May 29, 2017 • 32 mins
In the late 18th century, Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler, also known as the Ladies of Llangollen, abandoned their life in the upper tiers of Irish society and made a home for themselves in Wales. And they became rather famous in the process.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. In the
late eighteenth century, Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler, who
(00:23):
became known as the Ladies of Van Goflin, abandoned their
life in the upper tiers of Irish society and made
a home for themselves in Wales. And even though their
entire plan with this had been to live alone in solitude,
they became famous for doing so. Anna Seward and William
Wordsworth both wrote poems about them in the cottage that
(00:44):
they lived in. Byron sent them a copy of The
Corsair with a personal note. When that came out. Arthur Wellesley,
the Duke of Wellington, paid them a visit and even
stayed with them, and Queen Charlotte was enamored enough with
them that she convinced the King to at them a pension.
Apparently at one point they were even offered a lock
of Napoleon's hair. And this whole story, which in a
(01:07):
lot of ways sounds kind of like a regency romance novel,
was completely outside the bounds of what was expected or
allowable for women at the time, and up here at
the front, I'm just going to issue a blanket apology
for our poor pronunciation of Welsh. Yeah, definitely not a
language either of us has grown up speaking. It's a
(01:28):
tricky one if you didn't grow up speaking two l's
and the two d's. Those are easy sounds if you've
been making them your whole life. But if you are
an English speaker, you start watching these tutorials, they're like,
put your tongue behind your teeth and kind of exhale
a little bit and then make that noise while you're
saying words, And well, it's difficult. It's tricky, so brace
(01:49):
they We're gonna do our best, but it's not gonna
be anywhere near perfect. But to start in Eleanor Charlotte
Butler born seventeen thirty nine was the youngest daughter of
one of the most powerful and prominent families in Ireland.
Her father was Walter Butler, the Earl of Ormond, and
their family's home was Kilkenny Castle. The Butler's family seat
(02:10):
had been at Kilkenny Castle since the late fourteenth century.
I know sometimes there are buildings that are described as
castles that look sort of like a stone square. This
is not one of those. It is a castle with
four towers on it. Eleanor was Eleanor was quite a
(02:34):
bit younger than her two attractive and accomplished older sisters,
and the arrival of a younger brother also supplanted her
as the baby of the family before she was even
two years old. Consequently, Eleanor wound up being the most
left out of all the Butler siblings. Her two older
sisters got a much more fashionable education than she did.
(02:57):
They were sent to the Convent of the Blue Nuns
in Paris, while Eleanor went to an English Benedicting convent
and Cambray. When it came to the quality of education
at the convent, Eleanor went to I mean it was
a good enough education, but it was certainly no Paris,
and it did not have the same prestigious reputation is
(03:17):
where her sisters went. At times, it seemed like Eleanor
was literally forgotten. Correspondences from aunts and cousins routinely mentioned
and asked after her older sisters, while saying nothing of her.
Relatives remembered her sisters and their wills, but they passed
over Eleanor entirely, and even though from a social standpoint
(03:38):
it was essentially mandatory for the Butler family to find
suitable marriages for all of their daughters, they put way
more effort into her sisters than into Eleanor. While Eleanor
had had some suitors, none of them really worked out.
So by the time Eleanor was twenty nine, she was
the family spinster, and she just did not have much
(03:58):
to occupy her time him. That changed when she was
introduced to Sarah Ponsonby. Sarah, born in seventeen fifty five,
was from a family that was also quite prominent and
well off, although not nearly as big a deal as
the Butler's, but a series of tragedies left her both
orphaned and destitute before she was out of her teens.
(04:19):
Her father, Shambre Brabazon Ponsonby, was a member of parliament,
and he had been married once before marrying Sarah's mother.
He and his first wife had a son and three daughters,
but only one daughter survived infancy. This left him still
in need of a male heir, so he married Sarah's mother,
Louise A Lyons, in seventeen fifty two. Sarah was born
(04:42):
three years later in seventeen fifty five, and Louisa died
another three years after that. Sarah's father married once again,
as time to Mary Barker, who was an heiress and
did indeed conceive the son that he was hoping to have,
but Shambrey died before that son was worn when Sarah
was only seven. Then Sarah's stepmother remarried, but died herself
(05:06):
when Sarah was only thirteen. After this series of marriages
and deaths Sarah was left with no fortune of her own,
in the care of a stepfather who didn't have much
interest in a teenage girl he had acquired through his
late wife's previous husband's prior marriage, so he sent her
off to live with a cousin, Lady Elizabeth Founds, who
(05:26):
was called Betty, and she lived with her husband, Baronet
Sir William Founds in woodstock House, County Kilkenny, when Stockhouse
no longer stands, but it was also very large and impressive.
Sarah's introduction to Eleanor Butler came when the Foundss enrolled
her in a boarding school run by a Miss Parks.
The boarding school was much closer to kill Kenny Castle
(05:48):
than it was to Woodstock House. So Lady Betty Founds
wrote to Eleanor's mother, the Countess Ormand, to ask that
the Butler's keep an eye on Sarah, and this request
wound up serving two purposes quite well. It offered Lady
Betty some assurance that Sarah would make the right sorts
of friends at school and be kept away from influences
that might damage her prospects, and it offered Eleanor Butler
(06:11):
something to do with her time. Eleanor and Sarah became
fast friends, and for the entire five years that Sarah
was enrolled in the school, they were very close. Eleanor
had a reputation for being way too educated for a woman,
and they spent a lot of their time reading and
then discussing what they had read. The sixteen year gap
(06:32):
in their ages, combined with Sarah's youth, wouldn't have raised
eyebrows at the time and the way that it probably
would today. But what did raise some eyebrows was was
that they seemed to be so devoted to one another.
Close and intimate relationships were common, but the fact that
Sarah and Eleanor seemed to turn to each other to
the exclusion of anyone else was viewed with some suspicion.
(06:56):
It was probably during Sarah's school years that they began
to talk about how nice it would be if they
could retire somewhere together, to live quietly out in the country,
away from society. But when Sarah finished school, they were separated.
Sarah returned to Woodstock House to live with the founds Is,
while Eleanor continued to live at Kilkenny Castle, about twelve
(07:17):
miles roughly nineteen kilometers away, and even though Lady Betty
had asked the butlers to keep an eye on Sarah,
the two families weren't particularly close. For the next five years.
