1. Clare Consuelo Sheridan was an English sculptor, journalist and writer, known primarily for creating busts for famous sitters and keeping travel diaries.
26 Facts About Clare Sheridan
1. 2.
Clare Sheridan was a cousin of Sir Winston Churchill, with whom she had enjoyed an amicable relationship, though her support for the October Revolution in 1917 caused them to break ranks politically.
3.
Clare Sheridan enjoyed travelling around the world; and among her circle of friends were Princess Margaret of Sweden, Lord and Lady Mountbatten, Lady Diana Cooper, Vita Sackville-West and Vivien Leigh.
4.
Clare Sheridan's mother was the elder sister of Lady Randolph Churchill, which made Clare Frewen a maternal cousin to Winston Churchill.
5.
Clare Sheridan was a debutante at the age of seventeen but turned away from that social scene to attempt to write novels.
6.
Clare Sheridan was encouraged in this by family friends who included both Henry James and Rudyard Kipling.
7.
Clare Sheridan married William Frederick Temple Sheridan in 1910 at St Margaret's, Westminster.
8.
William Clare Sheridan was a captain in the Rifle Brigade and was killed in the First World War while leading his men at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, a few days after the birth of the couple's third child, their son Richard.
9.
Clare Sheridan moved from France to London to study under John Tweed and Professor Edouard Lanteri.
10.
Clare Sheridan stayed in the Kremlin for two months, where her sculpting subjects included Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Felix Dzerzhinsky and Kamenev.
11.
Clare Sheridan's reputed relationship with Kamenev is thought to have started the problems in his marriage to his first wife, Olga Kameneva.
12.
Trotsky signed and dedicated a painting of himself to Clare Sheridan and invited her to stay in Russia and set up a studio.
13.
Clare Sheridan met Koehler on the ship, and despite her Bolshevist sympathies and his allegiance to the White Movement, they became friends.
14.
Clare Sheridan was amazingly kind and put up with infinite boredom and waiting on our account.
15.
Clare Sheridan was introduced to Herbert Swope, the editor of the New York World who, impressed by her account of her time in Russia which had been published as Russian Portraits, offered her a job as the papers' roving European correspondent.
16.
Clare Sheridan filed vivid accounts from the occupied city of Smyrna during the Greco-Turkish War.
17.
Clare Sheridan interviewed Aleksandar Stamboliyski in Bulgaria, Benito Mussolini in Rome and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
18.
Clare Sheridan is described at this time as 'beautiful, intelligent, meddlesome, and man-mad'.
19.
Clare Sheridan published a memoir of the journey, Across Europe with Satanella in 1925.
20.
Clare Sheridan moved to Constantinople with her two children and gave up journalism to focus on sculpture.
21.
Clare Sheridan built a house on the edge of the Sahara at Biskra.
22.
Clare Sheridan died of appendicitis in 1937 at Constantine in Algeria.
23.
Clare Sheridan's mother took a large oak tree from the family home, Brede Place, in Sussex and carved it into his memorial.
24.
Clare Sheridan had a well-received exhibition in London of the carvings she made there from tree trunks.
25.
Clare Sheridan died in 1970 at the age of 84, having outlived two of her three children.
26.
Clare Sheridan is buried in the churchyard of St George's, Brede, Sussex beside her nephew Roger Frewen [d 1972] and her great-niece Selina Frewen [d 1972] and near the memorial she had carved to her son.