4 mins
By Cressida Bell
Duncan Grant was a major figure in my childhood, acting as a sort of surrogate grandfather after mine (Clive Bell) died when I was 4. Until I was eight years old we lived in Leeds so as he lived with my grandparents in Charleston, Sussex we didn’t see that much of him. We did go at least once a year to stay there, often en route to our camping holiday in France. I have happy memories of staying there but the grown-ups didn’t figure much as they spent so much time in the studio - which was out of bounds to children.
After we moved to Sussex the connection grew much stronger. My father (Quentin Bell) still had his pottery at Charleston so every Saturday he would go there to throw pots and make sculptures. I often went too (as an aspiring potter) and enjoyed our lunches with Duncan at the big round dining table with it’s patterned surface decorated by my grandmother Vanessa.
Sometimes we would encounter one of Duncan’s many fans who were almost all gay men, many of them quite notable. I bumped into one such visitor in the corridor who introduced himself saying, ‘hello, I am Mr Godfrey Winn’. I was taken aback and quite lost for words as he was quite famous at the time (though not greatly admired in our family). We constantly teased Duncan for his totally unjudgmental stance on his dodgy admirers. He even entertained Edward Heath (the ex-Prime Minister) who we all thought ghastly.
At the end of the day Duncan would come home with us for Saturday dinner, more or less every week. We children used to watch him fall asleep after dinner with a cigar in his mouth – anxiously waiting for the ash to fall and willing it not to set fire to his jacket.
He also always joined us for Christmas too, memorably participating in our in-house version of charades where we had to act out syllables of a word in a full costume mini drama. At the age of around 80 he was still game for dressing up as a sheep in a woolly blanket with a coat hanger strapped to his head and bleating Baaa while crawling around on all fours!
Duncan painted portraits of all three Bell children: me, my sister Virginia and my brother Julian. My older siblings were both paid sixpence an hour for sitting for their portraits but by the time it came to me I don’t think Duncan was that keen on his subject matter. I had to plead to be painted and the result is a rather grumpy looking 8 year old. (I much prefer a small sketch he did of me when I was younger.)
I was 16 when I finally found out that Duncan was in fact the father of my aunt Angelica. I had vaguely wondered why my cousins looked so different to us, but I never put two and two together. Henrietta, the most beautiful of them, came to stay with us in Sussex and I overheard her explaining to somebody that she was ‘here to visit my grandfather’. I did a double take thinking ‘he’s long dead’ and then suddenly the realisation came to me that Duncan was her grandfather, not Clive. No wonder she was such a beauty – both she and Angelica had inherited his good looks.
I never heard anyone say a bad word about Duncan. He was amiable in the extreme, very funny and charming and also quite reticent. I always loved the story about his involvement in the notorious Dreadnought Hoax.
Horace de Vere Cole and five friends, including Duncan and Virginia Woolf duped an admiral and the crew of the battleship HMS Dreadnought, flagship of the home fleet, into showing a fake delegation around the ship. Four of them pretended to be Abyssinians and two claimed to be their Foreign Office guides. Cole then exposed the hoax in the Daily Mail.
In the aftermath the story is that two naval officers called on Duncan and hustled him into a cab going to Hampstead Heath. They had every intention of horsewhipping him – but when he put up no resistance (in a typical Duncan way) they found themselves unable to carry out their threat and instead sent him off telling him not to breathe a word of what happened.
Duncan ended up as the sole resident of Charleston. I remember my parents being concerned that he would run out of money, specially as he had a habit of giving away his paintings (or selling them for almost nothing). The solution was to approach Anthony D’Offay, then a young budding art dealer, to represent Duncan. I think this was a turning point in his later life as his star started to rise again and his painting regained its rightful place in the story of 20th Century art.
Published 9 July 2025
