Margaret Gardiner

Margaret Emilia Gardiner OBE (22 April 1904 – 2 January 2005) In the 1980 Birthday Honours she was awarded an OBE for services to the Pier Arts Centre Trust, Stromness. She was referred to as Margaret Emilia Gardiner Bernal on the list.

Biography Gardiner was born in Berlin where her father, the Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner, was working at the time. In 1923 he assisted Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon with the opening of Tutankhamun's tomb. Her mother was Hedwig , Lady Gardiner, whose father was an Austro-Hungarian Roman Catholic with Jewish roots and mother a Swedish Finn.

She made her home at 35 Downshire Hill, Hampstead, close to the Heath where she swam in the ponds into her 90s.

Her son with Bernal was Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena. Despite never marrying, Gardiner referred to herself as "Mrs Bernal". John Desmond Bernal had married Agnes Eileen Sprague, a secretary, on 21 June 1922, the day after being awarded his BA degree when he was aged 21. As well as his son with Gardiner, he had two children with Sprague and one with Margot Heinemann.

Politics With Bernal, who was a Communist, she was part of the 1930s and 40s group campaigning "For Intellectual Liberty". Gardiner was however not pressed to join the party. The work, named after a hill in Cornwall between Zennor and St Ives, was Hepworth's first entirely bronze work. She gave 67 works of art to the people of Orkney and "Curved Form" now sits outside on the centre's pier on the original plinth from Gardiner's garden.

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