Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Penelope and John Mortimer at home

  (© Mark Gerson/National Portrait Gallery, London.)

  Those who embarked on careers had to be thick-skinned: immune to slights and knock-backs, resolute in the face of tremendous social expectation and prepared for loneliness. When she began working at Picture Post at the age of just nineteen, the first consequence for Grace Robertson was that she lost two of her girlfriends. ‘Their parents stopped them seeing me. You could be a nurse, a secretary or a teacher while you waited to get your man. But a photographer? That sounded off-putting. I might be a bad influence. I was cut dead.’ In the office she grew accustomed to visitors assuming she was a secretary. Her colleagues treated her well, mostly, but on work trips they would inevitably attempt to get her into bed. ‘They would try and get you blotto, and then turn up at the door of your hotel room. Luckily, I could out-drink any man in Fleet Street.’ Her mother worried about such predators. She insisted that Robertson go to work in a hat and gloves like a ‘nice’ girl. (The gloves lasted about as long as it took her daughter to peel them off.) In 1954 Claire Tomalin, future biographer of Dickens and Pepys, went for a job interview at the publisher Heinemann. A few minutes into her conversation with a man called Roland Gant, a younger man, ‘thick-set and wearing heavy glasses’, came in without a word and put a piece of paper on Gant’s desk. ‘He was James Michie, the poet,’ she writes in her book Several Strangers. ‘Later, he told me he had been awarding me marks for my looks. Seven out of ten, he gave me, just enough for the job of secretary/editorial assistant, at £5.10s a week. This was how things were done in 1954.’

  It was, of course, impossible to fight back. It wasn’t only that sexual harassment had yet to be invented; women were expected to know their place, irrespective of their talents and experience, of the fact that they had won their jobs on merit. In 1959 the influential costume designer Jocelyn Rickards* was hard at work on the film of John Osborne’s The Entertainer when Michael Balcon, the famous producer, questioned the casting of Joan Plowright as Jean Rice. Rickards made the mistake of sticking up for her. Soon afterwards, Balcon asked the film’s director, Tony Richardson, to sack Rickards. He would not, Balcon said, ‘be spoken to like that’ by a woman.† But this was a mild example (and in any case, Richardson refused to relinquish her). Others had it far, far worse. One thinks of Rosalind Franklin, the crystallographer whose X-ray photographs were crucial in establishing the structure of DNA in 1953. At one end of the scale, her male colleagues persisted in referring to her as ‘Rosy’, though this was not a name used even by those closest to her. At the other, they repeatedly refused to acknowledge her outstanding contribution to the discovery of the double helix.*

  Those who were mothers had also to worry about childcare – and it was at this point in history that many women first learnt to juggle, even if that wasn’t the word they used. Anne Scott-James, the journalist who spent the Fifties first as the editor of Harper’s Bazaar and then as the women’s editor of the Sunday Express, described her own routine as ‘a sort of miracle of slotting in’ (her son Max was born in 1945; her daughter Claire in 1951). In her 1952 memoir-disguised-as-a-novel In the Mink, she carefully describes the battle that raged inside her as she tore herself away from the nursery each morning, an account that would not look out of place in a glossy magazine today. ‘Up to now I’d always started out eagerly to work,’ she writes. ‘Ever since my apprentice days, the office front door had been an agreeable sight to me, and I had looked forward with pleasure to the jolts, excitements and interchanges of the day’s work. Now, I banged the door of the flat behind me with something of a pang.’ Every day she promised herself – and ‘James’ (aka Max) – that she would get home in time for tea. And every day she failed: ‘Half-past five would find me with three or four people still to see, and the letters still to sign, and I would think: “Bang goes my meringue” – and all it stood for.’

  Anne Scott-James

  (Getty Images.)