Sarah and Eleanor may have seen one another at social
events that both families would have attended, but they really
did not have much time together. They started to have
more contact with each other a few years later, when
(07:39):
Sarah was in her early twenties. Lady Betty founds health
wasn't very good and it had become obvious that Sir
William Founds was planning to take Sarah as a wife
once Lady Betty died. Sarah had so many problems with this.
She did not want to marry Sir William. She thought
he was repulsive, and she found his attention to her
(08:01):
to be gross and inappropriate. And even though Lady Betty
had urged her to be kind and accommodating to Sir William,
Sarah didn't think she meant that accommodating. So Sarah felt stuck.
She didn't want to encourage Sir William, but she also
didn't want to hurt Lady Betty. In a letter to
a friend, Lucy Goddard, she wrote, I would rather die
(08:21):
than wound Lady Betty's heart. In these same years, Eleanor
was almost equally unhappy. By this point, her brother Robert
had converted to Protestantism. Then the family had long been Catholic,
but following some changes to the law, Catholics are being
stripped of their titles, so Robert's conversion was a matter
(08:42):
of necessity to try to hold onto the earldom, and
that title would be in jeopardy at various other points
in Eleanor's life for various reasons. At the same time,
Eleanor's family was getting tired of supporting their spinster daughter.
They were talking about sending her to a convent, which
would simultaneously give the family a cheaper way to keep
(09:03):
her fed and sheltered, and it would also maybe get
them right with God. Her parents probably also thought she
might be happy at a convent, after all, she'd been
happy enough at the convent in Cambrai where she was educated.
But Eleanor did not want to go to a convent,
especially not to please the family who had always been
kind of indifferent to her, and particularly since part of
(09:25):
the motivation was the religion of her brother, who she
had always blamed for her being so overlooked at home.
So Sarah did not want to marry her gross guardian
when his wife, who she was very fond of, died,
and Eleanor did not want to join a convent to
make things financially easier on her family or assuage their
(09:46):
religious guilt. So the two of them decided that they
would do something about it, and we're going to talk
about that after we first pause for a little sponsor break.
Both unhappy with their situations and their future prospects, Sarah
Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler started writing each other secret
(10:10):
correspondence around seventeen seventy six. To do this, they would
have needed help, probably from someone in the household staff,
to basically secret their letters in and out of the house.
They wrote back and forth bemoaning their circumstances and trying
to plan an escape for at least eighteen months. Then
on March seventeen seventy eight, they made their first attempt
(10:32):
to run away. That might seem like an odd choice
of words to describe grown women who were twenty three
and thirty nine at the time, but both women were
at this point really considered to be under the control
of their parents and guardians. They were expected to do
as they were told Mary and have children to continue
the family line, and if that for some reason absolutely
(10:53):
could not happen, to go to a convent. Even though
they were, at least in numeric terms, adults, the fact
that they were leaving home alone without their parents or
guardians permission or knowledge was scandalous, particularly given Eleanor's family's prominence.
Eleanor snuck out of Kilkenny Castle that night, changed into
men's clothes once she was out, and took a horse
(11:16):
from the stables, and she wrote it to a barn
where she and Sarah had arranged to meet. No One
at the castle noticed her absence for at least a
couple of hours. Meanwhile, Sarah climbed out the window at
Woodstock House, dressed as a man and armed with a pistol,
and she took her dog Frisk with her and proceeded
the rest of the way on foot. I love a
window escape with a puppy. From their rendezvous point, they
(11:42):
planned to go to Waterford and take a packet ship
that was a boat that carried mail across St. George's
Channel to Wales. This plan did not work out, though,
either they missed the boat or the one they had
planned on didn't set sail. The weather was bad and
there were rumors of pirates in the channel, so it
really could have been either. Their families, though, had started
(12:03):
a search as soon as they realized that the young
women were gone. The Founds and the butlers alike worried
that they had run away with men. They were simultaneously
kind of puzzled because they couldn't think of any men
that would be candidates for this. After a few hours,
some of Sir William founds as men tracked Eleanor and
(12:25):
Sarah down not far from Waterford and sent word back
to their respective families. Lady Betty took a coach to
retrieve them, intending to bring both Sarah and Eleanor back
to Woodstock House, but before they left the dock, a
friend of the Butler family arrived and insisted that Eleanor
be sent back with him. Over both women's serious objections,
(12:45):
they were sent back home separately. This left their families
to puzzle out what had happened and ideally how to
keep it from happening again. An elopement, which at the
time just meant running away and didn't necessarily have a
romantic or marriage subtext, was a huge topic for gossip
and scandal. Letters quickly circulated among both families social circles,
(13:08):
full of details and speculation. It was typical for mail
to be delivered several times a day, so even Lucy Goddard,
who was the subject of a lot of letters from
a lot of people in this story, even Lucy Goddard,
who was away in Dublin, had heard about it within
a day or two. It was in this flurry of
letters that people started describing Eleanor and Sarah as having
(13:31):
a romantic friendship. Like elopement, romantic had a different connotation
at this point, and it was one that wasn't altogether positive.
When it came to friendships, romantic often meant eccentric, whimsical, imaginative,
or in some way not really something that people talking
about it understood, So their quote romantic friendship was viewed
(13:54):
with some suspicion, but not nearly as much as if
they had run away with men, which would have real
in their reputation and that of their families. For a
couple of weeks after the attempted elopement, both Eleanor and
Sarah were miserable. Sarah had caught a cold, which came
along with a fever and a sore throat, and on
top of being six, she was increasingly worried and agitated
(14:16):
about Eleanor. Eleanor's parents had sent her to stay with
friends at Boris House, which wasn't that much farther away,
but it kept her out from underfoot while they made
preparations to send her to a convent in France, and
also tried to bribe her into going along with it
by promising to double her allowance. Sarah became even more
(14:37):
distressed when she heard the news that Eleanor's departure might
be imminent. The butlers announced that their decision that Eleanor
would be sent to a French convent, whether she liked
it or not, was final. On April sixteenth, seventeen seventy eight,
both Eleanor and Sarah asked to be allowed to meet
one last time, just for half an hour to say goodbye,
(14:58):
and that wish was ultimately granted. But this was not
really a goodbbe, is it. They agreed that they would
make one more attempt to try to be together. Eleanor
would run away again. This time she would go to
Woodstock House, and she did exactly that. On April eighteenth.
