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Norma Barzman, Lord Saye and Sele, Jim Hobson, Susan Campbell

Norma Barzman, Lord Saye and Sele, Jim Hobson, Susan Campbell

Released Friday, 26th January 2024
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Norma Barzman, Lord Saye and Sele, Jim Hobson, Susan Campbell

Norma Barzman, Lord Saye and Sele, Jim Hobson, Susan Campbell

Norma Barzman, Lord Saye and Sele, Jim Hobson, Susan Campbell

Norma Barzman, Lord Saye and Sele, Jim Hobson, Susan Campbell

Friday, 26th January 2024
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Full terms at mintmobile.com. On

1:07

last word this week, Lord Say and Seal, who

1:09

served in the Army during the Second World War,

1:12

then worked to restore the family's

1:14

historic seat, Broughton Castle. Also Jim

1:16

Hobson, who was Assistant Chief Constable

1:18

of West Yorkshire when the Yorkshire

1:20

Ripper was arrested. And

1:23

Susan Campbell, the illustrator who co-founded

1:25

the Walled Kitchen Garden Network. But

1:28

first, we take you back to the Golden

1:31

Age of Hollywood, as we remember Norma Bartsman,

1:33

who's died aged 103. Norma

1:36

was one of the last survivors of a

1:38

group of screenwriters forced to flee to Europe after

1:41

facing the threat of being blacklisted for

1:43

their left-wing political views. Norma

1:45

Bartsman was born in New York in 1920

1:48

into a wealthy family. She

1:51

was sent to the elite Radcliffe College and

1:53

during her junior year she got married for

1:55

the first time. But as

1:57

her friend the writer Larry Sepler told me, it wasn't until she was 18 that

1:59

she found her true love. was her second marriage

2:01

that lasted. She had been

2:03

married previously to a man named

2:05

Claude Shannon who was one of the

2:07

most significant figures in the development of

2:09

computer technology. He was one who came

2:11

up with the notion of bytes and

2:14

so she had been living with him in

2:16

Princeton for several years and she

2:19

went a little more out of life than she

2:21

was getting in Princeton. She also had a cousin

2:24

whom she was very fond to as a screenwriter in

2:26

Hollywood so she migrated out

2:28

to Hollywood hoping maybe she

2:31

could also become a screenwriter. I

2:33

had seen a film called Hot

2:35

News with B.B. Daniels and she

2:37

was a newspaper reporter,

2:40

a sub sister, and she jumped

2:42

from one spike

2:44

of the Statue of Liberty

2:46

to the other to get a hold of

2:48

a murderer she was writing a story about.

2:51

Well that convinced me I wanted to be

2:53

a reporter and I stuck with that and realized

2:55

that I wanted to be a writer and when

2:57

I got to Hollywood I realized I wanted to

3:00

be a screenwriter. She did write a very

3:02

what I think is an important film

3:04

called The Locket which is one of the

3:06

first films to use flashback within flashback within

3:08

flashback. You met Miss Patton

3:11

in 1938 you say? Yes in Miami

3:13

where I've got to be with a patient. Strange

3:17

but at that time I thought it was the luckiest

3:19

of accidents. It's sort of

3:21

a mystery, a murder mystery about this

3:23

locket and how it gets passed down

3:25

from people to people and the search

3:28

for it and the story just built

3:30

around this locket and I thought was

3:32

worked very well. It was at a

3:34

Hollywood Halloween party to raise funds for

3:36

Russian war relief that Norma met her

3:38

future husband the screenwriter Ben Bartzman as

3:41

their son John told us. She

3:43

liked to recount a story that

3:45

as they were dating he

3:47

said something that women were

3:49

not really suited for writing screenplays

3:52

and she threw a lemon pie in his face.

3:55

He was part of a kind of a

3:58

young Jewish intellect. actual screenwriting

4:00

crowd that she was able to fit right

4:03

into. The people I

4:05

cared about in Hollywood, writers

4:07

and actors and all of

4:10

our friends were

4:12

progressive. I use the

4:14

word progressive, doesn't mean that they joined

4:16

the Communist Party, but

4:18

it means that they supported all the

4:21

progressive causes. They were both

4:23

communists. In Hollywood, communists

4:25

associate with communists, and non-communists

4:27

associate with communists. And

4:29

if you left the party, then you, all

4:31

your friends who were party members, simply

4:33

disowned you. Investigating

4:42

communism in Hollywood, the Committee on

4:45

Un-American Activities, hears testimony of prominent

4:47

film personalities. The Council

4:49

of American Activities Committee had been in existence

4:51

since the 30s and investigating

4:54

communists. And they had come to Hollywood

4:56

in the late 30s to try and

4:58

investigate it, but they got no cooperation

5:00

whatsoever from the movie people, so they

5:02

dropped it. But when the war was

5:04

over, they decided they were going to

5:06

come back at it. So

5:09

19 people were subpoenaed, called

5:11

the Unfriendly Witnesses, and they went to

5:13

Washington. Only 11 of them testified. One

5:15

of them was a man named Edward

5:17

Demetriek, who was a director. After

5:20

the hearings were over, Demetriek was blacklisted. So

5:22

he went to England to make a movie,

5:25

and then he called Ben and said, you've

5:27

got to come here and do the script

5:30

for me of this movie. It was called

5:32

Christ in Concrete. There's

5:37

a beauty that once was in my life. How

5:41

did that happen? You always wanted

5:43

a little more. Why couldn't you take life

5:45

as it came? Who wants life as it

5:47

comes? So that is a norm, and figured,

5:49

well, why not? You know, this would

5:51

be interesting. They went to England, and

5:53

while they were there and they were working on

5:55

the movie, things got increasingly worse, and they decided

5:57

there was no point in going back and being

6:00

subpoenaed and having to appear and being

6:02

blaspheless. So they decided to

6:04

stay in Europe. There were many of our

6:06

friends in France and

6:09

in other places in Europe who like us,

6:12

who have been perfectly happy with

6:14

studio jobs and houses

6:16

they had. They sold their houses

6:18

and it's no joke, protecting

6:21

your children and bringing in starting

6:23

a new life. Must have

6:26

been 1949-50. She helped

6:28

with Time Without Pity, which was

6:30

a film against the death

6:32

penalty. That was the first day in England.

6:35

That film got a prize

6:37

at the Carlo Vivari Film

6:40

Festival, first prize, in

6:42

Czechoslovakia. They

6:45

go to the film festival in

6:47

Carlo Vivari and when they come

6:49

back, the embassy summons them and

6:52

recites blow by blow

6:55

everything they did hour by hour in

6:57

Carlo Vivari and says,

6:59

so we would like to see your passport.

7:01

So they give their passports and they never

7:03

recolor their passports. So

7:05

yes, there was a lot of surveillance.

7:08

I believe they settled in Paris. What

7:10

sort of a community did they join

7:12

there? Well, they basically fit themselves into

7:14

the Parisian left-wing community. I mean, they

7:17

became friendly with Simone Signore and Yves

7:19

Montan. They knew Picasso

7:22

and basically the whole Parisian

7:24

art community. Then more

7:26

blacklisted people came over from Hollywood.

7:28

They kind of formed a little

7:31

group which Ben didn't like.

7:33

He called it the Herring Barrel.

7:35

It was just too hermetic. And

7:38

so he wanted a

7:40

larger framework in which he could operate.

7:43

He kept on changing places,

7:45

changing houses, changing friends, changing

7:47

schools. It was very difficult.

7:51

If you read my mother's later

7:53

writings, she tends to

7:55

present the fact that

7:57

they vanquished the blackless.

8:00

having a very rich life, continuing

8:02

to work, meeting

8:05

famous people or interesting people. But

8:09

I think that tends to obscure the

8:11

fact that they were living in very

8:13

difficult, precarious conditions and felt

8:15

threatened all the time. They

8:18

came back to the United States in the

8:20

late 70s and then Ben

8:23

got ill and so she

8:25

was taking care of him. When Ben

8:27

died, she picked up a column

8:29

in the Los Angeles Examiner on women. I

8:32

encouraged her to do a memoir. I'm

8:35

told that the memoir is quite racy.

