Rochester often appears to be under the monopoly of Charles Dickens’s influence. And yet other important literary figures are also part of the city’s history. Of these, Enid Bagnold (1889-1981) is one of the most eminent. The daughter of an army officer, Colonel Arthur Henry Bagnold and Ethel, she was born in Borstal Cottage, on the outskirts of Rochester, her parents having only been married ten months at the time of her birth. It is not entirely clear why she was born here, as her neither of her father or mother were natives of Kent. Perhaps her father was briefly at Fort Borstal – at the time, this was a village a little separate from the nearby city, though in the twentieth century it has long been subsumed into suburbs. Borstal in any case is famed now for the youth incarceration system established after Bagnold’s birth in 1895 at the local prison, and then spread more widely across the world. Borstal Cottages are along Manor Road. There is no mark to commemorate Bagnold there currently.
In any case, she was to spend much of her youth in Jamaica where her father was posted, before going to school in London, and working for the infamous writer Frank Harris, whose lengthy `My Lives and Loves’ published in the 1920s recounted his sexual experiences in often explicit, gaining him notoriety and banning orders from many places for publication of this work. Bagnold was to become his lover, something she detailed in her own autobiography (along with several beatings as a child from her father) before marrying Sir Roderick James, chair of the news agency Reuters, and entering the British establishment. She served as a nurse in the First World War, something that inspired her to start writing.
Her greatest success was with the publication of `National Velvet’ in 1935. She produced many more works. By this time she was a resident of Rottingdean, close to Brighton in Sussex, the place where she was to die in her nineties, and where she is buried. Bagnold’s work was hugely popularised by the film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Mickey Rooney in 1944. There was a sequel just before her death in 1978, `International Velvet.’