Drusilla Beyfus, sparkling Telegraph journalist who anatomised modern manners in her column ‘The Done Thing’

Drusilla Beyfus, who has died a few days short of her 99th birthday, was a doyenne of the worlds of fashion and journalism, as an editor, author, lecturer, authority on style and a well-known commentator on modern manners and etiquette.

Over the course of a long career she worked as a columnist and editor on several national newspapers and glossy magazines. She was also the author of 15 books on subjects such as marriage, courtship, sex and etiquette, as well as biographies of the fashion designers Givenchy and Valentino.

But she is best remembered for the 19 years she worked at the Telegraph, firstly as a columnist for The Sunday Telegraph and then on the Telegraph Magazine as a writer and associate editor, where she was fondly known by her colleagues as Wise Owl.

Drusilla Beyfus was a journalist who combined striking elegance with stylish nonchalance. As a 19-year-old reporter for the Daily Express she was one of the first journalists to ​enter Berlin during the Airlift, a feat accomplished by talking her way on to an RAF plane carrying coal to the beleaguered city.

“The Express correspondent in Berlin was on the tarmac to meet the plane,” she recalled. “I arrived in a lorry on top of a load of coal. So the vaunted young reporter from head office emerged with a face and much of her person covered in coal dust. Who cared? I was there.”

Lord Beaverbrook, the proprietor of the Express, was so taken by her enterprise and gamine looks that he invited her to accompany him to New York in the bridal suite of the Queen Mary. Much to his chagrin, she turned him down. When she later married the theatre critic Milton Shulman, whom he also employed, Beaverbrook showed his displeasure by sending a deliberately insulting wedding present of just £20.

Drusilla Norman Beyfus was born on March 1 1927 in Danehurst nursing home, Haverstock Hill, Hampstead, the elder of two daughters born to Norman Beyfus and Florence Noel Barker. She enjoyed telling the story of how she owed her Roman forename to a tea room in East Sussex known as “Drusilla’s”, which her parents visited one day when her mother was pregnant.

Norman Beyfus was a clerk in the City and a frustrated novelist. He was a Christian Scientist and virtually blind, partly due to his refusal – according to his religious beliefs – to accept any medical treatment for his eye condition. Drusilla recalled that she was not allowed to pass him the salt at the table as it would acknowledge his disability.

When she was 11 her family lost all its money. Her parents separated and she and her sister Angela were removed from Glendower prep school in South Kensington and sent to the Royal Naval School in Richmond. That was followed by sixth form at Channing School in Highgate, which also had a finishing-school tier.

Her mother had moved from “a swish house in Belgravia to a flat in Twickenham, and then to Henley-on-Thames. Life was difficult,” Drusilla Beyfus wrote in her unpublished memoir. “I had one nice dress – I used to borrow clothes, especially if I was going for job interviews.”

It was in Henley in 1944 that she got her first job, aged 17, as a cub reporter on the Reading Mercury and the Berkshire Chronicle, writing the woman’s column in both papers. As she would later note, “I had no specific training for this role. I think I got about 30 shillings a week, paid in cash, in a little brown envelope.”

She was living in digs – “which taught me what an archetypal British working-class family was like”, she recalled in an interview with the Telegraph. “I shared a bedroom with ‘our Beryl’, as she was known. She’d left school without any qualifications, which horrified me, and she was working in a sausage factory. But their son was a rear gunner in the RAF and he’d shot down a record number of Jerry planes. Mr Blake worked in the local brewery and he had never seen Mrs Blake in the nude – that’s one thing I remember. But the Blakes were wonderful, I’ve never forgotten them.

“I had fun in Henley-on-Thames – there were lots of boys there, servicemen coming back, so I had a terrific time – I had several offers. I always remember, ironically, that with all these bloodthirsty stories going on, there was I, dancing the conga.”

After the war she worked in Paris, which at that time was beginning to enjoy itself again after the ravages of German occupation. It was “incredibly exciting”, she recalled. “Being in Paris in the early 1950s was untold luxury. There was a tremendous sense that beautiful clothes and wonderful food really mattered; they were part of the city. I was completely seduced by it.”

