Anne Olivier Bell: Bloomsbury Group veteran and tireless editor of Virginia Woolf’s diaries

Somewhat belatedly awarded an MBE, aged 97 in 2014, Anne Olivier Bell was far from impressed but took it in typically good humour. “Commander of the British Empire – that’s quite grand,” she joked. “‘Member’ is not worth having.”

George Clooney’s film The Monuments Men had just come out, about a band of 350 Allied scholars – among whom she was the only female officer – who set about protecting artworks from the Nazis during the Second World War.

Always of a scholarly disposition, Anne Olivier Bell, who has died aged 102, achieved fame well beyond the academy with the body of work that came to define her life – her edition, in five volumes, of The Diary of Virginia Woolf – a work so meticulous that it will surely never be superseded.

Her 25 years of toil on the diaries started off when she set out to help her husband Quentin produce his biography of Woolf in 1972 – Woolf was his aunt. (Olivier, the name by which she was always known, said she only ever saw Woolf once.)

Excellent thought the biography was, Olivier’s edition of the diaries has turned out to be the greater and more important work.

As she said in her editor’s preface: “My qualifications for the undertaking rest partly on luck and partly on assiduity. I was born, geographically speaking, in Bloomsbury during the First World War, and was largely educated in London; to some extent my parents’ world was contiguous with that of Virginia Woolf’s.”

Her father was Arthur Ewart (Hugh) Popham, the distinguished authority on Italian art, Leonardo da Vinci scholar, and keeper in the department of prints and drawings of the British Museum, until his retirement in 1954. Her mother was Brynhild Olivier, one of the four celebrated daughters of Sir Sydney Olivier, governor of Jamaica, and later the 1st Baron Olivier of Ramsden (and uncle of Laurence Olivier). Bryn and her sisters were part of Rupert Brooke’s “Neo-Pagan” circle, and the sexually chaotic poet was usually in love with, and in hot pursuit of, one or another of them, especially Bryn and the youngest sister, Noel.

Olivier’s parents were married in 1912. Hugh, a socially diffident, unbending, outdoorsy type, was two years younger than Bryn; she gave up both her training as a jeweller and a distressed Rupert Brooke to marry him. They lived in Regent Square, near the British Museum and had three children, Hugh Anthony in 1914, then Olivier in 1916 and finally Tristram.

Hugh enlisted in the army in 1917 and shipped out to Port Said. At about that time Bryn met Raymond Sherrard, who had a motorcycle, a prominent scar on his head, and was eight years younger than she. With the war over, wanting to take the children to live in the country, she moved with them to Draycott in the Cotswolds, where Sherrard not coincidentally lived – and Hugh, staying on at the BM, came only at weekends.

Virginia Woolf wrote cattily that “Poor Hugh … spent his Sundays making wooden beds, for Sherrard to step into on Monday when he’d gone.” The Pophams moved to Ramsden to be with Bryn’s parents, but divorce followed in 1924, and Sherrard, cited as co-respondent, was sacked from the Agricultural Economics Institute in Oxford. He married Bryn, and they had three more children and a hard life, living on the £50 a year Bryn had from her father. At one point Bryn had a milk-round. Olivier’s stepfather went bankrupt, probably for the second time, in the early thirties, and Bryn appealed for help to her father’s Fabian chum, George Bernard Shaw.

Shaw and HG Wells joined together to make her a gift of a thousand pounds, with which she bought Nunnington Farmhouse at West Wittering, Sussex.

In 1926 Olivier’s father had married, out-Bloomsburying Bloomsbury, a cousin of Bryn’s, Rosalind Thornycroft (daughter of the sculptor, Hamo), the divorced wife of Godwin Baynes (who had himself been in love with Bryn). Ros Baynes contributed another three stepsisters to Olivier’s family (and had an affair with DH Lawrence in 1920). Bryn died in 1935, having been persuaded three days earlier to leave her entire estate to her sister Noel, and Lord Olivier summoned the police to evict Sherrard and the younger children.

