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David
Urquhart and the Foreign Affairs Committees
If
we know anything of David Urquhart (1805-1877), it is that he
was eccentric, that he re-introduced the Turkish bath into the
British Isles, and that politically he was a Russophobe and a
Turkophile.
His political career is almost invariably encapsulated by
these two labels—concision which is in this instance,
perhaps, appropriate, and certainly inevitable. For so many of
Urquhart’s views on foreign policy can be traced back to
these two obsessions rooted in attitudes embraced during his
early diplomatic career in Constantinople in the early 1830s.
Even his fixated belief that Palmerston was a traitor was
based on his view that he had been ‘bought’ by the Russian
aggressor.
Those
historians who have thought his political career worthy of
attention have tended to focus on two areas of interest:
first, his mission in Constantinople culminating in the Vixen
episode (which, a year later in 1837, effectively put an end
to his direct involvement in policy-making); second, his
creation of a network of Foreign
Affairs Committees (FACs)
which, mainly in the mid-1850s and particularly in the north
of England and the Midlands, promulgated his views and
furthered his personal war against Palmerston.
Most
historians agree that neither Urquhart nor the FACs made any
lasting impact on foreign policy. But all are agreed that
Urquhart, ‘one of the most remarkable publicists of his
day,’ was a knowledgeable, charismatic, and eccentric person
who, to the surprise of many, was often right—though Karl
Marx probably had tongue firmly in cheek when, on 2 November
1853, he wrote to Engels,
Strange
though it may seem to you... I have come to the same
conclusion as the monomaniac Urquhart—namely that for
several decades Palmerston has been in the pay of Russia.
Miles
Taylor is one of several historians to ask who comprised
Urquhart’s following. To the educated contemporary observer
of foreign affairs, Urquhart’s doctrines may well have been
‘a specialized taste’ and, as Anderson has noted, ‘once
acquired they became an addiction.’ No-one, however, has
satisfactorily explained what it was that attracted so many
working-men to the committees, or why Russophobia (or any
other aspect of foreign policy) bound them to Urquhart so
loyally, and for so long.
As for
Urquhart’s re-introduction of the Turkish bath to a
Victorian society in which any form of bath was a novelty for
the wealthy, historians seem to have thought such diversions
not worthy of serious study. Neither have they sought to
consider Urquhart as a person, other than to notice,
repeatedly, such obvious eccentricities as his refusal to
shake hands with anyone. (He taught his children to kiss the
hands of visitors.)
Several
historians have studied parts of the important unpublished
collection of Urquhart correspondence at Balliol College,
Oxford, but hardly any attention has been paid to those
letters in the group labelled ‘Turkish baths’, nor even to
the significance of the occasional paragraphs on the subject
to be found in a surprising number of other letters dating
from the 1850s and 1860s.
Several
other items in this collection seem also to have escaped
attention as, for example, a letter from Urquhart’s son
David to Gertrude Robinson, his father’s biographer, and the
cutting of an article with the unacademic title of 'The Feast
of kébôbs' which, however light-heartedly, begins to
show us a different side of Urquhart the human being. Both are
discussed further, below.
An
article by Briggs on West Riding FACs
is one of very few exceptions to this catalogue of neglect.
Briggs suggested that in their meetings can be found,
the
proto-type of a highly successful and intelligent WEA
tutorial class. However wild the personality and outlook of
Urquhart himself—and he was the main inspiration of all this
effort—the Foreign Affairs Committees mark an impressive
stage in adult working-class education.
Briggs
noted also that ‘another activity of the committees
was the building of Turkish baths’ and that ‘Local letters
were often headed "the Turkish Bath".’ But this
article was written nearly forty years ago, and no-one seems
yet to have followed up these acute observations.
The
positive view of Urquhart traditionally taken is of a
well-read person, extremely knowledgeable on his own subjects,
a clear thinker with reasoned answers to any question put to
him in the course of his public meetings and,
with
a singular genius for impressing his opinions upon all sorts
of men, from aristocratic dandies down to the grinders of
Sheffield and the cobblers of Stafford.
To
this must be added some less attractive traits: that his
unchecked enthusiasms ‘often obscured his judgment;’ and
that ‘he put down with ostentatious insolence anyone who
ventured to demur to anything he said.’
At
first sight, photographs of Urquhart seem to confirm a surly
demeanour, although when he was in Constantinople in his
mid-twenties, he had ‘looked much younger than his age’
with ‘fair hair which he wore almost to his shoulders’ and
‘vivid blue eyes.’ But too much should not be inferred
from such photographs as few mid-nineteenth century
photographic portraits show their subjects in anything other
than serious mien. This photograph taken shortly after his
marriage at the age of about 50—a happy period for
Urquhart—shows him still ‘young looking, though the
wrinkles of age appear when he becomes animated by passion’.
A
later photograph taken around 1874 when he was almost 70,
three years before he died, shows a face on which there is not
even a hint of a smile. But this was a man who was approaching
the end of a life during most of which he had endured ‘a
personal and individual knowledge of the tortures of acute
rheumatism,’ often noted in the letters of those writing to
him, but rarely mentioned by Urquhart himself.
Urquhart
among family and friends
Accounts
of his public appearances seem to confirm the general
impression of humourlessness gained from reading
his numerous speeches and pamphlets. Indeed Maria Catherine
Bishop writes of the Urquhartite Free press that
perhaps ‘a keener sense of humour would have contributed the
element which would have made it more digestible by working
souls.’
But
with family, friends, and others in a non-work environment,
Urquhart was quite different. So much so that in 1920, after
reading Gertrude Robinson's biography 0f his father, David,
the eldest of his surviving children, in what can best be
called a polite letter of thanks, wrote to the author,
…You
have selected, and well selected those sections of his work
which appeal to you and you have given a wonderful picture of
the man he was, when working—He had a lighter side tho’—
Brilliant conversationalist full of fun, jokes and
quips—That does not show in his letters and with increasing
bodily sickness and pain, there was little of that in his
later years...
David
confessed that he was ‘really more interested in the man
than in his work’. He was also aware that the author had
been helped in her selection of Urquhart’s correspondence by
his own younger sister Harriet—Gertrude's lifelong friend.
But Harriet (known in the family as Hatty), was a timid girl
who had been only fifteen years old at her father’s death.
Indeed, having once seen him in a ‘great rage’ she had
been somewhat frightened of him. He wrote that when
young, Maisie (the elder of his two sisters) , Hatty and
he,
used
to go into [our parents’] bedroom in the mornings and have a
real romp and fight in the big bed with him—I can well
remember that little Hatty never really enjoyed these romps.
So it
is, in part, a distorted picture which emerges from a
biography unduly coloured both by Hatty’s view of her father
and by the author’s personality. Her own father, the staunch
committeeman A E Robinson, had looked up to Urquhart
and at his death had written, ‘I have loved the man who gave
me light a thousand times more than he who would give me
gold.’ While Gertrude herself, immersed in political
Catholicism, sums up her view of Urquhart (in the chivalric
subtitle of her biography) as ‘a Victorian knight errant of
justice and liberty’.
David’s
happier picture of his father is given credence by an amusing
description by Lady Currie of a party at her parents’ home
around 1856 when she was just in her teens, and Urquhart
(known to his friends as ‘The Bey’) was one of the guests.
Upon
one side of [my mother] was seated the Prince Frederick of
Schleswig-Holstein... From time to time, with a shrieking
laugh which sounded almost hysterical, he bounded up and down
in his chair, and slapped the table with his hands, by which
one knew that the Bey, who sat upon his other side, had made
some more than usually witty sally.
Urquhart
seemed to retain the friendship of those for whom he
campaigned even when unsuccessful, for he was seen to be
honest, caring, and (unlike many of his contemporaries) had
genuine respect for those beyond the borders of Europe with
whom he chose to work. Ahmed Khan of Daghlestan, for example,
began a letter, ‘Beloved Daoud Bey—Your Highness,’
and if he had not fully grasped the specific British usage of
the latter phrase, the intention is evident. While Hassan of
Circassia began, ‘Most noble Daoud Bey,’ extending his
greeting to Urquhart’s young son in his valediction, ‘I
salute thee and little Daoud Bey and all your friends.’
Jenks
has pointed out that Urquhart’s personality particularly
appealed to women. He welcomed their assistance, and ‘almost
all of the men who were most closely involved with him
received the encouragement of their wives.’
But he
also worked well with women who were single as was, for
example, Harriet Ann Curtis. She was a long-standing supporter
of Urquhart’s activities. It is not clear how she first
became involved, but she was important enough to be consulted
by committee secretaries who needed advice and did not wish to
trouble Urquhart. Later, she was to become the second largest
shareholder in Urquhart’s London & Provincial Turkish
Bath Co Ltd.
Harriet
Urquhart
But it
was Harriet Fortescue who, after her marriage to Urquhart on
5 September 1854, became his chief support and
collaborator in all things. An independent-minded individual,
and a believer in rational dress for women, she had earlier,
with financial help from Ruskin, started a shirt factory for
the unemployed of Ardee in Co. Louth. During the year before
her marriage, she had been preparing an introduction to some
of Urquhart’s papers which she was ‘going to republish in
a volume without her name.’ And the day after her wedding,
the Morning advertiser published 'The Words of Lord
Palmerston' under her pseudonym ‘Caritas.’
Maria
Catherine Bishop found it extremely difficult to distinguish
between Urquhart’s writing and Harriet’s. ‘Half her
articles in his paper, the Free press, and her many
other writings were by him, and half of his by her.’ Bishop
quotes a letter from their son David who wrote that, generally
speaking, ‘the argumentative work, the collating of extracts
from despatches, treaties, &c., was done by her first, and
then my father dictated the introduction and conclusion.’
Historians
do not seem to have given Harriet credit for the closeness of
her collaboration with Urquhart, though it must be clear to
all who go to the source documents. Their two temperaments
complemented each other in exactly the manner needed to ensure
that their work was most effectively undertaken. The retention
of committee members’ loyalty to Urquhart was in no small
measure due to her calm soothing rationality.
Her
contribution was widely recognized by many of the FAC members
themselves, Benjamin Morrell, for example, referring to her in
a letter to her husband as ‘your valuable partner Mrs
Urquhart.’ They
appreciated the trouble she took in her explanations of
difficult points, as when David Scott wrote asking John
Johnson to ‘present my sincere and grateful thanks to Mrs
Urquhart’ for helping him overcome his habit of ‘jumping
to Conclusions without weighing evidence.’
And they responded to her personal interest in their lives, as
when Thomas Dean, answering her query, wrote, ‘My wife’s
name is Bridgett, but having lived in service where certain
names are not liked, we have got the habit of calling her
Ann...’
Harriet
could not, even had she wished, avoid involvement in
Urquhart’s campaign to re-introduce the Turkish bath.
Whenever they moved house, one of David's first actions
would be to build a new Turkish bath. Harriet’s biographer
wrote:
My
first impression of the hot air room contrived in his Geneva
villa was of a dimly lighted catacomb. Mrs Urquhart, in white
bathing costume, slight and picturesque in the light of the
lamp she carried, stood at the foot of the stairs in friendly
welcome. She taught us as we lay panting on our shelves in a
heat of 170° Fahrenheit, all the merits of what is truly a
sanitary institution, but one that with its attendant
shampooing
was not then as freely recognized as now.
Throughout
his life Urquhart was hospitable to all who wished to try the
Turkish bath whether they were friends or neighbours, his
servants, local doctors with their patients, FACs
wanting information, or their members who were unwell.
The Turkish bath at the first home they built, at Riverside
near Rickmansworth, was internationally renowned and
considered ‘a great boon to the neighbourhood.’ Harriet
agreed that its use should be offered to those who sought to
discover its worth, and kept many sciatic and invalid guests
over for breakfast.
If
David Urquhart was used to receiving effusive letters from his
acolytes, he was not alone. Harriet too, received highly
complimentary letters written by those who realised the
contribution which she made to their common endeavours. John
Harlow writing from Small Heath, Birmingham, spoke for many
when he wrote:
To
yourself Madam, I would only say—Who that has seen
you, has heard you speak, and has known your acts as I have,
can have other feelings towards you than those of humble
reverend admiration.
The
members of the FACs
had ‘an absolute conviction that they were right and an
utter devotion to Urquhart and his cause.’ But Jenks, for
one, finds it difficult to explain how this was inspired.
It is clear that many factors were involved, but one of these
must surely have been the feeling shared by committee members
that within the movement there was a knowledgeable intercessor
able to take the rough edges off any problems which might
arise in their work.
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