I have been trying to find out more about Millicent Rose, an art historian who published one of the first and best histories of the east end, which describes its origins as a series of different villages and neighbourhoods before it was a home to successive waves of migrants and the classic home of slums and poverty. The book was published by Cresset Press in 1951 and has never been reprinted. It turns out that she was the daughter of a general in the Indian army, born in 1913, went to Newnham College, Cambridge and attended the Courtauld Institute in the mid-1930s. A Marxist and mistress of Francis Klingender, a lecturer in sociology at the University of Hull, she apparently used to heckle Herbert Read when he gave talks at the ICA.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Don’t know this book at all but have just enjoyed reading a less than positive Spectator review of it from 1951 http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/14th-december-1951/24/good-east-bad-west The reviewer is Robert Sinclair author of the East London volume of the County Books series. Haven’t seen that book either, although we do have a copy of Walter Greenwood’s contribution to the series, on Lancashire.
Yes, I read that review too. Very hostile to the fact that she has a possibly over-romanticised view of the east end.
When I read Millicent Rose’s introduction to Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner illustrated by Gustave Doré, I was so taken with the sophistication of her prose, the brilliance of her artistic insights and the uncontaminated quality of her English that I was determined to find out who she was, so I am indebted to you for this information.