Mary Carroll, who was Lady Buddy's housemaid, snuck her in
(15:18):
through a window and then kept kept taking care of
her by smuggling her food from the kitchen. There's a
lot of window entry and exit, which always makes for
a good story. Uh. They managed to keep Eleanor's presence
at wood Stockhouse secret for a little while, but soon
one of Sir William's men told him that he had
learned where Eleanor was hiding, and that it was in
(15:40):
fact in his own house. Sir William began writing letters
to the butler's asking them to come and collect their daughter,
but those letters went unanswered. He also started trying to
convince Sarah to give up her attachment and let Eleanor
go to the convent as planned. Sarah professed that she
would live and die with miss Butler. That is a
(16:01):
quote in her own words. Finally, the Butlers essentially gave up,
agreeing to let Eleanor do what she wanted. She and
Sarah had at that point been ready to leave for
Wales for days, down to Sarah putting on her riding
habit every morning just in case. When they went, they
took Mary Carol with them. They went to Waterford to
(16:22):
sail on the package ship, as they had already planned
to do back in March. After being delayed at Waterford
for four days due to a combination of bad weather
and pirates in the Channel again, they left for Wales
on Friday May nine. We will talk about their life
in Wales after another quick sponsor break. After arriving in Wales,
(16:51):
Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler spent a few weeks traveling around,
essentially touring the country. This wasn't really something they could afford,
and because they'd spent some time. Being tourists, they wound
up needing to hurry to find a place that they
could actually live before winter. Also as they were doing this,
Thor William Founds died. It was of a sizar or
(17:11):
maybe a stroke that followed about ten days of serious illness.
Then Lady Betty Founds died three weeks after that, so
that they were traveling, Sarah and Eleanor only heard of
it much later. Sarah had an income of about eighty
pounds a year and Eleanor had maybe two hundred pounds
a year. They also both occasionally got small sums of
(17:32):
money from other sources, and this would have been enough
to live on if they lived frugally, but that was
not a skill that either of them had ever learned. Plus,
at multiple points each of them was convinced, often with
good reason, that they were going to receive more money
from a range of inheritances, annuities, and pensions. More often
than not, those expected funds fell through. As a result,
(17:55):
the pair always struggled with money, and they were almost
always living outside their me They did, however, find a
five room cottage that they were able to rent. It
was in thank Gothland, where they'd started their tour of
Wales on the River d It was a very simple
stone house and they named it plas News, which just
means new place or new home. They moved in in
(18:18):
seventeen eighty and one of their major projects for the
rest of their lives would be making it beautiful. They
had four servants, a gardener, a footman, a kitchen maid,
and Mary Carroll, who was the housekeeper. All of them
but Mary were paid. It's a little unclear why Mary,
unlike the other employees, did not receive a salary. She
(18:39):
was allowed to keep tips from people who visited them,
and that number of people did grow over the years.
And when she died, she left all her money to Sarah,
so even though they weren't paying her, she apparently did
have enough of an income to be able to save
it up and buy property. I wish I could find
(19:01):
more detail about that, but I could not. The nebulous
finances of Mary Carroll well, and she was incredibly devoted
to both of them. It's I feel like there's a
whole other story there, and at this point in time
probably impossible to get the details of it. So Sarah
and Eleanor had been hoping for solitude when they decided
(19:24):
to retire away together, and at first then Gothen was
even more lonesome than they had hoped. There was barely
a town there. Both women had a lot more education
and had come from a higher rank than most of
the people around them, but they did gradually begin to
make friends. By sight two people were describing their little
home in the surrounding garden as very romantic, and at
(19:46):
that point that was a term starting to shed some
of the negative associations that had previously been used to
describe their relationship. Eleanor's father died in seventeen eighty three
and she was not mentioned in the will. There was
a huge and bitter back and forth with her brother
that secured her two hundred pounds a year and a
lump sum of five hundred pounds to pay off debts.
(20:08):
There would be a similar situation when her mother died
and she was left one hundred pounds, but wrote to
her sister to ask for more, which her sister turned down. Typically,
their letters to ask for money came off as accusatory
and backhanded, which might be why they were so often
turned down. Yeah, they often started out with a tone
of you have always been terrible to me, and I
(20:31):
have some money, though may I have some cash. As
the years progressed, Eleanor and Sarah continued to read and
study extensively. They learned multiple languages. They compiled enormous lists
of books that they had read together. They also walked
a lot. Even though they didn't have a lot of money,
(20:53):
they tried to help people around them who were less fortunate,
setting a goal of giving away ten percent of their
income to charity every year, and they put a lot
of work into plast nudds, adding Gothic embellishments, expanding and
making one of the rooms a suitable guest room, which
they named the State Apartment. At one point, oak carvings
came into fashion, and they went wild collecting them. They
(21:16):
and the gardener also constantly improved the garden and the ground.
Their monograms contained both of their initials, and they signed
all of their letters jointly. Their journals chronicle all the
mundane details of their life together and also express a
deep and tender love for each other. For example, in
one entry, Eleanor, writing about one of her very frequent migraines, said,
(21:40):
quote rose at eight after a tedious night spent in
coughing and with a most dreadful headache. My dearest, my
kindest love, did not sleep even for one moment the
entire night, but lay beside me, watching and lamenting my illness,
and soothing by her tenderness the distressing pain of my
head simultaneously. There was so much gossip about them back
(22:04):
in Ireland as well as elsewhere. People speculated extensively about
what they were doing and what had led them to
throw off all of their family obligations and the incomes
that would have come along with them to live in
a remote part of Whales. As a side note, the
idea that they dressed as men persists today, but that
really came around after they lived, and it was mostly
(22:25):
because they had short hair and they wore hats, both
of which were following a French fashion, and they were
not so that they would look like men. Yeah, if
you see there are a few of great engravings of them,
and in some of them they're wearing their clothing. They
have the short cropped hair, which you see other portraits
of women in the same time who have short cropped hair,
(22:46):
and it's sort of top hat looking hat on and
if you start just at the top and stop at
the shoulders, you might think that's a kind of masculine appearance,
but then below that is a dress. So yeah, that
was definitely going on in France. Yes, they they and
also they did not spend a ton of money on
(23:08):
their wardrobes, so dis gossip about them even made the
papers in see the General Evening Post published an article
about them called Extraordinary Female Affection. And even though some
of the information in the article was actually accurate, not
all of it was, and it was heavily threaded through
with an undertone that their relationship was unnatural, that they
(23:31):
were lesbians, even though that term hadn't taken on that connotation.
Yet that same undertone of being quote unnatural would even
be President Eleanor's obituary when it ran in The Gentleman's magazine.
