Introduction
At the heart of this article is the exploration of a selection of letters (within a wider cache of over 100 love letters) written during and immediately after the First World War from between the relatively newly married, Hope Squire and her husband, Frank Merrick.Footnote 1 A substantial number date from the period of Frank’s imprisonment from May 1917 until April 1919.The letters between the two not only reveal the depth of their love for each other and their shared passion for music but also their wide network of associations across the political, musical and cultural worlds of Edwardian England. The letters are intimate and detailed, and because of this, the authors shall be referred to as Hope and Frank throughout this article. The letters form a political and musical dialogue over the two-year period in which Frank was kept in solitary confinement in prison as a Conscientious Objector, firstly in Wormwood Scrubs and then in Wandsworth prison.
Hope called herself Hope Squire Merrick, double barrelling but not hyphenating her surname – as did many first wave feminists – to reflect the equality of her marriage to Frank, a theme that reoccurs throughout the letters. The letters have not hitherto received focused scholarly attention, but they provide rare insights into daily life on the provincial home front in Manchester during the First World War, allowing a unique glimpse of some of the contemporary wartime debates around suffrage, feminism, anti-war activism and politics. This article will explore the effect of both the war and the decision of Frank to register as a conscientious objector, which shattered both Frank and Hope’s domestic and professional lives. It will explore the ambivalence of the Royal Manchester College of Music (RMCM) both to Frank’s declared conscientious objection and his subsequent imprisonment, and their coolness towards Hope as his replacement at the RMCM between 1917 and 1919. It will also consider the extent to which their radical politics overlapped with their lives as musicians. For Frank this meant maintaining the study and composition of music as far as possible while separated from genuine music making in prison. For Hope it implied not only taking over Frank’s teaching at the RMCM, but also having to counter certain obstacles that the responsibility brought with it.
There is, of course, a particular and peculiar political background to these letters, written during the last two years of the First World War. The domestic details of Hope’s letters show the impact of the war on daily domestic life which has to date received little detailed attention.Footnote 2 Even though there have been considerable explorations into the effect of war on women on the Home Front, that research generally focuses on the roles of women in the war, predominantly in munitions work and nursing.Footnote 3 However, there has also been extensive research focused on conscientious objection throughout the country, by Cyril Pearce in particular, and other authors who have explored the anti-war and peace movements in Britain during World War 1.Footnote 4 Jo Vellacott’s seminal article on women anti-war suffragistsFootnote 5 led to an emerging critique of the anti-war and anti-militarist feminist campaigns which grew out of the muted wartime suffrage campaigns.Footnote 6
As well as involvement in the anti-war movements, both Hope and Frank were part of the wartime suffrage movement in Manchester: Frank had been an active member of the Manchester Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage since his arrival in the city, a membership he shared with many of the liberal elite of Manchester, like Professors Arthur Schuster, Frederick Weiss and Charles Herford from Manchester University.Footnote 7 Both Frank and Hope were involved in many of the other activities now associated with early twentieth-century-radical Edwardian Britain: socialism, vegetarianism, pacifism and learning Esperanto. They were part of Manchester’s radical set, as Frank wrote to Hope in January 1918: ‘Give my love to all our ‘Crank’ societies, my enthusiasm for the ideals which each has set before it increases’.Footnote 8 The extensive correspondence, covering the period between October 1917 and April 1919, was written between the Merrick’s rented home in 12 Parsonage Road in Withington, Manchester, and the London prisons of Wormwood Scrubs and Wandsworth. Prison visits were rare and expensive for Hope as Frank was continuously imprisoned in London until April 1919, despite repeated and unsuccessful requests by Hope to the Home Secretary to move him to Strangeways Prison in Manchester.
The First World War’s impact on Manchester’s music and musicians was profound, despite strenuous efforts to maintain a viable and varied programme of concerts. Elsewhere in this issue Eleanor Roberts discusses the implications of the war for the Hallé Orchestra, left without a Principal Conductor and moreover at the start of the war presenting a substantially Austro-German repertoire. The Gentlemen’s Concerts, older than the Hallé but already struggling, limped through the war only to fold in 1920. Chamber music suffered through the internment for all or part of the war of two members of the Brodsky Quartet, including its leader Adolph Brodsky – the Brodsky Quartet concerts being the chief forum for chamber music before the war. The war also restricted the appearances of those overseas artists who had previously included Manchester in their touring programmes. Yet there were benefits too. Geoffrey Thomason’s article in this issue offers a case study in responding to the need to rethink concerts of chamber and instrumental music. They, along with Hallé concerts, also provided women with a platform for professional performance, in the case of the Hallé concerts to replace the men at war, although only to be dismissed when those men returned.Footnote 9 Moreover, as Eleanor Roberts explains, a number of guest conductors of the Hallé were able to bring new repertoire which frequently broke the Austro-German mould. Both students and staff of the RMCM served in the war, while European students and teachers at the College were interned in Europe or returned to their home country to fulfil their national service.Footnote 10 Frank Merrick was the only Conscientious Objector (CO) on the staff at the RMCM.
