Joan Arbuthnot - her fame and her later life

Recently, while visiting Glengarriff, I learned a great deal more about the life of my cousin Dorothy St. Felix JACKSON (1887-1964). Some of the stories that I was told by local people who had known her rekindled my curiosity about her social circle. This led me to take a closer look at the life of Joan ARBUTHNOT, and she turned out to be a close friend of one of Dorothy’s close friends. I have already covered some of Joan’s backstory in my post on The Childhood homes of Joan Arbuthnot, and in a later post, I will explore what can be gleaned from looking at their shared three degrees of separation.

Joan Arbuthnot aka Irene Joan Grace ARBUTHNOT (1904-1997) was famous – in her time – for her memoir/travelogue More Profit Than Gold. It told the story of the year and a half spent seeking gold and diamonds with her uncle Major Maurice Bernal BLAKE (1878-1934), his wife Gwendolyn White BLAKE née RICHARDSON (1894-1944) and her close friend Rachel Veronica Rose LEIGH-WHITE (1906-1985) - of Bantry House, Co. Cork - in the jungles of British Guiana (as it was called then). Before they had even set out, newspaper coverage about all this went viral. In the opening chapter, Joan mentions the impact of these early articles:

At last, shortly before Christmas, an appalling headline appeared in the evening paper. ‘Society gold rush! Mayfair girl tired of parties!’

Aware that some announcement impended but never suspecting anything so silly and inaccurate I had gone out, leaving instructions with my sister to remove the offending page before anyone else saw it. This she had done, and nobody noticed its absence until one of my brothers walked in and picked up the paper.

‘What has become of the middle page he asked. There is a long account on it of Joan’s expedition.’

So another copy was sent for and then the talk began.

‘The idea is insane they told me.’

‘The British Ghana has the worst climate in the world and everyone knows the forest is the white man's grave.’

‘If you go up there you will certainly never come down.’

‘… Or if you do,’ someone else amended, ‘you will be riddled with fever and look forty.’

It did not sound a cheerful prospect.

SOURCE: More Profit Than Gold. p19. NOTE: She was 26 years old at the time.

Many such articles are online thanks to: British Newspaper Archive.

February 2, 1930. Sunday Sun, Newcastle.

February 13, 1930 Irish Times. – two days before they left on their trip

Two days after this piece was published, Joan and Rachel, sailed from Dover to Trinidad. Her uncle and aunt had headed out earlier.

Joan and Rachel, both residing at 42 Grosvenor Place, London, left from Dover on February 15, 1930 sailing for Trinidad on the S.S. Van Rensselaer

After their year and a half away, and when Joan had only just arrived back in England, the viral news coverage picked up where it had left off, all agog that one so beautiful, wealthy and wearing an oyster-satin dress at her sister’s coming out party, had just spent a year and a half in the jungle.

July 8, 1931. Evening News London.

July 9, 1931. Dundee Courier

July 10, 1931. Dundee Courier

July 17, 1931 Wilmslow Advertiser

July 18, 1931 Sport Dublin.

October 9, 1931 Otawago Daily Times

The publication of her memoir received rave reviews in England, Australia and even in the New York Times, but not long after its reissue in 1937 coverage quickly petered out. She had returned on a subsequent trip, but the news of not finding gold wouldn’t have had the same sizzle power. Peaking at such a young age can be challenging, so, how did the rest of her life play out? In some ways, she would have had the support of a family which included many powerful and accomplished women, several of whom were also writers. At the same time, her lifetime of restlessness and travel had a shadow side. It was also a bid for independence from the clutches of her redoubtable mother. In his memoir The Broken Boy, a memoir about his family as well as his experiences with childhood polio in the mid-1950s, her nephew Patrick COCKBURN framed it:

Aunt Joan had also written a book. It was about an expedition she had made-up the rivers of British Guyana into the Amazonian forest looking for gold in 1930. It's title More Profit Than Gold, was a clear indication that she did not find any. I later saw photographs of her in pith helmet and semi military brown uniform at her jungle camp with long canoes drawn up at the riverbank. My mother [Patricia Evangeline Anne COCKBURN née ARBUTHOT (1914-1989)], who had once made a language map in the forests of the Congo, spoke of Aunt Joan’s expedition as a tragic comedy because it was the demise of her sister's most rigorous attempt to escape the predominant influence of a redoubtable mother.

