JOAN HAZELDINE

A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Joan Hazeldine (1918-1994)

Novels   |   Short Stories

Novels

Cassy
Published by Michael Joseph, 1981
This novel originally appeared as a serial, under the pseudonym Elizabeth Lyle, in the weekly magazine Woman's Realm. The first instalment was published in a January 1981 edition of that periodical. I have been unable to ascertain the issue dates of the further instalments, nor how long the serialisation ran in Woman's Realm. In the same year, Michael Joseph published Cassy in book form as a hardcover while the New York based publisher, St. Martin's Press, brought out an American edition. The novel was reprinted again in the U.K. as a paperback by Hodder & Stoughton in 1982. Cassy is a Regency romance story set in 1813. Lucasta Loring, known as Cassy, is one of three sisters who are left penniless after their parents die in an accident. Their father had squandered all his wealth in gambling debts. The handsome Marquis of Allingham has set his eyes on Cassy but she has an independent streak and becomes an actress, changing her appearance and adopting a stage name for her performances in London theatres. While pursuing a successful stage career, Cassy lets her sisters believe that while she is away she is teaching at a school for young ladies. A double life ensues, in which she meets many notable people in London and Brighton. Fearing her secret will be discovered, Cassy travels abroad. Her adventures take Cassy to Paris, Vienna and Brussels. This is an outstanding first novel by Hazeldine which was well received by critics upon its publication.

Claire
Published by André Deutsch, 1983
This novel was reprinted as a hardcover in the U.S.A. by St. Martin's Press in 1983. The same publisher issued a paperback edition of it in 1987. Joan Hazeldine drew on her local knowledge when writing Claire, which is set on the East Sussex coastline in the late eighteenth century, shortly after the Revolution in France. Brighton, Rottingdean, Saltdean, Newhaven and the cliffs and beaches of the area are the settings for this tale of adventure and romance. Claire de la Robinière is a French emigrant who travels from Dieppe in a fishing boat to Newhaven, her family having lost almost everything. A beautiful young woman, Claire finds herself a centre of attention in the Prince Regent's Brighton. Nevertheless, she carries a secret. With the local aristocracy, eligible suitors, the Preventive and smugglers involved in the plot, Claire is a marvellous work of historical fiction. Although it in no way detracts from one's enjoyment of this novel, the time period in which it is set, as one literary critic pointed out, is a little too early to be a true Regency novel. But to my mind, it's close enough and a joy to read as Hazeldine strikes a happy balance between historical detail and an enthralling story.

Short Stories

"Girl in a Yellow Swimsuit"
The Star, August 2, 1948

"Primrose and Her Paragon"
The Star, October 16, 1948

"Listening for Love"
The Bristol Evening Post, April 30, 1949

"Portrait of Carol"
The Star, June 18, 1949

"Present from Santa"
The Star, December 24, 1949

"Joy's Easter Bonnet
The Star, April 8, 1950

"Laura Goes Home"
The Star, May 27, 1950

"Holiday for June"
The Star, June 24, 1950
The Bristol Evening Post, September 8, 1951

"Date with Daphne"
The Star, September 9, 1950

"Dawn for Greta"
The Star, November 18, 1950

"The Love Slogan"
The Star, January 27, 1951
The Bristol Evening Post, September 22, 1951

"The Paying Guest"
The Star, September 1, 1951

"Girl on the South Bank"
The Star, September 20, 1951

"Portrait of Marriage"
The Star, February 16, 1952

"Mona Lisa's Suitor"
The Star, April 12, 1952

"Angel Face"
The Star, August 23, 1952

"Betty and the Bumpkin"
The Star, October 18, 1952

"Christmas at Clare's"
The Star, December 20, 1952

"Cupid Catches the Bus"
The Star, March 28, 1953

"His Music for Maureen"
The Star, July 11, 1953

"Pink Shoes"
The Star, August 3, 1953

"Wife for Joey"
The Star, November 21, 1953

"Farewell to a Ballerina"
The Star, July 17, 1954

"Pam's Producer"
The Star, November 27, 1954

"The Bird for Basil"
The Star, May 7, 1955

"Bunch of Red Roses"
The Star, July 2, 1955

"Julie in Town"
The Star, July 16, 1955

"Bobby's Present"
The Star, December 1, 1956

Illustration in The Bristol Evening Post for the story "Holiday for June".

Sources and Acknowledgments:
In the process of compiling this bibliography, as well as referring to my own collection of literature and the research I have done at the British Library Newspaper Library, I also consulted the Newspapers.com website and the online British Newspaper Archive. In particular, I have used as a source of information an article about Joan Hazeldine written by journalist Mary Kenny that was published in the April 26, 1981 edition of The Sunday Telegraph.

