Madge burnand biography examples
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Born to a feckless father and an inept mother, they have been dumped into the care of their grandparents, who plainly cannot cope.
The year is 1940 and, desperate to reduce their burden, the grandparents arrange for the two youngest of the brood — twin brothers, aged six months — to be adopted by a trusted family friend from London.
The friend’s name is Pamela Lyndon Travers.
After being introduced by AE Russell, the women shared a flat in London, and later rented a cottage together in Sussex. He also had a daughter called Kate, now a brilliant academic.
Like his brother, Anthony Hone was very bright but succumbed to chronic alcoholism, and it cost him both his career in public relations and his family.
Travers, apparently, was not fond of the Julie Andrews/Dick Van Dyke musical and particularly hated the animated dancing penguins.
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- Vale, Allison. Travers wrote five sequels to "Mary Poppins" and, as "Saving Mr. Banks" depicted, she reluctantly sold the rights to Disney, who produced the famous film.
But Travers Goff fell ill and died prematurely, forcing his subsequently impoverished family to move to a tin-roofed shack and rely on the charity of various aunts.
No fairy tale: Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson as Walt Disney and PL Travers in the film Saving Mr. Banks
Pamela, who had doted on Travers, never recovered from losing him so early, and according to friends she spent the remainder of her 96 years vainly seeking a father figure.
By the age of 17 — by then strikingly tall and slim, with a frizz of auburn curls — she had left home, working briefly as a secretary before becoming a theatre actress.
Sources
- ↑ FamilySearch Record: QKQS-KQML
- ↑ FamilySearch Record: QK31-M3VD
- ↑https://billiongraves.com/grave/Madge-Burnand/16974461
Is Madge your ancestor?
For all his charm, looks, academic promise and literary connections, he disappointed his mother by taking modest jobs at a friend’s fashion company and in an antique bookshop.
But again, we cannot know for sure.
Equally intriguing was her relationship with Madge Burnand, daughter of the playwright and Punch editor Sir Francis Burnand, who, at Russell’s suggestion, became her flatmate in 1927.
To raised eyebrows, the two women lived together for more than ten years, their friendship, as Lawson writes ‘growing more and more intense’.
There were frequent hot-tempered rows which suggested they were entwined, and speculation was heightened when, during a holiday in Italy, Madge Burnand photographed Travers topless on the beach: a shockingly daring act in those days.
‘Take the two of them,’ he implored her, ‘they’re only small.’ Fatefully, the author refused his entreaties.
[Anthony Hone] was a Jekyll and Hyde when he was drinking — I never knew who would come through the door'
- his ex-wife, Frances
She removed Camillus first to her Sussex cottage, and then, as the Nazi air-raids grew uncomfortably close, to America, where she flaunted him among the New York literati before taking him to Arizona to camp with Red Indians.
When they returned, his upbringing was no less exotic.
Her ambitions were altogether loftier, though, and she quickly made overtures to the legendary George A. E. Russell, editor of the Irish Statesman and leading light in an elite circle that included Yeats.
So, as she approached her 40th birthday and had all but given up hope of forming a lasting relationship, Travers began to long for a baby.
To live up to her own unfulfilled ambitions, it would have to be a baby with Irish blood and a strong literary lineage.
She found this identikit child through Macnamara, who was friendly with the Hone family — an old dynasty of celebrated artists and writers — and knew that the grandfather, Joseph, and his wife, Vera, were struggling to raise their son’s children.
According to family members this week, Joseph Hone pleaded with Travers to spare the twins the pain of separation.
Little, Brown Book Group. But not just any baby. Aged 40 she adopted an Irish baby boy, who became known as Camillus Travers. and it affected the rest of his life’.
Camillus’s widow Frances Hone and his children were invited to the London premiere of Saving Mr Banks last week, and introduced to Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson.
And as the author of a popular new children’s book about a nanny with magical powers, the eccentric writer — who is unmarried and yearns for a son — seems the ideal person.
Pamela Travers, the woman who wrote Mary Poppins, is pictured with her adopted son Camillus Hone in the Forties.
Her fascination for Ireland and its writers had been fuelled by her father, who (in addition to lying that he was Irish himself) had read her the poetry of such greats as William Butler Yeats.