The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  From early stylized figures (which found an appreciative buyer in the collector George Eumorfopoulos) she turned towards the abstract in the 1930s. Her ideas in this respect were parallel with those of her second husband, Mr Ben Nicholson. There was much in her work at this period that shows the influence of Brancusi in the simplicity of ovoid shape. Visits to his studio and those of Arp, Picasso, Braque and Mondrian made for a great sympathy with the trend of art on the Continent. In the highly productive post-war years, when she also pursued the study of anatomy and structure in drawings and added proficiency in bronze casting to her accomplishment in carving, she showed most conclusively her ability to conceive a formal and geometrical completeness in harmony with natural surroundings.

  Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born at Wakefield, on January 10, 1903, the daughter of H. R. Hepworth, CBE, county surveyor, and Gertrude A. Hepworth. After study at the Leeds College of Art, 1920-21, she went to the Royal College of Art, 1921-24, competing for the Prix de Rome in sculpture, which she missed winning by a narrow margin. A West Riding travelling scholarship enabled her to go to Italy, where she met Mr John Skeaping, the sculptor, who had won the Rome competition. They were married in Florence in 1925 and exhibited together. For some years thereafter they were members of the mildly avant-garde “Seven and Five” Society and contributed to its exhibitions but their first comprehensive joint exhibition was held at the Beaux Arts Gallery in 1928.

  Both by this time were enthusiasts for direct carving, giving much attention to the different qualities of the marble, stone and wood they employed. At a second joint exhibition at Tooth’s gallery in 1930 Miss Hepworth was especially praised for her “Mother and Child” in Honiton stone, her work at this stage being more of note for its sensitive treatment of material and craftsmanship than for new departure in style.

  Barbara Hepworth working in her garden studio at St Ives, Cornwall, in May 1952

  From 1931 she worked in association with Mr Ben Nicholson, whom she married after divorce from Mr Skeaping in 1933. They exhibited together at the Lefevre Gallery, where a number of Barbara Hepworth’s later exhibitions were held (1933-54) and became jointly active in the groups promoting abstract art, “Unit One”, 1933-34, and in Paris “Abstraction-Création”, 1933-35. London remained her headquarters until 1939 when she moved to St Ives, Cornwall. This remained her home and place of work. In 1960 she bought the building that had formerly been the “Palais de Danse” and made it into a studio. In the church nearby is the “Madonna and Child” which she carved in memory of her son Paul, who was killed in action while serving with the RAF in Malaya in 1953.

  An increasing interest in modern sculpture brought her work prominently into notice at home and abroad in the 1950s. Monumental commissions included the “Single Form” (bronze) for United Nations, New York, 1963, the Dag Hammarskjöld memorial and the 15ft bronze for the office building in Holborn, State House, a dynamic system of curves.

  Perhaps her culminating achievement was the completion in 1972 of the monumental nine-piece group “Family of Man” which she designed to occupy a special hillside setting in Cornwall.

  She was the recipient of many awards and honours and was created CBE in 1958 and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1965. Her works are widely distributed about the world in museums and private collections. There are monographs by William Gibson, 1946, Sir Herbert Read, 1952, Professor A. M. Hammacher, 1959, Dr J. P. Hodin, 1961, and Michael Shepherd, 1963. A film about her work, Figures in a Landscape, was made in 1952-53.

  In person she was broad of brow, firm and precise in speech, neat in habits of dress and with a fondness for the outdoors which extended to carving in the open.

  The abstract nature of her art implied no coldness of feeling. She was as sensitive to beauty in any form as she was bitter against ugliness, the ugliness she found, for example, in much modern architecture. Undertaking drawings in a hospital in 1947 she feared she might not be able to bear the sight of an operation but in fact found herself absorbed, as she put it in her own words, by “the extraordinary beauty of purpose and coordination between human beings dedicated to the saving of life”. She dated her sculpture, it was noted, from intimate and emotional circumstances, a change of style for instance from the birth of her children. Domestic life and children were as important to her as to any woman. She spoke of “this wonderful business of having children” and the care they needed as something that “flowed back” into her work.

