Miss Estelle

On 16 December 1911, Tormore House School (now Walford) celebrated its annual speech day at the Adelaide Town Hall. Amongst the prizes awarded that night was one for 'physiology diagrams' for Estelle Bowen, Sixth Class.

Now, you're probably thinking, 'um, History Girl? This is a bit different from your other posts - what does this have to do with anything?' [And that is the last time I'll write in the third person!] Well, Estelle Bowen, who was apparently very good at drawing physiology diagrams, grew up to be Stella Bowen, the common-law wife of author Ford Madox Ford.

I decided to do a post about Stella Bowen for a couple of reasons: 1, I think she's a very interesting person; 2, Parade's End (based on Ford's novels) was recently turned into a mini-series and the character of Valentine Wannop - awesome name! - was (reportedly) based on Stella; 3, Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby was released recently and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were in Stella's circle of friends.

I think Stella is honestly one of the coolest people to ever come out of Adelaide, yet she's not particularly well-known. She left Adelaide in 1914 (yes, at the very beginning of the then-Great War) to study art in London, using money from her parents' estate. She was friends with actors, writers, artists and bohemians. Soon after she met Ford, they moved to Sussex and lived on a farm before moving to Paris and livin' it up bohemian writer/artist French style. The recent(ish) Woody Allen movie, Midnight in Paris, is about the bohemian Paris of the 1920s with the Fitzgeralds and Hemingway among others, but I don't believe Ford or Stella are in it (probably because they were English/Australian and not so well-known in America?).

Stella Bowen was born Esther Gwendolyn Bowen on 16 May 1893. Her father, a surveyor, died when she was three and her mother died several years later, when Stella was twenty. Her parents, Thomas and Esther Eliza (nee Perry) married at St Giles' Church, Oxford on 2 February 1892 and settled in North Adelaide. From 1897-1913, Stella lived at 59 Mills Terrace, North Adelaide, which is still a private residence and it has a blue plaque commemorating it as her home out the front. A link to a pdf file published by the Adelaide City Council about the house can be found HERE. A quote from the pdf, quoted from (what I believe is) Stella's autobiography is:

 I was born in the sort of house that must inevitably end its days as a boarding house. It was sizeable, rather gloomy, at a sufficiently good but not fashionable address, detached, with two little lawns and a summer house in front and a backyard behind containing clothes line, a stable and a coach house, a see-saw and a swing. Being in Australia, it had a front verandah with balcony above, and its roof was largely smothered in Banksia roses, bougainvillea and other greenery. There was a trellis of vines covering the path from the front to the back and figs, apricots, lemons and oranges grew around the backyard. There was a pampas-grass in the garden, and an aspidistra in the drawing-room. There were no modern conveniences. The nicest thing about it was the view. Being placed high on the edge of the town's oldest suburb, it looked down over low-lying park lands where cattle grazed...

She was, as I wrote before, educated at Tormore House School - which then had campuses in North Adelaide and Unley Park - and was known in Adelaide as 'Estelle' (presumably to differentiate between her and her mother, who was also called Esther). A report about Tormore House from 1909 can be found HERE - Stella was thirteen in 1909.  During that year, young Estelle won prizes for French history and botanical diagrams. Interesting note: one of the senior students of that year was Paquita Delprat, who later married Sir Douglas Mawson.

Following her mother's death, Stella left Tormore and Adelaide behind her and set sail for London, to study at the Westminster School of Art. Her departure from Adelaide was mentioned in the Chronicle's 'Social Notes' (on page 56!):

Miss Estelle Bowen sailed for England by the Marmora on Thursday, February 25.

Stella's actual departure was probably far more interesting than that. She was a young, unmarried woman and we can guess that social propriety (and probably her mother) prevented her from leaving her home until after her mother's death. Mirabel Osler, who was the daughter of Stella's friend Phyllis Reid, wrote about Stella in her autobiography The Rain Tree. Stella described Adelaide as 'a queer little backwater of intellectual timidity'. She was only meant to be away from Australia for a year, but 'never used the return half ticket'.

Her post-Adelaide life with Ford is fairly well-documented - there are numerous biographies of Ford Madox Ford and Jean Rhys (author of, among others, The Wide Sargasso Sea and one of Ford's best known mistresses), and Stella wrote her own autobiography (which is now out of print). Since the television production of Parade's End, I've noticed a lot of articles about Ford and, in particular, his relationship with Stella. But I'm not going to write about that. I'm going to write about Miss Estelle Bowen, the daughter of (the late) Mr. and Mrs. T. Bowen of North Adelaide. Miss Estelle attended parties and wore pretty dresses, which were described in great detail in the Adelaide newspapers. She and her mother went on holiday, which was announced in the Adelaide newspapers. And, oh yeah, she was an artist.

