SUNDAY SUPPLEMENT: Born in the reign of Queen Victoria, she died when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, Dora Russell was an academic, a campaigner for women’s rights and world peace, who met Chairman Mao and supported the Bolshevik Revolution. DAVID MORGAN details some of her many achievements
School founders: Bertrand and Dora Russell pictured in 1931, at Beacon Hill School
Imagine a school where it is considered more important to clean your teeth regularly than to go to formal lessons. Think of a child being able to roam through the 200-acre school grounds with deer and rabbits and with trees which could be climbed to your heart’s content, without a care in the world for health and safety. Put yourself in the shoes of prospective parents hearing that co-operation is better than competition, and that the best way to teach democracy is to run the school on democratic lines.
Almost one hundred years ago, in 1927, such a free-thinking school was opened about 70 miles from Croydon, near Petersfield in Sussex. The founders were the philosopher Bertrand Russell and his second wife, Dora. Croydon-born Dora was an intellectual, progressive in both her thinking and in her lifestyle, who achieved national acclaim during her lifetime, but who has been largely forgotten.
Dora Black was born in Thornton Heath in 1894, the second child of Frederick Black, a senior civil servant who was knighted in 1913 for his work in the Admiralty as director of naval contracts. The family home where Dora was born was 1 Mount Villas, Luna Road, Thornton Heath.
Influential: Sir Frederick Black, Dora’s father
In 1906, Black took 12-year-old Dora up into London to see the celebrations after the Liberal Party won a landslide victory in the General Election, placing Henry Campbell-Bannerman into Downing Street as Prime Minister. Being part of that exultant crowd made a big impression on young Dora. “I was carried away by the mass emotion, utterly intoxicated by it all,” she recalled many years later.
Frederick Black was a volunteer teacher at Morley College, an adult education institution for “working men and women” founded in Waterloo towards the end of the 19th Century by the philanthropist Emma Cons, after she had taken over the nearby Old Vic theatre.
Black wanted the best for his daughters as well as his sons – Dora was the second of four children – and so after a period of private education, she went to Sutton High School having won a scholarship. She is still remembered and talked about in the school today, as one of the school houses is named after her.
Dora won a scholarship to Girton College, Cambridge, where she studied modern languages. She blossomed in her new surroundings. She joined the Heretics Society, founded by CK Ogden, a noted linguist, philosopher and eccentric, and she began to disassemble the traditional world view which she had encountered in her early life. Any Christian faith she held was discarded. Women, she reasoned, needed to change the patriarchal systems. Her first steps on a life of feminism and activism had begun.
She met Bertrand Russell in 1916.
Russell was by then very well-known – born into the aristocracy, he was the grandson of Lord Russell, the 18th Century Prime Minister. Following the early deaths of both his parents, Bertrand was brought up in the elderly Lord Russell’s household. Of giant intellect, after studying at Cambridge, Bertrand Russell became a fellow of the university, where his work marked him out as a mathematician and logician.
He was also a pacifist. In 1916, during World War I, Russell was tried and convicted for his anti-war activities and fined £100 (equivalent to £7,500 today), which he refused to pay in the hope that he would be sent to prison. He was thwarted when the authorities seized his possessions and sold some of the academic’s collection of books at auction to pay the fine. The books were bought by friends; he later treasured his copy of the King James Bible that was stamped “Confiscated by Cambridge Police”.
Intellectual giant: Dora Russell
It was not long after he met Dora Black, then in her early twenties, that the 44-year-old Russell asked her to marry him. She refused because her feminist outlook viewed marriage as a restriction on women’s liberty. She did, however, agree to live with him, reflecting her beliefs in sexual freedom, and scandalising Edwardian society of the time.
She joined Russell’s campaign against military conscription, which in 1918 led to Russell’s incarceration in Brixton Prison for offences under the Military Service Act.
After his release, at the end of the war, he and Dora left Britain to visit Russia and China.
In China, she was known as the “very intellectual Miss Black.” She met Mao Zedong when he was a librarian in what was then known as Peking. He was, declared Dora, “tremendously anti-Marxist but also a confirmed socialist”.
On their return, Dora then went to Paris. She read at the Bibliotheque Nationale and sketched out ideas for a satirical musical about concepts of god. All the while, Russell badgered her to marry him. In the end Dora agreed, by which time she was pregnant.
In 1921 they married, without vows of monogamy, two months after their son John was born. The ceremony took place at Battersea Town Hall and Dora Black wore a wedding dress of black.
