Eric Gill - Personal Life

Personal Life

In 1904 he married Ethel Hester Moore (1878–1961), and in 1907 he moved with his family to "Sopers", a house in the village of Ditchling in Sussex, which would later become the centre of an artists' community inspired by Gill.

In 1913 he moved to Hopkin's Crank at Ditchling Common, two miles north of the village. In 1924 he moved to Capel-y-ffin in Wales. Gill soon tired of Capel-y-ffin, coming to feel that it had the wrong atmosphere and was too far from London, where most of his clients were. In 1928 he moved to Pigotts at Speen near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire,

A deeply religious man, largely following the Roman Catholic faith, his beliefs and practices were by no means orthodox. His personal diaries describe his sexual activity in great detail including the fact that Gill sexually abused his own children, had an incestuous relationship with his sister and performed sexual acts on his dog. This aspect of Gill's life was little known until publication of the 1989 biography by Fiona MacCarthy. The earlier biography by Robert Speaight mentioned none of it.

Gill died of lung cancer in Harefield Hospital, Hillingdon (formerly Middlesex), in 1940. He was buried in Speen churchyard in the Chilterns, near Princes Risborough, the village where his last artistic community had practised. His papers and library are archived at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA.