Eulogy for Mrs. Pauline Macartney at her Funeral Service at Lillingstone Dayrell Church of St. Nicholas de Myra on Thursday, 24th. October 2013 by Tom Storey, her nephew.
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Paulie was my godmother and 66 years ago I was a pageboy at her wedding to Clive Stoddart. According to Paulie I was the only glum face at the wedding. I put this down to the silly satin suit that I was forced to wear for the occasion. I am determined not to be glum today!
Everybody here will have their own favourite memories of Pauline. During her long life she met, influenced and cared for so many people that I cannot hope to match or encapsulate all your memories of her but I am sure that some of my memories will be matched by your own.
Pauline was a strong woman with a great sense of duty and strong views on everything from the right way to scramble eggs to Scottish independence. But my over-riding memory is of her sense of humour, loyalty, kindness, extreme generosity and a great interest in the young.
Where did this sense of duty come from? I think there were two main sources. The first was her family.
Paulie’s maternal grandfather was a Scottish engineer who had gone to South Africa in 1884 at the age of 24 to seek his fortune. He started by servicing the pumps in the Big Hole at Kimberley and, having caught the eye of Cecil Rhodes, subsequently became a prospector and developed successful mines in what is now Zaire and the Congo. But his main achievement was the construction and financing, over a period of nearly 30 years, of the Benguela railway to bring minerals from central Africa out to the Atlantic coast. He was a man who had successfully made his own way in the world and who believed in the virtues of honesty, straight talking and who had a complete commitment to the task in hand.
Pauline Mary Follett was born in September 1921. Her mother, my grand-mother , Mary, known as Doddie, had been widowed in 1917 at the age of 26 when my grandfather died in what is now Iraq. In 1920 a widow with two small girls, Pam and Sue, she married Francis Follett. Franny was a colonel in the Royal Warwickshire regiment, my grand-father’s regiment, good-looking, charming and witty. He had served in India and South Africa before being highly decorated ( DSO and MC ) in France. I think Paulie inherited her dashing good looks and bravery from him– although it is also true that my grandmother once went down the Cresta run.
Paulie was brought up with her two older half-sisters in London but with frequent visits to her grand-father’s estate on Deeside and to Francis’s family in the West Country. It was the life of a comfortably-off family between the wars, hard for us to imagine now. My mother told me that when the family went to Scotland on the sleeper train they had a carriage to themselves. In Scotland there was tennis with her cousins, fishing on some of the best beats on the Dee, Highland Games at Ballater or Breamar or the Ghillies Ball at Balmoral. My mother always told me that these were happy and carefree days for the family. Paulie was to grow up to become a vivacious young woman who was drawn towards a possible career on the stage.
But the second major influence on her must have been the war.
The war, of course, changed everything for Paulie and for most others of her generation. Paulie joined the WRNS and this was to have a profound effect on her view of the world and provide her with many life-long friends. It is difficult for us today to imagine the national sense of common purpose that was engendered after Dunkirk, the mixture of excitement and personal freedom resulting from the overthrow of outdated social conventions, coupled with moments of sadness and terror. She told me that she never liked the cry of seagulls ever since, when working within the cliffs of Dover, the gulls were set off by the sound of gunfire.
In 1942, Paulie met a young Canadian, George Macartney and they became engaged and, although the engagement came to an end through the uncertainties of war, they never lost touch .
She was commissioned and posted overseas. The long sea trip she made to Trinkamalee in Ceylon, via Cape Town, to serve with Mountbatten’s far eastern staff, almost certainly had its high points for an attractive young Wren but the threat of U-boats was never completely absent and of course there was the terrible reality of the sudden death of friends and family.
After the war the tragic death from cancer of her first husband, Clive Stoddart, after only two years of marriage when she was 28, must have been a terrible blow to her but she threw herself into developing the garden at the Glebe, in Lillingstone Lovell, which she bought immediately after his death. And it was then that she persuaded my mother, herself widowed in the war to come and live about ten miles away.
Soon she met David Robarts, whose family lived here at Lillingstone Dayrell. David, a successful banker in his mid-forties, spent most of his time in London at his house in Smith Square, looked after by the redoubtable Bird and Mrs Bird, but it was not surprising that he wooed the attractive young widow in the next village and in 1951 they married. In 1953 they started a family and in the course of the next seven years Tim, John, Jamie and Sue were born. These were happy times with family birthdays and Christmases. Paulie was a stickler for politeness and I remember a terrible ticking off for not writing a prompt thank you letter to her for the gift she had given me at my confirmation. I thought about blaming it on my O-levels but decided this would not be a valid excuse!
Meanwhile David’s career went from strength to strength . In 1954 he had been made chairman of the National Provincial Bank, the youngest chairman of one of the ‘big five’. He masterminded the takeover of the Westminster Bank, creating the National Westminster. Those were intensely busy times for them both. Paulie and David travelled extensively and Paulie was now the wife of a powerful city figure as well as being a full time mother. It is often said that behind every powerful man there is a powerful woman and I am sure that this was true in David’s case. She had scurrilous tales about some of the small, high powered dinner parties that were held in Smith Square.
When David’s parents died they moved from her beloved Glebe here to Lillingstone House and lived here and in London. Again she threw herself into work in the house and garden, Church fetes, governor of the Royal Latin School, growing family, David’s career, these were hectic years. Sadly, in 1989, David died but not before he had seen Sue and John married from this lovely little church.
George Macartney had, himself, been recently widowed and he and Paulie renewed their friendship and were married in 1990, bringing Patrick and his family into her life. This was at first a very happy marriage . They moved out of Lillingstone, an exhausting task, leaving John and Ann to take charge and settled in a big flat in Bramham Gardens, until very sadly ,George became unwell. He died in 2000
She continued to travel, to stay with friends and family and to entertain well into her 80s. We have fond memories of her and Margery, her retired cook, staying in a small cottage where she loved the scent of the bluebell woods. She was always ready to reminisce and to come up with a spikey comment with a twinkle in her eye. She made her last trip to South Africa when she was 83.
Paulie was such a dynamic, humorous and forceful character, with her deep voice and penetrating looks that the gradual loss of her sight and physical decline seemed particularly cruel. But she bore it all with great fortitude and continued to take a keen and vital interested in her visitor’s news, always asking about the family and able to recall places and events and people from the past in a most vivid manner . My over-riding memory is of her kindness, extreme generosity and a great interest in the young. She was proud of her children and delighted with her grand-children and great-grandchildren, always telling Vicky and I when we visited what they were doing and equally wanting to know about our family. So many of us here who loved her deeply, will be thankful that she is at peace but will feel the loss of someone who cared so deeply for us.
Paulie was a supreme example of her generation, a generation now passing but to whom we all owe so much in so many ways.