Full of Grace

"Before the interview, you need to understand she is in her second childhood." Mark Antrobus gives clear instructions about his ‘Centenarian mum’, the world's first woman features' editor from Fleet Street

April 09, 2010 03:56 pm | Updated 03:58 pm IST

Grace Wardell at her home in Kodaikanal

Grace Wardell at her home in Kodaikanal

“Before the interview, you need to understand she is in her second childhood.” Mark Antrobus gives clear instructions about his ‘Centenarian mum’. Through the drive from Madurai to Kodaikanal, Grace Wardell dominates my mind. Will she be happy to meet me and sit through the interview? – it nags me till I knock in awe on the door of the world’s first woman Feature’s Editor from the Fleet Street (also perhaps the oldest surviving).

“Oh! So wonderful of you to come,” the witness of two horrifying World Wars instantly greets me kissing my hand and I sense the spontaneous warmth and vibrancy she radiates even at 103.

Dressed in a light pullover and leggings, thick metallic rings clasped to her ear lobes, silver grey hair back combed, the large glasses framing her expressive eyes, Grace is every bit a frame of style and elegance.

On March 23 scores of people came spontaneously to wish her many more years. “There was a continuous stream of people. It felt as though the place was lit by a strange ‘prakasham’ and positivity,” Mark shares in chaste Tamil.

My eyes turn to his smiling mother. One moment she listens to us intently, the next she releases a cry pleading with us not to leave her and the next, complains of tiredness and reclines against pillows on the bed. Even though Grace slips into these moments of fatigue and amnesia, she jerks back with zest to continue and complete the story of her life.

A life packed with joy and sorrow, dreams and achievements, risks and action, fears and disappointments, intrigue and enigma, success and fame. In her words: “I have lived a full life, with its quota of errors. It was made rich by friends. I loved experimenting with life though I lose my way sometimes now.”

With prompting from her 64 year old son, she traverses 10 decades of her life. Her earliest memory is as a three-year-old when she stood atop the stairs of their grand family house in London announcing to the world that she was able to fasten her knicker buttons.

The setting of her childhood years in the quieter London of Sherlock Holmes — the clip clop of horses on the cobblestones, the rattle of the milkman’s cans, the evening gas lamps of home and street, the melancholic peals of church bells — was totally erased when the First World War progressed. Her father's electronic business folded and her family sunk into penury.

“Our spacious house with the billiards, the music room was gone. My father had to sell his precious library. The uselessness of the war embraced my childhood. Yet, the surreal “war of the air” fascinated me.”

Manned flight was a new phenomenon then and the “Red Baron” type biplanes were circling menacingly with pilots manually dropping bombs. Grace was an eyewitness to one of the zeppelins meeting its fiery end over their kitchen garden. Held by her father she watched in horror an enormous shadowy gas-filled airship roaring into flames, and the “crewmen falling one by one like living flares from the firestorm in the air”.

That was also the time when Darwin’s theory of evolution was intensely debated and Albert Einstein was the hot new thing.

Grace was born to Ethel May Graveling, a classical pianist and John Christian Russ, a Danish-German who immigrated to England for business. As WW-I wrecked the family’s finances, Grace experienced the humble side of life that has remained with her.

She joined the Woodford County High School in Essex as one of its inaugural students in 1919. She recalls fondly how the atmosphere of enthusiasm saved their lives after the ‘horribles’ of the war”.

After graduating, Grace sold Electrolux vacuum cleaners and also did a stint as a seamstress in London that enabled her to stitch her own clothes with amazing success thereafter and helped her gain intimate knowledge of fashion.

While Grace was happy indulging in “experiments in living”, her father entered her in Pitman’s Business School, London. Even eight decades later, she could still do shorthand with flair. She married William Fitz-Herbert, known as Bill Herbert then on the editorial staff of London’s Daily Mirror and added to her secretarial skills, meeting eminent calligraphers, Eric Gill (designer of Gill Sans Serif) and Stanley Morison (designer of Times New Roman).

Grace Herbert inherited the editorship of Woman’s Page of The London Daily Mail when the then boss went on maternity leave. Coupled with her flair for dressmaking, gift for language and the common touch to her writings, she excelled as a reporter of the Paris Dress Shows interviewing couturière luminaries like Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli.

Grace was at the last Dress Show in her beloved Paris of high style in couture and cuisine when the dreaded Nazis advanced. With her illustrator she caught the last channel steamer before the city was engulfed by Hitler‘s men.

In 1939, she joined as a reporter under Frank Owen, Editor of Lord Beaverbrook’s London Evening Standard . Her first story — evacuation of London slum children to the country — was a hit that made her rise as a creative journalist.

She shifted to London Daily Express as Assistant Feature Editor to Paul Holt and later became the first woman Features' Editor of the Fleet Street’s national newspaper, responsible for quarter of its contents.

