Ann Stafford Author

Ann Stafford was the pen-name of Anne Isabel Stafford Branfoot, later Pedler (1901-66).  Her family came from County Durham, where her grandfather ran the Tyzack and Branfoot Steam Shipping Company, which he left after the First World War. She was educated at Cheltenham Ladies College and Newnham College Cambridge, where she graduated in French and Russian. She completed a PhD at Kings College London in 1926 in Russian social history. She also studied art in Paris during the university vacations, and her illustrations to some of her books are skilled and arresting. She married the barrister Tom Simpson Pedler (1891-1975) in 1926, but was no longer living with him from the early 1930s, by which time she had a son, John. She worked at the Times Book Club in the early 1930s, where Helen Evans was her secretary. She and Helen collaborated on their first joint novel, Business as Usual (1933), as well as on newspaper features. Ann became a children's author and the author of romance and historical novels from the 1930s to 1960s, including many written with Helen as Jane Oliver, and under a joint pen-name as Joan Blair. Ann met the Polish writer Michael ‘Misha’ Lubin at an International PEN Club meeting in France in the 1930s, and she was able to sponsor Lubin and his family to come to the UK before Nazi Germany prevented Polish Jews from leaving at the beginning of the Second World War. During the war Ann was a volunteer ambulance driver from the Paddington ambulance station and was in charge of an East End advice bureau. After Helen’s husband was killed in 1940 she shared Ann’s house with her and John in St John’s Wood, London. Later the two close friends lived next door to each other in North Gorley, Fordingbridge, Hampshire. Ann died in 1966 in Salisbury, looked after by Helen. Jessica Hammett is a historian at the University of Bristol.