About Grace

Grace was married three times, officially.—My sister Sally is from her first marriage to Bill Herbert, and I, Mark Antrobus, am from her second to Edmund Antrobus. Grace wrote under the byline Grace Herbert during the second world war, reporting on the human side of war in London braving bombs and, apart from the tragedies of war, as a matter of fact, rather enjoying being able to contribute in a positive way to the action.

Grace has appeared in the Indian press over the past few years detailing her life before the first world war, and her exciting career as first woman Features Editor of a Fleet Street national newspaper, this meant she was responsible for one quarter of national newspaper and mixed with the likes of Dylan Thomas and James Agate.—During the countdown to her hundredth, Zareen Babu of our local Kodaikanal Friendly Post carried stories every month about Grace along with news of the 100th bash at The Kodai Club where she was by then its oldest member. The national weekly news and features magazine Outlook ran an article by Pushpa Iyengar in 2010, another by Nandini Murali appeared in 2009 in Dr Reddy’s House Calls magazine with portraits by Dr Vivek. Grace is commemorated in miraculous Woodford County High School for Girls Website: the oldest old girl. When you have a chance, please take a look at these links that our friend Shiva has collected. The latest article on her was in The Hindu Metro-Plus, a cover story “Amiable Grace” by Soma Basu, with photographs by James which came out in April and is available online www.hinduonline. There is mooted an article by Rajni George on Grace for Vogue India in autumn.

A well-known cigarette advertisement in India goes, “For a man of action, satisfaction!”—Well, Grace was a woman of action and, as a matter of fact, decided to quit smoking, saying she hated to be addicted to anything, anything but, of course action and creativity. She found it very difficult being tied down to the life of a house wife which is why she said, “I always ran away from people I loved, and especially my husbands,” while in my experience she got along with Bill and my father Edmund, as friends, I never felt any tension between them after their divorce. “All quite civil,” she used to say..

A modern secular humanist girl, and very much part of the Now, including the “often potty” life of an un-definable bohemian … she never posed as one:—from her father, John Christian Russ and Ethel May Graveling, she inherited a love of ideas and art and passed on some of that love of exploration—one reason I came to India and—after the car accident in Wales broke both her legs, causing the death of her third husband Simon Wardell—why she too came here. That loss of a good friend and the operations on her legs didn’t break her spirit … when she came to see me, her sadhu son in 1969, from that time onwards Grace kept a relationship with the subcontinent that was to continue the rest of her life. She loved India, the Sun, which she would worship if she had a religion, since it is the giver of life and light, and the sun-like smiles of the children here, the openness and canniness and, in particular, Indian women, “So strong, their character!” Kodai was good because Grace also loved to play Bridge, “For pleasure, and to keep the memory sharp!—I cannot stand it when people take cards too seriously,” she’d say. She loved books, the KMU, and reading and absorbing and discussing ideas, and found that in all these respects, “India is never boring, never, ever!”

In the eighties, when I was living in the west by now, from Portugal and England she wrote to our friend Adam about how she kept planning to come back and visit … even as she kept delaying her trips. Writing in from the Algarve in 1989, she said, “I miss India. India was always so exciting for me, so much living and struggling and help to give.” And help she did give when the occasion arose. Grace is remembered by all classes of people for her common touch and readiness to rise to an emergency, like when she arranged in the seventies for one of the lone vans around (from Kodaikanal International School) to carry an injured woodsman fallen from a great height of a eucalyptus tree with broken bones and dislocated joints down to hospital in Madurai—how could he sit upright?—Ever resourceful, Grace got them to, shh!—remove a bus seat as she rifled through her home for a mattress they could lay out for him.