Drusilla Beyfus obituary: doyenne of English manners
She was not on the list.
When her quartet of books entitled The Done Thing began to appear in 1992, Drusilla Beyfus dedicated the one on business to her businesswoman sister, the ones on parties and courtship to her son, and the one on sex “to M, with love” — unmistakably her husband Milton Shulman, the theatre critic.
“Etiquette and sex, on the surface, are strange bedfellows,” began her insightful little volume. “Nevertheless, collaboration between the two has always been fruitful.”
Beyfus was the doyenne of English manners for five decades. Her instinct for knowing how people ought to behave in any social situation sprang not from upper-crust snobbery — even though her mother had once “danced with the Prince of Wales”, as in the 1920s song — but from her instinctive good sense and desire to keep everyone happy. She would ask, what are manners for otherwise? “Manners are the happy way of doing things.”
Her essential volume Lady Behave: A Guide to Modern Manners, written with wit and humour in collaboration with her fellow Express journalist Anne Edwards, first appeared in 1957. This was an era when much that passes unnoticed today — commenting on people’s clothes, asking how much things cost or what others get paid — was firmly unacceptable. Such conventions of traditional etiquette were about to slip out of fashionable use in the 1960s, yet by the time the updated edition of Lady Behave appeared in 1969, instruction was still needed. And by 1993, The Done Thing had to deal with “Condom Etiquette”, “Gay Coupledom”, and even “Tactful Behaviour when the sex wasn’t all that good, or a fiasco”.
One piece of advice Beyfus was especially qualified to give. “Take a tip from the author,” she wrote. “The odder your name, the more boldly it must be uttered. When the major domo at a formal banquet asks for your name at the door, stifle the impulse to whisper it quietly into his ear.” She knew that the result, in her case, might be a master of ceremonies booming out “Miss Priscilla Byfish”.
The name Drusilla was taken from a café in Sussex, she
claimed, which later became a zoo. Beyfus is pronounced Bye-fuss. Having an
unusual name impelled her to advise readers not only how to introduce the
Buccleuchs to the Leveson-Gowers (an unlikely circumstance) but, as Beyfus said
in her book Modern Manners, to resist correcting other people’s pronunciation:
“Never a good idea … It leaves a feeling of discomfiture, and is never
forgotten.”
Drusilla Norman Beyfus was born in London in 1927, the elder daughter of Norman Beyfus, a City wool broker who aspired to become a poet, and his wife Florence Noel Barker, known as Noel, who had been a singer and dancer in Gerald du Maurier’s company. The family lived in Chelsea and Drusilla attended the Glendower School, the Royal Naval School at Richmond, and finally boarded at the Channing School, evacuated to Ross-on-Wye in 1943.
Her parents’ marriage fell apart when her father lost his money (suddenly) and his sight (gradually) but as a Christian Scientist he could not acknowledge the latter. Noel took her two daughters to live in a rectory near Henley, but there was not enough money to buy blackout material — it was wartime — for the windows. On leaving school, Drusilla went straight to work as a junior reporter on the Reading Mercury. Readers of Monica Dickens’s novel My Turn to Make the Tea, she used to say, would instantly recognise her life as a provincial trainee reporter.
But within a year, after the war was over, she broke into Fleet Street, becoming a star writer on the Daily Express who caught the eye of the proprietor, Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook. She remembered one stunt which involved being flown out to what remained of war-stricken Berlin, disguised as a sack of coal, or potatoes, the story varies. She was sent to New York with the photographer Eve Arnold to write about the difference between dating American men and English men. Interviewing the film star Cyd Charisse, who was famous for her legs, she was told by Charisse’s husband: “You have the best legs I have ever seen.”
Another of Beaverbrook’s favoured recruits was his fellow Canadian, Major Milton Shulman, author of Defeat in the West, lately demobbed from intelligence. In 1953, Shulman wrote a series called “Shulman’s Beauties of 1953” that included the gamine, much-sought-after women’s editor Miss Beyfus, then 26 and lately involved with the film critic Derek Monsey.
Shulman invited her on a date, after which she returned to
her Shepherd Market flat — shared with Toni Scott, a South African model — and
wrote in lipstick on her bathroom mirror: “That man is SO annoying.” It took a
girl with spirit — to cope with Shulman’s invincible amour-propre and
unstoppable racontage. They were married in 1956 at Caxton Hall with Michael
and Jill Foot as witnesses, and were together until Shulman’s death in 2004.
Her equable temperament withstood five decades of her husband’s vociferous
pontificating, his fondness for betting on the horses and his passion for
Jewish jokes: but Beyfus said that having earned her own living since the age
of 17, she always felt “determined to make a go of things, including marriage”.
From being women’s editor of the Sunday Express, she moved into a glossier milieu as associate editor of Jocelyn Stevens’s Queen magazine. She went on to be home editor of The Observer, associate editor of the Daily Telegraph magazine, editor of Brides magazine, associate editor of Vogue, editor of Harrods magazine, and a columnist on You magazine — all the while continuing to contribute to or edit pages in Vogue, the Telegraph and the Oldie until well into her nineties. Colleagues agreed: “It was always such fun when she was there. She made the office the nicest place to be.”
She was followed into the glossy magazine world by all three children: Alexandra Shulman, who became editor of British Vogue, Nicola Shulman, writer and critic, who became the Marchioness of Normanby, and Jason Shulman, the artist who started out as a magazine art director.
Combining marriage and family with career was possible in journalism, thanks to its flexibility (“I was finishing an article as I went off to Queen Charlotte’s and drank a bottle of brandy thinking I could disguise the pain”), so motherhood never interrupted her career. In 1968 her first book was called the English Marriage: interviews with 30 couples, some of whom (including the Bakewells and the Andrew Sinclairs) had divorced by the time the book appeared. She could not conclude her book with a ringing endorsement of marriage — “the most personal, volatile and unclassifiable of human bonds — and impossible to computerise”. Nor would she boast of how she combined work with family life. Modesty persuaded her that “the edifice I had built up was, I felt, always teetering on the brink of collapse”.
Beyfus was a perfectionist who brought to magazines her style and originality, her flair for visual innovation linking high fashion photography with contemporary art.
Caroline Clifton-Mogg, who arrived at Brides to be home editor, recalled Beyfus’s willingness to help others: indeed, she taught her to write. “I couldn’t write for toffee, not even 100 words on bathrooms. But that was her generous cast of mind. Like Chanel, she would advise you to take something out. Keep it light, make it funny. She spoke in pronouncements, everything came out as a fully formed thought. You had to be ready to pronounce back.”
For instance, though she accepted feminism (“a statement of the obvious”) she asked the pertinent questions: “All attempts across the world to dispense with the family have failed.” “You may assume that at a certain age, children are ‘off your hands’ — but whose hands are they on?”
Her quick wit earned her a place on radio and TV panels such as My Word! and Call My Bluff. Endlessly curious about people — she said a good definition of bad manners was showing no curiosity about others — she so charmed the artist Raoul Millais, grandson of Sir John Everett Millais, he insisted on her taking Dippersmoor Manor, a beautiful medieval house in rolling Herefordshire farmland, for a peppercorn rent; here the Shulmans spent many family weekends.
“She was the most beautiful woman in Fleet Street, and didn’t seem to know it,” is how Shirley Conran, her Observer colleague, characterised Beyfus’s insouciant beauty. “Like Audrey Hepburn, but more beautiful.”
Invited to make a film for the BBC’s One Pair of Eyes series, Conran chose “Danger — Women at Work” as her subject, featuring Beyfus. “Drusilla never appeared to be a harassed mother. But working mothers were still frowned upon by other women. I remember Drusilla saying, ‘I wish we all had a baboushka like the Russians do’.”
For a time Beyfus took to wearing Issey Miyake’s indigo-dyed shirts, skirts and baggy trousers, which found no favour with her husband — “why dress as a field-worker in some communist country?” — but she carried it off as the height of chic. She once wrote that fashion had never been more flattering than in the postwar 1940s, but she was “way ahead of the crowd in her own style”, said Clifton-Mogg. “In the early 1970s it was long dresses. She wore them with elan.”
In art, theatre, books, cinema and photography as in fashion she was a cultural neophiliac and on the side of experiment. Her daughters were never surprised to be told by a 30-something friend, “I trawled out to an opening at some warehouse in east London and was feeling very cool and hip to be there — when I turned round and there was your mother.”
In widowhood and grandmotherhood (“My mother might not know how to knit,” wrote Alexandra after the birth of her son Sam, “but she’ll be able to explain Anselm Kiefer to him”) she maintained her appreciation of theatre, on the judging panel for the Milton Shulman newcomer prize in the Evening Standard theatre awards.
A letter of condolence, as Beyfus told readers, was the most difficult to write, and impossible to dash off. The example she provided included the words: “Your mother was such a sweet, gay, affectionate and brave person, which is how I — and I am sure everyone who met her — will always remember her.” Words most likely to occur to anyone acquainted with Beyfus herself.
Drusilla Beyfus, author and journalist, was born on March 1, 1927. She died on February 26, 2026, aged 98
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