“Eleftheria y Thanatos” (“Freedom or Death”) The first woman Admiral

How come I didn’t know that?! …

I’m always excited when I discover fascinating women from history of whom I was previously unaware. And in this case, I have to thank Joanna Lumley’s delightful and informative TV documentary series about Greece for introducing me to the extraordinary Admiral Laskarina Bouboulina.

On following up the episode, I discovered Bouboulina’s links to Russia that added another dimension of interest – her connection with the diplomat Count Stroganov[off] - who may, or may not, be the one associated with that beef recipe - and who saved her from the Turks by sending her to an estate owned by Tsar Alexander I. It was the Tsar who bestowed her with the title of “Admiral”, the only woman to become one.

This webpage offers a good summary of her life and actions taken from information that is also available at the Museum dedicated to her on the Greek island of Spetses.

Bouboulina's flagship, Agamemnon (A. Milanos)

Otherwise, there little else to be found on Bouboulina and there does not appear to have been any English-language biographies or, better still, a blockbuster historical novel.

In 2005, a documentary about her by April Householder was presented as part of a dissertation at University of Maryland but I haven't been able to find out whether this documentary is accessible to the general public.

But Boubalina wasn’t the only sea-faring female champion of Greek Independence.

Another was Manto Mavrogenous, the “Heroine of Mykonos” who was equally fearless and gained her own title of “Lieutenant-General”. Most of the online references to her are in Greek, and there was a film made about her in 1971.

Read all about her here and at Mykonos.

Both Bouboulina and Mavrogenous are highly esteemed by the Greek people and they both appeared on drachma coins prior to Greece's now seemingly unfortunate decision to join the Euro. Perhaps they could do with some more feisty women like these two to help to restore the country's confidence and  pride.

Manto Mavrogenous, Mykonos

Cairo Home for Freed Women Slaves

Mention the slave trade and most people are likely to envisage images of the infamous “middle passage” - sailing ships laden with black people heading out from the west coast of Africa across the Atlantic and destined for the Caribbean, North and South America.

But a fascinating website created by the New York Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on the African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean tells another less well-known story on what happened to slaves sent from East Africa - from places like Zanzibar or Mozambique - to India and countries as far away as Palestine, Iraq and Iran. 

This image from the website shows routes of that slave trade and the rough estimate of number of slaves shipped to the various countries between 1500-1900 - nearly 1.5 million to Egypt alone.

The real figure is probably far more as it may be astonishing to many people to read that “Slavery continued in Muslim lands in the Indian Ocean world well into the 20th century: Saudi Arabia did not abolish slavery until 1962, and Oman did not officially do so until 1970.” And the sad truth is that it still continues today in some form in war-torn or un-policed remote areas that are well away from the prying eyes of investigative journalists.

But with the main purpose of this blog to focus on women, a photograph of a Mrs. Crewe with some of the slave girls at the Cairo Home for Freed Women Slaves, caught my interest. When was the Home established, who was Mrs. Crewe, and how did she come to have the position of matron? But there is little to be found online, apart from reports in British newspapers of the era.

(Copyright Getty Images)

The Home was founded in 1884 under the auspices of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society with a committee that included many great philanthropists of the day including Mrs. Sheldon Amos (nee Sarah Maclardie Bunting) – a remarkable and far-sighted woman who warrants a future blog entry of her own. Queen Victoria donated £100 - or about £5,000 today . The committee then appointed a “Mrs. Crewe – an Englishwoman born and bred in Egypt and speaking Arabic with perfect fluency” as the matron, and a suitable house was found in a “healthy quarter of Cairo” where:

“Mr. and Mrs. Crewe, with their family of young children, were installed in January 1885, and on the 16^th of that month the first girls were received, these being two Circassian slaves who had escaped from the palace of a well-known pasha.”

Various subsequent reports detail some of the dreadful conditions, cruelty and brutality from which the girls had escaped, also this:

“Mrs. Crewe has had to exercise great caution before complying with the requests of Mahomedan gentlemen for servants, as it might mean simply giving the girls back to slavery; most of them have, therefore, been sent to the houses of Christian Syrians or Copts. The girls give satisfactory proof of their appreciation of the slave Home. They often leave little articles of property – even their freedom papers – with Mrs. Crewe. They come back from time to time to see her, to ask her advice, to show her new clothes, to get her help in changing situations, etc., so that although they may not reside long in the home itself they continue to recognize it as, in fact, a home to which they can return in time of need.”

