Pilgrimage to Mecca

By Lady Evelyn Cobbold, William Facey, Miranda Taylor and Ahmad S. Turkistani

As the first British woman convert to Islam on record as making the pilgrimage to Mecca and visiting Medina, Lady Evelyn Cobbold (1867- 1963) cuts a unique figure in the annals of the Muslim Hajj. Anglo-Scottish aristocrat and landowner, Evelyn Murray had spent childhood winters in North Africa.

There she had been imbued with the Muslim way of life, becoming, as she puts it, a little Muslim at heart. While travelling widely as an adult in the Arab world, she also maintained a conventional place in society at home, marrying the wealthy John Cobbold in 1891 and devoting herself to her Suffolk and London houses and her Scottish estate, where she became a renowned deer-stalker. Deciding to perform the pilgrimage in 1933, at the age of 66, she stayed with the Philbys in Jeddah while awaiting permission to go to Mecca, and received visits from various dignitaries, notably the King's son the Amir Faysal (later King Faysal).

Pilgrimage to Mecca is as much an account of an interior journey of faith as a conventional travelogue. It takes the form of a day-by-day journal interspersed with digressions on the history and merits of Islam. She is the first English writer to give a first-hand description of the life of the women's quarters of the households in which she stayed in Medina, Mecca and Muna - an account remarkable for its sympathy and vividness. Her book was first published in 1934 but has never until now been reprinted. This new edition, with a substantial biographical introduction by William Facey and Miranda Taylor (a great-great-niece of Lady Evelyn), serves to rescue this unique and intriguing Anglo-Muslim from the obscurity that has since befallen her.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Medina Publishing
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 095588943X

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

From Mayfair to Mecca

The Life of Lady Evelyn Cobbold

LADY EVELYN COBBOLD’S life as a British Muslim, her contribution to the literature of the Muslim pilgrimage, and her place as a female traveller, have been overlooked by modern scholarship.¹ This is puzzling in the light of the recent revival of interest in women travellers and Islam, though perhaps understandable since most of her private papers and photographs have been lost. Her biography has been a challenge to piece together but, thanks to her great-grandsons, Angus Murray Sladen and Philip Hope-Cobbold, as well as to other family members and various friends and scholars, a clearer picture of this remarkable woman has begun to emerge. Among her surviving papers, the family photograph albums and her personal letters home to her grandson, Toby Sladen, at the time of her 1933 pilgrimage, have been accessible for the first time. Most notably, the letters that her host in Jeddah in 1933, the explorer Harry St John Philby (Hajji Abdullah Philby), wrote home to his mother, have been consulted. In these, made available by kind permission of the Philby family, the great Arabian explorer candidly conveys his impressions of her visit.²

From time to time during the course of her long life Evelyn (1867–1963) was much reported upon in the press, even into her old age. Her book, Pilgrimage to Mecca, leaving aside its frosty reception by the Foreign Office and the Royal Geographical Society, was enthusiastically reviewed in the press and journals. Her friendships with Muslims (for example with the leading British convert, Marmaduke Pickthall), her pilgrimage and other extensive travels in the Arab world, her knowledge of Arabic, and her gender and membership of the landed aristocracy, all combine to ensure her a unique place in Anglo-Arab and Anglo-Muslim relations.

Despite this, and in accord with its disdain for other contemporary Muslim converts such as Lord Headley, the British establishment of Evelyn’s day was inclined to belittle her significance. But she pursued her course regardless, lecturing at societies all over England and Scotland and accomplishing a remarkable collection of firsts. Not only was she the first British woman on record as having performed the pilgrimage to Mecca: she was also the first foreign pilgrim outside King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Saud’s court to make the pilgrimage by car, the first person to report the new pilgrim buses in 1933, and the first to record the trip by car from Mina to ‘Arafat. She enjoyed a reputation as a first-class angler, rifle shot and deerstalker, and was the first British woman to shoot a 14-point stag. She also claimed to be the first woman to travel by air to Africa, on a flying-boat in 1935.

