Sylvia Schofield


Sylvia Anne Schofield was a British writer and traveller. She had a long and varied career, and her The Daily Telegraph obituary described her as, "an agony aunt, wartime intelligence operative, honorary colonel in the US Military Police, advertising copywriter, mystery novelist, photographer, archaeologist, and intrepid traveller."

Early life

She was born Sylvia Anne Terry Smith on 28 May 1916, at 113 Ramsden Road, Balham, London, the elder daughter of William Horace Smith, an architect and chartered surveyor, and his wife, Annie Smith, née Terry, a Salvation Army officer. She was educated at Wimbledon Technical College until the age of 16.

Career

Aged 16, she started work as a freelance journalist, in a women's magazine as its teenage agony aunt, and as an interviewer for newspaper arts pages.
At the start of the Second World War, she joined the BBC's monitoring service, where she met her future husband, Angus Matheson. Even though they divorced in 1950, she was to publish all her non-fiction books as Sylvia A. Matheson.
She wrote four Crime Club novels using her dog's name, Max Mundy, as her pseudonym, all adventure thrillers with a news photographer named Russell Jones as the chief protagonist: Death is a Tiger set in Baluchistan, Dig for a Corpse set in the mountains of central Asia, Pagan Pagoda in Burma, and Death Cries Olé in Spain. She was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
The Daily Telegraph in her obituary, described her as, "an agony aunt, wartime intelligence operative, honorary colonel in the US Military Police, advertising copywriter, mystery novelist, photographer, archaeologist and intrepid traveller."

Personal life

On 19 December 1941, she married Angus Matheson, son of Malcolm Matheson, a church minister in the Outer Hebrides, at Kingston and Surbiton Presbyterian Church. They divorced in 1950. Matheson would later become professor of Celtic languages and literatures at the University of Glasgow.
In 1956, she married Henry Beaumont Schofield, a petroleum engineer she met while reporting on the discovery of the Sui gas field in Pakistan's Bugti tribal area.