they visited Trelogan, near the Point of Ayr colliery in north east Wales, staying in Mersey Cottage, owned by Catherine's aunts. Here Houthuesen painted landscapes and portraits of colliers. In spring 1936, Houthuesen suffered an internal hemorrhage due to a duodenal ulcer, from which it took him a long time to recover. When Herbrand Russell's wife, the aviator and ornithologist Mary Russell, Duchess of Bedford, died in a plane crash in March 1937, the duke commissioned a stained-glass memorial window in St Mary's Church, Woburn of Saint Francis of Assisi surrounded by birds. In 1938, the Houthuesens moved to 37b Greville Road, not far from their previous London home. War work In September 1940 the house of the Houthuesens' immediate neighbour and landlord, sculptor Alfred Frank Hardiman, was bombed in the Blitz. Nobody was hurt, but the house was uninhabitable. The Houthuesens returned to Trelogan. From late 1941 until the end of the war, they lived in Yorkshire, just south of Doncaster, where St Gabriel's College, the teacher training college where Catherine worked, was evacuated. They lived first in a cottage in Letwell, then in the Farm House in Loversall, and by summer 1943 at 21 St Mary's Gate in Tickhill. Houthuesen was rejected from the army on health grounds and worked as a draughtsman for the London and North Eastern Railway at the Doncaster Works. He suffered a severe nervous breakdown and was discharged in March 1944. He made his first clown drawings in 1944, after seeing a family of Russian Jewish clowns, the Hermans, at the Grand Theatre in Doncaster. After the war The Houthuesens returned to London at the end of the war and lived in Lady Margaret Vicarage in Chatham Street, Southwark, where they acted as wardens for St Gabriel's College students accommodated there. Houthuesen was able to attend ballets at Covent Garden and the Adelphi Theatre, such as Los Caprichos (inspired by the Goya etchings), Petrushka, The Three-Cornered Hat, and Les Sylphides. In autumn 1950, the Houthuesens moved again, to (then) semi-derelict Stone Hall with overgrown gardens, in Oxted, Surrey, and then again, in July 1952, to their final home at 5 Love Walk, in Denmark Hill, Camberwell. Houthuesen helped to build up the art collection at St Gabriel's College. His acquisitions included a woodcut of The Ecstasy of Mary Madgalene by Albrecht Dürer, a pencil drawing of Whitehaven on the Cumbrian coast by J.