  But, in the end, such struggles were worth it. The bliss of work! The balm of it, and the satisfaction. ‘I was so pleased to have found what it was that I really wanted to do, and to be paid for it,’ says Grace Robertson. Wendy Bray found it ‘thrilling’: ‘I was well aware that I was doing a good job which I enjoyed, and which used my skills.’ (She still remembers the first major purchase she made with her new salary: a purple velour coat, which – so much for the brown Fifties – she teamed with yellow shoes and a lime green hat.) ‘I loved my job,’ says Sylvia Syms. ‘Any aspect of it. I needed to work for money, but I wouldn’t ever have given it up.’ In Selective Memory Katharine Whitehorn notes admiringly that in 1956 her former flatmate Sheila Gibson became a partner in the architectural firm Carden & Godfrey. ‘She had a life she relished,’ she writes. ‘She said once about her work: “This is what I am for.”’ For her own part, Whitehorn, who was then working as a journalist on a small magazine called Home Notes, was about to hit what she regarded as the big time. ‘HAVE GOT JOB ON PICTURE POST WHICH I WANTED MORE THAN HEAVEN’ said the telegram she sent to her parents. I don’t mind telling you that I have a copy of this message by my desk as I write. Even after all this time, I still can’t see it without smiling.

  A word on how this book should be read. It is a group biography, but not in the traditional sense. These women were not friends, or members of the same gang or organisation. A few of them knew each other, it’s true, but not well. Fame was often the only thing they had in common. Each of the essays in this book, then, stands alone, making perfect sense even if yanked from its neighbours. But if you read all seven of them there will, I hope, be a cumulative effect, the culture of the Fifties – its food, its architecture, its popular culture, its habits and its opinions – revealed through the lives of ten revolutionaries and taste makers who just happen to have been women. I hope these stories make people reconsider the ‘lost’ decade between the end of the war and feminism. I hope, too, that they speak to readers everywhere, whichever city or continent they happen to be reading in. Isn’t pluck the same all over the world? Isn’t ambition? But more than that, I hope they pull the reader along. As I researched them, piecing lives together by means of interviews, diaries, letters, photographs and memoirs, I was mostly goggle-eyed, in awe. These are, above all, tales of derring-do. Records will be broken, and hearts.

  In the Kitchen with . . .

  Patience Gray

  (Courtesy of Miranda Armour-Brown and Nicolas Gray. (photograph by Lion Stanham))

  ‘Large fishes are best left unscaled . . .’

  Rationing. How miserable it was. ‘Shoot straight, lady,’ urged one of the Ministry of Food’s many wartime posters. ‘FOOD is your munition of war.’ It was up to women to keep the nation fighting fit. But how few weapons the housewife infantry had at their disposal! No meat, no eggs, no butter, no sugar, no cream and barely any fruit. The cookbooks of the day, so chipper it makes you want to weep, are full of ideas for mock foods: marzipan cobbled from haricot beans and almond essence; eggs that are really tinned apricots fried in bacon fat. One cold afternoon in the British Library I opened one of these books and realised with a start that I was looking at advice for cooking crow. ‘Boil it up with suet,’ said the writer, ‘to keep the meat as white as possible.’ There was a recipe for sparrow pie too – though the Ministry of Food did not ‘encourage’ the eating of these tiny birds.

  ..Shoot straight, Lady

  (From Raynes Minns, Bombers & Mash.)

  Reams have been written about snoek, an imported tinned fish no one cared to eat. Ditto Woolton pie, a concoction of boiled vegetables named for the Minister of Food. But you get a truer sense of the privations of rationing by thinking about what people missed than by how they made do (or not). Oh, the longing that was there. On 5 March 1944 Vere Hodgson, who worked as a social worker during the war, recorded in her diary that a shop near her flat in Notting Hill had got hold of some oranges. ‘We have seen orange peel in the street,’ she wrote. And then: ‘Mos
t refreshing even to look at it.’ In 1946 Elizabeth David, the future author of Mediterranean Food, returned to London from India, where she moved in with her pregnant sister Diana and promptly took over the shopping. ‘One day, I took back to her, among the broken biscuits and the tins of snoek . . . one pound of fresh tomatoes. As I took them out of my basket to show her, I saw that tears were tumbling down my sister’s beautiful and normally serene face.’ Elizabeth asked Diana what on earth was wrong. ‘Sorry,’ she was told. ‘It’s just that I’ve been trying to buy fresh tomatoes for five years. And now it’s you who’ve found them first.’

  Things did not improve after the war; they got worse. In 1946 bacon, poultry and egg rations were all reduced, and the National Loaf shrank; far more shockingly, bread, flour and oatmeal were rationed for the first time (the government had agreed to donate part of the nation’s wheat crop to Germany, the price of America supplying the bulk of what was needed to the starving nation). In 1947 a bad winter led to restrictions on potatoes. Milk was also in short supply, and canned meat and fish no longer coming in from America. Bread was removed from the ration in 1948, along with jam, but there then followed a long and dreary wait. Tea was not de-rationed until 1952; sweets, cream, eggs and sugar until 1953; butter, cheese, margarine, cooking fats and meat until 1954. At this point the cookbook-writers went into celebratory mode. Suddenly it was glamorous to be at the stove: new homes were being built at a rate of three hundred thousand a year, with new kitchens full of new appliances – and now, just in the nick of time, food was abundant once more, which meant that these colourful new work surfaces (Formica!) could be put to good use. People could entertain. They could be adventurous. A trickle of books turned into a deluge, one that has been unstoppable pretty much ever since.

  Of course, it was a while before most people would be eating, say, pasta as a matter of course. I was born in 1969, and into a family that cared about food, but it was 1977 at least before I tasted an avocado, 1978 before I tried lasagne and some years after that before my stepmother first attempted to cook a risotto. We were deep into the Eighties before most of us ate a salad leaf other than butter lettuce, and nudging the Nineties when pesto became a craze (and only then the ersatz kind, in little glass jars). This is why we must take cookbooks, whether written in 1945 or 2005, with a pinch of salt: they tell us more about our aspirations than about our daily lives (and this, perhaps, is why I remain unconvinced that anyone ever cooked a crow for their dinner – though I hope the thought of its black feathers shocked you as you read about it). Fifty years from now people will look at the cookbooks in kitchens like yours and mine and assume that our lives were one long celebration of spelt and sea bass, samphire and salsify. But the truth is that I can’t tell you when I last used any of these things. Indeed, I have never knowingly cooked salsify.

  It is in this context that we must consider Elizabeth David and her vastly less well-known but equally talented peer Patience Gray. David’s ambition, her sheer chutzpah, cannot, I think, be overestimated; outrageously, she published her first cook book, Mediterranean Food, in 1950, four long years before rationing ended. But her influence surely can. This book and those that followed it were only ever read by a small, select crowd, and even after rationing ended its fans would not have been able to get hold of many of the things she described: the figs and the aubergines, the polenta and the pistachio nuts. But, of course, that hardly mattered. She was not writing for the masses – she was too grand for that – and nor, in all honesty, was she writing a handbook. As Rosemary Hill has pointed out, David was to cooking what Bernard Leach was to ceramics: A Potter’s Book, published in 1940 but unexpectedly popular after the war, offered a similar kind of paradise in its description of the lives of Oriental craftsmen to the one David evoked in the olive groves of Europe. Just as the majority of Leach’s readers had no intention of building themselves a kiln, so David’s were mostly not about to make a bouillabaisse for dinner. David was certainly prescient. The food she wrote about is everywhere today. But in her own time she fed fantasies, not families.

  Perhaps because she is still so famous, people often assume that David was the Fifties’ best-selling food writer. In fact that accolade must go to Patience Gray and her 1957 book, Plats du Jour, some hundred thousand copies of which were sold before the decade was out. It is said that David and Gray met just once, in 1961, for dinner in the flat of their mutual acquaintance, an antiquarian book dealer called Irving Davis. But if this is so neither one of them recorded the occasion. What would such a meeting have been like? Terrifying, one imagines. For one thing, they were the kind of women who mostly preferred male company to that of their own sex; impossible to imagine them, heads bent, sharing baking tips. For another, they were too similar for each to have taken the other for a kindred spirit; as every junior science student knows, like poles repel. If such an encounter did happen, one hopes that Davis was more than usually circumspect with the claret.

  Both came from the upper middle classes, growing up in large Jacobean manor houses in Sussex where legendarily bad nursery food was cooked by cooks and served by maids, and both were famously beautiful and intelligent. Compared to most British women their age they were well travelled and in possession of complicated, bohemian private lives. Elizabeth David, as all the world surely knows by now, spent the war abroad, travelling to Greece in a small boat in 1939 with Charles Gibson Cowan, an actor and writer, and thence to Egypt; Patience Gray was in London and Sussex for the duration of the war, sharing her life with a badly behaved man called Thomas Gray, but she went to Romania in 1938, and later to France, Italy and Yugoslavia. Most significant of all, both women enjoyed a brief period in thrall to older mentors who would have a profound influence on their careers as food writers. David met the writer Norman Douglas in Antibes when she was twenty-six and he was seventy-two; he is the dedicatee of Mediterranean Food. Patience Gray met Irving Davis when she was forty and he was sixty-nine; the seventh chapter of her masterpiece Honey from a Weed is a tribute to him, and in 1967, after his death, she edited his Catalan cookery book, A Collection of Impossible Recipes.

  What about their work? Both women were extremely clear-sighted about what it was that they wanted their books to do. Controlling, you might say. You see this in their prose (bracing), in their recipes (sophisticated, unapologetic) and even in the illustrators they chose starting out (John Minton in the case of David, and David Gentleman in the case of Gray: neo-Romantics, the pair of them). David was first into print, but Gray beat her to it when it came to French cuisine bourgeoise; David’s French Provincial Cooking, the most accessible of her books, was published some four years after the chic but unprecedentedly user-friendly Plats du Jour.*

  And yet, as I have said, we know so much about one – Elizabeth David’s story has been told many times, in print and on screen – and so little about the other. Gray, perhaps because she was the more unconventional of the two, and perhaps because she followed her heart in a way that David never did, remains in the shadows. This is not a competition, and I am not about to make it one. They were both glorious, fascinating, pioneering. But I will say this. It was Gray who hung on to her ideals right to the end (though this does not mean that her opinions calcified; she never ceased to be interested in the world and in other people). She was a cook to her bones: not for her the diet of instant coffee and Ritz crackers Elizabeth David would come to favour in old age. When it came to the details of her life she was, like David, wilfully vague.† The ins and outs could be glossed over, she felt. But when it came to dinner, she meant what she said. She lived her words. ‘As can be seen, all this chopping and pounding has much to do with health,’ she once wrote. She could no more give it up than she could breathing.

  Patience Gray was born on 31 October 1917 at Shackleford, near Godalming in Surrey, the second of the three daughters of Hermann Stanham, a major in the Royal Field Artillery, and his wife Olive. The family home was Mitchen Hall, a grand but rather isolated house of peach-colour
ed brick, whose oak-panelled rooms overlooked ‘a world of woods, garden, cherry trees’ and beyond them the Hog’s Back, that part of the North Downs which rises far higher than the countryside around. For Patience, Mitchen Hall was a place of ‘wonder and terror’ whose every nook and cranny she would remember until the end of her life. ‘Mysteries without and mysteries within,’ she wrote of it in her maddeningly cryptic collection of essays, Work Adventures Childhood Dreams. ‘Sunbeams streamed into these rooms, in which the dancing dust particles were so clearly seen against the darkened panelling that they were imagined, then known to be, slides for fairy beings. The passages, concealing cupboards in their walls, the winding stairs with carved balusters, impressed mere infants with uncertain feelings, as if at any moment some terrifying “thing” might appear . . .’

  Major Stanham was not quite what he seemed. Stanham was his mother’s maiden name. His real name was Warschawski, and he was the son of a Jewish professor of Hebrew who had fled persecution in Poland in the middle of the nineteenth century, become active in the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews and had finally been ordained as a Unitarian minister in about 1900. Major Stanham’s career in the army, moreover, was running in parallel to a photographic studio he kept up in Brighton – a business his children seem not to have known about until much later, and which operated under his real name.* But outwardly he was an upper middle-class Englishman, and this was what his daughters took him for. Thanks to an inheritance his wife had received from her grandfather the family had servants, and the children were brought up in high Edwardian style by their nanny in a nursery at the top of the house; later, there would be governesses, often French. Left alone – Nanny would regularly disappear down the back stairs for tea with Cook – Patience would stand on a toy box and gaze on the garden below with its orchard, its enclosing yew walk, its tennis court and its wide lawn on which, in summer, tea would be taken: black lacquer tray, silver pot, cucumber sandwiches, strawberries and cream. ‘Nanny’s so wonderful!’ her mother liked to say. ‘She never leaves the children.’ Unbeknownst to Olive, Nanny was also in possession of certain ‘terror-inducing powers’. Sudden death was a favourite theme: it could, she informed the children, strike at any time, even in the paradise of the garden. Patience knew to avoid the pink-orange berries of the yew and the shiny black berries of the deadly nightshade. But still, magpies had to be saluted, knives and forks immediately straightened, salt handled with extreme care.