Wimbledon tennis champion Doë Howard remembered in The Times
The tennis career of Wimbledon player Doë Metaxa Howard, widow of the late MRA leader Peter Howard, was highlighted in an obituary of her in The Times following her death, aged 96, on 7 September. She and her doubles partner, Josane Sigart, won the Wimbledon ladies doubles title in 1932. Greek-born, Doris Metaxa represented France at Wimbledon. A week after their victory, she announced her engagement to the England rugby player and journalist Peter Howard, who was to become the world leader of MRA (now Initiatives of Change).
In the Lives Remembered column of The Times, 19 September, Geoffrey Pugh wrote:
‘Whenever the tennis player Doris Metaxa Howard (obituary, September 13) telephoned friends, as she frequently did, until the last weeks of her life, the crisp announcement ‘Doë’ (as she was universally known) was a prelude to a shrewd but warm-hearted catalogue of questions and concern for the person she called, followed by a quick and unsentimental end.
‘Committed lifelong to the work of Moral Rearmament, with her husband, the newspaperman Peter Howard, she corresponded with an extraordinary cross-section of people across the world, after his untimely death 42 years ago.
‘Her letters, brief and to the point, were full of humour, unexpected shafts of insight and a puncturing of pomposity. Her sensitive understanding of what was really going on in the other person showed itself in simple, steadfast care that healed hurts and included all in her wide sympathy. She will be much missed, and certainly by this writer.’
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