10/52 Worship: Mary Jane Godlee
Mary Jane Godlee: Cousin Nina; one exasperated female.
When my great aunt Norkie and her mother, Charlotte Godlee, were in London in 1927 they visited their cousin Nina. I was very exercised about her identity for many years as there didn’t seem to be anyone in the family with that name. Eventually I worked it out and this is her story.
Cousin Nina was a Quaker and introduced Norkie and Charlotte to Quakerism. This was of particular interest to me because I became a ‘Quaker By Convincement’ - (that is to say, I wasn’t raised a Quaker but became convinced in my 40s.) When I started going to Meetings for Worship with the Quakers, my only surviving great aunt, Jay, told me that her grandfather had been a Quaker. I did have a vague memory of being informed of this when I was a child staying at their house when I was wrapped in a thick soft velvety green rug. It was the rug Grandpa had used when he went in the trap to Meeting for Worship, He was a Quaker, you see.
So Jay’s Grandpa Godlee was the uncle of Cousin Nina. He and his two older brothers and many sisters had grown up in Lewes Sussex. The middle brother was Rickman, named after their mother, Mary Rickman. And Cousin Nina was the only daughter of this Rickman Godlee, a Barrister; her mother was Mary Lister, the sister of the famous doctor, Joseph Lister.
Both Joseph and Mary Lister were born at Upton House in West Ham. This was a notable Quaker family in a notable Quaker neighbourhood. The Gurney’s lived in Ham House, The Cedars was the home of Elizabeth Fry (née Gurney). The Listers in Upton House were part of this close knit Quaker community.
Upton House, West Ham, painting by Mary Lister.
When Mary married Rickman Godlee she was marrying into another well connected Quaker family, from Sussex. By the time he married Mary Lister, Rickman was practising Law at Lincoln’s Inn. They married at Plaistow Friends Meeting House in 1845. He was 41 and Mary was 25. They had two sons before the birth of Cousin Nina in 1851. The boys were Joseph Lister, (1847) - called Lister, to distinguish him from Mary Lister’s father and her brother, both Joseph; Rickman John, (1849), called John, to distinguish him from his own father; and Mary Jane, apparently called Nina. When you have a lot of people with the same names, you have to make up nick names to distinguish them. So Mary Jane Godlee had a mother and a grandmother called Mary. No wonder she was known as Nina, or even ‘Ninepins’ by her nephews and nieces, or even ‘Pinnie’ or ‘Pins’, according to Norkie's letter. That was in the family. In public life she was called Mary Jane Godlee but in the letters from my family who visited her in England in the 1920s, she was Cousin Nina. Very confusing to the family historian!
They were rich enough to be able to afford two or three servants: general servants or more particularly a lady’s maid, a parlour maid, or a house maid, a cook and sometimes a kitchen maid. This certainly freed up the women in the family from domestic drudgery. Mother Mary née Lister kept a journal which is stored in the London Friends Meeting House library in Euston Road. Unfortunately it is not digitalised so I will have to spend weeks in London at some stage reading many volumes and taking hundreds of photos with my phone. Keeping journals is a standard Quaker practice.
Eventually the family had five boys and a girl. After Nina came Arthur, (1853) Francis (Frank),(1854) and Theodore. (1856). They all studied and practised Law, except for John who did medicine and Frank who went into business. They seem to have been living at The Lillies, Upton Lane in 1861 but at some stage in the next ten years they moved to Whip’s Cross. Rickman Godlee died in 1871, aged 67. In 1881 Lister, Nina, Frank and Theodore were still all living with their mother in Wood Street, Whip’s Cross. By 1891, Nina was 40 and living at home with her mother, Lister and Theo. Mary née Lister died in 1894 at 74 leaving ‘effects’ of £12,131. 8s 11d.
Norkie’s brother, John, recuperating from Gallipoli, visited Nina and Theo in Whip’s Cross in 1915. He reports: ‘I came out here yesterday afternoon. It’s a most delightful old house, quite large, with about 10 acres of garden and field. Cousin Nina and her brother Theo live here alone. They are such charming people. I could be happy here for the house is swarming with books of every kind. … I have often longed to feel what it was like to be in an old English home; now I know and shall feel the benefit always.’
It is instructive to compare the life of Cousin Nina Godlee to that of Auntie Annie Wibberley in last week’s blog. They were both only girls in all boy households, both having five brothers. While the Wibberley’s were not poor, Annie’s father a miller, her brother a butcher, they only ever afforded one servant and sometimes not even that. Annie’s mother died when she was 16 and Annie would have taken on the bulk of the domestic labour, looking after her father and brothers. Nina was 43 when her mother died when most of her brothers had left home. She did not feel the need to marry and didn’t do any paid employment. Annie, at 36, married a working class man who worked in low status jobs; he died when she was 55 and at 78 Annie was described in the 1939 English Register as ‘Domestic help’. Nina however was able to indulge in hobbies, reading and religion. Annie was probably a devout Methodist, attending the Ashbourne Primitive Methodist church regularly but Nina was free to do more than just attend Meeting For Worship. Both Primitive Methodists and Quakers had a theology which supported women’s ministry and involvement in church affairs but I doubt that Annie would have had time to pursue it.
