After a year with her father and stepmother, Dorothy, who turned 15 in April 1914, was excited to be invited to spend more time in Europe with her aunts following her 1911-13 travels. But it was the summer of 1914, and rather than her planned trip to France, she was shipped back from England and sent to boarding schools, first St Mary’s in upstate New York, and then Foxcroft in Virginia. There are some vivid descriptions of London at the start of the first world war.
Before, in my mother’s time and Aunt Lily’s, I could have friends come to play or go to them just as much as I liked, but now all that was changed. I had to get permission before asking anyone, and the big attic at the top of the house which had always been our playroom, Lyman’s and mine, was now used for storing various things; there wasn’t much place to play in it. I was rather a tomboy at that stage and liked racing about and making a lot of noise; that was forbidden. So most of my days were spent reading; there were many books in the house and I sampled most of them. I went to Miss Hartridge’s school again; Lyman [Dorothy’s brother, six years older] by this time was at Yale. The other girls had already started Latin and had used an easy grammar to begin with; they were just starting a more advanced grammar and I had to begin with that. I found it very hard at first but Lyman, at home for Easter, helped me.
Altogether that year at home was not a success and my joy was unbounded when Papa called me into his study one morning and told me that he had had a letter from Aunt Lily asking if I might go over to her in London in May, 1914. He was rather hurt when I jumped for joy and asked if I was really so glad to leave him. But I pointed out cheerfully that he had my stepmother so he wouldn’t be lonely.
Dorothy’s aunt Lily Wickersham, known later as Zora and earlier as Ninnie, lived from 1870 to 1956; she was the ninth of her father’s ten children, the third of her mother’s four, three years younger than Dorothy’s mother Rebecca / Ruby. She never married. She will feature repeatedly in the memoirs, as she gave Dorothy an allowance until her marriage. She is buried in the same grave as her mother, her sister, her brother-in-law and her niece Dorothy in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey; I tracked it down in September 2022, on the day of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral.
Cousin Katie Belt and Tante, my great-aunt Mrs. McGrath, were with me on the boat. That was the first time that I had been told that my mother had died in childbirth; I had had no idea that a baby was expected, children were never told in those days, and when Aunt Lily heard that I had been told, even though I was by then 15, she was quite upset about it and said that Cousin Katie should never have said anything about it.
Katie was Catherine Dulaney Belt (1851-1923), Dorothy’s mother’s second cousin. She was born in Frederick, Maryland, but (like most of that branch of the Belts) lived most of her adult life in Philadelphia. She never married. She owned a stunning portrait of her own great-grandmother and namesake, Catherine Belt nee Dulaney (1764-1830) which s still owened by the Turner family in Maryland. It was she who broke the news to Dorothy in 1905 that her mother had died.
Tante was Elizabeth Gibson Bordley Belt (1842-1926), sister of Dorothy’s grandmother who had died in Italy in 1912. She married Robert Hunter McGrath (1837-1912) in 1864; so she had been widowed two years before this trip. Her granddaughter Peggy married David Rockefeller.
We all stayed at the Hadfields’ house in Carlton House Terrace. A few years before my uncle and aunt had gone on a trip round the world, as he hadn’t been well and the doctors advised travel and change of scene; during that time a friend, Marion Buist, had been charged with buying and furnishing a London house for them when they returned. It was a fine house, though not one of the enormous ones on the Mall side of the terrace; it had no garden, only a small paved court at the back where Uncle Bobby’s car waited all day in case he should suddenly want to use it. the chauffeur could sit in the servants’ quarters but must be there, ready to drive off at any moment.
Sir Robert Hadfield (1858-1940) was a British metallurgist based in Sheffield, who invented both manganese steel and silicon steel. He married Frances Belt “Bunnie” Wickersham (1862-1949), Dorothy’s aunt, in 1894; they had no children, but informally adopted Dorothy in her teens after her father remarried. She wrote at much greater length about them elsewhere, in a long piece which I will put online eventually.
