My aunt Helen Mann, who has died aged 93, worked variously as a secretary, model, writer of a children’s guide to London and as a curator of paintings.
Always stylish, she combined immense practicality with an eye for colour and clear lines; she had a talent for creating beautiful spaces indoors and out. Helen turned her hand to arranging flowers for parties and weddings, making curtains and baking bread when money was short, but her time at the Economist magazine from her mid-50s provided her with a professional life and fellowship to which she remained devoted.
Helen joined the staff of the Economist in the 1980s and her many roles there included reading and responding to readers’ letters, commissioning art for the courtyard of the Economist’s office building in St James’s Street, central London, and curating their art collection.
She enjoyed the excitement of Thursday nights when staff and journalists would stay late to “put the paper to bed” and dinner was laid on in the top-floor dining room. Helen loved the culture of the Economist and remained actively involved with the magazine, continuing for a number of years as a temp, long after her formal retirement in 1995.
Despite being a lifelong smoker, she cycled everywhere, only giving up her bicycle in her last year. Aged 83 she took part in a sponsored cycle ride across India in aid of Robert Winston’s reproductive health charity.
Born in Stirling, Helen was the eldest of four daughters of Dorette (nee Wilson) and Lesley Cuthbert, a GP. In 1940, she and her sister Katharine, aged nine and seven, were evacuated to stay with family in Australia as part of the Children’s Overseas Reception Board, not returning home until 1945.
Helen thrived; she loved bare-back riding in New South Wales and became an expert diver. Little surprise that she later encouraged her own children, Alexandra and Justin, to settle there in their twenties, and continued to visit annually until prevented from doing so by ill-health.
Back in Scotland after the second world war, Helen went to the Beacon school at Bridge of Allan, near Stirling, and spent a year in France at an international school in Grenoble, before starting nurse training in Glasgow, which she had to give up because of a back injury. She had a short-lived career in modelling and also went to secretarial college.
She married Bryan Mann in 1959 and they spent their early marriage in Edinburgh, where Helen worked as a secretary for a local restaurateur. They moved to London in the early 1960s, then to a watermill near Dorking, Surrey, and finally to Ramsbury in Wiltshire, where Bryan dealt in antiques. When her children were small, Helen co-authored a guidebook, Children’s London (1973), with Caroline Brakspeare.
Her marriage to Bryan ended in 1982 and Helen moved to London, initially to Pimlico before finding a flat in Chelsea. She remained there until 2022, when she moved to a care home nearby, while continuing to enjoy lunch out at local restaurants with family and friends.
She is survived by Alexandra and Justin, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, and her sisters Katharine and Jill.