In spite of this suspicion, as we noted at the
top of the show, the two women became famous more
or less for simply being who they were. Their home
(23:53):
was on the way from London to Ireland, and it
became something of a tourist attraction. They eventually got a
lot of visitors, to the point that Eleanor would write
things like quote when will we be truly alone? In
her journal, and their names and manner of living were
well known even among people who did not personally visit.
They were basically famous in the regency. They found a
(24:16):
little bit more financial stability when they were able to
buy Plassnews in eighteen nineteen. Their ability to do this
is often credited to Mary Carol, who died in eighteen
o nine and as we said earlier, left all of
her money to Sarah that was actually less one shilling
for each of her siblings, provided that they came from
Ireland to collect it. It's almost certain though that they
(24:40):
got money from somewhere else as well, but it's a
little unclear as to exactly where. Later in her life,
Eleanor developed cataracts in an eye inflammation, and she eventually
lost her sight. She died on June two eighty nine.
She and Sarah had become such a fixture in Glan
Gothlin that a whole community went into mourning. Word also
(25:03):
began to spread about a number of supernatural happenings attributed
to her passing. One of the local farmers cows had
all black calves, a stray dog that arrived at their
home on the day of the funerals, started howling inconsolably
when Sarah tried to give one of Eleanor's books away.
Because so much of their lives together had been spent
(25:24):
reading and learning and walking in general generally being pretty
solitary apart from receiving so many visitors, A lot of
Sarah's day to day routine stayed pretty much the same
after Eleanor's death, except that she no longer had Eleanor
to share it with. She didn't live very much longer, though,
she died on December nine, thirty one. Six months after
(25:46):
their deaths Plas Nue was sold and their belongings were
auctioned off. The proceeds were enough to pay their debts
and set up annuities for their surviving household staff. Today,
Plas Nue is a museum that is open seas Anally.
I thought we would end their story, which I find
to be lovely. It's kind of a heavenly idea. Let's
(26:08):
live out in the country together and read books and
walk around. All right, Maybe not for Holly, it would
not be I need um, I need a lot more
takeout options than that would offer. Critically. Well, but you
would have a staff of four people who would be
cooking for I need more than the country life offers
(26:31):
in terms of um stimulation. Okay, yeah, I'm a city
I love to walk so much that as long as
I can walk, I'm pretty happy about it. But anyway,
I thought we would end by reading Wordsworth's sonnet, A
stream to mingle with your favorite d along the veil
(26:51):
of meditation flows so styled by those fierce Briton's pleased
to see in nature's face the expression of pose or
happily There some pious hermit chose to live and die
the peace of heaven, his aim to whom the wild
sequestered region owes at this late day. It's sanctifying name.
(27:14):
Glenn kak Rock in the Cambrian tongue. In hours the
veil of friendship. Let this spot be named, where faithful
to a low roofed cot on Diva's banks, you have
abode so long, sisters in love, a love allowed to
climb even on this earth above the reach of time.
(27:38):
I find those ladies to be very dear. It's a
very charming little story. Well, and I stumbled upon it
completely by accident. I was I was looking into a
completely different topic, which was Radcliff Hall, who we may
still talk about sometime later. Um. And in this cycle
of of pulling together resources on Radcliffe Hall all, I've
(28:01):
fell down this rabbit hole about the origin of the
term Boston marriage, which is a basically term for two
women who decided to make their lives together without the
company of men. Uh. And a number of people point
to these two ladies is like maybe the first Boston marriage.
I don't know if I would go that far. And
it's also unclear when exactly the term Boston marriage was coined. Um.
(28:25):
But then I said, you know what I think I
want to talk about instead of Radcliffe Hall right now,
to these two ladies. I love them, Sarah and eleanor
out in the country. Uh. Do you have listener mail
for us? I do? Uh this listener mail. This listener
mail is from Susie, and Susie wrote after our podcast
(28:47):
that was the Six Impossible episodes on Soldiers, Snipers and Spies. Uh,
and Susi says, I was interested to hear your most
recent episode regarding Six Impossible Soldiers, in particular, you're mentioned
of Vivian Bullwinkle. I came from a very small town
in South Australia, and we're all well versed in the
story of the winer Brook as one of the nurses
(29:08):
killed was a local woman, Elaine Balfour Ogilvie. I take
my information from the Australian War Memorial Site. Sister. Elaine
Balfour Ogilvie was born in nineteen twelve and Renmark, South Australia,
a town located on the River Murray. The family was
well known in the district and her father was highly
respected for his war service. After school, Elaine trained as
(29:31):
a nurse. In nineteen forties, she enlisted in the Australian Army,
becoming the district's first Army nurse. She was soon appointed
to the fourth Casualty Clearing Station of the Australian Army
Nursing Service and in February ninety one embarked on the
Queen Mary for Singapore. She worked in various places in
the Melee Peninsula along with the ninth Field Ambulance, before
(29:52):
being based with the fourth CCS in Lampi, South Johore.
After the fall of Singapore, Elaine was one of the
sixty five Australia and nurses who left aboard the viner
Brock after it's bombing by the Japanese. Elane swum to
safety on Banka Island, beeting from a river town. She
was a strong swimmer. Elaine was among the twenty two
Australian nurses who remained on the beach to tend the
(30:14):
wounded after their discovery by the Japanese, who ordered them
into the ocean and ocean before opening fire on them.
Elane Ogilvie was one of the twenty one nurses killed.
She was thirty years old. The children's section of the
local library is named after Elane and a beautiful photo
of her hangs on the wall there. Having just commemorated
our Anzac Day, a particular emphasis was placed on Elane's story.
(30:37):
In particular, it was discussed at length at my daughter's school,
so a new generation of children are now aware of
her sacrifice. Thank you for bringing her story via Nurse
bowl Winkle to light. We tend to think that nothing
much of note happens here in the country, but your
story shows that everyone has a story to tell. I
could hear the emotion in your voice as you spoke.
It was a very touching and I had a lump
(30:58):
in my throat as well. Up up the good works, Susie.
Thank you so much, Susie. I never would have heard
of this particular woman without getting your note. Yeah very cool.
