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Abstract

Bagnold, Enid 1889–1981 Novelist and playwright, best known for her children’s book National Velvet (1935). Enid Bagnold, daughter of Major Bagnold, a Commander of the Royal Engineers, and Ethel Alger, was born in Rochester. She led something of a military childhood, spending part of it in Jamaica, where her father had a command, and part in Surrey, at a progressive school run by Mrs Huxley (mother of Aldous; niece of Matthew Arnold). Having been ‘finished’ in Paris and ‘brought out’ on Shooter’s Hill she left home and took up lodgings in Chelsea, where she studied drawing with Walter Sickert. For a while she worked for Frank Harris, then editor of Hearth and Home, as a ‘sort of journalist’. She became his lover, but was not in love with him. The love of her life was Prince Antoine Bibesco, who later married Elizabeth Asquith. With the outbreak of the First World War Bagnold worked as a VAD nurse at the large military hospital, the Royal Herbert, Shooters Hill. She published Diary Without Dates (1917), an impressionistic piece that comments on, among other things, the unfeeling nature of routine hospital procedures. Publication coincided with the exposure of such procedures in a French hospital: the book seemed to exemplify these and was the subject of a leader in the Daily Mail. Bagnold was instantly dismissed. After the war she joined the FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) and went to France as an ambulance driver, an experience that provided material for The Happy Foreigner (1920), her first novel.