For 60 years, Norman Parkinson photographed the late Queen and her family. Robin Muir salutes an artistic visionary
Did you ever meet Norman Parkinson?’ The voice that boomed out across Vogue’s fashion room belonged to Sheila Wetton, Senior Fashion Editor. And she was senior by many years. This was the early eighties and I was a lowly assistant in the Vogue library, wheeling from floor to floor a trolley piled high with newspapers and magazines. I had got to know Sheila well; she reminisced about the Vogue she had known for many years and I was a willing listener. A house model for Hartnell before the Second World War, she was a fashion assistant by its end. She had worked with all the great photographers – mostly the difficult ones, for she was a safe pair of hands: Cecil Beaton, who had returned from the war disillusioned; Lee Miller, who came back damaged; John Deakin, brilliant when he hadn’t pawned his cameras for drinking money; and the American...
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