Tina Brown Family History

Christina Hambley Brown, better known as the Anglo-American journalist Tina Brown, was born on November 21st, 1953 to George and Bettina Brown in Maidenhead, Berkshire.  She was the younger of their two children.

It was said of Tina:

“An angelic little girl, at parties she could always be found sitting on the lap of the most important man in the room.  She was a shy observant child, pretty, funny, feminine, and an instigator.  By sixteen she had been expelled from three boarding schools.”

Nevertheless she was admitted to Oxford at seventeen and graduated in 1974 with a degree in English Literature.  She got herself around too.  Her irreverent article about an invitation from Auberon Waugh to a Private Eye luncheon caught the eye of New Statesman editor Anthony Howard who offered her an Oxford column.

It was in 1979 that, aged twenty-five, she was asked to take over the editorship of Tatler, a then fading society periodical.  She managed to rejuvenate it into a modern glossy magazine on a very limited budget.  Tatler readership quadrupled while she was at the helm.

New York.  Tina’s work at Tatler attracted the attention of  Condé Nast in New York.  They were looking to revive the fortunes of their own publication Vanity Fair.  Tina took over its editorship and made the move to New York.

Tina ran Vanity Fair for Condé Nast from 1984 to 1992 and The New Yorker from 1992 to 1998.  This was a boom time for print journalism – before the internet and social media came along and spoilt things.  Tina made her publishing mark during those years.  Like her compatriot Anna Wintour she was the classy English lady in New York’s publishing world.

Since that time, with the decline of the legacy media, Tina has moved with the times.  Her savvy journalistic skills and breadth of contacts have enabled her to stay both relevant and interesting.

She co-founded the online news site The Daily Beast in 2008.  She founded Women in the World, a live journalism platform, in 2010.  And her book The Palace Papers on the British royal family in 2022 topped The New York Times best-seller list and sold 250,000 copies in America.  In May 2023 she co-hosted Truth Tellers, an inaugural summit to celebrate investigative journalism.

The RFC Pilot and the Chorister

The Pilot.  The first Brown of Tina’s line, Christopher Brown, arrived in London from Somerset as a young lad in the early 1900’s.  He became a pilot with the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War.  In 1917 while on line patrol he was shot down near Beselare on the Western Front and taken prisoner by the Germans.

He did return to England in 1919 and after the war worked in London as an assistant theater manager.  But then his trail goes cold.  It looks like he died young.

Christopher had met Nancy Hughes before the war and they had one son George, born in 1913.

The Chorister.  After the war – specifically between 1924 and 1931 – Nancy was a chorister under her maiden name with the D’Oyly Carte Company, well known for its production of Gilbert and Sullivan operas.    She assumed the small part of Ada in Princess Ida in 1925 and played it for the remainder of her career,  whenever Ida was in the company’s repertoire.

Nancy did leave her middle name of Hambley to her descendants – to her son George and passed onto her two grandchildren.  Hambley or Hambly is a Cornish name.

Indeed the Hamblys were a long-established Cornish family who can possibly trace their ancestry back to the Breton Hamlin who was recorded as holding land in Boyton, Cornwall in the Domesday Book of 1086.  The Cornish mining slump in the 19th century caused many of these Hamblys to leave.

Nancy’s own Hambley line seems to have gone as follows:

• William Hambley from Cornwall (1842-1906) m. Clara Pitter (1845-1894) in 1865
• Eugenie Hambley (b. 1874 in Greenwich, London) m. Mr. Hughes
• Nancy Hambley Hughes (b. 1896) m.  Christopher Brown in 1919.

Nancy’s grandfather William died in Lewisham, London in 1906.  Her mother Eugenie lived on into the 1940’s.

Tina’s Father George

With his father missing, George was raised instead by relatives in Barcelona.  Through his mother he took an early interest in show business, serving as a stuntman and bit-part player.

In 1936 his knowledge of Spanish helped get him a foot in the production side of the film industry – as a third assistant director on The House of the Spaniard.  He graduated to assistant director in the film Fire Over England which starred Laurence Olivier.

His Marriages.  In 1939 George was a production assistant and occasional scriptwriter on the film set of Jamaica Inn.  There he met the young Irish-American actress Maureen O’Hara, then just eighteen years of age.  They had a quick romance and this resulted in a secret marriage between the two in London in June of that year.

However, Maureen’s mother discovered a wedding ring in her daughter’s handbag on their return to Hollywood.  She had a fit.  Their marriage did nor survive the separation and was annulled in 1941.  Maureen went onto movie stardom.

Interestingly, George recorded himself as married (presumably to Maureen) in the 1939 UK Register.  He was then living in Harrow with his widowed mother Nancy, her mother Eugenie, and a younger sister Cynthia.

When World War Two started, George joined the newly-formed RAF Film Unit in the North African desert and ended the war with the rank of Squadron Leader.  In 1948 he married Bettina Kohr also in the film business (she was the press agent to the actor Lawrence Olivier).

This marriage lasted. 

George the Film Producer.  His breakthrough as a film producer came in 1951 with Hotel Sahara.  This comedy, set in North Africa, included a young Peter Ustinov among its cast members and was based on George’s own story from his wartime experiences with the Desert Rats.

He continued to make movies through the 1950’s and 1960’s with varying degrees of success.  His last production was Innocent Bystanders in 1973.

His advice to his son Chris who wanted to follow in his footsteps was: “Never trust the Americans because we do it for fun and they do it for the money.”  In fact George hated the chore of having to raise money for his movies.

And Retirement.  In 1973 Chris was working as a cameraman at London Weekend Television and thinking about making films; while his daughter Tina was graduating from Oxford and contemplating a journalism career.

So, aged sixty and with his children off and running, George decided to take early retirement in Spain.  There his wife Bettina wrote a gossip column for expatriates.  In 1992 they moved to New York and lived on East 57th Street in the same apartment building as their daughter Tina (Chris had settled in Australia by that time).  George died in 2001.

Tina Meets Maureen O’Hara

In 2002 Tina decided to seize the bull by the horns.  Maureen O’Hara was due to appear at a New York screening of Miracle on 34th Street.

Tina dashed over to the theater and sat down for what Maureen thought would be a standard interview.

“I am the daughter of your first husband, George Brown,” Tina said. “You know,” she added when Maureen fixed her with a hard stare, “you were married to him.”

“Married,” Maureen answered sternly, “for five minutes, yes.” She then explained: “The marriage was annulled. I left on the boat for America immediately. I didn’t have a choice. I was under contract to Charles Laughton. George was very hurt.”

Yes, Tina asked, but why was it annulled?

“Well,” Maureen said, “it was the lies on the marriage certificate. His age and so many of the other details were untrue. And he should have sought parental consent. I was only 17 at the time. It wasn’t right.”

True?

The following account appeared in the Ottawa Citizen in August 1939:

“When Charles Laughton went to Hollywood for The Hunchback, Maureen and George Brown went with her mother for a holiday in Ireland.  They toured Killarney in a sports car and visited her home.  On June 12 there was a cable from Hollywood calling her out there at forty-eight hours’ notice to take the role, originally Ginger Rogers’, in The Hunchback.

The young lovers decided that they could not be parted by 3,000 miles unless they were married first.  George Brown telephoned home and fixed a special license. They were married at 5.30 p.m. on June 13 at St. John’s church in Harrow.

The next morning Maureen sailed from Southampton on the Queen Mary. The bridegroom stayed behind.”

Tina Brown’s Family Tree

• Christopher Hawthorne Brown, an RFC pilot in WW1 m. Nancy Hambley Hughes from London in Hammersmith, London in 1919.  Nancy was later a chorister with the D’Oyly Carte company.
• – George Brown (1913-2001)
• – Cynthia Brown (b. 1922)

• George Hambley Brown, film producer m. Maureen O’Hara, budding film star (1920-2015) in London in 1939, annulled in 1941; rem. Bettina Kohr, press agent (1923-1998) in London in 1948.  They retired to Spain around 1975 and moved to New York in 1992.
• – Christopher (Chris) Brown (b. 1950), film producer
• – Christina (Tina) Brown (b. 1953), journalist

• Tina Hambley Brown m. Sir Harold Evans, English newspaper editor (1928-2020) in the Hamptons, New York in 1981.  They moved to New York in 1984.
• – Georgie Evans (b. 1986), with Asberger’s syndrome
• – Isabel (Izzy) Evans (b. 1990)