My mother, Evangeline Evans, who has died aged 90, was an actor, a craftswoman and an activist.
Born in London, Evangeline was the daughter of Gwendoline (nee Unwin) and Leslie Banks. Hers was a family of strong personalities: her father was a big theatre and film star, her mother a witty socialite. Evangeline had two sisters, Daphne and Virginia, who were much older than her, and she was brought up by her nanny, coming down in the evenings to meet her parents. She knew from early on that if “I wanted something done, I’d better do it myself”.
She decided to become an actor. After leaving St Mary’s school, Wantage, she went to Webber Douglas drama school in London, and, after a stage manager’s job in Brighton, her first professional engagement as an actor came at the Castle theatre in Farnham, Surrey. There she met Tenniel Evans, and they married in 1953.
Evangeline worked in repertory at the King’s theatre in Northampton. Tenniel, who was struggling to find acting roles, took work teaching but he was not happy. She asked what he would do if he was single. “Oh, acting,” he replied. “Right,” she said, “hand in your notice.” He did, and together they became the leading lights of Northampton rep.
After I was born, in 1955, Evangeline considered giving up acting and our family returned to live with her parents in London. There, Fanny Cradock, a neighbour, persuaded Tenniel and Evangeline to appear in a West End production of her play Something’s Burning. During 17 performances at the Arts Theatre in July 1958, my parents played a newly married couple travelling round the world on their honeymoon, meeting different chefs (all played by Fanny and her husband, Johnnie). The food, which was worse than the script, was cooked live on stage and was pretty much how they were paid and all they had to eat.
The experience confirmed Evangeline in her decision to retire from the stage. Moving to the Quaker village of Jordans, in Buckinghamshire, in the early 1960s, my parents bought a gloomy house and she filled it with light; the boring garden was planted up with curving beds of herbs, rambling roses and espaliered fruit trees. Evangeline believed that “things” could always be made better.
She found committees to join and a community to dive into. She loved making: she abridged books for the BBC; made her family’s clothes; she painted, drew and carved wood.
Tenniel, by now experiencing success as an actor, was ordained a non-stipendiary priest, and Evangeline became involved in the Movement for the Ordination of Women. She ran food parcels to Greenham Common and was instrumental in joining her Beaconsfield parish with the Newham Renewal Programme. When a local vicar had to conduct an exorcism, he took her along as a “wise woman of the parish”, because she was. The meditation group in St Mary’s church in Beaconsfield is still there because of her.
Well into her 80s, as a volunteer at the High Wycombe Homeless Connection, Evangeline told me she had to take a client to a new home, but “before he would get in the car, he had to have a spliff. I don’t think anyone knows how old I really am.”
Tenniel died in 2009. Evangeline is survived by her children, Serena and me, and her grandchildren, Sam, Amy, Eleanor and Daisy.
