Fiona Maccarthy
Author who revealed Eric Gill’s sexual quirks and wrote a lively memoir of her season as a debutante
FIONA MACCARTHY, who has died aged 80, was a journalist and an authority on the British Arts and Crafts movement; she wrote acclaimed biographies of, among others, William Morris, Lord Byron and Eric Gill. Her 1989 biography of Gill, her first full-length book, caused a sensation by breaking the news of the artist’s unorthodox sexual habits, as detailed in his diaries – numerous adulterous affairs, incest with his sisters and his two daughters and even sexual experimentation with the family dog.
The diaries documented these liaisons, sometimes with little diagrams, in the same matter-offact tone in which Gill, a convert to Roman Catholicism much feted by the Church establishment, would mention that compline had been sung, and alongside sketches of religious carvings.
Other biographers of Gill in the 1960s had seen the same material, but had decided not to inform their readers about Gill’s less savoury quirks. But Fiona Maccarthy began her research well after Michael Holroyd’s life of Lytton Strachey had altered the ground rules, making discussion of subjects’ sex lives almost de rigueur.
When advance copies of the book were sent to Gill’s family and elderly monks who had known him, the reaction was positive. Nothing prepared Fiona Maccarthy for the fury which erupted on publication.
While the monks turned up cheerfully at the launch party, 15 members of Gill’s family boycotted the event and subsequently subjected her to a “barrage of letters and phone calls” describing their hurt and anger and threatening legal action.
Art-lovers, too, protested that Gill’s work had been ruined for them by inappropriate details of his private life, and affronted Roman Catholics rushed into print. “Can I let my daughter read The Catholic Herald any more?” asked one outraged reader when the journal published a review.
Fiona Maccarthy herself came under attack for her cool treatment of the material – and indeed, her judgment was strikingly insouciant. “There is nothing unusual about his protracted string of adulteries …” she wrote, “nor is there anything so absolutely shocking about his long record of incestuous relationships with sisters and with daughters … Even his preoccupations and his practical experiments with bestiality, though they may strike one as bizarre, are not in themselves especially horrifying or amazing. Stranger things have been recorded.”
Maybe. Yet the biography was a critical success, reviewers praising the scrupulousness of her research and her vivid depiction of key scenes in Gill’s life. It was also a big commercial hit for Faber, providing Fiona Maccarthy with a launch pad for her biographies of other creative, idealistic, anti-establishment types.
In the 1960s Fiona Maccarthy had been a Guardian journalist of Leftwing sympathies, and for many years afterwards she kept mum about her upbringing. In 2006, however, she published a spirited memoir of her early life, Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes, in which she described her brief season as one of the last young women to be presented at Court in 1958, before the 18th century ritual was brought to an end – in the words of Princess Margaret, because “every tart in London was getting in”.
Fiona Maccarthy was born on January 23 1940 at Sutton, Surrey, a location chosen by her mother Yolande because she insisted on using the gynaecologist who had “delivered the royal children”.
Yolande was a granddaughter of the sometime bricklayer “Concrete Bob’’ Mcalpine, founder of the construction firm that built and owned the Dorchester hotel. Fiona’s father Gerald, a Royal Artillery officer from a family originating in Cork, was killed in action in the North African desert in 1943.
Afterwards Fiona, her sister and their nanny were taken by their mother back to London, to a house in South Kensington from which they were evacuated when the area was hit by bombs to the supposedly bombproof Dorchester, known in Mcalpine family circles as “the Dorch”.
As a child, Fiona attended dancing classes and was dressed in coats with velvet collars as worn by the young princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. When the King died, her mother insisted that 12-year-old Fiona wear a black armband for the official mourning period.
In other ways, however, her upbringing was progressive. Educated at Wycombe Abbey, she won a place at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, to read English.
Before going up she “did the season”, an exhausting round of cocktail parties, dances, balls and horse shows in which success was symbolised by the rows of “stiffies” (invitations) on the mantelpiece; “wallflowerdom” was a misfortune worse than death and the pressure on girls not to surrender their virginity was sorely tested at Scottish country dances.
In her characteristically thoughtful but detached memoir, Fiona Maccarthy chronicled the rigorous training at Vacani’s School of Dancing, where a correctly performed curtsey was regarded as a vital life skill (“Now darlings, throw out your little chests and burst your little dresses”).
Her coming out party at the Dorchester followed, and she wrote of the ruthless mothers – determined to snare the best husbands for their daughters – who compiled blacklists of unsuitable young escorts under the category NSIT: “Not Safe in Taxis”. The girls added to the list VVSITPQ – “Very, Very Safe In Taxis, Probably Queer’’.
Of the last 1,400 debutantes to be presented to the Queen in 1958 Fiona Maccarthy was one of only four to go on to university, though she was not the only deb of her year to react against her background. Her friend Teresa Hayter later came out as an International Marxist and author of a book entitled Hayter of the Bourgeoisie, while Rose Dugdale joined the IRA.
After graduating from Oxford Fiona Maccarthy conformed to what was expected of her and married an Oxford contemporary, a young businessman from a military-county family, but she soon became bored: “I hated … the shoots, the tennis parties, the before-lunch Sunday drinks parties.
The routine became anathema.” The marriage broke down, and in 1963 she landed a job at The Guardian as assistant to its first women’s editor, Mary Stott. Terrified of being found out as having been a former deb, she tried to keep her voice and clothes neutral and resisted any temptation to recall dress fittings at Worth or her first major crush – the Master of the Eton Beagles.
Over the next six years she became the paper’s voice for metropolitan youth, interviewing trendsetters and writing a feminist column. But it was probably the year she had spent in grand country houses, developing a passion for architecture and visual culture, that led to her appointment as design correspondent – and to an interview in 1964 with David Mellor, the Sheffield-born master metalworker and award-winning cutlery designer.
She married him in 1966 and later moved to Sheffield. There, in 1973, they bought Broom Hall, where Mellor converted the Georgian wing to make cutlery workshops and Fiona Maccarthy began her career as a biographer in the coach house. In 1990 the couple moved to a converted gasworks in Hathersage.
Her first book, A Simple Life (1981), was a biography of CR Ashbee, the Victorian designer who in 1902 set up a utopian community of craftsmen in Chipping Campden. It gave her an initiation into writing about unusual sex lives, for Ashbee, though becoming the father of four daughters in his fifties, was gay.
Fiona Maccarthy’s 1994 biography of William Morris won her the Wolfson History Prize and the Writers’ Guild Non-fiction Award; Stanley Spencer: An English Vision (1997), was praised for revolutionising perceptions of the artist and “his search for a new expressiveness of sex”.
Byron: Life and Legend (2002), the first John Murray-authorised biography since the 1950s, made headlines with its claim that poet’s relations with men were his true “emotional focus”, but established Fiona Maccarthy as one of Britain’s leading biographers.
The Last Pre-raphaelite (2011), her study of Edward Burne-jones, won the James Tait Black prize for biography. Her final biography, published last year, was of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus.
Though her year as a debutante remained “an unmentionably embarrassing secret history” for many years, in later life Fiona Maccarthy developed a sympathetic understanding of why families clung to the tradition long past its sell-by date.
“I thought of it as a sort of silly season,” she told an interviewer, “but it was also symbolic of so much else. I hadn’t thought of what was happening in these families, how fragmented many of them were, how hard it was for the fathers coming back from the war and finding this very fast-changing scene.”
Fiona Maccarthy was appointed OBE in 2009 and was a fellow of the Royal College of Art and the Royal Society of Literature.
David Mellor died in 2009. She is survived by their son and daughter.
Fiona Maccarthy, born January 23 1940, died February 29 2020