Hon. Eleanor Theodora Roby Benson (1906-1968) and Hon. Betty Ellen Askwith (1909-1995) collaborated with Nicolas Bentley (1907-1998; then, three years shy of illustrating T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats) on a clutch of commercially successful ‘In a nutshell’ titles of fashionably flippant humour. Both women had writing careers, Benson as a travel writer and novelist (under ‘TB’) and Askwith as a biographer.
Lady Ellen Askwith (née Peel; 1909-1962) was the mother of Betty Askwith, and, like her daughter, an author, having turned her hand to journalism following the death of her first husband; she published two novels as Mrs Henry Graham. Lady Askwith was appointed C.B.E. in 1918, for her work during WWI with the YMCA and national kitchens (ODNB for George Ranken Asquith).