Evelyn Anthony
Novelist whose work ranged from historical romances to the Cold War thriller The Tamarind Seed
EVELYN WARD-THOMAS, who has died aged 92, was better known as the novelist Evelyn Anthony; the author of some 50 books, she began writing historical romances in the Coronation year of 1953 but by the late 1960s had switched to spy thrillers, though retaining the romantic element.
One of her best known books, The Tamarind Seed (1971), a tale of Cold War espionage, was adapted by Blake Edwards into a film in 1974, starring Julie Andrews as a low-level Home Office functionary and Omar Sharif as her Soviet air attaché lover.
For a reference work which solicited authors’ comments on their own oeuvre, Evelyn Anthony supplied a single sentence, “I seek only to entertain.” That she did, producing, in the words of one reviewer, “consistently professional and intelligent novels that are very readable, if not actually un-putdownable”. Her novels were translated into more than 19 languages.
As well as writing, Evelyn Wardthomas served in 1994 as the first female High Sheriff of Essex, a county to which she and her husband Michael, a director of an international mining company, had moved in 1968. They bought Horham Hall, a Grade I timber-framed early Tudor moated manor house near Thaxted, beginning work on its renovation and buying antiques of the period to furnish it.
Two of Evelyn’s earliest books had been about Tudors. One, about Anne Boleyn, had won her an American Literary Guild Award. The other concerned Elizabeth I who, she was delighted to discover, had actually stayed at Horham Hall twice, for nine days in 1571 and for five in 1578.
The Ward-thomases opened the house to the public, but with six children and escalating maintenance costs, it was sold in 1976 when the family moved to Co Kildare in the Irish Republic.
By the early 1980s Evelyn was at the peak of her success as an author and in 1982 the family returned to Horham after buying the house back. “It felt wonderful, especially as the Death Watch Beetle had been eradicated,” Evelyn recalled, though she observed that “It takes a special kind of fool to take on a house like this.”
The Ward-thomases refurnished it with an impressive collection of antique furniture, paintings and other treasures, opening Horham for group visits by arrangement. The experience would inspire one of her novels, The House of Vandekar (1988), a fastmoving story of the struggles over an English stately home for three generations. She continued to raise money for the Red Cross and the Forces charity SSAFA, causes which had been close to her heart since her childhood.
She was born Evelyn Bridget Patricia Stephens in London on July 3 1926 to
Henry Christian Stephens and Elizabeth (née Sharkey). Evelyn’s great-grandfather, Dr Henry Stephens (1796–1864), was the inventor in 1832 of an indelible “blue-black writing fluid” which was to become famous as Stephens’ Ink and to form the foundation of a successful worldwide company for more than 150 years. In 1919 it was used to sign the Treaty of Versailles.
Evelyn’s father had served in the Royal Navy during the First World War as a midshipman in the Battle of Jutland. Early in the Second World War, after watching newsreel at the cinema, he conceived the idea of projecting films and noise of attacking aircraft on to a curved wall of a hemispherical indoor cinema.
Named the “Dome Trainer” and nicknamed the “Christmas pudding”, this top-secret technology was the world’s first automated anti-aircraft gunnery simulator. A single fully working example remains at Langham airfield in Norfolk.
Evelyn was educated at home and at the Convent of Sacred Heart, Roehampton, before evacuation to the West Country in 1940, while her father re-entered the Navy at Portsmouth to develop his invention.
She began her career as an author after the war writing short stories for magazines. By the time she married Michael Ward-thomas in 1955 she had published three historical romances. She continued to turn out books at the rate of about one per year; her last novel, Mind Games, was published in 2005.
When not researching and writing, Evelyn Ward-thomas loved spending time with her many dogs, extensive travel, classical music, gardening, “going to salerooms” and National Hunt racing.
She owned a mare called Lady High Sheriff which, according to The Irish Times in 1997, “had the reputation as the slowest horse Captain Tim Forster had ever trained”, though it won a novice handicap at Huntingdon by 10 lengths. As well as serving as High Sheriff of Essex, she was appointed Deputy Lieutenant in 1995.
Evelyn Ward-thomas’s husband died in 2004. She is survived by four sons and a daughter. Another daughter died in 1995.
Evelyn Ward-thomas, born July 3 1926, died September 25 2018