Uh So if you would like to write to us
about this or any other podcast or history podcasts at
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. In the
late eighteenth century, Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler, who
(00:23):
became known as the Ladies of Van Goflin, abandoned their
life in the upper tiers of Irish society and made
a home for themselves in Wales. And even though their
entire plan with this had been to live alone in solitude,
they became famous for doing so. Anna Seward and William
Wordsworth both wrote poems about them in the cottage that
(00:44):
they lived in. Byron sent them a copy of The
Corsair with a personal note. When that came out. Arthur Wellesley,
the Duke of Wellington, paid them a visit and even
stayed with them, and Queen Charlotte was enamored enough with
them that she convinced the King to at them a pension.
Apparently at one point they were even offered a lock
of Napoleon's hair. And this whole story, which in a
(01:07):
lot of ways sounds kind of like a regency romance novel,
was completely outside the bounds of what was expected or
allowable for women at the time, and up here at
the front, I'm just going to issue a blanket apology
for our poor pronunciation of Welsh. Yeah, definitely not a
language either of us has grown up speaking. It's a
(01:28):
tricky one if you didn't grow up speaking two l's
and the two d's. Those are easy sounds if you've
been making them your whole life. But if you are
an English speaker, you start watching these tutorials, they're like,
put your tongue behind your teeth and kind of exhale
a little bit and then make that noise while you're
saying words, And well, it's difficult. It's tricky, so brace
(01:49):
they We're gonna do our best, but it's not gonna
be anywhere near perfect. But to start in Eleanor Charlotte
Butler born seventeen thirty nine was the youngest daughter of
one of the most powerful and prominent families in Ireland.
Her father was Walter Butler, the Earl of Ormond, and
their family's home was Kilkenny Castle. The Butler's family seat
(02:10):
had been at Kilkenny Castle since the late fourteenth century.
I know sometimes there are buildings that are described as
castles that look sort of like a stone square. This
is not one of those. It is a castle with
four towers on it. Eleanor was Eleanor was quite a
(02:34):
bit younger than her two attractive and accomplished older sisters,
and the arrival of a younger brother also supplanted her
as the baby of the family before she was even
two years old. Consequently, Eleanor wound up being the most
left out of all the Butler siblings. Her two older
sisters got a much more fashionable education than she did.
(02:57):
They were sent to the Convent of the Blue Nuns
in Paris, while Eleanor went to an English Benedicting convent
and Cambray. When it came to the quality of education
at the convent, Eleanor went to I mean it was
a good enough education, but it was certainly no Paris,
and it did not have the same prestigious reputation is
(03:17):
where her sisters went. At times, it seemed like Eleanor
was literally forgotten. Correspondences from aunts and cousins routinely mentioned
and asked after her older sisters, while saying nothing of her.
Relatives remembered her sisters and their wills, but they passed
over Eleanor entirely, and even though from a social standpoint
(03:38):
it was essentially mandatory for the Butler family to find
suitable marriages for all of their daughters, they put way
more effort into her sisters than into Eleanor. While Eleanor
had had some suitors, none of them really worked out.
So by the time Eleanor was twenty nine, she was
the family spinster, and she just did not have much
(03:58):
to occupy her time him. That changed when she was
introduced to Sarah Ponsonby. Sarah, born in seventeen fifty five,
was from a family that was also quite prominent and
well off, although not nearly as big a deal as
the Butler's, but a series of tragedies left her both
orphaned and destitute before she was out of her teens.
(04:19):
Her father, Shambre Brabazon Ponsonby, was a member of parliament,
and he had been married once before marrying Sarah's mother.
He and his first wife had a son and three daughters,
but only one daughter survived infancy. This left him still
in need of a male heir, so he married Sarah's mother,
Louise A Lyons, in seventeen fifty two. Sarah was born
(04:42):
three years later in seventeen fifty five, and Louisa died
another three years after that. Sarah's father married once again,
as time to Mary Barker, who was an heiress and
did indeed conceive the son that he was hoping to have,
but Shambrey died before that son was worn when Sarah
was only seven. Then Sarah's stepmother remarried, but died herself
(05:06):
when Sarah was only thirteen. After this series of marriages
and deaths Sarah was left with no fortune of her own,
in the care of a stepfather who didn't have much
interest in a teenage girl he had acquired through his
late wife's previous husband's prior marriage, so he sent her
off to live with a cousin, Lady Elizabeth Founds, who
(05:26):
was called Betty, and she lived with her husband, Baronet
Sir William Founds in woodstock House, County Kilkenny, when Stockhouse
no longer stands, but it was also very large and impressive.
Sarah's introduction to Eleanor Butler came when the Foundss enrolled
her in a boarding school run by a Miss Parks.
The boarding school was much closer to kill Kenny Castle
(05:48):
than it was to Woodstock House. So Lady Betty Founds
wrote to Eleanor's mother, the Countess Ormand, to ask that
the Butler's keep an eye on Sarah, and this request
wound up serving two purposes quite well. It offered Lady
Betty some assurance that Sarah would make the right sorts
of friends at school and be kept away from influences
that might damage her prospects, and it offered Eleanor Butler
(06:11):
something to do with her time. Eleanor and Sarah became
fast friends, and for the entire five years that Sarah
was enrolled in the school, they were very close. Eleanor
had a reputation for being way too educated for a woman,
and they spent a lot of their time reading and
then discussing what they had read. The sixteen year gap
(06:32):
in their ages, combined with Sarah's youth, wouldn't have raised
eyebrows at the time and the way that it probably
would today. But what did raise some eyebrows was was
that they seemed to be so devoted to one another.
Close and intimate relationships were common, but the fact that
Sarah and Eleanor seemed to turn to each other to
the exclusion of anyone else was viewed with some suspicion.
(06:56):
It was probably during Sarah's school years that they began
to talk about how nice it would be if they
could retire somewhere together, to live quietly out in the country,
away from society. But when Sarah finished school, they were separated.
Sarah returned to Woodstock House to live with the founds Is,
while Eleanor continued to live at Kilkenny Castle, about twelve
(07:17):
miles roughly nineteen kilometers away, and even though Lady Betty
had asked the butlers to keep an eye on Sarah,
the two families weren't particularly close. For the next five years.
Sarah and Eleanor may have seen one another at social
events that both families would have attended, but they really
did not have much time together. They started to have
more contact with each other a few years later, when
(07:39):
Sarah was in her early twenties. Lady Betty founds health
wasn't very good and it had become obvious that Sir
William Founds was planning to take Sarah as a wife
once Lady Betty died. Sarah had so many problems with this.
