The Adventurous Mrs Alec-Tweedie

Posted: January 20th, 2024 | No Comments »

As prolific as Ethel Brilliana Tweedie was – as an author, travel writer, biographer, historian, editor, journalist, photographer, and illustrator – she always wrote as Mrs Alec-Tweedie. This was the name her considerable public of readers and admirers knew her by and how she was always referred to in the newspapers of the time. Though now remembered primarily as a travel writer, particularly for her books on the United States and the Americas, Mrs Alec-Tweedie was many other things – a pioneering ethnologist, an accomplished watercolourist, a competent photographer, a campaigning suffragette, and a substantial philanthropist.

Ethel Brilliana Harley was born in London in 1862. Her father was a noted Scottish physician. She was educated at Queen’s College in London and then at a finishing school in Germany. Her wanderlust started early, in 1886, while still in her early twenties, with a trip to Iceland. There she met Alexander (Alec) Leslie Tweedie, a marine insurance brokers and a friend of her brother Vaughan Harley, a noted pathologist and professor at London University.

Tweedie had been born in India and was heir to a considerable fortune. The couple married in 1887, moved to the coastal town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk, and had two children – Harley Alexander and Leslie Kinloch Tweedie in 1888 and 1890 respectively. Tragedy struck when Alec died in 1896 following the collapse of a marine insurance syndicate and the loss of his fortune – killed by the shock it was said. Ethel’s father died suddenly afterwards, intestate and leaving his daughter nothing in his will. Though not completely impoverished, Ethel decided that she had to make her own living and called upon her contacts in the London publishing world.

She began by writing for the popular London press about her former travels and then decided to begin a roving life writing as she journeyed. However, tragedy struck again when both her youngest son Leslie was killed on active service at Ypres in World War One. her oldest son Harley Alexander continued to serve with the Australian Flying Corps after the war and was killed in a flying accident in Amman, Jordan in 1925.

Ethel continued to travel extensively and, when in London, to host receptions for the travel-inclined at her flat, at the smart Devonshire House in Mayfair. The receptions developed into a salon where many leading politicians, explorers, colonial officials, journalists, and writers of the Edwardian era gathered.

She became well-known, was photographed by EO Hoppé in his West Kensington studio (the photograph is now part of the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London) and was painted by the British painter Herbert Gustave Schmalz (aka Herbert Carmichael after 1918) and the Irish painter John Lavery. As well as recording her travels she became an accomplished watercolourist and also developed a serious interest in textiles and embroidery, which she began to collect on her travels. Today her extensive collection of textiles is part of the collection at the V&A in London.

Ethel continued to publish right up to her death in 1940 at home in her London flat.

Ethel Tweedie’s published works began with her journal of that fateful Iceland trip where she met her future husband. Her father had encouraged her to keep a diary of the trip and it was published as A Girl’s Ride in Iceland (1889). This was followed by several accounts of trips to the Nordic countries including A Winter Jaunt to Norway (1894), and Through Finland in Carts (1897), written in the wake of her husband’s sudden death when she left for Finland to escape the overwhelming grief she felt in Suffolk. She developed a tendency to make rather large claims – reputedly being the first woman to learn to ski or to ride astride a horse by her own account.

In the early 1900s Ethel travelled extensively in the Americas producing several books on Mexico (Mexico as I Saw It, 1902) and several more on the United States. She wrote prolifically and widely – as well as her travelogues she produced a biography of her father, a history of London’s Hyde Park, an appreciation of the island of Sicily, and a partial autobiography entitled Thirteen Years of a Busy Woman’s Life (1912).

During World War One she became an active suffragette and also wrote several books detailing and encouraging women’s involvement and efforts in the war, personally visiting several major battlefields. She worked Losing both her youngest son made the war particularly tragic for Ethel and after the armistice she decided to finally head East. Initially she wrote about the Near East and South Asia – Egypt, Palestine, and India – in a series of travel sketches based on her travels in the region between 1919 and 1921, Mainly East: In Prose – Perhaps Prosey (1922) and then her major journey East through Russia and Siberia on the Trans-Siberian Railway to China (excerpts of which form this volume). A later trip to northern China and Japan led to Manchuria, Japan and China: Water Colour Drawings (1926). In the 1930s she mostly remained in London writing more partial autobiography and a number of more factual books – on the explorer Fridtjof Nansen who she had met in Norway and admired and Mexican history.

Though not a specialist on China, in no way an academic or professional Sinologist, what does Mrs Alec-Tweedie have to tell us about China as she travelled through Hong Kong, Canton and Shanghai in the early 1920s?

As well as her books Ethel Brilliana Tweedie was successful in exhibiting and selling her watercolours with major exhibitions in London in 1921 and then regularly exhibiting with the last show being just months before she died in 1940.

Along with supporting the YMCA movement female suffrage was her major political campaign and she had shown an early predilection for women’s rights by daringly insisting on riding astride her horse, rather than side saddle as a woman was supposed to, back in the 1880s in Iceland (whether she was the first woman to do this, as she claimed, is debatable).

She served on the charitable committees of the International Council of Women, was a governor of London’s University College Hospital and St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. On her death many of her belongings were donated to the V&A Museum while her collection of paintings was distributed to the Navy League, the Imperial War Museum, The Royal Empire Society and The Royal Central Asian Society.

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