Her Brilliant Career: Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties

by Rachel Cooke

  What research did Patience do? A good deal of it must have been logistical; the pavilion was an organisational nightmare. It was divided in two: one section, entitled The Natural Scene, featured a huge plaster tree with a woodland garden and pools of water at its foot; visitors gazed at it through a tank of live butterflies. The other, The Country, was filled with animals – horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks and bees – and a variety of tractors, which moved, bizarrely, up and down on a series of hydraulic columns. The horses had to be transported to Hyde Park every day for exercise, and the fish fed with plankton, deliveries of which came from the Lake District each morning. The butterflies were kept alive with wildflowers, dug up by a network of boy scouts. Slightly less complicated to mount were the geological display and an exhibit of rural crafts,* the highlight of which was a vast narrative stump-work embroidery, The Country Wife, designed by the great Constance Howard to depict Women’s Institute activities such as baking and weaving (it had been worked by her students at Goldsmiths’ College, among them Mary Quant).†

  It may have been thanks to Henrion that Patience got her next job, as a secretary at the Royal College of Art (he sometimes used to teach in the design school). But though she somehow hung on to this position until 1953 – according to someone who knew her at the time, she simply wasn’t malleable enough to survive for long as a secretary – she had another iron in the fire. At the Festival of Britain an artist called Primrose Boyd had been among her colleagues, and the two women now set up their own freelance research partnership. Their business cards – touchingly and pluckily entrepreneurial, but rather prim – informed potential clients that they would take on ‘all kinds’ of research and ‘report writing’ for the rate of five shillings an hour plus expenses, and that commissions would be completed ‘accurately, fully and promptly’. When they said all kinds of research, they meant it. The list of their ‘SPECIAL SUBJECTS’ was extensive: bibliography, cartography, indoor gardening, horticulture, office organisation, kitchen equipment ‘and practice’. The last item on this list was opportunist but hardly surprising, for the two of them had also begun work on a cookbook.

  Patience’s growing interest in cookery had two sources. In Sussex, poverty and rationing had sent her out foraging, which was how she had learned about mushrooms: which ones to pick, and how to eat them (she carried them home in a basket lined with moss). But she had by now travelled quite a lot too. In 1947, leaving the children with their grandmother, she had seen Rome for the first time, a city she felt should be approached humbly, ‘on one’s knees’. She followed this with the first of what would be several visits to Brittany, where she and Nicolas and Miranda stayed in the Hôtel Lautram in a village called Locmariaquer and enjoyed the good Breton butter, the fat, fresh oysters and the ‘rosy mullets’ fished at dawn and bathed in an equally rosy sauce (‘M. Lautram was that mysterious personage, a great cook . . . Fish dishes were his forte.’)* In 1951 she had made her way, alone, to Paris, and thence to Yugoslavia on the Orient Express, a route inspired by some of the writers she loved: Gissing, Smollett and Stendhal.

  Foraging in Sussex

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

  Patience had arrived in London a pretty terrible cook. ‘My first introduction [to cooking] was desperate,’ she recalled. ‘I lived in a sordid square in an old Victorian house and, inspired by a particular article, tried to cook a sheep’s head à la Russe. It was absolutely indescribable, and made a frothy scum which filled the whole kitchen.’ But when she moved to the Logs, a sprawling Victorian Gothic mansion on the edge of Hampstead Heath – it still stands; Pevsner describes it as a ‘formidable atrocity’ – her skills began to improve. She and Miranda† lived and worked in its former billiard room; they slept on a mezzanine – little more than a shelf, really – designed for her by Alexander Gibson, one of the architects of the Regatta Restaurant at the Festival of Britain.* The billiard room, for all its obvious drawbacks and eccentricities, suited Patience very well, for she was an early adopter of open-plan living, believing that it was quite wrong for the cook to be marooned in a separate room. Her kitchen, then, was an alcove at one end of the space, and her dining table just a wooden shelf attached to a wall, which she called the Lion’s Bar (a lion’s head hung on the wall above it – a sculpture constructed by Nicolas and Miranda from lead collected from the crumpled roofs of bombed houses and melted down).

  At the Logs she liked to entertain, and gave Sunday lunches oiled with plenty of wine: talky gatherings of Hampstead neighbours such the writer Marghanita Laski and her husband John Howard. Henrion would come, and his colleague John Brinkley, the typographer who’d done the lettering at the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion. Also a young art student, David Gentleman. Patience and Gentleman had grown very friendly, and by the time he went off to Italy on a travelling scholarship in the summer of 1954 it was understood that while he was there he would gather material for Patience’s book, which she had asked him to illustrate.

  It took a long time to write, this cookbook: she and Primrose began working on it in 1953 or thereabouts, and would not finish it for another four years. Patience was scrupulous about testing its recipes: it made her furious when Primrose failed to do this, and she would often end up dismissing her co-writer’s dishes once she’d tried them herself. (She was not, you gather, terribly easy to work with, and because of this it was ultimately Patience who ended up writing and editing the main body of the book.) Then there was the shopping involved. Ingredients had to be hunted down. It’s a cliché of food writing to note that in the Fifties olive oil could only be purchased at a chemist. What people tend to forget is that the same was also true of – for instance – Tidman’s Sea Salt, an item most people used for bathing but which Patience recommended for seasoning fish and meat.

  Patience smoking a Craven A at the Logs; on the bentwood hatstand hangs a winnowing basket, possibly from Madame Cadec’s shop on Greek Street

  (Stefan Buzás, courtesy of Kate Irvine and Miranda Armour-Brown and Nicolas Gray.)

  The best shops were in Soho: Parmigiani’s and Roche’s in Old Compton Street, Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street and – for kitchen kit rather than for ingredients – Cadec’s in Greek Street, which stood next to a ‘hospitable place called Rose’s, whose horsemeat steaks and dandelion salads kept a happy few well nourished during the war’. Cadec’s was an emporium that filled Patience with awe. Established in 1862, only master cooks had, she felt, the true right of admission. Sometimes, her nerve having failed her at the last, she would simply remain outside, studying through Madame Cadec’s window all her wonderful and exotic wares: ‘the beautiful terrines with hares and pheasants moulded in deep relief on their lids, the chef’s knives, silver hatelets surmounted by cocks’ and boars’ heads, the embossed tin moulds for iced puddings in the form of pineapples and bunches of grapes . . .’

  Inside, the proprietor ‘occupied the foreground, an ample figure, her hair piled high and her eyes attentive to every detail behind their rimless pince-nez’, while around her stood great cairns of stuff piled high from floor to ceiling. Navigating these finely balanced pyramids of copper and earthenware was perilous, but mysteriously galvanising. ‘The essential thing about this charged interior was that it contained nothing which had not a practical significance,’ Patience wrote in Honey from a Weed. ‘But the quality was so superb that the function of the objects seemed to be transcended. Beautiful in themselves, they were an invocation to produce good food.’ At home she worked away, practising her daube de boeuf and her pot au feu, her bouillabaisse and her poulet à l’estragon. She wasn’t a great one for modern gadgets: no mixer, no dishwasher, no ice-cream machine. Her batterie de cuisine, however, was a splendid sight to see, and she had Madame Cadec to thank for it.

  Plats du Jour, or Foreign Food was finally published by Penguin in 1957. As planned, David Gentleman was its illustrator, and he gave it the adorable cover which was (and still is) so
much a part of its appeal.* It was an instant success, selling fifty thousand copies in its first ten months. It isn’t difficult to work out why. Of course people liked the recipes, which were pleasingly straightforward, and which came not only from France, but from Spain and Italy too (the book seemed to be doing the work of several volumes twice its size, and at the bargain price of just three shillings and sixpence). Moussaka, ratatouille, moules marinères: these things were easy to make, and delicious to boot. But it was also, in its own quiet way, an extremely fashionable book, and it made those who bought it feel modern. It was written for people like its author, who ate in their kitchens (or, if they didn’t, wanted to), and who owned smart new cookware from Denmark that could be brought from oven to table (‘armed with this utensil, it would be possible to produce most of the recipes in this book’). These readers preferred courgettes to marrows and fresh fish to tinned, and they sometimes – oh, the decadence! – drank wine with dinner in the middle of the week.*

  The tone of Plats du Jour was sophisticated, but it was rarely bossy and it was never severe. In this sense Patience and her co-author deftly occupied what might be called the middle ground. Consider, for instance, the still controversial issue of garlic. The authors of austerity cookbooks treated garlic with extreme trepidation, knowing that their readers were terrified of it. ‘Please try it, just for once,’ cajoled Peter Pirbright in his 1946 book, Off the Beeton Track. ‘Not masses of garlic, just a tiny bit, half a clove, well crushed.’ He was at one end of the scale. At the other was Elizabeth David, whose contempt for this kind of attitude rose from her pages like spitting fat from a hot pan. ‘The grotesque prudishness and archness with which garlic is treated in this country has led to the superstition that rubbing the bowl with it before putting the salad in gives sufficient flavour,’ she wrote in Summer Cooking (1955). And then: ‘It rather depends on whether you are going to eat the bowl or the salad.’ Patience was in neither of these camps – or at least, not on the page. She would not beg and plead, but nor would she dismiss her readers’ anxieties as rank stupidity. Having acknowledged garlic’s pungent whiffiness, she set out to reassure: after all, this mighty allium is very easily reduced to ‘a molecular state at the point of the knife or in the mortar’.* Try it in pesto, she said, or fried with mushrooms. She did not, of course, provide a recipe for pesto; an important part of the book’s flattery is its occasional assumption that the reader knows exactly what its author is talking about.

  (David Gentleman.)

  It was no mean feat to have written what would become the best-selling cookbook of the Fifties, and Patience was thrilled by its success, for all that she would soon turn her back on many (though not all) of its tenets. But one senses that she did not want to be known only as a cookery writer. Plats du Jour, a brilliant calling card, now pushed open another door. In 1958 she entered a competition held by the Observer, which was in search of an editor for its first woman’s page – and won. This was quite astonishing: she had been up against a thousand other entrants and she was not even a proper journalist – though she was not, it seemed, the editor’s first choice. When David Astor, the paper’s proprietor, told her he would be taking her on, the ‘joyful news was mitigated by his adding that the “ideal person” they had endeavoured to persuade [to do the job] was not available’.†

  What bliss to have a job with a regular salary that did not involve doing someone else’s typing! But still, she mounted the stairs at the Observer’s offices in Tudor Street with a ‘slight tremor’, a nervousness that proved to be well founded when she reached the top of them and discovered ‘what appeared to be a club for old Etonians’. As she put it, ‘A woman was not exactly persona grata at Tudor Street. The brilliant and delightful C. A. Lejeune [the film critic] was invisible, at home or watching films. Vita Sackville-West wrote her weekly article at Sissinghurst and posted it. Jane Bown [the photographer], already a wizard, then, was in her darkroom when not on photographic missions. Only Alison Settle,* marooned with her all too female fashion theme in a room apart, was established there.’ Settle, the paper’s thrusting and opinionated fashion editor, promptly invited Patience to lunch at the Women’s Press Club: ‘Not knowing that I was unclubbable, she invited me to join it. “Women,” she said, “in a man’s world should stick together.” Over a glass of wine she looked at me appraisingly. “It’s alright for you,” she said, with a trace of acidity, “you have looks. I have had to make my way without them.” What Alison had was red hair and character. She outlined her solitary uphill struggle. She was an early fashion pioneer, a quite indomitable profession. She made me realise that I was an amateur.’

  The page Patience would edit was to be called ‘A Woman’s Perspective’. But what exactly did this mean? She wasn’t sure. ‘Of course I wondered what were women’s subjects. In the late Fifties, it was not possible to discuss in print the question of how one might bring up two fatherless children and earn a living while contriving to get home at the precise moment they got back from school. It was this problem that impelled me to send my son to boarding school. I could only follow my own predilections and try to convince Nigel Gosling [her boss] that they might have some appeal for readers.’ The only trouble was that her own predilections were already the province of other experts. The arts, gardening, food and drink: all of these were covered elsewhere, leaving Patience with what she called ‘youth’, modern architecture, design and ‘craftsmanship’. But needs must. As she put it, ‘These themes, rather oddly, began to furnish the Women’s Page.’

  Life at the Observer was fraught. Her male colleagues could not be relied upon to act like gentlemen. After long meetings she would sometimes pass Philip Toynbee on her way out; alas, it wasn’t always possible to evade the critic’s ‘bearlike embrace’ as she came down the narrow stairs and he came up, roaring drunk after a late lunch in Soho. These same men seemed to think she was there only to help them with their problems. Could she pop over and make their living rooms look more elegant? Could she advise on where they might buy cheap but attractive furniture? David Astor, having read an article she had written about a show of modern jewellery at the Goldsmith’s Hall, asked her to choose a birthday present for his wife.

