Josie and husband George on their wedding day

Published: 29 August, 2013
by JOHN GULLIVER

JOSIE Pottle, who lived for many years in Camden Town, led a colourful life highlighted by two events: the first man she had an affair with was killed years later in a pistol duel, and she, herself, appeared briefly in several English films including the classic, Black Narcissus.

Josie’s childhood took a dramatic turn when her mother, from an old Camden Town working-class family, separated from her husband and married a French sailor stationed at the barracks in Regent’s Park.

Then she took all her family (three daughters and a new baby son) by boat, in the hectic months after the end of the Second World War, 10,000 miles to a tiny South Pacific island off New Caledonia, part of a French protectorate.

Her husband was a member of the island-chief’s family.

But two years later, homesick for London her mother, Mrs Winifred Warawi (née) Deane, brought the family back to these shores.

Back here she reconciled with the father of her three girls, a West African, who had come to London in the 1920s and was working as a musician mainly at Pinewood studios.

He would take Josie to the studios where she was picked several times to appear as an extra.

Once, Josie was chosen by the film director Emeric Pressburger as an extra for a film about a monastery in the Himalayas, called Black Narcissus, which has become a cult film.

Unlike other extras, Josie, of mixed race, had an ebullient personality and this and the fact that she had no need to black up for the part was probably why Pressburger had picked her.

At the end of the 1940s Josie had an affair with a young Ethiopian student who turned out to be the son of the highest-ranking military officer in Ethiopia, then ruled by the Emperor Haile Selassie. They had a daughter, Gina; and he returned to Ethiopia.

Life for Josie was difficult as a single mother but, always a rebel and a free spirit, she joined the Marylebone Young Communist League where she met and married George Pottle.

While her mother, Winifred Deane, looked after Gina, Josie worked at various jobs until she joined a newly formed travel agency, Progressive Tours, which specialised in taking tourists to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union for holidays.

She and her close colleague Sophia Skipworth, a former Russian princess from the Tsar’s family, organised many tours.

For several years in the 1960s Josie was a central figure at Progressive Tours with her husband, George, who had become one of its directors.

These perhaps were her most vivacious years, and Josie would regale family parties with hilarious tales of passports and visas that had gone missing, and sometime even clients who had become temporarily lost in Romania, Hungary or Moscow.

In the early 1970s she was invited to Haile Selassie’s palace in Addis Ababa from where her former lover had been a senior military officer. Here she learned that he had been killed in a duel in Cairo.

 Later, Josie returned to Britain, and she and her husband moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales where they ran an antiques shop. She lived there for more than 30 years and became a popular figure in the town.

She died on August 7, and left a husband, George, daughter Gina, who lives in West Hampstead, and several grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Josie loved her garden in Blaenau Ffestiniog, and was buried on a hillside overlooking a stunning valley.