Hilda Leyel – Herb Society Founder
Beginnings – Hilda’s early life as an actress and fundraiser
Hilda Leyel (1880-1957) founded The Society of Herbalists (now The Herb Society) in February 1927. Her life story demonstrates her immense practicality, a woman taking ownership out in the world, using the chances she had in life to do as much as possible in a fast-changing and turbulent time. Early on, she was surrounded by influences from her botanist uncle, F G Dawtrey Drewitt, and Edward Wharton, the headmaster of Uppington School where her father taught, fostering her interest in plants. She studied there too and set off to study medicine. So, the herbs took the back seat for some time!
The medicine study did not last long; anatomy class was cited as the reason. So, dramatically she joined a theatre company instead. In that world she met a high flying theatre manager, Carl Leyel; they married in 1900 and had two children. They led a vibrant life in the artistic circuits of London and were known for throwing flamboyant parties. This became their recipe for success with Hilda organising fantastical, extravagant fund-raising balls around prestigious London venues, with all the costumes and props available from Arabian Nights to a Circus! These attracted the highest echelons of society, including the prime minister. With these events, she began to push the boundaries of legal fundraising at the time, but the worthy causes were supported by very influential people. After the First World War she accomplished her two largest projects with her charitable Golden Ballot, raising funding for a Sanitorium for the British Legion and a small village for returning soldiers in Westfield, Lancashire. From this prolific work, she was established as a tour de force and credited with shaping the national lottery models of the future.
Herbal revival – Hilda returns to her love of herbs and becomes and author
The early twentieth century was a fertile time for herbs in the UK. Two herb books, both published in 1912, made an impact – Lady Rosalind Northcote’s The Book of Herbs, and Agnes Arber’s Herbals: their origin and evolution. In 1920, Heath and Heather was founded by the Ryder family, which went on to be a very successful herbal enterprise. Horticultural institutions were well established and the Herb Growers Guild, formed in 1918, had good societal links. Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, a British gardener, garden designer, and horticultural writer, was in that Guild, and through the 1920s she put out a book a year on herbs. Eleanour also began to write in magazines, having spent the war working at Maud Grieve’s Medicinal Plant Nursery and Training School. Another influential book was Profitable Herb Growing & Collecting, by Ada B. Teetgen (1919). In 1923 a bill to register herbalists officially was rejected. There was plenty to draw Hilda’s attention to the herbal world.
A fresh start in the post-war climate was necessary for Hilda. In 1922, she and Carl divorced and aged 42 she returned to her younger passions for plants and medicine. She published her first book in 1920, The Magic of Herbs – “searching through the literature of herbs, I could find no history of the use of herbs in medicine and pharmacy. Facts bearing on the subject are scattered through hundreds of books in different languages. This book is an attempt to bring together in one volume for the general reader the information I have collected.” The war had sparked new interest in herbs after the supplies of medicines had been hugely reduced. In the background, greener living and local, organic growing movements had been gaining more ground, literally, from quiet origins at the turn of the century, then amplified by the conflict.
Hilda embarked on a set of cookery books from 1925 onwards, capitalising on her former hostess reputation. The series was headed as the Lure of Cookery, again setting out to be enticing and intriguing – including recipes such as parsnip curd, celery jelly and pink custard. Seminal food writer Elizabeth David cited her as inspirational, so sensuous and fun in her writing, if a bit eclectic and not exactly precise! The recipes were her own but also included interesting historic discoveries from old receipt books – the reviewers were largely charmed.
She took a very different turn in 1926. In Lucullus: the Food of the Future – co-authored with Olga Hartley, they discussed how to feed the world post war – what we might eat and what we might become. They cited people living predominantly in cities with greater populations – which would require most of their food to be transported across the world. This was already a reality, as the UK entered the Great War with food security in an awful state; no wonder they were concerned with what could happen next. And although society balls may have appeared a frivolity, the causes they aided and the impact made by the funds, were wide reaching in supporting groups across the social strata. They put their money where their mouth was and set out to achieve real things – political and social awareness and conscience fully focussed.
