My memories of the Bloomsbury Group
On her 100th birthday, Anne Olivier Bell tells Paul Levy about growing up with the bohemian set
Today, in a part of Sussex that has been the rural hub of the bohemian Bloomsbury Group for a century, some of the members’ descendants and friends will celebrate the 100th birthday of the last “Bloomsberry”, Anne Olivier Bell, known to her friends as Olivier (pronounced “Olivia”). A prettily decorated Indian marquee will be erected in the garden of her cottage, three miles from Charleston, the farmhouse where the artist Duncan Grant lived with Olivier’s mother-inlaw, Vanessa Bell, the painter sister of novelist Virginia Woolf.
Olivier is renowned for her fivevolume The Diary of Virginia Woolf – her husband Quentin’s aunt. (Olivier tells me she “saw her only once”, at a party, when Virginia was wearing a stunning red dress.) She is also the last of the British contingent of the “Monument Men”, who rescued Nazi-looted works of art.
Born in Bloomsbury, Olivier’s family life was “contiguous with that of Virginia Woolf ’s”; her father was A E (Hugh) Popham, a distinguished authority on Italian art at the British Museum. Her mother, the Hon Brynhild Olivier, was one of the four notable daughters of Lord Olivier of Ramsden, governor of Jamaica and uncle of actor Laurence Olivier.
“About 1917, my mother met Raymond Sherrard, who had a motorcycle, a conspicuous scar and was eight years younger. When the war was over, she wanted us to live in the country and we moved to Draycott in the Cotswolds [where Sherrard lived].” Her father only visited at weekends.
In 1924, her parents divorced, her mother married Sherrard, had three more children – and a hard life. “At one point my mother had a milk round. She appealed for help to her father’s Fabian chum, George Bernard Shaw,” Olivier told me, “and Shaw joined with H G Wells to make a gift of £1,000, which she used to buy a farmhouse at West Wittering, in West Sussex.”
After her mother died in 1935, Olivier lived with her father in Twickenham, and briefly attended Marjorie Strachey’s school. “I then went to St Paul’s School, and was sent to Germany and encouraged to become an opera singer. On returning to England, I was at the Central School of Drama. I had an unsuccessful audition at the Albert Hall, conducted by a grand dame of the theatre – Sybil Thorndike – who told me to ‘r-r-roll your voice along the floor’.”
By 1934, she’d abandoned her theatrical ambitions and began studying at the Courtauld with art historian James Byam Shaw and Anthony Blunt. In Paris for the 1937 World’s Fair, “a friend pointed out Vanessa and Duncan, their daughter Angelica and Quentin, who was 27. It was then that I also met Graham Bell [the (unrelated) South African painter], who swept me off my feet. He separated from his wife the next January, and we were living together. We both had strong anti-Fascist views, and he joined the RAF and was killed in a training incident in August 1943.”
It was during these bleak days that Olivier’s life was to take an even more extraordinary turn. She’d worked as a research assistant for the Ministry of Information, alongside Laurie Lee. As a German speaker, she was recruited to the Monuments Men, a cross between Courtauld scholars and Indiana Jones-types. Their endeavours helped rescue works by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Vermeer, which had been destined for Hitler’s unrealised Führer Museum in Linz, Austria.
On leave from Germany, she shared a flat in Islington, when she received a note from a neighbour, inviting her to tea. It was George Orwell, and he made a vigorous pass at her: “Suddenly, his arms were round me, and he was kissing me.” Shocked, she rebuffed him. He apologised and asked what her work was. “I’m governing Germany,” she replied, in her best Bloomsbury voice.
After Germany, she worked for the Arts Council, supplying hardto-find artists’ materials for clients, who included Vanessa Bell. “Vanessa invited me to Charleston to model for a painting. I’d been told Vanessa was secretive, that she never wanted to meet anyone. But she was charming.”
Olivier was set up with Vanessa’s son Quentin by Helen Anrep, the partner of Bloomsbury critic Roger Fry. “At first he seemed rather absurd, with his ginger beard,” she told the
Telegraph in 2014. “But then he asked if he could model my head in clay and was so nice that when he drove me to the station in the horse and cart I gave him a kiss. Shortly afterwards, I got a terrifically hot love letter, which quite knocked me over.”
On holiday in Italy, “we had a lovely time and I suppose in the end I got pregnant. Quentin was thrilled. I was 36 and thought I’d never love again.”
They married in 1952, and when Quentin became professor of art history at Sussex University in 1967, they relocated to Cobbe Place, Beddingham, which he decorated with his ceramics and eccentric sculptures.
But perhaps Olivier’s greatest achievement has been the restoration of Charleston – which opened to the public in the early Eighties, and even now looks just as it did when the Bloomsbury Group frequented it all those years ago.
‘We had a lovely time and I suppose in the end I got pregnant’