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Power Partners: great loves of humanist history

From Gustav and Nina Spiller (who together organised the First Universal Races Congress), through Leslie and Julia Stephen (whose shared humanist values brought them together and gave us Virginia Woolf), to Dora and Bertrand Russell (co-campaigners, and founders of Beacon Hill School), humanist history has its fair share of power couples.

In this Valentine’s Day article, we explore some of the other loves which have helped to shape the world outside of themselves—whether providing the basis for activism, inspiring works of art and literature, or offering a pattern for freedom and acceptance.

The power partners below include several LGBT relationships, such as that of the remarkable Roy Saich and George Broadhead. Together for nearly six decades, they were instrumental in founding LGBT Humanists, which celebrates its 45th anniversary in 2024.

In response to your desire, my wife, I undertake to record the more salient recollections of my life. It is a life you have made happy… its experiences during forty years have been yours also…

Moncure Conway, dedication to Ellen Dana Conway in Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway (1904)
Moncure and Ellen Conway, with family at their London home, c. 1890. Photograph Collection, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA

Moncure and Ellen Conway

Ellen Dana (1833–1897) and Moncure Daniel Conway (1832–1907) married on 1 June 1858, with a bridal party which included the brother of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Theirs would be a mutually supportive and devoted marriage, and one which would help to shape the story of today’s Conway Hall Ethical Society.

At home in America, the abolitionist couple were co-conspirators in transporting 31 enslaved people from Virginia to freedom in the North. In 1863, it was Moncure Conway’s abolitionism which brought him to London’s South Place, where he was subsequently invited to become ‘minister’. Under his leadership–and with Ellen’s close collaboration–what was then still a ‘religious’ society became increasingly humanist, and Moncure a self-proclaimed freethinker. Although today’s Conway Hall would be named, in 1929, after Moncure, it’s clear that the couple were mutually influential. On Ellen’s death in 1897, one member wrote that ‘much of the best work at South Place originated from her’.

In affectionate memory of Dr Alice Vickery, wife of the late Dr Charles R. Drysdale. A co-pioneer with him in social work. An original thinker and ardent feminist.

Gravestone inscription for Alice Vickery and Charles R. Drysdale, Brookwood Cemetery
Family photo showing Alice Drysdale Vickery with her son Charles Vickery Drysdale, Bessie Drysdale, and Eva Drysdale, 1913. New York Public Library

Alice Vickery and Charles Drysdale

Pioneering physician Alice Vickery (1844–1929) met her lifelong partner Charles Robert Drysdale (1829–1907) while attending the Ladies’ Medical College, a ‘controversial establishment’ providing midwifery training. The couple shared an objection to the institution of marriage, as well as a humanist outlook which animated their activism–especially in the realm of reproductive rights.

In defiance of rigid Victorian concepts of morality, Vickery and Drysdale never wed, and had two sons together before they lived underneath the same roof. It was not until 1895 that the couple settled in Dulwich, where they let it be assumed they were married. Alongside the elder Charles, their son, Charles Vickery Drysdale, was a founding member of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in 1907, alongside two other notable humanists: Laurence Housman and H.N. Brailsford.

The couple were both buried in Brookwood Cemetery, where a gravestone inscription describes them as co-pioneers in social work.

You will understand now why it would make me utterly miserable if I were not permitted to have this woman in Florence. I like fewer people more; and to no one I feel more grateful.

Vernon Lee on Kit Anstruther-Thomson, letter to her mother, 30 August 1887
Kit Anstruther Thomson and Violet Paget (Vernon Lee) on back steps of Lee’s villa in Florence, Il Palmerino. Colby College Archives

Vernon Lee and Kit Anstruther-Thomson

Vernon Lee (1856-1935) and Clementina ‘Kit’ Anstruther-Thomson (1857-1921) were longtime lovers and creative partners. Anstruther-Thomson was a member of the West London Ethical Society — one of the founding groups of Humanists UK. Lee wrote frequently about her agnosticism and was interested in the moral value of artistic appreciation. The two embarked on experiments in the enriching potential of art for art’s sake, culminating in the essay ‘Beauty & Ugliness’, first published in the Contemporary Review in 1897, and later reprinted as part of the 1912 collection Beauty & Ugliness, and other studies in psychological aesthetics.

In Beauty & Ugliness, they forefronted the notion of ‘vivid fellowship’, which could be understood both in terms of their understanding of the artists of the works they saw and in the sense of their relationship together. As is exemplified in this photograph, the couple spent much of their time in Florence, but they often travelled back and forth to Britain, visiting museums and recording how their bodies felt when encountering art. Interestingly, they moved to Florence at the moment when Italy decriminalised homosexuality, signalling a more sexually inclusive culture than Britain at the time.

