[Vwoolf] "a letter of introduction” in "A Room"

[Stuart N. Clarke]

“a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.”

We now know that this is not correct as far as Trinity College Library is concerned (see VWB No. 6, p.30), but, following the suffragette slashing of the Rokeby Venus in March 1914, “At the British Museum, women could be admitted only if they were accompanied by a man or, if unaccompanied, could produce a letter of recommendation from a gentleman.” (Bostridge, Mark (2014), The Fateful Year: England 1914, London: Viking, imprint of Penguin Books, p.52)

In the 1970s I met a centenarian Australian, who had been a governess in London before and during the First World War (like VW, she noted how terrified the servants were of the Zeppelins), and she remembered how you couldn’t go into the National Gallery and elsewhere with an umbrella, etc.

“That cupboard there,—you say it holds clean table-napkins only; but what if Sir Archibald Bodkin were concealed among them?”
Bodkin (1862–1957) was a lawyer and Director of Public Prosecutions (1920–30), in which role he was particularly committed to the suppression of what he regarded as obscene literature.

Diego Velázquez’ (1599–1660) “Venus at her Mirror” (the “Rokeby Venus”) in the National Gallery, London, was axed by the suffragette Mary Raleigh Richardson (1882–1961) on 10 March 1914.  She and Rachel Peace had previously set fire to “The Elms” in Hampton, Surrey (unfortunate, because the empty house was owned by the Countess of Carlisle, “an ardent, though non-militant, campaigner for women’s rights”).  Miss Peace alone appeared at the Old Bailey, as Miss Richardson “was too ill through hunger-striking”.  “The trial was remarkable for the pandemonium which broke out.”  Anyway, it is pleasant to read that one of the demonstrators “succeeded in hitting the gown of Mr. (later Sir) Archibald Bodkin, the prosecuting counsel, with an over-ripe tomato”.  (It was worth paying the £9 for "The Women's Suffrage Movement in and around Richmond and Twickenham" just for that).

Stuart
(Day 39)
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