Queer Places:
Mecklenburgh Pl, Holborn, London WC1N, UK
West Wittering Parish Churchyard
West Wittering, Chichester District, West Sussex, England
Brynhild Olivier (20 May 1887 – 13 January 1935) was the daughter of a
Victorian English politician and one of four sisters noted for their
progressive ideas, beauty and associations with both Rupert
Brooke and his Cambridge circle
of Neo-pagans, as well
as the Bloomsbury
Group. Born in Bloomsbury,
London, Brynhild Olivier was raised and home
schooled in Jamaica and Limpsfield,
Surrey. Although she had no higher
education, she became involved in cultural activities at Cambridge
University, through her sisters, who were undergraduates there.
Brynhild Olivier was married twice, first to the art historian, Hugh
Popham in 1912, with whom she had three children, including the art
scholar, Anne
Olivier Bell. Later, she married Raymond Sherrard and had three further
children, including the poet Philip
Sherrard. Brynhild Olivier died in London from aplastic
anaemia in 1935, at the age of 47.
The Honourable[a] Brynhild
Olivier, known as Bryn, was the second daughter of Sydney
Olivier, 1st Baron Olivier, and his wife, Margaret
Cox.[2] Sydney
Olivier, whose family was descended from French Huguenots,[3] was
a leading Fabian,
Governor of Jamaica (1907–1913) and a minister in the first
Labour Government of Ramsay
Macdonald in 1924 (Secretary
for India).[4] He
was one of ten children and among his brothers were Herbert
Arnould Olivier, the artist, and Gerard, father of the actor
Laurence
Olivier. His sisters included the author, Edith
Olivier.[3][5]
Margaret Cox was one of nine children of Judge Homersham
Cox and Margaret Smith. One of Margaret Cox's brothers was Harold
Cox the Liberal Member
of Parliament, another, the mathematician Homersham
Cox. Of her sisters, Agatha Cox married the sculptor Sir
William Hamo Thornycroft, while Ethel Cox married Captain Alfred
Carpenter, the brother of Edward
Carpenter the philosopher.[6]
The Oliviers were one of the founders of what came to be known as the
"aristocracy of the left", a group associated with the rise of the women's
movement, socialism and the Fabian Society. This group included the
author, Edith Nesbit,
the Webbs and the Shaws,
and had close ties to William
Morris and Edward
Carpenter. These families, in turn raised a generation of progressive
children, such as the Oliviers and the Reeves,
whose daughter Amber,
the Olivier daughters would encounter at Cambridge.[7] The
Shaws, who were childless, saw the Olivier girls as surrogate daughters, and
the characters of George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak
House were loosely based on the Oliviers and their "siren" daughters.[8]
Brynhild was born in Bloomsbury,
London in 1887 and named after Brynhild,
the wise queen and heroine of William Morris's Sigurd
the Volsung. Sydney Olivier was a career civil servant in the Colonial
Office. In October 1890, when Bryn was three, Olivier received his first
posting overseas, leaving his family behind in London. He served for six
months as Colonial Secretary (chief administrator) in British Honduras.[3] On
his return, the Olivier family were ready for a move from London, and Margaret
Olivier had been inspired by Edward Carpenter's Simple
Life. They settled near Limpsfield
Chart, Surrey, purchasing a cottage which they had previously used as a
holiday retreat, converting it into a home, which they named "The Champions".[9] It
lay at the foot of the North
Downs, overlooking the Weald,
and was backed by the dense Chart woods. Like the other children in the
community, the three older girls, Margery, Bryn and
Daphne were all home
schooled. They were also tutored for nine months in Lausanne to
ensure competency in French.[10] Later,
the progressive coeducational boarding
school, Bedales, in Sussex,
became available for the youngest sister,
Noël.[4] Soon,
like minded people started to settle in the neighbourhood. Among the first
were the Peases and
the Garnetts, Edward and Constance
Garnett and their son, David
“Bunny” Garnett. Others included Octavia
Hill, the economist J.