Addenda:
I first discovered Joan Hazeldine's delightful short stories in 2006, while researching the fiction published in the London evening newspaper The Star at the British Library Newspaper Library in Colindale, North London. Back then, I felt the name did not sound like a pseudonym and I tried to trace any details of the author's life. However, I drew a complete blank. Now, twenty years later, I have been able to learn a lot about her and I am pleased to share what I know here.
My knowledge of Joan Hazeldine's writing is limited to her novels and short stories. She was said to have also written humorous articles under her own name. At the time of writing, I have yet to come across any articles by her in magazines and newspapers. I suspect these were published during the post-war period in women's magazines; quite possibly some of them may have appeared in Woman's Journal, for which publication she was once employed as a journalist.

Arthur Leslie Cranfield (1890-1957)

Joan Maureen Cranfield was born in Crowborough, East Sussex on February 9, 1918. Her father was the well known journalist Arthur Leslie Cranfield. The son of a solicitor, he was born in St Ives, Huntingdonshire in 1890 and fought in the First World War with the Essex Regiment as a captain and brigade signalling officer. In January 1916, he married Mary Frances (née Smyth) in Hammersmith, London. Born in the same year as her father, Joan Cranfield's mother was the daughter of the Irish sculptor George Smyth (1859-1927). A huge figure in the newspaper world, A. L. Cranfield's first job was with The Warwick Advertiser. He went on work for The Sheffield Telegraph and The Birmingham Gazette, in addition to two spells with The Star that were interrupted by his service in the First World War. In 1922, A. L. Cranfield was appointed as chief sub-editor of The Evening News and in 1926 became the editor-in-chief of the Press Association. His later career in Fleet Street encompassed editorial and executive roles at The Daily Mail and The Evening Standard before his sixteen-year tenure as editor of The Star, which began in 1941. Joan Cranfield was the oldest of their two children. Her younger brother, Leslie Cranfield, was born in 1921 and became a barrister. Both had a Catholic upbringing, and in her youth, Joan Cranfield lived in Rottingdean, near Brighton in East Sussex and the Kensington area of West London, where her parents had a second home. As a young woman, she served in the Second World War as a public relations officer for the South-East Command division of the A.T.S. In August 1943, she was transferred to the Northern Command of the A.T.S. at York, where she held a similar role.
Joan Cranfield married Captain Clifford Leslie Curtis-Willson, who was born in Hackney, East London and had played rugby for Sussex, on March 25, 1944, their wedding taking place at the Catholic Church of St. James in Marylebone, Central London. Her husband had attended Brighton College before the war and while there he edited a magazine. I suspect their shared passion for writing was one of the things that brought them together. Both came from journalistic backgrounds, for his father, William Thomas Curtis-Willson (1888-1957), a First World War veteran, was later a journalist who served as president of the Newspaper Society and ran The Brighton and Hove Herald newspaper in his capacity as chairman and managing director. His son fought in the Second World War and was a pilot in the air observation post squadron of the Royal Artillery. He served his country with the RAF's 660 Squadron and was sent to France after the Normandy landings in 1944. On the morning of March 12, 1945, Captain Clifford Leslie Curtis-Willson died from his wounds after the aerial reconnaissance plane he was piloting was shot down the previous day by an enemy fighter plane on the Western Front near Bedburg in Germany. He was buried at the Groesbeek Canadian War Cemetery in the Netherlands.

Captain Clifford Leslie Curtis-Willson (1918-1945)