The course of her life commands interest as much for its intriguing contrasts as for the incongruity of such firsts. She grew up an aristocrat of relatively slender means who acquired wealth through an unfulfilling marriage. Perfectly at home on the Scottish moors, among the comforts of British country-house life, in Claridge’s, or in her mews house in Mayfair, she was also a traveller who sought spiritual solace in Muslim North Africa, Syria and Arabia. And, despite her forbidding reputation, she could exercise considerable charm: Philby summed her up in 1933 as Gertrude Bell in figure and mannerisms, slim, active, rather snobby and full of quite entertaining chatter.³ The jostling currents of her upbringing combined with her nature to produce a strong-minded woman who could insist that she had been a Muslim since childhood while, as we shall see, living her religion very much on her own terms.

Early life, 1867–1887

Lady Evelyn Murray was born in Edinburgh on 17 July 1867, the eldest of the Earl and Countess of Dunmore’s six children.⁴ She took after both her parents, but her father, whom she idolized, was the greater influence. Charles Adolphus Murray (1841–1907), 7th Earl of Dunmore, was a larger-than-life Scottish explorer. After a career of astounding adventure, in 1901 he was one of the fourteen founding members, headed by Francis Younghusband, of the Central Asian Society (later the Royal Central Asian Society, and now the Royal Society for Asian Affairs). Her mother, born Lady Gertrude Coke (1847–1943), daughter of the 2nd Earl of Leicester, was given, as we shall see, to spiritual quests not unlike her daughter’s, and was similarly long-lived.

Married life had started far from smoothly for the Dunmores. When Evelyn was just one year old, Charles was forced to declare himself bankrupt and relinquish his Hebridean family seat, Amhuinnsuidhe Castle – meaning sitting on the river – on the Western Isle of Harris. He had been the instigator of his own misfortune when, three years earlier in 1865, he commissioned the architect David Bryce to build a castle for house parties in the Scottish baronial style on the estate, which was excellent for sea-trout and salmon fishing. Allegedly, when it was nearly finished, he sent for Gertrude, whom he had married on 5 April 1866, to view the property. However, she was unimpressed, being said to have exclaimed scornfully: But it’s no bigger than a hen house or a stable at my father’s house! Gertrude Coke had been brought up in the magnificence of Holkham Hall, the Earl of Leicester’s seat on the Norfolk coast, whose estate was renowned for the splendour of its progressive agricultural buildings. Her reaction stung Charles into setting about enlarging the castle with a further wing.

Their joint hubris proved their financial undoing as it quickly brought about Charles’ bankruptcy. He went into liquidation before the wing was complete and, in 1868, his bankers in London took over the unfinished castle and the North Harris estate in lieu of his debts. Though Charles and Gertrude Dunmore seem to have continued to visit Harris, of which Evelyn had childhood memories, they no longer owned their intended seasonal residence at Amhuinnsuidhe. Henceforth, though they held on to the family estate, Dunmore Park⁵ between Stirling and Falkirk, it is important to bear in mind their limited means in comparison with their social peers, as this was greatly to influence Evelyn’s choices later in life.

Unlike her younger siblings, to whom she was not particularly close, Evelyn was destined to inherit her father’s passion for the Scottish moors and mountains. Her love of Scotland would predispose her to homesickness during her itinerant childhood, while deer-stalking and salmon-fishing, for which she showed remarkable aptitude, were to become obsessions in later life.

The Dunmores were driven by their slender means to lead a peripatetic life, basing themselves for much of their time in North Africa, which would prove to exert as powerfully formative an influence on Evelyn as Scotland. They owned a villa in Cairo, where it was fashionable among some of the aristocracy to take winter holidays. This was a natural place for Dunmore to return to with his young family since a few years earlier, in 1862, it seems he had gone to Cairo on the occasion of the visit to England of the Viceroy of Egypt to whom, according to his own handwritten notes, he was especially attached though it is unclear in what capacity.⁶ The family developed a taste for these sojourns in North Africa, which afforded them an agreeable climate and varied hunting trips for Lord Dunmore. While there, Evelyn and her sisters were schooled at home by a governess and befriended by all manner of local people, many of them Algerian and of course Muslim. This absentee parenting, so typical of the Victorian aristocracy, would have been considered quite normal at the time. In Evelyn’s case it nurtured a natural empathy with the Arab world that would inspire her love of travel here. She felt deeply at home in a culture that to her contemporaries seemed exotic and alien. As she herself writes in Pilgrimage to Mecca:

As a child I spent the winter months in a Moorish villa on a hill outside Algiers, where my parents went in search of sunshine. There, I learnt to speak Arabic and my delight was to escape my governess and visit the Mosques with my Algerian friends, and unconsciously I was a little Moslem at heart … in time I forgot my Arab friends, my prayers in the Mosque and even the Arabic language.⁷

Another vignette, tucked away later in the book, shows how open she was as a young woman to a fascination with Islam:

I remember many years ago being in Cairo at the time of the departure of the Mahmal. The whole of the Citadel Square was lined with troops and the camel bearing the Holy Carpet was led up to the dais where stood the Khedive surrounded by the Ministers, Ulema and notables of Egypt.⁸

The Mahmal, an elaborately decorated but purely symbolic empty litter, accompanied the new kiswah, or embroidered covering for the Ka‘bah, that was woven in Egypt each year and taken amid much pomp and ceremony to Mecca to replace the old one: So when the pilgrims had completed the pilgrimage and discarded the Ihram for their festal clothes, they returned to Mecca to find the Kaaba in its beautiful new canopy. The old covering was cut up and sold to the pilgrims in special shops for the purpose close to the Haram.⁹ The whole ceremonial ritual evidently inspired her youthful imagination.

Evelyn and the family had to endure Dunmore’s long absences from home while he travelled widely. He had a military background, having served with the Scots Fusilier Guards before his marriage, and was later connected with the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders.¹⁰ After his marriage he gave full rein to his varied talents as explorer, landowner, passionate sporting hunter, painter, and later travel writer and even novelist – talents which Evelyn herself partly shared. The extent of his expeditions in an age before air transport seems prodigious until one recalls the comparable wanderlust of many of his contemporaries in the British Empire. It was characteristic of his generation to feel that no part of the world was closed to them. A note in his personal papers of all the countries in which he lived and travelled between 1858 and 1891 conveys the spectacular compass of his travels:

1858: Norway; Lapland; Spitzbergen; Arctic Ocean; Denmark; Sweden; Germany; Egypt; Syria.

1859: Greece; Turkey; Russia; Guinea; Caucasus.

1861–62: Cape Breton Island; Nova Scotia; Canada; United States; West Indies; Bahamas.¹¹

1863: Hudson Bay Territory; Prince Rupert’s Land.

1868–73: Canada; California; Wyoming.

1875: Canada; Colorado.

1877: Germany.

1879–82: Canada; North Africa.

1883: Canada; North Africa; Corfu.

1884: North Africa.

1885–91: Egypt.¹²

It is only natural to wonder how he managed to spend any time at all with his family. Presumably he returned home once every year or so – if only to conceive his children.

In 1892–93, when Evelyn was twenty-six years old and Dunmore in his early fifties, he embarked on the epic journey which, because he published it, brought him a modicum of fame.¹³ He went with another soldier, a Major Roche, and the two men penetrated areas of Afghanistan, Kashmir, Tibet, China, the Pamirs and Russian Central Asia, covering some 2,200 miles. Next he went to Constantinople, Ceylon, Malaya, China, Japan and Canada. Much of his time was spent mapping, painting, and hunting the local game. In his diary he notes, in an all too terse and matter-of-fact style, expeditions to hunt tiger, deer, elephant, moose, buffalo and birds of every description.

