Anne Scott James

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 October 2004

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the journalist and writer Anne Scott-James. Now in her 92nd year, Anne Scott-James came from a line of critics and writers and became one of the first women career journalists, editors and columnists, before embarking on a second career as the author of a series of gardening books. After Oxford she joined Vogue - first as an assistant to a secretary and then went from writing the odd picture caption to proper articles. She became editor of Harper's Bazaar - and during her magazine career she commissioned work from such figures as Cecil Beaton, John Betjemen and Elizabeth David. Her marriage to Macdonald Hastings collapsed and in the early 60s she met the writer and illustrator Sir Osbert Lancaster and they married in 1967. At around the same time she embarked on a new stage in her career - gardening writing. Her first book, Down to Earth, and The Pleasure Garden, which she produced jointly with Sir Osbert, are now being republished as gardening classics.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Double Concerto for Two Violins in D by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: Semi-attached Couple by Emily Eden Luxury: Nightdress made of pure white cotton

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a journalist and writer. She is, she says, one of the first generation
0:34.9	of career girls. She went to St Paul's school in London where her music teacher was Gustav
0:39.5	Holst, then on to Oxford which she left early to get on with life.
0:44.0	Starting in a lowly job on Vogue, she went on to become
0:47.0	Woman's Editor of Picture Post during the War,
0:49.0	and later editor of Harper's Bazaar.
0:52.0	She then became one of the first star personality
0:55.6	columnists writing for the Sunday Express and the Daily Mail and later she
0:59.0	enjoyed a second career writing books about gardens and gardening.
1:03.0	Her private life was less well ordered.
1:05.0	Her marriage to the writer and television reporter
1:08.0	McDonald Hastings ended in divorce
1:10.0	and although she was subsequently very happily married to the cartoonist
1:13.6	Osbert Lancaster, her relationship with her son Max himself a highly successful
1:18.3	journalist seems to have been a difficult one. Most lives are untidy and mine is no exception she says but it has
1:25.5	rarely been boring. She is and Scott James and you were a if not the Queen
1:31.9	Pin of Fleet Street back in the 50s and the 60s on the Sunday Express
1:35.8	and the Daily Mail.
1:36.9	What was it like then?
1:37.9	Because it was quite a male-dominated place, wasn't it?
	...

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