Cecily Mackworth

Cecily Joan Mackworth (15 August 1911 – 22 July 2006) was a Welsh writer, journalist, poet and explorer.

Early life Cecily Joan Mackworth was born on 15 August 1911 in Llantilio Pertholey, Monmouthshire, to an illustrious and well-connected Welsh military family. Her great-grandfather Sir Digby Mackworth, an officer in Wellington's army, married Julie de Richepense, the daughter of one of Napoleon's generals. Her aunt Margaret Mackworth, later Haig Thomas, 2nd Viscountess Rhondda, was an editor of the newspaper Time and Tide. Her father, Francis Julian Audley Mackworth (1876–1914), a captain in the British Army, was killed early in World War I. Her mother was the former Dorothy Conran Lascelles (1883-1976).

After being widowed her mother, moved to Sidmouth, Devon, with she and her younger sister Helen Margaret Mackworth (1914–1938). When her mother remarried to Charles Edward Gatehouse, Mackworth moved to Sidmouth and she subsequently studied at the London School of Economics, where her aunt Margaret was later a governor. She successfully undertook a two-year course in journalism. A close friend there was the economist Nicholas Kaldor.

Marriages After leaving LSE, Mackworth spent much of the next two decades traveling. She married Leon Donckier de Donceel, a Belgian lawyer, at the age of 22 after meeting him in a Swiss sanitarium. The couple had one daughter before he died three years into their marriage. In one notable incident during this time, Dylan Thomas' wife, Caitlin, stubbed a cigarette out on Mackworth's hand, on the grounds that Mackworth was acting too intimately with her husband at a party.

She died at 94, on 22 July in Paris.