Heal's

DS took up an assistant position in the toys and art department at Heal's furniture shop, where she soon rose to become a buyer.

While she was acting at the Everyman Theatre , DS had a brief fling with its founder, Norman MacDermott . In 1927, a few years after she began working at Heal's , she began an...

DS recalled that the play opened on Easter Monday, and the gallery, full of rowdy playgoers, laughed in the wrong places, invited Fay Compton [playing the lead] to speak up and made itself generally unpleasant...

The play, clearly inspired by the author's career at Heal's furniture shop, offers a rosy view of employees and managers pulling themselves together to get through difficult times. Later, DS was apologetic about the happy...

After attending a toy fair at Leipzig for her job at Heal's , DS travelled to Innsbruck in Austria, where she stayed at a Tyrolean inn—the inspiration for her first West End hit, Autumn...

Autumn Crocus earned DS enough money—£4,000 by Christmas 1931—to reduce her work at Heal's to just one day a week. By 1937 she had earned £60,000 from her playwriting alone—enough to enable her to...