Margaret Gardiner (artist)

Margaret Emilia Gardiner OBE (22 April 1904 – 2 January 2005) was a radical modern British patron of artists and resident of Hampstead, London, from 1932, where she was also a left wing political activist. She was also for a time the partner of Professor John Desmond Bernal, the eminent scientist and political activist. She was known as "Mrs Bernal" for most of her life, but they were never married. In the 1980 Birthday Honours she was awarded an OBE for services to the Pier Arts Centre Trust, Stromness. She was referred to as Margaret Emilia Gardiner Bernal on the list.

Gardiner was born in Berlin where her father, the Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner, was working at the time. In 1923 he assisted Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon with the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb. Her mother was Hedwig, Lady Gardiner, whose father was a Hungarian Jew and mother a Swedish Finn. Her brother was Henry Rolf Gardiner.

Gardiner was educated at the Fröbel School in Hammersmith, then at Bedales, the liberally-minded school, followed by Newnham College, Cambridge. There she read Modern Languages, but transferred to Moral Sciences, the Cambridge term for Philosophy. Her family was wealthy and she had no need to work, devoting her life instead to politics and the arts. At Cambridge she fell in love with Bernard Deacon, a scholar at Trinity but was shattered when he died from blackwater fever whilst working on Malakula in the New Hebrides, Vanuatu in 1927 at the age of 24. She visited his grave there 56 years later and wrote a book, Footprints on Malekula: Memoir of Bernard Deacon, in 1984.

...
Wikipedia