Pamela Lyndon Travers

Above: Travers in the role of Titania in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, c. 1924

Pamela Lyndon Travers the author of Mary Poppins was born Helen Lyndon Goff in Queensland Australia in 1899,  the daughter of  Travers Robert Goff an Irish banker who succumbed to alcoholism and died of pneumonia when Helen was only seven. Helen was the apple of her fathers eye and she claimed that he instilled her love of poetry and stories. Her mother, Margaret Agnes Morehead Goff, was of Scottish Irish decent and the sister of the former Premier of Queensland

“Myth has been my study and joy ever since the age . . . of three. The true fairytales … come straight out of myth.  One might say that fairytales are the myths falling into time and locality." PL Travers

Her grieving mother and the children had to rely on an eccentric great aunt (Helen Morehead, later Christina Saraset) for financial support and they moved to Sydney where the children were sent to boarding school at Normanhurst Private Girls School in Ashfield Sydney. 

This great aunt is understood to be the inspiration for the character of Mary Poppins.

On leaving school Helen briefly worked as a secretary but then pursued her passion to be an actress, a career her family did not approve of, she  performed in Oscar Asche's 'Othello', and was Regina in Andrew McMast's 'Ghost' and toured NSW and New Zealand during 1921-22.

However at this time she also started writing poetry and newspaper articles and aged 24 she moved to London where she changed her name to her pen name PL Travers, Pamela Lyndon Travers, with her father’s first name as her surname.

In London she wrote to George Russell (AE) in Dublin, where he was editor of the Irish Statesman, with a poem and he wrote back with some money encouraging her to continue her poetry and to come to see him. For the remainder of George Russells life he mentored her and they corresponded regularly and met often. 

Above: PL Pavers and George Russell 1933 two years before Russells death.

Pamela Pavers traveled extensively and had a thirst for spirituality and understanding, she studied with gurus in India, lived on a reservation in the American Southwest, and was a dedicated student of  George Ivanovich Gurdjieff an esoteric Russian spiritual teacher and writer. Spiritualism at this time in England was a strong guiding force along with a love of nature and these elements were of course to be woven into Pamela's books

As she traveled she learned of the commonalities in the fairy tales and ancient stories that children are told around the world. 

In 1926, PL Travers published a short story, "Mary Poppins and the Match Man", which introduced the nanny character of Mary Poppins and Bert the street artist. 

Above:Australian Women's Weekly, 28 August 1963, p. 13

Mary Poppins was published in 1933 and was Travers' first literary success. Seven sequels followed, the last in 1988, when Travers was 89.

Travers's sexuality is unknown, she never married and had relationships it is said with men and women. Her most enduring relationship was with Madge Burnand, the daughter of Sir Francis Burnand, playwright and former editor of Punch magazine.  

They lived together for more than ten years, starting in 1927 when they shared a flat in London and later in an idilic small thatched cottage called Pound Cottage in Mayfield, Sussex in the south of England.  

In 1939, when PL Travers was 40, she adopted an Irish twin baby boy from Joseph Hone, her friend and biographer of Yeats and George Moore, whom she named Camillus Travers Hone (1939-2011). During World War II, PL Travers and her Camillus moved to New York for safety where Pamela worked for the British Ministry of Information. 

Her friend John Collier, who was then the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, saw that she was homesick for England suggested that she visited with native Americans, so over two summers they stayed at reservations and lived with the Navajo, Pueblo and Hopi tribes.

In a letter to her friend Helen Keller speaking of  Camillus:

“He, when he first heard poetry, was enchanted by it, but now at the age of eight only wants it now and then. He is so busy being a gangster one moment, supervisor another, a policeman the next. Everything now is acting and there is very little dreaming. The house shakes with his thundering feet, he is always coming from or going somewhere and only at night remembers that he has a mother and is still small enough to sit in her lap and be rocked in the rocking chair.”  

Camillus was a twin and one of six siblings who were in the care of their grandparents. His grandfather Joseph apparently begged Pamela to take both twins but she refused. Pamela never told Camillus that he had a twin brother, or about his real parents. She had told him that she was his mother and that his father was a sugar planter in the colonies who had died.

This was to prove a disastrous misjudgement for when Camillus was seventeen, his twin brother Anthony finally tracked him down to London and he discovered the truth, and the lies.  Despite Travers’s refusal to let the twins see each other, they did get together to celebrate their reunion, however they found they had little in common due to very different upbringings. Their older brother said that it ruined both the twins lives and both succumbed to alcoholism.