How many names have we lost?
The recent piece on Edna Mann's studio work prompted a question we haven't been able to shake since: if one woman's serious, sustained practice could nearly vanish from the record, recovered only through a family's own archive, rather than through any institutional account, how many others passed through Bomberg's classes at the Borough Polytechnic and, later, the City Literary Institute, and simply never resurfaced at all?
This piece isn't a settled history. It's closer to a working note, an attempt to lay out what we do and don't know, and an invitation to anyone who might help fill the gaps.
What's Documented
Standard accounts of the Borough Group settle on a small, stable cast: Bomberg himself, then Cliff Holden, Miles Richmond, Dennis Creffield, Dorothy Mead. Mead's name usually survives the retelling, in part because she went on to a visible public career. Edna Mann appears far more rarely.
But the record, once you go looking, is wider than the standard cast suggests, and it points to at least four different kinds of gap , not one.
Dorothy Missen is the clearest case of a name genuinely thinned out by the historical record. Cork's 1987 Bomberg biography and later scholarship confirm she was a founding-era member of the group, and a 2020 Tate Papers essay by Kate Aspinall adds a detail that opens the door to further research: her maiden name was Bergan, before she married a fellow Borough student, Len Missen. Cliff Holden's own account of the Group's history adds one further, pointed detail: she was left out of the Group's third annual exhibition in 1949 on the stated grounds that her recent work hadn't met the required standard, a judgment made by the same small, self-selecting circle that decided everything else about who counted as a serious member. Beyond her name, her marriage, that exclusion, and her presence in group exhibition listings through the late 1940s, we currently have almost nothing, no surviving account in her own words, no clear record of what happened to her practice afterward. This is exactly the kind of gap a family archive could close.
Susanna Richmond (born Eleanor) is a different kind of case again: not erased, but folded almost entirely into someone else's biography. A fellow Bomberg student and full member of the Borough Group, she married Miles (then Peter) Richmond, and the couple left England together in 1952, first for Aix-en-Provence and then for Ronda, Spain, where Miles rejoined Bomberg. Decades later, in 1993, the two held a joint exhibition at London South Bank University, meaning she did keep painting and exhibiting into later life, but almost every trace of her that survives in the public record appears as a clause inside her husband's story rather than as an entry in her own right.
Lilian Holt (who exhibited under her maiden name though she took Bomberg's name personally, having married him) and her daughter Dinora Mendelson (later Dinora Davies-Rees) were both present from the earliest days of the classroom, not as occasional visitors but as working members of the group , Holt was one of the four artists who first proposed the exhibition that led to the Borough Group's founding, alongside Edna Mann and Dorothy Mead. Mendelson, meanwhile, is credited with recruiting several other students into the class, including Leslie Marr and Len Missen. Both left first-hand written accounts held in the Tate Archive (via the Marr Papers), which makes them better documented than most of the group's women, and a reminder that "founding member" status did not, on its own, guarantee lasting visibility. Holt in particular is on record as resenting how much of Bomberg's time and energy his students absorbed, a tension that adds a sharper edge to her own position inside the community she helped found.
Janina Baranowska turns out to be the most striking case: not a forgotten figure at all, but one whose full, prominent public career has simply stayed almost invisible within English-language Bomberg and Borough Group scholarship. Born in Grodno, Poland, in 1925, she was arrested and deported to Russia in 1940, later joining the Polish Armed Forces and reaching Britain via the Middle East. She arrived in London in 1946 and studied under Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic from 1947 to 1950, by some accounts his youngest pupil, and by her own account his favourite, crediting his teaching, including the practice of turning a drawing upside down to break its dependence on literal appearance, with shaping her lifelong emphasis on form over surface likeness. Within the separate, extensively documented world of Polish-émigré art in Britain, she was a genuinely major figure: a member of the Royal Academy of Arts' exhibiting circle, the London Group, and the National Society of Artists; a founding figure of the artist collective Group 49 in the late 1940s; founding secretary and, from 1980, chairman of the Association of Polish Artists in Great Britain; editor of the 1983 survey volume Contemporary Polish Artists in Great Britain; and director of the POSK Gallery in London for over four decades. Her work is held in the Ben Uri Collection, the National Museum in Warsaw, and the Museum of Art in Łódź. A 2023 scholarly survey of Polish art in Britain singles her out, by name, as one of the significant Polish visual artists whose entire artistic output has gone unmentioned in mainstream British-cultural histories of "Polish London", including academic monographs that otherwise run to hundreds of pages. She died in London in 2022.
Baranowska's case suggests the gap isn't only about women's work vanishing outright. It's also about which communities get treated as the canonical record. A full, prominent career, extensively documented within Polish-émigré art institutions, can still be almost entirely absent from the standard English-language accounts of the very classroom she trained in — and, as the 2023 survey argues, this is not unique to her: it is a structural blind spot affecting the study of Polish artists in Britain generally. That raises an uncomfortable question for an archive like this one: how many other students passed through the Borough on similar terms — prominent in someone else's record, invisible in ours?
A Structural Problem, Not Just an Archival One
The Mann research suggested a further reason names thin out closer to home, and it's worth stating plainly. The Borough Group's own culture, shaped heavily by Bomberg's convictions, seems to have carried an assumption that a serious studio practice and a domestic, family-centred life were difficult to hold together, particularly for women. If that assumption shaped how contemporaries spoke about, exhibited, or remembered particular women's work, it would help explain why some names, like Missen's, thin out precisely at the point where a woman's life moved outside the group's immediate view.
This is a pattern documented elsewhere in twentieth-century British art history. There's no reason to assume the Borough Group was an exception, and taken together these cases are a reminder that the same period could produce more than one kind of gap at once, women written out (Missen), women recorded but under-credited within their own founding group (Holt, Mendelson), women written fully into a different history altogether (Baranowska), and women preserved only as a footnote to a husband's career (Richmond).
A Call to Archives
This is where we'd like to ask for help.
If you're a descendant, relative, or estate holder connected to Dorothy Missen (née Bergan), or to anyone else who studied under Bomberg whose name doesn't appear in the standard accounts, we would very much like to hear from you. The Mann piece exists only because a family came forward with material that had never been shown publicly. We suspect hers is not the only such archive sitting quietly in someone's home.
We're not looking for finished, polished stories. Partial material, a handful of works, a name half-remembered, a family anecdote, is exactly the kind of thing that lets us start asking better questions.
An Open Project
We're publishing this now, in an unfinished state, because we think the gaps are worth naming publicly rather than waiting until we have a complete answer. Consider this the first entry in an ongoing thread rather than a conclusion. As more material comes in, we'll return to update this piece, or write new ones alongside it.
If you have something to share, or simply a lead worth following, please get in touch.
Sources consulted: Richard Cork, David Bomberg (Yale University Press, 1987); Cliff Holden, "The History of the Borough Group" (2004, cliffholden.co.uk); Kate Aspinall, "Artist Versus Teacher: The Problem of David Bomberg's Pedagogical Legacy," Tate Papers, no.33 (2020); Kate Aspinall, "Mark of the Times: Charcoal and the Borough Group" (Borough Road Gallery, 2016); Dominika Buchowska, "Teaching Art in Post-War Britain: The Case of the Borough Group 1945–1953" (Adam Mickiewicz University); Mirosław Adam Supruniuk, "'Permanence and Liquidity.' Polish Art in Great Britain in the 20th Century — Introduction to a Description," Archiwum Emigracji, vol. 3 (33) 2023; Ben Uri Collection and Art UK artist records for Janina Baranowska; Art UK and Messums gallery records for Miles and Susanna Richmond.