| Husband: | James FIELD ( -1941) | |
| Wife: | Xenia Noelle LOWINSKY (1894-1998) | |
| Marriage | 1936 | |
| Name: | James FIELD | |
| Sex: | Male | |
| Father: | - | |
| Mother: | - | |
| Occupation | bef 1936 | General Practitioner |
| Death | 1941 | |
| Name: | Xenia Noelle LOWINSKY | |
| Sex: | Female | |
| Father: | Thomas Hermann LOWINSKY (aft1857-1932) | |
| Mother: | Florence Henrietta MOSENTHAL (1867- ) | |
| Birth | 25 Dec 1894 | Secundirabad, Hyderabad, India |
| Residence | aft 1894 (age 0) | Tittenhurst Park Sunninghill Berkshire |
| Census | 31 Mar 1901 (age 6) | Paddington London |
| 5 Hyde Park Street | ||
| Education | c. 1904 (age 9-10) | Heathfield School , Ascot |
| Census | 2 Apr 1911 (age 16) | Sunninghill Berkshire |
| Tittenhurst Place | ||
| Occupation | 2 Apr 1911 (age 16) | Student; Sunninghill Berkshire |
| Residence | 1929 (age 34-35) | 9 Clarence Gate London NW1 |
| British Phone Book | ||
| Occupation | bef 1939 (age 44-45) | Vice President of the Red Cross |
| Occupation | 1939 (age 44-45) | WVS |
| Occupation | bef 1945 (age 50-51) | Head of Women's Organisation for Salvage and Recovery |
| Occupation | 1945 (age 50-51) | Magistrate |
| Occupation | frm 1946 to 1949 (age 51-55) | London County Council Member |
| Occupation | aft 1950 (age 55-56) | Employed by The Daily Mirror as their Gardening correspondant |
| Award | 1958 (age 63-64) | |
| Awarded MBE for prison work. | ||
| Award | 1972 (age 77-78) | |
| RHS Veitch Award | ||
| Charitable Trust | bef 1998 (age 103-104) | |
| £2m trust fund called the 'Field Trust' adiministered by the Salvation Army to fund Bail Hostels | ||
| Will | 1998 (age 103-104) | |
| She left a will valued at £2.5m | ||
| Death | 24 Jan 1998 (age 103) | Goldborough Nursing Home, Ladbroke Rd Kensington, London. |
| Cause: Stroke | ||
OXFORD DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY
Field [née Lowinsky], Xenia Noelle (1894–1998), prison reformer and horticulturist, was born in Secunderabad, India, on 25 December 1894, the daughter of Thomas Hermann Lowinsky (d. 1932), general manager of the Hyderabad–Deccan mines, and his wife. Xenia's unusual Christian names reflected the fact that her mother liked the sound of Russian words and that she was born on Christmas day. A year later the family returned to England, where her father worked as a stockbroker. They lived at Tittenhurst Park in Berkshire, a house with an 80 acre estate where Xenia began to share her father's enthusiasm for gardening. He built up an outstanding rhododendron collection, was a Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) gold medal winner, and encouraged his daughter in her passion for auriculas for which she, in later years, was similarly rewarded.
Lowinsky was educated at Heathfield School, and at a finishing school in Paris, and as a young woman her first professional interest was the theatre. She had three plays performed in the West End and also published short stories, but by the mid-1920s she was devoting most of her time to charitable works, becoming vice-president of the British Red Cross. In 1936 she married Dr James Field, a medical practitioner who had lived and worked in India. He was considerably older than his wife, and the childless marriage ended after only five years with his death in 1941.
At the start of the Second World War, Field joined the WVS, but soon left to concentrate on the problem of salvage disposal under the Ministry of Supply; by the time the war ended Field was head of the improbably named Women's Organization for Salvage and Recovery, which encouraged housewives to turn over their aluminium saucepans for the war effort. She was greatly motivated by her minister, Herbert Morrison, who became her political mentor; under his influence she was elected to represent Paddington North for Labour on the London county council in 1946. She lost the seat in 1949 and stood as an unsuccessful parliamentary candidate for North Somerset in 1950 and Colchester in 1951; she remained an active Labour supporter until 1982, when she joined the nascent Social Democratic Party.
Shortly after the war Field became a magistrate, and she then first developed what became a lifelong interest in penal reform. In the early 1950s she initiated Christmas concerts in the London prisons, consistently persuading leading performers to oblige; she also began the Field lectures in which prominent speakers were invited to talk in the main London prisons. She was awarded an MBE in 1958 for her prison work, and her book Under Lock and Key: a Study of Women in Prison (1963) was a major contribution to the subject. Field persuaded the Salvation Army to set up the first bail hostel in Britain in 1971, thus initiating a practice that later became an established and official procedure for those homeless persons awaiting trial who hitherto had always been held in prison. Field's interest in gardening saw material fruit in the publication shortly after the war of Window Box Gardening, a book that caught the eye of Sylvester Bolam, then editor of the Daily Mirror. He invited her to write a weekly gardening column for the paper, and this she did for almost forty years. She became a familiar figure at Royal Horticultural Society events, and continued to make lively and incisive contributions to discussion until well into her nineties. Horticulturally, Field was no innovator, but she wrote and talked good common-sense gardening that appealed to a wide audience; despite her upbringing on a country estate, her best contributions were paradoxically on town gardens. She drew on her own experience of gardening at her home in Holland Park, London, to produce Town and Roof Gardens in 1967, and her contribution and influence were recognized in the award of the RHS's Veitch gold medal in 1972. The Salvation Army benefited materially from Field's devotion to its cause when she arranged for it to be the beneficiary of the Field Foundation, a substantial charitable trust that she had set up, having astutely multiplied many times the capital left to her by her father. Her own great longevity led her to recognize the problems that old age brings, and as she approached her century she gave funds for postgraduate study into age-related problems at Hammersmith Hospital. Xenia Field died of a stroke on 24 January 1998, at Goldsborough Nursing Home, 40–46 Ladbroke Road, Kensington, London, in her 104th year.
Stefan Buczacki
Sources
The Times (27 Jan 1998) • The Independent (21 Feb 1998) • d. cert.
Likenesses
photograph, repro. in The Times
Wealth at death
£2,534,627: probate, 1999, CGPLA Eng. & Wales
Desert Island Discs. She appeared on the programme on the 12th June 1967 but not available to replay on the BBC website.