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 Dame 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 Sir 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. It earned her an OBE for services to equality.
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 made a Dame 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.’
Last week, the Lord Lieutenant of London Sir Kenneth Olisa was dispatched to her hospital room to carry out the investiture ceremony on behalf of the King. It was the last, glittering highlight in a truly astonishing career.
BORN Shirley Pearce in 1932, she was evacuated from London to Hereford during World War II 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’: ‘Something I hotly denied until after he died in 2020, when I felt so depressed I could barely do anything for a month.’
As bright young things of the Sixties, the Conrans enjoyed a ‘vibrant, exciting’ time in London,
socialising with Shirley’s best friend Mary Quant at her iconic shop, Bazaar. ‘Terence and I had a lot of fun together, apart from the infidelities,’ Shirley recalled. ‘But life became just criticise, criticise, criticise from morning to midnight. It was very wearing.’
Two weeks after she walked out, Terence sacked her from her role as design and sales director of Conran Fabrics, leaving her a homeless and jobless single mother. ‘I know only too well the frozen panic when money runs out,’ she wrote of that time.
‘What it’s like to turn off the heating all winter, scold children for not switching off lights and fill up on bread and potatoes, never throwing away leftovers which make the soup thicker.’ She found a job as a designer at the Daily Mail. When divorce proceedings began, the judge denied her alimony on the grounds that she had a job. Terence paid the boys’ school fees and was supposed to provide further support. When he failed to pay, she ran up lawyer’s bills taking him to court. Eventually, she bought the family home from Terence — for three times what he had paid for it — and lived with her sons in London.
She was promoted to the Daily Mail’s homes editor before launching Femail, when her career really took off. She never lost her connection to the Mail and would recall this pivotal moment with great fondness. In an article to mark Femail’s 50th anniversary in 2018, she wrote of the ‘ razzle dazzle’ of the launch: ‘The office atmosphere felt a bit like a modern teenager sleepover.
‘There was a permanent air of exhilaration. We all enjoyed the effortless effervescence, the first joke of the morning, the fashion editor’s decision to print a list of hangover cures.’
Until then, newspapers had only ever included a women’s section about knitting, dress patterns, recipes and the odd interview with charity organisers. In Femail, for the first time, Shirley said: ‘ We wrote about our weaknesses and fears. And we weren’t afraid to ruffle feathers. Femail tapped into a feeling that life could be better for a woman.’
A year later, Shirley collapsed with viral pneumonia. After a month, she left hospital unable to stand up and could not return to the Mail. Unable to afford home help at this time, Shirley took notes about the housework and used them to write Superwoman. An exhausting book tour led to a diagnosis of ME ( chronic fatigue syndrome). Realising she would probably need expensive medical help for the rest of her life, she decided she had better try to write an international bestseller — a bold ambition considering she had never even written a novel.
But Shirley wasn’t one to give up easily. In her episode of Desert Island Discs, recorded in 1977, she said: ‘My aim in life is get your foot in where you can and heave against the door.’ Originally conceived as a sex manual for confused teenage girls, Lace told the racy story of four school friends who’d reached the top of their professions. It was a novel filled with scenes of sex and masturbation, erotic encounters with Swiss ski instructors, playboy princes and men about town. Shirley said: ‘Every time someone said young girls shouldn’t read Lace, I thought, “Good- oh! That means they will.”’ Overnight Shirley became the lead author at one of the world’s top publishers Simon & Schuster. Amongst other things, her newfound wealth bought her a 10th-century chateau near Cannes. In 1994, she was said to be the 84th richest woman in Britain. As her success grew, her mind turned once again to using her influence to help other women. She became what she called a ‘social entrepreneur’, directing her wealth to further the cause. And she had a habit for identifying valid causes before anyone else; particularly her focus on work-life balance and flexi-hours. Such was her knack of predicting trends before they happened, she referred to herself as a ‘futurist’. A term meaning, she explained, that ‘ you don’t just know the zeitgeist; you know next month’s zeitgeist too’.
Shirley said she was most proud of her work on maths — something she reiterated to me at the end. I first interviewed her about maths in 2014 at her stylish 1930s mansion block flat in leafy East Putney. (The interiors were impeccable — all white walls, low- slung white sofas and white drapes with bold works of art on the walls.) Before launching Money Stuff, she had conducted two years of pilot studies in a school and university.
‘I feel like shaking young girls and grown women who prefer to stay ignorant about maths and its uses,’ she said. ‘I’ve grown tired of 13 and 14-year-olds smugly saying to me: “The day I leave school is the day I give up maths.”
‘I growl back: “The day you leave school is the day you will start to need maths.”’ She was always one for a smart retort, with a lifelong power to shock and amuse.
In her 80s, she reprimanded a Mail interviewer who asked if sex was as important in her real life as it was in her fiction. Her complaint? Not the content of the question but the tense: ‘Was? What makes you think it still isn’t?’ she said, eyes flashing. ‘I may be 80 but believe me, that part of me isn’t dead yet.’
Last month, she wrote that sex was ‘important until I turned 89. Then overnight it stopped, bingo, no response’.
She was equally candid when it came to the harsh realities of old age, hailing the NHS for her recovery from brain surgery to remove a benign tumour the size of an orange in 2020 and later confessing her suicidal feelings when social care fell apart during her convalescence mid-pandemic.
IN 2021 she underwent a hip operation and was plagued by kidney infections in her later months. She spent so much time in hospital she joked that she was the Mail’s ‘hospitals correspondent’.
Most recently, Shirley wrote movingly of witnessing the true meaning of love in a critical ward. ‘Few of us really understand the force and power of real love until we are about to lose it,’ she wrote. ‘And with my front row seat on the critical ward, I watch and almost feel that loving devotion. From the four devoted nurses who tend us day and night to the families and friends who visit.
‘ This embracing love for a worn-out, tired person is almost touchable. It fills the ward like the scent of hyacinths: indescribable and invisible but precious, because there’s nothing like it: it’s unique.’
Never one to shy away from difficult subjects, she faced her own mortality head on, hiring a death coach to help get her business affairs in order and planning her funeral.
‘I’ve told my sons not to worry when I go, they won’t lose me completely,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in their head for ever.’
As I said my final goodbye, she grasped my hand.
Tears clouding my eyes, I told her she is an inspiration. To me and no doubt everyone else who met her — on paper or in person.
A Superwoman indeed.