Invited to appear on Desert Island Discs in October 1991, Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, who has died aged 85, spoke with the cautious air of one picking her way across ice. Her choices of music were mostly the uninflammatory ones of a woman of culture – a Bach partita, a Beethoven piano sonata – as was that of her non-Bible book (TS Eliot’s Four Quartets). When the presenter, Sue Lawley, finally addressed the elephant in the room – the near civil war that had raged at the Victoria & Albert Museum following Esteve-Coll’s appointment as its director four years earlier – she deftly defused the question by broadening it.
“The whole period was very difficult indeed for everybody within the museum,” Esteve-Coll allowed. Pressed as to how she herself had survived attacks that were both personal and vicious, she said: “I have a group of extremely supportive close friends, I have a small, tight, close family, and they closed ranks.” Then, on a crisper note, she ended: “I am absolutely certain that the decisions taken then were the right ones.”
