Celebrating Hampshire Historians

Stanley, Diana Margaret

18 February 1909 - 02 July 1975

Born in Paddington, Stanley attended Cheltenham Ladies’ College and subsequently studied at Regent Street Polytechnic and Byam Shaw School of Art.

In 1954, aged 44, she married a distinguished surgeon, Charles Aubrey Pannell. In the same year the couple moved to Basingstoke. She is best known as an artist and illustrator of children’s books (e.g. Mary Norton’s The Borrowers series; Barbara Euphan Todd’s Worzel Gummidge). However, she also wrote and illustrated one of the most distinctive and best selling histories of her adopted town (see below).

Sources

• https://artuk.org/discover/artists/stanley-diana-19091975

• Hants and Berks Gazette, 8 July 1975, p.3.

Portrait

Basingstoke Gazette 15 January 2015

Contribution to county’s history

Stanley deserves to be recognised as an historian, on account of her one publication from 1968, Within Living Memory. This effectively combined her interest in the past with her wonderfully evocative paintings of the town before redevelopment. As John Betjeman observed in his preface to this work, ‘Basingstoke is lucky in having so sympathetic an artist and writer’. He continued by expressing the wish that ‘there were Diana Stanleys to illustrate every market town in England’. 

Relevant published works

• Within Living Memory (Basingstoke : Charles Skipper & East Ltd., 1968). See the cover below.

  

Critical Comments

Unfortunately, Within Living Memory is unpaginated and does not have an index.

Other Comments

To provide a flavour of her artistic approach she described Basingstoke, somewhat idyllically, as ‘a small compact town surrounded by farms and woodlands stretching for miles around, all mutually bound together by agricultural and forestry activities into a single entity. Town served country and the country supplied the town in an inseparable dependency’. She has the distinction of being recognised with a Basingstoke Heritage Society blue plaque.

Contributor

Roger Ottewill (6 October 2023)

Key Words

Basingstoke, market town

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