Promising pianist ended life as vagrant
Declined offers of help, lived in car, and then bushes
Anne Naysmith enjoyed a promising career as a pianist in the 1960s but latterly achieved notoriety as “the car lady of Chiswick,” a dishevelled and familiar sight to commuters in west London, England. She lived first in her dilapidated old blue Ford Consul and then in bushes by an Underground station.
Her concert career took her to the Wigmore Hall in 1967, where a critic noted that in her performance of Rachmaninov’s Preludes Op 23 she “blossomed most fully as an artist and drew some of the warmest and richest sonorities from her piano.”
But after being evicted at the age of 39 from her home in Prebend Gardens, Annie, as she was known locally, spent 26 years sleeping in her car. When that was towed away, she declined the offer of social housing, preferring a makeshift shelter by Stamford Brook Underground station, tending her plants and shrubs. That too was removed in August 2012, leaving her distraught. She died on Feb. 10.
Some commentators drew parallels with Miss Shepherd, the musician who lived in a van on the driveway of Alan Bennett’s home in Camden and was immortalized in his play The Lady in the Van (1999).
She was born Anne Smith in 1937, adding the “Nay” in later life. Her father, an army officer of whom she had no memory, failed to return home from leave one day. In due course her Russian mother, Marie, who desperately wanted a high-profile musical career for her daughter, moved them to west London. They became estranged.
By the age of 18 Anne had won a place at the Royal Academy of Music. She began teaching piano at the Marist convent school in Sunninghill, Berkshire. Later she worked at Trinity College of Music, quickly saving the cost of a car.
By the early 1960s Anne was making a respectable if not spectacular career in music, but within a decade her life fell apart. Her performing career never fulfilled its early promise; she withdrew from teaching for reasons that were never explained; and an intense affair with “a handsome 6-foot-5inch choral singer” disintegrated.
Her eviction was, she believed, an injustice. By way of protest she began sleeping in her car — apparently her sole remaining possession of substance — insisting to anyone who came near that she should be allowed back into her former home.
Naysmith’s plight divided local residents, some of whom feared for the value of their homes, and in 2002 the Ford Consul was towed away. Others felt protective of their eccentric neighbour and provided her with a replacement — a Mercedes — but it was vandalized almost immediately.
Sometimes she would sit in on local court cases. On other days she could be found in the Barbican music library. Or she would chat with concertgoers outside the Albert Hall. On other occasions she would feed the pigeons and tend to the vegetation in her parking lot home. She washed her tattered clothes at a gas station with a hose pipe, wrapping them in old newspapers to dry. She collected pigeon feathers, tying them round her feet with carrier bags to keep warm, and cooked on an open fire.
After her third eviction in 2012 Naysmith became something of a minor celebrity, and told how being a professional pianist had killed her love of music.
“I suppose I just wanted to practise for enjoyment instead of for a concert,” she said. Yet she insisted she would have had no trouble picking it up again: “I haven’t touched a piano seriously for over 30 years. But it’s like learning to swim: If I did it for two weeks I could rush out a few things quite quickly.”