Rosemary Amies
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Your support makes all the difference.Rosemary Peggy Amies, business administrator and voluntary worker: born Wembley, Middlesex 19 October 1915; died Oxford 22 June 2001.
For the past 20 years, living in the honey-stoned Cotswold village of Langford, Rosemary Amies appeared the very model of an English countrywoman, with gardening, the bowls club and church restoration occupying most of her days.
Her quiet rural retirement belied, however, the remarkable contrast of her two working lives. The first was her long and eventful career with the Woman's Royal Voluntary Services (WRVS). The second was acting as right-hand woman to her elder brother, the couturier and royal dressmaker Hardy Amies.
It was in 1960 that she joined Amies's thriving London salon in Savile Row as administrator and personnel manager. It was, however, the organising skills she had acquired in the very different environment of the (then) WVS which her brother had realised would be of great benefit in the management of his fast-expanding business. She was to remain a director of Hardy Amies Ltd until the end of her life and played a significant role in the sale of her brother's business in May this year to the Cardington group.
The exotic world of high fashion could not have been further removed from her life in the WVS where her fast tour of duty, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, took her through Italy, Greece and Austria, following in the wake of the Allied advance across Europe.
Her initial assignment was to drive a mobile canteen, a three-ton Chevrolet truck, from Genoa to Naples. It was a gruelling week-long journey taking her over improvised bridges and along bomb-blasted roads, but it was also one which was to whet her appetite for adventure and impress on her the need for fortitude and a cool head.
Later, in 1950, during the Korean War, she rejoined the WVS and was sent to Hong Kong as part of a team to organise recreational clubs for servicemen. Her next period of foreign service was during the civil war in Malaya where she was promoted to Area Organiser in order to supervise the work of 40 volunteers as well as looking after the welfare of the wives and children of Gurkha soldiers.
Her duties in Malaya involved much travelling over a wide, war-torn terrain. Returning with her driver from Penang to Kuala Lumpur, she was persuaded, for safety's sake, to travel with the Provost Marshal's armed convoy. It was during this homeward journey that she found herself under enemy fire, facing a hail of bullets from a rebel band of Communist bandits. The experience made her resolve always in future to travel alone.
Rosemary Amies was born in Wembley, north-west London, in 1915, the only daughter of Herbert William Amies, a valuer for the London County Council, and younger sister of Hardy, who had been born in 1909. Their mother was a court dressmaker. After their father's return from the First World War he was put in charge of the LCC's new housing estate in Becontree and brought his family to live in nearby Barking where Rosemary Amies spent much of her girlhood until, in 1928, she was sent as a boarder to Brentwood County High School.
For brief periods before the war she tried her hand in the world of retail fashion, first at Jacqmar in New Bond Street and later in a dress shop in Reigate, Kent. But it was not until the outbreak of war when she joined the Civil Defence as an ambulance driver that she found her real métier.
Soon afterwards she was transferred to the transport section of the Fire Service. Here she became one of only six women in the whole country to be chosen as fire-fighting instructors. At the approach of D-Day she was put in charge of all the firewomen in the West Country region.
After her return to civilian life she worked for a time in the sales department of a firm making agricultural machinery. But after two years entertaining clients at country fairs and listing orders for ploughs and threshing machines she decided to re-enlist in the WVS.
Her last posting was to Germany where she came to work under a new administrator, a gentle-natured but highly competent woman, Gwyn Owen, who was destined to become a lifelong friend and with whom she eventually settled in Langford in the charming cottage which they shared until Owen's death in 1983.
Rosemary Amies possessed a character of staunch integrity, and faced the world four-square, sturdy, downright and dependable, her opinionated directness shielding a self-effacing personality of great warmth and kindliness. For her famous, clever and successful brother, always her first priority, she admirably fulfilled the role of candid friend, sometimes critical but always fiercely loyal, and, though on occasions she could bring him down to earth with a dismissive snort, the bond between them was indestructible.
Derek Granger
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