Myfanwy

Myfanwy

One of the delights about family history nowadays is how, if you let it, the internet will entice you from one connection to another - and I believe your life is enhanced as a result.

Somewhere, in a cardboard box, I have an LP of Sir John Betjeman reading some of his own poems.

Statue of John Betjeman at St Pancras station

I can't remember whether his poem 'Myfanwy' is on that record but I can vividly imagine him reading the verse

"Smooth down the Avenue glitters the bicycle
Black-stockinged legs under navy blue serge
Home and Colonial, Star, International,
Balancing bicycle leant on the verge."
From John Betjeman "Myfanwy" published in "Old Lights for New Chancels" (1940)

(For the full poem see this link)

"You only have to look at a poem such as "Myfanwy" - one of his most emotionally naked - to feel the camera leading you effortlessly back and forth across the generations, as the grown Myfanwy bicycles "out of the shopping and into the dark, / Back down the avenue, back to the pottingshed, / Back to the house on the fringe of the park", where the adolescent Betjeman first saw and fell in love with her, playing sardines at a party. Before we reach the Fuller's angelcake we see the motherly Myfanwy once more, reading to her own children. The poem collapses the generations with such assurance. The montage of images, immediately moving, only gradually reveals its meaning as the generations extricate themselves at subsequent readings. The confusion echoes his own slight embarrassment. Is she a child or a mother? Is she a girl he once knew and lost touch with and longs for still, remembering her childhood beauty? Or just the wife of a friend? Larkin talks somewhere about the need to give the reader something to be going along with, while reserving something more to repay closer scrutiny. Betjeman manages this with cinematic blurrings of time and space."
Hugo Williams, The Guardian 2006

My "Golden Myfanwy" John Betjeman called her.

"Mary Myfanwy Evans was born on 28 March 1911 into a Welsh family in London. Her father was a chemist in Hampstead, north London. She attended North London Collegiate School, from where she won a scholarship to read English Language and Literature at St Hugh's College, Oxford.
From 1935 to 1937 she edited the periodical, Axis, devoted to abstract art. In 1937 she married the artist John Piper, with whom she lived in rural surroundings at Fawley Bottom near Henley-on-Thames for much of her life.

Between 1954 and 1973 she collaborated with the composer Benjamin Britten on several of his operas, and between 1977 and 1981 with composer Alun Hoddinott on most of his operatic works. She was a friend of the poet John Betjeman, who wrote several poems addressing her, such as "Myfanwy" and "Myfanwy at Oxford".
John and Myfanwy Piper had two sons and two daughters. Her elder son, painter Edward Piper, predeceased her.
She died at her home in Fawley Bottom on 18 January 1997"
Wikipedia

The Benjamin Britten operas for which she provided the libretto were 'The Turn of the Screw", "Owen Wingrave", and 'Death in Venice' - all powerful works. She also provided libretti for three works by Alun Hoddinot which I do not know -  'What the Old Man Does is Always Right', 'The Rajah's Diamond' and 'The Trumpet Major'. I do not know them now but I am inspired to find and listen to them.

OK - but what is the Swindell connection you may well be asking.

Gladys May Swindell

Courtesy of Michael Cope

Daughter of George William Swindell and Jane Macaree, born on the 5th of May 1891 at 92 Caledonian Road, Clerkenwell and the granddaughter of Thomas Swindell, born in Parwich, Derbyshire, who had become a London public house landlord. Her father had been a coal merchant but had died in 1908 when she was 17, the youngest daughter. In 1911 the six children who remained unmarried shared a house in Wood Green, north London. Gladys was a typist at Messrs Kearley and Tonge.

Four unmarried sister remained at Wood Green until at least 1929 but by 1934 had moved to Carshalton on the southern fringe of London in Surrey. Gladys never married and died in Surrey in 1969.

So what is the connection with John Betjeman?

International

In 1911 Gladys was a typist at Messrs Kearley and Tonge. The business was founded in 1878 by Hudson Kearly (later Viscount Devonport) and Gilbert Augustus Tonge as the International Tea Co., with the objective of selling tea direct to consumers rather than through wholesalers. Soon most towns in the South of England had their own International Tea Co. store as immortalised in a verse from John Betjeman's poem "Myfanwy". (see above).

'International Stores' became a chain of retail grocers - the first UK supermarket chain and one of the largest companies on the UK stock exchange. It was bought by British American Tobacco as part of their efforts to diversify away from tobacco. It was thereafter a pawn in the UK supermarket business and became part of Asda, Sainsbury and the 'Coop' (via Sommerfield).


More about the Swindell Surname