Lady Strong, CBE (1930-2003) (Julia Trevelyan Oman)
Michael Rhodes
Julia Trevelyan Oman, CBE (Lady Strong)
(Filed: 13/10/2003)
Julia Trevelyan Oman, who has died aged 73, was one of the most imaginative
and intelligent theatre and opera designers in Britain, and the wife of the
writer and aesthete Sir Roy Strong.
Julia Trevelyan Oman's career in theatre design began when Sir Frederick
Ashton telephoned her about some drawings she had done which attempted to
interpret Elgar's Enigma Variations for ballet. She had discovered the music
as a student at the Royal College of Art when she attended a prom in 1955,
and had felt inspired to work out how the music could be made into a ballet.
She took her drawings to Sir Hugh Casson, Professor of Interior Design at
the RCA, and he arranged for her to leave her portfolio at the Royal Opera
House for the attention of Dame Ninette de Valois. When she collected the
portfolio a few weeks later, it seemed that no one had looked at it, so she
was surprised when, 12 years later, she received a call from Frederick
Ashton inviting her to tea. The Enigma Variations (1968), which Ashton
choreographed, was a triumph and from then on one success followed another.
Julia Trevelyan Oman's gift was to distil the essence of a period from a
myriad of sharply observed historical details. Her appetite for research,
powerful visual memory and magpie's eye for collecting ephemera which would
be of use meant that her sumptuous set and costume designs were always
immediately believable.
For the set of Brief Lives, Roy Dotrice's one-man account of the life of the
diarist John Aubrey, she helped to convey the atmosphere of his cluttered,
musty study with a jumble of books, relics, globes, armour, pewter and
half-eaten meals by wafting stale, cheesy smells into the auditorium.
Julia Trevelyan Oman brought her skills to play on the Nutcracker, Swan
Lake, Die Fledermaus, Eugene Onegin, Un Ballo in Maschera, Otello, La Boheme
and The Importance of Being Earnest among many other productions, chalking
up a prolific portfolio of successful ballet, stage, opera and television
credits both in Britain and abroad. Her ballet A Month in the Country was
chosen by the Queen Mother for a birthday gala at Covent Garden.
She first entered Roy Strong's life when her father, Charles Oman, Keeper of
Metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum, gave her a small engraving of
Elizabeth I. To find out more about it, she was sent to see "young Strong"
at the National Portrait Gallery.
When Strong asked her later what impression she had formed of him, "she said
it was of my back view disappearing down the Kafkaesque corridor at the
Portrait Gallery with one leg dragging slightly behind. Looking at that
lonely figure receding into the distance, she thought: he needs looking
after. She was right and in the end she did".
During a discreet courtship, they collaborated on the Pepys exhibition at
the gallery, for which she designed a series of stunningly evocative
17th-century interiors. "If Roy Strong is the modern version of Renaissance
man then his female equivalent must be Julia Trevelyan Oman," wrote a
Telegraph critic in November 1970.
Nonetheless, the arts world was astonished when Strong abandoned the
bachelor life and "eloped" with Julia Trevelyan Oman, marrying her at
Wilmcote church, near Stratford-upon-Avon, on September 10 1971 with a
special licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Julia Trevelyan Oman was
41 and her husband 35.
"I go this a.m.," Roy Strong wrote to a friend, "and then with Julia to the
church which is very Oxford Movement for me and reminds Julia of her ballet,
The Enigma Variations, and her Oxford background and the dynasties of Omans
and Trevelyans. Julia is going to wear a huge black velvet hat [in fact she
wore a straw hat] and beautiful skirt and blouse with masses of tucks and
folds made by the wardrobe at Stratford (who didn't know what they were
making). I will be in a beautiful pale grey velvet suit. Then off to a
Wellcome hotel for lunch and on to Brighton."
They enjoyed a belated honeymoon in Tuscany, where, Roy Strong recorded, "we
saw as few people as possible, apart from a trip to Lucca to see [Hugh]
Honour and [John] Fleming, the obligatory dinner at the Berenson villa, I
Tatti, and luncheon with divine, lovely Harold Acton."
Theirs was a marriage of true minds. "Marrying Julia was the best thing I
ever did," Strong said years later. Without her, he felt, he would have
become a "faded dandy, camping around, writing bitchy articles". Lady
Antonia Fraser observed that, by marrying, Strong had "swapped private
anguish and public happiness for private happiness and public anguish" (a
reference to his unhappy term as director of the V & A).
Julia Trevelyan Oman was a knowledgeable plantswoman and their marriage
focused on the joint creation at The Laskett, their house in Herefordshire,
of the beautiful formal garden which Roy Strong described as "a portrait of
a marriage, the family we never had or wanted, a unique landscape peopled
with the ghosts of nearly everyone we have loved, both living and dead". The
Laskett: The story of a garden was a tribute to their joint enterprise.
Julia Trevelyan Oman was born in Kensington on July 11 1930. Her father was
already working at the V & A; her mother was the historian Joan Trevelyan.
The writer Carola Oman was her aunt.
Julia was sent to various boarding schools, which she regarded, she said, as
"a distraction. I learned most of what I know at home". She went on to study
under Hugh Casson at the Royal College of Art, where she was Royal Scholar,
won the Silver Medal and took a First.
In 1955 she joined the BBC, where she remained for 12 years, working on sets
for Marriage Lines, Compact, Meet the Wife, Dixon of Dock Green and the
Billy Cotton Band Show, among other series. She worked with Patrick Garland
on the Famous Gossips series which flowered into Brief Lives.
Her sets for Jonathan Miller's Alice won her a Designer of the Year award
and caught the eye of Tony Richardson, who asked her to design his film The
Charge of the Light Brigade. She also designed the film Laughter in the
Dark. It was while she was working on The Charge of the Light Brigade that
she got the call from Sir Frederick Ashton.
Roy Strong once said that he could "never have married anyone who wasn't a
definite personality". His wife, he said, was "somebody in her own right.
When I go to the opera I trudge behind her being Mr Oman".
Indeed, Julia Trevelyan Oman did not care to be addressed as "Lady Strong"
and she was a stickler when it came to the pronunciation of her name: "Some
people," she told an interviewer, "are slack about the pronunciation of
Trevelyan which is 'Trivillion'. And it's not Oman like an oil-rich sultan.
Its pure Viking with the stress on the first syllable." Yet she was a warm,
kind, courteous and approachable person.
Julia Trevelyan Oman was named Royal Designer for Industry in 1977, and was
appointed CBE in 1986. She died at home in Herefordshire on Friday
afternoon.