Madame Paulette HOWARD-JOHNSTON

We don’t usually publish obituary notices of member’s, or late member’s, wives, but Madame Howard-Johnston was a remarkable lady, with whom I had quite a lot of contact after her husband died in 1996 – she was then 91, but continued to take (and apparently read) the ‘Naval Review’.
She was French by birth, and grew up in the artistic milieu of Proust, Monet, etc., in the Paris of the 1920s (her father was an artist himself, and a not-undistinguished one). She married R-A ‘Johnny’ Howard-Johnston in 1955, who had had the traumatic experience, as the Captain of the ‘Vernon’, of having to organise the search for the submarine ‘Affray’, in which his own son was then serving.
She became a redoubtable old lady, and those who may have had her acquaintance in Paris – she and her husband were very hospitable – are recommended to read the DT obit, which is excellent.