Person Page - 95

BOYD, ARTHUR MERRIC (1862-1940), artist, was the father of WILLIAM MERRIC (1888-1959), potter, and THEODORE PENLEIGH (1890-1923), artist.
Arthur Merric was born on 19 March 1862 at Opoho, New Zealand, son of Captain John Theodore Thomas Boyd, formerly of County Mayo, Ireland, and his wife Lucy Charlotte, daughter of Dr Robert Martin of Heidelberg, Victoria. The Boyds came to Melbourne in the mid 1870s and on 14 January 1886 Arthur married Emma Minnie à Beckett, artist; they settled at Brighton. In 1890 they left for England to live at the à Beckett seat, Penleigh House, near Westbury, Wiltshire. They both exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1891 after which they moved briefly to Paris. On their return to Melbourne in 1894 they lived at Sandringham. In 1898 their works were included in the Exhibition of Australian Art in London at the Grafton Galleries. The family travelled overseas from time to time, and spent summers in Tasmania where the scenery inspired some of Boyd's best work; he exhibited regularly with the Victorian Artists' Society.
At some time Boyd had studied to become an engineer but he did not practise. He was an artist of charm and ability, who painted best in water-colour, without reaching the heights of his contemporaries in the Heidelberg school. While he was friendly with Frederick McCubbin and E. Phillips Fox, he did not associate much with other artists. According to his son Martin (1893-1972), the novelist, he was, if a little remote, just and generous, with a tolerant and enlightened way of bringing up children.
His wife Emma Minnie (1858-1936) was born on 23 November 1858 at Collingwood, second daughter of William Arthur à Beckett and his wife Emma, née Mills. Many critics believe her work to be superior to her husband's. She, too, painted landscapes in Tasmania and many seascapes, but she had a particular talent for genre. At their farm at Yarra Glen she painted the four seasons in a frieze around the dining-room. She was lively, handsome, cultivated and compassionate. Restless, she had something of the religious mystic in her make-up. After her death at Sandringham on 13 September 1936, her husband lived at Rosebud where he was joined by his grandson Arthur, to whom he gave painting lessons. Boyd died at Murrumbeena on 30 July 1940, survived by two sons and a daughter.
His son William Merric, known as Merric, was born on 24 June 1888 at St Kilda, and attended Haileybury College and Dookie Agricultural College. Unsuccessful as a farmer at Yarra Glen, at one time he considered entering the Church of England ministry; he was the model for 'a difficult young man' in Martin Boyd's novel under that title. However, in 1908 at Archibald McNair's Burnley Pottery, he successfully threw his first pot. His parents helped to provide a workshop for him at Murrumbeena and pottery kilns were established there in 1911 (destroyed by fire in 1926).
Merric studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School under L. Bernard Hall and McCubbin. He held his first exhibition of stoneware in Melbourne in 1912 and a second exhibition soon afterwards, and was employed by Hans Fyansch of the Australian Porcelain Works, Yarraville. On 12 October 1915 he married Doris Lucy Eleanor Bloomfield Gough, a fellow student and potter. In May 1917 he joined the Australian Flying Corps but was discharged later in England. Before his return to Australia in September 1919 he undertook training in pottery technique at Wedgwood's, Stoke-on-Trent.
Merric produced his best works in the 1920s and 1930s. These were mostly pieces for domestic use, often decorated by Doris, and some pottery sculptures. He believed that 'the first impulse of the maker of hand-pottery is to obtain pleasure in making and decorating an article, and making that pleasure intelligible … the use of our own fauna and flora is of the first importance'. In spite of his aversion to creating art that would sell well, he worked hard to provide for his growing family. In the 1930s he was employed at the Australian Porcelain Co. Pty Ltd, Yarraville, in the manufacture of Cruffel art porcelain; he earned £4 a week. Doris worked there also on a half-time basis.