Marion Carruthers Smythe (1875-1953) married Frederick Braid Buist né Sparks (1861-1946) in 1894, and was a close friend of the Hadfields and in due course of Dorothy’s. She will recur repeatedly in the memoirs.

it was wonderful to be with Aunt Lily again, but I was rather in awe of Bunnie. She cared a great deal about clothes and was not all impressed by the things I had brought. I had thought they were quite nice; most of them were made by a dressmaker who came to the house, but one or two things had been made in New York by a dressmaker to whom a friend of my aunts’ sometimes took me, and I was allowed to wear those while other clothes were being made for me. I remember chiefly two white serge coats and skirts which I wore most of the time; as soon as one was a bit grubby it went to be cleaned and I wore the other. Though I was considered too young, at fifteen, to stay up for a late dinner with the family, I was often allowed to lunch when there were guests – unless it was a very grand party. I never said much but I listened a good deal. In June some of the guests were worried over the shooting of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but my uncle was quite certain there would be no trouble. He was a steel maker, and among other things he made shells, and he said that it was quite impossible for any country to go to war, as the price of munitions would be too high for any country in the world.
So on the whole the people I knew didn’t worry, and we all had a pleasant time. I rode quite often in the Row [Rotten Row, a track along the southern side of Hyde Park which is still used as a route to ride horses], on a hired horse, with the master from the riding stales with me. There was no nonsense about a leading rein, and indeed I was perfectly capable of controlling my horse. Sometimes the Prince of Wales was riding there and that was very thrilling. One wasn’t allowed to gallop in the Row, just to trot or canter, and it was a bit monotonous, but still it was riding and I loved to ride.
Of course I poured out all my troubles to Aunt Lily, and though she said very little to me she was in actual fact quite distressed at my unhappiness with my stepmother – who had once opened a letter from my aunt to me and had read it before I did; I was furious at that and it never happened again. I wasn’t a very amiable young girl, as I look back, and though i obeyed my stepmother it was with a very bad grace.
So Aunt Lily had the idea of sending me to school in Paris, so that I could get back the French which I was beginning to lose, and wrote to Papa to ask for his consent.
Then suddenly war was upon us. I was staying with people called Reynolds at Bournemouth at the time; two or three times a day telegrams arrived saying what I was to do; someone would come for me, then it was put off, then it was to be the next day, and so on, but finally Aunt Lily did come for me in Bunnie’s Rolls-Royce and took me back to London. War was about to be declared and the banks were to close for a few days. We were all right, but some people living in hotels were having a hard time as their money ran out. One friend walked all the way from Claridges as she didn’t know if anyone was at Carlton House Terrace and she hadn’t enough money to pay for a taxi, though she was a very rich woman.
There is a reference in Dorothy’s 1927 diary to an Evelyn Reynolds who is a friend of the Hadfields, and comes to her London wedding celebration, but I have no other information about her.
Tante, my great-aunt, had gone to Belgium to stay with friends there; I think she was also going, or had actually gone, to Germany, but we weren’t sure where she was. When trouble was looming her son in America kept sending frantic cables to say she must go home at once, but as no one had the slightest idea how to reach her it wasn’t any use.
Then one morning, as Aunt Lily and I, who shared a room, were having our usual luxurious breakfast in bed, the door opened and in came poor little Tante, looking very frail and miserable; she burst into tears of relief when Lilly put her arms round her. Then I was told to get up and dress as quickly as possible, and Lily got Tante undressed and into my bed without even waiting to have the sheets changed, and sent for more breakfast. Tante, who was usually so energetic and capable, domineering, in fact, seemed just a helpless little old lady. Yet she was then only [blank in original; she was 72] which is not such a very great age. But her experience had been rather trying; the friends she was with had got her into a train for Antwerp – no, Ostend, I think – and there a ship was about to sail for England, the last ship that would leave, she was told, and that there was no more room on it. As she stood there, stunned and unable to think of what she should do next, a nun in charge of some English schoolgirls said to the man on the gate that two of her girls could double up and give a cabin to the old lady, and the man let her get on. But she had no idea if we were all still in London or what was happening and she couldn’t feel really safe till she had actually arrived.
