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.
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)Herbert Tracey, The Book of the Labour Party (1925), p. 100.M.A. Hamilton, "Sidney and Beatrice Webb". Sampson Low, Marston &Co. Ltd., London, 1932. pp. 13-14, 20, 34, 86. 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.
Sydney Olivier's duties in the Caribbean would continue to take him away from home. 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. 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. 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.
All four daughters (and their parents) were considered striking in their appearance, but Brynhild was considered the beauty of the family. 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!". Their reputation would also lead D. H. Lawrence to warn David Garnett they were "unclean". 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.
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.
In 1909, camping and the outdoor life was coming into fashion, and for undergraduates replacing the reading parties, such as the one Margery and Noël attended at Bank in the New Forest at Easter that year. Baden-Powell had written Scouting for Boys in 1908, 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 (see image). 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. 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 (see image).