The Real Mrs Miniver

by Ysenda Maxtone Graham

  In 1957 Dolf married Beverley Kalitinsky, née Robinson, Canadian niece of the Beverley Robinson to whom Jan had told her secret at the Republican dinner party during the war. Dolf and Bev had forty-three years of cloudless happiness together, united in their love of architecture, German, French and English literature, music and conversation with friends young and old, in their book-filled apartment with a Mozart or Beethoven sonata open on the grand piano. Dolf never fathered a child, but Bev had a daughter from her first marriage, and the step-children and step-grandchildren from both his marriages remained Dolf’s family.

  Between 1960 and 1980 he was Avery Librarian, expanding the collection by purchases abroad and helping to make it internationally known as one of the greatest architectural libraries in the world. If Jan had ‘set him free’ from his junior job there, this might not have happened. He was made an emeritus professor on his retirement, after which he was Editor-in-Chief of the four-volume Macmillan Encyclopaedia of Architects and founding editor of a still larger project, The Buildings of the United States, the American ‘Pevsner’.

  I visited him and Bev at their apartment in West 87th Street in 1998 and 1999, and we talked for days, sitting near the chess table which Jan had made at the Austin Riggs Sanatorium in the depths of her depression. Dolf died in New York on 19 March 2000, a few days after his eighty-seventh birthday, and his obituary – like Jan’s – appeared in the London Times. His memoirs of growing up in Vienna and of Viennese refugees in New York were published to great acclaim in Germany and Austria, at the very end of his life. His sister Susan still lives in New York.

  Tony married Peggy Barne in 1952. After the house of Cultoquhey was sold in 1955 they lived happily at Aberlady Mains House in East Lothian, near Muirfield Golf Course, and travelled a great deal together. Tony died in an aeroplane over India in 1971.

  Jamie was twice married and twice divorced, and had three children. After farming at Cultoquhey he became a freelance journalist, and in 1976 he opened the smallest restaurant in Britain, with only one table, in Peebles High Street. Later, much more successfully, he became the world’s leading dealer in vintage fishing-tackle.

  Janet and Pat Rance had seven children. In 1954 they took over the village shop in Streatley, Berkshire, which Pat transformed into one of the best-known cheese shops in the country. Janet wrote for the Reader’s Digest, and Pat wrote definitive books on French and English cheese. They died at the end of the 1990s, and ‘Lord of all hopefulness’ was sung at both their funerals.

  Robert, my father, became a Scottish advocate, then an estate agent, and then an entrepreneur and a Planning Inspector. In 1962 he married Claudia Page-Phillips, née Tannert, who with her Jewish Austro-Hungarian parents had fled from Austria to England in 1938. They live in Sandwich, Kent, in the house in which I was born.

  Notes

  Chapter One

  1. ‘I know not what it might mean, that I feel so sad.’

  Chapter Seven

  1. ‘Anne Talbot came yesterday evening. Now they are all playing golf (Anne, my husband, Jamie and Janet). At four o’clock we are going to listen to the “Messiah” on the wireless. Tonight the three children are going to hang up their stockings. Sadly I can’t come to London this week. My next German lesson will therefore have to be in 1940.’

  2. ‘I am very sleepy, and full of a sweet, peaceful, dreamy happiness. You are close to my heart, and I’m glad that we will be together soon.’

  3. ‘I woke up at 6 o’clock, so full of longing and desire for you that I was almost on fire. Oh, God, how I love you…’

  Chapter Thirteen

  1. ‘I know how deeply thankful I should be, and I really shouldn’t complain, but often I’m so terribly alone … Have you ever been photographed by the buddies?’

  2. ‘Nowhere does the stranger feel more strange, than where lovers live.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  1. Tender.

  2. ‘Stateless and homeless, we go our way: it is hard to be stateless, worse to be without a home. Stateless? Homeless? No, beloved, no: for you are my homeland, and I am yours.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  1. Marriage-bed