Evelyn would have grown into adulthood with her father’s tales of travel and marvelled at his pictures and trophies on each return home. She was very much her father’s daughter, to the exclusion of her sisters who shared neither his taste for adventure nor his interest in the East. According to Anne, Countess of Dunmore, Evelyn actually accompanied her father on some of his journeys: It was Evelyn who was chosen to travel with him when she was old enough. Evelyn was chosen above even her brother presumably because she was the oldest and keenest to go.¹⁴

Hard as they would have been for all the family, the absences of the intrepid father she so admired would have affected Evelyn most of all. He went from the Arctic to the Equator and traversed the eastern and western hemispheres. Dunmore’s numerous fine watercolours – self-published for his friends and family – show some of the most remote and untouched regions of the world during the 1890s: a flotilla of Chinese junks in Hong Kong harbour; the execution of some Namoa pirates at Kyloong; his first buffalo kill on the prairies in Saskatchewan; his Hudson Bay dog train; wrecks in the Caribbean Sea; a graveyard of Afghan soldiers killed by the Russians at Surmatash; Alichur Pamir; the roof of the world in western Tibet; a perilous path along Loongo Gorge in Ladakh; the Karakoram Pass in western Tibet at 18,800 ft; floating ice boulders and his ship off Spitzbergen Island.¹⁵

Photographs of Charles Dunmore show a tall, broad, bearded, handsome man with all the trappings of a seasoned explorer. In one, probably a studio photograph, he is shown sketching with pen and ink at a small table outside a tent against a backdrop of cedars of Lebanon. His long striped turban is worn with expert ease, his beard is grey and grizzled, his cotton shirt-coat most un-English, cut in the loose Middle Eastern style, and an ornate silver and wooden pipe dangles from the side of his mouth. In another picture, his garb is fit for the Arctic.¹⁶ His voluminous hooded coat is tied around with a leather belt holding a dagger in a scabbard, and he wears capacious fur-lined boots. Snow sprinkles the fur lining of his coat and beard alike and his large, piercing eyes – he was almost doe-eyed, like Evelyn – have an intelligent, amused expression. The caption, reading Lord Dunmore in the Kirghiz dress he always wore on the Pamirs, makes the point that he dressed as the natives did for his expeditions. As a journalist wrote in the North American Philadelphia: There is something druidical in the appearance of Dunmore. He is a Saxon in feature, great-bearded, and of heroic figure. Crowned with oak leaves and clad in flowing robes he would be an ideal figure of a druid priest.¹⁷ Dunmore denied ever having met its writer, but this description accurately conveys the flavour of his larger-than-life personality.

Life in fashionable Cairo for the Dunmore family was quite the opposite of his ordeals of exploration. It is conjured up by Charles himself in his own novel Ormisdale.¹⁸ The Pall Mall Review comments on

… the very thin disguises of names and people to be met with there every autumn; and frequenters of Cairo will come across in these pages many old friends and acquaintances, without any attempt at disguise at all, from the Khedive himself, as he appears on the Gesireh racecourse, to Luigi welcoming you on the steps of his hotel, and Adams supplying whiskies and sodas at the sporting club. There is not a word of maudlin or false sentiment in the very pretty love making, not a touch of scene-painting which is not vivid and bold, nor a single side-current in the drift of the story which does not make for what is open-air, straightforward, and genuinely British.

The impression left on the mind after laying down Ormisdale is that Lord Dunmore is a remarkably lucky man to lead such a pleasant life among such charming people and in such charming places, … and that everybody will be delighted to hear from him again when he has more of the same sort to tell us, whether he wraps it up in a book of personal anecdote or a novel.¹⁹

However for Evelyn’s mother, Gertrude, brought up in palatial Holkham Hall, this itinerant life with little money and security seems not to have been so fulfilling. Much less is known about Gertrude than her husband, as she left no written record of her life. But it was often said in the family that she would take to her bed while her husband Charles was away. Whether this was from depression or boredom is impossible to judge, but it is most significant that Gertrude, like her daughter Evelyn, was also prone to spiritual reflection. This apparently led her for a while towards Islam, among other faiths, though she never actually converted. Gertrude also took to travelling without her husband, just as Evelyn was increasingly to do as her marriage unravelled. Gertrude’s great-nephew writes in his personal memoirs about his own grandmother, Gertrude’s sister Winifred, Countess of Leitrim (1851–1940):

I have described Granny [Winifred Leitrim] as formidable and eccentric, and this was shown above all in her obstinate refusal to conform to the social conventions of her own class … and by her total dedication to her particular brand of Christianity which I think must have come from her Whitbread mother and which took the form of an absolutely uncompromising fundamentalism, excluding any other approach to the truth. Every word of the Bible was held to be inspired, and indeed at times she talked as though the scripture had been dictated by the Holy Spirit in English. …

She had been through many varieties of religious experience during her long life and had put herself under the influence of a series of prophets who each in turn directed her spiritual life, but – my father used to say – never succeeded in breaking her earthy Coke caution so as to lay their hands on her money.

