She survived the sinking of the Lusitania...
... the least interesting thing about Margaret Thomas, Viscountess Rhondda!
Margaret Haig Thomas was born in 1883, the only daughter of wealthy Welsh politician David and his well-connected wife Sybil. She would marry, then swiftly become a suffragette and be sent to jail; divorce, at a time when that was still almost unheard of; work alongside her father in his extensive business interests, becoming the first woman to chair the Institute of Directors; and found and edit Time and Tide Magazine for more than thirty years. I had never heard of this woman until two weeks ago, when I started researching the life of Winifred Holtby, and now I’m hooked. So this is just Part One of her tale, and we will leave her clinging to the wreckage of the Lusitania in 1915, to be rescued at a later date.
This adorable little cherub was David and Sybil Thomas’s only child: David (or “DA”) Thomas was the increasingly affluent son of a self-made businessman Samuel Thomas from South Wales, whose commercial interests expanded from coal mining into distribution, and who left his son a fortune of £75,000 plus shares in the Cambrian Collieries business. David went through the ritual cleansing of the Victorian entrepreneurial family - he was taught to speak English rather than the Welsh his parents had grown up with, was educated at Clifton College and then sent to Cambridge University. He married at the age of 26 and took his wife to live in London, where he began a career as a stockbroker and where Margaret was born. In 1887 he returned to Wales and took up the management of the colliery business. That same year he was elected as the Liberal Member of Parliament for Merthyr Tydfil, a seat he retained until 1910. This was the great (and final) period for the Liberals in Parliament: it was possible that DA might have achieved high office if his local rival, David Lloyd George, had not determined that there would only be room for one Welsh Wizard in government, and according to Margaret ‘took all the necessary precautions to ensure that he should be that one.’ She goes on ‘My father made one attempt to work with him in 1894 but his spoon was not long enough for that supper.’
Margaret was sent to school, first in London and then to board at St Leonard’s, in St Andrews in Scotland, which she adored, and many of the friendships she made stayed with her for life. In the summer of 1904 she left school and her mother inflicted a London season on her, her ‘Coming Out’, which seems to have passed in a misery of uncomfortable clothing, and gruesome evening parties. The ‘stays’ that she was compelled to wear snapped at the sides the first time she put them on, and she secretly removed all the others over the course of the summer, vowing never to wear them again. She was painfully shy and found the dances and receptions tedious and terrifying, pleading with her mother to be allowed to leave before supper was served. In October 1904 she escaped to Oxford, being admitted to Somerville College, but it was not a success either:
I disliked the ugliness of most of the public rooms, and I disliked the glass and the crockery and the way in which the tables were set. I disliked the food and, more still, the way in which it was served… And I disliked the dowdiness of the dons, and more still that of the other girls… I could not bear the cloisterishness of the place; and felt irritated by the cautious way in which we were shut off from contact with men, the air of forced brightness and virtue that hung about the cocoa-cum-missionary-party-hymn-singing girls.
Not surprisingly, she left without a degree after just two terms, and found herself at the same loose end as many a young middle-class woman of the period.
At ten I had wanted to be Prime Minister of England, a famous writer, and the mother of twelve children. But I was no less susceptible than the average. By the time I was twenty I had cut my hopes according to my cloth. A thousand subtle influences of environment had done their work, the cramping mould of things-as-they-are had closed around me and I had conformed to pattern. I no longer thought consciously of any future save love and marriage.
Marriage came along in 1908, in the shape of Humphrey Mackworth, a near neighbour in Wales, whose main interests were hunting and the Conservative party. He was twelve years older than her, and they quickly realised they had nothing in common. Margaret believed that you should never interrupt someone who was reading a book: Humphrey believed that no one should ever read in a room where anyone else wanted to talk. They never had children and would divorce in 1923. But she wrote that in fact the early years of her marriage were extremely happy: she had found the suffrage cause, and had become her father’s ‘right hand man of business’.
Margaret’s family were all deeply invested in the cause of women’s rights. Her cousin Florence Haig, who lived in Chelsea, was a founder member of the East London Federation of Suffragettes, and was imprisoned in 1908 for six weeks. On coming out, she said that it was'wonderful how each woman who acts influences their own circle. Friends who before may have been but mildly in favour, are converted into active and eager workers for the cause. Coming out is so delightful that the stupidity of the time in Holloway is forgotten'. This is what influenced Margaret, who first dipped a toe in the water by joining a Suffrage Procession in Hyde Park, along with her mother Sybil. She then became known as a platform speaker on the subject in South Wales, and as a correspondent on the suffrage issue in the local press, including the Western Mail. Luckily, her husband did not try to hold her back, and her father was mildly sympathetic to the cause (although if she was out and about in Newport selling Votes for Women and spotted her mother-in-law, Lady Mackworth, she would hide in an alley).
Over the next five years, Margaret, her old school friends and her new acquaintances became more boisterous. In 1910, during the General Election campaign, she went back to St Andrews to confront the Prime Minister, Lord Asquith, and failing to gain entry to the hall where he was due to speak, decided that her only chance was to jump on to the running board of his car as it came down the street.
