ROSEMARY Blackett-Ord was born in 1923, the daughter of E W Bovill, the distinguished historian of English country life, of the East India Company and of the Sahara Desert. In the War she joined the Wrens.
When she was twenty she fell in love and quickly become engaged to Jim Blackett-Ord. He departed almost immediately to the battle of Anzio and a German prisoner of war camp. He returned in May 1945 in a poor state of nerves which she cured by marrying him within exactly a month.
She had known from before her marriage that the Helbeck estate was to come to him as the heir to his cousins the Breeks’s. When she first set foot in Helbeck Hall she thought it cold, damp, dilapidated, lonely and haunted.
Turning over the relics that had been left behind by the Breeks family, she had found one of them to be a book of carbon copies of the letters of Susan Breeks who had lived at Helbeck in the 1890s. They became the foundation of this book.
Sadly she died quietly in her sleep, soon after her ninety-first birthday and just after the final manuscript of this book had been delivered to the publisher.
ROSEMARY Blackett-Ord was born in 1923, the daughter of E W Bovill, the distinguished historian of English country life, of the East India Company and of the Sahara Desert. In the War she joined the Wrens.
When she was twenty she fell in love and quickly become engaged to Jim Blackett-Ord. He departed almost immediately to the battle of Anzio and a German prisoner of war camp. He returned in May 1945 in a poor state of nerves which she cured by marrying him within exactly a month.
She had known from before her marriage that the Helbeck estate was to come to him as the heir to his cousins the Breeks’s. When she first set foot in Helbeck Hall she thought it cold, damp, dilapidated, lonely and haunted.
Turning over the relics that had been left behind by the Breeks family, she had found one of them to be a book of carbon copies of the letters of Susan Breeks who had lived at Helbeck in the 1890s. They became the foundation of this book.
Sadly she died quietly in her sleep, soon after her ninety-first birthday and just after the final manuscript of this book had been delivered to the publisher.
