Barbara Niven and her husband Ernest Brooks were close friends of the MacDiarmids. She was a talented painter producing a particularly fine, artistically shadowed, full-face portrait of MacDiarmid and captioned artist and friend of Barbara Niven visited MacDiarmid with her husband Ern Brooks on Whalsay in 1938 and 1939 . It was Niven who produced a wickedly funny line drawing caricature, for MacDiarmid's The Voice of Scotland, of a statuesque Willa Muir petting a docile little lamb supposed to be her husband Edwin Muir. No doubt an in-joke about how the Grieves viewed the Muirs. Brooks and Niven were lifelong members of the Communist Party and in the Thirties had helped found the Manchester Theatre Union with Joan Littlewood and the folk singer Ewan McColl.