Charles H. Allen, the Secretary of the British & Foreign Anti-Slavery Society kept up a regular correspondence to the Editor of The London Times about the Home, pleading for extra funds while updating the readership on its operation. By April, 1900, he was able to announce “the complete success of this important philathropic undertaking”. Up to 1,000 women were rescued from slavery during the twenty years of the Home’s existence.  Many of the women had married and had families.

After the closure of the Home, Mrs. Crewe slips out of history, but probably remained in Egypt and was the sort of woman who would have always involved herself in good works. 

With the increasing interest in the subject of the slave experience, there is much scope here for the lives of these rescued women to be investigated in depth and written about.  Follow this link for an academic paper by Eve Troutt Powell on Slavery and Empire in Egypt which details an infamous trial involving six slave women and the powerful pashas and which created a scandal of international proportions. 

Etching from a photograph, The Graphic, May 10, 1890

Utopia Girls

Not many women will know that Australia was the one of the first countries to give women the vote.

An excellent documentary “Utopia Girls” fronted by historian Dr Clare Wright was screened on ABC TV on June 14, 2012, the broadcast coinciding with the 110^th anniversary of the day when women were granted the right to vote at a federal level and to stand for election to the Parliament of Australia via the Commonwealth Franchise Act.

This is a documentary that all women should watch – the young in particular who may take their voting rights for granted and know nothing of the great struggle involved.

It should be available to view in its entirety, in Australia at least, via ABC’s iView for a short period.

Also see this website for more information and an interactive experience:

http://www.utopiagirls.com.au/

Another forgotten heroine

In the Agenda section of Melbourne's Sunday Herald Sun yesterday, Sunday 20 May, was a story about one woman's quest to have an unmarked grave of her great-aunt a World War 1 nurse, Estelle Lee Archer, rehabilitated by the Office of Australian War Graves Office.


There is much history waiting to be rediscovered on nurses who won the Royal Red Cross, the majority of whom have slipped into obscurity or were just overlooked, so this is a story that should be publicised more. I'd have liked to post a web link to Margaret Leyden's campaign here but am unable to do so as it is not available online, so include a scan of the article instead.


Most articles in daily newspapers are freely available online on the day of publication - or for at least a week or two afterwards but News Limited's webmasters probably don't consider stories like this to be of much interest and if you want to read this article online, you have to pay for it again even if you've already bought the print version!


Even the ghastly UK Daily Mail regularly publishes historical gems free online and although you often have to wade through a ton of unbelievable trash to find them, they can be found.


Rant aside, here are the scans.

Nuns on the run

With the Catholic Church in damage control all around the world over revelations of child abuse going back decades, one can’t help wondering if there might also be a cause for women who were bullied into the convent life in times past to seek some kind of apology.

How many unmarriageable daughters or immature teenage girls who were yet to know their own minds ended up behind locked doors through family and/or priestly coercion?

When they realised they were unsuited to convent life, a few were brave enough to walk -  more likely run -  away, but many others would have been so indoctrinated by the system or maybe even too afraid of the wider world to have even tried. How many ended their lives in frustration and bitterness that resulted in mental disorders or harsh treatment of others, including children,  in their care? (Many members of the older generation who had nuns for teachers will know all about it!)

In our modern secular age, it’s easy to forget the bitter sectarian divisions that once raged in society between Catholics and Protestants and that the press was often the major battleground. Reports of “escaped nuns” were guaranteed to inflame passions.

Protestant editors liked nothing better than having some sensational story of a woman defecting from imagined wicked and secretive Romish practices with salacious tales to tell of what really went on in convents.

On the other hand, Catholic Church spokespersons (usually men of course) would proclaim that there was no compulsion on any woman to remain in a convent, that she was always free to leave should she choose. The reality was probably quite different.

