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Lady Florence Caroline Dixie (24 May 1855 – 7 November 1905) was a
British traveller, war correspondent, writer and feminist.
Dixie
was a sister of the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, who gave his name to the
rules of boxing and who brought down Oscar Wilde.
Born in Scotland
at Glenstuart, Cummertrees, Dumfries, Lady Florence Douglas was the daughter of the
8th Marquess of
Queensberry and his wife Caroline, daughter of General Sir William
Clayton, 5th Baronet (1786–1866), Member of Parliament for Great Marlow.
She had a twin brother, Lord James Douglas (d. 1891), an older sister,
Lady Gertrude Douglas (1842-1893), and three older brothers: John,
Viscount Drunlanrig (1844–1900), later the
9th Marquess of Queensberry;
Lord Francis Douglas (1847–1865), who died in a climbing accident on the
Matterhorn; and Lord Archibald Douglas (1850–1938), who became a
clergyman.
In 1860, Lady Florence's father died in what was
reported as a shooting accident, but was widely believed to have been
suicide. In 1862 his widow converted herself and her youngest children,
Florence and her brother James, to Roman Catholicism, taking them to live
in Paris for two years. This led the children's guardians to threaten Lady
Queensberry with the loss of her children, a real possibility at a time
when women's rights were very limited. In later life, Lady Florence
campaigned on such injustices, highlighted in her book The Story of Ijarn
(1903).
Lady Florence was educated at home and, after returning
from Paris, in a convent school. She hated the school's repressiveness and
the dogmatism of its religious teaching and took to writing poetry. Her
childhood verses were published in 1902 as Songs of a Child, under the
pseudonym 'Darling'.
From an early age, Lady Florence showed a love
of sport and travel and a gift for writing.
On 3 April 1875, at the
age of nineteen, Lady Florence Douglas married Sir Alexander Beaumont
Churchill Dixie, 11th Baronet (1851-1924), known as "Sir A.B.C.D." or "Beau". His
father of the same name, the 10th Baronet, had died in 1872. The young
couple lived at first at Bosworth Hall, near Market Bosworth in
Leicestershire. They had two sons, George Douglas (born 18 January 1876),
who later became the 12th baronet, and Albert Edward Wolstan (born 26
September 1878, died 1940), whose godfather was the Prince of Wales. Sir
Alexander Beaumont Dixie was High Sheriff of Leicestershire for 1876. In
1877, Lady Florence published her first book, Abel Avenged: a Dramatic
Tragedy.
Husband and wife shared a love of adventure and the
outdoor life, but a shadow was cast over them by his habit of gambling for
high stakes; eventually his ancestral home and estate at Bosworth were
sold to pay his debts. After this, in the 1880s, the couple moved to Glen
Stewart, one of the houses on Lord Queensberry's Scottish estate of
Kinmount, previously the home of Lady Florence's mother, the Dowager
Marchioness.
Several members of the Queensberry family were
affected by mental illness. As mentioned above, Lady Florence's father is
believed to have committed suicide. Her twin brother, Lord James Douglas
(known to his family as Jim), was deeply attached to her and was
heartbroken when she married. In 1885, he tried to abduct a young girl,
and after that became ever more manic. In 1888, he married a rich woman
with a ten-year-old son, but this proved disastrous. Separated from his
twin sister 'Florrie', James drank himself into a deep depression and in
1891 committed suicide by cutting his throat.
Lady Florence's
eldest brother, the 9th Marquess of Queensbury, is remembered for his
contribution to the sport of boxing and to the downfall of the writer
Oscar Wilde. The Queensberry rules for the sport of boxing, written in
1865 by John Graham Chambers and published in 1867, were endorsed by the
young Queensberry, an enthusiastic amateur boxer, and thus took his name.
In 1887, Queensberry and his wife Sibyl Montgomery were divorced. During
the 1890s, their youngest son, Lady Florence's nephew, Lord Alfred Douglas
(1870–1945), had a close relationship with Wilde, to the growing fury of
his father, who accused the writer of "posing as a somdomite" (sic). Wilde
sued Queensberry for libel, a bold step which ultimately led to his
downfall and imprisonment.
Lady Florence's great-nephew Raymond
Douglas (1902-1964), the only child of Lord Alfred, spent most of his life
in a mental hospital.
