page_title: Brynhild Olivier
section_title: Postwar (1918–1924)
hierarchical_section_title: Brynhild Olivier / Marriage (1912–1935) / Brynhild Popham (1912–1924) / Postwar (1918–1924)
caption_attribution_description: English: Hugh Popham and his three children at Draycot
context_page_description: Brynhild Olivier was the daughter of a Victorian English politician and 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 Raymond 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.
context_section_description: When the war ended in November 1918, Hugh was demobbed and returned to his job in London, while Sherrard went up to St John's College, Cambridge to read Natural Sciences. The following July, the Popham's third child, Tristram was born. Bryn continued to see Sherrard discretely, but wanted to maintain her marriage. She confided in her husband, but was shocked to find he did not see it her way, and she was trapped between the demands of two men. She and Hugh took a house in Draycot Fitz Payne, Wiltshire, where they were the neighbours of the MacCarthys, and where she spent much of her time, Hugh Popham visiting only at weekends. There she established a local branch of the League of Nations Union in 1920. Bryn's daughter described her parent's relationship as one in which Bryn found her husband rather dry and his love for her, "dumb and beseeching". Virginia Woolf also commented that it was obvious what was happening to the marriage. However, in 1920. Bryn found that she was pregnant again. This time she consulted her sister Noël, now a physician, and her fiancée, Dr Arthur Richards. Abortion was illegal in Britain then, but they reluctantly and discretely arranged what they referred to as "certain services" for Bryn.
  A few years later, the Pophams moved their home to Ramsden, where Bryn's parents had retired to. Sherrard, who had recently graduated, also moved to Oxfordshire to be nearby, and eventually moved in. He continued to pressure Bryn, eventually persuading her to reluctantly have his child. She did so in the hope of changing his behaviour. She soon concluded that it had made "everything ten times worse".
  Raymond Sherrard's child, Philip, was born in September 1922. Margery, who was in and out of nursing homes, also spent time with her parents in Ramsden, but continued to act out her paranoid delusions, attacking people she feared or suspected. On one occasion she attacked Bryn and injured Raymond. On another, she decided that Philip was her child, and attempted to abduct him. Bryn now asked Hugh for a divorce, and with her parents, took the younger three children and went to stay with her uncle, Herbert Olivier, at his home in La Mortola Inferiore, Italy. Her parents still hoped the marriage was salvageable, but the situation had become more complicated by Hugh starting an affair with Bryn's married cousin, Joan Thornycroft. Bryn continued to feel torn by her loyalty to two men. Various relatives on both sides of the family, including Hugh, who was refusing to divorce her, came to stay. She considered returning to him, insisting he break up with Joan, which he refused. Bryn was acutely aware of her weak position under English divorce law, and feared she would lose custody of the children. Again. she was shocked that "a modern yong man...would ever in any circumstances attempt to take advantage of such an anti feminist law". Bryn returned to England in May 1923, and in August, she and Raymond checked into a hotel and sent a copy of the receipt to her husband, thereby providing him with what then were grounds for divorce. She was bored with her marriage, and although the law that year was changed to allow either partner to sue for divorce on the grounds of adultery, she and Hugh agreed that it should be her adultery, in order to protect his job.
caption: Hugh and children 1919
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