Barbara Vine - The Blood Doctor

3

A Labour life peer, whose name I can’t remember, has come up behind me and is looking over my shoulder. He asks who the ‘old boy’ is and I tell him it’s my great-grandfather. So of course he quotes the famous phrase Henry is known for, maybe the only clever thing he ever said in the House.

‘Control circumstances and do not allow them to control you.’

Apparently Thomas à Kempis said it first and Henry was only quoting him in his maiden speech. But everyone has forgotten that if they ever knew it. More malicious members aren’t above reminding me of another notorious statement of Henry’s: What is the answer , Hansard quotes him as asking, that is the question . The life peer asks me if I’ve heard about the ancient hereditary peer the opposition ‘bussed’ in to vote on a motion in last week’s debate.

‘He was in the loo,’ he says, ‘the one by the Bishops’ Bar, and he heard this ringing and clattering. So he comes tearing out, asking everyone what that frightful noise is. Of course it was the division bell. He’d never heard it before, he hadn’t been in for forty years.’

I laugh because it’s funny, though it’s also a mite embarrassing, and the life peer ambles off. Because I am plainly not an aristocrat, people forget that I inherited my title and don’t seem to think twice about using expressions like ‘getting rid of the hereditaries’ in my presence. The accurate description of what they’re aiming at is removing hereditary peers’ right to sit in the House and vote but even that hasn’t a gracious sound. I must try not to be so sensitive, though in the past I’ve never found that possible. ‘Control circumstances and do not allow them to control you.’ The truth is that you can only do so up to a point. Did Henry ever discover that? I wonder. There’s nothing I can do to control the circumstances that are going to turf me out of here, and we’re all victims of circumstance in the end.

I turn the page in the album and here is another photograph. It’s not dated but this is the last picture ever taken of Henry. He is in that same room where in 1896 he was sitting and looking smug, but this time his two sons are with him, the healthy and the sick. The younger boy seems eight or nine, so that is the length of time which has passed. The room itself has changed. It is less crowded with furniture and bric-a-brac. Lighter coloured curtains hang at the window. But the change in the room is nothing to the change in Henry. He is an old and broken man. A metamorphosis has taken place in regard to his skin and his hands and his now thin hair, so that it looks as if a carapace of some creased-up, roughened and worn material has been spread across his face and neck and hands, entirely hiding what nine years before remained of his youth. Alexander sits beside him looking cheerful and unconcerned. George, who must by this time have been no more than two years from death, leans against his father’s shoulder and Henry has his arm round him. I can’t read the look on Henry’s face. Sad? Bitter? Desperately tired? Perhaps all those things. I shall perhaps know when I have found out everything I can about him.

Big white letters come up on the red background of the television monitor: House Up. I put the album back into the briefcase and go down the corridor towards the Prince’s Chamber, the stairs, the cloakroom and the outdoors. A newish life peer, a woman of maybe fifty, a QC and chairman of some august body, with a fine head of blonde hair and legs nearly as good as Jude’s, comes out of the door that leads to the Barry Room and walks towards the blue carpet. Behind her a couple of active old hereditaries are talking and one says to the other, ‘Who’s the new girl?’

I’m reminded of something and I go back into the library to look it up. You can look up anything in here or someone else will do it for you. And here it is, part of the speech Earl Ferrers made in opposition to the bill that would, and eventually did, allow women to become members of this House.

‘Frankly,’ he said, ‘I find women in politics highly distasteful. In general, they are organizing, they are pushing and they are commanding. Some of them do not even know where loyalty to their country lies. I disagree with those who say that women in your Lordships’ House would cheer up our benches. If one looks at a cross-section of women already in Parliament I do not feel that one could say that they are an exciting example of the attractiveness of the opposite sex. I believe that there are certain duties and certain responsibilities which nature and custom have decreed men are more fitted to take on; and some responsibilities which nature and custom have decreed women should take on. It is generally accepted that the man should bear the major responsibility in life. It is generally accepted, for better or worse, that a man’s judgement is generally more logical and less tempestuous than that of a woman. Why then should we encourage women to eat their way, like acid into metal, into positions of trust and responsibility which previously men have held?

‘If we allow women into this House where will this emancipation end? Shall we in a few years’ time be referring to “the noble and learned Lady, the Lady Chancellor”? I find that a horrifying thought. But why should we not? Shall we follow the rather vulgar example set by Americans of having female ambassadors? Will our judges, for whom we have so rich and well-deserved respect, be drawn from the serried ranks of the ladies? If that is so, I would offer to the most reverend Primate the humble and respectful advice that he had better take care lest he find himself out of a job…’

That speech was made not in Henry’s time but in 1957 and Ferrers was only twenty-eight when he made it. I put the photocopy from Hansard into my pocket for Jude to see and retrace my steps along Pugin’s gold and crimson corridors and across the bright blue carpet.

It’s a strange mad old place and I don’t want to leave it.

The school Henry went to was Huddersfield College. He left at the age of fifteen for his father’s woollen mill in Godby, where he spent two years learning various processes. Why? According to a letter from his mother to his aunt Mary, his father was appalled by Henry’s ambition to become a doctor of medicine. His only surviving son must go into the business. There follow two pages in which Amelia gives vent to her grief at the death of Billy, a sorrow that seems as intense as it was immediately after his death. If only he had lived, she writes, he might have learned the factory processes and one day taken over, leaving Henry to do as he chose. Perhaps it was too painful to confront, but she ignores the fact that Billy, suffering as he did from some kind of mental incapacity, could never have developed business acumen.

Nor, apparently, could Henry. At any rate, in 1853, when he was seventeen, he was apprenticed to a surgeon in Manchester and entered the Owens College in Quay Street. This seems to have been one of the first medical schools in the country. His father had relented and made him a fairly generous allowance. Possibly, he saw there was a future in medicine. It was no longer the rather disreputable trade, a ‘leech’, a ‘barber surgeon’, which it had been in the first decades of the century when he was young. At the Owens College and at the Manchester Royal School of Medicine Henry gained medals in chemistry, materia medica, operative surgery, physiology and anatomy, and in 1856 he carried off gold medals in anatomy, physiology and chemistry at the first MB London examination.

Marcus Grady, the Professor of Materia Medica at Manchester Royal School, wrote a glowing letter to his father. It was carefully preserved, firstly I’m sure by Amelia, then by Henry, between sheets of tissue paper in one of the trunks.