Food
There are two kinds of socialists when it comes to food. The first are hedonists; the second are puritans. The first look forward to the day when the masses will be able to enjoy caviar along with the rich. The second live on turnips, in sympathy with the working poor.
Beatrice Webb (1858-1943), the illustrious co-founder of the New Statesman, was undoubtedly the second sort. Born the eighth daughter of the stupendously wealthy Richard Potter, she ate like a starving pauper. Photographs of her with her husband Sidney, her fellow Fabian and co-author, show a ghostly figure with large spiritual eyes. Her angular frame wastes under long floppy scarves and her fabulous bone structure holds scarcely enough flesh to hide her skull. Next to her, Sidney looks all flesh - a stout little apple-shaped gnome.
Beatrice's anorexia had its roots in her wealthy North Country childhood. Her mother Laurencina was a zeal- ous Victorian who brought up her ten children on a very strict diet. Plain nursery puddings and sugar-free "anti-scorbutic" gooseberry compotes were thought to instill self-denial in little ones. Though "Bee's" father would sometimes spoil his daughters with picnics of salmon and champagne, Laurencina's influence was stronger. She once gave Bee and her sister Maggie a terrifying lecture on thrift, after they had presumed to take a cold leg of mutton from the larder for a country jaunt.
All her life, Beatrice saw her "besetting sins" as "self-indulgence and self-complacency". Sensuality horrified her. She married stumpy Sidney, a man for whom she felt no desire, but was tormented by yearnings for the handsome, unattainable Joseph Chamberlain. In 1901, in a nervous state of eczema, indigestion and troubled sexual feelings, she turned to diet guru Dr Andrea Rabagliati, author of Air, Food and Exercise. How much should a "brainworker" eat, she asked him? Rabagliati's answer was simple. No more than one pound of food every 24 hours.
Never a big eater, Beatrice now began a ruthless fast. At 8am she took four ounces, including the only starch of the day. At 1.30 and at 7pm the regime allowed six ounces of green vegetables and meat, with hot water to drink. She weighed herself every Monday at Charing Cross station. After a few months she was quite emaciated, yet the eczema and indigestion were as bad as ever. Beatrice responded by cutting back still further. In 1903 she informed her sister Georgie, who had sent her some pheasants, that she was "a rigid anti-flesh-fish-egg-alcohol-coffee-and-sugar-eater".
For the next 40 years of her life, Beatrice kept up the war on flesh, determined that at last her intellect should triumph over her body. Under her reign, inevitably, the Statesman had no food column, though there were occasional articles on "Forcible Feed" or "The Still Hungry School Child".
Mrs Webb's abstemiousness was hard on those around her. Poor Sidney was bullied into going vegetarian, and dinner guests of the Webbs were far from well nourished. Beatrice intently scrutinised every mouthful consumed at her table, which rather killed the appetite. Nor was she sympathetic to those whose hungers were less tightly marshalled than her own.
In the 1930s, when a septuagenarian Beatrice was convinced that Stalin's Russia was a heavenly idyll, she sent her niece Kitty on an Intourist trip to Leningrad. Kitty (the wife of Malcolm Muggeridge) was appalled by the hunger she witnessed - the "dry black bread and cabbage-water" at the Worker's Restaurant. But when Kitty complained, her aunt gave her short shrift. "If you don't care for what is provided," she was told, "you can always order rice pudding. I do."
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