Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  † Returning from her final visit to Zywiec in 1939 – she and a friend had driven there in her Wolseley – she only just managed to miss the German invasion of Poland. ‘Wo sind die Manner? [Where are the men?]’ asked the German border guards, unable to believe two women would travel alone. Convinced they must be involved in spying, they then confiscated Colvin’s camera.

  * Another regular at these meetings was Marjory Allen, a landscape architect who, in 1954, published an influential volume on adventure playgrounds for children.

  * Coined in 1955 by the architectural writer Ian Nairn for the areas on the edges of cities that had been failed by urban planning. By 1959 many of the New Towns were deemed to be failures.

  * And no wonder: in 1959 she had been appointed landscaper at Drakelow C Power Station in Staffordshire. Her award-winning design included a wildfowl nature reserve on lakes created by gravel excavation. In the same year Sylvia Crowe was commissioned to do the same job at Transfyndd in Snowdonia. Working alongside the power station’s architect Basil Spence, she built an outdoor rest area for staff; it comprises a series of curving dry-stone terraces that feel like the ruins of some ancient building – appropriate given that Spence thought of his design as resembling a castle.

  * She loved opera and was a regular at Glyndebourne, for which she used to wear a kimono that was rather too tight, forcing her to take comically diminutive steps.

  * To be truthful, in the case of bergenias, all leathery and vulgar, I wish she hadn’t bothered. I look at them and shudder.

  † Margery used to call these sculpted green blobs her ‘pudding trees’. The current avenue is not the one she planted; in 2001 a new set of trees were put in, Margery’s having been on their last legs.

  * The cousin of an Earl, Henry was a reckless gambler. In 1951 she was jailed for fraud, having borrowed money from a ‘friend’ to pay her racing debts (the cheques of this friend were forged). Who Lie in Gaol was based on her time in Holloway and Askham Grange prisons, and attracted controversy for the allegations it made (some women, she said, were forced to give birth in their cells). Her next book, Yield to the Night, was a novel set in the cell of a young woman shortly to be hanged for murder. J. Lee Thompson, who was by now her lover, turned it into a 1956 film starring Diana Dors. At the time many people believed it was based on the case of Ruth Ellis, hanged in July 1955 for the murder of David Blakely, but this was not so: the novel was published in 1954. Spookily, Henry appeared to have seen the future. For more on Ellis and Dors, see the Introduction.

  † Connell began her career as editor on In Which We Serve (1942), Noel Coward’s patriotic war film. She went on to edit Alfie (1966), starring Michael Caine, for which she received a BAFTA nomination.

  * Anthony Asquith was the son of the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith and his second wife, Margot Tennant. Puffin was his childhood nickname. He would go on to film Shaw’s Pygmalion with Leslie Howard, and Terence Rattigan’s plays The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy.

  * Michael Powell, the director celebrated for his partnership with Emeric Pressburger. In the Forties they made such celebrated movies as The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. The quota quickies were the result of the 1927 Cinematograph Film Act, which required exhibitors to screen a greater percentage of British movies. The idea was to give the industry a boost, but this huge new market only encouraged film companies to supply the demand for as little cash as possible. Cinema charladies, so the story goes, used to hoover while they were on; they were so bad no one wanted to see them.

  * A 1946 newspaper portrait of Sydney described him like this: ‘He bites off large lumps of life. But there’s a baby face, a soft voice, refinement, sensitivity and the odd paradox of urbane naivety.’ But he never forgot his roots. Even when he was rich and famous and never out of the papers, he would still keep two hundred pounds in his pocket for reassurance. I’ve always got this, he would think to himself.

  * Britain’s very first woman film director, Craigie made left-leaning documentaries and wrote screenplays. She met her future husband Michael Foot, the Labour politician, while she was making The Way We Live (1946), a film about family life in Portsmouth, the most bombed town in England.

  * It’s about a spoony boy who indulges his feelings for two girls at the same time, while his parents are away on holiday.