Aunt Joan had pitched her camp on the edge of the forest canopy and was busily digging for gold, believing her mother to be safely distant in the Bahamas or Jamaica. Olive's father Sir Henry Blake had been governor of both islands and the family still kept up a connection. Then one day a canoe appeared around a bend in the river. It moved fast through the water and in the back, time for the oarsman with her parasol, was my grandmother [Olive BLAKE (1875-1953)], dressed like a Victorian lady in full regalia. She did not stay long. She said: “Joan dear, I was getting a bit worried about you so I just thought I'd come to see how you were getting along. But I can see that everything is going splendidly.” She gave a few brisk instructions about re-pitching the tents to avoid drips from trees and, after a few hours, climbed back into her canoe to return to the mouth of the river. “She never realized,” my mother would say sadly, “that she had ruined poor Joan's bid for independence.” p80.

Joan does not mention this episode in her memoir, but later when she returned to New Guinea several ships’ manifests recorded her and her mother’s travel – always separate – on dates which align with Joan’s and her uncle’s later trips to the region to again seek gold. After that, Joan frequently visited Youghal and other family homes, visits which were fondly recalled by her nephew, Patrick Oliver COCKBURN where he also mentions Monica BALDWIN (1893-1975), one of Joan’s significant close friends:

Extremely good looking and with a strong mellow voice Joan never married. She lived for many years in a cottage in Oban in Scotland with Monica Baldwin, a nun who had fled her convent after 28 years and was a niece of Stanley Baldwin, the British Prime Minister before the war, with whom she exchanged frequent letters. Monica wrote a memoir, which did well, called I Leap Over the Wall, and was known in our family as ‘The Show Jumper’. p 79. 

MONICA BALDWIN & Joan ARBUTHNOT – the impact of their friendship.

The 1967 Edition in Nun on the Run.	Monica BALDWIN National Portrait Gallery London

Although I found no record that Monica and Joan had stayed at Oban, it is quite likely that they did. According to Pauline Annis, Monica did go to Scotland for three months [in 1942] to stay with her friend “Nikki” in Cueil Bay. Nikki’s husband was Laird of Duror of Appin. [SOURCE: Searching for Monica Baldwin Part III. Pauline Annis, Stourports Civic Society Newsletter Newsletters #46-20, 2009-2010: (later published as a chapbook). NOTE: Nikki might have been a nickname for Marjorie Descarrieres STEWART (1890-1980), the widow of Allan Winslow STEWART (1865-1953), 11th Laird of Ardshiel 14th Chief of Ardshiel, Appin & Lorn. The distance between Cuild Bay and Oban is about 41 km.

In 1946, four years after her stay in Scotland, Monica relocated to a cottage in Lamorna Cove, on the Penwith peninsula in west Cornwall, England, about 4 miles (6 km) south of Penzance. This stay was followed by four months in Ireland, and later by five months in a flat in London with her sister Frieda who was working at the BBC. It is at this point in my research that I began to feel as befuddled as the researchers portrayed by Ian McEwan in What We Can Know.

·        Who did Monica visit with in Ireland in 1946, and did she stay at Myrtle Cove or elsewhere while there? Was this visit to Ireland before or after Joan had stayed with Monica in Oban? Unfortunately, Monica burned all her personal papers before her death, so there is much that we are unlikely to ever know.

