Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  In 1956 Margery was sixty-four years old. She had begun her first job before women had the vote. Only now, in late middle age, was she approaching fulfilment. In the weeks after We Made a Garden appeared in Britain’s bookshops something remarkable happened: a future suddenly opened out before her – and to her astonishment and clear delight, it was more expansive even than her husband’s precious lawn.

  Margery Fish was born in 1892 at Stamford Hill, London, the second of the four daughters of Florence Buttfield and Ernest Townshend, who made his living as a tea broker. Hers was a conventional, middle-class childhood – Florence was rather straitlaced, and Ernest was the first of a series of difficult men in Margery’s life – but the Townshend girls were known both for their cleverness and for their liveliness: at the Friends’ School in Saffron Walden, they did well academically, and the three eldest all served as head girl.

  Margery with her mother and two sisters

  (Sir Henry and Lady Boyd-Carpenter.)

  Her schooling over, Margery decided that she would attend secretarial college. This was controversial – she had to battle Ernest for his permission, but she had a helpful precedent in the form of her older sister, Dora, who was already working for a goldsmith in Hatton Garden. The college Margery chose was Clark’s in Chancery Lane, which advertised itself as an establishment that would prepare its students for the civil service, ‘the professions and business’, and she did predictably well; she left in the summer of 1911 with a glowing reference. ‘It is a pleasure to recommend Miss Margery Townshend to any employer who requires a sensible, well-educated and smart citizen,’ read this prophetic document. ‘She has a wonderful capacity for work; she applies herself diligently and zealously to everything she takes up. She has a good command of English which makes her a good correspondent. It rarely falls to my lot to recommend so excellent a student and one who has reached such a high mark in all the subjects of our curriculum. I am certain of her success.’

  But not for Margery the quiet rhythms of a suburban solicitor’s office. Instead, she made a beeline for Fleet Street where, after a short stint as secretary to the editor at the Country Gentleman’s Publishing Company, she joined the Daily Mail. For a girl from Stamford Hill – then an affluent, Pooterish sort of place – this must have been a revelation: the noise, the dirt, the pace; all those men shouting. But if she was shocked she didn’t show it. As usual, she simply got on with the job – she was secretary to the advertisement manager – and it wasn’t long before her smooth efficiency was recognised: within months she was promoted to the office of Tommy Marlowe, who had been the Mail’s editor since 1899.

  The Mail, ‘the busy man’s paper’, had been founded in 1896 by Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, and it was by 1911 Britain’s biggest-selling daily. Northcliffe – aka the Chief – was a bona fide newspaper genius, but he was also vain (he liked to style himself ‘N’, the better to signify his position as the Napoleon of Fleet Street), temperamental and fearsomely energetic: when he took up golf on doctor’s orders in 1910 he made 284 drives from a single tee before collapsing of exhaustion. He had edited the Mail himself in the early years, and in 1912 he was still apt to interfere, sending memos to his editor and other staff at least once a day. As a result the atmosphere on the paper was oppressive: people never smiled, and only rarely did they manage to leave their desks to eat, ‘gobbling up’ their supper when and where they could. Marlowe and Northcliffe seem to have had a particularly sticky relationship. On the morning that Britain entered the war in 1914, they had a row so violent their staff ‘wanted nothing less than to fall through the floor to escape seeing any more’.

  What Margery made of all this is not recorded, though it’s possible that he was much kinder to her. Female staff were generally devoted to the Chief: Northcliffe, if not exactly a feminist, had realised early on how important it was for newspapers to appeal to women readers, and he was genuinely anxious to hear their opinions. When he launched the Daily Mirror in 1903 it was as a newspaper for women, by women. ‘I intend it to be really a mirror of feminine life as well on its grave as on its lighter sides,’ he said. (Sadly, this plan was not a success.) He paid his girls unusually well, handed out bonuses at holiday time and would often give them gifts too: when his private secretary, Louise Owen, complained that her watch was not keeping time he unhooked his gold repeater from its chain and handed it to her. But whatever the tenor of their relationship, he certainly noticed Margery. In 1917, when he agreed to Lloyd George’s request that he head a British Mission to the United States, he asked if she would be part of his team there.*

  Margery’s passport

  (Sir Henry and Lady Boyd-Carpenter.)

