Arts Centre founder celebrates century
(Story dated April 22, 2004)
By Ian Johnston

Margaret Gardiner - pictured in 1980 - the founder of the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness.

The founder of the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness - one of the most prestigious galleries in the UK - is celebrating her 100th birthday today - April 22.

Half a century has passed since Mrs Gardiner first set foot in Orkney.

On a chance holiday in the 1950s with her son, Martin, she visited Rousay and spotted the deserted crofthouse that would become part of her life well into her 90s.

Margaret spent her first six years in Berlin where her father, Alan Gardiner, was working on the great Egyptological dictionary.

A leading hieroglyphicist, he was among the first to enter the tomb of Tutankhamen and was later knighted for his services to Egyptology.

The family then moved to London, where Margaret attended the progressive Bedales school.

At home she took for granted the presence and conversation of distinguished figures in the cultural world.

Her uncle, the composer Balfour Gardiner, was friend and patron of Delius and organised the first performance of Gustav Holst’s suite The Planets.

The artist Stanley North, who died in the First World War, planted in her mind the idea that art was of supreme value and that it could make the world a better place in which to live.

Through study at Newnham College in Cambridge and what the artist Adrian Strokes described as “her genius for friendship”, Margaret had contact and close ties with leading figures of the day. Among them were the poets W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, the scientists Desmond Bernal and Solly Zuckerman, the artists Naom Gabo, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, and the architect Berthold Lubetkin.

The wars and turmoil of the 20th century made Margaret a political activist.

In the 1930s, she was honorary secretary of For Intellectual Liberty, an anti-fascist organisation of academics and professionals.

During the Vietnam war, she produced a number of full-page anti-war advertisements signed by well known British, European and American people in The Times and The New York Times.

In 1962, she initiated and organised a three months advertising and publicity campaign for nuclear disarmament. She was treasurer and on the executive committee of the International Confederation for Disarmament and Peace.

Among her writings is a memoir of Barbara Hepworth, recently republished to mark the opening of Tate St Ives.

Her book, A Scatter of Memories, prompted a Channel 4 documentary on her life.

Her friendship with the anthropologist Bernard Deacon, who died of blackwater fever on the island of Malekula in the New Hebrides (now Vanuata) in 1928, led her to take up an invitation in 1983 to visit the island, after which she wrote the memoir of Bernard Deacon, Footprints on Malekula.

Margaret’s friendship with the artists of the internationally renowned St Ives group - among them Gabo, Hepworth and Nicholson - led her to acquire many paintings and sculptures, both through purchase in the early days of struggle, and later as gifts from her friends.

Early in her eighth decade she decided to preserve the works as a group for public enjoyment by giving them to Orkney in return for all the pleasure of time spent at her home in Rousay.

Margaret identified a suitable site - houses of character on a Stromness pier, where people could drop in and view the works in a homely setting.

With great determination and energy she led the fundraising to buy and remodel the buildings as the Pier Arts Centre.

As a result, her unique collection of 20th century British art - art which would have been gratefully accepted by such leading institutions as the Tate Gallery in London or the National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh - came, a quarter of a century ago, to a permanent home in Orkney.

For this Margaret was awarded the OBE.

Until recent years she continued to play a very active part on the board of the Pier Arts Centre Trust, and regularly visited the Pier, where, on her 90th birthday, she danced the night away.

Margaret Gardiner’s legacy will live on in Orkney. She now lives quietly at her home in Hampstead.

Mr Neil Firth, the director of the Pier Arts Centre in Stromness, said: “We take this opportunity to pass on our good wishes to a great lady, and to wish her a very happy birthday.”