Esther Georgina (Harwood) Battiscombe (1905 - 2006)

Born 21 Nov 1905 in London, England

Ancestors

Problems/Questions Profile manager: Geoffrey Allen [send private message]

Biography

Georgina (Harwood) Battiscombe is Notable.

Georgina (Harwood) Battiscombe was a centenarian, living to age 100.

Georgina Harwood was born in London in 1905. She was the elder daughter of George Harwood from his second marriage to Ellen Hopkinson. She was educated at St Michael's School, Oxford and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. She married Christopher Battiscombe in 1932; they had one daughter. She made a literary career as the author of a series of well-received biographies. She died in 2006 at the age of 100.

Obituary in The Guardian, 2 March 2006:
Georgina Battiscombe, who has died aged 100, had a special excellence as a biographer. She succeeded in portraying truthfully - without debunking, but also without hagiology - good men and women. This is one of the most difficult feats of biography, "painting in white on white" as she herself called it when she was confronting the problems of writing her life of the priest who founded the Oxford Movement, John Keble. But it was an art which she mastered and, together with the historical imagination that enabled her to place and judge her subjects in their context, by the standards of their time, it made her one of the last century's most illuminating chroniclers of 19th-century ethos.

Georgina Harwood was born into a family with strong Liberal party connections. Her father George Harwood, a master cotton spinner, came from a family of Bolton mill owners. He, her stepfather John Murray, principal of Exeter University College (as it then was) and her maternal grandfather Sir Alfred Hopkinson, first vice-chancellor of Manchester University, were all MPs. A long family tradition of Liberal party politics descended to her. During her undergraduate years at Oxford she was a Liberal activist, and later she was approached to stand for parliament herself; she found it a tempting prospect, but decided it came only third in her list of priorities, after those of being a wife and mother and writing books, and that she could not combine them all. But she remained a supporter of the Liberals all her life.

She was educated at St Michael's School, Oxford, and then at Lady Margaret Hall. In 1932 she married Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Battiscombe, and they spent the next two years in Zanzibar, where he was secretary to the sultan and tutor to his son. The couple made many friends in the then ruling Arab community of Zanzibar; she loved her spacious old house and regarded this as the happiest time of her life. When it ended, they spent six months in a leisurely holiday on the way back to England, and then settled for a decade in Durham, where Kit Battiscombe was librarian and clerk to the dean and chapter.

Their next move was to Windsor; one perquisite of Kit's new job there, at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Park, was the tenancy of the Henry III tower inside Windsor castle, a romantic, but inconvenient building honeycombed by spiral staircases in the immensely thick stone walls.

It was at Durham, and then at Windsor, that Georgina's literary career took wing. In 1943 her Charlotte Mary Yonge: the Story of an Uneventful Life was published. Charlotte Yonge's reputation as a writer was then at its nadir, and Georgina's book provoked a savage and contemptuous review by Mrs Queenie Leavis, but it was greeted with joy by a wide, though secret band of fans throughout the country, and led to a revival in Charlotte Yonge studies in university English literature departments, and to the foundation, a few years later, of the Charlotte Mary Yonge Society, an elite group of writers such as Margaret Kennedy, Marghanita Laski and Elizabeth Jenkins.

Georgina's next notable book was her Mrs Gladstone (1956), a sympathetic account of a pleasingly eccentric character. This was followed in 1963 by what was perhaps her most important achievement, her biography of John Keble, which was awarded the James Tait Black Prize, and which pioneered the reviving interest of 20th-century historians in the Oxford Movement. Her wide knowledge of different aspects of the Victorian ecclesiastical scene, from Anglo-Catholics and Roman converts to the extremes of Millenarianism, was equally evident in her 1974 biography of the evangelical philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury.

She portrayed, with judicious calm and understanding, that paragon of high intelligence, good looks, aristocratic birth, piety and lifelong devotion to ameliorating the lot of his less fortunate compatriots. These two scholarly biographies were the peak of her literary achievement, but she gained her most popular success with her authorised biography of Queen Alexandra (1969), in which she extracted the greatest possible interest from a beautiful and kindly but unintellectual and rather boring subject. The Spencers of Althorp (1984) was also popular with a wide general readership. The role and status of academic and literary women in the 19th century were explored in Reluctant Pioneer: the Life of Elizabeth Wordsworth (1978) and Christina Rossetti (1981). Her last published work was a moving anthology of poems about old age, Winter Song (1992).

She gave "looking at churches" as her recreation in her Who's Who entry, and she was on the committees of many organisations concerned with the preservation of England's ecclesiastical heritage: the Friends of Friendless Churches, the Historic Churches Trust, the Diocesan Advisory Committee for the Care of Churches.

Quite early in her life she had begun to suffer from deafness, and this was made worse by a flight to South Africa in a temporarily unpressurised aeroplane; by the end of her life she was almost completely deaf. This did not make her unsociable; she retained her warm interest in other people, in politics, in sport, in her daily stint with the Times crossword.

After leaving Windsor Castle she lived in a flat near Windsor Park, and then moved to Henley-on-Thames to be near her daughter. Until her late eighties she continued to make adventurous journeys abroad, often with her sister Ruth Harris.

Her husband died in 1964, and a further series of family sorrows shadowed the last years of her life; her brother George was murdered in South Africa, her son-in-law's early death was followed within two years by the death of his wife Aurea, the Battiscombes' only child.

Georgina is survived by three grand-daughters and several great-grandchildren.

Sources

• Index to England & Wales General Register of Births, Marriages & Deaths.
• Obituary of Georgina Battiscombe in The Guardian, 2 Mar 2006.[1]

See Also:

• Wikipedia contributors, "Georgina Battiscombe," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Georgina_Battiscombe&oldid=1168297053 (accessed March 28, 2024).