Ecologist and artist Marietta Pallis spent much of her life in the Norfolk Broads, creating art and researching the environment around her.
Decades after her death, the pieces of her remarkable legacy are being unearthed.
In the early 1990s, Dominic Vlasto moved to Norfolk and began researching the life and work of his great-aunt, Marietta Pallis. Little was known about her, and seemingly, that’s how she liked it.
In Vlasto’s words: “She was an enigma even during her own lifetime!”
Vlasto’s quest to fill in the blanks of his family legacy led him to British botanist Dr Joyce Lambert, who penned a heart-warming, 6-page obituary after Pallis’ death in 1963.
To date, this obituary, available only at the Norfolk Record Office, offers one of the most in-depth biographies of Pallis, who was born in Bombay to Greek parents in 1882.
The eldest of 5 siblings, Pallis grew up in a strict and regimented household. Especially as a young woman, she had her freedoms restricted from a young age, yet she grew up finding ways to break these rules slyly.
The best-known story of her rebellion is that she secretly saved up to buy a bike and teach herself to ride despite being forbidden by her father. When he discovered the bike stashed away, he smashed it up with his bare hands.
Pallis was intelligent, self-assured and determined to study, so she attended the University of Liverpool in the early 1900s to study art.
According to Lambert, Pallis quickly decided that “art without science was an impossibility,” so she began studying botany and, later, ecology instead, taking up residence in the famed all-women’s Newnham College in Cambridge.
Some of her earliest research, published in ‘The Geographical Journal’ in 1911, was an in-depth study of the salinity in the Norfolk Broads. Following this, she guided ecologists around the national park’s rivers and lakes and contributed to A G Tansley’s 1911 volume of ‘Types of British Vegetation’.
Higher education had only recently opened up to women in England. Yet, a handful of so-called ‘New Women’ were rising the ranks of their respective fields, albeit with disproportionate challenges and pushbacks.
Pallis’ father offered financial support, but it’s clear that their relationship was strained. 5 months before a research trip to the River Danube in Romania in 1912, she sent her father a book entitled ‘Criminal Psychology’, complete with a scathing inscription: “From a gifted daughter to an insignificant father.”
Pallis was a ground-breaking researcher, but accounts of her work focus heavily on the way she dressed and carried herself. Throughout her life, she kept to a relatively consistent uniform of patched-up Norfolk shooting jackets, coloured waistcoats, and loose trousers tapered sharply at the knee, worn usually with white stockings.
According to Lambert, the jacket pockets would be stuffed with “letters, notes, cigarettes and matches, a jar of vaseline, a knife and other equipment.”
From 1918, she spent most of her summers at her estate in Long Gores, in the quaint Norfolk village of Hickling, but she rarely interacted with the locals.
In a newspaper article published after her death, villagers described her as “the little old lady who walked around in a Norfolk shooting jacket and plus fours.”
Pallis kept herself to herself, building solid friendships with only a select few.
Undoubtedly, the woman who knew Pallis best was her lifelong companion, Phillis Clarke. Little is known about Clarke. One of Vlasto’s letters inquires after her, knowing she played a role of huge importance in his great-aunt’s life.
What we do know is that they lived together for decades, seemingly in a state of domestic bliss.
Again, Lambert’s obituary offers the most intimate insight into their partnership. Although Pallis spent her summer holidays in Long Gores, she spent most of the year in London, where she shared a house with Clarke.
Although most of the scholarship on her work is about botany and ecology, Pallis was also a keen artist. She painted for most of her life and exhibited portraits infrequently, although it’s thought that she never sold any.
In 1946, Lambert went to visit Pallis and Clarke. Due to bombing during the Second World War, the house was in ruins. While it was being repaired, the duo lived in a studio cottage just behind it.
Here, Clarke managed to rustle up a lavish meal despite strict food rationing, while Pallis returned to the wreckage of the main house, pulling off strips of wood to feed a roaring fire.
Lambert recalls them playfully bickering, describing Clarke as a “strong, quiet figure letting Marietta have the limelight” and a “splendid” cook with formidable artistic talents of her own.
In these latter years of her life, Pallis oversaw the digging of a swimming pool at her Long Gores estate, a quest documented in her 1956 research paper, ‘The Impermeability of Peat and the Origin of the Norfolk Broads’.
The result was a spectacular pool shaped like a double-headed eagle, with the Greek letters for ‘M’ and ‘P’ beneath.
Somewhat hilariously, an RAF helicopter captured aerial images of the pool, which led to bewildered newspaper articles, launching Pallis into an unlikely limelight.
At the centre of the pool was a 15-foot-tall iron cross. Clarke sadly died while the couple were travelling across Asia. Afterwards, Pallis arranged for her body to be transported to Norfolk and buried underneath the iron cross.
Pallis died aged 81 in 1963. Posthumously, news of her will was covered in a local newspaper article, which features an interview with John Lambert, credited as a workman who helped to execute the pool’s design.
“[Clarke] has been companion to the eccentric old lady for nearly half a century,” he said. “They were great friends, and I heard she said after Mrs Clarke died about 8 years ago that it was like losing one’s husband.”
Queer and feminist scholars have spent years piecing together the parts of Pallis’ legacy. Her ground-breaking research on botany and ecology; her determination to succeed in academia despite the barriers facing women at the time; her refusal to follow societal dress codes expected of women, and her seemingly peaceful, decades-long relationship with Clarke.
Through extensive research and archiving by the likes of Lambert and Vlasto, the layers of mystery are being peeled back to reveal the life story of a truly remarkable woman.
Written by Jake Hall
About the author
Jake Hall is a freelance journalist and author living in Sheffield, England. Jake’s first book, ‘The Art of Drag’, was an illustrated deep dive into the history of drag, published by NoBrow Press in 2020. Their upcoming book, ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’, is a history of queer solidarity movements over the last 6 decades. It is scheduled to be published in May 2024 by Trapeze Books.
For years, Jake has been fascinated by everything from queer culture and histories to fashion, film and climate activism, and they’ve written for publications ranging from ‘Dazed Digital’ and ‘The Independent’ to ‘Refinery29’ and ‘Cosmopolitan’. They’re also a keen book fan and reviewer, publishing regular reviews on their Instagram.
Further reading
- 5 Historic Places that Mark LGBTQ+ Love and Pride
- Pioneers and Rebels: 7 LGBTQ+ People in History
- 6 Reasons to Love Historic Norfolk
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