Mary Burchell aka Ida Cook: Righteous Gentile

We Followed our Stars by Ida Cook 

published 1950

Ida and Louise  by Louise Carpenter

published 2007

 

Yesterday’s books were by Mary Burchell, and as I was discovering them I found out quite a lot more about the author, with the help of Constance who introduced me to them. And what an extraordinary story it was.

Mary Burchell wrote a huge number of romance books, and was one of Mills & Boons top-selling authors back in the day. Burchell was a pen-name: the author was Ida Cook, and Constance told me that ‘She has a fascinating bio - she and her sister were secretaries with a passion for opera and helped save Jews from the Nazis, often using music as the cover for their activities’. 

You can easily find her on Wikipedia. But even better, I followed up on this: my book has a front cover quote: ‘The grande dame of romantic fiction’ – Granta. Now, Granta is a serious literary magazine of extremely high pretensions, so I immediately wondered: when were they looking at romance? And the answer, luckily was easy to find: in an edition on Memoir in 2007, there is an absolutely fascinating long-read biography of Ida Cook and her sister Louise: it had me spellbound. It is by Louise Carpenter, and is beautifully written, telling an extraordinary story.

Ida and Louise | Louise Carpenter | Granta Magazine

Carpenter refers often to Ida Cook’s own autobiography, We Followed Our Stars, published in 1950, so I got hold of a copy of that as well and read it.

Ida and Louise seem like the classic single women who missed out on marriage after WW1. They were very close, always lived together, and charged through life at a fair old pace. They started out in safe humdrum admin jobs, and Louise stayed there, while Ida became a hugely successful author. They became obsessed with opera, and travelled all over to see their favourites, becoming rather fangirl stalkers in some ways. And then that led to their role as Righteous Gentiles – they helped Jewish families escape from Germany in the lead-up to WW2, using their appearance as spinster opera fans as cover, along with the money from Ida’s books to ease the way. It is truly a startling story, and Carpenter tells it very very well.

This description of their first visit to New York gives a feel for it – this was early days and they had no money and had had to save up for two years:

On arrival, they unpacked their trunks and laid out their opera outfits: scarlet for Louise, pink and silver for Ida, opera cloaks for both, all of which Ida had run up from patterns published in Mab’s Fashions, a magazine read mostly by typists and edited by Miss Florence Taft. They then put on their smart little moleskin hats and went to the offices of [top singer Amelita] Galli-Curci’s agent to pick up their free tickets. The next night, they went to the Met for the first time to hear Galli-Curci sing La Traviata. ‘We were two of the best-dressed people in the Opera House!!!’ Ida writes in a letter home. ‘People quite goggled at our cloaks… other people had diamonds and bare backs and all that sort of thing, but, with all due modesty, our get-ups looked so pretty and young and colourful—besides, they had the Mab’s touch!!!’

It is all like that, while tackling some tough subjects: I cannot recommend the piece highly enough. Carpenter also tracks down a survivor whom the sisters helped, and has an honest and moving encounter with her.

The stories of helping Jewish refugees are quite extraordinary. The two women travelled regularly to Germany for the weekend, in order, apparently to watch opera or concerts. But they were seeing people who wanted to emigrate, helping them smuggle out their valuables, sorting out papers and admin. The Cook sisters would wear people’s fur coats and jewellery on their way home, as a way to get it all out, so the refugees could sell when they managed to rejoin their valuables. Back home again they were organizing sponsors, finding money for the refugees, smoothing the official requirements. They gave a huge amount of time to this, and Ida – who was a best-selling author by now – gave huge amounts of money. They bought a small flat which could be used as short-term accommodation.

This continued right up to August 1939 and the start of the war. They believe they helped in 29 cases (each of which might have involved more than one person) – as someone said to them “So many. And so few.”

The descriptions of this era are straightforward and powerful.

But it is also fascinating to read of the sisters’ love for opera, and how that kept them going, and how they were able to pick up again after the war. (Though, like all good opera fans, they felt that the singers, crowds, productions, managements of later years weren’t a patch on those they used to know… )

They loved Rosa Ponselle – one of my own favourite opera singers of the past – they loved clothes, Ida wrote her books. Later on they became fascinated by spiritualism and consulted psychics constantly.

Ida and Louise are more Barbara Pym than seems possible – both the writer herself and her characters (‘stalkers in flat shoes and comfy cardis’ as I like to describe them), but mixed in with some serious aspects of the world. We are encouraged to feel sorry for the spinsters who missed out in the first half of the 20^th century, but it would be patronising to feel sympathy for Ida and Louise and their extraordinary lives…

You can find more  Mab’s Fashions pictures like those above on pinterest.

 I did some posts on opera singers after reading a book called Prima Donnas by Rupert Christiansen,  and in this post I give details of my fantasy life as an opera singer House of Names by Colm Toibin (clothesinbooks.blogspot.com)

For true Mitford fans – the Cook sisters made friends with many of the opera stars they loved so much, but their first target was Amelita Galli-Curci, as in the excerpt above. Lovers of Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love will know her as the singer whose records Uncle Matthew played constantly – until he went to see her live, and was much disillusioned. (This was a real thing, in 1924 – a late tour when she was past her prime and had voice problems, a tour which was acknowledged as disappointing).