Shortly after they met in 1887, Lee wrote in a letter that ‘Miss Anstruther-Thomson turns out very handsome, a sort of Venus de Milo-Margaret Cantagalli creature, clever & curiously interesting.’ Writing to her mother in 1888, Lee described how Anstruther-Thomson ‘takes care of me in a hundred ways other people wouldn’t’. When Anstruther-Thomson died in 1921, Lee wrote ‘I confess that at the moment of her death, I hoped that her ashes might be mingled with the earth of those Fifeshire beech groves and hornbeam hedges where I had first got to know her’.

…to know human beings intimately, to feel their affection, to have their confidences is so absorbing that its clearly absurd to think one only has the inclination for one variety.

Dora Carrington, letter to Gerald Brenan, 15th December, 1919
Dora Carrington; Ralph Partridge; Lytton Strachey; Oliver Strachey; Frances Partridge by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1923 © National Portrait Gallery, London

Lytton Strachey, Carrington, and Ralph Partridge

This photograph was taken in the doorway of Mill House, where the writer Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), the artist Carrington (1893-1932), and the writer Ralph Partridge (1894-1960) lived as a mutually supportive throuple. As central members of the freethinking Bloomsbury Group, they embodied humanist values of freedom and equality, feeling that every person had the right to live and love as they chose. 

A key influence on the Bloomsbury Group as a whole was the philosopher and President of the Ethical Union (now Humanists UK), George Edward Moore, who Strachey encountered at university in the Cambridge Heretics society. Moore argued in Principia Ethica (1903) for the value of ‘the pleasures of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects’ as the central guiding force of morality.

Carrington grew up in a religious family, which her brother noted in 1970 when he reflected on his mother’s control of him and Carrington:

Any mention of sex or the common bodily functions was unthinkable… We all came to hate the whole atmosphere of a Sunday morning. The special clothes, the carrying of prayer books, the kneeling, standing and murmuring of litanies.

Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf by Lady Ottoline Morrell, June 1923 © National Portrait Gallery, London

In stark contrast, the sexual liberation of Bloomsbury offered a haven for Carrington’s desires. Writing in 1919 about her bisexual ménage à trois, Carrington noted that to ‘be very fond of certainly two or three people at a time, to know human beings intimately, to feel their affection, to have their confidences is so absorbing that its clearly absurd to think one only has the inclination for one variety’.

Offering a heartfelt commentary on their living situation, Partridge wrote a poem to Strachey exploring how his feelings of love superseded those of jealousy. He talks of Strachey’s joy for having ‘a choice of pillows for his head’ and how he need not feel envy of Strachey because Partridge’s life was enriched for being ‘his boy’.

You must hug the thought of our secret happiness and not let public duties weigh on you too heavily.

Letter from Nye Bevan to Jennie Lee, in My Life with Nye (1980)
Jennie Lee and Aneurin Bevan signing the register following their marriage on 25 October 1934 at Bloomsbury Register Office

Nye Bevan and Jennie Lee

Both humanists and socialists of working class origin, Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) and Jennie Lee (1904–1988) are towering figures in humanist history: spearheads respectively of the National Health Service and the Open University. Both of these organisations have profoundly shaped wider society, rooted in an ideal of equal access and opportunity—whether in matters of health and wellbeing, or education and culture.

Bevan and Lee’s marriage in 1934 helped to create the bedrock on which their political activity could be based. Their devotion to one another was strengthened by their shared ideals, and though seeking to keep their relationship private in life, Lee’s memoir of her husband after his death strove to set his humanity on record. She wanted to ensure people knew, she wrote, that Bevan had been:

as great a delight to his family and friends as he was a scourge to those he believed were responsible for inflicting unnecessary poverty on their fellow men…

Weekend gathering of the Gay Humanist Group (now LGBT Humanists) at Long House hotel, Pilton, Somerset, 1984

Roy Saich and George Broadhead

Roy Saich (1940–2023) and George Broadhead (1933–2021) were together for almost six decades, during which time they were instrumental in the creation and success of the Gay Humanist Group (now LGBT Humanists), and the provision of same-sex humanist commitment ceremonies through the Pink Triangle Trust. The couple were also founders of, and leading lights in, their local humanist group, the Coventry and Warwickshire Humanists, from 1974.

Roy and George met in 1965, in London’s well-known gay pub, the Coleherne. During the early 1970s, while living in Chesham, the couple founded their local chapter of The Campaign for Homosexual Equality: Chilterns CHE. Through it, they helped to organise meetings, talks, socials, and trips, creating spaces of safety and community for gay men and women.

Upon moving to Warwickshire, they continued their activism, and in 1979 were among the founders of the Gay Humanist Group: bringing together their mutually held humanism, and commitment to advancing LGBT rights. This picture, from the group’s archive at the Bishopsgate Institute, shows George (centre) and Roy (back row, far right) at a weekend gathering in Somerset—one of many organised by the Gay Humanist Group. In addition to social events and excursions, the group were always firmly rooted in activism: including campaigning against the notorious Section 28, and challenging workplace discrimination. 2024 marks 45 years of this pioneering humanist group.

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