Society

Amazing Grace

She recalls Edwardian London and the Blitz. Kodaikanal-based Grace Wardell, Fleet Street's first woman editor, has turned 100.

Advertisement

Amazing Grace
info_icon

There was a dear lady called Grace
Who stared life straight in the face
She has made it to a hundred
Without priest or pundit
This dear old lady called Grace
—Birthday tribute to Grace Wardell

"I'
info_icon
Undimmed vim: Grace riding pillion on friend Amaresh's motorbike

She's been there, done that and has no regrets whatsoever. "I don't live like that, I don't love like that," says Grace, who might need a cane to walk around, and a hearing aid, but whose voice is loud and clear. "I lose my way sometimes," she says of her fading memory but adds coquettishly, "I enjoyed sex". She loved them and left them—three husbands and many lovers ("I don't keep count"). She has two children (Sally, now 76, and Mark, 62), three grandchildren, one great-grandchild and one great-great-grandchild.

Grace was born in London to Ethel May, a classical pianist, and John Christian Russ, a Danish-German contractor, who had a hand in rebuilding London after the Great War. Listening to her is like being transported to the London of Sherlock Holmes—she remembers the clip-clop of horses on the cobblestones, the rattle of the milkman's cart, the evening gas lamps and the peal of church bells in London's streets.

"The First World War was very destructive," she says, shuddering as she recalls the evening when a Zeppelin (the massive airships that Germany used for long-range bombing and reconnaissance) met its fiery end over the neighbourhood. "I'll never forget the sight of the crewmen falling one by one like living flares." She says she has a sense of deja vu every time President Bush says "the war in Iraq is all about peace. Because they said wwi was the war to end all wars, but it only resulted in a horrific new and improved second one."

After her graduation from school at 16, she spent the summer selling Electrolux vacuum cleaners in Folkstone from door to door. Later in London she did a stint as a seamstress and from then on "made my own clothes, copying designs from Vogue". Her father then enrolled her in Pitman's Business School, London, and, today, eight decades later, she can still do shorthand. She then worked at the printing firm Monotype Corporation where she befriended Eric Gill (designer of the Gill Sans Serif) and Stanley Morison (designer of Times New Roman), learnt layout and to work with printers "on the stone". Her marriage at the time to William Fitz-Herbert, who was with London's Daily Mirror, nudged her towards making journalism her career. She divorced him before her daughter Sally, now a US-based photographer, was born.

Her next job was as Woman's Page editor of the London Daily Mail. When her boss went off to have a baby, Grace got the job and used her knowledge of haute couture to make her name as a reporter covering Paris fashion shows. She interviewed Coco Chanel ("a dominating lady") and Elsa Schiaparelli ("a gentlewoman"). Present at the last couture show in Paris in 1940 under the shadow of the advancing Wehrmacht, she caught the last channel steamer out. "She was always one step ahead of disaster during wartime," says Mark.

In 1939, she was hired as a reporter for London Evening Standard and was the first to report on the evacuation of slum children to the countryside from a war-wary London. She remembers a little boy spying a field of buttercups and hollering, "Ey, look at dem yallers." Features like that set her out as a war correspondent; her reports from the front conveyed the war's lurid immediacy, the ever-present terror and the courage of the ordinary Tommy. She then shifted to the London Daily Express as assistant features editor and got promoted to features editor—the first woman to be an editor on Fleet Street, where she was responsible for one-quarter of a national newspaper.

That was the time she had friends like poet Dylan Thomas, who asked her, "What am I doing walking (on Grosvenor Street) with a woman in a hat like that?" referring to the intricate hats she had acquired in chic Paris. After the war, Grace married journalist Edmund Antrobus, and moved with him to America. She and Antrobus then split and Grace went on to join the National Enquirer as editor.

In 1962, Grace renewed an old acquaintance with playwright and journalist Simon Wardell, and he became her third husband. Simon, Grace and Mark went back to North Wales where she restored Simon's historic home. In 1968, the couple was involved in a car accident that killed Simon and broke both her legs. A year earlier, Mark had come to south India to become a monk. Grace, with one leg still in a caliper, came to visit and fell in love with the place. She came back to stay, but would often wander off to England, America, Portugal till she was advised not to fly.

"I'm spiritual, but not religious. In the world today I see the destruction of the ideals we grew up with. There is need for a world rethink," she says, and then adds that she's optimistic about the future. An avid follower of news on TV, she's placing her bets, like so many others, on one man: "Obama is beautiful and he's the saviour."

Advertisement

Tags

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement

    Advertisement