Fitzy's War: The man behind Foyle's War reveals for the first time the tragic governess who inspired his feisty heroine
- Foyle's War character inspired by writer Anthony Horowitz's governess
- Sam Stewart is based on vivacious WAF driver Norah FitzGerald
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For more than a decade she has been the loyal blonde driver to the police detective Christopher Foyle.
But tonight, Sam Stewart will embark on a different set of dangerous adventures, as she and her Detective Chief Superintendent boss enter the murky world of espionage. As the final series of ITV’s Foyle’s War starts, seven million viewers will eagerly tune in to find out what lies in store for Sam, played by Honeysuckle Weeks.
What they won’t find out from the series is the tragic real-life story of the woman who inspired the character of Sam, revealed in full for the first time here by Foyle’s War writer Anthony Horowitz.
Inspiration: Honeysuckle Weeks' character Sam Stewart was inspired by writer Anthony Horowitz' governess and former WAF driver, Norah FitzGerald
For just as Sam has struggled to find love in the hugely popular Second World War-set drama, so did pretty, vivacious and immaculately groomed WAF (Women in the Air Force) driver Norah FitzGerald.
She was asked for her hand in marriage by three Battle of Britain aces, yet she was never able to walk down the aisle with any of them – for all three were killed in action.
Childless, she chose instead to devote her life to another family’s children, becoming a governess and housekeeper to Mark Horowitz, a Jewish businessman and solicitor who lived in North London. One of her charges was his youngest son, Anthony.
Anthony, of course, would grow into one of Britain’s best-loved authors and scriptwriters, also penning Midsomer Murders, working in Hollywood and on Broadway, adapting Agatha Christie’s Poirot for television and writing the Alex Rider teen spy novels.
But it is only now, as he prepares to say goodbye to the Bafta-nominated Foyle’s War, which begins its eighth series tonight, that Horowitz has revealed the true debt he owed Norah FitzGerald.
Foyle's War: Sam Stewart, inspired by the feisty Ms FitzGerald, with Foyle, played by Michael Kitchen and Milner, played by Anthony Howell
For he was so enamoured of his nanny’s glamorous tales of wartime love and adventure that he welded them into the character of Sam Stewart. Her sense of humour, can-do nature and romantic disasters – all of which have made Honeysuckle Weeks a star of primetime television – actually belong to Norah, whom Horowitz affectionately calls Fitzy.
He says: ‘Fitzy used to tell me all these stories about her time in the war, to do with driving and drinking and young men. She had a very happy war. I guess that’s where Foyle’s War began, with the memory of all these stories she told me.
‘She became my governess in the Sixties. She had been a WAF driver, engaged to a pilot who died in the Battle of Britain. That meant she was left high and dry after the war. There were quite a lot of young women like her who simply had nowhere to go.
‘It was post-Downton Abbey in a way, where the aristocratic level of service had to a large extent collapsed but the new middle classes – particularly North London Jewish families like mine – were taking on staff. Maids, cooks, butlers – we had them all. Fitzy came in, not as a nanny – that’s a word she would never have used – but as a governess. The truth of the matter was that she was in service but she was quite a snob.
‘But she was a huge emotional support to myself and my sister. In an unemotional family, where my parents were distant, she was the stand-in.’
Honeysuckle Weeks, who has appeared as Sam in every one of the 22 two-hour episodes of Foyle’s War, was nominated for Most Popular Newcomer in the 2004 National Television Awards for her portrayal. The actress has known for years that her character was based on Horowitz’s nanny.
Weeks says: ‘Anthony always does a profound amount of research and his stories are always based in reality.
‘I think that’s what makes Sam so authentic. She’s based on a real person and there is nothing stranger than reality.’
Although Weeks is fond of her fictional alter ego, she feels that there is little of her own personality in the character.
‘Sam is such an innocent,’ she says. ‘Even now, although she’s become a “woman of the world”, she still maintains more than her fair share of naive glee in her job as a spy. There’s something a bit Famous Five about her.’
Weeks’s analysis of Sam’s character resonates with the upbringing that Fitzy had. She was brought up in a house with orchards and a tennis court but, when the war came along, she was determined to do her bit for her country as a WAF driver. Poised and confident, she loved a good joke and a strong cocktail, and always turned out in lipstick and nail polish. By her own admission, the war years were the time of her life.
Larger than life: Writer Anthony Horowitz says Foyle's War heroine Sam Stewart owes a huge debt to his governess and the stories she told him of her life during the war
But when she died 12 years ago, it was as she had lived: a spinster. She was a poster girl for a generation of young women who gave their youth and with it their chances of motherhood to the war effort.
Like many women after the war, Fitzy had to find another role for herself.
Horowitz’s sister Caroline, a theatrical agent, was just two when Fitzy joined the household where she would stay until she retired.
Caroline says: ‘Fitzy taught me to read and write. She took me to school on my first day, and every day brought me home, gave me my evening meal and put me to bed. We children ate in the nursery, not in the dining room. Before bed I think I would be taken downstairs to say goodnight to my parents.
‘When we were considered too small to go on holiday with our parents, we were sent with Fitzy to the Marine Hotel in Instow, Devon.
