| Dione Venables | |
| Pseudonym: | DG Finlay |
| Birth Name: | Dione Gordon-Finlay |
| Birth Date: | 20 October 1930 |
| Birth Place: | Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England |
| Occupation: | Novelist, publisher |
| Children: | Nicky, Sally, Guy and Juliet |
| Parents: | Alan Gordon Finlay
|
| Nationality: | English |
Dione Patricia Mary Venables (née Gordon-Finlay, 20 October 1930 – 12 September 2023), also known by her pen name as DG Finlay, was an English novelist and publisher who is probably best known as the founder of The Orwell Society.
Dione Patricia Mary Gordon-Finlay was born prematurely in the Prestwood Hotel at Great Missenden, England on 20 October 1930, the second daughter of Florence (née Gallagher) and engineer-inventor Alan.[1] The family had just returned from living in Switzerland, where her father had co-created the Filene-Finlay simultaneous interpretation system at the League of Nations in Geneva.[2]
The young Dione’s infancy had been dominated by life at St. Leonard's school where she boarded from the age of three until the outbreak of War when she was ten. The Blitz forced many urban families to re-evaluate where their children lived, prompting mass evacuations of children; Dione and her sister June were hastily booked on a passage to Montreal aboard the SS City of Benares to live with their aunt in Canada.[3] Days before they were due to leave, their father had a change of heart, resolving instead to keep the family together at their home in Kensington. A few days later, the Benares was torpedoed and sank, taking with it their luggage and the lives of seventy-seven children. A few weeks after that, still in a state of shock, their Kensington home was destroyed in a bombing raid while the family sheltered in a nearby underground station. With nowhere to live and all of her belongings destroyed, Dione was sent away from the bombing to live with another aunt, Laura Buddicom (née Finlay), in Shiplake, where she was to remain for eighteen months, with her older cousins (who were sisters), Jacintha and Guinever.[4]
While living with the Buddicoms, Dione developed a friendship with Arthur Ransome, who encouraged her to write. Her first attempt at writing, aged 11, featured a hedgehog called Edward Wigg, who was adapted by Jacintha in support of the War Effort as part of the National Savings Movement.[5] [6]
By 1944, Dione had relocated to Beckenham, as the streets filled with assorted military vehicles preparing for D-Day.[7] On 15 June, the 3-storey house where she and her mother were living collapsed on top of them after a V-1 flying bomb exploded in their garden.[8] Dione remained buried under rubble with her mother for several hours until they were discovered by rescuers and slowly released using a collapsed Morrison shelter as an escape tunnel. Following a number of weeks in Beckenham General hospital, the pair were transferred to a flat in Thornton Hall to convalesce within a few miles of Bletchley Park where her father and sister were working. Still recovering from her injuries, Dione attended school at the nearby Thornton College, where she met Heather Loftus, the sister of her future husband.[9]
After war had ended in 1945, Alan and Florence Gordon-Finlay returned to their pre-war home in Switzerland, leaving Dione a semi-permanent guest at Tingewick Hall, the family home of her new best-friend Heather.[10] It was at Tingewick that Dione became a young adult, learning to ride, drive, fly a Gypsy Moth, and to enjoy music. Dione and Geoffrey Loftus became inseparable over this period and in 1949, they married.[11]
Between 1951 and 1956, Dione raised two daughters and a son (Nicky, Sally and Guy).[12] Within a decade, her marriage was failing and in 1959, she joined Overseas Aviation as an air hostess participating in sometimes dangerous humanitarian relief flights operating out of Southend.[3] On one such flight to Entebbe, Dione was reportedly captured by rebel soldiers under the command of Colonel Mobutu, when their aircraft stopped in Léopoldville for refueling.[3] In 1960, Dione followed Freddie Laker by transferring to British United Airways for the next four years. In addition to scheduled routes to the Southeast Asia, the airline was chartered by the British Government for trooping flights to East Africa during the unrest that flared up as Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda transitioned to independence from Britain.[13] Chartered flights gave way to scheduled flights, which Dione flew to the USA and Southeast Asia. It was on regular flights to Singapore that she met, and in 1964, married Lt. Cdr. John Venables (RN).[14]
Dione wrote short articles for newspapers and magazines giving eye-witness accounts of her experiences during those times of great change across Africa and around the world.[15] She started married life with John Venables by publishing more memories of her experiences in the Middle East and Pakistan, while providing relief flights for refugees in war torn states.[16] [17] Being a naval officer's wife, however, did not come easily to Dione at first,[18] but it wasn’t long before the couple got an assignment back to Singapore, where their adopted daughter (Juliet) was born in 1968.[19]