In spite of the Arbuthnot’s joke about the title of Monica’s book, it is a good fit. The family trees of the BALDWINs, like the ARBUTHNOTs, included several knights and such, including many who were active in politics, and as a result had earned (or paid for) family crests and mottos which had been passed down for generations. For example, one of the ARBUTHNOT family mottos was I move as a wave, but I flow on, while Monica’s family motto was Per deum Meum Transilio Murum - By the help of God I Leap over the Wall. The BALDWIN motto came about because of a key event in England and Scotland’s history. SOURCE: Pauline Annis:

The origins of the Baldwin family motto are interesting. Thomas Baldwin leaped to freedom from the Tower of London having been imprisoned for a plot to free Mary Queen of Scots c 1585 and his escape gave the family their motto.

In spite of their itinerant habits, connections to family homes mattered to both Joan and Monica. In Joan’s case, she often stayed with family in both Ireland and England, while Monica did likewise. While Monica was writing her first book, she stayed with a distant relative, Angela Thirkell in Pembroke Gardens, London. Thirkell’s first published book, Three Houses, was a memoir of houses she knew when young, starting with her Kensington childhood, and including portraits of some of her famous relatives. [SOURCE: Angela Thirkell’s A Writer’s Life].

In 1950 she [Monica] received an invitation to share a house with “a lady in Devon who apparently knew, slightly, somebody that I knew. Monica tells us nothing of her time in Devon but, one suspects as so often in her life, she did not stay very long. SOURCE: Pauline Annis Part Three. 

If Monica had already met up with Joan in 1946 when she was in Ireland, and if they had begun a close friendship at that time, then it is no surprise that we find them together on December 29^th, 1951, on a ship’s manifest, sailing from England to Jamaica - each recorded as authoress – and each sharing the same departure address: Byre House, Northium, Sussex. [SEE: The Byre House]. They stayed together for less than half a year. A later manifest records Joan sailing to Bristol from Jamaica via Dominica, on June 13, 1952, this time sans Monica. Her declared destination was Myrtle Grove. What came next? As they say, Mind the Gap.

Between 1963 and 1964 Monica embarked on a world tour. Edward Baldwin, the current Earl Baldwin, remembers Monica inviting him when a young man to join her in order to get the views of both the old and the young. He declined, probably wisely, as Monica soon fell out with the woman who accompanied her on her tour. The end-product of Monica’s world tour was, Goose in the Jungle: A Flight Round the World with Digressions, published in 1965.

There may have been a disruption in Monica and Joan’s relationship, but their shared bond outlasted most of Monica’s other friendships:

The day before her death, 16th November [1975], Monica drew up a new will, witnessed by the local vicar and his wife (Rev and Mrs Herbert). The whole of her estate, which amounted to just over £20,000 was left to Irene Arbuthnot, a friend. Monica was last seen alive on 17th November. She was found dead in bed on the morning of 18th November, “slumped on the bed, a bottle in her right hand and tablets in her left”. The coroner’s verdict was that death was due to: “poisoning by a combination of alcohol and barbiturates.” He further recorded that Monica Baldwin took her own life while the balance of her mind was disturbed. [SOURCE: Pauline Annis]

Monica’s life ended sadly, according to Sunday Express, November 23^rd 1975: Turbulent life of ex-nun Monica Baldwin:

At 82, a cantankerous old woman, she committed suicide in an old people’s home by drinking half a bottle of whiskey with a handful of barbiturate tablets. She had systematically destroyed her collection of letters and diaries which chronicled many years of a strange, troubled existence.

What had brought Monica and Joan together? One thing is that they shared a passion for experiences of spiritual transcendence. Joan recorded some of hers in More Profit than Gold:

Once again I felt, as I had felt when I was in the Sahara, an overwhelming sense of rightness - a rapturous consummation. Where the landscape is broken by trees, rock, hills, the attention is distracted. You admire or you do not. In either case - unless the admiration is so great as to obscure everything else, you are conscious of an irritation with these details that get between you and the something you must reach. They are small agitating objects, you feel, powerless and unimportant, that you could easily demolish if you were to take the trouble. Only when you are alone on a desert with nothing about you but the flat earth on the sky, do you feel this rightness, and with it a rising exhilaration, a sense of abiding peace, for here at last is the ultimate reality. You have done with refuge and protection, with a fearful hugging of illusion; You are face to face with that which you dreaded as emptiness, and the strange thing is that you are not appalled at its immensity.; You are not even afraid, for rising strong over everything else is a knowledge of its essential rightness, and of the rightness of the revelation between you and it. p. 61 

