Michael Sherard was born Malcolm Henry Sherrard, recorded in portraits of his family now held by the National Portrait Gallery. Later he would change his professional name, but insist that he was not a couturier but a dressmaker. Eustace and Ida Sherrard had five other sons and lived in Kingston-upon-Thames, then part of the county of Surrey. Sherard's father was a City solicitor and his grandfather George C. Sherrard had been mayor of Kingston three times.
