CHAPTER ONE
1 There is an account of these liaisons in Gerald, Daphne’s biography of her father (Gollancz, 1934), and in Gerald du Maurier by James Harding (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989).
2 Arthur Llewelyn Davies was the second son of John Llewelyn Davies, the brilliant scholar who was Honorary Chaplain to the Queen and a radical who supported women’s suffrage. His sister Emily founded Girton College, and his daughter Margaret was a co-founder of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. Arthur was called to the bar in 1891, aged twenty-eight, and married Sylvia du Maurier – the union of two very different families.
3 The games Gerald played with his daughters are well documented in Daphne’s autobiography Growing Pains (Gollancz, 1977), and in Angela’s It’s Only the Sister (Peter Davies, 1976).
4 The first house in Hampstead lived in by the du Mauriers was 4 Holly Mount, then they moved to Gangmoor House, facing Whitestone Pond on the summit of Hampstead Hill; a year later, in 1870, they settled at 27 Church Row (where Gerald was born in 1873) and from there went to New Grove House, where they stayed twenty-one years.
5 Mrs Beaumont also at one time wrote articles on household and domestic subjects for The Bystander, the magazine edited by her son.
6 Letter to Pucky (Ellen M. Violett, second daughter of Ellen Doubleday), 7 October 1948.
7 Gerald himself finally volunteered, in 1918, at the age of forty-five, and was accepted by the Irish Guards. He was a disastrous soldier (amusingly described in Gerald – see note 1 above) and was luckily still being trained when the Armistice was declared.
8 There is no date on this poem, but it is likely it was written around 1920.
9 There is a description of ‘Eric Avon’ in Growing Pains (see note 3 above). Daphne claimed there were ‘no psychological depths’ to this invented character, who was Captain of Cricket at Rugby and shone at everything. She played the Eric Avon character in games until she was fifteen.
10 Letter to Ellen Doubleday, 10 December 1947, quoted more extensively in Chapter Fourteen.
11 Maud Waddell’s surname, with the emphasis on the first syllable, was pronounced by the du Mauriers as ‘Waddle’. This made them think of a waddling walk, which in turn led to the thought of toddling and toddle, and was shortened to Tod: a typically convoluted way of bestowing nicknames.
12 Frederick Lonsdale was the successful playwright of the 1920s and early 1930s. He met Gerald in 1904 and they were friends from then onwards. The two of them worked many times together and used to sit up all night smoking, drinking and playing cards. There is an entertaining description of the du Maurier and Lonsdale families holidaying together in Frances Donaldson’s biography of her father, Freddy Lonsdale (Heinemann, 1957).
13 Tod was an accomplished painter of watercolours. When she decided she hated Australia, she paid for her passage home, first-class, by selling her paintings. She was elected to the Royal Watercolour Society and also the Société des Artistes and had her work exhibited in both London and Paris.
14 Letter to Pucky (Ellen M. Violett – see note 6 above), 23 August 1949.
15 Daphne considered that J. M. Barrie understood Gerald better than anyone else and that this understanding went into the creation of the part of Will Dearth in Dear Brutus. (Recording, ‘Portrait of Gerald’, made for the centenary of Gerald’s birth in 1973, BBC Sound Archives.)
CHAPTER TWO
1 Patricia Hastings, who was at Camposena with Daphne, has provided me with information about the school.
2 To describe a man as ‘dago-like’ shows Daphne as a creature of her class and time, and was not seen by her as derogatory, though it undoubtedly was. In a similar way she refers to Jews and Negroes without stopping to think about the terms she uses. This could be interpreted as being antisemitic or anti-black, but, in fact, she was neither. Later in life she was tremendously pro-Israel and also strongly against apartheid, and signed petitions to that effect.
3 Letter to Ellen Doubleday, December 1947.
4 Gerald du Maurier hated homosexuality, and when The Vortex was staged in 1924, which dealt not with homosexuality but with an ambiguous mother-son relationship, he used it to protest against the theatre becoming besmirched with ‘filth’. The play’s author, Noël Coward, replied with a spirited defence, and though this did not change Gerald’s mind, the two became, if not friends, at least tolerant of each other.
5 Letter to Ellen Doubleday (see note 3 above).
6 Daphne always had dogs from now onwards, all of them West Highland terriers (except Bingo, half-Spaniel half-Sheepdog). There was Mouse, Moray and Bibby, whom she had for ten years each, and finally Mac and Ken, who survived her. She was devoted to her dogs, lavishing affection upon them, but disciplined them very strictly.
