Sipping a G&T on her deathbed, Shirley Conran fixes me with her startling blue eyes and delivers her final message to women — 56 years after launching Femail...

As the powerhouse author behind Superwoman and Lace — who famously declared life’s too short to stuff a mushroom — dies aged 91

AGIN and tonic is not what you’d imagine a person to be sipping on their deathbed. But then Shirley Conran was never ordinary. In fact, the last time we met, she described herself as a ‘maverick’. She was the very definition of the word: unconventional, independent, someone who does not think or behave the same way as other people. As a result, she leaves the world a better place — particularly for women.

‘You can put that bit in about the gin and tonic,’ she told me, before explaining that she couldn’t hold down water and this was the only thing she could stomach — along with crushed ice cubes. ‘Normally one gin and tonic would be enough to have me under the table,’ she said, with a wry smile. ‘But not now. I only wish it would!’

When Shirley asked me to visit her in the weeks before her death, aged 91, I didn’t know what to expect. The fact she was incredibly lucid during my visit made the experience all the more moving. That she still had a mind like a steel trap made the end seem premature, unfair somehow — despite her long life.

Fixing me with her startlingly blue eyes, she directed me to sit in a chair on the side of her good ear and asked me to take out my notebook.

After a brief chat about the Princess of Wales’s health and what’s really going on in American politics — knowing the inside track on neither, I had to disappoint her on both counts — she wanted to give me ‘the scoop’ about her death because, in her words: ‘If it wasn’t for Femail, I would never have worked for women’s equality — they encouraged me to do so.’

A lifelong champion of women’s rights, Shirley launched the Daily Mail’s very first dedicated women’s section in 1968, where she headed up a team of what she called ‘pop feminists’.

‘The editor stood back and let me do what I wanted,’ she told me. ‘Which was to improve life for all women.’ And so important are these women to her — you, her readers — that she was determined to muster the strength to say farewell.

SHIRLEY dictated the following message: ‘Once I accepted the doctor’s invitation to palliative care... they turned off all the restore-to-life stuff and gave me more of what I wanted, which was oxygen to breathe. Life immediately became easier. So, dear friends and readers, I say goodbye.’

Shirley and I had worked together on and off for ten years, on her more recent articles for her ‘beloved’ Daily Mail. We were in regular contact, such was her insatiable desire to keep working and fighting for women — through articles about coping during Covid and the perilous state of social care, to name a couple.

During this period, she became a fascinating, funny and faithful friend, despite her jam-packed life. She once sent me a copy of her 690-page, bestselling book Savages when it was reprinted for its 30th anniversary with the note: ‘Always useful as a doorstop if you don’t have time to read.’

We would talk for hours about her incredible life and she’d gift me pearls of wisdom — from career advice (‘step out of the shadows and write under your own name’), grammar (‘“meanwhile” is a terribly Victorian word; no need for it’) as well as her colourful thoughts on men.

I am deeply honoured to have known this outspoken yet compassionate trailblazer who counted Mary Quant, Princess Diana and Jackie Collins as friends but fought for the rights of ordinary women. Shirley often said she spent 20 years making a fortune and 20 years spending it on this important cause.

A sense of service, she told me at the end, that was engendered by her alma mater, the renowned St Paul’s Girls’ School. Such was her debt to the school that one of her final acts was to pay for a new St Paul’s Girls’ School Collection of Modern Art, which opened three months ago. (‘I didn’t want it named after me,’ she told me at the time, ‘that’s such a male, egocentric thing to do!’)

Art was yet another string to her bow. She had trained as a sculptor at Southern College Of Art, Portsmouth, then as a painter at Chelsea Polytechnic.

‘Life is too short to stuff a mushroom,’ she famously wrote in Superwoman, her ground-breaking book of 1975. A phrase quoted so often she grew ‘sick to death’ of it, though she admitted it was more relevant than ever for women struggling to keep up in today’s fast-paced world.

But mushrooms or otherwise, Femail’s founding editor certainly enjoyed a full and fulfilled life.

Superwoman, her very practical guide to ‘having it all’ for women trying to juggle life and work (by ditching pointless, fiddly jobs such as stuffing mushrooms), was an instant bestseller.

She followed it up with an even more sensational book — Lace, her first ‘bonkbuster’, which broke the European record for a debut novel with a million-dollar advance in 1982. Five other blockbusters followed.

And with this newly acquired money, her ‘life’s work’ began. It was a very personal mission, inspired by the difficulties she had faced as a single mother of two young sons after divorcing Terence Conran in 1962.

She founded Mothers In Management in 1998 to improve working conditions for working mothers. The Work-Life Balance Trust followed in 2001, lobbying for flexi-hours for both men and women.

SHE felt strongly that financial independence was the key to equality for women — but many just didn’t understand how to handle money.

Her answer was Money Stuff, a free online maths course for girls, produced by Conran’s Maths Anxiety Trust. Money Stuff was the antithesis of a dull textbook with an aspirational, fun design inspired by Teen Vogue.

When she was presented with an Honorary Fellowship by University College, London, in 2016,

Shirley said she thought it was a joke ‘until they asked for the size of my head’ (so she could be fitted with a mortar board).

Last year, she was given an honour for services to maths education, an honour that meant a huge amount to her because it made her sons proud.

Again, female empowerment had been her motivation: ‘Maths is money and money is power. I want women to get richer and stay richer. To achieve this, they need to be financially literate.’

When it was announced, her youngest son, the fashion designer Jasper Conran, wrote: ‘Her tireless campaigning for women’s rights... is what has made me the proudest amongst her many, many other remarkable achievements.’

Born Shirley Pearce in 1932, she was evacuated from London to Hereford during the Second World War and — back in London — attended St. Paul’s, followed by a finishing school in Switzerland.

Her father, Thirlby Pearce, a drycleaning baron, was a drunken bully who would beat her mother, then charm her into forgiveness.

Shirley and her five younger siblings learned to avoid his rages. She recalled one Christmas when he threw the turkey against the wall and locked them all in the cellar.

It was in Chelsea that she met Terence, then a penniless designer who’d go on to become the founder of Habitat, when she worked as a waitress in the cafe he owned. They married in 1955 and had two sons, Sebastian, now 68, and Jasper, 64, both designers. She often talked of the many achievements of her brilliant sons and two grandsons.

Despite a famously acrimonious divorce and two further ill-fated marriages (to John Stephenson, former Conran sales director, and later sales director Kevin O’Sullivan) Shirley would describe Terence as the ‘love of her life’: