Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  Olive and her daughters. Patience is on the right, Tania on the left, Virginia carried piggyback

  (Courtesy of Miranda Armour-Brown and Nicolas Gray. (photograph by Lion Stanham))

  With the exception of her father, the household was entirely female. This did not improve Major Stanham’s famously bad temper: ‘Looking round the table he sighed, then came out with the familiar words: “Women again . . . always women.”’ As an adult, Patience would lay her refusal to marry firmly at his feet. ‘The kneeling upset me,’ she wrote. ‘I used to suffer appalling embarrassment when my mother got down on her knees to implore my father, who was sitting in a low armchair stretched with well-worn leather and completely absorbed in the Times fourth leader, to come to dinner.’ Mealtimes were a battlefield. When the children were small he would command the maid to set down the dish of the day in front of one or other of them, knowing full well this would provoke tears (no one liked the look of Cook’s spotted dogs and roly poly puddings). When they were older he would ask impossible questions, ‘the answer to which was supposed to be a fundament of general knowledge’. There would then follow a lecture, a disquisition that proceeded without interruption because their mother carved the meat herself.

  The Major was also mean to his daughters’ governesses. One, Miss Collins, used to be teased about the arrival (or non-arrival) of letters from her fiancé in India. Another, Zella, was asked to take his prize boar for a walk – an outing that ended in disaster when the pig lay down in a ditch and refused to budge: the fuming Major, called from the sanctuary of his study to retrieve the hog, condemned this incident as ‘a bad case of mismanagement of which only a woman is capable’. It was left to Patience’s mother to act as his pacifier, a role on which she seemed to thrive. As her daughter put it drily, ‘“Pacifying” can also be seen, in retrospect, as “a bad case of masochism”.’ No one knew why their father was so choleric – though it must have had something to do with the war, it might also have been connected to his strange double life – but his moods were difficult to live with. ‘I have listened to other people’s accounts of their happy childhoods with sadness mingled with disbelief,’ wrote Patience. ‘I recognised mine as a snuffing out of every spontaneous impulse to the point where one might have been said to be walking on tiptoe to avoid the detonations.’ The only respite came when her parents disappeared to hunt, to swing their golf clubs and, most blessed of all, to ski. (For them, this relatively new sport had an especially romantic aura, for they had first met on the slopes at Gstaad.) At these times a maiden aunt – the kind who lived in fear of draughts – would supervise the household and all would be peaceful, for a while, at least.

  When Patience was six, however, the family’s fortunes changed dramatically. On his return from the war and a stint in Mesopotamia, the Major had set up a pig farm near Basingstoke. When this failed – according to his middle daughter, he was born with ‘zero business sense’ and found himself quite unable to market his pigs – he moved the family back to Sussex, the county where he had grown up, buying a ‘perfectly inconvenient farmhouse’ halfway between a seaside golf club and the Pevensey Marshes. Here he returned to studio photography full time,* at which point Patience’s parents’ social life became altogether more rackety: ‘Divorce, a word hitherto unknown, began to crop up at home in adult conversation, a signal for our dismissal to the schoolroom. Lingering on the stairs, one overheard phrases such as: “The cad! I’ve a good mind to go and horsewhip him.” A supposed victim on one occasion – a rather fast and fascinating woman with [an] Eton crop, low husky voice and nine-inch ivory cigarette holder, who drilled my father through the clockwork paces of the foxtrot and the perilous complexities of the tango – inspired him to dash off and threaten the doubtless cruel but perhaps timid offender . . . with a revolver. This high-flown action resulted in a visit from a policeman.’

  Patience’s maternal grandfather and her mother’s sister Dodo began to worry about Olive, ‘detecting in my father’s indifference to breadwinning a growing threat to my mother’s peace of mind and pocket. Our bread and butter could be traced to mysterious “shares” left to her by Grandmother. In the financial landslides of the time, she became the object of their solicitude . . . poor Olive.’ It was on her sister’s account, then, that Dodo suggested Patience, a prodigiously intelligent child, should live with her in term time and attend school in London with her youngest cousin.

  For Patience, this was a terrifying prospect. Aunt Dodo, a talented musician, was a ‘glittering’ figure. She had a large collection of ‘late-afternoon adorers’ with whom she liked to discuss Proust and Wagner, and she was married to the distinguished obstetrician Eardley Holland (later Sir Eardley Holland), a saturnine figure who was ‘often reported to be “perfectly charming” to his female patients’.* At home, Patience was the only daughter capable of speaking to Major Stanham without stammering or blushing. But in London – the Hollands lived, in grand style, close to Harley Street – she found that she could not countenance the idea of uttering so much as a single word to Uncle Eardley. She had, it seemed, moved out of the frying pan and into the fire: ‘At breakfast, he gloomily, silently, savagely surveyed the five females [the Hollands also had three girls] from the far end of the table, frowning, then with a grunted Umph! retired behind the Times, emanating thunderous vibrations.’ The family was always relieved when, at 8.30, his chauffeur arrived to take him to the London Hospital.

  Being ‘a half-fledged cuckoo in alternating family nests’ gave Patience a certain detachment. Moving between the two houses threw all sorts of things into relief, for the contrast between them was now severe: ‘While the tea tray was still being gracefully borne across the polished parquet in Queen Anne Street [the Hollands’ home], financial extremity faced my mother with new tasks.’ Thanks to the Depression, the Stanhams now lacked both cook and housemaid, and Olive was forced to perform their duties herself. By rights Patience should have admired her mother’s stoicism, the determined way she learned to make kedgeree, angels on horseback and all the other familiar dishes on the her newfangled gas stove. But somehow she could not. The ‘pursed lips of self-immolation’ saw to that. When her mother set about the hall gong with the Brasso, she and her siblings would ‘linger on the sidelines as spectators’. There was something frantic in these displays of domestic drudgery that Patience disliked. ‘I don’t exaggerate this obsession with things to be kept up,’ she writes in Work Adventures Childhood Dreams. ‘When Major Blacker, who so recently had flown solo over Everest, a hero, was invited to dinner, my elder sister and I were reluctantly transformed into spotless maids in starched aprons and caps in order to bring on the asparagus, the roast pheasants, and the Stilton cheese.’

  At the bridge tables frequented by her father, having a clever daughter was ‘a misfortune equivalent to the loss of a dog or an Act of God’. But at least this meant that Patience was spared the fate of her older sister Tania,* shortly to be dispatched to Switzerland to learn household management, and at her new school, Patience thrived. Queen’s College in Harley Street,† founded by the Victorian theologian and social reformer Frederick Denison Maurice, was a liberal establishment respectful of the rights of women, having begun its life as a place where governesses might be educated. The atmosphere was serious and the teachers able and passionate (save for poor Miss Enderby, a ‘well-intentioned, broad-bottomed lady’ whom the girls liked to tease, and whom Patience would one day meet again in a short story by Katherine Mansfield, an old girl whose portrait hung in the school’s entrance hall). Drawn to the Jewish girls in her class, a group she thought particularly bright and quick, Patience began to feel competitive, and with pleasing results: by the time she was fourteen she had already qualified for university entrance.

  She spent her final year at school as a boarder – it’s not clear why; perhaps Uncle Eardley had had enough – sharing a top-floor bedroom with a girl from Berlin called Edith Goeritz and Ann Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s niece. (‘A victim of psyc
hoanalysis’, according to Patience, Stephen mistook her narrow bed for the analyst’s couch with the result that her dorm-mates had to listen to her droning free associations late into the night.) Patience found boarding ridiculous at times – ‘how absurd to remember the midnight feast which, in a childish fit, the boarders had conspired to hold underneath the long table in the library’ – but Queen’s taught her to be both free-thinking and spirited, and when she went home to Sussex for the holidays she noticed immediately the effect she had on the young men in her parents’ social set. The ‘least gleam of thought or the slightest satirical inflection’ in the direction of these youths, callow or otherwise, caused them both anxiety and irritation. She found their chat – what animals they had shot, what injuries had befallen them when they ‘took a toss’ from their horses, what miracle they had performed on the billiard table – intensely boring. Her father, meanwhile, regarded these young men as ‘undesirable intruders’. He had not left home until he was forty. Wouldn’t his daughters be doing the same?

