The Disappearance of Grace Oakeshott

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August the 27th, 1907.

On the beach at Arzon in France, a woman goes for a swim. She leaves her clothes in a neat pile, petticoats and skirts pressed into careful folds.
It's a common sight.

This part of France is popular with tourists. They come to explore Celtic ruins and whitewashed fishing villages, to breathe sea air and watch blood-red sunsets from the Hotel de la Plage.

The swimming at Arzan is excellent. Bathers float on warm currents towards pine-fringed islets.

But there's danger here too.

Cold currents and treacherous riptides have been known to swallow unfortunate swimmers.

Dusk falls, the Atlantic Ocean a shifting palette of greens and blues.

The beach empties out.

The woman never returns for her clothes.

Coulsdon, just south of London, one week later.

Harold Oakeshott opens his newspaper and sees a death notice.

It tells of how his wife, Grace, died while swimming at Arzon in France. She was 35 years old, the newspaper adds, and had devoted her short life to improving working conditions for women.

She'd started a trade school for girls and was a celebrated activist.

What would you have seen if you'd been there as he opened the newspaper?

No sign of shock.

He reads the notice of his own wife's death calmly. His face is inscrutable.

He neatly refolds the newspaper and gazes out of the window for a while, as if contemplating new horizons.

The following year,

he remarries.

I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

At the moment that Grace Oakeshott's petticoats were being neatly stacked on the Arzon beach.

Grace Oakeshott herself had been married to Harold for over a decade.

But unlike some other women of her station, marriage had never been an inevitability for Grace.

She had been prepared for another path altogether. When Grace was born in London in 1872, A groundswell of change was reshaping Britain.

Railways were stitching the country together, and the telegraph was relaying information at lightning speed. Schools for girls began to multiply and the women's suffrage movement was growing.

It was an age that buzzed and crackled with possibility, electric in its promise.

Grace had two strokes of good luck. Not only was the tide of progress rising around her, but her parents, James and Elizabeth Cash, were ambitious strivers.

They were determined to give their children the best possible tools for self-advancement.

And that meant rigorous schooling, not just for their son Henry, but also for their three daughters, Kate, Jessie, and of course Grace.

Victorian women were typically raised to rely on a male breadwinner. Middle-class girls were supposed to marry and not compete with men for wages.

Providing one's daughters with a robust education and preparing them for a career, as Grace's family did, went against the grain.

But by the late 19th century, it had also revealed itself to be the practical choice.

When Grace was born, a recent census had shown that Britain was home to roughly half a million more women than men. Fathers such as James Cash realized that their girls might not be able to marry.

They needed to be able to support themselves.

With this in mind, James Cash invested in his daughter's future. He bought a share in a new company which set up schools for girls.

Grace drank deep of the knowledge on offer, a curriculum designed to match what was available to boys. Confident and determined, she was an all-rounder and honoured at prize-giving ceremonies.

She had serious eyes and distinctive auburn hair. Her peers affectionately nicknamed her Coppertop.

James and Elizabeth's commitment to their daughter's education wasn't just a safeguard against hardship. It also reflected their profound belief in the equal potential and worth of every human mind.

They were social reformers, but that faith faith in progress had to be balanced with another priority, maintaining their respectability.

This wasn't just about moral virtue, but a form of social currency. And so they strove to be paragons of decency, self-discipline and diligence.

Their goal wasn't to overthrow society, but to carefully improve it from within.

While her sisters went on to become teachers, Grace set her sights on college. In 1892, she enrolled at the University of Cambridge.

Despite improvements in education for girls, the idea of university for women was still controversial.

Abstract study, it was feared, would turn women into unmarriageable aberrations and trigger the downfall of the traditional family unit.

Women at Cambridge were subject to various strictures. They could take classes and sit examinations, but they could never earn an actual degree, merely a certificate.

Academically, Grace thrived at Cambridge, studying political economy and history.

She also formed lifelong connections. Her closest friend was a young woman called René Courtold.

Unlike Grace, René's family was immensely wealthy. But at university, their differences in background dissolved.

The two women bonded over their passions for activism and improving opportunities for poorer women.

Grace left Cambridge after one year, perhaps because her family could no longer afford it.