The mud-slinging and accusations from pulpits of both persuasions were remarkable. Catholic defectors would be condemned with hyperbole such as describing them as “the foulest weeds in the Pope’s garden” (Fr. Cleary, Minneapolis) and every effort was made to show them to be liars, lunatics, or just simple-minded innocent girls whose heads were turned by money-makers and con-men (no doubt Protestant.)

And of course there was nothing better for restoring Catholic esteem than reports of these poor misguided souls retracting their defection on their death beds and accepting the last rites of their original church.

Researching these women through the digital archives of newspapers can make for eye-opening and fascinating reading. In Chronicling America, there are reports on a number of them such as one Sister Mary Ethel (surname unknown) who came from India and lectured in America on her “10 Years in Hell” and other inflammatory topics, also a Mary Windsor White who retracted on her deathbed.
Some of the more famous “escaped nuns” who published books were Edith O’Gorman and Josephine M. Bunkley (Andrews) and both women were later mired in sensationalism or controversy as to their truth. 

Early in the 19^th Century, Maria Monk and Rebecca Reed fuelled anti-Catholic hysteria with their writings.

There was a 1869 British court case known as the "Great Convent Case" that can be read at the Internet Archive - Saurin vs. Star & Kennedy – which still generates academic works on the topic.

In Australia as recently as the 1920s, columns of newsprint were devoted to the case of “the nun in the nightgown”, Sister Ligouri, or Bridget Partridge, whose sad story makes for sober reading. 

In modern or open societies, one hopes that any woman entering a nunnery these days is able to make her own own informed choice. In other cultures, there could still be clouds hanging over convent life. Just recently, this report appeared in the Indian Telegraph -  and thereby hangs another nun's tale.

Further reading:

Ruth Seddon’s biography of Edith O’Gorman

The Nun in the Nightgown

British nun, Margaret Mary Moult.

In a puff of smoke

There is one field of entertainment where women still don't have a major profile, even today, and that is in performance magic. All the great and famous magicians have been men although there is almost always a woman - often exotically named or scantily clad - as their support. 
Finding out about historical female magicians has been quite difficult. Adrienne Herrmann (1854-1932) seems to have been one of the better-known and the subject of a new biography. 
The "Magicpedia" has a listing of several others, but many of them were wives or partners, e.g. Bess Houdini, and some are only listed under one-word names, such as Mystia, Talma, and Zirka. Their biographies are as shady and thin as some of their outfits. No doubt many of them would have been run-aways to the music hall or the circus.

Madame Cora, State Library of Victoria

One woman with hints of a particularly intriguing past was Cora de (du) Lamond, or Madame Cora, the Magicienne 
According to her slim entry in Magicpedia, she was born in America and off-stage she was just Ursula Bush - the name she used when called to account for her actions in Ballarat, Victoria, where it seemed the authorities were suspicious about her motives in giving away all kinds of prizes to her audience from silverplated tea sets to card tables, brooms, lamps, and even pickled vegetables. 
How and when plain Ursula turned into Madame Cora, and where she learnt her amazing skills in mesmerism, levitation and legerdemain is a mystery. 
Although she is supposed to have performed around the world, other than entries in Australian and New Zealand newspapers (see TROVE and PAPERSPAST) the only mention of her in America that I can find is in The Hawaiian Gazette of September, 1871 in which she is called an Illusionist and performed to capacity crowds at Buffum's Hall in Honolulu. 
Her manager in Australia appears to have been Mr T W Bush, possibly her husband.
But the trail goes cold by the 1880s and according to the Magicpedia entry, she killed a female vocalist in her troupe in South Africa in 1877 but her death sentence was commuted and she died in Durban in 1902. 
This type of tantalising snippet is like a red rag to a bull for me but I can find nothing - online at least - about this murder, or what happened to Madame Cora afterwards. 
Just like many other "magiciennes" before and since, she appeared on stage as if by magic and then just as swiftly disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Photo taken at Ballarat c. 1869-75  of Madame Cora wearing the same outfit as in the etching
 State Library of New South Wales

The New Zealand newspaper, The Nelson Evening Mail of August 2, 1873, offers this introduction to her performance at the Odd Fellows' Hall.

Click here for another magic site that has biographies of various past and present woman magicians (but not Cora).  The tendency for tacky stage names and hazy backgrounds hasn't changed. 