Olivier was shunted around from house to house, sharing accommodation with a selection of her six stepsiblings and two brothers. Despite what one of the evicted Sherrard children detected as “a hard streak in the Oliviers,” Anne Olivier always got on splendidly with all of them.

Her grandfather’s house at Ramsden, three buildings joined together by a passage at the back through which Olivier would ride her first bicycle, was important to her early childhood. Olivier was already living in Ramsden in 1924, when Sir Sydney joined the first Labour government as secretary of state for India and was elevated to the peerage – his post making relations with Olivier’s scandalous stepfather even more tricky.

Olivier was educated at St Christopher’s School, Letchworth, which Olivier described as then being “vegetarian-progressive”. She moved to a nearby farm in Hertfordshire with her mother, and then to her father’s house in Twickenham, west London. There she briefly attended Marjorie Strachey’s school in Gordon Square with other second-generation Bloomsbury children, Igor and Baba Anrep (children of the artist, Boris), and Christopher Strachey (Marjorie and Lytton’s nephew).

She then went to St Paul’s School, London, along with Jocelyn Herbert, who became the celebrated theatrical designer, and was later sent to Germany, where she said she was encouraged to become an opera singer. Returning to England, she enrolled at the Central school of drama, where she numbered the writer Monica Dickens among her friends. At some point she had an unsuccessful audition at the Albert Hall, where she remembered that the grande dame of the theatre (possibly Sybil Thorndike) conducting the audition told her to “r-r-r-roll your voice along the floor”.

By 1934 Olivier had abandoned the idea of becoming an actress. Now living in Elm Tree Road, in St John’s Wood, London, she began to attend the Courtauld Institute of Art, to study art history under Geoffrey Webb, James Byam Shaw and Anthony Blunt. The study of art history revealed her superlative gift for paying attention to detail, perhaps in rebellion against her sometimes chaotic childhood.

In September 1937, Olivier Popham left for Paris where she visited the World’s Fair, the Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, and especially relished and noted the German and Russian Pavilions, and also the Chef-d’Oeuvres de l’Art Français, where she met Graham Bell, William Coldstream and her schoolfriend, Igor Anrep. It was at the Hôtel de Londres, Paris, where “Old Bloomsbury” used to stay, that she first encountered Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, their daughter, Angelica, and the 27-year-old Quentin Bell, her future husband. (Looking down from the top of the stairwell, she was able to see them in the lobby, and a friend pointed them out to her, but she never actually met them on that occasion.)

Back in London, she was involved in a relationship with the South African painter Graham Bell (1910-1943), having been swept off her feet when they spent time together in Paris.

That February, Graham Bell had married Eileen (Anne) Bilbrough – who bore his daughter later that year – though they said they’d been previously married in South African in 1931. By January, 1938, they had separated, and he and Olivier were living together. In opposition to abstractionism and surrealism, Bell believed in painting from close observation and, in October 1937, was one of the founders of the Euston Road School of Drawing and Painting, along with Victor Pasmore, Claude Rogers and Coldstream. Olivier spent time in Dover, with Bell, while he completed a commission, then travelled with him to Dijon, Besançon, Ornans and Paris. Both she and Bell held strong anti-fascist views, which he propounded both in his exhibitions and in his writing. Bell joined the RAF and was killed in a training incident in August 1943, when his Wellington bomber crashed. His Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry, written by Olivier herself, says: “The one fixed point in these six final itinerant years was his attachment to the art historian (Anne) Olivier Popham (b. 1916) – the subject of a 1938 portrait in the Tate collection – whom, owing to the divorce laws and the disruptions of wartime, he was never free to marry.”

