Page 32 - Sample pages "Kim: A Biography of M.G. Founder Cecil Kimber" by Jon Pressnell

TWO SISTERS IN COCKTAIL PYJAMAS
This wasn’t just a period of excitement for the Abingdon factory. On the personal front there were also developments. It is difficult to be precise about whether it was in 1931 or 1932 when Cecil Kimber met the lady who would upend his married life and become his second wife. ‘It really was love at first sight when my father met my future stepmother, Muriel Dewar,’ writes Jean in The Other Tack. ‘My sister and I were with him in the garden of Cecil Graves-Morris, an Oxfordshire dentist, [in] about 1931, and looking back I realise that I saw it happen – one of those instantaneous attractions so powerful that in time they could override all obstacles.
‘My stepmother did, of course, meet my father, but she did this reluctantly, not very often, and nearly always in the company of her elder sister as a chaperone. She told my stepsister, Bobbie, long afterwards, that she resisted the attraction she felt for two or three years, as she did not want to break up a marriage. There was also her own family to consider...Bobbie was settled in a good school, and my stepmother quite rightly feared the damage that a scandal might do both to herself and to my father.’
Muriel Lillias Greenwood, who worked for Cecil Graves-Morris as a dental nurse, was born in 1900 in Headington, Oxford, and had married an Anzac soldier by the name of Dewar towards the end of the First World War, according to Jean. ‘They were very young, and he was quite unable to afford to send for her once he was back in New Zealand and demobilized. When all hope had evaporated, her uncle paid for the divorce.’
This is not quite the case. Although it was not realised at the time, Muriel Greenwood – later to be invariably known by the nickname Gillie – had never married Australian-born New Zealander Owen Dewar. Their daughter Pauline, known as Bobbie, and born in 1920 in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Lancashire, was therefore illegitimate. When Dewar returned to New Zealand, contact dried up at about the time Bobbie was seven. Suddenly letters were returned, says Bobbie’s daughter Easter Kirkland, who assumes this was because
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Chapter Nine: Technical Advances but a Marriage in Retreat
LEFT: Muriel Dewar was Oxfordshire-born and when Kimber met her she was working as a dental nurse in Oxford.
RIGHT: Gladys Hamilton, Muriel Dewar’s sister. The two were close, and shared a home.
Dewar had found a wife in his home country. It was only on her grandmother’s death that she discovered that she and Dewar had never been husband and wife.
Muriel Dewar, as she called herself, brought up Bobbie in the company of her sister Gladys Hamilton, who had also suffered a broken relationship. In 1919, at the age of 22, she had married 29-year-old Claud Reginald Matheson Hamilton, a lieutenant in the Australian armed forces, but the marriage fell apart and in 1922 she and Hamilton divorced; the marriage had been childless.
The image handed down of the sisters is one of uncomplicated good-time girls: not ‘fast’ or of loose morals but having a sense of fun and an easy and infectious complicity. As such, they were a contrast to the more cerebral Rene Kimber. “They were bobby- dazzlers. My mother said there was a scandal in Oxford because
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