Alciston Parish Church
Partner Virginia "C.V." Wedgwood
Queer Places:
Featherstone Castle, Hall Bank, Haltwhistle, Northumberland NE49 0JG, UK
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Whitegate, The Village, Alciston, Polegate BN26 6UN, UK
Jacqueline Hope-Wallace CBE (May, 1909 - October 27, 2011) built a successful career in the civil service at a time when women were a rarity in its upper echelons. She lived for nearly 70 years with her close friend C.V. Wedgwood. She worked in the Ministry of Labour and then with the National Assistance Board. She was awarded a CBE in the New Year Honours List for 1958, identified as "Assistant Secretary, National Assistance Board". She was Under-Secretary of Labour from 1958 to 1965, Under-Secretary of the Ministry of Housing and and Local Government from 1965 to 1969. She was Commissioner of the Public Works Loan Board from 1974 to 1978.
Dorothy Jacqueline Hope-Wallace was born in May 1909, the daughter of Charles Nugent Hope-Wallace and Mabel Florence Ida Chaplin. She went to the local school in Wimbledon Common. Her grandfather lived in Featherstone Castle in Northumberland. She graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1931 with a BA. Her father was in the civil service: the Charity Commission. So when she came down from Oxford with a degree in history in 1931, she wasn't keen on the civil service; it seemed boring. But of course in the early '30s things were very low. She had friends with very good degrees from Oxford who couldn't get jobs; one girl who got a first at her college was selling hats at Harrods for a year or two before she could get a proper job. So her father said she had better go into the civil service, and she did. She was there for 40 years.
She joined the Ministry of Labour, and they sent her out into the provinces, which she hated. She had to stay in B&Bs in county towns for nearly two years, then she managed to get back to London. Soon after that they set up something called the National Assistance Board (NAB), and she got in there right at the beginning. There was high unemployment at that time, and the unemployed and pensioners received a non-means-tested unemployment benefit; the NAB had offices all over the country, and gave means-tested benefits to people for whom the basic benefits weren't sufficient.
Alciston Parish Church
Her brother, Philip Hope-Wallace, was a notable music and theatre critic. And her lifelong partner - until her death in 1997 - was renowned author Dame Veronica Wedgwood. It is sad to note that this relationship was not acknowledged in most of Dame Veronica's obituaries. But Ms Hope-Wallace was remembered by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Alexander Chancellor, editor of the Spectator from 1975 to 1984, recounted that: On Easter Monday, a beautiful spring day, Lord Alexander Hesketh brought Margaret and Denis Thatcher over from Easton Neston to my house at Stoke Park, where she said another surprising thing to me. Staying there with my late uncle Robin was Jacqueline Hope-Wallace, a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher, having once served under her as a civil servant in the Ministry of Pensions in the early 1960s, who was feeling bereft after the death of her long-term friend C.V. (Veronica) Wedgwood, the historian. I didn't mention that they had been lovers but must have somehow implied it, for Lady Thatcher grasped the point immediately and said, as a very modern person might, "I didn't realise they were partners." When they eventually crossed paths on the lawn, Hope-Wallace started to say "You won't remember me, but .." when Lady Thatcher briskly interrupted her: "Of course I remember you - you wrote that marvellous report on pension reform ..". She went on to recall the names and personalities of all the other civil servants in that department. She thus made a forlorn old lady very happy. Ted Heath would never have managed that.
So that was the entourage that she lived in socially; when she left the office she shut the door completely, and her evenings were spent with quite different sorts of people. But the 1930s was a very bad period; they all felt certain that there was going to be a war.
When the war came the NAB got lots of extra jobs: anything that involved a means test. For a short time she was evacuated up to Lancashire while London was being bombed, but it was awful being exiled up there and she got back to London as quickly as she could. She lived in Wimbledon, so had to get up to London every morning - and that was sometimes difficult, London being in such a state of chaos, but one got used to it.
After the war, everybody was hopeful that everything was going to be wonderful and different - but it wasn't, of course. She got a fellowship to America for six months, where she examined how they dealt with the unemployed and old people, then she stayed at the NAB until 1965: she became an under-secretary, and looked after the policy side of things. In 1965 she moved to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG) to deal with countryside matters - and very soon after that, the NAB was folded up.
The newspapers wrote that she was the first woman to reach the rank of under-secretary - but she dedn't think it's true. When she became an under-secretary there were a couple of women who were already permanent secretaries, and when she moved to the MHLG the permanent secretary was Dame Evelyn Sharp. It upset her when they wrote that.
She retired in 1969, though she stayed on various boards: she was on the board of the Corby Development Corporation until 1980. Corby had been a village and it absorbed all these people from the North. Like many of these places, the people who lived there originally didn't like being a new town.
Wedgwood and Hope-Wallace owned a country house together near Polegate in Sussex.[7] Both came from musical families. Wedgwood's father was a cousin of Ralph Vaughan Williams and the dedicatee of his London Symphony.[2] Hope-Wallace's brother Philip was for various periods music and drama critic of the Times, Time and Tide and the Manchester Guardian. She edited a collection of his writings as Words and Music (1981) for which Wedgwood wrote the introduction.[26] In 1997, Hope-Wallace donated a 1944 oil portrait of Wedgwood by Sir Lawrence Gowing to the National Portrait Gallery, London.[27]
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