  Then there was their response to her ideas. When she reported that she had just seen a brilliant performance by Marcel Marceau in Paris, she was told there was no point in writing it up: mime was so un-English! Only by writing for the Observer’s Foreign News Service, which sold stories to newspapers in far-off places, could she keep herself sane, for this allowed her to cover all manner of ‘forbidden’ subjects (contributing to it was, she said, ‘like confiding a message to a bottle and casting it out to sea’, the stories circumnavigating the world ‘without remonstrance’). It was for the foreign press that she wrote of the spellbinding lecture given by the French actor Jean-Louis Barrault, to the students of Oxford University; of Henry Moore’s retrospective at the Whitechapel Art Gallery; of the thrilling change Maria Callas had made to her interpretation of Medea between dress rehearsal and premiere.

  She sometimes asked herself what her page did for women. Was it a morale booster? She hoped so. She deplored the pitiful women in the paintings of John Bratby,* who stared out of his canvases as if through the bars of a prison (they seemed, his defeated females, always to be surrounded by great piles of washing-up). She believed that women would rather learn than go shopping. She wanted her readers to look out to Europe, where life seemed altogether jollier and more enlightened, and it was therefore on their behalf, or so she told herself, that she travelled so much (on freebies, wherever possible; the paper was notoriously parsimonious, at least with her). She went to Paris and Milan, to Genoa and Venice, and even, on one occasion, to Turin, where she wrote about Pier Luigi Nervi’s extraordinary modernist exhibition hall of reinforced concrete and ribbed steel: ‘awe-inspiring, vast, a summit of engineering’. Her bosses, of course, remained mostly indifferent to ‘the innovative genius burgeoning in foreign parts’, and had their
revenge by insisting that she also write a column about worthy domestic bargains such as rubber-backed carpets and battery chickens: ‘Etonian tit-for-tat,’ as she called it.

  But I don’t suppose she was really unhappy. Life was busy and interesting. She had several suitors, and at least one lover – though he was married and often unavailable. She was also in the throes of a heady platonic affair with Irving Davis, who sometimes accompanied her on these press trips. She and Davis, a gnome-like antiquarian book dealer with a shop in Bloomsbury, had met in London shortly after the publication of Plats du Jour. Shocked that she had had the temerity to write a cookbook before she met him – Davis was a gourmet and a famously good cook – he had quizzed her on fungi, and when she passed this test with flying colours had invited her to dinner at his flat in Brunswick Square. Davis’s dinner parties, held in his kitchen, were legendary affairs: best bone china, Venetian glass, fabulous claret. A highly particular cook, if a dish wasn’t right he would destroy it altogether. He once threw a duck, imperfectly roasted, out of a window, where it became attached to a drainpipe several stories up; some days later the fire brigade had to be called, it being summer time and his neighbours put out by the smell. Thanks to this, dinner at his place was inevitably served rather late – though as he surely knew, this only heightened the pleasure of his guests, hunger making everything seem the more delicious.

  It was at Davis’s table that Patience now learned the ‘full poetic meaning’ of the word ‘classical’ when it came to cooking. ‘His dishes were invocations to the ideal,’ she writes in Honey from a Weed. ‘His method of presenting them a celebration of his Mediterranean past [in 1911, when Davis was twenty-three, he had opened a bookshop in Florence with Giuseppe Orioli, a lover of Norman Douglas]. The effect was a kind of alchemy by which the past became manifest, and made me feel, in knowing him, I held the key to that lost Bohemia where Orioli, Douglas, Lawrence, Furbank, Beerbohm were creatures of substance, not of reminiscence.’ The meal would usually begin with something simple: leeks à la grecque, sorrel soup or a plate of marinated anchovies. This would be followed by lobster, a matelote of eel or, in season, a game bird. Finally, to finish, there would be a salad with an ‘admirable’ dressing and, if Irving had been in Paris, perhaps some little goat’s cheeses. I can’t help but wonder whether devouring these feasts ever put the crimp on the success of Plats du Jour; the book might have been very different had it been written under Davis’s influence. But it must have been wonderful, too: not just the deliciousness, but the feeling that he was a kindred spirit.*