Lesley Blanch

Lesley Blanch, MBE, FRSL (6 June 1904, London – 7 May 2007, Garavan near Menton, France) was an English writer, historian and traveller.

Blanch attended St. Paul's Girls' School, Hammersmith from 1915 to 1921. A scholarly romantic, she would spend the greater part of her long life travelling about remote regions and recording them vividly in her books. Her lifelong passion was for Russia and the Middle East. She was, in the words of the historian Philip Mansel, "not a school, a trend, or a fashion, but a true original."

Blanch studied painting at the Slade from 1922–24 and went on to do all that artists did at the time to earn a living: scenic and costume designs for the theatre; book jackets for T. S. Eliot at Faber and private commissions; wall panels and murals for grand houses; satirical caricature-portraits of society figures; a poster for the London Underground (1933). Eight of her stage designs were included to represent England in New York’s MOMA, Theatre Art International Exhibition in 1934. She turned to journalism, and was features editor of British Vogue from 1937 to 1944. Her brief was to write on anything but fashion. She covered various aspects of Britain at war for the Ministry of Information, and documented the lives of women in the forces with her friend the photographer Lee Miller. The society photographer and designer, Cecil Beaton, admired her and became a lifelong friend. She married Robert Alan Wimberley Bicknell in 1930 and they were divorced in 1941, although the marriage had failed long before that. She stated, in an interview with Karen Robinson for The Sunday Times in August 2006, that she had married Bicknell 'for love of a house' in Richmond, overlooking the Thames.

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