Patricia Mary Woods (was Temple-Muir) (was Lyttelton) Braithwaite Gaskell (1929-2018)

PERSONAL DETAILS

Full name: Patricia Mary Braithwaite (née Gaskell).
Date of birth: Saturday, 14th September, 1929.
Birthplace: Edmonton, London, England.
Date of death: Wednesday, 4th April, 2018 (aged 88 years).
Place of death: Sudbury, Suffolk, England.

FAMILY

PARENTS

John Wellesley Gaskell (1901-1941)
John Wellesley Gaskell
(1901-1941)
Olive Elizabeth Braithwaite (was Gaskell) (née Baker) (1902-1990)
Olive Elizabeth Braithwaite (was Gaskell)
(née Baker)
(1902-1990)

SIBLINGS

John Philip Wellesley Gaskell (1926-2001)
John Philip Wellesley Gaskell
(1926-2001)

1st HUSBAND

Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton (1921-2008).

Date of marriage: Thursday, 19th August, 1948.
Place of marriage: Hampstead, London, England.
Divorced: 1952.

"Humphrey Richard Adeane Lyttelton (23 May 1921 – 25 April 2008), also known as Humph, was an English jazz musician and broadcaster from the aristocratic Lyttelton family." - Wikipedia

CHILDREN

2nd HUSBAND

Richard Horsfall Temple-Muir (1923-1989).

Date of marriage: Friday, 20th January, 1956.
Place of marriage: Chelsea, London, England.

"Muir, Richard Temple, known to friends as Dicky. Businessman. Graduate of King's College, Cambridge. Engaged to Lyndall in 1948. Publisher of magazine Autocourse. Proprietor of London restaurant, La Popotte. Married Patricia, ex-wife of Humphrey Lyttelton." - Antonia White, diaries 1926-1957 - Susan Chitty.

"David started his first company in 1949 with a friend from Cambridge, Dickie Muir, who initially provided the capital. Together, the two embarked on a series of publishing ventures, including London Information, a weekly broadsheet which gave details of events in the capital. In 1952, as managing director of Rowse Muir Publications Ltd, David founded Autocourse magazine, which was followed by Nuclear Power in 1956, Control in 1958, and Machine Age in 1960, thereby giving the company a scope of subject matter as broad as motor racing, machine automation and the geography of British engineering exports. As profits rose, the company expanded to become Rowse Muir International Ltd." - King's College Annual Report

"Almost as soon as they got back to Gardnor House the Amises were invited to visit the Edinburgh Festival by their friends Dickie and Patricia Temple-Muir. Dickie Temple-Muir owned a restaurant in Walton Street in London called La Popotte and co-owned the Roxburghe Hotel in Edinburgh." - The Life of Kingsley Amis

CHILDREN

3rd HUSBAND

Christopher Matthew Woods (1923-2016).

Date of marriage: 1992.
Place of marriage: Kensington, London, England.

Christopher Woods obituary from www.telegraph.co.uk (full obituary can be read here https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/03/18/christopher-woods-soe-officer---obituary/

"Christopher Woods, who has died aged 92, spent more than eight months with SOE as a British liaison officer in Italy behind the German lines; after the war, he was posted abroad as an officer in the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or MI6) under diplomatic cover."

"Christopher Matthew Woods was born at Dulwich on May 26 1923 and won a scholarship to Bradfield College. He went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, after the war to read History and Modern Languages with Russian."

"From July 1945 to December 1946 he served with the Political Warfare Division in Java and Sumatra. He retired from the Army in January 1947 and the following year began working for MI6.

He served at the Tehran station from 1950 to 1952, and was transferred to Ismailia in the Canal Zone in 1953, and then withdrawn to Nicosia. He was appointed head of station in Milan in 1957, and moved back to head office at Broadway Buildings in Victoria in 1958.

He was appointed to the Rome station in 1962, and was promoted Controller, Soviet Bloc in 1965."

Upon his retirement in 1988 he succeeded the redoubtable Edward Boxshall as the Foreign Office’s SOE Adviser and completed an official history of SOE in Italy. In 2006 he contributed a chapter on operations in Italy to SOE: A New Instrument of War, published by the Imperial War Museum.

Settled in Suffolk, he listed his interests in Who’s Who as birds, churches, music and books. Throughout his career he maintained the charm and bearing of the regiment into which he was commissioned at the age of 20.

Christopher Woods was appointed CMG in 1979; he described it as a “Cold War medal”. He contributed to a Festschrift for MRD Foot and to published records of various British and Italian gatherings of SOE. A family memoir, Petrol and Sawdust, was published privately."

RESIDENCES

1929-1934 - 63, The Ridgeway, Hendon, England.

1934 - 3, Grey Close, Hampstead, London, England.

1934-1937 - "Pixholm", Chorley Wood Road , Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire, England.

1946-1948 - 15, Kidderpore Gardens, Hampstead, London, England.

1948 - 21a, Canfield Gardens, London, England.

1950 - 27, Buckland Crescent, Hampstead, London, England.

1951-1952 - 67, Belsize Park, Hampstead, London, England.

1958-1965 - 33 Molyneux House, Molyneux Street, Marylebone, London, England.

1978 - Wickham Place, Wickham Bishops, Witham, Essex, England.

