Rathmell Wilson, Hinemoa, Tutanekai and Eve Balfour

Rathmell Wilson, Hinemoa, Tutanekai and Eve Balfour

In 1905 the Oxford Review critiqued a book called Hinemoa and Tutanekai. A Maori Legend. It was written by Rathmell Wilson, a 22 year old Oxford scholar who had never been to New Zealand. Wilson wrote in the introduction that it had first appeared in his school magazine, The Shirburnian.[1] The reviewer wrote, “The Maori legend which gives the title to the book is a very readable story of love and war, told in prose and verse, in a mystical, romantic style which has a certain charm.”[2]

George Grey’s Polynesian Mythology, which included this story, had been published in England in 1855, and Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha in the same year. I imagine Wilson had read both for his introductory trochaic verses are very reminiscent of the latter. The book was dedicated to the members of the Mermaid Club (for play reading) and Falcon Club but Hinemoa and Tutanekai was dedicated “To Esmé”. Other verses and prose were included; a second edition was published in 1907.

Hinemoa begins with verse but Hiawatha’s trochaic tetrameters with their rushing cadence here alternate with trimeters—retaining the insistent rhythm but with a less hurried effect.

Edward Archibald Rathmell Wilson 1883–1955, actor, playwright, author, traveller, art collector and dilettante was born on 1 October in Salisbury, Wiltshire, a cousin of the Delaware Rathmell Wilsons. He would become a significant professional colleague for the New Zealand born movie star Eve Balfour.

In 1896 Wilson entered Sherborne, a full boarding school for boys near Sherborne Abbey in Dorset. In his final year he wrote Hinemoa. He matriculated in 1903 and was admitted to St John’s College at Oxford.[3]

In April 1905 Wilson appeared in a one act play Robespierre at the Victoria Hall in Weston-super-Mare.[4] It was the beginning of a long career in the performing arts. In 1908 he was in Peg Woffington with Laurence Irvings company, then Clive Currie’s company, then Patrick Kirwan’s Pastoral Plays.

In 1909 the Revival Company presented four one act plays at the Rehearsal Theatre, the last Fortune’s Fool by Rathmell Wilson. The Era thought it unoriginal,

The author seems to possess some notion of poetic expression, but his phrases are as old as the hills, and the sentiments in which his characters indulge come as familiarly to one’s mind as the words of “Home, sweet home.”[5]

Later in 1910 he produced and appeared in The Hour-Glass in Oxford St,[6] then played in Ibsen’s Rosmersholm—

Mr. Rathmell Wilson conveyed the gentle melancholy of the unsuspicious Roemer, but also conveyed a depressing sensation of monotony, saying each succeeding sentence in the same expressionless cadence.[7]

He toured with Walter Pearce’s Pastoral Players and appeared at a Shakespeare presentation at the Little Theatre—when he was referred to as an “old Bensonian”[8] suggesting he had at one time been with the FR Benson company. At the end of 1910 he was with the Stage Society in John Masefield’s Pompey the Great[9]and in early 1911 in the Ibsen club’s The Wild Duck.[10]

He founded the Drama Society and in 1911 corresponded with fellow Dorset native Thomas Hardy about staging Hardy’s play The Three Wayfarers.[11] Hardy suggested a fee of a guinea for each performance. In early 1912,

The Drama Society, of which… Mr. Rathmell Wilson is president, will, on Monday afternoon, March 4, at Clavier Hall, Hanover-Square, present…. “The Death of Tintagiles” by Jocelyn Godefroi, in which Miss Edyth Olive will appear.[12]

Also in the cast were Eve Balfour and Rathmell Wilson himself.[13] A month later they were both at the Boudoir Theatre in Orestes, Rathmell Wilson as Orestes, Eve Balfour as Electra.[14] Then The Snake Woman (Wilson as Dick Charteris, Eve as Zillah).[15] In May Eve appeared in In a Balcony at the Poets’ Club dinner at the Monico restaurant and Wilson recited from Browning.[16]