7 A board game, rather like ludo.
CHAPTER THREE
1 There is a description of going to Cornwall as a child in the prologue to Vanishing Cornwall (Gollancz, 1967).
2 Daphne records in her memoir Growing Pains that she had to be led from her seat in tears after watching Gerald in Dear Brutus.
3 Recorded by Angela du Maurier in her first volume of autobiography, Old Maids Remember (1966), where she describes her father as a ‘mixture of Mr Barrett and a schoolboy brother’ and reflects that his conversation with his daughters was often ‘strangely bawdy’.
4 Described by A. L. Rowse in Quiller-Couch: A Portrait of ‘Q’ (Methuen, 1988).
5 Daphne told her son this.
CHAPTER FOUR
1 The best description of Daphne finding Menabilly is given by her in an article called ‘The House of Secrets’, written in 1946, for a book entitled Countryside Character. This later appeared in The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories (Gollancz, 1981).
2 Gerald’s first film was Escape (1930), made on Dartmoor, which proved a gruelling experience. He followed this with Lord Camber’s Ladies (1932), made by Alfred Hitchcock, in which he starred with Gertrude Lawrence. The money he earned got him out of financial difficulties but, compared to the income from lending his name to a brand of cigarettes – ‘Du Maurier cork-tipped’ – it was extremely hard work and he detested the experience.
3 For Carol Reed’s career see The Man Between, a biography by Nicholas Wapshott (Chatto & Windus, 1990).
4 Daphne’s real feelings towards her mother are given in a letter to Ellen Doubleday, January 1948, quoted at length in Chapter Fourteen.
5 The trip with Otto Kahn is described in Growing Pains. Daphne tells, with great relish, how she avoided her host’s unwelcome attentions by stripping her clothes off and diving naked into the water. Later, he offered to buy her a fur coat, but she asked for a dagger instead.
6 Clara Vyvyan was forty-five when Daphne, aged twenty-three, met her. Her husband, Sir Courtenay, was still alive and they were both great gardeners. Four years previously she and a friend, with two Indian guides, crossed the divide from Canada to Alaska, collecting and pressing wild flowers for Kew Gardens.
CHAPTER FIVE
1 Mentioned in Growing Pains.
2 Daphne uses this simile – that sex is like a game of tennis – frequently in her correspondence.
3 The first print-run for The Loving Spirit was 2,300 and the advance £75; for I’ll Never Be Young Again it was 2,000, and the advance £125; and for The Progress of Julius, the last novel published by Heinemann, 4,000, with the same advance.
4 Angela’s The Little Less, dealing with a lesbian friendship, was turned down. It was eventually published in 1941.
5 Both Daphne (in Gerald) and Angela (in her two volumes of autobiography) describe scenes with Gerald near to the kind portrayed in The Progress of Julius.
CHAPTER SIX
1 Why a boy named Frederick was called ‘Tommy’ nobody can now remember, but he was called ‘Boy’ in the army – ‘the boy Browning’ – to distinguish him from his father, who was also serving in 1916. After his father died, ‘Boy’ stuck, and those who did not know assumed Browning was called this because of his extremely youthful appearance well into middle age.
2 Tommy became very attached, not just to George (who was best man at his wedding), but to the entire Hunkin family. He backed George Hunkin’s boatyard and later, with Daphne, bought it. George was a regular visitor to tea later on, and his wife’s sister, Mrs Hancock, known as ‘Hanks’, was the Brownings’ cook in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
3 Volumes I and II of Lt.-Col. Sir Frederick Ponsonby’s The Grenadier Guards in the Great War 1914–1918 has details of Tommy’s battalion’s action.
4 Mr Hubert Browning, Tommy’s cousin, described this incident to me in a letter.
5 Laila Spence made available to me a copy of Guy Westmacott’s memoir, privately printed in 1979.
6 Argument still rages among the contemporaries of both Tommy and Jan over who broke off the engagement. I am inclined to believe those who say that Tommy did.
7 Daphne describes how she and Tommy met in Growing Pains. Mrs Hunkin informed her that Major Browning wished to meet her and later she brought Daphne a note. It said their fathers were once ‘fellow members of the Garrick Club’ and that, since he heard she was recovering from an appendix operation, he would like to take her sailing. She accepted.
8 Leo Walmsley (1892–1966) was best known in the 1930s for his autobiographical novels. Three Fevers (1932) was greatly admired by Daphne and she wrote to Tod that she wished she could write like Walmsley. He lived in a derelict army hut, overlooking a creek of the River Fowey, with a young actress who later became his second wife.
