Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  * Mortimer hated to feel thwarted; she feared it. ‘Frustration is a greater poison than jealousy, which at least recognises the existence of someone else,’ she once wrote – and she was in a position to know, given the reputation of her husband John Mortimer.

  * Rickards, an Australian-born artist and costume designer, went on to dress some of the most iconic films of the Sixties, among them Blow-Up and From Russia with Love.

  † Balcon was an implacable enemy of women at work. For more on this, see Chapter 5, ‘The Brontës of Shepherd’s Bush.

  * The canon of sexist slights against Franklin is miserably extensive. (Most recently, it was revealed that shortly before she left King’s College London in 1953, her colleague Maurice Wilkins wrote to James Watson and Francis Crick in Cambridge to say that ‘the smoke of witchcraft will soon be getting out of our eyes.’) When Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on DNA in 1962 only Wilkins made mention of Franklin’s role in his acceptance speeches. Franklin died of cancer in 1958.

  * It is striking that Patience Gray is not mentioned at all in Writing at the Kitchen Table, Artemis Cooper’s authorised biography of Elizabeth David.

  † As Artemis Cooper notes, David always behaved ‘like a married woman’ even when she was not. Her busy private life as a younger woman was tidied away in the assurances of her publisher that ‘Mrs David has kept house in France, Italy, Greece and Egypt’ – as if she were just another diplomatic wife. (She was a divorcee.)

  * A notice in the London Gazette of 21 April 1903 announces Hermann’s promotion from Captain to Lieutenant. In this, he is referred to as Hermann Stanham Warschawski. Before he joined the army Hermann had trained as a photographer’s assistant.

  * Patience did not, I think, realise that he was returning to his original trade. Similarly, she did not find out about her Jewish roots until late in life – a discovery that delighted her.

  * This may be code – or sarcasm. Holland had a long affair with the novelist Elizabeth Jenkins, whom he met during the war, and who described him as the love of her life. ‘He wasn’t faithful to his wife,’ said Jenkins many years later. ‘I wondered why she didn’t value him more; so many women, including me, would happily have changed places with her. I offered him my heart on a plate. He made me unhappy, but it was worth it.’ Jenkins wrote one of the great novels of the Fifties – and one of the great novels of any age about marriage – The Tortoise and the Hare.

  * Tania became a photographer. Her work appeared in National Geographic and elsewhere. She married the journalist John Midgley, who had a long career at The Economist.

  † Among her contemporaries at Queen’s College were the daughters of the Labour politician Stafford Cripps, and Unity Mitford, who was a boarder: ‘Try to imagine an outsize supercilious beautiful doll harnessed inside a gym tunic, aloof and dumb, outraged at being thus confined.’

  * Thomas Gray was the brother of Milner Gray, the artist and designer who founded the Design Research Institute (where Thomas may have worked after the war). The DRI made important contributions to the Britain Can Make It exhibition of 1946, and to the Festival of Britain. He was a close friend of the artist Graham Sutherland.

  * I have been unable to find out any more about this adoption drama. Patience never spoke about the baby, and only revealed the adoption to Miranda in old age.

  * Patience loved meeting artistic types, especially writers. In Work Adventures Childhood Dreams she describes how she met T. S. Eliot at a Sussex cocktail party in 1950. They talked for a long time – until the curtains were drawn and the lights went up, and all the other guests had gone on their way. They drank many gin and tonics, and talked of London and Henry James, whose ‘interminable sentences’ muffled Eliot’s sense of the present.

  * As one visitor, Dylan Thomas, put it, ‘What a pleasure of baskets! Trugs, creels, pottles and punnets, heppers, dorsers and mounds, wiskets and whiskets.’ According to her daughter Miranda, Patience was at one point friendly with Thomas.

  † Howard, embroiderer and textile designer, won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in the Thirties. She then went into teaching. At Kingston School of Art, where she spent the war, she and her students embroidered maps for the RAF, which were then photographed – a technique that produced great clarity. The students who worked on The Country Wife would go to her house in Chelsea both to embroider and to babysit her new daughter Charlotte. Howard would feed them tripe and onions, which she thought good for them. The Country Wife was so large it had to be assembled on site. According to the Embroiderers Guild, Howard inspected it every weekend because sections kept disappearing. One, featuring a fish, had to be replaced four times.

