Remembering a ‘forgotten saint’

Jan 28 2008 by Tony Henderson, The Journal

A remote corner of Northumberland shelters a local woman who shook the double standards of her times and made great strides for women’s rights. Tony Henderson reports.

IN a tranquil churchyard on the edge of the Cheviot Hills lies a woman who rocked Victorian society by tackling its great taboos.

Josephine Butler, who is buried at the Church of St Gregory the Great in Kirknewton, near Wooler in Northumberland, has been described as something of a forgotten saint and was one of the most passionate 19th Century social reformers.

The rural serenity of her last resting place is in contrast to the urban squalor in which she worked to expose the horrors of widespread prostitution and the trafficking and sexual exploitation of young girls.

Yet Josephine, at first glance, would not have seemed to be cut out for such a daunting mission.

She had enjoyed a privileged upbringing in Northumberland, and was the mother of four children, with a husband who was a college principal and later a cathedral canon. But driven by her Christian faith and a sense of injustice, she embarked on a strenuous campaign over many years devoted to improving the lives of women.

She began by pressing for greater access to higher education and a wider choice of jobs for women. Then turned her attention to the prostitution and sexual exploitation which was rife in Victorian times.

She could not bear a situation where women – mostly driven by desperation – were vilified for providing what men wanted while the men themselves escaped censure.

Her campaigning also exposed the white slave trade in young girls from Britain to the Continent, where the age of consent was higher, and the sale of virgins on the streets of London. As a result, the age of consent was raised in Britain from 13 to 16.

In 1869, Josephine targeted the Contagious Diseases Acts, which were designed to control the spread of venereal disease in the Armed Forces and allowed police in any garrison town or port to detain any woman on the slightest suspicion of her being a prostitute.

Largely because of her campaign, the Acts were repealed in 1886.

Josephine took prostitutes into her home and also opened refuge “rest houses” to take women off the streets.

And despite being warned that Josephine’s actions would damage his career, her husband gave his wife his full backing.

It was a life which would have been impossible to predict when Josephine was born 180 years ago at Milfield Hill, near Wooler.

She was the seventh of the 10 children of Hannah and John Grey, cousin of Earl Grey, the Northumbrian Prime Minister whose administration passed the Great Reform Bill in 1832.

John Grey was appointed agent for the northern estates of the Greenwich Hospital – land which had gone to the Crown after the execution of James Radcliffe, 3rd Earl of Derwentwater for his part in the 1715 Jacobite rising in Northumberland.

In 1835, John Grey and his family moved to the newly-built Dilston Hall near Corbridge, now used as a college.

Josephine wrote: “Our home at Dilston was a very beautiful one, the wild beauty all around its doors. It was a place where one could glide out and be hidden in a moment, plunging among wild wood paths.”

In 1842 Josephine’s brother, Charles, began his studies at the fledgling Durham University, where George Butler was a classics tutor.

He was 29 and Josephine 20 when they met. Three years later they were married at St Andrew’s Church in Corbridge – where all the Grey girls were wed.

The church is also the burial place of her father – who did not retire until the age of 76 – and her mother.

She had her children in quick succession, and became president of the North-East Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, and wrote The Education and Employment of Women and Women’s Work and Women’s Culture.

Later, she allied herself with fellow Northumbrian William Thomas Stead, born in Embleton, and who as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette worked alongside Josephine to publish exposes of the trade in young virgins to men willing to pay the financial asking price.

George Butler’s career took him and his wife to Liverpool, Cheltenham and Winchester. In her widowhood, Josephine returned to her native Northumberland in 1901, visiting St Andrew’s Church and Dilston Hall.

She stayed with her son, George, at his home in Ewart Park near Wooler, and later moved to Queen’s Road in Wooler, where she died on Sunday, December 30, 1906, aged 78.

On January 3, 1907, her son buried her in a private funeral at Kirknewton, near the graves of her grandparents, George and Mary Grey.

Tributes to Josephine included that in The Daily News: “Her victory marked one of the greatest stages in the progress of woman to that equality of treatment which is the final test of a nation’s civilization.”