  Playing deck quoits

  (Sir Henry and Lady Boyd-Carpenter.)

  Margery agreed to go straight away. For all that she knew that the Atlantic crossing would be extremely dangerous, that there was every chance their ship would be hit by a torpedo from a U-boat,* she wanted to have an adventure and she had Buttfield relations in America whom she longed to meet. Doubtless it was also made clear to her that she would be well looked after. According to the journalist Hamilton Fyfe, a Northcliffe employee and one of his earliest biographers, the Chief was extremely solicitous of the secretaries and stenographers who made the trip. ‘For their comfort he was as careful as for his own,’ he wrote. ‘He gave the girls grants of money to buy suitable clothes for the hot weather in New York. He took trouble to find out how they were boarded and lodged. He arranged little jaunts and excursions for them. One of them said to him, “You are like a fairy uncle to us, Lord Northcliffe.” He beamed and answered: “Well, my dear, I’ve brought you a long way from your home. The least I can do is to see that you get a little enjoyment.’

  Nevertheless, Margery’s time in the US can’t have been easy. She adored America – this would be the first of several visits – and she enjoyed meeting her relations, but her new boss was under pressure and it showed. The British ambassador to the US, Cecil Spring-Rice, his nose out of joint, had proved obstructive, failing even to arrange for an embassy representative to meet Northcliffe when his ship docked. Northcliffe’s staff were all watched; his mail was pilfered and his car followed; his schedule – he found himself criss-crossing America at the height of summer – was exhausting even for a man of his energies. He began to unravel. At his home near Broadstairs for a short rest by the sea, he startled Hamilton Fyfe by picking up a heavy stick and striking a seagull. Having stunned the bird, he then proceeded to beat it to death in front of his colleague’s ‘disbelieving’ eyes. His health was failing physically, too. It was at about this time that Northcliffe began writing his ‘throat diary’, a journal in which he carefully recorded every coughing fit, and the number of times a day that he brought up phlegm.

  The war over, Margery returned to Britain, where she was awarded the MBE for her service overseas. It isn’t clear what precisely she did next, but in May 1921 Northcliffe wrote to her, asking her to come and see him; word had clearly reached him that she was looking for a new position. ‘I am sorry to hear that you are unhappy in Liverpool,’ said his note. ‘I have been there for nearly a week and had I known you were there, I would have seen you. It is difficult to find appointments just now, but yours is an exceptional case. You crossed the Atlantic when the submarines were at their worst and I have always given special treatment to those of my staff who took the risk. I will do my utmost.’ Soon after this she was appointed personal assistant to the Daily Mail’s new editor, Walter Fish.

  Fish, who came from a newspaper background (his father had been a reporter on the Preston Herald), had joined the Mail in 1904 and served as its news editor between 1906 and 1919. A Northcliffe discovery – the paper’s proprietor referred to him as ‘the man with Brixton mind’, which was just about the greatest compliment he could pay an employee – Fish was an instinctive and wily newspaperman. It was thanks to his contacts that Daily Mail readers were the first to read of Dr Crippen’s capture during
his attempted escape to Canada in 1910; and it was Fish, too, who had spotted the potential of a small story about what the Connaught Rangers were singing as they marched to war in 1914 and put the piece on the front page of the paper, with the result that the music-hall song ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ soon became the unofficial anthem of the British Expeditionary Force. But his relationship with Northcliffe was even stormier than Marlowe’s had been. In 1922 things got so bad that he started libel proceedings against Northcliffe.* There was also, according to Margery’s nephew, a falling out when Fish took exception to a comment Northcliffe made about the way ‘Miss Townshend’s breasts’ looked in a rather daring dress. His colleagues believed that he never really understood Northcliffe.

  In the tradition of Mail editors, Fish was a difficult boss. Dapper and precise, he was a stickler for correct dress and he expected his subordinates to work as hard he did, which was very hard indeed; his memory was prodigious, which meant that he was always catching people out. Margery, however, must have got along just fine with him because when he retired in 1930 she sent him a note in which she offered to continue helping him with his letters. ‘My dear Miss Townshend,’ he wrote back, ‘I was more pleased than I can say to receive your letter. It has always been a very great pleasure to work with you, and I shall miss our happy association very much indeed. But I am looking forward to seeing you frequently as I shall come to the office fairly often. It is very nice of you to offer to help me with my correspondence, but that does not surprise me as I have always found you the most willing girl in the world. Ever yours, sincerely, Walter Fish.’

