Belinda Norman-Butler; Great-granddaughter of Thackeray who devoted her formidable energy to a host of causes, notably the English Speaking Union
Hyfler/Rosner
January 3, 2009
Belinda Norman-Butler: committee woman and social activist
Stunning photo here:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article5434890.ece
Belinda Norman-Butler was a dynamo of energy, the galvaniser
of numberless committees, social, musical, architectural and
literary. Her proudest and most significant achievement was
founding the music scholarships of the English Speaking
Union (ESU) and chairing the scheme for more than 40 years.
She was a great-granddaughter of William Makepeace
Thackeray, and she closely resembled her paternal
grandmother, Thackeray's daughter, the novelist Anne
Ritchie. She was one of those women who are recognised as
beautiful in both youth and in old age.
She was born Belinda Ritchie in London, the second of four
children, in 1908. She had eminent grandparents on both
sides. Thackeray's daughter Anne had married (to some
tutting in society) her much younger second cousin, Richmond
Ritchie, who became Permanent Under-Secretary at the India
Office. Their son William, invalided out of the First World
War, was a Chancery registrar.
Her mother, Meg, or "Marnie", was the daughter of Charles
Booth, founder of the Booth Shipping Line. He used his
fortune to research the reasons for poverty. He had married
Mary Macaulay, the favourite niece of Lord Macaulay and the
chief editor of Booth's classic work of research, The Life
and Labour of the London Poor, which was instrumental in
bringing about the award of old-age pensions in the year of
Belinda's birth - 7s 6d was paid out weekly from post
offices to those over 70. In 1972 Belinda celebrated her
Booth grandparents in a well-received book, Victorian
Aspirations; she also wrote shorter lives of her husband and
of her elder brother James, who was killed in 1940 in the
rearguard defence of Dunkirk.
The four Ritchie children had at first a "horrid and
negligent" nanny. Early on, Belinda showed her willpower by
making sure she was got rid of. She was replaced by Edith
Hotchkin, who had a fine alto singing voice and was Belinda's
introduction to music. Belinda and her younger sisters
Catherine and Mary sang in the choir of St
Martin-in-the-Fields.
Until the Great War the family lived in Durham Place,
Chelsea. When Belinda's father came home in 1916 they went
to Ware, Hertfordshire. After an attack of the postwar flu
in 1918, her brother James developed TB. Belinda joined him
on the Isle of Wight for a year; her grandmother, Anne
Ritchie, had bought a cottage there from Julia Margaret
Cameron, the pioneer of portrait photography. She also
stayed with her Booth grandparents at the Pugin-designed
Gracedieu Manor in Leicestershire. Charles Booth, she
recalled, spoke with a Lancashire accent.
Back in London, Belinda was happy at Miss lronside's school,
known as Rene's. It was progressive, with much acting, music
and play-writing but little science or maths. At home a
French mademoiselle was hired. She punished the girls by
making them eat extra porridge. Again she asserted her will
and the Frenchwoman was sacked. Belinda left Rene's at 15 to
study abroad. She stayed in the grand house of the de Burnel
family in the rue de Parnasse, Brussels, and went to the
Conservatoire for her music and had French classes in a
convent.
She returned to England in May 1928 and went to the Royal
College of Music the following autumn to study piano and
viola, with a view to teaching. One of her tutors was Ralph
Vaughan Williams, a friend of the Ritchie family - Belinda
always called him Uncle Ralph. On her first day at the
college she was late and all the places at the back of the
hall were taken so she sat up front. The conductor who was
taking them for Brahms's German Requiem was a striking man
with dark hair. After the lesson he invited Belinda to
lunch. She declined. Afterwards a fellow student said to
her, "Didn't you know who that was? That was Malcolm
Sargent."
Belinda met her husband, Edward Norman-Butler, in 1927 in
the Cambridge rooms of a family friend, Desmond
Bonham-Carter. Edward was 19 and she was not yet 18. He
wrote to her once or twice, then asked her to lunch in Greek
Street, London. He ordered white wine, which made her nose
go red and her chilblains prick. The next day she began her
stay in Brussels. In the summer of 1929 she was taken to
Henley by some friends of her parents and again met Edward
Norman-Butler. They were married in 1931 in St
Martin-in-the-Fields.
In 1929 Edward had joined Martins Bank. In 1933 he was sent
to Liverpool to continue his training. The couple moved to
the Wirral. Liverpool, as a city, was dying; Belinda went to
the launch of the last ship made there. When the bottle of
champagne was broken, the launch was greeted with sullen
silence by the watching crowd.
Edward next had a spell in Manchester, but in 1936 the
couple returned to London, where he was to be a manager of
the new Martins branch in Curzon Street. On their way home
they encountered the Jarrow marchers. "The men," Belinda
recalled, "filed past in their neatly pressed dark-blue
suits. We gave some of them money for tea." Edward and
Belinda never subscribed to the idea that prevailed in the
Establishment, that it was easy to find work if you were
unemployed.
