Enid was born in the United Kingdom on the 11th January 1931 at her parent’s home in East Sheen, London. Her parents were unusual in their attitudes towards the class structure, and particularly the role of women in society.

Her father, Walter Wheeler was the headmaster of London’s first Comprehensive Secondary School, Creek Manor Secondary School, in Deptford London, then a tough slum in the eastern part of the city. He and a long-time friend, Dr. Archibald Flight, founded the School Journeys Association, which had the radical premise that exposing children from the slums of East London to large parks, open spaces, and beaches, would be beneficial for their mental and physical health.

Her mother, Hannah Catherine Wheeler (nee Rowles) was a schoolteacher with the London County Council Public School Board. Hannah had grown up in the slum of Poplar, in East London, however due to the efforts of Enid’s grandmother the family managed to improve their situation and moved to a house in a north London suburb.  Hannah Wheeler’s mother was determined that her daughter would not be trapped in poverty as a laundress, and encouraged her daughter to get into teacher’s training college. This shaped Enid’s mother’s view of women and work, and Hannah passed this attitude on to her daughter.

When Walter Wheeler married Hannah Rowley, he was a widower with a son, Allan, and two daughters, Nancy and Sheila. Hannah had an adopted son, Erik.

Enid was Walter Wheeler’s fourth child, and the only from his second marriage. Enid had a near idyllic childhood and early life, where she had especially close relationships with her father, her step-brother Erik, and her long time nanny Fay, who she called Fazzy. With her father, Enid enjoyed trips to the seaside, to circuses, and a wide range of the other things to see in London.

Not long after Enid was born, her mother went back to work as a schoolteacher, and hired a nanny to look after Enid. For Hannah Wheeler to resume work as a married woman schoolteacher, especially after having a child, was almost unheard of. It was accepted that middle-class women, once they married, would give up their jobs and become fulltime housewives.  Hannah also insisted that Enid would go to private schools, rather than the state schools of the type that she and her husband taught at. Private schooling was (and still is) the fundamental distinction between the social classes comprising British society. Childhood education determined absolutely, for life, the way a person spoke, and the accent that the individual used.

Enid enjoyed a very privileged educational upbringing found usually in Britain among very wealthy families and the aristocracy. As a consequence of this education she was very well read, knew a great deal about the social, cultural and historical life of the British people, of London, France and Europe. She spoke with the same accent as the Royal Family, in contrast to the rest of her family who she remained close to, who spoke with South London accents.

She had learned a great deal about teaching and the value of reading and education from her parents. From a very early age Enid was able to read quite well, however her mother regarded endless reading as a “waste of time”. They compromised when Enid demonstrated that she could knit and read at the same time, a skill that Enid refined to the point that she could knit by feel and follow complex patterns subconsciously. Many visitors to the Robbie house over the years remember seeing Enid knitting at high speed without looking at the needles, while reading at high speed!

Following nursery school, she was enrolled in her first private girls school at age 6. This was the beginning of a series of at least 7 high-end girls private schools in London and Wales during and after the Second World War, before she left for Art College at the age of 16. This may have been the root cause of Enid’s conservative outlook on life: resisting change to established routines unless she was fully convinced that an important change was acceptable.

Enid ended her secondary school career at the highly prestigious St. Paul’s School for Girls. Miss Strudwick, the High mistress, had been a prominent suffragette when she was younger, and believed that young women should be prepared and educated not only to deal with the social aspects of Britain’s leadership, but also hold the positions of the highest power, influence and authority in government, industry, business and academia. Enid enjoyed her time at St. Paul’s Girls School and made a number of close friends, who all had a great interest in the theatre and ballet. Enid maintained contact with many of them throughout her life.

Enid’s parents had assumed that she would become a teacher, preferably a professor at a university. Enid had other ideas however, and enrolled in Goldsmith’s College in South London. She then transferred to the Kingston School of Art at Kingston on Thames. During her training at these schools she obtained a comprehensive knowledge of art, Art History, paint and pigment manufacture, printing, sculpting and plaster modeling. 

She graduated in 1952, and on the strength of high marks and excellent work, was accepted into the Slade School of Art, in London. The Slade School was the best painting, sculpture and drawing art school in Britain. Over the years many prominent painters, graphic artists, and sculptors had taught at the Slade or had been affiliated with it as visiting lecturers. While Enid was there, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Lawrence Stephen Lowry, Professor Rudolf Wittkover the architectural historian, were among the lecturers. Enid graduated with a Masters in Art from the Slade School of Art in the summer of 1955.

When Enid came to the Slade, she soon met Roderick George Robbie at a student party. Later she would say that she noticed him because he spent most of the evening helping her wash and dry glasses in the kitchen, “unlike the rest of that drunk lot”. They were married on the 20th December 1952, in East Sheen, London, at a small church near to her home where she had been born. She was 21 and Rod was 24 years old. There is no photograph of them at the church because the photographer forgot to show up! They went to Paris for their honeymoon, using the free travel that Rod was entitled to as an architect for British Railways. They had a very good time, personally, culturally and hedonistically.