Sunday Afternoons with Alice
You could be forgiven for thinking that the early Panacea members, being mostly Edwardian ladies, might spend their Sunday afternoons in a leisurely fashion, perhaps sitting in the Garden of Eden waiting for uniformed servants to bring them cucumber sandwiches. Quite apart from the religious aspects of their day, they would certainly have involved themselves in genteel pastimes such as needlework and embroidery and generally led a comfortable middle-class existence. Society Member Alice Jones stood out as an exception to this rule.
Not-shy Alice Jones in costume for a play in the Panacea Gardens
Before joining the Society, she was involved in various groups working for Women’s Suffrage, and heard about Joanna Southcott. After joining, she became Octavia’s ‘Apostle for Pisces’. Unlike the sometimes shy and retiring women in the Community, she had the confidence and ability to approach people in the street and give speeches about Southcott and the Society.
Like Mabel’s aunt, Fanny Waldron, Jones was a good speaker of German to the extent that Octavia considered her to be her “Foreign Secretary.” In public, she was no shrinking violet. In the early 1920s in particular, she had a regular spot at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, where she would brave the heckling and insults to preach about Southcott’s Box of Prophecies. She would attend church conferences to harangue clergy on the same subject. She would be the first to hand out leaflets in the streets of London or talk at open air meetings, even in the rain. She must have been a difficult person to argue with, and as the unofficial historian of the Society Rachel Fox put it: “difficult visitors who persist in teasing on doctrinal subjects are always handed on to her.” She could be quite a challenge for doubters, considered Octavia’s “attack-dog.”
Speakers Corner in modern times
Since 1871, Speakers Corner on a Sunday has been a place for eccentrics and idealists alike to tell everyone who wants to listen about their beliefs and theories. Officially anything can be said, as long as it is lawful. It has seen large crowds for Chartist and Suffragette meetings, anti-Iraq war protests, and speeches from Karl Marx and George Orwell. Anyone can turn up and talk. But speaker beware- The audience can be noisy, irreverent and cruel. Speakers must expect to be shouted at and insulted, even today.
Alice Jones “at the request of the Panacea Society,” found herself a regular speaker on Sundays between 2.30 to 5 or 5.30, talking without a break. In an Article in The Panacea magazine she described how she was one of the very few female speakers, grouped wide selection of speakers ranging from the Salvation Army, the Church Army, and Catholic and Muslim faiths who constantly argued with her. Generally, she seems to have been well respected by the regular listeners and have had a cordial relationship with them, despite them giving short shrift to her preaching about Southcott. She herself listened (and joined in the criticism of) other speakers on religious matters.
Public Speaking can be daunting, and even those like Jones who are accomplished can have internal doubts. As she put it: “few people would at all realise what it costs in the way of strength and nerves for a quiet ordinary woman to enter Hyde Park on a Sunday, set up, all alone her little stand, without one friendly spirit to support her, wishing all the time that no one could see her and that she could slink away and not speak after all.” It took her days to recover, knowing that she would have to do the same thing the following week, “but directly I began to speak, the fear vanished and I felt ready to face anything and anyone.”
In later years she seems to have been sidelined by Octavia, becoming a less important figure, possibly because of her closeness to Kate Firth who left the Society under a cloud, and the increasing influence of Emily Goodwin. Her official reason for stopping the Hyde Park visits was that what with the success of the Healing Mission, her open-air work was no longer necessary, but she said when she made her final visit she didn’t then know it would be her last. No doubt she was simply told to stop this activity, just as, presumably, she had been told to start it originally. And she did as she was told.
