Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Just as before, it was work that pulled Jacquetta through. Throughout her relationship with Turner she had written reams of poetry, and she now prepared the best of this for publication: Symbols and Speculations would be published in 1949. Meanwhile, there was also her day job. In 1943 she had been made principal and secretary of the UK National Commission for UNESCO, and preparations for the first meeting of this new organisation, which would take place in 1947 in Mexico City, were now under way.

  It had fallen to Sir John Maud, the most senior civil servant at the Ministry of Education, to assemble the British delegation. He had selected J. B. Priestley, the novelist, playwright and broadcaster, to represent the world of the arts: a sensible, if somewhat unexciting, decision. Priestley was hugely famous, his greatest plays already written and widely revered: at the start of the war, he had broadcast to a rapt nation every Sunday night (until, that is, Churchill – or someone – stopped him).* But Jacquetta disagreed. Still under the influence of Turner and his circle, who fancied themselves rather more avant-garde than Priestley, she thought him too lightweight, too popularist, too downmarket.

  Maud, though, would not be moved and Jacquetta slunk back to her office to begin a correspondence with Priestley. Soon after this the delegation gathered for a reception at an office in Belgrave Square. It was here that the two of them met for the first time, Jacquetta handing the playwright some kind of comedy pink pudding (you imagine her raising her eyebrows ironically as it wobbled on a plate). This first encounter was swiftly followed by another, at a UNESCO meeting in Paris for which Priestley was allocated two assistants, Jacquetta, and her friend Helen de Mouilpied, who also worked at the Ministry of Information. On this trip Priestley operated a divide and rule policy. First there was dinner with Helen, during which he quizzed her about Jacquetta, with whom he was clearly taken. (As her answers came back, he is said to have to exclaimed: ‘What a woman! Ice without and fire within.’) Then there was dinner with Jacquetta, in whom he confided his worries about his daughter Mary (she would shortly be hospitalised having suffered a complete nervous breakdown). Did he also tell Jacquetta that his marriage was as unhappy as her own?* Perhaps. But more likely he simply took stock. A long voyage to Mexico loomed – and according to his biographer Vincent Brome, whenever Priestley travelled by sea it was his habit to select a woman to sleep with en route. A little bit of advance planning would not have gone amiss.

  The Queen Mary left Southampton for New York in November 1947. Priestley’s plans, however, were immediately thwarted: Jacquetta, a terrible sailor, spent the entire voyage confined to her cabin. Installed in the Hotel Maria Cristina in Mexico City, moreover, she fell ill again, this time with gastroenteritis (the entire delegation had gone down with it, thanks to the hotel’s dire plumbing). This time, Priestley was not to be put off. He went up to her room bearing a medicinal bottle of brandy, a visit which left her feeling grateful and cared for; and when she recovered he took her out for dinner over the course of which – the high altitude and martinis having gone straight to her head – Jacquetta told him she didn’t think much of his work. Priestley was hurt, particularly when it became clear how little of his writing she’d actually read. But perhaps her words came as a challenge too, for it was as they walked back to the hotel that their affair began.

  The conference lasted six weeks. Their clandestine relationship seems to have thrilled them both – ‘Now, in my late thirties, I was to discover the pleasures and spiritual transformations of total love,’ wrote Jacquetta, ‘I seemed to be created anew’ – but they also told themselves it could go no further. Priestley had to leave for New York before the conference closed, and they agreed that once he had gone there would be no communication between them. They would quietly return to their own lives.

  How easily promises fall from the lips! Priestley’s archive is kept in an inhospitable windowless basement at the University of Bradford, his home town, and there you can read the first of the many love letters he wrote to Jacquetta. This one was written on a train, on hotel writing paper, his wobbly script even less decipherable than usual, and it begins: ‘My darling, I know I shouldn’t be doing this – it’s against everything I meant or even said – but I can’t help it. I must write one letter to you . . . to try and relieve myself of this terrible weight of sadness and loss . . . Missing and missing and missing you. I’ll get over the worst of it soon, I suppose, but just now I feel older and emptier and sadder than I ever remember feeling before.’ He had, he told her, ‘feasted on beauty and strangeness and comradeship and fun’, and now it was time to pay the bill. Would she write to him care of his hotel in New York? That would be wonderful. Because back in England contacting him would be fraught with danger: all his post went through his secretaries.

