Clare Takes Charge

A widow at sixty-four, the matriarch of a vanished England. When Arthur Scorer died of cancer in April 1951, his widow Clare was sixty-four — and just getting started. Over the next twenty-eight years she would bury a son, help to fight a prolonged court case claiming compensation for his widow and children, support her younger daughter in her difficult marriage and instigate her move into a half-derelict Elizabethan farmhouse in Devon with 200 acres needing to be farmed. She would also criss-cross the globe between Cheshire, Rhodesia, South Africa and Torquay, and remain at the head of one of those quietly formidable upper-middle-class English families that ran on letters, lists and unbreakable nerve.


Drawing on Clare’s own letters and on the diaries of her daughters Wendy and Sybil, novelist Rebecca Tope reconstructs her grandmother’s later years in extraordinary detail. Here is post-war Britain as it was lived from the front parlour of a comfortable bungalow in Cheshire, and then two rooms in the Devon farmhouse, to which Clare valiantly adapted in the face of many impediments. The chief of these was the personality of her irascible son-in-law. There was also mud, missing animals and the epic winter of 1962-3 to endure.


The book is at the same time a portrait of a marriage – Sybil and Tony’s – its tribulations observed by a mother who has facilitated the move in good faith, helping to buy the farm, supervising the electrical and plumbing work, tolerating three rowdy Tope children and only after five and a half years finally retreating to a Torquay flat when her son-in-law’s rages prove too much. The irony is at times inescapable. By taking charge, Clare might inadvertently have greatly increased Tony’s frustrated rages and Sybil’s humiliations, because the farm simply turned out to be too much for them all.


Beautifully drawn from primary sources, Clare Takes Charge is social history at ground level: women in late middle age running their families’ affairs through sheer competence, in the years when British life pivoted from austerity to package holidays and beyond. It is the second volume in Rebecca Tope’s Scorer Family Memoirs, picking up where Wendy in Wartime left off and standing easily on its own. For readers of Vere Hodgson, Nella Last, Juliet Gardiner, Virginia Nicholson and Hunter Davies — and of Rebecca Tope’s celebrated Cotswold, Lake District and West Country mystery novels.