She did not want to marry Sir William. She thought
he was repulsive, and she found his attention to her
(08:01):
to be gross and inappropriate. And even though Lady Betty
had urged her to be kind and accommodating to Sir William,
Sarah didn't think she meant that accommodating. So Sarah felt stuck.
She didn't want to encourage Sir William, but she also
didn't want to hurt Lady Betty. In a letter to
a friend, Lucy Goddard, she wrote, I would rather die
(08:21):
than wound Lady Betty's heart. In these same years, Eleanor
was almost equally unhappy. By this point, her brother Robert
had converted to Protestantism. Then the family had long been Catholic,
but following some changes to the law, Catholics are being
stripped of their titles, so Robert's conversion was a matter
(08:42):
of necessity to try to hold onto the earldom, and
that title would be in jeopardy at various other points
in Eleanor's life for various reasons. At the same time,
Eleanor's family was getting tired of supporting their spinster daughter.
They were talking about sending her to a convent, which
would simultaneously give the family a cheaper way to keep
(09:03):
her fed and sheltered, and it would also maybe get
them right with God. Her parents probably also thought she
might be happy at a convent, after all, she'd been
happy enough at the convent in Cambrai where she was educated.
But Eleanor did not want to go to a convent,
especially not to please the family who had always been
kind of indifferent to her, and particularly since part of
(09:25):
the motivation was the religion of her brother, who she
had always blamed for her being so overlooked at home.
So Sarah did not want to marry her gross guardian
when his wife, who she was very fond of, died,
and Eleanor did not want to join a convent to
make things financially easier on her family or assuage their
(09:46):
religious guilt. So the two of them decided that they
would do something about it, and we're going to talk
about that after we first pause for a little sponsor break.
Both unhappy with their situations and their future prospects, Sarah
Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor Butler started writing each other secret
(10:10):
correspondence around seventeen seventy six. To do this, they would
have needed help, probably from someone in the household staff,
to basically secret their letters in and out of the house.
They wrote back and forth bemoaning their circumstances and trying
to plan an escape for at least eighteen months. Then
on March seventeen seventy eight, they made their first attempt
(10:32):
to run away. That might seem like an odd choice
of words to describe grown women who were twenty three
and thirty nine at the time, but both women were
at this point really considered to be under the control
of their parents and guardians. They were expected to do
as they were told Mary and have children to continue
the family line, and if that for some reason absolutely
(10:53):
could not happen, to go to a convent. Even though
they were, at least in numeric terms, adults, the fact
that they were leaving home alone without their parents or
guardians permission or knowledge was scandalous, particularly given Eleanor's family's prominence.
Eleanor snuck out of Kilkenny Castle that night, changed into
men's clothes once she was out, and took a horse
(11:16):
from the stables, and she wrote it to a barn
where she and Sarah had arranged to meet. No One
at the castle noticed her absence for at least a
couple of hours. Meanwhile, Sarah climbed out the window at
Woodstock House, dressed as a man and armed with a pistol,
and she took her dog Frisk with her and proceeded
the rest of the way on foot. I love a
window escape with a puppy. From their rendezvous point, they
(11:42):
planned to go to Waterford and take a packet ship
that was a boat that carried mail across St. George's
Channel to Wales. This plan did not work out, though,
either they missed the boat or the one they had
planned on didn't set sail. The weather was bad and
there were rumors of pirates in the channel, so it
really could have been either. Their families, though, had started
(12:03):
a search as soon as they realized that the young
women were gone. The Founds and the butlers alike worried
that they had run away with men. They were simultaneously
kind of puzzled because they couldn't think of any men
that would be candidates for this. After a few hours,
some of Sir William founds as men tracked Eleanor and
(12:25):
Sarah down not far from Waterford and sent word back
to their respective families. Lady Betty took a coach to
retrieve them, intending to bring both Sarah and Eleanor back
to Woodstock House, but before they left the dock, a
friend of the Butler family arrived and insisted that Eleanor
be sent back with him. Over both women's serious objections,
(12:45):
they were sent back home separately. This left their families
to puzzle out what had happened and ideally how to
keep it from happening again. An elopement, which at the
time just meant running away and didn't necessarily have a
romantic or marriage subtext, was a huge topic for gossip
and scandal. Letters quickly circulated among both families social circles,
(13:08):
full of details and speculation. It was typical for mail
to be delivered several times a day, so even Lucy Goddard,
who was the subject of a lot of letters from
a lot of people in this story, even Lucy Goddard,
who was away in Dublin, had heard about it within
a day or two. It was in this flurry of
letters that people started describing Eleanor and Sarah as having
(13:31):
a romantic friendship. Like elopement, romantic had a different connotation
at this point, and it was one that wasn't altogether positive.
When it came to friendships, romantic often meant eccentric, whimsical, imaginative,
or in some way not really something that people talking
about it understood, So their quote romantic friendship was viewed
(13:54):
with some suspicion, but not nearly as much as if
they had run away with men, which would have real
in their reputation and that of their families. For a
couple of weeks after the attempted elopement, both Eleanor and
Sarah were miserable. Sarah had caught a cold, which came
along with a fever and a sore throat, and on
top of being six, she was increasingly worried and agitated
(14:16):
about Eleanor. Eleanor's parents had sent her to stay with
friends at Boris House, which wasn't that much farther away,
but it kept her out from underfoot while they made
preparations to send her to a convent in France, and
also tried to bribe her into going along with it
by promising to double her allowance. Sarah became even more
(14:37):
distressed when she heard the news that Eleanor's departure might
be imminent. The butlers announced that their decision that Eleanor
would be sent to a French convent, whether she liked
it or not, was final. On April sixteenth, seventeen seventy eight,
both Eleanor and Sarah asked to be allowed to meet
one last time, just for half an hour to say goodbye,
(14:58):
and that wish was ultimately granted. But this was not
really a goodbbe, is it. They agreed that they would
make one more attempt to try to be together. Eleanor
would run away again. This time she would go to
Woodstock House, and she did exactly that. On April eighteenth.
