Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives. Katie Hickman
Any woman following Flora Annie Steel’s advice to the letter would therefore have made her journey with a total of seventy-four different items of underwear (not including the pocket handkerchiefs).
Mary Sheil would have been similarly restricted in 1849, when she made the three-and-a-half-month journey to Persia via Poland and Russian Turkistan. The introduction of the crinoline was still seven years off, but there were stays, combinations and yards of cumbersome petticoats to hamper her. A typical day-time outfit of the period, even for travelling, would have included long lace-trimmed drawers, a tightly laced bone corset supporting the bust with gussets, and a bodice or camisole over the top. In addition to these a woman would have worn a total of five different petticoats: two muslin petticoats, a starched white petticoat with three stiffly starched flounces, followed by a petticoat wadded to the knees and stiffened on the upper part with whalebone, followed by a plain flannel petticoat. Over these went her travelling dress.
Mary Sheil was a highly intelligent and educated woman. During the four years she spent in semi-seclusion in the British mission in Tehran she learnt to speak Persian fluently, and became something of an authority on many aspects of Persian history. However, like so many other women contemplating their first long-distance diplomatic journey, she must have been totally unprepared for the kind of hardships she encountered. But the sheer physical discomfort of the journey, although considerable, was eclipsed by her growing sense of the vast cultural chasms which she would somehow have to cross. Physically, she may have had the protection of her husband and his Cossack escort; emotionally, I suspect, she was entirely alone.
Colonel Sheil and his newly pregnant wife were luckier than most contemporary travellers for, as diplomats, they were provided with a messenger, an officer of the Feldt Yäger,* who rode ahead of them and secured, to the exclusion of other travellers, a fresh supply of horses. Nevertheless, the journey was not only uncomfortable, but occasionally extremely dangerous. Until a few years previously, Mary noted with some trepidation, no traveller had been allowed to proceed through the Russian hinterlands without an armed escort.
At one point they travelled in their carriage – ‘an exceedingly light uncovered wagon, without springs, called a pavoska, drawn by three horses abreast’ – for five days and five nights at a stretch. They stopped only for meals in flea-bitten inns along the way; sometimes, after a long and exhausting day on the road, they would find that there was absolutely nothing for them to eat: ‘not even bread, or the hitherto unfailing samawar [sic]… so we went dinnerless and supperless to bed.’
As they penetrated still further into the Russian outback the countryside became increasingly desperate. There was nothing to be seen but desolation and clouds of midges. ‘It is marvellous,’ Mary remarked sombrely, ‘how little change has taken place in this country during fifty years.’ In Circassia she noted down the price of slaves who, even in 1849, were still openly on sale. A young man of fifteen could be bought for between £30 and £70, while a young woman of twenty or twenty-five cost £50-£100. The highest prices of all, however, were fetched by young nubile girls of between fourteen and eighteen, who went for as much as £150 (just under £9000 today).
For the most part, the strangeness of these lands was something which Mary had to endure before she could reach her destination. Unlike her successor, Vita Sackville-West, she found little in the Persian landscape to excite her imagination. ‘Sterile indeed was the prospect, and unhappily it proved to be an epitome of all the scenery in Persia, excepting on the coast of the Caspian,’ she wrote.
If Mary’s upbringing had ill-prepared her for the rigours of the journey, it had prepared her even less for the stark realities of life in Persia. At the border she veiled herself for the first time and, very much against their will, persuaded her two maids to follow her example.
At first the implications of this self-imposed purdah were lost amidst the excitement of their reception. The Persians welcomed them magnificently, as Mary recorded in her journal:
The Prince-Governor had most considerately sent a suite of tents for our accommodation; and on entering the principal one we found a beautiful and most ample collation of fruits and sweetmeats. His Royal Highness seemed resolved we should imagine ourselves still in Europe. The table (for there was one) was covered with a complete and very handsome European service in plate, glass and china, and to crown the whole, six bottles of champagne displayed their silvery heads, accompanied by a dozen other bottles of the wines of Spain and France.
More typical of her fate, however, was the ‘harem’ which had been prepared for her and her ladies – a small tent of gaily striped silk, with additional tents for her women servants, surrounded ominously by ‘a high wall of canvas’.
Colonel Sheil’s triumphal procession through Persia to Tehran is counterpointed in Mary’s journal by her growing realization that, as a woman, she would play no part at all in his public life. In Tabríz, in northern Persia, where thousands of people turned out into the streets to welcome them, ‘there was not a single woman, for in Persia a woman is nobody’. A tent was set up where the grandees of the town, who had come to meet them, alighted to smoke kalleeans and chibouks, to drink tea and coffee and to eat sweetmeats. Mary was obliged to remain in solitary seclusion while her husband received their visitors alone. Once the men had refreshed themselves, the entire procession was called to horse again, this time with a greater crowd than ever, including ‘more beggars, more lootees or mountebanks with their bears and monkeys, more dervishes vociferating for inam or bakshish …’
Excluded from these courtesies, and relegated ingloriously to the very tail of the procession along with the servants and the baggage, poor Mary found the show, the dust and the fatigue overwhelming. To make matters worse, at every village a korban, or sacrifice, was made in which a live cow or sheep was decapitated, and the blood directed across their path.* Although this ceremony was carried out in their honour, Mary was repelled and disgusted by it. Every last vestige of romance which Persia – the land of The Arabian Nights and Lalla Rookh – might once have held for her was swept away. In the towns she saw only dead horses and dogs, and a general air of decay; in the countryside only desolation and ‘a great increase of ennui’.
Mary Sheil completed her journey to Tehran in one of the strangest conveyances ever used by a diplomatic wife – a Persian litter known as a takhterewan, a kind of moving sofa ‘covered with bright scarlet cloth and supported by two mules’, while her two maids travelled in boxes, one on either side of a mule, ‘where, compressed into the minutest dimensions, they balanced each other and’ – no doubt echoing their mistress’s private thoughts – ‘sought consolation in mutual commiseration of their forlorn fate in this barbarian land.’21
* In recognition of her ground-breaking travels in Chinese Turkistan, Ella later became one of the first female Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society.
†A kind of small horse-drawn carriage.
* These special ‘double-lined native boots’ were a present to her from the orientalist and explorer Sir Aurel Stein.
* This was enough to furnish a very large villa. In those days only the houses of heads of mission were furnished by the government.
†Lord Nelson’s father was a close friend of Mr Blanckley’s.
* Although they were first published almost simultaneously, the difference in tone between these two handbooks is an interesting