Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

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Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties Page 9

by Rachel Cooke


  In late 1963 Nancy and Joan bought a house in Clapham, south London. It had five bedrooms, one of which was designated for Sheila (Nancy and Joan still shared a bedroom, for all that Nancy had by now taken, in addition to Ginette Spanier, another lover, Dolly Goodman). The house would give the women the space to remain together – the complicated nature of their triumvirate did not lend itself to small rooms and narrow hallways† – and to warm it they threw a New Year’s Eve party. It will give you some idea of Nancy’s fame at this point to know that among the 150 guests was Paul McCartney.

  The Grand National, 1964. Nancy’s latest wheeze.

  She was going to cover the race for the News of the World. But why shouldn’t she turn the assignment into a family day out? She and Joan would fly to Aintree with their guests, Dolly Goodman and her husband Leon. They would bring with them a Fortnum’s hamper and some champagne, a little of which they would drink high in the sky. Meanwhile, Sheila and her sister Nona would drive at least part of the way, a picnic prepared by Mrs O’Dea, the Windmill’s cook, safely stowed in the boot of their car.

  It all happened so quickly.

  Sheila and Nona arrived at Aintree shortly before three o’clock and began to look for Nancy and Joan. ‘Nona [had] heard rumours that there had been an air crash,’ Sheila wrote later. ‘But it was said to be a Dove from Scotland. Jonnie and Nancy, I knew, were flying in a Piper Apache from Luton.’

  The sisters went to their stand so they could watch the next race. ‘At 3 p.m., something – I don’t know what – made me switch on my portable radio, and I heard the terrible news. I exclaimed: “My God, it’s them!” My immediate reaction was to want to sink into the ground and let the shock wash over me. Then I heard: “Sheila, pull yourself together!” Nona, instinctively, had jumped down from the tier above me and landed by my side.’

  The plane had gone down at about half past eleven in a cabbage field close to the racecourse. There were no survivors.

  A police patrol car passed them. Sheila told its occupants who she was. Would she come and identify the bodies? Of course. ‘They drove me to the mortuary, a low brick building adjoining Ormskirk hospital.’ As she looked on the broken bodies of her dear friends she held a policeman’s hand, and ‘nearly broke it’.

  At school in Derbyshire, Nick heard about the crash on the radio, whereupon he rang the News of the World, just to be sure. At school in North Wales, Tom was asked to see the headmaster. ‘Your mother has been killed,’ he was told. ‘What about Nancy?’ he asked. ‘Yes, she was involved, too,’ said the headmaster. In Trouville, France, Ginette Spanier’s husband, Paul-Emile took a telephone call from Marlene Dietrich. ‘She had taken the telephone book and rung every hotel in alphabetical order until she found us.’* Outside the house in Clapham, Nancy and Joan’s lawyer, David Jacobs,† knowing the press would soon arrive, had a policeman installed.

  The wreckage of Nancy and Joan’s chartered plane in a cabbage field near Aintree

  (News International.)

  The following morning Joan’s brother Dick travelled up to Liverpool with Jacobs. On the train they had gin and kippers for breakfast. Jacobs wept so hard his mascara ran. Sheila van Damm met them at the other end. She had organised everything. When the police tried to show Dick photographs of the bodies in the wreckage of the aircraft she said, with a certain fierceness, ‘You don’t look at this. I’ll look at this.’

  It was Sheila, too, who arranged the funerals, which took place one after the other at Golder’s Green Crematorium. These funerals, which were private, were attended by Nick but not Tom (amazingly, the boys had still not seen one another since the accident; no one seemed to think this was necessary). Two women in dungarees were also present, friends of Nancy’s who seemed to Dick to be ‘sort of hiding behind the columns outside’.

  The aftermath of any sudden death is horribly painful for those left behind. But there is sometimes a kind of comfort to be found in practicalities, in the cumbersome paperwork of an estate. Not in the case of Nancy and Joan. The latter’s will consisted of a tiny scrap of paper hidden away in her wallet. She left everything to Nancy, to distribute as she thought fit. Nancy’s will, made only a month before the accident, left everything to Joan. Neither had ever stopped to consider what would happen if they died together.