Background
Frank Merrick (Figure 1) was born in Clifton, now part of Bristol, the son of musical parents. Due to his asthma, he was mostly educated at home by his parents and by a governess. At the age of eleven he was taken to play for the great Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860–1941), who suggested he go to Vienna to study with Theodor Leschetizky (1830–1915) with whom Merrick stayed until 1901, working with Leschetizky’s assistant, Malwine Brée.Footnote 11 While in Vienna he met Johann Strauss II (1825–1899) and showed him a waltz he had composed. After 70 or more lessons with Leschetizky he returned to London and made his debut, first in 1902 with the Hallé Orchestra under Hans Richter (1843–1916); he made his first London concert appearance the following year, in March 1903, at the Bechstein Hall.Footnote 12 It is clear from a series of extant programme notes that Frank was a prodigy playing concerts regularly from 1903.Footnote 13 In 1907 and 1908 he also toured Australia as accompanist with the contralto Clara Butt and her husband, the singer Kennerley Rutherford.Footnote 14 Programmes held at BUA reveal Frank’s early interest in the promotion of new music and pieces by Debussy are particularly prominent. The earliest inclusion of Claude Debussy’s (1862–1918) music is in a series of recitals given by Frank in 1907. The same year he included ‘Reflets dans l’eau’ (Images, series 1) and ‘Jardins sous la pluie’ (Estampes) in a concert in Clifton (Bristol) at which he also played music by Percy Grainger (1882–1961).Footnote 15 The programme for that recital contains a note, possibly by Frank himself:
Debussy (who is a Frenchman) is the latest new and strange thing in music. He may be said to have invented a musical diction of his own, which is not least most interesting.Footnote 16
Frank Merrick c.1912. BUA DM203.
Subsequent performances of music by Debussy include a recital, also in Bristol, on 18 March 1909 where in addition to L’isle joyeuse Frank also included pieces by himself in addition to improvisations. Later surviving programmes evidence some dozen or so recitals containing music by Debussy prior to Frank’s arrest in 1917. He also gave a lecture in Manchester on 23 November 1916 on ‘The Value of Debussy’s Works to the Pianoforte Teacher’.Footnote 17
Another name that features in concert programmes is that of Max Reger (1873–1916), particularly in the 2-piano recitals given with his wife Hope. A far less familiar one is that of Richard Owen Beachcroft, Music Master at Clifton School. Frank included his piano Impromptus, dedicated to Beachcroft, in several recitals. After Frank’s release from prison in 1919 he continued to champion new music in Manchester, with programmes between 1919 and 1928 including, not only music by Debussy and Reger (both of whom had died during the war years) but newer pieces by, Granville Bantock, Sergei Prokofiev, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger and Arnold Schoenberg, among others.Footnote 18 Schoenberg’s music appears in concerts given in Manchester by Frank and Hope in which they made a feature of not revealing the composers’ names in the hope that their audience would receive the music with an open mind. Their identities were only published in the press sometime later. Mention needs also to be made of Frank’s interest in older English keyboard music. He performed pieces by Byrd and Purcell in a recital given to the RMCM Club on 7 November 1911, pairing them with Beachcroft’s Impromptu no.3 in D flat, his own Variations on ‘The bonny blue bell’ and Debussy Préludes (Book One) ‘La Cathédrale engloutie’ and ‘Les Collines d-Anacapri’. This interest in both early and contemporary music was distinctive but did not preclude a deeply rooted attachment to Austro-German classical and romantic traditions, as we will see.
Frank moved to work in Manchester after a period in London, where he had met and married composer and pianist, Hope Squire in 1911. The same year he was employed as a piano tutor at the RMCM, which had been founded in 1893 by Sir Charles Hallé (1819–1895), who assumed the role of first Principal.Footnote 19
Hope Squire (Figure 2) was born in 1878 in Southport.Footnote 20 She studied piano with first with Henry Gadsby,Footnote 21 followed by Tobias MatthayFootnote 22 and then Ernő Dohnany. Having heard Dohnanyi play Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto Hope asked him if he would teach her, and she became his first English pupil. She taught piano privately and presented recitals at London’s Steinway Hall and other venues. Although she was not taught composition systematically, she composed about 40 songs, including settings of Henry Newboult Imogen (performed at the RMCM in 1918), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Widow Bird Sate Mourning. Most of these remain in MS as part of the Merrick/Squire archive at Bristol. Like the compositions by Merrick in the archive, they reveal a stylistic conservatism at odds with both her and Merrick’s commitment to championing new music. There is, for example, a reliance on traditional formal models in Frank’s music and one detects no great desire to explore the harmonic language of the contemporary composers he otherwise championed. Hope’s output is chiefly confined to songs. Musically, at least, they were hardly ‘white hot rebels’. Nor, beyond a handful of songs to Esperanto texts, does their music appear to function as a vehicle for their political views. She and Frank continued as musical equals after their marriage, often playing concerts together. It is clear from the archives at RNCM that Hope was not part of the teaching staff at RMCM until she took over teaching some of Frank’s pupils in December 1916, when Frank’s imprisonment as a conscientious objector was becoming increasingly likely. Although the war disrupted the lives of both Frank and Hope, it paradoxically reinforced the importance in their lives of musical teaching, performing and composition. Moreover, the war widened their sphere of association, allowing them to forge new friendships across both class and generation and beyond their musical spheres. The letters also enable the reader to contextualize the particular significance of music to musicians during a time of incarceration and the deprivations of war.
