ANNE SCOTT-JAMESAnne Scott-James, who died on 13 May, 2009, aged 96, was a pioneering female journalist and later an expert writer on gardening.Described as “one of the first female career journalists” and later “Fleet Street royalty”, she was among the industry’s most respected figures.She was best known as a leading columnist in the Daily Mail during the 1960s and before that she had edited Harper's Bazaar and been woman's editor at the Sunday Express.She was born on 5 April, 1913, and both her father and mother worked in the press. She studied at Somerville College, Oxford, but left to join the staff of Vogue in 1934, initially as a secretary, but then as a columnist and beauty editor.She was woman’s editor on the Picture Post during the Second World War before moving to Harper's Bazaar where she edited the British edition from 1945 to 1951 – the likes of Cecil Beaton, John Betjeman and Elizabeth David contributed to the magazine.She took 1952 out to write a novel, In the Mink, then joined the Sunday Express for a four-year period. She had brief spells at the Sunday Dispatch and Daily Express, before beginning her column for the Daily Mail in 1960.By-products of her fame as a writer included appearing on radio panel shows and she also gave evidence in defence of DH Lawrence at the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial.In 1968 she went freelance and one of the topics she wrote about was gardening. Describing her style, she said: “I would try to see gardens through the eyes of the gifted people who had created them. I wanted to choose gardens which would be individual or even eccentric, exciting in design or plantsmanship or both, and probably not very large, so that the reader could glean ideas rather than admire from afar.”Her subsequent books of gardening included Down to Earth (1971), Sissinghurst - The Making of a Garden (1974) The Pleasure Garden: An Illustrated History of British Gardening (written with her second husband, the cartoonist Osbert Lancaster, in 1977), all of which are regarded as genre classics. In 1978 she became a member of the council of the Royal Horticultural Society and sat as a judge at shows.She wrote an autobiography, Sketches from a Life (1993), in which she wrote: “Most lives are untidy, and mine is no exception, a mixture of happiness and misery, success and failure, false starts and strokes of luck, but it has rarely been boring.”Osbert Lancaster died in 1986. Anne Scott-James was survived by a son and daughter.
Keep me informed of updates