  * It was eventually released in July 1945. Audiences loved it.

  * The war did affect the filming of The Seventh Veil. Thanks to clothes rationing, it was difficult-verging-on-impossible to get the right costumes for Todd, and the V2S that succeeded the doodlebugs often exploded near the studio; shrapnel made a che-querboard of the roof and the rain dripped on to the set. Staff and artists alike were delayed in the mornings, their cars and taxis having disappeared into bomb craters overnight, and the sirens interrupted the recording of dialogue.

  † Overjoyed but also, like many people, sceptical. The news about Hitler – that he was dead – was so good it was almost ‘fishy’.

  * Queen Mary asked to have a private screening of The Seventh Veil – and she, for one, ‘heartily approved’ of Francesca’s choice.

  * She was excited to meet Somerset Maugham, whose stories Sydney turned into three successful films, but was disillusioned by the reality of the man, who resembled an ‘inscrutable tortoise’ and whose caustic wit on set provoked ‘uneasy laughter’. Maugham, she noted, was so enamoured of himself in make-up – he ‘introduced’ the stories on screen – that he jokingly announced his intention of wearing it permanently.

  † Rogers was Betty’s second husband. She divorced her first, a mechanic, when he returned from the war a stranger. She then reverted to using her maiden name, as she would do for the rest of her days.

  * Women first joined the Metropolitan Police in 1919. In 1949 there were 235 women police officers in uniform and just twenty-one in CID. The separate women’s police unit at the Met was not disbanded until the mid-Seventies.

  † Eyewitness, for instance, was scripted by Janet Green, later the screenwriter of Victim.

  * She did work very hard. In addition to her directing, she was still writing: plays, novels, screenplays; her work rate is astounding. She was also required to do publicity for her films: unglamorous tours to provincial hotels with coin-operated gas fires in their bedrooms; appearances on local television and radio; interviews for the newspapers. On top of all of this, she was a keen Labour Party activist – Jennie Lee and Nye Bevan were friends – and a passionate gardener.

  † Sydney’s business affairs were increasingly vast. In addition to his movie production business and his writing, he had interests in television and a three-hundred-acre dairy farm. He was a mainstay of the newspapers, his latest moves always reported in the gossip columns.

  * I have no proof of this relationship: no letter, no photograph. But every single one of my interviewees for this chapter mentioned it to me, unprompted.

  * Kenneth More, star of Genevieve, Reach for the Sky and Wendy Toye’s hit Raising a Riot.

  * Though not as bad a mistake as the fact that in the guillotine scene a man in a beret can be seen riding a bicycle. Seeing this on the rushes, Betty made the decision that it would be too expensive to reshoot the scene. ‘I decided to take a chance. Dirk [Bogarde] and Marie [Versini] were so good in the sequence – if anyone in the audience had eyes dry enough to focus on the far right background, we had failed anyway, I figured.’

  * When More left his wife in 1968 for the actress Angela Douglas, who was twenty-six years his junior, he became estranged from his family and he was also ostracised by some in the industry – including, it seems, Betty. According to one source, this was because she had once made a pass at him, and he had turned her down.

  † Though she loved her first trip to Hollywood. She stayed with David Niven, met Ida Lupino, then Hollywood’s only woman director, and watched Cecil B. DeMille at work on The Ten Commandments.

  * This site, in Walbrook Street, was init
ially thought to be a relatively unimportant villa. Shortly towards the end of a two-month period of excavation, however, exquisite carvings were found, including one of the head of a faintly smiling Mithras. Walbrook Street was close to Fleet Street, with the result that a photograph of the young god appeared in the Sunday Times, and the following day the row over its fate was heated enough for Churchill to order his minister of works, Sir David Eccles, to go straight to the City for a look-see. Grimes won an extension for the dig, and more finds followed. The remains were then rebuilt in a more convenient location close by. In January 2012, however, it was announced that the temple would shortly be returning to its original home, the better to make way for a new HQ for Bloomberg. W. G. Grimes, incidentally, was one of the team who excavated the ship burial at Sutton Hoo in 1939 – a race against time of a quite different order (see John Preston’s marvellous 2007 novel, The Dig).