But the experience had already been transformative.

Back at home, she worked as an assistant teacher at her old school. And then, aged 24, she did something surprising.
She decided to get married.

On a mild day in December 1896, Grace Cash wed family friend Harold Oakeshott.

Why did Grace raised to be an independent woman, choose marriage? She was ambitious and hungry for her her own career as an activist. Wives, on the other hand, had limited freedom.

Coverture laws denied them independent legal status, so everything a wife owned or earned was controlled by her husband.

What's more, a new icon was sweeping the nation.

Often depicted on her bicycle, smoking a cigarette, the new woman appeared in both newspapers and fiction as a kind of shorthand for growing female independence.

Why, when you had a bicycle, would you need a husband?

Britain was poised on the brink of modernity, reconsidering the role of women in public life.

Unfortunately, Britain wasn't reconsidering that role fast enough for Grace.

Marriage was still a cornerstone of respectability, and for a morally upright reformer like her, that made it the rational choice.

Harold was 25 years old, and he came from Grace's world.

He was a committed socialist, prominent in his community. She likely and quite reasonably thought they would achieve more for their causes as a pair than alone.

Harold was also witty and idealistic, and he held a good position with a London tea specialist.

Crucially, he supported Grace's professional ambitions, believing wholeheartedly that a meaningful life was one guided by self-discovery, integrity and freedom. It must have seemed an excellent match.

But Harold Oakeshott had a secret.

After their wedding, Grace and Harold moved to the village of Coulsdon near London, where they lived in a comfortable cottage with a leafy garden. Grace returned to work almost immediately.

She joined the Women's Industrial Council, which aimed to improve women's working conditions through a campaign based on social investigation.

Grace set about conducting interviews, surveys, and close observations in factories, and collating figures on women's wages.

How could you propose change without a thorough understanding of the status quo?

Her reports were published in newspapers and journals.

Grace spent long days away from the cottage she shared with Harold, and it might have been a little while before she learned his secret.

Perhaps the truth came by slow degrees, a faint odour on his breath. Unsteady hands, practiced excuses.

At some point, though, the knowledge dawned. Her brilliant husband, so admired, so upstanding in public, was privately undone by drink.

Had Harold's alcoholism been known to his wider community, it would have been an immense source of shame. His job would have been threatened.
and his reputation destroyed.

Habitual drunkenness belied the self-control so central to Victorian morality.

But there was no scandal. Harold's disgrace was quietly contained.

No one beyond the Oak Shots' close family and friends knew the truth. For a time, at least, the couple found their way forward.

Grace and Harold never had any children. likely by choice, and Grace continued to throw herself into her work, leaving the house early to board the train for London.

They might have continued in this way forever, focused on their jobs and their causes, lives running on parallel tracks.

But something happened to turn their world upside down.

Something quite unforeseen.

Grace

fell in love.

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Grace and Harold would accompany her brother Henry Cash on summer cruises around Britain's south coast. Henry was an accomplished yachtsman.
In 1899, they were joined by Henry's friend.

a warm, friendly young man called Walter Reeve.

Walter had spent the first part of his life in Canada's Northwest Territories before his missionary parents had sent him back to London.

He planned to become a doctor and he thought about returning to the colonies one day.

The atmosphere on the trip was lively and jocular. The group swam in clear water, lunched at local inns and chatted excitedly.

The following summer, Henry, Walter, Grace and Harold set out on another cruise together. Walter had just completed his first year at Guy's Medical School in London and he was relaxed and cheerful.

Harold's drinking was obvious. He would disappear at times to knock back liquor and Grace and Walter, who were both teetotalers, sometimes found themselves alone.
She was by now 28. and he was 24.

Walter was scrupulously honest, curious about nature and keen to help others. They bonded, although he kept a respectful distance at first, could even be tongue-tied in Grace's presence.

She was a married woman. Intimacy between them should have been unthinkable.

And yet,

one evening, they stole a moment together, rowing on the harbor by the light of the moon.

It might have been Venice, wrote Walter.

The craft lay gently rocking, dark specks on a vast expanse of slowly moving silver water, and the slightest of mists hid where the harbour mouth became sea and sky.

