An Irish Diary

The woman behind Mary Poppins: An Irishman’s Diary on PL Travers

PL Travers: the Australian-born writer who created the character of Mary Poppins had close connections with Ireland

Hugh Oram
Mon Oct 22 2018 - 18:45

PL Travers, the Australian-born writer who created the character of Mary Poppins, had close connections with Ireland and lived at Upper Leeson Street, on Dublin’s southside, for several years in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

She was born in 1899, at Maryborough in Queensland, as Helen Lyndon Goff. Her father, Travers, was of Irish descent. Her mother, Margaret, had Scottish origins and was the sister of a previous premier of Queensland. Her father was a very unsuccessful bank manager, and his career was blighted by chronic alcoholism. He died when Helen was just seven.

She, her sisters and their mother moved to New South Wales, where a great-aunt supported them in considerable style.

As a child, Helen had a rich fantasy life and loved both fairy tales and animals; she often imagined herself as a hen. She was a precocious reader, of such works as Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The editor who put her first poem into print was Rupert Murdoch's father.

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From writing, she turned to acting and dancing, but she found family disapproval stultifying and Australia conservative and stodgy, so at the age of 24, she sailed to London. She created a new identity for herself, as Pamela Lyndon Travers, using her father’s first name as her surname.

In London, she was very conscious of her Irish background, and in 1925 she sent some poems to George Russell (AE), editor of the Irish Statesman. He started publishing her work and he remained a friend and supporter until his death in 1935. Her association with AE drew her to Dublin and in 1939, over a decade after she had first come to Dublin, she adopted a young Irish boy called Camillus. But she flatly refused to take his twin brother and years later, when Camillus ran into him in a pub in London, it was a shocking experience, as he had been told nothing of his family background.

Travers was also friendly with WB Yeats and other Irish literary figures; these encounters enhanced her love of Irish mythology and storytelling.

Her first published book, in 1934, related her Russian travel experiences, but that same year, while recovering from pleurisy at a remote cottage in Sussex, AE suggested that she should write a story about witches. It evolved into her first book about Mary Poppins, the governess with magical powers, who had a parrot-head umbrella for transport, and an uncanny ability to organise tea parties on the ceiling.

In writing the book, Travers drew extensively on her own childhood experiences and fantasies, as well as her subsequent encounters with Irish mysticism.

When it came out in 1934, it was an instant success and she wrote a further seven titles in the series, the last of which was published in 1988.

Travers was very unhappy with many aspects of the film production over which she and Disney had many strong disagreements. At the premiere, she wept

Very private and even more prickly, she never married and although she had some relationships with men, her overwhelming preference was for women, and she had a long-time roommate, Madge Burnard, whom her friends considered to be Travers’s romantic partner. Her private life always remained just that, totally closed off. During her lifetime, Travers went to enormous trouble to ensure that people couldn’t access her personal history, the reason why she used initials in her name.

In the late 1960s, she decided to move to Dublin, to the house at 69 Upper Leeson Street that had once been her father’s home. It’s a fine mid-19th-century terrace house, still there, with no indication that the famous author once lived there.

But her mythological perceptions of Ireland, dating from the late 1920s, didn’t fit at all into how she found modern Ireland, so her stay here was comparatively brief. Most of the rest of her life was spent in London.

She had also spent time in the 1960s as a writer in residence at various American universities in an unsuccessful bid to reclaim her serious literary reputation.

Walt Disney negotiated with Travers for nearly 15 years for the rights to Mary Poppins and the film emerged in 1964. Travers was very unhappy with many aspects of the production over which she and Disney had many strong disagreements. At the premiere, she wept. But selling the rights had made her seriously wealthy.

Disney's remake of Mary Poppins is due for release in December. The fantastical character of Mary Poppins has become a legend not only with countless readers, but within the entertainment industry itself. As for PL Travers herself, she lived for nearly the entire 20th century, until 1996.

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