 they put all Baxter’s money into the fund supporting it. The managing committee contained Sir Patrick Geddes and Principal John Caird of Glasgow University. By 1920 these had been replaced by weaker people who now bowed before the storm of unfriendly publicity. They sacked Victoria and gave the clinic to Oakbank Hospital as an out-patients department. Dr. Victoria had spent her savings printing, distributing and advertising A Loving Economy, so her only remaining property was 18 Park Circus. All Baxter’s old servants were dead by now. She let the upper rooms to university students and withdrew to the basement where she continued what she still called The Godwin Baxter Natal Clinic on a much smaller scale.
From then until 1923 she was chiefly noticed for her support of John Maclean. In a letter to C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid) she wrote:
I cannot like the orthodox communists. They have one simple answer to every question and believe (like the fascists) that they can forcibly simplify what they do not understand. In any discussion with one I feel I am facing a bad school teacher who wants to shut me up. Maclean is a good school teacher.
When Maclean did not join the newly formed British Communist Party but founded the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party she offered him her home as a meeting place. When he died of overwork and pneumonia in 1923 she made a short speech by his graveside. His daughter, Nan Milton, recorded it in a letter, and Archie Hind quotes it at the end of his play about Maclean, Shoulder to Shoulder.
John was not a Zapata, galloping on horseback over the corn-fields. He was of the peasantry who fed Zapata. He was not a Lenin, working to move his office into the Kremlin. He was of the Kronstadt sailors whose mutiny gave Lenin the chance. John was not the sort who lead revolutions. He was the sort who make them.
The Daily Express put another reporter onto her two years later, perhaps hoping to find more conclusive evidence of illegal abortions, but the article which came out of this was a short character sketch, probably because nearly everyone who now remembered “Dr. Vic” thought she was dead. The reporter learned that children of the area called her The Dog Lady, because she walked around the West End Park accompanied by dogs of many sizes, some of them bandaged. The clinic was entered from the back lane, and the ground on each side of the path was overgrown with rhubarb plants. The waiting-room was crammed with heavy mid-Victorian seating, particularly a huge horse-hair-covered sofa. The only wall decorations were old posters for the Scottish Workers’ Republican Party. There was also a heavy padlocked box with a slit in the lid and a notice pinned to the side saying Put what you can afford in here—it will not be wasted. If you are hungry please do not steal this but speak to me in the surgery—hunger is curable. Half the people waiting looked very poor and old. The rest seemed to be children with animals, mostly dogs. There was only one pregnant woman.
When the reporter was admitted to the surgery he found it was a huge gas-lit kitchen with a pot of soup simmering on the fire range, various animals reclining in corners, and a tall, straight-backed woman sitting at a kitchen table laden with books, papers and medical instruments. She wore a white apron which covered her body from neck to ankles, with white celluloid cuffs attached to the black sleeves of her dress. Her strangely unlined face could have been any age between forty and eighty. When the journalist sat down facing her she said at once, “You look like a newspaper reporter. Is it the Daily Express?”
He said yes, and hoped she would not mind answering some questions. She said, “Of course not, if you pay for my time on the way out.”
He asked her if all her patients paid her in that voluntary way. She said, “Yes. They are poor people, or children. How can I judge what they are able to pay me without hurting themselves?”
He asked if she always gave money to hungry beggars. She said, “No. I give them soup.”
He asked if her veterinary work had not reduced her number of human patients. She said, “Undoubtedly. The human animal is prone to silly prejudices.”
He asked if she preferred dogs to human beings. She said, “No, I am not that kind of sentimentalist. I will always feel tenderness toward my own silly prejudiced species. But nowadays folk with sick animals shun me less than sick humans.”
He asked if there was anything in her life she sincerely regretted. She said, “The Great War.”
He told her she had misunderstood him—he meant, did she regret something for which she felt personally responsible? She said, “Yes. The Great War.”
He asked what she thought about de Valera’s Irish republic, the short length of young women’s skirts, Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats (a popular song of the time) and Trotsky’s expulsion from the Russian Communist Party. She said, “Nothing. I no longer read newspapers.”
He asked if she had a message to give to British youth. She smiled brightly and said that for five pounds she would give him a very quick little answer summing up all she thought good in life, but she wanted the money first. He gave her five pounds. From a pile at her elbow she handed over a little hardbound copy of A Loving Economy, bade him good-bye and ushered him out.
That article is the only record of Victoria McCandless between 1925 and 1941, apart from her name and address in Kelly’s street directory.
