Cecil Woodham-Smith: Encyclopedia II - Cecil Woodham-Smith - Early life

Cecil Woodham-Smith - Early life

Cecil Woodham-Smith was born in 1896 in Tenby, Wales. Her family, the Fitzgeralds, were a well-known Irish family, one of her ancestors being Lord Edward Fitzgerald, hero of the Irish Rebellion of 1798. Her father Colonel James FitzGerald had served in the Indian Army during the Sepoy Mutiny; her mother's family included General Sir Thomas Picton, a distinguished soldier who was killed at Waterloo.

She attended the Royal School for Officers' Daughters in Bath, until her expulsion for taking unannounced leave for a trip to the National Gallery. She finished her schooling at a French convent, and afterwards entered St Hilda's College, Oxford. She graduated with a second class degree in English in 1917.

In 1928 she married George Ivon Woodham-Smith, a distinguished London solicitor with whom she had an exceptionally close and deep relationship until his death in 1968. But though she possessed a knack for historical writing, she postponed her career (as was customary for women of her time) until her two children had gone off to boarding school. In the meantime, she wrote pot-boilers under the pseudonym 'Janet Gordon'; this training was to stand her in good stead as a historian, as she mastered the art of writing entertaining narrative.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Early life", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki