Molly o' the Morgue
My Grandmother

     Molly Lefebure photographed by her husband John Gerrish


Molly Lefebure was born on 6th October 1919 in Green Lanes, Clissold Park to Charles Hector Lefebure and his wife Elizabeth. Her Father was a senior civil servant and was partly responsible for the foundation of the NHS with Beveridge. Charles partly based it on the ideas of Robespierre, as the Lefebures, in Paris, had been thoroughly Jacobin in their sympathies.

Molly's grandmother was a Blandy from Newbury, a great hunting family, and Molly spent a few summers on a remote farm on Exmoor and there learnt to hunt. She was blooded aged eight while out with the Devon and Somerset Staghounds. She wrote on hunting for both The Field and Country Life and had been a member of the Blencathra Hunt for over 50 years.

Molly Lefebure in 1919

The Lefebure family home and Molly's birthplace

A page from Molly's childhood photograph album

Charles and Elizabeth Lefebure

The first Lefebure to come to London from Paris was Pierre. He is listed in a mid Nineteenth Century census as being Peter Lefebure, occupation: Gentleman, living at 28 Frederick Street, Kings Cross. Pierre's Father was Charles Lefebure, a mathematician in Paris. The Lefebures had been quite major armament manufacturers in Paris for a few hundred years. Various members of the family had also been men of letters and attended the Sorbonne.

Pierre Lefebure

 Pierre had helped to set up the Institut Francais and was a professor of languages at the newly formed London University. He was married to Marie Rossignol, who was also from an influential family and her Father was a professor at Berlin University. Her sister was governess to Grand Duchess Anastasia Mikhailovna of Russia and lived at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Charles's sisters both moved to St Petersburg with their widowed Mother, after Pierre's death, and one married a famous icon painter and another the son of one of the Grand Duchess's ladies in waiting, who owned the railway line between Moscow and St Petersburg.

Caroline Rossignol (back right) with the Grand Duchess (back left) and two Ladies-in-Waiting on holiday in Germany

 

 Pierre and Marie's son, Charles, married Camille Bourdot in London, whose family were from the Vosges and Droyez Haute Marne (where her Mother's family, the Thomassins, were Lords of the Manor). Camille's father, Nicholas Bourdot, ran a wine business in Montmartre and Camille remembered the Commune when they had to eat the family cat!

Charles and Camille Lefebure - Molly's Paternal Grandparents

Charles and Camille Lefebure lived at 25 Belitha Villas, Islington. They had two sons, Charles Hector Lefebure and Victor Lefebure, and a daughter, Caroline Mina Lefebure. Victor married Isabel Clark (who's Aunt was Dame Elizabeth Cadbury) and had a son, John Victor Lefebure, and two daughters, Jill and Judith Lefebure. Major Victor Lefebure was British chemical Liaison Officer with the French in Paris. He wrote the book 'The Riddle of the Rhine' and was an OBE, Chavalier of the Legion of Honour and an Officer of the Crown of Italy. He and Mrs Lefebure lived in Hampstead at Sunbury, where Molly would often visit them.

Victor Lefebure

Sunbury, Molly's Lefebure Aunt and Uncle's house in Hampstead.

Molly's father, Charles Hector Lefebure, was a high ranking civil servant, and possibly a spy. Like his brother, Victor, Charles was made an OBE. He married Elizabeth Cox and they lived in Stoke Newington and had two daughters, Molly and Elizabeth.

                       Molly as a very little girl in Devon when the circus came to town

Molly aged seven in 'walking costume'

                             Molly Lefebure(right) with her sister Elizabeth in Devon

                                                  Molly Lefebure

Charles, Molly and Elizabeth Lefebure in Bude

Molly and Elizabeth both attended The North London Collegiate School from the age of five. My Grandmother was always so proud of her good education there and of being an 'Old North Londoner'. While there Molly had her first piece of writing published aged nine.

          Molly and Elizabeth Lefebure in their North London Collegiate blazers

Molly Lefebure

Molly Lefebure

After school Molly spent some time in Paris learning French, climbing mountains in the Alps with her Father and sister, and then half a year at St Godric's Secretarial College in Hampstead.

                                       Elizabeth and Molly Lefebure

                                         Molly and Elizabeth Lefebure

Elizabeth and Molly Lefebure in the grounds of their old school, The North London Collegiate

After her year out Molly started at King's College in London and also became a newspaper reporter in East London and worked fourteen hour days, seven days a week. While at King's she met her future husband John Gerrish.

                                     John Gerrish

A year in to their education War interceded and Molly, along with everyone else, was called-up and John enrolled at Sandhurst. It was at this time, in a cemetery in Walthamstow, that Molly first encountered the famous Dr Keith Simpson, who was impressed with her secretarial work, and then she became his private secretary. Dr Simpson was the Home Office pathologist and head of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy's Hospital. Despite what she had first thought of as yet more 'horror of secretarial work' in 1940 Molly became the first woman in the World to work in a mortuary and her wisdom, wit and strong stomach lead to a wonderful five years of work with Dr Simpson and 'Miss Molly' (as she became known at Scotland Yard) became a regular sight at Scotland Yard, mortuaries and murder sights throughout England. Her beauty and youth contrasted with the often grotesque cases her and Keith Simpson worked on, one of the most famous of which was that of Mrs Dobkin, whom Dr Simpson identified some eighteen months after being murdered by her husband from an incomplete skeleton with 'a few withered tissues adhering'.

Albert Pierrepoint, friend of Molly and acknowledged as the most efficient executioner in British history

Molly would attend up to eight postmortems in a day. She would often say things to me like;'you can eat anywhere once you've eaten a ham sandwich in a mortuary'!!

Molly Lefebure ('Miss Molly') in the courtyard at Guy's

Molly Lefebure in the East End

Molly Lefebure

Keith Simpson

When 'Miss Molly' left Dr Simpson's side in 1945 he was pretty devastated. John Gerrish was back from India, where he had been in the army, and her and John wished to start a family. They were married in Marylebone in 1945 and, after a reception at Grosvenor House, they went for their honeymoon in Cumbria. They must have had a huge amount to talk about; John had had an interesting time, with much merriment and fun in India and had not seen much if any fighting there, while Molly, back in England, had seen as many dead bodies as soldier on the front line in Europe.

                  John Gerrish with his platoon on the North West Frontier

Molly Lefebure and John Gerrish on their Wedding Day in 1945

 

Molly Lefebure in the 1960's

The Lake District was probably the perfect tonic after so much gore and grime in Blitz scarred London and Molly and John enjoyed their time there staying near Little Town on the slopes of Catbells. Molly's Father had often taken her and her sister Elizabeth for walking holidays in Cumbria, and sometimes the Alps, and she knew Newlands Valley well and the little white farmhouse at the top of it, which in 1957 she bought for the princely sum of £500. This was to prove the catalyst for her next great passion in writing; Cumbrian history and the Lake Poets. When not in Cumrbia Molly and John and their two children lived in Kingston-on-Thames where Molly worked as a group therapist and counsellor for youth clubs and founded The Cambridge Club there. On one occasion she had arranged a football match with another youth club and the Mayoress of Kingston was in attendance. Molly had told her club that they must be on best behaviour and be friendly. Towards the end of the match one of her team started swearing quite vigorously at one of the opposing team. Molly, sitting next to the Mayoress, was furious and marched up to the lad and said 'Bill, you know this is supposed to be a friendly?!' and he replied 'I know Mrs G, I would have punched him had it not been'! Molly studied drug addiction and wrote two books about this under the name 'Mary Blandy', a murderous Eighteenth century ancestor of hers.

Mary Blandy at Oxford Gaol

        A teenage Molly (right) in the Alps with her Father and Sister, Elizabeth

Molly Lefebure with her sons, Nicholas and Hlary Gerrish, photographed by Erich Auerbach

From 1957 Molly wrote many of her books on the Lakes and the Lake Poets, of which Samuel Taylor Coleridge was her main subject. She is now viewed to have been one of the foremost experts on Coleridge in the World. Molly assisted her close friend Richard Wordsworth in starting and running the internationally famous Wordsworth Annual Summer Conference at Grasmere, where she lectured and organised walks and excursions in connection with the Lake Poets, Romantic studies and even wild birds! In 1988 she won The Hunter Davies Prize in The Lakeland Book of the Year Awards for her book on Coleridge 'The Bondage of Love'.

Molly Lefebure by Goldscope Mine, Newlands Valley

Molly Lefebure while out hunting with The Blencathra

John (left) and Molly (2nd from right) with Richard Wordsworth (centre)

Molly subsequently became a great friend of famous walker Alfred Wainwright, who went on to illustrate two books for her; Scratch & Co - The Great Cat Expedition (1968) and The Hunting of Wilberforce Pike (Victor Gollancz 1970). The former was republished for Mr Wainwright's centenary and the launch party was held on top of Scafell Pike.

One of many personal pieces of correspondance between Molly and Wainwright

Molly wrote numerous radio and television plays and scripts and short stories for magazines and journals. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010.

Up until her death on 27th February this year she was working and had recently completed her last book on Coleridge which will be published next year, and another book on the Lake District, also to be published next year, both by Lutterworth.

Her wartime memoirs during her time with Dr Keith Simpson were re-published on 14th March this year under the name 'Murder on the Home Front' and have been made in to a major new ITV two-part series, the first episode of which was on television on last thursday 9th May. Two of her wartime novels will also be republished this year.

She really was the most marvellous lady and such a wonderful Grandmother. She only lost Grandpa in November but, as he instructed her to do in such an event, she 'kept calm and carried on' editing her diaries, which she had kept since the age of eleven, and working with her secretary and agent.

She will be missed by all who knew her, but her legacy, wit and wisdom can't but live on.

Molly Lefebure

Molly Lefebure

Molly Lefebure in the 1990's

My Grandmother and me in Cumbria in September 2012

Molly speaking about her time with Keith Simpson:-

http://youtu.be/Zr4I-iMUhR0

Me being interviewed on ITV News the evening of Murder on the Homefront's screening on ITV:-

http://vimeo.com/65833162

Molly interviewed about her book 'Scratch and Co', based on cats, rabbits and many other animals trekking up a great imaginary mountain in Cumbria. Wainwright illustrated the book

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILpb3yWvPdM

Molly's obituary in The Telegraph:-

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10001457/Molly-Lefebure.html

                        All images in this blog are under the copyright ownership of Oliver Gerrish