Hope Squire c. 1912. BUA DM203.
Suffrage and Anti-War Movements
Hope became a member of the local Manchester branch of the breakaway Women’s Freedom League (WFL) sometime after her arrival in Manchester in 1911.Footnote 23 The WFL was formed in 1908 by suffrage activists who, disillusioned by the violent militant tactics of the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), supported non-violent militant action. Unlike the WSPU and the WFL the much larger National Union of Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) continued its campaign for the vote after 1914 but split over positions to the war.Footnote 24
Hope and Frank talk in the letters about their formidable neighbour Margaret Ashton (1856–1937) who had been the president of the local NUWSS branch and who was part of the NUWSS national executive until she left in 1915, to establish the pacifist Women’s International League (WIL) nationally. These suffrage debates were very lively in Manchester during the war and the local suffrage networks in Manchester gave Hope and Frank an opportunity to meet other campaigners outside the rarified atmosphere of the RMCM.Footnote 25
The couple also increased their sphere of association by becoming closely involved with the emerging peace movement in Manchester.Footnote 26 By 1916 Hope had joined the local branch of the WIL,Footnote 27 which attracted local women from the suffrage movement, local Quakers and socialists, making Manchester the largest branch in the country.Footnote 28 By March 1918 Hope was busy making things for a WIL sale of work and recruiting neighbours, like Meg Unwin and Thekla Rothchild,Footnote 29 to the WIL.Footnote 30
The Merricks were close to another nationally recognized peace activist, Emmeline Pethick Lawrence (1867–1954) who had played an important role in the WSPU before the war, and who then became a peace campaigner and a staunch supporter of COs during the war.Footnote 31 She was one of three women from Britain who attended The Hague Women’s Congress in 1915, which had been the impetus for the development of the WIL by anti-war suffragists across Europe.Footnote 32 She visited Frank several times in prison and took up the cause of prison reform. Pethick Lawrence is mentioned in several of the letters, particularly when she decided to stand (unsuccessfully) as a candidate in Manchester’s Rusholme ward in the 1918 General Election, the first election where women could vote and stand as MPs. The letters also mention the changing fortunes of the suffrage movement after the passing of the Representation of the People Act in February 1918 which gave some women the vote, with many of the suffrage groups disbanding. In late 1917, Frank suggested that Hope might take 12 Parsonage Road in her name, if ‘it gets you the vote’. He wrote in April 1918:
Have you a Parliamentary Vote? And if not, will any steps you can take secure you one – such as taking the house in your name (if not done already). I suppose ‘two years hard [labour]’ will do away with mine [i.e. my vote] right enough; but were it ever to be a choice between us, I think it would be far more important for the woman to be applying that lever than the man for a good many years to come.Footnote 33
On his release from prison in April 1919, Frank was issued a Certificate of Disgrace and not allowed to vote nor find work through the Labour Exchanges.Footnote 34
Conscientious Objection and the Impact on Hope and Frank in RMCM
The Military Service Act of 1916 introduced conscription to Great Britain for the first time. Before this Act, the armed forces were generally made up of volunteers. ‘Conscientious’ objection was not specifically defined in the Military Services Act, but the government, pressed by Quaker MPs, recognized that there would be men whose objection to war, genuinely rested on political, religious or moral convictions. This was a new and confusing situation for both the authorities and the Army, as there were no clear guidelines for the local Military Tribunals that were established to deal with cases of objection. Many men who were called up often objected to conscription because of work or family commitments and only a small number declared their objection because of ‘conscience’. Most of these ‘conscientious’ objectors were not exempted from service absolutely and were obliged to serve in non-combatant roles or to face a court martial and imprisonment.Footnote 35 It is estimated that of the approximate 20,000 men who registered as conscientious objectors, some 6,000 were imprisoned as ‘absolutists’ who, like Frank, refused any engagement with alternative non-combatant service.
Frank Merrick was arrested in May 1917 in a classroom of the RMCM as he had not reported to camp as instructed to do earlier in the year, and his absence made him liable to prosecution for desertion. He was then taken to Manchester Police Station and then to the Bury depot of the Lancashire Fusiliers, where he refused to take off his clothes and put on a uniform. He refused to do any work in the Non-Combatant Corps or under the Home Office Scheme which meant agreeing to perform civilian work under civilian control in specially created Work Centres.Footnote 36 At his Central Military Tribunal at Wormwood Scrubs on 30 June 1917, Frank declared:
I regard war itself as the fundamental atrocity and the refusal to fight as the most effective antidote against it. I regard conscription as a very evil form of tyranny, against which I intend to put all the moral strength I possess. I regard my musical lifework as a contribution to the future wealth of mankind and I will not desert my art of my own free will though I recognise that it may be torn from me by force.Footnote 37
He never wavered in his stance, declaring in late 1918, just after the end of the war:
During the 17 months that I have been under lock and key I have never for a single second doubted the fact that I did absolutely and unequivocally right in coming here when I might perchance might have got out.Footnote 38
Although Hope supports Frank’s stance she wrote to him in February 1918, urging him:
I’m requested to tell you that you might ask permission to write – as a business letter – to the Tribunal here stating your present position, because on Dec 4th Lord Curzon said there were many men ‘in the army’ who would have been granted exemption by the Tribunal if they (tribunals) had understood that it was in their power to grant absolute exemption and a movement is being made to have these cases reopened.Footnote 39
Frank always refused.
Frank Merrick’s imprisonment was not formally noted in the College Minutes of Council, but his post was kept open and reactions to his decision were varied and often muted, not least in references within the minutes themselves. When Merrick was arrested the minutes of the College simply reported that he was unavailable for classes.Footnote 40 The Minutes of Council of 12 December 1916, state:
The Principal announced that Mr Merrick has been called up for Military Service and that it was necessary to make arrangement for the carrying on of his work. Resolved: that Mrs Merrick be invited to act as substitute for her husband during his temporary absence.Footnote 41
The Council followed the Board’s lead and six days later, on 20 December 1916, the Minutes of Council record:
Resolved: that Madame Hope Squire be appointed as substitute for Mr Merrick during his temporary absence as recommended by the Board’.Footnote 42
The Council was less sympathetic after Frank’s imprisonment, and the minutes of 21 March 1917 state that:
Resolved: that the Principal and Staff be reappointed with the exception of Mr Merrick whose case be reconsidered at the next meeting of the Council.Footnote 43
However, Frank’s case is never mentioned again in the official records of the College. No mention of why he was away is recorded: the RMCM probably didn’t want it on record that a CO and therefore, for all intents and purposes, a criminal, was on the staff, even though he wasn’t imprisoned as a criminal but rather because of the military offence of refusing to obey a lawful order. From the College’s point of view, this was an important distinction and accentuates the ambivalence that the RMCM felt about Frank’s stance, although it appears that the distinction was a ‘fine’ one. Hope recounts, with some amusement, in early 1918:
Another new pupil has applied this week, Frances Margison aged 17, her father very keen on sending her to you at College, and tired of waiting till the war is over wants me to take her privately till you come back. He called here and Oscar [Rothschild] interviewed him, an inimitable interview! ‘Oh, I suppose you know Mr. M is criminal and is in prison?’ Parent ‘O yes – we have to be thankful for such criminals! I shall be glad for my daughter to be under the influence of such a fine man. My son is in the Army, but only because he had to go!’ Oscar then informed the victim that he had studied the pianoforte with St Saens (!!!!!!) (sic) Mme Schumann and countless other celebrities, but none of them etc. to compare with Hope Squire!Footnote 44
Again, this shows the way in which COs were vilified, even by sympathetic friends of Hope and Frank’s like the Rothschilds, but it also reveals the way in which there might be more sympathy than imagined, for the ethical stance taken by the men who refused to fight.Footnote 45
The Centrality of Music in the Letters
The background of the musical dialogue which is apparent in the letters between Frank and Hope, lies in the work that they did individually and jointly, before and during the early years, of the war: as noted earlier, they would have been known in Manchester music circles for their regular appearances playing in concerts in the city and across the country. As mentioned earlier, both Hope and Frank were keen promoters of contemporary music, and in 1913 they gave a recital of anonymous new music in the Manchester Memorial Hall where the programme declares:
The concert gives [the] feel that there is so much difficulty in listening to unfamiliar music with an absolutely open mind, that they are venturing an experiment of withholding the names of the composers whose works are presented this evening, not with any idea of mystifying the listeners, but in order to give the music greater freedom to make its own appeal.Footnote 46
This commitment to revealing contemporary modern music in their concerts seems often at variance to the more conventional music composed in prison by Frank, although arguably, the need for familiar harmonies while in solitary confinement gave him better known tropes with which to work. In prison, Frank had access to manuscript paper, but no access to any musical instruments; but as an accomplished musician, the music was in his head.
From 1917 to 1919, Frank was in solitary confinement, but he was constantly immersed with three elements of music making that he could do in prison: composition, performing and conducting. His compositions start from July 1917, just a few months after he was imprisoned, permitting him to carry on his lifetime commitment to his ‘musical work’. In one of the early letters to Hope in October 1917, Frank writes:
Composition has been very fitful although I have done certain bits and fragments; the musical nature of many of the echoes here is rather an obstacle to such work; that is there is generally a very low pedal-note faintly audible (either as a continuous hum or marked by the rhythm of footsteps etc.) which makes modulations difficult to accomplish mentally unless one knows them beforehand, so to speak.Footnote 47
As well as composing, Frank clearly wanted to perform – at least mentally – in his cell and in the autumn of 1917, he asks Hope to send him a range of classical chamber music, some oratorios by George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), as well as the early feminist work by Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women. He asks for:
A bound volume of string quartets (miniature score) by Mozart or Haydn, Wollstonecraft’s ‘Vindication’ and failing the quartets ‘Israel’ – for ‘Judas’ was a great success. I should so like to learn the choruses, then I could feed on them at many hours of the day – for instance at exercise, when the regular steps make musical thought difficult or disagreeable and when poetry would be help indeed. … Tell Dr Brodsky I wish I could hear his quartet from time to time, I often think of it. …
I have done lots of musical work, and I believe my technique has improved, mainly in two respects, i.e. wristwork and motion of the arms from side to side while the body remains still. The latter improvement has been partly helped by much conducting, which has also helped to unstiffen some pieces from a rhythmical point of view (Chopin’s Ballade in F, Impromptu in F sharp, and some of the short Brahms pieces, etc.); it is also a better way of warming oneself than ‘tiger pacing’ because less tiring, more lasting in effect and noiseless.Footnote 48 (See Figure 3)
Manuscript written in Wormwood Scrubs prison dated July 1917. BUA DM2103/F/2Footnote 49
Figure 3 Long description
The scanned copy shows a handwritten musical manuscript laid out across three systems on a single page. System 1 contains two staves with a treble clef visible on the upper staff. The staves are separated by barlines dividing the music into measures. System 2 also contains two staves, again with treble clef notation on the upper staff and includes slur markings over groups of notes. System 3 is shorter and appears to contain one or two staves with fewer measures, suggesting a concluding passage. No key signature with sharps or flats is clearly visible at the opening of any system. No time signature is clearly legible in the image. Note values include quarter notes and eighth notes, with some beamed groups of eighth notes visible across multiple measures. Accidentals appear at various points within the staves. Slur markings and what appear to be dynamic or phrasing marks are present above and below note groups in systems 1 and 2. No lyrics or text underlay appear beneath any staff. The only text visible outside the staves is a handwritten inscription at the lower right of the page reading July 1917. No tempo marking or instrument label is visible anywhere on the page.
