Baines’s love-affair with the sub-continent began during the Second World War

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Published: July 24, 2010

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Baines’s love-affair with the sub-continent began during the Second World War. He served there with the Royal Engineers from 1941 to 1946, being seconded to the newly formed exhibitions division information department of the government of India as director of the design studio. Baines brought to his favourite medium, charcoal, an uncommon warmth of handling, especially when recording the people of India. He worked to a discipline, unfashionable for many years, which forged such exponents as Eric Kennington, A.K Lawrence and James Stroudley. Harry Baines was one of Britain’s finest realistic figurative draughtsmen. Tongue-tied in youth, she was determined to make herself heard in old age, and the lengthy telephone calls her friends learnt to expect ranged from lively debates to fiery harangues.Ursula Wyndham’s memoirs articulate an authentic voice, crying out often in great pain but always with courage and style. It was an unhappy story she told, but not a sad one.Peter WashingtonUrsula Constance Wyndham, writer: born London 20 September 1913; died Petworth, Sussex 9 October 1995..

With the manners of a county lady she combined the outlook of a bandit chief. The daughter, friend and mistress of colonels, it sometimes seemed that she would have made a better colonel than any of them. Her tall, spare figure, military bearing and beetling brows inspired alarm in friends and enemies alike, not least because she so evidently relished the prospect of battle.Generous and forbearing in peacetime, she could be wild and dangerous when roused. If she made up the queries herself, that was testimony to her inventiveness and her fondness for giving categorical advice on problems she had meditated for many years.For, as many of her friends discovered, Ursula Wyndham could be a formidable figure. When her nephew Lord Egremont gave her an 80th-birthday party at Petworth, the average age of the guests was well under 50.Her interest in others was fed by the success of her memoirs which brought not only fan letters but also a surprising new career as television personality and journalist For a while she wrote regularly as agony aunt in the Oldie. But, above all, friendship was vitally important to her, especially the friendship of younger people. She travelled extensively and wrote several other unpublished books, including a life of Queen Charlotte She was an expert needlewoman.

The activity served a double purpose: being obliged to pasture the animals on verges, she read in the hedgerows while they grazed by the road and thus acquired the education earlier denied her.Though claiming to despise the conventions of upper-class life, she was fascinated by genealogy and social history. After leaving her parents’ home she lived alone in Sussex and bred goats. It was not well received.The fundamental unhappiness of her life was assuaged in part by many pleasures and interests. During the Second World War she worked in a factory, where for the first time she enjoyed good relationships with ordinary people This was a revelation. When her lover’s wife became ill, for example, Wyndham – an excellent cook – thoughtfully left a steak-and-kidney pie on her rival’s doorstep as an anonymous gift. The book is a richly comic account of their misunderstandings etched by a sharp eye in piquant style, though not always in full consciousness of its implications.


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