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Olivier left the Courtauld and took up a new position, financed by Count Antoine Seilern, as research secretary to Ludwig Burchard, working at the British Museum on his great Rubens catalogue; she continued the work when Burchard was interned in 1940. With Bell in the RAF, Olivier moved to a flat in Brunswick Square and then to her father’s former home in Canonbury. Her first war work was for the photographic division of the Ministry of Information, when she moved to a new flat in Canonbury Square, with Ruth Beresford, who was private secretary to John Strachey, the air minister.

After visiting her father in Aberystwyth, where he was in charge of the art collections removed there from the Royal Library Windsor, and Chatsworth as well as from the British Museum, she worked as a research assistant for the publications department of the Ministry of Information alongside Laurie Lee.

After the war, Anne Popham (as she was to be known in this circle) was recruited to the Control Commission for Germany, Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Branch – the “Monuments Men,” who were a cross between Courtauld scholars and Indiana Jones-types, and whose efforts rescued works by Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Vermeer, some of them destined for Hitler’s infamous Führer Museum in his home town of Linz, Austria.

She moved to Germany where she sorted through intelligence reports about the seizure of works of art from Jewish properties in France by the Nazis, and held the equivalent rank of major in the headquarters of Interior Affairs Department of the Control Commission in Bunde, Westphalia. She also witnessed with distress the effects of the bombing of Berlin, Hamburg, Brunswick and Dusseldorf – “Acres and acres of rubble, with people emerging as if from nowhere.” Diaries she kept at that time have been donated to the Imperial War Museum. In 2007, aged 91, she was summoned by the US ambassador to a morning ceremony, where she was presented with a citation by congress honouring her, if belatedly, for her post-war contribution to the Allies.

On leave in London, she made friends of George Orwell, who proposed marriage to her – she turned him down – and VS Pritchett; and on returning permanently to London she was persuaded, by Lawrence Gowing to accept a research position with the publishers Secker and Warburg, where she worked on Robin Ironside’s monograph on JMW Turner before undertaking research for Gabriel White. She then moved on to work for the new, Bloomsbury-inspired, Arts Council and was assigned to accompany, by rail, Rembrandt’s Family Portrait from Brunswick to Rotterdam en route for exhibition at the Edinburgh festival. She was involved with numerous Arts Council exhibitions in the late 1940s and helped with plans for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

In 1950 a mutual friend, Helen Anrep, “set up” Quentin and Olivier at a weekend at her house at Rodmell, and following that Olivier’s innate stylishness was noticed when Vanessa Bell invited her to her farmhouse, Charleston, in Sussex, to model for a painting – the first time she and Vanessa had properly met. She made the acquaintance of Duncan Grant, and of Quentin’s father, Clive Bell, who was living mostly at Charleston, when not travelling with his long-time mistress, Mary Hutchinson. Olivier and Quentin travelled to Italy, Paris, Turin and Florence, and were married at Islington Register Office, London, in February, 1952; the reception was at Hugh Popham’s house in Canonbury and they honeymooned in Brighton and at Charleston. It was also in this year that Olivier modelled for Duncan Grant’s murals at Lincoln Cathedral.

That year, too, Quentin was hired as a lecturer in Art Education at Newcastle University. With their newborn son Julian (now a painter and distinguished writer on art) they moved to Newcastle; it seemed far from Sussex, but Henry Moore and the painter Robert Medley visited them there. Their daughter Virginia (now, as Virginia Nicholson, also a prominent writer) was born in Newcastle, as was Cressida (now a celebrated textile-designer).

In 1959 when Quentin Bell was appointed head of Department of Fine Arts at Leeds University, the family moved to Shadwell Lane, Leeds; in 1962, Quentin became Professor of Fine Art, Leeds University. Vanessa Bell died at Charleston in 1961 and the tenancy passed to Clive Bell and then, on his death in 1964, to Duncan Grant.

