Vera Gwendolen Pragnell was born on 23 September 1896 at 10, West Chislehurst Park in Eltham, London, the daughter of Sir George Pragnell (1863-1916) and Leonora Caroline Louise Jenkins (1872-1950).
Vera’s father was a self-made man, born in Sherborne, Dorset, his father William George Pragnell (1837-1898) was head gardener to the Wingfield Digby family at Sherborne Castle. George Pragnell attended Foster’s Grammar School in Sherborne, where in 1912 he founded the Sir George Pragnell prize for ‘the most manly, truthful and thorough boy’. On leaving Foster’s School, George went into the wholesale textile trade, working his way up to eventually becoming managing director of Messrs. Cook & Son. In 1912 he was knighted in King George V’s birthday honours for services to the Territorial Force and, when he died on 14 February 1916, Queen Mary sent a message of condolence to his wife Lady Pragnell.
George’s daughter Vera Pragnell was educated at Hillcote, a girl’s boarding school in Eastbourne, Sussex, but her plans to study medicine were interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War and instead she assisted her father in his war work, serving as Stores honorary secretary and treasurer of the Lewisham Division of the British Red Cross Society at a large military hospital in Lewisham and also at Burlington House on Piccadilly in Mayfair, London.
The death of her father in 1916, and of her brother George Frederick Pragnell (1891-1917) at Ypres in 1917, left Vera a very wealthy young woman and in 1923, ‘tiring if a society life of ease and luxury’, she bought 50 acres of land on the Sandgate Estate at Washington in Sussex and started The Sanctuary colony, giving away one and half acre plots to those who asked for them.
In 1928, Vera published The Story of the Sanctuary, in which she credited the influence of her father in setting up the Utopian community, saying ‘Perhaps this particular story should start with the death of my father – a remarkable man, whose strength is apt to be reckoned by his actual, material, accomplishments during his lifetime, whereas, to those who knew him intimately, these seem almost negligible as compared with that courage and strength and enthusiasm which endeared him to whole hosts of people, and made him at once the stimulus and challenge to almost all with whom he came into contact. Freed from the undoubted tyranny of his love, and bereft of its beautiful, satisfying support, I was set feverishly seeking for something great enough to take its place.’
Vera married in 1927 to the artist Edward Dennis Earle RA (1892-1969) and their daughter Deirdre was born at The Sanctuary in 1928. By 1931, Vera realised the colony had not become what she had intended it to be and it closed. Over the next ten years Vera and her family travelled widely, living in France, the South Seas, and in Hollywood, USA.
Vera worked as a film researcher, script writer, and journalist, writing under the name Vera Denis-Earle.
By 1940 she had moved back to Sussex, living at Sleepy Hollow, where she died on 24 October 1968.
Find out more about Vera Pragnell and The Sanctuary
Rachel Hassall