Lorna Garman
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Lorna Garman Wishart (1916 - 2000) was the youngest of the seven daughters (and two sons) of Walter and Margaret Garman, an eccentric Victorian doctor, 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 and friendships with writer Vita Sackville-West; composer Ferruccio Busoni, painter Bernard Meninsky, sculptor Jacob Epstein; poet Laurie Lee and the painter Lucian Freud.
Lorna was perhaps the most flamboyant and fatale of the sisters. Exotic clothes, Chanel No5, horse riding at night, a chocolate-brown Bentley, and swimming naked in lakes, rivers and rough seas. At 14 she seduced Ernest Wishart, a very rich and a committed Communist Party member, who became her husband when she was 16[citation needed].
Ernest Wishart owned Lawrence and Wishart, the anti-fascist publisher which became the publishing house of the British Communist Party in collaboration with Douglas Garman, the party's Education Secretary.
Throughout the marriage she had affairs with, among others, writer Laurie Lee, who fathered her third child and 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. Although 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 and Kitty Epstein.
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.”
She finished her days as a pillar of the Roman Catholic community around Arundel, in West Sussex[citation needed].
[edit] References
The Rare and the Beautiful: The Lives of the Garmans by Cressida Connolly, Fourth Estate
Categories: Articles with unsourced statements since February 2007 | All articles with unsourced statements | 1916 births | 2000 deaths | Bloomsbury Group | British Roman Catholics | British socialites | Converts to Roman Catholicism | Date of birth missing | Date of death missing | People from Sussex | People from Walsall | People from Wednesbury