In an article in the Journal of the Friends Historical Society it mentions Mary Jane Godlee as an elder and overseer of Ratcliff & Barking Monthly Meeting. She is mentioned as ‘one exasperated female’ complaining that the Women’s Meeting was ‘chiefly occupied with reading aloud extracts from the Book of Discipline to fill up the time till men Friends come out; some reform is certainly needed’. She went on: the state of affairs was ‘very curious and … rather painful to those …who may have believed in the theory that women Friends have always had an equal place with their brethren in the Church’.
This article describes changes that occurred in British Quakers following the watershed 1895 Manchester Conference, a show down between the conservative older Evangelical Quakers and the young liberal Quakers. Quakerism, then as now, had ceased to attract young people and the children left. The young friends who organised the Manchester Conference wanted a religion that moved with the times, accepted science, with a more open interpretation of the Bible. Thirteen hundred British Friends attended the conference and I wonder if Nina was one of them.
The Conference Committee was an all male affair and almost all who those called to comment on the papers were men, but this was noticed: Friend Ellen Robinson, at the end of the first afternoon session requested very politely ‘We should be very grateful to the Clerk if he can kindly silence the men a little bit’. Someone else made the suggestion that men and women Friends could speak alternately. But this was not taken up. I wonder how Cousin Nina felt.
The years between the Manchester Conference and the Great War saw the Religious Society of Friends evolve away from the stuffy respectable society to a more radical, socially involved and active community, some would say, closer to its roots. Nina and her family lived this change.
In highlighting this change the article explains: ‘When Yearly Meeting… assembled at Devonshire House in the final months of the Great War, …Mary Jane Godlee, for a time, sat in the Clerk’s chair.’ She had been given the opportunity to act as Clerk of Yearly Meeting because the presiding Clerk had handed over to her to ‘proceed directly to the Guildhall to demonstrate his solidarity with three Friends on trial for defying …Government censorship regulations. By 1918 hundreds of Quaker men and a few women were in jail cells or detention camps for failing to obey Military Service or …other Acts imposed by the wartime movements’. How far Quakers had come from their respectable conservatism of the Nineteenth Century. Mary (aka Nina) Godlee was 68 in 1918 so she and her brothers represented the older generation. I like to imagine that they joined the progressive Friends and moved willingly to Liberal Quakerism. Her brother John, certainly, was a scientist, a leading brain surgeon, with a passion for natural history. When Norkie visited Cousin Nina in 1925 she commented on her reading The Clash of Colour, a book about race.. ‘She seems very up-to-date in things of that kind,’ remarked Norkie.
Norkie dressed carefully when she went to visit Cousin Nina. She was a bit nervous about it, believing correctly that the English Godlees were more upper class than the Australian branch. But she needn’t have worried : ‘She really is a nice old dear, much more lively & full of beans than I had imagined. Her room was a bit of a muddle. She is taller and bigger than I had thought, rather untidy - but nice and interested in life & things in general. She took me over her garden which is not very big, but she is quite proud of it. Then she showed me over the house. It is rather pretty,…She has some beautiful old furniture and china, also lots of jolly water colours & some drawings. …She was very interested in our flat. I think she was a little surprised at us doing our own work, etc. but thought we should have great fun.’ Nina had lived all her life with servants and thought that ‘doing their own work’ might be fun!
When Charlotte Godlee stayed with Cousin Nina in 1927 she suggests that their place in Whip's Cross is called Lillies. Perhaps it was named after the place in Upton Lane where they lived in 1861. She also implies that the house they then lived in was part of a previous larger property. They walked to meeting through the woods and passed a lake where Nina said they used to skate. Theo took Norkie to see ‘the old house’. Perhaps that was where Norkie’s brother John visited in 1915, but they ‘down sized’ after the war.
I am just on the edge of understanding the story of Mary Jane Godlee, my cousin Nina. To learn more I need to visit the British Quaker library and immerse myself in the minutes of her meeting, the journals. She was certainly a Quaker sister as well as a Friend! I feel great affinity with her, her untidy house full of old things, family treasures, her excitement about her garden and the bowls of bulbs that Charlotte reported being surprised to find under the bed.
References
England and Wales, National Probate Calendar. (Index of Wills and Administrations,) 1958 -1966.
English Census, 1851, 1861, 1871, 1891, 1901, 1911.The National Archives, Kew, London, England, 1939 Register, Reference, RG 101/5456G
Godlee, Norah Lucy, Letters.
Godlee John, The Letters of John Godlee, the boy and the man. 1921, transcribed and edited by Sally O’Wheel.
Journal of the Friends Historical Society, Vol 57 No 3 1996. Kennedy, Thomas C, ’What hath Manchester Wrought? Change in the Religious Society of Friends 1895 -1920, p 277.https://quakertheology.org/landmark-manchester-1895/
I really liked your take on this week's theme and your ancestor "one exasperated woman". I would have been exasperated too. So interesting to read about Quakerism. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteThank you Alex.
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