'George Bernard Shaw broke my sofa'
A short but fraught romantic episode in the life of a great playwright
This is a story of chaste flirtations and thwarted passions. Set in Chelsea, London in the 1890s, it involves an ambitious Irish writer on his way to becoming world-famous, and two young women artists struggling to make their way in a male-dominated world. The first of the pair to fall into George Bernard Shaw’s orbit was Bertha Newcombe.
Bertha was born in Hackney in 1857, the daughter of liberal parents who allowed her plenty of freedom. Her father was the proprietor of the London School of Photography, and the author of home education manuals for children including ‘Little Henry’s Holiday at The Great Exhibition’. She was one of the first women admitted to study at the newly-opened Slade School of Art in 1876, which from its inception granted women equal rights as students. From the early 1880s Bertha was an active exhibitor of her work, showing at The Royal Academy and The Royal Institute of Oil Painters among many others. In 1888 she became a member of the fashionable Chelsea-based New English Art Club.
Reading through the published reviews of the exhibitions in which Bertha displayed her work, you get a flavour of the patronising line that Victorian critics liked to take when reviewing women’s art. For example, the Pall Mall Gazette reviewed the Dudley Gallery in October 1882: ‘A general air of ‘young-ladydom’ prevails – every second name in the catalogue is a Lily or a Jessie or a Letitia’. In May 1884, The Times reviewed one particular piece: ‘Miss Bertha Newcombe’s “Last Load” is the most ambitious and the best picture which she has yet painted. It would have had more chance of a good place had she not chosen a frame of a colour which harmonises badly with those around it.’ Does it make you want to kick the furniture?
Bertha knew her way around London and its art world. From what we know of her personality and subsequent history, she was independent and forceful of character, prepared to live her life right at the boundary of what was acceptable for a young unmarried woman. She had financial security, her father Samuel having taken a house at 1, Cheyne Walk, a prestigious address close to the Thames, where Bertha lived until the First World War. Her father died in 1912 leaving a substantial estate of some £25,000, so she was more than capable of supporting herself. There are no surviving images of Bertha, but in diary entries from 1897, her friend the Fabian campaigner Beatrice Webb cattily described her thus: ‘She is petite and dark, about forty years old but looks more like a wizened girl than a fully-developed woman. Her jet-black hair heavily fringed, half-smart, half-artistic clothes, pinched aquiline features and thin lips, give you a somewhat unpleasant impression though not wholly inartistic. She is bad style without being vulgar or common or loud – indeed many persons … would call her ‘lady-like’ – but she is insignificant and undistinguished.’
By the early 1890s, Bertha had joined the growing Fabian Socialist movement, and in 1892 this led her into a life-defining experience. She was asked to paint a portrait of one of the movement’s leading lights – George Bernard Shaw. The painting was to be known as ‘The Platform Spellbinder’. Shaw was impressed with the painting, and with the artist, but poor Bertha fell in love with her subject. The portrait she created is reproduced in several places, including in Shaw’s ‘Sixteen Self-sketches’, published in 1949, with the unkind caption ‘Portrait by Bertha Newcombe, spellbound’. For many years the painting was lost, believed to have been destroyed in the Second World War, but in 2012 was discovered during a spring clean at Ruskin College, Oxford, and was last heard of hanging in the Labour Party Headquarters in London.
The sittings began on 24 February 1892, according to Shaw’s diaries, and continued for five weeks. He visited Bertha’s studios and the sittings quickly deepened into friendship. His diary notes that he regularly stayed at Cheyne Walk until after 11pm. (At this time, Shaw was becoming well known as a critic and pamphleteer, but he was not yet famous as a playwright. His first public success, Arms and the Man, would not be staged until 1894.) The friendship continued long after the sittings were completed. All their friends, including Bertha, assumed that the relationship was leading towards marriage, but Shaw was not convinced.
