by Sue Corbett
In later life, after most of the separate birth-control societies had united and achieved acceptance and respectability in the Family Planning Association, the defects of her qualities became apparent. She remained aloof, for she could not co-operate on equal terms with others. Her dogmatism in scientific matters lost her the support of most doctors sympathetic to her aims. The shortcomings of her exuberant style and literary imagination (which could not readily transcend the plane of private bodily rapture) marred the verse she occasionally published.
Her home was near Dorking. She had two sons, one of whom survives her.
Marie Stopes, palaeobotanist and family-planning pioneer, was born on October 15, 1880. She died on October 2, 1958, aged 77
COUNTESS MOUNTBATTEN OF BURMA
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CHARITY-WORKER AND WIFE OF ADMIRAL OF THE FLEET EARL MOUNTBATTEN OF BURMA, WHO WAS ALSO LAST VICEREINE OF INDIA
FEBRUARY 22, 1960
Tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed in the English tradition, Lady Mountbatten was the heiress of great wealth and made a brilliant marriage to one closely allied by blood and marriage to the Royal Family. Lady Louis gave early promise of the part she would play as the last Vicereine of India by her dedication to the interests of all those who care for the sick and helpless. No one did more to help that cause during and after the recent war than she, and her devotion was amply repaid by the love of the people of the sub-continent of India. Her influence there was immense and it was suitably acknowledged by Mr Nehru in 1948 when he recalled how she had moved from camp to camp in the stricken Punjab to bring help and cheer to the refugees.
She was the elder daughter of Lord Mount Temple, a grandson of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, and his first wife Amalia Maud, the only child of Sir Ernest Cassel. King Edward VII stood sponsor at her christening and she was named Edwina Cynthia Annette. Though the heiress to great wealth she was brought up strictly and up to the age of 21 she had a dress allowance of only £100 a year. Her grandfather’s close personal friendship with King Edward VII and her father’s prominent position in the House of Commons before he was raised to the peerage, ensured to her an entrée into the best circles, and it was at a Cowes Week soon after the end of the 1914-18 War that she was introduced by the Duke of Windsor, then Prince of Wales, to the first Marquess of Milford Haven’s younger son, then Lord Louis Mountbatten, and serving in the Royal Navy. Their marriage was one of the great social events of the season of 1922 and was graced by the presence of King George V and Queen Mary. Both were young and full of life and they became by sheer force of character the leaders of the young fashion of the time. Sir Ernest Cassel had died in 1921 and had left between his two granddaughters the income from his immense fortune, subject to a number of provisions which were soon to become embarrassing. Only five years after his death Brook House, the great mansion in Park Lane which Sir Ernest Cassel had built and filled with an immensely valuable collection of objects of art, was sold and a block of flats was built on the site, with a penthouse on the roof to accommodate the Mountbattens. They also had a house at Bosham, a castle in the west of Ireland, and later Broadlands, near Romsey, once the home of Lord Palmerston.
Yet amid all this luxury neither of them forgot the more serious things of life. Lord Louis pursued his career in the Navy which his father had served with devotion throughout his life; Lady Louis took the greatest interest in dockland settlements and other charitable causes, but above all in hospitals and nursing. She became president of the London County branch of the St John Ambulance Brigade in 1939 and after the outbreak of war was indefatigable in the work of recruitment and organization. When her husband became head of Combined Operations in 1941 she added to her duties by organizing most efficiently the welfare branch of that immense inter-service body. Later on she proved a valuable stimulus in the same field in the even larger sphere of the South East Asia Command.
She had become Superintendent-in-Chief of the Red Cross and St John war organization and as such made an immense number of inspections of hospitals, welfare centres, schools, and clinics all over the world, but particularly in the Middle and Far East. In a three-month tour in 1945 she travelled some 34,000 miles, visiting many parts of India, Ceylon, Chungking, and the Burma front. Later in the year she visited Palestine and Jordan and after the collapse of Japan she did sterling work in Java in the early days of the organization for the recovery of allied prisoners of war and internees (RAPWI). She was gazetted DCVO in the New Year Honours of 1946, a recognition richly deserved. In the spring of that year she visited Australia and in Sydney was invited to march with the veterans of both wars to the Sydney cenotaph for the dawn service, a unique honour in recognition of her and her husband’s work for service men.
She was therefore no stranger to India, Burma, and Malaya when she went to New Delhi as Vicereine in 1947. The staff at Viceregal House quickly found that she was determined to get to grips with the problems of Indian life. When her husband flew to the riot-torn Punjab she went with him, travelling thousands of miles by aircraft, car, and on foot in heat and dust to bring hope and solace to the despairing refugees. She was no great lady standing at a distance, but a mother and a nurse who took their soiled and trembling hands in hers and spoke quiet words of womanly comfort. In the short and difficult term of office of the last Viceroy of India she won the hearts of all, and nobody contributed more to the warm ties of friendship between the British and Indian peoples than she. In 1947 she was made CI [Imperial Order of the Crown of India]. She had been appointed CBE in 1943 and in 1948 she was advanced to GBE.
The year 1949 saw the introduction of a private Bill into the House of Lords with the object of varying the terms of her inheritance. Taxation had risen so steeply that her income had shrunk to less than a tenth of its original amount and some relief from the provision of Sir Ernest Cassel’s will forbidding the anticipation of capital was urgently necessary, otherwise she and her husband would be compelled to curtail the public work they had so long and so devotedly performed. An Act giving relief from onerous provisions of settlement of married women’s property had been passed in 1935, but it was not retrospective and as Sir Ernest Cassel had died in 1921 its provisions did not apply to Lady Mountbatten’s case. The Bill passed through all its stages in the House of Lords, but there was considerable opposition from both sides of the House of Commons. After debate, the private Bill was withdrawn and a public Bill having similar force was eventually passed into law in November.
At the time of her death Lady Mountbatten was connected with a dozen and more bodies devoted to the welfare of youth, the sick and the underprivileged; among them the St John Ambulance Brigade (of which she was Superintendent-in-Chief), the Westminster Hospital, the Girl Guides Association, Save the Children Fund, the Royal College of Nursing, and the WVS. Yet her interest was never passive; she had an inquiring mind and it was never enough for her to be just a name on a letter heading. Once her sympathies had been roused she gave generously both of her time — she was often overseas — and her organizational experience. Of the two daughters she bore Lord Mountbatten, the elder, Lady Patricia, is married to Lord Brabourne and the younger, Lady Pamela, was married in January to Mr David Hicks.
Countess Mountbatten of Burma, GBE, DCVO, CI, was born on November 28, 1901. She died on February 21, 1960, aged 58
SYLVIA PANKHURST
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A MILITANT SUFFRAGETTE WHO ALSO CAMPAIGNED ON BEHALF OF ABYSSINIAN INDEPENDENCE
SEPTEMBER 28, 1960
Miss Sylvia Pankhurst, who was one of the chief figures among the militant suffragettes in the years before 1914, died yesterday in Addis Ababa, our Correspondent there reports.
A woman of ardent temperament, devoted without emotional or any other reserve to the causes she made her own, Sylvia Pankhurst found in the women’s suffrage movement an outlet for her somewhat tempestuous energies more satisfying than she was able to find afterwards. Her mother, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, and her elder sister, Christabel, wer
e the chief forces in the Women’s Social and Political Union; but she, as its honorary secretary and, later, in secession from the WSPU, was not the least dramatic personage in the movement as a whole.
An unqualified and vehement militant, she came frequently into collision with the law and suffered imprisonment on numerous occasions under the rigours of the “Cat and Mouse” Act. When in 1914 her mother and sister, together with most of the other militant leaders, called a truce in their campaign and lent their organization to the cause of national service, Sylvia Pankhurst took her stand upon violent opposition to the war. She attached herself to the extreme Left and continued upon occasion to find herself in serious trouble with the police. In later years, when the glory of the militant campaign had been dimmed, she devoted herself above all else to an all but private crusade against Fascist Italy and on behalf of Abyssinian independence.