  Sensitiveness was combined with a strong will and fighting spirit that supported her during the lean years of unpopularity. She was never intimidated by the idea of competing with men in sculpture. The woman’s approach, she said, had a different emphasis and a special range of perception. She thought of “the sensation of being a woman” as “another facet of the sculptural idea”.

  She had four children, the first by her marriage to Mr Skeaping and triplet children, a son and two daughters, born in 1934 by her marriage to Mr Ben Nicholson. Their marriage was dissolved in 1951. She herself designed the tombstone for her grave though it was reported in 1967 to be a problem for local officials as it was 3ft over the permitted height.

  Dame Barbara Hepworth, DBE, was born on January 10, 1903. She died in a fire at home, on May 20, 1975, aged 72

  DAME AGATHA CHRISTIE

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  WRITER OF DETECTIVE FICTION, WHOSE PRINCIPAL SLEUTHS, HERCULE POIROT AND MISS MARPLE, HAVE PROVED ENDLESSLY POPULAR

  JANUARY 13, 1976

  Dame Agatha Christie, DBE, died yesterday at the age of 85. She belonged to the great period of English detective fiction. Her work typified the genre, and, after Dorothy Sayers died, she was recognized as the undoubted queen of her profession.

  The popularity of her books not only survived into an era when other crime writers had abandoned detection and were trading in sex and violence, but continued to grow. According to a Unesco report, she was the most widely read British author in the world, with translations into 103 languages — 14 more than Shakespeare. Her principal detectives, Poirot and Miss Marple, hold a secure place on the roll of classic sleuths which is headed by Sherlock Holmes.

  She was born in September, 1890, at Torquay, the youngest daughter of Frederick Alvah Miller, an American from New York. “My father”, she recalled, “was a gentleman of substance, and never did a handsturn in his life, and he was a most agreeable man”. She received little or no formal education, but was brought up in a house full of books and by a mother who encouraged her to read and tell stories. Further encouragement came from Eden Phillpotts, who was a neighbour. When she was 16, she went to Paris to be trained as a singer, but found her voice not strong enough for opera or the concert platform. She wrote some poems and “rather gloomy stories of unrequited love”.

  In 1914 she married Archibald Christie (later Colonel Archibald Christie, CMG, DSO). While he was in France, she did VAD work at a local hospital and qualified as a dispenser. Her first detective story, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), not only utilized her knowledge of poisons but introduced Hercule Poirot, with his egg-shaped head, comically broken English and his reliance on “the little grey cells”, who was based on Belgian refugees she had met. The book enjoyed a modest success, but it was her seventh novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), which brought fame. In that same year a curious episode occurred: she vanished from her Surrey home, and was found 10 days later, after a nationwide search, staying under a false name in an hotel at Harrogate, apparently suffering from amnesia.

  She divorced Colonel Christie in 1928. Left with a daughter to educate, she began to write seriously, and to travel. Two years later, while visiting Sir Leonard Woolley in Iraq, she met another archaeologist, Max Mallowan, now Sir Max Mallowan, CBE, Emeritus Professor of Western Asiatic Archaeology in the University of London. They were married almost at once, and she subsequently accompanied him on many of his expeditions to the Middle East, learning to help with photography and the piecing together of shards.
Several of her detective stories had a Middle Eastern background, and one, Death Comes As The End (1945), was set in Ancient Egypt.

  Agatha Christie at home in 1966

  Although she continued to write about Hercule Poirot — Murder on the Orient Express (1934) and The ABC Murders (1936) were tours de force to equal Roger Ackroyd — largely because her readers insisted, she came to think him too artificial a character and she totally discarded the Watson-figure of Captain Hastings. She preferred, and increasingly used, Miss Marple, the inquisitive spinster from Murder at the Vicarage (1930), who found the solution to all mysteries in her experience of human behaviour in an English village.

