Norah FitzGerald: The Inspiration for Sam Stewart

The adventures of Honeysuckle Weeks' Sam Stewart in Foyle's War are mostly based on the real-life story the pretty, vivacious and immaculately groomed WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force) driver Norah FitzGerald, Anthony Horowitz revealed.

She was born on April 6, 1913, in Esher, Surrey, the youngest of three children of bank cashier Maurice FitzGerald (33) and his wife Mary (32). Tragically, her mother died giving birth. Maurice was left to look after Kathleen, 6, Peter, 16 months, and the baby.

Maurice remarried, and they lived in a palatial place with tennis parties and orchards and nannies. The family fortune was lost during the economic depression after 1929 and the family ended up moving to a house in Kingston.

When the war started, she was determined to do her bit for her country as a WAAF-driver. Poised and confident, she loved a good joke and a strong cocktail, and always turned out in lipstick and nail polish. By her own admission, the war years were the time of her life.

She was engaged twice to RAF-pilots, but both pilots were killed, and a third pilot was planning to propose when he too died.

After the war, childless, she devoted her life to another family’s children. In 1960 she became a governess and housekeeper to Mark Horowitz, a businessman and solicitor living in North London. Anthony then five, his brother Philip nine, and Caroline just a toddler.

[Anthony Horowitz and his parents]

Anthony Horowitz was so captivated of his nanny’s tales of wartime love and adventure that he welded them into the character of Sam Stewart. Her sense of humour, can-do nature and romantic disasters actually belong to Norah, whom Horowitz affectionately calls Fitzy.

Anthony says: "Fitzy used to tell me all these stories about her time in the war, to do with driving and drinking and young men. She had a very happy war. I guess that’s where Foyle’s War began, with the memory of all these stories she told me."

Honeysuckle Weeks has known for years that her character was based on Horowitz’s governess. "Anthony always does a profound amount of research and his stories are always based in reality. I think that’s what makes Sam so authentic. She’s based on a real person and there is nothing stranger than reality."

Norah FitzGerald died on May 5, 2001, two years before Foyle’s War first aired. Both Anthony and Caroline were frequent visitors in her final years. Caroline says: ‘The last time I saw her she was completely lucid. She asked me if she was dying and I said I thought she was. She said she wasn’t scared, when I asked, and that she had had a wonderful life and how much she had loved me. Two days later she was dead.’

Source.