At the time of her death she was editing the Ethiopian Observer.
Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst was born in Manchester in 1882. Her father, Richard Marsden Pankhurst, who had been a friend of John Stuart Mill, was a barrister and a sincere and high-minded social worker. Her mother, Emmeline Pankhurst, was the daughter of Robert Goulden, a calico printer. She was educated at the High School for Girls, Manchester; the Municipal School of Art; and the Royal College of Art, South Kensington. She won medals and scholarships and during her student days went to Venice, where she took a diploma at the Accademia. In 1903 her mother and her sister, Christabel, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union, and in the course of time she became honorary secretary.
In 1912 and 1913 Sylvia Pankhurst formed branches of the WSPU in East London, which, developing upon other lines than the parent body, became a separate organization, under the name of the East London Federation. Thus she came to pursue her own feminist and other ideals, working in isolation from her mother and sister. In 1914 she established the Workers’ Dreadnought, in which her pacifist attitude of mind was supported by a vaguely revolutionary social philosophy.
She was active all through the war years in organizing the work of a number of clinics and a day nursery in East London, though not in work of that character only; in October, 1918, she was fined £50 on a charge of attempting to cause mutiny, sedition, or dissatisfaction among His Majesty’s Forces or the civilian population. Two years later, having in the meantime embraced with passion the cause of the Russian revolution, she paid a visit to Russia and on her return figured prominently among the communists in this country. Later in the year she was arrested again on a charge of publishing subversive matter, notably an article entitled “Discontent on the Lower Deck”, and was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment — a conviction that was upheld on appeal. She was expelled from the Communist Party in the following year after having refused to hand over to it the Workers’ Dreadnought.
Abyssinia represented her chief devotion before, during, and after the war of 1939-1945, and there she settled finally in 1956. For her services she received from the Emperor the decoration of the Queen of Sheba, first class.
She wrote many books, most notably a history of the Suffragette movement (1931), an interesting enough volume, though characteristically it displayed little knowledge of the non-militant movement, a Life of her mother (1935), and in the last year of her life a number of works concerned with various aspects of Ethiopian life.
Sylvia Pankhurst, suffragette, was born on May 5, 1882. She died on September 27, 1960, aged 78
Editor’s note: In response to the wave of hunger strikes by Suffragette prisoners, legislation that became known as the “Cat and Mouse” Act was passed in 1913, allowing hunger-striking prisoners to be released until they recouped their strength, at which point they could be re-arrested. In addition, this postscript appeared in The Times of October 27, 1960: “Dr Richard Pankhurst informs us that his mother, Sylvia Pankhurst, was never a member of the Communist Party and was therefore never expelled from it.”
MARILYN MONROE
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HOLLYWOOD LEGEND WITH A GIFT FOR COMEDY THAT SOME THOUGHT OUTSHONE OLIVIER’S
AUGUST 6, 1962
Miss Marilyn Monroe’s career was not so much a Hollywood legend as the Hollywood legend: the poor orphan who became one of the most sought after (and highly paid) women in the world; the hopeful Hollywood unknown who became the most potent star-attraction in the American cinema; the uneducated beauty who married one of America’s leading intellectuals.
The story thus dramatically outlined was in all essentials true. Marilyn Monroe began life as Norma Jean Baker in Los Angeles, where she was born on June 1, 1926. She was brought up in an orphanage and a series of foster homes, married first at the age of 15, obtained a divorce four years later and began a career as a photographer’s model. From this, in a few months, she graduated to a screen test with Twentieth-Century Fox, a contract and the name which she was to make famous. Nothing came of this contract immediately, however, and her first appearance in a film was for another studio in 1948, when she played second lead in a not very successful B picture called Ladies of the Chorus. There followed a number of small roles in films such as Love Happy (with the Marx Brothers), The Asphalt Jungle, directed by John Huston, in which she was first seriously noticed, Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night and others, until in 1952 she was given her first starring role in a minor thriller, Don’t Bother to Knock, in which she played (improbably) a homicidal baby-sitter.
