Lady Coulson

Kyt · Mar 24, 2009

Lady Coulson - Telegraph

Lady Coulson, who died on February 28 aged 88, was a pillar of the British arm of the charity International Social Service (ISS) and the wife of a senior diplomat, Sir John Coulson.

ISS was founded in 1921 to help refugees around the world. Mavis Coulson became involved in the late 1950s, and in 1959 launched its first Spring Fair in London to raise funds, manning a stall with a small group of women at Chelsea Town Hall.

Gradually she persuaded many of London's diplomatic missions to operate stalls selling goods from their respective countries. Today the fair is held every May at Kensington Town Hall. Lady Coulson remained a guiding presence for more than four decades.

She was born Mavis Beazley on March 3 1920 and educated at the Beehive School, Bexhill.

During the Battle of Britain she worked as a nurse with Archie McIndoe's burns unit at East Grinstead hospital, where many of the patients were badly burned airmen.

Mavis later recalled: "Psychology was the priority... On the ward you quickly understood that not only was any kind of pity ruled out, but revulsion too. Nor was it acceptable to pretend to ignore a man's often hideous appearance. To get it right, in fact, was far from easy, and the sensitive were apt to find themselves becoming too hard, in self-protection."

She remembered in particular a 19-year-old pilot officer who was visited by his 16-year-old financée; on seeing his face, she burst into tears and broke off the engagement.

The airman turned his face to the wall and "proceeded to die slowly". Some weeks later the singer Frances Day came to the hospital on a morale-boosting visit, and McIndoe asked her to pay particular attention to the "dying" man. She did so, and he instantly began to improve again.

On one occasion Mavis Beazley visited an uncle at a nearby village for tea. When the air-raid warning sounded he made her sit in a deckchair under the staircase in the hall with an enamel washing-up bowl on her head.

Mavis Beazley then went to the Foreign Office, where she worked for Gladwyn Jebb, head of the postwar reconstruction department. Her immediate superior, Jebb's PA, was arrested by MI5 after it discovered that she had been passing secret documents to her boyfriend, a journalist on The People; she was sentenced to three years' hard labour. Then, in 1943, Mavis Beazley became engaged to John Coulson, at that time a resident clerk at the Foreign Office. Shortly afterwards she accompanied Anthony Eden and senior generals on a flight by Liberator bomber to the Cairo conference attended by Roosevelt and Churchill. From there she travelled to Tehran, where Churchill and the American president met Stalin.

She left Jebb in early 1944, and after her marriage worked with the Free French in London.

Following the war John Coulson was appointed head of chancery at the embassy in Paris. Duff Cooper was ambassador, to be succeeded in 1948 by Sir Oliver Harvey. Mavis Coulson did her duty as a hostess, looked after her two young sons and served as ex officio chairman of the ladies' linen committee at the British Colony hospital. The couple then had postings to New York, London and, in 1955, Washington, where John Coulson was appointed No 2 to the ambassador, Roger Makins, and his successor Harold Caccia. They were in the American capital during the tense atmosphere of the Suez Crisis.

In 1960 Coulson was appointed ambassador to Sweden. He was then Chief Clerk at the Foreign Office, during the period when the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices were about to be amalgamated. Mavis Coulson became chairman of the Foreign Service Wives' Association, then, in 1965, accompanied her husband to Geneva when he was made Secretary-General of the European Free Trade Association.

In retirement the Coulsons lived at Selborne, Hampshire, the village made famous by the naturalist the Rev Gilbert White. Sir John died in 1997, and nine years later Lady Coulson published a memoir, The Old Bird Remembers.

She is survived by her sons.
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Antipodean Andy · Mar 24, 2009

A Lady in every sense of the word. RIP.

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