War was declared on the 4th of August; the streets were full of marching soldiers; the night that war was declared the crowds were everywhere, in front of the Palace and in Trafalgar Square, where I heard them singing “Britannia Rules the Waves” as I lay in bed at Carlton House Terrace. There was a tremendous wave of national feeling, far more that in the second great war. Over-zealous ladies went about pinning white feathers on men in mufti without stopping to find out just why they weren’t in uniform; it happened sometimes to men who had tried again and again to join but who were always turned down because of some grave physical disability.
Then there was the spy scare; some of the forms it took were ludicrous. I heard of one case in Ireland where some people living in Co. Sligo had a German governess; they lived near lake, and the story got about that the governess was sending messages to the Germans enclosed in bottles which she threw into the lake; what possible good that would have done is hard to see – and it isn’t easy to imagine what useful spying she could have done in that remote part of Ireland.
Then friends of ours at Bournemouth told of a mysterious couple who used to come at weekends in their own car, bringing all their provisions with them, never gong to shops there, never, in fact, being seen outside the house on the cliffs where they stayed. Of course they must be spies, and no doubt were signalling to the Germans from the window looking towards the sea. But later it was found that all their secrecy was for a very different reason; she had a husband, and he had a wife, neither of whom had any idea of the love-nest in or near Bournemouth.
There were so many rumours going about. At the time when the German armies were pushing on irresistibly, the story spread like wildfire that Russian soldiers were arring in their thousands; they had been seen in Scotland with snow on their boots. Quite an achievement, that, in August and early September!
Lily had wanted me to go to school in Paris, to keep up my French, and had written to Papa to ask if she might do it, but the war put an end to that; Papa insisted that I should be sent home at once. We had to get passports, Lily and I; we were lucky as we knew the Ambassador, Mr. Page, and so there was no trouble of having to be identified, but some people who knew no one in the British Isles had a good deal of difficulty. We heard that once, when a crowd of people were waiting at the consulate to get their precious passports, an American asked one of the harassed officials if he could tell her whether the museums were open! She evidently didn’t know, or didn’t care, about the war.
Passports presumably had not been required when Lily and Dorothy travelled to London a few months earlier; they were introduced by the British government (and indeed most governments) when the war broke out.
We got off safely enough, but I remember nothing at all about the trip. In all probability Lily stayed in her cabin for most of the voyage, as she usually did. Her brother George used to say of her, and of Mildred, his wife, that they had only to look at the picture of a ship to feel seasick. Yet Lily never was really seasick, she just felt very uncomfortable all the time. In spite of that she was to come over twice during the war to see me, braving submarines and mines and all the other hidden dangers; I wasn’t half grateful enough for that.
Dorothy may not remember much about the trip, but the official record of her arrival in New York on the Baltic, on 14 September 1914, survives. Curiously, Lily is not listed as one of her fellow passengers, though there is a record of her travelling to New York on the S.S. New York in September 1916, two years later. This is a little odd, and suggests that Dorothy may have come back across the Atlantic on her own.
Dorothy’s uncle George Woodward Wickersham (1868-1936), the only child of her grandfather’s second marriage, served as Attorney-General of the United States in the Taft administration (1909-1913). The law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham and Taft still bears his name (and also the name of the President’s younger brother). His wife was born Mildred Wendell (1854-1944).
When war seemed imminent Bunnie had been investigating schools for me in the US; she heard of Foxcroft, and thought that would be most suitable, especially as the one thing I really liked was riding, and I’d get plenty of that. But Foxcroft was full up for that year, so I was put down for the following year and it was decided that I should go to St. Mary’s at Peekskill.
