Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Harlow water gardens

  (Henry Snoek/RIBA Library Photographs Collection.)

  Like Margery, Colvin and Crowe looked to the past for inspiration for the future. But in their case it was to the open, sweeping style of Capability Brown rather than the thronged charm of the cottage garden; the idea was to combine nature with the freedom and calm afforded by twentieth-century abstraction. Their hallmarks were smooth vistas of bare grass, delicate glades of trees and an intuitive feeling for shape; when it came to large-scale projects they disliked ‘small, scattered spaces’ squeezed in willy-nilly – such miserly pockets of green were more dead than alive. ‘No one uses the odd grass corner,’ said Crowe. ‘Except to throw bus tickets on it; no one wants to sit midway between a bus route and a terrace of houses.’

  At Harlow, Crowe was determined to make the most of the understated Essex landscape; her design kept the existing streams and trees of its shallow valleys and she linked areas of housing using old lanes that were turned into cycle tracks. The town park was planned with no hard boundaries cutting it off from the town centre, which itself featured a terraced water garden and, eventually, a fine collection of modern sculpture (Moore, Hepworth, Frink). At East Kilbride Colvin’s task was more difficult: the site was bleaker and more windswept than Harlow and she had to work on a massive scale, creating ‘a continuous forest belt round the south and west of the built-up area’. Ultimately, she would resign before her job was complete, feeling that the project’s general manager was interfering too much. But her trees framed the town beautifully, and her decision to take footpaths off the side of the main roads, putting them above cuttings or below embankments instead, was both forward-thinking and successful. Most are still in use today.

  At home in Somerset, Margery must have read about the New Towns and their development in the newspapers. It seems unlikely that they were her cup of tea – it was city or country for her, not the burgeoning subtopia* between – but she would doubtless have been reassured by the fact that it was Crowe and Colvin who were responsible for the landscaping of these slightly forlorn new Jerusalems. She had met Crowe, a friend of Phyllis Reiss, and she certainly knew of Colvin, some of whose post-war gardens for private clients could be seen in the new wave of gardening books (for instance, Modern Gardens by Peter Shepheard, which was published in 1953). In particular Margery would have been aware of Colvin’s recent ‘alterations’ to Norah Lindsay’s garden at the Manor House at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, a gorgeous creation whose influence may be seen today at both Sissinghurst and Hidcote. Margery knew Sutton Courtenay well: Lindsay’s plant-hunter daughter Nancy, who lived in a cottage near by, was among her ever-growing band of gardening correspondents.

  The garden at Sutton Courtenay was similar in spirit to Margery’s – a place of ‘thoughtless abundance’ with ‘an air of spontaneity in the planting, as if the flowers and the trees had chosen their own positions and, like the house, been overlooked by the rushing tide of men’. But its new owner, the newspaper proprietor David Astor, wanted something that was easier to maintain, especially now its presiding genius (Norah) was no longer there to enforce her vision. Colvin’s response was a series of lawns and winding paths; objets trouvés, sculpture and the few fine old yews that had survived Lindsay’s passing provided further focal points. It was, however, a project that she would work on for some two decades, and it tells you everything you need to know about Colvin’s sensibility that when the cooling towers of Didcot Power Station – another of Frederick Gibberd’s projects – rose in the sky in the late Sixties she refused to screen them from the house with a new planting of trees. They were, she felt, a part of the landscape and could not simply be ignored: ‘Our power stations, oil refineries, factories and water works must take their place, in time, with the pyramids, castles and temples of the past.’*

  I suspect that Margery would have agreed with the passer-by who told Colvin’s assistant that his boss had made Norah Lindsay’s lovely, old garden ‘look like a public park’; she would have mourned the loss of its dreamy, absent-minded maturity. But she would also have understood that things move on. After all, wasn’t that the story of East Lambrook? And as it happened, things there were about to change again. Her career as a journalist now firmly established, Margery daringly began work on We Made a Garden. How did this feel? Writing such a book wasn’t a betrayal, exactly, but it was certainly an act of domestic insurrection, albeit a postdated one – and she must have worried, just a little, about how it would be received (our own, more confessional age takes memoir in its stride). Once it was done, though, and she saw how well the book was received, there was no stopping her. For wasn’t this the great advantage of having dispatched one’s most-tricky-to-write volume first? Whatever followed would be easy in comparison. Over the course of the next thirteen years she would write another seven books, perhaps the best of which – it is widely considered a classic – is Gardening in the Shade. To the infuriation of her neighbours Margery wrote to loud music: Wagner, preferably.* He urged her on. There was, after all, an awful lot that she needed to get down. In 1990 some poor fool made a database of every plant she ever mentioned in print: it comprised some 6500 names, including over two hundred single-snowdrop varieties.