9 Tommy reminded Daphne of this in a letter written on their thirteenth wedding anniversary, quoted in Chapter Twelve.
10 Angela’s nickname was Puff, shortened from Puffin, and Jeanne’s was Queenie. Daphne herself was known as Bing, and later also sometimes as Track, and Tray.
11 ‘Chink’ was a controversial figure in the army during the Second World War, when he felt he was made a scapegoat for everything that went wrong with the Eighth Army in the Desert Campaign. He was a friend of Ernest Hemingway and was reputed to be the prototype for the hero in Across the River and Into the Trees. He was demoted in 1943, and afterwards allowed his home to be used as an IRA training ground. See Chink – a biography by Lavinia Greacen (Macmillan, 1989).
12 It was thought at the time by fellow officers in the Grenadier Guards that Tommy had, in marrying an actor’s daughter, rather let the regiment down. Lord Carrington remembers his father being disgusted with those who said so.
13 Lt.-Col. Frederick Henry Browning CBE died in 1929 at the age of fifty-nine. He was a great sportsman – rackets and cricket – at Oxford, and after taking his degree went into business, becoming chairman of Twiss, Browning and Hallowes. He was on the board of the Savoy Hotel. During the First World War he worked in Intelligence and was afterwards attached to the Foreign Office for services at the Versailles peace conference. He was an immensely popular man, though rather overbearing in his behaviour to his gentle wife Nancy.
14 Why there were no Brownings at this unconventional wedding nobody knows. Tommy’s mother was neither abroad nor ill at the time and neither was Grace, his older sister. He was very fond of both his mother and sister and of his cousins, which makes their absence strange. Since both Mrs Browning and Grace liked Daphne and were delighted at the marriage, their absence was certainly not a mark of their disapproval.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1 ‘Daddy’s old horrors’ can only be a reference to Gerald’s drinking. Daphne quotes him in Gerald as saying, ‘Too many whisky and sodas, that’s my trouble. They give me the horrors.’ How serious his drinking was, and whether it continued all his life, she does not say. Whatever the truth, his ‘horrors’ never prevented him working, and he never drank before a performance. The form the ‘horrors’ took was that ‘he put his hands over his eyes and [would] stand and tremble and hold on to Mo or one of his children . . . until . . . the terror, fear and loneliness were gone’ and he had stopped hearing voices in his head. (Gerald.)
2 The name ‘Tessa’ came from Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, and not, as sometimes believed, from Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
3 Grace Browning, sixteen months older than her brother, never married. She was an indefatigable worker for the Girl Guide movement (she was Commissioner for Westminster), and Chairman of the National Association of Training Corps for Girls, and was awarded the OBE in recognition of her work for this organization.
4 It was a surprise to Daphne’s children to discover that she had ever driven after her marriage. They had assumed that their father, who adored his cars, would not let her drive.
5 Letter to Foy Quiller-Couch, 14 April 1934.
6 Letter to Pucky (Ellen M. Violett), 12 January 1949.
7 Victor Gollancz to Daphne, 15 March 1961.
8 For accounts of Victor Gollancz’s life and work see Victor Gollancz by Ruth Dudley Edwards (Gollancz, 1987), and Story of a Publishing House: Gollancz 1928–1978 (Gollancz, 1978) by Sheila Hodges (née Bush), Victor Gollancz’s secretary, who became Daphne’s editor.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1 Jamaica Inn is the only one of Daphne’s books for which there is no record of the first print-run. The production book covering 1936 is missing from the Gollancz files.
2 Not only did Daphne never sew, she also was proud to tell her daughters that she had never even lifted an iron. Their domestic skills were a constant source of amazement to her.
3 Oscar Yerburgh, whose stepfather was sent to Alexandria to command the Coldstream Guards, lived in the house after the Brownings left. He and his family ‘adored the lovely house and garden’ and thought Hassan ‘gracious, tactful and silent-moving’.
4 Queen Anne’s Mansions was a block of flats in Queen Anne’s Gate, off Petty France, St James’s, where flats could be rented by the week or month.
5 Once she was back in England Tessa became very fond of Grace Browning and received from her, during her childhood, a great deal of the affection not bestowed on her by her mother.
6 This was the beginning of Daphne’s long history of taking sleeping pills. Medinol was a mild sleeping drug, but later she moved on to stronger ones. These are not usually named in her letters and papers, but simply referred to by their colour, but in the late 1970s and early 1980s she does name some (see Chapter Twenty-four).