St Mary’s had been founded in 1872, in Peekskill north of New York City, by an Episcopalian order of nuns; its new building had just opened a couple of years before Dorothy got there. Designed by Gothic revival specialist Ralph Adam Cran (whose fiction was admired by no less than H.P. Lovecraft), I find it very reminiscent of the quadrangle of the Queen’s University of Belfast, built 70 years earlier. The school no longer operates and the buildings are now a holiday resort.
Foxcroft, in Middleburg, Virginia, had only opened in 1914, so Aunt Bunnie was right up with the latest educational trends. It is still going strong, and has an impressive roster of alumnæ.
I was desperately homesick there at first; little though I had enjoyed being in Plainfield at least I knew where I was there and at school everything was strange; I didn’t care for my first room-mate at all. Once when I was allowed to go to New York to meet Lily and lunch with her and Aunt Mildred, Uncle George’s wife, the latter asked me if I would rather be at school or at home, and I said at home, which must have been a surprise to Lily who had been getting very miserable letters from me all the time that I was there! But after a bit I made friends, some of whom I’ve still kept, and then somehow we started a sort of game where I was a princess, and another girl revived an old game where she was the Queen of Sheba, and the school divided itself into Hebites and Shebites, and we had a grand game of basket-ball in the gym, and my side won and I was chaired all round the gym afterwards – I had taken no part in the game, I was no use at all at basketball.
[1915]
My being a princess didn’t last beyond that one term, but it got me over that time very happily, and in the New Year I went to live in the French cottage, where the French and German teachers lived, taking two girls; I liked the other girl but she was very unhappy at school and was always threatening to run away. However, she never did, but perhaps she left at the end of the term, as I don’t remember her later and I myself moved up into the New School where I had a room to myself and saw more of the girls I liked best, Kitty Merrick from Philadelphia was the chief one. In fact in the summer I went to stay with her and she came to stay with me, and we have been friends ever since.
Kitty Merrick (1900-1988), from 1946 Countess Wielopolska, became a leading exponent of the Alexander Technique.


By the end of the school year I liked St. Mary’s so much that I hated the idea of leaving and I begged Aunt Lily to let me stay on. Of course I had then no conception of how difficult it was for the grown-ups to change such things, and that everything had been arranged over a year ago; if I ever thought about it – which I never did – I would have thought that they need only say to St. Mary’s “Dorothy will stay next year after all” and to Foxcroft “Dorothy won’t be coming.”
That was, I believe, the summer we went to Nantucket no, it wasn’t, that was later.
Several photos are labelled “Nantucket, June 1915”, which suggests that they did go there that year.


I expect I just had Kitty to stay and went to stay with her. I used to spend a lot of time in the hammock on the verandah with books and a supply of apples from our back yard. As I couldn’t have my own friends come in there wasn’t much else to do, I thought, though I did fairly often play chess out of books. My father had taught me the moves when I was very young, but I had no real idea of the game and it wasn’t at all amusing for him to play with me, so he showed me how to play from books, of which he had a large supply, and enjoyed that.
My stepmother didn’t altogether approve; she considered it unfeminine. I wonder how things would have been if I had been the sort of little girl she herself had been; never wanting to play rough games, happy to do needlework and to go with her to pay calls – both of which things I disliked intensely. It couldn’t have been much fun for her having me at home, and though she told all her friends how fond she was of me, and how little I responded, she did rather stick pins into me at every opportunity. The things I couldn’t stand were digs at my mother or at my aunts. Nothing very dreadful, just hints at their extravagance, and things like that – but that was enough to make me fire up – and she never did it in front of my father. She wasn’t a happy woman. For some reason she was obsessed by a fear of poverty and I caught the infection.
No one explained to me that Bunnie, whose husband was a very rich man, and who was childless, was paying for all my school expenses, including the clothes I wore there. A friend of Bunnie’s, Mrs.Tainter, whom I called Aunt Bercie, used to take me shopping in New York, and she seemed always anxious not to spend too much, so though she got me a few nice things, made by a good dressmaker, she was apt to get cheap underclothes which didn’t last. Then I had only $3 a month pocket-money and nearly all my school-mates had very generous allowances and that made it difficult for me to join in all the things that should have liked to do.