  It seems clear that at this point his relationship with Margery was barely flirtatious, let alone romantic. Then, suddenly, everything changed. Three months later Walter wrote to Margery again, and this time his note was warmer: ‘Although we have seen each other for years it is strange how little time we have ever had to talk,’ he said. ‘That is why it was so jolly to be able to talk to you the other evening apart from business concerns.’ I do not know if this letter marks the beginning of their romance; Walter’s wife, Nellie, the mother of his two grown-up daughters, Muriel and Frieda,* did not die until 1932. But two years later, on 2 March 1933, Walter and Margery were married at Marylebone Register Office. Margery, at forty-one an extremely handsome, sensual-looking woman with heavy-lidded eyes, wore a fur coat and carried a dainty clutch; Walter, a veritable parody of a Fleet Street editor, wore a bowler hat and spats. At their wedding breakfast, which was held at the Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair, guests were served caviar or oysters, fillet of sole ‘Galieni’, supreme de volaille Maryland, pêche pompadour and patisseries, all of which was washed down with Pol Roger 1921. In the photographs they appear happy, but somehow organised too, as if the wedding were just another professional engagement.

  Wedding day: 2 March 1933

  (Sir Henry and Lady Boyd-Carpenter.)

  Was this a love match? Not exactly. Margery was certainly fond of Walter, but she was also impressed by him; something in her enjoyed being dominated, at least at first. And she loved the life he was able to give her. They bought a smart new mansion flat in Kensington, with a porter and lifts and polished wooden floors, and when Walter wasn’t working – he remained on the board of Associated Newspapers, and would be made an honorary advisor to the Ministry of Information with the outbreak of the Second World War – they gave themselves up to their hobbies and to their diaries, which bulged so very pleasingly. They played a great deal of golf. They motored across Europe – they had a (possibly slightly alarming) passion for Germany. They entertained. They went to the theatre and the opera. Walter was well connected, and Margery had a thirst for novelty and intellectual companionship; in this sense, he suited her perfectly.

  They thought of themselves as city people, and doubtless this is what they would have remained for the rest of their marriage had it not been for the threat of war. By 1937, however, Walter was growing increasingly anxious that they find themselves a country home: although he had remained in London throughout the last war, nobly battling the censor on behalf of the Mail’s readers, he thought the city would be badly bombed this time. They would hang on to their flat in town, of course: he knew Margery couldn’t imagine life without Foyles bookshop in Charing Cross Road, in which she could spend hours at a time. (She loved reading, and would one day introduce her adored nephew Henry to Zola and D. H. Lawrence; he remembers that the copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover she gave him was ‘well-thumbed’.) But it would be sensible to begin the search now, before it was too late. Margery took this plan in her stride, receiving her marital orders with her usual calmness and efficiency. It would, though, be a mistake to think she was secretly hankering for open spaces, or even for a garden; two of her sisters had recently taken up gardening and had tried in vain to interest her in their new hobby. Asked to choose between gardening and golf, Margery would choose golf every time.

  She must have been surprised, then, when she glimpsed the shivering leaves of a variegated sycamore through the open door of a house she and Walter saw at East Lambrook – and found that they lodged in her brain. (Not, of course, that the building itself had much to recommend it: on the occasion of their first visit, the roof was patched with corrugated iron, the front garden was a jungle of rusty laurels and the interior smelt musty and dank.) But surprised or not, this garden – or the idea of this garden – somehow wheedled its way into her affections, where it remained, illicit and unspoken, until they returned three months later. This time – I don’t believe for a minute their second visit was the result of a ‘whim’ – she was ready. Margery, one gathers, was an expert strategist. The thing to do was to coax Walter upstairs where (this is how I picture it) she would throw open a mullioned window and casually offer him the view.

