Queer Places:
Roedean School, Roedean Way, Brighton BN2 5RQ, UK
Royal Holloway, Egham Hill, Egham TW20 0EX, UK
Mount Maunganui, Tauranga 3116, New Zealand
St. Mary, Church Rd, Itteringham, Norwich NR11 7AY, UK
Elizabeth Pudsey Dawson (September 3, 1894 – May 14, 1986) was born in England, the daughter of a clergyman at the private Roedean Girls’ School, which she and her three sisters attended. She then studied physiotherapy at the Royal Holloway College, London.
She is seen at far left in this photograph of a hockey team at the Royal
Holloway University of London, around 1914.
She moved to New Zealand with one of her sisters in 1925, and by the late 1930s was living in Pelorus Sound. She moved to Wellington, then Auckland, and eventually to Mount Maunganui, Tauranga 3116, and returned to England in 1962, living alone in Norfolk until her death. She left everything to Janet Frame.
Michal King, in his biography on Frank Sargeson, Dawson’s friend, describes her as “a lesbian physiotherapist with private means”. And in Frame’s biography King calls Dawson an “upper-class English woman who had moved to New Zealand in 1925 to escape her family and what she saw as the expectations of her class,” adding that she was “well-educated… left-wing and lesbian.”
My published books:
