‍WHEN journalist and author Hunter Davies took over as editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, he was told to make it more British. He did. But it wasn’t always easy.

‍

‍In a revealing article about his early days in 1976 he tells how he received some transparencies from a journalist in Plymouth.

‍

‍“They were paintings by a 49-year-old seaside landlady,” he said. “She was showing her work for the first time at a Plymouth arts centre.”

‍

‍Hunter was impressed. They were different. Colourful and imaginative and focussed around people from everyday life.

‍

‍“I looked at them and laughed,” he said. “Not often did I smile at any of our colour mag pics. I took them to the art department and said: “Look aren’t these funny!”

‍

‍The art editor flicked through them on his lightbox and replied: “Derivative, naïve and amateur! The seasides of Britain are full of Sunday afternoon painters doing this sort of boring stuff. Next!”

‍

‍Hunter went back to his office furious. He had bowed to the art desk’s visual wisdom for two years as he knew ‘bugger all’ about photography and design. This time though, he wasn’t having any of it.

‍

‍He went back to the art desk and said: “Hard cheese, I am the editor of this mag, we are doing this in the next edition!”

‍

‍Hunter then rang the landlady himself, to make sure she existed. He talked to her about her life and ordered the freelancer in Plymouth to do a proper interview, he told the Oldie magazine.

‍

‍That lady was Beryl Cook who was to become known in England for her comical paintings of people whom she encountered in everyday life, enjoying themselves in pubs; out shopping or on a hen night.

‍

‍She was a shy and very private person who did not take up painting until her thirties. Her work depicted flamboyant and extrovert characters very different from herself.

‍

‍And there is no doubt that Hunter helped her on the road to fame. The Sunday Times magazine featured her paintings across five pages the following week, including the front cover.

‍

‍Because she was unknown, she was introduced unnamed and was identified on the cover as a “seaside landlady.”

‍

‍In 1995 she was awarded an OBE and the Royal Mail reproduced one of her paintings as a first-class postage stamp.

‍

‍When Hunter looked at her paintings for sale, there was one he particularly liked: ‘Three Girls in Bikinis’ showing them eyes closed, spread out flat in the garden. It reminded him of his sisters in the backyard of their Carlisle council house in the Fifties, trying desperately to get a tan.

‍

‍He offered to buy it from her. She hadn’t sold many at this time in her career, just 10 out of 70. It was selling for £45 but he got it for £20 as it wasn’t very big and done on hardboard.

‍

‍Just recently, he was looking at the painting when he noticed something he had missed for 50 years. Next to the sunbathing women there was a plant pot. Looking closer he saw a small image on it, like a face. It was a self-portrait of Beryl.

‍

‍Her paintings today sell for £60,000 upwards. “Gawd knows what this is worth now,” he says.

‍

‍Beryl died on May 28, 2008, aged 81 at her home in Plymouth.

‍

‍Rosie Kennedy in London with her father Joseph before
the lobotomy to change her 

‍

‍KENNEDY BEAUTY ADORED THE FATHER WHO DESTROYED HER

‍SOCIETY beauty Rosemary Kennedy, the sister of American President, JFK, was born into one of her country’s most prominent political families. They were royalty, and she had to behave correctly in the public eye. She didn’t.

‍

‍So, her father, driven by pride and ambition, secretly sent her for a lobotomy, and paid a doctor to drill a hole into her brain. A sterilised rod was slipped in … and Rosie, who was once presented to royalty at Buckingham Palace, wasn’t Rosie any more. She became a shell of herself.

‍

‍This was the awful truth the Press discovered after she disappeared from society at 23 and went into a mental home. And it was all because her father Joseph Kennedy, whom she idolised and trusted, was grooming his sons for political stardom — and she was an embarrassment, but she didn’t know it.

‍

‍Rosie was born on Friday, September 17, 1918, in the city of Brookline, Massachusetts, which at the time was in the grip of the Spanish Flu epidemic that would eventually kill nearly 50 million people worldwide. 

‍The workload led to her birth doctor being delayed by other patients.

‍

‍During her mother’s labour, Rosie’s head was already emerging and the midwife reportedly told her to keep her legs clamped together to prevent the birth until the doctor arrived. She followed the instructions for two agonising hours. Finally, he came.

‍

‍As the years went by, Rosie developed behavioural and educational difficulties. Specialists told the Kennedys that her development was due to oxygen deprivation suffered because of the “uterine accident” at birth.

‍

‍Her disabilities were often hidden or disguised by the family to avoid the stigma of being associated with ‘defective genes’ that might reflect on Jack and Robert Kennedy’s career path to the Presidency.

‍

‍Rosie wasn’t good at learning. But there was one thing she excelled at — love. She loved and idolised her father. When he was appointed ambassador to the UK by President Franklin D Roosevelt in 1938, the family relocated to England. The beauty and charm of teenager Rosie attracted the hearts of the British press.

‍

‍In May 1938, she and her sister Kathleen were presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace.

‍

‍Fleet Street newspapers plastered photographs of 19-year-old Rosemary on their front pages. The Evening Standard swooned over “the beautiful, Miss Rosemary Kennedy in her dress of white and tulle embroidered with silver”.

‍

‍But when Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, the family hurried back to America; only Rosie stayed behind. She believed her father had kept her to show her off on his arm. In her mind, he wanted her to himself. The reality was he wanted to keep an eye on her. Her life was marred by saying embarrassing things, stumbles and blunders,

‍

‍But Joseph’s Nazi sympathies, combined with his outspoken opinions that Britain could not win the war and “democracy was finished”, made his withdrawal inevitable. In November 1940, with America on the brink of joining the conflict, he was sent back home, his political career in ruins. Rosie accompanied him and her life took a tragic downward turn.

‍

‍She had violent seizures and temper tantrums, lashing out at her younger siblings and the children in her charge. In one incident, she attacked her small, white-haired grandfather until she was pulled away.

‍

‍Shut up in a convent, she grew defiant of restrictions. The nuns could not control her. She went missing, only to be found walking around the streets at 2am.

‍

‍She met men in bars who were “happy to give her the comfort and sex”, she needed said author Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff in her serialised book ‘The Missing Kennedy.’ And in November 1941, her father, without consulting his wife, authorised two surgeons to perform the lobotomy on her.

‍

‍The treatment offered hope that patients would turn into useful members of society. It was hailed as ‘a cure for psychological delinquencies such as alcoholism and ‘nymphomania’.

‍

‍The operation was a catastrophic failure. Rosie could no longer walk or talk. Even after years of therapy, she could utter no more than a few words and never recovered the use of her limbs.

‍

‍She was to live for the next 64 years hidden away in institutions, needing full-time care and died in 2005, aged 86.

‍

‍FANCY THAT

‍In 1878 the Edinburgh News carried a story headlined: ‘The voyage of an inebriate’ and the Dundee Courier carried the same story headlined ‘One way to escape sea sickness’. The reports said: ‘Mr John Wren woke up in hospital in Cleveland, Ohio and asked the nurse for a large scotch. He didn’t know where he was after a drinking binge in England that lasted seven weeks and led to him travelling 3,000 miles on a one-way travel ticket.’

‍

‍SAD STORY OF A FRENCH TREE

‍WITH BLOOD ON ITS BRANCHES

‍DIARIES are always a good source of history and no more so than in the Second World War.

‍

‍But so many of them are just published as notes and can be boring to read unless you are passionate about the subject.

‍

‍Not the diary of French school teacher Jean Guéhenno, who lived in Paris during the German occupation in the Second World War. The New York Times published extracts from it when it was published in 1914. Called ‘Diary of the Dark Years’, 1940-1944, his wonderful, descriptive words truly capture the moment.

‍

‍Like other townspeople at the time, Jean went to a site that had been regularly used by German firing squads. He wanted to see a particular tree: This is what he writes:

‍

‍“We draw near. It is really there. The tree has been partly sawn off, ripped apart by bullets at the level of a man’s heart.

‍

‍“It was used all last winter, four or five times every week. The earth is all trampled down at the foot of the tree where victims stood. It has lost its bark. It is black from the blood that drenched it.”

‍

‍German soldiers sometimes emerge as human beings in the diary.

‍In another piece he recounts watching an old German soldier in the square outside his school.

‍

‍“Every morning around eight o’clock, German vehicles assembled under the trees along the sidewalk. A few Germans guarded the carts and horses.

‍

‍“One old soldier captured my attention. I had watched him on and off for at least six months. The German’s clothing and boots were worn out, and he stood at the head of a team of horses.

‍

‍“He seems so alone, so resigned, so distressed. He only has one comrade —his comrade through exile and war, for all the many years they’ve been roaming together across the roads of Europe from east to west and west to east, through rain and shine, dust and snow.

‍

‍“His comrade is a horse, an old black horse who has endured countless miseries and victories. Every Wednesday I see them exchange tokens of affection. The old horse pulls on his yoke until he can touch his soldier companion with his muzzle.

‍

‍“Then he nibbles gently at his shoulder, so that finally the old soldier turns around and rubs the nostrils of the happy animal with his thick fingers”

‍

‍TERRY MANNERS

‍20 April 2026