Written by Jayne Sharratt.
“Hot off the oven of our own time” was the verdict on new novel The Big Firm, according to The New York Times of 20th February 1938, in a review which also found it “unusually significant” and “distinguished as a work of literary art”. The novelist was the forty-three-year-old British writer and left-wing activist Amabel Williams-Ellis, who, although fulfilling the description of “neglected” today, in her lifetime was used to commanding press attention.
I began investigating Amabel’s story after visiting Plas Brondanw, the Snowdonia ancestral home of her husband Clough Williams-Ellis, architect of the fantasy village Portmeirion, and seeing her name on a plaque commemorating their marriage in 1915. Though Amabel was described only as a daughter, sister, wife and mother in the guidebooks, I followed my hunch there might be more to her than that and began digging. I found that in a career spanning seven decades of the twentieth century Amabel had published over seventy books. Six of these were novels, mainly written between 1925 and 1939.
One sign of her present-day obscurity is the difficulty I have had in buying copies of these novels, and what follows relies on my memory and notes of reading the book in the British Library in pre-pandemic times, as well as my own research into her life.
Born in 1894, Amabel was the daughter of the influential editor-proprietor of The Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, and grew up in a family where celebrity was normal. Dinner with a prime minister, story time with Rudyard Kipling, chess with the governor of Egypt and tea with the explorer Mary Kingsley were normal experiences for a girl whose relatives included the biographer Lytton Strachey and the painter Simon Bussey.
When journalists and photographers turned up at her wartime wedding in a rural chapel in Surrey at an hour of the morning intentionally chosen to evade them, chasing the bride and groom down the hill to their getaway car, they came for her not Clough. She was both a Jazz Age socialite and an activist with serious politics and a steely work ethic. Despite the war being over and Clough being offered alternative employment as an architect, the Army refused to discharge her husband at the end of the war until he had written a history of the Tank Corps, so Amabel sat down and wrote it for him, finishing it just in time for the birth of their second child, Charlotte, in 1919.
The Big Firm(1938) was Amabel’s fourth novel. It was written in an atmosphere of increasing international tensions and crisis – Hitler’s annexation of Austria took place within weeks of its publication. Completion of the novel had been complicated by the concussion Amabel suffered when she was struck by a car while visiting her mother and her friend and author Margaret Storm Jameson helped proofread the draft for publication. The Big Firm tells the story of Owen Wynne, a scientist who works in microbiology research and his love affairs with two women, Caro and Nicola. The big firm of the title is Consolidated Scientific Products, which employs Owen and prevents him from publishing his research. Owen’s political leanings are left-wing; the plot concerns his attempts to prevent arms and scientific products being sold to the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War. The action moves remorselessly and thrillingly to the climax in which Owen and Nicola race to intercept a shipment intended for a mysterious cargo ship moored off the coast of North wales.
Characters who wrestle with strong political principles when others seek to corrupt them are a feature of The Big Firm. When Nicola, the wife of a Labour MP and committed member of the Labour Party herself, hears her husband preparing to compromise to gain a government post, her respect is lost. “This isn’t the moment when responsible leaders ought to stress our fundamental socialist policy,” he tells her. “We’ve got to soft pedal, otherwise the Labour Movement will be destroyed.” Nicola decides she must leave him. To her, his pragmatism is “false and horrible.” Her decision to end the marriage over this difference of political views might seem extreme to us, but in the context of the 1930s politics compromise could mean appeasing dangerous forces.
Amabel recognised the threat posed by Hitler to world peace when he came to power and advocated action to prevent full scale war. To this end, in July 1934, she travelled to New York to give evidence to the American Inquiry Commission, which was collecting information about conditions in Germany in the hope of getting the US government to take notice. Amabel described her missions to Berlin that year, the death threats she had received, and the treatment of Jews and Communists. “There is not only no right or justice in Germany, there is no truth,” she told the commissioners.
For the rest of the 1930s, Amabel campaigned against Fascism. She was put under surveillance by the British secret service as a result. Her son Christopher was killed in 1944 in Italy at the age of twenty-one, and she often wondered whether she had done enough to prevent the war. Amabel always suffused her writing with the issues which most concerned her, and in this light The Big Firm is part of the history of the anti-Fascist movement in the 1930s.
To the New York Times’ reviewer Jane Spence Southson, it was the scientific background of The Big Firm that stood out. A wife of one of the directors of Consolidated Scientific Products declares in a speech that although many people think of themselves as contemporary, they don’t have the first clue what is going on in the world of science. Southson notes that this will not be true for readers of the novel, which she considers more masculine in tone than any she has ever read by a woman because it is so detailed and knowledgeable on its subject. Reviewing Amabel’s memoir in 1983, Michael Holroyd noted that her working method was always to write a book in order to learn about its subject, and she would have been very much following her inclinations in the case of The Big Firm.
The masculine tone Southson referred to may have been a reference to its descriptions of the inner workings of Owen’s employer, CSP, an environment rarely written about by women at that time. Amabel had a track record of writing about technical “male” subjects established when her first published book detailed the development of the tank as a weapon of war. When she wrote a careers guide aimed at boys and girls in 1933 called What Shall I Be? she visited work places personally and interviewed the people who worked there to gain insight into what their work actually entailed. At a chemical plant, she observed astringently, “for some unexplained reason women are hardly ever employed…. Probably this is just a custom of the trade, for their seems to be no other objection.”
Amabel always said that if she had been a boy, she would have chosen to be a scientist. Given no formal education or encouragement to go to university by her parents, she became a writer instead, but ensured that her daughter Charlotte became a scientist after studying at Cambridge University. Charlotte’s daughter, Dr. Rachel Garden, also a scientist, told me that her grandmother had a well-hidden insecurity about her lack of formal education which she rectified by asking questions of experts. It is probable that this kind of research lay behind her convincing portrait of a research scientist facing moral dilemmas at work in commercial industry.
In her testimony before the American Inquiry Commission in 1934, Amabel made a point of saying that the Nazi regime was suppressing women’s rights, that Nazis held that women were to be wives and mothers in the home only, with the primary task being to raise “fine warriors.” In Britain at that time, opportunities for women were slowly improving but the belief that women had to choose between family and career was still dominant. As a writer, Amabel was always concerned with women’s feelings about their lives.
Both Caro and Nicola, the women in The Big Firm, are struggling with complicated emotions towards traditional female roles. When the novel opens, Owen is having an affair with Caro, a woman of whom her family say, “all girls want to elope with their schoolteacher or with the butcher, or eat hasheesh, or run away to sea. They all want to – but Caro does.” Caro is lost. She realises that clinging to Owen will not give her the purpose she craves. Married women confuse her: “Could she, did she even desire to become like them, so peaceful…so blank…annihilated?”
But what, she wonders, is her alternative?
“You remember I tried to be a Doctor once? It was too difficult . . . oh, well! Anyhow, I believe a lot of women don’t stick things because they find it hard to believe enough in themselves…to think the work that they do, is all that necessary.”
In the 1950s, Amabel would write bitterly about the way in which society’s “uncreating unbelief” in a girl’s “power to do anything worthwhile” held young women back from reaching their true potential. Perhaps this is what she was implying with the deeply unhappy Caro.
Meanwhile, Owen and Nicola have been working together as part of the Industrial League Against War. They acknowledge their love for each other on the journey to Wales to intercept the suspicious cargo ship. Nicola has realised she is pregnant with her husband’s child and looks at Owen with “the desperate eyes of a creature in a trap.” In the end, Nicola and Owen decide to be together and love the child nonetheless. It is not going to be an easy romance, but the reader feels it might be a successful one.
Both Caro and Nicola are wrestling with their roles in a society which is not built for their benefit. This was a theme Amabel would return to, most notably in her 1951 work of nascent feminism The Art of Being a Woman.
In the late 1930s, Amabel was a modern woman writing about issues which still resonate today. Why then, is she so unknown? One answer to this question could be the variety of genres Amabel wrote in. Her dozens of books include biography, politics, memoir, feminism, parenting, anthologies of fairy tales and science fiction, and non-fiction books for schools. By the time of her death in 1984 the novels, none of which were written later than 1951, were forgotten and (if her work was mentioned at all) she was considered “a writer for children.”
Another answer lies in the fact that she was a woman. A male reviewer of her autobiography (who complained that she failed to say enough about all the famous men she had known and talked too much about herself) decreed her a writer “fated to be known by her menfolk”. This was an unjust self-fulfilling prophecy, but the growing fame post World War Two of her architect husband Clough Williams-Ellis and Portmeirion overshadowed Amabel’s own achievements. Portmeirion is such a flamboyant and colourful vision it is hard for Amabel’s narrative to have space within it, and the Williams-Ellis name today is synonymous with both the village and the pottery begun by Amabel and Clough’s daughter Susan.
Amabel herself recognised that her legacy might have fared better if she had written with her birth name when she called her memoir All Stracheys are Cousins. In the majority of Amabel’s books I borrowed from The British Library, the same pencilled hand had struck out Williams-Ellis on the title page and annotated “Strachey”. In the eyes of The British Library she was a Strachey.
A recurring note in Amabel’s writing is her hope for the next generation of young women. In The Big Firm, a schoolgirl called Lou tells Nicola that she wants her own life to be different:
“I should want to be able to say I was a something – you know, a doctor or a writer or a vet or something. I’m certain that if I was doing politics like you, I should want to be a member of parliament or in the cabin … not just a person who makes speeches.”
Amabel Williams-Ellis cared deeply about her family, but she was also very resoundingly “something” in her own right and The Big Firm is convincing evidence of this.
| This is a guest post by Jayne Sharratt. Jayne is working on a biography of the writer and activist Amabel Williams-Ellis. Follow her on Twitter: @jayne_sharratt. |  |