A. Hobson, the writers E.
V. Lucas and Henry
Salt and William and Margaret Pye, whose children included
Edith, Ethel,
Sybil and David.
Ford Madox
Ford lived there for a while and Margaret Olivier's sister Agatha
and her family also moved to Surrey. Eventually the area became a hub of
progressive Fabian intellectuals.[11][12][13] There,
the four Olivier sisters led a free-spirited outdoor life, disdainful of
social convention, which later made them very much aligned to the ethos of Rupert
Brooke's Neo-pagans, building tree houses, referring to themselves as
the Reivilo[b] tribe,
and becoming very athletic in a manner that David Garnett compared to ancient Sparta.
He also described them both as "ruthless Valkyries"[14] and
as "cruel as savages".[c][17][18] Frances
Wilson would later describe them as "feral".[19] One
woman, hired as a nursemaid to care for the children in 1892 was the future
author Gertrude
Dix, herself an emancipated woman who described her child rearing
philosophy as "principles of freedom", allowing children to learn through
experience rather than rules.[20] Dix
was a New Woman writer,
and this philosophy permeated the culture of Limpsfield.[21] Among
other early childhood influences, were G.
B. Shaw and H.G. Wells.[22]
Sydney Olivier's duties in the Caribbean would continue to take him away from
home.[23][4] Following
his appointment as Colonial Administrator of Jamaica (1899–1904) he decided to
summon the family to join him there in 1900, for the remainder of his term.[24] In
1907, Sir Sydney Olivier, as he had now become, left with Lady Margaret
Olivier to take up the governorship
of Jamaica, a position he maintained till 1913.[4] Margery,
now 21 was put in charge of bringing up her three younger sisters. For the
next few years the sisters' lives were divided between England and Jamaica,
keeping their mother company and performing official functions at Government
House.[7]
All four daughters (and their parents) were considered striking in their
appearance, but Brynhild was considered the beauty of the family.[8][25] They
had also developed a reputation for unconventionality that would later come to
the attention of Rupert
Brooke's very protective mother, when it was reported to her: "The
Oliviers! They'd do anything, those girls!".[4] Their
reputation would also lead D.
H. Lawrence to warn David Garnett they were "unclean".[26] Of
the four sisters, Bryn was the only one not to successfully pursue higher
education, abandoning her studies at the Royal
College of Art, when her parents returned to Jamaica.[27][d]
Bryn first came to the attention of Rupert
Brooke on a Cambridge
University undergraduate skiing excursion to Andermatt,
Switzerland in 1907. Bryn was not an undergraduate but came with her older
sister Margery, an important figure in the Cambridge Fabian Society. Brooke
had gone up to King's
College to read classics in
1906, was a member of the steering committee of the Fabian Society and then
President (1909–1910). In the evenings, the party put on performances of
plays, and in Oscar Wilde's The
Importance of being Earnest, Bryn played Cecily to Brooke's Algernon.
Although the women were closely chaperoned by
Mrs Leon, a friend of Rupert's mother, he wrote excitedly back to his maternal
cousin Erica
Cotterill[e] of
this encounter "There is One!...oh there is One!...aged twenty, very beautiful
& nice & everything...I adore her".[33] A
contemporary described her as "Most fetching...sweet, charming, gay. Very pale
amber eyes".[34][35]
Shortly afterwards, Bryn joined her parents in Jamaica where she spent most of
1908. In May of that year[36] Brooke
met the rest of the Oliviers when the Cambridge Fabians gave a dinner in
honour of Sir Sydney, at which both he and Lady Margaret, together with
Margery, Daphne and Noël attended, while Bryn remained in Jamaica. Brooke was
seated opposite the fifteen year old Noël, wearing her school uniform,[37][38] and
although Bryn was reputedly the most beautiful, it would be her younger sister
that Brooke would then pursue the most.[8][39]
In July 1908, Rupert Brooke's production of Milton's Comus at
Cambridge brought in many of the Newnham women to assist, and Noël was also
recruited to clean paint brushes. All four daughters attended the production,
and Brooke decided he was in love with Noël. Brooke then took to turning up at
Bedales, Limpsfield and wherever he knew the Olivier girls might be.[40] He
and Noël began a flirtatious correspondence, becoming secretly engaged two
years later. Their relationship became the source of many of his poems.[41][8]
Jacques
Raverat, who described Bryn as having "the startled beauty of a nymph
taken by surprise", formed the impression that Brooke was in love with all
four sisters at once,[42] and
they with him.[4] Brooke
used his association with Margery in the Fabian Society to pursue the other
daughters.[8]
It was around this production that the loose association of friends, later
dubbed Neo-pagans by the Stephen sisters,
began to form around Brooke. The core group or inner circle being the four
Olivier sisters,
Justin
Brooke, Jacques
Raverat,
Gwen Raverat and
Frances Cornford and
Katherine Cox. The
fringe members or outer circle included David
Garnett, Geoffrey
Keynes, Sybil Pye and Ethel
Pye, Dudley Ward, Godwin
Baynes, and Ferenc
Békássy.[43] Later
it would include A. E. H.
(Hugh) Popham (1889–1970),[44][45] a
Cambridge diving champion who Bryn would later marry,[f] and
Bryn's maternal cousin, Rosalind
Thornycroft.[g][48]
In 1909, camping and the outdoor life was coming into fashion, and for
undergraduates replacing the reading parties,[49] such
as the one Margery and Noël attended at Bank in
the New Forest at
Easter that year. Baden-Powell had
written his Scouting
for Boys, and it had been incorporated into the curriculum of Noël's
school. Rupert Brooke was much taken by this trend and organised camping trips
for his circle, travelling extensively in the summer months in both England
and France, where Raverat had a chateau at Prunoy.
In July, David Garnett assembled the group at Penshurst,
Kent, close to his and the Olivier residence at Limpsfield. The three younger
Olivier sisters attended, but Margery was not present to keep a watchful eye,
and Brooke invited himself. The Oliviers were noted for bathing nude, which
they referred to as "wild swimming", as illustrated by Gwen Raverat in
her Bathers.[50] They
and the men would swim in the river, under cover of darkness, illuminated by
bicycle lamps. This was an extension of the Bedalian spirit that promoted nude
swimming but separated the genders after they turned thirteen.[h] Bryn
was usually the camp manager and did much of the cooking, as depicted by Ethel
Pye in her painting of the Beaulieu
River site in 1910.[51]
Another one of Brooke's circle, Godwin
Baynes, a medical student at King's and a rowing blue,
was also present. The attraction that Bryn felt for Baynes was described in
Brooke's poem Jealousy[52] but
when Baynes proposed shortly afterwards, she refused him.[53] Among
other considerations in this decision was that Bryn was aware that her cousin
Rosalind Thorneycroft[g] considered
herself Baynes' intended.[27] Baynes
was not prepared to wait indefinitely, and at Easter 1910 he proposed to
Rosalind while rock climbing in Wales, and was accepted.[i][55][56] In
the summer of 1909, Brooke also invited the Olivier sisters to his parent's
summer home at Clevedon,
on the Severn, much to his mother's consternation. In particular, Bryn
demonstrated total disregard of etiquette and convention. Margery noted "It's
such a responsibility taking Bryn about...people always fall in love with
her". Mrs. Brooke's summary of the event was that "they are pretty, I suppose,
but not all clever; they're shocking flirts and their manners are
disgraceful".[57] As
a core member of the Neo-pagans Bryn was one of those who thought up the
group's solemn pact to reunite at Basel
Station on 1 May 1933, to start a new life, and reject growing old like
their parents.[58]
By 1910, Bryn, now twenty-three realised she had no formal education or
vocation and no immediate prospect of marriage. She had tried painting and for
a while was apprenticed to a jeweller in Kent with a view to opening her own
studio but found the work hard on her eyes, and incompatible with the long
summer vacations she had become used to. Her mother was keen to keep her
daughters close to her, and Bryn agreed to take Margery and Daphne’s place in
Jamaica when they returned to England in October. Before she left, she
confided her unhappiness to Hugh Popham, who incorrectly took it as an
invitation to propose, but she was not yet ready for that, and he was still
only an undergraduate.[59] Meanwhile,
Brooke was contemplating whether he could have both Bryn and Noël on their
summer excursions, but it was the latter he would soon propose to.[60] In
August of that year, the Neo-pagans staged a performance of Marlowe's Faustus at
Cambridge, in which Bryn was cast as Helen
of Troy in a low cut robe and hair highlighted with powdered gold (see
illustration), Brooke as the Chorus, Ka Cox as Gluttony and Noël was an understudy.[60]
In May 1911, Bryn returned to England from Jamaica with her father. She had
found the time in Jamaica frustrating because the native population would not
pose nude for her to paint. She kept Popham at bay, declining his invitation
to May Week, and writing
affectionately to Brooke that it was time she got married.[40] During
1911 there was increasing interaction between the Neo-pagans and the
Bloomsbury Group. A number of the men knew each other through Cambridge
circles, in particular the Apostles.