  * Les rougets au vin blanc de Monsieur Lautram: For eight red mullets, put 8og butter and a glass of white wine in an oven dish with the fish and cook in a moderate oven for 25 minutes. Thicken the liquor in a pan with good butter and a little flour. Set the fish in a serving dish, cover with the sauce and sprinkle with parsley. Patience adds: ‘This is the recipe he gave me written in French in his own hand. What he fails to say is that the sauce, copious and perfectly amalgamated, is achieved by a tour de main. A perfect example of a “simple” recipe conveying no idea of procedure, or an instance of a true Breton’s reluctance to share his secrets.’

  † Nicolas was away at boarding school. According to Miranda, there was no room for him at the Logs. When term was over he and his sister would grab their cat, Pussy Willow, and head straight to their grandmother’s in Sussex. The children, incidentally, called their mother Patience.

  * Gibson’s co-designer at the Regatta Restaurant was Misha Black, Milner Gray’s partner at the Industrial Design Partnership – which suggests, perhaps, that she still kept tabs on Thomas’s life, or at least that she knew what he was up to. The restaurant sat on the river next to Hungerford Bridge, adjacent to the Skylon. It was the main showcase for the Festival Pattern Group, a selection of futuristic-looking fabrics whose designs were inspired by crystal structures. The food was said to be awful.

  * Gentleman told me that he ‘cribbed’ the arrangement of the book from John Minton, Elizabeth David’s illustrator. ‘An opener for each section of a big picture, and then smaller drawings scattered throughout.’ The frontispiece, of a woman lunching outside in the shade of what looks like a wisteria, was a drawing he’d first made in Milan, on his student tour. When I told him how many copies the book sold he looked amazed. ‘I’d no idea,’ he said.

  * To me, Plats du Jour feels more like a book of the Seventies than the Fifties, especially when you reach the chapter on fungi, which seems to have been written for Good Life types who combine ‘an experimental approach to cooking with an interest in natural history’.

  * She took a similar approach with David’s beloved olive oil: ‘Those who actively dislike the taste of olive oil might try ground-nut oil which is effective and cheaper.’

  † Patience believed that the person in question was Anne Scott-James. For more on James, see the Introduction.

  * Settle (1891–1980) was a former editor of Vogue, a vocal champion of women’s rights and a contributor to the work of the Council for Art & Industry and the Council of Industrial Design.

  * John Bratby (1928–92) was a leading exponent of what the critic David Sylvester called the ‘Kitchen Sink School’. He was married to the painter Jean Cooke, a much more talented artist than him – and, threatened by the competition, he was known to paint over her work when he ran out of canvases of his own. He would also beat her.

  * Many people, of course, found this kind of simplicity slightly baffling: the long years of rationing meant that they craved novelty, complexity, colour and the richness of sauces made from eggs and cream. Thanks to this, and to television cooks like Philip Harben and Fanny Cradock, dinner-party food had grown loopily garish. Cherries, angelica and pineapple chunks featured prominently; so too did piped mashed potato and strips of pepper arranged over the top of dishes in co
mplicated geometric patterns.

  * Patience used to take Miranda to Great Bardfield in Essex to see Edward Bawden at his home there.

  * Following her resignation from the Observer, Patience was working as a textile designer. She had also worked as one of the translators of the 1961 English-language edition of Larousse Gastronomique, and had written for House & Garden (the Logs even made it to the magazine’s pages).

  † Ursula Mommens, who died in 2010 at the age of 101, studied pottery with William Staite Murray at the Royal College of Art, and under Michael Cardew. Her first husband was the painter Julian Trevelyan.

  * This strange book – it has the same paranoid textures as the early novels of Mary Stewart – was written in 1963–4, but she did not find a publisher for it until 1988.

  * Cowper, ‘Pine-Apple and Bee’: ‘They whom Truth and Wisdom lead / Can gather Honey from a Weed’.

  * Before there were celebrities . . . there were personalities.

