Beginnings
Bourne’s formal education was limited. She left school at 14 and seems to have largely taught herself the skills of composition, drawing and painting.
Born in Oxford in August 1918, she was the only child of Lilian Dudman, an unmarried schoolteacher from London. Bourne never knew her father, Cecil Bourne. He was an Australian serviceman who survived the First World War only to die of influenza on his way back to the UK.
Bourne’s childhood was mainly spent around Barnstaple in North Devon. In 1939 when she was 21, her mother retired, and the pair moved to the Cotswolds. Because Bourne had chronic asthma, she was expected to stay at home.
Energetic and ambitious, she found this highly frustrating and sought escape in art and writing, immersing herself in fantasy worlds. She studied art in books and illustrated magazines and often visited museums and art galleries in nearby Oxford, steeping herself in the city’s medieval atmosphere.
In an unpublished memoir she recalls how she “drifted into a world of imagination”, spending hours reading and collating scrapbooks, tracing and copying images from books and magazines. Bourne showed a particular interest in old buildings and historic interiors. Her love of horses and fascination with tales of King Arthur led to an intense interest in armour and knights on horseback.
The hero of my childhood – and for many years after that – was the knight-in-armour. He was the rider on the white horse, he was St George forever slaying the dragon. He was the knight-errant of Arthurian romances riding through the fairy forests and enchanted landscapes.
Unpublished memoir, late 1980s.
© The Exmoor Society.
© The Exmoor Society.
Gallery