7 This ‘psychological side’ was more significant than anyone realized. As Daphne related to Michael Thornton many years later (see the Observer, April 1989, for Thornton’s account of this) and to Maureen Baker-Munton (letter, July 1957, quoted in full in the Appendix, here) the starting point for Rebecca was her own jealousy of Tommy’s one-time fiancée, Jan Ricardo. Jan Ricardo married in 1937 and died during the war (she threw herself under a train), but Daphne was still haunted by the suspicion that Tommy had found the beautiful, dark-haired, glamorous Jan more attractive than herself.
CHAPTER NINE
1 A. J. Cronin’s The Citadel had had a first print-run of 30,000 in June 1937.
2 The film producer David Selznick bought the film rights to Rebecca. Alfred Hitchcock, who had directed Jamaica Inn in 1939, was under contract to Selznick Studios and was given it to direct. Daphne was not pleased because she hated what Hitchcock made of Jamaica Inn (see here), but Rebecca, made in 1940, delighted her, though she lived to regret a carelessly drawn-up contract, which meant that in future years she did not receive royalties from the very successful TV adaputions.
3 For Frank Buchman see Frank Buchman: A Life by Garth Lean (Constable, 1985).
4 Daphne knew perfectly well that Victor Gollancz loathed MRA, and she had been afraid of his contempt. What she did not realize was that Victor’s business sense made him look on anything his most successful author wrote with indulgence.
CHAPTER TEN
1 Daphne called Henry ‘Christopher’ and herself ‘Jane’ – nicknames derived from The Loving Spirit. ‘Jane’ was a shortened form of ‘Janet’, the novel’s heroine. Christopher is her grandson in the novel.
2 Quoted in Angela’s autobiography It’s Only the Sister.
3 Peter Howard was a journalist who wrote for Express Newspapers. He investigated MRA in 1940 and became a convert, writing a book, Innocent Men, in which he gave the facts as he saw them. On publication he was forced to resign.
4 A sulpha drug (sulphathiazole) made by May & Baker. These drugs were used to treat bacterial infections before the introduction of antibiotics in 1941.
5 Daphne once wrote to Ellen Doubleday that, although at the time of writing Frenchman’s Creek she had seen Puxley as being like the pirate, later on she realized that the pirate was really the man she would have liked to be.
6 Margaret Eglesfield always called Browning ‘Major’, which is the rank he held when she was first engaged by Daphne.
7 Not quite all the people. Mrs Puxley, mother of Henry (‘Christopher’) and John, was still alive and objected to the way in which real people from the Puxley family had been used. She disapproved especially of how the women were portrayed.
8 Published in the USA in 1942, and in Britain, by Todd Publishing Group, in 1953.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1 This huge tax bill was the first of many and at this point Daphne had no accountant. After the war, when inflation began, she was in the surtax bracket, which rose to 80 per cent. Until trusts were set up for her children in the early fifties she was shocked to find most of her earnings going in tax. Tessa remembers her mother white-faced when she received this particular tax demand.
2 An entailed estate or house can, in fact, be sold, so long as the proceeds of any sale are paid to the trustees of the settlement and become subject to the same trusts.
3 But it was also based on someone else’s real life story, and Daphne caused a good deal of offence in Cornwall for using it. John Rathbone, MP for Bodmin, was reported missing in 1940. His wife was returned unopposed to Parliament to fill his place, when his death was confirmed. In 1942 she remarried and shortly afterwards it was rumoured that her first husband was, after all, alive and a prisoner. The rumour turned out to be untrue.
4 Daphne herself wrote the first draft of the screenplay of Hungry Hill. It was then taken over by Terence Young and Francis Crowdy. The film appeared in 1946, starring Margaret Lockwood, Dennis Price, Michael Denison, and Jean Simmons.
5 All descriptions of the interior of Menabilly in this chapter are taken from Flavia Leng’s as yet unpublished MS ‘Dreaming of Manderley’.
6 The other two girls were Violet and Joyce Hooper.
7 Flavia Leng’s MS (see note 5 above).
8 Tommy’s letters are all written in a strange mix ure of Cornish dialect (or his version of this) and code words and phrases. It seemed confusing to stay absolutely faithful to this and so I have kept the exact sense but ‘translated’ the so-called dialect, and the code.
