Rosemary Giedroyć, 1937-2024: A veteran Herald correspondent

“The VB who pens this April Charterhouse Chronicle is not the same person who wrote in March,” Virginia Barton, the Catholic Herald’s popular columnist of the late 1980s and early 1990s, informed backpage readers of the paper in 1990. “She has been to the Holy Land. You cannot paddle in the Jordan at the foot of Mount Hermon and remain unchanged. If you’ve leaned against the wind on Mt Nebo and shared with Moses that first glimpse of the Promised Land, some inward shift of vision is inevitable.”

To her fans – and her postbag was bigger than anyone else’s at the time, including my own as editor, for most of those years – Ginny, as she liked to be known, put into words their experiences of being Catholic: in their family setting with children who were growing up with other ideas; in their local parish church as the rhythm of weekly rituals were changing; in sickness and in health; and on pilgrimage as well. In lyrical prose, she shared with them the challenges and joys of lived-out faith.

Even death, which came to her just short of her 87th birthday, did not escape her gimlet eye – in her musings, in the Herald and elsewhere. In her Beloved Snail: A Book of Commonplaces, which she published in 2017 to collect some of her writing (its title taken from the Mock Turtle’s song in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), she included a reflection, written in 2014, on the death of her aunt, which began: “As my outer world narrows, so my inner world expands. I may not be able to take to the hills, but within my head I go further and further. Do you see what I mean?”

Virginia Barton was a pen name – the first part promoting her own middle name, the second recalling her family home in Cumbria. In daily life, as opposed to on the page (though she liked mixing the two and would sign letters to friends as Ginny), she was Rosemary Giedroyć (Ged-roy-ch), born in London in 1937, the third of four Cumpston sisters.

“Blissfully happy childhood,” she wrote succinctly in a very short CV in the introduction to her Book of Commonplaces. She hated it when people turned the spotlight on her. There was no eulogy at her funeral, at her insistence.

Hers was a privileged education: “posh London school, failed maths, regret not having worked much”. She trained as a nurse, but dropped out at 21 when she fell in love with and married her husband, Michał, a Polish-Lithuanian aristocrat who had arrived in England with nothing in 1947 – she was duly received into the Church as well.

Her beloved Michał trained as an aerospace engineer and – in first Surrey and then Oxford – they raised a boy and three girls: Miko, a musician and founder of the Soul Sanctuary choir; Kasia, who began her writing career at the Herald and introduced her mother to its pages; Coky, a Bafta-winning film and television director; and Mel, comedian, actress and TV presenter. With her children growing up, she began appearing in the Herald’s pages from 1986 onwards, blazing her own trail on matters big and small, domestic and societal.

Reporting in one of her columns on attending the “themed” wedding of a friend’s offspring complete with purpose-built flower-bower and camera crew, she offered her own “sound advice as a mother who has married off a child” – don’t bankrupt yourself. Elsewhere she advised against forcing moody teenagers to come to Mass on Sundays: “After a certain age the youngster must be abandoned to his/her guardian angel.”

As well as running the Herald’s book club, long before they became fashionable again, she was its roving reporter, attending inter alia a young nun’s profession and consecration on the Isle of Wight. “My mother used to tell us not to speak to nuns,” she recalled.

Illness struck in 1993, so serious there were fears for her life, but she was made of strong stuff and eventually recovered, though her journalism lapsed for a bit. Meanwhile, there were 15 grandchildren to enjoy; she loved children, and they loved her.

More recently came the great-grandchildren, plus the publication in 2017 of Michal’s memoir, Crater’s Edge, describing his childhood journey (once the Russians invaded Poland in 1939) from the family’s requisitioned manor house in Lobzcw to a Siberian labour camp, then with his mother and sisters (his father had been executed) via a long trek on foot to Iran and finally, in 1947, England.

Latterly, Rosy was to be found in various American Catholic publications, where her observations remained as acute as ever. In person, she was undiminished to the end, a treasured friend unafraid of telling you what she felt you needed to hear – the same quality that in her Herald heyday had drawn readers to her.

Peter Stanford was Editor of the Catholic Herald from 1988 to 1992

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