ROSALIND DELMAR I & II

Memories of Rosalind Delmar

By Amanda Sebestyen

Rosalind died in the autumn of 2024. I was lucky enough to attend the memorial held by her family and her many closest friends from the women’s liberation movement, who I hope may write here soon. She has left indelible memories even with those of us who knew her for shorter times.

At the memorial, it was agreed that the two words used most often for Ros Delmar were ‘formidable’ and ‘warm-hearted’. This absolutely chimes with our encounters.

First, the formidable. Rosalind was part of the rather awe-inspiring group of Marxist theorists around New Left Review. She must have been the only one from a working class background, though this wasn’t at all evident on first meeting. It emerged slowly as she revealed a lifelong knowledge of music-hall songs, for instance, and told me about her childhood in a Teesside steel town. She was always in some sense a communist, though sometimes critical of the Party grouping inside women’s liberation (see below); and I was always a bit more anarchist-libertarian, a squatter and almost a separatist then.

I can still remember her voice and firm stare when telling me: ‘I don’t agree with the “anti-authoritarian” analysis of politics’. She made it sound strange, and made me think. The most important conversation I remember was about the Nazi Soviet Pact of all things. Bringing her Freudian thinking to bear, she told me ‘This shows how someone [ie Stalin] can bring about the thing they fear the most [German invasion], through their efforts to forestall it’. It’s a thought that has occurred to me often and often in the last 50 years as different political currents rise and fall.

Of course we could always meet on the grounds of our feminism, especially as we were both interested in the other women’s movements that were springing up in Europe. She favoured the French Psych et Po (Psychanalyse et Politique) whereas I loved the Rivolta Femminile from Italy.

I’d been in an all-women squat on the Islington-Hackney border, leaving when it became overwhelmed with childcare and also because of an unrequited love. Not spoken about, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Rosalind guessed. Here we come to the warm-hearted side. She just invited me to live in the spare room of her elegant Pimlico flat in 1973.

Pimlico was immensely different, and it was great fun spending more time with Ros’s friends like Sally Alexander and her cousin Elona Bennet, Juliet Mitchell, Laura Mulvey. I remember great food and amazingly uninhibited conversations from these slightly older women… and learning the Italian name for fennel, which is ‘finocchio’, if you want to know.

I don’t think I stayed more than a few months before moving off into another squat, this time in Whitechapel. Rosalind never objected or made me feel bad about it. Hopefully we had each given each other something, and she certainly reached a resolution when she had her children with her devoted husband Geoffrey.

Three decades passed with no more than an occasional sighting or hearing via other people, with one exception. When I started to find my voice again, writing in City Limits magazine I recall sniping at our Marxist-Freudian ‘organic intellectuals’, probably via a review of The Rights and Wrongs of Women edited by Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley in 1986. Rosalind was the only one to take me up on my remarks. This was part of her deep commitment to dialogue and getting things right.

It was well into the 21st century when Ros contacted me again. As an independent therapist she was working hard at Highgate Counselling Centre, one of the last places in the UK to offer affordable counselling to working-class women. The Centre was desperately short of funds and in danger of closing. As a member of the Network for Social Change I looked around for donations. Ros was also supporting the Centre for Young Musicians – greatly important to both her musical children, Cecily and David – which was similarly a public service in danger of closing. (The CYM continues and has long survived its funding crisis, caused when the Inner London Education Authority was forcibly disbanded thirty years ago.)

My networks didn’t come up with any major funding but the effort brought me and Ros together for a while. It turned out we were almost neighbours in North London. She had meanwhile become the most marvellous gardener. There was no garden behind the Pimlico basement flat that I ever saw, but in Tufnell Park Rosalind had made a wonderful, almost-professional garden: the kind that flowers all the year round even when nothing else does. Her rippling carpet of hellebores – Christmas roses – stands out in my memory as a true creation.

In 2011 I visited Tunisia during the Arab Spring and became deeply involved with supporting that nonviolent uprising (often spearheaded by unknown women). I was receiving an outpouring of despatches and video from grassroots activists, wanting their voices to be heard. Rosalind again supplied the missing connection, introducing me to her young neighbour Agnes Reeve who had just returned from Syria and could translate the Arabic while I worked on the unorthodox French. With dedicated editorial help from the late Rosemary Bechler, those despatches from the rebel town of Kasserine reached a much bigger audience through Open Democracy.

In the years coming up to 2020 Rosalind was writing a historical memoir of Red Rag, the socialist feminist magazine of the 1970s. This account exemplified her deep commitment to truth. Meticulous research, honest personal recollection, a real effort to be impartial between different political currents (see above).

A model for us in HOWL! https://banmarchive.org.uk/red-rag/redrag-introduction/

Rosalind Delmar 18/10/1941 – 2/10/2024

---

Rosalind Delmar – Friendships: thoughtful, generous, intellectual

By Sally Alexander

When I received news of Rosalind’s death in October 2024, my thoughts and heart filled with memories. Of Ros with my daughter Abigail, for whom she was a special, loving friend from the age of six or seven.  Rosalind offered to collect Abigail from school one day a week – this was the height of the women’s movement in the early 1970s. Collective responsibility and living were on our minds.  Abigail attended the local primary school, Churchill Gardens, at the bottom of our streets in Pimlico.  Rosalind was utterly reliable, always on Abigail’s side whether versus me or authority; she didn’t so much indulge Abi’s every wish – for cake with tea, choice of supper, her fill of radio Caroline – as fully share them.  Abigail was always happy and full of news when I collected her.  Routine suited both her, and Rosalind and her husband, Geoffrey.

