A small family archive of materials related to pioneering female explorer, writer and Royal Geographical Society member Violet Olivia Cressy-Marcks, née Rutley, later Fisher (1895-1970), largely collected by her brother Lieutenant Commander Reginald Vincent Rutley (1910-1962), and thence by descent.
Cressy-Marcks (as she was generally known, even after her second marriage) was from an wealthy British family, and caught the travel bug after leaving school early to drive lorries in Italy during the Great War. With support from her mother (to whom her first book is dedicated), by the time she was twenty she had made extensive self-funded expeditions from Alaska to Java, through Tibet and Kashmir and beyond. In 1922 she was elected as a member of the RGS. She would go on to travel “overland from Cairo to the cape in 1925, and Albania and the Balkans (1927-8), and spent the winter north of the Arctic circle travelling by sledge from [Sapmi] to Baluchistan (1928-9). Eventually credited with travelling in every country of the world, she was keen to have a scientific grounding to her travels, and was a fellow of the Royal Asiatic and Zoological Societies” (ODNB).
Present in this collection are a group of postcards sent to her eldest son William Cressy-Marcks (1922-1945) as she travelled through Eastern Europe and the Balkans, with descriptions of her travels and instructions to save them for an album. She also sent a fine group of photographs from her trip to Egypt, Syria and the Near East, including scenes from her archaeological work. The captions appear to be by her second husband, Francis Fisher, who was likely the photographer. One image, annotated in Cressy-Marcks’s hand, is addressed to her son and shows her meeting the Commandant of Alexandria. Lieutenant William Roy Cressy-Marcks would tragically die at age twenty-three whilst stationed in the Far East during WWII. Present in this collection is a printed card from Mr. Francis Fisher acknowledging condolences for William, and stating that his wife was still abroad. At the time, she was stationed in China working as a war correspondent.
Her Arctic journey in 1928-29 was a nine-month expedition from Finland to Baluchistan, travelling through the Sápmi region (then referred to as Lapland) by reindeer sleigh. The lecture programmes and press clipping attest to the intrepid nature of this adventure, with Cressy-Marcks travelling mostly alone, except for the assistance of local guides. She describes being chased by wolves at the Russian border, and indeed earned the nickname “The Lone Wolf” for her solitary predilections. By contrast, when she returned to British society, she was scrutinised in the press for everything from her hairstyle to her unusual choice of children’s names (her second and third sons were called Ocean and Forest). The lecture programmes include images of her both in explorer’s garb and evening wear, highlighting this duality.
Between 1929-1930 she made a significant survey of the north-west Amazon basin, which resulted in her first published book Up the Amazon and Over the Andes (1932). There are two specially bound copies of this book in the collection, including one inscribed to her brother. The typed letter dated 1932 mentions that she had “several special editions done for Christmas presents this year”, which would imply that this thick paper issue was likely only produced in a very limited number. There are also lecture programmes relating to this expedition, which again revel in the salacious, and racialised, tone in which her dangerous exploits were reported: “She was the only white person in tropical jungles, masked against poisonous insects and vampire bats, camping with primitive and savage Indians, and navigating in canoes, with enormous difficulty, the rivers infested with man-eating fish.”
She drove through Ethiopia in the 1930s, where she documented the frontline of the Italian invasion with cine camera. Whilst there she befriended Emperor Haile Selassie who later visited her at her home in Herefordshire. She drove Red Cross ambulances during the Second World War, and served as a war correspondent in the Far East, and later at the Nuremberg Trials.
The Christmas cards show scenes from her travels, including China, Ethiopia, Tibet, India, and the Fishers’s Herefordshire home Hazelwood. Aside from the odd note apologising for lateness, most of these cards are unsigned, perhaps owing to Cressy-Marcks’s prolonged absences throughout the year.
As well as writing, photography, cinematography and archaeology, Cressy-Marcks was a keen collector of artefacts. A brochure in the collection which was printed to accompany an exhibition in aid of the Conservative Bazaar, details her extensive holdings in surveying and meteorological instruments, Eastern furniture, embroidery and ethnographic objects.
In spite of her extensive travels, Cressy-Marcks only published two books. Her own copy with ownership inscription of the second of these, Journey into China (1940), is present in this collection. It details the period she spend in the late 1930s travelling “from Mandela to Peking (Beijing) over land and … from Turkey to Tibet by motor” (ibid). During this trip she interviewed Chairman Mao at the Communist headquarters.
A formidable but unassuming adventurer, Cressy-Marcks was able to gain fairly unprecedented access to politically sensitive locations. A stipulation in her will requested that a copy of her biography be delivered to the head of MI5 ‘for his appreciation’, and many have extrapolated from this that the Secret Service may have followed, if not funded, some of her more daring exploits.