Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Was Priestley delighted to have bagged his prize? Not exactly. In letters from this period he is cruelly equivocal, banging on about his latest health kick – a regime of cold baths, which were supposed miraculously to shrink him – and worrying about the consequences of this second separation: ‘I certainly don’t want people to get the impression that I was responsible for breaking up a happy home.’ His advice is rather chilling in the circumstances: divorce, he tells her, would be the best path, even if he were not around. It is as if he cannot bear to take responsibility for his part in the proceedings. Then again, he was also telling his stepdaughter Angela that he would soon be free to marry Jacquetta. (Not that Angela, or any of his children, had met his lover.) He wanted Jacquetta, it seems, but feared, metaphorically speaking, the sight of her baggage cluttering up his hall.

  And that letter of Priestley’s to Christopher was now to spring up and bite the playwright on his not inconsiderable backside. Jacquetta’s divorce came to court on 5 June, a date which, being so soon after the Coronation, Priestley fervently hoped would pass unnoticed by the newspapers. But, alas, the headlines were all his. The divorce was to be petitioned on the grounds of Jacquetta’s ‘misconduct’ with Priestley while in Japan; on the advice once again of his father Christopher made full and unexpected use of the letter he had extracted from Priestley the previous autumn. Its contents were duly revealed, but minus the reason for its existence. As a result the judge read it as evidence only of its author’s duplicity: Priestley, a writer of fiction, had indulged in a ‘deliberate and cunning attempt to deceive Professor Hawkes’, and his conduct was ‘mean and contemptible’.

  Priestley was horrified. So was Jacquetta, who despised the judge for his attempt to ‘stir up beastliness in a case where all those concerned were entirely free from it’ (there is no record of what she thought of Christopher’s ignoble role in this affair, though he came to regret it deeply). And the heat of it – a prickly blend of embarrassment and indignation – must surely still have been upon them when, a month later, they married at Caxton Hall, Westminster.* It certainly was in the eyes of the press; as they emerged from the registrar’s office they were greeted by the flashbulbs of some thirty photographers. But perhaps this episode drew them together, too, for thereafter you sense something closing down – in Jacquetta, at least. She was happy. She loved her new husband. But there was now a placatory spirit abroad. The ‘sudden antagonisms’ of old would be replaced with a careful public smoothness. ‘Let me have the guts to behave badly,’ she had written to a friend shortly before she asked Christopher for a divorce. She would not need such guts again for almost three decades.

  Jacquetta and J. B. Priestley marry. Thirty photographers awaited them outside

  (© National Portrait Gallery, London.)

  After their marriage Jacquetta went to live at Brooke Hill, Priestley’s house on the Isle of Wight. It was fabulously grand, the hall large enough to accommodate the classical quartets Priestley liked to invite to play public concerts, and she took to life there – cossetted, formal, lavish – with gracious ease. The day was oiled by Priestley’s loyal staff Gertrude and Miss Pudduck, and one always dressed for dinner; guests were sent off for hot baths and told to return at the cocktail hour, which Priestley would host in a velvet jacket (he mixed an ‘exhilarating’ martini). Her new husband’s income was such that she was now free to indulge her passion for clothes. She adored his collection of art, which included work by Sickert, Derain, William Nicholson and Utrillo, and added to it with buys of her own; in her bedroom at Albany there was a Turner and a Gwen John nude (she and Priestley kept separate bedrooms, believing that this was better for ‘sleeping and sex’). Was part of Priestley’s attraction that he was rich? Perhaps. She certainly enjoyed his money. ‘She wasn’t vulgar about it,’ says Nicolas Hawkes. ‘But they were in agreement that people who were creative who did well were perfectly entitled to live well. What they believed in [politically] was that the rewards of life should be spread to all people. Denying themselves wouldn’t have helped anyone else.’

