Edith Grace Collett was initiated into the Golden Dawn at its Amen-Ra temple in Edinburgh on 8 June 1896, taking the Latin motto ‘Caritas nunquam excidit’.  She did not give the GD any address at which they could contact her; and when she moved to England she did not continue her membership of the GD at its Isis-Urania temple in London. 

 

She had more important demands on her time and effort: when she was invited to join the GD she was in the process of qualifying as a doctor.  In terms of the women who were in the GD, she was a rare bird indeed.

 

May 2014: I’ve been able to update this biography with more details of the sanatorium where Edith Grace was working between 1901 and 1903.  I was emailed by a researcher saying: did I know that Emily Carr had been a patient at East Anglia Sanatorium?  I had never heard of Emily Carr, who turned out to be an artist renowned in her native Canada but virtually unknown here - hopefully that will change following the exhibition of her work due this autumn at Dulwich Art Gallery.  It turned out that Emily Carr was never Edith Grace’s patient, but despite that disappointment I’ve been able to add a lot more detail about Edith Grace’s working life in what was probably her first important post.  Many many thanks to the researcher, who prefers to remain anonymous.

 

 

Edith Grace’s family

 

The family history website www.collettfamilyhistory.net is a collaboration between many people with the surname Collett (originally Colet).  They trace their ancestry back to 1360 in Suffolk, branching out into Buckinghamshire; and to 1485 in Gloucestershire.  According to this exhaustive website, Edith Grace was a descendent of the Suffolk Colletts.  Her grandparents on the Collett side were Cornelius Collett and his wife Amelia.  Cornelius Collett was probably dead by the day of the 1841 census, because Amelia Collett was head of the household, living in North Lane, Beverley, Yorkshire with three of her four sons: Charles and Samuel described incorrectly as both aged 15; and Daniel aged 12. The youngest, Trusson, was not at home.  He was probably at school but I couldn’t find him, probably because of his odd forename, mis-spelled several times in subsequent censuses.

 

None of the Collett boys went to university, there was probably not money in the family for that expense.  Samuel doesn’t seem to have worked at anything; Daniel became an engineer; and Trusson worked in the offices of a London wine merchant.  Charles joined the Madras Civil Service, arriving in India in April 1845 and spent about ten years working as a tax collector with the Madras magistrates’ service, being posted to Malabar and Calicut (now Kozhikode).  In the 1850s he began to study law, intending to qualify as a barrister. He took two periods of leave in England, in 1856 and 1859, to do the bar exams and the social side of qualification, and was called to the bar of Lincoln’s Inn during his second period of leave, in January 1861.  He had already spent periods standing in as a judge for people on leave, and in March 1866 he was promoted to the Madras high court as one of four judges serving under one senior judge.

 

In 1869 Charles Collett was living at 2 Harrington’s Road, in the Chetput district of Madras (largely occupied by European residents and businesses) and was earning 3750 rupees per year.  This is important information because it was in 1869 that his daughter Edith Grace was born, on 18 July.  Her baptism record survives, though without the details of which church the service took place in (probably the Cathedral); it gives her parents as Charles Collett and his wife Dahliah, née Phillips.

 

The baptism record has been put online at familysearch.  I have hunted high and low, in Indian records and UK ones, for the record of Charles Collett’s marriage to Dahliah Phillips and not been able to find it.  The best I can do is suppose that he married the daughter of another English resident of Madras, and look for people called Phillips.  The highest-ranking and longest-serving candidate is Henry Dominic Phillips, who went to India in 1829 and who by the 1860s was the most senior paid official in the whole of the Madras civil service.  There are two other possible candidates, another judge and an army officer, but they had both spent less time in that part of India and may not have been old enough to have daughters of marriage-able age.

