Singled Out (31 page)

together, and such was their success that no man could have provided for

them better. Moreover, they were completely interdependent.

It was after the war that Elsie and Doll’s duo career took off, and soon

they were being paid £ a week for their stage double act. Wireless

broadcasts followed, and the sisters got up a comedy turn combining jokes

and crosstalk with musical numbers; in character Elsie was Gert and Doris

was Daisy, two gossipy old charladies dissecting their sweethearts, and other people’s, or commenting on births, marriages and deaths from the sidelines.

Their Cockney accents breathed life into the stuffy atmosphere of the

pre-war BBC, which in those days tended to be grandiloquent in tone. By

the late s Gert and Daisy were already firm favourites with Queen

Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother), and were being booked to appear in

royal variety performances. After the Second World War they were both

made OBE, starred in three major cinema films, and had two elephants at

London zoo named after them. Elsie outlived her younger sister by twelve

years, but for two talented girls from Poplar, life could have had little more to offer.

Talent and resourcefulness gave women like this the possibility of making

their own way in life; with the love and support of a sister setbacks could

be overcome and ambitions realised. Tess, Una and Carmen Dillon set out

to succeed, survived in a man’s world, and all became prominent in their

fields.

The girls were the three youngest of six children. Strict Catholics, the

Dillon parents were not rich but, determined that all their offspring should 

Singled Out

have the opportunity to attain success in life, they made the necessary

sacrifices to educate them well. None of the three sisters married; all three were high-flyers.

Tess took a first-class science degree and became head of physics at

Queen Elizabeth College, London. Una was drawn into the world of

publishing, bought a dilapidated bookshop in Store Street, Bloomsbury,

and exerted considerable energies into turning it around. Dressed in a tweed suit, she bicycled round London delivering orders to her customers. Dillon’s Bookshop thrived, attracting an academic and literary clientèle, and by the time of her retirement in  Una had expanded into large new premises,

cornered the market in teacher training manuals and educational texts, and

entered into partnership with London University.

Carmen Dillon meanwhile developed into a talented artist, whose initial

leaning was towards architecture. Friendship with the film art director

Ralph Brinton led to a career in films – not, in those days, an easy option. The British film industry found it hard to accept the presence of a woman on set, and Carmen was forced to endure reproaches from all sides: women

shouldn’t be taking men’s jobs, women can’t work within budgets, women

must not give orders to men or step on to the studio floor. She stuck it out and in  was made chief art director at Wembley Studios. She worked with Sir Laurence Olivier, and her reśume´ was to include such notable

films as his
Henry V
() and Joseph Losey’s
The Go-Between
(). For twenty-five years of her thirty-five-year career she was the only woman art director in Britain.

For forty-four years Tess, Una and Carmen shared a mansion flat in

Kensington High Street. Religion, science, travel, art, books and music

enriched their lives. Could marriage or children have given them more,

without also detracting from such abundance?

Gert and Daisy were two halves of a whole; the three Dillon sisters, while

taking quite separate paths in life, were inseparably joined. But the equation for arriving at such geometry doesn’t always balance. Take Florence and Annie White.

Florence White had a mission. In April  she set up the National

Spinsters Pensions Association to fight for the right to pensions of unmarried working women. And she struck a chord:  women attended the first meeting of the NSPA; four months later nearly , had joined, and by

December the Association had sixteen branches spread across the north of

England. Florence, who was now nearly fifty, had found her life’s work,

and it was full-time. She was determined to make the nation ‘spinster

conscious’. Campaigning, organising petitions and speaking at rallies left no
Caring, Sharing . . .



time for dressmaking and piano lessons, which all through the s had kept

the wolf from Florence and Annie’s door. She could never have kept going

had it not been for her sister’s practical turn of mind.

Annie had been a keen amateur playwright, with several local successes to

her name, but now there was a need for a more reliable income. Back home

in south Bradford, she had been attending night classes in confectionery. In  the sisters opened a confectioner’s and baker’s in Lidget Green, where to begin with – inevitably – Annie did all the baking and Florence iced

the cakes and served the customers. They lived over the shop. Somehow,

Florence combined her political activities with decorating iced fancies and

slicing up parkin. But when the NSPA took off, the buns and flapjacks

were handed back to Annie. Florence slept at the shop, but that was all.

Annie was back-up. She baked the cakes and ran the business. Not only

that, she turned her literary talent to writing Florence’s speeches and acted as her secretary. Help had to be brought in. Imperious as ever, Florence leant on her niece Dorothy to leave her job at the mill and come into the

shop, and another local girl, Bertha, was hired to bake. Joe Wells, an elderly and mild-mannered uncle who had settled into cosy retirement, was cajoled out again and prevailed upon to do part-time clerical work for the movement.

Then they got a delivery boy with a bicycle.

Every day, while Annie and Bertha toiled in the bake house, Florence

was out on the campaign trail – Manchester, Stockport, Leeds, Leicester.

Her return was an anxious moment at the Lidget Green shop. Had her day

gone well? Interfering and bossy, she was much given to smashing crockery

and throwing things, and when she was on the premises tension could

mount. The bicycle boy would spot her first. ‘Florrie’s back,’ he would

call, and the household would hold its breath. If Florence found things not

to her liking there would be hell to pay.

One day in the busy run-up to Christmas Bertha blundered over a tricky

cake recipe; a whole batch went wrong, and though Annie was sympathetic

she agreed that the cakes were unsaleable. Best to pop them down in the

cellar for now and get on with making a new batch; the spoilt ones could

be got rid of later. That same day Florence got home earlier than expected.

Powerless to prevent her, Annie followed horrified as her sister went down

to the cellar and discovered the spoilt cakes. Upstairs, the nieces cowered

as battle ensued, descending some time later to find the cellar strewn with

crumbs and currants, the debris of their frenzied bombardment.

Rows between the sisters erupted with terrifying frequency, and Annie

could give as good as she got. If you walked into the middle of one you

took the consequences. Uncle Joe appeared one day bearing a well-meaning



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treat, some prime steak – a rare luxury in that stretched household.

Unluckily he walked in exactly as Florence and Annie were deep into a

stormy exchange – no missiles this time – and Florence was winning. Annie,

in a rage, stomped off to bed. Uncle Joe put the steak on a plate and tiptoed up to her room, where he gingerly placed it on her bedside table. The peace offering could not have been more misjudged. Annie leapt out of

bed in her bloomers and vest, yelled at poor Joe in her broadest Bradford

to get out of the house and pretty quick too, and hurled the steak down

the stairs after his retreating form with all her might. It wouldn’t do to

waste good food. Joe picked it up and washed it and put it in the pantry.

Then he went home.

But Annie was always there for her sister. She was secretary, editor,

speech-writer, companion, political hostess, cook, home-maker. Neither

ever considered for a moment leaving the other; neither doubted the

other’s worth. Through triumphs and crises they were shoulder to shoulder,

working to the same end. The things that mattered to them were taken for

granted, unspoken and unquestioned, as such things are in families – their

cat Ginger, for instance. During the Second World War the White sisters

offered refuge to a spinster who had been evacuated from Bethnal Green.

This lady had the misfortune to step backwards off a chair and accidentally

land on Ginger. At the time Florence was addressing a combined meeting

of the NSPA London branches at the Bonnington Hotel. In the middle of

this she got an urgent telegram from Annie: ‘Come home at once. Ginger

ill.’ Florence was on the next train back to Bradford. Sadly there was no

hope for the cat, who had suffered internal injuries. Both the sisters were

prostrated with grief. ‘Auntie Florence was crying for days,’ remembered

Dorothy. ‘We dared not mention his name for weeks and his collar had to

be kept safely in a drawer.’

In  Florence White’s campaign bore fruit. Insured spinsters over

sixty would get ten shillings a week. It was not as good as she had hoped

for, and she was to continue fighting for a better deal, but it was a major

concession by the government, and a personal triumph. The tributes poured

in from her supporters. In the words of a Bradford factory worker: ‘All the

spinsters in England should rise today and salute her.’ And the following

couplets were sent in from a schoolchild admirer:

God made each maid a husband

But men on earth must fight,

So just in case there aren’t enough

He made Miss Florence White.

Caring, Sharing . . .



In  Florence herself started receiving her old age pension. By then

the shop was getting too much, and the years of campaigning had taken

their toll on her health; one day, after spending seven hours in the lobby

at the House of Commons, she suffered a mild heart attack. In 

she and Annie turned their backs on Bradford and retired to a two—

bedroom bungalow in Morecambe. They were still quarrelsome, still affectionate, still inseparable. But now it was Annie’s turn to be looked after, payback time, and she made the most of it. Querulously complaining of

a series of ailments, she languished in bed while Florence devotedly

ran around cooking and keeping house. It was all a front. Florence would

go to great lengths to smooth counterpanes and bring her sister dainty meals before she left the house, but no sooner was the door closed behind her than Annie was out of bed and buttoning her blouse ready for a walk

or an outing. By the time Florence got home, there was Annie back in bed

again, surrounded by pills and patent medicines. In the event, Florence

died first, in , when she was seventy-five, collapsing suddenly as she

prepared to go out and deliver an address to the Yorkshire Society Ladies’

Section.

*

Florence White’s campaign to get financial help for spinsters grew not only

out of her awareness of the poverty of lower-paid single women, but from

the reality of such women’s lives, whose scanty incomes often had to stretch to support their relatives. Today it is unlikely that an unmarried daughter would accept meekly that her lot in life was to live with and look after her parents. But in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that duty was taken for granted. Women were, above all else, carers. If they had no

husband to care for, they must care for their nearest and dearest, and so it fell to the spinsters to take on this often thankless task. Jobless, or on low wages, keeping elderly, often invalid dependants out of the workhouse could be a desperate, hand-to-mouth business.

Florence had first-hand experience of this situation. She herself had little in common with her mother, but there was never any question of leaving her to fend for herself. James White, their feckless father, had been mostly absent when she and Annie were growing up, and had died when they were in their late teens. Caroline White lived with her spinster daughters

for the rest of her life. She had her uses in fact, for, while practically

illiterate, she did the housework, but Florence had no intention of making

sacrifices. Mother shared a bedroom with Annie, and was finally moved up

to the attic, while Florence occupied the ‘best’ room. Nevertheless, there

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Caroline remained until her death in the early s, by which time her

daughters were well into middle age.

And this situation was entirely typical, entirely accepted. At the turn of

the century an estimated , women were at home looking after their

elderly parents.

Doris Smith had been a primary school teacher all her working life. In

her hundred-and-first year Miss Smith – very frail, very deaf, at times

confused – was living in a residential home in Ascot. I went there to ask

her about her memories.

The extremely old often seem to look back on their past as on a landscape

blotted out by heavy snowfall. All is white and drifting, save for the few