Six months later in May 1918, he writes:
The Handel things I principally hoped would help me to ‘think chorally’, as I can, in a measure, think in German, etc. and in wind-instrument and pianoforte music, the quartets would, I thought, help me to think in string passage-work, and thus the ‘Furies’’ or other compositions would be scored in a more animated and lively manner, without some of the players and singers doing mere automaton fill-up work (like the actions of Opera chorus-folk!). The different scores you sent have, I think, produced a very great improvement, although of actual composition there has been practically none for months.Footnote 50
One might draw two inferences from this. One is that, cut off from the opportunity to hear actual live music, Frank needed to hear it mentally by reading the scores to recreate the pieces in his head. The other is that he sought to use the scores as models for improving his own compositional technique. His request for scores by Austro-German composers explains his reference his thinking ‘in German’ and supports the observation made that, as a composer, he was largely reliant on traditional structural models. Furthermore, although his comments here point to known specific works, the compositions held at Bristol do include manuscript scores of large-scale orchestral works, including two piano concertos and a symphony.Footnote 51 They also include a substantial amount of chamber music. Despite the daily struggle to think creatively, there is a complete file of the many compositions that Frank wrote while in prison.Footnote 52 The realities of solitary confinement cannot be underestimated. But Frank’s ability ‘to think chorally’ was a coping mechanism in prison as well as a way to continue his ‘musical lifework as a contribution to the future wealth of mankind’ as he declared to the Tribunal in 1917. It is also fascinating that he ‘practices’ the piano in his cell, despite the absence of an instrument.
A concern for Hope’s situation after 1916, is another theme in their letters. Frank’s imprisonment gave Hope a new position as a piano teacher in the RMCM and gave her new responsibility for taking on Frank’s students. Hope appears in the list of tutors in late 1916 (Figure 4), when Frank’s fate as a CO became obvious. Although there were a number of women tutors at the College, including the singing teacher, Marie Brema (1856–1925), another piano teacher Ellen Arthan and violin tutor, Edith Robinson (1867–1940), they were still very much in the minority.Footnote 53
The first appearance of Hope’s name as an RMCM tutor in its staff register. RMCM/B/3/3.
In the letters, Frank and Hope discuss at length the progress of pupils. In July 1918, Hope reported that:
Edith [Hothersall] and Nelly Partington [first Frank’s pupils and then hers] all played all their diploma works so splendidly, I don’t think you could believe unless you heard. Edith’s interpretation of the Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue – when it dawned on her – was so grand, I was moved beyond words, I specially asked that she might be allowed to play it through at the exam. I expected them both to get distinction. Edith has failed 72 [see Figure 5]– Nelly passed 75 – go for teacher’s cert. I feel very indignant – of course I was tabooed as an examiner again. Mr [Hamilton] Harty said Edith had more talent than anyone in the College, but the reason given for not granting her a diploma was ‘too young and immature’. I can’t see what age has to do with it – especially in a performer – I’ve had a furious letter from Nelly who says Edith never played better and that everything went perfectly – if that is so all I can say is that there has been no playing as fine since I have known the College. Nelly declares that Max and Miss Arthan are responsible, and that Mr. Withers (the registrar) said Edith was ‘full of conceits not really musical, uneducated unrefined and had none of the instincts of a lady’. What this had to do with the exam I don’t know.Footnote 54
Edith Hothersall student report attached from teacher’s student register. RMCM/B/3/3.
