The Oxfordshire commune that gave Marianne Faithfull her rebellious ethos
The memory of Marianne Faithfull as merely ‘Mick Jagger’s ex girlfriend’ is an insult – it was then, and it always will be. Long before she locked eyes with Jagger at a Stones party in 1964, Faithfull was already one of the most enigmatic and interesting forces in the London art scene, and she was raised to be exactly that.
By the time she met Jagger, Faithfull was married to John Dunbar. He would soon open the hyper-influential Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would meet Yoko Ono and the city’s crowd of artists, painters, poets, and general provocateurs would gather around. Before the doors opened in 1965, they were already huddled together at Faithfull’s home in Knightsbridge as the couple kept the company of the beats like Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, who took a keen interest in Faithfull. They loved her and saw her as one of their own.
From the first time they all connected, when a young Marianne was already a fierce artistic spark, Ginsberg and his beat crowd kept her close. Later on, she’ll be granted the title of ‘Professor of Poetics’ at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. She hosted a lyric writing course for the school in 1988, as they truly couldn’t think of another musician more ascribed to their way of working than Faithfull, especially given that she’d once outright stated that she’s spent a lot of her life trying to live by William Burroughs’ rules.
All of this is only a small corner of a big picture illustrating the type of person Marianne Faithfull was. All too often minimised to just the pretty pop singer in the corner, she was arguably far more of a devoted artists that the most famous names that surrounded her, at least when it came to her lifestyle and artistic ethos. But that seems to span right back to her childhood, as she was always raised to be an individual and a confident one at that. For that trait, she had Braziers Park to thank.
“My father belonged to a commune, and the food was ghastly,” Faithfull reported to The Guardian in 2011. “My idea of food hell is the salad cream they’d pour all over bits of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. It was just disgusting,” she said then.
However, the next fun fact she delivered about herself was this: “I love dinner parties”, as Faithfull always loved a bustling social life of great conversation, undeniably coming down to her youth spent surrounded by artsy types.
Braziers Park wasn’t a commune in the way you’d think. It was a country house and estate near Oxfordshire, so they weren’t exactly slumming it. Made in the Strawberry Hill gothic style, it’s the sort of whimsical, castle-like building that is sure to set a child’s imagination running wild. Her family moved there when she was young, and so the most foundational years of her life were spent around people like John Norman Glaister and his wife Dorothy, who was the first woman to study under philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Glaister himself was a psychoanalyst, but a radical one, as everyone at Braziers brought in a mix of vast education and liberal spirit. Really, they were academic anarchists devoted to free yet deep thinking – so it’s really no wonder that Faithfull went on to be so at home in the literary set, or such a multi-faceted figure herself.
Around the time Faithfull lived there, Glaister had set up a school of Integrative Social Research, which was to study “the dynamics of people living in groups, to develop better methods of interpersonal communication and to find new ways of combining knowledge to make it more meaningful.” But to Faithfull, it was a hub of “high utopian thoughts and randy sex”, which could also stand as her ever-rebellious artistic ethos, combining sharp intellect with pure rebellion.
