October 2018 meeting: Account by Bill Doherty of Richard Ormrod's talk on "Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge; A duo to Remember"

The Lit. Soc. welcomed one of its active members, Richard Ormrod, as the October speaker. He had agreed to share the fruits of his earlier labours on a book about Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge with the Society. This colourful duo cut an exotic swathe through the London cultural scene in the 1920s and had strong associations with Rye. Even today these associations carry a whiff of sulphur, mainly arising from the scandal which enveloped Hall’s fourth novel, “The Well of Loneliness” narrating an explicitly lesbian love affair in terms which were far from sexually explicit.

After the novel’s publication in 1928 the nation was rescued from the mire of moral turpitude by the editor of the “Sunday Express”. In a quintessentially British fashion his moral outrage infected the higher echelons of the Conservative government and the judiciary through the shared social nexus of the Garrick club whose very walls echoed ricocheting epithets – “corrupt”, “corrosive”, “libidinous”! The book was banned as obscene. 

The wily publisher, Jonathan Cape, had the novel published in Paris where several openly lesbian salons flourished and copies of “The Well” flew off booksellers’ carts at the Gare du Nord where the sex-starved English travellers piled from “the Golden Arrow”. Sylvia Beach, who had published Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922 found her shop, Shakespeare & Company in the Rue de l’Odeon, could not keep pace with demand. Not everyone in England could muster the requisite moral fervour and a spoof version, “The Sink of Solitude” appeared. The “Well”  was published unremarked in England in 1949.

Hall cut an extravagant figure and, financially secure from a substantial legacy bequeathed by her grandfather, graduated from lyric poetry to novels. Examining their dust-jackets now, you see a liberal sprinkling of complimentary quotes from reviewers in broadsheet newspapers and literary magazines. She styled herself an “invert” and was convinced she was a man trapped in a woman’s body. No concessions were made to femininity. Her photo in Rye Library reveals a “dark, smouldering gaucho” with a masculine hair cut (barbered fortnightly), tailored lounge suit, bowtie and large signet rings. 

In addition to the notorious Sapphic ode, Hall wrote half a dozen other novels with the titles of the last four being chosen by Una. “The Sixth Beatitude”, (Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God).,   is set in an ” insanitary” town on the edge of Romney Marsh with an ignorant and  “unlettered” populace.  The main protagonist, Hannah Bullen, has three illegitimate children by three different men but passes the pure of heart test in the end. Both Hall and Troubridge were adult converts to Roman Catholicism and Hall’s works have strikingly religious threads running through them.

Una was less flamboyant – diminutive, gaminesque, page boy hair style and, like Hall, a monocle. She had shed her Betjaminesquely banal birth names and styled herself Una Vicenzo , Lady Troubridge. A sculptress, her much older husband Ernest Troubridge found himself enmeshed in a protracted naval court martial for lack of zeal in having the naval squadron he commanded hunt down two German light cruisers in the Adriatic at the outset of the Great War. His enforced absence allowed her liaison with Hall to mature to co-habiting lovers. 

Richard recounted, that although considered eccentric, the pair were favourably regarded in Rye and were associated with a number of properties in the town. After Rye, their domestic arrangements became more complicated when Hall’s last innamorata, a White Russian nurse called Evgenia Souline, joined the household. 

In 1943, Hall succumbed uncomfortably to bowel cancer in what she termed “my Gethsemane” and was buried in Highgate cemetery. Una lived on in Italy and her last wish, to be buried in Highgate also, was thwarted when she was interred in Italy. Richard’s eloquent account of the intriguing pair more than held our attention and from the Q & A at the end some audience members had clearly been stimulated to seek out evidence of the duo’s Rye footprint for themselves.