Revel Guest
Documentary-maker who ran the Hay book festival and helped to bring War Horse to the big screen
REVEL GUEST, who has died aged 90, was told by her father as a child that there were no more limits on her as a woman than on her two older brothers in “doing something with her life”.
She followed his advice faithfully in her various careers in politics, documentarymaking, film production, farming, racehorse training and, latterly, as a long-standing chairwoman of the annual Hay literary festival, winning the admiration and affection of her peers, many awards, and the satisfaction of bringing Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse to the big screen in 2011, with six Academy Award nominations.
When Revel Guest stood for the Conservatives in the safe Labour seat of Swansea East in the 1955 General Election, just 24 women were elected to the Commons. More significantly – and an early indicator of what was to come – she was the youngest female candidate the Tories had ever put up, having navigated her way undaunted, she recalled, through 26 selection meetings to get her chance.
It may have helped in such interviews that she could mention having already, at 21, organised a talk in Westminster by her father’s first cousin, Winston Churchill, on free trade.
“Sitting next to him beforehand,” she reported, “I hoped to store up a wonderful memory of some wise words, but he said nothing at all to me. In those days elders were treated with respect, so I wouldn’t have started the conversation.”
Yet she was never one to be limited by the conventions of the wealthy, aristocratic world of her upbringing (her paternal grandmother was a Spencer-churchill, and her father Oscar Guest and his three brothers had all been MPS).
Having spent her 20s first in politics, working for the Liberal leader Jo Grimond; as press officer for the UK Council of the European Movement; and then in journalism, at Time & Tide and Westminster Press, Revel Guest headed into her 30s not by marrying and settling down, but by becoming the first woman producerdirector on the BBC’S Panorama programme, alongside Richard Dimbleby, Robin Day and others.
“My mother didn’t burn her bra like other women in the Sixties,” recalled her son, Justin Albert (director of the National Trust in Wales), “but she was a feminist. It annoyed her that she had to be three times better than any man around her to get the job.”
From Panorama, where she made her name with hard-hitting reportage on subjects including racial inequality and homelessness, as well as profiles of leading political figures, she moved to the United States in 1966 as bureau chief of the Public TV Laboratory, funded by the Ford Foundation and a forerunner of PBS, the public broadcasting network in America.
While on that side of the Atlantic filming her 1963 Panorama documentary about James Baldwin, the American writer and civil rights activist – using the hand-held camera techniques that are now ubiquitous – Revel Guest met her husband, a lawyer called Robert Albert, at a drinks party in the Dakota building in New York. It was a whirlwind romance.
They ended up flipping a coin to decide where to make their home. London won out, but in the decades ahead they were forever dividing their time between both cities as they welcomed their son Justin in 1965 and, two years later, Corisande.
But it was the Guest farm, Cabalva, in the Golden Valley on the Welsh border near Hay-on-wye, bought by her father in the 1940s, which she regarded as both her family and spiritual home. It was, she liked to point out, “not at all House & Garden – the electrics and the plumbing don’t always work”.
In 1968 the couple set up Transatlantic Films, a pioneer of the model of independent companies producing documentaries for networks around the world that in 1982 saw the establishment of Channel 4 in Britain.
Among the 150-plus projects she either directed or produced – often doing both – were many that reflected her own passions: a love of music (1984’s Placido: A Year in the Life of Placido Domingo); history (the prize-winning 26-part History’s Turning Points between 1995 and 2002); and horses (The Horse in Sport, told in eight episodes in 1987 and, according to her son, her personal favourite).
Revel Sarah Guest was born in London on September 14 1931, her unusual name recalling “an ancestor who was a defrocked priest”. She was the fourth and youngest child of Kathleen Paterson and Oscar Guest, Liberal and then Tory MP in the inter-war years, whose father had made the family fortune in steel with GKN.
Her experience at Bedgebury Park, a girls boarding school in Kent, was “horrid”, but did not put her off going to the London School of Economics to read politics and philosophy.
As well as Cabalva – the running of which she took over from her father in 1982, handing it on in 2011 to her daughter – she had a professional base in Notting Hill from the early 1970s, long before it became a fashionable enclave. The house was always full of people.
As a family, they never had a lot of money. So Revel Guest applied the skills learnt in running a film company in other areas, developing a profitable side-line in buying, selling and training race horses at Cabalva, which means “horse place” in Welsh.
How she found time for everything she packed into life was a mystery to her friends. “I work for myself,” she said. “It means that there’s no difference between weekdays and weekends.”
At Transatlantic, her closest collaborators were often women, including Georgina Lowe, who went to produce films for Mike Leigh. Though she had to be tough to get on in the film business, Revel Guest never abandoned the good manners of her childhood, or the solid ethical template it had given her. “She was not one to leave behind ‘dead bodies’ when she completed a project,” said a former colleague. “She remained friends with everyone.”
It was that quality, and her optimism in striving always to move the world forward, that made her so effective for so long. She was able to pull off feats that others would judge impossible, the most notable seeing her persevere over 12 years to bring together Michael Morpurgo, the screenwriter Lee Hall, Stephen Spielberg and the producer Kathy Kennedy to make War Horse.
For the last 20 years of her life, those same skills enabled her, as chairwoman, to contribute to making Hay the doyen of British – and, at times, international – literary festivals, hosting at Cabalva Nobel Prize-winners, retired presidents and film stars. “It is my favourite time of year, because everything and everyone I love is to hand,” she said.
The dinners she organised were famous. “I love it that my name has connotations of partying,” she remarked, as someone who never drank, “and hope to live up to it. I’m not a great cook but I love sitting up having intelligent conversation with them late at night.”
Revel Guest, who was appointed OBE in 2018 for services to literature, is survived by her husband and their two children.
Revel Guest, born September 14 1931, died June 8 2022