Hilda starts Culpeper House and The Society of Herbalists
Hilda put her own money in to start the Society of Herbalists (The Herb Society) – set up as a co-ordinating organisation of healers, herb growers and sellers, parallel to the National Association of Medical Herbalists, to whom she aspired to be accepted. Like Grieve and Sinclair Rohde, among others – Hilda was not content with only an academic relationship with herbs – hands on action was called for. She launched her first Culpeper shops in London in March 1927. “The whole business was to be extremely English in character, so on all the wooden bins and spotless white jars were painted the old familiar names…of plants.” She set the public face of herbalism as a beautiful and sensorial experience, with a visitor quoted saying how visually alluring it was, with names on the jars he’d long forgotten, like old friends. The shops began by selling pure floral scents, a few tisanes, soaps and lotions – “restoring the art and craft of herbalism.”
Culpeper House published a catalogue with articles and testimonies from famous customers. More stores were added as they flourished into the 1930s, focusing on spa towns – Bath, Harrogate, Brighton and Southport, in addition to five around London. The stylish frontages were designed by up and coming art deco architect Basil Ionides, best known for the rebuild of the Savoy Theatre (1929). Ever entrepreneurial, she had amassed an impressive historic botanical and herbal library collection, which would become a feature of her flagship shop, for customers and students to freely access. The cost of running training schools for herbalists in this period was a long and troubled journey, so her support was timely. The model of such societies was to sign up an impressive list of advisors and supporters across arts and politics. Early advisors of Culpeper House and The Society of Herbalists included British Museum Egyptologist Sir Ernest Wallice Budge, Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry, a noted suffragist, gardener and founder of the Women’s Legion, garden writer and designer Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, poet and critic Edith Sitwell and barrister and Buddhist Society founder Christmas Humphreys, to name a few. The political challenges to herbs that were to come would need this collaboration.
Hilda edits Maud Grieve’s A Modern Herbal, expands Culpeper and continues to write
The book Hilda’s most associated with is as editor for Maud Grieve’s A Modern Herbal (1931). Grieve had come into Hilda’s radar in 1927, when she was handed her amazingly detailed pamphlets of herbal monographs. She had a team to help, but it all required meticulous work to collate. Hilda insisted that some American herbs be added to appeal to that market too. The forward she wrote then still resonates today: “Botany and medicine came down the ages hand in hand until the 17th century; then both arts became scientific, their ways parted, and no new herbals were compiled. The botanical books ignored the medical properties and the medical books contained no plant lore. Serious herbalists have long realised a new herbal is badly needed, which must include the traditional lore and properties for modern use – standardised extracts for example.” Articles in the shop pamphlets (and from other institutions who produced similar booklets) showed herbalists engaging the latest research on plants, as pharmacy companies plundered the larder for active plant compounds. The level of scientific engagement at this point in time was huge and it is interesting to note that it then took until the 2000s for this exercise to have to be repeated by Simon Mills and Kerry Bone, and contemporaries, creating a generation of degree level text books that collated the disparate disciplines again. Hilda felt that gardens would be more wonderful for knowing that the flowers were not only for pleasure but “for their compassionate use in our pain. Since 1926 I have done nothing else but research work in herbal medicine.” In her later books, she gains the confidence to write more directly on her cause.
In 1937 Culpeper House set up their own small factory in Gloucestershire to make their own products. This was expanded in the 40s into the Culpeper Biochemical Company by Hilda’s son, who had brought new equipment and techniques back from Europe to make juices and health foods from local produce around Evesham. In particular they catered for the RAF, providing medicines and drugs. This enterprise shows the recognition and demand for herbs from people, at the very same time that the team were having to fight so hard against parliament to retain the rights to use them! Between the wars Mrs. Grieve had written – “by learning to rely on our own (herbal) resources, thus we can face the future with safety and confidence.”
