Madeline Bingham

Madeleine Mary Bingham (1 February 1912 - 16 February 1988, Ebel, sometimes misspelled Madeline) was a British playwright, novelist and historian. She also wrote under the pseudonym Julia Mannering. She was married to John Bingham, 7th Baron Clanmorris, so had the title Baroness Clanmorris. Early life and wartime work Madeleine Ebel was born on 1 February 1912, the eldest daughter of Clement Ebel, managing director of a firm of interior decorators, and met John Bingham at a secretarial college, where he was learning shorthand and typing to prepare for a planned post as private secretary to a millionaire. They married on 28 July 1934. Madeleine worked for some time as a journalist for newspaper The Times. Both Madeleine and John joined the Security Service soon after the start of World War II. She worked at Blenheim Palace in administration and later in the Special Operations Executive, when she was based at the HQ in Baker Street and "kept a drawer of suicide tablets for agents". Writing Bingham wrote plays, historical biographies, and a miscellany of other books. She published her autobiography Peers and Plebs: Two Families in a Changing World in 1975, in which she described the contrast between her and her husband's backgrounds: hers Catholic, with mid-European roots, and his firmly Northern-Irish protestant. The book only covers her life up to 1937 and the birth of her son: she makes no reference to her or her husband's work with the security service. It is said that she had later planned to write a book about her husband's life, including the suggestion that he had been the model for John le Carré's character George Smiley, but that she was firmly told that "no such book would be tolerated". Her plays included a three-act comedy, The Men From The Ministry, first performed at the Aldwych Theatre in London in 1946 and later in Bristol in 1948 or 1949, and The Real Mccoy, performed in Sheffield in 1964.