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seats, and tables with newspapers and magazines. During the week and at the weekend there would be brass band competitions, singers, and buskers of all sorts. After working hours it was always crowded, and when Florence dropped in she was generally asked to play the piano and lead the songs. The Winter Garden, later renamed the Dame Florence Bell Garden, was an immediate success, and continued to be so. On one of their wedding anniversaries, Hugh presented Florence with the title deeds of the building.
    Gertrude was both part of this, and not part of it. Observing from close quarters what it took to devote yourself to the improvement of conditions for your fellow men and women, the constant efforts of sympathy to be made and the stamina to go on year after year without acknowledgement, she came to understand that this kind of work was not for her. Florence owned this particular territory. Tacitly acknowledging her step-mother’s enormous achievements in the field, Gertrude began to look outward. Her own concerns would be international rather than local, her contributions on a world scale.
    Her attitudes honed by long discussions with her father, Gertrude already took a strong line on many of the issues of the day. She itched for debate, and hoped to find it at the many lunches and dinners in which she was now included. When she met up with the “normal” views of “normal” people, though, she was often angered by their incomprehension and their failure to take her point. She wrote home from London: “I have had enough of these dinners where people say ‘I think’ all the time.” She wanted to talk to people who knew the facts, or were prepared to discover them. It is easy to imagine her at the dinner table, fidgeting in her seat between two kindly adults, doing her best to derail the lumbering train of the conversation winding its way slowly to the usual conclusions. If Free Trade were the subject, the discussion might have gone something like this:
    NEIGHBOUR : “If we relax the import tariffs there will be terrible unemployment, because we can’t compete against cheap labour from abroad.”
    GERTRUDE : “Nonsense. How do you know?”
    NEIGHBOUR : “Because, my dear young friend, our factories would close.”
    GERTRUDE : “The factories might close, but there would not necessarily be widespread unemployment.”
    NEIGHBOUR : “And how do you reach that conclusion?”
    GERTRUDE : “Because if Britain can buy cotton more cheaply from India, the population will have more money to spend on other things made in Britain.”
    NEIGHBOUR : “And what about the poor crofter whose livelihood has vanished?”
    GERTRUDE : “He will come to Middlesbrough and learn to work pig iron at Clarence, and earn more money for a higher skill.”
    As Florence’s daughter no less than Hugh’s, Gertrude would frequently have become entangled in discussions about the working classes. She was a Liberal and a Gladstonian, and she pursued her views on contemporary political controversies with logical reasoning and sound historical perspective. By the time she went up to university, she had become something of a social hand grenade.
    In 1886, at Oxford, the undergraduates still drove dog-carts, Dr. Jowett still presided at Balliol, and the figure of Lewis Carroll could occasionally be spotted crossing the quadrangle of Christ Church. Although there were two colleges for women at the university, it nevertheless managed to remain a bastion of misogyny. At the age of eighteen, Gertrude was joining an almost exclusively male world under the guidance of Lady Margaret Hall’s first principal, Miss Elizabeth Wordsworth, grandniece of the poet. But even here, where it might have been expected that emancipation would flourish, she found that chaperones were required whenever the women entered men’s colleges or entertained men or mixed in male society.