At one period she had come near to Islam, and either then or in another troubled chapter of her search for the truth she had left my grandfather to go off for a year or more with Aunt Gerty Dunmore [Evelyn’s mother], to the North African desert. What the exact relationship was between the two sisters and the then reigning prophet has never been spelt out to me, but I know that London Society was surprised when Lord Dunmore and Lord Leitrim eventually took their wives back.²⁰

Hence Evelyn took after her mother in her desire for independence and in her quest for enlightenment, though in around 1900 Gertrude, like her husband Charles, settled upon Christian Science as her chosen denomination.²¹

On their visits to England the Dunmores would often stay at Holkham Hall. Lesley Blanch, in The Wilder Shores of Love, writes a life of Gertrude’s aunt, the highly unconventional Lady Ellenborough (born Jane Digby, 1807–81), who had also been brought up at Holkham, and whose career had cast its long shadow over the family honour.²² Lady Ellenborough (ironically, both she and Evelyn were nicknamed Lady E), also known as the Honourable Jane Digby el Mezrab, ended her colourful life in Damascus in 1881. She was a remarkable woman who knew nine languages, was a fine horsewoman, and was friends with Sir Richard and Isabel Burton in Syria, where she found happiness as the wife of a Bedouin shaikh twenty years her junior. But even Lady Jane was by no means the first of the family to travel in the Arab world, as Lesley Blanch points out. Her illustrious 17th-century forebear Sir Kenelm Digby had travelled there, and one of her own cousins came to grief there:

When Jane was twenty, her cousin Henry Anson, together with John Fox-Strangways, set off for Mecca. They planned to pass from tourism in the Holy Land, to Arab disguise, and so approach the Ka’abah. They do not seem to have been very well equipped for this desperate venture. How much Arabic they spoke is not known; but the first elementary precaution of removing their shoes in an Aleppo mosque was overlooked. They were discovered, and almost torn to pieces by an outraged mob. They languished in prison and awful tales reached London that they had been discovered in a harem, mutilated, poisoned, and so on: the embroideries were infinite. When at last they were released, Henry Anson was dying. He had caught the plague, and died a few days later, being buried in Aleppo, while his companion returned a pale wreck.²³

Jane Digby’s yearnings for the East were apparently neither allayed nor discouraged by her cousin’s ill luck. But, despite her marriage to an Arab shaikh, she never converted to Islam, in stark contrast to Evelyn. Evelyn too was attracted to Syria, but her quest in the Near East was to take a far more serious tone than her great-aunt’s, whose attachment to the Arabs was chiefly a romantic one. Most probably Evelyn disapproved of Jane Digby and of her other relatives’ disreputable dabblings in the East. Such disapproval was certainly shared by her family, who forbade any mention of Jane in public. Yet it is also possible that Evelyn harboured a secret admiration for her adventurous, rebellious and uncompromising great-aunt and sought to emulate her familiarity with the Muslim world. All such qualities Evelyn herself possessed, though she would manifest them as part of a very different moral and spiritual quest.