  * Spain was devoted to Beaverbrook, the owner of the Daily Express. ‘Five minutes with the Lord and the adrenalin courses through the veins,’ she wrote in Why I’m Not a Millionaire. ‘Fifteen and I can move mountains.’ She once asked him if it was true that he received his editors naked and sitting on the lavatory. ‘Naked, yes,’ came the reply. ‘On the lavatory, no.’ For a slightly less adulatory view of the press baron and arch manipulator, see Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, or his biography by Anne Chisholm and Michael Davie.

  * Incidentally, the first non-stick frying pan made using Teflon (or polytetrafluo-roethylene) was manufactured in 1954 by the French engineer Marc Grégoire under the Tefal brand name. Non-stick frying pans were one of a whole range of new products that came on to the market in the Fifties – others were twin-tub washing machines, domestic refrigerators, electric toasters and kitchen mixers – all of which made the life of women unimaginably easier.

  * My favourite story about the extraordinary Jacob – for more, raid Paul Bailey’s superb Three Queer Lives – is that during the fight for suffrage she put an alarm clock in a tin box and placed it outside a seaside house Lloyd George was visiting in Selsey, Sussex; believing it to be a bomb, the Liberal leader’s bathing companion screwed up all of his courage, raced down the beach and hurled it into the sea.

  * Having auditioned for the BBC Newcastle drama department, she also got work in radio. In Fell Top, an adaptation of Winifred Watson’s 1935 novel about Weardale, she played the heroine, Anne Mary. One can only imagine the accent she gave her.

  * Spain was ultimately the author of ten eccentric and outrageously camp detective novels, most notably Poison for Teacher (1949), which is set in Radcliff Hall, a thinly disguised Roedean, and features as its sleuths a revue star called Miriam Birdseye and her chum, the Russian ballerina Natasha Nevkorina. Birdseye was based on Hermione Gingold, who had begged Spain to put her in a book. Poison for Teacher received rapturous reviews, including one by Elizabeth Bowen: ‘It is to be recommended, albeit recklessly, to girls’-school fiction addicts . . . an inspired craziness rules.’ This last point is certainly correct. It is barmy. But it is notable also for its portrayal of gay and lesbian characters – Miss Puke, the classics mistress, yearns hopelessly for Miss Fork-Thomas, who teaches chemistry; not for nothing does Roger Partick-Thistle teach the organ – and for the fact that it is suggested to one character that she have an abortion. Spain’s prose, moreover, has great style: when one fellow takes off his shoes his toes uncurl and crimp like ‘an oyster in hot milk’. Personally, I find it irresistible, though I do see why an Observer critic described Spain as belonging to the ‘lunatic fringe’ of detective writers.

  † Spain attended Bowen’s parties in London, where she met writers such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Taylor. She also stayed with the author at Bowen’s Court, her home in Ireland. In Why I’m Not a Millionaire she describes this visit in some detail. Eudora Welty was another houseguest – she had ‘hands like graceful fish’ – and to show her gratitude was determined to make Bowen a Mississippi Witch Pie, to be eaten at midnight. On being told there was no oven, Welty simply fashioned one from an old biscuit tin and a frying pan. ‘We bolted [the pie] manfully,’ writes Spain. ‘“Creative genius takes us the strangest ways,” murmured Miss Bowen mildly, on the stroke of midnight.’ Bowen and Spain’s friendship was, however, short-lived; the novelist turned cool on Nancy, possibly because she made a pass at her.

  * She had left Books of Today in 1951 for a job at Good Housekeeping, a move she and Jonnie celebrated with a trip to Paris, where they met Colette (‘there are people one loves immediately and forever’) and Christian Dior (‘the flunkeys looked a little bit sideways at us, in our jeans’). At the Express she joined another famous woman journalist of the Fifties, Anne Scott-James (1913–2009). ‘I did think her clothes were awful by any standard,’ Scott-James told Nancy’s biographer, Rose Collis. ‘She would appear in jeans in the office and then appear at a cocktail party or dinner looking absolutely stunning in a Balmain dress. It was like there were two people.’ Scott-James began her career at Vogue, a job that later inspired her 1952 novel In the Mink, a satire set in the offices of a glossy fashion magazine (for more on In the Mink see the Introduction). At the Express, she was women’s editor, but she also worked, periodically, as a foreign correspondent. Here’s a sample: ‘I was sitting at my typewriter in my bedroom at the Hotel Metropole in Moscow, wearing nothing but a bra and briefs, for it was boiling hot, when the door burst open and a burly Russian came in without knocking.’ In 1964 Scott-James replaced Nancy as a panellist on the BBC show My Word! Her son is Max Hastings, the historian and former editor of the Daily Telegraph.

