Margaret Gardiner

Art collector and peace campaigner

Margaret Gardiner, anti-war campaigner and patron of the arts: born Berlin 24 April 1904; OBE 1980; (one son with Desmond Bernal); died London 2 January 2005.

Margaret Gardiner was a great supporter of people and causes. She often diffidently said that she had never had a profession, had never done anything (and you won't find her in Who's Who). But she did possess what the artist Adrian Stokes called "a genius for friendship" and, in her own words, "everything in my life has resulted from friendships", which mostly came about by chance.

Almost nothing in her life was planned, but those friendships were with some of the most creative figures of her time, and they meant much to both parties. When the history of British 20th-century art, poetry, anthropology, science, psychology, social justice, activism, is written, the name of Margaret Gardiner will keep on appearing. Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Adrian Stokes and Herbert Read, Desmond Bernal and Patrick Blackett - these were her close friends, and one could easily extend the list.

Margaret Gardiner grew up in culturally privileged surroundings. The Gardiners are as intellectually distinguished as any Bloomsbury family. Margaret's wealthy grandfather provided private incomes for his sons and their children - "I'm a bloomin' old capitalist," admitted Margaret. The sons used their inheritance well - Balfour Gardiner was a composer and patron of Holst and Delius and other living musicians; and Margaret's father, Alan Gardiner, was the most distinguished Egyptologist of his generation, knighted in 1948. Margaret's older brother, Rolf (who married a Hodgkin), was a farmer and early ecologist; his son is the conductor John Eliot Gardiner. Margaret's son, Martin Bernal, linguist and historian, is the author of Black Athena.

Gardiner was born in Berlin in 1904, where her father, still in his twenties, was deciphering papyri in preparation for the great Egyptian dictionary. Her mother, born in Vienna, was half Swedish Finn and half Hungarian Jewish. After early years in Berlin, the family returned to London, and Margaret was educated at the Froebel School, at Bedales and at Newnham College, Cambridge. She later wrote eloquently about these early years, which established a pattern for later life, including an unusually positive response to abstract art. But she was not an academic bluestocking; "Meeting people was, for me, the main purpose of Cambridge," she said, and this was also her lifelong interest.

Margaret Gardiner read Moral Science at Cambridge. She was taught by G.E. Moore and C.D. Broad; she was befriended by I.A. Richards, who took her mountaineering (she introduced him to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins); she talked about The Waste Land with T.S. Eliot, who said to her, "I write about the Thames, but I think about the Mississippi." She had many proposals of marriage - she was always a most attractive woman, of medium height, with untidy bobbed hair and a fringe.

The new ideas of the Twenties such as psychoanalysis and anthropology interested Gardiner. Her first great love was the ethnologist Bernard Deacon. They met in 1925, just before he set off for Malekula in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) for a pioneering study of graded societies and marriage systems. Aged 24, Deacon died of blackwater fever in March 1927, at the end of his long, 14-month field trip. Nearly 60 years later, Gardiner published a memoir of him, Footprints on Malekula (1984).

After Deacon's tragic death, she self-confessedly had no sense of direction. She felt that teaching young children might be fulfilling, and was interested in A.S. Neill's revolutionary educational theories. After a year's training at the Froebel Institute, she taught at a village school in Cambridgeshire. But this lasted only a year before she moved to London.

Earlier, in 1929, she had made a short and sudden trip to Berlin to see a suicidal friend, the anthropologist John Layard. It was there that she med Wystan Auden, who much enjoyed her company, visited her in Cambridgeshire and remained a friend for life. He introduced Gardiner to his fellow poets - MacNeice, Stephen Spender - and she immediately felt at home in these literary circles and the chain of friendships widened.

More important, early in 1930 her then boyfriend Solly Zuckerman introduced Gardiner to Barbara Hepworth and that began what was for 20 years at least the most creative friendship of her life.

Gardiner was at once fascinated by Hepworth, so different from herself, so capable and professional, at home with her small son at the time but driven by the need to make sculpture. Gardiner was Hepworth's confidante when Ben Nicholson came on the scene, and she was there when to everybody's astonishment Hepworth's triplets were born. (Nicholson telephoned her with the news at six in the morning: thinking he was joking, she rang off and went back to bed.) But she became the devoted (if godless) godmother to their triplets.

Wanting to help the impecunious couple, Gardiner began to buy Hepworth's work. She knew little about art, but had no prejudices about it. To be near Hepworth she had moved to Hampstead to take rooms in Jim Ede's house in Elm Row and then in 1937, when her own son Martin was born, to the delightful small Regency house which was to be her home until the end of her life. The house exemplified a certain Hampstead modernist taste - simple furniture, pale-coloured walls, woven textiles and carpets.