Ka Cox had also become friends with Virginia
Stephen (later Virginia Woolf), whose brother was an apostle,[j] in
January. [63] The
camp at Clifford Bridge in Dartmoor in August that year was referred to as
"Bloomsbury under canvas".[64]
In 1912, Brooke was recovering from a mental breakdown following his
realisation that Ka Cox's interests might lie elsewhere. He was despairing of
Noël, was feeling suicidal and started to again consider Bryn as his primary
love interest. He wrote to her while she was rock climbing in Wales and asked
her to join him and take care of him, which she did, although he read far more
into this than she did. They then returned to London together, joining
Virginia Stephen, before travelling on to Limpsfield. At the time, Virginia
commented that Bryn "has a glass eye - one can imagine her wiping it bright in
the morning with a duster", referring to a perceived insensitivity. At
Limpsfield, Noël and Bryn pleaded with Brooke not to travel to Germany. In
particular, Bryn urged him to respect his "Duty as an English Poet" to remain
in England. Brook's instinctive response was to propose to her.[65] In
the end, Brooke went to Germany with Ka Cox. There, he received a firm refusal
from Bryn forty days later. At Bank she had confided to him that at nineteen
she had fallen in love, but had "cauterised" her passion and retained a firm
self control since.[66]
When Bryn turned twenty-five in 1912, she once more took stock of her life
and came to a realisation that marriage and children were things she would
need to consider. Her parents were returning to Jamaica, and she had more or
less abandoned her dreams of a jewellery studio. Of the possible Neo-pagan
suitors, she had turned down Hugh Popham in October 1910 and avoided him
since. But now, although two years her junior, he had a secure job as an art
historian in the Prints Department at the British
Museum and a London flat.[54] She
proposed to him in July, but he needed little encouragement to accept,
inquiring of her how she felt about "children and sexual matters".[67]
In August when the Neo-pagans met at Everleigh,
Wiltshire, Brooke again tried to engage Bryn's affections, but discovered
that if she did go sailing with him she would bring Popham. Frustrated, she
informed him that she and Hugh Popham were to be married.[68] Despite
this news, Brooke unsuccessfully persisted in trying to get her to have an
affair with him. Instead she went rock-climbing with Hugh,[69] becoming
increasingly exasperated with Brooke's emotional immaturity, confiding to
James
Strachey "He's evidently got to get through this - what ever this is, by
himself...One comes away feeling baffled and exhausted".[k][70]
Rupert Brooke was not the only one devastated by Bryn's engagement. Her sister
Margery, who was starting to have delusional thoughts, had also considered
Hugh Popham as a suitable husband.[71] Brooke
was invited to the wedding, but declined,[72] although
later he sent the couple two Gwen Raverat woodcuts as a wedding present.[73]
After an engagement of two and a half months, Bryn and Hugh were married on
3 October 1912, not without some misgivings. Her parents were in Jamaica and
did not attend, nor did Brooke, who instead sent her a letter bewailing all
their lost opportunities. The wedding took place at a registry
office, and the reception at the Richelieu Palace Hotel, Oxford Street,[l] before
departing by train for the
Continent. After their honeymoon in Holland and Belgium, the Pophams
settled at 5 Caroline Place,[m] Mecklenburgh
Square, Bloomsbury,
close to both Hugh's work at the British Museum and Noël's work at the London
School of Medicine for Women on Hunter Street. Noël would soon also come
to live on Mecklenburgh Square.[76] At
Caroline Place, the Pophams entertained members of both the Neo-pagan and
Bloomsbury groups and held literary evenings (the Caroline Club)[77] while
also continuing to attend their summer camps.[78] Their
first child, Tony, was born in March 1914.[2] Initially,
Bryn had decided to raise him without help from a children's
nurse, then unheard of in her social circle.
