She had been an actress during the First World War, entertaining 'the Boys from the Front', and in 1920 had turned down a Hollywood contract when her artist boyfriend delivered an ultimatum: the movies or him.

Ulric Van den Bogaerde - son of a Belgian-born art faker - had served in the war, at the Somme and Passchendaele, during which he had seen his best friend blown to pieces; he suffered ever afterwards from the effects of shell-shock. In the same year that he married, Ulric, who had started his career before the war as an artist on The Times, became its first art editor, in which capacity he became responsible for all the illustrations in those pioneering days of newspaper photography.

Art school was a natural progression for the young Derek. After an uncomfortable adolescence spent with an uncle and aunt in Glasgow, where he had been sent when his brother Gareth was born, he attended the Chelsea Polytechnic (later the Chelsea School of Art and Design) in Manresa Road from late 1938 to summer 1939. As Bogarde recalled in his first volume of memoirs, A Postillion Struck by Lightning, he was taught by Graham Sutherland - 'patient, calm, gentle' in 'neat farmer's smock' and 'pale blue knitted tie' - and Henry Moore: 'He too moved among his pupils quietly and gently', exhorting them to treat their life-class skeleton carefully; 'it's very hard to get skeletons these days.'