In his later years Merric became something of a recluse. He had adopted his wife's faith in Christian Science and from the 1930s read little beyond its teachings and the Bible. Subject to epileptic fits, he died at Murrumbeena on 9 September 1959. Doris died on 13 June 1960. They were survived by their five children, all noted artists: Lucy, Arthur, Guy, David and Mary. Merric had considerable influence on younger artists. 682 of his drawings were collected and published by Christopher Tadgell as Merric Boyd Drawings (London, 1975). His portrait by his son-in-law John Perceval is one of several.
Theodore Penleigh was born on 15 August 1890 at Penleigh House, Wiltshire, and was educated at Haileybury College and The Hutchins School, Hobart. He studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School (1905-09) and in his final year exhibited at the Victorian Artists' Society. He arrived in London in 1911 and his 'Springtime' was soon hung at the Royal Academy. He occupied studios at Chelsea, Amersham and St Ives, but for a time made Paris his headquarters. There his studio adjoined that of Phillips Fox who brought him into contact with the French modern school and through whom he met Edith Susan Gerard Anderson; they were married in Paris on 15 October 1912.
After touring France and Italy, the couple returned to Melbourne. In 1913 Boyd held an exhibition and won second prize in the Federal capital site competition; he also won the Wynne Prize for landscape in 1914. In October he exhibited at the Athenaeum Hall paintings of Venice, Paris, Sydney, Tasmania and Victoria, including some of Warrandyte, where he had built The Robins, a charming attic house set in bushland.
In 1915 Boyd joined the Australian Imperial Force, becoming a sergeant in the Electrical and Mechanical Mining Company, but was badly gassed at Ypres and invalided to England. In 1918 in London he published Salvage, for which he wrote a racy text illustrated with twenty vigorous black and white ink-sketches of army scenes. Later that year he returned to Melbourne and in November held an exhibition at the Victorian Artists' Society's gallery. Although he suffered from the effects of gas, he held one-man shows in 1920, 1921 and 1922; his work, both water-colours and oils, sold quickly. In September 1922 he visited England to choose a collection of contemporary European art for a government-sponsored exhibition to Australia.
On 28 November 1923 Penleigh Boyd was killed instantly when the car he was driving to Sydney overturned near Warragul; he was buried in Brighton cemetery. Next March, Decoration Co. auctioned most of his remaining work, including some of his finest paintings, without reserve.
In his short career Penleigh Boyd was recognized as one of Australia's finest landscape painters, with a strong sense of colour controlled by smooth and subtle tones. 'Wattle Blossoms', hung at the Royal Academy in 1923, was much admired. He loved colour, having been influenced early by study of Turner and the example of McCubbin.
His wife Edith Susan (1880-1961), was born on 16 February 1880 in Brisbane, daughter of John Gerard Anderson, head of the Department of Public Instruction, and his wife Edith Sarah, née Wood. She studied at the Slade School, London, and in Paris with Phillips Fox. After her marriage she continued to paint and excelled in drawing. In later years she wrote several dramas, staged by repertory companies, and radio plays for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in which she took part. She died at East Burwood on 31 March 1961, survived by her two sons, of whom Robin Gerard Penleigh (1919-1971) was a distinguished architect and writer. She may be recognized as the beautiful red-haired woman in several of Phillips Fox's paintings; three of his portraits of her are held by the family.⁹

BOYD, GUY MARTIN à BECKETT (1923-1988), sculptor and potter, was born on 12 June 1923 at Murrumbeena, Melbourne, third child of William Merric Boyd, potter, and his wife Doris Lucy Eleanor Bloomfield, née Gough, a painter. Grandson of the painters Arthur Merric and Emma Minnie Boyd, nephew of the novelist Martin Boyd, cousin of the architect Robin Boyd, and brother of the painters and potters Arthur and David Boyd, Guy never doubted his vocation as an artist. He chose sculpture, he said, because in painting he could not compete with Arthur, the brother he always revered. The à Beckett family fortunes, on which his father depended, dwindled to nothing in the Depression years. Guy and his brothers, for whom a Murrumbeena state primary school education had to suffice, took labouring jobs. In 1941-46 he served in the Militia. A committed pacifist, he refused to bear arms and worked at first as a draughtsman. Conflicts with his superiors were resolved when he was posted in 1944 to the 103rd Convalescent Depot, Ingleburn, New South Wales, to teach pottery to the patients.