  2. Office-work

  Acknowledgements

  I HAVE BEEN greatly helped, in researching and writing this book, by many people. Dolf Placzek’s telephone call to me in June 1998 launched me into the project when I was hovering round the edge. He and Bev were inspiring, and sympathetic to the biographer’s need to get to the bottom of Jan’s complicated character. Dolf’s last telephone message to me before he died expressed (in his thick-as-ever Viennese accent) delight that the story was being told. I am also grateful to Bennes Mardenn, Harriet Harvey, Susan Stern, Ruth Hanbury-Tenison, John Maxtone Graham, Michael Maxtone Graham, David Townsend, Ian Anstruther and Merlin Sudeley, for helping me with research and talking to me so candidly about Jan; to Nicola Beauman, for giving me initial confidence in the project; to Rupert Christiansen, for solidifying that confidence; and to Grant McIntyre, for his well-judged guidance. My father Robert Maxtone Graham, expert archivist, verifier and indexer, was an invaluable eye-witness and a constant but never intrusive support. Janet Rance’s notes, and Jamie Maxtone Graham’s papers, lent to me by his son Robert, helped me greatly, as did Victoria Rance’s, Anthony Gardner’s, Geoffrey Barraclough’s and my mother Claudia Maxtone Graham’s insights and comments. Kathleen Dunpark undertook some research for me at the Court of Session in Edinburgh. Henry Villiers gave me access to his aunt Anne Talbot’s diaries. Joy Grant provided me with notes which she had made on Jan. David Drew-Smythe of New South Wales gave me access to documents inherited from his grandfather Douglas Anstruther, and compiled the Jan Struther website. David and Daphne Smith gave me time to write during the school holidays. I am grateful also to the Library of Congress, the London Library, the A.P. Watt archives, the Chatto & Windus archives, the British Film Institute Library and the FDR Library. My husband Michael (who played piano duets with Dolf during our last visit to him in New York in 1999) helped me each day in the quest for the essence of Jan and the mots justes to express it. This book is dedicated to him.

  Further Reading

  Mrs Miniver and Try Anything Twice were last published in London in the paperback series Virago Modern Classics, both with introductions by Valerie Grove. An American edition of Mrs Miniver was published in 1990.

  Editions and translations are described in my father’s illustrated Bibliography of Mrs Miniver and of the other books by Jan Struther, copies of which are at the British Library, London Library, Cambridge and Oxford University Libraries, National Library of Scotland, Library of Congress, and University of Pennsylvania Library (where Jan was awarded an honorary D. Litt. in 1943).

  An Internet edition of Mrs Miniver, and of that Bibliography, can be freely downloaded from the first of the following list of useful websites:

  www.bigfoot.com/∼idds/home/janstruther.htm is my cousin David Drew-Smythe’s ‘Jan’ web page, which also has links to: www.reelclassics.com/Movies/Miniver/miniver.htm which includes many articles about the 1942 film and its cast.

  www.google.com if searched under ‘Jan Struther’ or ‘Mrs Miniver’ will reveal hundreds of more or less relevant websites, including those listed above.

  www.digital.library.upenn.edu/books is the ‘On-Line Books Page’ of the University of Pennsylvania. Links to Author/Struther will lead to the text of the following works, freely available on the internet: Mrs Miniver, Try Anything Twice, her hymns, and all poems printed in her five volumes of collected verse.

  robert@sandwichkent.freeserve.co.uk is my father’s email address. He has available for sale, by post, some copies of the Futura paperback of Mrs Miniver (1980).

  Index

  The index that appeared in the print version of this title does not match the pages in your eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device to search for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below. />
  The initial ‘J’ stands both for Joyce and for Jan.

  Ada, the cook at Wellington Square

  Adams, Franklin P. (1881–1960, NYC newspaper columnist)

  Appin, Argyllshire; family stayed at Druimavuic House

  Austin Riggs Sanatorium, Stockbridge, Massachusetts

  Anstruther family, originally of Balcaskie, Pittenweem, Fife:

  Henry Torrens (Harry), MP for St Andrews, J’s father, 1860–1926, younger son of the 5th baronet

  Hon. Eva, DBE (1869–1935, his wife, née Hanbury-Tracy, ‘the Dame’, J’s mother)

  Douglas Tollemache (their only son, J’s brother, born 1893, married twice, died 1956), of Greyfriars, Redbourn, Herts

  Joyce, their only daughter, see Struther

  Bach, J.S.

  Balkan journey

  Barrington-Ward, Robert M., DSO, MC (1891–1948, editor of The Times)

  Bayano (Fyffes Line banana boat, built 1917, converted for passengers, 6,815 tons); drunken breakfast menu

  BBC

  Beaverbrook, 1st Baron (1879–1964, politician and newspaper magnate)

  Berry, Ruth (1900–88, of Campden Street, Kensington)

  Bev, see Placzek, and see Robinson

  Blythe, Nan (nannie to the Smythe family, died 2002, unmarried, aged 101)

  Bowes-Lyon, Lady Elizabeth (fellow pupil, later Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, died 2002 aged 101)

  British Information Service

  Brittain, Vera (1893–1970, author, of Glebe Place, Chelsea)

  Brown, John Mason (1900–69, critic and author)

  Brunswick, Germany, Tony’s POW camp; Brunswick Boys’ Club, London, founded by Tony and fellow POWs

  Cambridge, where Robert took his law degree at Trinity College

  Campbell, Lady George, née Sybil Lascelles Alexander (1860–1947, the Dame’s enemy, first mother-in-law of Douglas Anstruther)

  Campbell, James, gamekeeper at Cultoquhey

  Camp Kieve, Nobelboro, Maine

  Camps Library, First World War charity

  Cane, Melville (NYC attorney and poet)

  Cape Cod, Massachusetts

  Chamberlain, Neville (1869–1940, Prime Minister)

  Chatto & Windus Ltd, publishers

  Chieti, Abruzzo, Italy, Tony’s POW camp

  Churchill, Winston (1874–1965, Prime Minister)

  City of Benares (Ellerman Line flagship, torpedoed in late 1940 with loss of 77 evacuee children)

  Cominucci, Al, maintenance man at Beekman Place

  Csato, Tibor, MD Vienna, MRCS, LRCP London, Hungarian doctor engaged in cancer research at Brompton Hospital, later consultant at Great Cumberland Place, London

  Cultoquhey, Crieff, Perthshire, original home of the Maxtone Graham family (pronounced ‘Cult-o-way’)

  Curtis Brown Ltd, literary agents

  Curtis Brown, Anne, Jan’s secretary

  Curtis Brown, Beatrice (writer, Bea Horton)

  Darling, Hon. Diana (fellow pupil and member of the Scratch Society, died unmarried, 1961)

  Davis, Bette (1908–89, actress)

  Dawson, Geoffrey (1874–1944, editor of The Times)

  de Tapla, Anne (of NYC, benefactress of the Placzeks)

  Dearmer, Revd Percy (1867–1936, Canon of Westminster)

  Dolf, see Placzek family

  Donne, John (1573–1631, the poet)

  Douglas, see Anstruther family

  Drummond, Gena (fellow pupil)

  Duchess of Atholl (Canadian Pacific liner, built 1928, 20, 119 tons, converted to a troopship, torpedoed 1942)

  Dunkirk evacuation

  Edinburgh; Bilston Lodge

  Egypt, J’s visit; Tony on active service in

  Eisler, Fritz, doctor in Vienna, Dolf’s stepfather

  Eisler, Pauly, formerly Plazcek, Dolf’s mother

  Ernst, Morris Leopold (1888–1976, NYC attorney)

  Eton College, Berkshire

  Fadiman, Clifton (1902–99, writer, question-master of Information, Please!)

  Fleming, Peter, OBE (1907–71, writer)

  Forster, E. M., OM (1879–1970, author)

  Fox, James (born 1939, as child actor played Toby in Miniver Story)

  France

  Franklin, Sydney, film producer

  Froeschel, George (a screen writer of Mrs Miniver)

  Garson, Greer (1904–96, actress, played Mrs Miniver, married Richard Ney, divorced)

  Gascoigne, Kathleen (childhood friend)

  George School, Newtown, Pennsylvania (Janet’s school)

  Getts, Clark H. (NYC lecture tour booking agent)

  Golenpaul, Dan (1900–74, of 5th Ave., NYC, creator of Information, Please!)

  Goebbels, Josef (1897–1945, Nazi propaganda minister)

  Good, Annie ‘Mabel’, ‘Nannie’ (born in England, 1904, brought up in Canada, returned to London, worked as the Maxtone Graham nannie, 1931–40, and as caretaker at Wellington Square and Alexander Place, 1945–53; unmarried; died 1983)

  Gordonstoun, Elgin, Morayshire (a house until 1934, then a school; Jamie’s school after an unsuccessful start at Eton)

  Gracie, J’s maid, NYC

  Gregory, Sir (John) Roger (1861–1938, solicitor)

  Gregynog, Montgomeryshire, now Powys, Wales (a Sudeley property)

  Gunther, John (1901–70, author of Inside Europe)

  Hahn, Kurt, CBE (1886–1974, founder of Gordonstoun School)

  Halifax, Earl of (1881–1959, British Ambassador to USA)

  Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the VE day riots there

  Hanbury, Ruth (1901–2000, J’s cousin and childhood friend, married Gerald Tenison of Lough Bawn, Co. Monaghan, Eire)

  Hanbury-Tracy, see Sudeley

  Harcourt Brace Inc., publishers

  Harvey, Harriet (fellow patient)