Through Ros, Abi acquired a kitten called Bessie, who was one of Ros’s cat Squeaker’s several kittens, sired by the ginger Tom, king of the neighborhood.  Ros always agreed with me – at least face to face – that my Alderney St household could not absorb a kitten; she only smiled when Abi brought Bessie home. Recently Abi explained, ‘Squeaker was my cat, Mum. We found her together in the gutter. Ros looked after her for me.’  Bessie, like her mother, Squeaker, was fed – following Ros’s instructions – on minced pollock from the fish monger, with an occasional raw egg.

Rosalind seeded Abi’s interest in cooking, her love of Italian and cinema; she encouraged Abi’s musicianship and her developing interest in acting; she took Abi to see Jaws twice – neither Gareth nor I could face it. And years later, after Rosalind and Geoffrey had moved to Swains Lane and given birth to their children, David and Cecily, she introduced grown up Abi to North London, welcomed her husband Nigel into her life, and later enticed their children, Molly and Talia, with her special individual attention. Children flourish, Ros recently remarked, if they are fed and watered, left alone sometimes to grow at their own pace – like a plant – in the right environment.

Ros loved to dance – after suppers or meetings in the garden kitchen of Alderney St where I still live, though the basement was sold off in the late 1980s to pay some of my father’s debt to the Inland Revenue. There was always music in the 70s and 80s; a sense of rhythm ran deep into her bones.  So did a streak of hedonism.  Ros loved conversation, drank wine, smoked dope with Gareth and Elona (Bennett, the sculptor, another close friend of R and G), occasionally Mary (Kelly) joined them, into the early hours; there was a lot of giggling.  Not me, I had to be up with Abigail, then Daniel – who remembers the same Rosalind as Abigail.  Ros – formidable feminist intellectual, author, film buff and Italianist – included Karl Perkins videos of Elvis among her collection and watched them with Daniel after roast lunch, when he wasn’t playing cricket with Geoffrey.

I met Rosalind through Gareth (Stedman Jones) – historian, stepfather of Abigail and father to Daniel.  Ros was of the New Left through student politics in Manchester, membership of the Communist Party and CND, postgraduate studies in Soviet history and friendships.  She’d met Geoffrey through her political organising in Manchester.  Houses in central London were relatively cheap in 1970, and we lived collectively in order to afford the running costs.  Margarita Jimenez, Robin Blackburn, Linda Redford, Riccardo Steiner, among others, passed through the Ros and Geoffrey’s Sutherland St household. Gareth and I followed them there and bought a house in Alderney St. There was much traffic between the houses.  The History Group was held in one or the other; we read Claud Levi-Strauss, Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millet, Shulamith Firestone, Marx and Engels on the family (one of Rosalind’s indispensable articles), Mao on Contradictions Among the People, and on Juliet Mitchell’s prompting we read Freud.  Some of us never looked back.

Layout and design of Red Rag, Shrew, and Seven Days happened in the living rooms of Sutherland St; we formed the Pimlico WL small group, joined and helped run the offices of the London Women’s Liberation Workshop; a women’s refuge was eventually established a few doors up which Madge Cavalla, later a local councilor ran.  Ros worked on Bananas, the literary magazine, with Emma Tennant, and for a year trained as a telephonist for the GPO.

Ros and Gareth both worked on Seven Days, the short lived independent Socialist newspaper in the early 1970s. [1] I went with her to report on the 1971 Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in for Seven Days.  We were met by the shop stewards, welcomed into the home of a shop steward family and shown round the work-in. We travelled up to Glasgow by sleeper.  We talked all night.

Ros’s stories of her childhood in the iron and steel town of Dormanstown, near Redcar in Yorkshire, never left me.  One of eleven children, she was the first of two daughters whose parents had both previously been widowed.  ‘I was born in a time of death, in the last quarter of 1941’ is the opening sentence of her childhood memoir.  Her father, brought up in an orphanage, had served as a gunner in the first world war. He was a steel worker with three grown up sons and one daughter.  Her mother who had ‘skivvied’ for a family before marriage, had five sons aged sixteen and under.  ‘Whenever I think of our house I think of its intimate geography’ Ros wrote, ‘of who slept where and with whom. It was cramped, overcrowded, I think now, though I didn’t think so at the time.’  ‘We lived ‘pressed together’ she continued. What everyone shared she recalled, was ‘a commitment to the collectivism of trades unionism, an awareness of how everyone depended on everyone else at work for personal safety, and in the street for daily acts of kindness’.

Intimate geographies of mind and body politic were Rosalind’s steadfast concern, and that of her feminism.  Rosalind – intellectually thorough in everything she did – trained as a psychotherapist after a long analysis.  One day she phoned, as I was late meeting her.  I spoke haltingly.  I could not cross the room, open the door, leave the house.  After a pause, Ros firmly but gently talked me up from my chair and out of the room.  This was an infant state of mind, she said, unable to move from grief and terror ‘but you are not that infant Sally, you are a mother of two, a historian and a friend’.  Through such friendships – thoughtful, generous, intellectual – dreams are made – sometimes through several generations.  Dreams which are necessary because they imagine the future.

(Sally: there’s so much I left out.  So much.)

[1]  Rosalind’s Introductions to Seven Days and Red Rag are on the website of the Amiel/Melburn Trust. https://amielandmelburn.org.uk