[On checking, it seems as of August 2017 the above link has also disappeared in a puff of smoke.]

Cynthia Stockley - "The dark ages of shackled womanhood"

Cynthia Stockley (1862-1936) was a once popular writer to whom time and changing perceptions have been rather unkind.  She doesn't even rate a Wikipedia entry of her own.

She was prolific and it's interesting to see her name listed as a film writer on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) and that several of her stories were made into films during the 1920s featuring silent super stars like Marion Davies, Norma Talmadge and Bebe Daniels. 

Cynthia's misfortune was to write largely about white people in Africa and a country destined to go the way of the dodo, being Southern Rhodesia, later to become Zimbabwe. 

Always a depressive character it seems even by the mid-1930s, she said she "felt out of touch with the modern world" just before she gassed herself at her little flat in Bayswater, London.

Jessica Amanda Salmonson details something of Cynthia's life and books on her Violet Books website via this link and discusses the reasons why Cynthia is ignored or forgotten today. 

The Rhodesian writer, Jeannie M. Boggie * chatted to Cynthia Stockley at her home in Gwelo (now Gweru, Zimbabwe)  for her book Experiences of Rhodesia's Women, first published in 1938 which was two years after Cynthia's death, although that fact isn't mentioned in the article. 

There are some tantalising snippets in it about Cynthia that are not covered in the limited biographical details elsewhere, such as how she began her literary career:

"It was while in Natal, after my first stay in Rhodesia, that I began to write. A newspaper proprietor gave me a position on one of his papers as a political reporter. I knew nothing of politics ... but I would go to Parliament each day and listen to the speeches; and then write columns of personal comments on the speakers. This was far from being expert political journalism perhaps, but it was, I may say, extremely popular, as personalities always are - especially to the persons not directly involved.

In those days, when I first began to write, journalism for women was all in the dark ages of shackled womanhood, and as a pioneeer woman journalist, I was looked upon by the women of Natal with suspicion, and with disapproval ..."

She goes on to say that after a year of this she gave it up and went to Europe to try her luck, but it was a hard struggle and it was two years before she found a publisher for her first book. She also says that in America her book was pirated and she never received a penny and ...

"I was indeed so poor that I had to stop writing and go on to the stage. I joined Benson's Shakespeare Company ... also toured in America ... But I prefer to forget that period of my life which was both difficult and unhappy ..."

Her first book (image from www.SouthAfricaBooks.com)

Poppy was her first big success and Hollywood took notice. Cynthia also said that nearly all the events and situations in her books were "founded on fact" and many of the incidents were from her own experience of life in Africa, London, Paris and New York. 

Jeannie Boggie adds a comment that "such facts have been surrounded and embellished with fancies and day dreams, wonderful fancies from Cynthia Stockley's own rich, vivid imagination and her winged pen of inspiration; from her sympathetic insight into human nature ..."

Her two marriages are completely glossed over and also her daughter who was born in the Umtali laager during the Mashonaland Rebellion of 1896 and later became a Mrs Wymer. **
 (People may forget that the Scouts movement had its origin in such African wars. See this story of the Rebellion as written by Colonel Baden Powell)


These images are from The London Times archives. One wonders what Cynthia had to say in the Daily Express Lectures about "The Other Man" - is this a hint as to something she had experienced in her own background? Also another advertisement for one of her novels being serialised in Nash's magazine in 1922 which indicates her popularity at the time.

There is much about Cynthia Stockley's personal life and early years that are unknown, and perhaps some day her books will also be rediscovered.

Images of Cynthia and her books at the website www.SouthAfricaBooks.com

As to where to find Cynthia's books - the Nabu reprint POD editions (Amazon) of her books seem to be over-priced. Many of her works are available for free reading online via the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg, also as free Kindle downloads, and even her first editions are available from book dealers at modest sums. 



*  Jeannie Boggie wrote a number of books on Rhodesian women and was an eccentric and larger-than-life figure herself worthy of remembrance.  I can add nothing to this most comprehensive blog on Rhodesian Heritage! 

**   Dorothy May Joan Stockley, married in London at the age of 21 to British major, Hubert Julian de Crespigny Wymer, and presumably later they lived in South Africa.