  Patience had other ideas. She longed ‘for air and flight’. Too young to take up her place at university, she went first to Bonn to learn German and study economics, though she soon swapped the latter for history of art. Bonn was her father’s choice, being a safe little town; Paris he deemed immoral, and Rome, Florence and Perugia were ‘out of the question.’ She lived in a ‘kind of prison’, a seventeenth-century observatory in the Poppelsdorfer Allee which she shared with the professor of astronomy and his wife and child. To escape the observatory’s claustrophobic atmosphere she spent much of her time walking in the old town, and it was here that she discovered the baroque. ‘I was drawn to these musical façades and domed interiors where imagination could take off and soar . . .’ It was not the gilt and the putti that she loved but the spaces, and their glorious flowing curves soon ‘entered her dreams’. What did these dreams mean? Freedom. Escape. Or, as Patience put it in her slightly more grandiose style, ‘Edwardians! Let me breathe and live!’

  Patience in Germany, 1936

  (Christoph Haimendorf, by permission of Nick Haimendorf.)

  In England once more she began her degree at London University, where her tutor was Hugh Gaitskell, the future Labour leader. She read economics which was, by all accounts, Dodo’s idea; since her father was not going to be able to support her – it wasn’t only that funds were low; he was now suffering from cancer and would soon die – she needed to study a subject that might help her to earn a living. But she knuckled down all the same. Better economics, she thought, than a return to Sussex and the young men with their gumboots and their billiard cues.

  In 1938, after she had graduated, Patience and her sister Tania travelled to eastern Europe on a grant from the Society of Quakers, their brief ‘to make friends with the Romanians’. From the scant details we have, their three-month stay seems to have been an extraordinary experience – though it’s important to bear in mind Patience’s tendency to myth-making. Given to making Delphic pronouncements, her writing was often opaque, perhaps because life seemed more interesting that way. ‘She had this . . . idea,’ says her daughter Miranda. ‘You had a little black dress [among your luggage] that you could wear on any occasion, and then you travelled on carts and met the people.’ And so it went. The sisters spent time in Balcic, a formerly Turkish town close to the Black Sea (it’s now in Bulgaria), where they drank mazagran (black coffee poured over honey and shreds of ice) and Patience wandered its ancient sites with an archaeologist called Rosetti, whom she hoped, somewhat misguidedly, to use as a human Baedeker (in fact, they got terrifyingly lost). In Bucharest – a city then so elegant it was known as Little Paris – she and Tania stayed in the only ‘respectable’ hotel, all carmine damask, deep red plush and yellowing marble. In as long as it took to turn the key in the door of her room, she was grown up.

  In July Marie of Romania, the Queen consort, died, with the result that Patience was moved to write her first piece of journalism, for a (presumably English language) Bucharest newspaper. The funeral made for great copy. Marie, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria who is sometimes referred to as the jazz-age princess, had led a life full of intrigue and drama and her coffin, followed by an honour guard of hussars, nuns and wounded veterans, moved through a city that the king had commanded to be draped all about with her favourite colour, mauve. (Marie’s heart, incidentally, was sent to Balcic, where she had kept a beloved summer palace.) But no sooner had Patience delivered her report than the newspaper’s infatuated editor laid siege to her, filling her hotel room with tuberoses, the cloying scent of which would thereafter always fill her with remembered horror. The story goes that she and Tania escaped his attentions by fleeing to the Black Sea in a monoplane piloted by a Romanian prince.

