Bit off-beat this, but is anyone here old enough to remember Lady Isobel Barnett? I'm sure a few of you do - Ralph, Tom, boo & a few others.
She was immensely likeable despite her title & the posh way she spoke, & she was one of those folks who everyone admired & respected.
Anyway, I was reading a book & she was mentioned in passing, so I Wiki'd her & was shocked to read this...
In 1953 Barnett arrived on BBC television as one of the panel of What's My Line?, which made her a household name. She appeared on the programme for ten years but was not an original panelist, her seat having been previously occupied by Marghanita Laski.
She was regarded by audiences as elegant and witty, the epitome of the British aristocracy, although her title actually came from the fact that her solicitor husband had been knighted; the form Lady Barnett suggested she possessed a courtesy title, but she was not an aristocrat, nor had she married into the aristocracy. She also made regular appearances on the BBC radio series Any Questions, on the radio panel game Many a Slip and on the women's discussion series Petticoat Line. She was greatly in demand as an after-dinner speaker, a role into which she slipped confidently
In her last years Barnett became reclusive and eccentric. In 1980 she was found guilty of shoplifting, and fined £75 for stealing a can of tuna and a carton of cream worth 87 pence from her village grocer. This brought her briefly back into the public eye; four days later on 20 October, she was found dead at her home in Cossington, Leicestershire.
A coroner's inquest subsequently ruled that Barnett killed herself with an overdose of painkillers in her bath. During the inquest, police testified that she wore an extra spacious pocket, known as a poacher's pocket, inside her coat when she was caught stealing the groceries. Two days before her death, Lady Barnett told an interviewer she was a compulsive thief and had been shoplifting for years. Finding that Barnett, a trained physician, killed herself deliberately with an overdose of arthritis painkiller.
I never knew any of that, or if I did I had clean forgotten.
This, of course, was pre-internet days.
It's all a bit late now, but it made me feel terribly sad.
Don't like a poacher's pocket being evidence of shoplifting... poaching, well....
16m