Bercie Tainter, born Susan Bayard Ryckman (1872-1954) was married to Frank Stone Tainter (1862-1942), who became the borough engineer of Far Hills, New Jersey. They had no children, so Bernie was probably glad to take young Dorothy shopping.

On one occasion my stepmother offered me five dollars if I would read the whole Bible through. That seemed a lot of money to me and I did read it, a certain quantity each day, till I finished it. Just about as I finished it I overheard Sally talking to a friend and sounding terribly worried about money. I felt that in that case I should not take so large a sum, so I told her that she mustn’t give it to me. She was very much touched by that and insisted on giving it to me all the same; she was really very much touched by my having offered to give up the money and told everyone about it. I think after that I didn’t worry so much about our being so very hard up.
The autumn came and the time I must go to Foxcroft. Bercie took me there, and all the way I was hoping that something would happen, an accident, anything, so that I need never arrive. But nothing did happen, and I duly arrived and very soon made friends and was happy enough; I loved the riding – it wasn’t an extra, all the girls could ride – and learned to ride astride, like most of the others, though I hunted side-saddle, when I had a chance to hunt. The meet was never near us on Saturday, our one free day, but once or twice when Miss Charlotte [Charlote Haxall Noland (1883-1969), the founder of Foxcroft] couldn’t ride she sent her maid to fetch one out of class to hunt her big horse Screwdriver, as she always hunted side-saddle herself. He wasn’t very fast but he knew a lot and all I had to do was to sit still and leave it to him; he knew the best places to jump and wouldn’t jump anywhere that he didn’t approve of. I got a few good days with him. The horse I really loved was Nosegay, a half-Arab with a ‘coon tail; I could do anything with him. My great friend there, Billie McKeever, once took a ticket in a raffle and arranged with Miss Charlotte that if she won – the prize was a horse called Ace of Spades – she would exchange Ace for Nosegay and give me the latter. She did win, and would have given me Nosegay but when I wrote home for permission to have him it was refused; indeed it wouldn’t have been easy, he would have had to be kept at a livery stable and it would have been expensive.
Marianne Goodhue “Billie” McKeever (1898-1934) married Edmund Steuart Davies in 1925; she was also one of the early lovers of the writer Mercedes da Acosta, who was probably the most visible lesbian in American culture in the early twentieth century.
Sometimes if a horse was being tiresome and unmanageable it would be turned over to me to get him gentle and well-behaved again, and I think I always succeeded; I was good with horses and could make them do what I wanted.
Altogether those were happy enough years; I certainly liked being at school better than being at home, and I always went back as early after the holidays as Miss Charlotte would allow. In the holidays we went to different places, and I always spent some of them with the Tainters at Far Hills, where I got some riding, as Frank Tainter had two hunter mares, one of which, named Azalea, was a wonderful jumper and a very pleasant animal; the other, Bo-Peep, was old but still go well.

Twice during that time Aunt Lily carne to the States to see me; I was so proud to have the other girls see her, she looked so beautiful always, and was so charming.
The high light of the Foxcroft year was the trip to Luray; we rode over the mountains, spending a night at a sort of boarding house, then on to Luray to visit the famous caverns there. Alas I did the trip only once; my last year was spoiled by Papa and his wife coming just at that time; though I had told them that I was going on the trip they paid no attention and I got a letter to say they were arriving the next day, too late for me to get them to change. It was a bitter disappointment, more so than anyone realised, though Miss Charlotte was sorry for me. But it couldn’t be helped, I had to stay, or thought I had to; Sally said that I should have gone.
It’s a sixty mile trip from Foxcroft to Luray Caverns, which seems to me a long time for the horses, going there and back.