  * We do not know for sure that Nancy deliberately decided to get herself pregnant, but given her sexuality it seems likely. If it had been some kind of accident a woman like Spain – metropolitan, well connected – would have had less difficulty than you might imagine arranging an illegal abortion. See About Time Too, a memoir by Penelope Mortimer, in which she describes being taken to a Chelsea abortionist by her future husband, John Mortimer, in 1948 or thereabouts (‘he had,’ Mortimer writes, ‘sophisticated friends’).

  * Nick Werner Laurie has a memory of being taken to Dietrich’s London pied-a-terre for tea, whereupon Nancy and Marlene disappeared ‘for an hour and a half, leaving him all alone.

  * From 1957 until 1964 Nancy spent a week of every month, at least, in Paris.

  * When he screened the silent film The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, he employed thirty men backstage to imitate the sound of galloping horses and gunfire. The film ran for eight months, and was seen by Queen Mary and the Prince of Wales.

  †Henderson, who wore a diamond tiara to dinner every night, was a noted eccentric. She would sometimes arrive at the theatre in disguise and, on one occasion, auditioned as a novelty act: dressed in an animal skin, she pretended to be a polar bear, which danced ponderously about the stage on its hind legs.

  * Van Damm’s first few (non-nude) acts were terrible: a man who juggled apples at the same time as eating one; a violinist from Huddersfield who played while knotting his arms and legs into extraordinary contortions. But van Damm also went on to discover many future stars, among them Bruce Forsyth, Tony Hancock and Peter Sellers.

  * Some Windmill facts – which Sheila knew by heart. In the course of an average year a Windmill Girl would walk thirty-five miles on the stairs between her dressing room and the stage. She would change costume five thousand times, perform seventy-five thousand high kicks and wear out seventy-five pairs of dancing shoes. These girls were well cared for: the theatre had a doctor and a subsidised canteen, and in summer a miniature lido was installed on the roof, complete with deck chairs and flowering plants. They were also well paid. Strange as it may sound, the ethos of the theatre was curiously feminist. ‘It was totally liberating working there,’ says Iris Chappie, a former Windmill Girl. ‘It was tough, but it made us free. You were earning and it gave you self-esteem, and you improved and impr
oved. We felt powerful; we felt women could do anything they wanted. If we have a get-together now, you’ll find only about five out of twenty of us married. We travelled, we made loads of money and we blew it, we met interesting people. You never even thought about getting your pinny on.’ Sheila van Damm paid for Iris Chappie to have a breast reduction. Iris, who hated her breasts, was thrilled. Afterwards, Joan ran a feature about the operation in SHE.

  * Hughes (1918–93) served in the ATA for six years, never losing an aircraft – though on one occasion she was forced to land a Hurricane whose undercarriage she was unable to lower. The only damage was a bent propeller (a relief, since the first Hurricane flights by women had attracted much attention, on the grounds that female pilots might not be physically strong enough). It was Joan who coached Kenneth More, another famous graduate of the Windmill, for his role as Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky (1956).

  * She also continued to write books, among them the Nancy Spain Colour Cookery Book. I have not been able to discover the name of the home economist who helped her with this volume (knowing Nancy – ‘I am an impromptu cook,’ she writes in her foreword, with some understatement – she couldn’t possibly have written it herself). Among its pages, you will find recipes for such delights as jockey club salad (pineapple in gelatin, set in moulds so it resembles a jockey’s cap, and served on a lettuce leaf) and French egg casserole (hard-boiled eggs in white sauce).