Elizabeth Longford

OBITUARY 

by Kevin Pakenham

Elizabeth, Countess of Longford, acclaimed historian and widow of the social reformer Lord Longford, died last week aged 96.

Like her husband, Lady Longford was active in Labour politics in her earlier years and, also like him, took the decision to become a Catholic.

Together they had eight children, seven of whom survive: Kevin Pakenham is the youngest. Lord Longford died in August last year. Lady Longford died at her home in Hurst Green, east Sussex, on 23 October.

ELIZABETH was an idealist and an optimist who held a view of the perfection of Man commonly associated with Rousseau. Under the influence of Hugh Gaitskell in the Twenties she converted to socialism while at Oxford. Afterwards she taught at adult education colleges in the Potteries with my father. Her political career ended in 1944 when she withdrew from standing for a safe Labour seat.

In 1946, she converted to Catholicism, influenced by my father's conversion five years earlier. Her Catholicism drew on the inspiration that had made her a Socialist, and built on it. She greatly admired the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin and, as befitted a Classics graduate, her conversion was intellectual as well as spiritual. But at heart she believed in a good Providence, revealed in all God's creation. Her love of her garden at Bernhurst was an expression of this. Hell was a difficult concept for her to accept, except perhaps for her political opponents.

This optimism ran through her life as a mother, and indeed matriarch. She expected the highest achievement from all her issue, and gave them persistent encouragement, however unattainable the goal. Like the best team coach, she set the hurdles at their limit, and continued to do so whatever the disappointments. Only the death of her daughter Catherine in 1969 seriously shook this optimism, a blow she struggled to recover from.

She had a love and fascination with family, not just her own eight and their offspring. It inspired her interest in history. Discussing life and its inevitable end, she once said that she wanted to go on for ever, in order to find out what happened to all her children and their descendants.

Born in 1906, the oldest of five, her own background was Harley Street in London. Both her parents were doctors, as was her beloved younger brother, John. Her upbringing was muscular Low Church. Her mother, a Unitarian, Katherine Chamberlain, came from that Birmingham political aristocracy that gave us Joe, Austen and Neville; her father, Nathaniel Harman, was a Baptist whose conversion to Unitarianism was required if his marriage was to proceed.

Her first serious history book, published in 1960, Jameson's Raid, was a study of Joe Chamberlain's involvement in the anti-Boer shenanigans that led to the Boer War. She then turned to biography with Victoria RI in the early Sixties, which made her name as a writer. Her crowning work was her two-volume life of the Duke of Wellington (1969 and 1972). These works and the many more that followed, often devoted to royalty, illustrated the third element in her character: her determination to be fruitfully engaged at all times, to work with utter dedication, even up to her ninety-fifth year, with the issuing of an abridged version of the Wellington life.

She was also a romantic. As a schoolgirl she developed a lasting love of the nineteenth-century romantic poets, particularly Keats, Shelley and Byron, of whom she wrote a biography. At times this led her down false paths, such as with her biography of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the philandering poet and freedom fighter from the turn of the last century. As she wrote his biography, and his atrocious treatment of his mistresses came into sharp focus, she lost sympathy with her subject. She was indeed a feminist, but of an earlier kind. She never doubted the capability nor the right of women to hold the highest offices, but she did not admire sexual liberation. She regarded promiscuity as a disappointing fall from the ideal, though she was disappointed rather than censorious.

She was passionate. She was a strong public speaker, and a funny one, and more the latter as her political life ended. She believed strongly in finding opportunities for enjoyment, and when she returned to her home at the end of her life, she insisted that it was an excellent opportunity for the grandchildren to give a party, more than one.

With all this, she was still highly practical in her approach to life. She had a good grip on finance, a self-help approach to medicine, and certainly did not waste sympathy where she felt none was due.

These characteristics found a harmonious tension with my father. His personal odyssey from conservative Anglican to Catholic socialist mirrored hers. She provided the belief that at times he doubted. Over 69 years of marriage their thoughts became inextricably entwined, but remained distinct and complementary: she was the Yin to his Yang. He died within a month from pneumonia. She died with dignity over 18 months of gradual decline in physical capability. Her optimism and her passion, at the thought of rejoining him, was undimmed to the end.

Elizabeth, Countess of Longford. Born 30 August 1906, London. Died 23 October 2002, Hurst Green, east Sussex.

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