 

Nor can I find any record of the death of Edith Grace’s mother.  She must have died, probably in India, between Edith Grace’s baptism and 1871, because by the day of the 1871 census Charles Collett was in England, staying at a lodging house on Piccadilly, and describing himself as not married.  He had retired from the Madras Civil Service and was back in England for good. Charles’ mother Amelia Collett and his brother Samuel had moved south and were living at Clare Lodge, Spring Grove Isleworth by 1871, according to the Collett family history website.  I’m suggesting that Charles Collett came back to England partly to leave Edith Grace with her grandmother, at least as a temporary measure. 

 

In 1872 Charles Collett married Lucy Ellen Daniels.  They had five children, half-siblings for Edith Grace: Phyllis, Margaret and Charles, all born in London; and Laura and Arthur, born after the family moved to Torquay.  I say ‘the family’ but I do wonder whether Edith Grace ever lived with them: all those involved with the situation may have thought it preferable for her to stay with her grandmother. She was not living with her father, on the census day of 1881.  She was at school; one of the few GD members whose schooling I have any direct evidence of.   Edith Grace was one of four boarders at the school on that day; perhaps most of the pupils were day-girls; or had gone home for the holidays (the habit of holding the census during the Easter vacation has been a real curse on my research work - everybody goes away!)  The school was a small one, contained in one house in the St Andrew’s district of Bristol and was run by Mary Robe, a local woman, and Elizabeth Crampton, who’d been born in Ireland.  They both described themselves as school-mistresses so I guess they took most of the lessons between them; but they employed Phébé Trouzel (or possibly Touzel), a Frenchwoman, to teach French. 

 

I’ve tried to discover a bit more about Miss Robe and Miss Crampton’s school - especially what was taught there - but I haven’t had any luck except to find that it was still going in 1901, having moved to Frenchay on the outskirts of Bristol.  This argues that generations of parents were satisfied with what it taught; but when it came to what girls were taught, 19th century parents tended to be satisfied with very little.  And of course I don’t know how long Edith Grace stayed at Miss Robe’s school; or whether she went on to another school elsewhere; or whether she studied on her own or was lucky enough to find a man willing to teach her (it would have had to be a man, I think).  I would really like to know, because by the late 1880s, Edith Grace had persuaded Glasgow and Edinburgh universities to take her on to study medicine.  Where did she learn enough science to do it?   She would have had to persuade her father to allow it, as well, particularly as she was very young to be taking such a big step, a step that most parents would have viewed as lowering the chances that she would marry.  She was only 20 when she began her studies.

 

Edith Grace passed her final medical exams in 1892, one of five women out of 106 students in  total who took the exams that year and 56 who passed them.  By passing these exams the five were automatically licensed by the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh and the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh; and could practice medicine.  On 27 October 1892, Edith Grace went through the final hoop in the process of preparing to start work, by registering with the General Medical Council (GMC).  She was now ready for a job.  IF she could get one.  If you were a woman doctor, qualifiying was often just the start of your problems.  (Perhaps I should say here that registration with the GMC is permission to work; it’s not an indication that you are working.)

                                                                                                           

Charles Collett had died while Edith Grace was an undergraduate, on 28 January 1891, at his home at Highclere, Warberry Hill, Torquay.  Lucy Ellen was his sole executor.  He left a tidy sum, eventually assessed as £25036.  I haven’t seen the Will (copies are quite expensive) but I’m rather supposing that Edith Grace did inherit some kind of income from her father; otherwise she might not have been able to finish her studies.  Money was not the issue, I think, in her decision to become a doctor. 

 

When Edith Grace registered with the GMC in 1892 she was living at 27 Comiston Road in the Morningside district of Edinburgh.  She was still living in Edinburgh in 1896 when she joined the GD there.  Once more, I have to guess what she was doing in these years, but it’s a good bet, I think, that she was gaining practical experience; probably unpaid but valuable just the same.  Perhaps she even got as far as setting herself up as a general practitioner; but I have to say that I haven’t found any evidence of it.  Five or six members of the GD in Edinburgh were medical practitioners, and it’s very likely that Edith Grace was acquainted with some, if not all, of them.  However, when she joined the Theosophical Society in August 1894 her application was sponsored by Dr Robert Felkin and his wife Mary, so it was mostly likely to be the Felkins who recommended her for GD membership.  Edith Grace may have been one of Robert Felkin’s students: from 1886 to 1896 he taught tropical medicine at the University of Edinburgh medical school.

 

I daresay Edith Grace realised quite soon after her GD initation that to follow up her initiation properly she would have to dedicate more time to it than she was willing to.  She opted to stick with the TS, continuing to pay her yearly subscriptions, at least, until 1899 when the TS in Scotland lost contact with her.  She had moved to England, because she had got a job.

 

The job had come through Jane Harriett Walker.  She and Edith Grace had either been fellow students at Edinburgh for one year, or just missed each other, because in 1890 Jane Walker gone to Brussels to qualify rather than stay and get her qualifications in Scotland. After a visit to the Nordrach Sanatorium in the Black Forest in 1892, where the new ‘fresh-air’ treatment for tuberculosis was being pioneered, Dr Walker had returned to England determined to set up the first such sanatorium to operate in the UK.  She had started small, in a building converted for the purpose, in Downham Market, in 1896, and spent the next three years raising money and searching for a suitable site on which to build.  The East Anglia Sanatorium Company was founded in 1899 to run the new hospital, which opened in January 1901 on a site in the village of Nayland-with-Wissington, in Suffolk. Dr Walker was its medical superintendant, but spent most of her time working in London.  She was already known for an active policy of employing women - in 1903 the driver of the sanatorium’s horse and cart was the only man on the staff - and I think this where Edith Grace Collett came in, either as someone Walker knew personally, or as someone with family in the district, who recommended her; or both.

 

On the day of the 1901 census, two months after it had opened, the East Anglian sanatorium already had 15 patients and a large staff: a matron, a gardener, three nurses, a cook, and seven domestic servants.  Described by the census official as the head of this household was Edith G Collett, house surgeon.

 

From 24 June to 10 August 1901 Edith Grace would have found herself treating the writer George Gissing, who had been recommended to go to Dr Walker by a mutual friend, after not recovering well from a severe cold he’d had in the spring.  Dr Walker had diagnosed emphysema, rather than TB, but she had sent him to the sanatorium anyway.  Something very similar happened to the Canadian artist Emily Carr early in 1903: although there was no question of her having TB - she knew herself that all she needed was a period of rest - Dr Walker sent her to the sanatorium anyway and Carr remained there for over a year.  The notes and sketches she made at the time were published after her death, giving an account of what life was like in the sanatorium just after Edith Grace had left it.  Carr’s biographical writings are not always an accurate representation of what actually happened, apparently, but her descriptions of the treatment regime followed by the sanatorium’s TB patients are confirmed by other evidence I’ve read. 

 

It’s clear from Carr’s book that the sanatorium stuck closely to the Nordrach system of fresh air and lots of food.  The Nordrach treatment focused on fresh air day and night whatever the weather; eating well in order to regain weight lost because of the illness; and exercise for those judged fit enough. Carr arrived in January 1903, but all doors and windows in the sanatorium were still open, blowing snow into her room.  Treatment was based on a weekly schedule, agreed for the next seven days during a Saturday morning round of the wards, led by Dr Walker with the resident doctor and the senior nurse in tow.  All the patients were weighed and the TB sufferers were expected to weigh more than they had the previous Saturday.  After the ward round, all the TB patients who were able to get about went in turn to the consulting room for further assessment.  The TB patients were fed enormous meals.  Carr describes watching at mealtimes as the resident doctor and senior nurse stood over patients who hadn’t gained weight, making sure they cleared their plates.  As regards exercise, the Nordrach system divided patients into three groups which Carr calls ‘down’ - she was ‘down’ in her first three months of bed-rest; ‘semi’, those who were allowed to get up and sit outdoors and do some gentle exercise; and ‘up’, those who were getting well, and who were expected to do a lot of walking and were the only patients allowed to go to the local village.  