With the outbreak of the war Edward was called up as a
second lieutenant in the 69th Royal Fusiliers, and Belinda
moved to Cambridge, where their couple's daughter Catherine
was born, during an air raid in May 1941. Edward was posted
to North Africa in January 1943 where he endured severe
blood poisoning after a scratch on his leg. He recovered in
Cairo and later served in Malta and Cyprus (his game leg had
saved him from taking part in the invasion of France from
the south.)
He returned to England in 1945, weighing only nine stone and
sporting a moustache, which he shaved off as Catherine
disliked it. For a time the family lived at St Petersburgh
Place in London, but in early 1946 Belinda spotted a
half-ruined house in St Alban's Grove. They moved there in
May that year. Joining Edward in the Georgian Group and the
Kensington Society, Belinda helped to save important
buildings in Kensington. She was also in the Bach Choir. Her
service on committees became relentless. In 1958 Frank
Pakenham (later Lord Longford) asked for her help in setting
up a new organisation, the New Bridge, to help ex-prisoners
to find jobs and friendship when they left prison. He
suggested a ball, but Belinda held a huge meeting in Lincoln's
Inn instead attended by, among others, R. A. Butler, the
Home Secretary, and Sir Robert Birley, headmaster of Eton,
with the Eton sixth form.
In 1965 she made a six-week tour of Indian prisons, remand
centres and rescue homes. She was concerned that there were
no facilities for the children who accompanied their mothers
to jail. She happened to meet J. K. Narayan, Gandhi's
friend, while waiting at an airport; he persuaded the Indian
Government to improve conditions for the children.
Edward Norman-Butler died in 1963 aged only 56. His sudden
death was a profound shock to Belinda, but after a while she
threw herself into activity again, telling her daughter, "I
have decided to stop feeling sorry for myself."
At the time of his death, Edward had been treasurer of the
Kensington Housing Trust and of the Nightingale Trust (for
nurses). Both trusts put Belinda on their committees in
1963, and in 1973 she became chairman of the Nightingale
Trust. She served for five years and then handed over to Sir
Harry Verney, a great-great-nephew of Florence Nightingale.
She became a governor of several schools; of the Purcell
School of Music and of the Arts Educational Trust, and
served on selection committees for Voluntary Service
Overseas (VSO).
In 1969 she had her big idea for the ESU music scholarships.
Even then, she waited until a really outstanding young
artist emerged, before launching the first scholarship at
Tanglewood, the summer school associated with the Boston
Symphony Orchestra.
That was in 1976 when the violinist Nigel Kennedy was
chosen. The next year Simon Rattle was chosen, only to be
turned down by Seiji Ozawa, music director of the Boston
Symphony Orchestra. (Rattle, of course, had the last laugh.)
For years Belinda chaired the adjudication of scholarship
candidates.
Belinda Norman-Butler was both femme formidable and grande
dame. Her granddaughter, the artist Camilla Wilson, has
recorded how Belinda doubled as the Virgin Mary and Herod in
a nativity play; and there was perhaps something of each
character in her: on the one hand, a kind of radiant
innocence; on the other, an irresistible authority, which
might have been branded as bossiness but for her great
charm. She could be steely when toughness was needed. When
she proposed that Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten
should become vice-presidents of the ESU, she was attacked
by an economist who sneered: "We don't want any of Mrs
Norman-Butler's long-haired musicians." Belinda blew up and
pointed out that "Vaughan Williams is an OM - if you know
what that means!".
Her achievements were distinguished, but in her later years
she was honoured as much for being as for doing. She was an
authentic survivor of Edwardian England and had strong links
with the Victorian age - it was noted that if one spoke to
her of "the Eighties", she tended to assume one meant the
1880s. She, who had been alive in the earlier "Noughties",
could not quite come to terms with the new millennium and
the 21st century.She took a Miss Jekyll-like pride in her
garden at St Alban's Grove, which won several prizes. The
immaculate lawn was surrounded by camellias, hollyhocks,
pawlonias and fremontodendrons. Until her late nineties she
was to be seen at almost all literary societies and
gatherings, bending her warm, eager gaze on the young, ready
to be enlightened, entertained or amused, or to deliver a
witty aside.
She is survived by her daughter and her grandchildren. Her
son Christopher predeceased her in 1994. As an executive of
Barclays Bank in Pall Mall East, London, he discovered in
1976 the papers of Lord Byron's great friend Scrope Berdmore
Davies - a find described at the time as "a miniPompeii" and
now lodged at the British Library.
Belinda Norman-Butler, committee woman and social activist,
was born on December 10, 1908. She died on December 26,
2008, aged 100
