Jacqueline Wheldon - Later Life

Later Life

In 1980 she was asked to take on the job of Director of the UK branch of the Committee for the Free World. This was an organisation of intellectuals unified by a desire to stiffen the sinews of western resistance to communism, and in particular to argue the case against unilateral nuclear disarmament by the West and for the introduction of cruise missiles in response to the communist deployment of SS-20s in Eastern Europe. Alun Chalfont was the chairman and the committee included intellectuals such as Raymond Aron, Sybille Bedford, Max Beloff, Milovan Djilas, Joachim Fest, and Tom Stoppard. Its activities culminated in the conference ‘Beyond 1984’, which addressed the continuing threat of communism throughout the world.

Her penultimate battle was against the author of her husband’s biography. He had discovered, among unsorted papers, letters from Huw Wheldon to his wife of an extremely intimate kind describing sexual fantasies, and had used these, without having informed Wheldon of his discovery, as the foundation of a biography of the broadcaster (letter from Lady Wheldon to the Sunday Telegraph, 22 July 1990). Despite widespread disdain for the book among critics, Wheldon felt that she herself was at fault, that she had betrayed her husband ("inexcusable treachery" (JMW) was the term she used), and by this her morale was destroyed. The book was published in 1990. She struggled with attempts to write her own memoir of her husband, but her desire for omniscience hindered her. After three years battling deteriorating health, Wheldon died of cancer at Charing Cross Hospital, Hammersmith, not far from her childhood home, on 21 June 1993. Among her final words were: “I shall have such a lot to write about when I get out of here” (WPW). Her ashes joined those of her husband at the base of an unmarked tree in the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.

Wheldon – known as ‘Jay’ to all but a few very old friends who knew her as ‘Jacq’ or ‘Jackie’ - was short, blonde, blue-eyed, attractive. Her deafness gave her a kind of physical grace, “like patience on a monument”.

Wheldon enjoyed the company of intelligent men and women of the world, and they enjoyed hers. A long correspondence with the art critic John Berger was maintained. So too with her husband’s friend the sculptor and novelist Jonah Jones. After her husband’s death the novelist Kingsley Amis made rare trips out of London to take tea at her house in Richmond. The broadcaster Michael Charlton was often in her company. The philosophers Roger Scruton and Kenneth Minogue were regular correspondents, as was the distinguished international lawyer, Robert Glynn. John Mansfield, Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at Harvard University, read 1 Corinthians 13 at her funeral. Paul Wright wrote that "It was perhaps her constant desire for perfection that was responsible for leaving us so small a literary legacy". (Daily Telegraph) Wheldon once helped her son write a school history project on Cardinal Wolsey. He was awarded 35 marks out of 30.

Dan Jacobson wrote that Wheldon "had a gift for friendship" (The Times); Melvyn Bragg used precisely the same words, adding that "she was one of the very few clever people who was also good" (The Independent). And Norman Podhoretz wrote: "I have known a few people of genius... but of them all, she was the most luminous." (WPW)

"I’m very interested in what God is," she once said, "interested in the idea that God is profound experience" (Daily Mail). By 1976 she had faith enough to write a prayer for her husband during a dire illness. She equated god and love. One of her characters writes that "love makes the heart yearn for eloquence" (Daughters of the Flood). It is a thought that serves as a fitting epitaph.