Vanessa
Bell was horrified, commenting to her sister, Virginia
Woolf, that this was "too awful...she'll never be able to go away or
hardly to leave the house...these young neo-pagan mothers evidently mean to do
everything thoroughly".[79] Later,
she relented and their household grew to include a housekeeper and a nurse,
Marie.[80]
The outbreak of World
War I in August 1914 was greeted with horror by most of their circle.[81] Hugh
Popham, on the other hand, welcomed it, enlisting as a volunteer in the London
Regiment of the Territorial
Force and was posted to Roehampton.
The war first touched the Olivier sisters with the death of Rupert Brooke on
23 April 1915. But it was not so much Brooke's passing that disturbed them as
the glorification of Brooke for propaganda purposes into someone they did not
recognise. This was a process they refused to cooperate with.[82] While
Margery and Daphne were pacifists, with Hugh in uniform Bryn was more
ambivalent, describing herself as "a patriot" she wrote "I can believe that
there are things worth dying for".[14] By
May 1915, Zeppelin incendiary raids
were terrifying the inhabitants of Bloomsbury, while at times the heavy
gunfire from France could also be heard.[83]
In June 1916, their daughter Andy was born and conscription extended
to include married men. Bryn, meanwhile busied herself with volunteer work.[84] Hugh
received a commission in the Royal
Naval Air Service, then the Royal
Flying Corps and was posted to RNAS
Killingholme in the north of England. They decided to let Caroline Place
and find a house near the base. Once more the realities of war were brought
home, when Hugh, pursuing a German raider, was forced to ditch into the North
Sea.[85]
In May 1917, Hugh was posted to Port
Said, Egypt for the duration of the war, and Bryn and the children
returned to London.[85] Meanwhile,
Bryn's family and friends had become increasingly alarmed by her sister
Margery's emotional and behavioural problems. In particular she was
exhibiting attachment delusions,
and in April 1917 had been admitted to the Chiswick
House asylum with a diagnosis of "dementia". On returning to London, Bryn
was confronted by Margery at her home, having escaped from the asylum, and
realised she was going to have to assume responsibility for the care of her
older sister.[85] The
Oliviers and their friends were disillusioned about the level of care for
mental illness, especially after the recent breakdowns of
Daphne Olivier and Virginia Woolf, and struggled to keep Margery out of the
hands of organised medicine.[86]
In October 1917, Bryn became convinced that it was in Margery's interests to
be out of London. The Oliviers knew of an Irish doctor, Dr Caesar Sherrard
(1853–1920), who had a farm at Tatsfield,
Surrey, where he cared for soldiers affected by shell
shock by having them work the land. Tatsfield, a village on the North
Downs, overlooked Limpsfield, about four miles from the Olivier country home,
The Champions. With great difficulty Bryn persuaded her sister to join her
there, where they took a cottage on the farm and joined the workforce.[87] It
was there that the sisters met the doctor's colourful young nephew, Raymond
Sherrard (1893–1974),[n][88] another
Cambridge graduate. Sherrard was a second lieutenant in the Essex
Regiment, recovering from a motorcycle accident that kept him from the
