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Barbara Stoney

We were very sorry to hear of the loss of Barbara Stoney, biographer of Enid Blyton and the Dame of Sark, and more recently author of our own 20th Century Maverick - the extraordinary life of Noel Pemberton Billing.

Barbara was the perfect biographer - learned, meticulous, enthusiastic for her subject, possessed of enormous energy and blessed with certainty. No doubts were ever raised about Barbara's literary accounts. What she averred to be the case carried with it an authority above question, and was delivered with a completeness that permitted no detraction, intellectual or factual.

She was a consummate professional, and rare, even among these, in knowing the exact value of her work. There is enormous responsibility in taking on subjects of the calibre of those she chose to chronicle - the more so because she was possessed of an inborn sense of fairness - she knew and admired her subjects, but was no slavish fan. If Enid Blyton was somewhat enigmatic, Pemberton Billing was something else again; all things to all men, but little known or understood by any.

I think Barbara herself found in him a worthy adversary - a chinese puzzle whose unravelling was not for the faint-hearted. PB proved to be just that - each attempt to bring his story to the public plagued with difficulties to the point where the most unimaginative person would begin to talk of a jinx.

A TV drama-doc was canned. A second disintegrated because Malcolm Bradbury's (lost) script for the first seemed not to have been entirely lost.

Barbara was already venerable in all senses when I met her, and her body was a war-zone, but the adjective 'indomitable' had clearly been coined in anticipation of her. Whatever her apparent external frailties, when you set foot on her creative path, you were swept up in a whirlwind that would toss back what was left of you when, and only when, you had recognised its force and intensity..

I count myself extremely fortunate to have met and known Barbara and her perfect husband, Bob. To have battled wills with and submitted to interrogation by someone of her intellect, class and professionalism was an honour and a privilege of the kind that makes the whole business of publishing worthwhile.

Through her efforts to immortalise others, Barbara has left her own significant mark upon our culture at this time.

Her legacy will remain with us. She, herself,has gone to a better place - at least, it had better be!

With love and remembrance,

DR