8:37

Is that right? Yeah, it shocked her

8:39

children. She had a number of

8:41

affairs when she was in

8:44

France. I think because she felt pushed

8:46

aside by Ben and not encouraged, that

8:48

this was kind of her way of

8:51

retaliating. After my father

8:53

died, she started becoming much more

8:55

feminist in the sense that

8:57

she sort of implied that

8:59

the fame of her

9:01

husband had created a shadow

9:03

of her own achievements.

9:07

I think it's important to be able to

9:09

talk about anything without having

9:12

anything happen to you, freedom

9:14

of expression. As

9:17

a matter of fact, I thought that's

9:19

what America was all about. Look

9:22

what happens when you don't come in

9:24

that guaranteed. You could have

9:26

to leave your country. You can

9:28

go to jail. You can look at all

9:31

the things that could happen to you. Norma

9:33

Bartzman has died aged 103. You

9:36

can hear more of that interview with

9:38

Norma in the podcast Hollywood Exiles, available

9:40

now on BBC Sounds. Now

9:42

Lord Sey and Seel also had a long

9:45

life. He too has died aged 103. That

9:49

was the ancient aristocratic title of the

9:51

man who was born Nathaniel Thomas

9:53

Allen Twistleton Wickham Fines in 1920.

9:57

He was the 21st in a line that started in

9:59

14. 1947 when

10:01

one of his ancestors did good work at

10:03

Agincourt and Nathaniel had a

10:05

unique start in life as his son

10:08

Martin Fiennes who's now inherited the title

10:10

told me. I think he has the nice

10:13

but very unimportant position of being probably the

10:15

only peer who was born in the House

10:17

of Lords. His maternal

10:19

grandfather Sir Thomas Butler was

10:22

yeoman usher of the black rod and so

10:25

had a an apartment in the Victoria

10:27

Tower Parliament above the House of

10:29

Lords and he was born in in there. So

10:32

what was his upbringing like? What sort of

10:34

childhood would he have had? So his father

10:36

was a soldier and they moved around

10:38

I think repeatedly 20 different houses in

10:41

the first 20 years of his life.

10:43

So I know Northumberland they were

10:45

very happy a bit in Ireland bit in vibrant,

10:48

in Gloucestershire all over

10:50

the place. Can we talk about his war

10:52

service because he had some very significant experiences.

10:55

Would you tell us what those were? Yes,

10:57

he always I mean he never talked about

10:59

them at all really until he was in

11:02

his late 80s early 90s. He

11:04

was adjutant of the 8th Battalion

11:07

of the Rifle Brigade part of the

11:09

11th Armoured Division and they fought

11:11

in two major

11:13

operations around Caen, Operation

11:15

Epsom where there was a famous

11:17

action on Hill 112 and Operation

11:20

Goodwood over to the east of Caen which

11:23

was the biggest tank battle of the war. I

11:25

remember we had to go across and cross

11:27

the river Aum and line

11:29

up the other side. There was

11:31

a thousand bomber raid in front of us and

11:34

you saw the planes coming in from behind you

11:36

and dropping their bombs just ahead of us and

11:39

then you came into a lot

11:41

of shelling and opposition and the

11:44

88 millimeter guns that the Germans

11:46

had were very effective in the

11:48

tanks. We started to see

11:51

tents on fire and that

11:53

was a terrific sight. We

11:56

had two amazing visits actually over there with him

11:58

in New York. early 90s,

12:01

walking around the fields. And

12:03

he also was part of the

12:06

regiment that liberated Belsen, which

12:08

must have been a very significant

12:10

and extremely distressing

12:13

experience. It was,

12:15

they'd been notified by the Germans

12:17

that there was a typhoid in

12:19

a camp, and so they

12:21

went into the camp and

12:23

witnessed the horrors. I

12:26

don't think many of us knew anything

12:28

about concentration camps before we encountered them,

12:30

really. And I don't need to exaggerate

12:32

the horrors. I mean, there were dead

12:35

people lying everywhere, people

12:37

being eaten by animals or whatever.

12:40

And then we went through huts with rows

12:43

of people, terrible smell. We remember

12:45

we smoked all the time to

12:47

restrict the smell. Terrible

12:49

evil, great evil. When

12:52

he returned to civilian life, Nathaniel became

12:54

a chartered surveyor and worked as a

12:56

land agent. But then he

12:58

inherited the title and responsibility for

13:01

the family seat, Broughton Castle, a

13:03

fortified and motored manor house near

13:05

Banbury in North Oxfordshire, set in

13:08

parkland and built of the local

13:10

Haunton ironstone. Successive generations

13:12

had struggled to keep up with

13:14

repairs. It was in poor condition

13:17

at the end of the wall, sort of trees

13:19

growing out of the roof and water pouring in

13:21

everywhere. And two in particular

13:23

of my 19th century ancestors had lost

13:25

all the money. So there was

13:27

no money. And the

13:30

story goes that the historic buildings

13:32

council officer who came to look

13:34

at the castle left his notes behind.

13:36

And on the front, it said, the fine

13:39

family are notoriously impoverished, which

13:41

is exactly what you want when somebody with a

13:44

grant comes around. So they got 100% grant to

13:46

do the roof. Of

13:48

course, once you've got a good roof, then you've got time

13:50

on your side. And we

13:52

all moved in in 1968. And

13:56

we've been living and shivering there

13:58

ever since. history of

14:00

this place is it was

14:03

built in 1306 by

14:05

John de Broton who also built the

14:07

church. It was modernized

14:10

in 1554 by

14:13

the sixth and seventh

14:15

Lord Sanseal. Since then

14:18

it's really been altered very

14:20

little indeed except for an occasional

14:22

bathroom and a little plumbing. In

14:26

1983 we started to

14:28

do work on the stone and the windows

14:31

and so for 12 years we had scaffolding on the

14:33

house and it's now the

14:35

architect said to me afterwards structurally

14:37

sound for the next 200 years. And

14:40

did he believe that it was his duty to

14:43

maintain it and preserve it for the

14:45

next generation? Yes, he did very much

14:48

that sort of caretaker role and

14:50

he and my mother together because there

14:53

were fantastic partnership doing it. All the

14:55

open days just the sort

14:57

of total love of not just the

14:59

house but also the estate

15:01

around it. Did he ever

15:04

appear in the House of Lords having been born

15:06

there? No, I mean A, he

15:08

didn't have time because he had a

15:10

day job and B, I don't think

15:13

he approved well I know he didn't

15:15

approve of hereditary peers. There's

15:17

a family tradition of opposition

15:19

to undemocratic things like that.

15:22

In the hall you will see

15:25

the leather coat scribed to Cromwell

15:27

and you will see the previous

15:29

seal bag of Charles II and

15:32

these two things bring together the

15:35

life of the 8th Lord

15:37

St. Cyr and the first

15:39

Viscount in those periods. He

15:41

was the leader of the parliamentary party

15:43

in the House of Lords with time

15:46

and he did a very

15:48

great deal towards trying to

15:50

get King Charles I to

15:53

work on I suppose

15:55

a parliamentary system. Obviously

15:57

You're now taking on the title

15:59

and the responsibility. The that he

16:01

did, he offer you any advice

16:03

while he was still alive about

16:05

your responsibilities New? Certainly not. About

16:08

the title. But I'm

16:10

into the house he could see.

16:13

That. I had inherited his love for

16:15

this and that was enough for

16:17

me. He was never someone who

16:19

lectures so telling people what to

16:21

do that wasn't he started to.

16:23

He was a quiet and humble

16:25

man. The current Lord Say and

16:27

seal on his father, Nathaniel, the

16:29

twenty first holder of that title

16:31

is died aged a hundred and

16:33

three. Now Assistant Chief Constable Gym

16:35

Hops was the police officer in

16:37

charge of the hunt for Yorkshire

16:39

Ripper When Peter Sutcliffe was arrested

16:41

previously had of see Id. In

16:43

Leeds. Gym had been a key member

16:45

of the inquiry team for some years,

16:48

but only took charge in the last

16:50

few weeks. The killer had murdered at

16:52

least thirteen women and brutally assaulted seven

16:54

others. They were a five year period

16:56

terrorizing the north of England. Team

16:59

Hopes and was born in Leeds in

17:01

Nineteen Twenty seven. His grandson, Frank Epidemic

17:03

has been telling me more about his

17:05

life in his well as he left

17:08

school at the age of fourteen. With.

