Miss Mary Grieve: a trailblazer for women

Who was Mary Grieve OBE?

As editor of Woman magazine for 22 years, Mary Grieve was one the leading journalists of her time and a trailblazer for women in the publishing industry. At its height Woman had a circulation of over 4 million, but actual readership was much higher. At one point it was estimated that 1 in 4 of the UK population (not all of them women) read the magazine. This gave her unprecedented reach into people’s homes. It speaks to how much she was in tune with people’s daily lives but also to the influence the magazine (and Mary Grieve as editor) will have had in shaping those lives. In comparison, today no similar magazine has a readership of more than a few hundred thousand.

Mary Grieve grew up in an upper middle-class religious family in Glasgow, but moved to London to work as a journalist, after being advised by a leading Scottish publisher that journalism was not a career for women. “A waste of time unless you were to write the bits about weddings and ladies’ dresses.” But things weren’t much more enlightened in London where she was pigeonholed into publications like The Nursing Mirror and Mother.

The launch of Woman magazine in 1937 had not gone well for its publishers and Mary Grieve was part of a team brought in to try to save it. Her big break came in 1940 when she was promoted to Editor after the (male) editor joined the RAF. And she never looked back, retiring aged 55 in 1962 when Woman was sold to the Mirror newspaper group.

Mary wrote an autobiography Millions Made My Story (Victor Gollancz Ltd,1964) which is a good place to look for more about her professional career, her thoughts on the influence of women’s magazines and on the experience of women across the middle of the 20th century. But of more interest to us is Mary’s life in Long Marston which she writes fondly about too.

Life in Long Marston

Mary Grieve and Dee Powell lived in Old Church Cottage, the thatched house at the bottom of Chapel Lane, from soon after the start of the Second World War to the 1970s. It was sitting in that cottage that Mary wrote her autobiography. Dee is a constant presence in Mary’s autobiography, without her ever describing the nature of their relationship, as was common in those times. It seems the village was very accepting of the two women living as a couple: no one sought to label their relationship either.

It was Dee who found the cottage as a refuge from London and the Blitz. It seems she had friends in the village and it was convenient for Woman’s printers Odhams in Watford. First they rented Old Church Cottage from the Gregory’s at 10 shillings (50p) a week, then as they gradually – and unexpectedly – fell in love with Long Marston and its residents, they bought it. Improvements were made and in echoes of the cottage’s later owners the Noakes, much effort went into the garden.

They played a very active part in local village life, especially Dee (or Miss Powell as she was known in the village), as Mary was often away in London for work. They loved giving parties for family, visiting friends and for local children. One of their major investments was putting in a swimming pool which was very popular, especially Miss Powell’s swimming lessons for children in the village. Young people played an important role in their lives. Mary Grieve had four god-children in the village (including my husband Tim’s late aunt Gill Allen) so I am hoping that there are others with memories of Mary and Dee that they can share with me and Tring Rural History.

Mary sums their life in the village beautifully: “In the summer waves of young people come down to our pool and as evening falls, we sit under the clematis monata and fry sausages and brew coffee and look out along the old moat past the Norman tower to the sunset and continue our conversation till the western sky is dark and the stars are up.”

James Kempton