  Done! She and Walter got the house for a thousand pounds and spent the next two years travelling back and forth from London while builders set about making it habitable. (The Old Manor, which dates from the fifteenth century, had been a bakery, a post office, and a slaughterhouse; it was uninhabited when the Fishes bought it.) Margery was quietly thrilled. She knew exactly how she wanted to decorate it once it was ready: ‘Colours in an old house have to be soft and mellow, no bright blues and hard dark greens, and reds should be faded to the colour of old brick. The only green I use is as light and silvery as the moss that grows under the beech trees.’ And with every journey west she fell further in love with Somerset – a county which, though not so spectacular as some, she thought of as ‘smiling’ and unspoilt: ‘Willows are everywhere. Their fluttering leaves are cool in summer and in winter the shoots from the pollarded heads take on a tinge of red. Corot could have painted his pictures here, for the whole scene is one of tender loveliness, with softly luminous skies against blue mists in the distance.’

  The Fishes moved into the manor in the summer of 1939, and we already know what happened next: having quickly furnished the house with saleroom bargains, our novice gardeners embarked on remodelling the two acres of land that came with it. Margery and Walter were in firm agreement on some matters. Both believed, for instance, that the garden should be as much a part of the house as possible, and made an early decision to pave the area between the lawn and the door leading into their hall, the main room in the house; when the door was open this space would then merge with the flagstones indoors (they were ahead of their time in wanting ‘to bring the outside in’). They also needed its design to be manageable, given that they would still be spending a lot of time in London. They did not realise at this point what a gardening fanatic Margery would become, and a spirit of compromise prevailed at first. But still, the difference in their tastes – a schism neither one of them had expected – soon became apparent, and had it not been both for Margery’s supreme diplomacy and for petrol rationing, which limited their trips to nurseries and other gardens, and thus restricted what was available to them to plant, they might have found themselves in a state of open warfare.

  There was
also the matter of Walter’s increasingly poor health. By 1945 he was suffering from high blood pressure and able to perform only the lightest of tasks in the garden. In a way this made life a little easier: when he was resting, Margery was able to garden in peace. But he was a difficult invalid, and more crotchety than ever. How to keep him occupied? She was grateful to old Fleet Street friends who made the journey to see him, though it must have been humiliating for him when he was too unwell to get up. ‘I remember that . . . he would thump on the bedroom floor three times, and that would produce Margery with a round of gin and French,’ recalled Wilson Stephen, the editor of the Field. In the mornings she had to take his toast up to him piece by piece to ensure each one would arrive fully warm. She felt relieved when the newspapers arrived; even in Somerset he still had every paper delivered every day. ‘He would read them from cover to cover, criticising and discussing as he went,’ she said. ‘I used to dread bank holidays when there were no papers, for I knew the lack would make Walter irritable. Newspapers were a lifeline to him.’

  She would escape completely whenever she could. In 1943 Lanning Roper, who would later become famous as the designer of Prince Charles’s garden at Highgrove and of the woodland walk at Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois, had turned up at her door in the uniform of the US navy, clutching a letter of introduction from Bruce Buttfield, one of her American cousins. Margery took to him immediately, and thereafter Roper spent all his leaves at East Lambrook, during which, petrol allowing, they would go off to see local gardens such as Barrington Court and Montacute House. She was also friendly with two other well-known local gardeners. Violet Clive was a disciple of Gertrude Jekyll who lived at Brympton d’Evercy, an estate described by Country Life as ‘the most incomparable house in Britain’. An eccentric in the grand manner, she wore voluminous black frocks and a huge hat that she skewered to her hair with a large diamond brooch. Visitors sometimes mistook her for a vagrant. Phyllis Reiss lived at Tintinhull, whose garden, with its exquisite compartments and its tranquil mood, Margery admired above all others, for all that their styles were so very different. ‘I always felt that Phyllis gardened like a man,’ recalled Margery. ‘She had the much more direct approach of a man, and less of the sentiment which seems to hamper many women . . . Though she preferred to call herself “the Groupist”, and me, “the Plantist”.’ Both Clive and Reiss were her companions on regular plant-hunting trips. If Clive was her companion for the day the women would travel by chauffeur-driven car; otherwise, Margery would take her huge Standard Vanguard out for a run. She was a rotten driver, and an exceedingly fast one.