18, Dorset Square
Dorothy Gladys, known as ‘Dodie’ Smith was born on the 3rd May, 1896,in a house named Stoneycroft (number 118) on Bury New Road in Whitefield, Lancashire. An only child, her parents were Ernest and Ella Smith and her father died in 1898 when Dodie was just two years old. Dodie and her mother then moved to Old Trafford to live with her grandparents, William and Margaret Furber in Kingston House, 609, Stretford Road, facing the Manchester Ship Canal. She lived with her mother, maternal grandparents, two aunts and three uncles.
In 1910, Ella remarried and moved to London with her new husband and the 14-year-old Dodie. Dodie started at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA) in 1914.
In 1939, Dodie married Alec Macbeth Beesley, who became her business manager and they moved to America in the 1940s to escape the war. Despite her growing success, she was terribly homesick, missing England. During this time, she began working on her first novel, ‘I Capture the Castle’ which was a love letter to growing up, writing and England. Its first line, ‘I write this sitting in the kitchen sink’ is very well known and the book has been adapted to film.
Dodie and her husband returned to England in the 1950s and settled in Stambourne, Essex. It was here that she wrote ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’, originally serialized in Woman's Day as The Great Dog Robbery. She found inspiration for the character of Cruella De Vil from a passing comment made by a friend about her beloved Dalmatians- ‘Those dogs would make a lovely fur coat!’ The scene where Mr. Dearly revives a still-born puppy was also based on a real event- her husband revived a still-born puppy from the real-life Pongo's litter.
A pink stucco townhouse on Primrose Hill is thought to have been the inspiration for the family home where dalmatians, Pongo and Perdita, lived with their owners, Roger and Anita Dearly. The novel describes the Dearly residence as a ‘modest but pretty’ Victorian house by the Outer Circle in Regent’s Park. Dodie had nine dalmatians including one named Pongo and is thought to have passed the pink house on daily dog walks to Primrose Hill park and Regent’s Park. Dodie wrote ‘The Starlight Barking’, the less well known sequel, in 1967.
Dodie Smith lived in Dorset Square which a blue plaque now commemorates; her date of birth is shown inaccurately as 1895 instead of 1896. She died in 1990 (three years after her husband) in Uttlesford, North Essex. She was cremated and her ashes scattered on the wind.
18, Dorset Square
London
NW1 6QB