Dulcie Cohen z"l Peter Conradi Funeral tribute 2 October 2008

Dulcie Phoebe Cohen, born 7 November 1917, died 29 September 2008.

Dulcie Cohen was born, almost 91 years ago, first of four children to Ruby Isaacs and George Cohen. George was direct descendant of a namesake who in 1834 started what was by the time of her birth the biggest scrap metal merchant in the world:  the 600 Group.

She had a fortunate birth, a happy temperament, and a lucky life. Dulcie soon acquired a sister Eileen, and  two brothers, John and Michael, the last – only -  still with us, in New York.

Dulcie belonged to a big extended family, in-bred as Jewish families established before the Great War were, who married mainly within the so-called club of 10,000. There were weddings where Dulcie was related to both bride and groom, and a lasting riddle: “Shall we ask the great-aunts?”. You could not invite one great-aunt without inviting all, in which case you catered for an extra dozen guests. The occasional claustrophobia of such a Forsyte-ish extended family, based in Hampstead, meant that escaping from 3, Frognal Lane in October 1946 to live in Hatch End was welcome.

Dulcie had all her life the different kinds of outward assurance that went with a secure home, with remarkable beauty, and being the eldest child. She hated showiness, and would make the family driver drop her two blocks away from Queens College on Harley Street, to arrive on foot and prevent the other girls from learning she was chauffeur-driven. She disliked meal-times in the dining-room at home where one of the maids stood at attention, hands held behind her back : this made for lack of privacy. Probably it also stifled family arguments. Dulcie enjoyed arguments.

She was head-strong. Due to her insistence the family moved its place of worship from Dennington Park Road to the LJS in St John’s Wood : she told her father she hated being segregated with the women-folk in the gallery, while her many boy-friends waved up at her from below. She also insisted, having enjoyed the novels of Angela Brazil, that she went off to boarding-school, Micklefield outside Seaford, school for debutantes. In summer the family decamped to Chesterford, a house on the esplanade at Frinton, where the house-keeper was a kind-hearted Lancashire girl called Florence Reynolds, and her Essex-born husband Pikle the gardener; entertainment included tennis and fancy-dress parties.

When the Spanish Civil War began Dulcie spent one happy year in a Lausanne finishing school, where she was fined six-pence for speaking English, and learnt good French with a strong Hampstead accent. Then a year at the LSE studying social science. She met Gordon Conradi whose American mother was admiring a sand-castle Dulcie’s youngest brother was building, and they fell in love. Of the help she soon gave in looking after the first Jewish refugees, Dulcie commented later, “We opened our homes, but not our hearts”.

War came and Dulcie joined the Red Cross to become a VAD nurse; Gordon the Royal Engineers. Dulcie’s parents had delayed the marriage  til after the duration because of his doubtful prospects, an objection that, considering he would inherit his father’s business, now seems strange.

In June 1940, 12 days after the Dunkirk evacuation, Gordon was among a group escaping from caves in Normandy and rang her with this news from Southampton Docks. Next day on Winchester station platform he and Dulcie ran into one another’s arms, his account of his escape was published in the Express, and Dulcie’s parents relented. Within 10 days a war-wedding, at the LJS: Dulcie wore blue.

She became a camp-follower, in  an Andersen shelter in Portsmouth during its terrible bombing and then in London, where she later recalled carrying baby Richard in the dark around the Harvard Court flat, bombs having fused the lights and shattered window-glass on the floor. She noted that German punctuality dictated that the blitz start exactly one minute earlier on successive evenings, to keep pace with the shortening day-light.

On November 15th 1941 on his final training flight as a navigator off the Lincolnshire coast,  and only weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, her brother John was shot down and killed. Her parents, she later believed, never got over this. 

As for Dulcie she had, with one exception, the gift of being able to let go and live in the present.  On the day war finally ended (VE day) a new baby arrived (Peter); then a daughter, Prue, finally Stephen by Caesarian section. She had wanted a second daughter and, hearing that her new child was another boy, asked wearily from the anaesthetic and with dubious taste, “Can’t you cut it off ?”.

Not un-typically she also later denied having said any such thing!

Dulcie came of the very last generation of young ladies whose fathers didn’t wish to see them employed. But she wanted more from life than petit point tapestry, knitting, and water-colour painting, at all of which she excelled. It was a source of shame that when she married, she could not even cook a cherry cake properly, without all the fruit going to the bottom! She felt her sheltered, old-fashioned deeply conventional upbringing - essentially late Victorian or Edwardian - had left her less than a fully mature and useful citizen of the modern world.

 That inward sense of self-worth that comes only from work she notably lacked. She had to fight to make a career for herself, and fight she did, including, at times, her husband. “Why” she noted, “did some men find it so hard to encourage their women to have another identity, a different one from the mothers of the past?” But hers was a generation divided. She simultaneously felt that feminism was sacrificing the “graciousness” [her word] that had formerly been women’s special contribution.

She none the less began her re-education by training as a psychotherapist at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation. She was delighted in 1958 to be  accepted to work with the Marriage Guidance Council on Queen Anne Street, and developed a private practice as a psychotherapist.  She was very proud of the first small income this generated: all her own work! She was a member of the Richmond Fellowship, and of Jewish-Christian Dialogue. And she joined co-counselling groups. Meanwhile she and Gordon moved to a bigger house in Pinner.

Rabbi Goldstein has spoken of her Judaism, at first an unquestioning faith, but newly important to her after 1972 when her marriage failed. Having supported Gordon through various difficulties, she took this failure very hard.

But she recovered. She re-married after some years Dick Cohen, an old family friend, and moved to his house on Dene Road, a happy step-mother to Judy, Edward and Dinah, to add to her own four.

Some time after Dick died in 1991 Dulcie moved to the Northwood flat where she lived for fourteen years, the last four with full-time carers. That no fewer than five of those who cared for her are here today speaks volumes for who Dulcie was - of what mettle she was made. It also makes clear the extraordinary quality of care she was lucky enough to be in receipt of.

On the Monday that she died her carer Ivy commented that Dulcie was blest.
Blest seems exactly the right word.
She came from a big secure family, had four children, four grand-children - Michael, Rachel, James and Ben - , then three great-grand-children - Sam, Arin, Abigail.

Though she was often in hospital - for a serious brain tumour in 1969,  and, much later, due to osteoporosis, for a succession of broken bones, her family remember with awe her fortitude, stoicism and will-power.  Adversity bought out the best in her. When, shortly before she died,  she was commiserated with about her pneumonia, she clearly and very typically retorted    “It could be a lot worse !”.

She made her own journey and found her own precious wisdom.
She made friends who were loyal and devoted.
She discovered herself as a psychotherapist.
And all her children were at her bed-side as she died peacefully at home.

She was, energetic, welcoming, witty, charming and obstinate, a woman of great warmth and strength of personality, interesting, wise, attractive, tolerant and very, very brave. She had a wonderful smile.
She was a great lady ….
She will be greatly missed.