‘We would spend a lot of time with her aunt and also her sister. I loved those holidays. She was endlessly patient, loving, and usually very cheerful.
‘She sang, mainly songs from the Second World War, and told stories all the time. She loved children and animals and read a lot of Mills & Boon. She enjoyed good food, sunshine and travelling. She always had something to talk about.
‘Our father would sometimes tell her she wasn’t allowed to say another word at dinner because we would all have finished our meal and she would have hardly started because she was talking so much.’
This fleeting funny memory is one of many that have translated on to the small screen, making Foyle’s War a smash hit in America as well as Britain.
Just as Fitzy insisted on joining Mark Horowitz and his wife for meals, Sam Stewart – who battles with her appetite during rationing – invites herself to dine with Foyle from time to time.
What’s more painfully drawn however, is the aftermath of the war and the way it left women in Fitzy’s position single and childless.
In Foyle’s War, Sam Stewart has a brief fling with Foyle’s son Andrew. She also has a romance with an American GI whose proposal she declines.
Fitzy’s own story was perhaps too sad – and perhaps almost too far-fetched – for fiction. Her niece Morny Haydon, 69, confirms that although Fitzy enjoyed a great deal of male attention during the war, she failed to find the husband she so desired.
She was engaged twice but both pilots were killed and a third pilot was planning to propose when he too died.
Morny says: ‘She would have been a wonderful wife and mother.’
Caroline elaborates: ‘The last man she was in love with was known as JD. He was married – and a Catholic. He told Fitzy the marriage had been “dead” for a long time and he behaved with total propriety apparently. They were very much in love and before his final flight he told Fitzy that he was going to tell his wife he wanted a divorce.’
Family member: Anthony Horowitz speaks fondly of his old governess, whom he affectionately calls Fitzy
Where reality and fiction reconnect is in series seven, which begins in June 1945 with Sam taking a job as a housekeeper to a wealthy artist. Sam is shown as having lost her sense of purpose, a plotline that encapsulates Fitzy’s free fall from military into civilian life.
She joined the Horowitz household in 1960 when Anthony was five, his brother Philip was nine, and Caroline was a toddler. At the age of eight, Anthony went to boarding school like his older brother. Several years later Caroline also left home, but Fitzy stayed on.
‘After we grew up, she still had nowhere to go,’ recalls Horowitz, ‘so she stayed on as a housekeeper. My father wanted to talk about Dickens and Trollope and she wanted to talk about shopping, so it was always rather tricky at dinner!’
Tragically, Fitzy had nowhere to go because her father first lost his wife during her birth and then the family fortune. She was born on April 6, 1913, in Esher, Surrey, the youngest of three children of bank cashier Maurice FitzGerald, then 33, and his wife Mary, 32.
But when Mary bled to death during Fitzy’s devastating delivery, Maurice was left to look after Kathleen, six; Peter, 16 months, and the baby.
Morny recalls: ‘Maurice remarried and they lived in a palatial place with tennis parties and orchards and nannies.
‘But for some reason, which I have never found out, that all went and they ended up moving to a house in Kingston.’
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Fitzy was 26 and in need of a husband. It was her moment to shine.
Mechanised Transport Corps driver Sam Stewart, with her military uniform, Forties bun and cheery smile is rooted in the woman Fitzy was then.
At first she is tolerated by DCS Foyle, but soon she makes herself indispensable. In the forthcoming series she is still working alongside Foyle as he is recruited by spymasters for the secret-service agency that was the forerunner to MI5 at the dawn of the Cold War.
When Fitzy finally left the Horo-witz family in the late Seventies, she did so to care for the widowed aunt who had stepped into the breach when her mother died.
The aunt later left Fitzy a cottage in Bideford, Devon, where she spent her twilight years. Sadly her one last chance of happiness ended in disaster.
Horowitz reveals: ‘She had a very sad time. At the very end of her life, she fell in love with a very elderly ex-RAF man.
‘The two of them used to go out together in their 80s. It was a real last-gasp, dying-light romance. But she was a terrible driver and she was involved in a small car accident with this chap.
So his daughter turned up one day and took him away. It finally broke Fitzy’s heart. She very quickly deteriorated, ending up in an old people’s home.’
Norah FitzGerald died from bronchopneumonia on May 5, 2000, two years before Foyle’s War first aired. Both Anthony and Caroline were frequent visitors in her final years. Caroline says: ‘The last time I saw her she was completely lucid. She asked me if she was dying and I said I thought she was.
‘She said she wasn’t scared, when I asked, and that she had had a wonderful life and how much she had loved me. Two days later she died.’
Anthony’s final, sweetest tribute is surely in his farewell to Foyle’s War where he has penned for Sam the lasting love that evaded Fitzy. Towards the end of the seventh series, Sam has a new love interest, former Bletchley Park codebreaker Adam Wainwright.
By the time the eighth series opens, they are married, living in a pre-fab and dining on Spam, as would-be MP Adam plots his path to Parliament. A happy ending indeed.
The first episode of the eighth series of Foyle’s War will be screened tonight at 8pm on ITV.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2298004/Fitzys-War-The-man-Foyles-War-reveals-time-tragic-governess-inspired-feisty-heroine.html#ixzz2OPZx8Fom
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