Marian Lines

Marian Alice Lines (née Berry-Hart; 27 November 1933 – 10 November 2012) was a British writer and actress.

The majority of Lines' works are libretti for musical productions, and many are for performance by children.

Her mother was a missionary’s daughter and a talented pianist with a love of spirituals.

Her father was a chartered accountant and her grandfather was David Berry Hart a renowned Edinburgh surgeon.

At six weeks old Lines' family moved to Carthage in Tunisia.

At the age of two she returned to London.

Her father then got job with the Trinidad telephone company.

The family was ready to return from Trinidad to England when war broke out.

Lines spent her early childhood in Trinidad swimming and climbing trees.

In 1944, following her father’s injury, the family returned by convoy to England, landing in Liverpool.

After a stay with relatives in Birkenhead her father returned to the Edinburgh firm where he had been articled.

The family moved to St Andrews in the Kingdom of Fife for two years where she acquired her love of Scottish folk tales.

Lines attended Birkenhead High School where she was a friend of Patricia Routledge.

Following three and a half years at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and winning a major prize, Lines joined a Summer repertory theatre company in Perranporth in Cornwall.

During a forces tour with Eileen Atkins she met her husband Graham Lines.

The company was run by Peter Southey who drove the company around in a Rolls-Royce with a trailer.

Lines then became an English teacher, working at Fox School in West London providing music for the infants and choir and running the drama club.

The poems give a snap shot of life for children in West London in the 1960s including the then recently constructed M4 flyover at Ladbroke Grove.

A now lost play from the early 1970s concerned children who break into a professor’s lab and are shrunk to the size of gnats.

With Rosalind Rowland, Lines wrote two musicals, a choral fantasy and four songs.

The Three Enchanters (1971) based on a Russian folk story.

Lines designed and assisted in making the costumes based on Russian folk dress.

Characters included the three enchanters, Baba Yaga and the hut on hens legs familiar from Mussorsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.

The Illustrator Michael Foreman expressed interest in developing the work but did not pursue the project.

The Brocklehursts was about a Victoria family with four children.

One daughter is frequently naughty.

In dream sequences she visits a land of sweets and the land of the witches.

Tam Lin Choral folk fantasy based on the Scottish folk tale and a precursor of the "fables"; Blacksmith and the Changeling and Burd Ellen.

A recording exists but the score is thought to be lost.

The first four poems in Tower Blocks were originally written as four songs for the School Choir.

Having written the first four poems of Tower Blocks to be set to music, Lines was introduced to the Children's book publisher Franklin Watts who commissioned a further 28 poems.

The volume was published with illustrations by Charles Keeping and was intended for Children aged 12 to 14.

In 1976 Eimear Murphy suggested that Lines meet John Bishop and Betty Roe.

Lines and Roe were subsequently introduced at a party and their working partnership has proved to be prolific and popular.

Lines was an enthusiastic member of the Association of English Singers & Speakers.

Lines played a Southern Belle in the BBC production of Mrs Patterson with Eartha Kitt.

Lines wrote Granny's Kitchen for Yorkshire Television with Joy Whitby.

This was a cookery programme for small children and Lines appeared as 'Granny' in the pilot episode.

Lines and Whitby also wrote the scripts for the Giddy Game Show.

Lines also featured in numerous radio broadcasts.