  Jacquetta was thrilled to receive his letter – my impression is that she had taken him at his word when he told her the relationship would go no further – and wandered through Mexico City in a happy daze, looking for a post office that she might put him out of his misery by sending a telegram. Priestley responded to her missive swiftly with another love letter, an ecstatic note in which he attempted to pin all that he adored about Jacquetta to the page: her wiry body, her strong legs, her ‘non-feminine gallantry’. He pictures the two of them as a couple of ‘chaps’, a Trojan and a Greek sentry meeting and finding, perhaps reluctantly, ‘much value’ in each other. Already he is telling her that he loves her.

  But Priestley, when he turned his mind to it, could be quite the pig. In his third letter, he complains that her last reply was cool and cagey and, having been thus provoked, informs her that their relationship must pass two tests. The second of these will be the return home, with all its complications. And the first? The fact that he has so many other temptations: ‘Ordeal by glamour girls – it has already passed here, for while beautiful young actresses look at me with such adoring eyes, I think of you.’ This is a funny kind of a compliment. No woman could fail to notice the note of warning in it – nor the horrible inference that Jacquetta is past the bloom of youth. (At the time of their meeting, Jacquetta was thirty-seven and Priestley fifty-three.)

  Back in England, however, the relationship prospered in spite of both their circumstances, and Priestley’s boorish moods. Over the course of the next six years they would meet whenever and wherever they could – Priestley’s marital home was a grand house on the Isle of Wight, but he also kept a flat at Albany, Piccadilly – enjoying sex ‘indoors and out, by day and by night, in borrowed offices and flats, in the box of a provincial theatre or the garden of the Institute of Archaeology’ (these are Jacquetta’s words, not Priestley’s). It’s difficult to picture, this snatched love-making: you think of the times, of Priestley’s fame, of their relative ages and of their respective personalities, and you wonder that they dared. But for Jacquetta, at least, this new relationship had a strong element of compulsion and she surrendered to it completely, with a certain amount of flamboyance and not a little pride.

  And Priestley? He was more conflicted. His letters to his wife, for a while at least, grew suddenly fonder – a guilty conscience, one assumes. ‘Unlike you,’ he told Jacquetta early on, ‘I don’t want to be in love.’ He convinced himself that he’d been ambushed in Mexico, though how consciously Jacquetta had done this, he could not tell.

  They were, you see, so completely different. Priestley, the son of a Bradford schoolmaster, had left school at sixteen to become a clerk in a local wool firm; he did not attend Cambridge until after the First World War, which he had spent in the trenches watching other men of his background die. His first instinct, always, was to put any criticism Jacquetta made of him down to her social class; she was, he feared, an intellectual snob, a hidebound elitist for whom the things most people liked (detective novels, say*) were infra dig. She was blunt and he was thin-skinned, with the result that some of his early letters to her are appallingly snitty. Even their strong physical connection seemed to have been wrought from difference. As he put it in a
note of 1948, ‘It is odd how everything is reversed for us. I, the easy sensualist regard you most unsensually, except when immediately excited by you; whereas you find love for me in your body, but little or none, alas, in your mind.’ Look at a photograph of them together – Jacquetta, queenly and elegant, the possessor of a singular ‘folded-in handsomeness’; Priestley, stout and balding and froggy, the very image of a well-to-do northern alderman – and you understand that Priestley used the word ‘odd’ for a reason.

  We know a lot about what Priestley thought of his lover. He is always describing her ‘mannish walk’, her ‘exquisite long eyes’, her ‘donnishness’, her ‘witchcraft’, her ‘astringent talk’, the way their connection seems to take place ‘below the conscious level’. He refers to her, more than once, as looking like a ‘high priestess from some strange race’. We know, too, that for the first years of their affair he was careful to manage her expectations; he is always telling her not to expect a letter, or warning her that he will be too busy to see her. He was also apt to moan, seemingly unworried that he might bore her with the details of his domestic arrangements. He mithered about his weight (‘my contours’), and in a letter of 1952 he notes that his Teasmade is broken. But what did Jacquetta feel? This is more difficult. Only one of her letters to him survives, Priestley having been determined to conceal the relationship, the better that he might lead a double life. It’s clear that she was eager to see him; also, that the sexual side of things was fulfilling. On the other hand, having given Priestley the impression in Mexico that she was inclined to take what he called ‘a rather tough detached masculine line’ with regard to their affair it was painful to find him taking her so much at her word, treating her almost as if she were ‘another man’.

  There were rifts – at least one of them serious. Some time in 1948 Jacquetta’s attention was caught by a young woman across a crowded restaurant. According to Priestley, her physical attraction to the girl in question was plain to see and it sent him into a tailspin, for he was nothing if not priggish. (Jacquetta had clearly told him all about Betty Pinney; my sense is that his resentment was born of disapproval as much as jealousy.) In a letter he wrote: ‘I felt you had moved clean away from me, unconsciously resented the surrender of the few days before, and so were swinging over to that attitude you had known some years before.’ Witnessing ‘this queer little scene’ had, he insisted, left him exhausted and depressed, and he needed to be left alone for ‘some weeks’ to brood. In a later letter – written after they had finally met – he blames his continuing inability to work on this encounter and wonders whether it wouldn’t be better for both of them if they stopped seeing one another.

  Their relationship was spiky, prone to ebb and flow. But if these ‘mysterious surges of antagonism’ got Jacquetta down, she rarely showed it. By 1950 Priestley’s home life was painful and difficult. Jane now knew he had another woman, and the thought of his continuing infidelity often drove her to her bed; Priestley, in turn, had trouble controlling his temper. Jacquetta’s home life, by contrast, was smooth and replete with interest. Christopher was away in Oxford much of the time; in London, where she was determined to remain, Jacquetta was free to work and to entertain (Nicolas was sent to boarding school in 1951). Work was as important to her as ever. Her son remembers being told by his mother, at around this time, that her income after tax was only just enough to cover the cost of domestic help: ‘She was clearly telling me that she went to work because she wanted to.’

  In 1949 she was appointed adviser to the Festival of Britain – she masterminded the display Origins of the People, for which she helped to create painstakingly accurate dioramas of Iron Age settlements – and in 1950 she became a governor of the British Film Institute.* As a result, her circle widened. Among her new friends were Laurie Lee, Henry Moore, Cecil Day-Lewis and Jack Pritchard (the furniture manufacturer whose company Isokon produced the Penguin Donkey, a dinky modern bookshelf designed for his friend Allen Lane, the Penguin publisher). Mortimer Wheeler was also on the scene, trying desperately to chase her into bed. The parties she threw could be boisterous; poor Christopher, assuming he was in town, was usually to be found hiding in the kitchen.

  The following year was a turning point. In June 1951 Laurie Lee, who had written the captions for Jacquetta’s dioramas of early man, wrote to say that her new book had ‘pride of place’ in the Lion and the Unicorn, the Festival of Britain pavilion celebrating Englishness, and that it was ‘well-thumbed already’. Lee called A Land ‘a book to hold and to have’, and he wasn’t the only one to feel its unlikely power. The letters poured in from a public who seemingly couldn’t get enough of it. By August the first edition had sold out; in libraries the wait to borrow a copy was six months. ‘We thought at first we couldn’t afford a guinea,’ wrote a Mrs Cecily Hadley of Swanage. ‘But after reading another chapter or two, my husband said: it ought to be two guineas.’ Freya Stark wrote, comparing Jacquetta to Proust. Vita Sackville West sent a letter begging her to come to stay at Sissinghurst.*

  Jacquetta, smoking a cheroot, on the beach at Deià with Robert Graves

  (Special Collections, University of Bradford.)