  Mrs Christie (as she continued to call herself for professional purposes) also wrote, more or less for her own pleasure, a series of “straight” novels under the strictly guarded pseudonym of “Mary Westmacott”, but year after year, throughout the Second World War and the decades which followed, her detective stories continued to be, and usually deserved to be, best sellers. Her style scarcely changed and her inventiveness showed little decline: Mrs McGinty’s Dead (1952), 4.50 from Paddington (1957) and At Bertram’s Hotel (1965) are every bit as good as Cards on the Table (1936) or The Moving Finger (1943). Her occasional experiments with different formulae, as in Endless Night (1967) and Passenger to Frankfurt (1970), were perhaps not altogether happy, but her public bought them as enthusiastically as ever and they did serve to demonstrate her continued alertness to social trends and quirks.

  Meanwhile she continued, almost to the end, to publish prolifically with Nemesis (1971); Elephants Can Remember (1972); Akhnaton (1973), a play written in 1937 which had remained unpublished and which she did not intend to be staged; Poems (1973); Postern of Fate (1973); Poirot’s Early Cases (1974), and a final salute to her detective hero Poirot entitled Curtain, which she had written during the Second World War intending it for posthumous publication, but in fact releasing it in 1975.

  She had achieved spectacular success in another field. The stage adaptations of several of her early books (including one of Roger Ackroyd with Charles Laughton playing Poirot) had dissatisfied her; so, in 1943, she made her own dramatization of Ten Little Niggers, and followed it with a series of other plays, culminating in The Mousetrap (1952) with its fantastic London run (at her death it is at the St Martin’s Theatre in the 24th year of its world record breaking course) and Witness for the Prosecution (1935), the film rights of which were bought by Hollywood for what was then the record price of £116,000.

  She never cared much for the cinema, or for wireless and television (though The Mousetrap was originally a short radio play, written at the special request of Queen Mary). The famous stage play, Love from a Stranger (1936), taken from one of her short stories, was filmed twice, however, and there was a series of adaptations for the screen with Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple, notably 4.50 from Paddington. Witness for the Prosecution was also a notable box office success and, more recently, Murder on the Orient Express was launched with a host of stars including Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall and Albert Finney.

  Dame Agatha’s private pleasures were gardening — she won local prizes for horticulture — and buying furniture for her various houses. She was a shy person — she disliked public appearances — but she was friendly and sharp-witted to meet. By inclination as well as breeding she belonged to the English upper middle-class. She wrote about, and for, people like herself. That was an essential part of her charm.

  She was not, in fact, a particularly good writer, certainly not the equal of Dorothy Sayers. But she had a real and subtle narrative gift. Her stories could be gulped down as smoothly and pleasantly as cream. Her handling of the plot-structures, too, was very skilful. She brought a peculiarly English form to its perfect, and perfectly English, flowering. She was, beyond question, one of the half-dozen best detective story writers in the world.

  She was created CBE in 1956, and advanced to DBE in 1971.

  Dame Agatha Christie, DBE, writer of detective fiction, was born on September 15, 1890. She died on January 12, 1976, aged 85

  DAME SYBIL THORNDIKE

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  HARD-WORKING, NO-NONSENSE ACTRESS WHO STARRED IN ROLES RANGING FROM HECUBA TO ST JOAN

  JUNE 10, 1976

  Dame Sybil Thorndike had a long and very distinguished career as actress, actress in management, actress on tours overseas, senior actress, and actress in dramatic recitals. To those who worked with her she appeared to be all actress, while to those who knew her in other contexts she appeared to be all daughter, wife, mother, grandmother or great-grandmother; all churchwoman; all musician; all Christian-Socialist and worker for the causes of the left. She deserves to be remembered not only as Lilian Baylis’s first regular leading lady in Shakespeare at the Old Vic, as Hecuba and Medea in Gilbert Murray’s translations of Euripides, and as Shaw’s Saint Joan, but also in her own right, as Canon Thorndike’s daughter, Lewis Casson’s wife, Dame Sybil.

  Born at Gainsborough on October 24, 1882, Agnes Sybil Thorndike grew up at Rochester, where her father, the Rev Arthur J. W. Thorndike, was appointed a minor canon of the cathedral in 1884. As a child she acted in home-made plays, “supported” by her brother Russell and in time by her younger brother Frank and sister Eileen, all of whom went on the stage. But the first art she seriously studied was her mother’s art, music, which she took so seriously that she strained her wrist and had to give up professional playing.