The water was still as glass, and the sunset threw long shadows upon it. On either side the forest spread like an impenetrable wall - over everything a feeling of unbrokenness. It is hard to describe, or even to explain exactly what I mean, but I have felt it ever since we left Morocco. It is not silence, but rather sounds within silence, intensely real, yet like a dream. As we passed the bank as we passed along close to the bank, from among the mangrove trees with their curious twisted roots growing through the water, there came a strange music, like the notes of an organ. Startled by our approach a Kingfisher rose from its perch and skimmed rapidly along the surface of the water, occasionally touching it with a wingtip. Screaming harshly, parrots winged their agitated flight 2 by two overhead. But no words, no mere recital of the sights and sounds can give any notion of the loveliness and wonder of the river, and of gliding up it in that strange evening light. It is all so still, and remote, and untroubled. p. 103

Surely an age of trouble would be more than requited by an instant's vision of such exceeding beauty. At first the wonder of it is almost unbearable, and sends stabs of pain through you, and then, as though a veil were suddenly lifted, the gulf, the feeling of discrepancy is gone and you know beyond any need of telling that you are utterly at one with the trees and the sky and all the wonder. There is no break, no pause between you and it; You are no emanation of life, you are life itself. Here, at last, is utter peace, utter comprehension. p. 105

I sat down on a tacuba and gazed about me. Just now the silence was unbroken - profound. I felt that I was in an immense cathedral, so strong was the impression of spaciousness, and this in spite of the fact that actually I could not see more than ten or fifteen yards in any direction. But the feeling of space and distant persisted, and I cannot account for it unless it is that the intertwining branches high above me gave the illusion of arches, and the shafts of sunlight that occasionally pierced their way through the dense mass of foliage were like the beams that strike through a stained glass window, illuminating the inner darkness. One such beam, penetrating the deep green gloom, lit upon a large brown leaf which was hanging from one of the lower branches. This leaf was behaving in the most extraordinary manner, twisting and waving violently to and fro, as though blown by an imperceptible wind. I examined it carefully but could not discover any cause. Maurice tells me that he's frequently seen the same thing but has never heard an explanation. p. 112

FINAL DAYS

I have not been able to find the address for the Sacred Heart Nursing Home in Youghal where Joan died, but am hoping that others can nail this part down. At least - unlike Monica, whose final resting place is unknown - Joan was buried close to her much-cherished family, family that she had never broken with, at the Collegiate Church of Saint Mary, beside Myrtle Grove.

In grateful and loving memory of
Major John Bernard Arbuthnot M.V.O. Scots Guards 1875 – 1950
and of his wife Olive Arbuthnot 1875 – 1953 of Myrtle Grove Youghal
also of their youngest son
Major Myles Henry Arbuthnot M.B.E. Royal Signals
died on active service in Italy 1943
and elder daughter
Irene Joan Grace Arbuthnot 1904 – 1997.

SOURCE: Historic Graves.

What we do know, when all is said and done, is that Joan was cherished.

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others," This quote is widely attributed to Pericles (c. 495–429 BCE)

CONNECTIONS: There will be more to come in future posts.

Honor Beryl HAMILTON, whose life I explored in an earlier post, was one of Dorothy JACKSON’s earlier long-term partners. They had started living together in Glengarriff at least as early as 1929, but by the early 1940s, they had ceased to be a couple and Dorothy Mary FITCH had begin living with Dorothy at Barony House, Glengarriff. In the same way that Monica’s probate to Joan speaks volumes, so too does Honor’s probate to Rachel. The theory of three degrees of separation begs to be applied here.

Rachel Veronica Rose Leigh-White of Ahakista Durrus Co. Cork. The townland of Reenacappul, Parish Kilcrohane, Barony West Carbery (West Division) [SEE: Map]