Brynhild Olivier (20 May 1887 – 13 January 1935) was 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 (Francis) Raymond George Nason 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.
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Family of origin
The Honourable Brynhild Olivier, known as Bryn, was the second daughter of Sydney Olivier, 1st Baron Olivier, and his wife, Margaret Cox. Sydney Olivier, whose family was descended from French Huguenots, was a leading Fabian (along with George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, and Graham Wallas), Governor of Jamaica (1907–1913) and a minister in the first Labour Government of Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 (Secretary of State for India). 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.
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.
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. 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 (see Family tree).
Childhood and education (1887–1907)
The Oliviers, who married in 1885, had four children:
Margery (April 1886 – 1974)
Brynhild (May 1887 – 1935)
Daphne (October 1889 – 1950)
Noël (December 1892 – 1969)
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. 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". 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. Later, the progressive coeducational boarding school, Bedales, in Sussex, became available for the youngest sister, Noël. 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. 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 tribe, and becoming very athletic in a manner that David Garnett compared to ancient Sparta. He also described them both as "ruthless Valkyries" and as "cruel as savages". Frances Wilson would later describe them as "feral". 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. Dix was a New Woman writer, and this philosophy permeated the culture of Limpsfield. Among other early childhood influences, were G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells.
Cambridge, Rupert Brooke and the Neo-pagans (1907–1912)
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 of this encounter "There is One!...oh there is One!...aged twenty, very beautiful & nice & everything...I adore her". A contemporary described her as "Most fetching...sweet, charming, gay. Very pale amber eyes".
Shortly afterwards, Bryn joined her parents in Jamaica where she spent most of 1908. In May of that year 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, and although Bryn was reputedly the most beautiful, it would be her younger sister that Brooke would then pursue the most.
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. He and Noël began a flirtatious correspondence, becoming secretly engaged two years later. Their relationship became the source of many of his poems.
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, and they with him. Brooke used his association with Margery in the Fabian Society to pursue the other daughters.
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 and Frances Darwin and Ka Cox. The fringe members or outer circle included David Garnett, Geoffrey Keynes, Sybil Pye and Ethel Pye, Dudley Ward, Godwin Baynes, and Ferenc Békássy. Later it would include A. E. H. (Hugh) Popham (1889–1970), a Cambridge diving champion who Bryn would later marry, and Bryn's maternal cousin, Rosalind Thornycroft.
Marriage (1912–1935)
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. She proposed to him in July, but he needed little encouragement to accept, inquiring of her how she felt about "children and sexual matters".
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. Despite this news, Brooke unsuccessfully persisted in trying to get her to have an affair with him. Instead she went rock-climbing with Hugh, 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".
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. Brooke was invited to the wedding, but declined, although later he sent the couple two Gwen Raverat woodcuts as a wedding present.
Brynhild Popham (1912–1924)
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, before departing by train for the Continent. After their honeymoon in Holland and Belgium, the Pophams settled at 5 Caroline Place, 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. At Caroline Place, the Pophams entertained members of both the Neo-pagan and Bloomsbury groups and held literary evenings (the Caroline Club) while also continuing to attend their summer camps. Their first child, Tony, was born in March 1914. 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". Later, she relented and their household grew to include a housekeeper and a nurse, Marie.
The outbreak of World War I in August 1914 was greeted with horror by most of their circle. 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. 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". By May 1915, Zeppelin incendiary raids were terrifying the inhabitants of Bloomsbury, while at times the heavy gunfire from France could also be heard.
In June 1916, their daughter Andy was born and conscription extended to include married men. Bryn, meanwhile busied herself with volunteer work. 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.
Brynhild Sherrard (1924–1935)
In 1924, Bryn married Sherrard, eight years her junior. Once the divorce 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. 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. 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. 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, George Bernard Shaw, who was becoming an eminent literary figure. He agreed to lend them £2,500, with which they purchased Nunnington Farmhouse there in the spring of 1934. 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, some seventy miles away, returning at weekends.
Bryn and Raymond Sherrard had two further children;
Daphne Lucilla "Luly" Sherrard b. 1924
Clarissa "Clary" Olivier Sherrard (1928–1994)
Final illness and death (1933–1935)
Bryn became ill in late 1933, with an illness that her doctors would label a "mystery disease", and diagnosed as lymphadenoma (likely Hodgkin's disease) 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, became increasingly disillusioned with the treatments she was receiving, and their side effects ("not only futile but vicious"). He and Noël 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. Jung recommended the city hospital in Zürich, where she received more radiation treatments. In Zurich she stayed in the prosperous mountainous neighbourhood of Rigiblick, 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, where she spent Christmas 1934. The move to London, brought her closer to her younger sisters 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. However, the hospital had little to offer to help Bryn. They diagnosed aplastic anaemia and gave her blood transfusions from her family, 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. In her will, Bryn left everything to her father and to Noël. Her estate was listed as £5,215 3s.
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.