(Helen) Violet Bonham Carter (née Asquith), Baroness Asquith of Yarnbury

Sitter associated with 31 portraits
The daughter of prime minister Herbert Asquith, she married her father's principal private secretary, Sir Maurice Bonham Carter, in 1915. She was president of the Women's Liberal Federation and was active in a number of anti-fascist groups in the 1930s. After the war, she was president of the Liberal Party Organisation until 1947. She stood unsuccessfully in the 1945 and 1951 elections. Her greatest political impact was made after the war when she condemned the British invasion of Suez in 1956. In a letter to The Times, quoted in the House of Commons, she argued that the invasion rendered Britain morally impotent at a time when it needed all of its authority to challenge the Soviet repression of Hungary.