I would not like the passing of Mary Edmond to go unrecorded. She had two careers, and it was after she left the BBC that she reached the height of her powers. She and I  conducted a long correspondence over a decade, in which she kept me abreast of her writings, her researches, her tussles with academic contemporaries, and her successes. We were “epistolary friends”, until late in her long life, although she would never consent to meet me. Some colleagues from the newsroom, who still remember her there, have been of assistance.

Peter Hill, Sept 18th 2008

Mary Edmond
Born 4 April 1916. Died 3 Nov 2007 aged 91.

Mary  Edmond was an outstanding scholar of the period 1550-1650, and her many books, articles and biographies  have been, and will continue to be, studied and quoted by other scholars for a long time. Her corpus of work was large and wide-ranging, and after ending one moderately successful career at 57 she embarked on another with enthusiasm, living alone and often struggling with the problems of age and ill health. In the latter years of her life, without ever meeting, we exchanged many letters about art, books and life, and she revealed herself as meticulous, hard-working and with a tendency to severity. Woe betide anyone who put an  ‘s’ on the end of her surname!

Barely two years after she was born in Kent in the middle of the First World War, her father John, an army doctor, was killed in the Battle of Cambrai. Raised by her mother, a theatre sister, she was sent to Christ’s Hospital, the girls’ school at Hertford, where she spent, in her words,  “eight unhappy years as a boarder”. She went on to Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford, supported by some Livery companies and a school exhibition, but  she thought it a mistake to be put down for Greats – and confessed that her time there was ‘undistinguished.’ A spell of learning typing and shorthand paid dividends, and to the end of her life she was still communicating on an ancient Adler portable.

She joined the BBC in 1939, working in the Secretariat, then the Radio Newsroom, the War Reporting Unit (1943), and Foreign News. Colleagues regarded her as a highly capable sub-editor, able to produce a story quickly and concisely.  In 1947 she covered the first U.S. session of the UN General Assembly in New York.  Later she did a tour of the US in a borrowed car with three BBC men. Her account of the trip in The Motor was the first of her many published articles.

She was to work for the BBC for 34 years, rising slowly until, in her 25-year review, she told the Director General , Sir Hugh Greene, that she had not been paid at the same rate as the men for all that time. She regarded it as ‘extreme sex discrimination’.  He sympathised with her case, and she was shortly promoted to being the first ever woman Duty Editor in the Radio Newsroom.  For a couple of months in 1969 she went over to the New York office and became acting head of the Washington Bureau: “I’m Charles Wheeler at the moment!” she wrote. In 1970 she was made Editor of “Today in Parliament” – which at the time consisted of edited agency reports read by a newsreader – but she resigned after three years to pursue her other interests. Peers, MPs and cabinet ministers attended her farewell party.

She had already  published book reviews and articles on such subjects as the herbalist John Gerard and the playwright John Webster; and from 1973 onwards there appeared as stream of articles based on her careful research and genealogical studies in the archives, record offices and museums of London.  The lives of creative people, in the arts and on the stage, were her field. In the Burlington Magazine she wrote about Jacobean painters and the limner, Peter Cross; and in 1980 came a key article on ‘Limners and Picturemakers’ in the Walpole Society annual publication which was often quoted by contemporary scholars. She described this as her “magnum opus”. In 1982 she published an important double biography ,“Hilliard and Oliver”. Further work on William Dobson and Samuel Cooper followed. Her reputation established, she was asked to contribute over twenty articles to the Macmillan Dictionary of Art.  Another book, “Rare Sir William Davenant” came out in 1987. He was Poet Laureate and Shakespeare’s godson. In a review Anthony Powell said he was “staggered by her research”. She was an expert on Shakespeare, and on the Droeshout engraving of him, and she also did research on his theatre company and on the Burbage family. She shed new light on painters such as Robert Peake, and on the Gheeraerts family. “I am the only person so far as I know to have sorted out the Gheeraerts  gang properly”, she wrote.

But her final effort , in her eighties, was reserved for the massive New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.  She was asked to complete thirteen biographies, all of considerable length, absolutely authoritative and subject to peer review by university professors in her field.  She was outraged when an outside consultant tried to rewrite one of her pieces. She managed to “face him down”. It was not well paid – she said to me “I have no talent for moneymaking, but I love the work”. Fighting illness, in a house in Hampstead Garden Suburb subject to subsidence, living alone on a liquid diet and increasingly hard of hearing, she turned out all she was asked for on time, on actors, painters, and theatrical figures of Shakespeare’s time. The articles, of up to 7,000 words in length, were highly praised by contemporaries.  She called it her “four-year enslavement” to the ODNB, but as she confessed to me “I am besotted with the Bard”, and she had unshaken confidence in her own scholarship.   By the end of it all, her trusty Adler had given up the ghost, and she was “worn-to-a-shadow”. She was fiercely proud of her work, a single woman with no academic post who could hold her own with Britain’s senior scholars. It was a remarkable achievement.