Obituary: Wendy Hall

Muriel Wendy Hall, author and journalist, born 18 September 1913, died London 21 September 1992.

FEW WHO knew Wendy Hall in her later years would have guessed that for more than a quarter of a century she had been one of the most successful writers in France.

Born in Surrey in 1913, an only child, she was brought up in Manchester, where her father was Editor of the Manchester Evening News. She studied French at London University and at the Sorbonne in Paris, then worked in Paris as a freelance journalist. In 1939 she was forced back to England by the impending war, which she spent working for the Ministry of Information, editing its house journal - among the contributors to which was Laurie Lee.

In 1949, after the death of her father, and having added Swedish and Finnish to her languages, she went first to Scandinavia, where she fell in love with Finland. She became Finnish correspondent for the Sunday Times and the New York Herald Tribune, at a time when little was known about the country, and wrote two popular books, The Finns and Their Country (1967), Green, Gold and Granite (1953) and, in collaboration with Professor Bill Mead, Scandinavia (1972). She also wrote several English textbooks for Swedes and it was these which were to bring her back to France and her greatest success.

The early 1950s was a period when the countries of Europe were beginning to realise that English was the language of the future. In 1953 the managing director of Librairie Hachette, then the biggest publishing house in France, invited her to create a series of English textbooks for French students, and introduced her to Pierre-Maurice Richard, who was to create with her more than 30 books which sold millions of copies and which cornered 70 per cent of the state-school market - a fact hotly disputed by Margaret Thatcher on the only occasion that she and Wendy Hall met. As the Librairie Hachette has recently recorded, theirs was 'an exceptionally fruitful collaboration over a period of unprecedented length'. Wendy Hall always deflated praise and once slyly remarked to Pierre-Maurice Richard, 'We're two typewriters that beat as one]'

Throughout this period, and although often in poor health, she kept up her links with Finland, the country she loved best and, although not a joiner of societies, served for many years on the Council of the Anglo-Finnish Society, and was decorated by the Finnish Government in recognition of her services.

In 1978, however, a severe heart attack brought her writing career to a close, but she continued to maintain a link with the academic world by acting as honorary coach to foreign PhD students from London University.

Wendy Hall began to learn to play the clavichord at the age of 70. Music - always a great enthusiasm of hers - led her to found the Avison Scholarship at the Purcell School of Music in 1987 - in memory of her mother Hilda Avison Hall, who had died the previous year, and of their ancestor the composer Charles Avison (1709-1770) - to be awarded to an overseas student from a low-income background.

The second recipient of the Avison Scholarship was a brilliant young pianist from Taiwan, Wei-Han Su, now reading music at King's College, Cambridge. One of Wendy Hall's proudest moments, and her last outing in public (having already suffered several strokes) was in June 1991 to the Queen Elizabeth Hall to hear Wei-Han Su play Beethoven's Piano Concerto in B Minor, conducted by Simon Rattle.

(Photograph omitted)