9 The beret was actually maroon but was invariably described as red, and the paratroopers as ‘red devils’. The insignia of the British Airborne Division was a light blue Pegasus against a maroon background. Tommy paid great attention to such details.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1 Flavia Leng’s MS see Chapter Eleven, note 5).
2 Tommy originally estimated that the new boat he had in mind would cost £3,000. He wrote in March 1945, asking Daphne to back him to that extent. In May 1946 he finally bought an old fishing-boat to convert (named Fanny Rosa) for £1,050, but then found that the cost of conversion and furnishings brought the total to £6,500. By the time the boat had been brought home from Singapore, the final cost was almost £8,000, ‘but I assure you, you will get value for money’.
3 Letter to Mlle Fernande Yvon (Ferdy), 12 September 1946.
4 The Whitelands House flat in Chelsea originally belonged to the mother of Grace Browning’s friend Helen MacSwiney. Tommy took over the lease after the war.
5 Letter to Ferdy (as note 3 above).
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
1 Tod went on frequent holidays, so the letters to her still continued at intervals.
2 Tommy had eight teddy bears. Every Christmas he gave them new silk bows, a different colour each year.
3 Letter to Tod, 18 October 1942.
4 Daphne did, at least, visit the school and took Tessa there on her first day.
5 The film of The King’s General was never made. In 1958, Daphne received a telegram from Zoltan Korda, brother of Alexander, saying that he intended to start shooting in the spring. He sent Daphne the script, which she disliked; it suggested Elizabeth Taylor for the heroine, which horrified her. She met Korda in London, but once more The King’s General was shelved. (All this was related in letters to Michael Thornton.)
6 Ellen George McCarter was born in 1898 in New Jersey, into a well-to-do family. She had a typically society-girl education. A great beauty, she married Atwood Violett after the First World War and had two daughters. In 1931 she divorced her husband, and married Nelson Doubleday the following year. She was a great reader and the ideal publisher’s wife. During the war she and her husband offered shelter to many English authors and publishers and their families, including Daphne, who had turned it down.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1 Letter to Ellen Doubleday, 10 December 1947.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Letter to Maureen Baker-Munton, 4 July 1957 (see full text in Appendix here).
5 She did. Judge Swan took until January 1948 to make up his mind, but finally said, ‘I am convinced there was no copying,’ and dismissed the complaint with costs to the defendants.
6 Nickname for Mrs Hancock, who still came in to cook sometimes.
7 Letter from Ellen Doubleday to Daphne, 5 December 1947.
8 Letter to Ellen, 10 December 1947.
9 Letter to Ellen, 13 January 1948.
10 Letter to Ellen, 4 February 1948.
11 Letter from Ellen, 9 February 1948.
12 Ellen kept a carbon of her unsent paragraph in the letter of 20 March 1948. She kept carbons of all her letters and treasured every scrap Daphne sent (now the Ellen Doubleday Collection, see copyright note).
13 Letter to Ellen 21 February 1948.
14 Both Ellen and Nelson were moved by what Ellen was to call Daphne’s ‘titanic capacity for giving of herself’ (letter to Daphne, 18 August 1948). Daphne herself described keeping a vigil over the exhausted, sleeping Ellen in the hospital where Nelson was treated (letter to Ellen, 15 July 1948).
15 Letter to Ellen 15 July 1948.
16 Letter to Ellen, 9 August 1948.
17 Letter to Ellen, 28 October 1948.
18 Kits came downstairs one day and, asked if he had seen his father, said yes, he was in his room ‘moping’.
19 Letter to Ellen, 2 September 1948.
20 Letter to Pucky (Ellen M. Violett), 23 August 1949.
21 Letter to Ellen Doubleday, 18 November 1948.
22 Ibid. These comments on Gertie and the memory of Gerald’s comments assume an extra significance in view of Daphne’s assertion in the letter of 4 July 1957 to Maureen Baker-Munton ((see Appendix here (cf. p. 435)) that Gertie was ‘the last of Daddy’s actress loves’.
23 Letter to Ellen, 7 December 1948.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1 Letter to Ellen Doubleday, 27 February 1949.
2 Letter to Ellen, Easter Day 1949. The postcard from Gertrude Lawrence was copied out in this letter (see below in text).
3 Ibid.
4 Ellen would have liked Daphne to write Nelson’s biography. Daphne was initially attracted to the idea, saying she would like to do for Nelson what she had done for Gerald, but decided she would not be able to do what she thought biography should do – ‘give all the truth’ – because it would hurt Ellen if she went over ‘times of unhappiness . . . and personal things . . . it is often hard for a family to take’.
