Five - Iris Gardiner

Summary

The final examinations for the BSc(Econ) in 1923 commenced on Monday 22 October. Lionel Robbins spent the summer revising, dividing his time between his lodgings in Guilford Street and his parents’ home in Sipson. He found himself thinking a good deal about Iris Gardiner. One Sunday in the spring when he visited the Gardiner home with Clive, a ‘whole crowd of family’ had been there. Clive’s younger sister Iris, who was a couple of years older than Lionel, started talking to him; as she recalled, he was ‘rather shy (always was really)…I must have felt sorry for him, sitting on the side of the tennis court, not realising I was sowing a seed…’After that Lionel saw her fairly often at Clive and Lilian’s house in London as well as at Whiteleaf.

In 1923 Iris Gardiner was a school dental officer employed by the Medical Department of the County Borough of Brighton Education Committee. She had trained at the National Dental Hospital in London during the war and worked for a year as a dental assistant in Bath before taking the position in Brighton in 1919. She was vivacious, good-looking and graceful – Reggie Lawson always remembered her dancing (in the style of Isadora Duncan) to the accompaniment of a friend’s flute – and rather elegant. She was also a very modern young woman, who smoked and owned her own car. Lionel listed her recreations in a letter to her on 21 January 1924 as ‘Motoring golf tennis and singing’ and ballroom dancing; her children many years later remembered her as ‘very sporty’, good at golf, and riding a motorbike rather fast. Lionel had been aware of her beauty – and had much admired the portrait that Clive had painted of her in 1917 – but on ‘that afternoon in the Easter vac’ in 1923 he thought he recognized a kindred spirit, someone who also had known loneliness and depression and who as he put it on 9 November 1923 knew and felt ‘how frail and insecure joy is on this bewildering planet’. It was some months before he learned the attraction was mutual.