Weary of her life in English society, during
1878-1879 Dixie travelled with her husband, two of her brothers and a
friend in Patagonia in South America. There, she hunted big game and ate
it with gusto. On one occasion, while riding on the prairie, her party was
overtaken by a huge prairie fire, and her horse bolted with her.On her
return, Dixie wrote her book Across Patagonia (1880). A hotel at Puerto
Natales in the Chilean part of Patagonia is named the Hotel Lady Florence
Dixie in her honour. When she returned from Patagonia, Dixie brought home
with her a jaguar, which she called Affums and kept as a pet. Affums
killed several deer in Windsor Great Park and had to be sent to a zoo.
In 1881, Dixie was appointed as a field correspondent of the Morning
Post of London to cover the First Boer War (1880-1881) and the aftermath
of the Anglo-Zulu War. Her husband went out to South Africa with her. In
Cape Town, she stayed with the Governor of the Cape Colony. She visited
Zululand, and on her return interviewed the Zulu king Cetshwayo, who was
being held in detention by the British.
Her reports, followed by
her A Defense of Zululand and Its King from the Blue Book (1882) and In
the Land of Misfortune (1882), were instrumental in Cetshwayo's brief
restoration to his throne in 1883. In Dixie's In the Land of Misfortune,
there is a struggle between her individualism and her identification with
the power of the British Empire, but for all of her sympathy with the Zulu
cause and with Cetshwayo, she remained at heart an imperialist.
Dixie played a key role is establishing the game of women's association
football (soccer), organizing exhibition matches for charity, and in 1895
she became President of the British Ladies' Football Club, stipulating
that "the girls should enter into the spirit of the game with heart and
soul." She arranged for a women's football team from London to tour
Scotland.
Dixie was an enthusiastic writer of letters to newspapers
on liberal and progressive issues, including support for Irish Home Rule.
Her article The Case of Ireland was published in Vanity Fair on May 27,
1882. Nevertheless, she was critical of the Irish Land League and the
Fenians, who in 1883 made an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate her. As a
result, Queen Victoria sent her servant John Brown to investigate.
Dixie held strong views on the emancipation of women, proposing that the
sexes should be equal in marriage and divorce, that the Crown should be
inherited by the monarch's oldest child, regardless of sex, and even that
men and women should wear the same clothes. She was a member of the
National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and her obituary in the
Englishwoman's Review emphasized her support for the cause of women's
suffrage (i.e. the right to vote): "Lady Florence... threw herself eagerly
into the Women's Movement, and spoke on public platforms."
In 1890,
Dixie published a remarkable utopian novel, Gloriana, or the Revolution of
1900, which has been described as a feminist fantasy. In it, women win the
right to vote, as the result of the protagonist, Gloriana, posing as a
man, Hector l'Estrange, and being elected to the House of Commons. The
character of l'Estrange is clearly based on that of Oscar Wilde. The book
ends in the year 1999, with a description of a prosperous and peaceful
Britain governed by women. In the preface to the novel, Dixie proposes not
only women's suffrage, but that the two sexes should be educated together
and that all professions and positions should be open to both. In this
preface, she goes farther and says:
“ Nature has unmistakeably
given to woman a greater brain power. This is at once perceivable in
childhood... Yet man deliberately sets himself to stunt that early
evidence of mental capacity, by laying down the law that woman's education
shall be on a lower level than that of man's... I maintain to honourable
gentlemen that this procedure is arbitrary and cruel, and false to Nature.
I characterise it by the strong word of Infamous. It has been the means of
sending to their graves unknown, unknelled, and unnamed, thousands of
women whose high intellects have been wasted, and whose powers for good
have been paralysed and undeveloped. ”
During the 1890s, Dixie's
views on field sports changed dramatically, and in her book The Horrors of
Sport (1891) she condemned blood sports as cruel.
The New York
Times dated March 19, 1883, reported an attack on Lady Florence Dixie by
two men disguised as women, under the heading A DASTARDLY IRISH CRIME AN
ATTEMPT TO ASSASSINATE LADY FLORENCE DIXIE. SHE IS WAYLAID BY TWO MEN
DISGUISED IN WOMEN'S CLOTHES - HER LIFE SAVED BY A ST BERNARD DOG.
The New York Times dated March 30, 1883, carried a further story headed
"LADY FLORENCE DIXIE'S OWN STORY. From the Pall Mall Gazette of March 19".
