An Unusual Wedding

 I have spoken about my Great Aunt Connie before; of the three Rowe sisters she was the one who neither wrote novels nor had children. She sits in my dim memory as a sweet faced woman with a very crooked ankle, broken in childhood and never properly healed. 

Perhaps that memory comes more from this photograph than my experience, though I know we met several times when I was a child and I'm sure I have an image of her limping down Lower Park Road towards the home she shared with "Harry". Connie and Harry have been a couple in my mind for all of my life but their coupledom was most unusual for their times.

Connie, was the first of the three daughters of Alice and Howard, my great grandparents. She was born in May 1896 in Birkenhead where her parents had been married. 

Some time in the next year or so the family moved to Arklow in County Wicklow, both Alice and Howard being Irish by birth. Howard, a qualified chemist, suffered from brittle bone disease, and was to die, aged 44, when Connie was just 18. Unable to keep the family business going, Alice and her three daughters, Connie, Ethel and Rhona, moved to St Leonards in 1921. All the girls found some kind of work and Connie, always the most physically fragile and spiritual of them also found inner sustenance with an organisation called the S.S.K.T.P. (the Society for Spreading the Knowledge of True Prayer), an offshoot of the Christian Science movement. It was here that she met Harry; baptised Evelyn Cowland. 

Evelyn Annie Muriel Cowland was born in London in September 1890, the only child John William Cowland and his wife Annie. 

Evelyn Cowland

The family moved to Hastings after 1891, initially to All Saints Cottage in the Old Town, but then to Lower Park Road. Sadly John William also died young, in 1894, aged just 42. Evelyn was a striking young girl, but at a relatively early age delighted in dressing and presenting herself as a boy She was known by her nickname, Harry. 

Harry being a boy

One can only imagine the joy these two women found in each other; both had lost their fathers tragically young, both were interested in the "New Thought" ideas of the S.S.K.T.P. and Christian Science and both were close to their widowed mothers, existing in a very female world.

The classic Hastings image - lovers at "The Seat"

A Warschawski Studios portrait photo of the couple

Their relationship blossomed and Alice, having prayed for years for a girl husband for her, since she felt she would never survive the rigours of childbearing, determined that her oldest daughter should not be deprived of a wedding. A ceremony was arranged for them, in the mid 1920s, in the back garden of Alice’s house in De Cham Road, going by the pictures, with Ethel and Rhona as bridesmaids. 

Rhona, Harry, Connie and Ethel in their finery

Here they are, Harry looking very dapper in a suit and the three girls dressed all in white with appropriate bouquets in each hand. Connie and Harry went off on honeymoon in their car, 

driving out to Iden Lock, just outside Rye, where they rented a summer cottage by the River Rother, called Sedges. This proved too small as Ethel and Rhona provided them with nieces, and family visits increased in size, so Harry arranged for Nirvana to be built, having the raw materials brought up from Rye by barge. 

Nirvana

Those nieces, my Mum Rosemary and my Aunt Cecil spent many happy times there with Connie and Harry. In their letters from holidays in Nirvana, Harry is always referred to as “he” and indeed, in pictures from the time, one might assume that this couple were man and woman. 

They lived all their lives in Lower Park Road, Harry embarking on a variety of  ventures including running a mushroom growing business from the land behind the houses. I remember the drying chimneys and concrete floors of the growing sheds still being visible when I was a child, playing behind the house I too was eventually to live in.

Harry and Connie cycling by the river Rother

Their relationship, and Harry’s unusual wardrobe would have been notable at the time they were married. The author Radclyffe Hall published her novel of lesbian love “The Well of Loneliness” in 1928. Judged obscene by the English courts, it caused a furore and was banned for thirty years in the UK. Connie evidently wrote to Hall at the time, expressing sympathy and telling her of their own life. Hall’s response, in January 1929 includes this lovely sentiment

“Your letter has made me very happy because it is always something to know that a few inverts [lesbians] are understood, you are fortunate indeed in having such a mother, and your friend and you in having each other. I wish you all possible happiness” 

A poignant response when one considers that Hall’s own relationship with her mother was deeply toxic, and probably a source of great sadness to her. 

Connie and Harry did indeed have around 40 years of happiness together, sharing a loving life, both in Hastings and Nirvana, and nurturing their two nieces when they came to stay. Connie died in September 1966 and Harry followed her four years later in 1970, by which time I and my Mum, having lost my Dad, were also living in Lower Park Road with Ethel, my “Ganna”. We were to inherit Connie and Harry’s home, so I grew to adulthood there feeling those spirits around me, nurtured by a sense of their presence hovering somewhere in the interstices of time. 

In a small footnote, Nirvana, which I also visited as a child, was eventually demolished and became the subject of a Grand Designs in 2015, when a new property was build there. James Strangeways, the owner, was kind enough to allow me and my Aunt Cecil to visit so she had the pleasure, aged 90, of seeing the place where she had spent so many happy childhood days with Connie and Harry, transformed into something new for the future.