Taking up a Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme grant, Boyd enrolled in 1945 at the East Sydney Technical College, where he studied sculpture under Lyndon Dadswell. In 1946 at Neutral Bay he founded a commercial pottery which, confusingly, he called the Martin Boyd Pottery. With moderate prices, functional designs and Australian decorative motifs, his products were popular with postwar homemakers.

On 22 April 1950 at St John’s Church of England, Darlinghurst, Boyd married 18-year-old Barbara Dawn Cooper, a secretary; they separated within a year. Divorced in 1952 and having sold his Sydney business, he moved back to Melbourne and, on 1 December at the office of the government statist, married Phyllis Nairn, an Adelaide-born graduate in social work. He moved into a disused pottery at his father’s property in Murrumbeena. After twenty months of communal living with his parents, and with Arthur and his sister Mary Perceval and their families, Guy bought his first home, at nearby Oakleigh. While his second commercial venture, the Guy Boyd Pottery, flourished, with Phyllis as an active business partner, Guy began to sculpt part time. In 1964 he was confident enough to sell the pottery, move to Brighton, and start his career in sculpture. At a time when abstract sculpture prevailed, he was committed to figurative art, but he soon won high praise for his finely textured work in bronze and in aluminium overlaid with silver, and for the strength and delicacy of his female nudes. His first big commissions included wall sculptures for Tullamarine (1970) and Sydney (1971) airports.

Study in Europe and Asia, on a Churchill fellowship in 1969, persuaded Boyd to test his work internationally. In 1976 he moved to Toronto, Canada; his wife and their youngest four children accompanied him. With access to the big galleries of Chicago and New York, his sculpture flourished. It was a bonus that `being a Boyd’ was not an issue, as it was in Australia. However, it was family feeling that brought him home. On a visit in 1980 he could not resist buying his grandfather’s house in Edward Street, Sandringham, because it held happy memories of childhood.

The Boyds returned to Melbourne in 1981 to restore the house and live in it. Continuing his career as a sculptor, with major works that expressed his Christian faith, Guy had also become a public figure who did not shirk controversy. A former president (1973-76) of the Port Phillip Bay Conservation Council, he remained active in environmental matters: he was arrested in 1983 while protesting against the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania. With his wife and elder daughters he campaigned tirelessly to reverse Lindy Chamberlain’s conviction for murdering her baby daughter, Azaria, at Ayers Rock (Uluru).

Conservative in his views on religion and family life, but ready to defy the law for his pacifist beliefs; ambitious to make his name in art, but selflessly dedicated to causes that depleted his energies, Boyd was a man of great charm, good looks and gentleness, with an inflexible will. In his remarkable family, he was never just `another Boyd’. He died on 26 April 1988 from coronary artherosclerosis and was buried with Anglican rites in Brighton cemetery. His wife, and their five daughters and two sons, survived him. Boyd had held one-man exhibitions in all Australian capital cities and in London, Montreal, Chicago and New York. His work is represented in the National Gallery of Australia and in the State galleries of Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland.³ William Merric, known as Merric, was born on 24 June 1888 at St Kilda, and attended Haileybury College and Dookie Agricultural College. Unsuccessful as a farmer at Yarra Glen, at one time he considered entering the Church of England ministry; he was the model for 'a difficult young man' in Martin Boyd's novel under that title. However, in 1908 at Archibald McNair's Burnley Pottery, he successfully threw his first pot. His parents helped to provide a workshop for him at Murrumbeena and pottery kilns were established there in 1911 (destroyed by fire in 1926).