The fact that Hope felt that she was ‘tabooed again’ as an examiner shows that her life at the RMCM was problematic and that she felt often sad about the unkindness shown to her by the other staff at the College. After Frank’s imprisonment in 1917, she wrote: ‘Mr. Forbes has lots of new pupils, Max just 1 – and me – none’.Footnote 55 In the spring of 1918 she wrote:
I teach at College on Tuesday & Friday from 12–1 in Dr. Brodsky’s room, from 1–4 in Max’s, Mr. Forbes having turned me out of No.12, after a guerrilla warfare which lasted all last term.Footnote 56
Hope clearly felt singled out. In January 1918 she wrote to Brodsky about how she was feeling, knowing that Brodsky was comparatively sympathetic to the situation, having been briefly interned in Germany at the start of the war. She told Frank that:
Dr BrodskyFootnote 57 has asked me to play at the next Brodsky concert. I was so amazed that I didn’t accept for 3 days as he has been so unkind to me since you left and what with the open hostility of Mr. Forbes and other things my life at College is anything but a path of roses.Footnote 58
Hope went to visit Brodsky at home in the suburb of Bowden, so they could play music together.Footnote 59
Frank reassured her:
I’m awfully interested in all the musical news; … … . I’m so glad you do lots of music with Edith H. Tell Edith H. I am tremendously pleased she got the Halle scholarship, not only for her sake and ours, but also because I believe she has the necessary persistence to go on improving in later years and thus live a musical life such as the Halle scholarship is intended to encourage.Footnote 60
Edith won the scholarship in February 1918 and went on to become a professional pianist, vindicating Hope’s faith in her abilities. However, Hope did attract some new pupils, including, in March 1918:
Ella Voysey: nearly 15, clouds of bronze, red hair like Rossetti’s pictures, remarkably intellectual having been brought up at Bedales’ school. I think she will turn out quite special – so enthusiastic.Footnote 61
But the continued hostility also affected Hope financially as well as professionally, in October 1918, she writes: ‘Pupils are leaving my tutorials and I will lose £72 a year’. And being the wife of a ‘conchie’ might have had other repercussions for Hope:
This morning also I had a cruel letter from Nelly saying she had felt for a long time past that I did not like teaching her – so under the circumstances had decided to leave – she has left, having written to Mr Withers (the registrar) making the same complaint. I am utterly mystified and I felt nearly heartbroken this morning – Winifred, Mary, Nelly, and possibly Edith – £54 if not £72 off my yearly income – all seems so black and difficult.Footnote 62
But there was support too, in early 1919, when the war had ended but the COs were not released, Hope tells Frank: ‘I was stopped in the road by a Mrs. Stoneley whose husband is a violinist in the Halle Orchestra, they absolutely worship you’.Footnote 63
Conscientious Objection and Its Impact on Daily Life
The families of conscientious objectors were under continuous strain and attack, having to defend the decision of their men. Very rarely do we hear the voice of these family, but in 1918 Hope wrote to Frank that she had defended him on the train home after a prison visit:
In my carriage 4 soldiers and 3 ladies – all talked about the war while I learned Esperanto, presently abuse and ridicule of the C.O.s. So after a few minutes I looked up and said quietly: ‘I wish to tell you that I am the wife of a Conscientious Objector’. There was a horrified silence … The arguments continued … … but in an hour all were my very good friends & eventually all expressed real appreciation of the real C.O.s whom they knew nothing about and declared that they could not stand Solitary Confinement, even for a week.Footnote 64
It can be imagined that these are conversations that Hope had to have on a daily basis, contesting the vilification of conscientious objectors and explaining the reality of their incarceration. For example, something that depressed Frank while he was in prison was the lack of colour in his life. Hope knitted him a bright red scarf and when he wore it in the prison yard in December 1918, he declared, ‘Thanks for the lovely scarf: its debut in the exercise yard might be described as triumphant!’Footnote 65 When he was moved to Wandsworth in September 1918, after a year in Wormwood Scrubs, he writes:
A rare event, the transference, which had its pleasures and its humours. Among the former was the very considerable one of beholding everyday things as women, children, policemen, dogs, horses, trams, motors and advertising hoardings. Only one cat did I behold [Hope and Frank had two cats, Mr Matthew and Mousegorski, whom they adored] but it was a very distinguished one – a dark Persian tabby located in a doorway, blinking its exceedingly green eyes with an air of great wisdom and gravity. Shepherds Bush Green now entirely devoted to allotments, scarlet runners and old-fashioned sunflowers.Footnote 66
There were other deprivations in prison too. Frank’s vegetarian diet was allowed but was very restricted and, in another letter, he thanked Hope for a parcel of toothpaste as he had been using brick dust to clean his teeth. He recalled too the terrible silence rule within the prison and the relief at being able to talk briefly to fellow COs in the exercise yard.Footnote 67
In Manchester there were over 300 local conscientious objectors and Hope and Frank would have received support and advice from them and from the local Manchester branch of the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF), an organization established in Manchester soon after the outbreak of war, by socialist/pacifists Fenner and Lila Brockway.Footnote 68 After 1916, the NCF developed a local Maintenance Committee in the city which collected monies from sympathisers and distributed food, clothes and a newsletter to local families. Hope refers to this in a letter to Frank when she was discussing her socialist friend Phillis Skinner, a neighbour whose husband, Allen Skinner, was also a CO,Footnote 69 Allan had been recently released from prison on the grounds of ill-health:
She (Phillis) goes to see him [Allan Skinner] every day; she tramps miles and what she lives on – heaven knows-for she is without means. I keep her supplied with bits of this and that. Mrs Watts (from the Maintenance Committee) is awfully good and 1 or 2 others. But she is very proud and won’t have help from the members.Footnote 70
Hope was not wealthy herself particularly when her pupils left or were moved to another tutor at RMCM, so perhaps she had some empathy with other CO families who were relying on the good will of others.