In 1948 she joined the Daily Express as deputy to the paper’s star journalist Anne Edwards, and by 1951 she was writing bylined stories and living with her fellow journalist Derek Monsey in a flat in Shepherd Market, Mayfair – the heart of the red-light district at the time.

She mixed with a diverse crowd, including the film director Mike Nichols; the actor Mel Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn’s future spouse; and Alan Lomax, the American song anthropologist, “who would come and sit on the floor and tell us extraordinary travel stories”.

She was already turning heads. According to her son Jason, the husband of the dancer Cyd Charisse said she had the best legs he had ever seen: “She was particularly proud of this because Cyd had famously beautiful legs herself.” In Ian Fleming’s The Spy Who Loved Me, the narrator Vivienne Michel talks of being inspired by a cast of real-life Fleet Street figures, “my gods or rather goddesses... [including] Drusilla Beyfus”.

Around this time, she met the journalist, war historian and theatre critic Milton Shulman, who was also working for Beaverbrook. He had come over from Canada after the war and would become the Standard’s theatre critic for nearly 40 years.

After a long courtship, they married at Caxton Hall in Westminster on June 6 1956, with Michael Foot and his wife Jill Craigie as the witnesses. “She never thought her marriage to Milton would last,” her daughter Nicola Normanby recalled, “and when they moved in together she put her name on all the things that belonged to her.”

Despite this unpromising start, they remained married until his death in 2004.

In 1960 they moved to a spacious flat in Eaton Square, where she would continue to live until her death. A stylish apartment, the walls hung with abstract art, it was like “visiting your Grandma but with a Banksy on the wall”, said one friend.

In 1956 Drusilla Beyfus co-authored a book, Lady Behave: A Guide to Modern Manners, with Anne Edwards, in which she drew attention to the “remarkable change” there had been in manners over the previous 20 years. Hereditary peers, she reported, were becoming involved in trade; schools were increasingly rating people’s sons by their brains rather than their backgrounds; “well-to-do people” had been seen “to wear the same dress twice”.

There were also more women in the workplace, though they could still expect to lose their jobs if they became pregnant: “The working woman wears a large satin bow above her stomach and calls it indigestion. When she feels a heel not lifting the typewriter herself, she is better off at home.”

It also included sage advice on staying in a grand household and how to handle difficulties with staff, and was the first in a series of books that would establish her as a leading authority on etiquette.

In 1957 she became associate editor of Queen magazine, at the time edited by Beatrix Miller. Simultaneously she was also writing on cookery for the Sunday Dispatch, and doing occasional features for The Daily Telegraph woman’s page and the Daily Mail, and later The Sunday Times.

In the same year her first child, Alexandra, was born, followed by Nicola in 1960 and Jason in 1963. All went on to work in the media: “My husband said we’re an epidemic because there are so many of us in the same field.”

Jason recalled: “Dad would wear a fedora and a cape and coloured scarves, like a caricature of a 1950s critic.” At dinner, “all the conversation was about art exhibitions and things, never gossip or tittle-tattle.”

It was the era when journalists were first acquiring a measure of celebrity. From 1966 to 1970 Drusilla Beyfus was a regular panellist on Call My Bluff, said Jason. “They were a starry power couple for a while; Mum was on the side of buses.”

Alexandra recalled: “She never played with us. She was usually working or in the kitchen. In the morning before she went to work we would crowd round her like limpets as she bathed and dressed, giving her no time to herself, but she was happy to have us there.” Jason added: “She managed us rather than bringing us up.”

In the 1970s, according to Alexandra, she made a big sacrifice for her children: “She took a job as editor of Brides and Setting Up Home magazine – a decline from her career trajectory, as well as a subject in which she had zero interest.”

The magazine came out eight times a year, which allowed Drusilla Beyfus to spend more time with her children and take holidays in a large rambling manor house in Herefordshire, lent to her by friends over the years.

The house was Dippersmoor Manor, a giant Tudor mansion which had been inherited by Hexie Millais – great-grandson of the painter John Everett Millais – whose deceased parents had been friends of the Shulmans. Milton would visit at weekends, and they would entertain friends such as Arthur Miller and Inge Morath.

“As a mother she did her best, according to the person she was and the life she wanted,” Nicola said, “which was to be a successful journalist and help pay for our school fees. You have to remember that she was a canary in the coal mine of working mothers.

“She was till the day she died bewildered in the presence of babies or young ch​ildren. But she was very good with teenagers, and with our teenage friends. She particularly lit up when the boys arrived and she would sparkle, somewhat annoyingly. Her speciality was persuading reluctant adolescents to go to university. She valued a university education above all things, not having had one herself and always feeling at a disadvantage on that account.”

In 1990 she joined The Sunday Telegraph, writing a weekly column called “The Done Thing”, described as “a guide to the conundrum of modern manners”. The following year she joined the Telegraph Magazine as contributing editor, staying for the next 18 years.

By now, she was frequently in demand as a commentator on etiquette and London society, of which she was both participant and amused observer. In 1992 she published Modern Manners, in which she breezily dispensed advice on everything from the correct use of condoms to the art of tipping, and how to avoid embarrassment after passing wind: “Moving around or swishing a newspaper about nonchalantly may help to dispel any rude smell. Otherwise, apologise briefly.”

A reviewer in Private Eye was unimpressed, observing sarcastically that her advice that “ ‘Hello’ is one of many informal greetings”, and “parting expressions include ‘Goodbye’, or more chattily, ‘Bye’,” had opened up “a whole new world”.

Paul Johnson was kinder, observing that “few people combine knowledge, elegance and common sense as effortlessly as Drusilla Beyfus,” although he felt that she had not been tough enough on “adulterers and homosexuals, especially the latter”.

In 1989, at the age of 62, she became a weekly lecturer on fashion journalism at Central Saint Martins, on their Fashion Communication and Promotion course. She went on to teach there for the next 24 years, and was awarded an honorary degree when she left.

“She taught us the craft of journalism,” one former pupil said, “and she wouldn’t let her students get away with anything. She was exquisitely elegant, she had refined aesthetics and the most amazing collection of jewellery.”

“A typical diary in the Nineties onwards,” Drusilla Beyfus wrote in her memoir, “would read, Telegraph desk on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday; Thursday during term time was my day for teaching at Saint Martins. Friday was for writing the Mail on Sunday column and getting on with other freelance commissions or trying to progress whichever book deal I was involved in. I was appearing on TV frequently as well.”

By 2004, her husband’s declining health made it necessary for Drusilla Beyfus to take leave from the Telegraph. Milton Shulman died in May and she was back at work a month later.

In memoriam, Jason blasted some of his father’s ashes into the sky attached to a firework. Wishing to “perpetuate his father in a very individual way”, he exhibited a work of art that used iron found in the ashes, which he put in a glass tube attached to a thread and suspended by a magnet. At the opening of the exhibition, Beyfus was seen nodding congenially at the exhibit and remarking: “There’s Milton.”

Simon Tiffin, a lifelong friend, recalled: “Drusilla always embraced change, and looked forwards rather than backwards. She never gave in to old age.” Her daughter-in-law Susan Irvine said: “She was very young at heart. When I used to listen to techno and house music she would ask me for tapes – she wanted to understand it.” Drusilla Beyfus told her granddaughter that her one romantic regret was never having had a lesbian encounter.

Towards the end of her life, she broke her hip after falling over while “picking up a flattering clipping from the floor” which she had wanted to consult for the memoir she was writing; she always blamed vanity for the accident.

Drusilla Beyfus ended her days at the flat in Belgravia. She was in poor health, but took to drinking champagne in the afternoons, having never had a taste for it before. “She was tucking into chicken soup and matzo balls,” said Jason, “and endlessly calling for Taittinger.”

Susan Irvine recalled: “Last time I saw her she insisted on giving me champagne at 10 in the morning, and we had to run through how all the family was doing, all the children and grandchildren, and then she said: ‘Let me think, who’s not doing well – oh, me! Me! I’m not doing so well.’ ”

Drusilla Beyfus is survived by her three children.

​Drusilla Beyfus, born March 1 1927, died February 26 2026​

[Source: Daily Telegraph]