Mary Carroll, who was Lady Buddy's housemaid, snuck her in
(15:18):
through a window and then kept kept taking care of
her by smuggling her food from the kitchen. There's a
lot of window entry and exit, which always makes for
a good story. Uh. They managed to keep Eleanor's presence
at wood Stockhouse secret for a little while, but soon
one of Sir William's men told him that he had
learned where Eleanor was hiding, and that it was in
(15:40):
fact in his own house. Sir William began writing letters
to the butler's asking them to come and collect their daughter,
but those letters went unanswered. He also started trying to
convince Sarah to give up her attachment and let Eleanor
go to the convent as planned. Sarah professed that she
would live and die with miss Butler. That is a
(16:01):
quote in her own words. Finally, the Butlers essentially gave up,
agreeing to let Eleanor do what she wanted. She and
Sarah had at that point been ready to leave for
Wales for days, down to Sarah putting on her riding
habit every morning just in case. When they went, they
took Mary Carol with them. They went to Waterford to
(16:22):
sail on the package ship, as they had already planned
to do back in March. After being delayed at Waterford
for four days due to a combination of bad weather
and pirates in the Channel again, they left for Wales
on Friday May nine. We will talk about their life
in Wales after another quick sponsor break. After arriving in Wales,
(16:51):
Sarah Ponsonby and Eleanor Butler spent a few weeks traveling around,
essentially touring the country. This wasn't really something they could afford,
and because they'd spent some time. Being tourists, they wound
up needing to hurry to find a place that they
could actually live before winter. Also as they were doing this,
Thor William Founds died. It was of a sizar or
(17:11):
maybe a stroke that followed about ten days of serious illness.
Then Lady Betty Founds died three weeks after that, so
that they were traveling, Sarah and Eleanor only heard of
it much later. Sarah had an income of about eighty
pounds a year and Eleanor had maybe two hundred pounds
a year. They also both occasionally got small sums of
(17:32):
money from other sources, and this would have been enough
to live on if they lived frugally, but that was
not a skill that either of them had ever learned. Plus,
at multiple points each of them was convinced, often with
good reason, that they were going to receive more money
from a range of inheritances, annuities, and pensions. More often
than not, those expected funds fell through. As a result,
(17:55):
the pair always struggled with money, and they were almost
always living outside their me They did, however, find a
five room cottage that they were able to rent. It
was in thank Gothland, where they'd started their tour of
Wales on the River d It was a very simple
stone house and they named it plas News, which just
means new place or new home. They moved in in
(18:18):
seventeen eighty and one of their major projects for the
rest of their lives would be making it beautiful. They
had four servants, a gardener, a footman, a kitchen maid,
and Mary Carroll, who was the housekeeper. All of them
but Mary were paid. It's a little unclear why Mary,
unlike the other employees, did not receive a salary. She
(18:39):
was allowed to keep tips from people who visited them,
and that number of people did grow over the years.
And when she died, she left all her money to Sarah,
so even though they weren't paying her, she apparently did
have enough of an income to be able to save
it up and buy property. I wish I could find
(19:01):
more detail about that, but I could not. The nebulous
finances of Mary Carroll well, and she was incredibly devoted
to both of them. It's I feel like there's a
whole other story there, and at this point in time
probably impossible to get the details of it. So Sarah
and Eleanor had been hoping for solitude when they decided
(19:24):
to retire away together, and at first then Gothen was
even more lonesome than they had hoped. There was barely
a town there. Both women had a lot more education
and had come from a higher rank than most of
the people around them, but they did gradually begin to
make friends. By sight two people were describing their little
home in the surrounding garden as very romantic, and at
(19:46):
that point that was a term starting to shed some
of the negative associations that had previously been used to
describe their relationship. Eleanor's father died in seventeen eighty three
and she was not mentioned in the will. There was
a huge and bitter back and forth with her brother
that secured her two hundred pounds a year and a
lump sum of five hundred pounds to pay off debts.
(20:08):
There would be a similar situation when her mother died
and she was left one hundred pounds, but wrote to
her sister to ask for more, which her sister turned down. Typically,
their letters to ask for money came off as accusatory
and backhanded, which might be why they were so often
turned down. Yeah, they often started out with a tone
of you have always been terrible to me, and I
(20:31):
have some money, though may I have some cash. As
the years progressed, Eleanor and Sarah continued to read and
study extensively. They learned multiple languages. They compiled enormous lists
of books that they had read together. They also walked
a lot. Even though they didn't have a lot of money,
(20:53):
they tried to help people around them who were less fortunate,
setting a goal of giving away ten percent of their
income to charity every year, and they put a lot
of work into plast nudds, adding Gothic embellishments, expanding and
making one of the rooms a suitable guest room, which
they named the State Apartment. At one point, oak carvings
came into fashion, and they went wild collecting them. They
(21:16):
and the gardener also constantly improved the garden and the ground.
Their monograms contained both of their initials, and they signed
all of their letters jointly. Their journals chronicle all the
mundane details of their life together and also express a
deep and tender love for each other. For example, in
one entry, Eleanor, writing about one of her very frequent migraines, said,
(21:40):
quote rose at eight after a tedious night spent in
coughing and with a most dreadful headache. My dearest, my
kindest love, did not sleep even for one moment the
entire night, but lay beside me, watching and lamenting my illness,
and soothing by her tenderness the distressing pain of my
head simultaneously. There was so much gossip about them back
(22:04):
in Ireland as well as elsewhere. People speculated extensively about
what they were doing and what had led them to
throw off all of their family obligations and the incomes
that would have come along with them to live in
a remote part of Whales. As a side note, the
idea that they dressed as men persists today, but that
really came around after they lived, and it was mostly
(22:25):
because they had short hair and they wore hats, both
of which were following a French fashion, and they were
not so that they would look like men. Yeah, if
you see there are a few of great engravings of them,
and in some of them they're wearing their clothing. They
have the short cropped hair, which you see other portraits
of women in the same time who have short cropped hair,
(22:46):
and it's sort of top hat looking hat on and
if you start just at the top and stop at
the shoulders, you might think that's a kind of masculine appearance,
but then below that is a dress. So yeah, that
was definitely going on in France. Yes, they they and
also they did not spend a ton of money on
(23:08):
their wardrobes, so dis gossip about them even made the
papers in see the General Evening Post published an article
about them called Extraordinary Female Affection. And even though some
of the information in the article was actually accurate, not
all of it was, and it was heavily threaded through
with an undertone that their relationship was unnatural, that they
(23:31):
were lesbians, even though that term hadn't taken on that connotation.
Yet that same undertone of being quote unnatural would even
be President Eleanor's obituary when it ran in The Gentleman's magazine.
In spite of this suspicion, as we noted at the
top of the show, the two women became famous more
or less for simply being who they were. Their home
(23:53):
was on the way from London to Ireland, and it
became something of a tourist attraction. They eventually got a
lot of visitors, to the point that Eleanor would write
things like quote when will we be truly alone? In
her journal, and their names and manner of living were
well known even among people who did not personally visit.