5 Letter to Ellen, 7 July 1949.
6 Letter to Ellen, 21 July 1949. Tessa remembers that her father also sang and danced. Tommy was a good dancer, though his speciality was a Russian Cossack dance.
7 Letter to Ellen, 9 August 1949.
8 Letter to Ellen, 28 August 1949.
9 Letter to Ellen, Thanksgiving Day 1949.
10 Letter to Ellen (no date), November 1949.
11 Ibid.
12 Letter to Ellen, 22 February 1950.
13 Daphne edited a volume of George du Maurier’s letters and wrote an introduction to it (The Young George du Maurier: A Selection of his Letters 1860–1867, Peter Davies, 1951).
14 Letter to Ellen, 22 February 1950.
15 Ibid.
16 Letter to Ellen, 13 July 1950.
17 Postcard to Ellen from Gertrude Lawrence, November 1950.
18 Letter to Ellen, 9 August 1951.
19 Letter to Ellen, 14 June 1951
20 Letter from Ellen to Daphne, 19 June 1951.
21 Letter to Ellen, 14 June 1951.
22 Letter from Ellen to Daphne, 19 June 1951.
23 Letter to Ellen, 9 August 1951.
24 Letter from Ellen to Daphne, 25 September 1951.
25 Letter to Ellen, 1 October 1951.
26 Letter to Ellen, 6 December 1951.
27 ‘The Birds’ was filmed in 1963, with Alfred Hitchcock directing. Daphne hated the film and couldn’t understand why Hitchcock had so distorted her story.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1 Letter from Ellen Doubleday to Daphne, 19 June 1951.
2 Letter to Ellen, 3 July 1951.
3 ‘Cinders’ was Daphne’s nickname for Gertrude.
4 Pucky (Ellen M. Violett), Ellen Doubleday’s second daughter by her first marriage, was in the car and overheard this interchange.
5 Letter from Ellen Doubleday to Daphne, 5 June 1952.
6 Letter to Ellen, 13 July 1952.
7 Letter to Ellen, 8 August 1952.
8 Ibid.
9 Clara Vyvyan wrote a book about her walk from which these quotations are taken: Down the Rhône on Foot (Peter Owen, 1955).
10 Letter to Victor Gollancz, 10 September 1952, Modern Records Centre, Warwick University.
11 She asked Ellen to send her ‘two rubber girdles’ from America and was extremely pleased with the slimming effect.
12 Peter de Zulueta (1928–82) came from an old Catholic Spanish family who lived in England. His father, who died when Peter was fifteen, had been attached to the Spanish Embassy. His mother came from Grimsby and Peter went to work in a family business there from 1959–65, after he left the army.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1 Clara Vyvyan also wrote about this holiday: Temples and Flowers (Peter Owen, 1955).
2 Letter to Victor Gollancz, 18 May 1953, Modern Records Centre, Warwick University.
3 Daphne used the word ‘pathetic’ here in a different sense from the usual. She meant that she and Flavia did not need other people and could stand on their own. Later, she used ‘pathetic’ in the usual way when she applied it to Tommy in his last few years.
4 Tessa has no memory of asking her mother actually to be in the room for the birth, and she was not. But she certainly asked Daphne to be in London for the birth, and she came up just in time to take Tessa to the nursing home. Peter, Tessa’s husband, was serving with the army in the Canal Zone at the time, and Daphne took over his role. She was very supportive and caring, and this marked a change in her relationship with Tessa.
5 Oriel Malet wrote an amusing account of this: Jam Today (Gollancz, 1956).
6 Brian Johnston and his wife, Pauline, clearly remember Tommy coming to supper and sinking down into an armchair, with a sigh, declaring, ‘I’m slowing down,’ and seeming very tired and depressed.
7 Letter to Bridget Graham, 1 February 1955.
8 Gollancz’s files (all quotations from letters to and letters from Sheila Bush are taken from these files, which are contained in folders marked with the titles of the du Maurier novels).
9 Monty Baker-Munton (b. 1922) was a Spitfire pilot in the war. Maureen met him in Kandy after he had been flying in Burma, but it was not until the early fifties that she got to know him in London. He was working by then in his family’s business (they were maltsters). He was taken by Maureen to Menabilly, and Daphne decided at once that he was utterly reliable and trustworthy. He married Maureen in July 1955 and from then on became as devoted to the Browning family as she was.