Merric studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School under L. Bernard Hall and McCubbin. He held his first exhibition of stoneware in Melbourne in 1912 and a second exhibition soon afterwards, and was employed by Hans Fyansch of the Australian Porcelain Works, Yarraville. On 12 October 1915 he married Doris Lucy Eleanor Bloomfield Gough, a fellow student and potter. In May 1917 he joined the Australian Flying Corps but was discharged later in England. Before his return to Australia in September 1919 he undertook training in pottery technique at Wedgwood's, Stoke-on-Trent.

Merric produced his best works in the 1920s and 1930s. These were mostly pieces for domestic use, often decorated by Doris, and some pottery sculptures. He believed that 'the first impulse of the maker of hand-pottery is to obtain pleasure in making and decorating an article, and making that pleasure intelligible … the use of our own fauna and flora is of the first importance'. In spite of his aversion to creating art that would sell well, he worked hard to provide for his growing family. In the 1930s he was employed at the Australian Porcelain Co. Pty Ltd, Yarraville, in the manufacture of Cruffel art porcelain; he earned £4 a week. Doris worked there also on a half-time basis.

In his later years Merric became something of a recluse. He had adopted his wife's faith in Christian Science and from the 1930s read little beyond its teachings and the Bible. Subject to epileptic fits, he died at Murrumbeena on 9 September 1959. Doris died on 13 June 1960. They were survived by their five children, all noted artists: Lucy, Arthur, Guy, David and Mary. Merric had considerable influence on younger artists. 682 of his drawings were collected and published by Christopher Tadgell as Merric Boyd Drawings (London, 1975). His portrait by his son-in-law John Perceval is one of several.⁴

Theodore Penleigh was born on 15 August 1890 at Penleigh House, Wiltshire, and was educated at Haileybury College and The Hutchins School, Hobart. He studied at the Melbourne National Gallery School (1905-09) and in his final year exhibited at the Victorian Artists' Society. He arrived in London in 1911 and his 'Springtime' was soon hung at the Royal Academy. He occupied studios at Chelsea, Amersham and St Ives, but for a time made Paris his headquarters. There his studio adjoined that of Phillips Fox who brought him into contact with the French modern school and through whom he met Edith Susan Gerard Anderson; they were married in Paris on 15 October 1912.
After touring France and Italy, the couple returned to Melbourne. In 1913 Boyd held an exhibition and won second prize in the Federal capital site competition; he also won the Wynne Prize for landscape in 1914. In October he exhibited at the Athenaeum Hall paintings of Venice, Paris, Sydney, Tasmania and Victoria, including some of Warrandyte, where he had built The Robins, a charming attic house set in bushland.
In 1915 Boyd joined the Australian Imperial Force, becoming a sergeant in the Electrical and Mechanical Mining Company, but was badly gassed at Ypres and invalided to England. In 1918 in London he published Salvage, for which he wrote a racy text illustrated with twenty vigorous black and white ink-sketches of army scenes. Later that year he returned to Melbourne and in November held an exhibition at the Victorian Artists' Society's gallery. Although he suffered from the effects of gas, he held one-man shows in 1920, 1921 and 1922; his work, both water-colours and oils, sold quickly. In September 1922 he visited England to choose a collection of contemporary European art for a government-sponsored exhibition to Australia.
On 28 November 1923 Penleigh Boyd was killed instantly when the car he was driving to Sydney overturned near Warragul; he was buried in Brighton cemetery. Next March, Decoration Co. auctioned most of his remaining work, including some of his finest paintings, without reserve.
In his short career Penleigh Boyd was recognized as one of Australia's finest landscape painters, with a strong sense of colour controlled by smooth and subtle tones. 'Wattle Blossoms', hung at the Royal Academy in 1923, was much admired. He loved colour, having been influenced early by study of Turner and the example of McCubbin.
