How a market town in Hampshire shaped Peggy Guggenheim

On 24 April 1937 Marguerite Guggenheim – known as Peggy – of Yew Tree Cottage, Hurst was booked by a certain PC Dore for driving an unlicensed vehicle through nearby Petersfield. What was the founder of the famous Venice museum doing in a market town in Hampshire? It’s a long story, vividly told in an exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of the opening of Petersfield Museum on the site of the former police station and courthouse where she paid her £1 fine.

In the 1930s the Jewish-American heiress, who had lost her father Benjamin on the Titanic, was rattling around Europe with a fast crowd of writers and artists. Divorced from Laurence Vail, the father of her children Sindbad and Pegeen, and mourning the death of her partner John Holms in 1934, she sought consolation with the handsome left-wing editor Douglas Garman, five years her junior.