Following on from
https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/long-reads/caste-out-anti-racism-impey-b1868595.html
Impey never again operated at the level of national or international politics or journalism. But she forever stood up for the causes she believed in – she served on local school boards and her dedication to the temperance cause never wavered. In 1913, she and Ellen funded the construction of a curious Swiss chalet-style building on a hill that overlooks Street. It was to serve as a holiday resort and social venue for workers with limited means.
The building still stands, now a youth hostel. It is well liked by us locals, but always in a mildly perplexed way – while it stands in Street, its unconventionality has never felt fully of the place. People sometimes know that it was built by two eccentric sisters.
In 1919, those sisters welcomed to Street a group of conscientious objectors who’d spent years imprisoned. Through the spring, Catherine and Ellen, with other sympathetic locals, consoled and helped revive these men. This work was now equally shared by the two of them – in a wonderful photograph, the aging sisters sit close together, at one with the group of smiling young men, the pair staring squarely into the camera, their faces are old but the sparks in their eyes are undimmed.
Regarding Impey’s relationship with the anti-racism cause after Anti-Caste’s demise, Bressey suspects that she must have remained connected somehow to the various evolving movements, but how, and to what extent is obscure. The visitors’ book, however, shows that the Impeys remained willing hosts to many guests, including at least two further notable African Americans.
The first was Paul Laurence Dunbar, who came in 1897. Dunbar was a poet, novelist, and essayist; one of the first Black writers to break through on the wider American and international stages. In London, he had worked the literary scene, later writing in an essay on England, “it was a great thing to have been accepted upon the basis of work alone; to have found a people who do not assert colour as a badge of degradation.”
In Street, Dunbar wrote in the guest book that he was at first mistaken for a burglar (by whom, he doesn’t say). Then, he said that he finished his first novel at Askew. Six years later, he would dedicate a book of poetry to Catherine Impey. To sign off his stay, he penned a short verse entitled In Somerset:
When days were dark & life seemed drear
Dear friends, you kindly asked me here
I thought the year had passed its prime
But woke to find it summer – time
---
One thinks that days of summer pass
Like fleeting forms before a glass;
Tis false: your home shall prove it yet,
For here, indeed, the Summer’s set!
The second African American visitor was Georgiana Simpson, an academic linguist who worked and studied at the University of Chicago, one of very few Black people who then did. She visited the Impeys three times – in 1897, 1905 and 1913. The first time, Simpson stayed at Askew – her departing words, “With thanks that cannot be expressed in words for my happy, happy stay among these dear friends.” But subsequently Simpson was hosted at a smaller house to which the sisters moved in 1901.
This house, a few hundred metres from Askew, is – to my great surprise – a place I know well. Aged fourteen I became friends with a girl who lived there, and spent many afternoons and evenings in the early 1990s, in this house listening to the music she introduced me to and putting the world to rights. We thought ourselves such knowing and sneering cynics. But we were, I now see, so optimistic. We railed against the world’s flaws, but never doubted it would get better -- that Nelson Mandela had recently walked free, seemed so natural, so inevitable. We thought, as teenagers do, that our generation saw things clearly at last, like no one previously had. What would we have thought if we’d known about the house’s former occupant?
I wrote to my friend when I learned about Impey. She spoke to her dad and soon she forwarded me a document given to him in 1987, written by a man, Stephen Morland, who’d known the Impey sisters. It said that Catherine had briefly been engaged to a Clark; that some American TV producers had come to Street, shortly after Wells’ autobiography was published, interested in making a documentary about Impey; and that the Impey sisters, when Morland used to visit them, were attempting to run a jam business, so as to divert apples from the cider presses; a venture they could never make succeed.
When I tell Bressey of this connection, she asks immediately if my friend’s dad searched the attic for lost documents. He did, I tell her, but found only a calling card that Impey had written.
I telephone my friend’s dad, and he tells me of talking to Morland about the house. Katie and Nellie, as he knew them, had always welcomed him into their home. He never forgot playing marbles on their bowed floors and the muslins that hung everywhere full of apples. My friend’s dad asked few questions because he’d had no idea who Impey was. But there she is – Impey, Catherine, Katie – just three conversations away. It’s superstitious, I know, but I can’t help but reassess the energy of that old house where I took an essential step in growing up.
On her final 1913, visit, Simpson wrote, “In the day when faith shall be turned to sight and we shall cease to ‘see through a glass darkly’ then too, I think, the tongue will receive new power and will be able to speak what the heart feels! Came Aug. 18, for spiritual uplift –am leaving, Sept. 2, much richer for having come.”
These glimpses and suggestions of how it was to spend time with Impey speak always of a warmth that’s perhaps absent in her public writing, yet, in a way that is entirely consistent with the moral constancy and passion that ran through every word she ever published. That Simpson needed uplift is understandable: though the University of Chicago admitted her to study, she suffered many miseries there.
In January, 1921, Ellen died. As is said of many couples, people feared that Catherine would not last long alone. That spring, she made her final contribution to the Street Village Album, reproducing an old political poem denouncing the evils of intoxication, about an apple tree branch burning in a fire, the result of local temperance campaigners felling six acres of cider apple trees. “I mean to keep puffing away until my last breath,” she’d told Douglass, this poem wasn’t a call for racial equality but it came from the same unconquered spirit.
On June 14th, that year, Simpson, aged fifty-six, received her PhD from the University of Chicago, as much an award for her courage and endurance, as it was an academic achievement. She was the first Black American woman to earn a PhD, and two more received such degrees within a month. I like to picture Impey, reading a letter from Illinois, happy.
Impey died two years later, on December 14th, 1923. The Central Somerset Gazette ran an obituary for this soon forgotten figure that said “the influence she exerted on the life of the place is still, and long will be, living and powerful.” Soon after, Dr Georgiana Simpson also wrote an obituary, which began, “About a year ago there passed away in England one of the staunchest friends of humanity. This was Catherine Impey.”
Caroline Bressey’s book Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste is available from Bloomsbury.
July 28th, 2021