Lorna Garman

Who was Lorna Garman?

Lorna Cecilia Garman Wishart was the youngest of the seven daughters of Walter and Margaret Garman, an eccentric Victorian doctor. She and her sisters led 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.

Her character may be summed up in this quote:

“Lorna, the baby of the family, was perhaps the most flamboyant of the fabulous Garmans. She wore beautiful and unusual clothes and smelled of Chanel No. 5, went riding on her horse at night, drove a chocolate-brown Bentley, and would strip naked to swim in inviting lakes or rivers or 10-metre waves. At 14 she seduced the man who would become her husband when she was 16, the publisher Ernest Wishart.”

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.