The Second World War revived for a while both the industrial and intellectual life on Clydeside. Glasgow was the main transit port between Britain and the U.S.A. The bombing of south Britain inclined many to the northern industrial capital. The painter J. D. Fergusson returned here with his wife, Margaret Morris. They had known Dr. Victoria in her younger days, and Margaret Morris rented an upper floor of 18 Park Circus as a rehearsal space for her Celtic Ballet Company. Until 1945 the house became one of several unofficial little arts centres flourishing on or near Sauchiehall Street. The painters Robert Colquhoun, Stanley Spencer and Jankel Adler briefly lodged in it or visited it. So did the poets Hamish Henderson, Sidney Graham and Christopher Murray Grieve, better known as Hugh MacDiarmid. In his autobiography The Company I’ve Kept (published in 1966 by Hutchinson & Co.) MacDiarmid says:
I seem to have been the only one there who knew that the queer old landlady lurking in the basement was the one female Scottish healer—apart from Long Mairi of the Glens—whose name could have been proudly inscribed beside Madame Curie, Elizabeth Blackwell and Sophia Jex-Blake. Perhaps her pets’ hospital frightened away the lily-livered, but her Scotch broth was excellent, and ladled freely out with a lavish hand.
He reviles:
our cowardly Scottish medical establishment which could easily have given her a university lectureship in gynaecology, but was scared out of its wits by the English gutter press led by that analphabetic hoodlum, Beaverbrook.
This last statement is perfectly true, but would have been more persuasive if expressed more politely. We must be grateful to MacDiarmid, however, for quoting in full a letter she wrote shortly before her death. A lesser man would have suppressed it, as it said things he certainly did not like. Though undated it was obviously written soon after the 1945 general election.
Dear Chris,
So at last, for the first time this century, we have a Labour government with an overall working majority! I will start reading the newspapers again. Britain is suddenly an exciting country. The anti-trade-union laws of 1927 are being repealed and it seems we WILL get social welfare and national health care for all, and Fuel and Power and Transport and Iron and Steel WILL become Public Property! As Public as broadcasting, telephones, tap-water and the air we breathe! And we WILL jettison that millstone round our necks, the British Empire! Do you not feel a little happier, Chris? I feel a lot happier. We are setting the world a finer example than the Soviet Union ever did. I feel that everything between 1914 and the present day has been proved a hideous detour, a swerving from the good path of social progress whose last fixed point was the Lloyd George budget which abolished poor-houses by the old-age pension, and started breaking up the enormous estates by death duties. It seems John Maclean was wrong. A workers’ co-operative nation will be created from London, without an independent Scotland showing the way.
I know (you thrawn old Devil) that you will not believe a word of this, and think I have a heart “too easily made glad”. I know you are even now reaching for your pen to describe for me all the obviously vicious worms gnawing at the roots of Blooming Britain. Leave that pen alone! I am going to die happy.
If you have read my publications (but has anyone alive ever done that?) if you have read A Loving Economy (which should be read as a poem, just as your worst poems should be read as treatises) if you have skimmed through even a paragraph of my poor neglected little magnum opus you will know I am unusually acquaint with my inner workings. No wonder! I was introduced to them by a genius. A cerebral haemorrhage will release me from this mortal coil in early December. I am winding down the little clinic which was launched so bravely and richly fifty-six years ago. Easily done! My patients now are some children’s pets and two elderly hypochondriacs who feel slightly happier after talking breathlessly to me for an hour about things only Sigmund Freud could understand. I have found homes for all my dogs except Archie, the Newfoundland. He has a home waiting for him, but will not be led off to it until the friend who calls on me after breakfast (Nell Todd, a courageous Sapphist who defies the Glasgow police in male attire) uses the basement key I have given her, and finds me out. Completely. I would have preferred a warm steady man at the last, but there has only been one in my life, and he died thirty-five years ago. Not that I disliked the fly-by-nights—some of them were great fun. But steady heat is what I need now, and my Archie will provide it.
If you insult me by offering to provide it I will never speak to you again. My love to Valda.
Sincerely,
Victoria McCandless.
Dr. Victoria McCandless was found dead of a cerebral stroke on 3rd December 1946. Reckoning from the birth of her brain in the Humane Society mortuary on Glasgow Green, 18th February 1880, she was exactly sixty-six years, forty weeks and four days old. Reckoning from the birth of her body in a Manchester slum in 1854, she was ninety-two.
The Necropolis of Glasgow where the three principal characters of this book are interred in the Baxter Mausoleum – the Romanesque rotunda on the far right.