The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  Freya Stark was born in Paris where her parents were briefly resident. Her mother and father were first cousins, both belonging to an old family with its roots in Devon. Here her father’s branch had remained, but her maternal grandmother had settled in Italy. It was Italy that was to be Freya Stark’s home (when eventually she had one) but her roots remained in Devon and, more particularly, in Dartmoor. No more fervent lover of everything connected with England has ever been a permanent and voluntary exile.

  Both parents were artists of more than ordinary ability (some of her father’s sculptures are to be seen at the Tate). Freya Stark’s childhood was highly mobile. Houses were rented, bought, and built in London, Italy, France and on Dartmoor, but none occupied for long. “My parents were moderately well off people of good taste, with a liking for the arrangement of houses, and yet it is astonishing how much of our childhood was spent in dingy lodgings.”

  One place only came to rival Dartmoor in her childhood affections, and that was Asolo, the small fortress town which looks out under the lee of the Dolomites across the Venetian plain towards Padua. Before Robert Stark married he had taken the advice of Robert Browning’s son, Pen Browning, and with an artist friend, Herbert Young, had escaped to Asolo from the summer heat of Venice. Within a week Herbert Young had bought a house in the city walls with a wild garden enclosing the remains of a Roman theatre. Here he settled for the rest of his life, and when he died in 1941 house and garden passed by his will to Freya Stark.

  Dame Freya Stark, intrepid explorer and sensitive author

  For Robert and Flora Stark Asolo also became an early home, though a less permanent one. In the first volume of her autobiography, Traveller’s Prelude, Freya Stark described the growing incompatibility and eventual separation of two beings whom she loved with parallel but distinct devotion. With her sister Vera, a year younger than herself, the small Freya was a sorrowful spectator of a process which ended with her father’s departure to Canada and her mother’s settling in another hill town, Dronero in Piedmont.

  Freya Stark had no regular schooling, but learnt to speak French and German almost as naturally as Italian. She read universally in the literature of all countries, including Greece and Italy. It was not until she was 19, and entered Bedford College, London, that her formal education began, and two years later the outbreak of war brought it to an end.

  One great benefit of this brief academic interlude was that it gave her the friendship of W. P. Ker, who was quick to recognise the unusual qualities of this small, shy creature who spoke English (on the rare occasions when she opened her mouth) with an Italian accent. He directed her imagination and guided her literary taste, and in the vacations transformed her from a lover of mountains into an intrepid mountaineer.

  When the first world war came, Freya Stark trained as a nurse and served with the Trevelyan hospital unit on the Italian front, finding herself caught up in the chaos of the Caporetto disaster of 1917, in which the Italians were utterly routed by the Austrians. Peace brought family complications and years of poverty and increasing ill-health, including three years as a bedridden and despaired of invalid. It was partly for distraction, but always ultimately with the idea of travel, that she began taking lessons in Arabic from a white-bearded Capuchin in San Remo. By 1927, a course at the London School of Oriental Studies behind her, improved health, plus a minuscule but assured income and the traveller’s prelude was completed.

  Poor health and lack of funds remained troublesome, though successful authorship eventually counteracted the latter. In other respects Freya Stark was now, at the age of 34, well equipped for the hazards of the next 12 years. She had great curiosity and no narrow prejudices; she liked people, treating them as equals without condescension or diffidence; she was used to hardship; she knew languages, had acquired the elements of surveying, and was a competent nurse. Two other things she quickly learnt — that journeys must be minutely planned if they are to be successful, and how to take photographs. Armed with the cheapest instruments she became an artist in photography.

  Freya Stark first set foot in Asia in November 1927. She settled for the winter at Brummana in Lebanon, spent some time in Damascus, and with a friend completed her first proper expedition, through the then disturbed Jebel Druze country, subsequently moving on to Jerusalem and Cairo. The literary product of this period was Letters from Syria, not published until 1942.

  Two years later she was in Lebanon again, on her way to Baghdad. Here she established herself in the house of a shoemaker overlooking the Tigris, much to the disgust of the British community which considered such behaviour “a flouting of national prestige”. Freya Stark never ceased to marvel at the blinkered views of expatriates. Upbringing and predilections made her in a sense “unconventional” though she cherished the traditional British virtues — courtesy, restraint, self-reliance — to an infinitely greater degree than most of her critics. She was, in fact, like her father, a High Tory anarchist as well as an artist.

  There were, however, some British in Baghdad without blinkers who were quick to appreciate the newcomer. These included Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, then adviser to the Ministry of Interior and later ambassador, and Lionel Smith, adviser to the Ministry of Education. These two became lifelong friends, joining the ranks of the older men whose society always meant so much to Freya Stark. Such had been her father and W. P. Ker; such, too, were Sydney Cockerell and Lord Wavell.

  Having absorbed oriental ways and languages in Baghdad, she used it as a base for invasions of Iran. Three tough but extremely rewarding solo journeys were carried out in 1929-31, two in Luristan and one in the mountains of Mazanderan, south of the Caspian sea. It was on this occasion that she “first stood consciously on the edge of death” as the result of severe malaria and dysentery combined. Out of these journeys came The Valley of the Assassins (1934), the book which made her reputation as a writer, and which remains probably the most popular of all those she wrote. In it can be seen in all their freshness the qualities which combined to make Freya Stark so attractive a personality in print — strong sensitivity to places and people, humour, and a clear narrative style, free from the somewhat conscious adornment which sometimes accumulated later. (She herself said of her style: “There is nothing to it except a natural ear for cadence and the wish to get the meaning right.” True enough.)

  The first truly Arabian journey came in the winter of 1934-35. Her route was from Mukalla on the coast, northward into the Wadi Hadhramaut and to Shibam and Tarim. The episode ended with her rescue by the RAF, from Aden, after she contracted measles and carried on, not properly recovered, so that her heart was strained and very nearly stopped altogether. Prolonged convalescence, and a return to Iraq, were followed by a second Arabian journey, again with Mukalla as a starting-point, in the winter of 1937-38, this time ending in dengue fever but no RAF rescue. These journeys were recorded in The Southern Gates of Arabia (1936), Seen in the Hadhramaut (1938), and A Winter in Arabia (1940).

  The war engaged Freya Stark in political and publicity work, for the most part in Arab lands. She served in Aden, Yemen (showing propaganda films under the noses of Mussolini’s ubiquitous agents), Cairo and Baghdad (where she was one of those besieged in the British embassy by Rashid Ali’s revolt). She had, needless to say, her own ideas of how things should be run, and these ideas, more than directives from a remote ministry, governed her actions. Much of her time was devoted to an association she founded in Egypt and later developed in Iraq called the Brotherhood of Freedom. This consisted of groups of autonomous cells devoted to the cult of self-help, encouraged and to a limited extent financed from a centre which mainly consisted of Freya Stark herself. By a characteristic twist of fate, a lecture tour of the United States, arranged for her by the Ministry of Information in the autumn of 1943, involved her in what she was later to describe as much the worst of all her journeys — during which she suffered a burst appendix on the Halifax-bound liner Aquitania, then a troopship. Again, she cheated death by inc
hes.

  After the armistice of 1943 she went back to Italy where she worked for the British embassy. When, towards the end of the war, she was able to return to her house at Asolo she found it intact, in spite of its having been used as headquarters by both the retreating Germans and the Salò fascists. Its possessions had been hidden and preserved by loyal friends.

  In 1947 Freya Stark married Stewart Perowne, diplomatist and orientalist, and accompanied him to his posts in Barbados and Cyrenaica, but five years later the marriage, which appears to have been based on a misunderstanding of his sexual orientation, ended in an amicable separation. She was now writing her autobiography, three volumes of which appeared in swift succession: Traveller’s Prelude (1950) the best of them, a graphic and at times most moving portrait, Beyond the Euphrates (1951) and The Coast of Incense (1953). A fourth volume, dealing with the war years, Dust in the Lion’s Paw, came out in 1961.