17:10

No. Actual. Educational qualifications

17:12

solely the of having been a

17:14

member of the Sea Cadets. And

17:17

was a qualified signals man so.

17:19

As soon as the war started and he

17:22

could take part in it, he joined the

17:24

world lazy. And. He saw some

17:26

quite difficult service during the war didn't

17:28

he? Yeah, he was on the a

17:30

now infamous Optic Com voice I were.

17:33

To. A Me: I'm thirty four and quite

17:35

for Jack. Sometimes upon game I had vowed

17:37

to fight this undies. And those

17:39

days he was fifteen sixteen years old

17:41

would join the Navy. To go

17:44

fight and then end up on a ship,

17:46

so in his was so cold that if

17:48

you have a touch, anything outside your hand

17:50

would stick to. And. He was the

17:52

poor guy upon the top deck with his. Signal.

17:55

Box communicating with a with other ships. what

17:57

do you think made him want to join

17:59

the put. police force? I think

18:01

it was a case of he'd already been

18:03

in the Navy, a public servant defending his

18:06

country and it

18:08

was a job that he could kind

18:10

of get stuck into. And he found

18:12

himself at the heart of one of

18:14

the most notorious cases in British legal

18:17

history, the Yorkshire Ripper case. Did

18:19

he talk to you about the experiences he

18:21

had on that case? He talked to me

18:23

about a few things and the

18:26

main things that he talked to me about will always

18:28

stay between me and him because he was very much

18:30

of the opinion that people who committed

18:32

crimes like that, they shouldn't be publicised, they

18:34

shouldn't be made to be celebrities, they should

18:36

be caught, prosecuted and

18:38

put in jail. Because

18:41

it was a hugely challenging investigation

18:43

and there was a great climate

18:45

of fear in the area

18:47

at the time. For

18:49

your home safety do not walk

18:51

home alone under stress. For your

18:53

home safety do not walk home

18:55

alone. Did he talk

18:58

to you about that, about how difficult

19:00

it must have been for the officers involved?

19:02

One of the things that he did say

19:04

that although I don't think many

19:06

people quite realise how difficult the collating

19:09

of information was, in those days

19:11

everything was handwritten on paper and you literally

19:13

had to go back to a police station

19:16

or police phone box, call some

19:18

of the head office, give them

19:20

the exact details of the information you wanted

19:22

as close as possible then they had to

19:24

go to a filing cabinet, hopefully

19:26

you've got the details correct and

19:28

hopefully they can find some information

19:30

regarding that person or vehicle in

19:33

these handwritten notes. Because I understand

19:35

that the major incident room had

19:38

four tonnes of paperwork and that

19:40

the floor had to be reinforced

19:42

because there was so much paperwork

19:45

coming in and obviously the investigation

19:47

was criticised afterwards because it

19:49

had interviewed Peter Sutcliffe several times and missed

19:52

him. Do you think one of the explanations

19:54

according to your grandfather was just this difficulty

19:56

of managing the volume of evidence? The

19:59

main thing that he always... was it's just

20:01

how everybody got bogged down in

20:03

paperwork and not bogged down

20:05

in the sense that it was pointless paperwork but

20:07

it was the sheer volume of paperwork and not

20:09

being able to synthesize it in

20:11

a logical, chronological

20:14

or efficient order so it was

20:16

easily accessible for everybody involved. One

20:19

of the suggestions was that the police

20:21

didn't take the killings seriously enough at

20:23

first because it was sex workers who

20:25

appeared to be being targeted.

20:27

I'd like to appeal to all the

20:30

prostitutes that frequent the Choppertown

20:32

Road areas and other areas

20:34

of the force to ensure that if

20:36

they are going to go in cars

20:39

with people in connection with their

20:41

trade that they should

20:43

take car numbers. I think they've

20:45

heeded the warning and see that there's

20:47

real danger in going with people

20:50

in cars in view of the

20:52

murders that we've had over the past two years.