1991-1999 - Bildeston Hall, Duke Street, Bildeston, Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

1999-2000 - 4, St James Green, Southwold, Suffolk, England.

2000-2005 - Old Bank House, 12 Market Hill, Framlingham, Suffolk, England.

2007-2018 - 31 Friars Street, Sudbury, Suffolk, England.

EDUCATION

1946: Camberwell School of Arts, Peckham Road, Camberwell, London, England

Studied Illustration

ART

"Patricia Woods (formerly Lyttelton, then Temple Muir) was born in London in 1929. In 1946 she began her studies at Camberwell School of Art, studying illustration. Camberwell in the post war period was a hotbed of talent and the epicentre of the Neo-Romantic group of artists. Patricia’s illustration tutors included John Minton, Keith Vaughan and Edward Ardizzone. Alumni of the time included Terry Frost, Gillian Ayers, Alan Caiger-Smith and scores of other notable figures. Also studying illustration at this time was the jazz trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton, the two married in 1948. Patricia produced various magazine illustrations and book jackets throughout her career, latterly concentrating on architectural studies in pen and wash and commissions to paint and draw private houses. Her connection with Camberwell and the artists of her student period persisted and informed a growing collection of art, her wide circle of friends included Bernard Dunstan, Dodie Masterman, Philip Matthews, Michael Rothenstein, Richard Bawden and John Verney and many of the pictures in this collection are by close personal friends. In 1956 she married Dicky Temple Muir and moved to Essex, later settling in Framlingham, Bildeston and finally a Georgian town house in Friars Street Sudbury. Here she drew on her artistic skills to balance colour, form and texture, antique and modern furniture, ceramics and works of art and found objects to create a harmonious interior which beguiled anyone who saw it. This collection comprises the majority of items from Patricia’s estate, encompassing a lifetime of collecting and a particular artist’s eye for quality and originality. The lucky buyers of works from this sale will be purchasing paintings and objects imbued with personality." - The Patricia Woods Collection - Reeman Dansie

"I am glad to hear that you have got as far as having had an exhibition and hope it was a success financially and artistically. I suspect the talent comes through - going backwards - Olive, Cousin Lily (whose real name was Amy E. Baker) and Amy Enock (A.H. Enock's sister) who married Henry Dell, cousin Lily's father." - Joseph Guy Enock to Patricia - 1st April 1981

THE INTELLECTUAL ARISTOCRACY - NOEL GILROY ANNAN, BARON ANNAN

Patricia and her family are discussed in Noel Annan's essay "The Intellectual Aristocracy", which illustrates, according to Robert Fulford in the National Post, the "web of kinship that united British intellectuals in the 19th and early 20th centuries."

"But the Lytteltons do not belong in this world. They are aristocrats, politicians, business men, bishops, generals - and cricketers; and we must leave them through Mr. George Lyttelton for long a master at Eton and his son, the jazz player, whose first wife was a Gaskell, and sister of the bibliographer, Mr. Philip Gaskell. Mr. Gaskell's mother is a cousin of Mr. Philip Noel Baker, Labour minister, and was the sister-in-law of Alex Penrose, Fellow of King's, whose brother, Lionel is a professor of genetics at London."

Philip John Noel-Baker

"Philip John Noel-Baker, Baron Noel-Baker, PC (1 November 1889 – 8 October 1982), born Philip John Baker, was a British politician, diplomat, academic, amateur athlete, and renowned campaigner for disarmament. He carried the British team flag and won a silver medal for the 1500m at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp, and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959.

Noel-Baker is the only person to have won an Olympic medal and received a Nobel Prize. He was a Labour member of parliament from 1929 to 1931 and from 1936 to 1970, serving in several ministerial offices and the cabinet. He became a life peer in 1977." - Wikipedia

Bertha Gwendoline Wright (was Penrose) (née Baker)

Bertha (Olive's half-sister) was married to Alexander "Alec" Peckover Penrose between 1919 and the late 1920s.

Alec's father, James Doyle Penrose, was an Irish painter.

Alec's grandfather was Alexander Peckover, 1st Baron Peckover, who was an English Quaker banker, philanthropist and collector of ancient manuscripts.

"During her first marriage she had a well documented affair with author Clive Bell, a prominent member of the infamous Bloomsbury Set, and who was married to the Bloomsbury painter Vanessa Bell (sister to author Virginia Woolf). Bertha divorced Alexander in the late 1920s and then married Ralph." - A Collection of Miniature Treasures Made by Bertha (Penrose) and Ralph Wright by Celia Thomas of KT Miniatures

WILLS CONNECTED TO PAT

Amy Elizabeth Baker

"TO each of my Grandchildren namely the children of my late son Barton and my said Daughter the sum of Two hundred pounds and to each of my step-grandchildren namely the children of my said step-daughter the sum of One hundred pounds."

Olive Elizabeth Braithwaite

"(a) Upon Trust to divide my residuary estate into three equal portions and

(ii) to hold the second such portion for Pip absolutely but if he shall have predeceased me then such portion shall he held in trust for his child or children who survive me and attain the age of twenty-one years and if more than one in equal shares absolutely"

Pat received about £79,494.

Page updated 11th November, 2020.