cartoonist, was born in London, only child of the Australian black-and-white artists Will Dyson and Ruby Lind (Lindsay) . Her mother died in London in 1919 and Betty came to Australia with her father in 1925 when he was employed on Melbourne Punch , partly to meet her relatives. It was the only time she visited Australia and she contributed to the family Australian cartooning tradition in a small way. A precocious teenager, she illustrated an article on marriage in Home (2 September 1929, 40) and did several cartoons about flappers for Adam and Eve (January-July 1929), e.g. 'The Reporter – What shall I say that you are wearing at Portsea?/ The Damsel. – Oh, nothing worth mentioning’, 1 January 1929, and '“They say the boss sacked that young ledger keeper just because he found him with his arms folded.”/ “Yes, dear, but I was in them -”’ 1 April 1929, 6. She had a weak drawing in the New Triad then being edited by Hugh McCrae , a great friend of the Lindsay family. She contributed to the Bulletin , e.g. Psychology and Psoap . 'The Mere Maid, “I’m sorry, but I could only marry a strong man – one who would master me.”/ The Almost-Male: “Oh, I see – still keeping your schoolgirl complexes!”’ 29 September 1928, 12.

Betty evidently returned to England with Will in 1930. Back there she continued with a variety of artistic activities – cartooning, writing, etching, fashion analysis and designing theatrical and period costumes – though she 'never attained the creative heights presaged by her precocious talent and expected by her father’ (McMullin, 293). She designed sets and costumes for the Shilling Theatre, Fulham, and the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, inter alia, and also did ballet designs, notably for Sadler’s Wells. Perhaps her major achievement was to design 4,000 costumes with Australian Edgar Ritchard (brother of actor Cyril Ritchard), for The Pageant of Parliament held in the Albert Hall in 1934; on 2 July 1934 Home reported that it was 'to record the history of the Parliament of England’. Some of her original designs survive in the private Chanteau collection, London.

In 1934 Betty Dyson held an exhibition of her drypoint etchings of the Indian dancer Uday Shan-Kar at the Comedy Theatre, Manchester, subsequently shown at various venues throughout the USA (Chanteau col., ill. Jensen). She also wrote a rather vacuous article for Home (2 January 1935, 21, 83) about a visit to Russia illustrated with four sympathetic portrait sketches that in no way caricature their subjects.

In 1939 Betty married a French cavalry officer, Baron Yves Chanteau, in Guadalupe. They spent World War II in France where the Baron, a Breton separatist, was both tortured by the Gestapo and interrogated by the French Resistance. Betty too was suspected of collaboration with the Germans, so that her cousin Jack Lindsay ( Norman Lindsay’s son) was 'involved in War Office manoeuvres to clarify her credentials with the suspicious French Resistance’ (McMullin). The couple separated in 1951 and Betty married Hebry “Othello” Smith, a Jamaican clerk. In 1956, aged 45, after a tempestuous life and before she could obtain a divorce from a marriage that was even more turbulent and unhappy than her first, Betty died at Mona St Andrew in Jamaica of cirrhosis of the liver.

Betty had treasured her parents’ artwork throughout her life. She bequeathed a collection of some 300 originals by her father, plus a small collection by her mother and herself to Baron Chanteau. The baron migrated to Britain, remarried (Marjorie), settled in Kensington and had two daughters, Diane and Cara, before dying in 1972 survived by his wife and their two daughters. Cara re-discovered the collection for John Jensen in 1995. It was offered for sale as a single collection in 1999.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007