Barbara Wykeham; Telegraph obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
the Independent obituary.
Barbara Wykeham
(Filed: 19/06/2006) Telegraph
Barbara Wykeham, who died on June 6 aged 83, was an
architect and an artist and the eldest daughter of JB
Priestley.
She was very much in the Priestley mould, with the broad
shoulders, the large, kind face, merry eyes and heavy jaw
line; and when she spoke there was the same care for
language, the same forthright manner. With her father she
also shared what his biographer, John Braine, called "an
indestructible youthfulness" and an eagerness to address new
ideas.
She was somewhat bohemian, and usually seen in casual dress
with her hair scraped back over her head into a pony tail
that dropped on to her shoulders.
As an architect, Barbara Wykeham worked in the London
practice of Ove Arup, where her modernist taste found
expression in several post-war schemes. When family
commitments made it hard for her to practise, she channelled
her creative energy into painting.
She was an accomplished portrait painter, exhibiting from
time to time but working mainly for her own pleasure,
finding in art an avenue to explore her endless fascination
with subject and character - a Priestley trait.
She also had a passion for literature and the theatre and
she read voraciously. Her taste was eclectic; contemporary
literature and biography, art history, fairy tales,
archaeology and books about the Dales and its crafts and
customs.
Although she had never lived in Yorkshire, she would say
that she "felt part of it".
She often asked booksellers to find copies of her father's
titles to give to friends as presents.
When a bookshop rang to tell her that they had found a copy
of Lost Empires that she was seeking, and that the price
would be £10, Barbara Wykeham replied without pleasure: "I
never normally have to pay more than jumble sale prices for
my father's books."
That was her sad comment on a decline in popularity for
Priestley's prose. On the 100th anniversary of her father's
birth in 1994 she noted that the BBC and literary journals
had not made much of it, and wondered whether Priestley's
star would rise again. Ever optimistic, she believed that it
might.
Barbara Elizabeth Priestley was born on March 4 1923 at
Fulham, west London. Her mother, Pat Tempest, died two years
later, leaving Barbara and her younger sister, Sylvia, to be
brought up by their father.
The two girls were to collect an assortment of stepbrothers
and sisters after their father married twice more. The
second Mrs Priestley was Jane Wyndham Lewis, former wife of
the journalist DB Wyndham Lewis, and the third was the
archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. None of this caused any
difficulties for Barbara, who looked back to a delightful
and loving childhood and "a most marvellous father".
Among the literary figures who visited the house was Sir
James Barrie, who once gave Barbara a toy rabbit that popped
out of a musical box.
Once a year her stepmother Jane would clear out the
children's toys, and so the rabbit went - to turn up years
later on The Antiques Roadshow. Barbara formed a close bond
with Jacquetta Hawkes, who, she said, "first convinced me
that people want a history to show 'what happened at the
same time as what' ", and who dedicated The Atlas of Early
Man (1976) to Barbara.
After boarding schools in Kent and Surrey, Barbara qualified
as an architect in 1948. While working on the designs of
some Air Ministry buildings in Cambridgeshire she was
introduced to Wing Commander Peter Wykeham-Barnes (he later
dropped the Barnes). "It was only when I recognised his
'angel face' in a book on air aces that I realised how
famous he was," she later recalled.
Wykeham - the holder of two DSOs and two DFCs - had helped
to defend Malta during the siege and had led raids on the
Gestapo headquarters at Aarhus, in Denmark. He and Barbara
were married in 1949 in the bomb-damaged St James's,
Piccadilly. Priestley used to joke that he would rather
Barbara had married a cigar importer than a war hero.
When Wykeham retired - as Sir Peter - in 1985, he and
Barbara moved into an architectural gem designed in 1906 by
the celebrated Arts and Crafts architect HM Baillie Scott.
Barbara described the house as a "blown up cottage" and
filled it with books and her own paintings. In her vast
kitchen she liked to talk to friends about literature and
art.
She was the custodian of scores of watercolours by her
father, who had taken up painting late in life, though for
her own painting she favoured gouache.
The art critic John McEwen, who viewed an exhibition to mark
her 80th birthday in 2003, said of her work: "In the way of
the English and Scottish colourists she admires, it extends
but never breaks the bounds of the observable."
She organised that birthday exhibition herself and declared
afterwards, without regret: "That's that. No more
exhibitions. After all, I have sold 71 pictures, and isn't
that enough for anyone?"
Barbara Wykeham, who did not much care to be addressed as
Lady Wykeham, is survived by two sons and a daughter. Sir
Peter Wykeham died in 1995.