Churchill's 'maker'

This week, Lady Aurelia Young, wife of former Chief Whip Sir George, gave the annual lecture of the Society of Portrait Sculptors, speaking about her father, the Jewish sculptor Oscar Nemon. She still refers to him as Nemon saying: "Everyone called him Nemon, including my mother, so I will, too."

Perhaps his most famous sculptures are of Sir Winston Churchill, who said Nemon was his favourite sculptor. "In 1950, Nemon was staying in the same hotel in Marrakech as Churchill and he used to sketch him in the restaurant. He made a little bust of Churchill and gave it to Lady Churchill as a gift." Thus, when the Queen came to the throne and wanted to commission a bust of Churchill for Windsor Castle, Churchill requested Nemon should be the sculptor, and so began a close friendship. "That was unpopular with all the more established British artists and there was a big row," Lady Young remembers.

So who was this formidable artist? Oscar Nemon was born in 1906 in Osijek, now Croatia, but left as a young man to study in Vienna and then moved to Brussels. In 1945, Nemon moved to London and there, at a party, he met Young's mother, Patricia.

"When my mother, who was an only child as well as a debutante and the heiress to an estate in Norfolk, met this artist who spoke in French, she fell passionately in love with him. Her parents were absolutely aghast. They were hoping she would marry a suitable English Lord. My grandfather's solicitors asked the Home Office if they could deport Nemon because he was a Yugoslavian Jewish artist. The Home Office tried their best but it proved impossible because he was sculpting all sorts of important people."