His wife Edith Susan (1880-1961), was born on 16 February 1880 in Brisbane, daughter of John Gerard Anderson, head of the Department of Public Instruction, and his wife Edith Sarah, née Wood. She studied at the Slade School, London, and in Paris with Phillips Fox. After her marriage she continued to paint and excelled in drawing. In later years she wrote several dramas, staged by repertory companies, and radio plays for the Australian Broadcasting Commission in which she took part. She died at East Burwood on 31 March 1961, survived by her two sons, of whom Robin Gerard Penleigh (1919-1971) was a distinguished architect and writer. She may be recognized as the beautiful red-haired woman in several of Phillips Fox's paintings; three of his portraits of her are held by the family.⁹

BOYD, MARTIN à BECKETT (1893-1972), author, was born on 10 June 1893 at Lucerne, Switzerland, fourth son of Arthur Merric Boyd and his wife Emma Minnie, née à Beckett. His parents, both painters, were then touring Europe, accompanied by their elder children, Gilbert, William Merric and Penleigh. Travelling with them was Emma Minnie's mother, Emma à Beckett, matriarch of the family, whose private fortune (the legacy of her ex-convict father John Mills, founder of the Melbourne Brewery) supported the Boyds. In March 1890 Emma's husband William Arthur à Beckett had bought Penleigh House, Wiltshire, from a cousin: they intended to divide their time between the Grange—their home at Harkaway, outside Melbourne—and the Wiltshire property.
In Melbourne's financial crash of 1892-93 the à Becketts' income was halved; Penleigh House was sold; and the Boyds, returning to Melbourne with Emma à Beckett in December 1893, were to live on a much smaller allowance. Martin Boyd's idealization of Europe may have stemmed from a sense of deprivation; the stories told to him in his childhood powerfully evoked a myth of past glories. The family suffered a deeper loss in January 1896 when 9-year-old Gilbert was killed in a riding accident at the Grange. Martin and his brothers nevertheless had a happy and secure childhood, living first at Sandringham, on Port Phillip Bay, and later (1906-13) at Tralee, a dairy farm at Yarra Glen which the Boyds bought with the hope of establishing Merric on the land. A fifth child, Helen, was born in 1903.
In 1906 Martin became a weekly boarder at Trinity Grammar School, Kew, where the headmaster George Merrick Long gave this small Anglican establishment an unusually informal, non-authoritarian atmosphere. Boyd did respectably in academic work; he edited the school magazine, the Mitre; he developed a love of English poetry; and, through Long's example, he began to consider a future as a clergyman. Hitherto his main religious influence had been his mother's strict fundamentalism, while his own temperament inclined him to Anglo-Catholicism. Canon Long, neither a High- nor a Low-Churchman, seemed to offer an acceptable compromise between the two extremes.
In 1912 Boyd enrolled as a theological student at St John's College, St Kilda; he soon became bored and restless, missing social life and finding no spiritual or aesthetic sustenance. Like his elder brothers Merric and Penleigh, Martin had no sense of urgency about earning a living. Accepting, however, his mother's suggestion that he might try architecture, he was articled in 1913 to the Melbourne firm of Purchas & Teague. Boyd liked the work well enough and showed promise, especially in domestic architecture, but he had no professional ambition. He wrote a play and some poems, and went to as many parties as possible. It was the pleasant, easy social life of pre-1914 Melbourne that he missed when the outbreak of war changed the direction of his life.
Boyd was reluctant to enlist. His instincts, he later said, were pacifist; yet, in a family with close loyalties to Britain, it was only a matter of time before he would feel the pressure to volunteer. After Gallipoli, when several of his friends were killed, he made up his mind. He chose not to join the Australian Imperial Force, but to sail for Europe to seek a commission in a British regiment; if he were to be killed, he would at least have seen England. In August 1915 he left Melbourne in the Miltiades. Having completed an officers' training course, in the summer of 1916 he was posted to the Royal East Kent Regiment, known as the 'Buffs'.
By good fortune Boyd's experience of the trenches was delayed until early 1917. As he waited, he explored the English countryside and visited Penleigh House. He stayed in country houses, discovered the London theatre and went to a great many dances. Adaptable, amusing and sociable, he made himself at home in English life. Although less striking in appearance than his elder brothers, he was considered handsome: he was tall and well built, with a clear complexion and fine, grey-blue eyes.
