The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  Inevitably, she had the failings of her virtues. She may sometimes have been earnest to the point of the didactic. So uncompromising were her ideals that she lacked her husband’s political skill. So unquestioned was her own righteousness that on occasion she did not notice her own prejudices. But overall she made a noble and healthy contribution to the public life of more than one American generation.

  Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was born in 1884, the daughter of Elliot Roosevelt, a younger brother of President Theodore Roosevelt, by his marriage with Anna Hull. In 1892 her mother died and she went to live with her maternal grandmother. Two years later her father, to whom she was devoted, died also. Both her parents had belonged to affluent families of high social standing in New York and she had a sheltered and very careful upbringing. Her earlier youth was spent at her grandmother’s homes in New York and the country. On occasion she stayed with her uncle Theodore at Oyster Bay. Lacking playmates of her own age she learned to amuse herself and became an omnivorous reader. Her mother had wished her to acquire part of her education in Europe, and in 1899 she went with an aunt to England, where she was placed at Mlle Souvestre’s School at “Allinswood”, near Wimbledon Common, frequently spending her holidays on the Continent.

  Returning to New York, where she found herself somewhat out of touch with the younger generation, she was launched by her relations as a debutante. Soon, however, she met her distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was still at college. In 1903 he proposed to her and on St Patrick’s Day, 1905, they were married. After a tour in Europe Mrs Roosevelt and her young husband returned to a New York house and, in due course, to the care of a growing family. (Their first child, a daughter, was born in 1906, and they also had five sons.) Then, however, with her husband’s entry into politics, there came a new home in Albany and the dual existence of a politician’s wife which was to continue through many active and crowded years. From girlhood she had had high ideals and one of them was that a wife should share her husband’s interests.

  In 1913 the future President became Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and the inevitable move to Washington ensued. It meant many social activities, into which she threw herself with characteristic energy. Then came the war and work for the Red Cross and in the Navy Hospital. After the armistice she was able to go with her husband to Europe. By that time his political future seemed assured, and in 1920 he was nominated for the Vice-Presidency.

  The election was lost and the following year he suffered the attack of infantile paralysis that was to be a turning-point in his life. This was a period of stern trial for a devoted wife. She responded with superb courage and calm. One of the greatest services she ever rendered to him was in encouraging his determination some day to resume his political career in the active world. His mother would have had him lead the existence of an elegant invalid: his wife would have none of it. During his long convalescence she began to take an increasing interest in affairs, and after his election to the Governorship of New York a new field of public life opened for her.

  In 1932 Franklin Roosevelt was elected President of the United States and Mrs Roosevelt became first lady in the land. She had immense energy and both enthusiasm and ability. The hesitancy of her earlier years had vanished and she threw herself into her new duties with vigour. She travelled immense distances, and was here, there and everywhere. Everything interested her. She talked with everybody she met, asked questions, examined everything. There was a cartoon of miners in the bowels of the earth looking with astonishment over their shoulders and exclaiming “Here comes Mrs Roosevelt”. By this time she was a practised speaker and lecturer, and made speeches and broadcast. She also wrote books and in 1935 started her column, “My Day”, which before long was reaching millions of readers. In it she was informal, chatty and friendly and the women in small homes absorbed her observations easily and felt they knew her. The profits she derived from her activities amounted to a large annual sum and she distributed it among her favourite charities.

  Even if Mrs Roosevelt had played a less ambitious role her work would have been immense. Sacks of correspondence and endless gifts came as a matter of course to the President’s wife. There was also the White House — she was soon to renovate its offices — and all its entertaining to look after. She seemed, however, to take her normal duties in her stride and to be always moving on to wider interests. In such spare moments as she had, however, she reverted to the kindly matriarch and knitted for grandchildren. Naturally she was a contentious figure and the political opponents of her husband did not spare her — “Nor Eleanor either” was a hostile slogan in one of his Presidential campaigns. But criticism she accepted as the natural lot of public life, and in spite of it she became and remained a great national figure.

