Queen Helps L.A. Woman, 99, Return : ‘Oh, to Be in England’--and She Is

When Mary Armstrong was a little girl growing up on the English coast, she kept a picture of Queen Victoria, then the monarch, in her room. She never lost her faith in British royalty, even though she lived away from her native land for 65 years, most of them in Los Angeles.

So when Armstrong, now 99, got fed up with life in Los Angeles and decided “the time had come to travel home,” it made sense to her to turn to Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter for help when negotiations with British officials here over her return grew sticky. “It pays to go to the top,” she said as she boarded a plane in Los Angeles just before Christmas.

Getting back to England took some doing for Armstrong, and not just because of her age, for she is a hale and sprightly near-centenarian.

Because she was an American citizen and no longer a British subject, she was told by the British Consulate in Los Angeles that the best she could hope for would be a visa that would allow her to remain in England for six months.

“But I’m like one of those carnival dummies, those dolls that you knock down only to see them stand up again,” she said in an interview with a Times representative in Blaydon-on-Tyne in northwest England near Newcastle, where she now lives with a niece and her family.

So she did what seemed only sensible to her. She wrote to Queen Elizabeth.

And an aide to the queen replied, saying that her majesty had intervened and instructed the Home Office to issue her a “certificate of entitlement,” which, when attached to her American passport, granted her permanent residence in Britain.

Armstrong’s disenchantment with America was a long time coming, she said. But old acquaintances dying and her living alone for nearly 40 years in a tiny apartment, she said, had set her to thinking about what the poet Robert Browning had written more than a century earlier: “Oh, to be in England. . . .”

Not to mention the fact that three times in as many years muggers had stolen her purse and knocked her down outside her home on South St. Andrews Place, just north of the Santa Monica Freeway.

“Towards the end, I did not like America. I did not like the people there. In my opinion, they were not as friendly as the British. I want to spend the rest of my days with friendly people. I love the people here because they are so friendly,” she said.

Besides, “I was born in England and I want to die in England,” she told friends here before leaving.

Armstrong grew up in Whitehaven on the northeast coast of England, one of 14 children of a miner and his wife. She left school when she was 14 and apprenticed as a dressmaker, but two years later followed an older sister to Canada, where the sister had found work as a housekeeper.

Romance Enters Picture

In Vancouver, she re-encountered a young man with whom she had gone to school in Whitehaven and who, as a matter of fact, had lived only four doors from her as a child. They married in 1912 and lived for a time in New York before moving to Los Angeles, where her husband, Charles, got a job as a movie studio makeup man.

Because of his job, she said, the young couple mingled with the Hollywood set and became well acquainted with many film stars of the day. Today, she takes a somewhat cantankerous view of that time.

“My husband and I were around them (actors and actresses) all the time,” she said. “They were a bunch of no-goods. I wouldn’t go across the street to see any of them now. After my husband died (in 1947), they more or less dropped me, not all of a sudden but one by one--gradually.”

Armstrong’s single child, a married daughter, died two years before her husband. The daughter had no children.

Following the death of her husband, she said, “I got a job with a very kind lady who was an interior designer.” Her job was making drapes and “I worked until I was 86. I had to retire when my employer herself gave up work. I didn’t want to give it up because it kept me busy.”

Usually Took Buses

Until the muggings began, Armstrong, who never learned to drive, traveled about town by bus. But for the last year or so, she kept pretty much to herself in her apartment, except for outings with friends who had automobiles.

Said one acquaintance, Ann Armstrong (no relation) of Rancho Palos Verdes, “She is a very independent lady. She had a fear of having to go into an old people’s home.”

Mary Armstrong confirmed that, saying she “couldn’t stand being around old people. They depress me.” And, she added, “If I had stayed in America, I would have wound up in an institution.”

Since her return to England, she said, she has spent much of her time doting on three great-great-nephews, one 4 years old and twins 13 months old. “ I never imagined I would see them. They’re adorable,” she said.