When Dorothy Mills disappeared to Haiti to research a travel book, the British press led with the headline: EARL’S DAUGHTER GOES TO SEE BABIES EATEN IN BUSH. Mills was never out of the news in the interwar years. She wrote nine novels as well as six travel books, all of which sold briskly, and in 1928 she was the only woman in the starry line-up at London’s Explorer’s Week (Ernest Shackleton’s skipper, Frank Worsley, spoke alongside her).
She was born Dorothy Walpole, in 1889.Her father, Robert, became the fifth Earl of Orford when she was five. Her ancestors included Britain’s first prime minister, another Robert. The young Dolly travelled widely with her parents; her mother was one of the American heiresses who enriched the aristocracy in the 1890s. She grew up in London and the family seats in Norfolk, learnt to drive and fish, and came out, presented to Edward VII and Queen Alexandra amid ‘a swish of society dances’.
She was petite, with a long face, and she displayed ‘a fondness for unusual, theatrical dressing’. In 1916 she married a career soldier, Captain Arthur Mills; instead of sending out invitations, the couple put an announcement in the Times to say that everyone was welcome at their wedding. The earl did not approve of the groom – he didn’t have enough cash – and disinherited his eldest daughter.
This is the first book on Mills. Jane Dismore, whose previous volumes include Princess: The Early Life of Queen Elizabeth II, has found a gripping subject. She frames the story by presenting Mills as ‘the most popular female explorer… at a time when women were finding new freedoms’. Mills set off on her first proper expedition in 1922, to the cave-dwellers of Tunisia’s mountains. Subsequent trips included to Timbuktu (she was the first British woman to get there, according to the newspapers), other parts of west Africa, the Middle East and the Orinoco. She travelled ‘alone’, which usually meant with a guide, cook, servant and 11 pieces of personal luggage. Her husband was also a writer, and after he had resigned his commission the pair settled into a routine of departing on separate research trips and reconvening each year for a three-month holiday. He left her in the end.
Mills’s first novel was described as ‘a sprightly society skit’, which seems to convey the flavour of her oeuvre overall. In the follow-up romance, The Tent of Blue, The Spectator’s reviewer picked up ‘the vividness of the desert descriptions’. These, and the travel books, are all out of print, and from the excerpts quoted here one can perhaps see why. But there is a nice passage in Through Liberia about the forest at night, which ‘loomed all around us above and below like an alive thing… a being with great dark hands that might any moment drop down’. I also enjoyed an account of the red earth of Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) and the Fulani people. Mills contended there, among other hazards, with the muddy suck of the poto-poto mangrove swamp (‘One’s heart pounded till it seemed like to break one’s ribs’).
Dismore does not give her view of the books, but instead summarises plots and quotes reviews. I was left gasping for an informed opinion. Her style is on the flat side, and she goes in for speculation, the biographer’s bane: ‘Mills may have met…’ and so on. But the prose is at least clear, and the information adroitly marshalled. There is little primary material, but Dismore draws on Mills’s autobiography, A Different Drummer, published in 1931.
She travelled ‘alone’, which usually meant with a guide, cook, servant and 11 pieces of personal luggage
Besides writing books, Mills took on a colossal amount of journalism. Like all proper hacks, she could turn her hand to most things, which in her case included boxing matches. But she specialised in women and their evolving place in the world, and she liked to opine on the general uselessness of the Englishman, who behaved ‘like an exultant cockbird’. She appeared in many issues of Tatler (at least once on the cover). She was usually in a cloche hat, and on one occasion, photographed next to Churchill, she is quoted as saying: ‘The only perfect husbands are other people’s.’ In Aleppo, she made a single diary entry: ‘Why did I send my clothes to the wash? It will keep me here till Tuesday.’ She died in 1959, aged 70, in a Brighton hotel, bags packed for the next adventure.
The chiaroscuro of the life conjured here – lustrous balls and leechy bogs – would make a fine film. Mills was a pioneer, and those of us who have followed stand on her shoulders. It is hard not to like the figure who emerges from these entertaining pages. Mills wanted to go to the moon, and told the press: ‘I believe it could be done.’
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