I leant in at the open window; Mr Asquith, looking pale, shrank back into the far corner of the car. We gazed at each other, I a little dazed at having succeeded so easily; he leaning back into his corner, looking white and frightened and rather like a fascinated rabbit. I think he may have suspected me of secreting some weapon. My plan, so far as it went, had undoubtedly succeeded, save perhaps for one point. Did I or did I not say to him (as it was of course my first duty to say to him), “Votes for Women, Mr Asquith!” I trust that I did, but I have never been able to remember for certain.
In 1913, Margaret was arrested for setting fire to a Newport postbox and briefly imprisoned in Usk Gaol, where she began a hunger strike. She was released after a very few days, much to the relief of her annoyed husband.
The biggest adventure of her life happened in 1915, and it came about because her perceptive mother, back in 1908, had suggested that what newly-married Margaret needed was an occupation, and that working alongside her father as his confidential secretary would be the best thing for both of them. Thus Margaret became a businesswomen. The plan worked for DA, as he needed someone he could trust absolutely, whose interests would be 100% aligned with his own. It worked for the Mackworths, who were very grateful for the £1,000 annual salary that the job commanded. But Margaret had still a household to run, which she did on a daily basis: ‘I had a perfectly competent cook. Might it not be possible to put out stores and discuss the meals, etc, once for the whole week instead of seven times? I went to my father “If,” said I, “I may work only five days a week and have Saturday mornings off for housekeeping I’ll do it”. The bargain was concluded on that basis.’
Initially, Margaret bag-carried into meetings, took notes, opened correspondence. Before long she was drafting letters herself, and then being given responsibility for some of DA’s smaller concerns, such as his local newspapers. Thirty years later she wrote perceptively about the impact her arrival had on her male colleagues - who not only resented the competition, but felt that their own professional pride was being diluted.
When a being of a class which throughout the ages has been considered to be in certain specified directions inferior - inferior in courage, inferior in initiative, inferior in capacity for personal intelligence, unfitted for the spectacular successes - has been regarded, in fact, as belonging to the permanent serfdom of the race - gets into a hitherto barred profession, wins the Newdigate Prize or flies to Australia, it lowers the whole prestige attached to entering that particular profession, to winning the prize or making the flight in question…When a woman makes a success in his chosen field, more especially when three or four women do, the young male thinks disgustedly that the thing he sets out to do cannot be so difficult as he supposed… The glamour wanes.
Increasingly her father was away on business, travelling to the United States and Canada where he was building a portfolio of mining interests, and when he was absent he left Margaret with a Power of Attorney over his companies. She became well-known among the South Wales business community, as well as among his political associates.
When the First World War broke out, the suffragettes suspended hostilities, and so did Lloyd George towards Margaret’s father. The Government asked him to become an envoy to the United States, and in March 1915, he set sail for America, with Margaret following a week or two later, arriving into New York in April. She describes the weeks that followed as some of the happiest of her life: she adored her father, and spending time alone with him, in business meetings during the day, enjoying the delights of Broadway, the opera and the dinners with him in the evenings, was a special treat. ‘Those weeks of open-hearted American hospitality and forthcomingness, of frankly expressed pleasure in meeting one, did something for me that made a difference to the whole of the rest of my life.’
On 1 May 1915, Margaret and her father boarded the RMS Lusitania bound for Liverpool, despite increasing rumours that the Germans planned to target a prestigious ocean-going liner. There were two thousand people aboard counting passengers and crew, including many families with children crossing to join the Canadians fighting in the war. The torpedo struck the ship while it was in the Irish Sea around 2pm on Friday 7th May and it sank in less than twenty minutes. Fewer than 800 people survived. Her father, on the port side of the ship, made his way into a lifeboat. Margaret, on the other side of the ship searching for him, was thrown into the water as the ship went down.
When I started to read about Margaret’s life, basically in her wonderful memoir ‘This Was My World’, published by Macmillan in 1933, I thought this would be the dramatic episode on which to pause the story. But I have since discovered, through Angela V. John’s biography Turning the Tide, and my own researches on Ancestry.co.uk, that Margaret’s time with her father in New York must have been significantly more momentous than she let on in her writings: for the two of them were hiding a secret from the world. The reason DA had come out to New York in advance of Margaret was so that he could spend time with his mistress and his two other children.
Evelyn Salusbury, only eight years older than Margaret, was the daughter of a local vicar with strong family connections to Sybil Haig Thomas. She grew up living in a house just outside the gates of Llanwern Park, the Thomas’s beautiful home, and when she reached adulthood, she began to work as one of DA’s private secretaries in the estate office. In April 1911 the British census records her as living as a guest at Llanwern Park in a house owned by Margaret’s cousin Peter Haig-Thomas and his wife. But exactly twelve months later she gave birth to a little girl Rachel Janet in Los Angeles. DA was travelling regularly to the States and Canada at that time. In July 1914, John Samuel was born in St Augustine, Florida. (Samuel and Rachel were the names of DA’s parents). Evelyn gave her children the surname Owen, apparently borrowed from a journalist, Edward Owen, living in St Augustine at the time. But there is no doubt that Margaret accepted both these children as her siblings, kept the secret from her mother and the world after her father’s death, and was responsible for ensuring their financial support through his estate for the rest of her life.
To be continued…
What an interesting life! Thank you, Sarah, I look forward to reading more...