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Reginald Sherring Partridge,MC &Bar (1894 – 30 November 1960), generally known asRalph Partridge, was a member of theBloomsbury Group. He worked forLeonard Woolf andVirginia Woolf, marriedDora Carrington and thenFrances Marshall, and was the unrequited love ofLytton Strachey.
Partridge was born in 1894, the son of (William) Reginald Partridge,magistrate and collector of theNorth-Western Provinces andOudh for theIndian Civil Service,[1][2] and Jessie (née Sherring).[3] His father was the son of a Devon solicitor while, on his mother's side, theSherring family wereclerics and Christianmissionaries working in India atVaranasi. In his childhood Partridge had been known as 'Rex'.[4]
He was educated atWestminster School where he wasHead Boy. Partridge won a scholarship to read Classics atChrist Church, Oxford, and rowed for Oxford University.[3] He was commissioned duringWorld War I, joining the6th Battalion of theRoyal Warwickshire Regiment[5] and was seconded to the48th DivisionCyclist Company, returning to his regiment after a year. He reached the rank ofmajor by the age of twenty-three, winning aMilitary Cross andbar[6] and theCroix de Guerre.[3][4][7]
Partridge was an Oxford friend ofDora Carrington's younger brotherNoel. They met in 1918. Partridge fell in love with Carrington and eventually, in 1921, Carrington agreed to marry him[8] even if she was in love withLytton Strachey. Strachey was himself more interested in Partridge.[9] 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 filmCarrington. Though Strachey spoke openly about his homosexuality with his Bloomsbury friends, and had relationships with a variety of men including Partridge,[citation needed] details of Strachey's sexuality were not widely known until the publication ofa biography byMichael Holroyd in the late 1960s.[10]
In 1926, Partridge left Carrington to live withFrances Marshall, whom he had met while she was working at the London bookshop owned byDavid Garnett andFrancis Birrell; at that time Partridge was working forLeonard Woolf andVirginia Woolf at theHogarth Press.[3] Meanwhile, Carrington had an affair withBernard 'Beakus' Penrose, who was a friend of Partridge. After Carrington died by suicide in 1932, shortly after Lytton Strachey's death, Ralph and Frances married in 1933. The couple had one son,(Lytton) Burgo Partridge (1935–1963).[11] They lived in London during the week and repaired to Ham Spray at weekends. They lived happily at Ham Spray until Ralph's death in 1960.[10] Frances, the last surviving member and diarist of the Bloomsbury Group died, aged 103, in 2004.[12]
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