While spending his leaves at the London house of his mother's sister Ethel and her husband Charles Chomley, editor of the British-Australasian, Boyd often helped his uncle and cousins with cutting and pasting copy on the dining-room table and occasionally writing a paragraph or a review. It was a useful, if amateurish, introduction to a writer's life, though it is possible that Boyd would never have become a serious writer if he had not been sent to fight in France in 1917. His first autobiography, A Single Flame (1939), written when another world war was imminent, describes the impact of the trenches on a sheltered, sensitive young man. Brought up to believe that a life of absolute virtue was 'not only possible but usual', he was confronted for the first time with suffering and violence, not in any abstract way but in his own nature. Killing was evil—and he himself was capable of killing. He was a competent officer, he had plenty of physical courage and he enjoyed the comradeship of the regiment.
In September 1917 Boyd applied for a transfer to the Royal Flying Corps. There the casualty rate was even higher than in the infantry, but flying avoided the immediate horror of fighting hand to hand. He went as observer on bombing raids over Belgium in early 1918 before returning to England to train as a pilot. Boyd chose the single-seater fighter plane, the Sopwith Camel, because he did not want to risk the life of an observer. The Armistice came as he was awaiting orders to return to France. In his poems (Verses, privately published c.1919, and Retrospect, 1920) Boyd's incipient pacifism is less apparent than his idealization of the doomed youth of his generation.
After his demobilization in May 1919, Boyd sailed for Melbourne in the troop-ship, Prinz Hubertus. It was a disappointing homecoming. Because his war experience had been with the British rather than the A.I.F., he had little shared experience with other returned men, and he was said to have become 'too English'. His parents were living in Murrumbeena, where Merric had established a pottery. Martin did not want to be drawn into this enterprise, nor did he want to resume his training as an architect. His closest friends at this time were his second cousins Mim and Nancy Weigall; and there is reason to believe that he was in love with Nancy. If so, it was not a whole-hearted courtship: what Boyd wanted most was to go back to England, which he did in May 1921, with his parents' reluctant consent and an allowance of £100 a year.
In London again, Boyd wrote for the British-Australasian, but after two years he had accomplished little; and London social life had ceased to charm him. In August 1923 he was spending a few weeks retreat at Batcombe, Dorset, with a new order of Anglican Franciscan friars, when he had news from Melbourne that his brother Penleigh had been killed in a motorcar crash. Desolate at the loss, Martin decided to join the monastic community in its mission to derelicts. The spiritual renewal and 'disinterested love' he had hoped to find at Batcombe seemed to lose itself in squabbles between the 'High' and 'Protestant' elements; after a brief period as a novice (in which he appointed himself as cook), Boyd left the order.
The experience gave him material for his first novel, Love Gods, published in 1925 and favourably reviewed. His next work, Brangane (1926), drew on the eccentric London career of the Australian writer Barbara Baynton, then by her third marriage the Baroness Headley. The Montforts (1928) which, like its predecessors, was published under the pseudonym 'Martin Mills', was based on the history of the à Beckett family in Australia; some thinly-veiled portraits caused offence in Melbourne. It won the Australian Literature Society's first gold medal in 1929.
In 1925-38 Boyd lived mainly in Sussex, in rented, seaside cottages; he wrote in winter and travelled in Europe in summer. His novels of this period, Scandal of Spring (1934), The Lemon Farm (1936), The Picnic (1937) and Night of the Party (1938), deft social comedies with serious undertones, show his grasp of English life and manners. In A Single Flame, written during the Munich crisis, he debated the morality of war, and concluded that appeasement of Hitler was futile as well as dishonourable. The semi-allegorical Nuns in Jeopardy (1940) explored good and evil in human nature in a desert-island setting. Lucinda Brayford (1946) brought together all the preoccupations of Boyd's earlier work. With its Australian-born heroine, it moved from pre-1914 Melbourne to England in the 1940s. Written in Cambridge where Boyd made his home for the war years, it reflected the renewal of his religious faith and the clarification of his ideas about war. When British bombs fell on civilian targets in Germany, Boyd denounced church and state for what he saw as crimes against humanity.