  In the war, kindly always in her recollections of her early days here, she proved herself a sympathetic friend towards Britain. She sent encouraging messages and adopted an East End boy for the duration of hostilities. In October, 1942, she flew across the Atlantic and stayed at Buckingham Palace. Her visit was full of incident. She saw the bombed areas and went to Dover, she visited American troops, the RAF and the women’s services and paid special attention to the work of women in the war. She also crossed to Ulster to see the American troops there and travelled to Scotland. Everywhere she went she radiated encouragement and created an admirable impression. From England, moreover, she broadcast to her own country. In the summer of 1943 she went to New Zealand and Australia to be again a welcome and honoured guest. The next year she was in the West Indies.

  At the President’s death, in April, 1945, she was 60 but a whole new life and career and even more travel lay ahead of her. She continued her daily column of comment, “My Day”, published several more books, was for years a delegate to the United Nations, visited half the countries of the world, and played an important role in American party politics.

  Eight months after her husband’s death President Truman asked her to be a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly meeting in 1945. The following year she was chairman of the Commission on Human Rights in Unesco. Thereafter she was constantly a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly meetings until the Democratic Administration gave way to the Republicans after the defeat of 1952. Even then she continued to be active in the American Association for the United Nations.

  In 1948 she came to London at the invitation of the King and Queen to unveil the statue of her husband in Grosvenor Square. She had visited Germany immediately after the 1945 meeting of the General Assembly in London and thereafter she crossed the ocean so many times she described herself as a harassed commuter across the Atlantic. In addition to Britain, France and Germany her travels included Russia (as far as Samarkand and Tashkent), Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, India, Pakistan, Burma, Siam, Indonesia, Hong-kong and Japan. On these travels she continued writing her daily column for various American newspapers and interviewed, as a newspaperwoman, important people around the world, including an interview with Mr Khrushchev at Yalta.

  At home she remained pretty well aloof from domestic politics while she was representing her country at the United Nations although she did support Mr Adlai Stevenson for President in the 1952 campaign. He inspired her, as he did so many other people of deep liberal convictions, with the belief that he would have made a President of outstanding calibre. She remained his devoted supporter. In 1956 she campaigned for him in his fight for the Democratic nomination and in his contest for the Presidency itself. Nothing would have pleased her better than for him to be the Democratic standard-bearer once again in 1960.

  It was not to be, but Mrs Roosevelt did not reconcile herself immediately to the choice of Mr Kennedy. Her doubts were occasioned not only by disappointment over the rejection of Mr Stevenson: she was disturbed by Mr Kennedy’s ambiguous record on Macarthyism and questioned whether he had the basic conviction and faithfulness to principle necessary for the highest responsibility. Eventually she did declare hersel
f for him and campaign on his behalf, but there was always the suspicion that she was moved less by confidence in him than by concern at the thought of Mr Nixon in the White House.

  Throughout these years, however, she was not preoccupied by national politics. Some of her most valuable work at this time was at the level of New York state affairs. In company with Mr Herbert Lehman and others she played a major part in freeing Democratic politics in the state from the control of Tammany Hall. It was on such an issue as this, where moral principles were closely involved, that she was at her best.

  Her popularity with the American people transcended parties and politics. Many times during her widowhood she was voted, in annual polls by the Gallup organization, the most popular woman in America. In addition to her political labours, her travel and her daily journalism and her work for many charities, she found time to write a number of books of reminiscence. They included This is My Story, My Days, If You Ask Me, This I Remember, India and the Awakening East, and On My Own, this last the story of her life and activities following her departure from the White House in 1945. In the early thirties she had also published books for children and women, including When You Grow Up to Vote, and It’s Up to the Women. She also edited various books including The Moral Basis of Democracy.

  Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the United States, was born on October 11, 1884. She died on November 7, 1962, aged 78

  NANCY, VISCOUNTESS ASTOR

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  FIRST WOMAN TO SIT IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

  MAY 4, 1964

  Nancy, Viscountess Astor, CH, the first woman to take her seat as a member of the House of Commons, died on Saturday at Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire. She was 84.

  In any age or country, Nancy Astor would have been remarkable for outstanding vitality, personality, charm and will power. She was always a delight to the eye, small, compact, a finely drawn profile, a classic head, growing more and more exquisite with the years. She was made all of one piece, a perfect working model, always well-dressed. From the first day she entered the House of Commons in neat black with touches of white at collar, in appearance she struck the exact note and set the style for her feminine colleagues in years to come.

  Nancy Witcher Langhorne was born of an old Virginian family on May 19, 1879, on the same day as her future husband William Waldorf Astor, was born in New York. In 1897 she married Robert Gerald Shaw, of Boston, from whom she obtained a divorce in 1903 and in 1906 she married Waldorf Astor. When he succeeded to the viscounty and resigned from the representation in Parliament of the Sutton Division of Plymouth Lady Astor was elected as Unionist member on November 28, 1919. She was the first woman to sit in the House of Commons, being introduced by Balfour and Lloyd George. Countess Markievicz, who did not take her seat, had been elected by an Irish constituency in the Sinn Fein interest at a slightly earlier date. From 1919 to 1945 Lady Astor continued to represent Plymouth and most of her life and work were closely identified with the city, of which during the Second World War she was Lady Mayoress.

  In Parliament she naturally devoted herself mainly to the claims of women and children, speaking with gaiety or gravity according to her mood, but never dully and always briefly and sometimes brilliantly. Her worst fault was a habit of interruption which, however tempered with wit, was apt to cause annoyance. Temperance, education, nursery schools, women police were subjects which deeply interested her.

  Like Zenobia, and also in St James’s Square, Lady Astor was a famous political hostess and her house was the meeting place of distinguished visitors to the metropolis, especially Americans. One day it might be Gandhi, the next Grandi and the following day a batch of social workers or Cabinet Ministers or Charlie Chaplin or Ruth Draper or G.B.S. And there were from time to time the huge party gatherings comparable with those of Londonderry House or of the Devonshire House of an earlier day. On the top of the staircase, sparkling with jewels, she welcomed each guest with a bantering quip or jest and was the central figure throughout the evening.

  Her energy was extraordinary. After a long day in London and in the House she would return to Cliveden about seven, change into tennis clothes and play two or even three sets of singles with one of her nieces; then down to the river (before the war) in her cream-coloured car, driven at speed; she would swim across the Thames, talking all the time about God, or advising someone on the bank about the way to live his, or usually her, life, touch the bottom on the far bank, tell the swans to go away, and swim back still talking. In earlier years she was a dashing rider and a sure shot; later golf was her favourite game. She played it well and conversationally and distinguished herself in parliamentary matches.

  She had a sharp sense of the ridiculous and could have made a fortune on the variety stage. No one who saw her Christmastide impersonations in the old days at Cliveden, egged on by her sisters Phyllis and Nora, will ever forget her clever performances. Dressed in a hunting coat of her husband’s and her hair hidden under a large black velvet huntsman’s cap she became the little foreign visitor, here for the hunting season; or with a row of celluloid teeth worn crookedly, an upper-class Englishwoman who thought Americans peculiar. Someone once said she was a cross between Joan of Arc and Gracie Fields. She wasn’t courageous, if by courage is meant mastery of fear, for she did not know about fear. She was fearless of physical dangers, of criticism, of people.

  No one could be kinder, more tender, generous, comforting and swift to help in time of trouble. She loved being needed and was at her best in a crisis. She would have denied it but she had an innate sense of drama and had a flair for dealing with people en masse. American politicians and journalists of the old school were bewitched by her. The later, war-time journalists were scared by her outspokenness and refused to be charmed. It is recorded that Gladstone asked his wife whether she would prefer to know nothing and say anything she pleased, or to know everything and say next to nothing on matters of foreign and domestic policy. Lady Astor got the best of both worlds, knowing everything and saying anything she pleased.