Due to paper and ink rationing, the newspaper was reduced to four pages and managing a full page was a mighty responsibility in those war-ravaged days. Grace with her eyes and ears open found plenty about humanity in peril to report for. Her boss — the legendary Editor-in-Chief, Arthur Christiansen, once gently chided Grace for “trying to get socialism into The Daily Express ”.

During that time Grace also befriended a spectrum of people including poet Dylan Thomas and his wife Caitlin. “The Savoy” used to be a plush London café-cum-restaurant where isolated artists, intellectual writers close to London’s bombing scenes and high society people who maintained their lives in, assembled daily. There were days when Grace walked hand in hand with Dylan Thomas on Grosvernor Street, who would then tease her: "What am I doing walking with a woman in a hat like that?" referring to the intricate hats she loved buying in chic Paris.

Grace and Bill Herbert separated in 1935 shortly before her daughter Sally was born. A decade on, she married Edmund Antrobus, a British naturalized American who came to Britain with the American forces as a journalist for “Yank“, the American Army newspaper.

In 1945 Grace joined him with their son Mark in America. They too separated in time and Grace was back at work as the Editor for the highly exciting “scandal sheet” — The National Enquirer .

In 1962, Grace renewed an old acquaintance with a journalist colleague, Simon Wardell, with whom she had worked on The Daily Express when he was visiting New York. Simon, a playwright and journalist, was the godson of Lord Beaverbrook who was his father’s (Brigadier Michael Wardell) friend. Married in Connecticut, Grace returned to Britain and assumed a new role of self-inspired architect and designer to rebuild her father-in-law‘s stately historic home on the family estate of 400 acres in North Wales.

Six years later, a horrible motor accident broke both her legs and took Simon away. That is when she arrived in India for the first time with one leg still in caliper. Her son Mark, after finishing schooling in England, was already here to become a monk.

Grace instantly fell in love with the country’s ambience despite the evident poverty. “Smiles were frequent from those I met, particularly from the children,” she recalls.

"The First World War was very destructive and resulted in a horrific new and improved second one,” she repeats as I shuffle the pages of an old album containing her sepia tinted photographs and articles that highlighted the courage of ordinary Londoners under attack.

“Today, I see the same destruction of the ideals we grew up with. There is need for a world rethink," she asserts and is also optimistic about the future believing in the younger generation’s ability “to discover treasures beyond the gates of academic institutions.”

“The way my art teacher encouraged me to think of painting as a career and English teacher encouraged me to think of a career in writing, if encouragement is endemic, spirits bloom. Any deprivation fades in camaraderie and laughter,” she says and enquires whether her “quote is okay?”

Her passions: “I wrote my first poem in school and subsequently wrote many and lost them to obscurity. My paintings too met the same fate. But I kept with me a love of English language which proved my tool for survival later.”

This cricket crazy girl had actually yearned for art school. “My mother went surveying three noted art schools and was shocked by nude models posing for the life classes. My parents felt though a higher liberal education was good, art school was too esoteric. I had to think about earning my living.”

Playing a variety of Shakespeare roles, Grace also fantasized becoming an actor. “But I never mastered giving speeches. As an editor I was notorious for forgetting even famous people’s names. There were such inadequacies but we were permitted our faults and even loved for them. That is what makes us who we are!”

FACTS

Grace was born as Grace Emma Russ on 23rd March 1908. By virtue of her three marriages, she held and wrote under different names like Grace Herbert, Grace Antrobus and Grace Wardell.

One of its first students in 1919, Grace shows up as the oldest living ‘old girl’ of London’s Woodford County High School for Girls or “HigHams”.

She has a daughter, Sally, from her first husband who is a photographer settled in the U.S. Her son Mark is from her second husband who came to India in 1969 in search of spirituality and is an Indian citizen now. Grace has three grandchildren, one great grand child and one great great grand child.

Grace made Kodaikanal her home where she lives with Mark doing charity for the past four decades. They run a community library, a trust that provides free education to children of poor widows, destitute women and HIV mothers, they feed beggars and medically treat.

Her failing eyesight in the last two years prevents her from being a voracious reader that she was. Earlier, she followed the TV news and read every possible newspaper and magazine available. The last book she enjoyed reading was Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope.“

As the oldest member of the Kodaikanal British Club, she would still love to visit and share a good laugh and story with her friends, read out limericks or play scrabble and Bridge. But her frail structure, following a cataract and orthopaedic surgery two years ago, restricts her mobility now.

But doting Mark takes her out regularly for ice creams, howsoever strenuous it is to push the wheelchair up and down the hilly terrain. His mom always returns aglow after the exertion.

Mark tries not to be over-protective but believes that after eight surgeries at her age, nature cure is the best healer. Grace apparently came to India, overweight and prescribed with dozens of pills for ischemia. Today, she sticks to liquid diet (fruit juices and horlicks) and two scrambled eggs for lunch.

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