20:54

But you're not offering them any kind of amnesty?

20:57

Oh no, quite the reverse. And

20:59

he did make some comments about

21:01

prostitutes which I think were criticized.

21:03

What he was quoted as saying

21:05

was that the killer has made it

21:08

clear that he hates prostitutes. Many people

21:10

do. We as a police force will

21:12

continue to arrest prostitutes but the

21:14

Ripper is now killing innocent girls

21:16

and I think it was that last

21:18

bit that really provoked a row,

21:21

didn't it? My interpretation of

21:23

what he meant by that given

21:25

the person he was, given

21:28

everything that he talked to

21:30

me about would be this. Women who

21:32

were working as prostitutes at the time, obviously

21:35

they were working on the streets. Given

21:37

what was going on, carrying

21:40

on working in those conditions would

21:43

put yourself in a position of danger. I don't

21:46

think it was meant to mean that

21:48

one group of people was deserving

21:50

and one wasn't deserving of such horrible crimes.

21:53

Did he ever talk to you about the

21:55

moment they caught Peter Sutcliffe? I've got various

21:57

memories of him talking to me about going...

22:00

going down to London to the Old Bailey for

22:02

the trial back and forth and I've got some

22:04

pictures of him outside the Old Bailey and my

22:06

grandmother was there with him for, God knows how

22:08

many weeks it was as well. I think it

22:10

was a sense of relief more than anything. Once

22:13

he was caught it was over. BBC,

22:18

6 o'clock, this

22:20

is the news. The

22:22

Yorkshire Ripper Peter William Sapteth has been found

22:24

guilty of 13 charges of murder

22:27

and sentenced to a minimum of 30

22:29

years in prison. Well I'm

22:31

very delighted with the results and

22:34

delighted with the kind remarks that the judge

22:36

made about the force. The force hasn't been

22:38

without its critics so how do you answer

22:40

those now? In the five

22:42

years that we've been conducting these inquiries,

22:44

obviously in the end the reputation of

22:47

the police service was at

22:49

stake but I'm sure that reputation

22:51

has now been restored. You're

22:53

obviously very proud of him. I wonder what you

22:55

learned from him, what you take away from

22:59

having known him. Do

23:01

what's right, be honest as

23:03

much as you can be, help people.

23:06

Him and my grandmother helped raise me. I was with

23:08

them every weekend from when I was born, I was

23:10

a teenager so a large part

23:12

of my life was with them.

23:15

I definitely saw a softer side of him,

23:17

a more fun side of him. It wasn't

23:19

really until I gave him two great grandchildren

23:21

that other people did see this big soft

23:24

kind of fluffy side of him and he

23:26

would doubt over them and do absolutely anything

23:28

they wanted to do. Franco Pardini

23:30

on Jim Hobson who's died aged 96.

23:34

This week last words also go

23:36

to Laurie Johnson who composed some

23:38

of the UK's best loved TV

23:40

theme tunes including The Avengers, The

23:42

Professionals and Animal Magic. And

23:52

we remember the American singer and songwriter

23:54

Melanie Safka, known simply by her first

23:56

name, she had a worldwide hit with

23:58

the song Brand New Key. Now Susan

24:01

Campbell was the illustrator and food

24:03

writer who co-founded the Walled Kitchen

24:05

Garden Network. Her passion for

24:07

these sheltered spaces led her to visit over

24:09

700 of them and to

24:12

write five books on the subject. The

24:14

network was created to provide an

24:17

integrated approach to restoring walled kitchen

24:19

gardens. Chip Buckland worked

24:21

with Susan on restoring the walled garden at

24:23

West Dean in Sussex. He

24:25

says she was a colourful character. She

24:27

came to one of the shows and

24:30

she was dressed completely in

24:32

purple with purple hair and

24:35

she'd been to a somewhere posh in fancy

24:37

dress and she'd gone on an aubergine

24:39

the day before and she turned up

24:41

at Asjo to sell the

24:44

drawings looking like an aubergine

24:46

but also slightly frazzled. Susan's

24:48

friend Caroline Conran collaborated with her on

24:50

a recipe book for those on tight

24:53

budgets called Poor Cook. Susan

24:55

came up with the idea after helping

24:58

Nell Dunn do the illustrations I

25:00

think with the covers for Poor

25:02

Carl which was the best

25:04

seller and she thought, yes,

25:06

poor Carl that's us. We

25:08

have to do all the cooking and shopping and we haven't

25:11

got enough money. So we'll do

25:13

one called Poor Cook and

25:15

it's going to be about cheap food.