  Then there was the garden itself. Increasingly in demand as a lecturer – friends remember that she had a clear, low voice, one she was well able ‘to chuck across a room’ – and with so much writing to do, Margery finally took on some proper help. She also decided to open a nursery. Any money she made could go towards the salaries of her new staff – though this wasn’t its main purpose; the truth was that only by propagating plants in an organised way would she be able to replace all those she gave away. The garden, in its pomp, was now open to visitors one afternoon a week (the money went to the Red Cross, one of the many good causes with which Margery was involved locally). Coach parties would book themselves in and – so long as they weren’t late – Margery would go to the gate to meet them, offering herself up as tour guide. Those she thought truly interested – she liked young, male horticultural students the best – would inevitably go home with an armful of cuttings. It was a compulsion; she just couldn’t resist.

  Margery working near her beloved ‘pudding trees’ in the garden at East Lambrook

  (© Valerie Finnis/National Portrait Gallery, London.)

  Slowly, her team grew. And yet having these young men and women about the place did nothing to change her own routine. When she was at home she was in the garden, whatever the weather. In summer she wore a cotton dress, the edge of her petticoat trailing below it. In winter, a faded corduroy skirt, its hem drooping at the rear, with a matching jacket, a tweed hat perched on her grey hair, her legs encased in thick lisle stockings (sometimes these didn’t match, though no one ever had the courage to tell her so). On her feet, which were big, were her ancient clogs. If it was raining she simply pulled on a long mackintosh. Her days were as full as ever; once it was dark she would return to her desk, where she would remain, head bowed, until one or two o’clock in the morning. Her staff sometimes found her abrupt, and she could be a slave driver; there is a story that one gardener resigned after developing frostbite. But she also knew, in most cases, just how far she could go. When she sensed people were fed up she would turn on the charm, telling her staff how wonderful they were, how appreciated. At bottom, she was warm-hearted. The only thing that truly made her snort was the word ‘ladies’. To Margery, women were only ever women.

  Life ticked on. In 1963 the RHS awarded her a silver Veitch Memorial Medal in recognition of her work. She began to make regular appearances on the radio. She continued with her various columns. Gardeners, though, have a more than usually keen sense of time passing, and while this is an essential part of the pleasure their plots bring them, nature’s metronome is unrelenting. Groundsel waits for no one. As she grew older and her health became less robust, Margery was increasingly crotchety; there was so much that she wanted to do. This is not to sa
y she was ever depressed. She was – here’s another trait common to gardeners – an exceptionally content person, and right until the end she always had the energy for a fight. When the celebrated Christopher Lloyd of Great Dixter – The Mixed Border was published a year after We Made a Garden – came to stay, bringing with him both his irascible dachshunds and his famously autocratic manner, she always gave as good as she got. Why should he have the last word?

  Margery’s final illness lasted only a week. She died in 1969, at South Petherton Hospital in Somerset, at the age of seventy-seven. When her extended family heard her obituary on the radio they were agog. They had never taken her gardening seriously – and she, alas, had never troubled to put them right.

  Margery lives on in the plants she loved. Artemisia absinthium ‘Lambrook Silver’, a fernlike wormwood, remains a popular variety of one of her favourite silver plants, and she made a special selection of another cherished cultivar, Euphorbia characias ssp.wulfenii ‘Lambrook Gold’. Santonlina chamaecyparissus ‘Lambrook Silver’, an exceptionally pretty cotton lavender, and Polemonium ‘Lambrook Mauve’, delicate as a butterfly’s wings, were also introduced by her. Since her death varieties of penstemon, bergenia, dicentra, hebe and hemerocallis have all been named after her. She is also credited with having given the astrantia ‘Shaggy’ its delightfully appropriate name.

  Her influence lives on, too, in gardens everywhere. Visitors sigh at Sissinghurst, Hidcote and the rest, but they know they cannot ever hope to compete, as you may tell from the consoling way they attack their slices of lemon drizzle cake in the café afterwards. They owe what they do in their own back yards – assuming they’re not going the banana-plant route, or importing spindly olive trees in the misguided hope that they will look out of their windows and see Tuscany rather than South London – not to Vita Sackville-West and Lawrence Johnston, but to the altogether less well-known Margery Fish. What a bountiful legacy she left them. Hardy geraniums? It was her who made them fashionable (though she preferred the old name, cranesbill). Hostas and bergenias?* Ditto. Jacob’s ladder? Same again.

  As for her own garden, it’s still there.

  When Margery died she left East Lambrook to her nephew Henry Boyd-Carpenter; he installed his parents as his tenants and they looked after it until the house was sold in 1985. Since then, it has had three different sets of owners. In 1992 the garden was listed at Grade I by English Heritage, which is good news in the sense that no one will ever be able to build a bungalow on it. Quite what else this status involves, however, is moot. Will every owner for the next hundred years be under an obligation to grow an avenue of chamacyparis lawsonia fletcheri on Margery’s terraces?† I don’t know. A garden, as some of us sometimes want to shout at our more fussy neighbours, is in a constant state of flux. And so it should be. If it were ever to stop changing it wouldn’t be a garden at all.

  I went to see East Lambrook Manor one cold, bright morning in March. There is a tea room in the malthouse now, and a too-big car park over the road, its expanse of tarmac as black and as shiny as liquorice. The latest owners, who arrived in 2008 and are extremely welcoming, have big plans, but perhaps they are also just a little overwhelmed by the scale of what they have taken on. The garden’s restoration, which began about a decade ago, still has a way to go.

  All the same, it is an enchanting place: so much more restful than those gardens that have been manicured to within an inch of their lives by massed ranks of National Trust professionals. Its beauty is quotidian, and therein lies its charm. There are weeds. There is disorder. It asks for your attention. Even for such a desultory gardener as me, the temptation to fall to my knees and work for an hour or two is powerfully strong.

  East Lambrook Manor, veiled in shades of mauve; in Walter’s day, wisteria was strictly forbidden

  (Margery Fish Archive/RHS, Lindley Library.)

  My first visit, but I knew my way around. I could have done it blindfold; thanks to Margery, it was all mapped out in my head. First the Lido, low and mossy. Then the Colosseum, whose bathetic scale made me smile. The woodland garden felt, that particular morning, as if it was on tenterhooks, the annual arrival of a delicate flurry of scillas suddenly imminent. Finally, I went in search of Margery’s first long border. It’s still there, that hard-won husbandly concession with which, in the end, she was never quite able to fall completely in love. The euphorbias were already well on their way to being quite magnificent.

  The Brontës of Shepherd’s Bush

  Muriel Box, director, and Betty Box, producer

  (© reserved; collection National Portrait Gallery, London.)

  ‘I want to go on the films’

  Until recently, anyone who wanted to see the film To Dorothy a Son had to lock themselves deep in the bowels of the British Film Institute off Tottenham Court Road and watch it on an old Steenbeck editing machine, a cumbersome mechanical beast that would whirr and click fretfully, as if even it was irritated to be involved with such a non-entity of a picture. A little-known comedy from 1954, To Dorothy is no one’s idea of a classic. It has an infuriating star in the form of Shelley Winters, a creaky screenplay by Peter Rogers (later to become famous as the producer of the Carry On series) and a set that looks as if it is on loan from a local amateur dramatics society.

