Audrey Beecham

Helen Audrey Beecham (21 July 1915 – 31 January 1989) was an English poet, teacher and historian.

Audrey Beecham
by Tony Cowlishaw
by Tony Cowlishaw
BornHelen Audrey Beecham
21 July 1915
Weaverham, Cheshire, England
Died31 January 1989 (aged 73)
Churchill Hospital, Oxford, England
OccupationHistorian, writer

She was born in Weaverham in 1915. Her grandfather was Sir Joseph Beecham, 1st Baronet, eldest son of Thomas Beecham, who had created a fortune with Beecham's Pills. Her uncle was the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham and her father devoted time to spending his inheritance.[1] She took PPE at Somerville College in Oxford. She left with a second class degree and went to live in Paris in the group that included Henry Miller. She made a lasting friendship with the writers Lawrence Durrell and Anais Nin.[1]

Beecham left Oxford and took a job at the University of Nottingham in 1950; she lectured and headed Nightingale Hall.[1] One anecdote tells of how when faced with demonstrating students intent on occupying one of the buildings she hid the weapons but supplied them with toilet paper. She memorably noted that revolutionaries frequently forgot the loo rolls.[2]

Sir Maurice Bowra, Warden of Wadham and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford was engaged to her.[3] Bowra, a homosexual, explained his engagement by saying "buggers can't be choosers".[4] In 1957, she published her first book of poetry, The Coast of Barbary.[5]

Death

Helen Audrey Beecham died in Churchill Hospital, Churchill Hospital, Oxford, England in 1989, aged 73, from asthma.

References
  1. Rachel Trickett, ‘Beecham, (Helen) Audrey (1915–1989)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2012 accessed 13 March 2017
  2. Stepney in the Right Direction, John Izbicki, 1999, The Independent, Retrieved 13 March 2017
  3. Cecil, Hugh (7 April 2009). "In a class of his own". The Spectator.
  4. Christopher Hollis, Oxford in the Twenties (1976), p. 22. "Allegedly," according to Mitchell in Maurice Bowra: A Life (2009), p. 144
  5. Audrey Beecham (1957). The Coasts of Barbary. Hamilton.
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