  Now, at 60, she looked for new worlds to conquer, and found them in Anatolia and its history. She learnt Turkish (with the aid of a Turkish bible and Turkish detective stories). She made several arduous journeys, often on horseback, in the remoter parts of Turkey, acting as guide, interpreter and goad to younger friends whom she thus initiated into the joys of oriental travel. She brushed up her classics. Out of this came Ionia: a Quest (1954), The Lycian Shore (1956), Alexander’s Path (1958), Riding to the Tigris (1959), and finally the product of three years’ concentrated labour, Rome on the Euphrates (1966), a scholarly study of Rome’s eastern limes, illuminated by her own unique knowledge of the topography of the region about which she was writing.

  Freya Stark had now all the resources for a graceful and comfortable old age — a beautiful house filled with beautiful things, troops of friends, a solid reputation, a contented mind. But she had, besides, an unconquerable restlessness. In 1962, on the eve of her 70th birthday, she suddenly bought a hill near Asolo on which she proceeded to build an enormous house to her own design. The Balzacian complications of the sale of her old house and the financing of the new one at times strained even her composure. She sought relief in revisiting old haunts — Iran, Turkey, Greece — as well as discovering new ones, notably Afghanistan and Nepal.

  After a few years the big house was abandoned for the final refuge of a flat in Asolo. There was more travelling, well on into her late eighties on horseback in Nepal and the Pamirs, down the Euphrates on a raft for the BBC — continuing to outpace many of those half or even a quarter of her age. She enjoyed watching the publication in many volumes of her letters, the form in which her career as a writer had begun and in which she excelled. Fortunately, since for the last five years the world had passed her by, she knew nothing of the publication of a shallow and hostile biography of her, produced to coincide with her 100th birthday earlier this year.

  Freya Stark was appointed CBE in 1953 and created DBE in 1972. She received many geographical awards, including the Burton Medal from the Royal Asiatic Society in 1933, the Founder’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in 1942, and the Percy Sykes Memorial Medal from the Royal Central Asian Society in 1951. She received an LLD from Glasgow University that same year and a DLitt from Durham in 1971. Her godson was her publisher, John (Jock) Murray.

  Dame Freya Stark, DBE, writer and traveller, was born on January 31, 1893. She died on May 9, 1993, aged 100

  TATIANA NIKOLAYEVA

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  RUSSIAN PIANIST AND BACH INTERPRETER, TO WHOM SHOSTAKOVICH DEDICATED HIS 24 PRELUDES AND FUGUES

  NOVEMBER 25, 1993

  For decades Tatiana Nikolayeva was, like so many Russian pianists of her generation, an unseen, mysterious name, known only to Western connoisseurs who would scour record shops for her 1960s LPs of Bach and Shostakovich. Yet in the 1980s Nikolayeva’s roles as mother, grandmother, composer and teacher gradually were overtaken by that of performing artist. Her fame in the West reached its climax in a remarkable debut at the last of the BBC Henry Wood Proms at the Albert Hall in 1992 — her small, comfortable, endearing figure enrapturing both the millions watching on television and the concert audience who chorused messages to her in Russian. The concert finally confirmed her “arrival” as a musician with a serious following in this country. She had also made a warm impression the previous year when she was given one of the Gramophone magazine’s awards. Her unassuming speech delivered in German again captivated her audience.

  Born into a Russia of great uncertainty, fear and arbitrary disappearances, Nikolayeva — like her mother — studied with Goldenweiser at the Moscow Conservatoire. While she was still young, the aged Goldenweiser who himself had been a friend of Tolstoy noticed her polyphonic gifts and enormous memory and encouraged her to memorise as much as she could. (At his instigation, she learnt all 48 of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, which were to become so central to her repertory.)

  As the Germans advanced into Russia, she and her family escaped to Saratov on the Volga, her father and grandmother dying en route. After the war she graduated in both piano and composition and in 1950 was selected to participate in the first international Bach competition held in the ruined city of Leipzig.