On 17 May 1911, Miss Estelle Bowen looked well in a white satin frock made with a silk net tunic, finished with a rouleaux of satin, and border of handsome old Honiton lace; the same 'lace was introduced on the bodice and silk cord girdle; broad white satin band in the hair at a 'charmingly arranged and altogether delightful dance' at the North Adelaide Institute, hosted by Miss Davies Thomas. Her mother, Mrs. T. Bowen, was also in attendance and wore 'grey silk with black Maltese lace tunic and bodice finishings'.

At "one of the most sumptuous and well arranged dances of the season...given by Mr. and Mrs. William Pope at their residence, 'Mount House,' Strangways-tce, North Adelaide, on Wednesday, August 9 [1911]", Miss Estelle Bowen wore a pretty frock of apricot satin over which was mounted a lovely- Mechlin lace tunic. As in May, her mother also attended and I think she was wearing the same dress as before ("grey silk with Maltese lace tunic")! At this party, another guest was Dr. Helen Mayo. Helen Mayo was one of the first (I believe the second?) female medical graduates from the University of Adelaide and she became one of the best-known authorities on babies' health. She wore black crepe-de-chine with lace effects.

On 23 August 1911, Miss Estelle Bowen wore yellow crepe-de-chine with folds of brown velvet on the corsage on a night out at a 'Two-Step Dance' at Miss Kathleen Kyffin Thomas' house at Brougham Place. The billiard room was used for dancing, and a dainty supper was served in the dining room. How sweet! Kathleen Kyffin Thomas was her cousin and Brougham Place and Mills Terrace are a little over a kilometre apart - a 20 minute walk, according to Google Maps.

In February 1912, she and her mother returned from a trip to Melbourne. I can only assume that they left earlier in the year(!)

On a Saturday night in October 1913, she was noticed in the audience at Brewster Jones's recital. Sadly, we don't know what she was wearing that night...

Although it appears that she was noticed more in Adelaide for her dress sense, she was an artist and was exhibited in Adelaide before moving to London. She was a featured artist in the fourteenth annual Federal Art Exhibition, shown at the Institute, North Terrace (the old building on the corner of North Terrace and Kintore Avenue), in November 1911 - when she was eighteen. I don't know how many paintings of hers were exhibited and I can't find if any of them sold.

After fleeing the 'little backwater', and adopting the ever-so-slightly cooler name Stella, she was rarely mentioned in the Adelaide press. In 1927, she was one of four Australian artists featured at the autumn exhibition at the Paris Salon. When her autobiography, "Drawn from Life", was published in 1941, a favourable review appeared in the Chronicle, which mentioned Stella and Ford's daughter and their 'partnership', "which ended without any bitterness". In 1944, she was appointed an official war artist by the Australian War Memorial and this brought her back to the general Adelaide consciousness, despite living in London at the time.

Stella Bowen died on 30 October 1947 in London. A brief obituary (and photo) was published in The Advertiser on 26 November 1947. Despite not having lived in Adelaide since the beginning of the First World War, she was described as "S.A. War Artist". An earlier article from 1944 describes her as the second South Australian woman to be appointed as a war artist - the first being Nora Heysen, daughter of Hans Heysen (as in, tunnels). Two years after her death, her daughter (Julia, with Ford) visited Adelaide as 'Mrs. Roland Loewe' with her husband (that would be Mr. Roland Loewe) and their son, Julian. Mr. Loewe planned to settle in Australia, but I'm not sure if they ever did.


PS: I've had this post in draft for a couple of months, but I've been umming and ahhing about putting it here because there aren't any pictures. I don't like using images on the blog that I haven't taken myself, due to copyright, but this post is about an artist and it feels odd not including some art. So, HERE is a link to some online images of her art from an exhibition at the Australian War Memorial.

I have a single photo for you. When Stella was eighteen, she exhibited paintings (or just one painting - I'm not sure!) at the Federal Art Exhibition at 'the Institute'. Here's a window I think looks cool (and a random photo I happen to have on my computer!) - I doubt it's changed much from Stella's time.