Arguably, what was different during the war was that Hope and Frank came into much closer contact with the local working class, drawn together by an anti-war stance that was shared across social class and generation, and they began to build friendships and relationships that cut across these divides. In August 1918, Hope writes:
Mrs HayesFootnote 71 has married Mr Rodway, recently discharged from prison on ill health, he is getting surprisingly better. His firm have received him with open arms and gave him a cheque for £10 to go and have a holiday. What a difference and there is a saint like [Harold] Webster (another local CO) still looking for a post and can’t get in anywhere.Footnote 72
Frank and Ted Rodway had been in Wormwood Scrubs together and Frank replied: ‘I am glad Rodway is out – I think his was the first CO face I saw when Childe Merrick to the dark tower came’.Footnote 73 Ted Rodway was a warehouseman and it is unlikely that the Rodways and Merricks would have known each other before the war.
The Merricks would have known the socialist Brockways through the Independent Labour Party (ILP), the No Conscription Fellowship (NCF) and the Women’s International League (WIL). Fenner Brockway (1888–1988) was the editor of the radical socialist Labour Leader and on 6 August 1914, two days after the outbreak of war, he covered the whole front page of the newspaper with an anti-war manifesto and the slogan DOWN WITH THE WAR. Fenner Brockway was arrested in 1916 for distributing anti-war material and then as a conscientious objector, spending the next two and a half years in prison. His wife Lilla Brockway was the instigator for the creation of the NCF in the autumn 1914, though this is often overlooked.Footnote 74
Hope and Frank were also friends with several other nationally well-known activists, like the trade union activist Annie Somers, who had worked with the Women’s Hospitals in France, and who wrote to Frank and visited him in prison.Footnote 75 This, combined with their friendship with influential people like the suffrage and anti-war Pethick Lawrences and Margaret Ashton, indicates that both Hope and Frank had a wide cultural and political network that stretched across the country. The letters also refer to activism in Liverpool, Sheffield and Bristol as well as London, demonstrating that they were aware of the lively network of activists across the country.Footnote 76
Frank and Hope would have known many of the other local NCF members: certainly many of them were in the Independent Labour Party (ILP), although there is no record of either Hope or Frank attending local ILP meetings. On 25 January 1918, Hope wrote to Frank, ‘The gas man who replaced Mr Lowe, I’ve converted to the ILP’.Footnote 77 Lowe, the gas man, had been arrested at Warrington and Hope told Frank that ‘he will be turning up at W. Scrubs’.Footnote 78 Local suffrage and socialist ILP women like Annot Robinson and Dorothy Smith sent Frank good wishes, and in October 1917, Hope sent greetings to Frank from the Mayers, Rothschilds, Isaacs, Robinsons, Dr Brodsky, Bauerkellers, Crewe Lucas, Unwins, the Normans, Stewarts and others, revealing a close and supportive friendship network.Footnote 79 Hope declared that: ‘I’m an anti-militarist and anti-snob [and] would rather see class co-operation. I want to do away with the extreme rich and extreme poverty’.Footnote 80 Hope writes a great deal about some of the other Manchester Conscientious Objectors, particularly a local plumber William Galtry, from Longsight, a working-class area in S. Manchester. Galtry had been in Wormwood Scrubs with Frank. Hope writes in August 1918 when Galtry had been released on the grounds of ill health:
The poor Galtrys have been having an awful time over the last two weeks since G came home. They had to have police protection every night – of course they live in a low district [sic], All this rough work is being done by gangs organised by Pendlebury, a shining light of the British Worker’ Union and a member of the War Aims Society, the same man who unsuccessfully tried to upset Mrs. Pethick Lawrence’s great [peace] do in Stevenson Square.Footnote 81
This was at a time when many peace meetings were broken up and stopped by the police and the ‘gangs’ mentioned by Hope. The years between 1914 and 1918 brought a dramatic advance in British counterespionage, taking it from a small, specialized system dedicated to the detection of German secret agents, to a vast intelligence-gathering network, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds each year, and collecting information on virtually anyone opposed to government policy.Footnote 82 The draconian Defence of the Realm Act (DORA), precursor to the Anti-Terrorism Act, was constantly updated bringing more and more people into its orbit.
