Elizabeth Coxhead
Eileen Elizabeth Coxhead (1909 - 1979) was born in Hinckley, England of Irish parentage. She worked as a journalist and literary critic. Published One Green Bottle (1951) a classic novel of British mountain-climbing, centred on 18 year-old working-class Cathy Canning from Birkenhead. The book was condemned for explicitness by Douglas Henry Crick, the Anglican bishop of Chester. She wrote The Midlanders (1953), set in Alney, a hosiery manufacturing town like the Hinckley of the 1920s. She also wrote The Figure in the Mist (1955), and The Friend in Need (1957) - which was filmed as A Cry From The Streets with Max Bygraves in the lead role. Her book Daughters of Erin (1965) consisted of biographical studies of Maud Gonne, Countess Markiewicz [Constance Gore Booth], Sarah Purser, Sara Allgood, and Máire O’Neill [Molly Allgood] She published a Literary Portrait of Lady Gregory (1961) and wrote about J. M. Synge jointly with Lady Gregory a year later in Longman’s “Writers and Their Works” series. She lived at Chalfont St. Peter, in Buckinghamshire, and committed suicide efficiently on the train track at Gerrards Cross, having carefully ordered her papers and affairs shortly before her death. A blue plaque was unveiled in her honour by her nephew Robert Chesshyre for the Hinckley Civic Society at Mount Grace High School, occupying the site of her father’s former school, in March 2009. Source: Commons