10 The Scapegoat was filmed in 1959. In spite of Alec Guinness in the lead and Bette Davis in a supporting role, not to mention a script by Gore Vidal (with Robert Hammer, who directed), the film was not a great success and Daphne was bitterly disappointed.
11 Letter to Ken Spence, 17 October 1957.
12 Letter to Maureen Baker-Munton, 4 July 1957 (see Appendix here).
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
1 Letter to Foy Quiller-Couch, 3 November 1957.
2 Daphne knew, all the same, that Angela had borne the brunt of caring for their mother.
3 Letter to Evie Williams, 23 October 1957.
4 One of them was ‘The Rendezvous’, which appeared in the collection of that name, published in 1980, after Victor’s death.
5 Letter to Victor Gollancz, 14 November 1955, Modern Records Centre, Warwick University.
6 As above, 2 September 1952.
7 Letter to Ken Spence, 25 August 1958.
8 Daphne began writing to Symington in February 1957 and their correspondence continued until May 1960.
1 Richard Pegler, of the London firm Spicer & Pegler, became Daphne’s accountant in 1949 and continued to handle her finances until the early sixties. He became ill before his retirement and this worried Daphne, with some justification.
2 Letter to Elizabeth Divine, 7 July 1956.
3 Daphne took over the narrative in Chapter XVII of Castle Dor, though she also added some extra dialogue earlier. It was published by Dent in 1962 with a preface by Foy Quiller-Couch.
4 Daphne, in fact, had only just stopped ‘touching it up’. Discussing her looks in this letter (to Evie Williams, 13 May 1960) she criticized her daughters for ‘already touching up their hair’, when she had been doing so for the last five years.
5 Kits was now sharing his Whitelands flat with a friend and each of them paid £4.50 rent. This letter (to Evie Williams) is a typical example of Daphne’s exaggerations over her financial plight. She makes it sound as though Kits contributed nothing and lived in isolated splendour.
CHAPTER TWENTY
1 During his hospitalization in 1957, Tommy’s liver was discovered to have been damaged, and he was not supposed to drink alcohol. He greatly reduced his intake but never managed to abstain completely.
2 Tommy had developed thrombosis in his left foot. He finally had to have a lumbar sympathectomy in order to try to restore the circulation in his leg and to prevent gangrene developing. It failed. Amputation of the foot was then the only option.
3 Instead she wore black and white for a year.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
1 She wrote an article about being a widow, which appears in Rebecca and Other Memories.
2 Sent to her by Michael Thornton in April 1963. He was preparing an article about her.
3 This spirited but not necessarily reliable version of the meeting with Philip Rashleigh was given in a letter to Michael Thornton, 21 April 1965.
4 Foy Quiller-Couch and Clara Vyvyan were still great friends of hers. In 1955, Foy had moved into Trelowarren (Clara’s home), into the main house, with a Mrs Hanson (niece of Octavia Hill), whom she had looked after since the death of her parents. Clara remained at Trelowarren, in a wing of the main house.
5 Letter to Elizabeth Divine, 24 March 1966.
6 Letter to Grace Browning, 21 March 1965.
1 This comment, in a letter to her agent, Curtis Brown, is puzzling. The budget for the Vanishing Cornwall film was £9,000, and Doubleday put up half of that.
2 This overdraft incident was due to a delay in the transfer of some money. Daphne knew perfectly well there was no real problem but enjoyed dramatizing the situation.
3 The King’s Road in Chelsea, London, is full of antique shops.
4 It was Sir John Wolfenden who persuaded her to go.
5 Letter to Bridget Graham, 8 May 1969. Bridget and her husband Michael Graham lived at Polpey, Par, near Kilmarth, and became friends of Daphne’s after she moved there (though Michael had known the du Maurier girls ever since they came to Fowey).
6 She told no one about the honour. Even her children learned of it from the newspaper.
7 Daphne wrote to ‘my pin-up boy’, Harold Wilson, congratulating him when he became Prime Minister. She also wrote to Mary Wilson, who replied that on the first day at 10 Downing Street she had felt like the second Mrs de Winter in Rebecca. Daphne sent Mary Wilson copies of her books and received a volume of her poetry in return.
8 There was a short correspondence with Peter Bessell over Rhodesia. Daphne was very anti-Ian Smith, and was indignant that Bessell appeared to want to come to terms with him.
9 It was Foy Quiller-Couch who had aroused Daphne’s interest in this fund. Foy was an indefatigable worker for the National Trust and between 1929 and 1937 had raised money to buy cliffs between Polruan and Polperro (mainly Lantivet Bay).
