Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (73 page)

News items courtesy of
The Scotsman
Archive.

Gertrude Jekyll

by M.M. Bennetts

S
he wasn’t a queen or a princess. Nor was she a pawn. She was denied neither education nor legal standing. Yet through her extra-ordinary life, her quietly pioneering work, and her writings, she has exerted more practical influence over how the 20th century British viewed their surroundings and what they did with them than any person before or since. And she was a Victorian woman.

Her name is Gertrude Jekyll (pronounced to rhyme with treacle).

She was born on 29 November 1843 (just five years into Victoria’s reign), the fifth of seven children born to Captain Edward Jekyll, who was an officer in the Grenadier Guards, and his wife, Julia Hammersley. The family was well-to-do, though not titled, and living at 2 Grafton Street in Mayfair at the time of her birth.

When she was nearly five, the Jekyll family moved to a sprawling country house near Guildford in Surrey, called Bramley House. Situated just off the Horsham Road, in the fertile Wey Valley, the house was surrounded by lush green meadows where cattle grazed in fields edged and speckled with cow parsley and buttercups.

There, with her many siblings, Gertrude was encouraged to wander first in the garden and latterly, farther afield, exploring the park with its streams, woods, and mill-ponds, climbing trees, playing cricket with her brothers, and learning first-hand all about plants, flowers, and the landscape—studying the outcrops of sandstone, eroded by time, the heaths, the tree roots. She also had the benefit of good governesses who taught her languages, music, and art, and in this “age of liberal indulgence” her parents elected for her to continue to study all three.

As she matured into young womanhood, her greatest desire was to be an artist, so in 1861, her parents enrolled her at the South Kensington School of Art to study painting. Jekyll was among the first handful of women to be taught at art school—where she studied the works of great artists, but most especially the work of J.M.W. Turner and his use of colour.

In the autumn of 1863, she travelled to Corfu, Crete, Rhodes, Athens and Constantinople—drawing and sketching.

Upon her return home, she met John Ruskin, and through him came into contact with that new wave of British artistry, the Arts and Crafts Movement. She visited William Morris, went to lectures by John Ruskin, met Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Through Morris’s influence, she began design and embroidery, as well as beginning to work in metal and wood. Indeed, her diary for these years mentions frequent meetings with the greats of Victorian art such as Frederick Leighton and G.W. Watts.

And year after year, she travelled abroad—to France, Italy, or Spain. She spent a winter in Algiers. She visited the great gardens of Europe and the Near East.

By the time she was thirty, she had gained a reputation for carving, modelling, house-painting, carpentry, smith’s work, repousse work, gilding, wood-inlaying, embroidery, gardening, and all manner of herb and flower knowledge and culture.

In 1868, the family had left Bramley Park to move to a house in Berkshire that Edward Jekyll had inherited. But when he died in 1876, the family members who remained at home decided to return to Surrey. They bought land high on Munstead Heath, near Godalming and the Wey valley and hired an architect to build them a house there.

And it was there that Gertrude Jekyll really began to come into her own as she spent more and more of her time creating the garden there at Munstead. Indeed, within four years, the garden was already sufficiently famous to merit a visit from the first President of the National Rose Society, Dean Hole, and from William Robinson, the editor of
The Garden
.

Jekyll then bought a plot on the other side of the lane from Munstead Heath, and there developed the ideas that would transform the gardening culture of Victorian England—from one of formality and carpet bedding, as she called it, to a marriage of colour and contrast, of cool to balance hot, of shape and scent, and year-round beauty.

Over the course of her life, she wrote thirteen books on gardens and gardening, and made plans for or helped to make the plans for some 350 gardens.

Her advice often flew in the face of what had been accepted practice for decades and replaced it with a hands-on love of gardening, of the processes of creating a garden, from double-digging the beds to arranging leaf-shapes to compliment each other, to planting herbaceous perennials in naturalistic drifts of colour as a painter—indeed painting a picture with plants—and using all that she had gleaned from her years studying art.

Among her favourite colour dynamics was the creation of a long and deep border of graduated harmonies that set pink against grey foliage at each end then fused into white flowering plants which bled into pale yellow into pale blue, then into darker blues punctuated by stronger yellows, oranges, and vibrant reds back into the oranges, yellows, and on until the softened misty edges of palest pink against the silvery greys of catmint, stachys, and artemisia. It was a blending and use and understanding of colour worthy of Turner himself.

Jekyll was 46 when she first met the young architect Edwin Lutyens, and their collaboration of house and garden design and decoration is one of the significant partnerships of the early 20th century. Though many of their houses and gardens remain, some having been ruined and then restored, many of them have disappeared, so it is through Jekyll’s prolific and delightful writings and garden plans that she is best known to us today.

Always blunt-spoken, never shying from controversy, her writings are practical and witty, honest, engaging, and wry. (She used to refer to the smell of one plant as “housemaid’s armpit”.) And through them all there runs a theme of looking deeply and well at everything, of learning to look and to see as an artist. Whether it’s the shape of a leaf or the vivid contrast of colours or the spill of foliage against crumbling stone, she encourages one to see what’s really there, not what habit tells us is there. Is the bark of a tree really brown? Or is it black and tan and crumbling mould and mottled moss?

To learn how to perceive the difference and how to do right is to apprehend gardening as a fine art. In practice it is to place every plant or group of plants with such thoughtful care and definite intention that they shall form a part of the harmonious whole, and that successive portions, or in some cases even single details, shall show a series of pictures. It is so to regulate the trees and undergrowth of the wood that their lines and masses come into beautiful form and harmonious proportion; it is to be always watching, noting and doing, and putting oneself meanwhile into closest acquaintance and sympathy with growing things.

And that seeing, for Miss Jekyll, was the beginning of the magic, the art, and the process that is a garden....

Battle of Isandlwana, 22 January 1879

by Richard Denning

T
he twenty-second of January is the anniversary of two battles that were fought only miles apart—one of which was a great defeat for the British, and the other, the action in which the greatest number of Victoria crosses were handed out.

The Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 started with a great defeat for the British invaders. On 22 January, 20,000 Zulus overwhelmed a force of 1800 British and allied troops on the plain beneath the mountain of Isandlwana and destroyed it. An entire battalion of British Infantry was wiped out to the last man. It was a defeat that stunned a Victorian Britain accustomed to victory and conquest.

This battle, along with the stubborn and heroic defence of Rorke’s Drift that night by the British garrison there, has always been of interest to me as it seems to exemplify the heights of human heroism (exhibited by both sides), coupled with the depths of folly and horrors that only war can bring.

Background

The origins of the conflict with the Zulus in 1879 have strange parallels with the conflicts in the Gulf and the Middle East. In recent times, the U.S. and allies’ interventions in the Gulf have been seen by some as spurred on by a concern about access to oil. Whether that is true or not of the present day, the British government in Cape Town in 1879 did not take much of an interest in the interior of South Africa, and much less in Zululand, until diamonds and other resources were discovered there. Then, suddenly, efforts and policies were introduced aimed towards confederation of the various colonies under a strong British rule.

Amongst the territories brought under the British Crown were Natal and the Boers’ homeland of Transvaal. The Boers’ main enemy and rival was the strong and powerful independent nation that had arisen under Shaka Zulu in the 1830s. A nation that could put 25,000 warriors in the field was a threat to the security of Transvaal and ultimately all of South Africa. Or at least that is the way that Sir Henry Frere—the British governor—looked at it.

Frere sent Cetshwayo, the Zulu king, a series of demands and ultimatums insisting that he disband his army and allow a British governor into his capital Ulundi. Frere knew that Cetshwayo would never agree to that, and when the Zulu king declined his demands, the British General Chelmsford was ordered to invade.

Chelmsford’s original plan envisaged splitting his army into five columns which would invade and converge on Ulundi. Chelmsford himself accompanied the central columns (II and III). They marched to the mission station at Rorke’s Drift and on 11 January began the invasion. It would have been better to have waited a few weeks as in January there was heavy rain and as a result moving a large army with baggage and artillery would take a long time. However, Frere was eager to have the matter resolved and so the British went in. The result was that it took many days for the central column to assemble fully inside Zululand at a base Chelmsford had established beneath an odd shaped mountain called Isandlwana.

