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From: "Peter_McCrae" <>
Subject: BRIGSTOCKE: Heather Renwick Brown Brigstocke--d.app.may/2004>UK
Date: Tue, 14 Mar 2006 14:07:29 -0000


Lady Brigstocke
(Filed: 06/05/2004)
The Daily Telegraph and the telegraph.co.uk


The Lady Brigstocke, who died in a traffic accident in Athens on Friday aged
74, was High Mistress of St Paul's Girls' School, the top independent girls'
day school in west London, from 1974 to 1989, and a denizen of numerous
boardrooms and quangos.



Tall, blonde and strikingly elegant, during her time at St Paul's Heather
Brigstocke became the most talked-about head in the country, her views and
exploits chronicled with glee in the press.

Her predecessor as High Mistress, Alison (now Dame Alison) Munro, had been a
school head in a more conventional mould, a lanky, forthright Scottish
intellectual who knew every girl and parent by name. Heather Brigstocke, by
contrast, was a flamboyant, glamorous socialite who enjoyed throwing
convention to the wind and never claimed to be a great intellect. Many girls
found her a dazzling role model - Rachel Weisz and Imogen Stubbs were
pupils - but others felt she paid them little attention: "She doesn't know
me from Adam," was a common refrain.

A keen thespian during her undergraduate years at Cambridge, Heather
Brigstocke had nurtured ambitions to be an actress, but her horrified
parents had refused to lend her the money for drama school and the stage
lost a star.

Instead she applied her dramatic talents to the business of leading a
school. She had an actress's honeyed voice and ability to switch from
flirtatious charm one moment to haughty imperiousness the next, and an
actress's ability to create mood and dominate a situation. Men, in
particular, found her fascinating and attendance at parents' meetings shot
up when "all the fathers started going".

Some, though, had difficulty warming to her personality and stories of her
imperious behaviour sometimes leaked out to the press. While lecturing
parents on the importance of not removing their daughters from school for
family holidays, it was noted that she herself had departed on a skiing
holiday in term-time. On another occasion she ordered younger members of
staff not to wear knee-length boots while sporting an expensive pair
herself. Nor was it appreciated when she observed that, given the
intellectual calibre of the school's intake, "that side of things" (the
academic side) virtually ran itself. As she herself admitted, she was not a
good team player, although she conceded that she was "marvellous at getting
other people to do things".

Heather Brigstocke's aim was to produce "well rounded" personalities, and to
that end she introduced a communications course for all sixth formers and
compulsory lessons in self-defence. She was also personally generous, paying
the fees of four girls who found themselves unable to do so out of her own
pocket.

She wanted to recruit more girls from humble backgrounds, though in fact she
succeeded in raising the school's social profile, turning it into the school
of choice for the daughters of the grand and famous. A brilliant networker,
she used her contacts to help raise funds for a series of ambitious building
projects, on one occasion persuading celebrity parents, including David
Dimbleby and Cleo Laine, to perform at a fundraising gala for a theatre
complex at which she herself brought the house down by dancing a can-can on
the stage.

Not everyone approved and when, at one point in her career, she tried but
failed to get the job of principal of New Hall, Cambridge, it was suggested
that they found her style and glamour unsuitable for their idea of academic
life.

Heather Renwick Brown was born at Reading on September 2 1929 into a family
with working class roots. Her father was a former Scottish coalminer who had
served as a fighter pilot in the First World War, winning a DFC, and had
subsequently pursued a career in the RAF. Her mother, a daughter of the
manse, was a teacher.

At the Abbey School, Reading, young Heather gained a reputation for wayward
behaviour and had her prefect's badge removed for, as she put it, "refusing
to conform". But, inspired by a classics teacher, Annie Ure, she set her
sights on Cambridge and won a Scholarship to Girton College, where she read
Classics, later switching to Archaeology and Anthropology.

She neglected her studies to act, playing Olivia in Twelfth Night, Antigone
in Oedipus and Colonus, and touring Sweden with the University Amateur
Dramatic Club as Mrs Clandon in You Never Can Tell, a title she regarded as
an augury for her future. When she was not acting, she was partying into the
small hours with the likes of Norman St John Stevas and Julian Slade,
avoiding the attentions of the Girton authorities by enlisting the services
of students with rooms - and therefore windows - on the ground floor. Though
she became the first woman to win the Winchester Reading Prize, she left
Cambridge with lower seconds in both parts of her degree.

After a few months as a management trainee at Selfridges "in boys'
underwear", she took up teaching classics at Francis Holland School and then
Godolphin and Latymer, a voluntary aided grammar school in Hammersmith, west
London. Rather daringly for the time, she moved in to live with Geoffrey
Brigstocke, a civil servant and former PoW. They married in 1952.

In 1961 her husband was posted as shipping attaché to Washington, where she
won a teaching post at the Cathedral School for Girls. She flung herself
into the diplomatic social round, scoring a notable coup by persuading
Jacqueline Kennedy to accept her daughter, Persephone, as the only
non-American child at the nursery school she ran in the White House.

Returning to London, Heather Brigstocke was asked to join Francis Holland as
headmistress. Here she put her formidable energy to good use, transforming
the school academically, broadening the curriculum, building a new
laboratory block and phasing out the junior school to concentrate on an
expanded sixth form. Her achievements commended her to the Mercers' Company,
the governors of St Paul's Girls' School, when they were looking for a
replacement for Mrs Munro, who was due to retire in 1974.

Then, three weeks before she was due to take up her new post, her husband,
Geoffrey, was killed in the Turkish Airlines DC10 crash outside Paris. She
was devastated, but carried on, finding that the demands of her new job made
it easier to cope with her loss, although some felt that the tragedy had
turned her into a more brittle personality.

During her time at St Paul's, Heather Brigstocke served on numerous outside
boards and committees. She was a member of the council of the Middlesex
Hospital Medical School, was one of only two women on the national committee
of the Automobile Association (she herself drove a large Daimler, nicknamed
the "Brigmobile" by Paulinas) and served on the councils of the City
University, the Royal Society of Arts and of St George's College, Windsor.

In addition she was president of the Bishop Creighton House Settlement,
Fulham, a governor of the Museum of London, a non-executive director of LWT,
a trustee of the National Gallery and a governor of no fewer than four
educational establishments including Wellington College and the Royal Ballet
School. She served as president of the Girls' School Association in 1980-81.

After retiring from the school in 1989, she acquired a new range of
appointments, serving on the Museums and Galleries Commission, the Health
Education Authority and the Modern Foreign Languages Working Group. She
served on the boards of The Times, Great Universal Stores and Burberry's and
was an effective chairman of the English Speaking Union from 1993 to 1999.
In 1999 she founded the charity Homestart International, of which she was
chairman at the time of her death. She was raised to the peerage as Baroness
Brigstocke in 1993.

She remained a widow until 2000 when she married the law lord Lord
Griffiths, a widower whom she had got to know when his wife Evelyn was
chairman of the St Paul's governors. He survives her with the three sons and
daughter of her first marriage.














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