  When two people with interchangeable wills die at the same time, the law decrees that whoever was the oldest at the moment of their deaths died first. Nancy, then, had died first. Her estate had therefore passed to Joan, with the result that it would now pass to Nick as Joan’s eldest child. Tom would get nothing, nor had any provision been made for his guardianship. In the end the question of money was fairly easily resolved – Nick was prevailed upon to share, and two separate trust funds were established – though the situation was complicated somewhat when various women came out of the woodwork to ask if they might sell the properties they co-owned with Nancy. (Dick Laurie remembers at least two such women.) By the time of her death, it seems, Nancy had a small portfolio of secret love nests. The question of who would look after Tom, however, was more vexed. No one in the family offered to keep him, perhaps because no one knew exactly whose responsibility he was. It had taken Nancy’s death for her sister Liz to discover she was an aunt.

  In the end, it was agreed that Tom’s headteacher and his wife would give him a home, ‘and that was rather uneasy because his [the headteacher’s] rages used to go on and on’.

  Did he know, yet, that Nancy was his mother? No. This was something he wouldn’t find out until he was nineteen, when a trustee of the estate suddenly corrected his ‘misapprehension’ that Joan was his mother. But Nick knew. In the days after the crash Dick told him, thinking the truth had better emerge sooner than later. How did he react? With deadly silence at first. He was hurt that Nancy and Joan hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him. Then things began to make sense. Only much later – many years later – did anger set in.

  For Tom, it was something of a relief to find out that Nancy was his mother rather than Joan. Like Nick, it was Nancy he had loved the most, and her loss he felt most keenly. Both boys had been rather afraid of Joan. But who was his father? Someone – Dick, perhaps – advised him to go and see Nancy’s doctor, Nelly Newman, and it was Newman who sent him in the right direction. He had no name, but he was certain that the man in question had been married to Nancy’s friend Margery Allingham. Tom looked up Allingham in Who’s Who, where he read that the detective novelist had been married to a man called Pip Youngman Carter. He rang Nelly back. Was this the right name? Yes, came the reply. Carter had died in 1969, three years after Allingham. Soon after this Tom changed his name from Seyler to Carter.

  Oh, the layers of misery that are here. Allingham had always longed for children. Her husband, however, had always refused to give them to her, and though there is no evidence that either one of them knew of Tom’s existence you can’t help but wonder how she would have felt had she ever been made aware of the truth.* The pain of it. An ache that would only have been made worse by the fact that her friend had carried out the deception with such astonishing sangfroid. In 1954, when Tom was only two years old, Nancy breezily interviewed Allingham for Woman’s Hour. Two years later Allingham made it to the pages of Why I’m Not a Millionaire. ‘Marge sees everything in gigantic terms,’ Nancy wrote. ‘Life, parties, dinner, conversation, literature. That’s why she, too, is on such a grand scale, mentally and physically. When I first met her, I was knocked down by the weight of her thought, the living profusion of her ideas, the glory of her language.’ Marge! It’s tempting to see this as brazen, or even cruel, but more likely it was simply the result of Nancy’s willed absent-mindedness. By 1956 it’s quite possible that she would only have been able to remember the name of the father of her child if you had put a gun to her head.

  As for Tom, his life was not easy. After university he had a series of breakdowns and spent the rest of his life struggling with mental illness. He died in 2012, in the bathroom of the
psychiatric wing of Yeovil District Hospital.

  And Sheila? She had now been running the Windmill alone for four years. In that time it had made a profit only once. In the early summer of 1964 she took the painful decision to close it. Revudeville had by then run for longer than any show on earth, at some sixty thousand performances; though the theatre had only 320 seats, more than ten million people had seen it. Nonetheless, the moment had come. When the news broke Fleet Street descended, and Panorama too. Among the letters of condolence was one from the Lord Chancellor’s office. It was the end of an era.

  The final show took place at 10 p.m. on 31 October 1964. Both companies gave her presents: a table lighter from A company, a gold windmill charm for her bracelet from B company. Among those who attended the final show were Dick Emery and Harry Secombe. Bruce Forsyth, another Windmill alumnus, sent a telegram: ‘DO WISH I COULD BE WITH YOU AS I AM SO GRATEFUL TO THE MILL FOR SO MANY THINGS STOP GIVE EVERYONE MY FONDEST LOVE LITTLE ME – BRUCE’. Afterwards, Sheila had five hundred bottles of champagne waiting for her guests. ‘I was determined that this last night should not be a wake, and that we would go out with our heads held high.’ The curtain, she decided, would not come down that evening. ‘The curtain never came down.’ The party went on for hours. When she slipped out, at a quarter past two in the morning, she was the first to go.

