Profile | From studying law to teaching to illustrating children’s books, Theadora Whittington on a varied life and the art of forgiveness
- Theadora Whittington, a lawyer, author and illustrator-artist, studied theology and law before working in Beijing and learning Chinese ink painting
- A brief return to the UK yielded an illustration degree before her family decamped to Hong Kong, where she produced three picture books
My father was English and my mother was Australian – he was an academic at Sheffield University [in northern England] and she was a doctor. I was born in Sheffield and grew up in a large rambling house. It was a pretty academic set-up and I was expected to do well at school.
My younger sister and I went to Sheffield High School, an all-girls school. There was an expectation that I would go into a sensible profession. My mother died when I was 12. I didn’t want to feel like the odd one out at school, I wanted life to go on as normal.
Nowadays, a lot of children have split parentage, but at that time you were expected to have two parents and you were a bit the odd one out in class when your mother had died. The headmistress of the school later became my stepmother – my father married her when I was at university.
Musical youth
I was more musical than artistic as a child, and I still play the flute and sing in a choir. We had a piano at home, but my father didn’t encourage playing music, partly because his father had been a pianist and hadn’t focused on the family firm as he might have done, so it was fairly discouraged.
My father liked painting, but painted in a very traditional way, he had a strong sense of right and wrong. I studied music to A-level, but didn’t do any art. I was interested in [French philosophers Albert] Camus and [Jean-Paul] Sartre, the philosophical angle, and went to Durham University to study theology.
It was a strange thing to do at university because most students were doing it thinking of being ordained, and I wasn’t. I met Will – who would become my husband – at university.
Break away
After Durham, I went to do a law degree at Buckingham University. I graduated from there in 1988 and went to the Bar. While I was doing my pupillage in London, Will went to Yunnan to teach English with VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas). I decided to have a break and go out and see him. My father’s new wife, the headmistress, thought this was dreadful and my father had some sort of shock that I’d gone.