While doing some research for my PhD on the great Orcadian novelist and poet, George Mackay Brown, I stumbled across his letters to a wonderful wood engraver called Margaret Tournour, who also just happened to be a Sacred Heart sister. Intrigued by their correspondence, I went ferreting and eventually ended up in the archives of the Sacred Heart at Roehampton, where a treasure trove of prints, wood blocks, and original pictures awaited me.
Margaret Ada Tournour was born in Sutton in 1921 and educated at the Old Palace School, Croydon, St Anne’s School, Sanderstead, and Croydon School of Arts and Crafts, though her education was cut short by tuberculosis. Nothing daunted, she started doing freelance book illustration for Oxford University Press during the Second World War before converting to Catholicism and then becoming a novice at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Woldingham on her 30th birthday.
During her years in the convent, she created stage scenery, costumes, and murals, while also teaching art and nature studies among many other subjects. She had a great love of the natural world. She delighted in, and collected, silkworms, spiders, moths, and woodlice, while also caring for a hedgehog, so it was perhaps no surprise that one of her duties at Beechwood School, Tunbridge Wells (where she was transferred after teaching at Woldingham) was looking after the children’s pets.
Sister Margaret’s health was never strong and in 1969 she had a breakdown due to overwork. She was also confined to a wheelchair after a failed hip replacement and wore a surgical collar to support her neck because of osteoporosis. However, she did not lapse into a quiet retirement. The end of her teaching career was instead the prelude to a late artistic flowering.
Like Leonardo da Vinci, Sr Margaret was ambidextrous. She engraved with her right hand and wrote with her left! And in her retirement it was to wood engraving above all that she dedicated her energy, creating about 500 blocks in her last 25 years, illustrating a range of books, and writing some of her own. Her particular forte was the natural world, which she carved with great skill and precision, though she also turned her hand to religious images, water colours and even the occasional caricature of her fellow Sacred Heart sisters.
When she died in Duchesne House, Roehampton in March, 2003, she was still relatively unknown, as she would have wanted, though her work now appears in museums and collections across the UK. The time has surely arrived for a reappraisal of her wonderful work.