Vote Labour!: Dora Russell out campaigning in 1924
They were married for 12 years, probably the most hectic of Dora’s life. During that time, she had four children, two of them fathered by her American journalist lover Griffin Barry. She published four books, one of them Hypatia; Women and Knowledge being most controversial among those who disagreed with her stance on sexual freedom.
She stood for Parliament as a Labour candidate in the Chelsea constituency at the 1924 General Election, losing to the Unionists.
And she opened the new school, Beacon Hill in Sussex.
On top of all that, she was a very prominent campaigner for birth control. “Pregnancy was four times more dangerous than coal mining,” she told Parliament and the Minister of Health, “and coal mining was the most dangerous of all occupations.”
She campaigned on behalf of the Labour Party for birth control clinics. One of her supporters on this subject was HG Wells, the author.
But in 1925, the Labour Party decided not to continue their support for the clinics, fearing it would alienate Roman Catholic voters. Dora was never again enamoured with the Labour Party.
She also wrote a column in Spain’s El Sol, published in Madrid from 1926 to 1930. “Like men, we have a romantic period in adolescence, but then we grow up and they so often don’t,” she wrote.
Motherhood and running a school sharpened her thinking about children and their rights. “There is not a word in the whole Ten Commandments about the rights of children. But there are injunctions as to their duties. God, property and parents are the object of prime concern.”
Children not only had rights she argued, they “had a right to be happy”.
Science lessons at Beacon Hill comprised forays into the woods, where the children could explore and ask questions. Conversations between the pupils were often in French and German as well as English. Her young charges were encouraged to stage original plays.
During the 1920s and 30s, Dora Russell was unusual in the Bohemian and radical company that she kept in that she actively parented her four children. She was able to call on help of a nanny, though.
The experience of bringing up four children made her realise the struggles which many women were forced to live through, with constant pregnancies and a financial straitjacket. Dora never forgot the indignity, as she saw it, of her mother having to justify her household spending to her father.
In 1931, Bertrand Russell’s brother Frank died, and so he succeeded to the hereditary title of Earl Russell and a seat in the House of Lords. Dora became a Countess. Their marriage, though, was in serious difficulty. Eventually, Russell left Dora for their children’s governess, Patricia Spence. The other love of her life, the Griffin Barry, went back to the States.
Formidable: Dora Russell, a founder member of CND, remained politically active into her 90s
The Russells’ divorce was both painful and financially damaging to Dora. He took their children away from Beacon Hill, stopped his funding for it and used the laws he had previously decried to end their union.
She was left with alimony for his children and their house in Cornwall, where they used to go for their summer holidays. She struggled to keep the school going, regularly seeking new funds and donations.
With the outbreak of World War II, the school transferred to her Cornish house, Carn Voel near Porthcurno, but it closed in 1943. Dora was employed during the war by the Central Office of Information, editing the British Chronicle.
After the war, Dora continued to be an active campaigner for peace. Her pacifist stance had begun when she was still young, seeing how rich some people had got on the back of the munitions contracts her father was procuring for the Royal Navy. She was a founder member of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The detonation of the atom bomb, she wrote, jolted women awake. “If men had perverted physics to produce this abomination, what else might their multifarious scientific escapades yield?”
Even when elderly, she visited Greenham Common to join women protesting against American cruise missiles based there.
One protestor remembered her: “There were about 10 women in the protest camp. We were stood around a big fire in big coats, woolly hats and wellies. Then all of a sudden, gliding towards us in nothing thicker than a sweater came Dora Russell. She was in her 90s by then. She looked so small and fragile, I thought she’d freeze to death, but she didn’t shiver once. I’m not sure she even noticed the cold. She was an old lady made of steel.”
Her life was not without its personal tragedies. Her eldest son John succumbed to mental illness in 1954 and his daughter, Lucy, lost her life protesting against the Vietnamese War in the ’70s. Dora’s youngest son, Roderick, a Korean War resister, was assigned to work in a coal mine but was paralysed from the waist down in a colliery accident when he was 24. He died aged 50.
Dora Russell, a Humanist, died in May 1986, aged 92. She lived a remarkable life. It began in Thornton Heath in the reign of Queen Victoria and ended in her house near Land’s End while Margaret Thatcher was the Prime Minister.
“Fundamentally, men have always loved themselves and their purposes better than they have loved women.” Candidates have one hour to write their answer, using one side of the paper only.
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Some previous articles by David Morgan:
- Gordon family’s service that stretched through the generations
- That was the writer that was: Addiscombe girl called the tunes
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
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