Mabel Hutchinson nee Curtis, the favourite sibling of Adela Curtis and an artist
Dear Substack friends, it has been a long time since my latest post In Search of Adela Curtis, a Modern Mystic. In recent weeks we have been very busy here at Othona and short staffed, plus I had been deep in preparation for the residential event about my research on Adela Curtis, and that took place towards the end of last month - more about that in future posts.
For now, I want to introduce Adela Curtis’ youngest sibling, Mabel Grace Hutchinson, nee Curtis. It was her daughters, Phil and Eve, who came to the UK at Adela’s invitation in the 1920s to live with her in Dorset. And in June this year, a couple of Mabel’s grandchildren came to Othona and shared a meal with us. Jeremy Jay is Eve’s son and our near neighbour, who lives in one of the original buildings put up by Adela Curtis in the 1920s. His cousin, Mary Hutchinson, is daughter of John Hutchinson, Phil and Eve’s older brother. Mary had come over from New Zealand with her husband Jonathan, to spend time in the UK with family. It was a lovely evening that we spent together, along with Grace, Mary and Jonathan’s daughter and her husband Sam, who currently live in London. It was good too, to welcome Stella, a friend of Jeremy’s, for the get together.
If you are a relative newcomer to this Substack, or you would like a reminder about Adela Curtis’ story before you read the rest here, then do click on this link to an earlier post about her. There is more Curtis family information here, if you’d like to look at that as well.
Mabel Grace Curtis - the youngest of ten children
Mabel was Harriet and William Curtis’ last child and Harriet travelled back from Yokohama to Southampton to give birth to her. The family was living in the hotel they owned in Yokohama - many years later it was remembered by a customer as a ‘third rate’ establishment. This could well be one reason for Harriet’s decision to return temporarily to the UK and she may also have wanted to have her mother Mary Billows near her when she gave birth - and Mary lived in Southampton. The journey back was fraught, as Adela recounted to her nieces, Mabel’s daughters, Phil and Eve, many years later. In the 1970s Phil wrote a Chronicle of her aunt’s life and work and included this event as follows:
[Aunt Adela’s] mother was expecting her tenth child, our Mother, and, not wishing to have another child in Japan, she set sail with her three youngest children. [The oldest of whom was Adela and the other two were her young brothers, Frederick and Edwin]. This was in 1873, the days of sailing ships, and the first picture Aunt Adela gave of her mother was that soon after the ship set sail south from Japan they were caught in a violent storm, so violent that the Captain believed his ship was going to founder, and ordered everyone to get on deck and put on their life jackets, to be ready to take to the [life] boats. It was night time and the three little children were sleeping peacefully. When a sailor banged on the cabin door, ordering all on deck, Aunt Adela’s mother, looking at her sleeping children and knowing that she, being pregnant, could not survive long enough to save them, locked the cabin door, and decided they all go down with the ship.
It was a good ship and she weathered the storm and the next picture is of Aunt Adela on deck, an eight year old, [she was actually six] standing on a coil of rope with a group of sailors squatting on the deck listening to her as she read to them from the Bible…
Arriving in England the ship disembarked at Southampton, where the tenth child was born, christened Mabel Grace, Aunt Adela’s favourite of all her brothers and sisters, and there grew a close bond between them.
These sisters experienced a fractured family life, for although the family home and business were in Yokohama, they were also to spend a significant amount of time in England. It wasn’t just half way round the world, it could also be half a year away, for sailing ships in those days could take between four and six months to complete the journey. England was a necessary part of their lives because this was where all their schooling would take place, but even before Mabel was old enough for school, we find Adela and Mabel with their grandmother in Southampton. Adela wrote a scrap of autobiography many years later, in which she described the painful experience of a young girl of nine or ten on the night of her birthday in mid-November - Adela’s birthday was 21 November. No names are given, but we can be confident that she was writing about herself, her youngest sister Mabel and their grandmother Mary Billows.
Midnight of mid November and in the back room of a little house near Southampton, a child sat watching and listening as if the fate of the world depended upon the vigilance of her eyes and ears. Her chair was drawn close to a worn horsehair sofa and on it stood a wicker cradle in which a baby of eighteen months was sleeping fretfully. On the other side of the room, by the fire, a frail little woman of eighty slumbered uneasily in a comfortless armchair. From time to time the child would look from one to the other, noting with unchildlike intentness the baby’s flushed face and feverish breathing and the old lady’s feeble moans & moments of distress. There was cause enough for anxiety about both of them yet it was not they who kept her eyes wide with expectant fear, her ears alert for every sound, & her quivering body braced to bear more than the burden of the long unhappy day which in its passing had reminded no one but herself that she was now ten [nine written over] years old.
Adela went on to describe the range of emotions and thoughts of the sensitive child as she realised that no one else had remembered it was her birthday that day:
Humour, faint but grim, twitched the sensitive nostrils as she registered the fact that any birthday but hers would have received some kind of honourable mention. Yet, at the same moment, with that rare instinct for exactness which was to be at once the blessing and the bane of all her days, she also recognised the subtle compliment implied in the oversight. For it meant that she was not counted among “the children” from whom the serious and painful things of life must be hidden or at least disguised by make-believe gaiety over such trifles as a birthday.
Was Harriet in Japan at this time? Wherever their mother may have been, this incident of a child’s forgotten birthday suggests that the Curtis family was in trouble and indeed by 1881, Harriet had left her husband and home in Japan and come back to England for good. Her mother Mary had died two years before and so any family support she might have been able to offer to children in the UK was no longer available. Harriet’s return did not make for a straightforward family reunion with her children however, for she had to find work and took up a position as a live-in nurse with a family in London, whilst Mabel 7, along with Adela 13, Frederick 11 and Edwin 8, were all in a boarding school in Ashwater in Devon. Clara, one of Adela and Mabel’s older sisters, was also at the school, working as a music teacher. In later life, Clara said that their father did not support the family members in England. This most likely referred to those like herself who had finished schooling and it certainly applied to Harriet: having had servants of her own earlier in her married life, she was now a servant herself. We could imagine that William might have said to Harriet, ‘If you return to England, I will not support you financially.’
By 1891, when she was 17, Mabel was living with her mother in a house called Woodside in Loughton in Essex. On the Census Return, Harriet described herself as a retired nurse and also a widow. The former description was true, but William Curtis, Mabel’s father, was still very much alive in Japan, living with a Japanese woman and their young daughter Mary. He did not die until 1906, by which time they had relocated to China. No doubt it was far easier in those days for Harriet to take on the role of widow in her community, than let on to anyone that she had left her husband. We don’t know if Adela was also living in her mother’s household at this stage because she was visiting someone in Surrey when the census was taken.
Phil’s Chronicle was mainly about her aunt Adela but there are some other glimpses of her mother Mabel too, when the sisters were in their early adulthood. For example Phil wrote that Adela
studied at the Slade [Slade School of Fine Art in London] with my mother [Mabel] where incidentally, my mother met my father, Francis Leigh Hutchinson, a young Englishman from New Zealand. My parents were both artists but Aunt Adela soon left the Slade to study medicine and, although that interested her, it did not hold her for long as she was already aware that ‘the sickness of the body’ was largely the result of sickness of the mind.
Mabel married Francis Hutchinson in 1896 when she was 22 and he was 28. Between 1899 and 1905, they had four children together: John Francis; Elaine Phyllis (Phil); Eve Isabel and David.
Phil recounted that Mabel and Adela shared another important experience, in that they both met and spent time with Dr James Porter Mills, an American
who was teaching and practicing what was then called New Thought, and [Aunt Adela] and my mother and father became deeply interested in his ideas. New Thought was basically that the mind came first and the body was the outward result of the mind’s thinking.
This was likely to have been in the early 1900s. (I have written in other posts about Adela’s enthusiasm for New Thought at that stage in her life and how she founded the School of Silence in Kensington and then later the Settlement at Cold Ash in Berkshire.)
Mabel the artist
The other person who was hugely significant in Adela’s life and who was known by Phil and Eve as Aunt Lil, was Lily Davison Cancellor and it was through a collaboration with Lily Cancellor that some of Mabel’s art work got published. I am grateful to members of the Hutchinson family in New Zealand for alerting me earlier this year to the existence of a book The True Story of Jane, which was written by Lily and illustrated by Mabel, and also to Jeremy for lending me a copy. The title page below shows that the publishers of the book were Curtis and Davison ie Adela and Lily’s bookshop and publishing service . Their bookshop had moved from Kensington High Street to 11a Church Street sometime between 1908 and 1912, so this gives a rough date for the book.
The book is a girl’s adventure story, set solidly in an upper middle class background, in which Jane and other girls are poorly educated by a series of inadequate governesses. The main point of the book I think is to convey the idea that girls can have adventures just as much as boys. Life becomes really exciting when Jane joins another family on holiday in a caravan. Members of the family make baskets to sell as they go along, so it is ironic that the ‘baddy’ in the story is a gypsy. Our main interest in the book in this post is in the art work, which was drawn by Mabel. Here are a selection of her drawings:
Mabel, Francis and their four children emigrated to New Zealand in the early years of the 1910s but Mabel’s own life story took a tragic turn, for she spent the last thirty years or so of her life in a mental asylum. Her granddaughter Mary did some research to try and find out if there were any hospital records still in existence for her. One hospital record card was found for her, with the word ‘epilepsy’ written on it. If this were the illness she was suffering from, there would have been little treatment available in those days. Family members are not convinced that this was the case, however. Could she have been suffering from severe post-natal depression, perhaps? It is frustrating that there is little evidence to go on. What is known is that her husband Francis had their marriage annulled and in 1925 he married his second wife. By then, Phil and Eve had already travelled from New Zealand to live with their Aunt Adela in Dorset.
Adela had had a breakdown after her Settlement at Cold Ash had failed around 1920. That her ambitious project had run into the sand was a hard blow for her, but at around the same time she had something of an identity crisis because, try as she might, she, a New Thought healer, had been unable to effect any healing for her sister Mabel. Because the kind of healing she practised did not involve touch or words, it was common for her to administer ‘Absent Ministries’. In other words, she would set aside times to be a channel for divine healing for those who were not in the same room, or even on the same continent as herself. That she had been unable to help Mabel in that way would almost certainly have raised questions in her mind about her own ministry and about the efficacy of New Thought itself. We could imagine her thinking to herself, ‘I can’t seem to do anything for Mabel, but I can offer to do something for her children’ and out of this came the invitation to Phil and Eve.
Adela Curtis could be very judgemental about almost everyone, including herself, but she never wrote harshly of Phil and Eve in her letters or diaries. She loved them and they loved her and were a positive link with her favourite sibling Mabel, from whom she was separated by distance and illness.
Hi Liz,
It’s great to see you on Substack!
Elizabeth Turner
Thank you, Liz, for another insightful and poignant installment in the story of Adela and her family.