 

It was not Edith Grace’s job to assess prospective patients.  Although she had probably never intended to live at the sanatorium, Dr Walker still undertook all first examinations of prospective patients, and these took place at her rooms in Harley Street.  Dr Walker was also the only person allowed to decide when a patient could leave.  However, Dr Walker worked in London all the week, going down to the sanatorium on Friday evening and returning to London late on Sunday.  To assist her she had a matron who took charge of the domestic arrangements, one trained nurse and a number of untrained nurses, most of whom were ex-patients.  An extra trained nurse was hired when Dr Walker felt one was necessary to care for a patient in their last few weeks of life.  Edith Grace carried considerable responsibility, therefore, overseeing treatment of the patients from Sunday evening to Friday afternoon with a limited number of experienced helpers.

 

Edith Grace was not expected to play an active part in the management of the limited company which owned the sanatorium.  This was done by a board of directors with Dr Walker as managing director.  She may have been glad not to have that responsibility in what was almost certainly her first job at such a senior level; but it did mean she did not have a great deal of say in decisions about the sanatorium’s future.  Emily Carr’s descriptions of the doctor she calls “Dr Bottle” - that is, Dr Walker - are borne out by all the other evidence I’ve read: she was a strong and dominating personality, she had drive and confidence and energy; but she can’t have been easy to work for.  It’s not clear, for example, how much say the resident doctor had in decisions on patients’ treatment.  Carr believes Edith Grace’s successor in the job had very little say.  As a patient, Carr could only observe the relationship between the doctors from the outside; but I have a feeling she was right and that might have been one reason why Edith Grace might choose to leave the sanatorium after gaining two years’ experience; another might have been that Edith Grace had decided she didn’t want to specialise in TB or in a sanatorium environment.

 

Edith Grace had left the East Anglian Sanatorium by the beginning of 1903, when she was listed in the GMC register as living at a house called Marcina, on Down View Road in Worthing.  I haven’t found any evidence of her working in another hospital so I suppose she was now in general practice.  However if she was, she didn’t do go about it in the way I would have expected, always staying in the same place once her practice had been established.  Quite the contrary, she seems to have moved quite a few times and spent periods out of the UK altogether - for example, for a couple of years around 1911.  I haven’t been able to find out where she went.  Was she working?  Did she return to India? - she can hardly have remembered it, having left when she was two, but goodness knows there was need enough for doctors there.  Or did she set up in practice in a town in Europe with a number of British residents? 

 

By 1914 she was back in England, living in Sidmouth, in a house called San Michele on Salcombe Hill.  From there she played her part in an exchange of opinions published in the British Medical Journal, showing herself to be keeping right up to date with new techniques in her profession.  Sticking her neck right out on a subject which is still quite controversial, she said that she was in favour of the use of Freudian psychoanalysis.  She did qualify this view by saying that they must be properly trained (her letter reads as though she was not trained in psychoanalysis herself) and that the technique should be used only when the experts deemed it appropriate.  However (I think with some amusement) she noted that its more fervent supporters were actually putting doctors off its use: she said that they “appear to discern sex from A to Z in almost any given problem”.  One of Freud’s acquaintances in England sent copies of the whole correspondence to Freud to read; so Freud did actually get to hear of Edith Grace Collett.

 

According to the GMC Registers Edith Grace was living in Sidmouth between 1914 and 1919.  I can’t quite square this with evidence I came across by accident in December 2015 indicates that she was working in the Midlands, probably from 1912 to 1916.  A job for a resident medical officer at the Ransom Sanatorium near Mansfield had been advertised in January 1912 at £160 per year in salary, plus board and lodging and all washing.  Applicants had to be female, so I take it that the successful applicant would be working on the women’s wards.  Edith Grace Collett resigned from such a post, at that sanatorium, at the end of 1916; so I assume she was the successful applicant. 

 

The Ransom Sanatorium had been founded in 1902 by the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Association for the Prevention of Consumption.  It was taken over by Nottinghamshire County Council in 1910 and the post advertised in January 1912 was probably part of this process.  There were other changes too: after taking only private patients in its early years, the sanatorium started to take patients paid for by the new National Insurance scheme as well (or possibly instead).  And the name of the sanatorium was changed, to honour William Bramwell Ransom (1861-1909), physician at the Nottingham General Hospital and a pioneer of the Koch treatment for TB. 