Joan Curtis-Willson remained a widow for two years. After the war, she had careers in advertising, film publicity and as a sub-editor for the magazine Womans' Journal. In early 1947, she married her second husband, Roy Hazeldine, whose father, Thomas Frederick Hazeldine, ran the White Horse Hotel in Rottingdean. Born in 1922, Roy Hazeldine was a local businessman who worked in the car industry. The couple settled in Rottingdean and had three children together, two sons and a daughter. Roy and his brother, Eric Hazeldine, went on to found Denes Motors in 1950, a garage business based in Telscombe Cliffs and Rottingdean. From 1948 to 1956, Joan Hazeldine contributed several beautifully written short stories to The Star and The Bristol Evening Post. Her short fiction certainly has merit, as I have enjoyed reading Hazeldine's stories very much. However, with her father, A. L. Cranfield, at the helm of The Star for the whole of this period, undoubtedly this fact provided a stepping stone, of sorts, to her writings finding their way into the pages of the newspaper. After 1956, it appears she stopped writing short stories altogether and concentrated on being a housewife and bringing up three young children. Her mother, Mary Frances Cranfield, had died after a long illness at a nursing home in Hove on April 15, 1955. Hazeldine's father had also been in ill health for some time and retired from The Star in July 1957. He passed away later that year at the London Clinic on October 9. A memorial service for Arthur Leslie Cranfield was held at St. Dunstan-in-the-West on Fleet Street. A lesson was read by Laurence John Cadbury, who was chairman of The Daily News Ltd., which owned The Star and News Chronicle. Lord Layton, Sir William Haley and many other journalists from across the newspaper world were in attendance, along with Cranfield's relatives
Five years later, the family was dealt another blow when Joan Hazeldine's brother, Leslie Cranfield, who was married with two children and had retired from the bar over a year earlier to join the legal department of the British Oxygen Corporation, died at the age of 40 in tragic circumstances on September 4, 1962. On the way to his office during the morning rush hour, he fell under a District Line train at Stamford Brook station, near where he lived in Chiswick. A 23-year-old student doctor, the former Olympic skier Mrs. Juliet Gardner, who was on her way to Guy's Hospital and off-duty at the time, ordered an ambulance before she climbed down from the platform and crawled under the second carriage of the train, where she administered first-aid and gave him a morphine injection. Eventually, with the help of firemen, he was lifted off the tracks. Gardner went with him in the ambulance but he died on the way to Hammersmith Hospital. At an inquest into his death, eyewitness accounts from those that witnessed the incident at the London Underground station suggested he had deliberately threw himself off the station platform into the path of the oncoming train. Leslie Cranfield had been receiving a war disability pension for gunshot and shrapnel wounds and his doctor confirmed that he had been suffering from anxiety and insomnia. Almost certainly what Leslie Cranfield saw and experienced in the Second World War would have had a profound affect on him. He may well have been suffering from PTSD. However, his wife and doctor both stated at the inquest that he was happily married, had no financial worries and there was no prior indication to them that he wanted to take his own life. The coroner found there was insufficient evidence to show that he had committed suicide and recorded an open verdict.
Despite these personal losses, it is evident that Joan Hazeldine got on with raising a family and had a good social life. Around 1966, at the age of 48, she was said to be content with her life in the Brighton area, a stalwart member of East Brighton Golf Club, as her father had been, and a frequent attendee of the local bridge circuit. At this point, however, Roy Hazeldine's work for British Leyland took him to a remote part of Turkey, near Izmir on the Aegean Coast. The couple ended up living there for 14 years. It took her some time to acclimatise, dealing with a culture shock and a different way of living, without the usual mod cons, for example. Her husband's posting abroad was, it seemed to her, a final throwback to the days of the British Raj, when a gentleman would go where his government or company would tell him to go, and the uncomplaining wife, at least in public, would accompany him. Once settled in her new environment, she flourished, learning to speak Turkish, Italian and German, as well as visiting the Edwardian libraries of expatriates who had previously lived in Turkey. Her love of literature had always been there, but now Hazeldine decided to write novels. She wrote four, three of them Regency romances and the fourth, a love story set in medieval Turkey.

Joan Hazeldine and her husband returned to England in 1980, and by 1981 were enjoying their retirement in Andorra, fairly high up in the Pyrenees. During this period, and well into her sixties at this point, she took to driving Land Rovers across Europe on her own. She clearly had an adventurous spirit at this time of her life. It was while living in Andorra that her novel Cassy was serialised in Woman's Realm under the pen name Elizabeth Lyle, with the first instalment appearing in that magazine in January 1981. Cassy appeared shortly thereafter in book form, as a hardcover by the publisher Michael Joseph, with a U.S. reprint edition being an indication of the novel's success. A second Regency romance novel, Claire, was published by André Deutsch in 1983. Claire also found its way onto the shelves of American bookstores, in both hardcover and paperback editions. It does seem a shame to me that her other two historical romance novels never saw publication. Given the quality of the two that did get published, I imagine they were equally accomplished literary works. I would have loved to have read them.

It is unclear when exactly Joan and Roy Hazeldine returned to Rottingdean after their time in Andorra. They were certainly still living halfway up a mountain in the Pyrenees in 1983. Eventually, they settled back in Rottingdean for good. Joan Maureen Hazeldine passed away, aged 76, at her home in Rottingdean on December 13, 1994. A Requiem Mass was held for her at the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Rottingdean, six days later. She was interred at St. Margaret's Churchyard, also in Rottingdean. Her husband, Roy, died in 1996. They are survived by their three children.

Joan Hazeldine in 1981.
Photo taken by her son, Nigel Hazeldine.

The above is, of course, a very brief sketch of her life. After being a mystery woman for so long, I can only repeat that it has been a pleasure for me to gain a little insight into who she was. And to take a fresh look at those early short stories she wrote for The Star, so charmingly written and deft they were in their composition. Joan Hazeldine's two published historical romance novels are also an inspiration. Entertaining, well researched tales that stand as a testament to her literary talent.

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