  Sheila went to live with her sister Nona in deepest Sussex, where they had bought a small farm and stables. She took comfort from a letter she received from a spiritualist, who told her that Jonnie and Nancy were with her father, and that they were fine. She believed in the afterlife. But the crash, the loss of Joan and Nancy, had changed her. In the years following she had a nervous breakdown, suffered from a depression bad enough to be treated with electro-convulsive therapy, and grew reclusive. She would see members of her own family: her mother, sister and nieces. But people from the old life were reminders of all that she had lost, and she would always put them off.

  She died of cancer at the London Clinic on 23 August 1987, an illness she kept from her family until two days before her death. There was no funeral.

  Sheila didn’t want a fuss.

  A Monumental Ambition

  Alison Smithson, architect

  (© National Portrait Gallery, London.)

  Alison working at the Solar Pavilion, otherwise known as Upper Lawn

  (The Smithson Family Collection.)

  ‘Mies is great, but Corb communicates’

  It’s not hard to find a good photograph of Alison Smithson. She was a striking woman who knew precisely how she wanted to present herself to the world; the camera loved her Russian-doll face and avant-garde clothes. But the picture that perhaps captures her best was taken in 1964, by which time she was the most well known and controversial female architect in Britain. Not that there was much competition. In 1964 you could count the number of women architects who’d had even one major project built on the fingers of your right hand. Alison Smithson, however, could already put her name to two.*

  The photograph was taken at the Solar Pavilion (otherwise known as Upper Lawn), which was where Alison and her husband Peter spent their weekends. The Pavilion was little more than a cube – a ‘camping box’, they liked to call it, for they thought of it as a kind of permanent tent – built on the site of a labourer’s cottage on the Fonthill Estate in Tisbury, Wiltshire. It consisted of two rooms on two floors, connected by a steep wooden ladder. Downstairs was the kitchen, if that is the right word: the house had no fridge, and cooking was done on a rudimentary stove powered by bottled gas. Upstairs were the sleeping quarters, though there were no beds: the Smithsons slept on mats, which were rolled up during the day. It was often cold – the Pavilion had no central heating, and only one fireplace – and it was always uncomfortable, there being neither armchairs nor sofa (Peter Smithson despised the sofa as a symbol of all that he and Alison wished to change about the world; unlike a good chair, which, done right, could be classed as architecture, a sofa was always just a soggy, bourgeois mess). But the almost 360-degree views were exhilarating, the changing seasons as integral to the building’s design as its flat roof, its lean wooden beams and its zinc cladding.

  It is high summer. Alison is sitting at a rickety table on the Pavilion’s terrace, her face in shade, her back warmed by the sun. She is wearing dark glasses and a striped jumpsuit; she looks Left Bank-ish and cool. Her self-conscious style, though, is at odds with her pose, which is utterly unselfconscious: oblivious, transported, sealed off. If she is aware that someone is taking her picture she gives no outward sign of it. One hand supports her chin, the other clutches a pen; she is gazing down at a sheaf of papers. You might take her for a student: selectively deaf, self-absorbed, a long vacation stretching ahead of her.

  But in 1964, Alison was thirty-six years old. Look closer. Over her right shoulder a small boy can be seen, climbing on a wall. And what’s this? On the floor beside the table is an oblong box with long handles, and now it comes to you: this isn’t a box at all, but a bassinet, and of a kind only big enough to contain a tiny baby. Alison is working – and by the look of her working quite hard – while one of her children plays and another sleeps (and there was a third child, somewhere off camera). Suddenly her modishness seems almost incidental, her clothes rather less modern than her conviction that work was as important to her as it was to any man. Some women, trying to wrestle papers over the course of a hot weekend, would find themselves distracted by their children. Here things have been turned on their head. Work is the distraction; it’s her drawings that lasso her attention.*

  Even in the Sixties Alison never described herself as a feminist; she had, perhaps, ploughed too lonely a furrow for too long to join that particular club. The building with which she had made her name – a ruthlessly spare secondary school, built of steel and glass, in the seaside town of Hunstanton in Norfolk – had been completed a full decade earlier, in 1954. But still, her example was plain for all to see. She was a mother and she was a famous architect. How, you might ask, did she do both, and without even employing the services of a nanny? For Alison, a Calvinist creature who disliked fuss, this wasn’t complicated. Mostly it came down to the fact that she simply could not abide waste. The hours were there to be snatched, to be made use of like the crab-apples she turned into jelly, the mattress ticking she made into dresses. The two things – work and home – were also intimately connected. Designing a space wasn’t the only job of an architect. A more interesting question was, how might the space be inhabited? A sleeping baby was both an excuse to start sketching and a means of tethering her immaculate, improbable drawings to her lodestar, the idea of home.