In these years as a mother and housewife (1952-1967), as well as afterwards, Olivier was a domestic paragon: hospitable, a wonderful cook, carpenter, gardener, dressmaker, and creator of lovely, comfortable, welcoming interiors. These virtues plus her love of gossip, encyclopaedic knowledge of British culture and society, and extremely funny conversational style, made her a much sought-after dining companion as well as hostess.

In 1967 Quentin was made Professor of History and Theory of Art at Sussex University, Brighton, and they moved to Cobbe Place, Beddingham, which Quentin decorated with his wonderful ceramics and eccentric sculptures. Their hospitality was legend. You could turn up, as I did, a postgraduate student whose research involved Bloomsbury, and be invited to stay repeatedly. Among the friends who were treated to the Cobbe Place cocktail – gin and ginger beer – and carefully prepared, delicious meals, were Noel and Gabriele Annan, the Roman publisher Enzo Crea, Jill Balcon and her son, Daniel Day-Lewis, Frances Partridge, Ernst Gombrich and Nigel Nicolson. Leonard Woolf, who had become close to Olivier as well, enticed Quentin to write a biography of Virginia while he was still in Leeds; and after accepting the task, he persuaded Leeds University to give him a sabbatical to do the work. However this coincided with the offer of a job from Sussex University, which he wanted to take, so Quentin had to persuade Sussex to give him the sabbatical instead.

Olivier was drafted to help with the research, proof reading and references. She then worked with Leonard Woolf on Virginia’s diaries, which were sold to Hamill and Barker, two old lady dealers who came from Chicago with suitcases filled with cash, which they then replaced with Bloomsbury papers for the return voyage. They engineered the sale of the diaries to the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, with the understanding that Olivier would edit the originals – later, when she began to realise the magnitude of the task, with the assistance of the poet and publisher, Andrew McNeillie, who was a friend of Julian. The first of five volumes of The Diary of Virginia Woolf appeared, to huge critical acclaim, in 1977. In 1990, Anne Olivier Bell edited A Moment’s Liberty: The Shorter Diary, and also wrote her tiny book, On Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary. This work was recognised by her two honorary degrees awarded by York and Sussex universities.

In 1984 following substantial restoration, Quentin and Olivier moved to the Dower House, Firle. Quentin had a studio there. But they had a new joint project.

When Leonard Woolf died in 1969, he had left Monks House, Rodmell, to Trekkie Parsons. Olivier helped to clear and preserve the contents of the house, and also sorted Virginia’s manuscripts and typescripts. The house was purchased by Sussex University and was later given to the National Trust.

After Duncan Grant’s death in 1978, Deborah Gage approached Quentin and Olivier to galvanise support for the preservation of Charleston. The Firle Estate agreed to sell the freehold and work began on restoring the house. Olivier, along with Deborah Gage, was involved with the difficult restoration of the original decorative walls by Duncan, murals by Vanessa, ceramics by Quentin, paintings, furniture, embroidery by them and by many different people, such as Angelica Bell. Olivier also attempted raised funds for Charleston in Texas, where she gave a glittering account of the role of Queen Victoria in Virginia Woolf’s play Freshwater, acting alongside Hugh Casson, Michael Holroyd, Margaret Drabble and Lynne Redgrave.

This was followed by a lecture tour of America with Quentin and some of her co-stars; while in Washington DC, they stayed with Sir Nicholas Henderson, another child of Bloomsbury, at the British embassy. In 1980, Quentin became the first chairman of The Charleston Trust and a trustee. From its foundation until her death, Olivier continued to provide not only practical help but also invaluable advice on the arrangement and aesthetics of Charleston as it had been when occupied by Vanessa, Clive and Duncan. She replaced Quentin following his death in 1996 as a much-beloved trustee of the Strachey Trust, whose co-trustees unfailingly resisted her annual attempt to resign. Her busy last years were filled with affection and visits from friends and grandchildren, and treating students from the Charleston summer school to tea and conversation none of them will ever forget.

Anne Olivier Bell, art historian and writer, born 20 June 1916, died 18 July 2018