Domestic Life
Frank and Hope lived in an Edwardian semi-detached villa which they rented in the suburb of Withington where they had a dedicated music room; Hope painted the music room emerald green and their bedroom peacock blue. Their neighbours included the remarkable local councillor, Margaret Ashton, who was also a very visible anti-war campaigner; the Herford family, who were involved in the NCF and the University; and William Whittaker, an anti-war Unitarian minister. Hope writes with a wealth of specific detail about life on the home front, the price of food, vegetarian recipes and other minutiae of life. When Phillis Skinner and her co-conspirator Maud Hayes came round for supper in June 1918, Hope told Frank: ‘I gave them some rissoles made of barley and lentils, a thing made from macaroni and mixed nuts, lettuce, bread and butter and a chocolate blancmange – I had a bit of luck as my neighbours had gone away and left me a ¼ lb of butter and nearly a pint of milk’.Footnote 83
Hope, like Frank a vegetarian, writes about the scarcity of vegetables and the increasing price of food and coal. However, music ws always at the forefront of her mind, and she told Frank that she ‘swapped my 5lbs of sugar savings for 7 overtures by Beethoven’.Footnote 84 She writes of planning to plant her small suburban garden with broad beans, scarlet runner beans, peas, onions, carrots, turnips as well as sweet peas, stocks and pansies. The price of food is a constant theme and by October Hope talks of rationing. In November 1918 she observes that ‘eggs are 7d each Coal 40/= a ton [£90 today] Milk 8d a quart’.Footnote 85 There are details about the price of coal and the continuing rise in the cost of living. By the winter of 1918, candles are to be rationed.Footnote 86
Of course the war raised new opportunities for women. Hope wrote about their friend Mrs Craven Sykes, in the autumn 1918:
I encountered Mrs. Craven who said that she was nearly worn out – I said why did she keep on the Red Cross work – she said ‘Well, I’ll tell you – you don’t know what my life is because your husband is a “sport”. I’ve spent all my life drudging and slaving after the opposite sex – my father wants as much waiting on as a child, my husband is the same, my only child is a boy, – I started life with a better brain than any of my brothers, but I only got half an education – and I’ll stick this R.C. work till I drop, because it’s my only chance of hobnobbing with a few well educated women, and getting away from the drudgery of home. I don’t mind work but I am so sick of being looked upon as a creature with no brain.Footnote 87
This letter speaks for many women after 1914. The First World War often created new opportunities for both working class and middleclass women, but it also raised issues about equality of pay and working conditions in munitions and other trades that absorbed women:
[In Manchester] several thousands of women and girls had entered the engineering shops. Dressmakers, workers from the various making trades, domestic servants, cotton operatives, girls straight from school and a proportion of married women including soldiers’ wives all became busy in producing the munitions of war.Footnote 88
The women in Manchester who opposed the war, like Hope Squire, came, predominantly, from suffrage, socialist and religious backgrounds and most of them brought pre-war lobbying and campaigning skills as well as political knowledge, personal networks and organizational experience to the changing wartime situation.Footnote 89 These women were simultaneously and paradoxically, ordinary and extraordinary. This was the world that Hope found herself in after Frank’s imprisonment.
Conclusion
The significance of these letters is that they reveal the complicated ways that lives are lived in a time of total war: they reveal provincial groups of suffrage, socialist and pacifist activists connected to a wider network of anti-war activism across the country and throughout Europe. They also shed light on the deprivations faced by the families of both working-class and middle-class men who were imprisoned for refusing to fight.
The correspondence between Frank and Hope is remarkable for giving insights into their close personal relationship, their intertwined professional musical lives, and the depth of their shared political commitments, which was put to the test during Frank’s incarceration. The letters also reveal the ways in which the resistance to the war cut through class and political affiliations in an industrial city like Manchester and it is probable that Hope and Frank’s experience was replicated across the country. They enable the reader to explore how Frank’s decision to register as a conscientious objector disrupted both their domestic and professional lives. The domestic details of Hope’s letters show the impact of the war on daily domestic life. Running through the letters is the sense of a regional and national ‘anti-war’ community which transcended class and generation, and which supported both Frank and Hope.
There was a general outcry about the fact that COs were not released at the end of the war, but the Government was adamant, despite a flurry of public meetings and a national petition launched by Lord Lansdowne. Both Hope and the College wanted to intervene to hasten his release, but Frank refused any preferential treatment, and he was not released until 24 April 1919 (see Figure 6). Even at this frustrating time, music is always in the forefront of their correspondence, and so, on Christmas Eve, Tuesday 24 December 1918, Frank wrote:
It seems grimly appropriate that people of our persuasion should still be persecuted by the direst of all penalties – separation from each other – at this Christmas season. For it is we who hold in the extension of Universal Goodwill lies the only practical hope of making a happier world. I fully share your love of moonlight; so did Debussy, did he not?Footnote 90
Frank’s discharge papers 2 April 1919. BUA DM2103.
The last letter from Frank is 21 April 1919 – still discussing setting poetry to music– like the old days. It is uncertain what happened on Frank’s release – one can only imagine the delight with which they must have embraced each other. They remained married until Hope’s death in 1935.
These letters create a fascinating narrative, revealing the dual dedication to both music and political activism in Frank and Hope’s lives. To the historian of music, Frank’s extraordinary dedication to composing, performing and conducting while in solitary confinement for nearly two years, is quite astonishing. For an historian of the anti-war movement in Manchester and the Northwest, they offer an extraordinary glimpse into the progressive networks that existed in an industrial city like Manchester in the early twentieth century. To an historian of women’s anti-war activism, the letters have provided an extraordinary glimpse into the daily life on the Home Front for a working and progressive woman like Hope.
After Brodsky’s death in 1929, when Mr. Forbes, who was very hostile to them both, became Principal of the RMCM, Hope and Frank moved to London where Frank became a professor at the Royal College of Music. Hope died not long afterwards, in 1935, at the age of 57. Frank remarried but kept all Hope’s letters and her music, where they can be found in their joint papers at Bristol University Archive. His musical tribute to Hope was a broadcast on the BBC’s National Programme, on Thursday 7 July 1938, called The Music of Hope Squire. Hope Squire and Frank Merrick were indeed, for a moment in time and in one sphere of their lives, ‘white hot rebels’.
Open access
