Cecil Blanche Woodham-Smith ( Fitzgerald; 29 April 1896 – 16 March 1977)
CBE was a British
historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...
and
biographer
Biographers are authors who write an account of another person's life, while autobiographers are authors who write their own biography.
Biographers
Countries of working life: Ab=Arabia, AG=Ancient Greece, Al=Australia, Am=Armenian, AR=Ancient Rome ...
. She wrote four popular history books, each dealing with a different aspect of the
Victorian era
In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the reign of Queen Victoria, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. Slightly different definitions are sometimes used. The era followed the ...
.
Early life
Cecil Woodham-Smith was born in 1896 in
Tenby
Tenby () is a seaside town and community (Wales), community in the county of Pembrokeshire, Wales. It lies within Carmarthen Bay.
Notable features include of sandy beaches and the Pembrokeshire Coast Path, the 13th-century Tenby Town Walls, me ...
,
Wales
Wales ( ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is bordered by the Irish Sea to the north and west, England to the England–Wales border, east, the Bristol Channel to the south, and the Celtic ...
.
[ Her family, the Fitzgeralds, were a well-known Irish family, one of her ancestors being Lord Edward Fitzgerald, hero of the ]Irish Rebellion of 1798
The Irish Rebellion of 1798 (; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ''The Turn out'', ''The Hurries'', 1798 Rebellion) was a popular insurrection against the British Crown in what was then the separate, but subordinate, Kingdom of Ireland. The m ...
. Her father Colonel James FitzGerald had served in the Indian Army during the Sepoy Mutiny; her mother's family included General Sir Thomas Picton, a distinguished soldier who was killed at Waterloo.
She attended the Royal School for Officers' Daughters in Bath, until her expulsion for taking unannounced leave for a trip to the National Gallery
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of more than 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current di ...
. She finished her schooling at a French convent
A convent is an enclosed community of monks, nuns, friars or religious sisters. Alternatively, ''convent'' means the building used by the community.
The term is particularly used in the Catholic Church, Lutheran churches, and the Anglican ...
and afterwards entered St Hilda's College, Oxford. She graduated with a second-class degree in English in 1917.[ ]
In 1928 she married George Ivon Woodham-Smith,[ a distinguished London solicitor with whom she had an exceptionally close and deep relationship until his death in 1968. She possessed a gift for historical writing, but postponed her career until her two children had gone off to ]boarding school
A boarding school is a school where pupils live within premises while being given formal instruction. The word "boarding" is used in the sense of "room and board", i.e. lodging and meals. They have existed for many centuries, and now extend acr ...
. In the meantime, she wrote pot-boilers under the pseudonym Janet Gordon;[Geoffrey C. Ainsworth. ]
Brief Biographies of British Mycologists
' (John Webster, David Moore, eds.), p. 177 ( British Mycological Society; 1996) () this training was to stand her in good stead as an historian, as she mastered the art of writing entertaining narrative.
Career
Her first book as a historian, a biography of Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale (; 12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) was an English Reform movement, social reformer, statistician and the founder of modern nursing. Nightingale came to prominence while serving as a manager and trainer of nurses during th ...
published in 1950 by Constable
A constable is a person holding a particular office, most commonly in law enforcement. The office of constable can vary significantly in different jurisdictions. ''Constable'' is commonly the rank of an officer within a police service. Other peo ...
, took her straight to the top of her profession.[ Her meticulous research had taken nine years, and the book succeeded in restoring Nightingale's reputation, which had dwindled following ]Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey (; 1 March 1880 – 21 January 1932) was an English writer and critic. A founding member of the Bloomsbury Group and author of ''Eminent Victorians'', he established a new form of biography in which psychology, psychologic ...
's representation of her in ''Eminent Victorians
''Eminent Victorians'' is a book by Lytton Strachey (one of the older members of the Bloomsbury Group), first published in 1918, and consisting of biography, biographies of four leading figures from the Victorian era. Its fame rests on the irreve ...
''. Acclaimed for its combination of scholarship and readability, ''Florence Nightingale'' won the James Tait Black Award[ for biography.
Her next book was equally well received. ''The Reason Why'' (1953, Constable) was a study of the Charge of the Light Brigade, a military disaster during the ]Crimean War
The Crimean War was fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of the Ottoman Empire, the Second French Empire, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Kingdom of Sardinia (1720–1861), Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont fro ...
and one of the defining events of the Victorian age. It became her most popular book, and afterwards she explained to a television audience how she wrote it: working at a gallop through thirty-six hours non-stop without food or other break until the last gun was fired, when she poured a stiff drink and slept for two days.[ Though the work was critically acclaimed, it came to the conclusion that the allies had lost the Crimean War, which most historians conclude is not true.
She produced two more notable works. The first was '' The Great Hunger: Ireland: 1845-1849'' (1962), a history of the Great Famine of the 1840s, which was critical of the British government's handling of the famine, in particular singling out Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan for criticism, although she did acknowledge that the British government assisted during the first phase of the famine. The second was the first volume of ''Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times'' (1972). She was unable to complete the next volume of the biography, and died in London in 1977][ at the age of 80.
Cecil Woodham-Smith was appointed CBE in 1960. She received honorary doctorates from the ]National University of Ireland
The National University of Ireland (NUI) () is a federal university system of ''constituent universities'' (previously called '' constituent colleges'') and ''recognised colleges'' set up under the Irish Universities Act 1908, and signifi ...
in 1964 and the University of St Andrews
The University of St Andrews (, ; abbreviated as St And in post-nominals) is a public university in St Andrews, Scotland. It is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, oldest of the four ancient universities of Scotland and, f ...
in 1965.[ In November 1965 she delivered the RCP's Lloyd Roberts Lecture. She became an honorary fellow of St Hilda's College (her alma mater) in 1967.][
Alan Bennett wrote of her:]
Cecil was a frail woman with a tiny bird-like skull, looking more like Elizabeth I
Elizabeth I (7 September 153324 March 1603) was List of English monarchs, Queen of England and List of Irish monarchs, Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death in 1603. She was the last and longest reigning monarch of the House of Tudo ...
(in later life) than Edith Sitwell ever did (and minus her sheet metal earrings). Irish, she had a Firbankian wit and a lovely turn of phrase. ‘Do you know the Atlantic at all?’ she once asked me and I put the line into ''Habeas Corpus
''Habeas corpus'' (; from Medieval Latin, ) is a legal procedure invoking the jurisdiction of a court to review the unlawful detention or imprisonment of an individual, and request the individual's custodian (usually a prison official) to ...
'' and got a big laugh on it. From a grand Irish family she was quite snobbish; talking of someone she said: ‘Then he married a Mitford … but that’s a stage everybody goes through.’ Even the most ordinary remark would be given her own particular twist and she could be quite camp. Conversation had once turned, as conversations will, to fork-lift trucks. Feeling that industrial machinery might be remote from Cecil’s sphere of interest I said: ‘Do you know what a fork-lift truck is?’ She looked at me in her best Annie Walker manner. ‘I do. To my cost.’
References
External links
LibraryThing author profile
*The Great Hunger, Referenc
{{DEFAULTSORT:Woodham-Smith, Cecil
British biographers
1896 births
1977 deaths
Alumni of St Hilda's College, Oxford
People educated at the Royal School for Daughters of Officers of the Army
People from Tenby
Great Famine (Ireland)
British women biographers
Welsh people of Irish descent
James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients
20th-century British historians
20th-century British women writers
British women historians
Historians of Ireland
20th-century pseudonymous writers
Pseudonymous women writers