  Harvey School, Westchester County, NY (Robert’s school)

  Haycock, Lizzie (J’s grandparents’ maid)

  Hess, Dame Myra, DBE (1890–1965, pianist)

  Hewitt-Myring, Philip (born 1900 in Paris; journalist, London; Robert’s godfather)

  Hilton, James (1900–54, author, main screen writer of Mrs Miniver)

  Hirsch, Gladys (fellow pupil)

  Holland, Mrs Martin, teacher

  Horton, see Curtis Brown

  Hudson, Lucy (‘Lala’, J’s nannie)

  ‘Indiana Compromise’

  Information Ministry

  Jackel, Dr (NYC psychiatrist)

  Jamie, see Maxtone Graham

  Jan, see Struther

  Janet, see Maxtone Graham

  Jessel, Vera Pearl (fellow pupil, later Mrs Clive Martyn, 1899–1928)

  Johnson, Celia, DBE (1908–82, actress, Mrs Peter Fleming)

  Joshua, Nell (fellow pupil)

  Joyce, see Struther

  Karloff, Boris (1887–1969, horror film actor)

  Kieran, John (1882–1981, NYC sports journalist)

  Kubie, Lawrence (Austrian-born psychoanalyst in NYC)

  Lala, see Hudson

  Launde Abbey, near Oakham (Col. Edward Dawson’s house)

  Lazarus, René (fellow pupil)

  Lee, Canada (Lionel Canegata, 1907–52, welterweight boxer turned actor)

  Lehmann, Rosamond, CBE (1901–90, novelist)

  Levant, Oscar (1906–72, pianist and actor)

  Lewis, Peggy (fellow pupil)

  London, and, passim

  Albert Hall, Kensington; Alexander Place, South Kensington; Battersea Park; Bloomsbury House, Great Russell Street; Caroline Place (now Donne Place), Chelsea; Cheyne Walk, Chelsea; Curzon Street, Mayfair; Denbigh Street, Pimlico; Halsey Street, Chelsea; Imperial War Museum; Kilburn Polytechnic; King’s Road, Chelsea; Little College Street, Westminster; Lloyds of London; National Gallery wartime concerts; Ormeley Lodge, Ham; Scotland Yard; South Street, Mayfair; Swan Walk, Chelsea; US Embassy and Consulate; Walpole Street, Chelsea; Wellington Square, Chelsea; the dining-room

  Lord Baldwin’s Appeal for Refugees

 
Lubbock, Cynthia (fellow pupil, later Mrs Alexander Wedderburn, 1899–1986)

  Mason, Michael Henry (1900–82, yachtsman and travel writer, of Freeland, Oxfordshire; Janet’s godfather)

  Mardenn, Bennes, drama teacher, NYC

  Margie, J’s secretary, NYC

  Marx Brothers

  Maxtone Graham family, originally of Cultoquhey, Crieff, Perthshire

  (Ellen) ‘Ann’, 1899–1991, née Taylor, of Cape Cod, first wife of Patrick

  Anthony George, 1854–1930, Tony’s bachelor uncle

  Anthony James Oliphant, ‘Tony’, born Edinburgh, 23 July 1900, J’s first husband: joined Scots Guards at Pirbright Camp; to North Africa; prisoner of war; POW life; impresario; camp theatre; post-war ambitions; liberated; reunited with J; effect of POW life; tries for Parliament; wants separation; unfulfilling work; irritated by J; described when asleep; leaves Wellington Square; ‘gentlemanly thing’, and divorce; wedding reception for Janet at Cultoquhey; remarries; sells Cultoquhey; moves to Edinburgh and then to Aberlady, East Lothian; his death, India, 8 June 1971

  Claudia, formerly Page-Phillips, née Tannert, Robert’s wife, the author’s mother

  Diana Evelyn, née Macgegor, Jamie’s first wife, J’s daughter-in-law

  (Margaret) Ethel, née Blair-Oliphant, 1861–1952, wife of Jim, family historian, mother of Tony

  James (Jim), 1863–1940, Chartered Accountant in Edinburgh, Tony’s father

  James Anstruther (Jamie), J’s eldest child, born 10 May 1924 at Walpole Street; later career, two marriages, and children; died November 2001

  Janet Mary, J’s only daughter, born 24 March 1928 at Sydney Street, married Patrick Rance, q.v.; career, marriage, seven children, and her death, 18 December 1996

  Michael and John, born 1929, twin sons of Patrick

  Mungo, Lt. Col. in the Jacobite army, 1719, died 1763; his ‘Litany’