  The usual line when it comes to Priestley’s decision to separate from Jane – their divorce was granted in July 1952 – is that it was mostly her doing: she had finally had enough; their children were grown up; she had met the man who was to become her third husband. And this is certainly the impression Priestley liked to give. He worried about his reputation, about attacks from the ‘cheaper’ Tory press. If he and Jane had to part, he favoured a legal separation. ‘I do not particularly want a divorce myself,’ he told one confidant. ‘And in some ways would find it more convenient (and safer) to be officially married.’ But it seems to me that he had another, more vital reason for letting Jane go: Jacquetta’s success. His lover was now a star in her own right, and with a legion of male admirers.* She might, if he was not careful, drift away. Adding to his anxiety was the sense that his own powers were beginning to wane. As a first step he asked Jacquetta to collaborate on a play, Dragon’s Mouth; this would allow them to spend legitimate time together. Its reception having been somewhat chillier† than that of A Land, however, he then contrived to make himself wholly available to her.

  How did Jacquetta respond? With verve. In 1952 matrimonial law was silly and archaic. There were four main grounds for divorce: adultery, cruelty, desertion and incurable insanity. Where the first of these was the reputed cause, it was usual for the man to assume the official role of adulterer, and for him to hire a ‘professional co-respondent’, book a hotel room and ensure that a private detective was there to see the couple enter and leave it. Jacquetta, ever proud, thought this dishonest and hypocritical. She would, she told Priestley, go with him herself to Paris. Why they chose Paris rather than, say, Bournemouth is not entirely clear. Yes, Priestley would be less likely to be recognised there. But in Paris the mood was altogether less conducive to procuring the necessary legal evidence. The hotel’s manager refused to provide Priestley’s detective with any information he could use in court on the grounds that the ‘English monsieur’ should be allowed to take his pleasure where and with whomsoever he pleased. In the end, ‘a sort of retired police inspector’ was found in Exeter, where the divorce proceedings were to be heard, and it was his statement that was read to the court.

  The farce did not end here. Priestley had been invited to Japan to give a series of lectures, and Jacquetta now decided to accompany him. She had so far said nothing to Christopher about a divorce, but perhaps she didn’t need to: the trip would last from September until shortly before Christmas. It is impossible to see this as anything other than a declaration of intent. Christopher turned to his father, a lawyer. Divorce, Fifties-style, was complicated by the fact that the law said that if a husband or wife was found to have condoned or colluded with the behaviour of a partner to obtain a divorce it would be refused. What effect, Christopher wanted to know, would Jacquetta’s trip hav
e in the event of their separating? His father advised him to ask Priestley to set out in a letter his motives for taking Jacquetta with him as a precaution against Christopher ever being accused of collusion. Priestley duly did so, citing their theatrical collaboration and work for UNESCO.

  Three months later Jacquetta returned home bearing extravagant gifts for her long-suffering husband. But it was no good. If she had intended to go on as before – I suspect she rather liked what she called her ‘half-and-half arrangement’ – the reality of a family Christmas soon put paid to that idea. On Boxing Day she asked Christopher for a divorce. He took this more calmly than she had expected, perhaps because he had done his grieving while she was away. But she wept, and so did Nicolas: ‘She called me into their bedroom. There were twin beds: Grandma Hawkes’s idea, I think. The curtains were drawn. It was the middle of January. I can’t remember the preamble. She said: “Your father and I are going to separate and I will marry Jack Priestley.” I wept buckets. “I’ll always love daddy as a father,” I said.’ To Nicolas, Priestley was just someone who’d come to the house a couple of times; he was remembered for playing the piano. Looking back, though, he had known something was amiss with his father. On Boxing Day evening the family had gone to party, where his father danced ‘dashingly’ with a good-looking young woman in a beautiful brown dress. ‘He didn’t look very happy about it, but he was very determined.’ Jacquetta had looked on, silently.