  Safely back in London, Patience acquired a job at the Foreign Office. But she held on to it for only a few months: when war broke out in 1939 she was promptly dismissed – well, this was her story – for ‘having too many foreign contacts’. Her next job was as a secretary at the Arts Council, and it was there that she met Thomas Gray, a designer and veteran of the Spanish Civil War.* In his spare time, Gray was running a clandestine counter-insurgency course for the Home Guard at Hurlingham in west London. He was married and had two children, but Patience – caught up in what Elizabeth Bowen would call the ‘lucid abnormality’ of the Blitz – became his lover anyway. And why stop there? She also became the secretary of this somewhat barmy-sounding training school for civilians who wanted to learn ‘how to make Molotov cocktails’. Hard to say which was the more exciting.

  For a while she and Gray were happy. In January 1941, by which time he and Patience already had a son, Nicolas, she took his name by public announcement in the London Gazette. A daughter, Miranda, was born in 1942. But then things changed. Gray was a womaniser, and when he tried to seduce one of her friends Patience resolved to give him up. She left London and moved to her mother’s cottage, which stood in a wood on the South Downs. The trouble was that she was pregnant again. Believing she could not bring up three children alone she decided to have the baby – a daughter called Prudence – adopted, a decision that turned out to be even more painful than it might ordinarily have been.* The baby was seriously ill, and for a while was returned to Patience so she could nurse her (only mother’s milk, it was thought, would see her through). This was agonising. Meanwhile, Gray had been conscripted. Patience was terribly alone, coping with a sick baby and two small children (though Nicolas was eventually evacuated to Fowey) in ‘a kind of Walden situation, with no telephone, electricity or water laid on’. The cottage didn’t even feel that safe. Planes could often be heard overhead, and behind the house was a dirty great bomb crater. In the end Prudence did not survive. As if this weren’t bad enough, her adoptive parents would not allow Patience to attend the funeral.

  After this, Gray fell out of the picture. Patience never spoke of him, and Nicolas and Miranda did not see him again, though there was an occasion when they found themselves bundled hurriedly on to a number 24 bus in Camden Town. ‘That was your father,’ said Patience once they were safely on board. In Work Adventures Childhood Dreams she refers to him only twice, and then only very briefly. He was, she writes, courageous during the Blitz. In an afterword she notes that she never found, in the Forties and Fifties, ‘the propitious moment’ for explaining to Nicolas and Miranda, ‘who had forgotten they had known their father’, why she had not married him, nor anyone else. Towards the end of her life, when she was unwell and her mind wandering, she would watch Nicolas, who resembles Thomas, stoking the fire at her house in Italy and she would say softly, ‘There’s my husband.’ But in 1943, when they separated, she thought of him only as a huge mistake. She turned her back on him and on all the trouble he had brought her. From now on, she would live for herself.

  Patience remained in Sussex until the winter of 1947, the worst in living memory, at which point the relentless cold and her difficult relationship with the widowed Olive sent her back to Lo
ndon. (Olive, a follower of Krishnamurti, was not judgemental about her daughter’s lifestyle; she was delighted to have grandchildren. The problem was more that Patience expected her to disapprove and so bristled anyway.) In the city she hoped to be able to make enough money to educate Nicolas and Miranda, and to keep a roof over their heads. But she also longed for an interesting life. ‘There is nothing to say about work,’ she once wrote. ‘It occupies you intensely if it’s what you choose to do.’ She wanted to make just such a choice. There followed a series of temporary jobs until, in 1951, she was appointed research assistant to F. H. K. Henrion, designer of the displays inside the Country Pavilion at the Festival of Britain. This was a wonderful opportunity, and not only because of the hullabaloo that surrounded the Festival. Henrion, kind, encouraging and cultivated, was fantastically well-connected: his friends included the writer and naturalist Julian Huxley, the Labour politician Tony Benn and Walter Neurath, the founder of Thames & Hudson. To belong to his circle was to belong to London’s intellectual and creative elite.*