When artists Richard Chopping and Denis Wirth-Miller died, their friend Jon Lys Turner inherited an extensive personal archive. He soon discovered letters and other material that revealed Chopping and Wirth-Miller to be a previously missing link in the twentieth-century art world and pivotol figures in the life of Francis Bacon. A kaleidoscope of artists and writers, including Colquhoun and MacBryde, John Minton, W.S. Graham and Stephen Spender, would travel from London for Chopping and Wirth-Miller's infamous week-long house parties, leaving behind a host of famous names in the visitor's book of their Wivenhoe home.