They were basically famous in the regency. They found a
(24:16):
little bit more financial stability when they were able to
buy Plassnews in eighteen nineteen. Their ability to do this
is often credited to Mary Carol, who died in eighteen
o nine and as we said earlier, left all of
her money to Sarah that was actually less one shilling
for each of her siblings, provided that they came from
Ireland to collect it. It's almost certain though that they
(24:40):
got money from somewhere else as well, but it's a
little unclear as to exactly where. Later in her life,
Eleanor developed cataracts in an eye inflammation, and she eventually
lost her sight. She died on June two eighty nine.
She and Sarah had become such a fixture in Glan
Gothlin that a whole community went into mourning. Word also
(25:03):
began to spread about a number of supernatural happenings attributed
to her passing. One of the local farmers cows had
all black calves, a stray dog that arrived at their
home on the day of the funerals, started howling inconsolably
when Sarah tried to give one of Eleanor's books away.
Because so much of their lives together had been spent
(25:24):
reading and learning and walking in general generally being pretty
solitary apart from receiving so many visitors, A lot of
Sarah's day to day routine stayed pretty much the same
after Eleanor's death, except that she no longer had Eleanor
to share it with. She didn't live very much longer, though,
she died on December nine, thirty one. Six months after
(25:46):
their deaths Plas Nue was sold and their belongings were
auctioned off. The proceeds were enough to pay their debts
and set up annuities for their surviving household staff. Today,
Plas Nue is a museum that is open seas Anally.
I thought we would end their story, which I find
to be lovely. It's kind of a heavenly idea. Let's
(26:08):
live out in the country together and read books and
walk around. All right, Maybe not for Holly, it would
not be I need um, I need a lot more
takeout options than that would offer. Critically. Well, but you
would have a staff of four people who would be
cooking for I need more than the country life offers
(26:31):
in terms of um stimulation. Okay, yeah, I'm a city
I love to walk so much that as long as
I can walk, I'm pretty happy about it. But anyway,
I thought we would end by reading Wordsworth's sonnet, A
stream to mingle with your favorite d along the veil
(26:51):
of meditation flows so styled by those fierce Briton's pleased
to see in nature's face the expression of pose or
happily There some pious hermit chose to live and die
the peace of heaven, his aim to whom the wild
sequestered region owes at this late day. It's sanctifying name.
(27:14):
Glenn kak Rock in the Cambrian tongue. In hours the
veil of friendship. Let this spot be named, where faithful
to a low roofed cot on Diva's banks, you have
abode so long, sisters in love, a love allowed to
climb even on this earth above the reach of time.
(27:38):
I find those ladies to be very dear. It's a
very charming little story. Well, and I stumbled upon it
completely by accident. I was I was looking into a
completely different topic, which was Radcliff Hall, who we may
still talk about sometime later. Um. And in this cycle
of of pulling together resources on Radcliffe Hall all, I've
(28:01):
fell down this rabbit hole about the origin of the
term Boston marriage, which is a basically term for two
women who decided to make their lives together without the
company of men. Uh. And a number of people point
to these two ladies is like maybe the first Boston marriage.
I don't know if I would go that far. And
it's also unclear when exactly the term Boston marriage was coined. Um.
(28:25):
But then I said, you know what I think I
want to talk about instead of Radcliffe Hall right now,
to these two ladies. I love them, Sarah and eleanor
out in the country. Uh. Do you have listener mail
for us? I do? Uh this listener mail. This listener
mail is from Susie, and Susie wrote after our podcast
(28:47):
that was the Six Impossible episodes on Soldiers, Snipers and Spies. Uh,
and Susi says, I was interested to hear your most
recent episode regarding Six Impossible Soldiers, in particular, you're mentioned
of Vivian Bullwinkle. I came from a very small town
in South Australia, and we're all well versed in the
story of the winer Brook as one of the nurses
(29:08):
killed was a local woman, Elaine Balfour Ogilvie. I take
my information from the Australian War Memorial Site. Sister. Elaine
Balfour Ogilvie was born in nineteen twelve and Renmark, South Australia,
a town located on the River Murray. The family was
well known in the district and her father was highly
respected for his war service. After school, Elaine trained as
(29:31):
a nurse. In nineteen forties, she enlisted in the Australian Army,
becoming the district's first Army nurse. She was soon appointed
to the fourth Casualty Clearing Station of the Australian Army
Nursing Service and in February ninety one embarked on the
Queen Mary for Singapore. She worked in various places in
the Melee Peninsula along with the ninth Field Ambulance, before
(29:52):
being based with the fourth CCS in Lampi, South Johore.
After the fall of Singapore, Elaine was one of the
sixty five Australia and nurses who left aboard the viner
Brock after it's bombing by the Japanese. Elane swum to
safety on Banka Island, beeting from a river town. She
was a strong swimmer. Elaine was among the twenty two
Australian nurses who remained on the beach to tend the
(30:14):
wounded after their discovery by the Japanese, who ordered them
into the ocean and ocean before opening fire on them.
Elane Ogilvie was one of the twenty one nurses killed.
She was thirty years old. The children's section of the
local library is named after Elane and a beautiful photo
of her hangs on the wall there. Having just commemorated
our Anzac Day, a particular emphasis was placed on Elane's story.
(30:37):
In particular, it was discussed at length at my daughter's school,
so a new generation of children are now aware of
her sacrifice. Thank you for bringing her story via Nurse
bowl Winkle to light. We tend to think that nothing
much of note happens here in the country, but your
story shows that everyone has a story to tell. I
could hear the emotion in your voice as you spoke.
It was a very touching and I had a lump
(30:58):
in my throat as well. Up up the good works, Susie.
Thank you so much, Susie. I never would have heard
of this particular woman without getting your note. Yeah very cool.
Uh So if you would like to write to us
about this or any other podcast or history podcasts at
how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook at
Facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter
(31:20):
at miss in History. Are tumbler is at miss in
history dot tumbler dot com, and we're on Pinterest at
pinterest dot com slash missed in History. You can come
to our parent companies website, which is how stuff works
dot com to learn about just about anything your heart desires.
Or you can come to our website, which is missed
in History dot com, where you will find an archive
every episode ever, show notes of the episodes Holly and
(31:43):
I have worked on together lots of other cool stuff.
You can do all of that and a whole lot
more at how stuff works dot com or missed in
History dot com for more on this and thousands of
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