Barbara Whittingham-Jones

(Mary Edith) Barbara Whittingham-Jones, later Oppenheim (1907-1958) was a British politician, historian and journalist. She spent some time living in Malaya, and became known for her writing on Malaya in the late 1940s.[1]

Life

Barbara Whittingham-Jones was the daughter of the Revd Edward Evan Whittingham-Jones and Edith Muriel, daughter of Walter Robert Taylor, paint manufacturer of Liverpool and London. As a teenager she stayed with a French family at the Chateau du Gresil near Rouen and then at Heidelberg ("The Adopted Son", Blackwood's Magazine, January 1951). She was educated at Huyton College and Newnham College, Cambridge, and studied for the bar at Gray's Inn.[2] She was called to the bar on 17 June 1931, but abandoned the law for politics.

In the mid-1930s Whittingham-Jones supported Randolph Churchill's unsuccessful efforts to stand as an Independent Conservative parliamentary candidate in Liverpool constitencies (contesting the 1935 Liverpool Wavertree by-election, and in the 1935 general election the Liverpool West Toxteth constituency). In 1936 she wrote a series of pamphlets criticising the sectarianism of the Liverpool Conservatives under its 'boss' Sir Thomas White - a 'tripod' of 'Religious bigotry, Class jealousy and Caucus formation'.[3] In 1936 Whittingham-Jones herself stood unsuccessfully as a Conservative City Councillor in Croxteth.[4] At the end of the decade she established an organisation called the Progressive Democratic Union in Liverpool. As the organisation's chair, she criticised Britain's 'nerveless foreign policy' in July 1939, calling for Winston Churchill to be Prime Minister.[5]

Whittingham-Jones in 1940 married Henry Rolf Oppenheim (1902-87).[1] Their child, the art expert Selby Whittingham, was born in Malaya in 1941.[6] Their and his escape from Singapore in February 1942 is related in the diary of her husband (typescript at Cambridge University Library). In the aftermath of the war, her 1946 article 'Malaya Betrayed' caused a sensation in Malaya. In September 1947 she was the first British correspondent to visit the Patani district.[1] She carried out an effective propaganda campaign supporting Tengku Mahmud Mahyiddeen and the claims of Malay Muslims of Patani.[7] She reported on the lead up to Indonesian independence for The Observer and Far Eastern Review, whose parliamentary correspondent she became. She was a member of the Royal Asiatic Society.

In the 1950s she embarked on a series of books starting from a study of Shakespeare's plays and embracing a study of the royal succession in the 15th century and the history of Southwark and its Shakespeare festival, incomplete at her death. She lived at 1 Scarsdale Villas, Kensington, where the previous occupant was Lady Benson, Sir Frank Benson inspiring her early love of Shakespeare. She failed to get a blue plaque erected to them, but one has now been to Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, who lived in the studio at the back which Lady Benson used for her drama school. Swann became a lodger at no.1 for a short period before he married his first wife. The first recording of 'At the Drop of a Hat' has a mention of Mrs Oppenheim as a neighbour.

On 28 November 1958 Whittingham-Jones died suddenly while flying from London to Gibraltar.[8] Her papers are held at the School of Oriental and African Studies.[1] In the 1930s she had collected material for a historical book on Liverpool politics, and after her death some of this material was published in the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire.[9]

Works
  • The Pedigree of Liverpool Politics: White, Orange & Green. [Liverpool], 1936.
  • More about Liverpool Politics: Red Flag, Rome and Shamrock, 1936.
  • Down with the Orange Caucus!. [Liverpool], 1936.
  • China Fights in Britain. A factual survey of a fascinating colony in our midst. London: W.H. Allen & Co, 1944.
  • 'The works of Maurice Collis', Asiatic Review, Vol. 41 (July 1945), pp. 298–300
  • 'Malaya Betrayed', World Review, May 1946
  • 'Patani – Malay State outside Malaya', The Straits Times, October 30, 1947.
  • 'The new Malaya', Spectator, No. 6240 (January 30, 1949), pp. 126–7
  • 'Moslem Community in Siam Oppressed by Buddhist Rulers. Patani Isolated', Scotsman, March 22, 1948.
  • 'Patani Appeals to UNO', Eastern World, Vol. 2, No. 4 (April 1948)
  • 'Spindrift of an Asian tour – II. Burma', The Asiatic Review. Vol. 44 (April 1948), pp. 212–219.
  • 'Independent Indonesia', Contemporary Review, Vol. 178 (February 1950), pp. 87–91
  • 'The Strangers Gallery', The Quarterly Review, 1951
  • Electioneering in Lancashire before secret ballot: II Liverpool’s political clubs, 1812-1830, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 3, 1959, pp. 117–138
  • 'The Dugdale Shakespeare', The Quarterly Review, 1964

References
  1. Papers of Barbara Whittingham Jones. Accessed 4 January 2021.
  2. 'Bar Examinations', The Times, 30 October 1929, p.5.
  3. John Belchem (2007). Irish, Catholic and Scouse: The History of the Liverpool-Irish, 1800-1939. Liverpool University Press. pp. 301–2. ISBN 978-1-84631-107-9.
  4. 'Municipal Elections in the Merseyside Towns', The Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1936, p.10.
  5. 'The Men the Country Wants', The Manchester Guardian, 4 July 1939, p.22.
  6. Dolman, Bernart (1992). Who's Who in Art. 25. London: The Art Trade Press, Ltd. p. 508. Retrieved 28 October 2011.
  7. Moshe Yegar (2002). Between Integration and Secession: The Muslim Communities of the Southern Philippines, Southern Thailand, and Western Burma/Myanmar. Lexington Books. pp. 107, 121. ISBN 978-0-7391-0356-2.
  8. Probate Records.
  9. Whittingham-Jones, Electioneering in Lancashire before secret ballot: II Liverpool’s political clubs, 1812-1830, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Vol. 3, 1959, pp.117–138.
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