by Tierl Thompson
In 1987 the Women’s Press published my book Dear Girl: the diaries and letters of two working women 1897-1917. The following is my description of how the extraordinary material came to light.
Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Women
It was 1981. Or 1982. Or thereabouts. Knowing the exact time proves difficult these days. But definitely early 80s. My friend Chris was on the phone, very excited. ‘You must come and see these diaries that Aunt Margaret has got’, she said. Aunt Margaret wasn’t a biological Aunt but an Aunt figure to her: a rock in Chris’s somewhat turbulent life. Margaret was in her seventies and a staunch Quaker, a progressive peaceful person. Chris and I were young, caught up in the heady days of feminism and our deepening relationships with other women.
This sounded important, so I went over to Margaret’s rather stately house in Blackheath. Margaret had inherited the house from a Quaker friend and colleague Hugh Jones. Along with the house was a huge collection of diaries, letters, photos and political leaflets from the early 1900s, kept (and a lot of it written) by Hugh’s deceased wife Ruth Jones (nee Slate). Ruth was also a fellow Quaker and friend of Margaret’s. All this material was written and collected at a time of intense political, personal and social change for women. ‘The Sex Question’ as it was then called, raged up and down the country, in novels, in the media, in drawing rooms, in mills, in parliament, in the national consciousness. Suffragettes became increasingly militant in their attempts to get the vote. It was an extraordinary time. I mean when did we ever go on hunger strike in prison for a cause?
It turned out that much of this period of intense political activity was documented in the diaries Chris was so enthusiastic about. This was exciting enough, but when I went over to Margaret’s house that afternoon, there was a discovery to me, beyond profound. Chris showed me a couple of pages of the diary of Ruth’s closest friend Eva. There in faded purple handwriting I read…….
I slept with my darling, or lay close beside her, my arms around her, for we scarcely slept:……
I caught my breath. Eva was describing her feelings of passion for another woman. This was astonishing – there being so little available about such things – particularly amongst ‘ordinary’ working women, who were not members of an artistic or bohemian group.
More reading told me that Eva had moved in with her friend Minna to support her after Minna’s husband Will died suddenly from ‘galloping consumption’ – an event common at that time amongst working people, who didn’t have the money for sanatoriums. This left Minna almost destitute with three children and pregnant with a fourth. On first meeting Minna, Eva had described her in her diary as a ‘type of woman of the future’, and she revelled in what she called ‘the love atmosphere’ in Minna’s house. She wrote that she felt a miracle had been performed on her life. She seemed to be describing falling head over heels in love with another woman.
And so began a deep relationship between the two women, recorded in all its complexities in Eva’s diaries while my jaw dropped as I continued reading.
The thrill of seeing those first words on the page, (which I remember to this day) told me this was a great discovery. This was lesbian history, love between women. This was a testament to the powerful and enduring friendships between the women – the ‘Dear Girls’ of the title.
I felt something must be done with this material. At the time I was working with The Women’s Theatre Group, not acting, but as the company administrator. We were a collective – all involved in planning and commissioning new work. We were devising a play called Time Pieces, going back through the history of a family via the women’s experiences. We had been interviewing women in our families and bringing ideas to the table. Well, I thought, I’ll take in the relevant diary extracts. ‘This is what was actually happening’, I said at the next planning meeting. ‘Why don’t we include this in the story – a section about two women living together?’ Surprisingly, the director of the piece, said she thought including Eva and Minna’s relationship would be a distraction, not suitable for the community audiences we would be touring to.
I didn’t win the argument, and I am forever indebted to Sue McGoun, an actress in the company, who said, ‘This is too good to include as one scene of Time Pieces – we need to do a whole play about these women.’
Tierl Thompson
So that is exactly what we did. Margaret gave us permission to use whatever we wanted. The next year saw me cycling to her house in Blackheath from my collective house in Islington, two days a week, to read through everything and find pieces suitable for dramatisation. Margaret fed me, put me up overnight, looked after me and encouraged me in what was a mammoth task. There was SO much stuff in boxes in her basement! Eventually we brought in Libby Mason to devise the piece with me (and subsequently direct it). This involved sorting through all the extracts I’d selected and crafting them into a theatre piece using only the women’s words. No laptops. No google. Unbelievable.
The play became Dear Girl and opened at the Edinburgh Festival in 1983, successfully touring afterwards. Margaret meanwhile, by then in her late 70s, had been struggling to write a book based on the diaries, something requested of her when she inherited the house. She felt indebted. And that she must. Feeling unable to do it, Margaret wrote and formally asked me to write it.
How could I refuse? Dear Girl, the book, was born and became a labour of love for me for the next four years in any spare time I had, eventually being published in 1987. It was an incredible time, a great ‘journey’. I learned so much about things I knew nothing of. I lived with the group of Dear Girls – as they called each other – Eva, Ruth, Minna, and Francoise in my head for years. And I thank Margaret, who passed on in mid-1990s, from the bottom of my heart for being so generous, for giving me a chance to write about them, for letting me into their world. And for bringing it all to light.
Margaret Johnson donated her entire Dear GirL collection to the Fawcett library in the early 90s. This eventually transferred to the LSE Women’s Library where it is available to view and read, filed under Ruth Slate