The unsatisfactory state of their affair continued into the following year - Bertha must have felt considerably compromised by the public talk surrounding the relationship, but unfortunately for her Shaw was pursuing other women as well, and tensions began to boil over: on 15th February 1893 Shaw went to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall. ‘Bertha Newcombe came and sat beside me during the interval and part of the second part of the concert, and we had almost a scene, as far as that was possible in so public a place, about our recent correspondence’.
Just around the corner from Cheyne Walk, with a studio in Manresa Road, lived Nelly Erichsen, the daughter of Danish immigrants, who has studied at the Royal Academy. Nelly, turning thirty in 1892, had begun to assert herself as a self-supporting professional woman. She had exhibited a string of paintings at the prestigious Summer Exhibition and elsewhere, several of which had earned appreciative, if not effusive, reviews in national art journals. She also had a growing social confidence, derived from her relationship with the well-connected Macmillan family in Tooting where she had grown up, and she was ready to make her own life. As with many other middle class women seeking to live on their own resources, she made friends with other like-minded single women. She and Bertha became friends, exhibiting at the same galleries, and both producing work which avoided the trap of appearing too feminine, too easy for the critics to scorn.
We know exactly when George Bernard Shaw first met Nelly. On 24th April 1893, Shaw noted in his diary ‘ …went to Bertha Newcombe’s where I found Wallas [Graham Wallas, a prominent Fabian] and a Miss Erichsen who attracted me considerably. They went presently and I was left with Bertha, to whom I read a bit of my play’. Bertha should have taken the hint: the play on which Shaw was working at that time was ‘The Philanderer’. Three weeks later, Shaw made up a party with Wallas, a Miss McCausland, Bertha and Nelly to visit Balcombe, near Haywards Heath. He met Wallas and Nelly at Victoria Station and they travelled down by train. Bertha and Charlotte McCausland, another painter, met them off the train and they walked to Sherlock’s Cottage to dine. ‘Then we went out and sat under a tree for a time. Finally we started for Three Bridges. We soon left Wallas and Miss McCausland behind; and soon after Miss Erichsen sat down and said she would wait for Bertha’s return. Bertha came on with me and put me into the High Road for the station.’ I suppose Nelly felt the need to let her unhappy friend Bertha have time alone with the maddeningly indecisive Shaw.
By 1895, Shaw was under pressure on all fronts to marry Bertha. The Easter of 1895 was spent in a party including the Webbs and Bertha at the Beachy Head Hotel, near Eastbourne. Bertha had been specifically invited by Beatrice Webb who believed she would make a suitable wife for Shaw. Yet despite the fact that Bertha was now openly pursuing him, he did not respond. In fact, the most significant event of this holiday in Shaw’s eyes, appears to have been his attempt to master the bicycle – ‘after a desperate struggle, renewed on two successive days, I will do twenty yards and a destructive fall against any professional in England. My God, the stiffness, the blisters, the bruises, the pains in every twisted muscle, the crashes against the chalk road that I have endured – and at my age too. But….I will not be beaten by that hellish machine.’
