The Arts In Berwick -- Other Narratives
Healthy Living and Decadent Arts

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By the time Mrs.Butler retired to spend her last years in Wooler, many believed liberalism had gone too far. Workers and women were demanding more rights, young people had lost their 'moral fibre', even the arts and literature seemed to be becoming decadent.

Eva Hope, in her "Grace Darling: Heroine of the Farne Islands - Her Life and its lessons" (c.1905), enjoins her female readers to follow Grace's example. She was "free, natural, and real" and "not the produce of ballrooms, where the air is poisoned by gases, and where women spend nights in scenes of excitement and gaiety" indulging in "the dissipations, the shams and frivolities, the dress and fashion, of modern society." Girls needed to get out more, to the rocky stormy coast.

Just the sort of frivolous woman Ms Hope had in mind was Balanche Ruth Brooke-Tatton-Grieve of Ord House. Her diary, preserved in the Berwick Record Office, is an empty headed trip though balls, parties and other social trivialities. Married in the 1890s, Balanche's high-fashion wedding dress still exists in the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. Unfortunately for Ms Hope's advocacy of the healthy life, the cover of her book is adorned with a particularly decadent entwinement of rank vegetation in the most sensual Art Nouveau style that Balanche would have loved.