  She continued to work, of course. In 1954 she published Man on Earth, a follow-up to A Land, and in 1955 she and Priestley co-authored Journey Down a Rainbow, an account of their travels in the south-western states of America. She also scripted a film, Figures in a Landscape, a celebration of Barbara Hepworth* that had its premiere at the 1954 Venice Film Festival. Thereafter, her output continued to be prodigious. There were two novels, a biography of Mortimer Wheeler, several more archaeology books and a collection of fables; she was also the archaeological correspondent of the Observer; co-editor of the prehistory volume of a vast UNESCO project, The History of Mankind; and author of The Shell Guide to Archaeology (this her last publication, in 1986). But she never repeated the success of A Land. Jacquetta had, for the time being, lost her taste for risk, in her work as in her life. The feelings she had poured into A Land were in abeyance and it was important to keep them that way. What had been instinctive now seemed daring – perilously so. As she later noted, ‘at no earlier time [in history] would it have been thinkable for a middle-class English woman to have lived this story without social ostracism and submergence’. She and Priestley rarely mentioned the past, and after their marriage lost touch with many of their old friends.* Most people continued to think of her as cool, daunting, a touch haughty: a man’s woman, who did not suffer fools. The ‘fire within’ was no more visible than before.

  Women Ask Why, a pamphlet published by CND in 1962, to which Jacquetta contributed an essay entitled ‘The Way Out’

  (Special Collections, University of Bradford.)

  Much of her energy she now put into political causes. In 1958 she and Priestley played an active part in founding the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. She was a regular Aldermaston marcher, helpfully visible to newspaper photographers by dint of her height and large red hat. Later, she organised CND’s Women’s Committee (other members included Iris Murdoch, Peggy Ashcroft and Dorothy Hodgkin). At rallies she was a highly effective speaker; women were known to immediately hand over watches and jewellery to be sold to raise money for the cause. In the same year, she and Priestley also became founding trustees of the Albany Trust, a charity established to complement the campaigning work of the Homosexual Law Reform Society.*

  In 1959, she and Priestley left the Isle of Wight for Alveston, near Stratford-upon-Avon. Gertrude and Miss Pudduck, and even the gardener, Hales, came with them. Their new home, Kissing Tree House, was just as splendid as Brooke Hill: there was a tennis court, and glasshouses to keep the house supplied with fruit and fresh flowers; the lawn was so big the local cricket team were known to use it. It was a good deal more convenient for London. They settled into a routine, writing in the mornings and afternoons, with a break for a proper lunch and a walk for Priestley; dinner followed by the evening news. At weekends there were house parties. Priestley was now the proud owner of a study with a secret door behind which was stowed a sink, a refrigerator and a variety of bottles.

  And so life went on.

  Then, in 1980, when she was seventy and Priestley was eighty-six, Jacquetta did something extraordinary. She published A Quest of Love. She called this book a novel, but it isn’t really. Yes, it has a heroine of sorts: a reincarnated Everywoman figure who looks back on her sexual awakening in her various lives, from the court of the Minoans at Knossos to the England of Queen Victoria. In this respect, it is rather Orlando-like. Except that this lusty heroine seems also to be – or at least to sound like – the book’s author and her story, which has come to her in a series of dreams and which she refers to as the memories of her ‘Long Body’, is bookended by two slices of confessional autobiography in which Jacquetta reveals the failure of her sex life with Christopher, the affair with Betty and the details of her early encounters with the nation’s most famous living playwright. (She also tells us, a propos nothing, that she did not masturbate as a teenager.) The result is bizarre and quite terrible, as though Mary Rena
ult had suddenly come over all Anaïs Nin.

  From start to finish, no one knew what to make of it. D. J. Enright, Jacquetta’s editor at Chatto, begged her to make the book less explicit (someone told me that he asked her not to use the word ‘cunt’ so often, though I have not been able to verify this). She refused. When it came out – as part of the publicity campaign, Snowdon photographed the Priestleys for Vogue – readers were baffled and horrified in almost equal measure. Even her most devoted friend, Diana Collins, was somewhat nonplussed. ‘I think that her keyword is imagination,’ she wrote in her own memoir, trying to make the best of an embarrassing job. As for her family, only Priestley was (albeit tacitly) supportive. Nicolas never really forgave her for writing the book; Christopher Hawkes, though happily remarried, was still alive and it caused him some pain.* ‘The general feeling was: why did she feel it necessary to say all that?’ Tom Priestley told me. ‘For someone who seemed very controlled, it was an aberration. She had to get it out . . . but she didn’t have to publish it.’

