Monica Dickens

Biography
Monica Enid Dickens (1915-1992) was the great-grand daughter of Charles Dickens. After being expelled from St Paul’s School for Girls for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge, she did not take the conventional route of her class: debbery followed by marriage. Instead, she became a cook-general, giving many of her employers the rather uncomfortable experience of employing someone who was further up the social scale than they were. Out of this came the extremely amusing One Pair of Hands, followed by One Pair of Feet and My Turn to Make the Tea: also autobiographical, and describing her experiences respectively as a nurse and journalist. In 1951 she married Roy Stratton, a former US Marines Officer, and moved to the United States.

Many of her works were based on her own strong desire to right wrong: she worked with the NSPCC and the Samaritans (her novel The Listeners was based on her work with them) and in 1974 founded the first American branch of the Samaritans In Boston. She was also passionate about the work of the RSPCA, and drew on her experiences with them to write Cobbler’s Dream, in which a horribly maltreated horse is rescued and taken to Follyfoot Farm, which rescues horses. This was the start of probably her most successful series: it was filmed by Yorkshire Television, and was required viewing for any horsey child of that era. Her World’s End series also dealt with rescuing animals and to some extent children: although the premise of the series - a family of children whose parents are sailing round the world live in an old inn on their own save for an ever-increasing cast of animals, seems like the classic children’s adventure where parents are neatly removed, the series still managed to keep a foot in reality. The children’s life in World’s End Inn is precarious and they are frequently under threat from concerned adults and lack of money. You felt it could, it just could, have happened.

Monica Dickens returned to England after the death of her husband, and died in 1992, one of the best-selling novelists of her generation.

"If a car passes me when I'm on a horse, I always think: if I were in that car and saw me, I would wish I was me. Wistful children's faces, staring out of the back window, agree." Monica Dickens Talking of Horses

Sources: National Dictionary of Biography
Books and Writers and Wikipedia
Many thanks to Dawn Harrison and Hannah Fleetwood for all their help with the pictures.