  * Mortimer Wheeler – Rik to his friends – was one of the great popularisers of archaeology. His excavations in 1926 at Caerleon in Wales were, for instance, sponsored by the Daily Mail in exchange for the exclusive right to cover the dig. His 1955 memoir Still Digging, which had for its cover a drawing of Wheeler in which he looks remarkably like the actor Terry Thomas, was a surprise best seller. An unstoppable womaniser, he also had a crazy private life. Wheeler was married three times: first to the archaeologist Tessa Verney, then to Mavis de Vere Cole and, finally, to Margaret Norfolk. Mavis de Vere Cole, a mistress of Wheeler’s friend Augustus John, was the second wife of the notorious prankster Horace de Vere Cole who was, for a time, in the frame for the Piltdown hoax. In the Fifties, having long since divorced Wheeler, Mavis achieved a strange kind of fame of her own when, in a jealous rage, she shot her lover Anthony Vivian in the abdomen – a crime passionnel for which she served a six-month prison sentence. Mortimer Wheeler died in 1976 at the age of eighty-five. His biography, written by Jacquetta Hawkes, was published in 1982.

  * Answers: I. ‘The Queen loved granite because she hated change; at her express wish nineteen varieties representing the principal Aberdeen granites were used to ornament the pulpit at Balmoral.’ 2. Wenlock Edge, in Shropshire: ‘So common and so conspicuous are the fossil trilobites in some parts of the Wenlock limestone that they have won the local name of Dudley locusts.’ 3. Both were protected from extinction by a kind of shell – for a time.

  * In 1929 women could study for the tripos but would not receive a degree after taking it; they did not become full members of the university until 1948. Jacquetta was a member of Newnham College, whose principal was Pernel Strachey, aka the Streak. Strachey was the older sister of Lytton, and surprisingly conservative for someone associated with the Bloomsbury Group. For instance, women students who attended the theatre were allowed to do so only in the company of a fellow student, and were required to sit in the dress circle. She did, however, permit members of the boat club to wear shorts on the river.

  * The director of this dig was the great Dorothy Garrod, who in 1939 would be elected Disney Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, thus becoming the first woman to hold a Chair at Cambridge or Oxford. She made a huge impression on Jacquetta, who remembered her like this: ‘Small (5ft 2in), composed and neat beside her fellahin workers – girls in bright ballooning skirts and a few lusty pick-men – her command of them was absolute. When a builder tried to cheat her, she overwhelmed him, thumping the table, her normally calm eyes glaring. In the cool peace of the evening after a good dinner there were a few classical records to be played or she might take up her flute. Her talk (low-pitched) was sometimes witty, always congenial.’ Garrod spent seven tough seasons at Mount Carmel (1929–34), the most important of her career. Her finds enabled her to establish a sequence of some six hundred thousand years of human activity in the region. Hawkes’s experiences in the 1932 season were also formative. A Neanderthal skeleton was unearthed – the first to be discovered outside Europe. ‘I was conscious of this vanished being and myself as part of an unbroken stream of consciousness, as two atoms in the inexorable process to which we all belonged,’ she said. It was on Mount Carmel, too, that she ‘took full possession of a love and confidence that have not yet forsaken me’. Watching a camel train in the moonlight, she was filled with a sudden comprehension of the beauty of the physical world. This was an intensely spiritual experience, but it was also deeply erotic – ‘I had the heightened sensibility of one in love’ – and, as such, the beginning of a restlessness that would endure for the next two decades.

  * Frederick Gowland Hopkins was a fellow of Trinity College.

  * Motley were John Gielgud’s designers during the Thirties. One of their number, Sarah Harris, was the first wife of George Devine, who would go on to run the Royal Court Theatre, where he staged one of the most important cultural events of the Fifties: the first production of John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger.