  Most of the action takes place in the home of Tony (John Gregson, then a huge star) and his baby-faced wife Dorothy (Peggy Cummins). Dorothy is heavily pregnant and confined to bed. Tony, charming but woefully disorganised, is a composer with a deadline to meet, bailiffs to keep at bay and, thanks to the condition of his wife, a home to run. The house, a picture-postcard cottage, is a mess: washing hangs from an indoor line, and when the telephone rings it can’t be found beneath piles of paper. Its proportions are all wrong too; as if doing the ironing wasn’t humiliating enough, Tony keeps banging his head on the ceiling. Then, just to make things even more chaotic, his brassy American ex-wife Myrtle (Shelley Winters) turns up, bearing the news that she will inherit her uncle’s two-million-dollar fortune if, by a certain date and time, her former husband has not yet produced a son. There follows, as the film’s poster had it, ‘a riot’. Myrtle is desperate that Dorothy does not give birth until her legacy is safe. Tony, meanwhile, is panicking about another of her announcements – thanks to a clerical error, they may not have been divorced. It’s all quite silly, and it comes, of course, with an unfeasibly happy ending. Tony discovers that he and Myrtle were not married in the first place; Dorothy gives birth to twins, a girl and a boy, the latter arriving just after the deadline has passed; Myrtle decides to share her legacy, thus solving Tony and Dorothy’s money worries once and for all. Hooray. Let the titles roll.

  To Dorothy is, however, more than the sum of its parts. It might feel tired now, but to those who saw it on its release – Friday night, local flea pit, quarter of sherbet lemons to share – it would have seemed much livelier, something dark at play beneath the surface fluff. In 1954 the divorce rate was six times what it had been before the war. Add to this figure the countless number of women who were involved in phoney second ‘marriages’, their surnames changed by deed poll the better to make them appear respectable, and you will understand why many people believed that marriage was in crisis. To Dorothy a Son longs to please, but it also reflects this anxiety. It’s all here: the untimely reappearance of a first wife/husband; the dread exposure of a bigamous/sham marriage and its shameful consequence, illegitimacy; and, most noticeably of all, the painful post-war recalibration of the respective roles of men and women. Even as Dorothy makes demands on Tony she fears his resentment. ‘I don’t want the baby,’ she tells him at one point. ‘I hate babies.’ But what she really hates, you suspect, is her own powerlessness – and, perhaps, the sight of her husband running around in an apron.

  ‘Men were made to wear the pants, and the pants were made to carry the dough,’ says Myrtle sarcastically, amused by the change in her ex (at a preview screening of the film, the men in the audience endorsed this se
ntiment with hearty laughter, much to its director’s disappointment). But she only half means it. Myrtle is a ballsy woman, independent and forceful, and it is clear that after years as a struggling singer she is thrilled to have her own money to spend: if Dorothy has two babies, she will have two mink coats. Hunkered in my screening room for one at the BFI, it was with some amazement that I realised the two women would end as friends, not rivals – a weirdly feminist twist in a film whose female characters are, at first glance, mere archetypes. Myrtle splits her inheritance not in half but three ways, and in doing so silently asks the question of the hour: why should only Tony escape the tyranny of the feather duster?

  John Gregson and Peggy Cummins in To Dorothy a Son

  (Welbeck Films/The Kobal Collection.)

  Every year, during the film awards season, the cry goes up: where are all the women? But in Britain, in 1954 they were everywhere. It’s hardly surprising that To Dorothy a Son came with a subliminal feminist message, for its director was Muriel Box, a passionate feminist. Amazingly, this was Muriel’s second picture of the year. Even as she was shooting it – Shelley Winters driving her halfway round the bend with her refusal ever to learn her lines until she arrived on set – she was editing The Beachcomber, a comedy drama starring Donald Sinden and Glynis Johns that she had filmed on location in Ceylon. And no sooner had she wrapped it than she was thinking about her next picture, Simon and Laura, on which she would start work in May 1955.

  Alas neither The Beachcomber nor To Dorothy was a hit for Box: ‘Spent nearly £8 on a pair of evening shoes . . . shocking!!!’ she wrote in her diary, having spent a consolatory day shopping after the ‘lousy’ reviews for the latter. Many of her colleagues, however, were having better luck. Wendy Toye, a recent winner of the prize for best short film at Cannes, had directed a respectable if rather baggy thriller, The Teckman Mystery, starring Margaret Leighton. A former debutante called Joan Henry* had adapted her best-selling prison memoir Who Lie in Gaol for the director J. Lee Thompson, and the result – The Weak and the Wicked, starring Glynis Johns as a gambling addict – had grossed two hundred thousand pounds at the box office. The Belles of St Trinian’s, the third most popular film of the year, had been edited by the brilliant Thelma Connell.†