Lucinda Brayford had high praise from critics in Britain and sold well; it was translated into Swedish and Danish, and, as a Literary Guild choice in the United States of America, added welcome dollars to Boyd's small bank balance. He already had his own cottage, Plumstead, Little Eversden, outside Cambridge, bought when his share of his mother's estate came to him following his father's death in 1940.
With his first major literary success, Boyd felt ready to go back to Australia. In June 1948 he sold Plumstead, and made plans to restore and live in his à Beckett grandfather's home, the Grange. A great deal of energy and money transformed the neglected, old house into an elegant, neo-Georgian setting for Boyd's eighteenth-century furniture. He commissioned his nephew Arthur Boyd to paint frescoes in the dining room; this ambitious work was lost when the house was demolished in the late 1960s.
Living at the Grange proved lonely and disappointing; there was little left of the life Boyd remembered, and, as in 1919, he was seen as 'too English'. Lucinda Brayford was ignored in a literary climate which devalued expatriate writing and Boyd found his reputation obscured by the rising stars of his nephews, Arthur and Robin Boyd. The one great gain, however, was the new perspective on his past: it provided a new subject which he took back with him to England in 1951. The Langton series of novels—The Cardboard Crown (1952), A Difficult Young Man (1955), Outbreak of Love (1957) and When Blackbirds Sing (1962)—had its initial impulse in Boyd's discovery of his à Beckett grandmother's diaries at the Grange. Having failed to make the past live again at the Grange, Boyd made enduring art from that failure. The first three novels won high praise in Britain and the U.S.A; in spite of their Anglo-Australian themes and settings, they were scarcely noticed by Australian reviewers.
Lonely and restless again in England, Boyd went to Rome in 1957 and lived for the rest of his life in a series of pensiones and apartments, on a diminishing income. The last Langton novel was a critical failure, as was the Roman comedy, The Tea-Time of Love (1969). In 1965 he published a second autobiography, Day of My Delight. Although his wit, charm and generosity had won him many friends in England, Boyd became isolated in Rome. His main resource was the 'English Centre' of the Church of San Silvestro where, as he often complained, he met too many priests and 'R.C. ladies'. Boyd's faith in youth, especially the anti-Vietnam War protesters of the late 1960s, was his mainstay against depression in this period. He defended them in Why They Walk Out (1970), a personal statement of belief, published at his own expense.
In Rome Boyd's affections were centred on an Italian youth Luciano Trombini, for whom he played a quasi-paternal role until Trombini married and moved to Milan in 1964. No record of any closer or more lasting attachment appears in Boyd's life, and, although the question of his homosexuality is often raised, it has never been demonstrated that any one of a series of sentimental friendships with young men amounted to an affair. The only sexual relationship for which there is persuasive evidence involved a woman of his own age during his Sussex years. Those who knew Boyd best stress his 'correctness', his reticence and a fastidious temperament which would not easily adapt to casual sex, nor, perhaps, to any full emotional commitment. It may be questioned whether anyone was allowed to know his deepest feelings.
His family and friends were unprepared for his reception into the Catholic Church which took place a few days before he died of cancer on 3 June 1972 in the Hospital of the Blue Nuns, Rome. His niece Mary Perceval and Arthur Boyd who, with his brothers Guy and David, had helped Martin Boyd financially during his last illness, attended his burial in Rome's Protestant English cemetery, after a service in which the Anglican vicar joined the Catholic priest in prayer. Boyd had lived just long enough to see his major works reprinted and his literary stature recognized in Australia; and, to his astonishment and ironic amusement, he was awarded a Commonwealth Literary Fund pension—for life—as he awaited his death.⁴