Back at home, Walter and Grace continued to see each other, walking together on Ranmore Common in the rolling hills hills near London. Before long, they were in love.

Divorce wasn't an option for Grace. Not only was it ruinously expensive, but it was also difficult to obtain.
In the 1900s, the deck was stacked against women.

For a husband to obtain a divorce, he need only prove that his wife had committed adultery.

But for Grace to divorce Harold, she would have had to prove adultery plus a second cause, such as cruelty, desertion, incest, sodomy, or bestiality.

Above all, divorce signified moral failure. If Walter's relationship with a married woman had become common knowledge while he was at medical school, it would have harmed his prospects as a doctor.

For Grace, it would have meant a total public shaming. Grace and Harold's family, friends, and colleagues would also have been tainted by the scandal.

The causes they'd been fighting for overshadowed by disgrace.

And so Walter and Grace's relationship remained shrouded in secrecy.

He pursued his studies, she continued her work for the Women's Industrial Council, leading an inquiry into ways of improving education for women workers.

It was painstaking research, and she concluded that free technical training had to be made as accessible as possible.

Grace plowed her energy into establishing a trade school in London for girls, the first of its kind.

The school opened its doors to 11 students in October 1904. In January, another 11 joined.

They learned how to make waistcoats, and they also took physical exercise at a nearby gymnasium to counteract the effects of long hours spent stooping over their work.

The trade school was Grace's crowning achievement, and it flourished.

But at some point,

Harold discovered his wife's infidelity.

There's no record of how he responded to the news that Grace was in love with another man,

but we do know that a dark plan began to take shape.

In August 1907, Grace left the comfortable Coulsdon cottage and headed off on a vacation to the resort town of Arzon in France, famous for its beautiful beach and fresh sea air.

One day, She carefully folded her skirts and petticoats into a small pile on the beach and walked towards the water.

She never returned.

When news of Grace's drowning reached Britain, her colleagues at the Women's Industrial Council were heartbroken and wrote of their deep sense of irreparable loss.

Grace had amassed many friends and colleagues over her short life, people like René Courtold, with whom she had formed a close sisterhood at Cambridge University.

They too were grief-stricken, one of them lamenting that Grace had been cut off at the very height of her usefulness.

Meanwhile, Harold Oakeshott went into formal mourning. In the local paper, his political party offered its sympathies for the cruel blow he'd sustained.

The horror of his loss is not lessened by the fact that there there seems small chance of the body being recovered.

New Zealand, one year later,

nighttime.

Walter Reeves, now a qualified doctor, was racing to the Paraki Hotel just north of the frontier town of Gisborne. He had been summoned to help a colleague operate on a grievously injured young woman.

25-year-old Minnie Peterson had been attacked at her workplace, shot twice by the man who'd promised to marry her.

Dr. Reeve and his wife hadn't been living in Gisborne long.
They were still acclimatising to this rugged, isolated place with its upside-down seasons.

He'd set out for the hotel the previous afternoon, but rising tides had cut off his progress. All the while, Minnie Peterson was bleeding out.

He urged his horse on, hooves thundering on the dark road, cart lurching beneath him. Finally, at 3 a.m.,

he saw it. A Parakai Hotel looming up ahead through the night.
One bullet had broken Minnie's collarbone and a rib and embedded itself in her back. Dr.

Reeve and his colleague managed to remove that shot, but a second round had torn through the young woman's jaw and lodged in her skull just out of reach.

Minnie wasn't expected to survive. A Reverend was called.

At 11 a.m., the exhausted doctor returned home.

Minnie Peterson's life still hung in the balance, but there was nothing more he could do.

When the papers went to press on the incident, they described how her jilted ex-fiancée had previously been a man of good character.

They theorized that this violent change in behavior was the result of chagrin at the broken engagement, as though Minnie Peterson was somehow responsible for her own attack.

Eight days later, Dr. Walter Reeve and his colleague operated on Minnie Peterson again.

This time, they managed to remove the second bullet from her skull. And slowly, amazingly, Minnie began to improve.

Her attacker was arrested. Thanks to Dr.
Reeve, he was charged only with attempted murder.

It was a disturbing introduction to Gisborne. But Walter and his wife Joan, who was pregnant with twins, managed to settle in.

They were known as a benevolent and civic-minded couple. They must have been easily recognizable in the little frontier town.

He, the local doctor, she with her serious eyes and her distinctive auburn hair.

In August, Joan and Walter's twins were born, Anthony and Colin.

A few years later, they had a daughter. They chose a name that reminded them of an old friend, Renee.

Cautionary tales be back shortly.

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A century passed. In 2008, a researcher called Jocelyn Robson was looking through some old photographs from the 1900s.
Girls in loose dresses hanging from ropes in a gymnasium.

They were students at the London trade schools, which, Jocelyn learned, had been the inspiration of the Women's Industrial Council, and in particular, an activist called Grace Oakshot.

Jocelyn was moved to learn that Grace had died shortly after the trade schools opened their doors, aged just 35.

She couldn't get the sad story out of her mind.

That summer, she began googling and re-googling the name Grace Oakeshott.

And then one day there was a new result.

A review of a play called Grace,

written by a young woman living in New Zealand. The playwright, Sophy Dingamans, was the great granddaughter of a woman called Grace Oakeshott.

Her story had captivated Sophy since she was small. According to family lore, great grandmother Grace

had faked her own death in Europe and run away to New Zealand with the love of her life.

Jocelyn was stunned. Could this be the same Grace Oakeshott?

She got in touch with the playwright. Sophie's Grace hadn't just disappeared in Europe, but on a beach in 1907, a beach at Arzon in France.

Researcher Jocelyn trawled the archives and began to build a picture of what had happened on that summer's day all those years ago.

After leaving her clothes on the beach, Grace is believed to have swum out into the bay and around the headland. Perhaps her sailor brother Henry picked her up.
Perhaps unknown friends helped her.

Either way, she was reunited with Walter and they made made their way to Marseille, where they boarded a boat bound for Australia.

Walter's medical license was in his name, but Grace could become someone new.

Joan Leslie Reeve.

Dr. and Mrs.
Reeve gave their ages as 31 and 34 respectively. At Sydney, they boarded a second boat to cross the Tasman Sea, and now they reversed their age difference.
Dr. Reeve was 28, while Mrs.

Reeve was 25.

Was this a private joke? Or were they trying to confound anyone who might try to follow them and expose their secret?

In October, the couple landed in Wellington. It was not hard to see why New Zealand appealed to them.

It was a British dominion known for its striking landscapes, healthy climate and progressive outlook.

Old-age pensions had been rolled out in 1898 and the country was miles ahead of Britain when it came to gender equality. Women aged 21 and over had gained the right to vote in 1893.

It was the first place in the world where they'd won the franchise.

Above all, New Zealand was thousands and thousands of miles away from Europe and anyone who might be able to recognize the couple.

Walter soon accepted a post and Grace was welcomed into the Wellington community as Joan, the wife of the new doctor from England. In December 1907, a tea party was held in her honor.

As she admired the exquisite floral arrangements, savoured strawberries and cream, and made small talk in the summer sunshine. No one could possibly have guessed her secret.

Soon, Grace, now Joan, was pregnant with the twins.

Five months later, she and Walter relocated to an even more secluded and anonymous outpost, the port of Gisborne, where they remained for many years.

Joan had changed her name and become a mother. but she still held all the same interests and values.

The oldest Reeve child, Antony, grew to loathe the words meeting and committee because they were so great a feature of family life.

Joan joined the Local Women's Guild and the Library Committee and became secretary of New Zealand's Plunkett Society, which was widely credited with a reduction in infant deaths in the first part of the 20th century.

When war came in 1914, Joan turned her attention to the continent she'd left behind.

After the invasion of Belgium, she addressed a meeting of the Gisborne Women's Patriotic Committee with a rallying call.

Their country has been overrun by the enemy, their towns shattered, and thousands of their brave soldiers have been killed, she proclaimed.

Intense suffering will follow, and it is the duty of all to do what they can to alleviate that suffering.

The family home became a makeshift war depot, filled to the brim with donations of clothing, bedlinen, and bandages.

The war years also held some jeopardy for the Reeves.

Walter went to work at a military camp, and then to cover for a doctor who'd succumbed to the influenza now ravaging New Zealand.

