My friend and former colleague Martha Whittome, who has died aged 89, worked in the 1980s and 90s at the Poetry Book Society, where she played an important role in running the annual TS Eliot prize, which began in 1993 and is given to the best collection of new verse in English first published in the UK or Ireland.
The Poetry Book Society was set up in 1953 by Eliot to send subscribing members a selected volume of new poetry. Forty years on, the TS Eliot prize seemed a fitting anniversary event, and Martha was in at its creation.
However, no one was entirely sure if it would have a life beyond its initial year, and its subsequent longevity was in no small part due to Martha’s administrative skills as she organised judges, facilitated the judging process, booked venues for the prize-giving and liaised with Eliot’s wife, Valerie, who became a friend.
It was also Martha’s decision, in the prize’s third year, to transform it into a public sit-down event at the Bloomsbury theatre in London, where poets shortlisted for the prize would read some of their work. That new format turned the evening into a well-favoured January literary gathering that grew in popularity to the point where it now fills the Royal Festival Hall.
Martha was born in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, to Edward Rose, a civil engineer, and Rose (nee Rowell), a housewife. She went to Northfield school in nearby Kimbolton, and then Cambridge College of Art, developing a fondness in those formative years for the surrounding fenlands that she retained for the rest of her life.
After marrying Brian Smart in 1955, Martha spent most of the 50s and 60s bringing up their three children. When they reached their teens, she felt free to explore other avenues, studying education and sociology as a mature student at Bordesley College of Education, Birmingham, and then Didsbury College of Education in Manchester, in 1970-71.
Afterwards she taught at Ramsey school in Huntingdon in 1972-73, before going back into academic studies at Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, where she graduated with an English degree in 1976.
She and Brian divorced in 1982 and it was shortly afterwards that she joined the Poetry Book Society (where I also worked) as an administrator. One of her many duties was to edit the society’s Quarterly Bulletin, which she did with efficiency, warmth and humour, and she also provided support to members of the society’s board, including Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes and Blake Morrison, with whom she was universally popular.
After her retirement in 1996 Martha became a judge of literature awards at the Koestler Arts charity. Her passion for poetry was matched by her love of riding, which she pursued mainly at Ham House Stables in south-west London. She was also an adventurous traveller, and drove 2,000 miles across Europe in her late 80s, only a few months before she died.
She is survived by her long term partner, the publisher Tony Whittome, whom she married in 1999, and by the children from her first marriage, Rod, Mike and Jo, five grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
