The complex lives of Mary, Kathleen and Lorna included affairs with the writer Vita Sackville-West, the composer Ferruccio Busoni, the painter Bernard Meninsky, the sculptor Jacob Epstein (whom Kathleen married), the poet Laurie Lee and the painter Lucian Freud[1] Mary Margaret Garman was the eldest of the sisters.
Mary was married to the penniless South African poet Roy Campbell from 1924 until he was killed in a car crash in Portugal in 1957.
Their brother Douglas Mavin Garman was born in Wednesbury, Staffordshire, and educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
[2] Of left-wing sympathies, he worked during the 1930s for the Marxist publishers Lawrence and Wishart, and thereafter rose to become the Education Secretary of the British Communist Party, remaining in situ until 1950.
The writer Laurie Lee fathered her third child, and during her affair with the painter Lucian Freud[1] she modelled for many of his paintings and brought him objects, such as a dead heron and a zebra head, to be inserted in his pictures.