The distaff side of death
Zenga Longmore
CHIN UP, GIRLS!: A BOOK OF WOMEN’S OBITUARIES FROM THE DAILY TELEGRAPH edited by Georgia Powell and Katherine Ramsay John Murray, £16.99, pp. 362, ISBN 0719563003 ✆ £13.59 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 The reason one heads straight for the obituary column when one is confronted by the Daily Telegraph is the abundance of rarefied mischievousness one finds therein. If it is grovelling hero-worship you crave, then Telegraph obituaries will disappoint. In Chin Up, Girls! we delight in a portrait of Dame Barbara Cartland: ‘In her later years, she cut an unmistakeable figure in a froth of pink ball gown with extravagant, almost clown-like make-up — her cheeks pulled back with sadly visible bits of sticking plaster ... She was a formidable fairy queen.’ Ah! A morning devoid of sunny Telegraph obituaries is a morning misspent.
I was slightly apprehensive about the idea behind Chin Up, Girls!. Why women’s obituaries? Don’t we need a touch of dear departed male company to spice up our breakfast times? My apprehensions were unfounded. The sheer range of Dear Departesses in this volume is breathtakingly entertaining. We meet wartime nurses, athletes, femmes fatales and pioneering surgeons, all of whom have died in the last 20 years. Most of the women are completely unheard of, which is just as well. We are all heartily sick of celebrities by now, although it was rather nice to simper over the antics of Beryl Reid and the fearsome Fanny Craddock.
The collection is divided deftly into categories which include Heroines, Trailblazers and Bluestockings. The historically minded will find it fascinating to dwell upon the extraordinary changes that the 20th century has wrought upon women’s lives. None of the Chin Up Girls, as the introduction points out, had their careers mapped out for them. They could not follow their fathers into the family regiment or inherit a title. They were not expected to have a career in the first place. It only goes to show that role models can come in any sex, age or colour.
We read of Violet Webb who won an Olympic medal for athletics in 1932. At that time, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, was strongly opposed to women taking part in sport: ‘At the Olympic Games [women’s] primary role should be like in the ancient tournaments — the crowning of the male victors with laurels,’ the baron opined. Undeterred, Miss Webb went on to win scores of medals and even competed at the 1936 Olympics where she commented on the arrival of Hitler: ‘You’d have thought God was coming down from heaven.’ Students of women’s rights will be fascinated to read about Dame Sheila Sherlock, a liver specialist and the first female professor of medicine. Although she graduated top in her year from Edinburgh university, she was prevented from holding a house job in a hospital because she was a woman. However, this book is not merely a collection of women who fought for sexual equality. There are also a number of gloriously eccentric, firm-minded characters such as Rear-Admiral Grace Hopper, a computer expert who remarked, ‘I am thoroughly in the doghouse with the women’s liberation people. They once asked me if I had ever met prejudice and I said I have always been too busy to look for it.’ If Chin Up, Girls! carries a feminist message, it is that women demand the right to be batty. Take Jennifer Patterson for example, included here under the affectionate heading, Battleaxes. She is lovingly described as a ‘fat, loud, outspoken, laughing cook’. It is further noted that ‘she sometimes washed her hands, but hygiene was not her first anxiety. Once she was found tossing the salad for a Private Eye lunch in the washbasin of the gents in the Coach and Horses, Soho.’ The obituary ends, ‘Luckily she never killed anyone.’ I gleaned as much fun from the wit and style of the writing as I did from the lives of the subjects.
The title, by the way, refers to the words of an Australian Red Cross matron who encouraged her colleagues as they awaited a Japanese execution squad: ‘Chin up, girls!’
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