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
1 Made into a highly successful film, of which Daphne greatly approved, in 1973, with Nicolas Roeg directing and starring Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland.
3 Fans had never troubled her much at Menabilly – though the children remember American soldiers during the war coming to try to have copies of Rebecca autographed – but at Kilmarth she was more accessible. Some persistent fans became a serious problem in the next decade.
4 John Reece was their sales representative for Cornwall. He used to take copies of her books to Daphne for her to sign, as many as a thousand at a time.
5 Letter to Bridget Graham, 25 February 1972.
6 Letter to Livia Gollancz, 7 April 1972.
7 Letter to Karen Prescott, 8 November 1975.
8 ‘Nim’ was code for ‘urinate’, ‘pal’ for ‘defecate’.
9 Letter to Evie Williams, 14 May 1974.
10 Daphne kept a diary of the two visits to France she made while researching the books on the Bacons.
11 The American money was finally brought over and the full tax paid. The figure given by her agent is the sum before tax.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
1 She enjoyed, though, Lady Antonia Fraser’s ‘Rebecca’s Story’, written for Harpers and Queen in September 1976, and contributed a witty epilogue to it herself. But, in spite of telling Antonia how amused she was by the story, she wrote to her agent saying that this could go too far and they would ‘need to watch out’.
2 Letter to Michael Thornton, 18 July 1974.
3 Jim Orr was equerry to HRH Prince Philip.
4 Ellen treasured and kept every letter, note and postcard Daphne ever sent to her, except for the very last letter she received while she was dying. Somehow, in spite of her weakness, she managed to keep this with her in her last days, but after her death there was no trace of it.
5 Dr Luther says that to the best of his recollection he never did prescribe Halcion for Daphne, and certainly never prescribed it for anyone as a tranquillizer. It is always possible, of course, that Daphne obtained Halcion without her GP’s knowledge from another source.
6 These early stories have an interesting history. A Mr T. Todd gathered together, from magazines, eighteen stories written by Daphne between 1927 and 1930 and, with her permission, published them in 1955, when he had started up his own publishing firm again after the war. In 1965 he offered them back to her if she would donate £100 to any Cornish charity. She agreed and paid £100 to Operation Neptune. Some of them then appeared in The Rendezvous and Other Stories in 1980.
7 Philip Varcoe took over the management of Cornwall Mills from his father during the war. He knew Tommy and through him met Daphne. From 1975 onwards Daphne visited the Varcoes at Lanescot weekly.
8 Letter to Henrietta Stapleton-Bretherton, 26 May 1980.
9 Mogadon is a brand-name for Nitrazepam, an effective sleeping drug to combat early waking. It can be habit-forming and its effectiveness may become weaker with time. In those over sixty, as Daphne was, it can cause forgetfulness, a side-effect of all sleeping drugs.
Prothiaden is a brand-name for Dothiepin, an anti-depressant used widely for the treatment of long-term depression. The average adult dosage is 75–150 mg daily. The most serious side-effect is the possibility of causing dangerous heart rhythms.
Largactil is a brand-name for Chlorpromazine. This was the first of the anti-psychotic drugs marketed in the fifties. It has a general tranquillizing effect and is usually used in the treatment of schizophrenic mania and similar conditions. (See The British Medical Association Guide to Medicines and Drugs, ed. Dr John Henry, MB FRCP, published 1991, Dorling Kindersley.)
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
1 Daphne was never a heavy smoker. The maximum number of cigarettes she ever smoked in one day was eleven, but her usual intake was six. Each cigarette was carefully fitted in to her daily routine and became ‘routes’. She had no difficulty giving up.
2 Monty Baker-Munton was appointed trustee by Daphne in 1960; in company with other professional advisers he gave investment advice from 1961; he helped over alterations to Kilmarth and monitoring of the costs in 1968; and in 1976 he liaised with Curtis Brown, Daphne’s agent, over publications. To give him power of attorney in 1981 was the logical conclusion of all the trust Daphne placed in him. In her will, he, together with her son, was appointed literary executor.
3 Mary Fox, friend of the du Mauriers from their joint Hampstead days and their neighbour in Fowey from the war onwards, moved to Lostwithiel, eleven miles away, in 1983. Daphne visited once then said it was too far to be included in ‘routes’. Mary visited her for a while but finally discontinued the visits because she did not feel entirely welcome. Bridget Graham felt similarly spurned.
4 Foy went into a home in 1982 and from there to the asylum at Bodmin, where she died in March 1986 of senile dementia.