Ralph Partridge

Updated 23rd July 2023 by W.J.E.W.: Inset Photo L to R: Dora Carrington, Ralph Partridge, Lytton & Oliver Strachey, & Frances Partridge; snapshot by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1923

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Partridge

Reginald (Ralph) Sherring Partridge, MC & Bar (1894 – 30 November 1960), generally known as Ralph Partridge, a member of the Bloomsbury Group, worked for Leonard Woolf and Virginia Woolf, married first Dora Carrington and then Frances Marshall, and was the unrequited love of Lytton Strachey.

Partridge was born in 1894, the son of (William) Reginald Partridge, magistrate and collector of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh for the Indian Civil Service, and Jessie (née Sherring). His father was the son of a Devon solicitor while, on his mother's side, the Sherring family were clerics and Christian missionaries working in India at Varanasi. In his childhood Partridge had been known as 'Rex'.

He was educated at Westminster School where he was Head Boy. Partridge won a scholarship to read Classics at Christ Church, Oxford, and rowed for Oxford University. He was commissioned during World War I, joining the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, and was seconded to the 48th Division Cyclist Company, returning to his Regiment after a year. He reached the rank of Major by the age of twenty-three, winning a Military Cross and bar and the Croix de Guerre.

Partridge was an Oxford friend of Dora Carrington's younger brother Noel. They met in 1918. Partridge fell in love with Carrington and eventually, in 1921, Carrington agreed to marry him even if she was in love with Lytton Strachey. Strachey was himself more interested in Partridge. An added complication was Dora Carrington's intermittent affair with one of Partridge's best friends, Gerald Brenan. Carrington, Partridge, and Strachey shared a Wiltshire farm-house, Ham Spray, in a complex triangular relationship later recorded in the 1995 film Carrington. Though Strachey spoke openly about his homosexuality with his Bloomsbury friends, and had relationships with a variety of men including Partridge, details of Strachey's sexuality were not widely known until the publication of a biography by Michael Holroyd in the late 1960s.