  So why did she? I’m not sure. It’s easy to see A Quest of Love as a form of attention-seeking by a woman who fears her power is diminishing and is determined not be forgotten, or not completely (‘I am an old woman now,’ it begins. ‘I had better admit that both to myself and to all those other women who I hope will listen to me.’) But something else is going on too. Read it closely, and A Quest of Love – so feverish and insistent, so embarrassingly sincere – suggests what might have been had its author dared to remain outside the establishment, had she not tamped down her emotions so definitively. Look, she is saying, this is what I’m capable of when I let myself go. I don’t dispute that Jacquetta loved Priestley deeply, that they were perfectly contented most of the time. But he was a place of safety too, and the home they built together a kind of gilded cage. There is regret among this book’s pages, as well as late-life ardour. ‘One must forgive oneself,’ she writes, carefully omitting to say for what.*

  Jacquetta and Priestley at Kissing Tree House

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

  J. B. Priestley died in 1984, a month before his ninetieth birthday. Jacquetta was holding his hand. Outside his bedroom, owls were hooting. A memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey.

  Jacquetta, who had grown into a somewhat difficult old woman, died in a Cheltenham hospital in 1996, at the age of eighty-five. The obituaries remembered her as ‘compulsively honest’, ‘demanding’ and ‘imperious’, though for many of those reading them she was already forgotten, her once glittering career always superseded by that of her more famous husband. There are those, such as Michael Shanks of Stanford University, who believe that the archaeological establishment moved explicitly against her, scandalised by her private life and disapproving of her sensuous, discipline-muddling engagement with the past (archaeology went through a severe period of scientism in the Sixties and Seventies). But though I’m not entirely convinced by this argument – I believe it was her marriage that marginalised her, not the academy – it’s certainly the case that A Land was out of print, and had been for years.

  Happily, though, you can’t keep a good book down. People talk of the New Nature Writing, by which they mean (best-selling, award-winning) authors such as Richard Mabey, Roger Deakin and Mark Cocker, whose responses to landscape are singular, personal, lyrical, unsentimental and, sometimes, indignant. But it’s only ‘new’ because memories are so short – and I’m not the only one to think so. In 2012 A Land was reprinted in a handsome new edition with a foreword by Robert Macfarlane, the poster boy for the literary outdoors. Macfarlane describes Jacquetta as ‘a missing link in the literature of nature and landscape’, and A Land variously as a ‘geological prose-poem’, ‘a Cretaceous cosmi-comedy’ and a ‘lusty pagan lullaby’. It is, he adds, ‘flamboyant enough that I can imagine it re-performed as a rock opera’. He’s wrong about the rock opera; A Land is more Benjamin Britten than Ray Davies. But he’s right about everything else.

  She is a missing link, too, in the world of what we have learned to call ‘heritage’ – a connection, perhaps, between the neo-Romanticism of the Thirties,* which insisted that the ‘modern’ need not be at war with the past, and the mob-cap-and-tearoom culture of the National Trust today (though she would, I think, have despised the latter; as she once said, ‘every generation gets the Stonehenge it deserves – and desires’). Her 1943 film, The Beginning of History, made while she was at the Ministry of Education and starring a specially commissioned reconstruction of an Iron Age site at Pinewood Studios, is one of the earliest instances, if not the earliest, of a historian using the medium to illustrate to the public how people used to live – to explain us to ourselves. Such things, of course, have since become commonplace.

  And once you know about her, you see her everywhere.

  In 2012 the Blagdon Estate, home of Viscount Ridley, and the Banks Group, a land development company, unveiled a huge piece of land art they had commissioned in Cramlington, Northumberland. Designed by Charles Jencks, it is called Northumberlandia and was built using the by-products of open-cast mining. At 112 feet high and 1300 feet long, it is the largest representation of the female body anywhere in the world.

  When this unlikely public park first opened – a hillside nude on whose breast any visitor may idly stand – I gazed at the newspaper photographs and felt amazed. The work of twenty-first-century bulldozers, the sculpture’s vast curves speak of Picasso and Matisse. But she looks over her shoulder, too, embracing in her form, in her swirling paths and her generous mounds, our brooding hill forts and our hunkered long barrows, our exquisite chalk drawings and our bounteous ancient goddesses. My mind was full of Jacquetta then, and I wondered, What would she have made of this?