 

Her work at the Ransom Sanatorium might have given a Edith Grace a second chance to have come across someone who was very famous later; though he was never a patient, only a visitor at the most (if visitors were even allowed), and at the time he was only a teacher called ‘Bert’ with literary aspirations.  In 1911 (though I don’t know about later) a young woman called Hilda Shaw was a patient at the Ransom Sanatorium, a friend of Louie Burrows and Louie’s then-fiancé D H Lawrence. 

 

Edith Grace resigned from her job at the Ransom Sanatorium at the end of 1916. This was a very serious time to be doing such a thing - the end of the year of the Somme - and I don’t suppose she made the decision lightly.  Why she left, where she went, and what she did afterwards I don’t know, but she was no longer giving Sidmouth as her address by 1923 - the GMC listings have only a ‘care of’ address, that of her bank.  She had gone abroad again and this time she didn’t come back.  She died on 23 September 1927, in Susa, a town in northern Italy. 

 

 

BASIC SOURCES I USED for all Golden Dawn members.

 

Membership of the Golden Dawn: The Golden Dawn Companion by R A Gilbert.  Northampton: The Aquarian Press 1986.  Between pages 125 and 175, Gilbert lists the names, initiation dates and addresses of all those people who became members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn or its many daughter Orders between 1888 and 1914.  The list is based on the Golden Dawn’s administrative records and its Members’ Roll - the large piece of parchment on which all new members signed their name at their initiation.  All this information had been inherited by Gilbert but it’s now in the Freemasons’ Library at the United Grand Lodge of England building on Great Queen Street Covent Garden. 

 

Family history: freebmd; ancestry.co.uk (census and probate); findmypast.co.uk; familysearch; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; Burke’s Landed Gentry; Armorial Families; thepeerage.com; and a wide variety of family trees on the web.

 

Famous-people sources: mostly about men, of course, but very useful even for the female members of GD.  Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  Who Was Who. Times Digital Archive.

 

Catalogues: British Library; Freemasons’ Library.

 

Wikipedia; Google; Google Books - my three best resources.  I also used other web pages, but with some caution, as - from the historian’s point of view - they vary in quality a great deal.

 

SOURCES FOR EDITH GRACE COLLETT:

THE COLLETT FAMILY

The Collett family website at www.collettfamilyhistory.net is thorough but isn’t aware of a first marriage for Edith Grace’s father Charles.  Its coverage of his second marriage, and the children of that second marriage, peters out a bit after about 1890.

Edith Grace’s father CHARLES COLLETT

India Office and Burma Office List 1845 p10 Madras Civil Service.  Madras Almanac and Compendium of Intelligence 1846 p134.

Madras Almanac... 1847 p132 Madras Civil Service list.

Madras Almanac... 1851 p132 Madras Civil Service list.

All the Madras Almanac... published in the 1850s have lists of European births, marriages and deaths but I couldn’t find a marriage of either Charles Collett or a D Phillips.  With its issue for 1862 the Madras Almanac... became the Asylum Press Almanac and gave up publishing birth/marriage/death data alas!  The section on the Madras Civil Service contains biographies of its senior personnel to date.  Both the men called Phillips are still in the Madras Civil Service. 

Asylum Press Almanac 1862 continuing the career details of Charles Collett, starting from the job at Malabar:

19 Feb 1855    acting sub-judge at Calicut

April 1855        sub collector and joint magistrate, Malabar

Aug 1856         acting deputy collector of sea customs Madras but he’d gone home for a period of leave in Europe, departing 29 July 1856.

Oct 1857         acting deputy collector of sea customs Madras

June 1858        additional sub-collector and joint magistrate Bellary

March 1859     another period of leave in Europe, from which he didn’t return until

April 1861        collector of sea customs Madras.  1861 was on the organising committee based at Madras for the London Exhibition of 1862

Aug 1861         commissioner for assessment of income tax

Aug 1861         sub-judge at Calicut

Just noting that there are 5 men called Phillips in the list of European residents in the presidency.  Indian Army and Civil Service List 1863 Madras Civil Service list p236.