Dione returned to writing in 1970, preparing scripts for radio documentary programming as a trainee presenter and interviewer, whilst living in Malta.[20] Returning to England, her emerging broadcasting career of four years was cut short abruptly by a car accident in 1975, confining her to a wheelchair for the best part of a year.[21] To relieve the boredom, Dione took to researching the history of her neighbourhood at her local library in Gosport, which lead to her writing her first historical novel Once Around the Sun in 1976, with the sequel in 1978.[22] [21] After a number of years living between Malta and England, Dione finally settled near to Chichester, where she researched her next series of novels.[23]
A few years later, John Venables retired and the couple took on a pub in Oxfordshire, while Dione's next novel Watchman was published.[24] Their time as publicans was short lived and by 1986, they moved to Chiswick, where the sequel to Watchman was released.[25] In the same year, Dione turned to publishing, creating an independent audiobook company, Sound Beam, at a time of expansion in the industry, which rapidly squeezed her out of the market the following year.[26] [27] At the same time, her two last novels in the Watchman series were published. Following three difficult years as publican, publisher and author, Dione returned with her husband John to the Chichester area in 1988. When John died in 1996, Dione turned to painting as a miniaturist and was quickly involved in local and national limner organisations, exhibiting and selling paintings from Chichester to New York.[28] [29]
Dione's two cousins, sisters Jacintha and Guinever Buddicom, had moved to Bournemouth not far from where Dione lived near Chichester and were quite elderly when Dione returned in 1988. She visited the cousins twice a week to do some shopping for them and help them out in the house and garden, talking about their childhood memories of George Orwell. Jacintha had unaccountably withdrawn from public discourse about George Orwell not long after publication of her memoir Eric & Us in 1974. Dione carefully solicited information from the two sisters between 1982 to 2002, which she noted in her diaries.[30] When they died (Jacintha in 1993, and Guinever in 2003), they left their photographs and the copyright of Eric & Us to Dione in the expectation that as a writer, she would rejuvenate the memoir in some way.[31]
In 2006, Dione created Finlay Publisher as a vehicle to publish and distribute online successive print runs of a newly indexed version Eric & Us. She was encouraged by Gordon Bowker to include a postscript in the autumn,[32] based on a series of previously unpublished diaries, letters and documented interviews.[33] [34] At the same time, Dione developed Orwell Direct online to encourage and to moderate discussion between academics and enthusiasts interested in promoting the life and works of George Orwell.[35] In 2008, the site began publishing a series of twenty articles submitted by scholars who had written at length about Orwell. Contributors included Sir Bernard Crick, Gordon Bowker, John Rodden, Liam Hunt, DJ Taylor, Douglas Kerr, Peter Davison, and Orwell's son, Richard Blair.[36] A number of regulars active on Orwell Direct encouraged Dione to institute a more formal collective of Orwell enthusiasts. The proposal was severely contested and became controversial because Dione herself, who was selling the idea, had no literary or academic background.[37] Despite some resistance, in December 2010, Dione floated The Orwell Society at an informal meeting at Phyllis Court, which became formally inaugurated in April 2011.[38] [3] In 2015, she compiled and published Orwell's poetry,[39] [40] [41] which she donated to The Orwell Society.
Having herself taken on the role of Membership Secretary to The Orwell Society in 2011, Dione stepped down from any formal role in 2016 at the age of eighty-six.[42] She continued working to preserve the memory of George Orwell through guest appearances on television and radio, as well as through The Orwell Society Annual General Meetings.[43] [44]
In 2003, Dione Venables started work on creating a memorial to commemorate the loss of fifteen airmen from Australia, America, Britain and Canada who crashed in two separate incidents in the South Downs overlooking Upwaltham.[45] The memorial was unveiled in 2009 by dignitaries and family members from all over the world and included a rare flypast of a World War Two Lancaster Bomber in honour of the airmen.[46] [47]
Dione Venables died on 12 September 2023, at the age of 92.[48] She leaves a legacy of ten books, dozens of articles and scores of paintings but what she was best known for in the years before her death was her role in preserving the life and works of George Orwell.[49]