front. Despite Bryn's best efforts, Margery soon transferred her fixation to
Raymond Sherrard, and she asked him to stay away,[88] but
this did not last long, and soon she started an affair with him.[89]
When the war ended in November 1918, Hugh was demobbed and
returned to his job in London, while Sherrard went up to St John's College,
Cambridge to read Natural Sciences. The following July, the Popham's third
child, Tristram was born.[89] Bryn
continued to see Sherrard discretely, but wanted to maintain her marriage. She
confided in her husband, but was shocked to find he did not see it her way,
and she was trapped between the demands of two men.[89] She
and Hugh took a house in Draycot
Fitz Payne, Wiltshire, where they were the neighbours of the MacCarthys,
and where she spent much of her time, Hugh Popham visiting only at weekends.[1][90] There
she established a local branch of the League
of Nations Union in 1920.[91] Bryn's
daughter described her parent's relationship as one in which Bryn found her
husband rather dry and his love for her, "dumb and beseeching".[92] Virginia
Woolf also commented that it was obvious what was happening to the marriage.[o] However,
in 1920. Bryn found that she was pregnant again. This time she consulted her
sister Noël, now a physician, and her fiancée, Dr Arthur Richards. Abortion
was illegal in Britain then, but they reluctantly and discretely arranged what
they referred to as "certain services" for Bryn.[93]
A few years later, the Pophams moved their home to Ramsden,
where Bryn's parents had retired to. Sherrard, who had recently graduated,
also moved to Oxfordshire to be nearby, and eventually moved in.[94] He
continued to pressure Bryn, eventually persuading her to reluctantly have his
child. She did so in the hope of changing his behaviour. She soon concluded
that it had made "everything ten times worse".[95]
Raymond Sherrard's child, Philip,
was born in September 1922. Margery, who was in and out of nursing homes, also
spent time with her parents in Ramsden, but continued to act out her paranoid
delusions, attacking people she feared or suspected. On one occasion she
attacked Bryn and injured Raymond. On another, she decided that Philip was her
child, and attempted to abduct him.[96] Bryn
now asked Hugh for a divorce, and with her parents, took the younger three
children[p] and
went to stay with her uncle, Herbert
Olivier, at his home in La
Mortola Inferiore, Italy.[98] Her
parents still hoped the marriage was salvageable, but the situation had become
more complicated by Hugh starting an affair with Bryn's married cousin, Joan
Thornycroft.[q] Bryn
continued to feel torn by her loyalty to two men. Various relatives on both
sides of the family, including Hugh, who was refusing to divorce her, came to
stay. She considered returning to him, insisting he break up with Joan, which
he refused.[99] Bryn
was acutely aware of her weak position under English divorce law, and feared
she would lose custody of the children. Again. she was shocked that "a modern
yong man...would ever in any circumstances attempt to take advantage of such
an anti feminist law".[100] Bryn
returned to England in May 1923,[101] and
in August, she and Raymond checked into a hotel and sent a copy of the receipt
to her husband, thereby providing him with what then were grounds for divorce.