He fell ill.

For two distressing weeks, he feverishly tossed and turned, his eyes glassy, glassy, his skin slick with sweat.

But eventually he pulled through.

Walter made it home two days before Christmas 1918.

That same year, Joan was recognised for her unflagging contributions to the war effort. She was awarded an MBE, a prestigious British honour.
Her community was fiercely proud of her.

It was an immense distinction, but one that came with risks too.

When newspaper reporters came to call, Joan took great care not to be photographed.

Britain had forfeited Grace Oakshot solely on the basis of her unhappy marriage.

But Britain's loss was New Zealand's gain. Joan Reeve was a war hero, and she laboured tirelessly to make the world around her a better, kinder place.

Into the bargain, New Zealand also gained Walter Reeve, a man defined by his compassion and courage, who'd once galloped through the night to save the life of a gravely wounded woman, even when the odds were stacked hopelessly against them.

The Reeves were by now living in the rural village village of Havelock North. After the war, it was time for a change of scenery.
They moved to a graceful wooden bungalow with a broad veranda,

a shady, peaceful perch to watch the golden hush of evening settle over the garden.

Joan and Walter called the house Ranmore,

in memory of the hills just outside London where they'd first fallen in love.

In the 1920s, Joan started to suffer numbness and blurred vision.

She grew tired and lost her balance too.

Eventually she received a heartbreaking diagnosis, multiple sclerosis.

Joan Reeve,

Grace Oakeshott, died in December 1929 with her husband at her side.

She was 57 and had suffered three painful years of illness.

None of us could wish her back, however much we miss her, said Walter.

They'd had 22 years together.

Marriage is an uncertain step. Couples can make the wrong choice and circumstances change.

But in Grace Oakshot's Britain, there was no room for a change of plan.

Rigid divorce laws and the weight of respectability trapped women in loveless unions, sometimes binding them to alcoholics and murderously violent men.

Grace was faced with a choice: remain married to Harold

or live out her days as a social pariah.

It was no choice at all.

In the end, her only route of escape was to erase her identity, to vanish and reinvent herself.

She found happiness in New Zealand, but she never saw her family and friends in Britain again.

Others, women without Grace's advantages or her daring, endured miserable and abusive marriages in silence.

Back in England, the Cash family never advertised their lost daughter and sister as a missing person.

They drew a careful mantle of silence over Grace's memory and never discussed her.

They were in on the secret all along.

On the other hand, there's no evidence to suggest that Grace's close close friend, René Courtauld, knew the truth.

All the more poignant then was Grace's act of naming her daughter after her, an invisible thread of connection to a friend who mourned her and a past she could never reclaim.

Harold Oakeshott remarried. and he and his new wife Dorothy had four children.

His incessant drinking was was a source of pain for the family. His daughter recalled that her father could be two totally different people at times.

Eventually, Harold lost his job, and the children were sent to live with friends and relatives.

Later, though, he managed to keep his drinking in check, and he became a playful and affectionate grandfather.

Harold remained a committed socialist.

He never spoke spoke of his feelings for Grace, but he had known all along what had happened to his wife. All his days, he treasured a letter from her.
She'd sent it just after the twins were born.

In it, she told him that she was very happy, and when she thought of him,

she felt a profound respect.

For Harold Harold Oakeshott, despite his drinking, had believed wholeheartedly that a meaningful life was one guided by self-discovery, integrity and freedom. And when he knew what Grace wanted,

he let her go.

How should we remember Grace Oakeshott?

A careful rebel? A courageous pioneer? A woman torn between the desire to follow her heart and the tug of her responsibilities to others.

She was all of these things.

But I'd like to remember her on that day in Arzon in 1907 when she stepped into the water and bravely swam towards the horizon.

This episode was based on Jocelyn Robson's research in her book, Radical Reformers and Respectable Rebels: How the Two Lives of Grace Oakeshott Defined an Era.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at TimHarford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fiennes, and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.

Ben Adaf Hafrey edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Genevieve Gaunt, Stella Harford, Masaya Monroe, Jamal Westman and Rufus Wright.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review.
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Coca-cola, para todos. Compra una Coca-Cola una tenda cerca lusted.
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