In October 1912 the Drama Society presented Wilson’s The Experimentalists at Clavier Hall, with Miss Eve Balfour-Hulston in the cast.[17] They were both in the cast of Hedda Gabler[18] and, in early 1913, Catherine the Great.[19]

In May 1913, at the Cosmopolis Theatre, the Drama Society presented Mr. Rathmell Wilson’s English translation, in blank verse, of François Coppée’s fantasy La Passant. He called it The Passer-by and it was followed by,

Miss Eve Balfour Hulston, who, attired in a striking costume of Eastern pattern, said with fine emphasis two short poems by Ezra Pound— “The Marriage of Cana in Galilee” and “The Touch of Akr Caar” —and a passage from “False Gods” (Brieux’s “La Foi”).[20]

She had recited the two Ezra Pound poems in “a suggestive, conventionalised method of delivery” at the Cave of the Golden Calf six months earlier. The Referee critic was clearly impressed,

Miss Eve Balfour Hulston gave some mystical recitations, and she gave them in a tight-fitting, low-necked, shimmering, fish-scaly, mystic, wonderful frock. The recitations were the reverse of cheering, but Miss Huston spoke them artistically and looked lovely.[21]

In January 1914 the Drama Society presented Eve Balfour in Poudre d’Amour and Rathmell Wilson recited Kipling’s “Mandalay”.[22] In May both recited at the Comtesse de Brémont’s Concert Revue at the Boudoir Theatre in Kensington.[23]

And then in November 1915 The Era announced, “Mr. Rathmell Wilson’s novel, “When Woman Loves,” is being dramatized for the kinema. Miss Eve Balfour will play the leading part.”[24]

The book had been briefly reviewed shortly after publication,

The heroine who sits smoking a cigarette in the first sentence, and who, upon rising from her chair a page or two later, helps herself to whisky-and-soda, is not the sort of woman one would want to marry, but she is just the woman to set the men in a Bohemian novel sighing. If you don’t believe it, read When Woman Loves!

Mr. Rathmell Wilson continues to improve. Where he was once all finicking prettiness, he has now settled down into romantic practicality. He must beware, however, of becoming too practical. He has more imagination of the creative sort than you would guess from his latest novel.[25]

The film was eagerly anticipated—by, for instance, the Shipley Times and Express reporter before it opened at the Pavilion de Luxe in Shipley, Yorkshire on 20 November 1916,

For Monday next a special drama has been secured in the shape of Eve Balfour’s production, entitled “Love,” a photo-play after the famous novel “When a Woman Loves,” by Rathmell Wilson. In this instance the author has personally supervised the production of the picture, and we cannot do better than quote the author’s remarks with reference to it. He says:— “My novel is a study of many kinds of love in many kinds of people. Especially it is a study of the fierce and reasoning love of an artist woman for a very ‘human’ artist man. In many ways the story of my novel has been altered by the Balfour Film Company in order to make it a film play. I can honestly say that each one of these alterations seems to me a success. While the film was being made I was almost forcibly kept out of the studio and I confess now that it was not without a certain fear that I went to see the completed picture for the first time. But a delightful experience awaited me. So often the unexpected are the most charming things in life. I saw many of my dreams come true upon the screen and by her wonderful art Miss Eve Balfour showed me my dream-heroine alive and kissing! Just as I had imagined her to myself, perhaps a little more beautiful than even I had ever dared to hope she might be. Has any author ever had a more delightful experience than that. I doubt it very much.” This remarkable film which is showing in four reels comes under three distinct headings. Firstly, the birth of love; secondly, the wane of love; and thirdly the re-birth of love. High art and the beautiful understanding of pictorial representation pervades every action of Eve Balfour. And, whereas this film will principally appeal to the female element of picture theatre audiences, we have no doubt that the domestic associations and the general atmosphere will make a great impression upon everyone…. we have no doubt that our readers will at once realise that they are being treated to exceptional masterpieces.[26]

His “dream-heroine”? “more beautiful than I had ever dared to hope”? was he in love with Eve?