She was bored with her marriage, and although the law that year was changed to
allow either partner to sue for divorce on the grounds of adultery, she and
Hugh agreed that it should be her adultery, in order to protect his job.[r][103]
The Popham's divorce case was finally heard in the courts in 1924.[s][104] The
timing was unfortunate for the Olivier family. Sydney Olivier had just been
appointed to cabinet, and elevated to the peerage. Divorce was still uncommon
but increasing, and reported salaciously in the press. The divorce immediately
created a scandal and Hugh was granted custody of
his three children. At the time, Tony and Andy were in boarding school, so
only Tristram was at home with his mother, but legally Bryn had little
recourse. Eventually the couple came to an informal agreement. The divorce had
a negative effect on the whole family, who maintained good relationships with
Hugh Popham, but not with Raymond Sherrard.[105] In
1926 Hugh Popham married another of Bryn's cousins, Rosalind Thornycroft, now
Baynes,[g] which
Bryn described as "bloody unenterprising".[54]
Bryn had four children while she was with Hugh Popham;[2]
Hugh Anthony "Tony" (March 1914 – 2002)[2]
Anne "Andy" Olivier (22 June 1916 – 2018)[t][109]
Tristram (2 July 1919 – 1992)[2]
Philip Owen Arnould (23 September 1922 - 1995), poet, translator and
theologian.[110][u]
In 1924, Bryn married Sherrard, eight years her junior. Once the divorce
became it became public and Raymond was cited as a co-respondent,
he was dismissed from his employment. Subsequently, they took possession of
Church Farm at Rushden,
Hertfordshire.[v] They
had few resources, with large legal bills from the divorce, Bryn having only
fifty pounds a year from her father, and Raymond, who had no savings, was not
accepted by her family. So she turned to H. G. Wells, as a family friend, who
agreed to give them the money to make a start.[112] In
the agricultural recession of the 1930s, Raymond Sherrard was unable to repay
his debts, the farm did not prosper and they went bankrupt in 1933, while Bryn
ran a milk round.[113] They
had exhausted H. G. Wells' patience, but on a vacation in West
Wittering, Sussex they learned that farming there was more profitable.
Bryn, who was in failing health, then went to another early mentor, G.
B. Shaw, who was becoming an eminent literary figure. He agreed to lend
them £2,500, with which they purchased Nunnington Farmhouse[w] there
in the Spring of 1934.[115][4][116] Despite
early promise, the venture rapidly foundered, and Bryn persuaded Sherrard to
take a position as a scientist at the Agricultural
Economics Research Institute, Oxford
University,[117] some
seventy miles away, returning at weekends.[118]
Bryn and Raymond Sherrard had two further children;[2][119]
Lucilla "Luly" Sherrard b. 1924 Clarissa "Clary" Olivier Sherrard (1928–1994)[120]
Bryn became ill in late 1933, with an illness that her doctors would label
a "mystery disease",[119] and
diagnosed as lymphadenoma (likely Hodgkin's
disease)[121] based
on lymphadenopathy in
her neck and chest. She was initially treated with X-rays with
no improvement. At the time she was so poor, she would walk the seven miles
into Chichester for
appointments, Raymond being still an undischarged bankrupt. In the summer of
1934, Bryn's father, who was paying her medical bills,[113] became
increasingly disillusioned with the treatments she was receiving, and their
side effects ("not only futile but vicious").[122] He
and Noël[x] decided
to intervene by taking Bryn to Switzerland, initially to an alpine health
resort at Kurhouse Val
Sinestra and then to see Dr Carl Jung, meanwhile letting the farm.[124] Jung
recommended the city hospital in Zurich,
where she received more radiation treatments. In Zurich she stayed in the
prosperous mountainous neighbourhood of Rigiblick,[y] with
her childhood Swiss governess. The treatments were to no avail, although she
had a brief respite from her vacation. They abandoned the farm, and she saw
less and less of Raymond, who now lived in Oxford and was in a new
relationship, while she became confined to bed and was in and out of the local
hospital. Noël, alarmed, arranged for her sister to be transferred to St
Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, known for its research into Bryn's
condition,[125] where
she spent Christmas 1934. The move to London, brought her closer to her
younger sisters[z] and
to Hugh Popham, with whom she had maintained a good relationship. Her older
children were now living with their father in St
John's Wood, London.[128] However,
the hospital had little to offer to help Bryn. They diagnosed aplastic
anaemia and gave her blood transfusions from her family,[129] but
she died in the hospital on 13 January 1935 at the age of 47 and was laid to
rest in the churchyard at West Wittering.[130] In
her will, Bryn left everything to her father and to Noël.[aa] Her
estate was listed as £5,215 3s.[132]
After Bryn’s death, Noël, as the new owner, evicted Raymond's children and
used Nunnington as a holiday home. Once again, Shaw came to the rescue,
enabling the debts to be paid off. The police had to be called on a number of
occasions when he attempted to retake possession. Raymond eventually remarried
and died in 1974.[133][131]
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