London Gazette issued 6 March 1866 p1647.

Indian Army and Civil Service List July 1866 Madras Civil Service: p272, P280.

Asylum Press Almanac for Madras 1869 issue: P83, P87, P107-09. 

Indian Army and Civil Service List July 1871 p253 which is the last time Charles Collett is listed in any Indian directory.

Thacker’s Indian Directory 1885 p1075 just to confirm he wasn’t there.

 

Charles Collett had several books published:

The Malayalam Reader: A Series of Original Papers, published by the Church Mission Press in 1856.  As compiler.

Charles Collett’s other publications are all his own work:

1869 A Treatise on the Law of Injunctions

1882 The Law of Specific Relief in India.   In the book The Malavikagnimitra: A Sanskrit Play pubd 1891 p121 there is an advert for Collett’s The Law of Specific Relief, confirming that he has retired.

1886 A Manual on the Law of Torts.

 

THE MARRIAGE OF EDITH GRACE’S PARENTS; AND HER BIRTH

Madras Marriages 1698-1948 at the British Library India Office Collection in which I couldn’t find anything.

India List for 1869 there were 3 quite high-ranking men called Phillips in the Madras presidency including H D Phillips the highest-ranking civil servant in the presidency; a judge currently based at Chingleput; and a lieutenant-colonel in the Madras army.

 

Baptism record for Edith Grace, via familysearch: Edith Grace Collett was baptised in Madras on 19 September 1869; she’d been born 18 July 1869.  Her parents were Charles Collett and Dahliah (sic) née Phillips.

 

A supplement to the website www.collettfamilyhistory.net dated Feb 2012 says that Samuel Collete, still unmarried was living with his mother Amelia at Clare Lodge, Spring Grove Isleworth by 1871.  I searched diligently for them on the 1871 census in case Edith Grace was with them, but I don’t think they were in the UK on that day. 

List of Shareholders in the Grand Trunk Railway Company of Canada, published October 1875 p33.

 

EDITH GRACE AS A DOCTOR

For a general summing-up of the rise of the medical profession during the 19th-century, see chapter 1 of Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England by Janet Oppenheim.  New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1991.

Glasgow Medical Journal volume 32 1889 p134.

British Medical Journal issue of 12 November 1892 p1088

General Medical Council Registers: Edith Collett was first registered with the GMC on 27 October 1892, giving 27 Comiston Road Morningside Edinburgh as her address: Licensed by the Royal College of Physicians at Edinburgh 1892; Licensed by the Royal College of Surgeons at Edinburgh 1892; Licensed by the Faculty of Physical Surgery Glasgow 1892.

Robert Felkin at Edinburgh University: his obituary in British Medical Journal issue of 12 February 1927 p309.

 

East Anglian Sanatorium

See www.pastscape.org.uk for some local detail.  The sanatorium at Nayland-with-Wissington was opened in 1901.  It was purpose built to an Arts and Crafts design by Smith and Brewer.  It’s now listed, but has been turned into eight houses.

Good information on it in www.nationalarchives.gov.uk hospital records database but beware it being known by a number of different names, which confused me when I was researching it.

 

Via Access2Archives further information on what exactly is held at the Record Office at Bury St Edmunds:

            ID 507/1 is records of the limited company covering 1899-1904

            ID 507/2 is committee records and minute books BUT ONLY from 1940s

            ID 507/3 is staff records BUT ONLY nursing and administration, AND ONLY 1905-19.  The web-page has a summary of the history of the sanatorium including the opening date, 22 January 1901.

The Contemporary Medical Archives Centre at the Wellcome Institute says that Walker’s diaries from 1896-97 are amongst the archives at Suffolk Record Office.