  Scarcely had she started, at the prompting of her brother Russell, on a new career as an actress than an accident, in the course of her third season with Ben Greet’s Shakespearian Company in the United States, threatened to deprive her of her speaking voice. Complete silence effected a cure, and in 1908 she joined Miss Horniman’s Repertory Company at Manchester, there renewing acquaintance with Lewis Casson, a young actor of Welsh extraction and, unlike Canon Thorndike, a Socialist. She married him at her father’s parish church at Aylesford in December of that year.

  Summoned by Ben Greet in 1914 to the Old Vic, where he was directing plays during Lilian Baylis’s first Shakespearian season, she remained there, while Casson served in the Army, almost four years, becoming the first great favourite of Lilian Baylis’s new audience for Shakespeare in the Waterloo Road. Miss Baylis then encouraged her to return to the West End, but in 1919 allowed the Cassons to present matinees at the Old Vic of Gilbert Murray’s translation of the after-the-war play, The Trojan Women. Sybil Thorndike’s Hecuba and Medea, presented at matinees at the Holborn Empire during the Cassons’ first venture into management, were felt to be, with all their faults, performances of tragic stature no other actress of her age in England could have given.

  The reward of almost two years’ continuous work in Jose G. Levy’s experiment in Grand Guignol at the Little was an invitation to the Cassons to associate themselves with Lady Wyndham and Bronson Albery in management at the New. Here, during their first season, she was seen by Bernard Shaw as Shelley’s Beatrice Cenci. GBS mentally cast her as Saint Joan in the play that he was considering writing. When written it had to go first to the Theatre Guild in New York, but for England he entrusted it in 1924 to the Albery-Casson management and to Sybil Thorndike. She might still incur criticism on the score of restlessness, hardness, lack of charm, but in this play, which was not a poet’s play nor a tragedy, but a Shaw play about a warrior saint, an eccentric worthy, a queer fish, her faults were negligible. Shaw himself admitted it by giving her permission to continue playing the part as long as she wished.

  She played it for some eight years in London, Paris, South Africa and Australia. In the intervals she appeared in new plays by Susan Glaspell and Clemence Dane, in Shakespeare under the Albery-Casson management (Henry VIII and Macbeth) and with Lilian Baylis’s Old Vic Company. She also appeared in silent films, notably as Nurse Edith Cavell in Dawn. In 1931, when she was approaching 50, she was created DBE.

  Dame Sybil’s managerial activity now decreased, and her opportunities as an actress were le
ss rewarding, though they included characters in plays by Van Druten and J. B. Priestley — in both of which she was seen on Broadway — and Volumnia to Olivier’s Coriolanus. Then Emlyn Williams’s The Corn is Green showed her at the top of her form as an English spinster with a vocation for teaching, and obtained for her and the author, who himself played the Welsh mining lad who was her star pupil, a heartening success on the eve of war and of new developments in theatrical life.

  One of the first professional companies to go out under the auspices of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, after it had received financial support from the government, was an old Vic Company led by the Cassons, which in 1940 took Medea on a tour of the Welsh coalfields. During the next two years they toured extensively and also appeared at their former West End address, the New, with Old Vic Companies. In 1943 when yet another Old Vic Company began operations at the New, this time in repertoire, with Ralph Richardson and Olivier for leading men and with Tyrone Guthrie directing, Sybil Thorndike was the “heavy” woman, opening as Peer Gynt’s mother to Richardson’s Peer. She toured with the company in Western Europe and remained with them for the first postwar season, which was regarded as the peak of the English theatre’s attainment in state-aided classical work up to that date. She played Mistress Quickly to Richardson’s Falstaff in Henry IV and Jocasta to Olivier’s Oedipus Rex.

  She did not go with the company to New York for their guest-season in 1946, but stayed in England, and appeared once again in a play with Casson, who had been knighted in the previous year. There were roles for them both in Priestley’s The Linden Tree and in a revival of Home’s tragedy Douglas at the Edinburgh Festival in 1950, but not in Waters of the Moon, N. C. Hunter’s long-running play at the Haymarket, in which Dame Sybil co-starred with her old friend Dame Edith Evans.