There are no mentions of Nelly in Shaw’s diaries for a couple of years, but by 1896 they were certainly back in touch. Shaw records that on 4 February he visited Nelly in her studios in Manresa Road to read from his latest draft of ‘You Never Can Tell’ but did not find her alone – she had with her a companion – her friend Fanny Johnson. Whether this was deliberate self-defence by Nelly, we will never know. Shaw clearly thought that Bertha had told Nelly that he was not to be trusted alone with women. He pondered the event for several days before writing to Bertha:
‘Your attempt to discredit me with NE has had a most ludicrous upshot. On Monday she invited me to afternoon tea. I washed and brushed myself most carefully and went. When I got there, lo! A chaperon, a sly little woman who was drawing N on millboard. N’s introduction clearly meant ‘I am sorry to disappoint your evident hope of finding me alone; but I have no intention of trusting you to that extent.’. Naturally our constraint was fearful. Presently the little woman began to smile slyly as she surveyed us with confidential good nature. She hurried up the tea, and then, before we could intervene, nodded at us in a ‘I know you want to get rid of me’ way; snatched up her things and deserted her hostess, leaving us in the most miserable confusion and consciousness. For an hour & a half we clung to Wagner, Shakespeare & other topics (including you); and I tried hard to behave myself, although the breaking off of the end of the sofa reminded me rudely that I had lapsed in to the habit of sprawling and lolling. However, we parted on fair terms with an understanding that I might turn up on Monday afternoons when I had nothing better to do. I must get her to take me to the Grafton Gallery: your departure is a serious blow to me in the matter of picture seeing’
It seems that Nelly handled the rather unsavoury and highly-conceited, furniture-wrecking Shaw with great aplomb! According to Ronald Pearsall, writing in The Worm in the Bud, The World of Victorian Sexuality, Nelly was one of the new generation of modern girls ‘who considered that free love was theirs for the asking’ but who found ‘that when the chips were down, their bourgeois upbringing placed a veto on any uninhibited behaviour’. Leaving aside the obvious reason why unmarried women at that time might have been nervous about indulging in sex outside marriage, I think it much more likely that Nelly could see Shaw coming a mile off and was quite capable of defending herself without the excuse of a chaperone. She must also have been well aware of how Bertha would have reacted to any flirtation. After all, Nelly was over 30, and had been mixing freely and unchaperoned with male art students since she was 18. I think it more likely that Shaw had his considerable vanity piqued by finding that Nelly did not behave as Bertha did, and spun the tale in a way which would show himself in a more amusing light.
A better description of a woman such as Nelly can be found in Shaw’s play “Mrs Warren’s Profession”, written in that same year. ‘I have sought’ he wrote to a friend ‘to put on the stage for the first time (as far as I know) the highly educated, capable, independent young woman of the governing class as we know her today, working, smoking, preferring the society of men to that of women simply because men talk about the questions that interest her and not about servants and babies, making no pretence of caring much about art or romance, respectable through sheer usefulness and strength, and playing the part of the charming woman only as the amusement of her life, not as its serious occupation.’
Shaw began to use Nelly as one of his several female shields against the persistent Bertha – pretending to flirt with Nelly to annoy or deflect his pursuer. The following month he wrote to Bertha ‘Miss Erichsen has gone off to Cheshire to paint a portrait. She offered me one date at the studio but I could not go.’ But we know from his diary that he had in fact called on Nelly again in early March, which he did not to mention to Bertha.
Many years later, Bertha wrote an account describing her relationship with Shaw at this time: ‘Frequent talking, talking, talking of the pros and cons of marriage, even to my prospects of money or the want of it, his dislike of the sexual relation and so on, would create an atmosphere of love-making without any need for caresses or endearments….Shaw has not a gift of sympathetic penetration into a woman’s nature. He employs his clever detective powers and pounces on weaknesses and faults which confirm his preconceived ideas. He imagines he understands. I objected to my emotions being divided into compartments and still retain my opinion that the emotion of love can be a fusion of body, spirit and mind.’
When the Webbs invited Shaw to stay at their Monmouthshire residence, Argoed, in the summer of 1896, he put his foot down at last and asked them not to invite Bertha ‘Everybody seems bent on recommending me to marry Bertha. She is only wasting her affections on me. I give her nothing; and I do not even take everything – in fact I don’t take anything, which makes her most miserable. She has no idea with regard to me except that she would like to tie me like a pet dog to the leg of her easel and have me always to make love to her when she is tired of painting’. By that time, he had in any case met his future wife, the wealthy Charlotte Payne-Townshend, and from then on Bertha was pushed even further over the sidelines.
