1940s: Argyll and Felix Sturgeon
Biography
William Dickie Sturgeon was born in Girvan, Ayrshire, the son of Robert Graham Sturgeon and Mary Frew Dickie. As a youing man, he studied in Paris at the Sorbonne and emigrated to the U.S. to become a teacher in 1913 according to his orbituary, or the 14th of July 1914 as recorded elsewhere.
He did, indeed teach maths and languages in private schools, and it was in one of these, probably an all-boys boarding school, Stevens Academy that he acquired the nickname of ‘Argyll’ from his colleagues. Apparently he was taken to wearing an Argyll and Sutherland Highlander uniform at fancy dress parties and the like. A variant of the nickname - ‘Argylle’ - appears in the odd letter and document. To avoid confusion, from now on I will refer to him as Argyll Sturgeon.
Argyll Sturgeon.
In the late 1920s he met and married a divorcee, Christine Hamilton Waldo, nee Dicker who was later, also often referred to by her nickname which was Felix. In future I will be referring to her Felix Sturgeon.
Felix Sturgeon.
Felix was born in St. John City, New Brunswick, Canada in 1897. She was educated in Canada and in Switzerland, but returned to England with her English parents when she was seventeen. A year later, she married Edward Molineaux Waldo and went with him to live on Staten Island in New York where she became a naturalized American. Her two sons, Peter and Edward were born there. The latter was known as Ted to distinguish him from his dad.
Responses to the latter correspondence make up a large portion of the letters in her papers. Her few published pieces in the Harp and Manuscript elicited praise from publishers, praise which she also treasured and kept . She also kept copies of the movie magazines for which she wrote articles, and a large collection of photographs of her later travels through Britain, Spain and, apparently, Morocco.
Her marriage to Waldo, however, did not last. The stresses of motherhood, her budding journalistic and advertising career - she worked for McFadden Magazine and other movie tabloids - and the fact that Waldo’s work required him to absent for long periods of time, all took their toll. She divorced him in 1926.
Two years later Felix met Argyll. Her children’s English nurse, Joan Ivy was dating a certain Cecil Pearson who happened to be a teacher in Steven’s Academy. Cecil was a colleague of Argyll who was employed by same school as a teacher of mathematics. Joan’s boy friend must have brought his friend over one day, whereupon, Felix and Argyll must have impressed each other and decided to marry.
After their marriage the new Sturgeon family moved to Philadelphia where Argyll took up a position as head of the Department of Modern Languages at Drexel Institute – which later became Drexel University. Argyll also adopted Felix’s children giving them his surname. He also changed Ted’s name to Theodore but allowed him to retain his middle name of Hamilton.
Although exact dates are hard to come by, at some period during the 1930s, the Sturgeons were either on holiday or simply exploring possibilities in both Europe and North Africa . These travels sparked a burst of creativity in Felix that produced numerous sketches, paintings, and articles, one of which was published in the Drexel Institute magazine the Drexer and is included in her papers.
The Drexel article described a trip by automobile through Spain in 1935 in which Felix, Argyll, and a male friend motored and camped all over Spain. Franco’s uprising against the democratically elected government of Spain in 1936 was just round the corner.
After their journey through Spain and North Africa, Felix took to smoking a hookah. She had already been caricatured by her New York days cartoonist friends Pat Sullivan, Walter Lantz, and Don Marquis - the two former attached to Pat Sullivan's publishing company - depicting her with short curly hair, an extremely long cigarette holder and a bag slung over her shoulder labelled “Publicity.”
It may have been around this period that Felix submitted an animation scenario of Felix the Cat to Pat Sullivan Studios. They were not used, but they did elicit an admiring letter from the animator Walter Lantz which included in her papers,
It is, of course, very likely that it was through her association with Pat Sullivan, that Christine Hamilton was given or adopted, the Felix nickname. As a result, her publications and attempts at publication fall under several noms de plume: Christine Hamilton, Chris or Christie Hamilton, Christine Dicker, Christine Sturgeon, and Felix Sturgeon. One letter from a publisher soliciting a novel, addresses her as “Mr. Felix Sturgeon.” Her husband and close friends began calling her Felix and later as a grandmother she insisted that her grandchildren call her Felix.
Probably not long after they had moved to Scotland Felix and Argyll joined John and Morag Aitkenhead in founding an experimental, coeducational school for children “ages 3 and up,” in Kilquhanity, near Castle Douglas in Kirkcudbrightshire. A Kilquhanity leaflet designed by Felix is included in the papers. WWII had broken out, and the school benefitted from the child evacuations underway in Britain.
There were attempts to bring in refugee children from the Spanish Civil War and elsewhere, but how successful these attempts were is not known. Argyll was also at this time attempting to complete his PhD at the University of Edinburgh; this failed, and their attempt at creating a school in Kilquhanity apparently was also short lived - although Kilquhanity House School itself went on to have a venerable history.
The family story suggests that the couple had planned to return to the U.S., but were asked to sign a loyalty oath. Felix’s refusal to sign contributed to the decision to settle in St. Georges, Grenada in the British West Indies. There, Argyll taught mathematics and, with Felix, pursued amateur theatre activities.
Argyll died of prostate cancer there in 1954, and Felix moved to the island of St. Vincent, where she lived alone with a cook, Cynthia, and a housekeeper, Gillie.
According to her son Peter, when about to make a visit to her son Ted in the U.S. in 1961, Felix proclaimed that the government ought to send a battleship to carry her back! This was not in the offing
Felix had remained in close touch with her youngest brother, Ernest Hamilton-Dicker. He had instituted the hyphenated form of the name and ran a hotel called Treasure Beach in Jamaica. The papers contain a Treasure Beach Hotel leaflet designed and calligraphed by Felix, with some line-drawn and silhouette illustrations.
As her health failed and she began to exhibit symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, it was decided that she would go to Jamaica to live with Ernest and his wife Florence Hamilton-Dicker. It was probably around this period that Felix packed up her papers in a large steamer trunk which was eventually inherited by Ted and then his children.
With Florence - nicknamed Mur, for mother - as her nurse, Felix irrevocably declined and was hospitalized at Nuttall Hospital in Kingston. She died there in the spring of 1963, aged 67, and was buried in May Pen Cemetery.
Perhaps it is now appropriate to mention that in in 2o12 I was contacted by Tandy Sturgeon, step-granddaughter of Argyll Sturgeon.
To Director Pyle and Whomever Else It May Concern,
I am a descendant (step-granddaughter) of Argylle Sturgeon, who with J. M. Aitkenhead, started Kilquhanity in I believe 1940. I grew up hearing that Argyll, with the help of his wife Christine ‘Felix’ Sturgeon, had participated in the founding of a school in Scotland. Not until recently, when I found an old pamphlet in my grandmother Felix’s papers, did I know the name of the school and its exact whereabouts. A search on the net revealed what I had been unaware of: that the school actually had a long history (Felix and Argyll left Scotland for Grenada B. W. I., after the first few founding years) and that it was associated with the pedagogy of Summerhill. I am in amazement and am happy to hear that the school was reopened by Mr. Pyle and others. Incidentally, my father Theodore Sturgeon, one of Argyll’s adopted sons (but too old to be a K. student), grew up to be a famous science fiction writer. He was a strong supporter of A. S. Neill’s approach to children, which he applied in raising me and my sister and brothers. Three of us went on to attend Waldorf schools and both became educators.
Sincerely, Tandy Sturgeon
PS: my familiarity with her artwork tells me that the engraving of Kilquhanity House on the pamphlet was done by my grandmother, Felix Sturgeon
Ms Sturgeon and I continued to correspond for quite a while after this contact and it will soon become apparent that she became the source of much of the material I have used concerning these two interesting characters who happened to be part of the story of the creation of Kilquhanity House School. Thank you Tandy.