In line with her family’s social duties and expectations, Gertrude Dunmore became a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria.²⁴ Pamela Gibson-Watt, Evelyn’s surviving granddaughter, recalls that after the Queen’s death Gertrude wore only mourning black until the day she herself died in 1943. When Pamela was taken to London as a child by her grandmother, Evelyn, to visit Gertrude, she recalls: Every day Great-Grandmama would take out her horse and carriage and take any children or dogs for a ride around Hyde Park. She also loved to play cards, which she was very good at, and to do puzzles with us on rainy days, which Grandmama [Evelyn] also loved to do with us children as she got older.²⁵

Such grand and eccentric relatives must certainly have played their part in forming Evelyn’s character. Even her paternal grandmother, Lady Catherine Herbert, achieved eminence in her own right, demonstrating considerable entrepreneurial skills and energy when she pioneered the Harris Tweed industry in 1846. Widowed early in her married life, she had the Murray tartan copied into tweed by Harris weavers, and then set about exploiting her social connections to promote Harris Tweed among the hunting, shooting and fishing upper classes. The island tweed was even adopted by Queen Victoria’s circle, so giving rise to the image of the tweedy country gentleman. Thanks to Evelyn’s grandmother’s personal marketing skills, Harris Tweed became firmly established by the end of the 19th century, not only as an industry but as a fashionable product combining traditional craftsmanship with social cachet. Evelyn herself was to wear her family tweed devotedly all her life while stalking and fishing in Scotland.

Noble birth alone being no substitute for financial security, as soon as Evelyn reached marriageable age it became imperative for her to make an advantageous liaison. Enter a wealthy businessman, John Dupuis Cobbold, scion of the prosperous Suffolk brewing dynasty. Born in 1861, he was six years Evelyn’s senior, and had been educated at Eton and Cambridge. He met and fell in love with her while on a visit to Cairo. According to the family, he was entranced by Evelyn’s slim elegance and sharp intelligence. It was not long before he proposed and Evelyn accepted – presumably with a mixture of happiness and pragmatism. John Cobbold was a handsome, kindly man who would later play a prominent role in Suffolk life as mayor of Ipswich, High Sheriff and Deputy Lieutenant of the county. He was genial, widely popular and famously good at racket sports. John and Evelyn’s shared love of travel and field sports would have given them much in common and promised exciting times together.

On 23 April 1891, Evelyn and John were married by an archdeacon in a grand ceremony at All Saints Church in Cairo. The palms and flowers adorning the church were a gift from the Khedive – who however was unable to attend. Lord Dunmore walked his twenty-four-year-old daughter down the aisle at 2.15 p.m. She wore a dress of white satin trimmed like her veil with deep Brussels lace, and a necklace of pearls. Orange blossoms adorned her hair. Two of her sisters, Muriel and Grace, were among the bridesmaids, who were dressed in white muslin with white hats to match, set off by yellow sashes. The older girls bore bouquets of ostrich feathers, the youngest bouquets of white lilac and shepherds’ crooks. Lady Dunmore looked on arrayed in a fawn-coloured gown trimmed with gold. At the wedding reception, some hundred presents were on display from local friends, the highlight being a scarab necklace set with precious stones, another gift from the Khedive. A traditional shower of rice bombarded the newly-weds as they boarded the express for Ramleh (in Alexandria) and Europe for their honeymoon.

In Ipswich, wedding bells rang out from the family church of St Clement’s – a parish the Cobbold family had been identified with for more than a century – in anticipation of the couple’s arrival a week later. The English festivities were postponed until the Cobbolds’ homecoming.

On the surface all seemed well. However, Evelyn’s personal papers reveal that just two years earlier, in 1889, she had composed a poem in Cairo that is worth quoting in full:

I stood on the roof in the still of the night,

And looked my last on my Eastern home.

The stars above shed their radiant light,

Those stars would be with me where’er I roam.

And their weird radiance was as soothing balm.

That filled my soul with an infinite calm.

The city beneath me lay silent in sleep.

It was the hush that precedes the dawn.

And my soul yearned to the mighty void,

To yield its mysteries ere the morn

Awake, when the toil of day would begin,

With its burden of weary sorrow and sin.

And as I gazed into those silent depths,

The vague longings that filled my soul,

Took the form of a prayer I upward sped,

To Him, the One, The Essence of all.

And I felt His Presence within and around.

Divine, soul-enhancing His Love I Found.

And even flowed onward the mighty river

To yield its secrets unto the sea.

The mysteries of forgotten nations

The buried Past of History.