Shaw had written to Charlotte ‘From the moment you can’t do without me you are lost, like Bertha. Never fear, if we want one another we shall find it out’. In the spring of 1897, Shaw finally wrote to Bertha breaking off their relationship. When Bertha received this letter, she wrote angrily to Beatrice Webb, whom she suspected of some responsibility for Shaw’s change of heart. Indeed, Beatrice had been keen to cultivate Charlotte who was independently wealthy, a possible donor to Fabian causes, and had introduced her to Shaw. The letter led Beatrice to call, rather nervously, on Bertha, who gave her a bitter account of her relationship with Shaw – ‘her five years of devoted love, his cold philandering, her hopes aroused by repeated advice to him (which he, it appears, had repeated much exaggerated) to marry her, and then her feeling of misery and resentment against me when she discovered that I was encouraging him ‘to marry Miss [Payne-Townsend]’. Finally he had written a month ago to break it off entirely’.
Beatrice explained that she had been willing to act as chaperone while she felt Bertha had had a chance, but ‘directly I saw that he meant nothing I backed out of the affair. She took it all very quietly, her little face seemed to shrink up and the colour of her skin looked as if it were reflecting the sad lavender of her dress.’ Beatrice continued that Bertha was well out of it, that Shaw was a philanderer and would never have been faithful ‘in his relations with women he is vulgar, if not worse; it is a vulgarity that includes cruelty and springs from vanity.’ In Beatrice’s diary, she goes on to record that at the moment they both looked at Bertha’s portrait of Shaw ‘with his red-gold hair and laughing blue eyes and his mouth slightly open as if scoffing at us both, a powerful picture in which the love of the woman had given genius to the artist… “It is so horribly lonely”, [Bertha] muttered, “I daresay it is more peaceful than being kept on the rack, but it is like the peace of death.”’
When Shaw first met Bertha he was 36 and she was 35 – Nelly was just 30. They seem too old to be behaving like lovestruck, flirtatious teenagers – but perhaps the behaviour illustrates that they had only recently escaped from the restraints of Victorian convention and family and begun to live independent lives – this was their ‘adolescence’, if adolescence is the time in one’s life when one experiments with emotional and sexual freedom. It may have sounded quite daring to Victorian matrons for Nelly to offer to entertain Shaw alone in her studio, even at the age of 30 – hence the mutual embarrassment revealed in his half-serious letter to Bertha. But I suspect Nelly was more mature than Shaw.
Nursing her broken heart, Bertha withdrew from the Fabian Society and threw herself into the women’s Suffrage Movement, which had been a cause close to her parents’ hearts as well. She became the Secretary of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage Society and was a member of the committee of The Artists’ Suffrage League.
In 1912 Bertha and GBS met for perhaps the last time – Shaw wrote a one act play called ‘Press Cuttings’ for the suffragette movement. Bertha had never married, and still lived at 1 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. As Honorary Secretary of the Civic and Dramatic Guild, she took charge of the play’s private production in aid of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage. She wrote to ask Shaw for a copy of the play and they met to discuss it. Shaw noted in his diary ‘I expected to find a broken hearted prematurely aged woman: I found an exceedingly smart lady, not an hour older, noting with a triumphant gleam in her eye my white hairs and lined face.’ However, yet again Bertha’s temper seems to gave caused offence - they had a spat when she asked Shaw to stop tipping the employees at The Court theatre – his reply caused her great offence, and she wrote ‘What a villain you are? How I wish I had not written…it is far better that I should again efface myself for another 11 years…do you still continue to think of yourself as an idol for adoring women? The idol was shattered for me years ago – even before you married.’ Of all the women Shaw had seduced, Bertha was perhaps the most affected by his cruelty. ‘Your memories terrify me’, he wrote to her in 1925. She never married and in her later years lived near Petersfield, Hampshire with her younger sister Mabel. They both died within a few months of each other in 1946, Bertha having reached the ripe old age of 90.
Thanks for reminding me of this part of your Nelly biography which I loved so much!! The details here were fantastic. I love the stories of now-famous men and little-known women. ❤️
Such a fascinating story. Thanks so much, Sarah.