 Born in Rugby and brought up in Gloucestershire (England), he was educated at Eton prior to reading archaeology and anthropology at Christ Church, Oxford.At Oxford his circle of friends included Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton as well as his future wife (Elena) Tamara Abelson (1904–1993) whom he was to marry in 1927.She was a Russian émigrée, who was also an art historian, writing on Byzantine and Central Eastern art and other subjects as Tamara Talbot Rice.