  At the Solar Pavilion the idea of home could be elusive – or that was how it felt to visitors, told they would be spending the night in a sleeping bag on the floor. Its clattery emptiness provided a bracing slap, not a warm embrace. In London, though, where the Smithsons lived in Cato Lodge, a tall Kensington villa built in 1851, visitors saw a different side of them: a collection of teapots, a battered Persian rug, a couple of Eames chairs covered wittily in chintz. The ground-floor studio, where the Smithsons worked together, their drawing boards barely a foot apart, had a crowded mantelpiece on which sat a bust of their early hero, Mies van der Rohe, the great German-American architect,* a fez pulled comically over his head. And close by, cast in plaster of Paris, two more unlikely sources of inspiration: Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny.

  Was this a private joke? No. Alison was deadly serious when it came to Beatrix Potter. In Potter’s world, objects and utensils hang on hooks and nails, and they are all the decoration her spaces need. The bare necessities are raised to a kind of poetry, just as they had been by Alvar Aalto,† Le Corbusier and the other guiding spirits of the modern movement. To Alison, the home Potter created for Mrs Tittlemouse was not so very different from the house Corb designed for Mr Shodhan in Ahmedabad.‡ Both were tailored to the individual needs of their inhabitants; both used materials ‘as found’;
both spoke eloquently of the ‘simple life, well done’.

  In low moments – and she would have more than a few of these in the course of her career – Alison would gaze at Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, and despair at the short-sightedness of those who seemed to have made it their business never to give planning permission to a Smithson design. It was a source of disappointment to her that a man who would no doubt have smiled indulgently at the frontispiece of The Tale of Two Bad Mice or The Tailor of Gloucester would only curl his lip at a scheme for a new apartment building. ‘It would still be a brave architect who would submit a white house to a County Planning Authority,’ she wrote in the magazine Architectural Design in 1967. ‘Even though it was suspected that the officers and the lay committee in question had read Jemima Puddleduck.’ She never quite shook off the habit of being amazed by this collective failure of imagination (the cottage outside which Jemima Puddleduck waddles is white, as I’m sure you know). On a good day, bolstered by her innate self-belief, Alison could brush it off, even laugh at it. But on a bad day, when the books were bare and bills demanded to be paid, it made her feel misunderstood and, sometimes, just a little lonely.

  ‘A camping box’: the Solar Pavilion, otherwise known as Upper Lawn

  (The Smithson Family Collection.)

  Alison Smithson grew up in South Shields, where her father, Ernest Gill, was the principal of the School of Art. No one seems to know why she wanted to be an architect – it wasn’t an ordinary kind of ambition, not even for the only child of a draughtsman so accomplished as Ernest – but no doubt the war played its part. Made vulnerable by its shipyards, South Shields was continually under attack. The worst air raids took place in October 1941 and involved some fifty bombers (the teenage Alison could identify planes the way other people could identify butterflies); sixty-eight people were killed and two thousand lost their homes. Many of the Gills’ neighbours, meanwhile, were in the merchant navy. ‘My parents could count the chimneys of twelve houses where captains or chief engineers had gone down with their ships,’ Alison wrote in an unpublished memoir. When the bombings were at their height she was evacuated, albeit briefly, to Edinburgh, the home of her grandparents. It isn’t difficult to see how the contrasting cityscapes of South Shields and Edinburgh – the piles of rubble and the mighty Mound, the yawning craters and the ordered New Town – might have worked on the imagination of a restless and precociously clever teenage girl. But whatever her motivation, she was nothing if not determined, taking up her place at the King’s College School of Architecture at the University of Durham in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1944, when she was just sixteen. (The war, of course, may also have spurred her on to apply to university early: the fear was that when the men came back from the fighting there might be rather fewer places available to women undergraduates.) She arrived at university, moreover, fully formed: preternaturally self-possessed and with a look that was all her own. Unlike most undergraduates, who were in old knits, tweed and ugly Utility clothing, she favoured – who knows how she came by these things – flowing chiffon, printed silks and Liberty prints. ‘It was obvious she was interesting,’ remembers a contemporary. And Alison’s outward exuberance was matched by an inward energy. In classes she expressed her views forcibly. Her sketches, though deft, were only just the right side of fanciful.

 

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