Reports are published of an attempt to assassinate Lady Florence Dixie
at her residence, the Fishery, situated near the Thames, and about two and
a half miles from Windsor. Lady Florence Dixie gives the following account
of the occurrence:
“ I was out walking near the Fishery last
evening, about 4:30, when two very tall women came up and asked me the
time. I replied that I had not got my watch with me, and, turning, left
them. Opening a small gate which led into the private grounds of Capt
Brocklehurst, of the Blues, I made toward a stile, and was just going to
get over, when I heard the gate open behind, and the two women followed me
in. Somehow or other I felt all was not right, so I stopped and leaned
against the rails, and then, as they came on, went to meet them. One on
the right came forward and seized me by the neck, when by the strength of
the clutch I felt it was no woman's power that pulled me down to the
ground. In another second I saw the other would-be woman over me, and
remember seeing the steel of the knife come right down upon me, driven by
this person's hand. It struck through my clothes and against the whalebone
of my stays, which turned the point, merely grazing the skin. The knife
was quickly withdrawn and plunged at me again. I seized it with both hands
and shouted as loud as I could, when the person who first pulled mr down
pushed a large handful of earth into my mouth and nearly choked me. Just
as the knife was wrenched from my hands, a very big and powerful St.
Bernard dog I had with me broke through the wood, and the last thing I
remember was seeing the person with the knife pulled backward by him. Then
I heard a confused sound of rumbling of wheels, and I remember no more.
When I came to myself I was quite alone. From what I saw of the knife I
believe it to be a dagger, and the persons were undoubtedly men. They were
dressed in long clothes, and were unnaturally tall for women; the one who
stabbed me had on a thick veil, reaching below the mouth; the other was
unveiled, but his face I did not notice much. This is all the information
I can give. My head is very confused and painful, and I expect they must
have stunned me. This is a wretched scrawl, but my hands are very much
cut, and it pains me so much to write. ”
Lady Ripon and Sir H.
Ponsonby called yesterday with a message of sympathy from the Queen to
Lady Florence.
However, the New York Times of April 8, 1883,
carried a further report:
LONDON, March 21 - It has been boldly
suggested by the St. James's Gazette that Lady Florence Dixie is labouring
under a mistake in regard to the dramatic occurrence which has occupied so
much attention during the last 48 hours. Possibly when this reaches you
its boldness will have been justified. The Tory journal does not believe
that her ladyship has been attacked at all. Others share this opinion. In
a week's time, the general public may share it.
When Dixie died in
November 1905, the New York Times carried a report headed LADY FLORENCE
DIXIE DEAD This stated that the "Author, Champion of Woman's Rights, and
War Correspondent" had died on November 7th "at her home, Glen Stuart,
Dumfriesshire", and included the following passage:
Lady Florence
Dixie was a member of the Queensberry family and inherited the
eccentricities as well as the cleverness possessed by so many members of
it. Some years ago she startled London by declaring that she had been
kidnapped she believed by Irish agitators, and had been held for some days
in captivity. Her story was never disproved, but neither was it proved,
and there were many people who said that the whole affair was imaginary.
Lady Florence Dixie's eldest son, George Douglas Dixie (18 January
1876–25 December 1948) served in the Royal Navy as a midshipman and was
commissioned into the King's Own Scottish Borderers in 1895. On 26
November 1914, he was promoted a temporary captain in the 5th Battalion
the KOSB. He married Margaret Lindsay, daughter of Sir Alexander Jardine,
8th Baronet, and in 1924 succeeded to his father's title and was known as
Sir Douglas Dixie, 12th Baronet. When he died in 1948, Sir Douglas was
succeeded by his son Sir (Alexander Archibald Douglas) Wolstan Dixie, 13th
and last Baronet (8 January 1910–28 December 1975). Married Dorothy
Penelope (Lady Dixie) King-Kirkman in 1950 as his second wife, and they
had two daughters; 1) Eleanor Barbara Lindsay; and 2) Caroline Mary Jane.
Both daughters have issue.
Lady Florence Dixie's grandson Sir
Wolstan Dixie wrote an autobiography called Is it True What They Say About
Dixie? The Second Battle of Bosworth (1972). The title alludes to a 1940s
song by Irving Caesar, Sammy Lerner and Gerald Marks recorded by Al Jolson
in 1948.
Cover of Lady Florence Dixie's book published by: Long Riders' Guild
Press When asked in 1879 why she wanted to travel to
such an outlandish place as Patagonia, the author replied without
hesitation that she was taking to the saddle in order to flee from the
strict confines of polite Victorian society. “Palled with civilization and
its surroundings, I wanted to escape to some place where I might be as far
removed from them as possible.
 In January 1877,
21 year-old Florence was known as a fearless horsewoman.
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