In 1937 Hilda wrote Herbal Delights – which was supposed to be the first of eight books on all aspects of herbs. Book one set out to lure people in, much like the enticing shops – it was “devoted to herbs for pleasure – refreshment and adornment – to please the palate and give cordial properties to wine cups, flavour and aroma to food and drink.” Cordial in this context means for the heart – and whilst it it is often used to mean soothing and compassionate virtues, in many earlier texts the term was used medically for heart conditions – like the clove pink – which contains antho-cyanins as in Hawthorn – to support the vascular system. She also added a few more cookery books at this time, including Picnics for Motorists (1936) – a new market and concept – and Diet and Common Sense (1936).
World War Two delayed book two, but the herbal medicine cause was now pressing. The Truth About Herbs (1943) was a confident fight back, exploring the consequences of the 1941 Pharmacy Acts, despite her and her colleagues’ success in amending it. This shows how thoroughly she knew her subject and was able to interact and fight back with precision, making use of her networking past. Her old society ties are evident in impressive lists of The Society of Herbalists advisors she signed up who were willing to be associated with the cause, when in parliament there was much to push against. Herbal shops were more popular than ever through this period. More on this history of herbal medicine in the UK can be found here.
In 1946 Compassionate Herbs focussed on wound healing, antiseptics, pain relief and fever – dedicated to “all those who have been wounded or whose health has been injured in this war”. The official mantra/slogan of the society at this time was, “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of nations.” This is an adaptation of the Bible verse, Revelation 22:2 – “The Tree of Life, on either side of the river, bears twelve kinds of fruit monthly, and its leaves heal the nations.”
From her love of renowned 17th century English herbalist, Nicholas Culpeper, in 1947 Hilda published a version of his English Physician, but applied as First Aid herbal, and included her own researched biography of the man.1948 brought Elixirs of Life – nutritious, bitter and tonic herbs – to prolong and sustain life. In 1949’s Heart’s Ease, focussed on the heart, ductless (endocrine – pituitary, thyroid & adrenal) glands and nerves. Green Medicine in 1952 focussed upon blood, throat, lungs, liver, reproductive, digestive and urinary systems and was dedicated to organic farming movement founder Sir Albert Howard. Published after Hilda’s death in 1957, her final book, Cinqefoil: Herbs to Quicken the Five Senses, referred to the five leafed plant potentilla, used in chivalric imagery for gaining control of your five senses. The last two books planned were to have been on culinary uses, and finally industrial – vegetable dyes, leather tanning, varnishing, preserving, inks, gums, insecticides, cloth, fibres and oils.
Hilda died in April of 1957. The Society of Herbalists carried on after her death, with her friends and fellow herbal enthusiasts such as Christmas Humphreys and Lady Margaret Meade-Fetherstonhaugh helming the Society into the future. The vibrancy of the herbal revival was certainly fuelled by such a determined and colourful woman; seemingly fearless to take on anything and fight for their rights and the life and world they wanted to protect and cultivate. Hilda was able to draw people together when it most mattered.
References
Debs Cook Hilda Leyel and her Books part 1– The Journal of the Herb Society (37.3) Sept 2012
Debs Cook Hilda Leyel and her Books part 2– The Journal of the Herb Society (37.4) Dec 2012
Debs Cook Hilda Leyel and her Books part 3– The Journal of the Herb Society (38.1) Mar 2013
Carroll, Alicia. (2019). New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond. University of Virginia Press.
de Carle, Claire. (2017).Maud Grieve. Self-published.
Griggs, Barbara.(1981). Green Pharmacy. Healing Arts Press.
Horwood, Catherine. (2010). Gardening Women: Their stories from 1600 to the present. Virago Press.
Hutton, Ronald. (1999). The Triumph of the Moon. Oxford University Press.
Sinclair Rohde, Eleanour. (1922). The Old English Herbals. Medici Press.
Wade, Francesca. (2020). Square Haunting. Faber & Faber.
Maud Grieve A Modern Herbal, Jonathon Cape 1931.
NFU Report The Many That Fed The Few, 2014
www.nfuonline.com/the-many-that-fed-the-few-ww1-report/
Jane Adams Revisiting Home Fronts, Gender, War and Conflict pt 2, 2014.
Lizzie B Stories of early business women who broke the mould, 2021
Peter Ayres Making British Botany – Medicinal Plants in Wartime – Hilda Leyel