Overture of Hope, page 2
The next day, when the sisters told their mother about the ghost, Mary Cook admitted rather matter-of-factly that she often spoke to the resident phantom. She had once stopped him on the stairs and said, “Poor man, I can understand that your spirit is still upset—because you met such a sudden and violent death, but after all it happened two centuries ago—why don’t you go to rest?”
The ghost’s reply seemed perfectly logical to her: “You don’t understand. You’ve got it all wrong. I’m not the victim—I’m the murderer.”9
By the summer of 1912, the family had moved again—this time back to the rugged landscape of Northumberland where they settled in Alnwick, a medieval market town on the River Aln, some thirty miles from the Scottish border. With its rough landscape, stone ruins, and winding cobblestone streets, Alnwick was a world away from London and the south of England. Not only was the barren terrain markedly unfamiliar, but northerners in general were wary and clannish, “a product…of the AngloScottish frontier, where their lives, wives and property had been since the Conquest at almost constant risk from Scottish raids.”10
Louise and Ida were enrolled at the all-girls Duchess’s School, which was founded by Frances Julia Burrell Percy (the second wife of Hugh Percy, the second Duke of Northumberland) for the daughters of their staff in 1809, when the first class numbered twenty girls. According to early records, the focus was on discipline and religion: “The Mistress was to teach the children to spell, read, knit and sew, hear them say two lessons in the morning and two in the afternoon, and teach them to repeat the creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments.”11 The rules were little changed the year the Cook sisters started at the school, although it was no longer just the refuge of impoverished girls and was a semi-private state institution. Free places were still available, but they were only offered to girls who passed a rigorous entrance examination. The Cooks’ enrollment records do not show any exemptions from tuition fees.
Shortly after the outbreak of the Great War in the summer of 1914, the town of Alnwick was transformed into an impromptu military camp, with mansions and public buildings requisitioned for the war effort. At the Duchess’s School, students were also asked to help with the war effort. In the Duchess’s School Magazine in the summer of 1915, there are articles about a Zeppelin drill and how women could contribute to the war effort: “Every woman can help by encouraging her friends and relatives to enlist and by giving them a hearty send-off.”12
Other than the disruptions and the steady stream of wounded soldiers who arrived at the makeshift hospital as the war progressed, the Cooks led a fairly uneventful, comfortable, middle-class life that revolved around school and family. A month after war was declared, their youngest brother Jim was born. “For Louise and me, these years in Alnwick were extremely happy ones,” recalled Ida.13
Both sisters had been good students, although Louise, a shy and anxious girl, failed her senior arithmetic exams and never managed to get a Cambridge Certificate in her final year of high school. In the early part of the twentieth century, the vast majority of girls in Britain were finished with their schooling by the age of fourteen. Louise’s crippling timidity also got in the way of a music exam, and even though she failed the test “through nervousness,” she was by far the best candidate, a school administrator noted in her file. “All others passed.”14 Still, she managed to brave a “pianoforte duet” with another student, according to the school’s magazine in 1917. Ida, outgoing and gregarious, was a stellar pupil and a talented violinist. In her academic bulletin, an administrator noted that she took her Cambridge Senior exam in July 1919, a month before her fifteenth birthday, although these exams were usually reserved for pupils who were seventeen or eighteen.15
In addition to the sisters’ musical abilities, Ida showed a talent for writing, and she submitted a three-page story about a young Italian aristocrat and her doomed love to the school’s magazine in 1919. No doubt influenced by her historic surroundings in Alnwick, it was entitled “A Romance of the 14th Century,” in which the heroine poisons her lover, thinking he’s about to marry another, but realizes too late that she is mistaken.16 The story displayed a precocious penmanship and talent for crafting a gripping narrative (even if some sentences still betrayed a schoolgirl’s clunky phrasing). With its emphasis on melodrama and a surprise ending, the story clearly showed where Ida’s fascination for opera might have originated.
