Here we provide additional information about some of the people who contributed to the success of the Anglo-Portuguese News.
Ethel Rosenthal, a concert pianist, moved to Portugal from India, where her husband had worked for Indian Railways. While in India she wrote The Story of Indian Music and Its Instruments, first published in 1928 and still available online in various editions. Apart from being one of the earliest collaborators with the APN, Rosenthal worked as a translator into English and there are records in the files of the Secretariado Nacional de Informação (SNI), the Estado Novo’s propaganda body, of her offering her services and receiving payment. The SNI received many such offers but, according to João Cotrim, Rosenthal was one of just three who were employed on a fairly regular basis.
Sir Marcus Cheke was independently wealthy. An unsuccessful Liberal Party candidate for the New Forest and Christchurch in 1929, he came to Portugal soon after to be the Honorary Attaché at the British Embassy. Moving to the Brussels Embassy in 1934, he returned to Lisbon to serve as the Press Attaché between 1938 and 1942. In that period, apart from liaising with the APN, one of his jobs was to guide Cecil Beaton around Lisbon, when the latter was asked by the British government to take photographs of leading Portuguese people, including the government. A very popular member of the British community, he and his wife Connie were known for the eccentric parties they gave at their home in Campolide. A prolific writer, Cheke authored several books, including A Life of the Marquis of Pombal and Carlota Joaquina Queen of Portugal (both of which are available in the Society’s library). Appointed as Minister to the Holy See, Cheke died in Rome in 1960, having been visited by the Pope in hospital before his death.
Jose Shercliff, born in 1902, left England at 20 and went to Paris, where she became the correspondent for the Daily Herald. In Paris she tracked down the, by then impoverished, Moulin Rouge performer, Jane Avril, made famous by Toulouse-Lautrec, and wrote her biography. In the 1930s she joined the News Chronicle and reported on the Spanish Civil War. After Paris fell to the Germans, she was headed to the US by flying boat via Lisbon, took one look at Lisbon and decided to stay. Resuming her life as a reporter, she also worked for British Special Operations, sending coded information through her news reports. Much of her time in Lisbon during the war was spent working with refugees. Shercliff stayed in Lisbon until her death in 1985, working for the Associated Press and The Times and writing for the APN.
Both Aubrey Bell and his wife, Barbara (née Wilkie), contributed to the APN, Barbara as the first gardening correspondent. Bell was born in Muncaster, Cumbria in 1881 and spent much of his childhood in France. An Oxford graduate, from 1909 he began working in Portugal as a correspondent for the Morning Post, which caused problems with the authorities of the Portuguese First Republic, given the Post´s monarchist tendencies. Whether for this, or another reason, he was arrested in 1912 and spent several months in prison. He was the author of numerous works, including biographies of Portuguese people, anthologies, and travel books and translated leading Portuguese authors into English. His travel books included In Portugal.…. and Portugal of the Portuguese. After the start of WW2, the family moved to Canada, feeling they would be safer there, and he died in Victoria, British Columbia in 1950. Bell received an honorary doctorate from the University of Coimbra and was made a Knight of the Military Order of Saint James of the Sword.
Ann Bridge (pseudonym of Mary Dolling Sanders - pictured above) was born in Hertfordshire in 1889. She married Owen O’Malley, later Lord O’Malley, and accompanied him to many diplomatic postings, including as ambassador to Portugal from July 1945 to May 1947. From an early age she was an enthusiastic mountain climber and was a close friend of George Mallory, who died on Everest in 1924. Bridge was a prolific and at the time popular novelist, who used the countries she visited as a setting for her novels, most of which are now out of print. As well as contributing to the APN she wrote The Selective Traveler in Portugal together with Susan Lowndes Marques, with the pair of them travelling through most of Portugal to compile the guide.
See also, previous articles on Elaine Sanceau and Rose Macaulay.
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