My aunt Helen Mann, who has died aged 93, labored variously as a secretary, mannequin, author of a youngsters’s information to London and as a curator of work.
At all times fashionable, she mixed immense practicality with a watch for color and clear strains; she had a expertise for creating lovely areas indoors and out. Helen turned her hand to arranging flowers for events and weddings, making curtains and baking bread when cash was brief, however her time on the Economist journal from her mid-50s supplied her with an expert life and fellowship to which she remained devoted.
Helen joined the employees of the Economist within the Eighties and her many roles there included studying and responding to readers’ letters, commissioning artwork for the courtyard of the Economist’s workplace constructing in St James’s Road, central London, and curating their artwork assortment.
She loved the joy of Thursday nights when employees and journalists would keep late to “put the paper to mattress” and dinner was laid on within the top-floor eating room. Helen liked the tradition of the Economist and remained actively concerned with the journal, persevering with for quite a few years as a temp, lengthy after her formal retirement in 1995.
Regardless of being a lifelong smoker, she cycled in every single place, solely giving up her bicycle in her final 12 months. Aged 83 she took half in a sponsored cycle journey throughout India in support of Robert Winston’s reproductive well being charity.
Born in Stirling, Helen was the eldest of 4 daughters of Dorette (nee Wilson) and Lesley Cuthbert, a GP. In 1940, she and her sister Katharine, aged 9 and 7, had been evacuated to stick with household in Australia as a part of the Youngsters’s Abroad Reception Board, not returning dwelling till 1945.
Helen thrived; she liked bare-back driving in New South Wales and have become an skilled diver. Little shock that she later inspired her personal youngsters, Alexandra and Justin, to settle there of their twenties, and continued to go to yearly till prevented from doing so by ill-health.
Again in Scotland after the second world struggle, Helen went to the Beacon faculty at Bridge of Allan, close to Stirling, and spent a 12 months in France at a world faculty in Grenoble, earlier than beginning nurse coaching in Glasgow, which she had to surrender due to a again damage. She had a short-lived profession in modelling and likewise went to secretarial school.
She married Bryan Mann in 1959 they usually spent their early marriage in Edinburgh, the place Helen labored as a secretary for a neighborhood restaurateur. They moved to London within the early Sixties, then to a watermill close to Dorking, Surrey, and eventually to Ramsbury in Wiltshire, the place Bryan dealt in antiques. When her youngsters had been small, Helen co-authored a guidebook, Youngsters’s London (1973), with Caroline Brakspeare.
Her marriage to Bryan resulted in 1982 and Helen moved to London, initially to Pimlico earlier than discovering a flat in Chelsea. She remained there till 2022, when she moved to a care dwelling close by, whereas persevering with to get pleasure from lunch out at native eating places with household and buddies.
She is survived by Alexandra and Justin, 5 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and her sisters Katharine and Jill.
