Garman Sisters

The Garman sisters were the seven daughters of Walter Chancellor Garman, an eccentric Edwardian doctor, and his wife Margaret Frances Magill, who led notoriously high profile lives within artistic circles of interwar London. With their two brothers the Garmans were known collectively as the Naughty Nine. Having grown up in the bleak surroundings of the Black Country at Oakeswell Hall in Wednesbury, they were prominent members of London's bohemian Bloomsbury set. The complex lives of the dazzling beauties Mary, Kathleen and Lorna included affairs with writer Vita Sackville-West, composer Ferruccio Busoni, painter Bernard Meninsky, sculptor Jacob Epstein, poet Laurie Lee and painter Lucian Freud.

Biographies

Mary (1898-1979)

Mary Margaret Garman was the eldest. Along with her sister Kathleen she made the younger siblings sell stolen family possessions in order to buy cigarettes and French novels and to visit the cinema. She and Kathleen were also known to buy drinks at the local miners' pub, and at age 21, Mary and Kathleen, then 17, ran away to London where they lived in a one room studio at 13 Regent Square in Camden on the outskirts of Bloomsbury. They frequented West End clubs such as the Gargoyle, the Harlequin and the Cave of the Golden Calf; their circle of friends and acquaintances now numbered highbrows, Jews, poets, authoresses, painters, singers, ballet dancers, and an economist (probably John Maynard Keynes). Mary was married to the pennilessFact|date=May 2008 South African poet Roy Campbell from 1924Fact|date=May 2008 until he was killed in a car crash in Portugal in 1957. She was driving the car. They shared an outrageous lifestyle which included him suspending her from a balcony in an attempt to intimidate her, his joining General Francisco Franco to fight alongside the Nationalist Army during the Spanish Civil War, the British army in World War II, and his espousal of various right-wing causes. Their infidelities on both sides included her lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West, which Vita commemorated in a series of sonnets. Mary and Campbell also lived in the south of France amongst Augustus John, Aldous Huxley, Sybille Bedford and Nancy Cunard.

ylvia (1899)

Sylvia Constance Garman, the second sister, spent most of her life with a woman whom she met as a fellow ambulance driver in the First World War, but in a short interlude she married a sailor. Perhaps to increase her profile the other sisters concocted a myth that she had been the only girlfriend of T. E. Lawrence.

Kathleen (1901-1979)

Kathleen Garman, the third sister, married Sir Jacob Epstein in 1955. She had been his lover since 1925 and mothered three children by him, during which period Epstein's jealous wife Margaret shot and wounded Kathleen and encouraged him into multiple affairs in the hope he would tire of Kathleen and "return home." Six years after Margaret's death, Kathleen became Lady Epstein and his sole beneficiary. She donated his works to the Israel Museum, and many can now be seen in the Garman Ryan Collection at the New Art Gallery in Walsall. Her daughter Kitty married Lucian Freud, who was a former lover of Lorna Garman, Kitty's aunt.

Douglas (1903-1969)

Douglas Mavin Garman rose to become the Education Secretary of the British Communist Party until 1950, was assistant editor of the Calendar of Modern Letters, and also a member of the original Left Review circle. His first wife, Jean Sophie Hewitt, had an affair with his sister Kathleen and he became one of the lovers of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim.

Rosalind (1904)

Mabel Rosalind Garman, number five, married a Scots-Italian who ran a garage in Surrey.

Helen (1906)

Helen Francesca Garman, number six, married a French fisherman. Her daughter Kathy married Laurie Lee, who was formerly engaged in an affair with the last Garman sister, Lorna.

Mavin (1907)

William Mavin Garman, the youngest brother, ran away to sea, became a rancher in Brazil and returned home to become a Communist.

Ruth (1909)

Ruth Veronica Garman, the eighth, received the epithet “If only Ruthie could go into a pub without getting pregnant.” The first of her five, mostly illegitimate, children believed that his father was an admiral named Reed, but the idea came from an encounter in a pub called the Admiral Reed. She committed suicideFact|date=July 2008 .

Lorna (1911-2000)

Lorna Cecilia Garman, the youngest, was perhaps the most flamboyant and fatale. She wore exotic clothes and Chanel No. 5 perfume and was known to horse ride at night and swim naked in lakes, rivers and rough seas. At 14 she seduced the wealthy publisher Ernest Wishart, who became her husband when she was 16. Throughout the marriage she had affairs which included the writer Laurie Lee, who fathered her third child, and the painter Lucian Freud, for whom she modeled in many of his paintings, and for whom she brought gifts such as a dead heron and a zebra head. She was renowned as the heartbreaker of her long-suffering husband and anguished lovers alike. Remarkably, Lee and Freud each went on to marry her nieces, respectively, Kathy Polge (daughter of Helen) and Kitty Epstein (daughter of Kathleen), the subject of Freud's "Girl with a White Dog".

Lorna’s quixotic character is perhaps crystallized by her comment to Laurie Lee when he announced his intention to fight in the Spanish Civil War: “…you don’t need a war because you’ve got one here.”

The Mitfords

There is a striking parallel between the Garman sisters and their illustrious contemporaries the Mitford sisters, although the social privilege, access, wealth and talent enjoyed by the Mitfords outranks the middle-class bohemian artistic lives of the Garmans. Both families contained striking beauties who were the society and style icons of the 1920s and 1930s, although the Mitfords' marriages to Bryan Guinness, Sir Oswald Mosley and Andrew Cavendish far outweighed the Garmans' liaisons with wealthy publishers and artists. Both families contained members espousing extreme right-wing values, although the Mitfords' intimacy with leading Nazis Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and Oswald Moseley far outweighs Roy Campbell joining General Francisco Franco in the Spanish civil war. Both families contained members espousing communism through Decca's activism in America and Douglas's work in the British Communist Party.

References

*"The Rare and the Beautiful: The Lives of the Garmans" by Cressida Connolly, Fourth Estate
* [http://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/2004%20archive/090904/r090904_4.htm Family Profile, book review and photographic images of Mary, Lorna and Kathleen]

External links

* [http://www.epstein.org.uk/ The Epstein website of the New Art Gallery, Walsall]