 

On George Gissing at the East Anglia Sanatorium:

The Gissing Journal volume XXIX number 2 issued April 1993 and found July 2012 on the web, has an article pp1-10 by Martha S Vogeler in its series People Gissing Knew: Dr Jane Walker. 

 

On Emily Carr at the East Anglia Sanatorium:

Emily Carr by Doris Shadbolt.  Vancouver and Toronto: Douglas and McIntyre 1990: p21-23; pp28-30 and its Chronology pp219-222.

Emily’s own take on her time at the East Anglia sanatorium:

Pause: A Sketch Book by Emily Carr. Toronto: Clarke Irwin and Co Ltd 1953 passim.   This sketchbook only mentions two doctors, “Dr Bottle” - that is, Jane Walker - and the resident doctor, whom Carr calls “Dr McNair”.  From the details Carr gives of Dr McNair, she wasn’t Edith Grace Collett.

 

From my anonymous researcher of Emily Carr’s time at the East Anglia Sanatorium, some follow up if you’re interested in finding out more about Carr’s work:

 

A web copy of the manuscript sketchbook that was the basis for Carr’s book Pause, containing more sketches than in the published version:

http://www.museevirtuel-virtualmuseum.ca/sgc-cms/expositions-exhibitions/emily_carr/en/search/index.php

Try limiting the search by institutional collection and tick McMichael Canadian Collection.

 

Carr and others in Cornwall:

Women Artists in Cornwall exhibition catalogue by Catherine Wallace, 1996.  Wallace is an expert on the art of the Newlyn School.  Copies of this book are very hard to find so try the website cornishmuse.blogspot.co.uk. 

Carr’s later brush with theosophy:

Canadian painting in the 1930s exhibition catalogue by Charles C Hill.  Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada 1975.

The Logic of Ecstasy: Canadian Mystical Painting 1920-1940 by Ann Davis.  Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press c 1992.

Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven by Ross King, a Canadian historian who lives in the UK; editor, David Staines.  Kleinburg Ontario: McMichael Canadian Art Collection and Vancouver BC: Douglas and McIntyre 2011.

 

Edith Grace on Freud:

Www.bmj.com/cgi/reprint shows the content of British Medical Journal Volume 1 no 2771, issued 7 February 1914: p341.

At www.pep-weg.org, the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing site, there’s the text of a letter from Ernest Jones to Sigmund Freud dated 6 February 1914 about the letter to the BMJ by Mercier that had started off the exchange; and enclosing copies of all the replies it had elicited, including Collett’s.  Jones tells Freud that Mercier has a French father, but still manages to be paranoid about “everything from the continent” and obsessed with “English clean-mindedness”.  Jones notes that all the replies which he encloses with his letter do favour the use of psychoanalysis in Britain.

 

THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY MEMBERSHIP

Theosophical Society: Membershipship Register for June 1893-March 1895, held at the TS headquarters building on Gloucester Place in London.

 

 

Edith Grace’s employer at the East Anglia Sanatorium, Dr Jane Harriett Walker:

The Hospital Gazette and Student’s Journal 1885 list of doctors recently licensed to practice after qualifying in medicine at King and Queen’s College of Physicians at Dublin.  Walker was licensed to practice both medicine and midwifery.

Edinburgh Medical Journal volume 35 part 1 1890 which confirms that she and Edith Grace were both studying medicine at Edinburgh in the same academic year.  Walker qualified as LRCS at Edinburgh.

General Medical Council Registers in which Walker never gave the East Anglia Sanatorium as her address.

The Gissing Journal vol XXIX no 2 April 1993 found on the web, has an article pp1-10 by Martha S Vogeler in its series People Gissing Knew: Dr Jane Walker.

Dr Jane Walker and Her Hospital by Anna and Michael Smith.  Printed The Lavenham Press Suffolk.  No printed publication date but in the copy at the British Library a pencil note “[1999]” is written on the title page. This booklet includes reproductions of some of Emily Carr’s sketches, with the people identified by their correct names.  The resident doctor Carr calls “Dr McNair” is named as Eleanor Soltau, not Edith Grace Collett.