What Happened

Cetshwayo heard of the invasion soon after it had begun and on 17 January ordered 24,000 men to move towards Isandlwana, although some 4000 split off to move towards Column I. On 21 January the Zulu Impi had arrived near the British camp. Chelmsford’s scouts had seen it approach but could not fix its location precisely, so on the twenty-second, Chelmsford decided to take half his force away on a march to try and locate the enemy.

This left Major Pulleine, a staff officer and administrator, in the base with his 1700 men. Chelmsford had refused to order the camp to form into a laager—a reinforced camp with wagons around the outside, trenches, and thorn bushes to impede attack. He did not feel it was necessary and was scathing of the threat posed by the Impi.

This mistake would prove to be costly, for the Zulu commander had outmanoeuvred Chelmsford, and whilst the British general was chasing around trying to locate him, the Impi moved forward in readiness to fall on Pulleine.

The crunch happened when a patrol of Natal mounted troops attached to the British command moved out of the camp to scout some valleys to the north east. There, in a valley within a couple of miles of the camp, was the entire Zulu army. The Zulus rose up as one and attacked the fleeing horsemen and followed them up and out onto the plain.

Pulleine formed the 24th Foot up into firing lines, and the British Infantry began pouring volleys from their Martini Henry Rifles into the enemy ranks. The Zulus fell in droves but still came on—massing and waiting to charge. Actually the redcoats held the vast numbers away for a long time but then something went wrong.

Around 1:15 p.m. that day, the Natal irregular companies out on the British right wing were outflanked and fell back. More or less at that moment, Pulleine was ordering the Regular companies to pull back to shorten their line. There was also a shortage of ammunition reaching the forward companies. There was a vast supply in the camp but for some reason it was not being handed out quickly enough. A combination of these factors meant that the previously pinned Zulu Impi was able to charge the British line.

Gaps appeared in the companies; then the gaps widened as the warriors surged through them. In a matter of fifteen minutes the Zulu army overwhelmed the British and the wings of the Impi swung in to deny escape to all save a lucky 80 or so men. The colour party with the regimental and the Queen’s flag wrapped the flags around the chests of two officers who made a bid to reach the Buffalo River and Rorke’s Drift. Their bodies were later found in the river, where they had fallen.

It was all over in a flash, and the British had suffered a huge defeat.

Aftermath

Cetshwayo had ordered that the Impi should not invade Natal and should stop on his side of the border. However, about four thousand Zulus who had not fought at Isandlwana decided to attack the British base at the mission station of Rorke’s Drift. Throughout the night of the twenty-second to the twenty-third of January, they led repeated attacks against a single company of about 100 British who fortified it. Eleven Victoria crosses would be handed out for the bravery of officers and men in the 24th Foot stationed there. The Zulus broke off the attack in the morning.

Cetshwayo had missed two opportunities to inflict a decisive defeat. His Impi had neither attacked the column under Chelmsford nor captured Rorke’s Drift. As a result, the war was not yet over.

News of the defeat at Isandlwana reached London on 11 February and caused an uproar. It literally stunned the nation, and even the Queen demanded to know why her soldiers were fighting the Zulus. It is small wonder then that the subsequent news of Rorke’s Drift arriving hot on the heels of the disaster was greeted with enthusiasm.

Nevertheless, the defeat led to a calling off of the January invasion. It would be June before the British army would be in a state to resume the war, and July before the Impi were defeated at the Battle of Ulundi. Cetshwayo was captured by the British in August but, perhaps in recognition of the bravery of his army, was treated pretty well and became something of a celebrity in London where he was allowed to live on a pension for the rest of his life. His kingdom, however, was absorbed into the British Territory of South Africa.

So then, a terrible battle and a tragic outcome for a brave warrior people, the Battle of Islandwana remains a dramatic moment in history. In my novel,
Tomorrow’s Guardian
, Edward Dyson, an officer in the 24th, is believed to have perished in the battle. Tom and his companion Septimus travel back in time to rescue him and bring him to the present day.