Friends And Lovers
THERESA THORNYCROFT
Siegfried Sassoon’s mother, Theresa Thornycroft (1853-1947) was a sculptor and painter. Brought up in an artistic family, she was the daughter of two prominent Victorian sculptors, Thomas and Mary Thornycroft. She married Sassoon’s fa- ther, Alfred Ezra Sassoon, in January 1884, and bought Weirleigh, a neo-Gothic house in a Kent village. In the following years they had three children; Michael in 1884; Siegfried in 1886; and Hamo in 1887. In their early years, her sons referred to her as ‘Mamsy’, and later, both in person and in correspondence, as ‘Ash’ (“a family legend has the latter name as a tease deriving from a chatty cleaning lady called Mrs Ash” Egremont ). She is immortalised in Sassoon’s fictionalised autobiographical trilogy (the third volume of which is offered opposite), as ‘Aunt Evelyn’. Writing to her son on the publication of its first volume, she said that the characterisation of Aunt Evelyn was “just what a boy would see”. Sassoon confided that his creation was “only a very faint portrait of a very small part of your character”, but that it was “the greatest joy to me when you enjoy my writings”.
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