Joan Hassall
In 1972 she was elected the first woman Master of the Art Workers' Guild[1] and in 1987 was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire).
She spent a great deal of time travelling around the area of Evesham and Pershore[3] to make preliminary drawings for her wood engravings and produced a book that is generally considered to be one of her best.
During World War II John Kingsley Cook, a tutor of Book Illustration and Drawing at Edinburgh College of Art, suggested that Joan Hassall act as his replacement, a post that she accepted.
When she returned to Kensington Park Road she had her own hand press and produced a range of ephemeral publications over the years – chapbooks, Christmas cards, fliers for the local Anglican church et al. – as well as using it to print her wood engravings.
1947 saw the publication too of A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, a charmingly illustrated book that was reprinted several times, and of Eric Linklater's Sealskin Trousers.
The publisher Rupert Hart-Davis produced a limited edition of 50 copies of the latter, printed by Hague and Gill and bound by the London bookbinding firm of Sangorski & Sutcliffe.
1950 saw the publication of The Strange World of Nature by Bernard Gooch, another book based on meticulous observation, Hassall's trademark.
Between 1957 and 1962 Hassall produced wood engravings for a seven-volume edition of the novels of Jane Austen by the Folio Society.
She said in a letter to Tim Coombs[3] "I often think how wonderful it would have been to live in 88 with an adequate income, as it was such a beautiful house, but it was a 24-year struggle to make ends meet."
Friends made at London continued to visit her, she had her cats and she had her music (she played the spinet, the organ, the flute and the viol).
Malham was her life at the end and she invited two friends from there, Norman Cawood and Barbara Hudson, to be her guests when she went to Buckingham Palace to receive the OBE.
Brian North Lee, her executor, said at her funeral:[12] "Joan’s retirement at Malham was arguably the most happy period of her life."
Another close friend, and former lodger at 88 Kensington Park Road, Norman Painting, gave the eulogy at her memorial service at St Giles in the Fields.
In 1948 Hassall designed the £1 postage stamp[14] issued in commemoration of the Royal Silver Wedding of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
Under the direction of Brian North Lee, the Fleece Press published two collections of her letters, the first Dearest Sydney (1991) in a limited edition of 220 copies,[18] the second the two-volume Dearest Joana: A Selection of Joan Hassall's Lifetime Letters and Art (2000) in a limited edition of 300 copies.