The second production by the Eve Balfour Company in 1916 was said to have been Eve’s Daughter, based on Rathmell Wilson’s novel When Love Dies. I can find no contemporary reference to either the film or the novel. Wilson himself was busy on the stage.

He was a frequent contributor of short prose or verse pieces with names such as “Womania”, Professionazia”, “The Actor”, “Ridiculosities”, “On Backing Horses” to the Sporting Times. In 1936 he was made a Freeman of the City of London and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Plumbers.[27]

Like Eve Balfour, Wilson was interested in mysticism and the occult, became a Rosicrucian, “Sine Metu”, initiated in 1913; a Theosophist; a regular contributor to the Occult Review and the Golden Dawn Magazine of The Brothers of The Path. In one of these articles he described a 1939 visit to “El-Sendero”, the headquarters of The Brothers of the Path.[28] There he met Founder-Principal Anthony Greville-Gascoigne and some of the leading lights of the organisation. He wrote the preface to Greville-Gascoigne’s The Way of an Initiate (1940).[29]

He died in Brighton in 1955. The literary critic Patrick Braybrooke praised Wilson’s achievements rather faintly for The Old Shirburnian.

Mr. Patrick Braybrooke, F.R.S.L. writes:— Rathmell Wilson was one of those personalities who was versatile without being brilliant. Aristocratic by birth he could mix easily enough in London bohemian circles.

His literary output was varied and entirely original. He travelled very widely and gave us his light hearted impressions in such books as “The Wandering gentile” and “All Sorts”. He could deal easily with incidents in various countries, and he could record them wittily and with whimsical charm.

His verse was certainly jingle, and poetry was not his best medium of expression. Prose suited him better: his style being easy and pleasant.

For quite a while after his Oxford days he played with the Benson Company and he toured with various companies in a number of plays. Acting did not find him specially gifted. His acting was stiff and too unemotional.

Perhaps more than anything else he was a personality and to find him at his happiest mood was to sit next to him at one of the famous “Monday nights” at the Author’s Club. He was a fascinating talker and a fairly patient listener but sometimes was a little reserved.

He did not care for lecturing on any subject; but he was a good enough reader of a selected play. He read a play aloud, carefully and with assurance.

I knew him for over thirty years and he was always cultured, eclectic in taste, and interested in impersonal and international subjects.

After he finally left London he went to live in Brighton and I saw him there several times. But somehow London always seemed “empty” to me when he had left.

In one of his books of travel his dedication greeted his friends on “both sides of life’s frontiers”. He had a mind at once mundane and groping. In his books, in his verse, in his long love of France, he showed his essential personality.

He was fundamentally the literary dilettante, and had he been forced to write professionally, his published work might have received greater recognition. Modern life after the first war, was not quite to his liking. His best work was in his earlier days; his “Happy Days before 1914”.[30]

Rathmell Wilson’s main publications are listed online at the New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors: Author names starting with Wif –Win.[31]

Rathmell Wilson, from a portrait by Florence Vandamm.

American Register 28 April 1912.

[1] It appeared in The Shiburnian in July 1903 (https://oldshirburnian.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/1903-July.pdf) so he wrote it when he was 20.

[2] Oxford Review 18 March 1905.

[3] Oxford Review 21 January 1903.

[4] The Stage 27 April 1905.

[5] The Era 6 March 1909.

[6] The Stage 3 February 1910.

[7] The Referee 29 May 1910.

[8] Morning Post 17 October 1910.

[9] Morning Post 28 November 1910.

[10] The Referee 8 January 1911.

[11] Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (eds) 1984. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Vol. 4: 1909–1913. Oxford University Press. Pp180–181.

[12] The Era 10 February 1912.

[13] The Era 2 March 1912.

[14] The Era 6 April 1912.

[15] The Stage 25 April 1912.

[16] The Stage 23 May 1912.

[17] The Era 26 October 1912.

[18] The Stage 31 October 1912.

[19] Pall Mall Gazette 23 January 1913.

[20] Morning Post 29 May 1913.

[21] The Referee 1 June 1913.

[22] Pall Mall Gazette 23 January 1914.

[23] Kensington News and West London Times 29 May 1914.