Margaret Ann (Lady) Elton, B.A.

Margaret Ann Bjornson was born in Winnipeg on 17 June 1915, the daughter of Olafur Bjornson, an Icelandic immigrant to Canada, who became Professor of Obstetrics at Manitoba University. Despite this donnish background, Margaret grew up in a tightly knit immigrant society, observing its traditional customs, which left her with a strong sense of community. While studying for a postgraduate degree in English literature, Margaret Bjornson met John Grierson, the Scottish documentary film producer, who was then working in Canada for the National Film Board, and joined his unit. She undertook research, first in New York and, after the war, in England where she met her husband, Arthur Elton, who was himself a former colleague of Grierson and a talented documentary film-maker in his own right. They were married in 1948. Three years later he succeeded his father as tenth baronet and inherited Clevedon Court in Somerset,`a fayre auncient and large stone built house', and surrounding estate which had been in the family since 1709 and which, in the early 1950s, was still the hub of a small, enclosed, rural world of its own. The house completely captivated Lady Elton, run-down though it was, and together they set about restoration work, demolishing the Victorian west wing and modifying the house to its medieval ground plan. They hung the family portraits coherently, arranged the collection of Elton Ware (produced in the stables by a nineteenth-century ancestor much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites) in the old kitchen and the Dowager Lady Elton's Nailsea glass in the Justice Room. In 1960, their tasks accomplished, they handed Clevedon Court over to the National Trust to preserve its future as a living home. After Sir Arthur's death in 1973, Lady Elton struggled, with all the tenacity of her Norse forebears, to keep his unique collection of books, rare pamphlets, pictures, artefacts and ephemera on the history of technology intact, and it was subsequently housed, with the acquiescence of the Treasury, at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum in lieu of death duties. She catalogued the Elton papers, which included correspondence with Arthur Hallam, Tennyson, Thackeray, Carlyle, Betjeman and many other literary personages, and continued to raise funds for the restoration of the graceful nineteenth-century Clevedon Pier, begun by her husband in 1970, when two spans collapsed. All her battles won, Lady Elton finally settled down in the library at Clevedon to complete her book, Annals of the Elton Family, Bristol Merchants and Somerset Landowners, which was published in 1994. She died on 16 May 1995 as the result of a road accident in Chelsea and, as a mark of respect and affection, the Clevedon Pier was closed for the duration of her funeral.