Six exhibitions and the article had achieved nothing. The art world was indifferent and my efforts were useless. In my despair, the only thing that I could think to do now was to donate the Collection to some honourable institution where the pictures would be shown and preserved.

Galleries were no good. They had to sell or relegate them to a cellar - and I thought of universities. Perhaps a women's college.

I wrote to Baroness Warnock and she replied excitedly and drove from Cambridge with her friend, the Bursar.

They looked at the pictures and their enthusiasm grew and grew. They would send a van at once and show them in the Fellow's Room when they arrived, give a party and invite the whole of Cambridge. They would show them in prestigious places all over the county, they would make the work known in the academic world and establish my mother once and for all. When I talked about lighting and temperature and humidity they lost interest and left still exuberant.

I wrote again and again about these environmental issues until despairing of her good sense and tired of her evasive letters - I withdrew my offer.

In 1987, I spent six weeks at Hawthornden Castle, the writers' retreat in Scotland and afterwards, at a reunion party, I met Lord Briggs, one of the Admissions Committee and Provost of Worcester College, Oxford and I asked him if I might donate the collection of my mother's work to his college.

He accepted at once, saying that he would place them in the new library which he was planning to build, but which would mean a two-year wait. Thrilled with this promise of such a splendid home for them, I altered my will in favour of the College - and was content to wait.

When, very soon he told me that there were money problems and the wait would be longer and, after that, the whole project was in the balance, I gave up hoping, sent reproductions to the Barbican and asked for exhibition space.

Maggie Wyllie, Head of the Visual Arts Department, came up to Derbyshire to see the collection and, thrilled, offered me an exhibition in prime space in the Theatre Foyer, Level 4, close to the Shakespeare Theatre, and fixed the opening date for the beginning of January 1988. I asked Germaine Greer to be the opener.

I had written to her in 1979 when her great book, 'The Obstacle Race' was published. She had spent 10 years travelling round Europe searching the archives, the galleries and the convents for lost women painters, and had written, "Women must begin to sift the archives of their districts, turn out their attics, search the cellars and haunt the sale rooms for lost women painters..."

I had asked her to come to my exhibition at the National Book League and she had replied from Tulsa, "I shall come up to Derbyshire...when I am farther ahead with my present project. We owe it to Louie to see the body of her work...and I long to..."

She never came but I went on writing, sending her news of the pictures, a copy of 'The Golden Thread' and Daphne's article.

Now, when I assaulted her again, I received a card, "Congratulations! You have done very well for Louie and I'm delighted! I shall be in Australia and cannot help with a launch..." I asked Jim Murrell to open the exhibition and Lord Briggs to write the Foreword to 'The Horses and the Charioteer', the second book of my autobiography.

On January 7th 1988, I travelled down from Derbyshire in a van with the parcels of pictures and arrived at the Barbican about noon, but because they had not finished painting my space and there was no holding room, I had to take them to Hampstead where I was staying and continue the journey the next morning in a taxi.

The driver got lost in the dark subterranean entrances and I had to unload the parcels onto the footway and leave them unguarded while I telephoned up to Maggie to send someone down to work one of the lifts. When I emerged at the top of some stairs, I had to carry them down to my space at the bottom. There I unpacked them and waited for someone to come to do the hanging.

At length, a young man arrived but with the wrong size screws for the mirror plates and, while he was fetching the right ones, I went over to the bookshop and got some empty cartons upon which to mount the miniatures and small pictures inside the showcases. When he returned, I saw at once that he knew nothing about hanging pictures and was only an unemployed friend given a job for the day.

When I had placed them and he was struggling to get them up, I crawled inside the cases and cleaned the dirty glass and then, making my way out of the nightmare building to the market, bought some cheap black material with which to cover the cartons.

By the evening we had finished the job and Maggie came to inspect. She took one look at the showcases and exploded.

"They're awful" she shouted, and began pulling down my arrangements. "I'll have to do them myself. I'll do them in the morning. You needn't come. I shan't need your help". I came in the afternoon.

She had rebuilt the cartons and bought yards of expensive black material ruched or ruffled it round the bottom of each case and round every picture, making them look like Victorian daguerreotypes and the cases like fancy boutiques.

She was still there playing about, but I said nothing, only making sure that the lights inside the cases were disconnected and they were only lit by the diffused conservation brightness from outside - and the dispensers were filled with my catalogues.

A large crowd gathered for the Private View. Jim spoke splendidly, Daphne amusingly and Charles Skilton, the publisher, came with a case of books, 'The Horse and the Charioteer', - but no critics although Maggie had assured me that she would get them all.

I returned to Derbyshire anxious about the pictures. Two security guards walked slowly about a vast area, allowing plenty of time for a picture to be prised off a wall and I drew their attention to their vulnerability.

When I returned a week later, they were safe but the lights inside the showcases had been switched on and the dispensers were empty. I hurried up to another level and to a space where a row of people sat behind a large counter administering the business of the Foyers.

They told me that the lights in the cases had been switched on by the cleaners who thought the pictures could not be properly seen and they assured me that it would never happen again.

I then had to telephone to some distant region, protest again, and wait until catalogues arrived and the dispensers were filled.

I came back a week later to find the lights on again and the dispensers empty again. This time, complaints being useless in this vast barrack of incompetent administrators, I crawled under one of the cases, found the electric cable, followed it along the wall of the Foyer, unplugged it, rolled it up and managed to hide it. Then sent for catalogues again.

When I returned once more, the lights were not on but, to my consternation one of Maggie's erections had collapsed and the pictures lay in heaps among the ruffles.

I pulled a few out of the wreckage and propped them up and, a week later, went to pack them all up. Happily, there was an important outcome to this prestigious but bungling and chaotic London show.

A few years before, an industrial manager, a civil servant, a teacher and an accountant, all living in Bushey, a Hertfordshire village with an interesting history, formed themselves into the Bushey Museum Trust with the long-term aim of establishing a museum to commemorate the great people who had lived there, and the work which they had done.

From 1800-1830, a group of artists known as the Monro Circle, under the patronage of Dr Thomas Monro, 1759-1833, physician to George III, worked and lived there.

From 1873-1914, the German artist, Sir Hubert von Herkomer RA, lived there. After emigrating to America, he returned to Europe and settled in England and, in 1883, opened an art school in Bushey, which soon became famous and the centre of another artists' colony. And he built a magnificent Gothic mansion in the village, Lululaund.

A distinguished painter, he was knighted by King Edward VII in 1907. His portraits and large social realist pictures were exhibited regularly in the Royal Academy and his landscapes captured the beauty of England.

In a lecture to the students of the Royal Academy, in 1900, he said:
"I would like my last word to be a plea for that loveable aspect of England's beauty. I urge you to cherish your England, its cottage homes, its farmsteads, its village greens and shady lanes...for the beauties of England are assuredly shrinking with the encroaching newness of all things, with a future of inartistic repair and citydom...Let the English painter see with English eyes and proclaim the great truth that England is one of the most loveable and paintable countries in the world".

In 1905, after the school closed, Lucy Kemp-Welch, the horse painter opened a successor school. In 1914 Herkomer died, and in 1938 Lululaund was pulled down by developers.

Two of the trustees of the Bushey Museum Trust, Grant Longman and Bryen had been researching this history and there was now immense enthusiasm in Bushey for the creation of a museum and art gallery which would do honour to Herkomer, display the scattered treasures of his house and seek out and show the work of the artists who had studied in his school.

As soon as they discovered that the paintings and drawings being exhibited at the Barbican were by one of his pupils, they approached me through the Press Office and in July of the same year, I sent 9 pictures to Bavaria.

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