Authors: Greg King
Somewhat short, with brown hair worn in a fashionable pompadour, and “soft gray eyes” that seemed “the epitome of femininity,” Margaret reluctantly allowed her father to launch her into London society, but the efforts failed miserably.
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The shy Margaret “became an inarticulate lump of diffidence” at parties, and felt hopelessly out of place in this world of shallow pleasures.
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Finally, on July 9, 1908, out of expectation and convenience, she married Welsh neighbor Humphrey Mackworth, a dozen years her senior, the son of Colonel Sir Arthur Mackworth, and the man who would in time become 7th Baronet. They were, she admitted, “an oddly assorted couple.”
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At first, Margaret tried to act as chatelaine of her husband’s manor house and play the expected part of wife of Master of the Foxhounds. Humphrey adored hunting; Margaret loathed it, insisting that the pursuit was “entirely uncivilized and non-adult, really utterly indefensible, and of a cruelty which did not bear thinking about.” She far preferred to spend her days reading; her husband, sure enough, disliked reading and thought it was a most unsocial pursuit.
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It did not take long for unhappiness to set in: within a few months, Margaret felt trapped in her loveless marriage and despaired of the claustrophobic future that spread out before her.
Then, “like a draught of fresh air” in her “padded, stifled” life, Margaret discovered the women’s suffrage movement. “For me, and for many other young women like me,” she recalled, “militant suffrage was the very salt of life.” For the first time, she had a “sense of being some use in the scheme of things, without which no human being can live at peace.”
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Humphrey Mackworth was bewildered, but this didn’t stop his determined wife, who eagerly devoured the latest political tracts and philosophical works on equality. She vividly recalled “reading Havelock Ellis’s
Psychology of Sex.
It was the first thing of its kind I had found. Though I was far from accepting it all, it opened up a whole new world of thought to me. I discussed it at some length with my father, and he, much interested, went off to buy the set of volumes for himself; but in those days one could not walk into a shop and buy
The Psychology of Sex
; one had to produce some kind of signed certificate from a doctor or lawyer to the effect that one was a suitable person to read it. To his surprise he could not at first obtain it.”
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Margaret openly battled Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, once breaking through a police cordon and jumping on his motorcar to protest his opposition to granting women the vote.
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She made speeches, dodged insults, and reluctantly agreed that the movement demanded militancy and sabotage. Early goals centered on burning postal boxes. Although she initially worried that such actions would harm innocent people by destroying their mail, she decided that “everyone knew we were doing it, and therefore knew that they ran the risk of not getting their letters.” “The end justifies the means,” she reasoned.
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One day, Margaret went off to a secret meeting and received “a flimsy covered basket” filled with crude explosives. Transporting the materials home so unnerved her that she actually buried them in her garden for a week before finally deciding to act. Her attempt, though, went disastrously wrong, and police apprehended Margaret while she was trying to destroy a postal box. An unsympathetic judge sentenced her to a month in a cold, dank prison cell. Humphrey, mortified, rushed to free her, but Margaret, more interested in the cause than in temporary discomfort, refused to leave. Instead, like many suffragettes, she embarked on a hunger strike, although she was horrified at the idea of being force-fed through a tube in her nose.
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Official government policy was to let the hunger striker reach the point of death and then release her; then, when she had recovered, she was rearrested—a vicious cycle that only increased the acts of militancy.
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Five days after her incarceration, authorities released Margaret; she left prison weakened but unbroken, determined to continue the fight until women had the right to vote.
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Luckily for Margaret, there was no rearrest: the outbreak of the Great War brought a cessation to most of the suffragettes’ more militant campaigns. Her father-in-law died and her husband inherited his baronetcy, but Margaret escaped marital unhappiness by taking on the role of her father’s personal assistant and business partner. “I must have been about eleven or twelve when he first talked business to me,” she recalled, “that is, poured out a stream of description of some deal he was engaged on at the time without any explanations.”
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David Thomas increasingly relied on his somewhat scandalous daughter; Margaret, in turn, now had an outlet for her formidable energies and talents as she attended board meetings, drafted letters, and accompanied her father on his business trips.
One such trip, made when future British prime minister David Lloyd George asked her father to investigate potential munitions deals, took Margaret and Thomas to America in the spring of 1915. “Part of the joy of New York,” she recalled, “was that there was no war there, and to come from England to America was like stepping from under a thundercloud into brilliant sunshine. After the strained tension of life at home the relief of this carefree place was just wonderful.”
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By the end of April, Thomas’s work was done, and father and daughter—along with his secretary, Arnold Rhys-Evans—decided to return home aboard
Lusitania
. While waiting for the ship to sail, they had strolled around the deck Saturday morning. Margaret was especially surprised to see so many children aboard the vessel: with the German warning, she thought, it seemed too great a risk for families to travel on
Lusitania
just then. “There was tension on board,” she remembered, “and the passengers were frankly anxious.”
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Tension eased with the passing days, but both father and daughter appeared preoccupied. Sharing a table with them, Howard Fisher thought that Thomas seemed “very grave, ate sparingly, and neither at table nor elsewhere was inclined to casual conversation.”
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Nor did Margaret have reason to celebrate. After her brief holiday in the “brilliant sunshine” of New York, she was returning to war-torn England—and to her loveless marriage.
Being a suffragette didn’t make Margaret Mackworth a social outcast: indeed, many fashionable and aristocratic women had involved themselves in the cause, though perhaps not quite as actively. The threat of being ostracized, though, hung heavily over two men traveling aboard the liner. The ever-observant George Kessler had spotted them walking, taking tea, dining, and disappearing into their shared cabin on B Deck. They “kept to themselves” throughout the voyage, never mixing or mingling with other passengers. People noticed their studied discretion; a few passengers wondered if they might be Germans—identities that, aboard
Lusitania
during the war, would perhaps raise concerns or even lead to unkind comments.
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The truth was more dramatic: Leo Schwabacher and Henry Sonneborn were a couple, at a time when homosexuality was punishable with harsh prison terms and hard labor.
If the individual struggles of Theodate Pope and Margaret Mackworth stood as precursors to the societal battles of a rapidly changing twentieth century, so, too, did Schwabacher and Sonneborn represent liberation and an increasingly growing homosexual subculture. They’d met in 1900, when Henry’s parents let a room above their Baltimore tavern to twenty-seven-year-old Leo Schwabacher. Originally from Peoria, the tall, slender Schwabacher came from a fairly wealthy family of liquor merchants but now worked as a bookkeeper. The same age as Leo, the handsome Henry also lived above the tavern, managing a coal distribution company with his brother. The friendship between the two young men blossomed: they apparently shared a love of music and art, and the Sonneborns happily treated Leo as if he was a member of their family: Henry’s mother, Wilhelmina, even referred to him as “a second son.”
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But what the Sonneborns might accept and indulge, society at large condemned. It was a time when homosexuality was hidden, condemned, and prosecuted. Less than a decade earlier, Oscar Wilde had been convicted of “gross indecency” and imprisoned; in 1903, New York City police raided a bathhouse and arrested some two dozen men for various criminal acts. Four years later, newspapers around the world entertained their readers with scandalous stories about Kaiser Wilhelm II’s homosexual friend Prince Philip of Eulenburg. Baltimore was not safe: Maryland, like all other states, had anti-sodomy laws that could lead to imprisonment and hard labor, not to mention financial ruin.
Uniquely, when many homosexuals fell victim to persecution, guilt, and self-loathing, Leo and Henry apparently made peace with themselves and their relationship. Nothing remains in the way of a paper trail to document their feelings, though at one point both bachelors described themselves as “married” on official documents. Perhaps this was an effort to conceal their status as a couple, or perhaps a tacit admission of how they viewed their own relationship. Starting in 1906, they began traveling to Europe with some frequency, dispatching postcards back to Henry’s nephew signed by them both. For a time the two lived in Paris; France was one of the very few countries to have decriminalized sodomy, and Paris boasted a vibrant homosexual subculture. In autumn 1914, though, the two men returned to America—aboard
Lusitania
—and moved back in with Henry’s mother in Baltimore.
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In the spring of 1915, Leo and Henry decided to return to Europe. Perhaps it was the war that drove their thoughts to the future: Leo purchased a mausoleum, where he and Henry could one day be entombed together, and both men changed their wills, each naming the other as sole beneficiary, before boarding the ship. At the last minute, Wilhelmina rushed to New York, pleading with her son to cancel the trip for fear of attack by a German submarine. But Henry assured her that all would be well. “Don’t worry,” he said, “we’ll send a telegram when we arrive safely.”
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Wilhelmina never saw either man again.
Adventurous or indolent afternoons on
Lusitania
invariably gave way to slower, more refined pleasures as evening approached. The exodus from deck usually began shortly after four. Passengers disappeared into suites and staterooms, relaxing, refreshing toilettes, and changing clothing before gathering in the First Class Lounge just aft of the Grand Staircase on A Deck. Although it was executed in a refined Georgian style, a previous traveler thought that the Lounge, with its deep bay windows and airy atmosphere, “had none of the formalism associated with a liner.” A twenty-foot-high, barrel-vaulted skylight, with stained glass panels representing the twelve months of the year, circled the room above a deep, ornate plasterwork cornice of sea nymphs and shells in contrasting ivory; at night, concealed electric bulbs illuminated the stained glass panels. Corinthian pilasters dotted richly veneered walls of polished French mahogany; a jade green carpet sporting yellow floral designs softened the effect. At either end of the eighty-six-foot-long room, alcoves featured fourteen-foot-high green
fleur de pêche
marble fireplaces, flanked by Corinthian columns and topped with decorative enameled panels framed in silver depicting
The Glory of Sunrise
and
The Conquest of the Sea.
Satinwood and mahogany sofas and chairs, “beautifully upholstered” in green and yellow floral silk, “stood about promiscuously,” offering intimate areas to relax as the hours passed.
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At five, the bells of
Lusitania
’s clocks chimed the hour as crisply uniformed stewards appeared with afternoon tea. Following British custom, this was a substantial meal of its own, with delicate little sandwiches, an assortment of cheeses, French pastries, cakes and petit fours, and a variety of teas and coffee.
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Helen Losanitch Frothingham, traveling aboard
Lusitania
a few months earlier, had noted that “fresh roses and carnations are on the small tables, and the passengers sit in comfortable easy chairs, some smoking, others reading the mail which awaited them aboard ship, still others sipping tea and chatting.” In such surroundings, she thought, “it doesn’t seem possible that elsewhere in the world people are homeless and starving.”
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