Louise graduated from school on July 26, 1918, a month after her seventeenth birthday, and Ida left school a year later when the family moved back to London. Louise then scored highly in Latin in her civil service exams, and Ida followed in her sister’s path. The girls and their family returned to London just as a Spanish flu epidemic gripped Alnwick, forcing the closure of schools for extended periods. “Louise and Ida Cook have gone to London, and are taking up Civil Service work,” read a bulletin under the “News of Old Girls” section of the Duchess’s School Magazine in 1920.17 A year later, the magazine announced that Ida was first out of 1500 candidates in a civil service examination and was appointed as a clerk to a local art school. “My salary was a modest £2 6s.… a week…and very pleased with it I was,” Ida enthused.18
The salary wasn’t quite enough to allow her to leave the family home, but neither Ida nor Louise felt the need to move away from 24 Morella Road and were content to live with their parents and brothers.
While it was not necessarily a given that the sisters would automatically live together, they had become adults in an era of “surplus women” when single women outnumbered single men. More than 700,000 British men had been killed in the Great War, creating a gender imbalance that had started during the Industrial Revolution. The 1851 census showed that 30 percent of British women between the ages of twenty and forty were unmarried. Following the war, there were 1,209 single women between the ages of twenty-five and twenty-nine for every 1,000 men in the same age group, according to the 1921 census. As a result, thousands of young women were forced to give up on an expectation of marriage. 19
Women of this generation had started turning to each other to satisfy their needs for companionship, and even sex. As the controversial writer and eugenicist Sybil Neville-Rolfe noted in the mid-1930s: “The war left behind it a generation of Eves in an Adamless Eden.… Starving for love, deprived of homes and denied the joys of motherhood, many women found in friendship, one with another, some sort of substitute for these normal but lost relationships.”20 Unlike male homosexuality, lesbianism was not illegal in Britain, although legislators did try to introduce the Criminal Law Amendment Bill in Parliament in 1921. The bill was rejected by the House of Commons and the House of Lords because of a fear of drawing too much attention to female homosexuality.
Neither sister wrote or spoke about this, although at some point both sisters made the decision that neither marriage nor intimacy with other women was for them. “There was something schoolgirlish about them that they never lost,” recalled one of their friends. But Ida was always the dominant one. “Louise was like an echo,” said the friend. “She was always listening benignly and nodding her head in agreement, and occasionally she would say something, and when she did it was worth listening to and you would realize that she was a thinker and had a hidden strength.”21
As they settled into adulthood, the sisters were clearly happiest in each other’s company, so much so that Ida never mentioned male suitors nor any pressure from their parents to marry or have children. “Many women of our generation made the choice of dignified spinsterhood rather than marry someone uncongenial. Perhaps Louise and I felt a bit regretful, but I don’t remember that we suffered.”22 Unencumbered by the strict dictates of married life or the responsibility of raising young children, both sisters were free to direct their passion and energy to other pursuits.
According to Ida, the sisters’ fascination with opera began in 1923 when Louise happened to wander into a lecture on music at the Board of Education where she worked as a “copying typist” or clerical assistant. The lecture was delivered by Sir Walford Davies, a composer and educator who would later go on to become master of the prestigious King’s Music from 1934 to 1941. Davies made a series of recordings about music for the His Master’s Voice label and later worked for the BBC, hosting a series of programs entitled “Music and the Ordinary Listener,” which proved very popular and continued to be broadcast until the beginning of the Second World War in 1939.
After that lecture, during which Davies illustrated his points by playing gramophone records, Louise “arrived home slightly dazed and announced to an astonished family, ‘I must have a gramophone,’ ” recalled Ida.23 Almost immediately, Louise put a deposit on an HMV gramophone for £23 and also bought ten records. “The buying of one new record meant much consultation, much planning and, frequently, going without a few lunches—which is, I still think, the way one should come to one’s pleasures,” explained Ida, adding that she and Louise were particularly moved by the voice of Italian soprano Amelita Galli-Curci singing “Un bel dì vedremo,” the famous aria from Madama Butterfly.24
“We listened to those records during all our spare time and at the end of the month our tastes and our lives were changed,” said Ida.25
According to Ida, Louise had yet again “wandered” into the gallery of Covent Garden, where the cheapest seats were to be found, to hear the aria from Madama Butterfly and was so enchanted that the sisters pooled their savings to attend three other operas that season: Tosca, La Traviata, and Rigoletto. “Soon we were spending all the money we could squeeze from living expenses for opera and concert tickets.”26
Galli-Curci soon became a favorite singer of the Cooks. The petite soprano had made her debut in 1906 as Gilda in Rigoletto in Italy. She then toured throughout Europe, Russia, and Latin America, famously singing opposite opera great Enrico Caruso in Buenos Aires in Lucia di Lammermoor in 1916. By the early 1920s, the prima donna was a global sensation, performing concerts featuring arias and a series of songs that showed off her impressive vocal range. But despite her years of touring abroad, Galli-Curci had never performed in front of a British audience.
Then, in the spring of 1924, it was announced she was to make her British debut at the Royal Albert Hall before embarking on a twenty-city tour. The news created a sensation. Ads in newspapers throughout the United Kingdom trumpeted “Galli-Curci—The Vocal Sensation of the World.” “Galli-Curci at any price!” screamed the placards outside concert halls where she was scheduled to perform. “First appearance in this country of world famous prima donna.” Over one hundred thousand tickets were sold in a matter of two weeks for her countrywide tour, while her four performances at the Royal Albert Hall, between October 12 and October 19, quickly sold out.27
Ida and Louise were among the frenzied ticket buyers. Not content with seeing her only once, they bought tickets to all her London performances, including one presentation at the Alexandra Palace in the northern part of the city. “By now, she was very much our favorite gramophone star, and her appearance—in London, in the flesh—was of monumental importance to us,” said Ida.28
On October 12, 1924, Ida and Louise entered the Royal Albert Hall for the first time. Although they were already on their way to becoming habituées of opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, there was something magical about stepping into that grand concert hall, directly across the street from the Albert Memorial where Ida and Louise had spent so many happy hours as children.
In many ways, the Royal Albert Hall was the practical extension of the Albert Memorial. The concert venue had been a pet project of Prince Albert, who had envisioned it during the Great Exhibition as part of a permanent series of theaters, museums, and other venues devoted to public enlightenment. After his death, Queen Victoria set about completing her husband’s vision. Sir Henry Cole, a civil servant and inventor who had collaborated with Albert on the design of the hall, said that he was inspired by his trips to Italy and the ruined Roman amphitheaters he saw there. Work began on the concert venue (which could accommodate more than eight thousand people) in the spring of 1867, and the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences was opened on March 29, 1871. At the lavish opening ceremony, which featured representatives from across Great Britain as well as foreign dignitaries, Queen Victoria, who would spend the rest of her life mourning her beloved husband, was “plainly attired in black silk dress and mantle, with a narrow trimming of satin floss, and a black bonnet.” Overcome with emotion, she managed only a few words—“I cannot but express my great admiration for this beautiful building, and my earnest wishes for its complete success”—before turning over the rest of the welcome speech to her son, the Prince of Wales.29
In fact, the acoustics of the hall were initially criticized, and in its early days the Royal Albert Hall became a more popular venue for sporting events, political meetings, balls, and fundraisers for the First World War. Among the most important musical events was the Grand Wagner Festival in May 1877, which featured the German composer Richard Wagner himself conducting the first half of the concerts that made up the festival.
For opera aficionados, Galli-Curci’s debut was of the same monumental importance as Wagner conducting his own compositions. “Initially, it was disappointing to discover that in the cruel acres of the Albert Hall, the voice sounded much smaller than on the gramophone,” said Ida after the concert. “But inexperienced though we were, it did not take us long to separate the natural nervousness of the first half hour and the unsuitability of the hall from the matchless vocal accomplishment.”30
Music critics were suitably overwhelmed. The following day, newspaper headlines blared “Famous Soprano Takes London by Storm,” and “Queen of Song Wins All Hearts.” A critic for the Courier and Argus noted the “furious” applause, the “generous clamors of her 10,000 hearers,” as well as the numerous encores after her performance of eighteen songs. Of the “mad scene” from Lucia di Lammermoor the newspaper noted that “the coloratura passage at the end during which it was difficult to distinguish between the prima donna’s voice and the accompanying notes of the flautist Manuel Berenguer—brought half the house to its feet and the last was seen of this remarkable personality waving…and throwing kisses to the excited audience as she stood amid a stage full of flowers and bouquets.”31
For Ida, the highlight of the evening was the diva’s rendition of “Home Sweet Home,” by Sir Henry Rowley Bishop: “To me, the most beautiful thing about the sound was the faint touch of melancholy—often found in the very best voices—which gave to certain phrases and notes a quality of nostalgia that went straight to one’s heart.”32 The sisters were so moved after the performance that they wrote a fan letter to Galli-Curci. “We were still only silly young girls—and we told her we admired her,” recalled Ida.33
Ida also seemed to have found time in between Galli-Curci’s London performances to embroider a handkerchief for the diva. “Many thanks indeed for your very kind thoughtful letter and the beautifully embroidered handkerchief,” wrote Galli-Curci in a note to Ida. “I used it at Alexandra Palace…I wonder if you saw it! I hope sometime to see you backstage after the concert so that I can thank you personally.”34
This communication was the stuff of their dreams, and all the encouragement the sisters needed. Astonished, they wrote back, immediately accepting her invitation to meet after her final London performance, and “while we were writing the letter, we suddenly decided we would save our money and go to New York to hear her sing opera,” reasoned Ida. “So we told her about this project too.”35
That evening, “there was an immense crowd” around Galli-Curci, who was signing autographs and handing bouquets of flowers to an assistant.36 Louise was so shocked to be in the presence of her idol that she was transfixed and unable to speak. Straining to be heard above the crowd, Ida just managed to blurt out that they would come to see her in New York City, although it might take them a while to save up for the trip.
“I shall remember you,” said Galli-Curci to her newest fans. “Just drop me a line and I’ll keep you the seats.”37
It would take two years for Ida and Louise to save enough for their trip to America. Having calculated that they would need £100 each to pay for their voyage to New York, they put away a pound at the beginning of each week and managed to save £50 each by the end of the first year. Although they had barely traveled outside London following their school years in Alnwick, they were undaunted about making an Atlantic journey. To their parents, a trip to the Metropolitan Opera seemed a strange way to spend their savings.
“After we had paid our very modest contribution at home, our season tickets to town and our insurance, we usually had about ten shillings a week each. From this pittance came our daily lunches,” wrote Ida.38 They “bought a Rand McNally guide to New York City,” and, as Ida recalled, “when we felt hungry, we used to study this and feel better.”39 A little more than two years after their fateful backstage meeting with their idol, Ida and Louise boarded the RMS Berengaria, the Cunard Line’s flagship. “We had left England,” wrote Ida. “Sailing for New York and adventure.”40
CHAPTER 2 The Photograph
On January 4, 1927, Ida and Louise arrived in New York City, disembarking on the West Side Pier, which was shrouded in an early morning mist. The fog and winter drizzle provided “a typically English reception in the way of weather” and hid the fabled Manhattan skyline from view, noted a reporter for the New York Times who had been assigned to write about the sisters’ unusual journey to America.1
According to Ida, the newspaper had been alerted to their arrival by one of the passengers aboard their ship. They traveled in steerage both ways, and Ida later described the crossing as pleasant and uneventful. During the days, the “weather [was] so warm that sometimes we sat on deck without rugs, which was quite phenomenal for an Atlantic crossing in January.” In the evenings, the sisters went for rapid walks around the deck before turning in and watching “the moonlight on the great tumbling, white-crested waves.”2
