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WWith the help of Dorset Police, MI5 confidently approached three would-be subversive terrorists living quietly together by the sea almost 85 years ago. Local officers had been alerted to their shared Communist sympathies and were now monitoring the suspects: Ackland, Townsend and Warner, each seen as a threat to British security in the run-up to World War II.
But in fact, as recently released Secret Service documents show, this potentially dangerous trio under secret surveillance were in fact female poets. And besides, there were only two: lesbian lovers Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner.
A new Ackland biography, released next month, is to reveal the Secret Service’s level of confusion about this unconventional writing couple at the start of the long period they have both been the subject of. a state examination. All their correspondence was stopped and read by MI5 officers without their knowledge, and Ackland’s subsequent attempts to enlist for important war work were blocked.
“There are all these hand-copied versions of their letters, which must have been hand-made by bureaucrats sitting in tweed jackets, as I imagine,” said biographer Frances Bingham, author of the first major study on the cross. dress the poet and activist. His book Valentine Ackland, a transgressive life will be published on May 20 by Handheld Press to mark 115 years since Ackland’s birth.
“I researched this part of the couple’s life at the Public Record Office in Kew and could see that the government had unsuccessfully sought definitive evidence against them,” Bingham said over the weekend.
“The authorities first heard of Ackland in 1935 when she wrote to the British Communist Party. She offered them to use her car and was ready to become a driver. MI5 assumed she was male and wrote to their local police telling them they should watch them.
Ackland, born Mary Kathleen in London in 1906 and known as Molly in her youth, had learned to drive and pull from her father, who had no sons. Her lover, Townsend Warner, was a writer who is still acclaimed for his novels and short stories, including an early bestseller, Lolly willowes. The couple lived together in intermittent harmony for 30 years until Ackland’s death in 1969.
“MI5 told police they wanted to know if there was anything wrong with Ackland,” said Bingham, who previously edited an Ackland poetry collection. “While that question and the mistakes about their gender, including the fact that they initially thought Townsend Warner was two people, made me laugh at first, a moment later it hit me a chill. It was clear that being gay and being a threat to society were one and the same in their minds. These people were communists and they were weird, and those two things were very bad.
By the age of 19, Ackland had married a man, Richard Turpin. But the union was a mistake from the start. And so, in 1925, already sporting a childish Eton crop and men’s clothing, the reluctant woman moved to the Dorset village of Chaldon to escape. She met Townsend Warner, 12 years her senior, soon after.
In 1934, the writers jointly published a sensational collection of erotic love poems, Whether it’s a dove or a seagull. The verses appeared anonymously, confusing the identities of the poets.
That year, they also both joined the Communist Party.
Ackland, who had begun to experiment with a simpler style of writing, began to be published widely in the left-wing press. Together, the couple volunteered for the British Red Cross in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, where they were delegates to an anti-fascist writers’ conference in Madrid and visited the front lines in Guadalajara. Ackland’s (“Our Worker’s Correspondent”) articles captured the idealism and chaos of Republican Spain, but she also wrote what Bingham describes as “melancholy poems” lamenting the victory of fascism.
After Spain, the couple moved inland in Dorset, to a riverside house in Frome Vauchurch, where they stayed for the rest of their lives. As the war against Germany unfolded, Ackland felt trapped in the west of the country, with repeated applications to use her driving skills for the mysteriously denied Allied campaign.
“She was a Communist in the sense that she was always on the side of the underdog,” Bingham said. “Even though she came from a wealthy background, she felt like a foreigner. She was very anti-Nazi, but despite being the right age, she did not get an interesting war job.
“It was because unbeknownst to her she was on the blacklist. All she could get was a little clerical work, and she was eventually transferred to Civil Defense, and even there her superiors were warned not to let her see or hear anything. She had no idea.
Ackland’s Teaching to Shoot poem from this period describes the unsettling process of teaching Townsend Warner how to use a firearm, while awaiting a Nazi invasion.
Ackland died of cancer at age 63. Townsend Warner outlived the woman she called “my light and my gravity” for almost nine years and spent much of that time editing a posthumous collection of Ackland’s poetry, The nature of the momentand prepare their letters for publication.
“I see Ackland as a pioneer of modern lesbian writing and want to celebrate her determination to live like herself,” said Bingham, who runs Potters’ Yard Arts in London with her partner, Liz Mathews. “I find her story very inspiring.”
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