And the weird cadence of the Mueddin’s cry

Bid the faithful prepare for the day that was nigh.

And far in the East where desert and sky

Seemed to meet to welcome the morn.

Came slowly stealing across Abbassiyeh

The radiantly beautiful Dawn

Embracing all things in its tender light.

And I bade farewell to the silent night.²⁶

The poem vividly expresses Evelyn’s affinity with the Arab East and her yearning for religious experience. Perhaps surprisingly for a woman of her tender years, there is no sighing for romantic love or an imagined beau to satisfy her longings. On the contrary, she turns her heart to the muezzin’s call to prayer to the East where desert and sky seemed to meet, and this seems a clear foreshadowing of her future coming-out as a Muslim. This early longing for Islam – for such it seems to be – is already a yearning for something that she finds comforting and redolent of an innocent childhood now lost to her. She feels her adult life to be already burdened: When the toil of day would begin, with its burden of weary sorrow and sin. We meet not a naive young lady looking forward expectantly to marriage to bring happiness and solace, but a world-weary poetess. She has resigned herself to prayer to Him, the One, the Essence of all, and looks to her faith to provide what is missing.

Married life, 1891–1911

It seems therefore that Evelyn must have been unhappy to have to leave behind her Arab friends, Cairo society and the East. While her own family returned to her beloved Scotland, she was to take up residence as the new lady of the manor of Holywells, a house and 67-acre park, part of a larger estate near the bustling port of Ipswich. Suffolk’s idyllic woods and pastures, undulating countryside and quiet estuaries radiate a luminosity that has inspired artists over the centuries – indeed many of the early 19th-century painter John Constable’s views were set not far from the Cobbolds’ new home. But Suffolk was a very far cry from the Scottish Highlands and the Muslim North Africa that had shaped Evelyn thus far.

The aristocratic bride of respected local businessman and philanthropist J. D. Cobbold was perhaps more an object of curiosity to the local people, and to the many employees of the Cobbold family, than they were to her. John was of the seventh generation of Cobbolds to take over the family brewing business, and the family had for long been a large and influential one in Ipswich: the town’s Murray Road, which today still bears the family name of John’s new bride, testifies to its local influence. But, as her granddaughter Pamela comments: Of course, she thought Suffolk and Holywells – their married house – a great step down. She used to refer to it as her ‘little villa’.²⁷ Here we have an echo of her mother Lady Gertrude’s haughty dismissal of Amhuinnsuidhe Castle as a suitable matrimonial base, and a glimpse of the snobbish streak in Evelyn’s own nature, perhaps derived from her mother. She always regarded her family background as far superior to that of the Cobbolds: rather than simply being rich through hereditary ownership of great estates, they had grown wealthy through trade.

A local newspaper reported their homecoming at length under the proud headline Welcome Home to Mr J. D. and Lady [Evelyn] Cobbold.²⁸ The journalist describes the dull May weather, and the triumphal arch carefully erected over the entrance to Holywells by the head gardener: Surmounted by an earl’s coronet, in honour of the father of the bride (the Earl of Dunmore) it bore on one side the words, ‘God bless the union’, with the arms of the Dunmore and Cobbold families below … The pillars of foliage were picked out with rhododendrons, lilacs, and roses, with flags on either side.

If the newlyweds had hoped to slip home from honeymoon quietly – we can guess that Evelyn’s private nature would have preferred it – they were thwarted by the Ipswich townfolk’s determination to see the exotic new bride. News had leaked out of their train’s arrival at the station at 4.55 p.m. and so they were confronted by a phalanx of well-meaning hands to shake. As soon as he could, John Cobbold whisked his wife into the Stanhope phaeton, drawn by a couple of strawberry roans, and with Lady Cobbold at his side went off at a rattling pace for home, where their staff lined up to greet them.²⁹

Exactly a month after their wedding day in Cairo, the newlyweds hosted the expected local celebration in Holywells Park. This was of course reported in even greater detail:

Cairo, April 23rd. Holy-Wells, May 23rd. Exactly one month after their marriage in the land of the Pharaohs, Mr J. D. and Lady Evelyn Cobbold were at home to receive in their picturesque part of Ipswich a notable gathering of the people whose interests are identified with their own. The invitation in the present instance was confined to the employees of Messrs. Cobbold and Co., and they mustered with their families in force. About 400 of the men and wives sat down to the dinner, some 500 children filed in to the tea, and many personal friends of the bride and bridegroom joined the party. The scene was bright, animated, and in several respects unique.³⁰

Land at Holywells had been in the Cobbold family since 1689. The Cobbold brewery, which had started at Harwich in 1723, was moved in 1746 to the new Cliff Brewery on the river’s edge below Holywells. In 1812 the lordship of the manor of Holywells was also acquired by the Cobbolds. John Cobbold had recently added various extensions to the existing house – including a watchtower, stables,³¹ and countless chimney stacks. He had also improved the interior by fitting old wood panelling and intricate antique work taken from local houses that his brewery had acquired for inns around the town: the old Tankard Inns and the Half Moon Inn, as well as various other converted merchants’ houses. For example, the dark-beamed and lavishly panelled dining-room boasted a grand overmantel moved from Eldred’s House in Fore Street, and in the library another impressively carved overmantel taken from the Half Moon Inn surrounded the fireplace. These Cobbold inns had once been the private residences of wealthy merchants, who had moved northwards as Ipswich began to flourish as a port with a large seafaring population. John Cobbold’s art collection included various Gainsborough paintings which he hung on the dark oak of the panelling [which] has many a legend carved thereon; the grand overmantel is grouped with carved oak figures over the open grate, which is adorned with Damascus tiles.³²

Photographs taken inside Holywells show a curiously assorted interior, crammed with Eastern treasures, English heirlooms, and stuffed sporting prizes from all over the East and Scotland. In the drawing-room good furniture and antiques mingled with crystal chandeliers, heavily flocked wallpaper and exotic houseplants, silver-framed family photographs and porcelain displayed on the mantelpiece, in a busy, artfully arranged room. We can pay a visit to the house at this time by reading a fulsome article in The Gentlewoman of Saturday, 23 April 1892, just three months after the birth of John and Evelyn’s first daughter, Winifred. In one corner of the drawing-room an intricately carved wooden screen is hung with tribally embroidered fabric, and there are a "mashrabeer [Arabic, mashrabiyyah] screen inlaid with green jade, silver and mother-of-pearl and a lovely inlaid cabinet panelled with sepia drawings, quite unique but for the existence of its fellow, the property of the brother of the King of Denmark. The screen was delightful to the eye with its coloured sketches of Lady Evelyn’s favourite views of Egypt". The carpets were brightly coloured in Persian-style patterns. In the hallway stood a stuffed brown bear, on hind legs and of ferocious mien, holding a tray between his claws. Evelyn’s bedroom was spacious and done out in a striped wallpaper, with comfortable chairs and a chaise longue around the fireplace, a large potted palm, a dressing table by one of the floor-length windows, and a brass bedstead.³³

In the stables, Evelyn kept her Arabian mare Sultana – her pride and joy – which, as she tells The Gentlewoman’s reporter, had to be smuggled out of the Euphrates valley due to the jealousy of the Feringhi tribe who were unwilling to export their noble breed.³⁴ That John Cobbold shared Evelyn’s love of game shooting is clear from the numerous trophies in the house:

You will not have been five minutes in the house before you will have ample evidence that John Dupuis Cobbold is an ardent sportsman, that is to say, with the gun, for, as Lady Evelyn will presently tell you, the fox is an animal tabooed on the estate, the cult of the sacred bird, the pheasant, being especially revered. Every representative of the fur and feather, from home covers and from foreign jungles, seems to have fallen to his unerring aim. In no house, perhaps with the exception of Sir Samuel Baker’s, have I come across finer specimens of the skins of wild beasts and of birds, beautifully preserved by Rowland Ward, than at Holy-Wells.

Himalayan pheasants and aquatic birds in glass cases are prominent features of the outer hall, which is also strewn with birds’ skins. Three