reviews_and_ramblings | Ida Pollock (April 12, 1908)

Ida Pollock, now resident in Lanreath, Cornwall, celebrated her 100th birthday in April 2008. Her daughter Rosemary says the day began with delivery of a birthday card from the Queen, followed the arrival of numerous friends and family members bearing gifts and flowers. Ida was particularly pleased to receive congratulations from the Romantic Novelists' Association, and several publishers including Mills and Boon, also celebrating their centenary this year.

Ida was born in Kent on April 12th 1908. From the age of ten she wanted to be a writer, and by the time she was nineteen several of her stories had been printed in major magazines. Early in the war she took a job in London, where she remained through much of the Blitz.

While visiting a publisher's office she met her future husband, the charismatic Major Hugh Alexander Pollock (1888-1971), DSO, married to the publisher's daughter, Enid Blyton. A later chance encounter with him, in the dark days at the beginning of World War II, was to change her life. Hugh was back in the army and Commandant of a school for Home Guard officers. Feeling Ida should be out of London, he offered her a post as civilian secretary. She accepted, and as the months went by their relationship intensified. In May 1942, he was sent overseas and Ida was present when her mother's Sussex home was devastated by a German bomb, but she was not seriously injured.. The following year, however, the Pollock's marriage was in difficulties, and after their divorce, Enid remarried with Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters and Hugh remarried with Ida at London's Guildhall register office, six days after Blyton's marriage. Soon they had a daughter, Rosemary Pollock, also a romance writer.

After the World War II, Ida began writing for Mills&Boon, and soon she was producing ten or twelve titles in every year. Four more publishers were to follow, and after the success of her first historical novel, The Gentle Masquerade, Mills and Boon's Masquerade series was launched. To being in print with several major international publishers at the same time she decided to use multiple pseudonyms. She wrote as Ida Pollock and as Susan Barrie, Jane Beaufort, Rose Burghley, Anita Charles, Pamela Kent, Averil Ives, Barbara Rowan, Mary Whistler and Marguerite Bell.

With their daughter Rosemary and various dogs Ida and Hugh spent time in Switzerland, Italy, France, Ireland and Malta, as well as many different parts of England. In 1971 Hugh died in Malta, where he is buried in Mtarfa's British military cemetery. Ida returned to England, spending several years in Wiltshire before moving to Lanreath in 1986.

The author of over 100 published novels, many of them historical romances, Ida is also an accomplished artist and in 2004 one of her paintings was selected for inclusion in an exhibition devoted to 'the best of contemporary British art' (this exhibition was staged at the Mall Galleries in London). She has also constructed a number of model houses. Ida's long awaited autobiography, Starlight, was published in 2009, and around the same time two favourite novels, Sea Change and A Distant Drum, were re-issued by House of Stratus.

Source: http://www.lanreath.com/page2.html

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1961 - Cover Art by Bern Smith

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