Arthur Davitt’s death certificate states he and Ellen married c. 1847, in Jersey. That may not be accurate, as she was not the informant; and the certificate contains mistakes, giving Ellen Frenchified Christian names (Marie Hélène), and a Dublin birthplace. It was Arthur who was Irish, b. 1808, and an educationalist. It is possible he met Ellen in Kingston, outside Dublin, where the Heseltines holidayed; and where Rose met Anthony Trollope, then a post office clerk.
Arthur Davitt was a Professor of Modern Languages at the Sorbonne in Paris. If he took Ellen back to France with him, that is when she gained her school experience, but as a teacher rather than pupil. After returning to Ireland in the late 1840s, Arthur Davitt became an Inspector of Schools. Ellen taught drawing in the Irish National Board’s Model School for Girls in Dublin from 1851-4. During an 1853 visit by Albert and Queen Victoria, her ‘fine’ copy of Winterhalter’s portrait of the monarch in coronation robes, hung prominently in the school.10
The couple were childless; a factor in their next career move, to Australia. In 1853 the Commissioners of National Education in Melbourne wrote to the Irish National Schools Board, requesting they recommend a Principal and Superintendent for the new Model School in East Melbourne; preferably a married couple without family. In effect, thus were two positions filled for the price of one; for the joint salary offered was £1,000 – £600 for the Principal and £400 for his wife. The Irish authorities recommended the Davitts.
At around this time Edward Heseltine’s frauds were discovered; prompting another good reason for a trip to the Antipodes, lest the Davitts be tainted by scandal. Another factor was that Arthur Davitt had tuberculosis, for which a standard treatment was sea air and a warmer climate.
The journey proved eventful. The Davitts had to change vessels, since the steamship Great Britain soon developed engine trouble. They took the clipper Lightning instead, whose captain was James Nicoll Forbes, a man intent on breaking sailing speed records. During the Davitts’ voyage he nearly wrecked the Lightning on the desolate Kerguelen Isles. The incident is recorded in the surviving journals of the passengers; and also in Force and Fraud, Davitt’s account being so detailed that it suggests she kept a travel diary.11
If she had, it would have been interesting to read her version of a dispute on the ship, noted by passenger John Warren Whitings:
This evening we had by way of amusement to some of the passengers as they must have something to pass a way the time, a fight between two men cabin [first-class] passengers, I call them men because I cannot call them Gentlemen with any truth and justice to that title, Mr. Davitt and a Mr. Robinson. Mr. D. called Mr. R. a liar and pulled his ears also promised him a good kicking. A Mr. Swift wanted very much Mr. R. to fight Mr. D. at 12 paces with pistols. I offered the loan of a case but Mr. R. said he could not think of risking his valuable person in a fight with such a man as Mr. D. it lasted about an hour and caused great fun to some of us.12
The Model School would have seemed a plum position, but it proved fraught. During the 1850s education in Victoria comprised two systems: religious schools controlled by the Denominational Board; and the secular National Board of Education, which hired the Davitts. The two boards were bitter rivals, with the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches in particular opposed to non-denominational schooling. The churches, in turn, were supported by powerful Parliamentarians.
In order to prove its superiority, the National Board determined to build a Model School. The building, in East Melbourne, was to be as impressive as the new system of schooling; instead, it proved vainglorious and costly. The Model School may have looked imposing, but it was jerrybuilt, with leaks and faults evident even before completion.
In addition, the place was an administrative nightmare. Arthur Davitt was expected to run an Infant school, separate schools for boys and girls and a Teacher’s training college in the one building. In order to conform to Victorian notions of propriety, the male and female students, whether teenage or adult, as in the case of the teacher trainees, had to be kept strictly segregated. Moreover, the National Board of Education was under the same roof, and the real power in the School.
In the Victorian world-view, the male dominated the public sphere, the woman the private and domestic. Ellen Davitt transgressed these boundaries. She was a woman prominent in public life; as Superintendent she was in control of all the female pupils in the school. The position was subordinate to her husband the Principal, but the Davitts were a team. Arthur’s letters to the Board frequently included the phrase: Mrs Davitt and myself. Thus, while Ellen was a loyal wife, she was not in the background. She had opinions and was ready to express them, for instance suggesting changes to the School’s architectural plans.13
The Education bureaucrats, used to a female ideal of submissive modesty, would have found her challenging and threatening. Certainly J. Alex Allan thought her ‘the power behind the throne’; harsh, priggish, and fond of fault-finding. Her only merit was ‘efficiency’.14
The Model School generated reams of correspondence, preserved in the Public Record Office. Any disputes among the school staff – and some of them were over matters as petty as 4lbs of butter (which Ellen Davitt was alleged to have appropriated) – had to be referred to the Board, in writing. The result was an endless stream of crotchety correspondence.
A re-examination of these documents does not support Allan’s depiction of Ellen Davitt. Was he influenced by other sources, such as a former Model school pupil, who recalled that Ellen ‘copied Queen Victoria in her style of dressing and deportment, wearing a shawl, folded cornerwise, around her shoulders’. Certainly a woman who was not amused appears in his account of John Donaghy, a Master who broke the rules by fraternising with the female trainees.
Allan wrote: “One can fancy the shocked prostration of Mrs. Davitt when the Matron, Mrs. Berkeley – who also acted as duenna to the lady trainees – flew to her with the news.”
The comment is fanciful indeed, for there is no surviving evidence of what Ellen Davitt thought and did on the occasion. Her husband, though, felt that the Matron was “giving this matter more importance than it deserves”. We can deduce that Ellen agreed with him, for the archives show the Davitts supported each other unconditionally.15
What it reveals about Martha Berkeley begs the question why Allan singled out Ellen Davitt for censure. The Matron reported to the Board, repeatedly complaining of ‘disrespect’ (as Allan claims Ellen did) from trainees and servants. It seemed that she could handle neither, requesting that talk between the two groups be forbidden; “such a practice tending to subvert all order”. The prohibition was enforced, against the Davitts’ wishes. In fact so many of Mrs Berkeley’s requests were granted, that she seems to have had the ear of Board.16
One student reported that the Matron described Mrs Davitt as “fit only for an actress”. Ellen Davitt could be theatrical. It is recalled that when “she appeared at the door of one of the girls’ class-rooms, all work ceased and the class rose and stood in awed silence till she had ‘sailed’ majestically through the farther door”.
Berkeley was herself disrespectful here, for ‘actress’ was virtually synonymous with whore. Yet the regal Mrs Davitt could also be friendly. A group of female trainees spent three evenings in her apartment; on the third evening exiting in such high spirits that the Matron indignantly reported their “complete insubordination” to the Board.17
History (and herstory) can be a series of competing biases, rather than absolute truths. Allan makes errors, as when he described Ellen as coming from an old St Heliers family. In the archives, Martha Berkeley seems more contentious, as is Arthur Davitt himself. The Principal complained, for instance, that his deputy, Patrick Whyte, had grossly insulted him by leaving the ‘Esquire’ off Davitt’s name on an envelope; thus implying that the Principal was no gentleman. Whyte retorted: “in all my experience I have never been associated with a man with whom it is so difficult to act harmoniously”.18
Davitt was undoubtedly difficult, but he was also dying – in an environment that would have driven