  † ‘Aspects of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods in Western Europe’. It was published in the journal Antiquity six months later, in March 1934.

  * Christopher sang ‘lustily’ throughout the wedding service. Afterwards his stiff wing collar was signed by all those close to him. ‘He really needed a trophy [bride],’ his son Nicolas told me. ‘Before that word was invented. There had to be some fine woman who would be a suitable partner for Christopher Hawkes.’

  * Nicolas Hawkes believes his mother’s jump was attention-seeking rather than a serious attempt to commit suicide. Over the years Jacquetta was to brood on the matter of her sexuality. In A Quest of Love, she wrote: ‘I do not think it was timidity that confined it to emotion. My body was only mildly interested, if at all. From that time, I have loved men, but still, on meeting other women, I can feel that instinctive message, the tremor of a nerve just penetrating consciousness, that triggers a true Sapphic presence.’

  * Jacquetta was a conscientious mother, but not a warmly affectionate one. She once said she had no instinct for motherhood.

  * These broadcasts, Postscripts, which ran from June to October 1940, were sometimes funny and sometimes serious. The more serious of them reminded the public what had happened to soldiers after the first war, when they returned to unemployment and poverty. As a result a critical minority, led by the MP Beverley Baxter, demanded that they be stopped on political grounds. The BBC did drop him, though letters from the public were running 300:1 in his favour – possibly on the orders of Churchill.

  * Priestley was at this time married to Jane Wyndham Lewis, his second wife and the mother of three of his five children. His first wife, Pat Tempest, had died of cancer in 1925, leaving him with two daughters to bring up. Priestley also had a stepdaughter from Jane’s first marriage, to D. B. Wyndham-Lewis. He had been unfaithful to Jane on many occasions.

  * Jacquetta had apparently ticked off Priestley for reading too many detective stories.

  * It was also the year she visited Robert Graves at his home in Deià, Majorca, where they discussed Goddess Theory.

  * Jacquetta did indeed visit Sissinghurst, on at least two occasions. Nigel Nicolson, Vita’s son, always insisted that there was nothing between his mother and Jacquetta but writerly admiration. Maybe so. Nevertheless, I believe that there was an attraction. A note from Vita to Jacquetta of 1959 includes the following: ‘I well remember our brief encounter in the Rope Walk [at Albany, where Vita’s husband Harold kept a set]. You were running both physically and mentally, and you were wearing a most becoming Russian-looking fur hat. So you see.’ The clue is in the last three words.

  * At least one man was passionately in love with her: the writer Edward Hyams, whose history of farming, Soil and Civilisation, was published in 1952. In the Jacquetta Hawkes archive at the University of Bradford there is a long letter from Hyams, written when he finally realised the relationship was hopeless. In it, he tells her that he is prepared to suffer a great deal of pain on her account – anything than be cut off from her completely. ‘To be with you, see you, hear you is exquisite pleasure . . . The choice is between
being very much alive and in pain, and half dead.’

  † Dragon’s Mouth was a dramatic quartet – each of them wrote two voices – inspired by Jung, about whom Priestley was quite dotty. The four characters represent Jung’s four functions of sensation, intellect, intuition and emotion. It is rarely, if at all, performed today – and with good reason.

  * An appropriate place for Jacquetta to marry. The Women’s Social and Political Union used to hold a ‘women’s parliament’ at Caxton Hall at the beginning of each parliamentary session before marching to the real thing, where they would attempt to hand a petition to the prime minister.

  * Jacquetta’s script, a hypnotic prose poem, was narrated by Cecil Day-Lewis, and the effect is mesmeric. The making of the film, however, was not a happy experience, not least because it coincided with the death of Hepworth’s eldest son, Paul, in an aeroplane crash. Hepworth and Jacquetta, cut from the same cloth, should have been friends, or at least allies, but this was not to be. Jacquetta found the artist needy and difficult, while Hepworth worried that the film would be ‘overcrowded’ with words. For more on Hepworth and the Fifties, see the Introduction.