Barbara Ker-Seymer

Ker-Seymer was married twice: first, in June 1941, to Humphrey Joseph Robinson Pease, of Yewden Manor, Henley-on-Thames, a researcher for Mass-Observation; second, in March 1945, to John David Rhodes (d. 2007), with whom she had one son, Max Humphrey Lionel Ewart Rhodes (later Ker-Seymer), born 1947. They divorced in 1955. She died on 25 May 1993.

She opened her London studio- above Asprey the jewellers- in 1931, and at around the same time produced for Harper's Bazaar the photographic series 'Footprints in the Sand' about up-and-coming writers; one of her sitters was Evelyn Waugh. She was a friend of the Surrealist artist John Banting, managing to keep his suicidal moods at bay with her upbeat personality.

Barbara Marcia Ker-Seymer (20 January 1905 – 25 May 1993) was a British photographer and society figure, considered one of the group designated by the tabloid press as 'Bright Young People'.

Born in Kensington, the second daughter of Horace Vere Clay Ker-Seymer (or Clay-Ker-Seymer; his father was Harry Ernest Clay, son of politician James Clay and brother of the composer Frederic Clay; for inheritance purposes his mother's surname of Ker-Seymer was appended), of a landed gentry family of Hanford, Dorset which had somewhat descended in wealth by this time, a situation primarily attributable to Horace's gambling addiction, which led him to squander his fortune- including the family's house- and caused estrangement from his wife), and Diana, the third daughter of Walter Pennington Creyke (died 1892), of Seamore Place, Park Lane, and Caroline (1844-1946), a writer as "Diane Chasseresse" and daughter of the agricultural scientist and entrepreneur Sir John Bennet Lawes, 1st Baronet. A younger sister, Pauline, was born in 1906, but died the next year. By the time Barbara left school, she, her mother and her elder sister, Manon (born 1903) were living at West Kensington, which was perceived at the time to be a place 'where the fly-blown respectability of the lower middle class clings to its dreary outposts against the slums'. Diana Ker-Seymer, whose 'preferences were lesbian', 'periodically retreated abroad with a girlfriend,' which did nothing to stabilise family life. Despite her mother's view of the family as 'poor', at least relative to the manner in which she had been brought up, Barbara was nevertheless presented at court as a debutante, expensively attired (including with the customary ostrich feathers), alongside Meraud Guinness.