\n All that will be put to rights when a plaque is unveiled next month by national treasure Joanna Lumley outside Edith’s former Hampstead home.\n<\/p>\n
\n Both Lumley and plaque organiser Brian Ferris believe the writer, artist and anthropologist – who successfully lobbied for Albania to gain independence – deserves to be better known.\n<\/p>\n
\n The blue plaque to Edith Durham is not English Heritage but has been privately funded and will be unveiled by Joanna Lumley in Hampstead in mid October. (Image: Brian Ferris)\n<\/p>\n
\n Mr Ferris said: “I first travelled to Albania in the late 1980s and like Edith I fell in love with this fascinating country.\n<\/p>\n
\n “I noticed the name of Edith Durham kept popping up in street names and when I did some research I discovered this brave Edwardian traveller who went all over Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and what is now Albania in the early years of the last century.\n<\/p>\n
\n “That was like going to the moon in those days for a woman travelling on her own – although she was treated very well.\n<\/p>\n
\n “She wrote books about the region, was a war correspondent for The Times, and was instrumental in creating Albania as an independent state in 1912.\n<\/p>\n
\n “Every school child in Kosovo knows her name but nobody in this country has ever heard of her – yet as a role model for young women you would be hard put to find someone with more guts.”\n<\/p>\n
\n A street in Albania named after Edith Durham who campaigned for the country to win independence. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)\n<\/p>\n
\n Mr Ferris lobbied English Heritage to install a blue plaque on one of her north London homes – including Glenloch Road, Belsize Park where she spent the last 20 years of her life.\n<\/p>\n
\n But he claims English Heritage told him Edith wasn’t sufficiently well known.\n<\/p>\n
\n Then he discovered Edith had lived for the first 10 years of her life at a property in Hampstead.\n<\/p>\n
\n A portrait of Edwardian explorer Edith Durham who will be celebrated with a plaque on her former home in Hampstead. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)\n<\/p>\n
\n “The owner was happy to go ahead so we had a plaque made and raised some money with the Anglo Albanian Association and Kosovo embassy and Joanna generously chipping in.”\n<\/p>\n
\n He explains that Edith was a stay at home carer for her sick mother who was prescribed travel by a doctor to avoid a breakdown.\n<\/p>\n
\n “She was the oldest daughter, unmarried who nursed her mother until the doctor said ‘if you don’t get away you will have a break down’.\n<\/p>\n
\n “So she made her first foreign trip down the Dalmatian coast – then after her mother’s death she was back and forwards to Hampstead.\n<\/p>\n
\n “She died in 1944 and was cremated at Golders Green.”\n<\/p>\n
\n Over the years Edith formed the Anglo-Albanian Society to pressurise Britain to recognise Albanian independence and campaigned for famine relief after the Balkan Wars.\n<\/p>\n
\n She was also an artist whose textiles are kept in multiple museums; the first female vice president of the Royal Anthropological Institute; and wrote books about the customs and places she visited.\n<\/p>\n
\n Lumley read from one of them – Hi Albania written in 1906 – during an event at the Kosovan Embassy.\n<\/p>\n
\n She will also attend a private event in mid October to unveil the plaque amid hope that passers-by might want to learn more about an extraordinary historic figure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All that will be put to rights when a plaque is unveiled next month by national treasure Joanna…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":773610,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-773609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=773609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/773609\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/773610"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=773609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=773609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=773609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}