  Her matriarchal feelings were strong and she liked to feel in touch with the whole circle at all times. She held the family together, including nieces and nephews. Within this circle she loved to recall Virginia days, her father, Colonel Langhorne, her sisters and their beaux. During a visit to the States in 1922 she made 40 speeches, mainly in Virginia, “without a single faux pas,” reported an American correspondent.

  Nancy, Lady Astor, electioneering at Plymouth in 1922

  Her deep religious sense found its formal setting in the Christian Science Church and she was a diligent student of the Scriptures, with a strong horror of sin and a crusading spirit which spurred her to pursue reforms regardless of party divisions. There were four persons whose influence and friendship and characters she was never tired of acknowledging with gratitude and affection: Rachel Macmillan, Henry Jones, Arthur Balfour, and Philip Lothian.

  After her withdrawal from Parliament in June, 1945, when she did not stand for re-election. Lady Astor continued her interest in the city she had represented so long and made regular visits while her health permitted.

  On July 16, 1959, she was made an honorary Freeman of the City of Plymouth.

  In the same year Lady Astor performed the launching ceremony for HMS Plymouth, first ship for 250 years to bear the name, presented a diamond and sapphire necklace to be worn by Lady Mayoresses of Plymouth, and gave her home at 3, Elliot Terrace, overlooking the Hoe, to the city for use as a Lord Mayor’s residence. Its use was later modified to a place for the accommodation of official visitors.

  She was made CH in 1937.

  Her husband died in 1952 and she is survived by her four sons, Viscount Astor; David Astor, editor of the Observer; Michael Astor; Major J. J. Astor; and by her daughter, the Countess of Ancaster.

  Nancy, Viscountess Astor, CH, first woman to sit as an MP, was born on May 19, 1879. She died on May 2, 1964, aged 84

  DAME MYRA HESS

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&
nbsp; PIANIST WHO RAISED WARTIME MORALE IN LONDON WITH DAILY LUNCHTIME CONCERTS AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY

  NOVEMBER 27, 1965

  Dame Myra Hess, DBE, the concert pianist, died at her home at St John’s Wood, London, on Thursday. She was 75.

  That she was more than a distinguished pianist is attested by the honours which came to her.

  Honorary doctorates of Durham, London, Cambridge, Manchester, Leeds, St Andrews, and Reading and her title, Dame of the British Empire, conferred in 1941, primarily in recognition of her establishment of daily concerts at the National Gallery as a war-emergency service, were public recognition that she gave to music more than virtuosity on her instrument, more even than many years of sane and poetical interpretation of pianoforte classics.

  She was not in the least a solemn person, though she had a proper appreciation of music’s significance and social value. There emanated from her presence on the platform as from her actual performances a combination of integrity and geniality. Her arrangement of Bach’s figured chorale “Jesu, Joy of man’s desiring” made her name a household word among amateurs and non-musicians.

  Myra Hess was born in London on February 25, 1890, and began her education at the Guildhall School of Music under Julian Pascal and Orlando Morgan, but in 1902 she won a scholarship at the Royal Academy of Music and came under the late Tobias Matthay, becoming one of his earliest as well as one of his most distinguished pupils. In Matthay’s textbook on muscular relaxation she and Mr Vivian Langrish are the models for the exercises which formed the basis of his method of teaching. In 1907 she came before the London public in a Queen’s Hall concert conducted by Beecham, at which she played Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto, an auspicious and prophetic choice. She must have played it hundreds of times — for many years it was a highlight of the Promenade concerts — yet more than 40 years afterwards it was still a revelation every time she came to it. Her success was immediate and engagements to play concertos, to give recitals and to take part in chamber music soon made her eminent. Her devotion to chamber music was never extinguished by the greater personal and material rewards of the other forms of concert giving. When she stayed at home to establish the National Gallery concerts in 1939 instead of going off on a lucrative American tour she confessed that one of her rewards for so doing was the opportunity it gave her to take part once more in chamber music. This she did with the Menges and Rosé quartets, and with Miss Isolde Menges in duet sonatas.