25:18

She did all the illustrations so soon. It

25:21

was a very good book. Can you talk a

25:23

little bit more about her style of illustration because

25:25

that's fascinating to me. What did

25:27

her illustrations look like? Well, they're line

25:29

drawings. She originally

25:31

was a very good artist and

25:34

she was a slave with all sorts of

25:36

good teachers such as Newsome Freud

25:39

and she got a scholarship

25:41

to go to Sicily and paint for

25:43

a year but when she came back

25:46

she showed the gallery in Hanover Street

25:48

her paintings and the woman

25:51

said no. And that

25:53

completely put her off and so

25:55

she didn't become a painter and

25:58

she used all her creativity. energy

26:00

in other ways. Susan had

26:02

developed this passion for walk

26:05

gardens and if

26:07

you think that every house of any

26:09

size in this country

26:11

had an associated wall garden with

26:14

it historically and she was

26:16

the first person who really

26:18

started picking up on that. She was

26:20

very intrigued. There would

26:23

be things like chimneys in the

26:25

walls and the walls would be

26:27

wavy and she was very curious,

26:29

a very fact seeking mind and

26:32

so she wanted to find out all about

26:34

it and how to have a hot house

26:36

and force pineapples and all this kind of

26:39

things. Most houses of even modest

26:41

houses had a wall garden and

26:43

within that wall garden there would be a number

26:46

of people working and historically they would be some

26:48

of them were huge. Some of them would have

26:50

a staff of 20, 30 gardeners working in them.

26:54

A lot of people had a very intimate

26:56

connection with them. So I think it just

26:58

touches a lot of people's folk memories. With

27:01

the economic situation after the second

27:04

world war, people just couldn't carry

27:06

on with these huge gardens. So

27:08

they just ignored them. Literally, they

27:11

were forgotten about, never mentioned, never

27:13

seen. She loved growing

27:15

vegetables. She had the

27:17

most amazing little tiny wall garden

27:19

herself and a greenhouse

27:22

and one of her passions

27:24

was growing sea kale which

27:27

is very hard to grow but because

27:29

her house was right on the beach, she

27:32

could dig it up from the beach and put

27:34

it in this sort of forcing

27:36

bed. She actually grew

27:38

it for restaurants. Going

27:40

right back to the 16th century, I

27:44

wanted to see a huge variety

27:46

of fruit that was available, those

27:49

cherries, those berries, those plums,

27:52

pears, apples, nectarines

27:56

raised in Northern European gardens

27:58

even at Hormago. 1563.

28:01

It seems like the abiding theme of her

28:03

life is creativity. It seems as though she

28:06

exercised creativity in all the fields

28:08

that she excelled in. She never

28:10

stopped. Yes, she was really amazing.

28:13

Her energy was fantastic. If

28:15

it was something she wanted to do, she will

28:17

do it the best. I think she

28:20

was hugely significant. She brought

28:22

her passion and enthusiasm for the

28:24

subject and because of her writing

28:26

skills and because of her drawing

28:29

skills, she was able to put

28:31

that out in front of a much, much poorer

28:34

public. Jim Buckland on Susan

28:36

Campbell, who's died aged 92. This

28:38

week you also heard last words

28:40

on the police officer Jim Hobson,

28:42

the aristocrat Lord Say and Seal

28:44

and the screenwriter Norma Bartzman. You'll

28:46

find hundreds of other fascinating life

28:48

stories when you search for last

28:50

word on BBC Sounds. Tired

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of ads barging into your favorite news podcasts?

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29:03

membership. Just head to amazon.com/ad-free

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