In the summer of 1918 Aunt Lily came again.
The years in this account do not quite check out. Dorothy says that she spent one year at St Mary’s, and two at Foxcroft; and but also seems to say that she went to St Mary’s in 1914 and left Foxcroft in 1918, which is four years, not three.
She had been living in London, playing hostess for Uncle Bobby in Carlton House Terrace as Bunnie was with the hospital she had started at Wimereux. She was so much tied that she couldn’t do a great deal of war work, but she used to take blinded soldiers from St.Dunstan’s out for walks, and she did all she could for soldiers on leave.
That summer, as I remember, we were chiefly at the Tainters. I was very shy then; I was short and dumpy and felt very unattractive and awkward. Once some people were coming to dinner and arrived very early, before Bercie and Lily were dressed, and as I was ready it was suggested that I should go and talk to them in the drawing-room till the others came. I was horrified at the idea, and Lily told me afterwards that she could see that if she insisted I would burst into tears, but her heart sank as she wondered what on earth she was going to do with me when the time came for me to come out. And these were people whom I had already met; it seems too idiotic.
I had left Foxcroft in June, and so we stayed on at Far Hills into the autumn, and I had the best season I had ever had; Frank Tainter was with the Army, and I could not only hunt Azalea, but as many other men were serving I had many other mounts offered to me too, including the Master’s own hunters. And the summer before a friend of my brother’s who was with the army had asked me to exercise his old race-horse, Silvertwist, which was kept at a livery stable not far from where I lived. He was an enormous beast, but I always liked a big horse, being so small myself. Once he ran away with me, and someone who saw it rang up my father to say that he was not a fit horse for me to ride, but my father only answered that if Ned Stevenson could ride him he had no doubt that I could. Luckily he ran away on a soft dirt road and I was able to stop him, mainly by taking to him soothingly, before we got to the hard road – I was so afraid that he would come down there and break a leg. He wasn’t a particularly endearing animal, just a big stupid lump, but I was glad to have anything at all to ride.

Postscript
I contacted the archives department at Foxcroft to see if they had any records of Dorothy’s time there. To my surprise, they told me that she was the editor of the school magazine, the Tally-Ho, and sent me the masthead with her name on it. It’s interesting and perhaps a bit surprising that she doesn’t mention this herself.

I have been able to identify a few of the others in the editorial team.
- Assistant editor – Mary Custis Lee (1900-1994) – 3xgreat-daughter of Martha Washington, granddaughter of Robert E. Lee, daughter of Robert E. Lee Jr; her father’s first wife, Charlotte Haxall, was an aunt of Chalrlotte Haxall Noland, who founded and ran Foxcroft; Mary Custis Lee married William Hunter DeButts (1899-1987) in 1925, and had three children, two of whom are still alive as of 2025; she edited her aunt’s diaries, Growing Up in the 1850s: The Journal of Agnes Lee.
- Business manager – Mildred Bromwell (1900-1990) – daughter of US Army engineer Charles Summers Bromwell and Letitia Green Scott; married British admiral Sir Sidney Bailey (1882-1942) in 1922.
- Sport notes – Margaret Colgate (1899-1988), daughter of the toothpaste heir Sidney Morse Colgate and Caroline Bayard Dod, married Olympic athlete Eddie Eagan (1897-1967) in 1927.
- Joke editor – Susan Townsend Groome (1900-1994) daughter of Harry Connelly Groome and Ann Louise Wright; married Robert Toland III (1895-1954) in 1920 (divorced); married Samuel Wagner (1895-1939) in 1934; married Thomas Porter Harney (1893-1960) in 1941, so she outlived all three of her husbands. Her third husband was a Pennsylvania State Senator.
- Music and drama – Gertie Olmsted (1901-1973), was the daughter of Marvin Olmsted, a Republican Congressman from 1897 to 1913, married Spencer G Nauman (1885-1961) in 1928, and herself became a well-known fund-raiser for the Republican Party in later life.