Background
Alix Hester Marie Kilroy was born on February 2, 1903, in Nottingham, England.
https://www.amazon.com/Public-Servant-Private-Woman-Meynell/dp/0575040866/?tag=2022091-20
1989
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0905899768/?tag=2022091-20
1998
Alix Hester Marie Kilroy was born on February 2, 1903, in Nottingham, England.
Meynell’s career took off and in 1946 she was appointed under-secretary of the board. Meynell also served as the first secretary of the Monopolies Commission before moving on to the South Eastern Gas Board. She was given a desk at the Board of Trade, where she ascended to Under-Secretary and where she served for 30 years. She retired in 1955.
Alix joined the protest against Suez in 1956 and campaigned energetically for CND. In March 1962 she led a formidable deputation of the CND women's committee to protest to prime minister Harold Macmillan at the renewed use of Christmas Island for nuclear bomb testing. Her success in the civil service led Meynell to write Public Serant, Private Woman: An Autobiography in 1989. She also edited her grandmother’s diaries, What Grandmother Said, which was published in 1998. Meynell’s late-blooming interest in writing may have been attributable to her husband, Sir Francis Meynell, founder of None-such Press.
Dame Alix was one of the most senior civil servants in the country, an under-secretary heading her own department. Meynell was expected to join her family’s law firm after attending Somerville College at Oxford University, but instead, she tested for the administrative class of the civil service. That year, 1925, marked the first time women were allowed to take part in the examination. Out of two hundred successful applicants she scored twelfth and was soon working for the Board of Trade. Her most controversial wartime assignment was the utility furniture scheme, and in 1947 she spoke out against the wastage of national resources in adopting the full skirts and mid-calf hemlines of Christian Dior's "New Look".
Alix was active in anti-Suez activism and early post-war socialism. As late as the 1997 election, she encouraged her friends to vote Lib-Dem rather than Labour on the grounds that this could end the Conservative stranglehold on Suffolk South; however, it did the opposite.
Alix was a founder member of the SDP.
Alix Hester Marie Meynell's insistence that emotional truthfulness meant more than technical fidelity was prophetic of later, more tolerant sexual attitudes. She was a woman of rare intellectual clarity and physical energy: in her time she was an expert ballroom dancer and good skier. In a sense she was an early "having-it-all" woman and her radiance lasted into a grand old age.
To those who did not know her, her brisk manner could be off-putting. But her capacity for affection was enormous, and the length, breadth and zest of her experience made her a joy to talk to. She never lost her curiosity. Her asperity and wisdom lives on in Francis's love poems, with their tender period quality.
In 1946, Alix Kilroy was married to Francis Meynell.
