Garman Sisters

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Girl with a white dog, 1951–1952, by Lucian Freud; Tate Gallery. The subject is Freud's first wife, Kathleen (Kitty) Epstein, the daughter of Lady Epstein née Kathleen Garman.

The Garman Sisters, the seven daughters (and two sons) of Walter and Margaret Garman, an eccentric Victorian doctor, led notoriously high profile lives within mid-20th century artistic circles. Having grown up in the bleak surroundings of the Black Country at Oakeswell Hall, Wednesbury, in England, they were prominent in London's Bohemian Bloomsbury Group, between the World Wars. 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 the painter Lucian Freud.

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 the Mitford's marriages to Bryan Guinness, Sir Oswald Mosley and Andrew Cavendish far outweighed the Garman's 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 Smith 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.

Mary Garman, the eldest, (1898-1979). Along with her sister Kathleen they made their siblings sell family possessions in order to buy cigarettes, French novels and visit the cinema. They also bought drinks in the local miners' pub and ran away to London when Mary was twenty-one, where they lived in a one-room studio at 13 Regent Square, Camden. Their circle of friends and acquaintances now numbered high-brows, Jews, poets, authoresses, painters, singers, ballet dancers, and an economist (probably John Maynard Keynes), and they frequented West End clubs such as The Gargoyle, The Harlequin and The Cave of the Golden Calf. Mary was married to the South African poet Roy Campbell from 1924 until his death in a car crash in Portugal in 1957. 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 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, and Virginia Woolf, an ousted lover, described in her biography of West. Mary and Campbell also lived in the south of France amongst Augustus John, Aldous Huxley, Sybille Bedford and Nancy Cunard.

Sylvia 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 Garman, the third daughter, (1902-1979). She married Sir Jacob Epstein in 1955, having been his lover since 1925 and being mother to 3 of his children, during which period his 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 the death of Margaret, 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.

Douglas Garman, (1904-1969), had risen to become the Education Secretary of the British Communist Party until 1950, was also assistant editor of the Calendar of Modern Letters and a member of the original Left Review circle. His first wife had an affair with his sister Kathleen and he became one of the lovers of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim.

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

Helen Garman, number six, married a French fisherman. Her daughter Kathy married Laurie Lee.

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

Ruth 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.

Lorna Garman, the youngest, (1916-2000), was perhaps the most flamboyant and fatale. Exotic clothes, Chanel No. 5, horse riding at night, a chocolate-brown Bentley, and swimming naked in lakes, rivers and rough seas. At 14 she seduced 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; the painter Lucian Freud for whom she modelled in many of his paintings, and for whom she brought objects 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, Kathy Polge (daughter of Helen), and Kitty Epstein the subject of Freud's "Girl with a White Dog".

Lorna’s quixotic character is perhaps crystallised 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.”