  Her prize-winning performance at Leipzig led, in her own words, to a far greater prize — the lifelong friendship of Dmitri Shostakovich, a juror at the competition. Shostakovich was delighted with her playing of Bach because, he felt, it was not belonging to a museum, but “modern”, and played unapologetically with all the dynamics a piano is capable of — this at a time when many Bach performers were demanding a return to the authentic instruments (the clavichord and harpsichord) for which Bach originally wrote. “I have no time for this asceticism,” said Nikolayeva, “Bach was a human being, after all.”

  Upon their return to Moscow, and inspired by her rendition of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues, Shostakovich immediately started work on his own piano cycle — 24 Preludes and Fugues — trying each piece out on his young protégée. He himself then demonstrated the finished work to the Union of Composers (with Nikolayeva turning the pages), but his interpretation was not a success, partly because he was racked by nerves, and it took Nikolayeva’s subsequent performance of it for other pianists to show interest. She was the dedicatee of this huge collection which many consider to be the finest piano music of the 20th century.

  Nikolayeva’s career until the mid-1980s was largely confined to the Soviet Union and remains substantially undocumented. Although she made the occasional trip abroad, she was not one of the favoured artistes regularly allowed out to the West. She spent, it seems, most of her time based at the Moscow Conservatoire where her name has been engraved on the marble rolls of honour as both pianist and composer.

  It was the Leeds International Piano Competition that first invited Nikolayeva to the United Kingdom in 1984 as a juror. At an unscheduled concert there she gave a performance of Bach’s Art of Fugue which enchanted her audience of piano-lovers. She attracted a cult-like following and her greatest fan, a Cambridge don, frequently travelled the world to hear her. It was fitting that it should have been Hyperion Records, with its legion of devotees, that was responsible for the first Western release of her playing the Shostakovich cycle. The recording, which introduced her to a fresh host of admirers, coincided with her performance of the same work at the Wigmore Hall in 1989. This led, in turn, to the Gramophone award, an invitation to the Edinburgh Festival and an opportunity for the BBC to film her playing the cycle.

  As it had been in Britain, so it later was in America. Her fame was growing across the New World at the time of her death. It was while in the middle of a concert in San Francisco last week that she suffered a stroke that proved fatal.

  Looking, and indeed at times behaving, like one of the legendary babushkas of Moscow, Tatiana Nikolayeva was always an improbable star of the concert platform. She would greet her audience with a cheerful smile and, without further ado, sit down at the keyboard to play with a natural musicality, full of expression and devoid of self-advertising tricks. But her prowess was ba
sed firmly on technique and she brought an authority to the keyboard, in particular in her interpretation of Bach, that was matched by few of her contemporaries and none of her successors. Especially in her later years she set herself a punishing schedule but, as she once remarked, “The important thing is to love music, then you’ll have enough time and energy to cultivate it”.

  Twice widowed, Nikolayeva leaves a son and two grandchildren.

  Tatiana Nikolayeva, Russian pianist, was born on May 24, 1924. She died on November 22, 1993, aged 69

  JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS

  * * *

  ELEGANT WIFE OF US PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY AND INSTIGATOR OF A COMPLETE RESTORATION OF THE WHITE HOUSE

  MAY 21, 1994

  For the two years, ten months and two days that her husband was President of the United States, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy brought an unprecedented degree of youthful glamour to the role of First Lady. Unlike those staid matrons in whose paths she trod, the young and always exquisitely turned-out Jacqueline Kennedy proved to be her husband’s best political asset during the primary campaign of 1960 (she sat out most of the actual election through being pregnant) and very rapidly became a celebrity in her own right. This despite the fact that John F. Kennedy had feared that she would be something of an embarrassment to his career possessing, as he put it, “too much status and not enough quo” to appeal to the average voter.

  Her family was the American equivalent of aristocracy — rich, Republican, and Catholic. Their ancestry could be traced back much further than the more boisterous Kennedy clan, on whom she tended to look down at first in consequence: 24 of them had come over from France to fight in the American War of Independence, returning with Lafayette to France, but a younger cousin, inspired by tales of frontier life, came back to Philadelphia in 1814, and subsequently made a fortune through importing and real-estate transactions in West Virginia.