The Collected Letters of George Gissing: 1900-02 by Gissing, Paul F Mattheisen and Arthur C Young 1990.  Fnp203

Tubercle: the Journal of the British TB Association volume 20 1938 p137, an obituary.

 

ELEANOR SOLTAU

I couldn’t find anything much about her, at least on the web, just hints at a fascinating and far-flung life as a medical missionary and daughter of missionaries.  Some sources of what little information I did find:

History of the Korea Mission: Presbyterian Church USA 1884-1934 by Harry Andrew Rhodes and Arch Campbell.  Chosen Mission Presbyterian Church USA 1934: p669.

 

Via archive.org to Through the Serbian Campaign: the Great Retreat of the Serbian Army by Gordon Gordon-Smith.  London: Hutchinson and Co 1916: pp264-66.

At www.cmf.org.uk the web pages of the Christian Medical Fellowship: article in its series Looking Back - Working Visionaries.  From 1997, the reminiscences of medical missionary Henry Backhouse originally published in the magazine Among All Nations number 3 spring 1998.

 

At www2.wheaton.edu/bgc/archives, Billy Graham Center.  Introduction to the Center’s collection Papers of Roy W Gustafson.

 

Via web to graceandpeacepc.org the website of the Presbyterian Church in America: a review dated May 2013 of The Desert Rat, biography of Annette Adams by Aileen Coleman.  And the book itself p32.

Via google to Christian Herald volume 104 1981 p7.

 

Eleanor Soltau is buried next to Jane Walker in the graveyard of the church at Wissington.  Source for this: photo of the two graves, taken by the anonymous researcher.

 

RANSOM SANATORIUM

Burdett’s Hospitals and Charities issued 1918 p862.

At www.nottinghamhospitalhistory.co.uk re William Bramwell Ransom 1861-1909.  He died of TB himself.  The British Medical Journal has an obituary: issue of 18 December 1909 pp405-06.

Chemist and Druggist volume 76 1910 p871 for the Sanatorium’s change of name.

http://www.28dayslater.co.uk

The job advert that Collett probably answered: it’s in the British Medical Journal issue of 27 January 1912 pp109-110 and in The Lancet 1912 p206.

Local Government Board Annual Report volume 43 1915 issued by HMSO plxvi-lxvii: a brief history and some current statistics of the Sanatorium.

Via archive.org to a National Insurance Acts.  Handbook for the Use of Approved Societies revised to August 1915 and issued HMSO 1915. 

The Medical Officer volume XVI July-December 1916.  Published by Macmillan Ltd; London; 36-38 Whitefriars St EC.  P428 issue of 18 November 1916: announcement of Dr Collett’s resignation.  Her replacement, Dr Ethel Dukes, was going to earn a great deal more than she had.

 

The connection with D H Lawrence:

At mss-cat.nottingham.ac.uk, the catalogue of the university’s D H Lawrence collection has two letters from a woman called Hilda, to Louie Burrows although its clear from the text that she knows DHL as well.  Letters La B 195 and La B 196.  Neither letter has a full date on it but the archive assigns them to 9-12 February 1911; and between 16 April and 18 May 1911.  Of course, the letter writer signs herself only as ‘Hilda’.  That she is Hilda Shaw is also a deduction by the cataloguers and there’s no indication in the letters as to how Hilda, Louie and DHL knew each other.  I rather hoped I’d get some clue as to how, from this book:

Louie: Her Remarkable East Midlands Life by Jon Turner.  Dave Dover Reprint of Loughborough 2010.   Unfortunately, Hilda was never mentioned in it.  However, see pp8-45: Louie and DHL met while training to be teachers at Ilkeston Pupil Teacher Centre in 1905.  They got engaged in December 1910 but DHL broke it off on Louie’s 24th birthday, in February 1912.

 

 

 

Copyright SALLY DAVIS

29 January 201

 

Find the web pages of Roger Wright and Sally Davis, including my list of people initiated into the Order of the Golden Dawn between 1888 and 1901, at:

 

http:www.wrightanddavis.co.uk

 

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