This was where she began in earnest to become a legend: during the shooting of the film it came to light that some years before she had posed nude for a calendar picture, and her career, hanging in the balance, was saved by the simple avowal that she had needed the money for the rent and was not ashamed. From then on her name was constantly before the public, even if the parts she played were not always large or important, and the advertising for her next major role, in Niagara, which showed her reclining splendidly the length of the Niagara Falls established the image once and for all.
Marilyn Monroe and her new husband Arthur Miller in Surrey, in 1956. He wrote the screenplay of her final film, The Misfits, for her
At about this time she married the baseball star Joe di Maggio — the marriage was dissolved in 1954 — and began to show signs that she had talent as well as a dazzling physical presence. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire startled critics noticed a real gift for comedy and by the arrival of The Seven Year Itch there was no doubt about it: she gave a performance in which personality and sheer acting ability (notably an infallible sense of comic timing) played as important a part as mere good looks. From then on she appeared in an unbroken string of personal successes: Bus Stop, of which as severe a judge as Jose Ferrer has said: “I challenge any actress that ever lived to give a better performance in that role”, The Prince and the Showgirl in which many critics felt she outshone her director and co-star Sir Laurence Olivier, Some Like It Hot and Let’s Make Love.
In 1956 Marilyn Monroe was married again — to the playwright Arthur Miller (they were divorced in 1960) and his next work, the original screenplay of The Misfits, was written for her. This was, in the event, her last film (the most recent, Something’s Got to Give, being shelved after her failure to fulfil the terms of the contract) and in it under John Huston’s direction she gave a performance which provoked its reviewer in The Times to a comment which might stand for her work as a whole: “Considerations of whether she can really act seem as irrelevant as they were with Garbo; it is her rare gift just to be in front of the camera, and, to paraphrase the comment of her apologetic employer in an earlier, more frivolous film, ‘Well, anyone can act’.”
Marilyn Monroe, actress, was born on June 1, 1926. She died on August 5, 1962, aged 36
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
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VIGOROUS, LONG-SERVING US FIRST LADY, WHO CONTINUED IN ACTIVE PUBLIC LIFE AFTER HER HUSBAND’S DEATH IN OFFICE
NOVEMBER 8, 1962
Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt, t
he widow of President Franklin Roosevelt, whose death at the age of 78 is announced on another page, was perhaps the most distinguished of all the First Ladies who have graced the White House. It is true that Mrs Wilson, the second wife of President Woodrow Wilson, exerted more direct political power for a short period. But Mrs Roosevelt was more of an influential personality in her own right. To the men and women of America she became a figure of legendary earnestness, simplicity and devotion to the public good.
Her prominence derived in the first place, of course, from her husband. She had done more than most wives to help him in his political development, and her services to him were not curtailed when he achieved the Presidency. She was a charming and gifted hostess, interesting and interested in the many and varied guests whom it was her duty to entertain. But she was much more than that. She became the eyes and ears of a crippled man who could not move about as much as he would have wished. To him she presented the information and the views she acquired during her wide travels. As time went on she became herself a public commentator on the news in print and speech — and it must be confessed that on occasion her outspokenness proved a political embarrassment for her husband.
Her independent standing, however, was proved when she did not lapse into an honoured twilight of oblivion after Franklin Roosevelt’s death. Indeed, her personal political influence became enhanced with the passage of years. In a country where politics is so often regarded as a race for the spoils she stood out for her sense of noblesse oblige. Among a people where political manipulation is often considered one of the higher arts she was remarkable for her undeviating devotion to principle. She became the conscience of the Democratic Party.
