Christina Broom: Britain's 1st Female Press Photographer

Christina Broom - Museum of London Collection

Christina Broom was credited as being "the UK's first female press photographer" and yet, despite her many achievements, her incredible life and work remain relatively unknown. “Historically she has been seen as an eccentric amateur, which has meant her work hasn’t seen the light of day in quite the way it should have done,” says Anna Sparham, who has curated a large exhibition of Broom’s photography, at the Museum of London.

Christina’s maiden name was Livingston and her parents were Scottish, although she was born at 8 King's Road, Chelsea, London, the seventh of eight children on 28 December 1862. Her father was Alexander Livingston, a master bootmaker and her mother was Margaret Fair Livingston. 

Her parents were well-off, but She must have rather exaggerated their worth, because when Christina told her fiancee, Albert, that she was not quite the heiress he thought she was, he asked her not to tell his mother. Christina’s brother Robert had already squandered much of the family inheritance at the gaming tables in Monaco, and her only income was the rent from a small house on nearby Oakley Street, which Oscar Wilde let from her to house his mother in – Broom would later testify at his trial.

Christina married Albert Edward Broom in 1889 and they had a daughter Winifred Margaret, who was born 7 August 1890. In 1903 the failure of the family ironmongery business was due to a cricketing accident which left her husband Albert an invalid after being struck on the shin by a ball. The injury was serious, causing necrosis of the tibia and fibulae bones. On the advice of a friend, the Brooms opened a small stationery shop in the middle-class suburb of Streatham. Although it never generated the income they hoped for, it was here that Christina noticed the booming trade in postcards which were all the rage. There were seven reliable postal deliveries a day; it was possible to send a card to someone in the same town and receive an answer within hours.

Christina Broom's Postcard Stall in London

Forced to become the main breadwinner for her family, Christina borrowed a box camera and taught herself the rudiments of photography when it was still very much in its infancy. She set up a stall in the Royal Mews at Buckingham Palace, selling postcards of photographs that she had taken. She maintained this stall from 1904 until 1930. 

Because newspapers were for the most part still unable to reproduce photographs, postcards were also used as a means of disseminating news, and Broom’s enterprise happened to coincide with a period of great upheaval in British history – she captured both the Suffragette movement and the First World War with an unusual, almost maternal intimacy.

She also turned her lens on the more humdrum details of city life, producing many streetscapes and informal portraits in which her sitters appear wonderfully unguarded.

Even though, by the turn of the century, photography had passed muster as a “suitable” pastime for women, most of Broom’s female cohorts preferred to operate from the safety of a studio, and to focus only on friends and family. Broom lugged her camera through the city instead, jostling for space among the male photographers of the press.

Anna Sparham says: “The testing circumstances in which she found herself stimulated her independent and resourceful qualities, but there were plenty of obstacles to overcome… conquering the apparatus was only one; having the nerve and ability to take these skills into the street, publicly projecting herself as a ‘professional photographer’, and most significantly as a woman, was another.”

When the family moved to a new house in Burnfoot Avenue, she used the coal cellar as her dark room. She was assisted by her daughter Winifred, who had left school to help and was extremely devoted for all of her life, both to the photography work and to her mother. Albert wrote the captions for the postcards in his neat script. The postcards sold well: in one night-time session Broom printed 1000.

Chelsea Barracks from Museum of London Collection

Christina was appointed official photographer to the Household Division of the Army from 1904 to 1939 and had her own darkroom in the Chelsea Barracks; she also took photographs of local scenes, including those at Buckingham Palace, as well as The Boat Race and Suffragette marches. Her portraits included  leading suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst and Emily Wilding Davidson. Although Broom’s photography is immersed in an Edwardian era of grandeur and tradition,  it also conveys and acknowledges change.

Suffragettes - Museum of London Collection

 It is in her coverage of the suffragette movement that we glimpse most of her character. Although she always sought to retain a respectable impartiality in her work, here we sense a fascination and a growing appreciation. In its bright, early days the ideas must have chimed particularly with Christina’s own struggles.

When Albert Broom died in 1912, Christina and Winifred moved to Munster Road, Fulham where she took the professional name of Mrs Albert Broom. Her daughter Winnie became a VAD nurse during the First World War.

Courtesy of Museum of London

By 1915 Broom had become firmly established, selling photographs to many newspapers and magazines which featured the images of her soldier friends. Her er wartime photographs cover a huge range of subject matter from Soldiers leaving to for the front, right through to those returning wounded. She also took a rare shor of Rudyard Kipling's son John who was killed in 1915 aged 18.

Her portraits were purchased in the hundreds by soldiers who sent them home to their families; she did more for conscription, Field Marshall Frederick Roberts said, than his prayers for new recruits ever had. He was so impressed by Broom’s work that he recommended her to the King.

She attended a tea party at Buckingham Palace held for wounded soldiers in 1916 and her meetings with King George V, both before, during and after the war, would prove fruitful for her career as a press photographer. The increasingly close relationship she enjoyed with the royal family led to some of her most impressive scoops.

She was allowed great privileges and had special access to major royal events and occasions. Broom was given an exclusive commission with the Prince of Wales and produced a lovely portrait of the young prince.

Broom was the only person allowed in to see King Edward VII when he died and was lying in state. She was allowed into Westminster Abbey to photograph him at 4am in the morning. In the 1920s and 1930s her work was featured in top publications such as the Illustrated London News, The Tatler, The Sphere, and Country Life.

Christina Broom's Portrait of Pankhurst - Museum of London

   Letters and journals from the time point to Broom being accepted and respected by many of her male peers. One of the royal photographers, Ernest Brooks, gave Broom a few tips. In one note he wrote: “I am extremely sorry for you having so much worry… Hope you will soon be all right. It warrants a good nerve I know.”

The physical strain of carrying around 40 pounds worth of camera equipment across London caught up with Broom, and eventually she was confined to a wheelchair. However, if Broom found herself with crippling back pain, her daughter Winfred would push her to the barracks or the Royal Mews in her wheelchair, so that she was still able to use her camera. By the Thirties, she had closed her stall selling postcards and begun to spend more time in Margate, where she and Winnie liked to fish. 

Christina Broom died on 5 June 1939 and was buried in Fulham old cemetery. 

With the outbreak of the 2nd World War, restrictions on military photography had tightened considerably, and, despite her best efforts, Winnie found she could no longer continue running the family business. She eventually retired in Margate, where she died in 1973, but not before Queen Mary had personally recommended she save her mother’s plates for the nation. Winifred was instrumental in safeguarding Christina's negatives by having them housed in various public institutions and museums. 

Collections of Christina Broom’s photographs are held at the Museum of London, the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, London, the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, the Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich, the Guards Museum, London; the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Local Studies Library; the Hammersmith and Fulham Archive and the National Army Museum; Maidstone Art Gallery, Kent; and the Harry Ransom Center and the Gernsheim Collection, University of Texas, both at Austin, Texas

On 17 December 2009 a collection of some 2,000 of her photographs, mainly of military subjects, was to be offered for sale by auction at Sotheby's in London. The collection was expected to make up to £35,000. It failed to sell and was acquired privately by the Museum of London.  In June 2015, the museum opened an exhibition of her photographs entitled Soldiers and Suffragettes.

Anna Sparham for the Museum of London said: 

'Bearing in mind she's this small-framed lady working in this quite often male-dominated environment, she has this ability to really pull people together to form lovely compositions.

'She seizes their attention and you always get a sense of her relationship with her subjects, whether that's the suffragettes or powerful soldiers going off to war.'

Broom, would have needed to be quite the character herself, as well as determined, as she pursued a career that was a far cry from the trajectory expected of a woman at the beginning of the 20th Century.

 

'Christina would have had to have been quite a determined lady,she is described as quite formidable and I think to embrace the world of photography, which within her world was fairly unique, it would have been quite a brave thing to do.'

VIDEO ON CHRISTINA BROOM FROM THE MUSEUM OF LONDON

The Amazing Mabel Stark - Tiger Trainer & Big Cat Tamer

A brilliant new documentary film entitled Mabel, Mabel, Tiger Trainer directed by Leslie Zemeckis premiered in 2017. We added the film trailer to our website in 2018 (on right sidebar) so we could help spread the word about this amazing woman. Lesley Zemeckis has done a sterling job in bringing Mabel’s incredible life story to the big screen. 

Mabel Stark, whose real name was Mary Haynie was a renowned tiger trainer of the 1920s and was one of the world's first women to take up this thrilling but very dangerous occupation, which she did from 1911 right through to 1968. 

"Mabel Stark" entered the world on December 10, 1889 in Kentucky. She was one of seven children born to Lela and Hardy Haynie. Her parents were farmers and they died within two years of each other, so that by the age of 17, Stark and her siblings were orphaned. 

She spent a short period of time living with her aunt in Princeton. She then travelled to Louisville and became a nurse at St. Mary's Hospital. Soon after that, she left Louisville and her history becomes difficult to trace. 

Her Circus friends contend that she worked in carnivals as a "dancer". Like many circus performers, Stark did not hesitate to enrich the truth to create an interesting story. She even once told an interviewer that she was born to a wealthy Canadian.

In 1911 she was working with the Al G. Barnes Circus based in Culver City, California, where she met animal trainer Al Sands. She worked for a brief time there as a "high school" horseback rider, but her dream job was to work with the big cats. She began work with Louis Roth, a famous "cat man" who she would later marry. Roth advocated training big cats by rewarding them with meat, as opposed to beating them as earlier trainers did. Roth used the carrot instead of the stick. Stark's first big cat performance was with two lions and two tigers. 

Soon, she became a tiger trainer in the ring. At first, they had her work a "balloon act" which had her "riding" a lion on a platform and then pressing a pedal to release fireworks at some point in the act. But by 1916, she was presenting the show's major tiger act.

On 18 February 1916, Stark was severely mauled by a lion named Louie while rehearsing for the Pacific Electric exhibit of the National Orange Show in San Bernardino, California. Stark's husband, Louis Roth, fired blank cartridges from a revolver into the face of the lion amid the screams of his wife and spectators who had gathered to watch the rehearsal.

 The lion seized Stark's left arm into its mouth and rolled over a number of times. Roth had also been mauled earlier that same day by a lion. He suffered deep injuries to his arm before firing blanks into the animal's open jaws. Mabel was dragged unconscious from the cage and rushed to a hospital where she was treated for a mauled and broken arm. This was Stark's third mauling in as many years. In 1914, while in Detroit, Michigan, she was attacked by her leopards during a parade, and during the winter of 1915 she was again attacked in Venice, California.

She adopted a sickly tiger cub named Rajah and raised him to perform a famous wrestling act with her. She accomplished this by romping and playing with the cub at the beach and actually keeping him as a pet in her apartment. According to Stark's autobiography:

 "Rajah would run straight toward me. Up he went on his hind legs, his forefeet around my neck. We turned around once or twice, I threw him to the ground, and we rolled three or four times. I opened his mouth and put my face inside, then jumped to my feet".

Rajah became instrumental in making Stark a star. She admitted years later that Rajah was actually relieving himself sexually during this wrestling act, which looks very much like a vicious attack to anyone not familiar with tiger behaviour. Stark started wearing a white uniform at this time so that the audience would not see tiger semen. The white costume became her signature, which she used for the rest of her career.   

She was approached by, and joined, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1922, where she performed in Madison Square Garden with snarling tigers and a black panther. By the end of that season, of the six wild animal acts featured with the circus, Mabel Stark's was clearly the greatest success. In 1923, she starred in the Ringling centre ring, but two years later the circus banned all wild animal acts. 

By then Stark had divorced Roth and was a star act. She married the circus's accountant Albert Ewing, who was embezzling funds from Ringling. They divorced when the crime was uncovered, but Stark believed she was being punished for her husband's sins when the circus cut all big cat acts in 1925. 

Ringling chiefs claimed that the cage took too long to assemble and tear down during a performance. Stark was still under contract, though, and was assigned to a horse act. Her tigers were kept on in the circus's menagerie, which was supervised by Art Rooney. Mabel later claimed that she married her first husbands for practical reasons, but she fell in love with Rooney. They soon married, which surprised other circus employees because Rooney wore makeup and nail polish, and they assumed he was not the marrying kind. Rooney died soon after under circumstances that were not recorded.

After a sojourn to Europe where she performed in a circus, she came back to the U.S. in 1928 and began work with the John Robinson Show. The circus train was late getting to the venue in Bangor, Maine, the tigers were getting wet in the rain, and there was no time to feed them before the show. Normally, a cat act would be delayed or cancelled for this reason. But Stark let the show go on. Two hungry tigers named Sheik and Zoo mauled her during the show. Stark's own description of the incident was:

    "Sheik was right behind me, and caught me in the left thigh, tearing a two-inch gash that cut through to the bone and almost severed my left leg just above the knee. . .I could feel blood pouring into both my boots, but I was determined to go through with the act. . .(Zoo) jumped from his pedestal and seized my right leg, jerking me to the ground. As I fell, Sheik struck out with one paw, catching the side of my head, almost scalping me. . .Zoo gave a deep growl and bit my leg again. He gave it a shake, and planting both forefeet with his claws deep in my flesh, started to chew. . .I wondered into how many pieces I would be torn. . .Most of all I was concerned for the audience. . .I knew it would be a horrible sight if my body was torn apart before their eyes. And all my tigers would be branded as murderers and sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in narrow cages instead of being allowed the freedom of the big arena and the pleasure of working. That thought gave me strength to fight."

She would suffer a wound that almost severed her leg, along with face lacerations, a hole in her shoulder, a torn deltoid muscle and a host of other injuries. Stark managed to leave the cage with the help of another trainer, Terrell Jacobs, and insisted on changing out of her blood-soaked stage clothing before going to the hospital. Doctors sewed muscles and skin back together with 378 stitches, but they did not expect her to survive. She was back to work within a few weeks, swathed in bandages and walking with a cane, although the injuries troubled her and she was in and out of hospitals several times over the next two years for further muscle repair. When she was mauled, she blamed herself, or other factors, but never the tigers. She loved them and respected them, but also said there was no such thing as a "tame tiger." 

 Stark announced her retirement a couple of times, but always returned to performing.

She performed with the Sells-Floto Circus in 1929 and then rejoined Barnes, after it had been sold to Ringling, in 1930 and stayed there until it was absorbed into Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey during the season of 1938. 

Mabel with Mae West in 1933

In 1932 she and her tiger act was filmed for the Paramount Pictures motion picture King of the Jungle (1933). In the film Stark is seen putting her tigers through their paces when fire erupts in the big top. 

 She also worked as a stunt double in the lion-taming scenes for Mae West in the 1933 film I'm No Angel, which West wrote, possibly inspired by Stark's career. 

Hollywood work introduced Stark to Louis Goebel's Jungleland, in Thousand Oaks, California, a facility that housed trained animals for movies. She returned to California and finished her career at the Jungleland Compound.

She toured with some small circuses and lived in Japan where she performed her circus act in the 1950s. Stark also appeared on television in the 1960’s - she did a stint as one of the guests with an unusual occupation on What's My Line?, the popular Sunday Night CBS-TV program.

In 1968 Jungleland was sold to a new owner who disliked Stark and fired her. Soon after she left, one of her tigers escaped and was shot. Stark was angry and hurt about the animal's destruction and felt that she could have safely secured the tiger if the owners had asked for her assistance. Three months later, she killed herself by an overdose of barbiturates.

 In the last pages of her autobiography, Hold That Tiger, Stark writes:

 "The chute door opens as I crack my whip and shout, 'Let them come,' Out slink the striped cats, snarling and roaring, leaping at each other or at me. It's a matchless thrill, and life without it is not worthwhile to me."

She died on April 20, 1968 and was found dead by her housekeeper. According to her 1938 autobiography Hold That Tiger, Stark would have preferred to “die at the hands of a tiger than by any other means.”

In 2001 a fictionalized biography of Stark's life by author Robert Hough, entitled The Final Confession of Mabel Stark was published. The story is based in 1968, the same year that Stark committed suicide. The screenplay was optioned by director Sam Mendes with the hopes of making a film starring his wife Kate Winslet, however no production schedule has yet been announced. Apparently Winslet, has been interested in playing the role of Mabel Stark since 2003.

In the meantime if you want to find out more about the real Mabel Stark read her autobiography and watch the fantastic new documentary Mabel Mabel Tiger Trainer. 

 http://mabeltigermovie.com

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.