  Sometimes I think she would have adored it. I imagine her marching right to the top of Northumberlandia’s nose, the better to contemplate her majestic proportions. But then the doubts creep in and I know that she would have loathed it, this ersatz monument-cum-camouflage job.

  I see her at the breakfast table, crossly folding her copy of The Times. Her lips are a narrow line, pressed tight with distaste. The air is heavy with her husband’s pipe-smoke and, just possibly, with thoughts of a wild new book.

  All Rise

  Rose Heilbron, QC

  (© National Portrait Gallery, London.)

  ‘I am serious about my career. But that does not mean I shall give up dancing . . .’

  On the night of 16 May 1956 there were eight people on board the Windmill, a forty-foot wooden houseboat moored at East Creek in South Benfleet, Canvey Island. In one room, sleeping on a pair of bunks pushed tight together, was forty-seven-year-old Grace Richardson, her daughter Ann, seventeen, her two-year-old granddaughter Beryl and Colin and Reggie, the two-year-old twin sons of her neighbour Violet ‘Vicky’ Clark. In a second were Grace’s own sons: thirteen-year-old John and sixteen-year-old Charlie. Finally, crammed into the boat’s kitchen-cum-living room, was thirty-five-year-old Vicky.

  Vicky had been living with Grace since 17 April, when Reg Wright, the man she called her husband, had died suddenly. She had told Grace that she could not face remaining on her own houseboat, the Buchra, until she had redecorated, and Grace had invited her to stay. It was only one more soul, after all. But then, overnight, the situation changed. On 14 May the Buchra had gone up in flames and Vicky had found herself homeless.

  Two nights later, Grace and her children woke up to find their own houseboat on fire, the flames coming at them ‘like a wall’ from the direction of the kitchen. There was no time to think. Ann acted first, pushing Beryl through the bedroom window – this was the only way out – and on to the mud outside. Then she looked around. Chaos, and in the middle of it was Vicky, a basket of clothes over her arm. On top of the basket was her handbag. She swayed a little, but she didn’t move. By now, Charles and John had climbed out of the window too, and Ann quickly followed them. Grace shouted at her, ‘I’ll throw the babies after you.’ H
er mother duly tried to pick up one of the twins, but it was no good. According to Ann, Vicky had a foot on the boy, making him impossible to move. When she came to life a moment later, Vicky didn’t attempt to help Grace. Rather, she began to push her basket through the window and then clambered after it.

  Grace was the last person to leave the boat alive. On the tow-path she saw Vicky on her knees; she was looking for her handbag. Her friend seemed preternaturally calm. Only when the police arrived did she become hysterical and attempt to return to the burning vessel; PC Ronald Wall and three others had to restrain her. A Mr Reeves, who lived on another houseboat, heard her saying, ‘My babies, my babies. Save my babies.’ But no one could. The fire had taken over. By dawn the boat, coal-black and half collapsed, resembled nothing so much as a vast crow’s nest, fallen from a mammoth tree. The charred bodies of the twins were discovered soon afterwards by a fireman. It was said that when they were found they were holding hands.

  Though barely thirty miles from London, Canvey Island is a strangely remote place. It has the feeling of being cut off, and all the more so in 1956. Everyone knew everyone else, and after the fire on the Windmill the briny Essex air was soon thick with rumour. Each week brought fresh developments, reported in full in the Canvey News & Benfleet Recorder, which had never known a story like it. By the time of the twins’ funeral on 24 May, the police had already interviewed more than a hundred people. By early June they had decided to exhume the body of Reginald Wright, Vicky’s common-law husband. In mid-June, a voluminous report was ready for the Director of Public Prosecutions. It was, the paper informed its readers, eight inches thick and a hundred thousand words long: ‘HOUSEBOAT POSER NEAR END’, promised the front-page splash. Up in London the nationals got in on the act, one of them even managing to secure an interview with Vicky Clark herself. She denied any involvement in either one of the houseboat fires.