Creative Team

P.L. Travers
Original Books

Pamela Lyndon Travers was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough, Queensland, Australia on 9 August 1899 in a residence over the Australian Joint Stock Bank of which her father was the branch manager. She was known by her middle name Lyndon - a Gaelic name meaning water and stone. Her father died when she was seven and a half years old and her mother moved with her three daughters to Bowral in New South Wales.

In later life, Pamela Travers did not admit to being Australian as she always felt her spiritual home was in the northern hemisphere. However, images from her Australian childhood run through her stories - the wind, the dusk, the moon, the stars, shadows and characters based on people she knew in Bowral. Every day in Maryborough at 1.00 pm a gun was fired to set the time for workers in the sugar plantations - a tradition which continues to this day.

In 1907 she went to live with her Aunt Ellie in Sydney where she was enrolled at the High School. She was interested in music and fell in love with the stage. She was in school plays and wanted to be an actress but this was considered too risqué, and she had to take a job as a secretary with the Australian Gas Light Company. She eventually achieved her acting ambition and took a stage name - Pamela Lyndon Travers. When in New Zealand with a touring company she began to write and continued on her return to write a weekly letter from Sydney for the Women’s World section of the Christchurch Sun. It was by supporting herself as a journalist that she was able to set sail for England.

After her arrival she sent some of her poems to George Russell, the editor of the Irish Statesman, whose protégé she became. Through him she met the philosopher Gurdjieff whose teachings were an influence on her for the rest of her life.

In 1930 she rented Pound Cottage at Mayfield in Sussex where she wrote Mary Poppins published in 1934 - the first of six books of stories about the famous nanny and Banks family. She did not think of them as children’s books. They contained universal themes and Mary Poppins was in one person a pretty young lady, a nurturing mother and a wise old woman.

Walt Disney had been interested in Mary Poppins for twenty years when in 1964 she eventually agreed to give him the rights to make the film. Although she wasn't happy with some aspects of the film she loved Julie Andrews and was delighted at the success of the film which gave her work a worldwide audience as well as herself financial security.

In the 1970s the burden of UK taxation drove her to Ireland which had a more favourable tax regime. However she was unhappy there and returned to London in 1976 and lived there until her death in 1996. Although famous as the author of the Mary Poppins stories, she wrote a number of other adult books. She remained fascinated by myth and fairy tales and travelled widely, living for a time with the Navajo Indians. She was a regular contributor to the magazine “Parabola - the Magazine of Myth and Tradition”. In 1977 she was awarded the OBE and in 1978 was delighted to be given an honorary doctorate in humane letters by Chatham College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From then on she called herself Dr Travers. She kept her personal life private but she had in fact adopted a son and had three grandchildren.

In 1994 she met Cameron Mackintosh, liked him enormously and felt that she could entrust him with the rights to produce a stage musical which would respect her original work. He had given her a cherry tree. She was by that time very frail and she died two years later before her dream of a stage show could be realised. The cherry tree flourishes in the garden of a friend.

Diana Rawstron
3 October 2003

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