Gardiner had split from Solly Zuckerman in 1932, and then her brother Rolf's friend Adrian Stokes came into her life (she introduced him to Nicholson and Hepworth). But it was her next man who was to be overwhelmingly important for Gardiner - Desmond Bernal, whom she met in 1933 and would have married had she been able. He was another Cambridge polymathic scientist, with broad artistic and political interests. They went together to Moscow in 1934 - Gardiner's account of the visit is a remarkable document of the time. Bernal was a convinced Communist, and remained one; Gardiner, although certainly left-wing, was never directly involved in politics.

With her partly Jewish background, socialist friends and idealistic temperament, it was inevitable that Gardiner should be swept up in the anti-Fascist movements of the 1930s. She was the secretary and driving force behind For Intellectual Liberty, a major anti-Fascist intellectual group, formed early in 1936 (and named by Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia - but Gardiner did not like Virginia).

Gardiner proved to be a brilliant organiser and a born persuader: her passionate campaigning was later to be anti-war. She was the leading spirit behind British support for American draft resisters during the Vietnam War, besides backing the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and acting as treasurer of the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace. Another visit to Moscow followed in 1973, once again written up by Gardiner from a characteristically independent perspective.

It was, however, her art collection that brought Gardiner a certain celebrity in the latter part of her life. In difficult wartime conditions, Gardiner continued to buy sculpture and paintings by Hepworth and Nicholson. She was always a major support for Hepworth, taking her to Greece in 1950, and providing the guarea wood for some of Hepworth's finest sculptures. She also acquired a few works by their friends Alfred Wallis and Naum Gabo, and then by the younger artists they admired - Peter Lanyon, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron. Those were mainly small in size, of a domestic scale to decorate Gardiner's house, comfortable to live with.

Gardiner never saw herself as a collector, and even said she was not fundamentally interested in art and visual things. She liked the company of artists, and was interested in what they were doing. Acquiring their work was the next stage - a help both artistically and financially. When she found she had a collection, she gave it away - to the people of Orkney, where she had a holiday cottage and for whom she felt great affection. Thus began the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, which today has the best collection of Hepworths and Nicholsons outside the Tate.

Margaret Gardiner had all her life written wonderful letters, and from time to time she wrote longer pieces. In her eighties these were collected in a book appropriately called A Scatter of Memories (1988). They are mainly autobiographical, or portraits of friends (Auden, MacNeice, Hepworth, Nicholson), or short stories written during the Second World War. Gardiner sometimes thought she was recounting trivia, but her ability to re-imagine conversations and bring characters immediately to life showed her to have a natural talent which one regrets was never structured - she could surely have written remarkable novels.

But, although she had a taste for the solitary, Margaret Gardiner could never have shut herself away for concentrated periods to write. She was too busy living - helping friends, bringing up her son, pursuing good causes, raising money for the Pier Arts Centre. There was an irrepressible side to Margaret: she had lived from childhood "between conformity and rebellion, unaware of any contradiction", as she herself said, and this came out at the very end of her life in early-morning swimming in the pond on Hampstead Heath.

She was the liveliest of company - amusing, intelligent, interested in ideas and people, and a source of comfort to all who knew her.

Alan Bowness

In common with all of Margaret Gardiner's life, her love affair with Orkney was based around the close friendships that she seemed so effortlessly to conjure, writes Neil Firth.

Her gift in return for the warm welcome and friendships she made in Orkney was an act of remarkable generosity and vision. In the mid-1970s, along with her son, Martin, she decided to set up an arts centre in the islands that was to house nearly 70 works of art from her own home. These treasures, including many of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson's finest works, Gardiner saw not as a "collection" but as the signifiers of her personal relationships, and in many cases deep friendships, with these artists. She was able to count among her friends a great many of the growing band of artists in Britain who adopted and articulated the new art of their day.

Gardiner had first travelled to Orkney in the early 1950s, almost on a whim, when, together with her son, who was at the time serving with the RAF, she planned a trip that would gain extra leave as travel time - along with its relative distance and archaeology Orkney provided a perfect destination. A small house on the island of Rousay was to become a regular retreat from her Hampstead home and her headquarters in the setting up of the Pier Arts Centre, which opened in 1979.

Gardiner's vision in placing these works of art in the seemingly unlikely location of a former Hudson's Bay Company warehouse and merchant's house on a stone pier in the town of Stromness is equal in genius to that of many of the works contained in the collection. The town of St Ives nurtured much of the art that she came to own, and Gardiner saw clearly that placing these works in a gallery in Orkney recognised the similarities of environment and outlook that acted on the artists in producing this refinement to the European avant-garde. In the process she also somehow unified the extremes of Britain. Her achievement in establishing the centre is all the more remarkable as it was carried through in an era long before the National Lottery.

On her 90th birthday, Orkney Islands Council honoured her with a presentation marking her remarkable contribution to the arts in Orkney and she was able to celebrate - reeling the night away. She maintained an active involvement in the centre until her 95th year and saw the beginning of the process that has led to a multi-million-pound refurbishment and extension of the centre that will take place over the next year and a half - reopening in September 2006.

In the meantime, a selection of works from the collection can be seen at the Scottish National Galleries' Dean Gallery in Edinburgh until 26 June.