The Extraordinary Life of Mrs Violet Van Der Elst:

VIOLET VAN DER ELST

Violet Van Der Elst was an ordinary working class girl from Feltham, near Staines in West London who became a successful, and very wealthy, business tycoon in the early 20th Century. 

She used much of her self-made fortune to help fund various political and philanthropic causes and was an outspoken social reformer, who was well-known for campaigning against the death sentence. 

She led a very eccentric lifestyle and lived in a lavish country house which she renovated and filled with all forms of art and furniture. A great lover of culture, she was also an occultist book collector, a writer, publisher, and a musical composer.

VIOLET THE WRITER

Today her life story is not very well known and her many achievements have faded into obscurity - so on that basis, she seems to be a perfect subject for her very own potted biography here.In her heyday Mrs Van Der Elst was regarded as one of the most colourful eccentrics of the 20th Century but she was born Violet Anne Dodge on 4 January 1882 in Feltham, Middlesex, England, to working class parents John and Louisa Dodge. 

Although she stated that her father was a coal merchant, census records actually show him to be an Agricultural Worker in 1871, a Garden Labourer in 1881 / 1891 and a labourer in a Timber Yard in 1901. On her maternal side, Violet claimed to be the descendant of an Elizabethan seadog named Sir Guy Goundry, who was killed raiding Cadiz, in Spain. Her mother’s maiden name was Gundry, but my own research into her mother's ancestry has not shed any light on the elusive Sir Guy at this point! It would not be out of character for Violet to "embellish" some of her life-story, as we shall discover.

Violet came from a large Victorian family and was the second youngest child. John and Louisa Dodge's first two children had died in infancy in 1867 and 1868. Violet's older sister Rosa Mabel  was born in 1870, followed by Edward John in 1872, Samuel Robert in 1875, Lillian Florence in 1877, Charles William in 1879, Violet herself in 1882 and Ella Louise in 1887. 

VIOLET'S FAMOUS CAR

Violet's older brother Edward Dodge decided that his future lay in the Army. He joined the Rifle Brigade in 1890 when he was 18. His Army records describe him as being 5ft 3 inches tall, with blue eyes, brown fair complexion and eyebrows that met in the middle. After two years training in England, Edward was then posted overseas to East India, Hong Kong and Singapore. He spent another year back in England and married Sarah Boyman on 7th August 1899 in Feltham. 

He was called up again on the 28th November 1899. He served out in South Africa fighting in the Boer War during the Relief of Ladysmith. He was killed in Action on 29th February 1900 at Pieter's Hill aged 27. He was the first of Violet's siblings to pass away.

Violet first job was as a scullery maid, then she had very brief stage career. In 1903, when she was 21, Violet married 34 year old Henry Herbert Arthur Nathan, a civil engineer from Wanstead, Essex, who was known as "Harry". 

In 1910 her father John passed away, followed by her brother Samuel in 1915. Samuel Dodge had been a bakers boy who then became a Pastry Cook, His first wife Fanny died just a year after they were married. Violet lost her brother Charles in 1922, then her mother died in 1923, and her sister Ella died in 1925. It is no wonder with so many deaths in her family that Violet later became fascinated with spiritualism.

Not one to sit back and be a contented housewife, Violet had began making and selling her own cosmetics, creams and lotions - using her kitchen to manufacture her products. She ended up founding a company that developed the first brush-less shaving cream for men. It was called "Shavex" and today the brand is worth millions.

Subsequently Violet became a very successful business woman and was especially concerned with the marketing of all her products. She personally oversaw every single detail of any advertisements that were created .

As an employer and boss she was always a force to be reckoned with. Violet sacked her aristocratic young secretary Lord Edward Montagu for embezzlement, after he had been arrested.

ADVERT FOR SHAVEX

She replaced him with 19-year-old New Zealander Ray Winston, whom she sacked and reinstated on a daily basis.

Four months after her first husband died on 15 November 1927, she married Jean Julien Romain Van der Elst, a Belgian who had been working for her as a manager but who was also a painter, traveller and composer. In 1934 he too died suddenly and it was in his memory that she dedicated the rest of her life to campaigning for the abolition of capital punishment.

She gained publicity from her vocal campaigns against capital punishment, and was a regular sight outside courtrooms, prisons and places of execution, stepping out of her chauffeur-driven Rolls to protest, chanting, “Abolish capital punishment” and These men must not hang,” into a microphone., while the planes she'd hired to pull black banners saying “Stop the Death Sentence” flew overhead.

An imposing figure, weighing 15 stone and always dressed in black, Violet’s highly visual and well organised protests also saw her gather hordes of sandwich-men on the ground, all accompanied by a brass band playing the Dead March in Saul.

VIOLET GETTING ARRESTED

She employed direct action tactics such as leading the crowd in song and breaking through police cordons. These were not only designed to engage and include the crowd that was present, but also to grab the attention of newspaper readers and the press. Her approach to campaigning made deliberate use of spectacle and, coupled with her direct action techniques, can be understood as a form of post-suffragette militancy.

Violet set up her own newspaper called Humanity, and published evidence which she believed proved that condemned people were innocent. She was often arrested or taken to court for slander. She is commonly regarded as the woman who fought the hardest for the abolition of capital punishment in Britain.

Having amassed a huge personal fortune through her businesses she purchased Harlaxton Manor, in Lincolnshire in October 1937. She rescued the 1830s building when she bought it for £90,000 after seeing an advertisement in Country Life Magazine. It had become derelict and faced being demolished. It had been rumoured that the Duke of Windsor had tried to acquire it, while his Grandfather, Edward V11, had also tried to buy it as a summer palace.

GRANTHAM CASTLE

She renamed it Grantham Castle and restored the interior, filling it with antique furniture from Buckingham Palace and Rufford Abbey, adding the large marble fireplace in the front entrance hall, and the Great Hall’s crystal chandelier which she claimed was the largest in the world. When she moved in, she also introduced electricity to the manor and added many new bathrooms.  She opened the house to the public, collected a library of over 4000 books, many of which were rare occult volumes, and filled the Grand Hall with statues. Her favourite was a bust of Napoleon dressed as Julius Caesar.

GRANTHAM CASTLE

She kept her second husband’s ashes in an urn on the ledge of a stained-glass window in the Great Hall and often attempted to contact his spirit during séances performed in Grantham Castle. Mrs. Van der Elst had a number of psychics who she consulted over the years. She was discerning about whom she let in and  could pick out a fake after just one session.

She hid money under carpets to test her maids’ honesty and banned shooting on the 427-acre estate - despite having a passion for wearing Russian sables.

VIOLET & HER DOG AT GRANTHAM CASTLE

Mrs Van der Elst became disillusioned with the Manor after it was requisitioned for the war effort, when the War Agricultural Committee ploughed up 100 hectares of parkland. She said: “I felt part of me was taken away.”

She had based the Women’s Peace Legion at Grantham Castle, and took out advertisements in national papers claiming women could end war for all time.

She spent much of the Second World War living at her Kensington flat, as the military took over Harlaxton Manor. There she showed extreme bravery, putting out incendiary bombs with buckets of water and driving through a blitz to deliver blankets to the needy and the homeless.

She entered politics and stood three times, unsuccessfully, as a candidate to be a Member of Parliament. Firstly she fought for the Putney constituency at the 1935 General Election as an Independent, coming third. Then she stood for the Southwark Central constituency in the 1940 by-election as the National Government candidate, coming third. And lastly, she fought for the Hornchurch constituency at the 1945 General election as an Independent, coming fourth.

She was also a prolific music composer, publishing (through her own company) more than 200 pieces, despite being unable to read or write a single note of music. She employed professional musicians to do that for her.

MRS VAN DER ELST'S BOOK

She wrote the book On the Gallows in 1937 as part of her efforts to eradicate the death penalty. In the same year she published a collection of 13 ghost stories, The Torture Chamber and Other Stories though her own company Dodge Publishing. These books are incredibly rare nowadays and 1^steditions of them sell on Ebay for between $70 -$400 upwards.The biography of her life written by Charles Gattey is also a very rare book - something no doubt that she would have loved.

As part of her campaign work, Violet fought to keep Ruth Ellis and Charlotte Bryant from being executed - to no avail. After Bryant was hanged, Violet helped find her children a suitable orphanage, and set up a fund to help children who had lost parents because of the death penalty. You can read Charlotte Bryant's story here on the blog.

Mrs. Van der Elst was a great fan of Shakespeare’s tragedies and could quote them word for word.

She had a great love for art and for painting and gave a lot of her money to orphanages and to the poor.

Her social campaigning, charitable acts, eccentric behaviour, and unsuccessful political career did much to reduce her fortune. She was forced her to sell Grantham Castle in 1948 to the Jesuits for a mere £70,000. It is now the UK campus of The University of Evansville, Indiana.

Violet moved into to her flat in in Campden Hill Square, Knightsbridge, London, in 1959. She died alone and forgotten in a nursing home in Ticehurst, Sussex, on 30 April 1966, aged 84.  Her wealth was reduced to just ₤15,528, but she had lived long enough to have seen the abolition of capital punishment for murder in Britain the previous year.

In the 2005 film Pierrepoint, she is played by actress Ann Bell.