Mary Garman

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Mary Campbell, nee Mary Margaret Garman (1898-1979) was the eldest of the Garman sisters, the seven daughters (and two sons) of Walter and Margaret Garman, an eccentric Victorian doctor, who lead 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 set, between the two 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.

The outrageous lifestyle began early whe Mary and her sister Kathleen made their siblings sell family possessions in order to buy cigarettes, French novels and visit the movies. 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, part of Bloomsbury. Their circle of friends and aquaintances 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 2, and espousal of various right wing causes. The infidelities of both parties 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. In the 1930's Mary and Campbell also lived in the south of France amongst Augustus John, Aldous Huxley, Sybille Bedford and Nancy Cunard.